After the Future

The Obsolescence of Principled Political Conservatism

I just roll my eyes whenever I read Andrew Sullivanesque rhapsodizing about the soul of conservatism and its small-government ideal.  It's an abstraction that has no longer any connection the way the world works or ever again will.  Bigness in a rapidly globalizing world is here to stay; it's just a question of putting the people in place who are most competent to manage it in a way that serves the common good. And the Democrats, for all their problems, have a much stronger track record in that regard. Principled conservatism has its place in the cultural sphere, but it is obsolete in the political sphere.  It's only function there is to provide cover for the wealth-and-power factions to achieve their anti-democratic agenda. 

Joshua Holland  makes the same points in more detail, and maybe a little more stridently.  But the bottom line is this.  There is no political base for principled political conservatism.  Whatever its merits, it's pie in the sky.  The true face of conservatism is what you see in the Bush Administration, and to think it's any different from what we saw in the Reagan Administration is delusional:

The Big Lie -- the deceit that's won them [Republicans] so many elections -- is that they can offer government that's just as big, but Americans won't ever have to pay for it. All the services you want and half the taxes! Eat ice-cream all day long and never put on a pound! Who wouldn't vote for such a utopian crock?

It's a series of boldfaced economic lies, actually, based on the carefully crafted separation of spending and taxes. The rebel [anti-Bush, pro-Reagan] conservatives' favorite statistic is that under Clinton, the government grew by 3.4 percent annually, and under Bush it's "exploded" -- a word that's ubiquitous to the genre -- to an average of over 10 percent each year (for some reason, they never mention that government spending increased by 9.75 percent annually under Saint Reagan).

But they never discuss his tax cuts. They've enriched a tiny über-wealthy minority enormously, without doing anything to stimulate the economy. The cost, of course, is a tab the kids will have to pay -- massive deficits that legendary former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan called "unsustainable."

The idea that Americans can have their big government cake and eat their tax cuts too is nothing more than a scam on a huge scale that's been perpetrated for forty years. It's left voters dizzy. Public opinion about budgets and taxes at PollingReport.com is a tangled mess of contradictions. By 66-31 Americans think reducing the deficit is more important than getting tax breaks and by 2-1 they think the Bush tax cuts haven't done anything to help their own families, but by 58-30 they approve of the cuts anyway and by a margin of 50-35 they want them extended. It's psychotic.

But psychosis can be treated. And that's why so many "principled" paleoconservatives are running away from Bush like the Roadrunner from Wiley Coyote: His excesses threaten to expose the fact that the whole ideology's a sham -- that the wizard's dead and there's a little man behind that curtain.

Bush, a fake cowboy from a billion-dollar Connecticut family, has spent six years telling Americans that his voodoo economics will "unleash capital" and create a "torrent of new growth." Don't worry, he promises with his trademark smirk, we'll just "grow our way" out of the deficits. But his own comptroller, David Walker, told an audience earlier this year that "anyone who says we can grow our way out of the problem wouldn't pass Economics 101 or basic math." And the General Accounting Office says of Bushenomics: "Today's fiscal policy remains unsustainable" and adds, for clarity, "what is unsustainable will not be sustained."

Bush, the former frat boy, is a president whose excesses go across the board, and that's not the way it's supposed to be done. His father was Big Business's handmaiden, but he took governing seriously. This Bush's administration thinks government's a joke, and has elevated cronyism and corruption to an artform. Reagan was a hypernationalist, yes, but he fought proxy wars and picked off some easy meat in Grenada. When he found his Marines in the middle of a civil war in the Middle East, he cut-and-run with the best of them. Twenty years later Bush's adventure in Iraq threatens to give militarism a bad name. And while Saint Reagan was a homophobe who paid lip service to the religious right, Bush went to the mattresses for a brain-dead woman in Florida, even as his staff referred to his Christianist base as "insane," "ridiculous," "nuts." That threatens to expose the whole hypocritical game of footsie the GOP's played with the religious right for decades.

Make no mistake: Those "principled" conservatives don't hate Bush for his spending, they hate him because he is them -- the only kind of conservative who can win an election, a Republican peddling big government and low taxes without blinking. And if Americans get a clue that modern conservatism is nothing but a bunch of economic lies gilded with some bogus "family values" and softened with a bit of morphine for the terror junkies, he can bring the whole fetid house of cards down with him.  --Joshua Holland

 

Common Sense about Abortion

There are an awful lot of people who take positions on issues not on the basis of what they really think or believe, but because it's the opposite of what those think whose "political aesthetic" revolts them.  I read this kind of thing all the time on liberal and conservative blogs, and even among those who think of themselves as moderates.  Conservative-leaning moderates may not be all that comfortable with conservative extremists, but they dislike Liberals more, even if on most issues they would be closer them. 

I call it a political aesthetic because it's not so much about the policy; it's about the style, and the Liberal style makes an awful lot of people right of center sick.  Bill Clinton, to take a recent example, was by 20th Century standards a right-of-center moderate in his policies, but he had a liberal aesthetic, and that's what made conservatives loathe him so. Nixon was his mirror image--a man with conservative aesthetic, but left of center on many of the issues.  Remember his push for a Guaranteed Annual Income?  The aesthetic is what determines our emotional reaction, our sympathy or antipathy, to a particular person in the political sphere.  His or her stand on the issues is secondary.

But the same is true of Liberals who are nauseated by the conservative style, and this is particularly evident when the question of abortion comes up.  I could advance an anti-abortion argument by appealing to a liberal aesthetic along the lines that the rights of the weakest and most vulnerable should be protected at any cost, that the measure of any civilized society is the protections it affords those who have the least power. That the destruction of nascent human life is anti-progressive, de-sensitizing, profoundly alienating, and barbaric in all but the most extraordinary, exceptional, and tragic cases. But that argument can't get any traction because an ideologically brittle, sanctimonious feminism cornered the liberal market on attitudes about abortion, and they did it by appealing to a Libertarian or "choice" aesthetic, which as I have argued here on several occasions is a symptom of a deeper political pathology. (See here, here, and here.)

And at the time when Roe v. Wade came down, people who didn't have strong opinions on the subject bought the feminist "choice" sloganeering which seemed in tune with times, that being the sexual-liberation zeitgeist of the 70s. It didn't help progressive anti-abortion arguments that to make them would also made you an ally of the liberal bogeyman, the Catholic Church, or now that opposing it makes one an ally of the wackos on the fundamentalist right.  And so in the public imagination being anti-abortion became associated with the aesthetic of the repressive, uptight cultural right. Yuk. So the substance of a progressive anti-abortion argument has an almost impossible task to overcome the powerfully negative aesthetic that anti-abortion position has among all liberals.

