After the Future

My What Big Teeth You Have.

Con artists understand that most people operate in a symbolically patterned world, and that reality, whatever is really there, is hidden behind the symbols. We tend to accept the world as it appears at face value. We can't live without a certain minimum level of trust that things are in fact as they appear. Con artists know that because people are uncritically inclined to accept that the symbol represents truthfully what lies behind it that they can use the symbol as a kind of disguise. A sheep symbolizes passive docility; the wolf cunning and rapacious greed. The wolf knows that if he appears as its symbolic self, no one will trust him, so he hides his real nature and presents himself symbolically as a sheep. His effectiveness in the con depends on his effectiveness in appearing non-threatening and innocuous, someone who raises no alarms in those whom he seeks to prey upon.

The con artist knows that people don't see what's there; they see what they are habitually disposed to see. Did you ever wonder as a kid how Little Red Riding Hood could ever have mistaken the wolf for her grandmother? I think the story speaks to this kind of patterned perception. We are inclined to see (or hear) what we have been habitually conditioned see, what we are comfortable seeing. When running into someone on the street have you ever hear a "Good" to a "How are you?" that you didn't ask?  The person wasn't listening to the actual verbal content or your greeting. He was simply enacting a symbolic or formal ritual where the content doesn't matter.

Con artists understand how to blend themselves into the patterns and symbolic rituals of our everyday life--one might be a wolf, but so long as he is tucked in bed like grandma and is wearing her nightgown and little night cap with the red ribbon, chances are that's all Little Red Riding Hood will notice. She sees big teeth but is not alarmed about them because she has been lulled into a mood of trust by the larger pattern of familiarity. In such a state of mind she minimizes the importance of what doesn't fit into the familiar pattern. She trusts that her world on that fateful day is the same as the world as it was the day before and the day before that. Big teeth, long snout? Minor aberrations. It's a story about how we are all more inclined to believe the symbolic version of reality rather than any evidence to the contrary.

Leonardo DiCaprio shows how it works in his role as Frank Abagnale in "Catch Me if You Can." He wasn't a wolf really; there was something rather innocent about his conning--he just wanted to be more than he was. But the key to his success was his uncanny ability to embody symbolic roles--airline pilot, lawyer, etc.--to become a symbol without having any of the substance to which the symbol points. Con artists play on that trust, and they have a talent for insinuating themselves into our symbolic landscape to appear the way we expect them to appear, to be what we want them to be. We tend to disregard whatever evidence doesn't fit into the familiar pattern.

It might be worth considering in a post at another time to what degree we live in a literal vs. a symbolic world. That's a big question, and there is no simple answer for it. My answer would pick up from what I was developing in the earlier post in which I talk about the hypertrophied eye and how it has led us to limit our consideration of what is real only to what we can see. For any of us who are religiously or spiritually inclined, what is real is not what we see. Rather the ground that provides the supporting matrix for what we see is far more real, even if it is something that enters our field of awareness mostly in subtle ways.

In a fallen world, except for the rare epiphany, because we are cut off from what is most real, we most intensely experience the husks of things--and symbols are the husks. And so what appears in our experience is real to the degree that is saturated with the living reality that grounds it and which gave it its shape, and it is unreal and dead to the degree that is has lost its connection to it.

Some symbols in our cultural life live (paternal/maternal love is one that comes to mind) and some are dead but live with a kind of zombie life.  Especially during a decadent or transititonal cultural era like the one we're suffering through now, we live in a cultural world of dead or undead symbols.  A con man can very easily inhabit a dead symbol because we don't really have that strong a sense of what the real thing is--we've forgotten or never known it.  As a result, we're easily confused and easily fooled. It happens to the best of us.

The transcendent reality behind the appearances in a symbol that truly lives is unfathomably deep and multidimensional, and anybody who has had a glimpse knows the real from the false. And so if we as human beings are grounded only in what we see, if we believe only in what is given to us on the surface, then we can be easily manipulated by anyone who has the ability to appear as something other than what he is. The devil is quite capable of quoting scripture to persuade us that his perverse purposes are legitimate. It happens all the time.

Our practical day-to-day life requires that we learn to navigate effectively in a world of appearances and dead symbols, but the more important meta-task is to discern what lies behind them and to re-connect with what is true and life-giving and to reject what is false and undead. And very often what is acclaimed by the official reality as true is false and what is denounced as false is true. Our only protection is to develop a nose for what is rotting inside the whited sepulcher on the one hand, and on the other a nose that knows the sweet fragrance of that which lives. This is a cognitive skill best developed by the thinking heart.

Some years ago, when I was reading to my son before bed, we were working through a fantasy series based on Welsh myths. The stories had an interesting recurring feature in which an evil spirit was able to disguise itself as something beautiful--a bird, person, flower--and it was so beautiful that the unwary would be irresistibly drawn to it, and when the victim would get close enough, the evil spirit would appear in its true ugly form and bite its victim and cause him to become deathly ill. But as beautiful as the shapeshifter was in its disguise, it always had a minor flaw that distinguished it from the real thing--it had an extra toe or finger, the wrong colored eyes, a leaf pattern that wasn't quite right. If one was alert and discerning, he could recognize the con for what it was.

That's the thinking part, but in such encounters the heart also knows better, whether or not the head notices the extra toe. The heart has to be strong if it's not to be overwhelmed by unworthy desire which is also very strong in all of us and always will be. Unworthy desire or impulse cannot be extinguished; it can only be refused, and it's easier to refuse if another choice is presented as an alternative. The stronger our hearts, the clearer the alternative. So the task is on the one hand to be vigilant and alert, but on the other to develop a solar powered heart whose impulses are stronger than the instincts from below that otherwise drive our actions.

