After the Future

Getting after the Future

I've been reading in philosopher of religion Charles Taylor's new book, A Secular Age, which explores the monumental cultural shift over the last 500 years from having the "social imaginary" of premoderns to that of moderns.  By social imaginary he means a culture's collective representation of reality. The medieval peasant in France has more in common with his peasant counterpart in China than than he would with French worker living today. The greater divide is not between the medieval Frenchman and Chinaman, but between the Frenchman with premodern consciousness and the Frenchman with modern consciousness.  It's not just about the cultural differences.  It's about the reality differences because the premodern social imaginary is so profoundly different from the modern one. 

The interesting thing for Taylor is not that the world changed because of scientific discoveries, but that the imagination of the world changed during the modern era in such a way that an ordered, meaningful "cosmos" morphed into a vast, empty, disenchanted "universe". In other words, he seeks to describe how and why we have become secularized moderns. And without diminishing all the important advantages that come with our having become moderns, he challenges us to recognize what has been lost and the price we have paid for those advantages. 

Although Taylor's erudition is more than I could acquire in two lifetimes, he is groping with the same themes I've been exploring here at After the Future. This past summer (check July archive posts on "Naturalism and Supernaturalism") I got into it with some naturalists with whom I argued that they were unnecessarily limiting themselves by insisting only on naturalistic explanations for everything, including religious experiences.  The more thoughtful naturalists who commented here admitted the reality of experiences that religious types like me call transcendent, but don't see how they provide proof of anything that points to a spiritual dimension that coexists or even envelops our material existence. 

I am not going to rehearse the back and forth that went on about that again.  But during those those exchanges it struck me how difficult it is for modern naturalists to stand outside of their assumptions, I think because those assumptions are still so strongly reinforced by the modern rationalist social imaginary. So as a remedy, might I suggest to open-minded naturalists to read Taylor if they are interested to get some perspective on terrain that is already very familiar to them if they are truly open to seeing this familiar territory in a larger evolving context.  For me the value of the book is to see one's own little mental world as  but an eddy in this larger, magnificent stream. I think secular moderns of the naturalist variety would have a similar experience.

Hillary's Inevitability

Here's the meme that will get her the nomination and probably the White House:

What are you people afraid of... A strong woman, a large prosperous middle class? Health Care for Everyone??? A stable economy?

A win for Hilary is a win for the majority of Americans. I personally have had enough of the extremes and would be happy to have a more balanced middle candidate.

I for one am tired of Conservative and Liberal weeping and complaining. Lets find some compromise and rebuild this country.

(A commenter at HuffPost)

She's perceived as the safe candidate, the known quantity. She's my last choice among the candidates but I don't know that I really care at this point.  She's the one most likely to keep the war dragging on, but the others would probably be forced to keep dragging it on as well. You can talk all you want about removing the troops now, but the reality is too many important people want this thing to drag on. We live in a ceremonial democracy now, and what most Americans and the politicians who represent them becomes increasingly irrelevant with each election cycle.

Hawks & Doves

From Obsidian Wings:

one particularly infuriating example is the ubiquitous use of the words “hawk” and “dove.” Here’s Dan Balz in the Post discussing Clinton’s Iran issues:

Whichever view is correct, Clinton's actions have elevated Iran even more as an issue in the Democratic campaign and demonstrated anew her possible vulnerabilities among dovish Democrats on national security issues.

And here’s the NYT on Rudy’s band of lunatic foreign policy advisors:

But in developing his views, Mr. Giuliani is consulting with, among others, a particularly hawkish group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers.

Maybe I’m making mountains of molehills here, but these words color perceptions. I mean, think about it -- who do you want to be associated with -- a weenie wussified dove or a big manly hairy-chested hawk. There are implicit value judgments in these terms. They also reinforce stereotypes of war opponents as Mr. Van Driesens from Beavis & Butthead.

We might think of war differently if the NYT wrote:

But in developing his views, Mr. Giuliani is consulting with, among others, a group of advisers and neoconservative thinkers who aggressively advocate starting wars to solve foreign policy problems.

Or if the Post wrote:

Whichever view is correct, Clinton's actions have elevated Iran even more as an issue in the Democratic campaign and demonstrated anew her possible vulnerabilities among Democrats more skeptical that starting wars is the answer to our national security issues.

