After the Future

Peter Buffet, Reza Aslan, Mark Leibovich, etc.

What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it. Foundation dollars should be the best “risk capital” out there.

There are people working hard at showing examples of other ways to live in a functioning society that truly creates greater prosperity for all (and I don’t mean more people getting to have more stuff). 

Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market. Is progress really Wi-Fi on every street corner? No. It’s when no 13-year-old girl on the planet gets sold for sex. But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.

It’s an old story; we really need a new one.

This quote from an article last week by Peter Buffet (yes that Buffet) entitled "The Charitable Industrial Complex" expands on one of the themes of my previous post, regarding how belief shapes what's possible. The mindset that creates a particular problem, that in this case requires high levels inequity as a structural necessity, cannot possibly solve the problem of inequity. It just seeks to put a smiley face on it, which is the mission of Philanthropic Colonialism that typifies the Gates and Walton foundations, and the ethos of Social Entrepreneurship in general. We get Teach for America and Charter Schools rather than a concerted effort to look at wealth distribution in this country, and to change the rules of the game. But that would require having a mindset that can see the problem from a stance outside the one that thinks the market is the solution to everything. It's refreshing to see that a guy like Buffet seems to be able to do that.

***

I was going to do a post over the weekend about the Reza Aslan interview on FOX, but it's become old news by now. I did want to say that it was one of those moments where you get an insight into how unself-consciously primitive is the tribal mentality of the cultural right. The interviewer seemed sincerely convinced that Aslan, a Muslim, could write a book about Jesus only for tribal motivations. As a Muslim, he must of necessity take a negative view of Jesus--what other reason could he possibly have for putting all that effort into writing a book about him? And the interviewer was hell bent to prove it. It struck me while watching the interview that so many on the cultural right cannot imagine anyone having motivations for anything that are different from their own. Aslan as a Muslim must look at Jesus and Christianity as Fox Christians look at Mohammed and Islam. 

I thought that the Fox interviewer might have attacked Aslan for depicting Jesus as a political insurrectionist, which is really the main argument of the book as I understand it. Aslan is concerned only to understand the Jesus of history, and paints a picture of him that has been airbrushed away since Constantine. Aslan is careful to refrain from saying anything about the Christ of faith, but I will say that neither the Jesus of history nor the Christ of faith is particularly at home in the halls of imperial power. There's no real disconnect there. 

That Jesus Christ could ever have been Shanghaied for the purposes of justifying imperial power is one of the most egregious distortions of his life and mission imaginable. The gospels are not a flag to rally 'round, but that's not something Fox Christians seem to understand, as they are equally incapable of understanding why the Jesus of history is such a compelling figure on his own terms for non-Christians to want to study and understand.

***

I'm probably not going to bother to read Mark Leibovich's This Town, the story of the root causes of Beltway dysfunction. From reviews of the book and interviews with Leibovich that I've watched, I haven't learned anything I didn't already know. But I suppose it's good to have someone work it into what appears to be a very well-written if disheartening chronicle. From Christopher Buckley's NYTBR review:

Anyone who’s lived in Washington for any length of time, listening to the latest candidate for the nation’s highest office thump the lectern and proclaim he is going to change the way we do business in Washington . . . will yawn. We heard rather a lot about all that in 2008. So, has Washington changed? Or as Sarah Palin would put it, “How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for ya?”

The answer, according to Leibovich, the chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, is: yes, actually, it has, but not in ways that benefit the Republic that the founders bequeathed us and that we squander so promiscuously.

He adduces four serious — I’m trying to avoid saying “tectonic” — shifts that have taken place over the last 40 years. Combined, they make “This Town” read like the endgame chapters of Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.” In addition to his reporting talents, Leibovich is a writer of excellent zest. At times, this book is laugh-out-loud (as well as weep-out-loud). He is an exuberant writer, even as his reporting leaves one reaching for the Xanax. As for those four big changes:

The big changes are the exponentially increased roles played in Washington by lobbyists, big money, consultants, and cable media. That part is not news, but he names names and provides details, but it doesn't matter who is implicated in this self-serving orgy. It's not the individuals who matter, but the corrupt system and its stolid resiliency. It's about the culture or the mindset that constructs a reality with its own rules and norms that, though distastefully foul for anyone who stands outside of it, works very well for those inside of it, and it's hard to imagine what might be powerful enough to dismantle it and replace it with something less shameful. There is no motivation for insiders to change it. Indeed there are too many disincentives that make any attempt to reform from within impossible. Some shock has to be delivered from outside.