Anyway, I've been thinking about all this because my son recently asked me what I think about abortion. He knows basically where I stand, but it's not something we've discussed in depth.  He said the issue came up for debate in his school, and the discussion from his description of it sounded pretty sophomoric, which I suppose is to be expected of high school sophomores.  But because we're in Seattle and not Tulsa the cliches were mostly liberal ones:  "Keep your laws off my body."  " A woman has the right to control her own body."  "If you think abortion is wrong,  don't have one--but don't impose your moral values one me."   "All women want is the right to choose."

If we lived in Tulsa or Biloxi, I suppose the cliches would involve over-the-top accusations of baby killing and how abortion is a license for sexual promiscuity.  Unfortunately, discourse among adults doesn't get all that much better.  So what I want to do here is get away from the cliches and attempt to look at the issue in a sane, humane, and non-ideological way. I want to say here what I said to my son.

First, let's get away from the idea that this is a religious issue.  Anyone who has been reading this blog for some time knows that I take religion and religious concerns very seriously, but that I also think that when you enter the political sphere you have to speak in secularese.  And political secularese is fundamentally rights language, and never religious language.  It's not against the law to steal or to murder because both are prohibited by the Ten Commandments, but because both are an infringement on the rights and liberties of one's fellow citizen. They are breeches in the social contract, and that contract has no need to appeal to a transcendent source for its justification.

And so it's incorrect to frame the abortion debate as if it's only about religious conservatives trying to legislatively impose their idea of morality on everyone else, which is how an awful lot of liberals think about it.  Rather it should be framed in terms of human rights and whether the human fetus has any.  And if it does have rights, whether they take precedence over the reproductive rights of the mother. We all recognize that the fetus eventually develops into a human being that is protected by the law.  The crux of the debate lies on differing opinions about when you think a developing human being should be afforded such protections.  At conception?  At three months?  Six months? Birth? At age 21? 

Different societies have different answers to that question, and the problem with our society is that we have no clear consensus about it.  So I recognize that reasonable people can have different opinions about the matter and that there is no way to have a certain test that has scientific certainty.  And that's why it's an issue that has to be politically determined. It's something we need to debate in the legislatures, and our laws need to be flexible enough to adapt as attitudes change.  But we've had one zealous group, with the help of the Supreme Court, pretty much decide the issue without any broad debate or consensus building. The feminists who pushed their abortion on demand agenda are classic Jacobins.  Jacobins don't care how much of a bloody mess they make so long as it's in the service of their great idea.  The Neocons are another variation on the theme.

So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that so many pro-choicers can so glibly dismiss even the possibility that the fetus has any rights. The dismissal of those rights is easily justified in the service of the grand idea of female sexual emancipation from the bondage of biology. Surely women have the right to control their own bodies, but does any sane person really believe that the fetus has the same status as the mother's kidney or liver?  To think so is the worst kind of alienation.  For you don't have to be religious to recognize that something  profound, mysterious, vulnerable, precious is growing there--and that while it is dependent on the mother, it is not the mother.  It is supported by the mother's biology, but it is not identical with it. And so you just don't think about it as if it's only an unwanted organ.  And if the choice is made to destroy it, there better be extraordinarily good reasons for doing so.  That should be the common sense attitude toward abortion.

And even when justified, it is always a tragic choice. Nothing horrifies me more about abortion as a contemporary phenomenon than the way it is treated as a hygienic "procedure" that has as little moral seriousness as a tonsillectomy.  This is pretty much the way "termination of the pregnancy" was presented to my wife by her "health care professional" when some complications arose around her pregnancy with my son.  Naive me.  I was shocked at how routine they were about it.  What does it say about us that so many people, especially people in the business of caring for our health, such tragedies as routine?

The real debate is not about religious values but about what makes a human a human, and everybody, no matter what his or her beliefs, has an opinion on the matter.  I grant that there is good reason to doubt that a fetus is "human" from the moment of conception, but if you have such doubts can you grant that there is good reason to believe that maybe it is human? Can you say for certain that it is not?  I'll grant that there is a lot of gray area that needs to be given more definition.  But how else ought that definition to be given except through the process of people working it out in the political process?  If people could just talk about it and work out some kind of reasonable consensus, whatever the legislation that resulted, whether it be a liberal or restricted abortion policy, at least people would have more of a sense of ownership of the result. But we never really have been able to have that debate because of Roe v. Wade.  Roe short-circuited the process by which we might have developed a consensus. 

Let me come at this from another angle. For argument's sake let's say that there were a political movement to designate babies born with Downs Syndrome or other mentally or severely handicapping conditions as subhuman.  And let's say that the goal of this movement was to promote legislation that would give parents who discovered that their children are disabled in this way the right to "terminate" their lives, say, within the first three months after birth. I think it's fair to say that most Americans would be appalled. 

But who's to say that such a movement with enough money and persistence might not succeed?  If well funded and effectively organized, such a movement could plausibly change public opinion on the issue, arguing that society has no right to tell parents who will have the expense and heartache of raising "defective" children that they must take on that burden.  They will arrange to have parents with their horror stories appear on Oprah and the Today Show.  And they'll say, "If you think it's morally wrong to kill retarded babies, don't do it.  But don't impose your morality on me."  "Who are you to judge what burden I can bear?  Shouldn't I, as a parent, have the right to choose?"  And many Americans will sympathize--wouldn't it be better for everyone if this child didn't have to suffer? There are painless, hygienic ways to put the dears out of their misery.  Why shouldn't we leave it to the parents to decide?

And if you find yourself moved to oppose such a program, what arguments can you make?  Would not such arguments come down to your private moral opinion about what makes a human being human?  And won't your success in defeating this political agenda depend on your getting organized to oppose such a redefinition of what it means to be human, and isn't this essentially what the pro-life people are doing? So whether you agree or disagree, like or loathe their style, surely you can recognize that they have as much of a political right to do so as you would have if you organized to fight those who wanted to euthanize the severely handicapped.

The point I'm trying to make here is that what defines a human as human in the political sphere is politically determined.  It comes from a consensus that derives from traditional and evolving cultural values.  Whatever individuals might believe privately in the cultural sphere, the definition of "human" is not an absolute in the political sphere.  Like anything else, it changes as groups with political agendas work to have it changed.  What drives change, for better or worse, is well-organized groups who persist until they reach their goals. 

My problem with Roe v. Wade is the same as Michael Kinsley's.  He's a pro-choice critic of Roe because he thinks as I do that it is an an anti-democratic form of top-downism that subverted the political process. He believes that if it were left to the legislatures, American attitudes would have gradually evolved toward acceptance of the pro-choice position. He may or may not be right about that, but I do agree that it would have been a far more acceptable way to handle the issue. At least it would have been debated, and citizens would have had a greater feeling of ownership of the decision no matter whether the laws were liberalized or not.

