After the Future

My What Big Teeth You Have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Feudalism: How We Are Divided and Ruled

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dream vs. Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dream Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

End of the Republic

From Chalmers Johnson:

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

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

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

Faith & Truthiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I bring Abraham in because he was for Kierkegaard the archetypal example of what he called the "teleological suspension of the ethical." In K's thinking about spiritual development there were three stages, or perhaps more accurately, three states of mind or soul: the 'aesthetic' in which one is driven primarily by self-absorption, the 'ethical' in which one discovers oneself capable of transcending one's self interest for the good of another; and the 'religious', in which one can find oneself in a crisis of conscience that may require him to break the moral law. A dramatic example of this was portrayed in the "Lost" episode entitled "The 23rd Psalm," in which the teenaged Mr. Eko shoots an old man so that his little brother, commanded to do it by the local druglord, would not have to. Eko breaks the moral law and commits a horrific act, but does so in an act of love to spare his young brother the choice of either killing or being killed. 

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

So can believers ever be certain that they are not deluded?  No. But neither can the materialist rationalist be certain that he is not. He's just making what in his mind is a safe bet. But as Kierkegaaard say, your greatness of soul is measured by the greatness of your expectancy. Small, safe bets yield small returns.  Abraham is great because of the greatness of his expectancy, and his willingness to risk it all. 

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

That's what makes the "knowing" that is involved in an act of conscience far superior to an act of knowing in the scientific, objective sense. Scientific knowing is about certainty. Faith knowing is about risk. Faith is an act of moral-courage knowing/not knowing. It is always a leap in the dark trusting that you will land safely without the certainty that you will. And if you were right, your act of faith will bear fruit. If not?  Well the best that can be said is that you took the risk and now you must bear responsibility and the consequences for it. It is precisely this failure to accept responsibility for the consequences of his decisions that makes someone like George Bush someone committed to his own self-reinforcing truthiness and therefore someone devoid of moral seriousness. 

And so the difference between "truthiness" and faith is that the first is motivated by a need to reinforce one's complacency and need to block out what one does not care to think about, the second by a challenge to ]risk to going beyond what makes sense or what is conventionally acceptable. It is never an act of arrogance, but an act, if genuine, undertaken with no certainty concerning the outcome and a willingness to accept the consequences if proven wrong.

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

 

Vanishing Middle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Defending Our Ports

From Think Progress:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Beltway Courtier Class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Branded

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Ports Deal Quashed, Kind of.

Rather than my repeating myself about this deal, I was waiting for somebody else to say it.  Maureen Dowd does a good job this morning:

President Bush does not seem to understand that it was his bumbling -- rather than our bigotry -- that led Americans to gulp and yelp at the idea of an Arab government running our ports. When the president said yesterday that "my administration was satisfied that port security would not have been undermined by the agreement," he seemed oblivious to the fact that -- after W.M.D., Katrina and Iraq -- many Americans no longer trust this administration to protect them.

Still shaken by his first rebellion by Republicans fed up with White House hubris and hamhandedness, W. chastised lawmakers about xenophobia. "I'm concerned about a broader message this issue could send to our friends and allies around the world, particularly in the Middle East," he said. He said that we had to cultivate moderate Arabs, but that moderate Muslims were shrinking back as violent Islamists pushed ahead.

American skepticism about the Dubai government running our ports is not prejudice. As Denny Hastert put it, "It's counterintuitive." There is nothing wrong with wanting Americans to be responsible for American security. That's not nativism or jingoism or bigotry. It's self-reliance and prudence. Of course, such an attitude can be exploited by bigots. And some bigotry is being fed by scenes on the news every day of Arab fighters blowing things up, leading to the same stereotype of Arabs that existed in the 70's, a caricature limned from terrorism, oil and the petrodollar.

The president preaches that we are seriously threatened by autocratic Arab societies that won't modernize and become free markets, but then his cozy relationship with autocratic Arab regimes, including the Saudis, continues basically unchanged.

As Michael Hirsh of Newsweek summed up in a recent column: "How then did we arrive at this day, with anti-American Islamist governments rising in the Mideast, bin Laden sneering at us, Qaeda lieutenants escaping from prison, Iran brazenly enriching uranium, and America as hated and mistrusted as it ever has been? The answer, in a word, is incompetence."