 

Liberal Christianity

Two pieces popped up today. One, "A Religious Legacy with a Leftward Tilt" in the NYT today, which talks about recent scholarship that is trying to show how liberal Protestant Christianity has shaped the mainstream American ethos. Key grafs:

In “After Cloven Tongues of Fire: Protestant Liberalism in Modern American History,” published in April by Princeton University Press, Mr. Hollinger argues that the mainline won a broader cultural victory that historians have underestimated. Liberals, he maintains, may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed.

Mr. Hollinger’s argument generated much chatter among his colleagues when he first presented it at the 2011 meeting. But his sometimes pugnacious new book, he said, is just a “punctuation mark” on the recent spate of work reconsidering the left-hand side of the American religious spectrum, which includes titles like Matthew S. Hedstrom’s “Rise of Liberal Religion: Book Culture and American Spirituality in the 20th Century”; Jill K. Gill’s “Embattled Ecumenism: The National Council of Churches, the Vietnam War and the Trials of the Protestant Left”; and David Burns’s “Life and Death of the Radical Historical Jesus.”

The surge of interest in liberal religion, many say, reflects the renewed vitality of religious history more generally, which has spread beyond its traditional redoubts in divinity schools to become one of the most popular specializations among academic historians, according to the American Historical Association.

That liberal Protestants "may have lost Protestantism, but they won the country, establishing ecumenicalism, cosmopolitanism and tolerance as the dominant American creed" is IMO an indicator of the weakness of liberal Protestantism rather than of its strength. Liberal Protestantism, as one of the primary carriers of modern spirit, reached it fulfillment, in the opinion of many, in the realization of the secular society, and in doing so made its creedal assertions obsolete. And so the best one can feel about that is a certain ambivalence. Better that than an oppressive theocracy, but perhaps there were (and could be) other, better possibilities.

So if you like the modern, flat-souled, 'spirit of whatever' secular society, what's not to like about liberal Protestantism? But what's to like? There's no there there. What is it that distinguishes it from non-creedal Unitarians or Ethical Humanists? How does it stand as something that seeks to offer a robust prophetic challenge to the mainstream? From where I stand its problem lies in that it was (and is) too accommodationist in its relationship to the cultural nihilism that emerged at the end of the 19th century, and thus it became infected with it to terminal effect. And as liberal Protestantism melted into the larger secular society it was complicit in creating, it created a space for the emergence of a more passions-driven religiosity of evangelical right, because it no longer could offer a deeply grounded, robust counterbalance to it that could be called Christian. So many people who are honest believers find themselves pushed to the Right for want of an alternative that can be taken with religious seriousness on the Left. 

Nevertheless, for those of us who are Christians firmly rooted on the poltical Left, we have to work with what is there to work with. And for a while now I've thought that the Black Church in the U.S. might be in the best position to bring Americans to a more vigorous retrieval of its full-souled, prophetic Christian heritage. So I was interested today to see coincidentally this piece in Salon about 'Moral Monday" in Raleigh, NC, where a Christian-led protest against the Republican nihilists there seems to have some legs:

NC-NAACP President Rev. Dr. William Barber, who has emerged as a de facto leader of the movement, opens with what can only properly be called a sermon. Barber, who identifies as an evangelical Christian and theological conservative, is a Disciples of Christ pastor. He invokes the liberationist promises of the Old Testament prophets and Synoptic Gospels in his scathing critiques of the ALEC-beholden extremists who currently control NC government. A powerful orator, his preaching style is old-school Southern Black Pentecostal, and shouts of “Amen!” ring out through the crowd as the intensity of his delivery grows. Even those of us with differing religious convictions — or none at all — have to respect the role of religion in this movement.

