LIBERAL FASCISM 7

 

I continue this mini-series on Jonah Goldberg’s 2007 book Liberal Fascism.* (In these Posts, Jonah Goldberg will be shortened to ‘JG’.)

Having given an overview of JG’s thoughts, in this Post I’d like to select some particular points of interest. In several subsequent Posts I’ll deal with some of the numerous and eye-opening quotations from historical figures in American and/or socialist and Progressive history, from the young Woodrow Wilson up through LBJ.

The role of Christianity and religion in first-wave American Progressivism cannot be underestimated. As Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch, the originator of the late-19^th century Social Gospel movement, put it in 1896: “Now men are free, but it is often the freedom of grains of sand that are whirled up in a cloud and then dropped in a heap, but neither cloud nor sand-heap have any coherence”. (p.87)

What you see here is the abiding Christian concern – especially acute and intense among Protestantism as it developed in Northern Europe – to make the most of this life and to have an impact on human history. This burning preoccupation was powerfully focused on proper human ‘stewardship’ of God’s creation, starting with one’s own self and soul and (with some exceptions among Protestant sects that sought a purely spiritual individual or communal existence) radiating outward into one’s community and one’s world. The goal was to avoid ‘waste’, you could say: a wasted life, a wasted opportunity for individual and communal excellence in both spiritual and material things.

This Stance bore some major differences if contrasted with the more Mediterranean Roman Catholic approach, which focused not so much on individual this-worldly dynamism as on a personal and cultural Order reflecting the rational and revealed Vision of God’s logos or Word that brought Creation (individuals with their souls and then the material realities of this-world) into existence and sustained and guided that entire Creation on its journey to the Ultimate Fulfillment in God.

Especially in American Protestantism, this cutting-loose from the other-worldly bounds of the Roman Catholic Vision created much more room and space for human involvement in the things of this world. But it also thus opened Protestantism up to the tremendous gravitational and centrifugal forces of the human spirit – never perfect – in the hurly-burly of human history. Precisely by making itself more flexible and adaptable, Protestantism opened itself to powerful historical and existential forces and pressures for which there was no centripetal Center such as there was in the Roman Catholic Vision administered by the hierarchy at that Center which operated as a keel to balance activity and action with steadying and Shaping dogmatic continuity.

 To use the imagery of a sailing ship: the Catholic Vision emphasized the necessary rigidity of the keel that ballasted and worked in dynamic tension with the motive forces created by the sails as they caught the winds. The Protestant approach de-emphasized the keel and gave itself over to the sails and the motion created as the ship faced the waves of history and the Sea of life.

Or in a biological image: the Catholic Stance emphasized the rigid and bony endo-skeleton that gave Shape to the being and sustained that Shape; the Protestant Stance emphasized the viscera – muscles, heart, blood flow and so forth – that interacted directly with the world.

Hence too, the Roman Catholic focus on Order and on the traditions that sustained that Multi-planar Order (originating in the Beyond-dimension of the divine), while the Protestant Stance focused on the Mono-plane of this world, emphasizing fluidity and adaptability.

As might easily be imagined, in America of the later 19^th-century, flush with a waxing Abundance channeled through industrial and urban capitalism, the Protestant Stance and its emphases seemed far more suitable to American life and history. ‘Boundaries’, as JG notes, became ‘frontiers’ (a hallmark JFK bit but rooted deeply in the prior centuries of the American past).

So within the Protestant Stance there was an urge to dynamically develop and deploy the genuinely formed Christian self into the booming buzzing flux and flow of history in all its dynamic complexity. But as Rauschenbusch indicates in the above quotation, there remained the insistence – seen in the Puritans – on achieving and sustaining a properly formed and grounded Christian self even as one immersed oneself in the affairs of this-world and its affairs.

For such a Protestant Stance, it would not do at all for persons to simply ignore their spiritual responsibilities of self-formation and merely leap into the deep ocean of history and events as if one were taking a carefree and thoughtless leap into the old swimming hole while playing hooky from school.

In this way, American Protestantism dove-tailed with the socialist-Progressive emphasis on ‘crisis’ and ‘responsibility’ and the abiding need to ‘reform’ and ‘improve’ history (which, as JG has often pointed out, was also a hallmark of Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, and even Hitler, and all the lesser socialists of the Left).

Thus Rauschenbusch is philosophically and spiritually averse to the disorganization and lack of Shape so often evident when humans are left at liberty to do whatever they want to do: the Protestant concept of Freedom – as was true of the Catholic concept as well – is that you presume a well-formed spiritual human being who is best suited to exercise that Freedom. A so-called ‘pure’ freedom, where people can simply do whatever they want without the ‘oppression’ of any boundaries or Shape (originating in this world or the Beyond), is not at all acceptable.

It is not acceptable because the Protestant Stance shares with its parent Catholic Stance the profound presumptions about human beings being created in God’s Image. As such, human beings are like ships (or – to use an anachronistic image – aircraft): these vessels are designed according to certain basic principles and no matter how ‘free’ you are as a captain or pilot, you can’t simply ignore those Shaping boundaries and principles.

Thus a pilot – although having complete command of the aircraft – still has to obey the fundamental principles and laws of aerodynamics; a ship captain – although having complete command of the vessel – still had to obey the fundamental principles and laws of physics and of wind and wave and hydrodynamics. To do otherwise will ‘waste’ that Freedom, that liberty, by wrecking the very craft that you command.

But again, this concern for Order and Shape dovetails with the socialist and the American Progressive Stance: in that era of first-wave Progressivism and of European socialism, the desire was not to anarchically cut loose from any Shape or Order (let alone to deny the necessity or existence or possibility or legitimacy of such Shape and Order); rather, it was to impose (‘achieve’ is, alas, putting it all too mildly and gently) a better Shape and Order – a New Order – than the old Shape and Order enshrined in the ‘traditional’ cultural and political and social arrangements that had evolved organically in European history over the millennia.

As Rauschenbusch indicates, a society of totally ‘free’ individuals resembles nothing so much as a miasm of loose grains of sand blown about by history’s winds and by each individual’s personal whims. (Note the resemblance to the industrial manufacturing dynamics of that era: you can organize human beings and keep them focused on a task, and get a lot of things made and a lot of things done; this preconception also influenced European (and after 1916 American) military thinking as well. Mobilization, motivation, and organization – all incited and sustained in the service of the proper Cause or Goal – is a dynamic conceptual motif that is widely afoot in that era, in American and Europe, especially in light of the intensifying and increasingly clear downsides to urban-industrial capitalism.)

Thus, Rauschenbusch continues, “New forms of association must be created. Our disorganized competitive life must pass into an organic cooperative life … Individualism means tyranny”. (p.87)

What you may immediately sense here is that Rauschenbusch is starting to bend in the direction of communal (and you might say ‘corporate’) organization and away from the traditional Protestant emphasis on the necessity of the individual’s achieving of self-mastery, spiritual and otherwise.

In a paradoxical conclusion that should have received more critical inquiry than it did, Rauschenbusch sees ‘tyranny’ as emanating from that unguided and un-Shaped and un-Boundaried ‘freedom’ that really has proven – to the Protestant eye – to have led to a wasteful and un-Shaped or under-Shaped license (which in the Jazz Age would arguably  mutate into outright licentiousness).

That there are profound problems here with the general first-principles of genuine ‘democracy’ does not detain him. If human beings are so easily unsuited for liberty and freedom, then how can a genuine democracy be sustained? What would be the purpose of creating or keeping it in the first place?** Worse, of course: if it turns out that living according to their ‘pure’ freedom of whim and desire renders individuals unable to govern themselves or achieve anything substantial together, then … the government and its elites will have to step in and take over the job; if the herd can’t control itself, then trail-bosses and trail-hands will have to do it. Thus does ‘pure’ freedom lead so easily to tyranny.

Another writer of the era, Washington Gladden, went so far as to assert that Progressivism was merely “applied Christianity”, supporting the Social Gospel’s belief that “the state was the right arm of God and was the means by which the whole nation and world would be redeemed”. (p.87)

And in this you can see something eerily and ominously reminiscent of the ancient Eastern and Byzantine solution to the relationship between Church and State (or Throne): the Church became merely but completely the chaplaincy of the State/Throne. Whereas in the Latin West, the Roman Church had struggled persistently to maintain the independence of the Spiritual from the Temporal power.

