After the Future

Which Side of History Are You On?

I've been thinking about the American Civil War and its tragic aftermath in recent weeks. I don't know whether our history is a source of hope or a source for despair. What's amazing about American history is how often the bad guys won in the courts in the state legislatures and in Congress. How in fact the bad guys' winning seems to be more the rule than the exception. How injustice is the normal way of doing things, and then a cleansing crisis brings us to our senses for awhile, we make some changes, and then things revert to the way they were.  Over 600,000 Americans were killed in the Civil War.  The union was preserved, but was the plight of the black man or woman any better in Alabama in 1910 than it was in 1855? 

The more you learn about the historical/cultural forces driving the nation toward the Civil War, the more unresolvable the basic conflict appears to have been.  After Dred Scott, which established the principle that slavery could be legal anywhere, it became clear that the nation was either going to be a slave nation, which is the way it looked in '57, or it was going to be slave free. After Dred Scott there was no more room for endless compromising.  Things were brought to a head. That was the point of Lincoln's "House Divided" speech:

 "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

Some have argued that if nothing was done, slavery would have just died out, but books like Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name show how in the post-Reconstruction period de facto slavery continued. Blacks were arrested for vagrancy or some other trivial charge.  They were required to pay a fine they had no money for; they were imprisoned in lieu of the payment, and then leased out to companies like U.S. Steel in Birmingham where they worked in chain gangs in the mines.

Steinbeck in East of Eden tells the story of Adam Trask's getting caught up in that system. He was traveling through the south on his way back from the Indian Wars in the West.  He was arrested for vagrancy, couldn't pay his fines, sentenced to hard labor, and as soon as he was released was immediately arrested for vagrancy again, and on the cycle went for years until he finally figured out a way to escape.

This kind of brutality was accepted as normal reality by Southern "civilization", but the mainstream culture, even in the North looked the other way.  Americans wanted to believe in a fantasy that the union had been preserved, the Confederacy's was a noble cause to preserve their way of life, their unique manners and culture, their resistance to the brutality of the modern industrial system by their embrace of Jeffersonian agrarian ideals that the Yankees were too moneygrubbing to understand. The South was wrong to have seceded, but it was right about wanting to preserve its culture; the North was right about preserving the union but it was wrong in its total war tactics used by Grant and Sherman to achieve that end.

So for me, you can get endlessly caught up in the moral ambiguities of any human conflict.  This one committed such and such a horror, but the other one did worse, and on it goes. The problem with it is that it give a kind of moral equivalency to both parties in a conflict that I believe is profoundly distorting. That kind of moral ambiguity plus fatigue basically allowed the North to give up on reconstruction and to allow the southern terrorists and insurgents to win back what they had lost and to postpone until one hundred years later the enforcement of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.

The Slaughterhouse Case in 1873  and the Cruikshank Case in '76 regarding federal prosecution of those responsible for the Colfax massacre, essentially made the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments into meaningless abstractions. The 13th and 14th amendments reversed Dred Scott and the 15th gave blacks their voting rights, but the Slaughterhouse Cases and Cruikshank decisions allowed the states  to determine their own rules about the rights of state citizens, and the Feds couldn't intervene to prosecute violators of black Americans' rights, even their murders. That had to be handled locally. We know how well that worked out.  David Blight in one of his lectures on the Reconstruction period says:

Now what [Justice Samuel Freeman] Miller did in this decision though was a bit weird, in retrospect. He named various national privileges and immunities--that's the language of the Fourteenth Amendment--like entering the nation's ports, or protection out on the high seas, the ability to run for federal office, and to travel to the seat of government, and so on. But he never mentioned basic civil rights, access to public facilities, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. He never mentioned the right to vote. He said all of those rights are only under the jurisdiction of the state, not the national government. In other words, traditional federalism, this separation of what states can control--like the right to vote; like what is a civil right; which civil rights; what kinds of equality are to be adjudicated in court--would be left to the states. Slaughterhouse set in motion then this federal retreat, at least in the courts--and the retreat is already happening elsewhere-- from Miller's own definition, ironically, of the meaning of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