So what it comes down to for me is that policies about abortion should be determined in the state legislatures based on the consensus within the state about when a fetus becomes a human.  Different states might decide on different standards, but at least it would be decided by the people and not imposed from above by elites in black robes.  If a majority of the people in South Dakota or Mississippi debate the issue and come to a more traditional understanding of the fetus's status as a human being and want to have more restrictive abortion laws to protect it, why should they be prevented from doing so?  If people in New York or California debate the issue and decide on a more liberal standard, fine.

Like Kinsley, I think that attitudes toward abortion will continue to evolve, and I don't like the idea that abortion has taken on the status of a constitutional right that makes legislative adjustments in relationship to people's changing attitudes virtually impossible. Let people decide on a state-by-state basis when they think human life begins, and so let the legislation evolve as people's attitudes do. The main thing is that the issue be debated and both sides present their case--Roe prevents that. And so if this conservative court finds a way of overturning Roe, I see that as a positive development if it promotes a more democratically open process toward developing legislation that reflects what people think, not what relatively small but powerful groups tell them it is poltically correct to think.

What if Karl's Math Is Right?

Karl Rove in an NPR interview with Robert Siegel Tuesday insisted that his polling shows that the GOP will retain control of both houses.  Despite the general polling that would indicate a landslide victory for Democrats, the election for the House of Representatives is a winner-take-all, district by district affair, and the GOP has worked hard to insure its continued success by gerrymandering districts to diminish the impact of broad popular sentiment.  The GOP has also brought electoral abuses, cheating, and dirty tricks to new levels of low that most Americans have a hard time believing such God-fearing folk could be capable of.  I know, Dems do it to, but they are rank amateurs compared to the GOP political ops.

Apparently the GOP has a lot more money committed to micro polling than the Dems do, and Rove might know things the Dems and the rest of us don't.  There are some people who question whether Rove is the political genius he's made out to be, but if he finds a way to pull off a GOP victory Nov. 7, I don't think there will be any question that it will be one of the biggest, and most undeserved, upsets in American political history.

And as in 2000, don't be surprised if you add up all the votes cast for Democrats and all the votes cast for Republicans, the Dems have a significant majority.  The Dems can get 90% of the vote in 49% of the districts, but the GOP will win if it gets 50.1% of the vote in 51% of the districts.  That's "the new math" Karl is working with, and he was right in 2000 and 2004 when the old math that assumes that popular majorities win elections.

Anyway, if Rove wins on Nov. 7, don't be surprised if on Nov. 8 the war with Iran begins. It may happen even if he loses.

Prejudice

As soon as you hear the word 'prejudice', you're prejudiced against it.  Everybody knows it's bad to have it, and yet none of us would be able to function if we didn't. So I'd like to say a few words on behalf of prejudice in an effort to give the poor word a fair shake. Because ultimately it's not about whether or not we have prejudices, but about whether we have prejudices that are reality based.

We cannot start with our mind a blank slate every day.  Our worldview is a network of interconnected prejudices that form a paradigm, and when we argue with one another it usually has less to do with the facts, and more to do with the paradigm that filters some out and others in, and which provides a template to help us interpret them. And so the real question is not whether it's good to have prejudices, but to ask what factors have contributed to giving us the prejudices we have. Is it possible to have healthy prejudices?  Yes.  Is it possible to distinguish them from unhealthy prejudices.  Again, yes.

Some of our prejudices, and maybe even most (depending on the person), are originally developed from empirical evidence. Isn't that the point of the fable about "The Boy Who Cried Wolf"?  It's a story about how a prejudice to trust was transformed into a prejudice to mistrust because repeated experience teaches that it's more likely the person crying wolf is lying rather than telling the truth. Nine times out of ten, you're going to be right if you think the person is lying.  And so even when he's telling the truth, you have good reason to be prejudiced in your thinking that he's not. The burden of proof is on him to prove otherwise.

Some people just cannot be believed, even when they are telling the truth. To think so derives from a healthy kind of prejudice.  But because these kind of healthy prejudices are formed from experience, they are open to be overruled by new evidence even if it has to be incontrovertible.  A healthy set of prejudices inclines us to organize the world in a certain way, but it is not so rigid as to be unable to adapt when solid new information challenges it. 

A second kind of prejudice derives from our cultural conditioning and perhaps on another level our innate psychological temperament.  It has more to do with the a priori template that we bring to the world from childhood.  These kinds of a priori prejudices can be either healthy or unhealthy depending on whether our socialization as children was healthy or unhealthy.  I think it's fair to say that anyone socialized into a racist, fundamentalist, politically correct, or jingoistic family is likely to have prejudices that are unhealthy, and that such a person has a lot of work to do to overcome the handicap of his upbringing. 

On the other hand, anyone socialized into a family that is respectful of all persons, intellectually curious about the mysteries of nature and the cosmos, skeptical of all groupthink, and a proud defender of his or her culture's highest ideals will have healthy prejudices.  Not all prejudices are equal, and I hardly think that it makes one an elitist if he wants his kids to hang out with the healthy, broadminded people in the second group, not the primitive, narrow-minded ones in the first.  If people are racist, fundamentalist, politically correct, or jingoistic, they deserve our respect as human beings, but how can anybody say that it's condescending to find their attitudes despicable?  There is no defense to justify these social pathologies.  Any attempt to do so is as absurd as defending the right of a paranoid to have his fears or of a chronic substance abuser to have his cravings.

For we as parents seek to cultivate healthy prejudices as habits of the soul in our children; the health and sanity of our children depends on the habits we help them to acquire.  But any habit becomes a problem when it rigidifies, becomes an end it itself, and as such makes us incapable of adapting when the empirical evidence demands an adjustment.  And so for me rigidity is the most important characterisitic that determines whether a prejudice is unhealthy or not, and that's what makes the attitudes fundamentalists and jingoists most unhealthful.  Their prejudices are impervious to new information.

So we're back to the boy who cried wolf.  Any normal, warm-hearted human being with healthy prejudices is inclined to believe and to trust what someone says unless there is good reason not to. It would be an unhealthy prejudice or habit of mind to assume that everyone was lying, that everyone had a vicious, hidden agenda.  That would be for me the definition of hell. And yet we are fools if we refuse to acknowledge the evidence that some people have vicious agendas, and that often they are politicians, and that American politicians are no different from any other. And that if we trust them after they have repeatedly abused our trust, there's really something the matter with us. 

So it follows that I should admit to another of my biggest prejudices:  I do not  trust people who make a career of acquiring as much power and wealth as they can.  Call it a prejudice that derives from my taking the Gospels seriously.  It follows, then, that I don't trust politicians because my empirical observations have led me to the obvious conclusion that wherever there are huge concentrations of wealth and power, you are likely to find, like flies buzzing round the pile, the people most interested in getting at it.  The more money and the more  power, the more attractive to those who want it most. Therefore, it is more likely than not that you are going to find people in politics, whether Republican or Democrat, whom we should be very wary to give our trust. 

