After the Future

Dying Traditions IIIb

The past is an abusive spouse that cultural conservatives have to divorce and then befriend for the sake of the children. Let me explain.

A couple of weeks ago I posted Dying Traditions II which argued that Southerners who are trying to maintain their Southern Heritage are fundamentally mistaken, and then in a short post entitled "Dying Traditions III" I refuted that argument as I would expect a lover of the Southern heritage to do:

We're from somewhere, and you aren't. We have roots. We have memories.  We have a cultural heritage and identity that you have no idea about. You cannot even begin to understand what we feel because it's not something you have ever felt. Who are you to tell us that our traditions are dead?  Who are you to tell us to get over it and move on? Move on to what? To an empty cosmopolitanism that doesn't care about or feel deeply about anything? What do you have to offer us that is better than what we have and cherish? Your pious abstractions don't cut it. So STFU.

First let me say that I make no attempt to argue that the North is morally superior to the South. That's stupid, and there's no question that Southerners have good reason to resent Yankee or Liberal smugness when Yankees have nothing to be smug about. My argument is that Yankee cosmopolitanism is healthier because more flexible and adaptive in a rapidly changing globalizing world.

I'm fine with any subculture that wants to resist assimilation into this globalizing fusion culture, and I'd even say that I'm sympathetic--parts of it should be resisted, particularly in the economic sphere. But insofar as a culture is animated by resentment and by a nostalgia for something that really doesn't exist anymore and can't exist, I'd argue that it's a trap, a whited sepulcher, and the longer one is stuck in it, the more curdled and decayed becomes his soul. 

I'd argue by extension that the cultural right has a form of cultural co-dependency. It's like the wife who won't leave her abusive husband because she's afraid to be alone and doesn't know how she'll be able to support herself. Whatever wholesomeness the cultural right thinks it's preserving is in fact a parody of wholesomeness, and it's driven by a need to feel safe and to preserve a sense of order even when the life preserved by that order is unhealthful.

Am I saying that everything cultural conservatives value is unhealthful?  Of course, not. The values important for conservatives--loyalty, respect, reverence for the sacred--should be culture-wide values. It's just that the right applies these values dysfunctionally--i.e., their loyalty, respect, and reverence are misplaced or misdirected. They are loyal to that which does not deserve their loyalty and are dying nobly in ignoble wars. They respect authorities that are morally bankrupt frauds, and they revere idols, not the living God who will not be contained in stone-rigid formulas.

The "Lost" Sensibility

Heather Havrileski at Salon doesn't have it:

Damn you, "Lost"! We went and jumped on your bandwagon way back in the first season, got sucked into your endless jungley maze and suspenseful chords, and waited breathlessly for the next shoe to drop, over and over again. Remember when that was still fun? Remember? Henry Gale's googly-eyed provocations? Michael shooting Ana Lucia in the gut? The impenetrable, nostalgia-inducing mysteries of the Dharma Initiative? Thanks to the brilliant character studies of the first season (we ignored the dumb monsters), thanks to the genius twists and turns of the second and third seasons, we're doomed to do our penance as the whole tale unravels in a messy heap. . . .

Back then, like teenagers at a Baptist retreat, we thought the big, bad world would add up to something, that every confusing twist was laden with hidden meaning. Now we know better. Now we get up in the morning and put on our Sunday best and trudge off to church on the off-chance that the Lord Himself will appear and shine His glory on us in person. Now we watch because we were once "Lost" fans, and here it is the final season, and there are only a handful of episodes left. Even though the long-awaited answers we're looking for are offered in such blunt, unimaginative language that we feel like we're reading first drafts: "I'm a smoke monster." "You're going to have to kill the devil." "It's all meaningless if I have to force them to do anything." And if we wanted to waste six years in a Judeo-Christian allegory, we would've just followed a Jehovah's Witness home a long time ago. At least their Armageddon should be a little bit gripping and suspenseful. (5/8)

Neither does Laura Miller at Salon after watching the finale, and there are many others who felt the show was a "long con". But needless to say I disagree, and I think the difference lies in there being two fundamentally different postmodern sensibilities. Havrileski and Miller represent one, and the Lost writers represent the other. The first is one that with its arms folded and foot tapping, suspicious about everything, fears to be hoodwinked. The second is arms open with second naivete ready to embrace everything that has the slightest scent of truth. Count me in with the second group.

