After the Future

The Healthcare Technocracy & the Pandemic

So, without realizing what has happened, the physician in the last two centuries has gradually relinquished his unsatisfactory attachment to subjective evidence—what the patient says—only to substitute a devotion to technological evidence—what the machine says. He has thus exchanged one partial view of disease for another. As the physician makes greater use of the technology of diagnosis, he perceives his patient more and more indirectly through a screen of machines and specialists; he also relinquishes control over more and more of the diagnostic process. These circumstances tend to estrange him from his patient and from his own judgment.

...

There are, one may be sure, very few doctors who are satisfied with technology’s stranglehold on medical practice. And there are far too many patients who have been its serious victims. What conclusions may we draw? First, technology is not a neutral element in the practice of medicine: doctors do not merely use technologies but are used by them. Second, technology creates its own imperatives and, at the same time, creates a wide-ranging social system to reinforce its imperatives. And third, technology changes the practice of medicine by redefining what doctors are, redirecting where they focus their attention, and reconceptualizing how they view their patients and illness.

Neil Postman, Technopoly, 1992 (pp. 77-79).

I think it was Pascal who made the distinction between the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse. We need both; what is lacking, particularly in the technocratic Liberal Order these days, is the latter. Finesse is another name for what Aristotle called phronesis, which is usually translated as 'practical wisdom'. It combines intuition with what we've learned from experience. The spirit of geometry is what we mostly encounter in the healthcare system and all the ways that healthcare judgments have been subordinated to statistical probabilities and the data generated by machines. One would think that the spirit of finesse is something that one would value in a competent health care provider, but that's rarely what one finds. 

The problem, of course, is that in the technocratic ethos that defines the delivery of health care in American society, finesse and subjectivity are not privileged in the same way that data-driven decisions are. And while the spirit of finesse, like most talents, is something some people have more innate capacity for than others, it's a talent that needs to be developed through use and experience. But its chances for development are attenuated in a society that does not value it. 

It doesn't require finesse to determine that 2 + 2 = 4. You just need a mind that operates in a mechanically logical way. And in our day-to-day life a lot of what passes for wisdom is really process knowledge that follows algorithms--it's automatic and mechanical. And too often this is the kind of solution you're going to get when you go to your doctor complaining about this or that ailment. His remedy is very algorithmic--x problem requires y procedure or z med. You're up the creek if you have a pattern of symptoms the algorithms don't recognize. Horror stories abound, and I have my own to share. It's no wonder to me why people would look outside the system for solutions to problems it seems unable to adequately to deal with. 

Anybody who has dealt with healthcare system has probably had to deal with people who are nice and well meaning, but rigidly conventional in their thinking. In a technocracy that means that their thinking is circumscribed by the spirit of geometry. They will only tell you about solutions that research or the data support. They will reject personal testimony as unscientific and anecdotal. And that's fine so far as it goes, but much better is to find a provider who both knows the research and also has a well developed spirit of finesse. In other words, a mensch. But it's unlikely that you will ever find one. 

While anybody who has read this blog over the years knows that my biases are with the Left, I have always found that I share common ground with the Right's distrust of technocracy. And I think that many on the Left might be more sympathetic to the underlying distrust that attracts so many Americans to MAGAism and its fear of big government and bureaucratic control if they spent some time reading Left-ish critiques of the technocracy, such as the critiques of Neil Postman and Christopher Lasch. And understanding their critiques might be helpful in understanding why all this distrust has come to a head during the pandemic.

And it's important for Democrat elites to use the pandemic as an opportunity to look at themselves in the mirror and face the fact that in the popular imagination the Democratic Party has become identified with the promotion of a soulless technocracy. I don't know that very many Democrats in this country fully understand the implications. That's because most educated Democrats are very well adapted to living in a technocracy and tend to be blind to its inadequacies until the have a personal crisis that requires that they deal with it, particularly in its health and legal systems. 

The common ground shared by both Left and Right critiques is a distrust for a class of trained "experts" who know the data but who lack any common sense or any of what I'm describing here as the spirit of finesse. We want to deal with people who know what the rules are, but also know when to break them. That requires a well-developed spirit of finesse. But the healthcare system is mainly designed to protect itself and to enrich its principals. There can be no rule breaking because that makes the system vulnerable to lawsuits. So regardless of the competency or good will of individuals working within it, the system has given ordinary Americans little reason to trust or admire it. 

Most Americans have encountered the healthcare system only when they have a personal or familial healthcare crisis, and that's when they learn what a soulless system it is. In that system, you are only your data, and while you might find a provider that has a cheery bedside manner, it's only a thin veneer that hides the training and protocols that require this person to make strictly algorithmic decisions about your care.

So the problem lies in that most people's experience of the healthcare system they often find that they are dealing with providers whose jobs are about serving them in moments of when they are coping with the profoundest issues of life and death, but who are forced by the system to work with them as if they were just data points on a spread sheet. It's understandable why so many Americans have come to see healthcare professionals as cheerful robots at best or arrogant Gregory Houses and imperious Nurse Ratcheds or at worst.  

I'm not saying that healthcare providers don't care about their patients. I'm not saying that they are themselves soulless robots. But the system forces them to behave as if they were. Even if they would bring a certain menschiness to their treatment decisions, the threat of a lawsuit hangs over every decision they make that does not follow strict protocols. There are no incentives within the system for anyone to exercise the spirit of finesse.  

I think that the pandemic has brought the contradictions inherent in the healthcare system to a head. This has been a time when we needed to trust the expertise of our healthcare professionals, but our experience with it has given us little reason to. Many Americans for good reasons are predisposed not to trust it. 

But during a pandemic the tragedy lies in that what we need is what we most dislike about the healthcare system, which is the rigor of the spirit of geometry.  A pandemic is the one place in medicine where the individual doesn't matter; he or she really is just a data point on a spread sheet because public health is all about statistical outcomes. The individual's well being is deeply implicated in the well being of billions of others. And whether freedom-loving Americans like it or not, they are all part of a global system where their individual well being and behavior is deeply linked to the well being and behaviors of people across the globe. A global pandemic is one situation where one's individual freedom must be subordinated to the common good, and it's one place where data and algorithmic calculation should shape national policy.