I don't want to make too much of this. As the article points out, NARAL was there insisting that its positions on abortion were moral, too. I don't dispute that, but it's a morality with a different genealogy. And their presence at an event like this shows how things get mushy on the Christian political Left and make it difficult for it to get any traction with sane Christians, serious about the challenges posed by the Gospels, who have a  sensibility that makes it difficult for them to take seriously the mushy morality of what they perceive as the flaky Left.

So sure, some Christians embrace NARAL positions. But where the confusion lies is when they embrace positions that developed largely out of a tradition that is very alien to Christian personalism, namely a feminist branch of the Utilitarianism of Bentham, Mill, Singer, etc., a stream of thinking that is at the heart of most contemporary secular ethics whether pro-choice advocates think of themselves as Utilitarians or not. And I would argue that Utilitarianism creates the frame for the rationalist technocratic thinking that (as I've with regard to education issues) is, whatever its imagined humane good intentions, anti-humanistic. It may be possible to make arguments from within the Christian personalist tradition about the permissibility of legalizing abortions under certain circumstances, but such arguments should not be made on terms that accept or are in any way associated with the NARAL utilitarian technocratic frame. The NARAL ethos of abortion on demand is completely out of alignment with a Christian personalist ethos for which abortions are seen at best as a tragic necessity in certain rare circumstances. 

And so while I think that alliances need to be made between Christians and secularist Utilitarians on issues where there is common ground--particularly on issues of economic justice--I'd like to see a more vigorous emergence of a Christian Left that makes a case for its positions on its own terms rather than to simply merge with the amorphous, ontologically nihilist positions of the secular Left. 

Does it Matter What People Think or Believe? (Updated)

Or only what they do?

I think that ultimately what most matters is what they do, the choices they make, but the scope of what they can do--the scope for their freedom--is expanded or limited by what one thinks or believes. And how one thinks is shaped by the underlying story he tells himself about the sense or nonsense that the world makes.

But it is also important what the people around us think or believe, what their expectations and aspirations are for themselves and for us. What is the accepted measure by which we measure up or fail to? In other words, it matters what the culture in which we find ourselves thinks and believes. That is the 'social imaginary'--and it structures our assumptions about possibility and impossibility.

I do not believe in the power of positive thinking. I do not believe that believing it so makes it so, but I do believe that one's mental framework creates the workspace for action. This is simple in the psychological sense of self-fulfilling prophecies. People who have a positive outlook expect good things to happen, and even when bad things happen, they see it as a temporary setback and keep at it. People who expect things to go badly, are less likely to put their heart into it, because, well, what's the point? The article the other day in the NYT about a study in the Journal of Affective Disorders that found that depressed people have a higher likelihood of to repsond well to treatment when compared to those who don't.

“I think it’s a scientifically sound way of measuring things that have to do with people’s experience of spirituality,” said Torrey Creed, an assistant professor of psychology in psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think about this as a study of cognitive styles, that there’s a pattern of thinking that helps people get better in treatment. And two examples of this pattern of thinking are ‘I believe in treatment’ and ‘I believe in God.’”

Randi McCabe, director of the Anxiety Treatment and Research Center at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Ontario, said, “People’s belief that something is going to work will make it work for a significant proportion of people,” similar to the placebo effect.

That makes sense to me on its own terms, and this kind of belief or outlook has very little to do with the deeper and more mysterious thing, which is faith. Faith, in fact, is very often accompanied by an anguish that is simply incommensurate with any discussion about having a positive outlook. I think we're all of us the richer that St. John of the Cross, Pascal, Kierkegaard and others didn't go into 'treatment'. Mother Teresa, we've learned, was often deeply anguished. William James did not identify himself among what he called the "healthy minded." Healthy mindedness has its limits. I have no patience with people who think that religious faith is some kind of opiate to dull wits incapable of confronting the world as it is.

But quite apart from the question of 'faith', the test of any social imaginaray is the degree to which it promotes sanity and decency. Sanity is the measure of human capacity to allow the world to disclose itself on its own terms. Decency is the measure of human capacity to act in the world as if one's own interests and concerns were not the only or most important consideration. One's capacity for one is reciprocal with the other. And yet if we live in a social imaginary in which one's dreams, interests, personal ambitions are celebrated as core values, whose realization is the measure of a life lived successfully or not, how is sanity or decency a possibility in our political arrangements? 