Progressivism – which in its first-wave was deeply enmeshed with a supportive version of (Protestant) Christian religious vision and fervor – was already working toward a type of ‘totalitarian’ arrangement whereby the Temporal power would be served by the Spiritual, even though in that first-wave era, the Spiritual – by offering ‘benefit of clergy’ to Progressivism – envisioned itself as ‘baptizing’ the Temporal into the Spiritual and thus achieving a marvelous synergy that would lead to both a Temporal and a Spiritual End-Time that would fulfill history. This was ‘Progress’ in a much more complete (and ‘total’) sense than anything Roman Catholicism, with its abiding and historically ingrained wariness of the things of this world and of the Temporal power, could robustly support.***

 

NOTES

*Goldberg, Jonah. Liberal Fascism. Doubleday: New York, 2007. ISBN: 978-0-385-51184-1 (hard cover). It’s also out in paperback.

**This also constituted one of the Roman Catholic Church’s abiding concerns about ‘democracy’. On top of the historical European reality that ‘democracy’ had so often led to civil strife, bloody disorder, and profound spiritual dis-Order – from the Peasants’ Revolt of Luther’s time through the stunning bloodiness of the French Revolution and the Terror with its enthronement of a purely this-worldly and Mono-planar Reason (as opposed to any Multi-planar Faith) and the (almost inevitable) secular imperium of Napoleon.

It took until the 1950s for American Catholic thought such as John Courtney Murray’s to impress upon the Vatican the possibilities of American Founding concepts of genuine democracy – as opposed to the French Revolutionary and Soviet versions of popular rule by, or at least in the name and service of, ‘the masses’.

But – in a stunning historical irony – America had been sliding toward the French-Revolutionary approach, rather than American Founding Vision, since Progressivism’s first febrile enchantment with Bismarck’s ‘top-down socialism’ in the later 19^th century. A slide which was erected into a Plan as time went on, especially as the decade of the 1960s saw a wild efflorescence of theological urges for change and reform following the Second Vatican Council (1962-5) and the various importations of outright Leninist and totalitarian thought spun as ‘liberation’ and ‘reform’ under the aegis of radical-feminism’s embrace of such ideology in the early 1970s, and the Beltway’s embrace of all of that ideological ‘justification’ for purposes of erecting new demographic coalitions after 1972.

Within a decade of Murray’s insightful and constructive work – and Martin Luther King’s equally redemptive and unitive religious-political American visions as enunciated so eloquently in 1963 – the government’s abandonment (for all practical purposes) of the American Revolutionary Stance for the French Revolutionary Stance was in the ascendant.

***And, of course, it would be in the American era initiated in the 1960s and early 1970s that the Temporal power, now so thoroughly Progressive-ized in both political Parties, would declare itself a ‘secular’ power, demanding the complete cooperation (that German Gleichschaltung of Bismarck and Hitler; given pithy expression in Mussolini’s maxim: Nothing against the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state) of whatever Spiritual power was left or else face the on-going efforts by the State to de-legitimize the Spiritual in the public forum.

 

 

 

TERRY EAGLETON 2

I continue to share thoughts here about Terry Eagleton’s 2009 book “Reason, Faith, and Revolution”.*

He points out (p.13) that if God is “pointless” then morality is too. At least any solidly-Grounded morality whose basis and authority resides in something (or Someone) Higher than mere human ‘choice of values’ (such a ‘choice’ relies on nothing but the individual’s continued preference for the ‘value’, which can change over time or at whim). Imagine trying to navigate a ship at sea not by reference to the fixed points of the stars but rather by whatever you ‘choose’ to consider the best course across the trackless sea. You won’t be getting anywhere very often.

Still, Eagleton continues on the same page to assert – and justify his Correct creds – that “it is a question of how to live most richly and enjoyable, relishing one’s powers and abilities for their own sake”.  

This sounds nice – very nice – but it won’t work; it won’t stand up under the pressure of a life that is a Vale of Tears and turmoil, in a human existence that, in the Buddhist vision, not ever going to be ‘happy’ but rather is always going to be characterized by the dukkha of dissatisfaction.

This is a layered problem.

First, human beings are ‘incomplete’ in the sense that they are – and in this dimension or on this Plane of Existence (PoE) always will be – separated from their genuine highest capabilities and self; the German for it might be Echtheit, translating into the clanky English ‘genuineness’. Thus, in the Christian and Catholic view especially, humans are always ‘workin’ my way back to You’ (as the Songster saith); we are always working upwards through the clutter of inferior desires and urges to get closer to our Echt self (which, of course, is made in the image of that God to Whom we are also working our way back toward; working toward an ever more congruent relationship with both our Echt Self and with the God in Whose image that Echt Self of ours has been created).

But it’s a journey that is never going to be completely fulfilled in this dimension and on this PoE, so ‘fulfilllment’ is not going to work as a source of happiness for us humans: if you’ve based all your ‘happiness’ on something that you can never achieve, then you are always going to feel – rightly so – incomplete and unfulfilled and not-totally-happy.

Second, to the extent, then, that humans try to find fulfillment and happiness through their inferior or less genuine or less Echt urges and desires, they are not only not-going to feel fulfilled, but are actually going to sail way off their primary course and get lost in the trackless welter of the inferior interior world of those desires, passions, urges and all that.

And once you’re in those shark-filled waters, the more you kick the deeper you’re going to get yourself into trouble. Physiological addiction to drugs is simply the most obvious example of this dynamic: you get badly off course and away from your higher and Echt Self and from the image of God – and maybe from God too – and then you can only muster enough energy to keep going forward (on the wrong course) even more intensely … and the band will play on until the unhappy end.

The great Axial religions – and especially in the core Christian variant – therefore insist that ‘autonomy’ or freedom is not enough; if you don’t know where you’re heading, or how to handle the ship, then simply having all the sails up and getting out of the harbor isn’t going to do you much good at all. Indeed, in that condition of existential incompetence you are safer staying in the harbor, tied to the pier of brute custom and tradition that imposes some Shape on you from outside yourself – which is ‘oppressive’ but at least keeps you from cutting loose, heading out into the deep when you don’t know where you’re going or how to sail the ship, and winding up lost or wrecked.

Modern American society has the idea that there’s nothing very grace-ful or ‘free’ about staying tied to a pier or just puttering around the harbor where your ship was launched. But that will at least keep you safe enough, compared to heading out into life’s deep ocean with no knowledge of course or vessel, where your chances of making progress or even staying afloat are hugely reduced.

Eagleton rhapsodizes in classic Romantic and Boomer fashion about “this self-delighting energy” that is “entirely without point or function” and “stands in no need of justification by some grim-faced tribunal of History, Duty, Geist  [German for ‘spirit’], Production, Utility, or Teleology [the study (and reality) of deep human Purpose]”.

In other words, ‘just do it!’; just take this hog out onto the highway and open it up and let the good times roll and the chips fall where they may. BUT this presumes that you know how to handle a motorcycle, especially at speed on the open road. Otherwise the simple glee and excitement of going reely reely fast and feeling the wind in your face and so on isn’t going to last long.

He reflects the Romantic/Boomer presumption that you can just take the human ‘bike’, hop on and turn the key, and head for the highway and total ‘freedom’ and ‘exhilaration’. Not if you don’t know what you’re doing. Because A) the bike is a lot more complex and dangerously powerful than you seem to think, and B) the ‘highway’ will thus provide ultimately only the opportunity for you to wrap yourself around a tree or go off a cliff; and C) you will be sharing the road – especially these days – with a whole bunch of other wannabe-bikers who also don’t know what the frak they’re doing but are equally giddy with ‘freedom’ and ‘exhilaration’.

The possibilities of you wrecking yourself or somebody else, or somebody else colliding with you or wrecking you, are huge.

This simplistic short-cut to ‘freedom’ approach – just do it – tries to anchor humans in God by claiming that you can be like God (ummmm – remember the Serpent in the Garden of Eden?) just by enjoying the exhilarating freedom that God has.