That's why Americans always go with ''strong and stupid''. "Smart" is always framed in the media as weak and nerdy.

Embracing Your Inner Authoritarian (Updated)

From a Sullivan reader:

I think a lot of President Bush's attempts to super-empower the presidency have to do with his perception of crisis stemming from 9/11.

I'm not endorsing Bush's policies -- I agree with a lot of your positions about the inherent antidemocratic dangers of his "Decider" presidency. But as a thought exercise, it's worth hypothetically changing the magnitude of 9/11 to test your positions.

What if 9/11 had been a nuclear attack? What if, instead of two towers in New York and one wing of the Pentagon getting destroyed, a Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb killed, say, 300,000 people in New York, in under one second? Studies have been made of these type of scenarios showing that the resulting crisis would not only engulf this country, but the entire world would ignite. From just one bomb.

If, for the past six years, we had been reeling from the aftermath of a nuclear attack, would your positions on Bush's policies and his flaunting the Constitution be identical to what they are now? Change the hypothetical scenario again -- make it 5 nukes, have 10 million people dead on 9/11. Or even bigger. In so doing, is there a line -- one that none of us really likes to think about -- where the crisis is so drastic, so desperate, that a Decider presidency that sanctions torture is inevitable? Where do you draw the line? And if you don't draw a line -- if you effectively say that there is no crisis possible that could justify a Decider presidency, are you being realistic?

If we were attacked on an unthinkable scale, I doubt that many people would be eager to watch Congress agonize and cat-fight over a response during a dire emergency. In times of crisis, people look to a strong man -- a decider. Crisis evokes fearful radicalism -- not a strict adherence to the rule of law, so easily countenanced during peaceful times.

If after reading this you think to yourself, "Hmm, this guy has a point," you are encountering your "inner authoritarian."  It's just as well you meet him and embrace him, and then show him a little tough love until he learns to behave.

This commenter is not really asking us to consider what our attitudes would likely be if there were such nuclear attacks, but rather he is asking what our attitude should be now about preventing such attacks. Is he not asking us to put ourselves imaginatively in the shoes of the "Decider" burdened with such an onerous responsibility?  Is he not then seeking to justify the "inherent antidemocratic dangers of his decider presidency"?  Isn't the clear implication of his line of reasoning that if it is possible to justify tyranny after such an event, why should we not justify it to prevent such an event from happening in the first place?

If there is any part of you nodding in agreement to this line of thinking, that's your inner authoritarian. And so the seeming voice of reason presented by this commenter is really the voice of his inner authoritarian. We all have such a voice in us, whether or not we hear it that often. The more attuned we are to threat either because of temperament or traumatic experience, the more likely we are to hear it. When it's the dominant voice drowning out all the others, we have Norman Podhoretz Syndrome (NPS). (h/t Greenwald--see update.) The Sullivan commenter, it would appear, suffers from a mild form of NPS; he is still capable of hearing other, saner inner voices. But it seems pretty clear which voice would dominate his inner sensorium in a crisis.

We live in a dangerous world, and there are real threats, and in a nuclear age the stakes couldn't be higher. Those who suffer from NPS aren't entirely delusional; it's just that they let their fears get the better of them, and they're more likely than not to give their inner authoritarian the steering wheel.

So then, the important question is not whether the horrible could happen, but to which part of ourselves we give the steering wheel as we contemplate such a possibility--the inner authoritarian or the inner republican? The former lacks poise, flails out at his enemies, seeks to kill houseflies with hand grenades, confuses courage with revenge and hatred, has paranoidal control-freak tendencies, and justifies fighting barbarism with barbarism because every threat, no matter how minor, is a threat to one's existence. 

The inner republican is prudent and clear eyed about real dangers; he is probing in his understanding of the causes and motivations of those who seek to do him harm; he recognizes his own culpability in creating tensions and conflicts; and he looks for ways to defuse explosive situations rather than to just throw ordnance at them.  And, yes, when all else fails he is willing to vigorously defend himself against threats that could not be defused. Maybe a nuclear cataclysm is unavoidable, but what kind of leader do you think has the better chance of avoiding one? The one ruled by the inner authoritarian or the other by the inner republican?