We are all of us wandering in a world of shapeshifters, a world where the shapes may or may not point to something true that lies behind them. Luckily, not all of what surrounds us intends us harm. And along these lines the official reality, as I spoke about it yesterday, is often innocuous enough. But there are times when the official reality is hiding horrors which, like Little Red Riding Hood, we are simply not conditioned to see because it doesn't fit into our pattern of expectations. Fear makes us stupid, but so does wide-eyed trust.

The New Feudalism: How We Are Divided and Ruled

The Civil Rights Revolution was perverted into a racial preference revolution by white leaders in the public and private sectors to end disruptive black agitation by quickly appeasing and co-opting black leaders.  One of the unintended side effects of this shift in civil rights strategy was to shatter the New Deal coalition that had supported progressive reform in the United States since the 1930s.  Conservatives were quick to take advantage of this: remember how Richard Nixon and George Shultz pushed racial quotas in unions in order to stoke resentment on the part of white workers against black Americans and the Democratic party.  As Nixon realized, the greatest beneficiary of the demise of transracial class politics has been the white overclass.  Since the 1960s, the effect--and, in the minds of at least some cynical conservative politicians, the purpose--of racial preference and the multicultural ideology that justifies it has been to divert attention from the class divisions in American society and focus it on racial/cultural squabbles.

The divisions between white, black, and Hispanic wage earners, the natural constituents of a broad liberal coalition, have made it easier for members of the white overclass . . . to pursue their own narrow economic agenda at the expense of most other Americans.  The disproportionate influence in government of the white overclass, provided by a near-monopoly on campaign finance and the staffing of elite offices in both national parties, helps explain why, since the sixties, the bipartisan political elite has made the American tax system more regressive, undermined the New Deal social market contract through free-market globalism and mass immigration, and promoted a new feudalism, through the privatization of formerly public amenities.

While colleges and congressional classes have been rearranged according to the logic of racial tokenism, the white overclass has steadily carried out its generation-long class war against wage-earning Americans of all races.  As racially gerrymandered congressional districts proliferate union membership falls, the victim of a government-sanctioned onslaught against organized labor by corporate America. As the number of black and Hispanic heroes and heroines in school text books increases, the average wages of black and Hispanic workers, along with those of white workers, continue to stagnate or decline.

Meanwhile, behind the Potemkin-village facade of Multicultural America, . . .the American oligarchy is quietly cannibalizing the remnants of mid-century New Deal America to construct its own enclave society, and America-within-America, linked to the global economy and detached from the destiny of the American middle class.  Members of the white overclass withdraw their children from the public schools, then finance and lead taxpayer revolts that cause local school systems to collapse in bankruptcy. . . Affluent suburbanites hire their own police forces--then agitate to cut back on the taxes that pay for the municipal police that protect the majority of their neighbors.  When inadequate policing results in high crime rates, the politicians who serve the white overclass, as a rule, do not vote to pay for more police (that would cost their wealthy constituents money) but call for draconian punishments: more prisons, more executions, public floggings, three strikes and you're out.  Finally, as part of an ominous trend, the wealthy residents of a growing number of overclass suburbs are trying to turn them into "gated communities," physically separated from the vulgar majority of their country men.

In any other democracy the majority would have coalesced by now in a populist rebellion.  In Multicultural America, however, the majority is fragmented while the elite is unified.  The bipartisan white overclass can pursue its goals with little opposition, as long as racial preference politics, the ideology of diversity, and  culture-war politics encourage potential opponents to battle among themselves.  The constitution of nineteenth-century Russia, it was said, was autocracy tempered by assassination.  The constitution of the third American Republic is plutocracy tempered by tokenism.--Michael Lind, The Next American Nation, 1995

We don't like hearing the word overclass.  It sounds so icky Marxist, but you have to have a name for this phenomenon. Nothing is going to happen until the problem is seen for what it is and named accurately, and 'overclass' is pretty accurate.  Our political impotency is linked to our confused understanding about the reality that we are confronting.  The culture wars are a huge red-herring that diverts our attention and energy from other matters that are proper to the political sphere. The political sphere is about rights and and about the distribution of power--it's not the place to discuss morality and cultural values. 

This discussion distracts the people in the middle and the bottom from focusing on political issues that they should be more focused on in the political sphere, and as a result, they are getting jobbed by the economic elites at the top. In a  healthy American as I envision it, the power should reside with an educated, self-reliant, well-informed middle.  That's not our reality by a long shot.  The American electorate has been so manipulated and coopted by overclass propaganda, it no longer knows what is in its best interests. 

This is not about class war; it's about recognizing that the less we talk about class, the more the overclass likes it. It's about we people in the middle waking up to how we're being conned, and then getting legitimately organized to leverage our political institutions to  find remedies that will return the commonweal to health. 

The elite on the left are just as complicit as the elite on the right.  Their obsession with abortion rights and multi-cultural identity politics plays right into the hands of the overclass. The Clintons, Bayhs, Kerrys, and Liebermans are all conscously or unconsciously dancing to the overclass tune. They have no clue about what the real interests of the majority of Americans are 

As bad as the GOP is, and it is god-awful bad, at least it unambiguously represents the class interests of the overclass in a logical, predictable way.  The Democrats are either egregiously disgusting or stupid for all the ways in which they have been coopted by overclass propaganda in pursuing their own political interests and careers and in having abandoned the real interests of their traditional constituencies in the middle and the bottom. But what's the matter with the rest of us that we have let them? It's getting to be time for the people in the middle to wake up, define a new agenda for the radical center, and to take back their country.