Subsidiarist principles were still unimaginable to most Americans in the 19th Century.  Miller in '73 thought the good Republicans in the state legislatures at the time would insure the rights of the blacks, and didn't anticipate what anyone with his eyes open and with an ounce of common sense would see--that the Democrat white supremacist takeover of those state governments was inevitable and in fact a fait accompli within the next five years. But so what? The Feds didn't want to intervene. Most Americans in the North didn't care enough about the plight of blacks to want intervene to defend their rights. And the South reverted to the ante bellum status quo ante. Six hundred thousan lives.

But here's the point I want to make. Political judgments and political affiliations in the long run are not evaluated by the moral purity motivating any individual or faction.  Moral ambiguity is universal--everybody is partially right and partially wrong--but I think you can say with a greater deal of certainty that some people or some social movements are on the right side of history and others are on the wrong side. The Tories had good reasons to reject the revolutionary ardor of the the patriots during the American War of Independence.  I'm sure on the whole they were not in any way morally inferior to the Patriots, but they were wrong because they affiliated with a frame of mind that history was passing by.

The same is true of Southerners during the Civil War, the Robber Barons during the Gilded Age, the Segregationists during the post Reconstruction period, the Hooverite Republicans during the Great Depression, the Fascists during the World War II period, and the Communists during the post WWII period. And I would argue that Reaganism and Libertarian free-market ideology have been on the wrong side of history for the last thirty years. Winning and losing does not determine whether a social movement is on the right or wrong side of history.  Soviet Communism won and reigned for over seventy years, but it was on the wrong side of history.  Southern segregationism won and reigned for the best part of a century, but it was on the wrong side of history.  Both were on the wrong side of history because they were unsustainable because in some fundamental way out of touch with reality.  They are in their different ways Towers of Babel--attempts to construct something unlawful.

So by what criterion do we judge whether someone is on the right side of history or not?  The key concept that I want to think about and explore here is this idea of sustainability and lawfulness. What are some basic criteria to define societies that are unsustainable and what criteria characterize a multi-valent sustainability?

Regarding the hope question: I'm never without it.  But that doesn't mean that one can't live the best part of his life suffering in a Tower of Babel. The challenge is to understand what these are, why people build them, and to develop strategies to impede their construction.  More as we go forward.

Quote of the Day: Abraham Lincoln

Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment, goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed. (Lincoln Douglas Debates, Ottawa, 8/21/58)

Mencken vs. Capra vs. Rockwell

 

And here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, or private and communal folly--the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances--is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows. H.L. Mencken  (h/t Michael Scherer)

American creativity has a long pedigree--there's always a new angle, and there always will be. There's a sucker born every minute--Mencken's scoundrels know it, and live by it. And for the last thirty years Americans have been suckered good with these scoundrels latest variation on their endlessly creative attempts to scam and exploit America's John Does.

Speaking of which, I saw Capra's "Meet John Doe" the other night. We tend to think of Capra as the Norman Rockwell of American moviemaking, but he's not. He sees clearly and understands the nature of America's underbelly, but unlike Mencken, he holds that perception of how America works in tension with his belief in the fundamental decency of the normal Americans--the John Does--who just want to live an ordinary life and are not smitten by greed or the will to power even if they are continuously vulnerable to exploitation by those who are smitten.

It's this tension between John Does and Mencken's scoundrels that defines the American experience, but earlier generations seemed to be able hold the two elements together better than we do now. They seemed savvier about the rogues while at the same time refusing cynicism. We now seem to be either one or the other--too naively optimistic like Rockwell or too cynically despondent like Mencken. What we need is to be more Capraesque--to be able to hold both aspects of the American character together. 

