After the Future

The Bi-Partisanship Fantasy

Digby quoting David Broder:

"Electing a president based solely on the platform or promises of one party is not adequate for this time," Boren said. "Until you end the polarization and have bipartisanship, nothing else matters, because one party simply will block the other from acting."

Except the one party is called the Republican Party. When was the last time the Democrats blocked anything?

That's pretty hilarious, this idea that the Dems are obstructionist.  The problem is precisely that they are not. I wish there was the polarization that Boren alludes to; there is not. The Dems have done hardly anything to prevent this administration's ransacking the constitution and the treasury.  Digby goes on:

But it's depressing that so many Democrats [moderates, and independents] still seem to have this deep conceit that the Republicans are really reasonable people in spite of fifteen long years of being shown otherwise over and over again. And it's infuriating that after everything that's happened, the permanent political establishment is still more freaked out at the prospect of the dirty hippies passing universal health care than radical neocons starting World War III. If only the reasonable people could get together over scotch and waters and talk it all through everything would work as it's supposed to.

It's a lovely idea, isn't it? The only problem is that they keep forgetting to tell the Republicans, who view politics as a blood sport. They aren't interested in compromise and haven't been since old Bob Michel shuffled off to shuffleboard-land. They play for keeps, which it seems to me, is perfectly obvious after all we've seen over the past 15 years or so.

You either get it or you don't, I suppose. This longing for bi-partisanship is another example of how cognitive dissonance prevents people from seeing what's really going on. Understandably, decent Americans want an end to fix a system that is so broken. So it's obvious--let's have some bipartisanship, that's the trick. They are so committed to the idea that they are unable to see clearly the causes of our brokenness. They are unable to see that these hyenas on the right couldn't even get along with the center-right pol like Bill Clinton. They sought to tear him to shreds from day one. 

In this script both parties are equally to blame, and they are right, but not for the reasons they think. The one party runs roughshod over the constitution while lining the pockets of its cronies; the other shrugs its shoulders and looks for ways to get some of the action. The problem isn't polarization. That would suggest that there is some serious opposition to the GOP agenda, and that the president has been unable to get anything done.  But there is no problem about getting things done--all kinds of things are getting done. Hardly any of them good for the health of our democracy.

What if one of the senators went on a hunger strike in the senate chambers until habeas corpus was restored.  Maybe that's the kind of thing we need to see.

UPDATE: Greenwald on the potential "bi-partisan" candidacy of Michael Bloomberg:

Clearly, this is just exactly what our country desperately needs, what it is missing most -- a neoconservative, combat-avoiding, Bush-supporting, Middle-East-warmonger who sees U.S. and Israeli interests as indistinguishable and inextricably linked, with a fetish for ever-increasing government control and surveillance, and a background as a Wall St. billionaire. We just haven't had enough of those in our political culture. Our political system, more than anything, is missing the influence of people like that. That's why it's broken: not enough of those.

Bloomberg is basically just Rudy Giuliani with a billion or two dollars to spend to alter the election. When it comes to foreign policy, war-making and government power, he offers absolutely nothing that isn't found in destructive abundance among the most extremist precincts in the Republican Party, while his moderate to liberal stance on social issues would prevent him from actually winning the support of his natural GOP base.

What's amazing is how in the public imagination you are considered a moderate if you are as far right as Attila the Hun on issues in the political and economic spheres so long as you are "liberal" on issues in the cultural sphere, like abortion and gay rights.  It's a nifty formula, and it's no wonder our politics is so addlebrained. 

Quote of the Day: Greenwald

Just as the warrantless eavesdropping revelations did, the CIA video scandal presents an extremely clear and straightforward case of serious lawbreaking by our highest government officials. It's far less complex and far more serious than the scandals that brought down Richard Nixon. That a rational person would be highly skeptical about the prospects that we will find out what happened, let alone that there will be consequences for any of it, is pretty compelling evidence of the kind of country we are becoming. (Whole post is worth reading.)

Subverting the rule of law is the "new patriotism".

Liberal Cognitive Dissonance

This post is a bit of a vent, but if you want a case study of Liberal cognitive dissonance, read Joan Walsh's piece on Barry Bonds.  Walsh is the editor of Salon, and when it comes to women's and race issues she's about as knee-jerk predictable as they come. She's aware of her biases, but that awareness doesn't seem to give her any perspective or or ability to adjust for her blind spots. If I complain all the time about Republican cognitive dissonance, Walsh is an example of the liberal kind, and it's just as irritating, even if not as harmful.

I say not as harmful because Liberal cognitive dissonance usually pertains to cultural issues regarding race and sexual inequality, which have less impact in shaping power arrangements in the political and economic spheres. Conservative cognitive dissonance enables the kinds of fiascoes and constitutional outrages perpetrated by the current administration. I am not saying that race and sexual equality issues are unimportant or that they have no connection to the economic and political spheres, but that the long-term resolution of such issues will occur in the cultural sphere because they are attitudinal. You can't (and shouldn't try to) legislate attitude changes; they evolve from generation to generation.  All you can do in the political economic spheres is insure that everyone's rights are fostered and protected.

And since sports has been one cultural arena in which there has been enormous progress in changing racial attitudes, when someone like Walsh starts blaming race for Barry Bond's having been singled for the condemnation he is receiving, it makes you want to scream. It's so formulaic, so cliche, and  in this case so far off base it's facetious. If Walsh want to feel sorry for someone affected by this steroid scandal, she should direct her pity toward all those players who stayed straight and saw their  spot on a major league roster taken by juiced players with less natural ability.

To those who challenge Walsh's argument by saying that Bond's was not singled out  because he's black but because he was a surly jerk or a cheater, Walsh retorts by saying that there are lots of white surly jerks and cheaters in baseball--why aren't they being singled out?  What about Jeff Kent?  How come nobody makes a big deal about Kent, she asks.   Kent's knuckle-dragging stupidity is well-known, but here's the difference: Kent's surliness or other white players steroid use never put them in contention to break and hold the two most hallowed records in baseball. Bonds was singled out because he now holds the record for both.  Does Walsh really believe that if Kent or someone as unlikable as Pete Rose, if either was known to be a steroid user, won either of those titles, he would be treated any differently than Bonds is being treated now?