But it can’t work like that. God knows how to be His Echt Self; God knows what He’s doing. Humans, alas, don’t. We are made in the image of God but we are not gods. Recall the kid Icarus whose father Daedalus made wings for him, stuck them on his back with wax, and figured he could escape the surly bonds of earth and fly like the gods – the ancient Greeks knew what would happen, and they didn’t even read the Bible. (The kid Icarus got so exhilarated he flew too near the sun, the wax melted, and the kid was history.)

Humans are born into ‘the surly bonds of earth’, of this incomplete PoE. It’s what we do. Or were created to do: to develop our Echt Self in the midst of this still-developing world that, like a new planet, is a dangerous and complicated place as each human and all humans are enmeshed in their inferior selves, some trying harder to climb and others not so much.

God and Grace help; but as any father knows, each kid has to actually master his bicycle on his own or he’ll never learn to do it right; dad can teach and encourage and stay close, but Junior has to get on the bike and learn the balancing bit and steering and pedaling and all that.

Or imagine a cargo-cult native suddenly given, with no introduction, an automobile there on his remote island. He has no idea whatsoever about what it is for, what is capable of. He has no instruction booklet or owner’s manual and there are no cues from the world around him. But he has a brand new car with the keys on the front seat. How ‘free’ is he, really? As the owner of a new car, I mean. He could wind up using it as a house, or a planter, or a status-symbol or even an awesome burial container (or at least plan to, when the time comes) – but that’s all. Maybe he’ll discover the gas in the tank and even siphon it out for fuel, or to mix with war-paint.

Elements of modern Pomo culture would call that marvelous and creative and – feh, this overused word – ‘rich’. But really, how ‘free’ is he in terms of having this auto? If you get my drift.

Reviewing the recent (and intriguing) German film “The White Ribbon”, Roger Ebert says that when the prevention of evil becomes more important than the preservation of freedom, totalitarianism results. This is true but too simple. The key – as always and as always must be – is in how you conceive of ‘freedom’. A Freedom without Shape or Grounding Image or Template is no freedom at all, but merely the Shapeless discharge of energy. To make this profound mistake is to imagine that because your oil well is spouting the stuff high into the air 24/7 you are therefore successfully conducting an oil business.

 

There is a reason why the “tribunals” of History and Culture and Tradition are “grim-faced”: being human and being an individual human is serious business, and dangerous if you don’t get it right. With more experience, you can let yourself feel a little exhilaration because you’ve earned it by going through the long and hard discipline of mastering your energies.

But the Romantic/Boomer/Youthy idea that the young are more god-like because they aren’t ‘inhibited’ is grossly and profoundly deceptive and mistaken: the young are much more susceptible to thinking (or feeling) that they can just skip the reading and get straight to the exhilaration. And thus, if they are of a spiritual bent, be closer to ‘God’ or be ‘like God’ or experience the god-ness within them. It doesn’t work that way.

The Boomer approach – and lots of folks with gray hair now still think the way they did when they were young – doesn’t work because it presumes there’s no hard work involved, and no danger.

Being a Boomer myself, I think it had something to do with the fact that we were born into an America that just ‘was’ rich and powerful and very clever and oh-so-modern and cutting-edge. We didn’t experience the Great Depression or World War 2 and we hadn’t really been in the life-business very long and just figured that everything was Groovy and all you had to do was lose the ‘grim-faced’ approach and Go For It because life, obviously (it seemed) was really great and you only had to enjoy it and enjoy yourself. Anything less was to fail as a human: if you didn’t enjoy your human-ness to the easily-available max then you must be ‘sick’ or ‘old’ or ‘repressed’.

Well, that was then and none of it worked.

But the Boomers created a revolution in culture that actually tossed out History, Tradition, and even nowadays Culture itself, in the name of total freedom and autonomy in this way or that way or any way at all. No ‘grim face’; remember the 1970s happy-face icon? We passed it on to subsequent age-cohorts. Remember the 1980s “Don’t worry – Be happy!”?

Eagleton tries to salvage a palpable Sense of God by locking onto ‘exhilaration’ and the old ‘happy face’. It’s a quick-burning fuel (which deludes the incompetent into thinking that the bright pretty flame and ‘rush’ means that it works). But quick-burning fuels don’t last long. And then you’re wayyy up there in your jet plane after an exhilarating steep vertical climb and a couple of good zooms high up above those ‘surly bonds of earth’ and suddenly you’re out of fuel and the jet – who knew? – doesn’t just fly because it likes to but instead, because you’ve burned up the fuel, it starts heading back toward those ‘surly bonds of earth’ at continually increasing speed. By that point, the Lesson can only end unhappily.

But achieving Mastery is so grim-faced (and, some would say, so ‘macho’ and ‘patriarchal’ and ‘control-oriented’) that no kids in their right mind would want to accept that such a hard Road is the only way to start toward fulfillment; to the Boomers it seemed more like just one more way to be a drone and to a later generation just one more way to prove ‘you just don’t get it’.

Kant, grim-faced but earnestly trying to help humanity get a grip on itself, went as far as to proclaim that if it’s pleasurable, it’s not virtuous. Virtue, to Kant, had to reflect the qualities in the human being necessary to marshal the self’s abilities to face the frak of living in so incomplete and confused and dangerous a dimension as this world of human history has always proven itself to be.

Eagleton will take the opposite route, the quick-burny Boomer route: pleasure and the high of exhilaration are the virtue, and Duty and all that are just proof that you’re unimaginative and not ‘with it’.

I would say this: there is indeed a pleasure and exhilaration that comes to a Master and Commander, after working hard to achieve competence in handling the ship and navigating and in getting the necessary things done, when standing on the quarterdeck, with the ship well-put before a good wind … there is a sense of legitimate exhilaration there, well-earned and indeed reflecting the image of God as God intended humans to ‘operate’ on this challenging PoE.

But there’s no short-cut to it. And to get that much mastery, you won’t be ‘young’ (chronologically speaking, anyway) by the time you’ve achieved it. (But really, is there anything less ‘young’ than a chronologically older person still trying to pass-for being ‘young’?) The amazing thing about the way God has set things up, the older you get – but if you’re working toward the Echt – then the younger you become.

And kids aren’t closer to God because they’re more ‘genuine’ or Echt. They’re closer to God because they don’t know what they’re up against and so they need all the help they can get; they are ‘innocent’ not in the legal sense but in the sense that they don’t-have something. And what they don’t have is the maturity that only comes with clear-eyed courageous Mastery, and it takes time to achieve that.

And it really does take courage. William Gass, riffing on Nietzsche, recalls that crazed thinker’s image: some people treat genuine consciousness like a knapsack that frightened soldiers rip off and throw aside in order to speed their escape from the field. That is a frightening, vivid characterization of the existential challenge that faces all human beings: to be human you have to be faithful to your (God-given) potential ability to see things clearly. And on this PoE that is bound to be frightening because this PoE is so full of incompleteness and people who are operating out of their ‘inferior’ passions, desires, and urges and organizations large and small that do the same thing.

It’s frightening to be a human and to truly inhabit human consciousness. You see and feel the weaknesses and dangers all around you – and within you.

And some people, like frightened soldiers, toss the knapsack of consciousness aside in order to escape that awful real-ness.

A real Master and Commander is up on deck and can see the huge waves of storms and lives always with the awareness that even on its best days, and with the best ship, captain, and crew – things can go wrong. You can’t just remain ‘optimistic’ in a situation like that; ‘optimism’ and the happy-face won’t get you very far. You have to have achieved a Mastery of your Echt Self, and that includes a steady source of fuel in the relationship with the God in Whose image you are made. Nothing less will sustain you.

Or you can hide down below-decks and get drunk or pretend you’re somewhere else or go to your happy-place or see if the ship’s doctor hasn’t got a handy bottle of some pills.

But you’re still on the ocean with all its possibilities.

The Existentialist writers like Camus said that you must keep the knapsack on, stay on deck and look the ocean and the elements straight-on; but that you had no help except what strength you could find in yourself. There was no other help (or Help) available to you.

This is where the Christian vision of how God works with humans demonstrates what Help is always available in the multi-Planar vision of human existence: the God in Whose image we are made also sustains humans as we try to work through this PoE’s complexity and work through our own frikkery and frakkery of inferior qualities, working to achieve more Mastery of our higher and superior qualities (catalogued handily as the Theological and Cardinal virtues).