I lay those thoughts out as a prelude to what I hope to get around to talking about, which is the dialogue between Millbank and Zizek about the possibility of working for justice and peace in the political sphere. Their discussion takes these basic ideas about the relevancy of thinking and believing to a different level. Millbank argues that Zizek's Hegelian ontolgoical nihilism makes any aspirational work toward a just society unsustainable. And although I don't understand Zizek yet well enought to agree, this is an argument that I've made here frequently about secular Liberalism, and I think we're seeing its failure played out all around us. The aspiration for justice and peace is not sustainable or even remotely possible in a "flat" social imaginary, if by flatness we mean closed to transcendence. There is at best Hobbes's perpetual cold war.

More on this as we go along. 

UPDATE: In the NYT this morning there was this article entitled "On Wall Street a Culture of Greed Won't Let Go." So what else is new? But it relates to the point I'm trying to make above. Wall Strett is the reductio ad absurdum of the American individualist dream. The article states that 

Virtually every top M.B.A. program in the country now teaches ethics classes, many of them required. In 2008, a coalition of students started the MBA Oath, a voluntary pledge among students to “create value responsibly and ethically.” So far, more than 6,000 students have signed the pledge.

And yet, the report and other anecdotal evidence suggest that whatever is being done both in the classroom and on the job is not enough. According to a controversial study called “Economics Education and Greed” that was published in 2011 by professors at Harvard and Northwestern, an education in economics surprisingly may be making the problem worse.

“The results show that economics education is consistently associated with positive attitudes towards greed,” the authors wrote. “The uncontested dominance of self-interest maximization as the primary (if not sole) logic of exchange, in business schools and corporate settings alike, may lead people to be more tolerant of what other people see as morally reprehensible.”

So you get require everybody take an ethics course, which everyone dutifully does with eyes struggling not to roll upward. In my experience these ethics courses are often more about what is legal or not, rather than what is ethical or not. But let's say you get somebody in there who wants to grapple with the ethical realities these kids are going to face. What does he have to work with? Everything outside his classroom militates against whatever he's might want to teach about embracing a code of basic decency. 

The people who go into MBA programs are already predisposed to think of self-interest as the only really important motivator, and everything they see around them reinforces it. So this guy in an ethics class wants to suggest an alternative mo? Whatever. What a waste of time and effort. 

Do you think my minimalist definition of decency as the 'capacity to act in the world as if your personal interests are not the only ones or the most important ones' can get any traction in such a social world? There are no resources in the social imaginary of the larger secular culture to combat a mentality in which decency is merely an aesthetic preference. Go for it if 'being decent' floats your boat--but you have no right to judge me if what floats my boat is the thrill of winning in a high-stakes game. By what standard can you make such a judgment about better and worse? 

Our political economy is such an obscenity because the obscene people who are its primary actors think they are completely morally justified, even benefactors of humanity, in pursuing their interests because they are social Darwinists in the Gordon Gecko idiom: 

Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A.

This is very compelling if you operate in a world in which it's not just an idea, but an accurate description of the way the most successful people around you think and behave. What works to counter it, some pre-school admonition "to share" or "be nice"? Why? Why should I share or be nice? I did it when I was younger because I'd earn the teacher's disapproval if I did not, but now I earn my peers' and superiors' disapproval if I do. Decency is for losers. Ask Rick Santelli.

 

The Judaeo-Christian Cosmogonic Myth

[This is a repost from 2010--with a few changes. I thought I'd throw it out there again since it links to a bunch of themes that have come up in comments recently--second naiveté, Mary, the flat, univocity of the post-Scotus cosmos, and the references to the Meditations, on which this piece leans heavily. This is theological pastiche, so take it for what it's worth, a thought experiment.--jw]

I think that one of the biggest problems with contemporary Westerners--even among people who think of themselves as religious--lies in their inability to  feel the sacred. And this lack of feeling makes it almost impossible to frame a plausible cosmology open to the existence of anything outside the materialist box that frames our experience. There are vestiges of an older sensibility. We look at the starry sky above us and we feel something that science simply is inadequate to explain, and yet moderns feel silly if they discuss seriously ideas about the cosmos on terms different from those that Carl Sagan would approve of.