It's incompetence and a sense that the parties which have the most influence on White House policy are motivated by their own political and economic interests more than what is it the best interest of the American people. I don't trust them to do anything for the right reasons, and I think that the common mistake that links people who supported the war with those who support the Dubai Ports deal lies in their thinking that the issues can be discussed as if it were a debate about abstract policy principles.  They make their case  as if a more fundamental issue was irrelevant, namely the motivations and competency of this particular administration at this particular time in history.

The more fundamental discussion should not be about whether Saddam should or should not have been toppled. It should not be about whether foreigners should run our ports, or whether something has to be done to constrain Iran's nuclear ambitions. These are certainly questions to debate and reasonable people can disagree about the answers to them, but they are not relevant to the root issue.  No matter what the right policy might be in the abstract regarding these questions, the more important issue is whether we can trust this government to do anything without making things worse. 

This government, with questionable legitimacy from day one, has proven itself to be one of the most reckless, corrupt, and destructive in American history.  Has it any credibility or moral legitimacy at all at this point?  Can we or should we trust it in anything?  I know life goes on, and we have to work with what we have, but if we can't throw these thugs out, we should at least put them under house arrest.   My assumption is that everything they do is harmful until proven otherwise. The Dubai Ports Deal is only one among many issues that need to be seen in this light.  It has to be understood in this larger context.

The  supporters of the Dubai Ports deal make the mistake of looking at the issue as if the Bush administration were worthy of our trust.  But whether or not the WTO globalization logic used  to justify this deal has merit in the abstract, it doesn't make sense at this particular time given who the players are in this particular melodrama. If I had confidence that this administration had given the Coast Guard and the customs officials the resources they need, maybe I'd feel a little better about Dubai Ports running the business end. The administration has not made port security a priority, and its blatant cronyism  in all things having to do with the Middle East gives reason for pause. But it boils down to my having no confidence in this government to do anything competently or to do anything for the right reasons.

I don't know if DP is ok.  Maybe it is.  But we're renting in a tough neighborhood without adequate police protection, and I don't trust the landlord to find the right tenant.  DP might be a sweet old grandma, but what about her misbehaving grandkids whom she can't control when they visit?  That's the concrete reality. It's  not about letting fear dictate policy; it's about being prudent. Prudent is the last word I would use to describe this administration and its approach to everything.

The Dubai Ports deal would be questionable at this time even if we had adequate port security, but given who's on watch now, it simply makes no sense.

Building Jerusalem from the Inside Out

The Self is a problematic word and my use of it in my "Subjects and Objects" post the other day needs more elaboration.  As RP asks, how is what I'm saying different from what Ayn Rand is saying?   And it's a good question.

There are a couple of angles I want to take in an attempt to try to answer this question. First, Ayn Rand and her philosophy has had an enormous impact on certain person, espcially in America particularly among business libertarian types.  It's the 20th Century's version of Social Darwinism.  Rand was a third rate Nietzschean.  She's like a clever undergraduate who took some of the ideas of her teacher and yet had no understanding of the spiritual struggle from which those ideas arose. 

In my view, Nietzsche was a great but failed soul; Rand was a small, smug, calculating soul who made a name for herself celebrating her own egoism. "Of course I'm a selfish bitch, Dahling. But at least I'm honest about it."  She did not succeed where Nietzsche failed; she wasn't even in the same game. She's Donald Trump with a PhD. (She didn't have one, but you know what I mean.) But at least she accepted the challenge of being a modern Self. 

In my post the other day, I talk about the exuberance of the Romantics who were intoxicated by the idea of the unlimited possibilities of a free Self liberated from the shackles of the objective world. Emerson through Thomas Carlyle mediated this German Romanticism to the American continent in the first part of the century, but by the end of the century the exuberance had died, and you had people like Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche all struggling with the dark side of this Liberation.

This newly discovered experience of profound estrangement, isolation, unbearable responsibility for one's own destiny and for creating one's own meaning.  This profound sense of having been abandoned by God, that the God who was always out there as familiar a fixture as the rising sun was not there, at least in any way that offered support from outside oneself, as a cultural prop, as a value that lives and animates the culture. That structure imploded  during the nineteenth century, and no such culture-God existed, and if a God existed at all, he had to be found elsewhere. Both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky were able to find him. Nietzsche was not. 