The tragedy lies in that people who understandably distrust the technocratic ethos of the healthcare system from their own personal experience of it, are likely to distrust it regarding public health. When they hear the pronouncements of the epidemiological bureaucrats, It feels like the same old soulless bureaucratic thing that they've come to hate about the healthcare system. If you dislike or distrust the healthcare system in one context, why should you trust it in this other? I think Anthony Fauci is a mensch, but I understand why he's so vulnerable to be vilified in the way he has been. 

Over the last several weeks the talking-head docs on TV have been saying that the vaccine hesitant should trust their local health care providers and their exhortations to get vaccinated. But how many people have a personal relationship with their local healthcare provider? And so why would they be more likely to trust him or her? Why would they trust anybody whom they see as merely a functionary of the healthcare technocracy?

In my own case, my provider is a nice enough guy, but I don't know him and he doesn't know me except for what's on my chart. When I visit for my once-a-year check up, I listen and ask questions, but I take every thing he says with a grain of salt. He provides some information that I recognize as important, but I evaluate it within a broader spectrum of information I take into consideration when making decisions about my health. 

For better or worse, I trust my own spirit of finesse over the recommendations of someone whose advice is legitimated only by the spirit of geometry. I have come to believe that I must supply what he lacks. Better if I could find a doc who had both, but good luck finding one. 

Biden's Visit to Capitol Hill

Mr. Phillips, a well-liked moderate who captured a Republican district in 2018, expressed hope earlier in the week that Mr. Biden could serve as a bridge between the party’s factions. But he acknowledged on Friday that those chances had “been sadly diminished” in light of what he called the president’s “nothing-burger” of a visit to the Capitol.  (Source)

Mr Phillips, the moderate Democrat--i.e., a Democrat who plays the insider game with donors and lobbyists, the kind who if they lose an election will wind up working as a lobbyist--assumed that Biden's serving "as a bridge" meanst whipping the Progressives into line. Isn't that what Obama and Rahm Emmanuel did in the run-up to the ACA?

He calls Biden's visit a 'nothing-burger' which tells you something about what a hack he is by virtue of his just using the term. It also speaks abundantly to his cluelessness because apparently it hasn't dawned on him yet that his kind of "moderation" is no longer mainstream in the Democratic Party. 

Uncle Joe, to his credit and my surprise, understands the moment, certainly in a way that Obama did not twelve years ago. Biden's Capitol Hill visit wasn't a nothing burger; it was an announcement that he's not interested in business as usual nor is he interested in supporting the politics of oblivious hacks like Phillips.

The stakes are too high, and if "moderates" like Phillips don't get that, then hopefully it will soon occur to them that Biden's visit yesterday was hardly a nothing burger, but rather an announcement that the rules of the game have changed. The rules must change. Business as usual is the path to doomsday.

I'm not saying Biden will succeed. I hope he will, but if he doesn't, it will be because of the political nothing burgers like Phillips and the other moderates quoted in the article, who really do not understand the moment or the stakes, and who, whether out of spite or just plain stupidity, might find a way to obstruct Biden and his agenda. 

Update 10/3/21: Just saw this column by Krugman who makes the same point:

...it makes a lot of sense to see Biden’s problems getting his plans across the finish line as being caused by the Rip Van Winkle caucus, Democrats who checked out intellectually a couple of decades ago and haven’t caught up with America as it now is.

Specifically, some Democrats still seem to believe that they can succeed economically and politically by being Republicans lite. It’s doubtful whether that was ever true. But it’s definitely not true now. . . .

So my plea to Democratic “moderates” is, please wake up. We’re not in 1999 anymore, and your political fortunes depend on helping Joe Biden govern effectively.

What the Median American Voter Thinks

In elite circles, including Capitol Hill, people often misunderstand American public opinion in a specific way. They imagine that the median voter resembles a type of political moderate who is quite common in those elite circles — somebody who is socially liberal and fiscally conservative.

Michael Bloomberg is an archetype, as are some Republican mayors and governors in blue states. Many people in professional Washington, at think tanks and elsewhere, also fall into the category.

In the rest of the country, however, this ideological combination is not so common, polls show. If anything, more Americans can accurately be described as the opposite — socially conservative and economically liberal. That’s true across racial groups, including among Black and Hispanic voters.

Most Americans are religious, for example. Most favor restrictions on both abortion and immigration. Most oppose reductions in police funding. At the same time, most Americans favor higher taxes on the rich and a higher minimum wage, as well as government actions to reduce drug prices, expand health care and create good-paying jobs. (Source)

But it doesn't matter what most Americans think because Beltway politics is an Insider game. Sure the voters matter to your average, "moderate" politician in elections, but the donors matter more. And while the Democratic donors might be culturally liberal, they are almost always fiscally conservative. Why? Because if you are a member of the donor class, you are rich, and if you are rich, your interests do not align with the economic interests of most Americans.

So "moderate Democrat" has come to mean that you care more about donors and lobbyists than the people who elected you. That's why taxes will stay low, and Medicare will still be unable to negotiate drug prices if they ever get this reconciliation bill passed. That's what the Insiders want, and moderate Democrats, in order to retain their good standing with Insiders will give the Insiders what they want. 

So because it matters little what most voters want and more what insiders want, policy opinion polls are interesting but mostly useless. And when it comes to the reconciliation bill that's being wrangled as I write this, the Insiders would just as soon it not pass if it's going to cost them a dime.

They couldn't care less about the big picture--things like the survival of American democracy. Such concerns are too abstract and sound like self-serving grandstanding by Progressives. They assume anybody who talks about such abstractions is just spewing propaganda to advance their own political agenda. Everybody is a game player, and that's just the Progressive way of playing. Progressives, in their view, are saying nothing substantive to be taken seriously, just as everything that they themselves say is substanceless and not to be taken seriously. One says what the game requires one to say. 

That's politics. To behave in any other way within the Insider ethos would be political malpractice. To behave differently, for instance, with sincerity, would invite the mockery of one's peers and others in the Insider class. It would be like a professional athlete choosing to stay with a team because his family likes the city and he feels a personal bond to his teammates rather than choosing to take an extra few million offered to him by a team in another city. If he turned down the money, most of his teammates and people in sports media would think he's an idiot. 