At this level we're not talking about political philosophy; we're talking about the fundamental motivations that drive people into politics. Politicians as individuals in either party have to be kept on a short leash.  We have no reason to trust that they are doing anything  except what is in their own best interest until they have provided incontrovertible evidence to make us think differently.  We have reason to believe that they will do whatever it takes to get reelected, and that they will serve only those who will help them to stay in office.  And the way the system is set up right now people with extraordinary wealth and power play a far greater role in keeping politicians in office and so have a far greater influence on most politicians than the will of the broad American public.

That does not mean that no politician is worthy of trust; some clearly are dedicated public servants with high ideals.  But at this time, if ever, they don't define our political culture. And even politicians with integrity have to operate in a world where the buzzing of the flies drowns out their voices. So the integrity of the individual politicians we elect matters--how could it not?  But I think we have to deal with the reality that few people who are attracted to public office have the integrity we would hope, and so our expectations of individuals cannot be very high.  What matters more now is their party affiliation and their willingness to support their party's respective agendas.

And so I would add a corollary to this fundamental prejudice against politicians:  I have learned to distrust more the Republican agenda than I have the Democratic one.  And I think a big part of my reason for doing so goes back to the paragraph above: the GOP has devolved into a political culture where bigots, fundamentalists, and jingoists feel most at home.  But for me more damning is that the Republican party is the party of Watergate, Iran-Contra, the zealots who forced the Clinton impeachment upon us, and now the Iraq fiasco and the Military Commissions Act. And those are just the most noteworthy. Don't let's get started about the School of the Americas and Operation Condor in the 80s. The GOP is the party that most represents the interests of power and wealth in this country and for that reason attracts more flies than the feckless Democrats.  It has proved time and time again over the last thirty five years that it is unworthy of the trust of any decent American. And yet people continue to be conned by its traditional values, small-government rhetoric.

This is not a question of liberal vs. conservative.  It's a question of right vs. wrong, healthy vs. unhealthy, concrete evidence vs. bubble ideology.  So, yes, I have a prejudice against Republicans.  And I would argue that it is a healthy prejudice because it's based on empirical evidence and experience. What I don't understand is how anybody who knows anything about its record can defend the GOP.  I can only assume that such a defense is rooted in two possibilities: either, one, such people approve of the the party's power and money agenda and hope to share in its spoils--or, two, they have been conned by the power and money Republicans who have exploited their fears and  prejudices. If there is any other reason to support Republicans, please let me know of it. But don't tell me that they are stronger on national security; just put yourself in the second category above.

But let me suggest another reason--an extraordinarily blindingly negative prejudice they have toward Democrats. I do not think that I am blind to the more woeful characteristics of the Democrats.  But for all that is lamentable about them, what is in their record that even remotely approaches this shameful GOP resume of the last three decades?  Listen, anybody who has been reading this blog over time knows that I'm no shill for the Democrats, but given the choice between Republicans and Democrats, there really is none. Not because the Democrats are so great, but because the GOP has lost all credibility and can no longer be taken seriously by anybody with any common sense or common decency.  Voting independent or for moderate Republicans is a wasted vote if it might contribute to preserving either GOP congressional majority.  Please, please, please.  Think about it. Nothing is more important than taking the majority away from this nasty, thuggish group.

For all their significant faults and foolishness, the Democrats are not dangerous, and they are reasonably competent.  It is the party that represents the most significant, positive accomplishments in the political sphere during the last century. For these reasons, a vote for them is the conservative choice. And so in this election it's not the resume of the individual that matters so much as the resumes of the candidates' respective parties. This about taking power away from a party that over three decades has repeatedly and egregiously abused it.  Nothing could be more clear or more important.
 

Military Commissions Act vs U.S. Citizens

Any person is punishable as a principal under this chapter who commits an offense punishable by this chapter, or aids, abets, counsels, commands, or procures its commission,” according to the law, passed by the Republican-controlled Congress in September and signed by Bush on Oct. 17.

Another provision of the law states that “any person subject to this chapter who, in breach of an allegiance or duty to the United States, knowingly and intentionally aids an enemy of the United States, or one of the co-belligerents of the enemy [presumably U.S. military allies, such as Great Britain and Israel], shall be punished as a military commission … may direct.”[underlining added]  --Robert Parry quoting from provisions of the Military Commissions Act of 2006.

In an editorial yesterday that was mostly negative about the  Military Commissions Act, it was misleading in this section:

While the Republicans pretend that this bill will make America safer, let’s be clear about its real dangers. It sets up a separate system of justice for any foreigner whom Mr. Bush chooses to designate as an “illegal enemy combatant.” It raises insurmountable obstacles for prisoners to challenge their detentions. It does not require the government to release prisoners who are not being charged, or a prisoner who is exonerated by the tribunals.

The law does not apply to American citizens, but it does apply to other legal United States residents. And it chips away at the foundations of the judicial system in ways that all Americans should find threatening. It further damages the nation’s reputation and, by repudiating key protections of the Geneva Conventions, it needlessly increases the danger to any American soldier captured in battle.

But the law can apply to American citizens.  Robert Parry tells us why American citizens are in fact vulnerable under this horrible piece of legislation by  analyzing provisions in the law quote above that refer to "any person" that the Times either didn't read or has turned a blind eye to.  So Parry concludes:

So, before assuring American citizens that they’re safe from Bush’s draconian system, the Times editors might check on why these “any person” provisions were put into the law. For more than two centuries, the civilian U.S. legal system has handled similar crimes, including allegations of spying and charges of Americans aiding foreign enemies.

Yet now, under the cloak of setting up military tribunals to try al-Qaeda suspects and other so-called “unlawful enemy combatants,” Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress have effectively created a parallel legal system for “any person” – American citizen or otherwise – who crosses some line and becomes an enemy of the state.

The Times editors may believe that to raise these concerns is alarmist. But over the past six years, Bush and his administration have routinely stretched legal language to aggrandize their power, not the other way around.

There are a multitude of reasons to think that Bush will now interpret every legal ambiguity in the new law in his favor, as granting him the broadest possible powers over people he perceives as his enemies.

It's the confusion and ambiguity that provides the screen behind which these right-wingers operate.  Read the whole piece.  It's important that we not allow administration propaganda and its outlets in the media to water down how horrible this bill really is.  It's important that it be completely repudiated, and sooner rather than later.  Bookmark this article and give it to anybody who thinks this law is no big deal.