There's no question that we are living in a very dangerous world, but giving the steering wheel to the inner authoritarian means insuring sooner or later that we drive off the cliff. Indeed such scenarios as envisioned by our commenter are likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone who is ruled by fear and thinks every body hates him usually behaves in ways that make even those who want to like him hate him instead.  Isn't that what we've seen in the last six years? Can we recognize that whatever it is in us that wants to hand off leadership to the inner authoritarian will only make a mess of things? If we allow our inner authoritarian to govern our thinking and actions, we are creating the conditions most likely to insure the inevitability of everything we fear most.

UPDATE: Sullivan tells his inner authoritarian to go to his room for a time out and gives voice to his 'inner republican'.  Read his longer piece reflecting on why the Decider became a torturer here.  Last graf:

We may have entered a world, in other words, where the empirical reality of our national security is less important than the imaginationland that every torture regime will create. We may therefore be sacrificing our liberties for a phantasm created by brutality spawned by terror. We don't know for sure, of course. But that's what torture does: it creates a miasma of unknowing, about as dangerous a situation in wartime as one can imagine. This hideous fate was made possible by an inexperienced president with a fundamentalist psyche and a paranoid and power-hungry vice-president who decided to embrace "the dark side" almost as soon as the second tower fell, and who is still trying to avenge Nixon. Until they are both gone from office, we are in grave danger - the kind of danger that only torturers and fantasists and a security strategy based on coerced evidence can conjure up. And since they have utter contempt for the role of the Congress in declaring war, we and the world are helpless to stop them. Every day we get through with them in power, I say a silent prayer of thanks that the worst hasn't happened. Yet. Because we sure know they're looking in all the wrong places.

To be fair to Sullivan, he's been unambiguous in his condemnation of the administration's torture policies from the beginning, but he still has an inner authoritarian that gets the better of him on some issues. I think his popularity in the blogosphere derives from how he represents naive, conventional, moderate opinion, namely the opinion of decent Americans who even now believe that Reagan was a great president, and that American policy is driven by by nice people, just like him, doing their best to be decent, patriotic Americans.  He admits in this post that Abu Ghraib came as something of a surprise to him.  If he were well informed it shouldn't have. He's at least honest enough to admit it.

Quote of the Day: John H.

Do the hacks just think that it's not worth taking political risks to end the Iraq War? Or do they secretly support it? After all, they feed from the same trough as Republicans.

The political risk that Democrats refuse to address is their Culture of Weakness. Every time they cave to Bush to appear strong on national security, they replay a script that highlights their weakness. They lack leadership qualities, a sense of purpose, courage or conviction. They prefer to react rather than take responsibility.

The major Democratic presidential candidates are a case in point. Hillary's position on the war is totally indecipherable, and to the extent she attacks the war, she focuses on its mismanagement. The others lack the strength of character to fight either Bush or Hillary. And to make matters worse, none have any track record of accomplishment on anything.

So it looks like 2008 will be a choice between a strong authoritarian who can lead, and a Democrat who shows no signs of being able to accomplish anything and who can be bullied by Republicans, their Democratic collaborators, and the media.(at Yglesias's Blog)

Rank and file Democrats are finally discovering that the conservatives have been right all along in their contempt for the Democratic culture of weakness.  Given the choice between a stupid strong man or a smart but weak ditherer, can you blame America for choosing the former? Is there any mystery as to why Democrats are peceived as such losers?  "Republicans" and "Democrats" are misnomers for their respective parties.  They would be better named the "Authoritarians" and the "Collaborationists".

Boomer Culpability (Updated)

MZ in response to my "Soft Tryranny" post asked what I thought about boomer culpability in getting us where we are.  I'll share a few thoughts here, but what do other boomers think?  Non-boomers--what's your take on the responsibility of your elders in getting us all into this fix?

I'd say first of all, the boomer generation is no different than any other except that it was young during an unusual--perhaps aberrational--moment in history. The technocracy trembled a little during that moment, but it didn't take long for it to recover and to reassert its control. Some boomers were affected by an awakening to new possibility that the sixties pointed to, but most in my generation were not affected.  There's a reason Nixon pushed for the voting age to be lowered to 18 in 1970--he knew most young people would vote for him, and they did in '72.

