After receiving the key, Beck spoke for about an hour, reminiscing about growing up in Mount Vernon, which he described as a "magical place," connected to the values of small-town America."I believe in Norman Rockwell's America," he said. . . .
Beck said he didn't remember politics being divisive growing up, and that if people now could just stop "tearing each other apart" there was a bright future for the country.
(The Seattle Times in a story about Beck's being given the key to the city in Mount Vernon, the town where he grew up about sixty miles north of Seattle.)
Probably enough has been written about Glenn Beck to make unnecessary anything more I have to say about him. And I don't know that I have anything to add to the subject that I have not already written on my many posts about "Zombie Traditionalism" and "Lot's Wife Syndrome", but I just find the right-wing mentality oddly fascinating.
It's not enough to simply dismiss it as irrational, because all the important things that give life meaning are irrational. The trick is to discern whether they are sub-rational (instinct driven, fear and greed) or super-rational (grace-inspired--compassion, understanding, idealism) and then to respond appropriately. My "hypothesis" is that the irrationality of the right wing is sub-rational while presenting itself as super-rational, and that's always when trouble starts: It's the archetypal problem of the devil quoting scripture.L
I've written before about the main difference between the Left and the Right lying in its orientation toward time--the Right oriented toward the past; the Left toward the future. It's suggested in the names we give each, conservative and progressive. I've also written about how all premodern societies are predominantly past oriented, and modern societies are predominantly future oriented. And I've argued that modernity came to the west because of the unique Jewish-Christian validation given to history as meaningful, as the stage upon which a cosmic, future-oriented, promise-centered salvation drama is played out. The essence of the Judeo-Christian orientation toward history is Abrahamic, on the move, trusting in the promise of an impossible future, rather than clinging to the securities of the past. Progressivism as it emerged in the 19th Century depends for its inspiration on Hegelian and Marxist eschatology which in turn would be impossible without the Jewish-Christian mythos in the background.
So the difference between past-oriented conservatives and future oriented progressives is where they find the locus of meaning--either its having been passed on from the ancestors in the first instance, or yet to be discovered in the future in the second instance. A key element that characterizes conservative thinking derives from premodern traditionalist societies, which is a desire for stability, for time-honored rituals, for studying and understanding the wisdom that comes from the ancestors who lived in the golden age of the culture's founding. The key element that characterizes progressive thinking is a longing for liberation from the restrictions of the past, for its irrational rules and limiting mores.
Southern slaveholders, for instance, argued that slavery was a constant in human society--that there always were slaves and always would be. They argued that civilization depended on it, that Africans were always enslaved, if not by Europeans, then by other Africans, that it was in the nature of Africans to be slaves, and that they benefited by their being managed by their racial superiors. Abolitionists inspired by both Christian and Enlightenment ideals about the rights of man saw the past as the enemy to be subverted and replaced with a new imagination of history based on a movement toward greater levels freedom and equality. The sexual liberation movements, driven by feminist and gay rights groups, use similar arguments: the way things were in the past is no determinant of the way they must be or ought to be in the future. The past, insofar as it restricts liberty and equality, is the enemy.
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So back to Beck: On one level it would appear astonishing that Beck could make a statement complaining about the people who are tearing the country apart without his acknowledging how he is widely perceived as one of the most egregious tearer-uppers. But to think so would be a failure to see things from within Beck's worldview, because from Beck's perspective, he's not tearing the country apart, he's defending its Norman-Rockwell, traditionalist integrity. The liberationists (aka, Liberals) are the ones tearing the society apart because their values and their agenda seeks to destroy the Rockwell picture. Liberals are contemptuously slashing at the Rockwell canvases and spraying them with their socialist graffiti noms de plume. If they would just stop, then the country would once again have a bright future. It would return to the "normal" past.
This is the wellspring of the right-wing irrationality that gives the movement conservatives their sense of meaning and purpose--the nostalgic Norman Rockwell fantasy. And it is, of course, a species of "Lot's Wife Syndrome." Nostalgia, the longing for something golden lost in the past, is one of the key components in the right-wing mythos. It's an atavistic vestige that lingers from the premodern past. Atavistic because the social order is no longer determined by the moral order given byt he ancestors in illo tempore. Our order and sense of identity comes from a provisional, evolving human construct--the constitution and rule of law. We are a nation of laws first, and a hodgepodge of traditions and other non-traditional subcultures which exist within that rule-of-law framework.
Monocultural traditionalism (aka, nationalism) is not a healthful possibility in modern and postmodern societies, and this is at the heart of movement conservative nostaligic longing. This kind of longing always leads to a species of zombie traditionalism, which is sub-rational in its origins, namely a fear of the future and of the Other--the un-American defined as not having his place on a Rockwell canvas. And this fear lacks supra-rational resources because it allows anxiety and fear to supplant hope, or to put it in Christian terms, it doesn't really believe that the Holy Spirit is active in history. Rockwell does not represent the wisdom of the ancestors. His are at best amusing illustrations of a very limited slice of American society at a particular point in time--maybe even pretty close to what Beck grew up with in Mount Vernon, WA. But in it our future as Americans does not lie.
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We no longer live in a time in which traditionalism is a mainstream cultural possibility. That does not mean that we must reject everything that comes to us from the past--far from it. But the past cannot be understood as a normative, golden-age fantasy that images for us a world we must somehow re-inhabit. The past is there; the parts of it we need can be retrieved, but more important to us now is the burden of responsibility we all share a co-creators of a human future.
Since the dawn of modernity humans slowly began to reorient themselves toward the the future, and that's how it should be, and it cannot be feared, for all the anxiety and pain that comes with its disruptions. The argument of this blog over the years has been that it is far more important to find our relationship in hope to the future than to worry overly much about what has been lost in the past, that our collective sense of meaning and purpose lies in imagining not some immanentized eschaton, but a movement forward, step by step, just as we have stepped past the idea that slavery always existed and always will.
A characteristic of postmodern thinking has been to reject the naive, optimistic progressivism that characterized much of modern thought, particularly in the 19th century. Postmodern 'anything-goes' and the hopelessness and nihilism that often accompanies it is as much an obstacle to the reframing of a positive, realistic imagination of the future as Beck's brand of nostalgia. I see this re-imagination of the human future as primarily a spiritual task, and I see " Abrahamic", i.e., future-oriented, promise-centered, Christians as playing an important role in shaping it, but first they must reclaim the name Christian and restore its cultural legitimacy. Legitimacy lies not in playing a dominant role in defining the cultural narrative, but in being perceived as serious in its concerns and realistic in its vision of human possibility. Evangelical Christians in the 19th Century were at the forefront of progressive politics, and some still are, but movement conservatism has run away with the brand for want of any robust resistance from Christians more worthy of the name.
I don't know how it's going to happen, but a future-oriented Christianity has to regain some measure of the cultural legitimacy it has lost. It's challenge is not to reassume its former role as providing the dominant cultural narrative, but to become actively engaged in partnership with all people of good will who long for a more deeply human future in a globalizing, pluralistic world. But it has to believe in itself if it is to play an effective part in this