And besides, polls about policy preferences don't matter because hardly anybody votes for policy. The connection between voting behavior and policy preferences is very weak. It's one thing to answer a pollster's question; it's another to cast one's ballot for a particular candidate or to support specific legislation that would enact one's policy preference.

Why? Because people don't connect specific legislation to their policy preferences because they don't really understand the legislation. How many Tea-Party, anti-Obamacare fanatics had even a rudimentary understanding about what the ACA was designed to do? So if you're a Tea Party Republican on the Red Team, It didn't matter if you or people you care about would benefit from Obamacare. A guy on the Blue Team proposed it, and so you have to oppose it.

The polling for Biden's Build Back Better bill is extraordinarily high in support of it, but it doesn't matter. What matters is the inside game, and Sinema and Manchin have strong hands to play, and they will play them to their advantage. Manchin is living as if the political landscape is the same now as it was in the 1980s. That apparently doesn't hurt him in West Virginia. He's also deep in the pockets of the Fossil Fuel industry. In Arizona BBB is supported by all voters by a 57/37 margin, but Sinema doesn't care-- she, like Manchin, doesn't have to worry about voters until '24. So until then, the insiders are more important to both. 

Nevertheless, Biden is motivated to get BBB done for all the right reasons, and regardless of the disdain with which the Progressives are held by those in the Insider class, Progressives are sincere in wanting to get something substantive done. I'd be very surprised if nothing gets done. It looks like $3.5T is off the table for BBB, but $1.5-2T is still possible. I support the efforts of Jayapal's Progressive caucus to hold firm until Progressives get the best possible deal, but at the end of the day, they understand that something has to get done. The Progressives are not fanatics, and so when it becomes clear that they've got the best deal possible, they'll get on board, even if it's only 1.5T. 

An Interesting Theory from Breitbart

Do you want to know why I think Howard Stern is going full-monster with his mockery of three fellow human beings who died of the coronavirus? Because leftists like Stern and CNNLOL and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Fauci are deliberately looking to manipulate Trump supporters into not getting vaccinated.

Nothing else makes sense to me.

In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?

If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!

And why is that a perfectly human response? Because no one ever wants to feel like they are being bullied or ridiculed or mocked or pushed into doing anything.  --John Nolte

???!!!

Oh, I get it--Nolte is using reverse psychology on his readers to get them to get vaccinated. He understands that the only way his readers will get vaccinated is if they can see it as a way to thwart a Liberal plot to deprive them of their liberties.

Staying alive, one would think, is something of a prerequisite for exercising your liberty. But dying, of course, is preferable if it's a way to thwart what the Libs want. So now that Nolte has uncovered the real reason that Biden and Fauci have been so insistent on people getting vaccinated, which is to kill off MAGA voters, MAGA voters can finally stick it to the Libs by getting vaccinated and staying alive. Brilliant.

And this is such an classic example of projection in the way people on the Right are particularly prone. As I said in a post earlier this month--whatever dark, nasty motivation people on the Right asserts about the Left, it's almost always something that they are already doing or want to do.  So it's very revealing when Nolte says,

"I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!"  

These people cannot imagine anybody being motivated by anything other than whatever nasty thing motivates them.

Now if the Dems could just figure out a reverse psychological strategy to manipulate MAGA voters to not vote. Hmm, I know! The Dems should insist that elections in the U.S. are not rigged. They should insist that the election last year was free, fair, and well managed. MAGAs will think the opposite and refuse to vote because, clearly, their vote will never get counted. What better way to lower GOP voter turnout?

"But," you say, "the Dems are already doing that?" Oh my. Those Dems. They're so sneaky brilliant. 

Left Authoritarians?

This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters the argument I made in Naive Idealists posted on 9/6. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, work with the energies of one-sided Doves, aka Naive Idealists. You don't have to be a Dove like Robespierre or John Brown to be an authoritarian. Stalin and Trump were one-sided Serpents, but even they could not have succeeded without the support of easily inflamed and manipulable Naive Idealists. While the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy, whatever its flaws and limitations.

Another difference between contemporary Right and Left authoritarianism is that authoritarian movements, especially on the Right, tend to require a personality cult to catalyze its latent energies. There is no personality on the Left who performs this function in the way that Donald Trump has done for Right authoritarians. Bernie Sanders might have been recruited for such a role by Left authoritarians, but he's no authoritarian. He's too much of a mensch to have ever assumed the role in a way that could ever have been effective. And the energies on the Left in this moment are not incendiary to the same extent that they are on the Right. In other words, the Left in the U.S. is not ripe for demagoguery in the same way that the Right is. 

The question for me at this point is whether someone like Trump is needed to sustain Right authoritarian extremism in the U.S. If Trump fades from the scene, can anyone replace him? I'm not sure about that. I don't think that Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, or a twerp like Tucker Carlson can, but maybe there's someone else lurking on the fringes who will emerge that can. Or it could be that rank-and-file authoritarians don't care who gets in front of their parade. Maybe any figurehead will do so long as he or she tells the mob what it wants to hear. I don't know. We'll see one way or the other. 

No 'fuehrer' emerging in this sense even imaginable in the short-term future on the Left. AOC and Stacy Abrams have the charisma, but imo they, too, are too menschy, too balanced, to play such a role. But I don't know them personally and I could be wrong. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine the energies on the American Left being catalyzed by them or someone yet to emerge in the way Trump has catalyzed the Right. Whatever the whackadoodle Right says about the threats posed by Left authoritarians, there is very little short-term danger posed by them compared to the threat posed by the Right. 

Lenin pointed out after his successful Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 that the 1905 First Russian Revolution was its dress rehearsal. The same thing might be said about the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Germany. There's good reason to fear that we will come to see J6 similarly as such a dress rehearsal. That's a threat that comes from the authoritarians on the Right, not the Left.  

One of the biggest obstacles to restraining the authoritarian Right at this moment are the one-sided Serpents that dominate the Beltway political class. They are capable of thinking only about what is in their short-term political interests, and are virtually incapable of thinking about the big picture. They see politics as a game, and they are incapable of seeing what they do as having consequences beyond what affects their narrow interests. What distinguishes the various Beltway Insider players is how they have responded to the radical way in which the game has changed since 2008. 