As a young man, I wanted to believe that the creative burst that manifested in the sixties represented the introduction of a new cultural era, and I searched everywhere to find people to connect with who shared that hope. I went to meetings of the SDS and other radical left groups and was for the most part disgusted by the egoism, anger, and hedonism that seemed to be their animating spirit.  It became clear that the idealism I was looking for would not be found there because for the most part the people in my generation who were leading the student movements didn't have it. They were driven primarily by narcissism and fear of the draft. The technocracy finally figured this out and adjusted by endorsing sexual license and taking away the draft. I learned then that the New Left in this country had its head up its ass then, and nothing much has changed since insofar as its ghost still dominates political discourse on the left.

There were and are exceptions. I admired what Saul Alinsky and his serious disciples were able to achieve. I admired the for the most part the sober analysis of Noam Chomsky, and there are several bloggers in the Chomsky "school" to whom I refer from time to time. But the closest thing I found to what I was looking for was in the Christian social activism of Dorothy Day, Cesar Chavez, and I admired what Daniel Berrigan was trying to do, and the liberation theology movement in Latin America. These people were all for real. I was influenced by the hope for a  Church "devoid of means of power" envisioned by the brothers of Taize (Rest in peace, Brother Eric) went to Yale to study theology, worked as a book editor, and then faded away to live on the margins of the technocracy in the late eighties and nineties, allowing myself to become preoccupied by family and other local concerns as it became clearer that whatever the sixties were, they were a moment that had come and gone.

I woke up to the fact that while the American ideal is real, it has had a relatively weak influence in American history. The American spirit has mostly been a celebration of unrestrained greed and powerlust.  Looking back on it now, it would appear that the only lasting effect of the sixties was to allow unrestrained sexuality join up with unrestrained greed and power. The technocracy is indifferent to sexual behavior or even promotes destroying traditional restraints.  Sex keeps us all distracted. Better from the technocracy's point of view that we should be preoccupied with sexual rights than with political or economic rights.   

Learning from Weimar

Democracy is a fragile flower, as we learn again and again. Among the many failed democracies of the past century, few held more promise than Germany’s Weimar Republic, and none collapsed into greater horror. Its story can be told in two ways: as a drama of decadent excess and tragic flaws, or as an elegy recalling noble promises betrayed by treacherous enemies. Eric D. Weitz’s “Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy” falls squarely into the second category.

Weitz, a professor of history at the University of Minnesota, praises the republic’s achievements and condemns its murderers: the right-wing businessmen, army officers and civil servants who handed the country over to the Nazis. Together, the respectable and the radical right nourished the toxic lie that Germany lost World War I because it was “stabbed in the back” by leftist democrats. Still, the Weimar of this book is not a prelude to Hitler, who barely puts in an appearance.

Weitz dispatches the political and economic history of the republic briefly and conventionally, describing its birth amid the trauma of German defeat; the incomplete revolution that created a model democracy but left it to be administered and defended by its enemies; the frightening 1923 hyperinflation that shattered middle-class trust in the government; and the fragile stability that lasted until the United States stock market crash of 1929 triggered the cancellation of American loans, a financial crisis, mass unemployment and dictatorship.

The republic’s mistake, Weitz argues, was its failure to dispatch its conservative enemies at the beginning. . . . Although Weitz enumerates conservative misgivings, especially from the churches, he equates fears of debauchery with opposition to democracy. Yet new freedoms could frighten even those who welcomed them. With his belief that “Weimar did not just collapse; it was killed off,” he plays down the self-destructive passions unleashed by democracy. People repelled by sexual freedom or by the brutal candor of Expressionist art were not necessarily Nazis, but they were ripe for the picking.

(From Brian Ladd's NYT review of Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, by Eric D. Weitz.)

Of course I don't think movement conservatives in this country need to be "dispatched," but I do think that their entire program must be vociferously repudiated and that we have to understand that there is no compromising with them if we have any hope of restoring our democracy. 

I've often spoken before about the Weimarization of American society. There are important differences between then and now,  but most Americans truly underestimate how fragile their political situation is. The important thing to understand is that with movement conservatives we're no longer dealing with reasonable people committed to the rule of law and the democratic process. The Republican Party is no longer the party of Lincoln and T. Roosevelt. There might still be some decent traditional Republicans in Congress, but they have no influence and  no future.