Lost was remarkable for its ability to be both complex and multilayered and yet to end with a theme that was simple, clear, resonant, and deeply human. It was a show that was full of ideas but was never just a head trip. In the end it was about the characters and their relationships, and it was about why those relationships matter and with meanings that might be described as having cosmic import.

Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism

Why was he a Catholic?  Because he believed that the Church's teachings are true; and because the Church, in his view, stood above and apart from the present age, which he called the age of the "theorist-consumer."  In his view, the present age has no use for anything that cannot be bought and sold or theorized about.  So the present age has no use for Christian faith.  But the believer, he thought, should count this as an advantage, and see the present age as preferable to "Christendom," when the churches prospered. "In the old Christendom," he explained, "everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it.  But in the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony: which is to say, open to signs."  From Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own, p. 460.

That encapsulates the point of my "Cultural Identity" posts (here and here). Catholicism in the U.S., like the conservative strains of Judaism, had been until recently countercultural, i.e., countercultural to the mainstream culture defined by the tension in values between Calvinistic moralism on one hand and rationalist modernism on the other--both swimming in a sea of materialist consumerism. The Catholic world I grew up in was in most respects the one that Percy entered into in the 1940s when he became a Catholic. That Catholic world had very little consonance with and to a large degree stood in contradiction to Calvinism, rationalist modernism, and materialism--but that Catholic world no longer exists. After the Second Vatican Council, Catholics stopped living in their own countercultural world and started living in Calvinist/Modernist/Consumerist America.

More on 'Lost' and Dante's Island Down Under

About a month ago, I wrote a too long post about how Cuse's and Lindelof's Lost was an creative exercise in postmodern religious syncretism and mythopoesis, but leaning perhaps a little more heavily on retrieval themes from Dante and by extension Catholic iconography.  I think after watching the finale last night, that assessment holds up pretty well. I'm off on some things, but I think I caught the spirit of what they were trying to do. You can read the whole post if you want, but I think the most relevant grafs are here:

For Dante, Purgatory was an island in the southern hemisphere, unreachable by ordinary means. It was the antipode to Jerusalem, which was the the center of the northern hemisphere, the top half of the earth, which in Dante's imagination of it stretched east to west, from the Ganges to Gibraltar. Purgatory is a mountain on this island at the center of the bottom half of the earth. So the central axis of the earth is defined by the North Pole at Mt. Calvary, and by Mt. Purgatorio and the South Pole, and the summit of Mt. Purgatorio is Eden, from which Adam and Eve were banned. And between the two lies hell.

The Tea Party and the Middle

Tristero at Hullabaloo has a post this weekend responding to a February article in the Progressive by Chip Berlet entitled "Taking Tea Partiers Seriously". He is bothered by a theme in Berlet's article that suggests that there is anything about the Tea Party or the cultural right's agenda that should be respected.  Take them seriously as a threat? Yes. Take them seriously as having ideas and policies worthy of our respect? No.

Read Tristero's post for his fully developed argument, but it boils down to this: Tea Partiers believe things that make it impossible for Progressives like him to find any common ground with them, even if they are against the war in Afghanistan and giveaways to Wall Street. A left-right coalition focused on de-militarization and economic issues is impossible because of the separation on cultural issues--gay marriage, abortion, race.