Some Republicans like Boehner, Ryan, Corker were shrewd enough to understand that the game has changed in such a way that they no longer wanted to play it. Others like Susan Collins, Joe Manchin, and Kristen Sinema seem clueless that the game has changed at all and continue to play by the old business-as-usual rules. And others, extreme Serpents like Graham, McCarthy, McConnell, Cruz, DeSantis, Hawley et al., recognize that the game has changed, but they still want to play--even if it their winning means destroying American democracy. They don't care so long as they come out on top. 

I think that most prominent Democrats understand what's at stake. There are few naive idealists among them. (Most Naive Idealists on the Left are in the media or in academia.) Prominent Dem pols--Pelosi, Schiff, Raskin, Sanders, and others--are both shrewd game players who also are sincerely committed to preserve and improve American democracy. The question is whether they will be able to get the clueless snakes like Sinema, Manchin, Collins, et al. to recognize that business as usual is no longer an option. If they don't, the shrewder snakes in the GOP and Right-wing media will continue to demagogue the Naive Idealists on the Right, and if they are effective in focusing the intensity of Right-wing passions, they just might find a way to win.

I don't think they will win, but there's a very good chance that they will.  

Bin Ladedn Toppled More than the Twin Towers

“We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”

Bin Laden did not win the war of ideas. But neither did we. To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end. When President George W. Bush addressed the nation from the Oval Office on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, he asserted that America was attacked because it is “the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world, and no one will keep that light from shining.” Bush was correct; al-Qaeda could not dim the promise of America. Only we could do that to ourselves.

Carlos Lazoda

Spencer Ackerman makes a similar if more detailed argument in Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Destablilized America and Produced Trump. Read it if you still need to be convinced that when all is said and done bin Laden's attack succeeded beyond his most optimistic expectations. Yes, he was eventually caught and killed, but he succeeded because he could count on the U.S. to respond as stupidly as possible to the 9/11 attack. Bin Laden toppled more than the Twin Towers, he toppled what was left of our collective sanity, and there's a good chance that might in turn lead to the toppling of America as an open society and liberal democracy. This isn't over.  

One of the most effective tactics of the warriors of the Near East dating back to ancient Greek and Roman times (and earlier) was feigned retreat and then counterattack. Genghis Kahn used the same tactic. I'm too lazy to look up a particular historical example, but they are numerous. Let's say the Parthian light cavalry confronts a Roman army. They play to the Roman ego by pretending to panic and hightail it. The Romans are elated and give chase until the find themselves in a trap. The Parthians turn around in a place where they have all the advantages and then decimate the Romans with their archers or some other ambush-like counterattack. Disaster ensues.

You play to the overconfidence of the foe, or you insult their manhood, ego, the need for vengeance, or use some other ploy to cloud their better judgment, and sure enough they respond with expected stupidity. Anybody who points out that maybe giving chase isn't such a good idea is pushed to the fringes--not a real patriot, a coward. So disaster inevitably ensues. You'd think Westerners would have learned by now. But Bin Laden knew that was unlikely. As Lazoda puts it quoting Richard Clark--

Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”

The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.

In other words, American complacent cluelessness was followed by fanatical vindictiveness. It's as predictable as poking a hornets' nest. The American reaction to 9/11 showed little more intelligence or shrewdness than an insect's. That kind of predictable stupidity is easy for a shrewd adversary to manipulate. 

Lance Morrow recently wrote an astonishingly stupid Wall Street Journal opinion piece entitled "You Are Living in the Golden Age of Stupidity". He gives as an example Biden's withdrawal from Afghanistan. He also talks about the stupidity of the Democrats twice trying to impeach Trump likening the Democrats to Wile E. Coyote to Trump's roadrunner. This is the guy who wrote in Time magazine a few days after 9/11 " A Case for Rage and Retribution". Here's the nut of it:

A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage... Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon (abhorred in decent peacetime societies) called hatred... This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilized toughen up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started."

I don't know if Bin-Laden had a chance to read this article, but if he did, it would have been a very strong indicator to him that he'd succeeded.

One of the chief characteristics of "stupid" is not to recognize it in oneself. For someone like Morrow everyone else is stupid, never you. Let's get after them chickenshit heathen Parthians and teach them a lesson. But what's really, truly astonishingly stupid is to fall for their ploy over and over again.

Conservatives like Morrow are prodigies of projection--they never quite grasp that the stupidities that they see in others are projections of their own. Whenever you hear someone on the Right accuse the Left of something nasty, they are almost always talking about themselves. The more unhinged the accusations, the more deeply rooted the projection. It would never occur to him that it is he and the hate- and vengeance-driven minions on the Right are those who most resemble the benighted Mr. Coyote. As Morrow says, stupid is as stupid does. 

Update 9/12/21: "See also After 9/11 the U.S. Got Almost Everything Wrong" by Garrett Graf. An excerpt:

Rather than recognizing that an extremist group with an identifiable membership and distinctive ideology had exploited fixable flaws in the American security system to carry out the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched the nation on a vague and ultimately catastrophic quest to rid the world of “terror” and “evil.” [See my  post on "Naive Idealism"]

At the time, some commentators politely noted the danger of tilting at such nebulous concepts, but a stunned American public appeared to crave a bold response imbued with a higher purpose. As the journalist Robert Draper writes in To Start a War, his new history of the Bush administration’s lies, obfuscations, and self-delusions that led from Afghanistan into Iraq, “In the after-shocks of 9/11, a reeling America found itself steadied by blunt-talking alpha males whose unflappable, crinkly-eyed certitude seemed the only antidote to nationwide panic.”

Naive Idealism

During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever motivated these Christians to kill one another had nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. This pathology that calls itself Christian derives from extreme forms of what I want to describe here as "naive idealism". 

My take on 'naive idealism' flows from a typology I describe elsewhere as the Serpent/Dove personality polarity*. Idealist Doves get you riled up enough to join a Crusades, but savvy Serpents win them.