All three of these men were great souls, and all three were awake to the significance of what had happened in a way that most others were not. Their greatness lies not so much in their doctrines but in their struggle to grapple with a new reality at a level of awareness that few others of their time possessed.  And yet what they struggled with remains a central theme for us today. They were pioneers, so to speak.  It's up to us to pick up from where they left off.  Someone like Ayn Rand probably saw herself doing the same kind of thing. I've already said what I think of her effort, but the question remains: How is what I'm saying about the Self any different from what she's saying about it?

Another digression before I come back to this question. Paul Riesman in his 1950s book The Lonely Crowd talks about three different human values orientations or dispositions for operating in the world: tradition-directed, other-directed, and inner directed. (I'm using these terms somewhat differently than he did, but he gets the nod for coining the terms.) As I've pointed out repeatedly elsewhere, modernity is the story of the destruction of traditional cultures and the consciousness that came with them. The three writers that I was talking about above were acutely aware of what this loss meant for the West, and all three in their different ways hated what modernity was doing to the human soul.

Tradition had been a fertile soil for the growing of full-souled human beings. Modernity caused the removal of the soil. The human being appears now like a Giacometti statue standing in a bleak, empty parking lot. There is very little to nurture him from a larger, richer, coherent culture world, which is open to transcendence and which gives his life meaning and purpose. There was only the individual left to his own inner resources--or not.  The individual in such a situation has two choices: In Riesman's nomenclature he becomes either inner-directed or outer-directed. 

The outer-directed person, as I want to use the phrase, is the one who cannot bear the responsibility for his own individuality and freedom and abdicates it by surrendering himself to mass political movements, corporate conformism, religious fundamentalism, religious cults, cults of personality, gangs, substance abuse, etc. This surrender is what existentialist philosophy calls "bad faith"--the refusal to accept responsibility for one's own freedom. My argument over the last years of my writing this blog is that what we see on the religious right is a prodigious example of bad faith masquerading as true faith. Religion is one of the greatest promoters of bad faith available to human beings. Dostoevsky's parable of "The Grand Inquisitor" in The Brothers Karamazov is of the most succinct descriptions in modern literature of how it works. 

There are left-wing styles of bad faith just as there are right-wing styles. Call it Patty-Hearst Syndrome. You didn't have to be kidnapped in the sixties or seventies to succumb to it. Bad faith, when it manifests on the right, is fascistic; when it manifests on the left, it's Maoistic. Both are horrific, but which one is the greater threat to us at this point in our history?

So the point I'm making here is that whether the threat comes from the left or the right, the character of the threat is in its pathological other-directedness, its refusal to take responsibility for one's Self, its surrender to the conventional wisdom promoted by the powers that be. The only antidote is to be inner-directed, which brings us back to the Ayn Rand problem, because clearly she was a promoter of inner-directedness, and in that she is superior to the bovine mentality that characterizes the other-directed. 

So, I'd much rather deal with an Ayn Rand than a Jerry Fallwell or a Reverend Moon, who live parasitically off of the the other-directedness of their followers.  She at least has accepted the challenge of being a Modern Self whereas those who live in the world of other-directedness have refused that challenge.  Nevertheless, once the challenge is accepted, there are a whole set of new problems.

Because the inner-directed have a choice to become citizens of two metaphorical cities: Babylon or Jerusalem. Babylon is the world without grace. Think of the kind of world lived in by Quentin Tarantino characters. It is the city built by the Trumps and Rands of the world, a city of smooth well-mannered predators driven by sex, money, and power; Jerusalem is the city built by those who have some sense of what the Gospels mean when they say the Kingdom is found within, which is where one discovers the movement of grace in one's life. And those who have made this discovery have some sense, even if only a very frail sense, of the subversive power of Love, Hope, and Faith. For the sex drive, money drive, and power drive that are the only Law in Babylon are turned upside down and transformed by grace.   

The problem is that Babylonians are running the show, and the Jerusalemites are at best a disorganized, ragtag guerrilla operation with a few sympathizers, and they are at this point unclear about their goals and strategy. I think there are lots of people who would prefer to work toward the building of Jerusalem, but accept that Babylon is the world as it exists, and it defines what we want, and insofar as our desire life is dominated by the sex, money, and power drives, Babylon remains the dominant law of the land. It's what we call "natural," and it is natural, but is "natural" all there is?  Or is "natural" what needs to be redeemed?