It might be relatively painless for you now, but if we let this trend continue, what kind of a country will your kids inherit?  Is that a question worth asking?

For other recent posts on this subject, see here, here, here, here, and here.

Update:  Be sure to check out article by Garret Keizer, "Right, Left, and Wrong" referenced by Forestwalker's comment to this post. It captures even more vividly what I was trying to get at with the Lind quote.

Dream vs. Reality

I revised and renamed the post I put up yesterday, but I wanted to add a few thoughts today.  The most serious objection to what I wrote in yesterday's post and in some of the others in the last week is that I'm defending precisely what I'm condemning  the Bush administration of doing.  Couldn't it be said, for instance, that the neocons had a dream for the Middle East and that they had the courage  to act on in the hopes of draining the swamps of hatred that foul the entire region?

I think that sincere, idealistic supporters of the war wanted to believe that this was the Bush administration's objective.  But there are two reasons why this is different from what I've been trying to argue about faith-based action in the last week or so.  First, the kind of not-limited-by-empirical-reality  "dream" that I described in yesterday's post broadens one's view of what is real and what is possible, but it does not negate what is true on the empirical level of sense and history. 

So, for instance, the fossil record is clearly established.  There is no question that biological evolution proceeded much in the way that the biologists understand it to have done.  But the mechanics of evolution are not the whole story.  There's a bigger story  to be told, and the source for our understanding of that story comes from a different kind of consciousness than  ordinary, sense-based consciousness. And scientific knowing has no way of evaluating the validity of what one learns in that kind of consciousness.

So my objection to the administration's policy in the Middle East on one level has to do with both the quality and source of its dream, and on another level its ignorance of the historical, empirical reality of the region.   

That's what distinguishes their "truthy" case from the cases of Gandhi, Mandela, King.  These three believed  that the existing empirical social/political reality could be transcended, and they were able to a remarkable  extent to realize their dream  to create a different social reality.  They were similar to the neoncons, at least the ones that were truly idealistic, in that they believed in their cause.  But these three differed from them in two ways. First, they understood their enemy, its culture and psychology.  They lived with it all their lives and understood it from the inside. That is not a trait they share with the neocons. It has been pointed out time and again how uninformed they were about the history and culture of the region.  They thought that military power was enough, and they believed Chalabi's fairy tale about being greeted with the hallelujahs and palm branches.

Secondly, they differed in their motivation and tactics.  The causes of the three had a less ambiguously noble motivation than the complex motivations that drove the neocons  and the parties that supported their ambitious objectives in the Middle East.  And the nonviolent tactics of the three did not incite such significant numbers of their enemies to violent revenge, but rather shamed them into embracing a better alternative.  And it's also interesting to point out that they were themselves continuously physically vulnerable in a way that the neocons are  not. They put themselves at significant personal risk for their cause.  What's Paul Wolfowitz doing these days? 

The neocons moved into the region without knowing much about its culture and history because they didn't really care about it or about the people who lived there. They were not motivated by a desire to right an historical injustice.  Liberating the Iraqi people from the tyranny of Saddam was at best a third- or fourth-level consideration.  For them the Middle East is just so many squares on a geopolitical chess board.  Iraq's critical strategic geographic location and its immense oil fields were always out of bounds for the U.S. during the Cold War because they were in the Soviet Union's back yard.

But as soon as the USSR collapsed, the neocons started to clamor for the the invasion of Iraq.  It was as if the U.S. had retained all its chess pieces and all that was left on the board were a few pawns. It was an historical opportunity to grab what all the world coveted, and the U.S was foolish and cowardly not to move.  (You're not naive enough to think Europe, China, India wouldn't do the same thing if they were in the U.S.'s position, are you?  So the neocons laced into Bush 1 for failing to go into Baghdad after Desert Storm, and they kept prodding Clinton through the nineties to little effect. But with Bush 2 they finally had their guy, and 9/11 gave them their pretext.

But  the dream of easy victory and all the benefits that would come with it morphed into a nightmare.  Many who knew something about the region predicted this would happen.  No longer were they playing chess with a weak enemy, but now a horrifically violent video game that never ends. And that's a nightmare that we each wake up to every morning.

Dream Time

There's an interesting interview with entomologist and founder of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson, at Salon this week.  He's a thoughtful man who in many of his books seems very much to want to break out of the rational/materialistic straitjacket so many people who have accepted the assumptions of modernity want to do. But he can't. Take for instance this remarkable quote:

You know, being a good scientist, and having been drawn up short so many times on my own theories and speculations -- as all honest scientists are -- I don't want to exclude the possibility of a creative force or deity. I think that would be a mistake to say there is no God or supernatural force. As the theologian Hans Kung once said, how are we to explain there is something and not nothing? Well, that's a question I'm happy to leave to the astrophysicist -- where the laws of the universe came from and what is the meaning of the origin of existence. But I do feel confident that there is no intervention of a deity in the origin of life and humanity.

What's remarkable to me is the unstated assumption that if the Big Cosmic  Question is to be answered regarding the existence of God and the origin of the universe, it's up to the astrophysicists! What objective evidence will they ever be able to find? How will they get it--with some hyperpowered telescope that will see billions of light years to the Big Bang?