No happy-faced Boomery ‘religion’ or god of Wheeeee is going to suffice if you want to be fully human. The world and the human self are too wonky, lethally so, for such saccharine stuff – no matter how much of a ‘high’ you might get for a brief period (before your fuel burns away).

So too, Eagleton is then forced (p. 14) to characterize the morality Jesus preached (as Eagleton sees it) as “reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling-block to real-estate agents”.

This is the cutesy Boomer short-cut: you are either crazy like a kid, or else you are stodgy, repressed and sleazy like the worst this-dimensional older people who represent the ‘grown-up’ world. Remember "The Graduate" from 1968?

Now I would say this: Jesus was against non-Genuine or anti-Genuine living; but Jesus wasn’t against maturity (which in the Christian vision requires growing toward God as you grow toward your own Echt and Genuine-ness).

Yes, many adults – having been around a longer time – have succumbed to the temptation to throw away the knapsack of Genuine consciousness and relationship to God and just try to cobble together whatever satisfactions and pleasures and successes they can manage on their own, and some of them really really don’t care what they have to do to get that done.

But although ‘older’ they are not at all Mature (capitalized to indicate the Christian sense of the word I’m going for in all this).

NOR does not-being ‘old’ mean that you are any more Mature or any closer to being Genuine in the Christian sense. You simply haven’t had the time to make the mistakes, to run away once you’ve seen the terribilita (as the Renaissance Italians would put it) of life.

Babies – the exact opposite of ‘old’ – aren’t closer to God (if they were, would they dump their poop all over you at every opportunity?). They simply haven’t gotten out onto the field yet. Ditto, to a lesser extent, youth (who before very many years pass from being a baby and are already threatened by the existential challenge of facing their own and the world’s incompleteness, and the darknesses that can result).

And of course those humans who have never Matured will demonstrate the fact by indeed dropping their poop on you in their witless and terrified flight from Genuineness, trying to make life ‘happy’ as best they can on their own (having cut loose from God as well as their own Echt Self).

These great tectonic existential challenges and how humans respond to them are what make ‘life’ and ‘history’ take the rough bounces they take. This whole PoE is knocked out of whack, like a planet off its axis, and that it comes from human beings thrown off their Genuine axis, not achieving their true and Genuine Shape.

But the Boomers tossed out any idea of ‘boundaries’ and ‘limits’, and yet while boundaries do limit you, they also give you a Shape (depending on what boundaries you accept, which is where the Church’s essential Rules of Navigation and Ship-Handling come in). Some folks accept a much inferior Shape, based on their ‘inferior’ and less-Genuinely human (made in the image and likeness of God) choices. Other folks just settle for being Shapeless.

And it is precisely here that the Boomers (and Eagleton) went off the rails: they ‘valorized’ Shapelessness (they didn’t even admit that there could be a wrong, less-Genuine Shape) as ‘freedom’ and ‘liberation’ and as being Genuine, and in Eagleton’s example even consider the fake ‘exhilaration’ of boundaryless-ness to be a participation in God’s very Life.

Nope. Not hardly.

And nowadays the Pomo’s have erected this terrific, catastrophic  mistake into a Plan and call it Good. Oy, feh, and oy-gevalt!

It’s like the Naval Academy graduating officers who don’t know the first thing about how ships work, or the Air Force Academy graduating officers who don’t think they need to know the first thing about the laws of aerodynamics and how planes fly. This is not a good thing.

And it will not – cannot – end well.

Eagleton acknowledges that Jesus was so reckless because he thought that the end of the world was coming and people didn’t have to worry about what I would call Maturity over the long haul.

But he misses something vital here.

Jesus may have been, in His human awareness, a tad off in when the End of the World would arrive.

But then again, in His awareness that all human beings are faced with the end of the inferior-Shaped world every minute of their lives, then the really important End of the World faces human beings right now, all the time, 24/7.

And in the Christian and Catholic vision, then the Church has been continuously keeping that awareness alive, trying to function as the officers’ Academy to continuously train folks and give them the knowledge of how to operate their human craft, their human vessels, so that they have a decent shot at getting closer to their own Genuine-ness and simultaneously a closer relationship with God (in whose image and Shape they are, you recall, created).

God’s Grace (capitalized to remind you how vitally and urgently important it is) is always among humans and within them, seeking to Help prompt the life-long faithfulness of the trek toward Genuine human Shape and the true fullness of human life that such a trek brings.

Eagleton thus comes a bit back on track when he decries the Modern and Pomo replacing “of a transcendent God with an omnipotent humanity”. Humans are not omnipotent; and anybody who has ever been out at sea in a storm or up in the air when a plane goes wonky or put his/her entire well-being in the hands of raising crops at the mercy of the weather and the locusts can ever delude themselves into thinking that humans are omnipotent.

As Lord Elrond said to Gandalf in “The Fellowship of the Ring”: this evil cannot be contained by the power of the Elves – we have not the power …”. So if even the Elves realize it …

The Boomers were big – reely reely big – into Henry David Thoreau back in the day. That little fraud spent a few years out in the woods on the border of downtown Concord, Massachusetts, living in a wooden hutch. Of course nobody bothered to recall that he frequently went back into town for handouts and supplies.

But what was even more lethally ignored was that a few years after that romp, he went up to the forests of the Maine wilderness. Not ‘woods’, but genuine, God-awful, dark, lonely, primeval wilderness forests. It terrified him. He came back wayyyy sobered-up and decided that the Concord woods weren’t really the total-challenge of life that he had so easily ‘conquered’ … all on his own.

The animals weren’t cuddly like woodchucks and squirrels and cutesy groundhogs and chipmunks. They were these remote, powerful, majestic beings of a darker and larger – huge – world that made him feel like a pipsqueak. (Which was probably one of the most accurate insights into himself that he ever managed to get.)

Perhaps now that Americans are finding themselves in the primeval forest of economic Scarcity and uncertainty, they might have that type of ‘Damascus Moment’ that St. Paul had when he was just plain old Saul and got knocked off his horse on the road by a God Who was wayyyy bigger and more real than he had previously given the old boy credit for. Perhaps some Americans can admit with Mark Twain that "when I was seventeen I was amazed by how stupid my father was; when I was twenty-one I was amazed by how much the old man had learned in a few years".

But Americans – like the Boomers and, alas, courtesy of the Boomers – are now going to face the sea of life in all its lethal uncertainty and perhaps agitated dangerousness. Abundance has gone and Scarcity is upon us.

No happy-face godling or do-it-yourself god is going to Help. All the illusions of the Boomer years (which to some extent are quintessentially American illusions from the long centuries of some sort of Abundance) are going to be burned away.

It will be terrifying and it will bring Americans face to face with that terribilita that is part of the incompleteness and brokenness of this PoE.

This could be a Damascus Moment for a whole of folks. And that could turn out as well for a lot of folks as it did for St. Paul.

Stay tuned.

NOTES

*New London: Yale University Press. ISBN: 978-0-300-15179-4

THE OLDER THEY ARE

In the September 10th issue of ‘The New Republic’, the marvelous philosopher and commentator Martha Nussbaum has a meaty piece on Roger Williams (“The First Founder”, http://www.tnr.com/booksarts/story.html?id=511ec724-6299-4bf4-adf7-38059cff16ae).

We may not think it’s worthwhile spending much time on philosophy or on the thoughts and actions of persons long dead (and white and male and – the horror! – religiously inclined). After all, We are sore bethump’t and there may not be too much time left. Necessity might seem to demand Our being ‘practical’; once, it is said, that was what We were famous for.

But this is the equivalent of not wanting to take a quick for-dummies primer on sailing as the ship slows almost to the point of unmanageability and starts to fill. Granted, an only slightly precocious 9 year-old might point out that people shouldn’t put to sea unless they sorta have a working knowledge of what makes vessels work, and how best to care for and handle them. We had reposed Our trust in ‘the government’, or at least those gentlepersons whom We had elected to represent Us … they were supposed to keep an eye on things and keep this marvelous if not altogether perfect ship of state afloat and in business.

But now it appears time for Plan B. High time.

But in the best spirit of the Marines’ ‘every Marine a rifleman’ (‘rifleperson’) it’s not a bad idea for all the citizenry to have at least a modest understanding of how things work – just in case the official crew jump ship or maybe lock themselves into the first-class saloon with the swells, leaving the rest of the passengery to shift for themselves. Which in this case is Ourselves. You see how quickly the political can get personal. Even more so the philosophical.