Bonds deserves all the negative attention he has received, and jailtime if his perjury indictment results in a conviction, not because he's an African American and not because he's an unlikeable jerk, but because he is a cheater and perjurer, and as such the undeserving holder of the two most important records in baseball. And the second of those records was taken from one of the greatest and classiest African Americans in sports. 

It's pretty simple. Bonds singled himself out by taking something he doesn't deserve. 

Explaining GOP Legislators' Lockstep Loyalty

"Tyranny is always better organised than freedom".--Charles Peguy

They are bought and paid for. How else to explain why they are risking their political careers in standing by a disgraced, failed president ?  I don't mean bought and paid for in the sense of outright bribes, but more in the promise of their being "taken care of" by the movement's moneyed machine. Digby explains:

If one assumes that we are dealing with a party and a political movement that operates as the constitution expected politicians to operate, this [loyalty to a broadly reviled president] would all be very odd. But they aren't. The modern Republican party has somehow managed to create movement loyalty that supersedes not only the national interest but their own political self-interest.

And that's probably where money comes in. In a system where people are aware that historical narratives are being written to spec and where they are rarely held accountable for past political misdeeds, there is little downside to putting party before country or even before your own public career. There is no such thing as disgrace, and if you lose an election, when you leave office you immediately become a well paid director or executive of various firms you used to regulate, a television commentator or "motivational speaker" and just wait a bit before becoming a high priced lobbyist. There are not only second acts in conservative politics, there are third and fourth acts, well paid and guaranteed.

This is true to some extent in the Democratic Party as well, but the conservative movement is a much more organic, full service organization that offers cradle to grave welfare for loyal soldiers at all levels (and a lonely wilderness for apostates.) They don't fear losing. As individuals, they stand to benefit handsomely from their association with the Business Party and no matter what happens they remain comfortably ensconced in the vast array of conservative organizations and affiliations that have been created over the past 30 years.

The conservative movement is built to last --- even when it suffers electorally, the individuals within it pay no price, and the movement itself is reinforced. They believe, with good reason, that they have a solid minority at least that will always vote for them and whose regional and political prejudices they will always represent well. They know they will win the presidency as often as not. They are very good at political campaigning and manipulating the media.

If you are not co-optable, the movement will reject you. It's classic machine politics. I suspect Huckabee is being "Gored" by the media and movement mouthpieces like Limbaugh because the machine perceives him as a loose cannon.  Many of his views overlap with the basic movement ideology (e.g., support for the war, attitudes toward gays, etc.), so it's obvious why Liberals can't stand him, but he's getting so much negative treatment from "his own" because he's a true believer from the religious wing of the party, and as true believer less easy to manipulate. He's the GOP version of Jimmy Carter, and as such the Beltway establishment's worst nightmare. Ron Paul, the other GOP loose cannon and true believer from the Libertarian wing of the party, would be getting blasted the same way if he was the threat to machine control that Huckabee appears to be right now.

Thompson would have been the perfect machine candidate, but his vacuousness and cynicism was simply too magnificent for even the most skilled machine propagandists to paper over.  The second choice would have been Giuliani, but his self-destruction has forced it to settle for Romney.  He's a loser, but better to lose an election than to lose control.

Relating this to my post yesterday about Obama's conciliatory approach, there is no reconciliation or reasoning with the machine--there is only resisting it.  The machine and its minions in the White House and congress have proven that they don't have to give an inch so long as they stay united.  Sure, they're in a defensive posture for now, but they haven't given up any of the ground they've won.  They have been very effective in using guerrilla tactics to harass and confuse the Dems, and it's only a matter of time until they regroup and go on the offensive again. Digby is quite right to say that the movement's machine is built to last, and the only thing that can defeat it in the long run is broad public repudiation of its agenda.   

Conservatives' Embrace of Obama

I'd be fine if Obama were the nominee; I'd much prefer him to Hillary.  He may well indeed be the best we can hope for. But this comment by feralman in repsonse to Joe Conason's piece  "Why conservatives love Barack Obama" captures my reservations about him:

I think some conservatives like Obama because they know they can sucker-punch him. His campaign theme is a variation on can't-we-all-just-get-along. He proposes to reform health care and accomplish much else by having everyone sit down at the same big table and just work things out. But the simple truth is, no, we can't all just get along. There are entrenched interests -- namely, the drug companies and insurance companies -- that will never willingly give up their privileged place in our health-care system. They will fight to the bitter end. They will relinquish their power and privilege only when we take it from them by force of law. Partisanship is the order of the day -- too bad, maybe, but undeniably true. Edwards knows it, and Clinton probably does, too. If Obama were to start off by not recognizing this fundamental truth about current American politics, his adversaries would be able to tie him in knots for years. His chance to make a difference will come and go while they have him pinned down by his own good intentions, giving him the Rodney-King but good.

I would feel a lot more supportive of Obama if he were saying something like, "Can't we all just get along? No? Then let's get it on." Let him talk that way, and see whether conservatives still play nice with him.

Every decent American hopes that we can find a way to get along. They understandably long for a politician who will transcend the partisan rancor.  Moderates think Obama will be acceptable to a majority of decent, reasonable Americans, even many who voted for Bush in the last two elections.  I think that's true, and I don't question the desirability of a candidate who has that kind of appeal.  The moderate fallacy lies in thinking that while Obama's conciliatory approach will have a wide appeal in the general population, that such an approach will be effective in his dealing with the entrenched interests and power blocs in Washington. Politics for these people is blood sport, and I don't believe for a minute that a reasonable, reconciliatory approach with these factions will have the slightest effect. I see them sharpening their knives as they await Obama's arrival. It's wrong to think that the reasonable, conciliatory way we strive to talk to our neighbors with whom we disagree is a workable approach when confronting these interests.