And yet when we read about the cosmogonies of the ancients, we sense they were onto something that we have lost the capacity to appreciate. We want to retrieve it, but we are shy about it; we study these texts and other artifacts of premodern consciousness and talk about them in a kind of scholarly way so as not to let on that we think that maybe they knew something that we don't. But we dare not take seriously their stories--safer to assume they are fanciful fictions, and any attempt to work with them is the stuff of trivial entertainments, like the novels of Dan Brown or the Indiana Jones films.

Modern consciousness has squeezed out the mystery in things that naive premodern consciousness took for granted, and so, echoing Paul Ricoeur, I'd argue that we need to develop a new mindset that embraces a 'second naiveté' that would once again be capable of experiencing what premoderns experienced and then tried to represent in their myths. The gospel tells us that unless we become like children, we cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. It does not mean to regress into childishness, but to open up the parts of the soul that we have closed down, the parts that are open to the enchantment in Being, to be adults but to also the recover something lost. That's what I understand second naiveté to be.

In what I write here I assume that human consciousness as it is currently structured cognizes in its ordinary states only a small fraction of the full spectrum of Being. Second naiveté, therefore, is open to the idea of a supersensible, supra-rational realm that is wrapped around us and interpenetrates what we experience in ordinary sense-centered consciousness.  A second naiveté is open to the idea that people in every generation have experiences in which clues, indicators, epiphanies are given concerning the existence of this supersensible, supra-rational realm. The difference between moderns and premoderns lies in that moderns think these people are crazy and premoderns thought they were shamans, initiates, or saints.

Brooks on 'A Secular Age'

Brooks's column this morning tries to summarize Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. There's nothing particularly striking in it to quote, but if you're not familiar with the book, the column will give you an overview of its concerns, which are the concerns of this blog. The basic question for the book, Taylor says, is "Why was it virtually impossible not to believe in God in, say 1500 in our Western society, while in 2000 many of us find this not only easy but even inescapable?"

I think the answer to that question is complex, and Taylor's grappling with it is an honest and interesting response, which is as a believer, a Catholic, to embrace the pluralism at the same time as to rigorously pursue his own faith commitment. What other sane choice is there? Faith, most particularly the Christian faith, is most itself when it eschews a Constantinian project, which isn't to say that it hasn't an obligation to evangelize, which I think is done for most of us in our deeds in how we live rather than in aggressive public professions. 

But I think it's also done by engaging with the spirit of the times and by reading the signs  of the times, and so along those lines I wanted to say a word about John Milbank Radical Orthodoxy. I bring him up because I started reading his dialog book with Slavoj Zizek entitle The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? 

Taylor, Millbank, and Zizek are not for everybody, and the focus of this blog is not to become a forum for technical discussions of philosophy or theology, but I sense a shift in the zeitgeist and while only a minuscule percentage of educated people could spend more than thirty minutes reading any of these books without giving up in frustration, I think it's important to point to and try to understand what they are doing: Challenging the presuppositions of modernity and hypermodernity and creating a space for believers to become essential voices in shaping the thought and imagination of the global fusion culture that is now emerging. The Western tradition is this Christian tradition. It isn't the whole story, but it's a critical part of it. 

Milbank's project to retrieve a tradition of Christian thought that uses Plato, and the Neoplatonism of Proclus and Iamblichus,  and moves through the early church fathers, particularly Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine, then through Aquinas, Eckhardt, Boehme, the Cambridge Platonists, Kierkegaard and the nouvelle theologie of de Lubac, Congar and other Catholic thinkers of the early 20th century is one I find very appealing in its broad outline. I am all for a post-Kantian, post-secular retrieval of serious, high-level metaphysics, and I don't think it's possible to do without this Christian tradition being an essential dialog partner.

And that's why the Millbank/Zizek book interests me. I'm not ready to talk about that yet, and when I do, I'm going to try to make it as accessible as possible to lay readers. But I'm convinced what they are doing is worth understanding and knowing about. 

It Is Futile to Reason with Them

From "Misreading Eichmann in Jerusalem" by Roger Berkowitz in yesterday's NYT:

That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world.