“Mutual respect” is absolutely essential for a democratic politics, for a democracy, to survive. This doesn’t mean a tactical tolerance for the sake of some temporary alliance-for-gain. That’s merely a mutual shrewdness. What those hardy if sharp-edged first souls of the 1600s grasped before they even waded onto these shores was that a community embarked on a mission so grandly tenuous needed to draw upon each of its members in order to muster the strength and skills to see the job through.

Whether through temperament or variously distributed quanta of fortitude – the courage, to see clearly and to consider carefully under pressure, and then to take the best conceivable and possible action - a split developed in early New England. There was the Mather approach: that religious conformity must be enforced by the civil power of the community for the sake of public order and – the Indians having been most sharply treated with insufficient regard to consequence, let alone to their dignity and any mutual respect that might be due them – simply for public survival.

It can get to be a vicious circle: for lack of respect for limits, boundaries, or for the necessary honesty due in relations with other human beings, a community takes actions that engender consequences that put said community in grave danger; thus fear-ified, the community attacks itself in order to expel any hesitation, and thus fortified, it goes forth to ferocitize afresh. Which in turn creates more baleful consequences, which in turn … and so on.

There was in the midst of 17th century New England a man with another approach to things. Based on three particular elements of his thought (and he did a lot of thinking before acting, even in matters that to the less-matured eye might have seemed far too urgent for such an otiose plan as ‘thinking’) Williams evolved a far different modus operandi in regard to setting up shop on these primeval shores; and when New England – Mather country – refused to countenance his methods, he took himself as far south as what is now Providence, Rhode Island, which he founded – named after that thing God does – and deployed his methods with no little success and far less blood-letting. (At which point in the story the average 9 year-old might feel a bit let-down; but that goes with the territory of being that age, and adults are – it can only be hoped – available to teach the tyke a perceptive patience that will serve as far more effective a tool in the building of a self and a life.)

First, and without bringing religion into it (and Nussbaum is a philosopher, not a theologian) Williams grounded his entire take on being human in the observation that all humans have a capacity for conscience. This conscience is defined as the “seat of emotion, imagination, and ethical choice through which each person seeks meaning in his or her own way”. And it is this capacity that constitutes for Williams “the source of our equality, and it is worthy of equal respect wherever it is found”.

And “political principles must be based on that equal respect”. I don’t know how many of Us, especially the generations that have joined Us in the past forty or so years, have ever really been given the opportunity to take that observation to heart. It should be carved in stone on public buildings, and leave the Ten Commandments – may they be revered – for carving upon churches. Perhaps the fundamentalist brethren and sistern, famously averse to large stone houses of worship, might be assisted somehow to own or build a few, so that they can then carve the Commandments thereupon to their heart’s and soul’s content.

On the other side of the national divide, the equally fundamentalistic secularists (or secularistic fundamentalists, if you prefer) might be well-advised that when such vital mutual respect is for all practical purposes nullified in the service of creating monsters to destroy out of this or that small or very large segment of the national community … then they need to re-visit their complaints, plans and agendas. If the community called ‘American’ – for all its imperfections, and their name is Legion – is not granted primacy by any group, then that group has to consider to just what extent it has seceded from the American Experiment. And haven’t We been down this road before?

In the second place, “Williams believed that equal respect for conscience entails protecting an extensive sphere of freedom around the individual, and that this protection must be impartial, imposing no orthodoxy”. This might be construed as overtly religious orthodoxy or as that secularist equivalent masquerading as ‘political correctness’ (a phrase and a concept borrowed from a certain 1917 revolution that finally succumbed to its own outrageousness in 1991, only to be resurrected in an amended form in 2008 – which might be to some a ‘proof’ that George Bush, as he has always claimed, is acting on God’s authority ... Pray, pray for your lives).

And – marvelously on the part of both Williams and Nussbaum – such orthodoxy Williams termed “soule rape”. It’s not hard to see why such rape has not been embraced by the Second-Wave-inspired sex-offense mania: the last thing Pomo deconstruction wants to do is give any public airing whatsoever to the concept of ‘soule’ (modern: soul) and all that the term might bear back into Our midst. It is harder to imagine why the churches have not been more steadfast in their proclamation of this particular variant of monstrousness over the decades and centuries since the Founding; tastefulness and a desire to be polite at the table could be one reason: A-list dinner parties, country club verandahs, and small-town church suppers all have this in common: too vivid a presentation of some truths and realities is simply beyond good taste. But, alas, ‘soule rape’ is still on History’s (not to say God’s) table. Boardrooms, of course, have always been averse to the concept; paying thus the compliment that vice always pays to virtue, but thereby piling up for themselves treasure not-in-heaven.

And thirdly, “civil peace among people who differ in religion [and secular fundamentalism is a religion just as much as Marxian materialism was] requires a moral consensus that is itself impartial, giving ascendancy to no creed more than any other”. But our modern American reality runs into that ‘abortion’ thing, and no ‘moral’ discussion is to be permitted; indeed, the non-moral is to be ‘privileged’. Is it me or is the Republic once again in the same type of ominous bind that bethump’t the generations before the Civil War (and in Williams’s time and up to the 1890s, in the matter of the treatment of the Indians). We have regressed, it seems. No therapist could leave that alone and still in good professional conscience submit a bill at the end of the month. Nor are We insured; no larger power is going to cover Our costs on this one. When it comes to Amairikuh, famously, there is no larger power. Except the one that We are assured is on Our side and has deputized Us to go out forthwith and make either democracies or wastelands. Sorta like those intergalactic prophets of believe-or-die on ‘Stargate SG-1’: the Ori.

Williams himself actively promoted friendship with the Indians. He was not doing this (as Jonathan Edwards and assorted Jesuits and other missionaries did) in order to convert them. He was acting out of “moral decency”. And again – it’s been a while since that term has been welcome around the official national hearth. No room for it, due to the reasons mentioned above. And sure as shootin’ – Our national decency, domestically and internationally, has got up and gone. Are We the better for it?

“The experience of finding integrity and goodness outside the parameters of orthodoxy surely shaped his evolving views of political principles.” Well, and what happens to those political principles when an unripe, primitive, regressed either-or pugnacity and hostility becomes the major key in the national discourse? I wonder if We had any right to expect some decades ago that We could excise all of those political principles and still retain the political structure – the Republic – which was built squarely upon them? The twin towers were finally taken down from the top (their tops, I mean); but the first attempt was to blow out their foundations. They may hold more symbolic truth for Us than had previously been considered.

Further, Williams's thought is far more perceptive in the tricky subtleties of the psychological dynamics of “both persecutor and victim”. A functioning lack of mutual respect belies a constructive (as the courts would say; or ‘de facto’) lack of conscience that makes ‘beasts’ not only of the designated monsters but of the designating community itself. I say this while thinking of Solzhenitsyn’s sharp observation, jabbed into the hyper-inflated balloons sitting before him at Hahvahd that day thirty years ago, that this country was on its way to becoming a prison, both for its many prisoners and for its even more numerous imprisoners. As if We are not all “sinners in the hands of an angry God”, as Edwards famously put it. As if Our prisons are God’s prisons and the rest of Us are ‘saved’ and may graze peaceably, sleek and fatted, at a better table. Henry Clay Frick, called from his New York mansion to come up the few blocks to his former employer Andrew Carnegie’s even grander mansion, when asked by that aging tiger of commerce and corporate engorgement to join in a soul-raising project of building nice things for the public while there was still time (a gambit taken straight from the playbook of dying and desperate Renaissance condottiere), replied that it was too late for that sort of thing now, taking his leave abruptly with the under-appreciated benediction: “I shall see you in Hell, Andrew, where we both are going”. They don’t make CEOs like that anymore.