I agree that extreme tea partiers are unreachable, but that's not the issue. He should be worried about why the extreme right is doing a better job of capturing the growing rage of those in the uncommitted middle. And that's essentially Berlet's point--the Tea Partiers we need to be taking seriously are not the extremists, but the sane citizens who see what's wrong about the American imperial agenda and the domination of Wall Street and other uber-corporations in Washington--who find themselves more attracted to people on the right who are organizing around these issues than they are to those who are organizing on the left. The Tea Party has to be taken seriously because they are doing a much more effective recruiting job than those on the left, and Berlet's article should be read as a wake-up call to Progressives and a challenge to them:  Why are they losing this recruitment battle?

What Libertarians Don't Get

“I think the two of them were having a bit of good time having a debate like you had at 2 a.m. in the morning when you’re going to college, but it doesn’t have a lot to do with anything.” Jon Kyl on Rand Paul's appearance on the Maddow show.

Kyl seems to support the definition of Libertarianism I posted the other day. I don't deny that Libertarians are often very intelligent, but I also think that they are adolescent in their thinking and stunted in their sense of what it means to live in "society".That's not just a snark. I mean it quite literally. They are like bright high-school debaters who take a simple premise, and with relentless consistency develop an abstract one-dimensional system of thought they promote as "principled".  And because they are often "bright", they find ingenious ways to explain everything through the lens of their unbalanced thinking. But in the end it's sophomoric nonsense embraced only by those who remain intellectually and socially stunted.

Libertarian one dimensionality is rooted in its assumption that Liberty is the only value that matters for Americans; it forgets that Equality is part of the picture, too. Libertarians make sense when they affirm things about Liberty we all agree are essential for the good health of American society. They stop makings sense, though, to the degree that they embrace Liberty as an absolute that diminishes the importance of Equality. It's not either Liberty or Equality. Both keep one another in a kind of tension and balance. When Liberty dominates, Equality suffers; when Equality dominates, Liberty suffers. A healthy democracy finds ways through use of its tools in the political sphere to keep the two in a rough balance.

Libertarianism Defined

Here's an attempt:

An ideology inspired by the hobgoblin that seduces messianicly adolescent minds who believe they've found the simple formula that will cure a complex world's ills.  

Dying Traditions III

Since no one attempted to rebut my previous post on Dying Traditions, I'll do it myself:

We're from somewhere, and you aren't. We have roots. We have memories.  We have a cultural heritage and identity that you have no idea about. You cannot even begin to understand what we feel because it's not something you have ever felt. Who are you to tell us that our traditions are dead?  Who are you to tell us to get over it and move on? Move on to what? To an empty cosmopolitanism that doesn't care about or feel deeply about anything? What do you have to offer us that is better than what we have and cherish? Your pious abstractions don't cut it. So STFU.

While I think a little more about how I'd respond, I'll let the accusation sit here a couple of days. 

A Vulnerable Status Quo? (Updated)

it's hard not to be encouraged by the disgust which the citizenry clearly has for the political establishment regardless of party, as well as the resulting (and increasing) fear and confusion on the part of the political class.  This sort of citizenry anger can re-arrange political alignments and explode political orthodoxies in fundamental and unpredictable ways.  There is, to be sure, a risk in that, but there is a far greater risk in simply allowing the destructive political status quo to linger in unchanged form for much longer. (Greenwald)

There are two questions that I don't know the answer to: One--Does it matter at this point that the electorate is disgusted with the political establishment, or are we beyond the point of no return?  In other words, is the power and wealth configuration that currently constitutes the political status quo really vulnerable? Two--If the political establishment is in fact vulnerable because of the electorate's disgust, what faction is in the best position to capture and channel that disgust to achieve its political objectives? 

UPDATE: Commenter #8 SRV at Balloon Juice:

If you think people are crazy angry now, wait until they have had a couple more years to stew on high unemployment, low growth, outsourced, local and state bankruptcies, bigger deficits, and being assraped by the next brilliant Goldman Sachs financial instrument.

The presumption is that the middle class will recover and be the moderate middle. I don’t think y’all should assume that. The middle is going to fragment, and they are going to go to the fringes.