Serpents are earthbound and worldly wise; they are  shrewd, practical, rational, calculating and concerned primarily about personal and tribal survival and comfort. They accept the world as it is, and look at life as a game that the smartest players win. They don't take rules or ideals of any kind seriously, and rather than change them, they'll just ignore them or stretch them beyond recognition in lawyerly or Jesuitical ways. They look at most of the Doves that they meet as flakes or boy scouts who don't understand how the real world works.

Doves are natural idealists who dream of a better world, a world purged of evil, and they are primarily motivated to do what they can to transform the world into their image of what it ideally should be. Not could be, but should be. Doves care about the rules, and if their group is dominant, they can be ruthless in their enforcement. If their group is not dominant, they quickly join crusades that seek to change the rules.

Serpents would never bother. They'd rather pay their accountants or lawyers to find a loophole or pay enforcers to look the other way.  Doves tend to be uncompromising. The most committed Doves are willing to make huge sacrifices, even to die, in the service of their ideals. Serpents, on the other hand, are always willing to cut a deal. Doves look at most of the Serpents they meet as utilitarian and soulless. 

I think each of us is a mix of Serpent and Dove, but in each of us one is dominant and the other recessive. Being a Dove, despite the Dove's penchant to claim the high moral ground, is in no way morally superior to being a Serpent. But I do believe that there is a moral project that involves both the Serpent and Dove in each of us, and that involves our becoming a "mensch"--someone who integrates both Serpent and Dove. This usually requires first understanding which of these for you is dominant, and then undertaking the lifelong task of integrating the part that is recessive. In other words, a mensch is someone who becomes both shrewd as a serpent and guileless as a dove.

An extremist Dove or Serpent refuses to live in the tension between their dominant and recessive aspects and becomes one-sided in the service of whichever is dominant. One-sidedness is more common than integration, but there are degrees of one-sidedness. An extremist Dove is what I describe below as a "naive idealist", and all fanaticism derives from some form or another of naive idealism. An extremist Serpent is never a fanatic but could be a criminal sociopath--a mob boss or a ruthless CEO. The culture of Wall Street, for instance, is shaped by one-sided serpentine values, as is capitalism in general.

But there are capitalist naive idealists. They call themselves Libertarians. Someone like Milton Friedman was completely sincere in an idealism that ironically came to justify capitalism's becoming dominated by extreme, i.e., utterly non-idealist, one-sided Serpents.  Libertarianism is a form of Dove fanaticism that justifies Serpent sociopathy.  

Naive idealism, as I speak of it here, is a condition of profound alienation. It is an anti-human form of angelism that hates the world as it is and which cannot tolerate the presence of evil in it. Evil for naive idealists is a force that must be purged from the world, and they will do whatever it takes to get the job done. There is no compromise with evil. Inquisitions, witch trials, the French Terror,  Mao's cultural Revolution, the January 6 storming of the Capitol all derive from the kind of naive idealism of which I speak here. The naive idealists who drive these sociopathies see themselves as trying to rid the world of evil, which by definition is incarnated in any group that opposes the realization of their ideals. In their one-sidedness they become, with all the best intentions, a force that promotes evil. This is, I believe, the real point of the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. 

For this reason, naive idealists are a force in the world with enormous potential for destructive violence. Because there is no compromising with evil for extreme, one-sided Doves, they often become explosively enraged when their project to create an ideal society is being undermined by groups who by the very fact of their opposition can be nothing other than evil. This anger at the intractable evil of the world results in escalating levels of violence with each successive failure to force it to conform. This is as much true of Islamic fundamentalists as it is of fervent Marxist revolutionaries as it is for the MAGA minions who stormed the Capitol. 

Again, the worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Religious fanaticism of the Muslim or Christian type is all in the family with the fanaticism of the Hitler youth or the Red Guard in China during its cultural revolution in the sixties. They might have different ideas about what the world would look like if it were cleansed of evil, but they are united in their obsession to cleanse it. This is not a religious phenomenon; it is a psychological pathology that can garb itself in religion, but just as often in secular ideologies like Jacobinism, Marxism, Nazism, and MAGAism. Religion has no corner on the market for fanaticism.

Was John Brown wrong in his goals to abolish slavery? Of course not. But he was nevertheless a delusional fanatic whose hatred of slavery made him more a force for evil and destruction than for good. People cut him slack because he had 'good intentions'; they shouldn't have. He was cut from the same cloth as Timothy McVeigh. Both were fanatics because both believed in the purity of their good intentions. But the impulse to purge evil from the world is in itself evil. It's as if evil creates a system that involves both those who promote it in serpentine sociopathic ways--crimes of greed, powerlust, predatory sexuality--and those who seek to exterminate it in righteous fanaticism. It's a closed system that locks both parties in an endless karmic loop where victory means becoming the evil one sought to purge. Like a parasite, evil just moves from one host to the other.

So the hatred naive idealists have for what they perceive as evil usually winds up sooner or later destroying themselves and a lot of innocents with them. The Jacobins during the French Revolution were paradigmatic in this respect. Jacobinism was marked by increasingly stringent tests of Revolutionary Purity. Recently, we saw this to some extent on the Left leading to the ridiculous purity test that requires that you are not sufficiently woke unless you agree that we must defund the police.

But that is benign when compared to what we see the same thing going on in Republican politics right now. The party is marked by an insane escalation of purity tests based on who is the most anti-vaccine or anti-mask in response to the Covid Crisis or who is the most fervid in his or her belief that the election was stolen from Trump. This is all justified by the  naively idealist, fanatical commitments to a delusional ideal of "Liberty".

One of the great cliches among aspiring writers is their ambition to write the "great American novel." But it has already been written, and it's called Moby Dick. Ahab is the archetype of the American version of the naive idealism that is so deeply woven into our Calvinist national character. Melville is our national prophet, and Ahab's story is the American story now in the fight against Communism and then Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorism in the Middle East. Both stories are about how the hatred of evil and the desire to hunt it down and exterminate it make one profoundly complicit in the system of evil. Ahab does evil's work just as much as the evil he hates, and he thinks he's doing God's work the whole time. And the final result is shipwreck, and the only victor is Evil. The whale swims on.