Yikes! Does this not strike anyone else as transparently silly a statement as to say that science will have to develop the technology to videotape our dreams in order to prove that we have them?  Isn't the evidence for human nocturnal dreaming, scientifically speaking, anecdotal?   Isn't the only evidence for it people simply reporting on their subjective, unverifiable experience?  Why is there this "belief" by moderns like Wilson that the only kind of knowing that has validity scientific knowing?

The odd thing about Wilson's statement lies in that there is in the first part of it an expression of humility proper to the scientist. All of our knowledge is provisional.  We do the best we can with the facts that we've been able to establish, but there is always an openness to new information coming to light, and there is, therefore, always an openness to one's scientific theory, the way the scientific community connects the established dots, being toppled.  As Wilson points out: we don't know everything.  New evidence can come to light. But for him the only evidence is sense evidence.  And for him the only way his construct will be toppled is from within the frame of rationalistic materialism, which is a provisional construct peculiar to moderns.   This is a construct that two hundred years from now I believe will be as peculiar to people living then as the construct of the Australian aborigine is to us now.

Science has very, very restrictive rules, and its scope is limited to an understanding of the mechanics of the natural world.  Does that mean therefore that the world can be thought of only as a machine?  Its operations have a physically mechanical aspect, but why is there this need to say that the mechanics is all it's possible to talk about?  Well, the reason is quite clear: the sense data with which scientist works is the one thing that everyone has access to.  The data provided by religious experience is not available to everyone, although lots of people have very similar subjective experiences--like dreams. And like our subjective experience of dreams, most are insignificant, but some are saturated with significance. 

Wilson, in my view, naively assumes that the kind of mind he has is the kind of mind humans always had and will always have.  He assumes that his sense-based perception is the only kind of perception that has any validity, and that scientific method is the only means by which something can be declared knowable with any certainty.

But let's work with the dream motif for a bit. What if everybody started having the same recurrent dream?  Hundreds of people?  And they spoke to one another about it and checked with one another.  And what if they reported the same thing, and a consensus developed that it wasn't a "dream" it was real, more real than the sense world they took for granted before as the only reality, even if now it could not be recognized as real in a scientifically verifiable way. How could it be if it were a dream? But does that make it less real? 

Wouldn't they be working with a different set of data than that given by the senses? Would it not be inevitable that the people who had this dream experience would attempt to understand the world in a different way and that they would develop a different epistemology than the restricted one insisted upon by science?  And perhaps the philosophy they developed would be very similar in nature to the one the  Neoplatonists developed, but then again, it would depend on the dream, wouldn't it? Perhaps it would be more like the philosophy developed by Tibetan Buddhists.  Or the dream of the Apostles after Pentecost. Philosophy has always been an attempt to reflect on the significance of one's experience.  The impoverishment of contemporary philosophy is directly connected to the impoverishment of the shriveled modern soul and its limited range of experience.

You see where I'm going with this, but you might object that they are different dreams, and contradict one another?  But I would say that the problem does not lie in that they are different dreams but that they are different parts of a larger dream, parts which might be integrated if people would put their minds to it.

Is the point not obvious?--"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philophies."  Or that are scientifically verifiable. And if the only evidence that is admissible in the court of your philosophy is that which is scientifically verifiable, you are limiting yourself to the slimmest sliver of what is  real.  So good luck with that, Professor Wilson, you can be sure you're on safe ground there. But if safety (certainty) is your concern, stay locked in your room, because who knows what might happen if you go outside of it.  You might be thought a fool by those whom you leave behind; you might get hit by a falling roof slate, and then again you might meet God.

End of the Republic

From Chalmers Johnson:

What does this administration think it's doing, reducing taxes when it needs to be reducing huge deficits? As far as I can see, its policies have nothing to do with Republican or Democratic ideology, except that its opposite would be traditional, old Republican conservatism, in the sense of being fiscally responsible, not wasting our money on aircraft carriers or other nonproductive things. . . .

If a bankruptcy situation doesn't shake us up, then I fear we will, as an author I admire wrote the other day, be "crying for the coup." We could end the way the Roman Republic ended. When the chaos, the instability become too great, you turn it over to a single man. After about the same length of time our republic has been in existence, the Roman Republic got itself in that hole by inadvertently, thoughtlessly acquiring an empire they didn't need and weren't able to administer, that kept them at war all the time. Ultimately, it caught up with them. I can't see how we would be immune to a Julius Caesar, to a militarist who acts the populist.  Read more here.

Who knows what's going to happen, but for sure it can't keep going on the way it is now.  Something's got to give.  But I can't help but wonder if we're dealing here with our own Christian evangelical style of Caligula.  How will future historians look upon this time?

Faith & Truthiness

Everyone shall be remembered, but everyone became great in proportion to his expectancy. One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became the greatest of all.  --Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.--George Orwell

The American Dialect Society recently announced "truthiness" to be their choice as 2005 Word of the Year with this citation:

In its 16th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. Recently popularized on The Colbert Report, a satirical mock news show on the Comedy Central television channel, truthiness refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, "I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart." Other meanings of the word date as far back as 1824.'

Stephen Colbert had this to say about it in an interview he gave about the word to The Onion:

"It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?...

"Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality."

For a thorough discussion of the word and its significance I refer you to the Wikipedia article where I found some of these quotes.  The same article also refers to Kierkegaard, who

asserted that religious experience could only be understood subjectively, rather than objectively, so that the nonreligious could never understand the truth of religion. Some religions explicitly teach that faith can never come through rational understanding, but only by gaining a feeling that something is true. A religious impression accepted as truth by a believer might therefore be perceived as truthiness by an outside observer." 