If nothing else, it's important to recognize that there is another possibility if we can find it and choose it. For many finding it is a first big step. But next comes the difficult task of learning to live according to its inner-directed laws, which is the activity of conscience. And the free, inner-directed, conscience-driven  activity of the Subject in this sense is what defines us as most truly and deeply human, and our becoming the humans  we were created to be is our way of laying the bricks out of which will be built Jerusalem. Jerusalem is not something that will be "given." It must be chosen and built brick by brick.

There are lots of people making bricks in their different ways, and probably most of them aren't Christians. I believe, but cannot prove, that the Christian mystery is at the center of it all, but I don't think that one has to  =consciously recognize it as such to participate in it. Obviously, there are deep and superficial levels of participation.  But at the end of the day, all that matters is that grace works in your life and that you choose to work with it. That's how free Selves are grown and how Jerusalem is built.

How Much Economic Freedom?

Forestwalker asks: "can you articulate how what you're advocating here in regard to the political and social/spiritual sphere is different than what libertarians advocate in regard to the economic sphere?" I think the question relates more to my 2/20 Religion and Politics post  more than to Subjects and Objects post where it appeared as a comment, so I'll attempt an answer here.

Libertarians believe that citizens should be given as much freedom to operate in the economic sphere as possible. In the three spheres as I talk about them, this kind of freedom is the guiding principle in the cultural sphere, not the economic sphere.

The guiding principle in the economic sphere is 'obligation'. We have an obligation to support ourselves, but we also have an obligation to the commonweal.  What precisely that means can be worked out in the political sphere, where those obligations can be spelled out in detail. 

This leaves room for flexibility depending on practical considerations. How much of a role should the market play?  How much of a role the state play? There are no absolutes here as there seem to be in the libertarian-style market theology. It's mainly a question of people trying to figure out what works best.

One's ideas about what works best are influenced by activity in the cultural sphere where ideals and values are explored and promoted. It makes a difference if the culture is dominated by a materialistic understanding of how the world works and what motivates human action or whether religious ideals shape the soul of the culture. It makes a difference if Ayn Rand is the national prophet or Karl Marx. A culture's values profoundly influence its ideas about what is good for the commonweal economically and in turn its politics. 

For me most of the persuasive work has to happen in the cultural sphere.  \People today feel overwhelmed by the economic complexity of the world system, and they are bankrupt of ideas about what to do or how to act in the political sphere, so the tail wags the dog, and we let it because we who know things are not right with the political and economic alignments in our society can propose no plausible, robust alternative. It's not for lack of ideas but for lack of control of the cultural institutions that determine what is plausible or not. Plausibility is in very large part shaped by what people believe is possible, which is an issue that needs to be clarified and discussed in the cultural sphere.

My own beliefs about what should happen in the economic sphere follow from some basic principles. First, each able-bodied man or woman has a responsibility to himself and to the larger community to support himself and to contribute to the common good in some way. People should be rewarded for their industry, and should be allowed to accumulate wealth, but there needs to be a wall separating the wealthy from having any more political power than any other citizen. It's probably undoable, but I would be interested in exploring some formula that would create some kind of tradeoff between economic influence and political influence. The more you have of the former, the less you have of the latter. You want to be rich, fine. We'll protect your rights in that regard. But stay out of politics.

I think freedom in the economic sphere is a practical value and by no means an absolute value. Freedom in the economic sphere when promoted as an absolute leads inevitably to concentrations of wealth and power and of the domination of the weak by the strong.

I think the principle of subsidiarity should operate on the level of markets, which means that people should be able to produce, buy, and sell as they please with as little interference from governments as possible. But when things get out of balance, such as when some people are too wealthy and others too poor, a democratic state should have the power to redress the balance when it serves a democratically determined common good. What balance means needs to be debated in the cultural sphere of values and ideals.

But this isn't a radical idea. It's the basic principle justifying trustbusting, state and federal regulation, WPA- and TVA-type projects, entitlements for the disabled, etc. Such policies are Libertarian heresy.