This relates to point two above.  If the middle continues to fragment, how much of it will go to the left?  Why should it as long as Corporate Dems are running the shop? What groups on the left are capturing voter outrage? Maybe that will change, but for now American populist rage is a right wing thing.

We make the assumption that things always return to "normal" with normal defined in rear-veiw mirror terms, but when deep structural changes are at work, the old normal has nothing to do with reality except in our obsolete imagination of it. It's clear that deep structural changes are at work now; it's also clear that these changes favor existing wealth and power and that the tradtional protections for the ordinary citizen are eroding year by year no matter which party is in office. And it's also clear that most Americans haven't a clue and are distracted by issues that are inconsequential to their futures and the futures of their children. 

It is not at all clear that there are power factions that are emerging that understand what's going on and have a plan to redress the imbalances. If nothing emerges, then this negative stratifying trend is going to play out in ways most Americans won't like, but will be powerless to do anything about because it will be too late.

Dying Traditions II

In the neo-Confederate view, North and South went to war because they represented two distinct and irreconcilable cultures, right down to their bloodlines.  White Southerners descended from freedom-loving Celts in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Northerners--New England abolitionist in particular--came from mercantile and expansionist English stock.

This ethnography even explained how the War was fought.  Like their brave and heedless forebears, Southerners hurled themselves in frontal assaults on the enemy.  The North, meanwhile, deployed the industrial might and numerical superiority to grind down the South with Cromwellian efficiency. A military historian and neo-Confederate guru named Grady McWhiney put it best "Southerners lost the War because they were too Celtic and their opponents were too English."

Viewed through this prism, the War of Northern Aggression had little to do with slavery.  Rather, it was a culture war in which Yankees imposed their imperialist and capitalistic will on the agrarian South, just as the English had done to the Irish and Scots--and as America did to the Indians and the Mexicans in the name of Manifest Destiny.  The North's triumph, in turn, condemned the nation to centralized industrial society and all the ills that came with it. (From Tony Horwitz's 1995 book, Confederates in the Attic, pp. 68-69)

One of the people Horwitz interviews tells him that whites in the South are like the Bosnians who at the time were being ethnically cleansed.

Ideas Matter II

I embrace the idea that we humans never know the truth in any direct way, and that all we have is provisional "interpretations". But some interpretations are better than others because there is a Good that those interpretations bear a closer or more distant relationship to. I know that this is not how moderns think, but I'm trying to make the case that we are no longer moderns and that our thinking remains modern merely by force of habit, because something better has not yet been proposed. I see the breakdown in modern habits of mind as an opportunity to recover important elements of Western thinking that have been forgotten or mistakenly rejected because of the materialist or uber-rationalist biases of modern habits of thought.

Those biases are gradually losing their hold on the mainstream culture, and the crisis in political Liberalism is closely related to the diminishing influence of those biases in our common imaginary.  Right wing sub-rationality is having a field day because there is no robust opposition to it. I think that right-wing sub-rationalism is attractive to even thoughtful moderates because the stench of the decaying corpse of Liberalism is repugnant, and average Americans will naturally choose the  alternative that has vitality. At least the Right has a pulse. It may or may not have its facts straight, but who cares? Liberals stand for no deeply grounded principles one can care deeply about. They seem to be all about expediency, and because there is nothing they will go to the mat for, the so-called reasonableness of Liberalism doesn't stand a chance against the passionate intensity of the right. Ideas matter, but they are useless unless they touch the heart, stimulate the imagination, and motivate action.