Moby Dick Syndrome is this tendency deriving from America's Puritan heritage that seeks to create a pure society that is on a mission to eradicate evil. It feeds our current Millennial generation with the expectation that society should be fair, equal, and free everywhere and immediately. It's at the heart of what it means to be "woke". I'm arguing here that as John Brown and Robespierre were not wrong in their ideals, neither are woke Millennials. But both are wrong when their ideals become fanatically one-sided. The challenge is to retain one's ideals while at the same time being shrewd about how to live in a way that is faithful to them. Naive idealism is something conjured in the head; a truly menschy idealism is conjured in the heart.  

Contrast the Naive Idealist attitude toward evil with the gospel depiction** of Jesus' intervention regarding the woman caught in adultery whose Ahab-like accusers were about to stone her to death. Jesus' attitude is "menschy"; It's not one of "whatever", but neither does he condemn. He encounters actors in the eternal action/reaction loop here in the accusers and the accused. Both parties will remain locked within the loop unless there could be an intervention from outside of it. And that's what Jesus' confrontation with the adulteress and her accusers represented--not a condemnation, but the chance to liberate both parties from the loop.

The great saints are not fanatics; they are mensches. Jesus's intervention in this story gives them the opportunity to become released from the loop in which they are trapped, which opens up the possibility for them to move toward greater levels of integration and 'menschiness'.

We are all of us caught in an all-but closed toxic system. Christians call it original sin; Buddhists call it maya.  And we are all suffocating spiritually, whether we are aware of it or not, to the degree that we have no access to sources of clean air from outside this system. We all need to breathe this clean air if we are truly to flourish as human beings. Clean air promotes integration. To the degree that we breathe it, we become healthier and in a curious way we absorb the toxins within the loop and this helps to cleanse the air around us. So when people choose to live from this cleaner air, their lives become infusion points through which clean air enters into the system, and they become filters through whom the toxins around them are removed. This is how real, positive change takes place. Naive idealists do not promote substantive change; they are fanatics, high on the toxins, who just perpetuate a demi-life within the loop.

Most people prefer to breathe clean air if it's available to them. The problem now is that in America, especially in its public personalities and in its public life, it's in such short supply. But I do believe that it's possible, both as individuals and as communities, to create zones within the world that are relatively free from these toxins. We can each of us find our own individual way to breathe clean air, but alone we can find only enough air to stay alive. Alone, we're like someone who has to drag an oxygen tank around with him wherever he goes. Better if we can together create zones where the air is oxygen rich enough so that the tanks are unnecessary. This is the only way in which true integrated, human flourishing--menschiness--on earth becomes real.

Is it naively idealistic of me to hope for such a future? I don't know. We'll see. But I do think I understand enough about human nature and human history to assert that Life within the "Loop" is not the only possibility for humans. Whether or not we survive as a species depends on whether we find a way, step by step, to improve air quality in this metaphorical sense. 

9/26/21 Update: This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters my argument here. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, whether cynically (Trump) or sincerely (Robespierre), work with the energies of one-sided doves, aka Naive Idealists. If you lean Left, you tend to cut some slack for--if not admire--the John Browns while being horrified by the Timothy McVeighs, and vice versa if you lean Right. Nevertheless, there's no question that while the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy and the open society that America has become, whatever its flaws and limitations. For more on this, see Left Authoritarians.

_____________

*The Serpent/Dove archetype suffuses literature and popular culture, and I'd argue it's at the heart of the meaning of the Taoist Yin/Yang symbol. In the Bible: Eve and Adam, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Peter and Paul. In Shakespeare--Iago and Othello, Hamlet and Ophelia, Berowne and Navarre, Antonio and Prospero, Rosalind and Orlando--are just the ones that come to mind off the top of my head. In Dickens Estella and Pip, Dora and Agnes, etc. In 20th Century Comedy Abbot and Costello, Hardy and Laurel, Martin and Lewis. It's central to themes developed in Dostoyevski's Brothers Karamazov and Steinbeck's East of Eden. Watch the recent Disney movie Cruella through this lens.

In most cases the Dove is the dullard, and the more interesting, compelling character is the shrewder, more worldly wise Serpent--Jacob, Hamlet, Berowne, Rosalind. In rare cases the more interesting character is the Dove--St. Paul, Prospero, Alyosha Karamazov.

I'd argue that interesting one-sided Serpents are a dime a dozen and so are easy to write, and the only compelling Doves are fanatics, which are rarely, for good reason, portrayed sympathetically. People have tried see John Brown and Che Guevara as compelling doves, but they are compelling only to the degree that we see them struggling with moral ambiguity in private rather than merely in their public personae as extremists. Interesting Doves like Prospero and Alyosha are compelling because we see them struggling to integrate their Serpent. Dickens' David Copperfield is the story of a Dove-dominant character integrating his Serpent. It's a rare Dove that integrates his Serpent, but it's also the rare Serpent who integrates his Dove. In Shakespeare the Serpent-dominant Rosalind achieves this whereas Hamlet does not. In this post, I argue that Dolly Parton is a Serpent-dominant type who has integrated her Dove. MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela, on the other hand, were Doves who had made more progress than most in having integrated their Serpents. 

Contemporary literature and literary criticism is almost completely circumscribed by Serpent-dominant values and so is inclined to dismiss any depiction of successful integration as sentimental. I think that most of the Shakespearean comedies are parables of integration. As is Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which is the story of the Dove-dominant character George Bailey integrating his Serpent. A litmus test for me as to whether someone has a shred of the Dove's guileless spiritual vitality in him is whether he dismisses this movie as sentimental nonsense or finds in it something vital.

It's a fairy tale, but like many fairy tales it points to an important truth about what it means to be human. You need to have some Dove life working in your soul to enable at least a minimal level of 'second naïveté'. It's second naïveté that allows you to appreciate what Capra achieves in this movie. Second naïveté is essential in a Serpent-dominated cultural milieu where a kind of worldly-wise cynicism plays such a dominant shaping role on the worldviews of, especially, the well-educated. 

**John 8: 1-11

 

During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever motivated these Christians to kill one another had nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. This pathology that calls itself Christian derives from extreme forms of what I want to describe here as "naive idealism". 