This cuts to the heart of the problem that I was addressing in my posts here, here and here about Subjectivity and the Self.  If religious truth is ultimately something that can only be subjectively known, and I believe with Kierkegaard that it's true to say so, then how can you possibly know for sure that you're not deluded?  How is it possible to distinguish "true" religious knowledge from the kind of delusional religion that is typified in cults.  Whose to say that David Koresh and the Heaven's Gate suicides who thought the Comet Hale-Bopp had come to take them to a higher level of existence were not right.  Maybe they knew something that the rest of us didn't.  They certainly thought so.

But good Christians say to themselves, "Well those people were crazy, and we're not.  We're normal."  Well is religious faith about being normal as it might be defined in conventional terms?  Is it simply about doing what one is told it means to be a "good person"?   Was Jesus normal in that way?  Was the Patriarch Abraham,  the founder of the the faith traditions that run through Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, normal?  He heard voices, and on one occasion the voices told him to kill his only son, Isaac.    Today Abraham would be judged certifiably insane. And yet we people of the book honor him as Father Abraham, the one who in risking everything made everything possible. 

I bring Abraham in because it was for Kierkegaard the archetypal example of what he called the "teleological suspension of the ethical."  In K's thinking about spiritual development there were three stages, or perhaps more accurately, three states of mind or soul: the 'aesthetic' in which one is driven primarily by self-absorption, the 'ethical' in which one discovers oneself capable of transcending one's self interest for the good of another; and the 'religious', in which one can find oneself in a crisis of conscience that may require him to break the moral law.  A dramatic example of this was portrayed in the "Lost" episode entitled "The 23rd Psalm," in which Eko kills an old man to prevent his brother from having to do so.  Eko breaks the moral law in an act of love in order to spare his brother from having to kill or be killed.  And he pays the price and reaps the reward. 

The faculty by which we make judgments to suspend the ethical is conscience.  The conscience is, in my imagination of it, located in the soul's solar center, otherwise known as the heart.  But it's like any other human faculty: it only works well if it is exercised properly.  Conscience can be called upon to justify the worst crimes, and anyone who commits a crime for reasons of conscience must be prepared to proven wrong.  None of us is immune from delusion.  None of us can be sure with complete certainty of our motivations.  Nevertheless there are occasions when we must act, and we must do so fully prepared to accept the consequences if we are wrong.   

I have argued before that torture is something that should be condemned as morally repugnant without qualification and should be illegal in all instances.  But I could imagine a situation in which I would be called upon to suspend the moral law and torture if my conscience dictated that I could prevent a greater evil.  But I would have then to submit myself to arrest and trial. Nothing should be done to mitigate the morally reprehensible thing I chose to do.  There is no recourse to a "truthiness" defense. It's horror should never be diminished. Any person forced to make a decision like that should be pitied, not praised.  And any person who commits such an act should be tried and only then after a thorough investigation, pardoned if the act was judged to be a necessary evil.  And condemned if the act should be shown to be unnecessary. 

An act of conscience is always a profound risk.  It is an Abrahamic act.  We take the risk in the hope we are right, but never with complete certainty of it.  And we must be open to the possibility that we are wrong, and we must accept the consequences if we are.  It's the failure to accept the consequences that distinguishes an act done out of truthiness from and act done in faith.

That's what makes the "knowing" that is involved in an act of conscience far superior to an act of knowing in the scientific objective sense. Scientific knowing is about certainty.  Faith knowing is about risk. Faith is an act of moral-courage knowing/not knowing. It is always a leap in the dark hoping that you will land safely but not being certain that you will.  And if you were right, your act of faith will bear fruit.  If not?  Well the best that can be said is that you took the risk and now you must bear responsibility and the consequences for it.  It is precisely this failure to accept responsibility for the consequences of his decisions that makes Bush someone committed to his own self-reinforcing truthiness and therefore someone devoid of moral seriousness. 

And so the difference between "truthiness" and faith is that the first is motivated by a need to reinforce one's complacency and need to block out what one does not care to think about, the second by a challenge to transcend or to risk to go beyond what makes sense or what is often conventionally acceptable.  It is never an act of arrogance, but an act, if genuine, undertaken with the deepest humility about the certainty of the outcome and a willingness to accept the consequences if proven wrong.

To know that others have leaped and landed safely is useful, but it is no real comfort because that was then and this is now.  Just as we must all die our own death, we must leap our own leap. And not just once because of life of faith is  life of leaps into the darkness with a trust that echoes Job: "Even though he slay me, yet will I trust him."

Update: For an interesting overview of the weirder apocalyptic dimension of the the truthy religious right and new age left, read Maureen Farrell's piece here.   Plenty of interestingly disturbing links.  One of the primary characteristics that distinguish the spiritually mature from immature is their good judgment and discernment.  It doesn't require a high degree of maturity to discern that all this pre-millennial expectation is childish, anxiety-driven fantasy.  And what is most dangerous about it is the way it gives those who buy into it an excuse to abdicate responsibility for the earth.

For the record, the word "eschatological" in the subtitle of my blog has no connection with the kind of crazy millenarianism out and about today.  I use the word because central to the purpose of this blog is the idea that we have to understand history teleologically, which is to say that it has a goal, an endpoint, as an acorn has an endpoint in a fully mature oaktree.  Or to put it in Teilhardian terms, history is the human evolutionary drama that occurs in several acts or cultural ages between Alpha and Omega. If we don't believe that there is something growing, how can we do our part to nourish its growth?

