Moby Dick is our national national myth. It's cognate with the story of Marduk and Tiamat. It's the story of the attempt to repress the forces of chaos with a violence that justifies itself in the righteous quest to impose law and order, but instead creates even more lawlessness and disorder.
It's a myth that's playing out right now in Iraq. It's a myth too many Americans haven't the sense to see through because of their inveterate Puritanism. The Puritan mind seeks out the infernal in its various manifestations with a compulsive need to eradicate it. The irrational is a sibling of chaos and it presented itself to the American Puritan mind in the guise of papists, witches, and Indians; now it’s Arabs. It used to hate the demented god Dionysos and his sacrament alcohol; now it hates tobacco.
If we accept Melville as our national prophet, we must accept that this hatred of the irrational creates a collective psychology that leads to inevitable disaster. We must also recognize that the violent, repressive tendency of the right-wing Puritan which seeks violently to impose its angelism on the bestial is complemented by its opposite. The secular rationalist tendencies in American culture compose what I would describe as the left-wing of the Puritan mind. If right-wing Puritanism tends toward an angelism that seeks to eradicate the irrational/instinctual, the left wing tends toward the secular materialist mentality typified by neo-Darwinist thinking—humans are merely animals who are ontologically no different from apes, whales, and porpoises except for their superior brain power.
The left-wing Puritan is just as militantly moralistic as his right-wing counterpart. It's at the heart of the left liberal campaign on behalf of a romanticized imagination of nature. This isn't all bad--at its best it seeks to save the wildness of nature from its destruction by the demon-machine that crushes the life out of everything that is wild and joyful. But at its worst, it's at the heart of prissy political correctness found among smug academics, radical feminists, and self-righteous environmentalists. It's behind the sanctimonious vegetarianism that screams "meat is murder." It follows, does it not, that if the human being is only animal that his killing and eating of other animals is a kind of cannibalism.
Another way of putting it is that the right-wing Puritan worships the father god; the left wing Puritan the mother god. (A similar point is often made by George Lakoff.) The first bows to a principle of dissociated masculinity, the second to a principle of dissociated femininity. Both create more problems than they solve insofar as they demonize the other and insofar as they seek to eradicate the other.
Left-wing Puritanism is more radically rationalist than the right wing, and in a curious way therefore more “spiritual” because of the priority it gives Mind. But its rationalism drives it to affirm only what is given by the senses, and so the left-wing understanding of Mind is utterly and paradoxically materialistic. It worships matter/mater/mother. Perhaps in another post we can explore that paradox, but the point is that for the left-wing Puritan anything that is not given through the senses is mysticism, and there is hardly a word with more pejorative connotations in the left-wing Puritan’s vocabulary if by mysticism we mean something fundamentally spiritual.
For the left wing Puritan there is nothing outside of what is given to us in the natural world. And yet it is comfortable with different varieties of nature mysticism, and has no problem with longing for a rapturous merging with nature and the natural world, with longing to be free and unconflicted as animals are.
If right-wing Puritans see human beings as angels who have bodies that they’d rather not have to deal with, the left wing sees the human being as only a body, as so many atoms complexly arranged, and any reference to the angelic or spiritual element is illusory. If the right wing mistrusts what is “below” in nature--ie, the sub-rational animalistic/instinctual--the left wing mistrusts what is “above” in the angelic, ideal, and super-rational.
There you have Calvinist-dominated culture succinctly, if somewhat simplistically, summarized. The angelism of the right wing is symbiotically linked to the materialism and instinctualism of the left, even though they see themselves as in opposition to one another. It’s a conflict most famously symbolized in the Scopes trial, and is being played out now in the ornament war in which the evangelical Christians’ ichthys—the fish symbol you see all over the place on the trunks of cars and trucks—is being swallowed by the smart-assed Darwinian, legged version of the same symbol. Creationism is nutty, but so is secular materialism in another way--but because it's the dissociated nuttiness of intellectuals, it has more style.
For me the problem lies not in that one or the other is completely wrong, but that each does not see how it needs the other. Effecting such a coincidentia oppositorum, is the trick that somehow or another we must pull off if we are to move beyond the sterile culture war that now defines our decadent era.