“Truth is not the basis for respect … the faculty for finding the truth” is. And even ‘men’ have it. Oy. Nor does this term refer only to those men who seek to embrace their Inner Woman. “Everyone has inside himself or herself something infinitely precious, something that demands respect from us all, and something in regard to which we are all basically equal.” And nobody among Us has a warrant, from God or a ballot box or by viva voce acclamation from a shoal of pandering pundits and roadies or from any ‘base’, to ignore that equality: not in the service of Party or of great ‘visions’ of Progress and Change or in the haste to meet this or that ‘emergency’. This Republic and this People does things the right way, or not at all. Lest any or all incur that awefull punishment reserved for those who “have practiced ‘violence to the soules of men’”. And he’s not talking about gays or child-molesters here. And if the fear of committing such a sacrilege keeps Us from giving bad example to children, it must also keep Us from bombing, rocketing, or otherwise blowing them up, and flaunting such impious malefaction in the faces of the rest of the world’s peoples, and declaring it to be “God’s work”, in JFK’s short but rock-like phrase. I don’t think We quite grasp just what God-fearing means nowadays. Or why far more accomplished generations of Americans put so much store in it.

“What does he mean by saying that “persecution takes ‘the world out of the world’? I think he is expressing the view that the spirit of love and gentleness, combined with the spirit of fair play, is at the heart of our worldly lives with one another. Take these things away and you despoil the world itself. You make it nothing but a heap of confusion and pain.” Reading a passage like this lights anew the hope that universities still provide something of more-than-tactical value to the young. And gives rise to the darkling intimation that Rome in her worst aspects has returned, making a desolation and calling it not just ‘peace’ but God’s will. And thence gives immediate rise to an expansion of Vachel Lindsay’s thought: Neither Lincoln nor any of the Founders can rest upon their hillsides now – they must be among Us as before. But only among Us: no matter how white the heavenly horses upon which they might ride, they cannot do for Us what We, even We here, must do to keep faith and to keep Our rendezvous with destiny.

“Peace and stability” are purchased at too terrible a price if they are purchased at the price of bringing wholesale violence into the lives and ‘soules’ of human beings. There must be ‘order’; but an order that deflowers the respect each is owed by all, and that each owes to all, violates an Order that is rooted in the foundations of humanity itself. The consequences of introducing such iniquity into the human realm, already sore beset, will be positively Greek in their utterness. And who would dare to boast that History cannot raise up barbarians to punish the barbarity of a civilization that has lost its savor? In a hell-hot irony, the barbarity itself breeds the barbarians who will avenge the impiety. We have seen it before.

“Williams is keenly aware of the danger of religious establishments as threats to both liberty and equality.” Yes, although Williams does not say – and I don’t think Nussbaum implies – that ‘religion’ itself is thus in essence only a danger and not potentially a 'good'. “Established” religion is, privileged by the government either formally or constructively. Eisenhower was on to this in a schoolboyish way with his insistence that the country couldn’t survive unless the citizenry were religious, and he didn’t care what religion. Of course, he didn’t quite appreciate – or never let on that he appreciated – just how grave the responsibilities a vital religious spirit must discharge: especially to stand in judgment over the doings of government.

But also: to speak with the authority of God does not mean that one is possessed sufficiently of God’s wisdom and knowledge so as to unsheathe the sword of righteousness and start whacking away according to one’s particular illuminations. I sort of think that John Brown still had to stand before that final awefull Court and face the consequences of those killings at Pottowattamie Creek. And that implies no disrespect to his burning anger at the outrages of slavery.

And I say again that the current ‘establishment’ of the ‘secular fundamentalism’ during the last forty years qualifies quite fully as a de facto ‘establishment’ of religion on the part of the government, and – alas – the Democratic Party. And We cannot escape the awefull symmetry: the fundamentalism of the Left ignited the fundamentalism of the Right. And now the ship of state is pulled lethally to both a port and a starboard list: no hull and no keel can withstand such pressure for long.

And finally, Nussbaum draws upon a third character who joins Truth and Peace in Williams’s ‘The Bloudy Tenent’: “’But loe!’, says Peace, ‘Who’s here?’ Truth replies, ‘Our Sister Patience, whose desired company is as needful as delightful.’” Patience, as I’ve said in earlier Posts, is not a hallmark of youth or of revolutionaries (and among the latter I number those impatient revolutionaries of the Identities who have found scant use for a democratic politics these past biblical forty years). There is a price to be paid for trying to court youth and revolutionaries: they have no patience for careful building – or careful renovation or reconstruction, for that matter. Patience is not what they do. But it most certainly is what We need and how We must proceed, if We are not to run amok among Ourselves and among all nations.

These be dark times, and such light as there is sheds a thin and lurid illumination that cannot enlighten. We must light a few lamps. It’s grown-up work. And We indeed must be a beacon, unto our own children if not – for a while – to the nations.

ILLUSIONS VICTORIOUS

Allons, allons, enfants de la patrie! Marchons, marchons, citoyens! We march under the flapping banner of the Illusions Victorious!

Over on Tom Dispatch, the acute and balanced retired Colonel and now-professor, Andrew Bacevich, examines the key ‘illusions’ through infatuation to which We proceeded to Iraq as confidently as Custer advanced down into the Little Bighorn that nice June afternoon. “Illusions of Victory”, (http://www.tomdispatch.com/). Also on Truthout: http://www.truthout.org/article/illusions-victory.

Illusions … in this age of ‘Narratives’, when ‘stories’ trump facts and spin trumps analysis, when ‘stories’ make history and the fact-dependent can simply stand by and watch, well … a couple-three things occur to me.

First, it’s no wonder that this country has been having a hard time distinguishing facts from reality. Human nature has always been subject to illusions, emanating from others around one or from deep within oneself. That, alas, is a fact. (Yes, I am – and I do now admit and confess – dependent.) But for most of human history that weakness was known and acknowledged; thus informed, the wily soul-captain could keep a watchful eye out for the ship’s tendency to ‘illuse’ and avoid or even compensate for it, thereby avoiding avoidable distractions and disasters.

But with the Identities’ (and the Dems’) embrace of that all-corrosive ‘deconstruction’, ‘stories’ replaced ‘facts’ as the decisive fuel for policy and – oy gevalt – civil and criminal law. We are now indeed a storybook culture, but in a far more dark and ominous sense than Louis B. Mayer ever dreamed of. Though the Warners on their better days kind of sensed.

It was the ‘Narrative’ of a benevolent and necessarily all-encompassing ‘revolution’ that propelled Marxism and Leninism even unto the darkest ends of Stalinism’s total-security, total-information earth. It was the storied promise of Germany’s re-emergence as a great power and the necessary revenge upon her humiliators – coupled with a promise of economic security – that lubricated Hitler’s last-minute rise to Ultimate Unitary Executive Authority.

Stories are marvelous things, drawing as they do on the human spirit’s unquenchable capacity for desire and vision. But they are like aircraft; they have to be flown – they don’t ‘stay up’ naturally. If you wish to take a ‘Narrative’ into your life, commit to a personal or societal or national ‘story’, then you’d a) better make sure it’s sturdy enough and b) you’d better plan to keep a close eye on it. Visions, like the proverbial horse, can sometimes run away with the meat wagon.

And while children and youth famously dream dreams, it takes a mensch – no genderism intended – to operate a vision. It takes maturity and a steady and strong mind to harness and manage the horse called vision. And this is all the more so if you’ve embraced a life-encompassing Narrative, and – by accepting that the Narrative has a basis and thus an authority above and beyond Space and Time – if you’ve embraced the Clydesdale called Vision. This is no country for young folk. Not without mature folk to give them a start first. Dude, how dated ammmmm I?

That being said, it stuns how un-mature Our national leadership – Our elites (so-called) have become. From national politicians to high-level government bosses to high-ranking military officers to ‘journalists’ and pundits formerly known – and with appropriate constitutional appreciation – as ‘the free press’.

But of course, the nice thing about democracy is that you get the government you deserve, as somebody once said who is even older than Rumsfeld. Our government is such a zoo of unripe chimps and chimpesses because – well – because We are so unripe. And because We think that being unripe is kind of a … ummmm … virtue. Maybe even an achievement. Which is very much akin to a child figuring that having produced his/her first steaming pile, then the pinnacle of development had been reached, and – impressively – rather early-on, doncha think? Oy. And We are sitting on top of nukular weppins? Ach!

How anybody imagined that We could “maintain global pre-eminence” and remain The Big Enchilada without sufficient maturity to grasp the operational differences between facts and stories, without the sufficient interior chops to manage Our visions and Our Vision (to the extent that there’s one left) … inquiring minds will want to know at the post-mortem. ‘Succumbed to 3rd-rate-ness after its People declined to un-ripeness’, the Final Report might read in that basement morgue of the Castle called ‘History’, still very much in business despite previous assertions of its demise or non-existence.