I haven't seen the movie Hannah Arendt yet because it hasn't arrived in Seattle. But in watching the trailers and reading about it I was surprised to learn that Arendt was roundly excoriated for her depiction of Eichmann in her New Yorker dispatches and the book she wrote about the trial. And I was surprised to learn from Berkowitz that the consensus since then about her depiction of Eichmann is that Arendt's book on Eichmann is good philosophy but bad history. Berkowitz defends Arendt, and says that she would be wrong if she said Eichmann was simply a bureaucratic automaton, but that's now what she said. She said that Eichmanns evil lay in his surrendering to a movement and allowing his own autonomy to be obliterated by his merging with it. This is the other side of 'movement politics'. 

I think there are a lot of directions to take this, but the one that interests me at the moment is how people understand the nature of the 'autonomy' that Eichmann surrendered? If Eichmann should have resisted, what is the ground for it? When your entire horizon is filled by norms and everyone you know accepts and reinforces those norms, and those norms are broadly reinforced as noble and idealistic, what resources does an Eichmann have to think or believe otherwise? And why should he think otherwise?

People who have religious commitments have a good answer for that, but I'm curious what the arguments might be for those who don't. Doesn't it just come down to aesthetic preference? Well, you prefer an aesthetic of humaneness and respect--good for you, but I choose power and glory and noble violence. Who are you to say I'm wrong? On what basis can you reason with me? To what in me can you appeal? 

 

Sirota v. Brooks on Egypt's Mental Capacity

“No more election after today,” the crowd chanted in response.

After a night of deadly clashes at Cairo University that accompanied the takeover, some ultraconservative Islamists gathered there said their experiment in electoral politics — a deviation from God’s law to begin with — had come to a bad end.

“Didn’t we do what they asked,” asked Mahmoud Taha, 40, a merchant. “We don’t believe in democracy to begin with; it’s not part of our ideology. But we accepted it. We followed them, and then this is what they do?” [Source: Todays's NYT, "For Islamists, Dire Lessons on Politics and Power"]

More often than not I'll side with Sirota if he's in a spat with Brooks, but this time I find myself siding with Brooks. Maybe I'm missing something--is there some neocon subtext that Sirota is responding to?--but I see Sirota's position in his Salon piece today as that of a Democratic absolutist, and he is, IMO, doing a silly pc police thing in his takedown of this morning's David Brooks's column. In doing so he's painting himself in a corner in which he is forced to support anti-democratic, political religious fanaticism exemplified in the quote above. Here are the grafs in the Brooks column that Sirota finds offensive:

Right now, as Walter Russell Mead of Bard College put it, there are large populations across the Middle East who feel intense rage and comprehensive dissatisfaction with the status quo but who have no practical idea how to make things better…

It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.

Brooks also says the paragraphs that precede the above quote, but that Sirota does not quote:

Those who emphasize substance [as opposed to democratic process], on the other hand, argue that members of the Muslim Brotherhood are defined by certain beliefs. They reject pluralism, secular democracy and, to some degree, modernity. When you elect fanatics, they continue, you have not advanced democracy. You have empowered people who are going to wind up subverting democracy. The important thing is to get people like that out of power, even if it takes a coup. The goal is to weaken political Islam, by nearly any means.

World events of the past few months have vindicated those who take the substance side of the argument. It has become clear — in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere — that radical Islamists are incapable of running a modern government. Many have absolutist, apocalyptic mind-sets. They have a strange fascination with a culture of death. “Dying for the sake of God is more sublime than anything,”declared one speaker at a pro-Morsi rally in Cairo on Tuesday. . . 

Islamists might be determined enough to run effective opposition movements and committed enough to provide street-level social services. But they lack the mental equipment to govern. Once in office, they are always going to centralize power and undermine the democracy that elevated them. . . .

Once elected, the Brotherhood subverted judicial review, cracked down on civil society, arrested opposition activists, perverted the constitution-writing process, concentrated power and made democratic deliberations impossible.

What part of this does Sirota disagree with? But here's how Sirota responds: 

Yes, that’s right, according to Brooks, a country and culture of 82 million is having a difficult time transitioning to democracy not because it has been repressed for decades, and not because it has few well-established democratic institutions, but instead because the people inherently don’t possess the cognitive (“mental”) capacity for self-governance.

To know this is some hardcore bigotry, just imagine saying the same thing about another demographic subgroup. Imagine, for instance, if Brooks said cities with large minority populations in the United States were facing corruption problems and blight because those minorities “lack even the basic mental ingredients” for better governance. It would be universally — and rightly — denounced as wildly racist by everyone other than white supremacists.

But he's not saying 82 million Egyptians don't have sufficient mental capacity for democratic self-governance, but that the Egyptians who elected Islamists in the Morsi-led Islamic Brotherhood don't. It's not just an Egyptian thing. Majorities often show that they don't have the mental capacity or maturity to govern. I'd say that would be an accurate description of the white Christians in the South who supported and lived comfortably with Jim Crow laws. Doesn't mean that they aren't nice  people in many ways, but I'd argue that they don't have the mental capacity or political maturity to elect people who are partisans of sanity and decency. I have Republican friends and family members, whom I love dearly, but who lose all credibility with me for political sanity when they start defending Limbaugh, Bachman or Palin. A grown-up political conversation is simply not possible with people who take these people and what they say seriously. 

Here's a thought experiment for Sirota: What if the Christian fundamentalists in Mississippi completely dominated the state Republican Party in the next election cycle, win in a landslide, and ram through the substitution of Biblical Law for its state constitution?  Would that be ok just because a majority supported it in a democratic process? Or would it be a sign that most Mississipians lacked the mental capacity to govern in the modern world? Why is it different in Egypt, and why is it wrong to question the mental capacity of any country, state, or party that allows itself to be governed by religious fanatics? 

If Brooks and I are mischaracterizing the fundamental agenda of the Islamist political program, make that argument, and I'm convinced, I'll back down. But regardless, the basic argument stands: Democracy is not an end it itself; it is a means to an end, namely to deliver within the framework of a contemporary, pluralistic society a basic level of sanity and decency. If I live in a society in which power resides with an entrenched faction dominated by actors who are not sane and decent, even if they are democratically elected, then democracy has failed. If insanity and indecency have clotted the system with majority approval, then the decent, sane people in the minority cannot be blamed for looking for other than democratic means to fix the problem. 

If 'sane' and 'decent' seem too vague, I define them in comments to my post the other day, "Egypt and the Problem of Democratic Legitimacy." I'm happy to discuss further in comments here or there.

 

 

 

Egypt and the Problem of Democratic Legitimacy

According to the civics text books, a democracy is a government in which the people are sovereign. In its republican forms it elects people who represent them in legislatures, and they work to create the laws that the sovereign people are obligated to obey, whether they like them or not because they were enacted by the representatives that popular majorities elected. If they don't like it, then they have to work to get the laws changed through the same process. That works fine, so long as the game isn't rigged, and the public interest has a chance to be realized.

And so unless you insist on some Rousseauan idea of the 'general will' and how the people are always by definition right, it's been demonstrated time and time again that majorities often get it wrong. Sometimes because they are in a paroxysm of fear or in a patriotic frenzy; sometimes because they have been manipulated by demagogues, the saner, more mature minority does not prevail. The ancient Greeks thought democracy was a form of government that inevitably devolved into tyranny precisely because of its vulnerability for majorities to be manipulated by demagogues who used popular support to obtain power, and then used that power to establish an autocracy. Think Germany or Louisiana in the '30s. 

And so it should be obvious that because a government was democratically elected, it does not mean that it has legitimacy.The ballot box confers what I would describe as a provisional legitimacy; it's not absolute. Ultimately legitimacy is conferred in the streets. When elections or the basic elements in the system are rigged, there might be legality, but not real legitimacy, not a legitimacy that means something. I'd argue that George Bush's taking office in 2001 was technically legal, but not legitimate; legitimacy was conferred in the streets when no one took to them. 