We are not at the end of the world, but we are  at the end of a cultural age, the Modern Age, and we're not yet into whatever is next.  And for many the being neither here nor there feels like the end of the world.  The end is not imminent; it is as far in the future as the beginning is in the past; but that does not mean that it makes no difference to understand the meaning and purpose of what we do now in the light of that which radiates toward us from after the future.

Vanishing Middle

Under the current regime, we are regressing to 1929.  Believe that this a conscious strategy goal of key factions within the GOP.  And we are allowing it because of the traditional values smokescreen that the architects of this plan are hiding behind. This from Tom Paine:

The share of national income going to wages and salaries is at the lowest level since 1929—the year that kicked off the Great Depression. The share going to after-tax corporate profits, which heavily benefit corporate executives and other wealthy Americans through increased dividends and capital gains, is at the highest level since 1929.

"In 2005, for the first time since the Great Depression, Americans borrowed more than they earned," Parade magazine reports in "What People Earn."

Fueled by obscene wage inequality and tax cuts, income and wealth are piling up at the very top. More and more jobs are keeping people in poverty instead of out of poverty. Middle-class households are a medical crisis, outsourced job or busted pension away from bankruptcy.

Contrary to myth, the United States is not becoming more competitive in the global economy by taking the low road. We are in record-breaking debt to other countries. We have a record trade deficit, hollowed-out manufacturing base and deteriorating research and development. The infrastructure built by earlier generations of taxpayers has eroded greatly, undermining the economy as well as health and safety.

Households have propped themselves up in the face of falling real wages by maxing out work hours, credit cards and home equity loans. This is not a sustainable course. The low road is like a "shortcut" that leads to a cliff.

We will not prosper in the 21st century global economy by relying on 1920s corporate greed, 1950s tax revenues, downwardly mobile wages and global-warming energy policies. We will not prosper relying on disinvestment in place of reinvestment. We can't succeed that way any more than farmers can "compete" by eating their seed corn. . . .

In the book How We Compete: What Companies Around the World Are Doing To Make It In Today's Global Economy, Suzanne Berger reports the findings of MIT's Industrial Performance Center study of more than 500 international companies. She observes, "Contrary to the widely held belief of many managers, we conclude that solutions that depend on driving down costs by reducing wages and social benefits—in advanced countries or in emerging economies—are always dead ends. . .

"Strategies based on exploiting low-wage labor end up in competitive jungles, where victories are vanishingly thin and each day brings a new competitor. . . As low-end firms that compete on price move from one overcrowded segment of the market to the next, there is virtually no chance of gaining any durable advantage. The activities that succeed over time are, in contrast, those that build on continuous learning and innovation."

Instead of pretending the problem is overpaid workers and accelerating offshoring, we need to shore up our economy from below and invest in smart, sustainable development. Raising the minimum wage is a vital step.

The high road is not only the better road, it is the only road for progress in the future. An America that doesn’t work for working people is not an America that works.

See other posts  here and here I've put up on this topic.  The point is an obvious one, but one most Americans seem unable to embrace.  We define the American dream in the crudest materialistic terms as the freedom to become fabulously wealthy.  A few do, and hats off to them.  But that ideology sets the stage for the migration of power away from the 90% of us whose means are more moderate.  And we are sitting back and watching this, and the next thing you know we are living in Brazil, the rich living in their heavily gaurded gated communities, the working poor growing larger as people who have been solidly in the middle since the New Deal lose their grip there.

There will continue to be a group of professionals and small business owners in some specialized service industries who will continue to maintain their middle status, but everyone else is in a much more tenuous situation, and if the middle is not going to vanish, it's certainly not going to be who most of us are. 

Nothing is guaranteed, and I'm not for a society in which people are pampered from cradle to grave, but we are allowing a society to develop in which it's going to be increasingly desperate and ruthless.  We're allowing this because we've bought into the propaganda of a group of people whose ideology dates to the Social Darwinism of late nineteenth century. Most Americans would reject this  vision of America if it was something that presented itself for what it is.  But it has been hidden in rhetoric of lower taxes and getting government off our backs.  It plays to a resentment of some the more poorly designed entitlement programs of the New Society.  But most of all it has been their appeal to fear after 9/11.

But even so, they have been winning the battle of ideas because the Democrats, as the representatives of the New Deal compromise, became complacently arrogant. They have not fought back by proposing a coherent, robust alternative vision of a more humane American future.  The GOP has seized the opportunity  the feckless and disorganized Democrats have given them, and America pays the price. I am disgusted with the Democrats because their irresponsibility.  But I fear the GOP because  of the predatory ideology that is at the heart of their vision of America, no matter how they try tot disguise it with their political rhetoric. 

 

Defending Our Ports

From Think Progress:

Moments ago [3/16], the House of Representatives narrowly defeated an amendment proposed by Rep. Martin Sabo (D-MN) that would have provided $1.25 billion in desperately needed funding for port security and disaster preparedness. The Sabo amendment included:

– $300 million to enable U.S. customs agents to inspect high-risk containers at all 140 overseas ports that ship directly to the United States. Current funding only allows U.S. customs agents to operate at 43 of these ports.

– $400 million to place radiation monitors at all U.S. ports of entry. Currently, less than half of U.S. ports have radiation monitors.

– $300 million to provide backup emergency communications equipment for the Gulf Coast.

Meanwhile, the Bush budget – which most of the members who voted against this bill will likely support – contains an increase of $1.7 billion for missile defense, a program that doesn’t even work.

What the military industrial complex wants, the military industrial complex gets.  Port Security?  Obviously not a priority.