So my argument here is that Liberalism is dangerous, not because of what it affirms, which within its limitations is unobjectionable, but because of what it cannot affirm--a plausible, philosophy of history or an ontological narrative of history grounded in supra-rational ideals that would inspire and give direction to progressive action. Liberalism as a mindset has no sense of its future possibility. It is dangerous because it creates a vacuum that is otherwise filled by more primitive passions. The bourgeois Enlightenment progressive narrative embraced and shaped to a large degree by a guy like Benjamin Franklin no longer inspires; neither does revolutionary fervor excited by Marxist eschatology. Because there is no inspiring alternative narrative to motivate the Left, the Right has an open field in which to run. The passionate intensity of the Right remains ascendant until it is countered by an alternative that is emotionally and spiritually robust enough to challenge it.

That's enough on this for now, but I want to explore this theme in some depth. I'm hoping that there are others out there who are like me who want to think about this, too--people who support Liberalism in the political sphere even though they reject it in the cultural sphere, the sphere of thought and of deeply felt value. We support it as a bulwark against the dark sub-rationalism of the Right in the hopes of buying time until a compelling supra-rational imagination of future possibility might take hold. The heroes of supra-rational inspiration to which I would point are Gandhi, King, Mandela.  Nothing short of that kind of inspiration will get us out of this mess. I certainly don't have definitive answers or an alternative vision that would even begin to be widely embraced, but I do have some ideas that I would like to use this blog to think out loud about.  In coming weeks, I'll be writing posts entitled "Ideas Matter III, IV, etc. 

Heartache

Commenter Bubba in my previous post describes how what is happening to our country makes his heart ache. Heartache is a good word to describe how I feel, too. It amazes me how easy a time the forces of greed and powerlust are having, how weak the resistance. About a 1/3 of the electorate is aware and dismayed about what is happening, but it doesn't seem to matter. There were always Americans who didn't get what the American experiment in equality and liberty was about. They were a nuisance and the source of a lot of unnecessary grief. Now their ideas are being embraced by so-called moderates.

There's an ineluctable character about what's happening to America, as if there's some  siren song that leaders of great powers hear as soon as they take office. It drowns out any memory of the song about its founding ideals and fundamental values. Regarding American civil liberties, we see In a guy like Eric Holder, and Obama himself, we are  how it's possible for decent people to dance unwittingly to the song of expediency croaked by an ugly, flat-toned beast singing "Come to Me; I'm the Banality of Evil"--so many little choices made in the name of expediency. It's tragic in a pathetic, ho-hum sort of way.

Quote of the Day: Digby

At this point there's no longer any reason to assume that Obama doesn't get it or is just trying to get his legislation through and doesn't want to alienate Republicans. He is what he appears to be, which is a dry, pragmatic, status quo, technocrat who makes symbolic leftward gestures while offering center right policies. The power of his iconic status is enough to create the illusion of idealism, which keeps him interesting. The Right is freaky enough to keep the left wary of going too far in challenging him.

But the right smells that he prefers to avoid fights, whether for psychological or ideological reasons, and they are successfully pushing him ever rightward while portraying him as a radical socialist. It's very clever. But then they are far more clever at macro-politics than anyone on the left*.  (Source)

The choice is between insane Republicans or corporate Democrats.  It's like the choice between brain cancer and heart disease--which would you rather die from?

Quote of the Day: Stuart Whatley

Perhaps the most enervating element of the BP-Deepwater Horizon disaster is its eerie familiarity—the sheer, inexorable predictability of it all. There is poetic injustice in its propinquity on the calendar to the Obama administration’s decision to expand offshore drilling last month, and to the Supreme Court decision just this year that further did away with any distinction between ‘corporate rights’ and ‘individual rights’. . . .