But this is pretty much the way things worked in this country since the New Deal. No one questioned the basic principles underlying the New Deal compromise until the rise of Ronald Reagan here and Thatcher in England. I am opposed in principle to Thatcherism and Reaganism, by whose principles there is simply no such thing as a common good. That isn't to say that I wouldn't agree with their complaints that the state sometimes overstepped its bounds. But those are practical considerations, not considerations of principle.   

Thatcherism and Reaganism were an extreme reaction that are unbalancing things now in the other direction, and that we allowed things to swing so far in their direction has put us in a very precarious spot. Because now the power has shifted dramatically to those with a lot of wealth, and they have expanded their influence from the economic sphere to the political sphere, and now they are using their economic and political power to dominate the cultural sphere through the mainstream media. And as a result, they determine what is plausible or not plausible; they determine what is thinkable and what not. Sure we're free to think what we want in the (for now) independent blogosphere, but we will be allowed to do so long as we're not a threat, and so far we're not one.  We're just bloviating for the most part, me included.

Quote of the Day

Should a Democrat win the White House in 2008, no doubt many conservative proponents of the theory of autocracy known as the “unitary executive” will awaken as from a dream, and revert to the belief that unlimited power vested in the hands of a president might not be quite compatible with our democratic heritage. Or perhaps not—perhaps their belief in the president’s absolute authority really is about principle, and not just about power. That would be even more frightening.  --Paul Waldman

Subjects and Objects

It has often been pointed out that Westerners differ from other cultures in their  sense of separation from the world around them--we are subjects over here and there are objects over there--but I don't think this is primarily a Western/non-Western difference, but a Modern/premodern difference. It's Western to the degree that Modernity is something given to the World by the West.

But until the modern period all normal human beings, even Westerners, had a more immediate sense of participating in the world and of being embedded in it as a thread woven into a tapestry. The individual thread in isolation is meaningless unless understood in the larger pattern, and that larger pattern in the premodern West had a marvelous sense of order, beauty, and symmetry. It is understandable that many should be nostalgic for its loss.  But lost it is, and while parts of it may be retrieved, the world itself as it was represented then is not a model that can make any sense for us now. 

So after the modern period began about five hundred years ago, this sense of being part of a web of interconnection gave way to a sense of being separated, of being alienated and disconnected from the world around us. And as the modern age progressed, so did the sense of alienation, and nature became something objective, something to be examined as not us, as a not-me-over-there.  And as the subject over here began to feel the implications of this separation, he began to feel kind of lonely and anxious in a new, modern idiom. 

And if the characteristic of a human being living in a tribal society is to feel connected to his tribe, to his totem spirit, to the brothers and sisters in the animal world, Moderns feel more the disconnections. And the more objective and detached from the subject the world over there becomes, the more it becomes  disenchanted, loses its magic, and becomes Hamlet's "sterile promontory".

Moderns feel that they stick out rather than blend in, and they hate that feeling. And so there is a huge temptation for moderns to lose themselves in mass movements, in compulsive behaviors, in substance abuse, or in cultish religions. But I would argue that all of these are forms of bad faith, because the task is not to lose the Self, but to find it and develop it. And any experience, even mystical experience, which obliterates a sense of the Self is harmful. My argument is that we have to learn to live with the the disenchantment and alienation before we can freely, and in all sobriety, reconnect with the world and to re-enchant it.

Connection is a good thing, but it is no longer a  'given' to us, at least not in the rich deep way it is/was for premoderns. And so we are required as free agents to create our connections. The idea of working on a marriage would have been an impossible idea for a premodern. Marriage had strictly prescribed roles, and the only work was to perform one's duties according to the cultural prescription.

There's very little latitude for freedom in such a system, but that's the price you pay for being a thread woven into a larger tapestry. Once freedom and individuality is added to the system, the tapestry comes unraveled. And that's our situation today. Only a minimum is 'given' to us, everything else is chosen and negotiated, and, for better and worse, that requires enormous effort. And it's a cause for endless conflict and stress especially in our personal lives. This is idea of 'given' vs 'chosen' is a key idea for me, and not one that many readers would accept without further argument. So sooner or later I'll get back to it, but first some more background.