Egypt is at the mercy of the military, and everything depends on whether it is dominated by actors possessed by the will to power or the public interest. There's good reason to hope for the latter, because they are responsive to the verdict of illegitimacy conferred on the Morsi government by citizens in the streets. There isn't something sacred about democratic elections. If 50% + 1 of your electorate is insane, ignorant, and easily manipulable, you probably shouldn't have them. The Jim Crow south was legal but illegitimate. Democratic elections, I'd argue, have legitimacy only in societies with majorities that possess a basic level of decency, maturity, and civic mindedness, and the jury is out on whether the US has that anymore and whether its government has real legitimacy. Legality does not equal legitimacy. 

I'd say a solid 40% of Americans don't have the requisite sanity and decency to endorse a legitimate government, but 40% do, and if at some point the latter don't take to the streets to call out the the way their government is trending toward illegitimacy, they will show themselves to be less mature and civically responsible than Egyptians, Turks, and Brazilians. And as with the Bush election, they are otherwise legitimating the illegitimate by their passivity. 

The Limits of Authenticity

Simon Critchley in a recent NYT piece: 

Unlike the conversions that transfigure the born-again’s experience of the world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that required extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality defined by scarcity have largely collapsed and been replaced with this New Age therapeutic culture of well-being that does not require obedience or even faith — and certainly not feelings of guilt. Guilt must be shed; alienation, both of body and mind, must be eliminated, most notably through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing work.

In the gospel of authenticity, well-being has become the primary goal of human life. Rather than being the by-product of some collective project, some upbuilding of the New Jerusalem, well-being is an end in itself. The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn’t really require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might transcend the serene and contented living of one’s authentic life and baseline well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma.

Whereas the American dream used to be tied to external reality — say, America as the place where one can openly practice any religion, America as a safe haven from political oppression or America as the land of opportunity where one need not struggle as hard as one’s parents — now, the dream is one of pure psychological transformation.

This is the phenomenon that one might call, with an appreciative nod to Nietzsche, passive nihilism. Authenticity is its dominant contemporary expression.

I think this passage and the rest of the piece adds a layer to the discussion prompted in comments to my last post "Taking Offense".  Louis CK and Eddie Murphy are hierophants in the cult of authenticity.

But the question remains: What is the alternative? Well I've been arguing that a shared sense of collective aspiration might be a good place to start. But you can't snap your fingers and say, "Let's do it." It has to emerge. Critchey is lamenting the loss of a time when we had it, but doesn't really suggest how to retrieve it.

***

I saw the Israeli film Fill the Void this weekend, and it seems connected to this discussion, but I'm not sure I can articulate why clearly yet. So a few preliminary thoughts. 

The film explores the tension between traditional forms and genuine feeling by telling the story of 18-year-old Shira and the marriage match being made for her within her ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Tel Aviv. I came away from the movie thinking about how the forms filter out some feelings and cultivate others. There were times in the movie where the forms seemed mechanical and formulaic, but other times when they were saturated with life and genuine feeling. In the end, the important thing is feeling, not the form--but it has to be the right kind of feeling. There are some feelings you do not feed, and there are others that you encourage. That's what a living traditional culture does. 

In the cult of authenticity, this would be regarded as repressive. but I'd argue that the forms create the possibility for genuine feeling that are impossible where these forms do not exist. The forms are like a trellis on which the capacity of the soul for a broader range of feeling grows. The problem lies when the forms become an end in themselves and no longer mediate feeling. 

I am not someone who is at all attracted to the kind of life depicted in this film, but if given the choice of having to be stranded on a desert island with 100 Louis CKs, Eddie Murphys, Sarah Silvermans, etc.,  or 100 people from a Haredi Jewish community, without hesitation I would choose the latter. I don't doubt that living with the first group would be easier and more entertaining, but for me there is no question that the second group would create a life on that island that would provide the possibility for the richer, more nuanced, and more deeply human life.  

The problem for us in America is that the trellis has been pulled down, it lies in shards, and now the American soul sprawls aimlessly along the ground rather that reaching up toward something worth reaching for. The traditional forms, when they worked, provided a way to reach for that, but they stopped working for an array of complex reasons. Now the challenge is to build something that works. It starts with sorting through the shards of the old, broken-down trellis, and finding something there that you can work with. So it seems to me.

See a related post: "Dying Traditions".