I hope I'm underestimating Obama's toughness, but a willingness to compromise with people who have no such willingness leads to the kind of ineffectiveness we've seen from the Democrats in the last year.  We've seen time and again that these factions on the right have no interest in compromise, and they look at compromisers as wimps.

The movement conservatives have conceded this next election to the Democrats, and they want the Democrat who presents the least threat to their agenda so they can buy time and regroup. I suspect that they see Obama as the one they can neutralize most easily precisely because of his conciliatory approach. Edward's pugnacity has probably disqualified him among moderates.  It's ironic that the man effeminized as the Breck girl would probably be the toughest candidate for the GOP to deal with. It remains a mystery to me why these conservatives can love a guy like Lieberman and hate Hillary so much.  She is the most Liebermanesque of all the Dem candidates; you'd think she'd be the Democrat they'd be falling over themselves to get her elected.  But that would assume a certain level of sanity and straightforwardness impossible within the funhouse hall of mirrors known as the Beltway.

Jean Vanier on SOF

Make sure you find an hour to listen to one of the great souls of our time.  You can find the podcast here.  This interview is one of the best I've heard in awhile.  It's given me plenty to think about this Christmas regarding the meaning of incarnation.  I also think it's a challenge to all of us who spend too much time in cyberspace.

Supernatualism vs. Naturalism IV

Very interesting Salon interview with John Haught. Very good questions and good answers I, for the most part, agree with. An excerpt:

What do you say to the atheists who demand evidence or proof of the existence of a transcendent reality?

The hidden assumption behind such a statement is often that faith is belief without evidence. Therefore, since there's no scientific evidence for the divine, we should not believe in God. But that statement itself -- that evidence is necessary -- holds a further hidden premise that all evidence worth examining has to be scientific evidence. And beneath that assumption, there's the deeper worldview -- it's a kind of dogma -- that science is the only reliable way to truth. But that itself is a faith statement. It's a deep faith commitment because there's no way you can set up a series of scientific experiments to prove that science is the only reliable guide to truth. It's a creed.

Are you're saying scientists are themselves practicing a kind of religion?

The new atheists have made science the only road to truth. They have a belief, which I call "scientific naturalism," that there's nothing beyond nature -- no transcendent dimension -- that every cause has to be a natural cause, that there's no purpose in the universe, and that scientific explanations, especially in their Darwinian forms, can account for everything living. But the idea that science alone can lead us to truth is questionable. There's no scientific proof for that. Those are commitments that I would place in the category of faith. So the proposal by the new atheists that we should eliminate faith in all its forms would also apply to scientific naturalism. But they don't want to go that far. So there's a self-contradiction there.

Do you accept Gould's idea of "non-overlapping magisteria" -- that science covers the empirical realm of facts and theories about the universe, while religion deals with ultimate meaning and moral value?

I think he's too simplistic. I don't think we want to remain stuck in this standoff position. First of all, Gould defines religion as simply concern about values and meanings. He implicitly denies that religion can put us in touch with truth.

By truth, are you talking about reality?

Yes, I'm talking about what is real, or what has being. The traditions of religion and philosophy have always maintained that the most important dimensions of reality are going to be least accessible to scientific control. There's going to be something fuzzy and elusive about them. The only way we can talk about them is through symbolic and metaphoric language -- in other words, the language of religion. Traditionally, we never apologized for the fact that we used fuzzy language to refer to the real because the deepest aspect of reality grasps us more than we grasp it. So we can never get our minds around it.

Then later the discussion migrates to Teilhard:

Teilhard argued that the universe is still evolving. Wasn't that the cosmic process he was trying to explain?

He put the Darwinian story of nature in the larger context of cosmic evolution. He saw the emergence of what he called "more" coming in gradually from the time of the big bang. Atoms become molecules. Molecules become cells. Cells become organisms. Organisms become vertebrates with a complex nervous system. Nervous tissue developed and eventually became complex in humans. He saw this process of growing complexity as something that's still going on. This planet is itself becoming more complex. And the process is accelerating today at an enormous pace because of communications technology, engineering, economics and politics. The globe is shrinking. We're able to connect instantaneously with other parts of the Earth, in the same way that nerve fibers carry an electronic message from one part of the body to the other. We should place what's happening now in the context of the previous phases of evolution and the cosmos. And we should expect -- and hope for -- the universe to keep becoming "more."

Earlier, you said cosmic purpose is a question that lies outside of science. But it sounds like you're bringing it into science. If you want to look for purpose -- whether it's in evolution or the larger universe -- you'll find it in this inexorable drive toward greater complexity.

We have to distinguish between science as a method and what science produces in the way of discovery. As a method, science does not ask questions of purpose. But it's something different to look at the cumulative results of scientific thought and technology. From a theological point of view, that's a part of the world that we have to integrate into our religious visions. That set of discoveries is not at all suggestive of a purposeless universe. Just the opposite. And what is the purpose? The purpose seems to be, from the very beginning, the intensification of consciousness. If you understand purpose as actualizing something that's unquestionably good, then consciousness certainly fits. It's cynical of scientists to say, off-handedly, there's obviously no purpose in the universe. If purpose means realizing a value, consciousness is a value that none of us can deny.

Are you suggesting there's some kind of cosmic consciousness -- a consciousness pervading the universe that has some connection to God?

I'm looking for an explanation that's robust enough to account for the kind of universe that is able, from within itself, to develop and unfold in this ongoing process of complexification. So the idea that some sort of providential presence is accompanying this process seems not at all irrational. And I like to think of God in these terms.

I might disagree a little with what he has to say later in the interview about human consciousness being exclusively brain-based.  I see the brain as a filtering mechanism that limits what a much larger pre-existing consciousness can be aware of in conditions of incarnation. The long-term evolutionary objective is for this larger consciousness to develop a brain whose range of cognitions is gradually expanded, but that's another discussion. I do agree with what he has to say about the inadequacy of intelligent design, the importance of theistic personalism, prayer, and the Resurrection.  The resurrection took place in sacred time, which is real time without all the avidya-- the noise and static that clouds true perception. Not something accessible to normal brain consciousness, and to cameras.

The whole interview is stimulating reading. If you don't have access to Salon, email me, and I'll email it to you. For my earlier posts on this subject see S v.N I, S v.N II, S v.N III.

UPDATE: I just started scanning the letters in response to the Haught interview--mostly negative, at least among the one's I've read. There are 545 of them at this point; it's just amazing to me how this kind of thing strikes a nerve--one guy saying that he canceled his subscription because of articles like this.  Why not just shrug your shoulders and say, whatever, and move on?  Why do people find themselves to violently reject this kind of thinking.  Why should they care so much?

I think it's because they're responding to this comment earlier in the interview:

Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus would have cringed at "the new atheism" because they would see it as dropping God like Santa Claus, and going on with the same old values. The new atheists don't want to think out the implications of a complete absence of deity. Nietzsche, as well as Sartre and Camus, all expressed it quite correctly. The implications should be nihilism.

I agree with this; that's why Nietzsche and Camus have my  profoundest respect.  They understood the enormity of the atheism they embraced with all the implications.  Many self-professed atheists don't think of themselves as nihilists, but I think it's the inevitable consequence of their metaphysics. They don't acknowledge their debt to religious tradition for the values they think they are just making up. And Haught is right, that while there are exceptions,  I think that the God idea is indeed for most professed atheists analogous to the Santa Claus idea--a fantasy one has to grow out of. That so trivializes any discussion on the topic, it's almost impossible to discuss it at all.  It's amusing that all these people writing into Salon think of themselves as more advanced in their thinking than many of the greatest minds that have ever lived.

Trying to Understand the Ron Paul Movement

Somebody help me out.  What am I missing here?  Read this article in Mother Jones about Libertarianism and Ron Paul's attraction particularly by the Wired Magazine techie types.  Are they as naive as I think, or is it that I just don't get it?

I understand the philosophical basis and attractiveness of Libertarianism, but I have never heard a committed Libertarian give an effective answer to this question: If there is no democratically accountable government big enough to check the domination of the weak by the powerful in the private sector, who will stop them? What powers does the government have to check private-sector power except the tax code and regulation? The problem, as I have said repeatedly, is not Big Government, but whose interests such government serves.  If you reduce the government's tools to tax and regulate, you create a society ruled by corporate warlords accountable to no one.  What answer do Libertarians have for that?  I really want to know? 

Anarchy would be my ideal if humans were not programmed toward power and wealth aggregation. So I get how government screws things up, but do these Libertarians really want to live in a neo-feudal, crony-capitalist state?  Why do they not see that this is the inevitable consequence of implementing their agenda?  Libertarianism just seems to be a second- rate philosophy adopted by people who are looking for simple solutions to complex problems.  Someone tell me what I'm not understanding, and why so many seemingly intelligent people buy into this.

P.S. All that being said, if someone put a gun to my head and told me to vote Republican, Paul is the only one on the list I would consider.

UPDATE:  Interesting brouhaha about Glenn Greenwald's, I think correct, praise of Paul for being the one candidate who seems to care about reversing Bush's militarism and his  program to erode the rule of law.   He is somewhat flummoxed that knee-jerk liberal types like Ezra Klein and shakespearessister are so blinded to Paul's virtues because of his position that abortion should be handled by the states and not federally legislated.  Both their misreadings of Greenwald's post shows how incapable certain kinds of liberals are to hearing and understanding anything but the politically correct orthodox line about abortion rights. The NARAL line on abortion is is shibboleth for their particular kind of groupthink.  I've said it before, but it's worth repeating--NARAL is the liberal answer to the NRA. They mirror one another the way Muslim and Christian fundamentalists do.  Both are completely nuts in exactly the same way but about different issues.   Both are incapable of seeing any view as legitimate except their own. Both see even the most reasonable restrictions on that "right" as sacrilege in their respective churches.

My problem with Paul comes from, as described above,  a rejection of what I believe to be the naivete of their of his laissez-faire economics and desire to shrink big government's role in the regulation of big business.  But Greenwald's point is well taken.  Namely that Paul is the only candidate who strongly opposes on principle what the Bush administration is doing in the Middle East and to civil liberties and the rule of law.  Hillary, Obama, and Edwards are significantly nondescript here.  Chris Dodd, at least stood up against the establishment's move to immunize the telecoms, but he's weaker on the militarism issue. And so I am an ally of all those people who have become enthusiastic Paulistas if there motivation is anti-war and pro rule of law.  If in the end it comes down to Paul vs. Clinton, it won't be an easy choice for me.

Hats Off to Chris Dodd

Like a lot of people, I complain about Democrats not having any backbone or fight, so when a mainstream, very mainstream establishment guy like Chris Dodd finally stand up, he deserves to be recognized for it.  He did that today in filibustering the Telecom Amnesty bill that his own party leadership was trying to ram through.  Harry Reid reluctantly took it off the table in response to Dodd's opposition to it. Let's hope more Dems follow his lead.  NY Times story here.  Glenn Greenwald's commentary here.

P.S.  Minimal blogging for the next two weeks.  Need more time for my real life.

UPDATE: A You-Tube thank you from Chris Dodd .  This could be a watershed event, not because this is a momentous and decisive victory, but because it shows what can be done when people get organized and find elected representatives who are willing to do their job.  They will do it if they know there are people out there who will support them:

As Greenwald puts it:

The most important lesson to learn here is that it is always possible for citizens to influence and disrupt even the most fortified Beltway establishment schemes. When that fails to happen, it's never because it can't be done, because it's impossible, because the deck is too stacked against it, etc. Rather, when there is failure in this regard, it's because the right strategy wasn't discovered, or because not enough pressure was generated, or because there were insufficient tools of persuasion deployed.

The most important value of victories of this sort is that they ought to serve as a potent tonic against defeatism, regardless of the ultimate outcome. And successes like this can and should provide a template for how to continue to strengthen these efforts. Yesterday's victory, temporary as it is, shouldn't be over-stated, but it also shouldn't be minimized. All of it stemmed from the spontaneous passion and anger of hundreds of thousands of individuals demanding that telecoms be subject to the rule of law like everyone else. And this effort could have been -- and, with this additional time, still can be -- much bigger and stronger still.

Hope does not lie with our elected representatives; it lies with us.  It doesn't matter how pure Dodd's motivations were. The only thing that matters is that he listened, and he acted. Our representatives act, even on principles that they profess, only when they feel pressure to do so, and that pressure has to come from an aroused and well-organized citizenry.

Moderate Complacency

The biggest obstacle that prevents decent, moderate Americans from seeing how their country is morphing into unAmerica lies in that the most negative developments do not directly affect them or their families and friends. This is certainly true about the war, and that's the main difference between this fiasco and the one in Vietnam. The draft back then meant (almost) every family was affected. The typical moderate might now not like the war. He may think now that the invasion was wrong or a mistake. But because it doesn't directly affect him, he's not going to get too worked up about it. It will just work itself out sooner or later. No urgent need to pressure legislators. Let the experts figure out what to do over there. 

And if this kind of psychological dynamic explains their soft disapproval of the war, think how easy it is for them to be even less concerned about "abstract" issues like the loss of habeas corpus, the broadening of surveillance powers and indiscriminate warrantless wiretaps, the burgeoning number of unitary-executive signing statements, the normalization of torture and rendition, the aggregation of wealth and power into the hands of the top five percent, the corporate consolidation of the media, the K-Street co-optation of the legislative process, the politicization of the Justice Dept., the administration's  repeated obstruction/destruction of evidence, or its lying about Iran's nuclear capability.  Anyone of these things should be a major scandal, but in our "moderate" mainstream public imagination, it's just more of the same old, same old.  My world isn't changed by these developments, so why should I worry?

Many American moderates are well enough informed to be somewhat disturbed by these developments, but they tend to think of them in isolation and refuse to see a pattern. Cognitive dissonance makes it hard for them to believe that their government could do anything evil without good reason. It's easier to dismiss as "extremist" or "alarmist" those people who are outraged by such developments and who insist that the administration is laying the infrastructure for the destruction of our democracy and the rule of law.

A typical moderate thinks it's easier to believe that things are normal because his life hasn't changed. Nobody he knows is really all that worked up about it, and these are not issues the mainstream media is harping on, so why should he be concerned? Besides if he starts talking about such concerns at work or among my friends, everyone will start thinking he's a "liberal" or leftist or an America hater. After all, Isn't that what he thought about all the people who criticized the war early on?  Isn't that what he thought about everybody who thought George Bush was a foolish man way out of his depth?  And even though such people proved right about that, they still don't have any credibility with him.  Nobody he respects, i.e., nobody who thinks like him,  thinks that way--at least now they don't.

And so the country suffers from a massive failure of imagination because the people in the moderate middle will continue to assume that everything is normal until it is irrefutably proven to them otherwise or until it affects them personally.  The problem lies in that when it finally gets to that point, it will be too late to do anything about it. They prefer to believe that things now are as normal as they have always been, and, sure, there are bad guys in government--there always will be--and they need to be weeded out. But most are decent people trying their best to do the right thing.

And so the bad guys who are destroying our democracy have a relatively easy task of keeping the moderates neutral by telling them what they want to hear and asking for their trust, knowing that what they do will not be scrutinized too carefully unless they're stupid enough to commit some sexual indiscretion. Everything else is easy to get away with because it is relatively boring and requires too much effort from a lazy, house-trained MSM to understand and explain.   

And it's the complacency of this kind of conventional thinking that no longer drives me barking mad as it used to.  It embarrasses and saddens me that this is what we have become. I am embarrassed for my boomer generation from which no leader with moral stature has emerged to awaken the justified outrage that lies dormant in every decent American's soul. As a generation we're a flat-souled, superficial generation that has failed to live up to its promise.  The current congress pretty much represents the spinelessness and narcissism that is our generational marker.  It's so sad. So disappointing. And so predictable. And even if we boomers don't suffer the consequences of our fecklessness, our kids and grandkids will.

And I'm as bad as anybody in my generation.  I'm not pointing fingers at anyone if not at myself. I was naively complacent in believing the movement conservatism that Reagan represented was a temporary aberration, and that Americans would regain their senses.  It took me a long while to recognize that the hard right in this country was as politically sophisticated as it was, that it was capable of running circles around the complacent Democrat establishment. I underestimated its organizational sophistication, the depth of its funding sources, its media savvy, and its psychological shrewdness in finding ways to make its extremist agenda appear mainstream.

I saw the hard right in this country as so abhorrently un-American, as a pack of not-to-be-taken-seriously frightened animals, as so pathologically selfish and paranoidal, that my own cognitive dissonance in this regard made it extremely difficult to embrace the idea that a majority of Americans would embrace the right's agenda so uncritically. But I underestimated the right's ability to infect the rest of the country with its pathology.  And this pathology's chief symptom is to make those infected by it to accept their illness as normal.

Of course lots of Americans have not been infected, but these people, like me, were the complacent New Deal types whose cognitive dissonance made it unimaginable that Americans would buy the self-absorbed libertarian logic that would return us to the Robber-Baron era. It still astonishes me, to tell the truth.  But I am also in retrospect quite chastened regarding my own complacent naivete regarding the resiliency of the hard right.  Think about it: even today utterly empty suits like Rudy Giuliani or Mitt Romney, running on an elect-me-dictator-and-torturer platform are taken seriously as candidates for the presidency of the United States. How is it possible, given all that we know about the empty ambition of these men, that they aren't laughed off the public stage?

It's embarrassing and shameful.  People in other countries, in countries that have suffered far more than we have, look at us and see a bunch of hysterical children.  And they're right; we are. But the fault lies with my generation.  We have failed as a group when the mantle of leadership was passed to us to stand up, to challenge Americans to live up to their best selves instead of giving in the scare tactics of the right.  It should be our job to inspire the magnanimity and courage that lies dormant in the American soul, and as a group we seem not to have the resources to do it.  We're all too comfortable, too complacent--too moderate.

Quote of the Day: Greenwald

You see, all of this behavior by the Democrats is absolutely necessary. They have no choice. Otherwise, Rush Limbaugh and Fox News will attack them for being weak (as though there is some circumstance under which they wouldn't) and that would be terrible. Nothing exudes strength, courage, toughness and resolve like having your behavior continuously described -- accurately -- as "bowing," "capitulating," "backing down," "caving" and "surrendering." Those are the verbs Americans love most when looking for the party to lead them.--Glenn Greenwald

Rather than reiterate what I've said about this before, see my (cleaned-up) post "Beyond Liberal & Conservative" from about a month ago.

Disembedding and Theosis

And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath no where to lay his head.   Luke 9:58

I've recently seen two films--"Into the Wild" and  "Beowulf"--that both in their different ways are  stories of human folly and human heroism, but each in a  different key. "Into the Wild" (and Jon Krakauer's book on which it was based) wants to argue that Chris McCandless, its main character, was a public fool and a private hero. Beowulf, on the other hand, it is clear, was a public hero, but a private fool.

McCandless is a holy fool. He's like the early Christian Desert Fathers who fled into the Egyptian wilderness, or the Irish monks who cast themselves into the sea in their coracles in a search to find God. Beowulf is the case study of the strong man who calculates what is in his best interest, does what it takes to obtain it, and loses his soul in the process. 

Beowulf's story is a morality play, but morality understood in the embedded, enchanted world of premodern consciousness. In that world, there's  nothing wrong with the getting of as much sex, wealth, power, and glory as you can--that's what every hero wants and deserves--but he has to earn them the old-fashioned way, by risking his life in battle. He broke the hero code in his getting his hero rewards by cutting a deal with the demoness he was commissioned to kill. He gets what he bargained for, but lives the rest of his life knowing he's a fraud. The moral balance could only be restored by losing his life in combat with the evil produce of his misdeed, the dragon he sired with Grendel's demon mother. 

You could describe Beowulf as a story of redressing a karmic imbalance, and while that's interesting in its own way, I'm more interested in what drives the holy fool toward "disembeddedness", the renunciation of everything that's important to the well-embedded pagan hero. The term 'disembedded' comes from Chapter 3--"The Great Disembedding"-- in Charles Taylor's important new book, A Secular Age. Taylor sets himself the task of trying to go beyond a simple description of the unprecedented shift in consciousness and culture from the premodern to the modern. He wants to understand the conditions for such a shift's possibility, the different layers of influence leading to it, and why the West was the locus for its emergence.  And one of his principal explanatory concepts is the embeddedness/disembeddedness of the unbuffered/buffered Self.

I refer you to the text for a fuller explanation, but in a nutshell, 'disembedded consciousness' in its extreme form is a completely disenchanted consciousness that imagines the world around it as pure material extension. The buffered self is the effect of the mechanical consciousness of modern rationality and that Blake decried. The buffered Self is disembedded because it experiences itself as walled off or disconnected from an objective world rather than submerged in it as is typical of the unbuffered Self of embedded consciousness.

There are different levels of buffering or of disembedded consciousness, but modernity is the story of a culture-wide movement into a kind of first-level of it. The Beowulf story assumes the readers or listeners live in a world of embedded consciousness, which is a world full of spirits, angels, demons. The embedded/unbuffered consciousness feels the connection with nature and other human beings to a point where it's hard for such a self to know where the boundaries between it and other are defined. This is the consciousness of shamanic and animist societies, and it is a consciousness that lingered in the West in the rural areas--the heath--where the unbuffered people there had not completely disembedded themselves from "heathen" consciousness.

In the developed countries, this embedded, heathen consciousness has almost completely disappeared, but we encounter it still in those societies that have not yet developed in the westernized sense. Disembedded peoples think of embedded peoples as primitive and superstitious. Embedded people look at modern disembeds and see cold, lonely people cut off from nature and one another. Both are partially right, and both need what the other offers.

But why was the West so precocious in developing these buffered selves? Taylor's argument is more complex than what I present here (and what I write is not intended to represent his thinking), but I would argue that the two primary cultural forces in the West that promoted disembedded consciousness are Greek rationality and Jewish monotheism. Both these forces had a profoundly disembedding effect in their respective societies. Socrates was condemned to death, essentially for the crime of "disembedding" the youth of Athens from an unconscious pious belief in the gods. The Jews were unique in their insistence on disembedding themselves as a people from the deeply embedded fertility cults and pagan consciousness that surrounded them. Both societies created a small minority of buffered selves--philosophers and prophets.

So along these lines I find compelling Barfield's argument in Saving the Appearances that the emergence of modern (buffered) consciousness in the West is derived by the cross-fertilization of Athens and Jerusalem in the medieval Christian synthesis, which in turn gave birth to modernity in the era subsequent to the Renaissance. The medieval period in Europe is essentially a transition phase from pagan embedded consciousness to modern disembedded consciousness, and the role of Christianity in this movement has to be recognized. 

And ultimately, the argument that I want to make is that modernity, even in its materialistic refusal of the spiritual, is nevertheless a spiritual phenomenon, not unlike the  Dark Night about which St. John of the Cross speaks, but on a culture-wide scale.  As such it is a difficult passage toward spiritual maturation. I think that it's interesting that both John and Teresa, although we tend to think of them as medievals are really early modern figures, and I think of them as transitional figures pointing the way toward a modern spirituality.

The Beowulf story is a twilight-of-the-gods epic, by which I mean it occurs on the cusp or transition point from the old embedded paganism to Christianity.  The movie contrasts the heroic qualities of the old paganism with the weak, womanish,  Christianity as represented in slimy Malkovichian character, Unferth.  This is a somewhat Nietzschean reading of the Beowulf story, and Hollywood excels in pop Nietzscheanism. It celebrates the brutal, rules-are-for-the-weak action hero or, as in this case, indulges in a nostalgia for the heroes of old--when men were men and women were women before Christian civilization de-sexed everyone. In this pop-Nietzschean imagination of the world, Christian religious figures are always authoritarian control freaks or repressed, alienated wraiths.

Nietzscheanism is an argument in the final analysis that seeks to overcome modern/postmodern disembedded alienation by a return to pagan embeddedness. (Isn't this essentially what Nazism was?) Christianity, insofar as it is a higher religion that calls humans to a life of at least partial disembeddedness, has to justify itself in terms that make sense in the face of this natural contemporary attraction to neo-paganism. Rationalist or disembedded paganism is duking it out in the contemporary culture wars with religious fundamentalism, and neither for me offers a way forward. So I want to provide a preliminary outline about how how a deeper kind of Christianity has the resources to offer another possibility.

But before doing that, let me reiterate a point I've made in posts this summer. I'm not anti-pagan. I think that embedded pagan consciousness embraced dimensions of reality that are not currently available to buffered moderns. While there have been at least since the axial era individuals who have been precocious in their disembeddedness, modernity is the process by which cultures and peoples become disembedded. But while I think that modern disembeddedness is an advancement, I don't think it is the goal--"re-embeddedness" is. Disembeddedness is a necessary but temporary moment in cultural maturation, but once achieved, the goal is to retrieve what has been left behind. 

That's my gloss on the gospel's injunction that we become as little children, and the process by which we do it is "second naivete", which is to use Blake's language, to re-open the doors of perception. We need to find ways to open up to what that older consciousness experienced, but with the maturity of critical consciousness and the dignity of an adult level of freedom. And so this opening up, if it is not to be regressive, if it's not to be some form of "going native", has to follow some rules. And those rules require the integration of a disembedded consciousness with an embedded one.

Now back to a Christian imagination of the way forward. I think that anybody who is serious about the spiritual life has to have some level of discipline about it. I think this discipline has many aspects to it, but one that is central is the development of a prayer or meditative practice. Such a discipline is an exercise in disembeddedness, but it's important to be clear what its goal is. I think there has been a tendency both in the Western and Eastern spirituality to see the goal as a kind of permanent disembeddedness. I don't.

People who see it this way imagine life on earth as exile in a Platonic cave ruled by the logic of original sin or maya or samsara. And whether east or west, they think of redemption as an escape from from the Cave into the true, the good, the real, which is a transcendent realm outside time and space. And so for them the purpose of prayer and meditation is to enter into that transcendent world, and that the goal is to stay there as long as possible.

That's not how I think about it. I think that being in touch with or vulnerable to the influence of that transcendent dimension is essential for our health and sanity, but I'm not an advocate of escaping life in the Cave, but of gently, gradually lighting it up with the unconsuming fire of heaven.

As I mentioned before there are many levels of disembeddeness, and even we moderns are disembedded in comparison with the embedded, unbuffered consciousness of premoderns, we remain embedded in our ordinary daily "cave" consciousness.  So we  benefit from the rhythmic daily exercise of trying to stand outside of it for a while. That's what a meditative practice seeks to do. Or as an alternative to the cave metaphor, I think it's useful to think of our ordinary consciousness as our being carried along mostly submerged in a slowly moving river, and the attempt at prayer or meditation is the effort to climb up onto the bank for a while to let our souls dry out. Some days it's just not possible to pull ourselves out, but even on good days, when we are able to get ourselves entirely onto the river bank, it takes a while for all the water to drain away, and often we find ourselves still covered with ooze and seaweed and suckers. 

Now the goal is to let the concerns and bric-a-brac of ordinary daily consciousness drain away and to dislodge the persistent thoughts and concerns that cling to us even as we sit there on the river bank. It's not easy, and I don't have to rehearse here all the problems the so-called monkey mind presents to us to complicate the effort.  But the goal is to create an emptiness, or perhaps better to say a dryness, which is the precondition for being filled by or kindled by the aforementioned unconsuming flame and its warming light that to be sure shines on the river, but is not of the river.

This emptiness and dryness are not pleasant, and it is very difficult to sustain--one longs to return to the familiar comfort of the river, and we need to do that. But in all the literature about the spiritual life that has any credibility, this discomfort is seen as a necessary, purgative first step. The dryness leads to the kindling of illumination, and the illuminations, if allowed to reshape one's soul, lead one on a path to union, which is the goal of "theosis". Meditative practice, insofar as it is the sustained effort to be radically open to grace, comprises all three stages--purgation, illumination, union. We are none of us, believer or unbeliever, ever cut off completely from the ubiquity of grace, but it is possible to become more radically open to its superabundant and transforming power.

And to the degree that a soul becomes interiorly transformed, when it goes back into the river of its ordinary cares and responsibilities, it does so in a way that has a kind of filtering or transforming effect on her immediate psychic environment. The river is beautiful, but it is polluted, and the question needs to be asked: By what means can it be cleaned up? I believe that nothing lasting or true happens except by the agency of this transforming power. I see it as a  gradual, gentle process achieved by people over time who, with varying degrees of intensity, carry this fire within them, and over the centuries their activity has a regenerative effect. Meditative practice is one way to increase the intensity.

People who have advanced in this respect radiate something positive and regenerative that other river dwellers pick up on. Certainly the Jesus of the gospels had this effect. One of the most interesting things about the gospel accounts was the way some people picked up on what Jesus radiated and how others didn't. Typically "sinners" were more responsive than the religious professionals, whom Jesus describes as whited sepulchers--all clean outside, but rotten inside. I have written before about Whited Sepulcher Syndrome (see here and here), but it strikes me that Whited Sepulcher Syndrome is a case of "arrested disembeddedness", a taking of the first step (purgation) without getting to the second, illumination. It's mechanical morality without grace. Emptiness without illumination. Dryness without fire.