We don't live in a Norman Rockwell World or a Walt Disney world; we live in a world that is defined by the Dick Cheneys and Ken Lays and John Thains.  These are the rogues Mencken is talking about. These men are not aberrational; they set the tone and they shape the world we live in. You could argue that such men are a minority in America--most Americans are not like them. But they set the rules. They rise to the top because they are just better in the power and greed game than those they compete with. And when they reach the top, the set the rules that they live by and the quite different rules that the rest of us have to live by.

And John Doe tends to trust and admire them and to accept what they say at face value.  John Doe, decent chap that he is, thinks everyone is a decent chap until he proves himself otherwise. And the bar for proving otherwise is set pretty high.  Think about it: this country elected George Bush and Dick Cheney for a second term. So the task for these scoundrels, as it is for all con men, is to work hard to hide what they are really up to, to tell the John Does they are really John Does themselves, that they are thinking only about what is good for John Doe.

But who is the real John Doe but that nice kid down the block who you find out now has PTSD or even worse was one of those soldiers ordered to abuse prisoners in Abu Ghraib? He or she is the laid-off auto worker who becomes a Wal-Mart worker. John Doe for the Cheneys and Lays and Corkers of the world are just fodder to be exploited, and they always have been and always will be exploited except when they get savvy and fight back. That fight is what Capra represents in his films.  The Baileys, Smiths, and Willoughbys are naive, decent folk who wake up and refuse to be exploited. Sure it's simplistic and sometimes sentimental--but he puts his finger on something that today's John Does don't seem to understand yet. Capra is not living in a Rockwell picture; he sees what Mencken sees, and he puts his hope, as I do, in the basic decency of John Doe, in his ability to figure things out, and then to fight.

Greed and the will to power are never decisively defeated; but they take over if they are not kept in check. That's been the difference the last thirty years or so.  It's not that Mencken's scoundrels have been any less creative than they have always been; it's just that America's John Doe's have bought in to the scoundrels' latest scam, promoting Libertarianism and Friedmanite free market ideology as everybody's ticket to the good life. As I said, earlier generations had more savvy about such things.  But maybe now or generation of John Does will  begin to figure it out.

My Two Cents on the Rick Warren Brouhaha

I understand why gays are upset about Obama's picking Warren to give one of the inaugural invocations, but I deeply believe that so long as "progressives" make culturally divisive values issues their rallying cry, it plays into the hands of the bad guys--at least until we resolve the constitutional crisis we're currently in the middle of. Let's get some perspective: We don't have habeas corpus right now. It means that the president, or one of his bureaucrats, could call me or you a terrorist, throw me or you into a Gitmo-like jail, and then throw away the key. That's the kind of country we are living in now, and that's not an exaggeration.

Until I am proved wrong, I will continue to assume Obama intends to dismantle the infrastructure of repression put in place by the Bush administration, and I will assume that he will be viciously fought on it, and that he he needs all the support he can get. If Obama fails, either because he doesn't try or if he does but can't get it done, we're in much bigger trouble than whether gays have the right to marry or not.

We are walking a razor's edge here.  We have to use our heads and prioritize. Resistance to gay marriage or civil unions is rooted in age-old cultural taboos.  There are lots of Americans--a majority in a blue state like California--whose identities and worldviews are invested in these taboos, and that isn't going to change because people on the secular left who dismiss traditional values as homophobic demand it. They have to persuade; they have to appeal to the decency, the compassion, and fairmindedness of ordinary Americans who don't know many gay people and think of them as stereotypes of decadence because they have no other reference points.

I think there are some people on the right who simply cannot be worked with. I don't think Warren or even a guy like Mike Huckabee are among them. I see them as  honest, thoughtful people who could some day change their minds. They need to be conversed with, not vilified. And in the meanwhile, there is a lot of common ground that they share with progressives on issues of social justice that distinguish them from the really crazy, inflexible evangelicals like Dobson, Robertson, and Falwell.