For the Record

Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.--Benjamin Franklin

Those words were quoted last night in Keith Olberman's commentary on the consequences of the Military Commissions Act, which is an evil piece of legislation if ever there was one.  I thought his piece last night was particularly good because he put it into historical perspective by linking it to John Adam's  Alien and Sedition Act,   Woodrow Wilson's Espionage Act, and FDR's Executive Order 9066, the one that authorized the internment of Japanese American citizens during WWII. Each of these was subsequently repudiated or seen as a blight on the record of these presidents.  It only remains to be seen whether in the case of the Military Commissions Act Americans will repudiate it or come to see it as the Bush Administration's crowning achievement.

Anyway, Oberman's piece last night should have been a speech given on the Senate floor not on Cable TV, and it's a must see or must read if for no other reason than at least one public figure has gone on the record to eloquently excoriate this bill:

We have handed a blank check drawn against our freedom to a man who may now, if he so decides, declare not merely any non-American citizens "Unlawful Enemy Combatants" and ship them somewhere — anywhere — but may now, if he so decides, declare you an "Unlawful Enemy Combatant" and ship you somewhere - anywhere.

And if you think this, hyperbole or hysteria… ask the newspaper editors when John Adams was President, or the pacifists when Woodrow Wilson was President, or the Japanese at Manzanar when Franklin Roosevelt was President.

And if you somehow think Habeas Corpus has not been suspended for American citizens but only for everybody else, ask yourself this: If you are pulled off the street tomorrow, and they call you an alien or an undocumented immigrant or an "unlawful enemy combatant" — exactly how are you going to convince them to give you a court hearing to prove you are not? Do you think this Attorney General is going to help you?

The sad thing is that the GOP and twelve Senate Democrats think this bill is a political winner with the American people.  But then again these are the ones Franklin was referring to in the quote above--they neither deserver freedom or safety.  The shame of it is they drag the rest of us with them.  I'm not sure yet that those Americans are in the majority.  But if they are, and if repudiation and repeal of this bill becomes a political impossibility, it means that the American idea,  moribund now for some time, has finally died.

P.S. If I ever had even a shred of respect for the likes of McCain, Graham, Warner, and Specter, I have none now.

The Confessing Church

Both modern liberal theology and secular totalitarianism hold pretty much in common that the message of the Bible has to be adapted more or less, to the requirements of a secular world. No wonder, therefore, that the process of debasing Christianity as by liberal theology led, in the long run, to a complete perversion and falsification of the essence of Christian teaching by National Socialism. --Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 1937.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for those of you unfamiliar with him, was a German Lutheran theologian who was executed by the Nazis in April 1945.  He, Karl Barth, one of the other towering theological conservatives of the time, and others founded the Confessing Church in Germany, a church which they set up as a Christian resistance movement to Nazism and as an alternative to the official Nazified Protestant Reich Church. 

Needless to say, the Confessing Church was a minority movement within German Christianity during the Nazi era.  But movements like it and the White Rose, although they did little to noticeably thwart Nazism, were noble expressions of extraordinary men and women of conscience who were willing to pay the price to do what conscience required them to do.  Bonhoeffer is the coiner of the phrase "cheap grace" and his book The Cost of Discipleship explores what "costly grace" means for people who are serious about being Christians.

People like Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, and Dorothy Day interest me because their actions in the world would be applauded by most liberals, while the conservative nature of their orthodox beliefs is something that most conservatives would applaud. And yet their conservative faith played a huge role in inspiring and sustaining their commitment to "liberal" causes--their opposition to powerful social systems, which in political terms are usually called conservative. Because let's face it, the word 'conservative', when you peel away all the self-justifying rhetoric, means, at least in the political sphere, serving the interests of wealth and power.

The all-too-common mistake made by religious conservatives is to think that to be a conservative in the cultural sphere makes them a natural ally of the power and wealth conservatives in the political sphere. That's at the root of the con that David Kuo writes about in his Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction. To me it is rather obvious that anyone who is a "serious" Christian is someone who feels to some degree out of his element when having to operate in  systems structured according to the logic of power and money.  And for the Christian right to so blithely ally themselves with the power conservatives was for them to bargain with the devil that has consequences they are only beginning to understand.

So I have been thinking recently about Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church.  I think about it as contrasted with the kind of right-wing Christianity that gets most of the publicity and is therefore the primary public face of Christianity.  And I am dismayed at the way this kind of conservative Christianity, whether Protestant or Catholic, has allied itself with the Republican party. 

I have tremendous repect for principled, doctrinally conservative Christians, and I understand their problem with the kind of wishy-washy liberal Chritianity that feels more comfortable in seminar room than it does praying in a church.  Liberal Christianity shares a kinship that is, in my opinion, too close to the a rationalist skepticism that is more interested in demythologizing and in stripping Christianity of its mythic and metpahysical power.  Liberal theology is the attempt to make the mysterium tremendum fit into the nice, reasonable categories of modern thinking, and sees traditional orthodox Christianity as a kind of primitive, syncretistic mythology with an passable system of ethics.

So if you jettison the mythology (and metaphysics), and keep the ethics, you can call yourself a liberal Christian.  And that's ok so far as it goes, but it doesn't do enough to give a person a strong enough foothold to stand his ground when the wind starts to blow, and so the influence of that which comes from above will always be weaker for such a one than what comes from below. Because the Liberal Christian sets his feet on what lies below, whereas the MLKs, Bonhoeffers and Days set their feet in what lies above, and in that sense have an upside-down relationship to the world.

Liberal Christianity may not be comfortable with the right, but in its project to reduce or adapt the mystery to which the Biblical narrative points, it has things wrong side up. It seems more bent on reducing something large into categories that cannot hold it.  And in doing so it sets the stage for the emergence of ecclesial organizations that are more concerned about various human agendas that have nothing to do with the biblical narrative even though they exploit its language.  And exploiting for puropose of social control is one of the most common ways the biblical text is abused, and this leads to  control-centered ecclesial organizations like the Reich Church and the kind of flim-flam that passes for Christianity on the Dobson/Falwell right. To me that's the point that Bonhoeffer is making in the quote excerpted above. 

Anybody can claim to be an authentic Christian and can even sincerely believe he is one, even if he isn't.  Who's to say he's not? By what standard can one judge?  I'm not into setting up some tribunal to judge who is and who is not, but I do see it as an important task for our time to point out what is deep and what is superficial, to what is real and what is bogus.  And when the powerful set up any of their variations of the Reich Church to keep the Indians well behaved and on the reservation, to me that's a pretty significant sign that something is bogus.

So my problem with the conservative Christians who vote Republican is not that  they see themselves in opposition to the banality of a spent liberalism as it manifests during this decadent time. My problem lies in its alliance with power and wealth and in its thinking that somehow their doing so is going to save America's soul.  That this kind of thinking is naive is the best thing you can say about it, and the publication of David Kuo's book might be the occasion to wake many of these conservative Christians up to the fact.