Only a few liberal and moderate Democrats understand think they can no longer negotiate and compromise with the Republicans. Harry Reid said this week, “I strongly believe that when we can put our differences aside, even Harry Reid and Rush Limbaugh, we should do that and try to accomplish good things for the American people.” If he really believes that, and I think he does, he will continue to just get pushed around by the bully right. Nancy Pelosi's criticism of Pete Stark's remarks were an unnecessary attempt to play nice with people who don't play nice.  Pelosi should have said nothing or just said Stark has a right to his opinions. 

Stark's remarks were over the top with his "amusement" phrase, but the important thing is not what he said but the fact that he's standing up and fighting. Her congress has an 11% approval rating.  What does she think she has to lose at this point?  Does she and Reid really believe that playing nice instead of coming out fighting is going to get them anywhere?  The only important thing now is that these Dems show some fight. We're no longer in a normal situation; we're in Weimar. Either Reid and Pelosi don't understood that or they are so complicit in this corrupt system that they are allies of those who want to squash those who want to fight against it.

Trying to be play nice is the fatal mistake decent people make when they deal with movement conservatives. The right is not interested in compromise or in working for the common good.  It wants to dominate the system, and it seeks to do that by any means possible--including appearing reasonable.  It's important for them to appear legitimate, to hide their deep agenda behind the appearance of decency and reasonableness, and to do every thing it can to delegitimize anyone who opposes them.  They want to keep you talking in your living room to keep you distracted while their cronies come in the back door to steal everything in your kitchen pantry.  They want to keep you confused and feeling ambivalently, because a confused and ambiguous people offers no effective opposition to them who are clear and focused on their objectives.

And now when someone like Chris Dodd finally stands up in opposition to the crony telecoms, Harry Reid won't support him?! Reid, apparently, wants to keep talking in the living room while the looting goes on in the kitchen. The movement conservatives rightly perceive him and those in Democratic Party like him as Neville Chamberlain types, not because they won't stand strong against Islamic extremists abroad, but because they won't stand up against conservative extremists here. So they'll keep pushing knowing that sooner or later he and his party will cave.

We ought not to be surprised. It's predictable according to the universal Weimar logic, which grabs a society that has become confused and decadent, and which is driven by no other motivations except the crudest and most instinctual.  Every society, whether decadent or not, is driven by crude, instinctual motives, but healthy societies feel a sense of shame regarding their most egregious manifestations.

A decadent society unfetters all the traditional restraints regarding sex, power, and money.  The movement conservatives don't think themselves decadent because while they wallow just as much as anyone else in the first, they feel shamed by it when they are caught. But they feel no shame about their extravagant indulgence in the second two. And whatever the society suffers (and it does suffer) because of a shameless lack of sexual restraint, it is nothing compared to the dangers it suffers when there is no shame about unrestrained greed and lust for power.

Is there any good news these days?  Just something. Dodd's move cheered me a little, and now Biden is joining him.  Barak?  Wherefore art thou?

Soft Tyranny

When any system of politics devours the surrounding culture, we have totalitarianism, the attempt to bring the whole of life under authoritarian control.  We are bitterly familiar with totalitarian politics in the form of brutal regimes which achieve their integration by bludgeon and bayonet.  But in the case of the technocracy, totalitarianism is perfected because its techniques become progressively more subliminal. The distinctive feature of the regime of experts lies in the fact that, while possessing ample power to coerce, it prefers to charm conformity from us by exploiting our deep-seated commitment to the scientific world-view and by manipulating the securities and creature comforts of the industrial affluence which science has given us.

So subtle and so well rationalized have the arts of technocratic domination become in our advanced industrial societies that even those in the state and/or corporate structure who dominate our lives must find it impossible to conceive of themselves as the agents of  totalitarian control.  Rather they easily see themselves as the conscientious managers of a munificent social system which is, by the very fact of its broadcast affluence, incompatible with any form of exploitation.  At worst, the system may contain some distributive inefficiencies.  From Roszak's 1969 Making of a Counterculture

Rereading Roszak almost forty years later is an interesting experience.  Nothing seems dated--it's just as relevant now as it was when it was first written. But it reminds you that forty years ago, we thought that the evils in the "system" had been exposed and it was just a matter of time before we evolved beyond them. The counterculture was the future, and my boomer generation would be its vanguard, and Roszak was one of the people pointing the way. 