Second, Bacevich points out what nobody of his status and achievement has ever dared to point out, certainly not in the past sixty years: our military is not invincible. It is no secret, although not widely realized here in God’s Country, that the Greatest Generation would have had a lot more dubious time of it there on the Western Front after Normandy, if they had had to face a reasonably intact Wehrmacht, undistracted and undrained by the stupendous war on their Eastern Front against the unparalleled Red Army.

American males – despite feministical assertions to the contrary – are not really adept maniacal killers. Ferocity does not come easily to them, and sustained ferocity is simply not in the American panoplium at all. Those gimlet-eyed half-children of the Civil War – now they might have had somewhat of the ability, tossed into that inferno without benefit of decent medicine or battery-operated consolations, fortified by the short sharpness of this life and the assurance of Another. But modern Americans as a rule do not ferocitize in militarily reliable terms.

Which is why there is a highly dubious and so spiritually and emotionally dangerous interest in ‘special forces’ and ‘mercenaries’, elite but small units that can indeed inhabit their Inner Chimp, their Inner Baboon even, for long periods. Bless their hearts for trying, but the whole idea is simply a more person-oriented version of the German idea that when you’re outnumbered and fighting enemies all around you and can’t afford to let large-scale operations drag on, then preventive terror is the best way to keep your subject populations docile and save your combat troops for the big stuff.

How much Our leadership elites have come to represent those of the late Duce and the late Fuhrer: strutting, unripe, kinda hairless and pasty-faced and doughy, cocky about the ability of ‘their’ glorious forces (but not their own well-fed selves) to go and obliterate all resistance. Nor have the females among them on the bandstand done much to improve matters, contrary to what We were assured some decades ago.

And just how debauched have We become? So debauched that – in a quietly stupendous observation – Bacevich opines that Tom Brady and not Pat Tillman is a more accurate incarnation of the current national conception of what a genuine ‘patriot’ is. He is spot-on correct – and the fact is, or should be, repulsive to Us. In some older cultures, sackcloth and ashes would be the immediate order of the day, and a Day of Prayer proclaimed. But ‘order’ and ‘prayer’ aren’t around anymore, and that can hardly be a coincidence. Nor are We spackled up by the dense resistances of this mortal coil, nor burnished by mastering ourselves so as to meet its challenges, nor raised up by the promise of Another life.

Thus We have sunk, pasty and dough-souled, into the flat, fleshy folds of this one.

For the moment texting and shopping and a thousand and two multi-tasks keep Us moving, and no doubt the challenging project of tracking Tom’s or Giselle’s stats. But We are reverting backwards to a state similar to Frankenstein’s artifact: electrically alive with twitching muscles, but without brain or soul. If this keeps up, having a Unitary Executive to manage Our lives might seem like a good, even necessary, idea. Perhaps some ‘elite’ thinker will assert that We even have a ‘right’ to be ruled-over. Which, if memory serves, is where the Israelites first went wrong.

So it seems that some serious Hearkening is in order. The alarm bells are going off all over America, and they ain’t just new ideas for ring-tones.

THE PAST IS TOMORROW

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. I wonder how it will play?

His remarks delivered at Harvard in June of 1978 are reprinted on Truthout (http://www.truthout.org/article/a-world-split-apart).

I remember Bill Mauldin’s death: that marvelous cartoonist, the creator of Willy and Joe, the two haggard but humorous infantry grunts who lived in a world of mud, rain, bureaucratic imbecility, incoming shells and foxholes somewhere in World War Two. Mauldin had the ill-fortune – perhaps – to die early in the current Iraq debacle. Once the most popular of WW2 cartoonists, neither the military nor the government wanted to think of him at his death, and his passing was almost un-noticed. War was too glorious and lightning-quick, so why waste time on such a ‘quaint’ cartoonist? The same was apparently felt by the national leadership of the assorted veterans’ organizations, always so quick to lend benefit-of-history to government gambits, for the price of being allowed to dress up in odd bits of uniform and shake the occasional Unitary hand or half-salute whatever emblem looms up into a fading, blurred vision.

Nor did any of the Identities, erstwhile tribunes of the ‘little guy’, take note. After all, Correct usage requires that one does not ‘endure and prevail’ in the midst of sustained hardship, but rather that one complain and see where something can be shaken loose on one’s behalf. And – being WW2-era white guys – there was no real Identity into which Willy and Joe fit. Nor does simply being ‘American’ really hold much traction any longer.

I recall Solzhenitsyn talking at Harvard back there 30 years ago. And being kind of surprised, naïf that I was. I had assumed that the ‘liberals’ of the Hahvahd faculty would embrace him, liberals being strong on liberty, as the similarity of the two terms would suggest.

But no, they were not at all amused. They had, after all, displayed their distaste (not altogether misplaced) for unbridled American capitalism by embracing the ideals of the Marxist-Communist Revolution, conveniently forgetting that a revolution-with-ideals and an ideal-revolution are not quite the same thing. It’s not an infrequent error: you sit around looking at flat maps covering vast swaths of ‘reality’ and figure that success will follow the sweep of your hand; only those who have to operate on the actual ground can see the hills, valleys, ruts, ridges, and assorted treacherous impassables.

So here was Solzhenitsyn, fresh – you should pardon the expression – from the actuality, from the reality, of that Revolution, speaking to a number of the educated elite who were themselves in the midst of their own unacknowledged but very cutting-edge revolutions over here.

“Veritas”, he reminded them, was not easily grasped, nor that grasp easily maintained. One pursued truth through a continuous maze of illusions and chicaneries from outside one, and a fog of irresolution arising from within. There is no ‘easy’ Truth, as there is no ‘easy’ Liberty; both, indeed, are ‘strenuous’ in their demands.

Little did he realize that he was speaking about the failures of a Revolution and the moral failures of its revolutionaries and votaries to those who were themselves in thrall to the excitements of revolution, and the even easier excitements of destruction and deconstruction.

And thus in addition to their ‘professional’ umbrance taken at his denouncing the methodology and psychology of ‘revolution’, they were doubly miffed when he put his finger on the core of the revolutionary gambit: a betrayal or deconstruction of Truth. They themselves were supporting the Blooming of a Million Identities precisely by deconstructing (denying) the concepts that i)there existed any objective truth, ii) that truth existed anywhere except in the construction of ‘stories’ by those in power, and iii) that there existed any truth whose origin was beyond human-ness itself, and most surely iv) that there existed such a concept with an origin so authoritative as to be designated ‘Truth’.

He didn’t so much trace out the darkling path that would capture any would-be votaries: that a ‘revolution’ so conceived and so dedicated could only destroy (‘deconstruct’), but could not create without constructing and then enforcing its own ‘authority’ upon all the citizenry. Instead, he remarked on what I would call the soul-strangling Flatness of a world which could not anchor itself in any principles beyond itself. The revolutionistas were committed – willy or nilly – to placing American society on a high stairway with no banister or railings; anyone using it would have to balance himself, herself, themselves – because there was to be no balancing, steadying, grounding assistance from outside the human self.

This was not what the multi-colored Guards of the revolutions wished to hear. Bad enough that he denounced the fundamental and essential shallowness of their Project; but he then pointed out that when divided against itself, no world or any “Kingdom” upon it can stand. The divisions of the Identities and their respective ‘stories’ and ‘politics’ were precisely the structures that were to shape the brave new world, and the engines that were to fuel its dynamics. Nor were those dynamics much longer to resemble a democratic ‘politics’ in anything but appearance.

There was as well, he noted, a loss of “civil courage” in the West. Now I state immediately that “civil courage” can be used as a cover for the most cynical and repulsive chimpery. Against such chimpery The People must be constantly on guard – but that goes with the job of being The People.

Equally relevant is that this loss of “civil courage” results in the abdication of The People from Its task of grounding the government in all its branches; if the government is the great wheel of the ferris-wheel, then The People are the struts on each side that hold it steady. And upon what, then, is The People grounded? In solid earth? Upon rock? Or upon sand, soft and shifting? Of course, for the Revolutions of the Identities, the whole idea was to soften up everything in order to squeeze their hydra-headed agendas and priorities (‘values’ is too dignified a term) into the whole process.