Descartes, the first truly great modern philosopher, gets a mostly bad press these days, insofar as anyone thinks about him anymore. People blame him for the subject/object split and for all the alienation that comes with it, as if his philosophy was the cause of it.  But his philosophy would not have been possible had a shift not already occurred, nor would his philosophy have had an impact. Had he written 100 years earlier, he would have been dismissed as an eccentric crank. But I see him as not the creator of the modern mind, but as its herald. Modernity awoke to itself when Descartes in an act of extraordinary philosophical imagination bracketed and cast into doubt the reality of the entire extra-mental world and declared, "Cogito ergo sum."  No longer is God or Nature the point of departure for philosophy, but now the thinking Self, the 'I Am' who thinks.

For earlier thinkers the idea of dismissing the world as a dream or delusion could not have been taken seriously. The whole problem of determining what was true or not focused on understanding what the mind must do in order that it conform to what really is, which is what’s out there in the sensible world (if you were an Aristotelian) or in the mind of God (if you were a Platonist). Descartes’ thought is a benchmark in the history of the West because it signified in a dramatic way how meaning as something given from a reality outside the human mind had shifted to a new understanding of meaning as something that depends primarily on the autonomous thinking subject.

Descartes “Cogito” framed the problem for philosophy for everyone who followed him during the Modern Era, and philosophy became preoccupied with epistemological questions that took for granted a split between perceiving subjects and perceived objects. The subject was no longer embedded or immersed in the being of the world, but alienated from it, over against it, and this estrangement from being is one of the chief characteristics that distinguishes the modern from the premodern mind. 

Two basic streams of thought developed in post-Cartesian philosophy, depending on which side of the split each thought was the more important. On the one side the dogged empiricists in the Anglo-American tradition continued to see the object as the center of concern. On the other, there developed the continental rationalist or idealist stream that emphasized the centrality of the human subject and the human mind. 

The philosophy developed on the continent came to a culmination about 140 years after Descartes in the thought of Immanuel Kant. Descartes had established the basic problem for modern philosophy, which was to understand how subjects were connected to objects in a way that the subject could know with certainty its cognitions about them were true. Few philosophers found his solutions satisfying, and David Hume went so far as to say that any certainty about the objective world was impossible for human thought. 

In response to Hume’s radical skepticism, Kant developed a philosophy in his Critique of Pure Reason, which he described as a “Copernican Revolution.”  Meaning and human cognition were not something merely given as a fait accompli as the empiricists claimed, nor were they guaranteed because that’s the way God set things up, as Descartes and Berkeley asserted. Meaning was a human creation, constituted by the individual subject’s mind. The human subject was what he called the “world-constituting ego.”  The extra-mental world was a jumble of raw data that needed to be deciphered and organized by the mind’s software, which he called the a priori categories. Scientific truth was guaranteed by the inherent lawfulness of the mind’s operations. If there is no mind, there is no lawfulness.

In the late 18th and early 19th century, Kant’s philosophy caused an intellectual euphoria among a group of philosophers, poets, and artists whom we now call the German and English Romantics. His philosophy had the effect of turning the world on its head in his emphasizing the centrality of the meaning-creating function of the human “I”.  If the world-constituting ego is the source of all meaning, then the extra-mental world is no longer a constraint on human possibility. Human possibility is constrained only by the limits of the human mind’s capacity for creative thought. And so Kant’s philosophy created the conditions for what became the wildest kind of metaphysical speculation. His world-constituting ego was a huge theme in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel who took it much farther than Kant would have allowed—Kant’s philosophy was quite clear in proscribing metaphysics as beyond the scope of reason.

Nevertheless the Romantics and Idealists, intoxicated with this new idea, were not to be constrained. And at this time was born a tremendous optimism that a new kind of free human being was possible. Such a being would be freed from the shackles of oppressive traditions and would with the unlimited capacity of the free human imagination create a new world. And in the middle of all this exuberance occurred the French Revolution, which Romantics and Idealists at first embraced as the world-historical movement by which this liberation would be delivered to Europe and then to all humankind. And if their optimism was curbed by the excesses of the Terror, it was fanned back into full flame by the emergence of Napoleon, who they felt would demonstrate to the world what a world-class, world-constituting Ego could do. 