The Beltway Courtier Class

Journalists, with a few rare exceptions, are not intrepid truthtellers. They are cautious careerists, and they do what conventionally ambitious people do to advance their careers. That's their primary concern. And that almost always means kowtowing to power and doing whatever one has to to do in playing the game that leads to getting ahead.

I don't think they do this in a completely conscious, calculating way. I'm sure there are denial mechanisms and all manner of self justifications to enable them to think that they are more independent minded than they actually are. But the fact is that you don't get ahead unless you play by the rules, and those rules are detrmined by those who have the power. Those who serve power get ahead; those who resist get filtered out.

If you were a citizen of the USSR and had ambitions to pursue a career in the days of Soviet power, you joined the party and you played by the rules, even if you didn't believe in Communist doctrine. It's not a particularly evil motivation; it's just what ordinary people do when for them it's a matter of adapting to and getting along in the "real world." The same basic social psychology is operative in the US. In the case of the Press, it's not Soviet reality; it's corporate media reality. It's called being a team player. Anybody with a real independent streak gets filtered out pretty early in his or her career.

A guy like Edward R. Murrow was an aberration even in his own day.  He would never have been allowed to do  what he did in the fifties  had he not earned enormous credibility in the forties from his courageous reporting during a war when there was no controversy about who the bad guys were. He had capital to spend that no  mainstream journalist has  today.  To his credit he spent it.

Bush received far more respect from the press than he ever deserved because the GOP dominates all three branches of governmnent, and the Democrats were about as weak-kneed and confused a lot as you could ever think possible. So if you're an editor or publisher for a bigtime media institution, you know which side your bread is buttered on, and that agenda gets passed on to the reporters in explicit and subtle ways. You're not going to loook for trouble, because Power can make all kinds of difficuluties for you. Power always gets the benefit of the doubt. You are first and foremost a businessman, and that's a tough enough job without making it harder by taking on the government.  Look at what has happened to the New York Times. It's a source I can no longer take seriously.

If you want to see an interesting record of exactly what I'm talking about, check out this page that Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting put together that compiles how wrong the pundits got it in the weeks after the invasion of Iraq.  It's why I just don't listen to them anymore.  What they say has no value except to understand what the current self-justifying groupthink is in the corridors of power. These are not serious people worthy of our time and attention.

So the Beltway media establishment has become, in effect, a courtier class, and like royal courts through the ages, all the courtiers are gossiping and maneuvering for to promote their advantage.  And success depends on knowing how to navigate the strong currents shaped by the very strong cliquishly determined likes and dislikes as determined by the powers that be.  These likes and dislikes have very little to do with the likes and the dislikes of the rest of the country. But the courtier class nevertheless has an inordinate amount of power in shaping the country's perceptions of those they dislike or like to appear likable or unlikable.

Everybody has strengths; everybody has weaknesses. The establishment media can be savagely selective about which they choose to emphasize and which to disregard. These courtiers loathed Jimmy Carter and loved Ronald Reagan.  One's flaws were magnified; the other's minimized. Did it have anything to do with the substantive qualities that either of these men brought to the office? As a result Ronald Reagan, the hollowest of hollow men, lives on in our media-mangled memory as one of the greatest presidents. 

Jimmy Carter, whom I believe would have been a great president in his second term, goes on to live a quiet life of committed, subtantive service in the private sphere.   In my opinion, 1980 was as tragic an election as 2000 for what it has meant for the direction this country has taken.  Maybe it was inevitable, but that electoral choice, which represented the difference between delusional pathology and complex honesty, marks the moment when this country truly began its steep descent to the level of this utterly dishonest and delusional government we have in place now.

Similarly the media courtiers  hated Al Gore and Howard Dean, and they loved George Jr. The same dynamic comes into play regarding weaknesses and strenghts emphasized or minimized. Take the way, for instance, the media at first just assumed that the Bush AWOL story was only for the lunatic fringe. Why?  The logic behind it doesn't have a lot more to it than the high-school logic of who's in and who's out. Sounds simplistic, but the way you get ahead in that world is to combine a prodigious cleverness with an astonishing level of superficiality. It's what it takes to become a leading member of the Beltway courtier class. And so Bush has been able to get a pass because all his life, but especially in the last six years, he has thrived despite his incomptency because of the sycophantish inclination of courtiers consciously or unconsciously to protect those whom they perceive as royalty.

Branded

E.J. Dionne points out in his column yesterday:

In the 2004 election, according to the main media exit poll, President Bush won 63 percent of the votes cast by Americans in households earning over $200,000 a year, and 57 percent from those in the $100,000 to $200,000 range. All things being equal, wealthier people vote Republican.

But conservatives counter that Democrats are the party of choice in swank, well-educated latte enclaves: suburban Boston, New York and Philadelphia; Montgomery County, Md.; and Microsoftland around Seattle, Silicon Valley and Hollywood. John Kerry's blue states are, on the whole, richer than George Bush's red states.

Yes, Bush carried a lot of poor states -- but with heavy support from the rich people who lived in them. The class war is being waged more fiercely in the Republican states than in the Democratic states. The income divide is especially sharp in the South, where it is reinforced by a strong racial divide.

Why should the rich support the Democrats in the blue states and the poor support the Republicans in the red states?  This isn't that hard to understand. Thomas Frank explains it very nicely in his What's the Matter with Kansas?  His thesis, for those of you unfamiliar with it, is that poor and middle-income cultural conservatives in heartland states have been persuaded that the GOP is the party of morality and traditional values and that the Democrats are the party of moral license. To heartlanders concerns about what they  perceive as immoral policies are more important than their economic interests.

It's a pretty common attitude in the more hardcore precincts of red-state land that a vote for a Democrat is a vote that if it doesn't condemn the individual voter to hell, will more than likely send the country there. The Democrats in their view are turning American into Sodom and Gomorrah. The religious right, therefore, are on a mission from God to save the country from itself.  And the GOP is their political tool to accomplish this.

The hardcore religious right in this country is pretty nutty, but from what I've read, about a third of the electorate is pretty comfortable in the mental world as they have constructed it. (If you're asking yourself who in the world the 34% that are still giving Bush a positive approval rating, there's a big part of your answer.)  And the GOP braintrust has recognized that it is a good, fanatically loyal base from which to build a coalition so long as you throw them a bone once in awhile, like a Supreme Court judge.  My take is that this braintrust is pretty much dominated by the corporate Libertarian right, who are indifferent to traditional cultural values except as they can be used as a political motivator to keep their base on the bus.  They do care about reducing taxes and  governmental regulations, and they see the religious right as their political tool to accomplish their goals in those arenas.

As the GOP has become dominated by southern and mountain-west barbecue elites (pushing to the background the traditional Northeastern, blueblood elites), they know the importance of old-time religion in shaping a kind of primitive identity politics that works effectively to keep the rank and file marching to their tune.  They've been using divide-and conquer tactics to  convince poor rural whites that their interests are not the same as poor, rural blacks since Reconstruction. They understand how to fan the flames of their rural resentment  toward the city folk whom they have branded as effete, condescending decadents.  The new GOP elites understand, as well, the red state love of guns and of their mindless support of any war their leaders get them into, no matter how disproportionately they pay the price in blood for them.

I've laid all this out in other posts I've put up about the "intexication" of American politics.  The bottom line is that the new southern and mountain west GOP elite are applying the political strategies that they used so effectively to maintain their  one-party oligarchy  through the Democratic Party in the South before Reagan. Since Reagan, the GOP has become their political tool, and the moderate Northeastern Republicans have been pushed to the side as viciously as have the Democrats. 

Politics these days are not about debating the subtleties of the issues.  Those who grasp the subtleties have no political clout.  We don't vote for people who take positions on the issues; we vote for or against symbols.  It's all about branding and branding is about appealing to the most primitive human symbolic thinking.  The GOP understands the branding dynamic in a way the Democrats simply have not yet grasped. And the GOP has used their advantage to put the Democrats into a hole they may never be able to get themselves out of.

The Republicans, on the other hand, have been able to build a coalition around a very strong core constituency for their base in the heartland states by finding a branding formula that galvanizes support in a way that the Democrats have not been able to match. They are able to add to that base all those who have bought into the branding of the the GOP as the party standing for traditional values (religious right), minimum government interference (wealthy libertarian right), and a strong military (neocon right). The GOP therefore establishes itself on the symbolic high ground as the party of traditional piety, self-reliant economics, and military valor.  What does the Democratic party symbolize?

The Democrats continue to make the mistake of believing that "it's the economy, stupid". It should be: "It's the power, stupid."  They've been outmaneuvered and still don't understand what happened to them.  They were fat and complacent, and they lost the power that they took for granted since FDR, and they're not likely to get it back because they have three branding issues going against them:

• One,  it doesn't matter that there's a lot of economic distress out there, because nobody believes the Dems can plausibly deliver economic relief.  The Hillary Clinton health insurance debacle branded the Dems as naively incompetent and politically impotent in that regard. And their having been coopted by the DLC/WTO wing of the party makes them very unattractive to the traditional blue-collar constituencies  who saw the Democrats as representing their interests.  This is the element that for me makes it most difficult to enthusiastically support Dem candidates.  I see them as coopted by the Libertarian corporate agenda. They are toothless and pathetic on economic issues.

• Two, they continue to be perceived as weak on national security because they are branded as the host for the naive "visualize world peace" element that does in fact compose a faction within the party, uninfluential though it might be.  It doesn't matter in the world of symbolic brand engineering. The Dems are branded, and as a result the GOP has inoculated itself against any criticism from the moderate left--any prudent alternative to the aggressive warmongering promoted by the GOP is branded as wimpy.

• Three, they are branded as the Hollywood party of moral license, abortion, and gay marriage. They are perceived not as the party of responsible freedom, but of undisciplined decadence.  It doesn't matter that blue-state Democrats have statistically more stable marriages and family life.  It's the symbol that sticks. Facts are boring; symbols vibrate and glow.

So what's the solution?  I think there's a chance that the Dems might make some gains in November because of disgust with the current administration's incompetency, but I don't see them holding such gains for very long unless they can develop a way of countering these three negative branding features.  I've suggested before that they have to find a way to develop new energy by redefining themselves from the radical center and to see their agenda as retrieving the New Deal vision for America that the Libertarian/Red State GOP coalition has been working so assiduously to destroy. The Bill & Hillary vision for the party is not the answer, and I fear that in the next decade the party will wither into dithering irrelevancy. 

It's not that I care about the Democratic Party in itself.  The way I see it, we'll continue to be dominated by the GOP by default until a coherent, robust alternative can be developed. And so the demise of the Democrats would mean nothing to me if another viable alternative would arise to contest GOP political hegemony. They matter to me because right now they are the only alternative.  The Greens understand the threat posed by the Corporate Libertarians in a way that the Dems don't, but they are still stuck in a secularism that heartlanders and the urban middle and blue-collar electorate cannot feel comfortable with.  The Greens will always be a fringe phenomenon in American politics.

I don't have an answer, but I trust sooner or later one will develop.