The gulf story will likely be no more about corporate corner-cutting than a broken political system—the recurring motif of this year. And regrettably, in a nation that incarcerates people by the hundreds of thousands for victimless crimes of self-indulgence it is yet inconceivable that those who wreck global ecological and financial systems could ever suffer anything exceeding the “cost of doing business.” When a corporation falls short of regulatory standards it does not do so accidentally or unwittingly. Rather, it is a calculated choice based on risible enforcement efforts and piddling penalties passed by legislators on the political take. (Source)

This is the world we live in, folks. Get used to it. It was brought to us by the creative thinking of Reagan Republicans and ratified by the "moderate" Democrats.  There is no political faction with power enough to correct the problems, and so they will not be corrected. The government has been captured by the Buccaneer class, and the best we can expect is band-aid solutions like Obamcare, solutions that don't even begin to come to grips with the underlying structural issues.  And the joke is that rather than vote in people like Grayson, Weiner, Dean who get it and would do something to fix it if they had any support, we Americans will vote in Republicans who will just make it worse.

The Zeitgeist of Unbelief

[Ed. note: I'll be revisiting several older posts with the idea of trying to regain my footing concerning the cultural-sphere themes that have always been the primary concern of ATF. Several of the key posts in this area are found in the "Don't Miss" section on the left side of the page. But I feel the need to bring other posts out of hiding if for no other reason than to remind myself of what I was once thinking about these themes before being distracted by the slow-motion train wreck in the political sphere. I'm hoping for the best but prepared for the worst in the political sphere, but in the meantime, I hope at least some ATF readers will re-engage with some of these ideas regarding whither the culture. This post comes from 11/4/07.]

From Taylor's A Secular Age:

We saw how for Providential Deism the principal claim to God's benevolence is precisely the nature of his unchanging order in creation. . . For those who take this view, the noblest, highest truth must have this general form.  Personal interventions, even those of a God, would introduce something arbitrary, some element of subjective desire, into the picture, and the highest truths about reality must be beyond this element.  From this standpoint, a faith in a personal God belongs to a less mature standpoint, where one still needs the sense of a personal relation to things; one is not yet ready to face the ultimate truth.  A line of thinking of the nature, steadily gathering strength, runs through modern thought and culture, from Spinoza, through Goethe, to our present time.

Now I think that an important part of the force which drove many people to see science and religion as incompatible, and to opt for the former, comes from this crucial difference in form. In other words, the success of science built on and helped to entrench in them the sense that the Christian religion they were familiar with belonged to an earlier, more primitive or less mature form of understanding.

Now this bent to impersonality was greatly reinforced by the new cosmic imaginary.  The vast universe, in which one could easily feel no sense of a personal God or benign purpose, seemed to be impersonal in the most forbidding sense, blind and indifferent to our fate.  An account in terms of impersonal causal law seemed called for by the new depth sense of reality in the universe.

This inference was the stronger in that the stance of disengaged reason, construing the world as it does a devoid of human meaning, fits better with the impersonal picture.  But this stance is part of the modern identity of the buffered self, which thus finds a natural affinity for the impersonal order. . . .

But other things too, tend to make us align materialism with adulthood.  A religious outlook may easily be painted as one which offers greater comfort, which shields us from the truth of an indifferent universe, which is now felt as a strong possibility with the modern cosmic imaginary.  Religion is afraid to face the fact that we are alone in the universe and without cosmic support.  As children, we do indeed, find this hard to face, but growing up is becoming ready to look reality in the face.

Of course this story will probably make little sense to someone who is deeply engaged in a life of prayer or meditation, or other serious spiritual discipline, because this involves in its own way growing beyond and letting go of more childish images of God.  But if our faith has remained at the stage of the immature images, then the story that materialism equals maturity can seem plausible.  And if in addition, one has been convinced that manliness is the key virtue, then the appeal to go over can appear irresistible. (pp. 362-64)

A couple of points:  First, the impersonal Deism of the eighteenth-century philosophes, after a few decades of Romantic protest, easily slid into the scientific materialism of the nineteenth century. This change in the social imaginary of the culture's elites had an enormous influence in shaping the Western zeitgeist and changed the imagination of reality wherever Western ideas were influential. While this is a story that many found compelling, many then and now for good reason did and do not. But the dominant social imaginary for even Christian fundamentalists changed dramatically. Whatever their beliefs may be, even religious believers live in an experientially disenchanted world.