And it suggests a way to better understand the difference between moral and moralistic. The moral person, whatever the condition of his exterior is alive in his interior. And the gospels are clear that inner aliveness is far more important than an exterior correctness, especially when exterior correctness leads to an inner death. And it is the insistence on exterior correctness by the moralistic, whether they be Torquemada or James Dobson, that is profoundly immoral because it is so profoundly deadly--pure repression with no goal other than to repress. A withered deadness with no goal other than to be dry and dead. Any lively paganism is more spiritually alive than that kind of moralistic Christianity. And that kind of paganism is also, when it encounters real Christianity, more receptive to it. Nothing could be clearer from a reading of the gospels. The "sinners" time and time again had an easier time recognizing who Jesus was; the religious professionals were the ones who seemed to be too blind or too dead to do so.

For the ascesis of the purgative stage can lead to the deadliest form of alienation if the necessary "dryness" isn't at some point kindled. (Father Ferapont in The Brothers Karamazov is the counter to Father Zossima in this respect.) And these moralistic Christians suffering from Whited Sepulcher Syndrome, because they are mostly interested in control and security, do everything they can to snuff out any spiritual flame that might kindle in themselves or in their congregations. For when there is a kindling, the flame will die if it is not given oxygen, and that oxygen is provided by "vertical breathing", one form of which is prayer/meditation.

I think there are lots of people who have been kindled but have had the flame snuffed out of them by the moralism of the churches they've sought out to help them find ways to sustain and grow it. But the whole logic of any kind of morality is not simply about correct behavior; it's about creating the optimal conditions for the kindling and growth of this flame. And the goal of prayer and meditation is not to leave the world of ordinary consciousness to live forever on the river bank (or outside the cave), but to bring the flame and its transforming, purifying power back into ordinary conscious in such a way that it will not be drowned by it. 

And that requires keeping one's head above the waters as the body is carried along by the current. For the head needs to be vigilant as to what lies ahead, and exposed to the source of light which illuminates it and inspires the action in the world that leads eventually to its redemption. This vigilance, this refusal to be pulled under, this daily effort to pull oneself out for a short time are keys to understanding what it means to be chaste. Chasitity is the capability to live in a polluted environment and yet to radiate this interior fire. It's the capability to swim freely in the river without being dragged under or coopted by it. It's not about staying out of the river altogether.

The goal is communion, but not just with the divine, but communion with everything--with the earth, with people, with the entire cosmos, and this communion can be effected only by the slow transformation of our souls from the soggy things they are now into a roaring unconsuming flame of love. That is our telos. That will be our theosis.  That is our deepest identity--our "I am", that part of us that was created in the image and likeness. It is the likeness of the flame that Moses encountered on the mountain in the wilderness, after which the great Jewish disembedding began. And we Christians believe that the flame that Moses encountered on Sinai is the same flame the people of Jesus' day encountered when they met him, and which it is still possible to encounter now in different ways.  And that unconsuming flame of love that burned in him was a flame that he kindled in all those around him, and so it has happened down through the centuries wherever true Christianity has survived and flourished.

McCandless, the holy fool in Into the Wild, you might say stayed away from and out of the river too long. He realized he had to return, but it was too late for him. And so in the end his was the foolishness of Icarus. He went into the wilderness seeking the fire of heaven and spiritual transformation; he wound up getting burnt to a crisp. It's a tragedy, maybe not so much for him, but for the people who loved him and for whom I'm sure he would have been a light had he made it back. If first it is necessary to disembed, it is only to create the possibility for our re-embedding, and in doing so to gradually slow-cook the world with the unconsuming fire of love.

World War IV

I think of the Cold War as World War III, but I've addressed this idea of World War III or IV, or whatever number you want to give it before before--for instance here--but I wonder why so little attention is paid to questions that relate to the larger geopolitical issues that are driving our current adventure in the Middle East. It's always been silly to think that the invasion of Iraq was just about Saddam or WMD. Nor does it have much of anything to do with the War on Terrorism. There have always been larger long-term goals, and while there hasn't been much talk about the Project for the New American Century lately, its agenda is still on the table so long as Bush/Cheney are in office. And so now after Iraq, the obsessive interest by Cheney and others in Iran is best explained not by its nuclear threat but by its being an essential piece of territory to be obtained en route to the achievement of their long-term goal of exclusive American hegemony in the Middle East.

So anyway I came across an interview this morning with Scott Ritter (h/t Chris Floyd).  He is someone who has mainstream stature and credibility, and it is very refreshing to hear someone like him actually addressing these larger issues.  The interview is long, but worth reading in its entirety in Detroit's metrotimes. My redacted excerpt of it below focuses on themes I've been developing here over the years. He first addresses the causes of what I've been calling our devolution into a merely ceremonial democracy:

MT: Last year you expressed hope that if Democrats took control of Congress it might pass legislation that could block the march toward war [with Iran]. Do you see them stepping up?

Ritter: No. They just passed a resolution declaring the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Command as a terrorist organization. Unless there is a radical reawakening in Congress, I don't see them passing any sort of pre-emptive legislation of that nature.

MT: But it is now clearer than ever that our invasion of Iraq has been a disaster. How do you explain the lack of opposition?

Ritter: It's difficult to explain. First of all you have to note, from the public side, that very few Americans actually function as citizens anymore. What I mean by that are people who invest themselves in this country, people who care, who give a damn. Americans are primarily consumers today, and so long as they continue to wrap themselves in the cocoon of comfort, and the system keeps them walking down a road to the perceived path of prosperity, they don't want to rock the boat. If it doesn't have a direct impact on their day-to-day existence, they simply don't care.

There's a minority of people who do, but the majority of Americans don't. And if the people don't care — and remember, the people are the constituents — if the constituents don't care, then those they elect to higher office won't feel the pressure to change.