The Devil Quoting Scripture

The new book by David Kuo, an Evangelical Christian who was second in command of the Bush administration's office for Faith Based Initiatives, has a new book out entitled Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction.  Reports about the book indicate that Kuo is a principled Christian conservative who was appalled at the political cynicism that characterized the Bush Administration's attitude toward its Christian conservative base. It's too early to say yet whether this book will have much of an impact on the true believers on the Christian right whose identity seems to have merged with the Republican political agenda, but It put me in mind of a post I wrote in June 2005 which I reproduce here:

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.

Nobody likes learning that they've been conned.  But the sooner the face up to the fact the the quicker will they be able to limit the damage.

 

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.

Reasons Postscript

It wouldn't surprise me if some people reading my last post probably responded to it by saying to themselves, "Whatever."   How all of that stuff about historical eras  connects with them and the way they live their lives could be difficult to see. And what I'm going to say here may not help them much either, but for me it comes down to this:  Either history is a random, meaningless process or it is not.  The first absurdist position is the  typically postmodern one that supplanted modern optimism about human progress; the second is peculiarly rooted in the Judaeo-Christian mindframe of the West. The idea that history has a direction is a hard idea to sell during a period of decadence, but it is one of the basic assumptions lying beneath everything I write.  So if you find what I write rubs you the wrong way, it might be because we don't share this very fundamental understanding of history.

For I would argue that the phrase "spirit of the times" is more than a metaphor.  It points to something very real.  Human beings are more than talking animals because they sense the reality of it and are moved by it.  Abraham and Moses were so moved.  Socrates and the Buddha were.  The apostles after Pentecost were.  The Irish monks who spread throughout Europe in the 8th and 9th century were.  Dante, Aquinas, and Bonaventure were.  Ficino, della Mirandola, Michelangelo, Raphael, DaVinci, Erasmus,  Luther, and Shakespeare were.  All the great souls of the modern period were, from Kant, Goethe, and Hegel to Newton, Wordsworth, Bach, and Beethoven. And in our own time, Gandhi, King, Mandela, Romero and the Brazilian bishops.  The great personalilties of an era best define the character of the spirit of the times, but we all feel it and we all are influenced by it.

These are just the most obvious,well-known names associated with the spirit of their times.  Their contemporaries felt it to some extent as well.  And a lot depends on whether in feeling it, people work with it or work against it. The forces of progress and reaction are forces that have moral implications.  It's not just a matter of political temperament.  History has meaning so long as it is working in alliance with the moral forces that are forward moving.  Defining what that means, of course, is the rub.

My point yesterday was that during decadent periods the spirit of a particular era recedes and with it the collective will to move forward. Things seem to stall, and the center no longer holds.  This is not necessarily a negative time, but it is a difficult one during which people are peculiarly vulnerable to being distracted or diverted. To use a biblical metaphor, it is a time of wandering in the wilderness having left Egypt behind and not yet having arrived in Canaan. It's a time during which we lose our Egyptian habits in order to be open to learn something new when we enter Canaan, or whatever might be the next stage.

When you're in the desert, after a while it's uncomfortable and it's easy to forget why you came into it in the first place.  There is no feeling of easy optimism to buoy you up, and it doesn't take long for everything to begin to look pointless. It's understandable that you would want to go back to what is familiar and comfortable.  But that is what I've called in another post, drawing on another biblical metaphor, Lot's Wife Syndrome. Zombie traditionalism and its cousins Phariseeism, Fundamentalism, and Dogmatism are symptoms of Lot's Wife Syndrome. You can't look back with nostalgia and longing for the life that was left behind. It mineralizes the soul. To stay supple souled, you have to keep moving forward toward the Absolute Future, even if you're not sure of the route to get there, even if it means just putting one foot in front of the other. It's a time during which it's easy to lose hope, and it's easy to be seduced by those who have other agendas with shorter-term payoffs.

None of the human beings listed above were without their flaws, but they were great nevertheless, and their greatness lay in the suppleness of their souls which made them prodigious in their openness to something bigger than they were, viz., the workings of grace through the spirit of the times. That was their "genius," and it's the genius of all geniuses that bring something truly good into the world.  It's what distinguishes them from people who might be genetically as gifted.  Genes don't explain genius; they don't explain the spirit. If you think that what the great historical geniuses achieved can be explained by the mechanics of Darwinian evolution, well you've a right to your opinion, but don't you think it's trying to stuff something that doesn't fit into containers that won't really hold it?

I don't deny Darwin and the Darwinists, and I think they accurately explain the mechanics of life processes over time. But I do have a problem with the Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilsons who seek to explain everything higher as having arisen from what is lower.  Theirs is the mentality of the engineer rather than the poet or musician.  They are like technicians who have stumbled across a folio of Bach concertos and analyze the acidity of the paper and the ink density and speculate about the printing processes that were used in producing it, and think they have said something significant. They see the notes, but have no clue about the music; their preoccupation with the physicality and mechanics of their discovery has rendered them uninterested in knowing what is really important. 

Something else is working in human history that transcends the instinctual.  If it were not so, then people would be only motivated by sex, power, and money, and let's face it, an awful lot of what passes for human civilization is the product of libido, ego, and greed. But fortunately, it's not the whole story, for in and through those instinctual drives works something else, and it makes all the difference. For human intelligence left to operate without the influence of grace has no other purpose except to devise ways to get as much of these three as it can for itself. 

Human cunning in the service of the three instincts causes most of the woe in the world. For human intelligence is only a tool, and everything depends on which master it serves, and if there was only instinct to rule it, then we'd all be living in social hells ruled by those who have used their cunning to dominate the rest of us.  Isn't that what we see wherever a society has collapsed and the rule of law or the norms of tradition have been discarded?  Why are we so sure that such a thing could never happen here?  Especially when we so cavalierly let our leaders discard elements of the rule of law that have been sacrosanct for centuries.  To me it's astonishing.

A decadent time, as I discussed it in my last post, is a period during which the spirit of the times has withdrawn, and since we cannot feel its influence in human affairs, there is a tendency for a society to be dominated by those who are driven by instinct rather than those who are inspired by spirit.  Sex, power, and money are the ruling gods during a decadent period.  Their influence is felt in every age, but during a decadent period there is no counterbalance, and so they tend to dominate the proceedings.

And those who are  prodigiously ruled by those gods are attracted to those places where they rule and their influence is most powerful. Washington seems to be where all three gods have presently set up world headquarters. Not everyone who works there is ruled by these gods, but it seems obvious that these gods  set the tone and shape the Beltway culture. There's a reason that what goes on there seems so disconnected from what goes on in the rest of the country--everything there is distorted by the mentally destablizing influence of the Power and Money gods. The Sex god plays a minor role as well, but its influence is the only one Americans really seem to get upset about anymore.  I suppose we should be grateful for that, if it's the only thing that puts a check on the influence of the other two.