I was 19 in 1969, and I believed then that we were at the beginning of something important and new. When I read Roszak now I am reminded how I felt then and how it contrasts with how I feel now about our collective future. And in reading Roszak now you cannot but be very impressed that despite my naive nineteen year old's optimism reading his book, none of that naivete is present in what Roszak wrote then. He understood the power of the system, which he called following Jacques Ellul the "technocracy." Ellul, Roszak, and Christopher Lasch all wrote on this theme concerning how our political disintegration was linked to our culture-wide surrender of our political will to the experts who always know better. We're seeing a perfect example of it now with this movement to destroy FISA:  Listen to McConnell. He's an expert. Listen to the telecom experts. This is complicated. Trust us. We know what's best. We are all the "conscientious managers of a munificent social system."  We've got it covered.  Go shopping, mow your lawn, and leave the worrying to us.

Roszak's point is the same one I've been trying to make--it's not about Democrats and Republicans, Liberals and Conservatives.  It's about the fundamental matrix that shapes all our attitudes and perceptions about what is real and unreal.  Roszak calls it objective consciousness. (See my posts about "The Myth of Objective Consciousness"  here, here, and here.)  I call it scientific materialism. It's the collective consciousness pond we all swim in whether we're religious believers or dyed-in-the wool atheists.  And it's suffocating us in ways we all experience but fail to understand. That's what's so refreshing about reading Roszak.  He understood it very well when he wrote forty years ago, and everything he said about what ails us then hold true now.   

So while the technocracy is just as much or more of a dominating influence on our political life today as they was in the sixties, the main difference is the loss of optimism that the power of the technocracy would be dissolved or housetrained and made to serve the will of a nascent soulful counterculture.  Instead the counterculture was coopted, housetrained, and trivialized by the technocracy. In the seventies the counterculture morphed into what Lasch described as the 'culture or narcissism', and its politics narrowed to sexual liberation movements driven primarily by feminists and gays. The broader hope for a revolution in consciousness evaporated as it became clear that any such revolutions required spiritual discipline and efforts not supported or reinforced by the technocracy and its need for predictable consumer behavior and prodigious military spending. Oh well, the sixties were fun while they lasted. Great music. The kids today are really into the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix. Good times.  But the machine grinds on.

Quote of the Day: Arthur Silber

Let us try to describe the general nature of our national conversation, and of our political debates.

To even raise this subject, is to run into nearly insurmountable difficulties at the outset. It is not simply that our national discourse rests on a foundation of evasions, complicated by equivocations, twisted by avoidance, and rendered into meaningless insignificance by an uncountable series of lies. All of that is true, but it fails to capture the quality that is most striking to the perceptive observer. That quality is one of overwhelming, oppressive and suffocating unreality. It is as if everyone knows, but will never acknowledge, that we may speak only in code, and that we may only utilize the safe, empty phrases that we have agreed are "acceptable" -- phrases and language that are safe precisely because they have been drained of all correspondence to facts. It is as if everyone realizes, but will never state, that we are engaged in an elaborate charade, a pageant of gesture and indication, where substance and specific meaning have been banned. On those extraordinarily rare occasions when a politician appears who speaks the truth on any subject -- for example, a Ron Paul, or Mike Gravel, or Dennis Kucinich (and whatever one's disagreements with these individuals, all of them speak the truth on certain crucial subjects) -- such persons are regarded as kooks and crazies, and they are treated as objects of derision and ridicule. It is impermissible that they be taken seriously, or that they be allowed to hold the public's attention for any appreciable length of time. And it is absolutely forbidden that they ever attain a position of notable influence; the governing class, including its indispensable adjunct, the corporate media, will make certain of that.

For this is where we are in the United States, nearing the end of the Year of Our Lord 2007: the truth is not merely unpleasant, an uninvited guest who makes conversation difficult and awkward. Truth is the enemy; truth is to be destroyed. To attempt to speak the truth on any subject of importance requires a deep reserve of determination, for to speak the truth requires that one first sweep away an infinite number of rationalizations, false alternatives, and numerous other failures of logic and the most rudimentary forms of thought -- as well as the endless lies. On that single occasion in a thousand or a million when a person overcomes these barriers and speaks the truth, he or she discovers an additional, terrible truth: almost no one wants to hear it. This is how we live today: lies are the staple of our diet. Without them, we would die, certainly in psychological terms. Arthur Silber

P.S. Kudos to Chris Dodd for trying to stand up to the telecom crony cabal.  A futile gesture perhaps, but at least it's something.