My take on 'naive idealism' flows from a typology I describe elsewhere as the Serpent/Dove personality polarity*. Idealist Doves get you riled up enough to join a Crusades, but savvy Serpents win them.

Serpents are earthbound and worldly wise; they are  shrewd, practical, rational, calculating and concerned primarily about personal and tribal survival and comfort. They accept the world as it is, and look at life as a game that the smartest players win. They don't take rules or ideals of any kind seriously, and rather than change them, they'll just ignore them or stretch them beyond recognition in lawyerly or Jesuitical ways. They look at most of the Doves that they meet as flakes or boy scouts who don't understand how the real world works.

Doves are natural idealists who dream of a better world, a world purged of evil, and they are primarily motivated to do what they can to transform the world into their image of what it ideally should be. Not could be, but should be. Doves care about the rules, and if their group is dominant, they can be ruthless in their enforcement. If their group is not dominant, they quickly join crusades that seek to change the rules.

Serpents would never bother. They'd rather pay their accountants or lawyers to find a loophole or pay enforcers to look the other way.  Doves tend to be uncompromising. The most committed Doves are willing to make huge sacrifices, even to die, in the service of their ideals. Serpents, on the other hand, are always willing to cut a deal. Doves look at most of the Serpents they meet as utilitarian and soulless. 

I think each of us is a mix of Serpent and Dove, but in each of us one is dominant and the other recessive. Being a Dove, despite the Dove's penchant to claim the high moral ground, is in no way morally superior to being a Serpent. But I do believe that there is a moral project that involves both the Serpent and Dove in each of us, and that involves our becoming a "mensch"--someone who integrates both Serpent and Dove. This usually requires first understanding which of these for you is dominant, and then undertaking the lifelong task of integrating the part that is recessive. In other words, a mensch is someone who becomes both shrewd as a serpent and guileless as a dove.

An extremist Dove or Serpent refuses to live in the tension between their dominant and recessive aspects and becomes one-sided in the service of whichever is dominant. One-sidedness is more common than integration, but there are degrees of one-sidedness. An extremist Dove is what I describe below as a "naive idealist", and all fanaticism derives from some form or another of naive idealism. An extremist Serpent is never a fanatic but could be a criminal sociopath--a mob boss or a ruthless CEO. The culture of Wall Street, for instance, is shaped by one-sided serpentine values, as is capitalism in general.

But there are capitalist naive idealists. They call themselves Libertarians. Someone like Milton Friedman was completely sincere in an idealism that ironically came to justify capitalism's becoming dominated by extreme, i.e., utterly non-idealist, one-sided Serpents.  Libertarianism is a form of Dove fanaticism that justifies Serpent sociopathy.  

Naive idealism, as I speak of it here, is a condition of profound alienation. It is an anti-human form of angelism that hates the world as it is and which cannot tolerate the presence of evil in it. Evil for naive idealists is a force that must be purged from the world, and they will do whatever it takes to get the job done. There is no compromise with evil. Inquisitions, witch trials, the French Terror,  Mao's cultural Revolution, the January 6 storming of the Capitol all derive from the kind of naive idealism of which I speak here. The naive idealists who drive these sociopathies see themselves as trying to rid the world of evil, which by definition is incarnated in any group that opposes the realization of their ideals. In their one-sidedness they become, with all the best intentions, a force that promotes evil. This is, I believe, the real point of the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. 

For this reason, naive idealists are a force in the world with enormous potential for destructive violence. Because there is no compromising with evil for extreme, one-sided Doves, they often become explosively enraged when their project to create an ideal society is being undermined by groups who by the very fact of their opposition can be nothing other than evil. This anger at the intractable evil of the world results in escalating levels of violence with each successive failure to force it to conform. This is as much true of Islamic fundamentalists as it is of fervent Marxist revolutionaries as it is for the MAGA minions who stormed the Capitol. 

Again, the worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Religious fanaticism of the Muslim or Christian type is all in the family with the fanaticism of the Hitler youth or the Red Guard in China during its cultural revolution in the sixties. They might have different ideas about what the world would look like if it were cleansed of evil, but they are united in their obsession to cleanse it. This is not a religious phenomenon; it is a psychological pathology that can garb itself in religion, but just as often in secular ideologies like Jacobinism, Marxism, Nazism, and MAGAism. Religion has no corner on the market for fanaticism.

Was John Brown wrong in his goals to abolish slavery? Of course not. But he was nevertheless a delusional fanatic whose hatred of slavery made him more a force for evil and destruction than for good. People cut him slack because he had 'good intentions'; they shouldn't have. He was cut from the same cloth as Timothy McVeigh. Both were fanatics because both believed in the purity of their good intentions. But the impulse to purge evil from the world is in itself evil. It's as if evil creates a system that involves both those who promote it in serpentine sociopathic ways--crimes of greed, powerlust, predatory sexuality--and those who seek to exterminate it in righteous fanaticism. It's a closed system that locks both parties in an endless karmic loop where victory means becoming the evil one sought to purge. Like a parasite, evil just moves from one host to the other.

So the hatred naive idealists have for what they perceive as evil usually winds up sooner or later destroying themselves and a lot of innocents with them. The Jacobins during the French Revolution were paradigmatic in this respect. Jacobinism was marked by increasingly stringent tests of Revolutionary Purity. Recently, we saw this to some extent on the Left leading to the ridiculous purity test that requires that you are not sufficiently woke unless you agree that we must defund the police.

But that is benign when compared to what we see the same thing going on in Republican politics right now. The party is marked by an insane escalation of purity tests based on who is the most anti-vaccine or anti-mask in response to the Covid Crisis or who is the most fervid in his or her belief that the election was stolen from Trump. This is all justified by the  naively idealist, fanatical commitments to a delusional ideal of "Liberty".

One of the great cliches among aspiring writers is their ambition to write the "great American novel." But it has already been written, and it's called Moby Dick. Ahab is the archetype of the American version of the naive idealism that is so deeply woven into our Calvinist national character. Melville is our national prophet, and Ahab's story is the American story now in the fight against Communism and then Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorism in the Middle East. Both stories are about how the hatred of evil and the desire to hunt it down and exterminate it make one profoundly complicit in the system of evil. Ahab does evil's work just as much as the evil he hates, and he thinks he's doing God's work the whole time. And the final result is shipwreck, and the only victor is Evil. The whale swims on.