The best people in such an environment are relatively impotent--unless they organize to resist, especially to resist those ruled by the Power god who are working to reverse the gains that have already been made.  During a decadent time there are no clear lines of advance, but decent people must be vigilant to protect from regression the forward movement that has already been achieved.

In his two most famous  films, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and "It's a Wonderful Life" Frank Capra gives us fairy tales (I mean it in the good sense of mythos) which are testaments to the spirit of resistance about which I speak here.  We need a similar mythos for resistance that will inspire us to resist the forces of regression now. And unlike the Capra mythos, it needs to focus on how we can work not as individuals but together. We do what we can alone, but especially during decadent times we must organize to resist erosion and regression. 

This administration of George Bush, more than any in my lifetime, including Nixon's, represents the forces of regression. And when readers, as some have done, want to dismiss the outrage I have expressed here as due to the distortions of my leftist prejudices, I reject the label.  I am neither Liberal nor leftist.  I consider myself to be a man of the center, just as an American Whig like Frank Capra used to the thought to represent the decent center in America.  If what I write here appears too far to the left for you, maybe you should consider the degree to which you've been seduced by the right. 

If Money was the god that corrupted the Washington of the Mr. Smith story, Power is the god that corrupts it now.  Of the three gods, the Power god worries me most because it has the greatest destructive potential. The greed and venality evoked by the Money god are not nearly so worrisome as the powerlust and sadism unleashed by the god of Power.  For the Power god is the god of brutality, and when left unchecked it's a god that loves to throw its weight around and blow things up.  It loves the feeling of putting its foot on someone's throat. It longs to impose its will without restraint, and to be bigger than everyone else, and it will brook no rivals, and it will fight all constraints. For this reason the Power god has no respect for the rule of law, and will do everything it can to dismantle it all at once or piece by piece. And eventually the meaning of the word law becomes transformed into nothing other than an expression of the will of the Leader. 

So let me say this to any of the self-defined moderate readers who still check in here: Forgive me if I seem too alarmed.  Forgive me if I see the fingerprints of the Power god in the treatment of Maher Arar and the prisoners of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and on the passage last week of the Military Commissions Act.  Forgive me if I see its prints all over the hundreds of signing statements exempting our leader from the rule of law. Forgive me if I seem too alarmed at the easy disregard for the need for warrants for wiretaps, and the looser and looser criteria to justify invasions of privacy.  Forgive me if I see it in the "irregularities" surrounding the votes in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.  Forgive me if I see it in the grandiosity of the neocons project for a new American century in the Middle East, and in their bullying, unilateral, my-way-or-the-highway attitude toward American allies. Forgive me for worrying about the pattern of deceit and Big Lies and the blatant manipulation of popular opinion by the crudest fear tactics and propaganda. Forgive me if I see its fingerprints in a GOP partisanship that exhibits an unprecedented virulence in a take-no-prisoners war with the Democrats.  And forgive me if I see a pattern in so many more little things that taken alone seem insignificant but when seen in relationship to everything else become very unsettling. So forgive me if I have appeared a little too alarmed about these developments, and forgive me if I have wondered a little impolitely how any genuine centrist could not be.

The Reasons for My Concern

When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.  The term is not a slur, it is a technical label. . . . [Decadence] implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense.  On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns but peculiarly restless for it sees no clear lines of advance.  The loss it faces is that of Possibility.  --Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence

The point is that decadence is not a moral term denoting failure; it's a neutral, descriptive one. Decadence occurs when a cultural impulse has grown old and died.  We're in such a period now.  It's much like the dark, chaotic 14th century Barbara Tuchman talks about in her book A Distant Mirror.  The 1300s was a time in Europe during which the medieval impulse, which had reached its high point in the 1100s & 1200s withered.  But in Europe, as bad as the 1300s was, the 1400s was a time of rebirth.  The key to the Renaissance was a rediscovery of what had been lost and forgotten.  My hope lies in that somehow, sooner rather than later, we will be able to effect a similar "remembering" of what was rejected during the modern period as "premodern."  I talk about what I mean by that in more detail here.

So like Barzun, I do not use the term 'decadent' to indicate moral failure.  I see it as a purely descriptive word that describes a culture that has lost its vigor.  It describes an in-between time, a time during which we live with old mental habits for want of others, but which are barely adequate to help us navigate in the new situation we haven't the habits of mind yet to understand.  In such a time we need to develop a mental discipline that refuses to panic at the chaos, and  to live in hope that something new will be born. Panic always leads to unnecessary disasters and needless suffering.

And when we feel the energy of the new thing, the zeitgeist changes and it gives the culture a sense of meaning and purpose that it simply does not have now. During a decadent period, because it is a time by definition in which we have lost a sense of future possibility, a culture-wide, future-oriented sense of purpose is absent. But at the beginning of the cycle its presence is strongly felt by the eras great personalities.  Artists and poets in Italy felt such an energy in the late 1400s and 1500s. The Protestant reformers of the early modern period felt it. The scientists and explorers who were their contemporaries felt it. It was an exciting time during which anything seemed possible.  It was an energy that defined the age, and read Barzun's book if you want a better sense of its biography.  There are no great personalities during a decadent period.  Can you name anyone born after WWI in the developed world who has the stature of  DaVinci, Galileo, Bach, Kant, Beethoven, Dostoyevski, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, to name but just a few? There are famous people, but no truly great ones.

And the optimism that was born during the Renaissance carried through until the end.  It was a powerful spiritual impulse toward freedom and individuality that germinated, grew strong and blossomed during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, and started to wither during the 19th century into a desiccated form of Victorian formalism, rationalism, materialism. 

Toward the end of the 19th century and in the runup to the World War I, there was a late-Victorian attempt to resurrect the Romantic impulse called 'modernism'. It manifested especially in the arts and in progressive politics that we now think of as the early avante-garde. The key to this late modern impulse was its anti-traditionalism; it's belief that all the world's problems were rooted in obsolete, stuffy institutions and worn-out traditions.   These early modernists still shared a great sense of optimism about progress and future possibility, that history is a movement toward a better future for all--if only they could throw off the dead weight of ossified cultural forms that manifested in stodgy Victoriana. 

These modernists were the late-19th/early-20th century impressionists, symbolists, futurists, etc. in the arts and were the muckrakers and progressives in politics influenced to varying degrees by Marxist ideas, and as such were usually supportive of anything “revolutionary” or anti-traditional. They saw the great enemy, especially in Europe, as the lingering medieval institutions like the church and the landed aristocracy, the class system, and the bourgeois materialist philistinism that kept progress from progressing.  But that all changed after World War I. Modernism went into a second phase that is really the beginning of what we now think of as the postmodern.

I see these pre-WWI modernists as working from the same impulse as the earlier generations of Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romantic moderns, but in an industrial-age key.  Their sense of meaning and purpose came from fighting against the entrenched cultural and politcal establishments in the hope of giving birth to a future utopia imagined in any of a number of ways. This fight against oppressive traditionalism has lingered into the late 20th century in the developed world as seen in the civil rights movements that fought an entrenched apartheid system in the South, and feminists and gays who fought traditionalists ideas about sex roles and sexual behavior.  But it's an impulse that is for the most part spent in the West.

The forward-looking optimism that characterized earlier generations was mortally wounded by the devastating impact of World War I, and  slowly gave up the ghost as the twentieth century played out. If it flourished, it did so mainly in still premodern, third-world countries which clumsily embraced modernist Marxist ideas as an ideology to throw out their European imperialists and to effect their passage into the modern world.  But in the developed West the left is driving on fumes.  Some still talk the talk, but they can't walk the walk. 

As suggested above, the post-WWI modernism in the developed West was really the beginning of the postmodern, a new frame of mind defined by its no longer being able to take seriously the optimistic, progressive, Enlightenment rationalist frame of mind. Of course, modernism lingers into the postmodern period, just as the medievalism lingered into the modern, but the postmodern is about the loss of hope in progress, in order, in anything making any objective sense. It’s a loss of common sense. It’s a movement that is shot through with despair and cynicism. It’s a period of “decadence” a la Barzun's definition of it excerpted above.  The left has become associated with this decadence, but it's not their fault. 

Because for the left just as for everyone else, there is no longer a sense of future possibility--no robust sense of common cause.  We're in an era in which nobody--espeically on the left--believes the same thing as anybody else. And yet subjective belief is the only thing anybody has, and so almost anything is believable, because what standard is there to evaluate whose beliefs are more truthful than anyone else’s?  It’s all a subjective, surreal dream, and a sense of objectivity, of there being any absolute truth, is considered naïve if not dangerous. It's hard to get organized if that's what you really believe.  And if you don't get organized, it's easy to be manipulated by skillful propagandists of the right who don't suffer from the organizational problems of the left, and who have no compunction about telling Big Lies.

Post WWI Modernism (or what I call postmodernism) is about the re-assertion of the irrational—Nietzsche’s will, Heidegger’s geist, Freud’s libido, Jung’s collective unconscious, Picasso’s dissociated cubism, the subjectivism of Derrida, the relativity and uncertainty principles in physics.  It’s Romantic subjectivity without the optimism. It’s about fragmentation, disintegration, radical subjectivity, radical individualism, loss of community and of a sense of belonging to something larger.  It’s about living in a world in which nothing is given and everything is chosen, where freedom of choice is the one sacred value about which there is no dispute.  And it’s about the panic reaction of people who find they cannot cope with the uncertainty and chaos of all that. W.H. Auden called it the "age of anxiety."  And it's this vulnerability to panic, this free-floating anxiety that poses the most significant challenge to those who must live during a decadent period.

Because in such a anxiety-soaked dreamscape the political leader who dominates is the one that weaves the most compelling dream. Hitler/Goebbels were in this sense the first major postmodern political leaders, and WWII was the first postmodern war.  When we look at political figures like Cheney & Rove, let's be clear: they are not conservatives; they are men of the right, and for the right power is the value that trumps all others, and rightists regard the rule of law as a quaint "liberal" nicety for those naive enough to think that law is strong enought to constrain the will of those who possess power. Cheney, Rove, Rumsfeld are rank amateurs compared to the founders of postmodern right-wing politics; nevertheless, they are swimming in the same pond.  Men of the right feed on resentment and anxiety, and the endless War on Terror is tailor-made for exploitation by such politicians who seek to weave delusionary, anxiety-driven dreams that provide a screen for their ambitions. 

This is, as I see it, our predicament. If there is an alternative to the right-wing nightmare, it hasn’t emerged yet.  Leftist politics are too much a function of discredited pre-WWI modernist optimism, and in this country just seems flaky. I am amused when I read conservatives and right-of-center moderates fulminating against the threat posed by the Left. Please, as if it has any political power these days.  The great red peril is part of the fabricataed nightmare woven by the right-wing dream machine.  The chaos and confusion is real, but they are not caused by the left; they are the natural consequence of the dying of the age.  The cosmopolitans on the cultural left are  better adapted to navigating in a decadent culture, but that does not mean that they caused it, and that does not mean they have much political power or any robust vision for the future.  That's why they are so weak.

And that's why the threat posed by the right is so much more potent. The nostalgia- and anxiety-driven right wing faces no vigorous opposition anymore,  and won’t until some sense of plausible future possibility can be imagined and a broad consensus developed around it.  The reasons for my concern lie in the peculiar vulnerability of decadent societies like ours to the seductions of the right.  If it is not possible to dream of a better future, we are seduced by those who tell us we must return to the social norms of the past. But this is a fantasy past animated by an unwholesome zombie traditionalism I referred to in yesterday's post.

We are more vulnerable to authoritarianism than most people think.  Things seem stable because the economy, although fragile and increasingly stressed, is still supporting most people who vote to maintain their habitual lifestyles. So most Americans don't feel the effects of the changes already made by the rightists in power at this time. But if the economy breaks down, or if we are hit again by a serious terrorist attack, we should expect things to change dramatically. It won't be just taking off our shoes in the airport anymore. The definition of security threat and enemy combatant will be expanded significantly, and you won't have to be brown-skinned with a name like Maher Arar to have your human rights trampled upon.

If the last six years have proved anything, it's that the resiliency of the American electorate and the system of checks and balances is a myth.  The latter is there in form, but not in substance. And the former is as easy to manipulate as any frightened population in the history of politicians manipulating their populations. Authoritarians in the future will have as little resistance to jettisoning the constitution article by article "for reasons of national security" as they had in jettisoning Geneva article 3 and habeas corpus last week. There are always good reasons for doing the wrong thing, and those moderates in the middle, whom I define as "lacking conviction," are too likely to see merit in those reasons. And the country needs them to stop being coopted by being in their own imaginations of themselves so grownup and reasonable.  They need to learn what it means to resist.

And so we must all be vigilant and not give way to any of the fear mongering fomented by the right.  We must hold fast to everything we have gained, and fight every attempt by the right to take it away. The Military Commissions Act passed last week was a devastating, shocking defeat for America during this vulnerable time, and we must fight to have this legislation reversed. But in the meantime we muddle through as best we can and do what we can to prevent the crazies on the right from doing too much damage.  It’s not looking good right now.  But I have an un-extinguishable faith in the human spirit and in the mysterious working of grace.  This too shall pass.