Quote of the Day: Michael Lind

In Salon in which he talks about the South's strategy to reduce the country to its primitive, neo-feudal level of doing things:

I can hear the objections already: "We agree that the South's beggar-thy-neighbor and race-to-the-bottom strategies should be thwarted -- but the methods that you suggest, a high national minimum wage, greater equalization of state and local public spending by increased federal revenue-sharing, and a national economic development framework built to align the existing state economic development systems are politically too difficult to achieve." That may be true. But if it is true, then the neo-Confederates and their strategy of turning first the South and then the entire U.S. into a low-wage export platform for the outsourced industries of advanced industrial societies in Asia and Europe will prevail. If a non-Southern majority, controlling the White House and Congress, with the support of at least some moderate Republicans in other regions, along with the support of Southern populists and progressives, is too timid to take on a Southern oligarchy that is willing to wreck the national economy to promote their local economic empires, then the neo-Confederates have already prevailed.

The choice is simple -- the reconstruction of the South, or the deconstruction of the U.S. economy.

Or as I wrote in May:

But what happened during the Nixon administration was the beginning of the southernization of the GOP, which reached its culmination in the Bush administration.  As the viciousness of converted southern Democrats joined forces with the viciousness of corporate interests, a new  GOP was created for which crony capitalism is its animating principle. If the GOP is allowed to stay in power, it would turn the country into a kind of corporate plantation society, for which Wal-Mart is the pioneer. Everything the GOP does can be understood according to the logic of promoting its crony capitalist agenda. The cultural wedge issues are simply a tactic to keep low-information Main Streeters on the GOP bus in a 50% +1 electoral  strategy.

And for these southerners, it doesn't even matter if the corporations are American.  That they are serving the interests of the Japanese auto industry to the detriment of the American industry doesn't seem to bother them in the least.  They know where their loyalties lie, and they are all dutifully wearing they're American flag lapel pins, I'm sure.

Free to Choose

I think that at a most basic level my concern is apologetic in the sense of making orthodox (i.e., Nicene) Christianity something that can make sense in our fragmented cultural milieu. In doing so, I try to work within a framework that respects traditional affirmations, but which might make an approach to Christianity plausible for those who cannot accept the premodern presuppositions so much of the faith seems required to assume.

Anybody who has read this blog over time knows that I have tremendous respect for what premoderns understood. I don't think they were prone to delusion anymore than we are, and I am certain that 500 years from now people will look back to our time in amazement at how absurd and limited was our modern understanding of the world. But we live now, and if we are intellectually honest, we have to work within the limitations of its particular historical cultural frame, even knowing how provisional it is. But if late-modern and postmodern thought treats the grand narrative with such diffidence, such an attitude is liberating because we are no longer locked in to any particular way of understanding the world--scientific or religious. Anything goes--there are no heresies; there is only agreeing or disagreeing, and that gives us a latitude to explore possibilities that would have been difficult even thirty years ago. And while this is uncomfortable for those who want certainty and security, there are advantages for those who want to probe around the edges of what is currently acceptable.

The conservative/liberal cultural battle is an artifact of the modern period which continues like a bad habit. The more interesting question is what new narrative will emerge that will supersede both. And whoever comes up with the most compelling, spiritually/scientifically consonant imagination wins. Right now everything is mush, but it's not unlike the confusion experienced by the early moderns. John Milton, an admirer and younger contemporary of Galileo, was certainly open to the idea that the earth revolved around the sun, but he still wasn't sure of it.  The idea was near the tipping point, but hadn't yet tipped.  The same thing is likely to happen some time this century.  Some new, world-view altering discovery or idea--it could be scientific or spiritual or some combination of both-- will emerged and slowly it will reach the tipping point, and the world will look differently. I am interested in stripping down Christianity to its essentials, so that when that day comes Christians will not react as so many of them reacted to Galileo.  If we are currently wandering in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan, we have to travel lightly with little tolerance for the superfluous.