But that required reducing the American Experiment and the workings of American society and democracy to a soapisch agitation over this or that ‘story’ being pushed upon The People, like a bill long-due from some unknown purveyor. The loss of “civil courage” stemmed from The People – youngish and emotional and impatient and insistent – forgetting what the Founders had always before their minds in vivid and alarming clarity: that their Constitutional vision involved a government that was not only constructed like a careful machine, but was also subject to the same dangers as any machine: if you forget the principles upon which it works, then the thing is going to break or stop working, and if it’s big enough, it’s going to crash. Oy. Who knew?

“Courage” and its decline among Us … Solzhenitsyn sensed it 30-plus years ago. How can one be courageous if one doesn’t know what to be courageous about? How can one be courageous if all ‘courage’ is instantly vilified as ‘masculine’, ‘oppressive’, ‘hateful’, ‘shrill’, or even just ‘quaint’? Surely there is a hugely fruitful personal and civic space between the utter lack of courage and the aggressive imposition of one’s own beliefs? But to the revolutionistas one could only be ‘courageous’ in the service of the revolution; against the ‘revolution’ any opposition or even honest doubt was the same: a willful obstruction to be overrun.

And their ‘happiness’ was – Solzhenitsyn inveighed – “morally inferior”. It was what might be called ‘merely of this world’, it was Flat. But of course, if one assumed that there was a God, a Judge or at least a Judging force in place over this human dimension, then there would be no emergency justification for pushing aside all laws in order to ‘get’ presumed evildoers before they ‘escaped’ through death (can one keep a straight face when reading of a 70-year-old nun prosecuted for a sex-offense decades ago?). The Flatness of the revolutionary ethos, here as well as in the USSR, was essential to the revolutionary ‘success’: all would have to look to the revolution here and now, not to some other authority, and certainly not one beyond Space and Time, for justification and for vengeance (not to say ‘for Justice’). The “dependence” of the individual on “state pressure” (once the state has been taken over by the revolution) is hugely intensified.

Even in the ‘70s, there was the deconstructive thrust against – ironically enough – ‘judging’. One could not say – and should not think – that this or that was ‘inferior’, let alone ‘morally inferior’; one should be tolerant of all things. But again: this responsibility of ‘tolerance’ was not universal: it was incumbent upon any individual, yet only in matters designated by the revolutions as in the service of their agendas. In regard to anything against the service of a revolutionary agenda, one did not ‘tolerate’; one judged ... and denounced. Thus too the “dependence” – in this case through fear rather than need – of the individual upon “state pressure” is hugely intensified.

And so in the heyday of the tolerant and nonjudmental and relativistic and sensitive Identities this country has seen an efflorescence of prosecution and incarceration; when the necessary suppressive acts against each of the ‘enemies’ of each Identity are toted up, it becomes immediately clear that Ours is a society in which huge swaths of the citizenry are liable to judgment, if not to Justice. Proportionately, more American citizens are incarcerated than Stalin ever managed to do; in a sense, this country is itself becoming one big prison, as Solzhenitsyn characterized the USSR.

But of course, he would mean it in a far more profound sense: this country has become so Flattened that it is indeed an existential and even ontological prison, the citizenry trapped in an ever-shrinking dimension like adventurers trapped in a room whose ceiling is coming down and preparing to crush them. The votaries of revolution at Hahvahd did not want to hear that.

But as it has become Flattened, American society and its ethos have also become unstable. It’s as if one tries to steady and secure a rowboat in a heavy sea only from aboard, without relying on an anchor or a line securing it to a pier or a larger vessel. It’s dynamically impossible; no rower can manipulate the oars long enough and accurately enough to keep the boat’s balance and its position relative to the crushing waves. Our philosophical and ethical and moral grounding is dissolved by the universal solvent of ‘deconstruction’, and now We are truly ‘at sea’, in a very small boat.

But he also went deeper: he put his finger on that most touchy of subjects: mediocrity’s relationship to American democracy. If there is to be a total ‘equality’, cutting across all spheres of life, thus an equality of outcome as well as of opportunity, of talent as well as of achievement, then the entire dynamic will be to skew toward the least common denominator. And thus away from any striving toward some excellence in an area of one’s individual life, or of the societal life.

And thus any freedom ‘won’ by any individual group will necessarily be ‘governed’ by a much-diminished capacity for judgment or any ethic of excellence in self-development or societal development.

And thus, given that there is a dark potential in individual human beings to not-develop themselves, concomitant to their willingness as citizens to be ‘governed’ by a ‘leader’, then Solzhenitsyn saw that “freedom” would “tilt in the direction of evil”. Yes, it all started with “a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent in human nature; [and that] the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected”. In pulling all of its citizens’ endeavors to itself, the revolutionary state pulls the ceiling down, even if it appears to push the walls out so as to ‘expand’ the life of its (now-captive) citizens.

You can judge for yourself whether he was prescient.

Certainly, the “hastiness and superficiality” that he sees are “the psychic disease of the 20th century”, as are the “in-depth analysis of a problem that is anathema to the press” and “the sensational formulas” that have replaced analysis. And this awful synergy is comprised of the primitive and unthinking emotionality that is essential to the propaganda state and to the manipulations of professional Advocacy; it is also thus comprised as a result of the ‘non-rationality’ of the enlightened feminist mind and the unthinking impatience and still-unripened mental processes of ‘youth’.

And so “there is a dangerous tendency to form a herd”. And as if that weren’t bad enough, such herd-ing can only lead to “shutting off successful development”. Individually or societally he doesn’t specify, but I’d say that it’s both, and that the formation of such a negative feedback loop, of such a dark symmetry, can only increase the rate and angle of decline.

And yet to protect themselves, individuals and groups will construct a sort of “petrified armor” around their minds, shutting out any awareness of the actual operating dynamics and the consequences of the ideas and movements they have embraced.

And such “armor” will only be pierced by “the pitiless crowbar of events”. As medieval folk knew, a blow sufficient to shatter armor will most likely proceed to break some bones inside that armor. Maybe a lot of bones. Nor can We permit Ourselves the almost clinically-significant denial of such as Douglas Feith (the noted Georgetown perfesser): having prophesied that Our troops would be greeted with flowers, and watching the actual films of Iraqi crowds precisely not-throwing flowers, he instantly simpered that they were intimidated by the presence of armed former Baathists on the streets, but were “thinking flowers in their heads”, an assertion that surpasses even the theory of ‘recovered memory’ in its demonstration of malicious fatuousness.

Solzhenitsyn's was a clear eye and a strong voice. We did not listen to him then. And now We are where We are.

They say that Obama is not hugely ahead of McCain, and that this seems a bit odd. And that it will be all about Obama as a person. No. It’s not odd because the Dems know, as do the Repugs, that there is still a vast and deep reservoir of concern among voters as to the wisdom and integrity of the Dems and their 40 years of the Revolutions of the Identities, and their pols’ decades of trying to cushion themselves from the consequences of the vastly deleterious ‘revolutions’ embraced by the Party after ’68. America’s civilization and its economy, its very ethos as a Constitutional republic, were quietly perverted in the Dems’ quest to somehow keep a lid on things that they themselves had induced.

How can Obama – or any individual – really change the course of all these decades’ worth of revolutionary deconstruction and destruction? They figured that the ‘destruction’ would automatically ‘create’ replacements for what it consumed, but such was not the case. Even a five-year old could have told them that.

So now, after a horrific 8 Republican years in which the economy, currency, military competence, international diplomatic stature, and reputation of this country – to say nothing of its moral integrity and maturity – have all been dragged in the mud of aggressive war and greed-and-lie-fueled enrichment … even now the Dems still cannot rely on a clear, let alone easy, victory in the election.

Drunk and at the helm, their Party will not accept that sobriety might increase their performance. They will remain drunk and at the helm, and hope that somehow the Republicans will screw up even more, and that somehow folks will agree to forget all that has happened, and agree to indulge in the lunatic fantasy that any one human being in the Oval Office will be able to improve Our situation sufficiently at least to avoid disaster.

As if Kerensky was going to be able to keep Lenin at bay. Solzhenitsyn would have known that.