David Brooks and Integrity

Brooks did a column yesterday on Deborah Pryce (R) Ohio. The whole premise that someone who admires Dennis Hastert is a paradigm of someone who has maintained her humanity and integrity is hard to take seriously. Maybe in Brooks's world. I don't know anything about Deborah Pryce, but from Brooks's description of her she appears to be one of these decent but clueless people who thought politics is the way it was portrayed in her High School civics book, and was truly shocked, as were her friends and family, that people in politics don't play nice.

Brooks in this formulaic puff piece does not tell a story of courage and strength; he's telling a story of an ordinary lady from the heartland who found out that politics didn't live up to her fantasy and is quitting so that she can be a nice person again. She admires Denny Hastert?!

The real point of the column is to provide a gloss on a quote from Meg Greenfield's memoir, Washington, in which she describes the typical politician:

They allow the markings of region, family, class, individual character and, generally, personhood that they once possessed to be leached away. At the same time, they construct a new public self that often does terrible damage to what remains of the genuine person.

So his point is well taken about the dehumanizing process one must go through in becoming a politician, and it's no wonder that anybody who is willing to go through it is more likely to be a creature of the system than to maintain his or her integrity.  And for that reason the process promotes a  certain kind of empty-suit personality with a big-time need for approval. These men and women do what they're told.

The system as it affects pols on both sides of the aisle is self-perpetuating no matter what individuals come and go, and so it's no wonder we're in the fix we're in. The system has a life of its own, and the people who thrive in it are people who are prodigious in their ability to serve its needs. And so it follows that the system spits out people who do not serve it, and anyone who exhibits a spirit of independence and personal integrity are spit out or spit upon. Their are exceptions, but they are tolerated  because they are for the most part ineffectual and their presence helps to support the illusion that the system embraces that kind of integrity. 

The system changes only if pressures outside the system challenge it the way, for instance, the civil rights movement challenged the cultural-political segregation system in the fifties and sixties. The problem for us now in developing such a movement that could apply such pressure on the system lies in that there is no clear focus point. It was relatively easy to organize around segregation and voting rights.  The rank-and-file of the civil right movement were people who felt the sting of segregation every day of their lives. It was easy to organize around the Vietnam War because so many Americans felt the sting because of the draft.

It's very hard to organize around issues like warrantless wiretaps, the politicization of the DOJ, or the restoration of habeas corpus because these issues, extraordinarily important as they are, are too abstract, and most Americans don't feel their sting. The same is true for the Iraq War--only a few feel its sting. That's why Bush will never reinstate the draft no matter how strained his military. He wants to keep the war abstract, and the draft will expand the scope of Americans who feel its sting.  So we are forced to depend on our elected officials to deal with the abstract issues and to prevent systemic abuses.  But these officials fail us because they are either naively nice people like Pryce who either do what they're told or get out. Or they are bad guys obsessed by greed and ambition. In either case, the needs of the system get served.

Maybe a guy like Al Gore could do more outside of the system than if he were to be elected president. Whatever his flaws and whatever his past complicity in the system, his not wanting to be a part of the system is a sign of his deep sanity.  I'm not saying Al Gore is Gandhi, but I think he's basically a good guy who has lived in the belly of the beast without having been completely digested by it. I think that his losing the election was a liberation for him when he realized, like Arthur Edens in "Michael Clayton", that the system has excreted him, that he's covered still in its filth, but  now he can to expose it for what it is without having to play by its rules. That's why the system has done everything it can to promote the-Gore-is-crazy narrative. He understands that the system is broken and not much can be done within it.  And I agree; initiatives from outside of it or pressures brought to bear from outside it are the only things that will make a difference.

P.S. I'd like to use as an epigraph for this post Arthur Edens's speech in the opening voice over for  "Michael  Clayton."  I looked but couldn't find it anywhere.  Anybody know where to get it?