Moby Dick Syndrome is this tendency deriving from America's Puritan heritage that seeks to create a pure society that is on a mission to eradicate evil. It feeds our current Millennial generation with the expectation that society should be fair, equal, and free everywhere and immediately. It's at the heart of what it means to be "woke". I'm arguing here that as John Brown and Robespierre were not wrong in their ideals, neither are woke Millennials. But both are wrong when their ideals become fanatically one-sided. The challenge is to retain one's ideals while at the same time being shrewd about how to live in a way that is faithful to them. Naive idealism is something conjured in the head; a truly menschy idealism is conjured in the heart.  

Contrast the Naive Idealist attitude toward evil with the gospel depiction** of Jesus' intervention regarding the woman caught in adultery whose Ahab-like accusers were about to stone her to death. Jesus' attitude is "menschy"; It's not one of "whatever", but neither does he condemn. He encounters actors in the eternal action/reaction loop here in the accusers and the accused. Both parties will remain locked within the loop unless there could be an intervention from outside of it. And that's what Jesus' confrontation with the adulteress and her accusers represented--not a condemnation, but the chance to liberate both parties from the loop.

The great saints are not fanatics; they are mensches. Jesus's intervention in this story gives them the opportunity to become released from the loop in which they are trapped, which opens up the possibility for them to move toward greater levels of integration and 'menschiness'.

We are all of us caught in an all-but closed toxic system. Christians call it original sin; Buddhists call it maya.  And we are all suffocating spiritually, whether we are aware of it or not, to the degree that we have no access to sources of clean air from outside this system. We all need to breathe this clean air if we are truly to flourish as human beings. Clean air promotes integration. To the degree that we breathe it, we become healthier and in a curious way we absorb the toxins within the loop and this helps to cleanse the air around us. So when people choose to live from this cleaner air, their lives become infusion points through which clean air enters into the system, and they become filters through whom the toxins around them are removed. This is how real, positive change takes place. Naive idealists do not promote substantive change; they are fanatics, high on the toxins, who just perpetuate a demi-life within the loop.

Most people prefer to breathe clean air if it's available to them. The problem now is that in America, especially in its public personalities and in its public life, it's in such short supply. But I do believe that it's possible, both as individuals and as communities, to create zones within the world that are relatively free from these toxins. We can each of us find our own individual way to breathe clean air, but alone we can find only enough air to stay alive. Alone, we're like someone who has to drag an oxygen tank around with him wherever he goes. Better if we can together create zones where the air is oxygen rich enough so that the tanks are unnecessary. This is the only way in which true integrated, human flourishing--menschiness--on earth becomes real.

Is it naively idealistic of me to hope for such a future? I don't know. We'll see. But I do think I understand enough about human nature and human history to assert that Life within the "Loop" is not the only possibility for humans. Whether or not we survive as a species depends on whether we find a way, step by step, to improve air quality in this metaphorical sense. 

9/26/21 Update: This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters my argument here. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, whether cynically (Trump) or sincerely (Robespierre), work with the energies of one-sided doves, aka Naive Idealists. If you lean Left, you tend to cut some slack for--if not admire--the John Browns while being horrified by the Timothy McVeighs, and vice versa if you lean Right. Nevertheless, there's no question that while the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy and the open society that America has become, whatever its flaws and limitations. For more on this, see Left Authoritarians.

_____________

*The Serpent/Dove archetype suffuses literature and popular culture, and I'd argue it's at the heart of the meaning of the Taoist Yin/Yang symbol. In the Bible: Eve and Adam, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Peter and Paul. In Shakespeare--Iago and Othello, Hamlet and Ophelia, Berowne and Navarre, Antonio and Prospero, Rosalind and Orlando--are just the ones that come to mind off the top of my head. In Dickens Estella and Pip, Dora and Agnes, etc. In 20th Century Comedy Abbot and Costello, Hardy and Laurel, Martin and Lewis. It's central to themes developed in Dostoyevski's Brothers Karamazov and Steinbeck's East of Eden. Watch the recent Disney movie Cruella through this lens.

In most cases the Dove is the dullard, and the more interesting, compelling character is the shrewder, more worldly wise Serpent--Jacob, Hamlet, Berowne, Rosalind. In rare cases the more interesting character is the Dove--St. Paul, Prospero, Alyosha Karamazov.

I'd argue that interesting one-sided Serpents are a dime a dozen and so are easy to write, and the only compelling Doves are fanatics, which are rarely, for good reason, portrayed sympathetically. People have tried see John Brown and Che Guevara as compelling doves, but they are compelling only to the degree that we see them struggling with moral ambiguity in private rather than merely in their public personae as extremists. Interesting Doves like Prospero and Alyosha are compelling because we see them struggling to integrate their Serpent. Dickens' David Copperfield is the story of a Dove-dominant character integrating his Serpent. It's a rare Dove that integrates his Serpent, but it's also the rare Serpent who integrates his Dove. In Shakespeare the Serpent-dominant Rosalind achieves this whereas Hamlet does not. In this post, I argue that Dolly Parton is a Serpent-dominant type who has integrated her Dove. MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela, on the other hand, were Doves who had made more progress than most in having integrated their Serpents. 

Contemporary literature and literary criticism is almost completely circumscribed by Serpent-dominant values and so is inclined to dismiss any depiction of successful integration as sentimental. I think that most of the Shakespearean comedies are parables of integration. As is Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which is the story of the Dove-dominant character George Bailey integrating his Serpent. A litmus test for me as to whether someone has a shred of the Dove's guileless spiritual vitality in him is whether he dismisses this movie as sentimental nonsense or finds in it something vital.

It's a fairy tale, but like many fairy tales it points to an important truth about what it means to be human. You need to have some Dove life working in your soul to enable at least a minimal level of 'second naïveté'. It's second naïveté that allows you to appreciate what Capra achieves in this movie. Second naïveté is essential in a Serpent-dominated cultural milieu where a kind of worldly-wise cynicism plays such a dominant shaping role on the worldviews of, especially, the well-educated. 

**John 8: 1-11