Metaxis

Metaxis is the Greek word used by Plato to describe the condition of in-betweenness that is a structural characteristic of the human condition--we humans are suspended on a web of polarities--the one and the many, eternity and time, freedom and fate, instinct and intellect, risk and safety, love and hate, to name but a few.  The human being until the modern period was considered itself to be such a polarity as comprising both angel and beast, a spiritual being with transcendent aspirations and longings for eternity that ennobled him at the same time enmeshed with a troublesome, instinct-driven body that suffers and dies. 

It is hard for humans to be simultaneously both angel and beast, so there is an understandable tendency for individuals to embrace one and reject the other--or to alternate having a beast phase, then an angel phase, then a beast phase, and so on.  The conflict between the Angel party and Animal party has been at the heart of the culture war in America at least since the Scopes trial. The first party refusing the human's animal provenance, the second refusing its spiritual provenance.

The last burst of culture-wide affirmation of the spiritual side of the human being occurred in the late 18th early 19th century, the era of the German Idealist philosophers and English and German Romantic poets. But Romanticism marked an interesting transition in the life of the human spirit, because it was an era during which Spirit was immanentized, internalized, subjectivized--or to put it another way Spirit went underground--or yet another way, humans began to recognize that's where it had been for some time by then. Let's rehearse a little of the historical trajectory:

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.

Continuity & Discontinuity

My concerns going forward have more to do with the larger trends than with individual policies. And the larger trends in the political sphere, when they move us forward, are almost always dependent on major discontinuities that force some kind of collective response that deflect a society from its normal course. Without a crisis or trauma, all we can realistically expect is politics as usual.

And politics as usual in every era is pretty basic: There are always factions which have  acquired power and wealth that will use that power and wealth to game the system to insure that they can maintain their power and wealth. And they succeed unless they are opposed by other factions that have the power to check them. This is just fundamental to any social analysis in just about every society. American society, although it began in a collective action against the British imperial oligarchy, has become one of the most egregious examples of the iron law of oligarchy at work, and unless some kind of collective action emerges soon to check this politics-as-usual trend, it will continue to morph American society into the imperial oligarchy it repudiated in its origins.

The idea that people who have power seek to consolidate it is a basic assumption that undergirds everything I write about politics in this blog. To me it's so obvious, I don't even know how to defend it. It's on the level defending the assertions that it gets cold in winter and hot in summer. And yet everything one reads in the mainstream press or in most of the blogosphere assumes that it's not the central problem. Libertarians seem to care, but they fear the threat of left oligarchies so much that they are blind to the threat from the oligarchical right, which is much more serious. And they have unwittingly abetted its agenda every time they vote Republican. It's  as if to talk about how power really works in this society is a taboo subject. And yet unless we talk about it, how does anything really change? Do we think that changing presidents or parties deeply affects the underlying power structure? It cannot happen unless there's a crisis that forces the power structure to adjust.

The most important issue right now is how to get the government to do what is in the broader public's interest rather than in the interests of elites enmeshed in our imperial militaristic system.  Is it not now clear to everyone that our invading Iraq had nothing to do with the broader interests of the American public and everything to do with the interests of this narrow elite? Is it not clear that even if 90% of Americans opposed the war in the polls, it wouldn't have made a difference? The decision had been made, and public be damned. Do we really think that Obama has the power to take this elite on and to defang it, even if he wanted to?

We could argue that it's already too late, but it's an open question (to me at least) whether things have rigidified to a degree that we are locked in. One factor that might paradoxically work against the power elite's continued consolidation of its power and wealth lies in its having overreached and in doing so quite possibly having caused the collapse of the system that kept the broader population anesthetized. As long as most people are comfortable, they don't care what elites at the top of the pyramid are doing, and those elites have been relatively free to lay an infrastructure that secures their interests in the future. And anybody paying attention who cares about preserving American democracy has become deeply alarmed in observing their successes in doing so.