By 1848, the last breath of this kind of revolutionary hope had been gasped. Reaction had set in, and a new mood quite cynical about the grandiose assertions of the Romantics took over. In the absence of any high, spiritually oriented metaphysical aspirations, the mainstream culture of the West took a very materialistic turn in light of the ideas about human origins proposed by Darwin and the human economically driven future by the progress-minded commercial- and technology-infatuated bourgeois.

In a post-Darwinian world any talk of the progressive self-revelation of the Hegelian Absolute or world-constituting egos as a force driving history seemed a little nutty.  Philosophies of Mind or Spirit were pushed to the spiritualistic/Theosophic/New Thought fringes--what we think of today as the New Age melange. All such lofty idealism evaporates when confronted with the grittier ‘scientific’ explanation offered by the Darwinians and a new breed of pragmatic materialist thinkers for whom talk about Absolutes was nonsense. The more modest claims for metaphysics elucidated by Kant were once again adopted.

Nevertheless Kant’s subjectivist successors persisted after Darwin in mainstream intellectual circles, even if they did so in a much more sober mood. The best known were the existentialist thinkers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleu-Ponty through Foucault, and Derrida. Despite their often irreconcilable differences, whether they were nihilists or believers, they all in one way or another affirmed the centrality of the free human subject who is the creator of his own meanings. This stream of thought had little impact in the Anglo-American world, which persisted in the naive empiricism that Hume and Kant had supposedly disposed of. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the continental subjectivist philosophy began in any significant way to influence American thought, at least in the humanities.

***

My reason for laying out this brief history of philosophy since Descartes is to better understand the thought world in which all of us operate and take for granted but which is really very different from the way people in other cultures and in earlier eras in the West thought. These ideas are what run the operating system of our culture. Lots of different programs can run on this system, but the system limits and shapes what can be said and not said.

Premoderns operated with a completely different operating system. Fundamental for premoderns was the experience of immersion and participation in the world around them. Premoderns are no less intelligent than moderns, but authority and tradition were the important criteria for their attempts to figure out what was right and wrong, true and false.

A deep-seated suspicion of tradition and authority is an intrinsic feature of the modern operating system, and operating within the program moderns understood their task, very much in the Cartesian spirit, to start from scratch using human reason as the only necessary authority. And the hope arose that if reason and the scientific method could be so effective in understanding the physical world, it could also be applied to a far more slippery subject, which was the human being, and a new kind of reason-based society could be developed in which all human ills could be eradicated. Any hope for such a rationalist utopia was crushed in the aftermath of the two great 20th century world wars. The human irrational dramatically reasserted itself, and the West had neither human reason nor God to give it hope for a better future.

All hope, then, lies with the human subject, and for me that's not a cause for despair. Because I believe that what the Gospels say is true, that "the Kingdom is within."  I think that this is a truth that has deeper and deeper levels of significance, and we are just scratching the surface in understanding what it means. But one thing it means is that it's an order that operates according to different laws than the Kingdom of the world as we most ordinarily experience it.

And I would also say that if the Kingdom about which the gospels speak first takes root in the soul of the human subject, then, to the extent that those subjects find a way to exteriorize it in their actions in the world, they have the possibility to establish a lawfulness there that is quite different from the lawfulness that we take for granted today. There is such a thing as the Faith that moves mountains; it's just that hardly any of us have a clue what such a Faith might be. And that's because we are not fully grown Selves yet, but at best only seedling Selves. 

The kind of naive, romantic utopianism that was so common during the Romantic period was the effort of seedling Selves drunk with the awakening of new possibilities. That they failed does not mean that what they dreamed to effect in the world was impossible, but only that they had not yet developed the capability to effect it.  Our job now is the more sober task to learn what must be done, and then to do it. Both to do the inner work and to explore in modest ways tasks to be accomplished in the outer world. It starts for most of us in getting our human relationships right. And for most of us that's huge.

And any kind of poltics of the future has to start here. It has to begin with communities of Deep Selves establishing an alternative to the mass consciousness that drives political movements and their propagandistic manipulation.  In the meanwhile we do what we can to resist the forces that would de-Selve us, and maybe that's all we can do for the moment.  And for me there are no more potent texts to empower our resistance to those forces than the Gospels. Much has been done to try to tame them, but the liberating power in them, for those who are truly vulnerable to it, cannot be suppressed or controlled.

For a related essay, see From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen.