After the Future

Death & Resurrection of the Human: The Rising of the Logos's World-Constituting Song

[For Nietzsche t]he Overman or post-human animal is he who freed himself from those forms of sham religion known as Nature, Reason, Man and Morality. Only this audacious animal can peer into the abyss of the Real and find in the death of God the birth of a new species of humanity. As with Christian faith, the only place to begin is with a confession that our hands are steeped in the blood of divinity. Man, too, must be dismantled, in so far as he is modeled on the unity and infinity of the godhead. He is defined so completely by his dependence on his Creator that the two must fall together. There can be no obsequies for the Almighty without a funeral ceremony for humanity as well. The death of God must herald the death of Man, in the sense of the craven, guilt-ridden, dependent creature who bears that name at present. What will replace him is the Overman. Yet in his sovereignty over Nature and lordly self dependence, the Overman has more than a smack of divinity about him, which means, ironically, that God is not dead after all. What will replace him continues to be an image of him.

That the death of God involves the death of Man, along with the birth of a new form of humanity, is orthodox Christian doctrine, a fact of which Nietzsche seems not to have been aware. The Incarnation is the place where both God and Man undergo a kind of kenosis or self-humbling, symbolized by the self-dispossession of Christ. Only through this tragic self-emptying can a new humanity hope to emerge. In its solidarity with the outcast and afflicted, the crucifixion is a critique of all hubristic humanism. Only through a confession of loss and failure can the very meaning of power be transfigured in the miracle of resurrection. The death of God is the life of the iconoclast Jesus, who shatters the idolatrous view of Yahweh as irascible despot and shows him up instead as vulnerable flesh and blood.   --Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

It's clear to me, anyway, that our life here on earth has a purpose, and that the future of the earth is central to that purpose. And yet it's clear that for most Christians this history, or any sense of humans being part of an evolving historical drama, has little to do with their understanding of who they are, where they came from, and where they are going. I think there is a mythopoetic narrative possibility here that awaits its moment to emerge into a legitimate space that has not yet been prepared for it. We live now in a time when all grand narratives are suspect, but that will not always be true. It's just a sign of the temporarily decadent stage through which we must pass in our time. We are at a historical low slack tide now, and soon enough we will be dealing with the flood and its aftermath.

In the meanwhile, the default Christian mythopoesis about history seems to depend strongly on the "exile" model--history is jail time: we do our time on the earth following the rules as best we can so that we can get out of jail on good behavior and go to our heavenly home in the spiritual pleroma. This model, in my opinion, is more Buddhist or Hindu than Christian. In such a model the earth is a prison to be escaped. I think of the earth rather as our ailing, semi-comatose mother whom humans must find a way to nurse back to health.

And so the exile model also enervates rather than energizes progressive political action by focusing on goals to be realized in eternity rather than in history. The Enlightenment idea of historical progress has likewise suffered enervation. Like all grand narratives, its assumptions have been debunked by postmodern deconstructive skepticism. And so the secular Left, because of its now postmodern assumptions, has no plausible narrative of human progress that it can embrace unironically, and so has become feckless in the face of threats from a more robust, grounded, regressive Right. At its energetic best the postmodern secular Left musters something like Occupy Wall Street, but because of its anarchic, foundation-less ethos, it has no ground to stand upon and so to sustain itself. The Enlightenment model, including its Marxist offshoots, was always flawed because too dependent on a flattened understanding of the human being and its aspirations, and it is hard for me to see any plausible sustainable resistance to the Right that is not grounded in an imagination of human possibility that is deeper and richer than the flattened model of the human to which the secular Left currently subscribes. 

But because the Enlightenment narrative for human progress has failed does not mean that another narrative of human progress cannot be framed. And I would argue that once there is a broader willingness to recognize that Christian ontological foundations can legitimately provide a framework for its development, Christian thinkers and activists can play a pivotal role in shaping such a future narrative. That foundation is already there; it always was. The Enlightenment narrative grew from a reductionistic misappropriation of it. We are clearly not at a point where the broader culture and its public intellectuals are willing to recognize that fact, but it's interesting to me that a Marxist like Eagleton seems to be working his way toward it, and that is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. Maybe, maybe not. Eagleton, at least, understands the terms of the problem.

***

Owen Barfield in his book Saving the Appearances provides a mythopoetic way to think about the Christian meaning of history that I, at least, find compelling. For me its a heuristic device, a provisional way to organize and hold random things I believe together until a better way presents itself. Barfield understood the problem of modern cultural decadence in much the same way Nietzsche did, but he frames it as a necessary, if risk-fraught, middle phase in the unfolding of a larger historical drama. This drama extends back in the evolution of human consciousness to what he calls Original Participation and forward to Final Participation, i.e., from the metaphorical Garden of the beginning times to the metaphorical New Jerusalem of the far-distant end times, from the participation mystique of totemic and animistic peoples, to the communion of saints envisioned in Revelations.

These ideas are similar to Teilhard de Chardin's evolutionary mythopoesis regarding the movement of history from the Alpha to Omega, from creation of the cosmos to the true telos of history at which point all things converge in Christ. Both Barfield and Teilhard take evolution seriously, but in a way that hearkens back more to Hegel than to Darwin. (See comment 1) The mechanics of Darwinian biological evolution are mostly accepted but subsumed into a larger movement that is geist-driven, i.e., spirit or mind driven--or, as I would put it grounded in an understanding of how the world is dynamically grounded in the Logos. 

Like Nietzsche, Barfield agrees that the modern era has been a time in which the last vestiges of transcendent meaning as a 'given' in the world have disappeared—transcendent meaning is no longer something a truly modern consciousness experiences as coming from out there. Moderns experience meaning partly from acculturation, but while that provides the scaffolding, the most intense experiences of meaning are subjective and constituted from within. But with this enhancement of subjectivity comes social fragmentation, anomie, fecklessness, enervation--and with it the progressive undermining of the cultural scaffolding that has brought us to this postmodern moment. So the solution must be to awaken capacities in the human soul and the soul of the earth (which are the same thing) in order that meaning in the world be reconstituted. The movement toward Final Participation is a movement toward an intersubjective communion: the alienation of the subject-thing rift is repaired, all beings become Thous. The lion lies down with the lamb, and swords are refashioned into plowshares.

For Nietzsche this reconstituting project assumes a world without grace and without the possibility of communion--it is radically individualist. If there is any meaning to be created it derives from the ontologically groundless uebermensch and his surrender to the will to power. For Barfield's postmodern Christian the reconstituting project  derives from an ontological grounding in the Logos that dwells in the depths of the human soul and the soul of the world. For Barfield it is possible, indeed essential, that meaning be constituted by a different kind of ‘overcoming’ man, not Nietzsche's uebermensch, but rather the Logos bearer, the man or woman in whom the shattered or broken image of the Logos in whose likeness they were created can itself be reconstituted: awakened, healed or reintegrated into a joyful communion with the cosmos.

Whether currently believable or not by most non-believers, this narrative opens up human possibilities rather than closes them off, and it provides a frame that helps to shape a humanity enhancing political agenda. The bigger problem as I see it is that most Christians don't believe it either because they are still locked in the Exile model. If Christians don't live it, or something like it, they offer no real alternative to the prevailing narratives of the secular Left or the inflamed Right. 

If for the postmodern Christian, meaning is fundamentally subjective, that does not mean it is arbitrary or ungrounded. It just means that the grounding is intrinsic, and lies within the supple, grace-inspired, logos-grounded human heart rather than in the cultural nomos. We are still in a fraught intermediary stage insofar as we still feel compelled to privilege objective truth as real truth, which we still see in the vestiges of in positivistic science. But the understanding of truth as subjective to which Kierkegaard pointed, and then later Nietzsche, directs us to an understanding the rest of us have to catch up to. For both the postmodern Christian and Nietzsche truth is not static and timeless; it's creative, dynamic and evolving, but if for Nietzsche it is basically stuff the "post-human animal" makes up as he goes along, for the postmodern Christian it is deeply grounded in a creative, evolving understanding of the Logos's awakening in history. It is, therefore, about discovering depths and potentialities in the Logos-grounded human heretofore unrealized. For Christians the image of those potential capacities fully realized is the risen Christ. 

***

An epochal shift occurred on the first Easter that has not yet been fully accomplished. The nature of this shift didn’t manifest itself broadly in the West until the time of the Renaissance and the dawn of the Modern period when individual inwardness and the autonomy of the thinking self became more broadly experienced by humans for many reasons, not the least of which was the broadening of literacy after Gutenberg. Modernity has been very much the Age of the Eye; whatever we're moving into now will involve a different McLuhanite ratio of the senses, and with it a corresponding shift in consciousness that is even now underway. 

The Jews were the "Chosen" people because they were "given" the Law on Mt. Sinai. If at first the law was given extrinsically on slabs of stone, for the last 2000 years it has been gradually awakening in the depths of human souls so it is known intrinsically or intuitively in the heart in whom the Logos has awakened. The Logos sings the secret song that the entire cosmos sings; we hear it with the grace-transformed heart--the conscience--and the more developed the conscience the more clearly heard the song. The condition of being fallen is the condition of not being able to hear the song.

The great saints sing this song and dance spontaneously to its rhythm. But all humans of good will, believers or unbelievers, hear it to some degree whether they recognize its source or not. Christians are those who identify it as the Logos and who believe that the human capacity to hear his song at all depended on the events we celebrate during Holy Week.  It is therefore something that is extra-subjective, in the sense that it is the song of the Cosmos, but our way to it is by first awakening to its sounding within. And as it sounds in one heart it has the power to awaken its sound in the hearts of others, and eventually it will be a song heard and sung everywhere and developed everywhere. That's my image of Final participation, the Omega point, and of how we are to find our way to it.

For Barfield these changes  in human consciousness during the modern period have not been spiritually regressive despite the secularism and materialism that have accompanied them. He recognizes that for the educated urban dweller in the West, religious language and ritual have lost almost all of their sacred power as something given to us from a meaning world out there. But that does not mean that what comes to us as given from the tradition is therefore untrue or unbelievable as atheists insist. Does that mean, then, that rituals like the Catholic mass because they confer no external meaning should be cast off as meaningless? No, because the mass is the celebration of the central event on which all history pivots, and as such the moment when the song of the cosmos dies into our subjectivity, so that it might rise again in our human singing of it and in doing so awaken one another and eventually our semi-comatose mother, the earth. The mass is that song, and to participate in it is to sing it whether we experience the full significance of its meaning or not.

***

And right now the Christian imagination of the future is not very robust because it is still hamstrung by its premodern self-understanding. The exile model--the heaven as final destination model--still plays too powerful a role in the Christian imagination of history. The idea that the goal and purpose of human existence is to get off the planet and into some spiritual pleroma can no longer be embraced; too much is at stake, and it makes too easy a blindness to our responsibility for future generations who will live on the earth. 

There is indeed a spiritual pleroma, and it is the source of all life and all goodness, but our job is not to get off the planet and into it, but to be the infusion point through which the spiritual pleroma, the Logos and its song, can be injected into the earth thus effecting its transformation. We humans are the infusion points through which the Logos lives into our death and thus ebables us to renew the face of the earth.

This is a big, big task, and we are only at the beginning of our understanding how to do it, because we are only at the beginning of understanding how radically things have changed in the last five hundred years. We are only beginning to fathom the massive. unprecedented responsibility that human beings have now assumed for the future of the earth.

I believe this wandering in the wilderness, this cultural winter through which we are now living, is a cultural dark night of the soul, a collective Good Friday moment through which we must pass in order for a cultural resurrection, a renaissance, to occur. It is a transitional experience, but the outcome is not certain. We have the choice either move back into Egypt or forward into Canaan. Nazism was Germany's hearkening to a neo-pagan song, a song that awakens a nostalgia for totemic embeddedness. That tendency is an ever-present temptation for all decadent western cultures. Nostalgia is the siren song to which the Right hearkens, and we should never underestimate its power to enchant. 

Over the years I've written extensively about my fears that the attitudes that lie behind the political popularity of movement conservatism are rooted in this nostalgia for lost embeddedness and with it the lost sense of the sacred. It was a terrible loss, and it is cruel to adopt an attitude of contempt toward those who feel the loss most acutely. But you don't win these people over politically by debunking their beliefs, but rather by offering them something better. And the Left in this country is not offering anything that satisfies the ontological craving that those on the Right feel.

If the cultural Left believes it has has adopted a more grown-up understanding of how things are in its refusal to believe in spaghetti monsters or however they callowly reject a deeply complex and interesting religious tradition, they will soon discover that they will be overwhelmed by religious forces that are not so complex and interesting. Going forward, the argument will not be between the forces of irreligion and religion but between good religion and bad religion. Good religion hears the song of the Logos, bad religion the enchanting, demagogic songs of the anti-Christ.

My God, my God, Why hast thou forsaken me?

The specific character of despair is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair. --

Soren Kierkegaard

God’s ways are not our ways, and it’s a good thing, too. How otherwise could we call this Friday ‘Good’? The logic of the cross makes no sense by any kind of normal human reckoning. It is a logic that is in almost every way the reverse of what we take as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ in a fallen world. 

Do you know that painting by the early Renaissance artist Masaccio called The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden? If there is an image that better expresses human forsakenness, or of two sorrier, soul-shattered, heart-broken people, I’m not aware of it. That image of Adam and Eve is us. Forsakenness is us—that’s the bad news. But it doesn’t have to be, and that’s the good news that we celebrate on this Friday we call for good reason ‘Good’. And so if we don’t recognize ourselves in them, then it is probably very difficult to understand the significance of the astonishing event that we commemorate today. But they knew something we don’t. They knew both the ‘before the Fall’ and the ‘after the Fall’; we know only the ‘after’, and we have come to accept the ‘after’ as normal, as natural.*  But that ‘after’ is not normal; it’s not what we were created for. To think it's normal is to be in despair. 

Genesis tells us that we humans were created in the image and likeness of God. But in that moment of the Fall, whenever or whatever it was, like Humpty Dumpty, the human soul shattered. And so like a shattered mirror was the human soul's capacity to do what it was created to do: to know and reflect the goodness of God in His fullness. After that event, we human beings could know something of the truth, but only in bits and pieces. We had become incapable of reflecting—or as Mary was to put it in a later age, ‘magnifying’--the fullness of the goodness and beauty of the One in whose image we had been created. And so our ways could no longer be His ways; at best our ways reflect His ways as shards of mirror glass scattered on a desolate city sidewalk glisten in the sunlight. That’s something—it’s better than nothing—but it’s not what we were created for.

We are lucky that we know only the ‘after’ and not the ‘before’, because to know both would be unbearable. But we nevertheless long for that which was lost. All of our longings are, whether we are aware of it or not, a longing to have restored to us the fullness that was lost. Because after the Fall we humans became a soul-shattered people, and as after Humpty Dumpty’s great fall, all the king’s horses and the king’s men couldn’t put us back together again. We nevertheless long to be put back together again, to become what we were created for: to magnify in its fullness the goodness and beauty of Him in whose image we were created.

In the Christ of the gospels we encounter the human being whose ways were always God’s ways. Jesus Christ was like us humans in all ways but sin, which means that in Him the human image and likeness of God was not shattered. It remained whole, and so He, unlike us, magnified the goodness and beauty of the Father whose will He sought in everything He did.

So then how to understand those disconcerting words from the cross—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Sure, Peter and most of the other disciples had forsaken Him, but now even His Father had done so? Why? At this moment of all moments? Why? Because if we soul-shattered humans were to become whole like Him, His human soul had to shatter like ours. All his life He knew the ‘before’, and at that moment, He knew the ‘after’. We sons and daughters of Adam, whoever the prelapsarian Adam was, never knew as he knew the 'before', only the after to which many humans have simply come to accept as normative. But to accept it as normative is to fall into the despair that Kierkegaard describes as not knowing itself. The beginning of hope is to recognize how desperate our situation in fact is.

Christ’s anguished cry from the cross marks for Him His Masaccio Moment. In these words we hear echoed down through the ages the lament of Adam and Eve as they came to understand the enormity of their loss. In that moment He re-experienced as the sinless representative of all humanity the soul-shattering consequences of Adam’s sin in all of its alienating power. And like Adam, He knew the before, and He knew the after. He experienced the despair that knows itself.

Jesus Christ on the cross was never forsaken by the Father, and never were the rest of us, but in this moment He knew in its fullness the anguish of what was lost. Nothing human, even this deeply experienced human alienation from the Father, is alien to Him. In this moment Christ speaks from the cross as the still sinless, but now sin-shattered representative of all broken, anguished humanity at precisely the moment when humanity’s ages-long experience of having been forsaken by God is decisively ended by God. In the Risen Christ we encounter the once shattered but then restored image of the human being in its fullness. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men had no interest whatsoever in putting him back together again, but his Father did. And so the risen Christ is the shattered us made whole. He is the image of what we were created for; He is the restored fullness of the image and likeness of God in human form.

So this is what our restoration to wholeness required: First, His movement into our forsakenness and brokenness; and, second, our movement into His restored wholeness. If we choose to make that movement, slowly, step by step, our shattered souls get put back together again, and we find, as in the lives of the saints, that our human ways become gradually more like God’s ways, and that our image comes more to magnify His fullness.

Blessed are they who recognize their brokenness and retain hope; blessed are they who trust that even in the darkest darkness, no matter how forsaken they feel, God is there. Because Jesus Christ has been there, done that, and nothing in our human experience is alien to Him. And so, therefore, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of God.

Forsakenness is us—that’s the bad news. But it doesn’t have to be, and that’s the good news that we celebrate on this Friday we call for good reason ‘Good’. 

_______________________

*I am not a literalist, but while I don't think the Genesis story about the expulsion from the Garden is literally true, I believe it is mytho-poetically true. I believe the story points to an event that really happened and that had huge ontological consequences for human beings. The story points to the essence of its significance, but in ways that are open to different levels of interpretation. This is just one possible interpretation.

Ed note: This was part of a Tre Ore meditation for Good Friday at my local parish in 2015.

From 9/11 to Brussels: Negation of the Negation

It is perfectly possible to imagine a future for the capitalist system in which its built-in atheism becomes, so to speak, official--in which, belatedly taking its cue from Nietzsche, it may throw off its mauvaise foi and dispense with a moral superstructure which is not only increasingly superfluous in practice but embarrassingly at odds with its own profane activities. Such a future, however is still remote. As far religious conviction is concerned, one does not jettison history's most formidably successful symbolic system overnight. Besides, just at the point when Western capitalism may have been edging in this direction, two aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center and metaphysical ardor broke out afresh.

...

The irony of this is hard to overrate. No sooner had a thoroughly atheistic culture arrived on the scene, one which was no longer anxiously in pursuit of this or that placeholder for God, than the deity himself was suddenly back on the agenda with a vengeance. Nor were these two events unrelated. Fundamentalism has its source in anxiety rather than hatred. It is the pathological mindset of those who feel washed up by a brave new late-modern world, some of whom conclude that they can draw attention to their undervalued existence only by exploding a bomb in a supermarket. This is not, needless to say, a distinction between West and East. Fundamentalism is a global creed. Its adherents are to be found in the hills of Montana as well as in the souks of Damascus. The world is accordingly divided between those who believe too much and those who believe too little. While some lack all conviction, others are full of a passionate intensity. There are those who are loyal to little beyond power and profit, and there are others who, outraged by some of the consequences of this moral vacuity, tout doctrines that can blow of the heads of small children. As John Milbank writes,"[an] agnosticism designed to ward off fanaticisms appears now to foment it both directly and indirectly." 

Ideologically speaking, the West has unilaterally disarmed at just the point where it has proved most perilous for it to do so. Furnished with a mixture of pragmatism, culturalism, hedonism, relativism, and anti-foundationalism, it now confronts a full-blooded metaphysical antagonist, one brought to birth in part by its own policies, for which absolute truths, coherent identities and solid foundations pose not the faintest problem. 

...

Western capitalism, in short, has managed to help spawn not only secularism but also fundamentalism, a most creditable feat of dialectics. Having slain the deity, it has now had a hand in restoring him to life, as a refuge and a strength for those who feel crushed by its own predatory politics. If it finds itself besieged from the outside by a murderous creed, it is also assailed from within by the rage and paranoia of those of its fundamentalist citizens left high and dry by its priorities. At the very moment when contemporary capitalism seemed to be moving into a post-theological, post-metaphysical, post-ideological, even post-historical era, a wrathful God has once more raised his head, eager to protest that his obituary notice has been prematurely posted. The Almighty, it appears, was not safely nailed down in his coffin after all. He had simply changed address, migrating to the US Bible Belt, the Evangelical churches of Latin America and the slums of the Arab world. And his fan club is steadily swelling. 

From Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God  (2014), pp. 196-98,

Angry White Guys

Thoughtful piece by a very politically correct woman who lived with and loved the kind of redneck—Abe—that supports Trump. Best part in the closing paragraphs here:

On the other hand, political scientist Richard M. Skinner pointed out that many voters don’t choose their candidates based on ideological positions but instead partially because they don’t have an ideological framework.

I’m going to take this one step further and argue that though they might not have a framework, they have a need to rebel and to see themselves as part of a compelling narrative, to cast themselves in some sort of heroic light. I’ve heard this so often from family members and friends who support Trump: “At least he’s shaking things up.”

After I heard this enough times, I started to think about Abe and his flag and his “Scarface” and his Clint Eastwood. Then I saw commentary written by Okla Elliott, a professor and author of “Bernie Sanders: The Essential Guide,” who describes a conversation with an Uber cab driver and Trump supporter. Elliott booked a series of rides with this driver, and they got to talking about politics. As Elliott described Sanders’ positions bit by bit (calmly, without insulting the drivers’ intelligence), the driver was won over to Sanders’ position.

That would seem—by traditional political frameworks—to be impossible. But these conversations are relatively common today, and they happen because some voters are choosing Trump purely out of a need to rebel. That need is real, and it is something to cherish as much as it is to fear. Trump tells a story in which the white worker is a rebellious hero with a mission. Trump seems to give voice to that story, to flip the bird to the establishment—and that is more compelling to voters than any of his ridiculous, racist, dangerous or contradictory political standpoints. I know this from my own experience: The sense that something is wrong starts in the gut. Then you can get lucky and find people to talk to about that desire to rebel, but for the white working-class, finding the left-leaning alternative has become an obstacle course. And they are so often seen as a faceless mass: the racist, hopeless, backward, rural enemy.

Over our years together, Abe and I taught each other many things. I talked about race in this country, and he taught me about the ever-present appeal of the “outlaw” for working-class white males, the only remaining identity refuge after losing economic standing. He’d later shake his head at himself and wince that he ever had a Confederate flag on his wall. I’m glad I didn’t dismiss him out of hand, because he was teachable, as was I. 

Now, we all have a critical opportunity. While it might be satisfying to deride Trump supporters as idiots, racists and rubes, history shows we’d be better served by figuring out how to re-knit the country around the only fable we have left, the “outlaw” in all its incarnations, our version of the kokopeli trickster that refuses to be tamed. Trump’s appeal rests in his appearance of outlandish untameability, and the fact that left-wing rebellion has been erased from public consciousness. Rather than mocking anyone’s stupidity, we should understand the campaign of cultural impoverishment that has led to this frightening and critical moment.

Democrats have to decide which of the following two issues clusters is primary and which secondary. Both are important, but it's a question of emphasis: (1) cultural issues that relate to race, gender, gun control, immigration, or (2) having a probing analysis and remedies regarding how power and wealth work destructively in this country. That’s the choice Dems have now between HRC, who is strong on #1 and very weak on #2, and Bernie who is very strong on #2 and solid on #1.

 

Bernie, IMO, is hitting exactly the right emphatic note if you believe as I do that winning back the so-called Reagan Democrats is necessary for building a broad-based Left coalition. I believe that the more success you have in fixing issues related to #2, the easier it’s going to be for people to evolve regarding #1. Focusing primarily on #1 is politically divisive; focusing primarily on #2 is politically unifying. With unity comes power, and with power comes the ability to actually get something done. Take care of the underlying economic structural issues first, and thorny cultural issues become easier to deal with going forward.

 

Democrats are at a defining moment, and they have to ask themselves what this moment calls for: the bold choice or the safe choice. I would argue that to support HRC over Bernie at this point is like deciding in a close game to punt rather than to go for it on fourth down. In making the safe choice they are IMO settling for eight more years of gridlock and impasse. In making the safe choice, they are ceding all the populist energy to the Right. And so in making the safe choice Democrats will lose an opportunity to take away a significant part of what composes the GOP base right now. The power of the one percent is significantly diminished if it can't hold the angry white vote, and If angry Reagan Democrats are not given a populist choice on the Left, they will choose the guy on the Right. Bernie can win over, not all, but a good chunk of them in a way that HRC just cannot.

 

I don’t know if the Dems’ nominating HRC is enough to give Trump the election in this cycle--probably not. But it's insanity for Democrats, because of their own tribal parochialism, to keep driving angry white people into the arms of the 1%. Democrats keep finding ways to say to them: "Go away; we don’t want you because of your politically incorrect attitudes." This group is only going to get larger going forward as more and more of them become economically marginalized, and it will start attracting “rebel”  blacks and hispanics, because it won’t take long for them to understand that Democrats like HRC don’t really represent their interests either. The idea that the Dems win in the long run because of demographic changes browning America assumes that brown attitudes now will be their attitudes always, and that’s wishful thinking if the fundamental structural problems regarding power and money are not fixed. 

 

Ides of March

Last night Democrats in Illinois, Missouri, and Ohio decided that they wanted to take what they think of as the safe bet, and their votes for HRC were so many daggers that killed Bernie's revolution.  A few thoughts going forward:

I see cultural identity issues as more central to our politics now than economic ones. This is the underlying point I make in the previous post, Dying Traditions in New York. Economics is about physical security; cultural identity is about spiritual security. Spiritual security is the felt sense of the dignity and freedom that humans feel that relies on their felt sense of the solidity of the place in the universe that they imagine themselves to inhabit. When the meaning framework that provides that solidity is attacked and it starts to crumble, so does the sense of self of the people who live within it.

Attack their meaning framework, and you attack their felt sense of dignity, freedom, and power. In the face of such attacks, some people find a way to adapt, but many don't. This IMO explains the Klan, the Nazis, the Tea Party, Islamic terrorism, and cultism in general. The people in these cults are people with little intrinsic sense of what's right or wrong. They depend instead on extrinsic social cues to know that. Mob violence is a socially legitimated way for powerless people to feel powerful, and their violence is usually directed toward scapegoats and those who made them feel powerless in the first place. The mob (or the cult, which is the same thing) provides the replacement for the richer, more nuanced meaning framework that was destroyed. 

Ted Cruz is a dangerous man and not to be underestimated, but I believe he is just enough of a sociopath to make him unelectable. He's just too creepy to win over most Americans. Trump is more benign and as such more dangerous. He is a pathetic, emotionally stunted narcissist looking for love in all the wrong places, but he is dangerous because of the mob that is giving him that love--and because of the agenda of the power elite who will give him their love once his nomination is inevitable. Trump himself has no agenda except to be loved and respected, so in the long run the powerful people whose love he craves will set his agenda. At this point because of his unfavorables he's still a long shot to win in the general, but things change--unforeseen things happen. Mobs, demagogues, rich powerful elites who think they can control the demagogue and the mob? We've seen this movie before too frequently. 

Democrats who justify their support for HRC as using their heads rather than their hearts are deluding themselves. She is a weaker candidate than Sanders in confronting the menace that Trump represents. These Democrats are mistaken to think that what makes them feel comfortable is what the country wants. That is very dubious. HRC is a yuppie careerist with no real moral compass, and as such a bland candidate with little to zero charisma. She will be a dim bulb when set next to Trump's flaring neon. So while it's important now that she win, there's a very good chance that she won't. Sanders represents something clear and strong. He's someone you can rally around. HRC is not that. She's not a terrible person or candidate, but she's not a particularly good or interesting one. She's just a formulaic, platitudinous, run-of-the mill politician who will play the Beltway game with little understanding or insight about the world outside the Beltway bubble. Anybody who thinks that's what most Americans want is delusional. 

I don't think she really understands what is fueling either Trump's or Sanders's popularity, and I doubt she really takes it very seriously. No constituency, except women of a certain age and class, feel any strong sense of identity with her. Once Trump gets the nomination he will tone down the demagoguery and pivot to present himself as a no b.s. pragmatic problem solver. His let's-make-America-great-again nationalism is a cultural identity strategy that could resonate powerfully with many Americans in the mushy middle. These are people who feel powerless in their own lives and long to feel empowered again, and any demagogue worth his salt knows how to use that. Trump's demagoguery will be particularly powerful if things heat up on the terrorist front.

Dying Traditions in New York: The Baymen and Farmers of Long Island before WWII

The other day, I reposted Dying Traditions, which I suggest you read before this post because it provides a context for what I want to say here. I was reminded of it during my current reading of Robert Caro's The Power Broker, which is a biography of Robert Moses. But it is not your run-of-the-mill biography. It is striking for its ambition and for the quality of its prose, and it is really the story of the clash during the first half of the 20th Century between a kind of Liberal technocratic mentality and the destruction of the customary cultures that shaped old New York and its rural suburbs and fisheries. It is, in other words, the story about how the arrogant rationalism of technocratic elites finds a way to make things worse with all the best intentions. I feel a personal connection to the story told in it because it's the story of a time in New York's history that both my wife's and my grandparents, parents, and she and I lived through. Her family stayed in the city, but mine moved out from Queens to Suffolk County in the early 50s. So it's a story about that in particular, but so much more can be extrapolated from it. 

***

When we hear about how the Chinese government seeks to integrate (homogenize?) into the modern world what it regards as the regressive, superstitious, and medieval Uighurs in Xinjiang or the Buddhists in Tibet, we liberal cosmopolitan Westerners get upset about how Chinese bureaucrats don't understand or appreciate their rich, indigenous, traditional cultures. But Chinese behavior is consistent with the way moderns have always perceived traditional or customary cultures--as ignorant, barbaric, and, most importantly, as an impediment to progress.

We in America, especially if we are Liberals and fairly well educated, tend to look at the loss of traditional cultures on other continents as tragic, but are less inclined to see the elimination of our own traditional cultures as worthy of our concern. The people in them vote mostly GOP, right? These reactionary xenophobes, homophobes, and racists are an impediment to progress, and we wish they'd just 'evolve' or go away.

Racism and homophobia are hateful, but it should be obvious that it is important to understand why those attitudes persist. More difficult is to find a way to reject a certain set of attitudes while at the same time to respect the people who have them and the positive things about the cultures that support them. That's not an easy line to walk, but because so many Liberals are prodigal in their contempt for people who hold these regressive attitudes that we see the emergence in the political sphere of a guy like Trump. So many white Americans in the south, the mountain west, the rural midwest, and among urban ethnic blue collars, whose identity and sense of self are shaped by their having grown up in customary cultures are attracted to Trump because he is so unapologetic in his pushing back against the prodigality of smug Liberal contempt. For these groups political correctness equals what they feel as contempt for them and the cultural worlds with which they are identified.  An attack on someone's identity is an attack that triggers an adrenal response. 

Anybody who has read this blog over time knows that I am no nostalgist and that I don't think saving a tradition just for the sake of saving it is a worthwhile project. What's worth saving is the life of the soul that a customary tradition preserves, but once that soulfulness has departed, there's little left in the forms that is worth preserving. There is a point when you just have to recognize that the tradition has died and move on. Nevertheless, it's important to understand that when a tradition still lives, its destruction is tragic, that something deeply human has been lost, that it cannot be replaced, and that it would have been better if a way could have been found to support the effort of the people in it to adapt and survive.

But the primary thrust of Liberalism, which is the ethos of modernity at least since its inception during the Enlightenment, has been to disrupt and destroy traditional cultures rather than to help them adapt and survive. And so there is in the modern Enlightenment project something that has been deeply dehumanizing that justifies itself in the name of progress. We see it when we have some historical perspective as most of us see the destruction of American aboriginal cultures for the wanton horror that it was. If we were contemporaries of that destruction, we would not have focused on what was rich and noble in those cultures, but on what was violent, barbaric, and cruel. Both things were true about them--they were rich and noble as well as barbaric and cruel. The same is true for our own American culture right now in ways that are very difficult for many Americans to understand or to see. We see what's is rich and noble in the American tradition, but we filter out what is barbaric and cruel. Both Liberals and Conservatives do this in their own way--they just have different ideas about what parts of the American tradition are noble or barbaric and cruel. 

The Power Broker is the story about the barbarism and cruelty of Robert Moses, who was perceived in the first part of his career in the twenties and thirties as an icon of good-government, anti-Tammany progressivism. He was and idealist of a certain kind, brilliant, resourceful, and imaginative. He was a figure beside whom almost everyone else was dwarfed, including figures like FDR and LaGuardia. But in the portrait Caro paints of him, he was a sociopath who justified his cruelty in the name of progress, a progress he defined on his own very narrow in terms as building highways and parks while not caring a fig for the local communities and traditions those roads and parks destroyed.

So, as someone who grew up on Long Island in the 50s and 60s, I thought I'd reproduce this chapter from Caro's Chapter 9 entitled "The Dream". In it he vividly evokes the pristine beauty and the customary culture of the people who lived on the South Shore of Long Island before the highways went in during the twenties and thirties. Moses' dream was to make that beauty available to the teeming masses in the city by creating highways that would get them out there into it. In the beginning it was well intended and idealistic, but its unintended effects were, in Caro's view and in mine, to make things worse for everybody.

The island's South Shore, the edge of the meadow that had been transformed into the Great South Bay, offered gentle waves and sandy beaches. But the bay was the haunt of the baymen, a closemouthed, independent breed, some of them descendants of families that had "followed the bay" since the Revolution, others, New England Yankees who, hearing about the bay's bountiful harvests of oysters and clams, tomcods, and smelts, had left the whaling boats and had moved to Long Island, bringing with them their taciturnity and their distrust of outsiders. 

Less than thirty miles from the borders of New York City, the baymen live in a world that resembled nothing so much as the remote fog banks of Nova Scotia. Their lives revolved around the bay. When its tides were flood, no matter what the hour, through the thick, damp mist, hip boots slung over their shoulders, caps pulled low over their eyes, they trudged to their weather-beaten little trawlers and crept out into the fog, returning hours later so heavily laden that only the bows and sterns of the boats were out of the water. They loved the bay's sparkle in summer, its cool breezes; somehow they loved its treacherous shoals and tides and the hidden traps of swamp grass that tangled their boats' propellers. Forced off it by winter storms, they settled down in taverns near the piers that jutted into it, drinking (they were famous for their drinking) and spinning legends about it. Once you were "bay salted," they said, you would never leave.

They were fiercely determined to keep their world for themselves. The bay bottoms, the hell-fire preachers in their weather-beaten little churches constantly reminded them, were "sacred," their priceless natural heritage," and when it came time each year for the townships that bordered on the Great South Bay--Hempstead, Oyster Bay, Babylon, Islip and Brookhaven--to sell leases to mine the bay's underwater crops of shellfish, the baymen crowded into town halls to listen while the leases were awarded--and no outsider was ever given a lease. No authority could awe them. In 1892, when the German liner Normandia arrived in New work flying the yellow flag that signaled a cholera epidemic on board, the state bought the only hotel on Fire Island so it could quarantine the passengers and crews there. Trawler-loads of armed baymen met then Normannia as it tied up to the hotel dock and cut loose its hawsers, and only the dispatch of a National Guard regiment put down the uprising. 

Distrusting anyone "from away," the baymen distrusted especially anyone form New York. Hating the city--many boasted that they had never been there--they feared that its "foreigners," hordes of long-haired Slavs, hook-nosed Jews, and unwashed Irishmen, would descend on and befoul their beautiful beaches as the first slackening in their  vigilance.

He goes on to talk about the farmers of Suffolk County, the rural eastern two thirds of the Island where I grew up:

The baymen's land-locked cousins, the farmers of Long Island, were men of conviction, too. In no part of New York State were the white hoods of the Ku Klux Klan, an organization whose venom was directed in the 1920's not only against Negroes but also against Jews and Catholics, as numerous as in Suffolk County. Three successive chairmen of Suffolk's Republican Party had been members of the Klan, and anyone who needed an additional symbol of its power had only to look at the flagpole in front of the Islip Town Hall: the pole, read the inscription on an attached plaque, had been donated by the Islip branch of the Ladies of the Klan and gratefully accepted by the Town Board. (In 1928, when [Irish Catholic] Al Smith ran for President, fiery crosses would blaze on the hills of Alabama and Mississippi--and, by orders of the county GOP organization, on the hills of Suffolk.) Combining with the baymen to dominate the Suffolk political picture, the farmers had no difficulty persuading the county's supervisors to make sure that there was not a single park in the Suffolk open to the city residents. 

Not just out in Suffolk County did these crosses burn. My father as a young Irish Catholic boy in the 1920s lived in Howard Beach, down near Jamaica Bay, and he recalls seeing those burning crosses. It scared him to death. What do these burning crosses represent? Is it just a primitive hatred of the Other? In part, yes, but it's also rooted in a fear of the impending extinction of their identity-shaping culture, a culture that was both rich and noble as well as barbaric and cruel. In other words, it was human because being human embraces both ends of the spectrum. We are wrong only to see the latter in the other and not in ourselves. We need to evaluate a culture or any complex social organism by what's humanly best in it, not worst--but as soon as a culture feels that it is threatened with extinction, the best gets suppressed as the worst gets expressed. Nativism is born of a siege mentality. 

Nativists are people who think with adrenaline-soaked brains, and when they do so, it reinforces the most negative perceptions that outsiders have of them. And this in turn justifies outsiders' thinking of themselves as having a moral superiority that, in fact, they just don't have. We all struggle with this. I know I do when I think I'm right about something. I have an obligation to argue for what I believe, but that does not make me morally superior, because I never know for sure whether I am right.The most dangerous and destructive people are those who are certain that they are right. The more certain one feels in his rightness, the more morally smug he is likely to be, and in turn the more likely he is to be blinded to other things that are also right and that are equally if not more important.

Hateful attitudes and the sanctimony that negatively judges them are polarities within the same system, and they feed off and sustain one another. If people are to truly "evolve" in their cultural attitudes, they have to be won over not forced. The problem with winning over is that it takes time; the problem with using force is that it doesn't work, that is, unless you completely annihilate whoever you're forcing, because force brings the inevitable backlash, if not right away, then later. There was no backlash against the Romans by the Carthaginians or against Americans by Native Americans, or at least none that anybody felt it important to pay attention to. Not true of southern whites, not true of the pre-FDR One Percent. Both have been backlashing in a way everybody has to pay attention to. 

In the 70s it became conventionally accepted that the way Native Americans were depicted as savages until then was grossly stereotypical. We could do that in the 70s because they not longer posed any kind of threat. But back when they did pose a threat they were savages in the sense that they fought savagely for their survival. Fighting savagely for one's survival is considered a virtue by everyone except those in the group being savagely fought against. Some good liberals like Bill Maher or Sam Harris, look at Muslims as savages in the same way. But are Muslim extremists savages or are they just savagely fighting to defend themselves in a way that is akin to the way that Native Americans did in the late 19th century? It's very difficult for us to see anything rich and noble in a group that poses such a threat to us.

Barry Goldwater said that 'extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice' echoing the New Hampshire state slogan "Live free or die". It sounds crazy to people who are smug and comfortable, but not to those who feel they are under threat of extinction, and Native Americans, Muslim extremists, and Ku Klux Klansmen on Long Island all in their different ways feel exactly that. Being absorbed into the great liberal consumer technocracy is extinction, and there is no real Liberty after cultural extinction, just a soulless, atomized anomie that is a parody of it. That is, in any event, how it looks to people in those groups who resist being swallowed up the Liberal mainstream culture that has such contempt for them and their old ways. 

So does that justify their hatefulness and violence? No, of course not. But you can't solve a problem if you don't understand its causes, and if it's possible for us after the fact to understand and sympathize with the situation of Native Americans at the end of the 19th century, is it not possible for us to make the same effort to understand the situation of American Nativists now? Isn't it important to understand what aggravates and what mitigates their hateful attitudes? Isn't it important to understand how it's possible to work something out with the saner members of these communities before it's too late? And isn't it important to avoid all the ways that Jacobin technocrats pour more fuel on the flames of resentment and fear that cause even the moderates to justify the barbarism and cruelty of the extremists? 

Like the flood that wiped out the culture of the Islenos on the Gulf, the cultures of the baymen and farmers of Long Island were wiped out by the flood of people from Ireland, Italy, and eastern Europe who after arrival in New York spent a generation or two in the city, but the highways out to Long Island that Robert Moses built in the twenties and thirties became the conduit, especially after World War II, for them to flood out onto Long Island. My parents moved our then small family from Queens to Huntington in 1954, so we were part of that flood. But growing up in western Suffolk I had no idea about the life of the people who had lived there for centuries before our arrival. Our lives were not integrated into theirs; rather we just squatted in a subdivision plotted on what used to be a farm and lived in a bizarre and soulless imagination of what it meant to be human that dominated America in the fifties. We lived in a suburban bubble dominated by the culture that came through the tube and lived oblivious of whatever was there before. I couldn't get out of that bubble quickly enough.

There are other factors--lots of them. And so perhaps the death of the old ways was inevitable. Or perhaps whatever lived there was already dead or dying. Rather than having been destroyed by the flood, it could be argued that the flood wiped away its rotting carcass and brought the possibility of something new with it. Maybe. Maybe I just don't have the eyes to see it, because I didn't see much of anything that I would describe as richly human during my time living in the suburbs of New York. Nothing like what the baymen had on Long Island or what Islenos had in Louisiana.

So I don't know for sure. But if there was any life left in the old thing, the automobile and the highways on which it traveled insured that whatever remained living of the old ways would be quickly overwhelmed, and that it would be impossible for whatever was noble and rich in them to adapt and survive. We're all poorer for their loss whether it was inevitable or not, and I understand why people who have some sense of the richness of the old ways want to push back against those who would cluelessly destroy them. Trump is a ridiculous figure to play the role of advocate for those who want to push back, but in their eyes at least he is pushing back. And when the brain is soaked with adrenaline, it's not much interested in what makes sense. It just wants to fight back, and it will follow anybody who leads. 

So I understand the pushing back, but I think it's mostly pointless. It is at best a kind of Camusian, Sisysphian rebellion. Cliven Bundy as existential hero?  I get why some people see him that way, but I'd argue that nobility in the service of delusion is no virtue. It's a delusion that typifies a kind of conservatism that seeks to conserve not a genuine living tradition but a zombie version of it, the soulless forms of something that once lived but is animated now by something alien in spirit to what original gave it form. Their allegiance to the old, dead thing is really just their way of showing their revulsion for the new, soul-crushing thing. While I would describe myself as a conservative in temperament, I am not conservative in my thinking because I look around and I see nothing worth conserving on this soulless, utilitarian landscape we call American mainstream culture, and what passes for conservatism shares in its soullessness.

And I think that's the crux of the problem, because you can't take something away from people unless you can offer to replace it with something better, and what that 'better' might be is something I have no idea about. Certainly conservatives are not offering it. So the impasse will continue unresolved until something emerges that clearly does offer everybody a deep, rich sense of future human possibility, and if there is anything like that on the contemporary landscape, I don't see it. 

Dying Traditions

NPR ran a story several years ago about the Islenos of St. Bernard Parish in New Orleans. They are people the Spaniards brought over from the Canary Islands in pre-Napoleonic times to settle and defend this northeastern outpost of their American empire. The report was essentially an elegy to a dying traditional American subculture. It is now moribund because the delta wetland upon which the Islenos people depended for their livelihood as crabbers and shrimpers has been gradually destroyed, Katrina being the latest blow. 

They are one of those rare subcultures that found a way to maintain a living tradition as the world around them modernized. It is not yet a zombie tradition. The culture has to die first for it to become that. A culture goes zombie when people won't let it rest in peace but try to keep the body moving once it has lost its soul. To stay alive, most traditional cultures must maintain a living connection to the land or the sea. There are exceptions--the urban subcultures of Hasidic Jews come to mind--but they are pretty unusual these days in America. And it looks doubtful that the Islenos will survive for much longer. Too much works against it.

Living traditions survive in the U.S. only so long as they can resist acculturation into the larger modern American milieu. The economic pressures working to break down such subcultures are terrific. And it is more than likely that the next generation of Islenos will think of themselves as Islenos as much as I think of myself as Irish. They will have lost their connection to the land and its culture just as much as my family has done: Ireland is in my name.  It's there in the background, but it no longer has any real defining power for my identity. It has very little shaping influence in the way I live my life. 

It might even be said that Ireland has very little shaping influence in the way the typical educated, urban Dubliner lives now. Other cultural influences, for better or worse, that have very little to do with Irish history, religion, and customs have severely eroded what it means to be Irish, even for the people who live there. The urban Dubliner has more in common with the urban Parisian or New Yorker than he has with the Irish-speaking farmer in the Gaeltacht. When you become a modern, you lose touch with the living tradition--you step out of it, and you might retain some of the tradition as a matter of habit, but you no longer are sustained by the tradition as something that nourishes in a deeply satisfying way. It no longer composes the warp and woof of one's soul.

Some might argue that the Italian, Irish, Polish neighborhoods of New York, Boston, or Chicago contradict my argument. And I would agree that traditionally ethnic cultures once thrived there, but such cultures are now for the most part moribund. Take the fairly typical example of my wife's family's experience. She came from a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx that was mostly Irish. Her grandmother, however, was a Siciliana who came to Italian Harlem when she was eighteen, was matched up with a husband whose Italian dialect she could not understand, eventually moved to an an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx in which she never had to speak English, and she never did. When we romanticize traditional cultures, we have to remember that tradition has very little respect for freedom and individuality. The group comes first, and you obey the group authorities and comply obediently with its customs. There is a form for everything. There is a way that things are done, and to deviate from form is considered ignorant and barbaric, even if there are good reasons to do it. 

This Italian subculture in which my wife's mother grew up still persists in the Bronx, but it's not what it used to be. Such neighborhoods are celebrated in Martin Scorcese's films. Raging Bull, for instance, was about my mother-in-law's neighborhood when she was a young adult. She is very nice woman, but she is  someone who simply cannot operate if required to think on her own. There is a way things are done, and her job is to learn how to do it as prescribed. She still retained a tribal mentality, even though she chose a life that required that she move beyond it.

My mother-in-law is a typical of the second generation in such immigrant families--neither here nor there.  She wanted independence--she married outside the tribe--but she couldn't pull it off because she couldn't free herself from the tribal mentality of her family. Her husband, usually referred to by my mother-in-law's family as "the German," had no real individuality. He was simply someone who was "not one of us." My mother-in-law paid a price for her one, bold stab at freedom, and so did her husband, because she was never able to really cut herself off from her family, and the family never accepted him.  

Today, that neighborhood is still Italian, but it is moribund Italian. It's still a place where the kids try to find homes to live near their parents. But my wife couldn't get away quick enough. Her mother, for instance, didn't want her to go to college.  "People like us don't go to college," she told her. But what her mother really feared was losing her daughter, because once you leave a world like that by going to college, you join the "white people's world," you're changed, and you can never really come back into the older world with  the "first naivete" that is necessary to live in it unselfconsciously. 

And my wife did not go back. She lived in Europe for several years, and after we were married in New York, it was her idea to move to Seattle. She couldn't put enough distance between herself and her mother. She needed the distance because the tribal pull was still pretty strong in her, too. But given the choice between freedom and the deeply felt need to live one's own life, on the one hand, and the choice to live within the restrictions of a moribund tradition, she, like most healthy, spirited people, chose freedom. Unless there is something that still lives in the tradition that nourishes the soul in self-evident ways, most normal people choose to leave rather than to stay, if the choice is open to them. 

That's the problem with most European ethnic communities in the U.S. now. They are at best running on fumes and are living a twilight existence that fails to deeply nourish. I see it in my Asian students here in Seattle as well. I was talking to bright, lively Korean girl today about how conflicted she feels about loyalty to her family and her hatred of the restrictions and patriarchal customs that she has to live out because they are antithetical to the kind of American woman she wants to become.

So people like her, as my wife did, leave the comforting but restrictive womb of their families' culture to seek their fortune in the wide, wide world. But then something interesting happens. Very often, even if they were very successful in the "outside" world, they find that something is missing--that the outside world lacks soul. And so they return to the old thing, but it no longer nourishes; it can't because in most cases it’s dying. People who insist on staying in the dead thing are those who live in a kind of zombie traditionalism. 

Zombie traditionalism is born of a longing for something that has been lost, and a hope that behind the forms there's a life that can nourish, but there's not. You can't go home again because there were good reasons for leaving it in the first place. One chooses to go back sometimes for lack of anything better.

So while I was listening to one of the Katrina-displaced Islenos women interviewed on NPR, I was moved by her obvious, deeply felt pain. It was the pain of the exile. It was the pain of the Russian émigré, whose very soul withers because it has been disconnected from the soil of Mother Russia. She was like a native American being asked to move to a reservation. After Katrina, she has been prohibited from moving back to St. Bernard Parish, and like so many other New Orleanais, it's not clear when or whether she ever will be able to move back. 

She spoke poignantly about how it's the only life she knows, how her parents and grandparents and all her ancestors lived and worked there. And I feel badly for her. For here's the tragedy: Now she has to live like the rest of us in a culture that has lost its traditional culture soul. That's a boat that's long left the dock for the rest of us. The challenge now is not to live in a culture where soul is given, but somehow, out of our own interior freedom to re-ensoul the world and in doing so to renew the face of the earth.  

 

NPR ran a story several years ago about the Islenos of St. Bernard Parish in New Orleans. They are people the Spaniards brought over from the Canary Islands in pre-Napoleonic times to settle and defend this northeastern outpost of their American empire. The report was essentially an elegy to a dying traditional American subculture. It is now moribund because the delta wetland upon which the Islenos people depended for their livelihood as crabbers and shrimpers has been gradually destroyed, Katrina being the latest blow. 

They are one of those rare subcultures that found a way to maintain a living tradition as the world around them modernized. It is not yet a zombie tradition. The culture has to die first for it to become that. A culture goes zombie when people won't let it rest in peace but try to keep the body moving once it has lost its soul. To stay alive, most traditional cultures must maintain a living connection to the land or the sea. There are exceptions--the urban subcultures of Hasidic Jews come to mind--but they are pretty unusual these days in America. And it looks doubtful that the Islenos will survive for much longer. Too much works against it.

Living traditions survive in the U.S. only so long as they can resist acculturation into the larger modern American milieu. The economic pressures working to break down such subcultures are terrific. And it is more than likely that the next generation of Islenos will think of themselves as Islenos as much as I think of myself as Irish. They will have lost their connection to the land and its culture just as much as my family has done: Ireland is in my name.  It's there in the background, but it no longer has any real defining power for my identity. It has very little shaping influence in the way I live my life. 

It might even be said that Ireland has very little shaping influence in the way the typical educated, urban Dubliner lives now. Other cultural influences, for better or worse, that have very little to do with Irish history, religion, and customs have severely eroded what it means to be Irish, even for the people who live there. The urban Dubliner has more in common with the urban Parisian or New Yorker than he has with the Irish-speaking farmer in the Gaeltacht. When you become a modern, you lose touch with the living tradition--you step out of it, and you might retain some of the tradition as a matter of habit, but you no longer are sustained by the tradition as something that nourishes in a deeply satisfying way. It no longer composes the warp and woof of one's soul.

Some might argue that the Italian, Irish, Polish neighborhoods of New York, Boston, or Chicago contradict my argument. And I would agree that traditionally ethnic cultures once thrived there, but such cultures are now for the most part moribund. Take the fairly typical example of my wife's family's experience. She came from a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx that was mostly Irish. Her grandmother, however, was a Siciliana who came to Italian Harlem when she was eighteen, was matched up with a husband whose Italian dialect she could not understand, eventually moved to an an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx in which she never had to speak English, and she never did. When we romanticize traditional cultures, we have to remember that tradition has very little respect for freedom and individuality. The group comes first, and you obey the group authorities and comply obediently with its customs. There is a form for everything. There is a way that things are done, and to deviate from form is considered ignorant and barbaric, even if there are good reasons to do it. 

This Italian subculture in which my wife's mother grew up still persists in the Bronx, but it's not what it used to be. Such neighborhoods are celebrated in Martin Scorcese's films. Raging Bull, for instance, was about my mother-in-law's neighborhood when she was a young adult. She is very nice woman, but she is  someone who simply cannot operate if required to think on her own. There is a way things are done, and her job is to learn how to do it as prescribed. She still retained a tribal mentality, even though she chose a life that required that she move beyond it.

My mother-in-law is a typical of the second generation in such immigrant families--neither here nor there.  She wanted independence--she married outside the tribe--but she couldn't pull it off because she couldn't free herself from the tribal mentality of her family. Her husband, usually referred to by my mother-in-law's family as "the German," had no real individuality. He was simply someone who was "not one of us." My mother-in-law paid a price for her one, bold stab at freedom, and so did her husband, because she was never able to really cut herself off from her family, and the family never accepted him.  

Today, that neighborhood is still Italian, but it is moribund Italian. It's still a place where the kids try to find homes to live near their parents. But my wife couldn't get away quick enough. Her mother, for instance, didn't want her to go to college.  "People like us don't go to college," she told her. But what her mother really feared was losing her daughter, because once you leave a world like that by going to college, you join the "white people's world," you're changed, and you can never really come back into the older world with  the "first naivete" that is necessary to live in it unselfconsciously. 

And my wife did not go back. She lived in Europe for several years, and after we were married in New York, it was her idea to move to Seattle. She couldn't put enough distance between herself and her mother. She needed the distance because the tribal pull was still pretty strong in her, too. But given the choice between freedom and the deeply felt need to live one's own life, on the one hand, and the choice to live within the restrictions of a moribund tradition, she, like most healthy, spirited people, chose freedom. Unless there is something that still lives in the tradition that nourishes the soul in self-evident ways, most normal people choose to leave rather than to stay, if the choice is open to them. 

That's the problem with most European ethnic communities in the U.S. now. They are at best running on fumes and are living a twilight existence that fails to deeply nourish. I see it in my Asian students here in Seattle as well. I was talking to bright, lively Korean girl today about how conflicted she feels about loyalty to her family and her hatred of the restrictions and patriarchal customs that she has to live out because they are antithetical to the kind of American woman she wants to become.

So people like her, as my wife did, leave the comforting but restrictive womb of their families' culture to seek their fortune in the wide, wide world. But then something interesting happens. Very often, even if they were very successful in the "outside" world, they find that something is missing--that the outside world lacks soul. And so they return to the old thing, but it no longer nourishes; it can't because in most cases it’s dying. People who insist on staying in the dead thing are those who live in a kind of zombie traditionalism. 

Zombie traditionalism is born of a longing for something that has been lost, and a hope that behind the forms there's a life that can nourish, but there's not. You can't go home again because there were good reasons for leaving it in the first place. One chooses to go back sometimes for lack of anything better.

So while I was listening to one of the Katrina-displaced Islenos women interviewed on NPR, I was moved by her obvious, deeply felt pain. It was the pain of the exile. It was the pain of the Russian émigré, whose very soul withers because it has been disconnected from the soil of Mother Russia. She was like a native American being asked to move to a reservation. After Katrina, she has been prohibited from moving back to St. Bernard Parish, and like so many other New Orleanais, it's not clear when or whether she ever will be able to move back. 

She spoke poignantly about how it's the only life she knows, how her parents and grandparents and all her ancestors lived and worked there. And I feel badly for her. For here's the tragedy: Now she has to live like the rest of us in a culture that has lost its traditional culture soul. That's a boat that's long left the dock for the rest of us. The challenge now is not to live in a culture where soul is given, but somehow, out of our own interior freedom to re-ensoul the world and in doing so to renew the face of the earth.  

Socialism v. Neoliberalism

As I wrote in the my last post Sanders' candidacy is important for his attempt to legitimate a certain range of ideas. The word "socialism" is one that timid liberals think is radioactive, but Bernie to his credit won't back away from it. Instead he seeks to define it in terms that make sense to the ordinary American. I liked a piece Corey Robin wrote a  post a couple of years ago entitled " Socialism: Converting Hysterical Misery into Ordinary Unhappiness for a Hundred Years", which seeks to do the same thing. An excerpt:

In the neoliberal utopia, all of us are forced to spend an inordinate amount of time keeping track of each and every facet of our economic lives. That, in fact, is the openly declared goal: once we are made more cognizant of our money, where it comes from and where it goes, neoliberals believe we’ll be more responsible in spending and investing it. Of course, rich people have accountants, lawyers, personal assistants, and others to do this for them, so the argument doesn’t apply to them, but that’s another story for another day.

The dream is that we’d all have our gazillion individual accounts—one for retirement, one for sickness, one for unemployment, one for the kids, and so on, each connected to our employment, so that we understand that everything good in life depends upon our boss (and not the government)—and every day we’d check in to see how they’re doing, what needs attending to, what can be better invested elsewhere. It’s as if, in the neoliberal dream, we’re all retirees in Boca, with nothing better to do than to check in with our broker, except of course that we’re not. Indeed, if Republicans (and some Democrats) had their way, we’d never retire at all.

In real (or at least our preferred) life, we do have other, better things to do. We have books to read, children to raise, friends to meet, loved ones to care for, amusements to enjoy, drinks to drink, walks to take, webs to surf, couches to lie on, games to play, movies to see, protests to make, movements to build, marches to march, and more. Most days, we don’t have time to do any of that. We’re working way too many hours for too little pay, and in the remaining few hours (minutes) we have, after the kids are asleep, the dishes are washed, and the laundry is done, we have to haggle with insurance companies about doctor’s bills, deal with school officials needing forms signed, and more.

It took until the late 19th Century, early 20th century before even the most progressive minds in the Anglo American world figured out that poverty for most people is not a sign of their moral turpitude. The famine in Ireland? It was ordained by God, and the Irish heathens deserved it. Debtors prisons, work houses, the concept of moral hazard: these are all products of a social imagination dominated Victorian economic moralism. The old Catholic idea that the poor were closest to God gave way in the modern period in the capitalist countries to the Calvinist idea that your wealth was an indicator of your favor with God. At least in the first model for all its limitations, the rich had a sense of their moral responsibility for the poor. In the Calvinist model, the immiseration of the poor was their getting what they deserved because the poor were responsible for their own immiseration--or they were predestined for it. 

So it was something of a breakthrough when the English sociologist Seebohm Rowntree made the distinction between primary and secondary poverty in a 1901 study entitled Poverty: A Study of Town Life. Primary Poverty affected those people who simply hadn't enough money to meet the basic necessities of life. Secondary Poverty was the condition of those who had enough money, but wasted it on "non-necessities". For Rowntree a non-necessity was meat if poor families could be taught to subsist on a vegetarian diet, but secondary poverty was really just a hangover from the Victorian Calvinist idea that people are poor because they blow their money on alcohol, gambling, and prostitutes. 

But the very idea of Primary Poverty, that a huge number of people were poor because they were unemployed or paid too little for the work they could find was actually a Victorian ethos frame crasher, so to say. Of course Marxists on the continent were saying this for about a half century already, but Marxism never found a congenial home in the Anglo-American ethos dominated by the Calvinist Liberal moralistic frame. 

The fact is that the difference between conservatives and progressives even today lies in that conservatives still work within that Victorian frame. They really believe that the poor are responsible for their own plight. That government handouts make them passive and dependent. They focus on the few who abuse government programs, the welfare queens, etc., and assume that they are the rule rather than the exception. And they would deny help to those who really need it if that's the only way to prevent the few undeserving from getting what they don't deserve.

Charles Blow did a piece in the NYT about this zombie Victorian idea that poor people are passive and dependent:

We have gone from a war on poverty in this country to a war on the poor, in which poor people are routinely demonized and scapegoated and attacked, and conservatives have led the charge.

They paint the poor as takers, work averse, in need of motivation and incentive. 

Well, that is simply not my experience with poverty. I have been poor, and both my parents worked. I grew up among poor people, and almost all of them worked. The problem wasn’t lack of effort, but low pay. Folks simply couldn’t make enough to shake the specter of need....

To buy into this destructive lie about the character of the poor means you’ve either had no experience being poor, or have no capacity to empathize with their plight.

Being poor is a job unto itself. The daily juggle of supplying the most basic needs — food, shelter, medicine — and the stress of knowing that you are always just one twist of fate away from calamity.

We moderns and late moderns live in a world where money means too much. It's bizarre that it has become a signifier of moral worth. Money is important--we all need enough of it that we shouldn't be in a continuous state of anxiety about it, but there are so many other better things to do than to manage it and worry about it.

That's the difference between those who celebrate free market capitalism and those who lean toward social democracy. The former thinks that the economic sphere in our lives is the most important, and that happiness and meaning in our lives depends on being effective economic players. It's for them as if economic activity is an end in itself, the way you prove your worth as a human being. And really, how bizarre is that? It's such an impoverished concept of what it means to be human. It takes an idea that has a little bit of truth in it and makes an idol of it. 

People in the second group think that, yes, the economic sphere provides a foundation, but that it is not an end in itself. Each of us needs a stable economic foundation upon which to build a meaningful life, but that meaning is not built through economic activity, but in the sphere of culture--of friends, family, music and the arts, religious practice, learning, sports, hobbies, and other entertainments. That's where the meaning is. Happiness is not guaranteed for anyone, but the prospect of immiseration for anyone is never a worry. The focus for your moral responsibilty lies in whether you have made a life, not just in whether you have made a llving.

There is at its heart something deeply dehumanizing about the Liberal and Neoliberal ethos, and so whatever might be said about socialism and its limitations, it has a human heart, at least until the technocrats get hold of it. That's the danger of socialism--not the moral hazards associated with redistribution, but its proclivity toward a toxic top-downism dominated by another kind of moralistic elite, the Jacobin who becomes a commissar.

No solution is ideal, but this is where the Rawls's veil of ignorance thought experiment is useful. If you were told before birth that you would be born black and poor, with average intelligence and talent, would you choose to be born in Cuba or in the U.S.? 

Ed: This is a repost with some minor editing of a post that first appeared in December 2013.

Perlstein on Sanders

To me, this history reveals the frustrating paradox at the heart of Sanders’s success. The very thing that makes it so exciting—a Democrat dreaming big dreams and who’s rewarded with burgeoning political success beyond anyone’s prediction but his own—is also what makes for such a stark contrast with the rest of the Democratic Party. The fact is that Sanders is nearly alone. In our generation, the dreamers have been the conservatives in the Republican Party. As one of them, Milton Friedman, put it in a quote made famous by Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, in a crisis, “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

My point is not to complain that laws adequate to the crisis have not been passed. I know as well as anyone that the lunatics running the Republican Party have choked the life out of the legislative process. Passing ambitious laws is presently impossible.

My worry is that Democrats don’t even keep the big ideas lying around any more.

My fear is the fact that, on January 20, 2017, a President Sanders would be inaugurated politically naked and alone—commanding a party apparatus less prepared ideologically, institutionally, and legislatively to do great things than at any time in its history.

Immediately the reader thunders back at the historian: Don’t you understand what you’re asking? Don’t you understand how badly Washington is broken? Isn’t it a fantasy that if we just elect principled progressives they can break the legislative stalemate? Isn’t that “Green Lanternism”—the currently fashionable term for liberals demanding too much of their politicians, or for idealists who don’t understand, as New York Timescolumnist Paul Krugman recently put it, “How Change Happens”?

But change happens when it’s made to happen, and historians understand that sometimes history turns on a narrow pivot. (Source)

Green Lanternism is a way of mocking the idea that change comes if the president gets on his bully pulpit and fights for a particular policy. I think that Green Lanternism is a straw man. Sure, if you are in an ordinary political environment, where everyone is relatively sane in representing their competing interests, a politician needs to know how to compromise, make deals, etc., to get things done. But in moments of crisis more is possible. Obama's approach seemed to assume that we were not in crisis, that we were in a politics-as-usual situation, that compromise, making deals, etc., would work. But we were not in a politics-as-usual situation. We were in one of the worst economic crises since the 30s and the worst foreign policy debacles since Vietnam. The country was ready for a new approach; it was looking to him for leadership, and when he didn't offer any, the country went back to sleep, and the 'disaster of 2010' occurred. 

Criticizing Obama for not getting more done is not Green Lanternism because the basic criticism of Obama is not that he didn't try to do anything; it's that he tried to do things using the old ideas, the ideas that created the crises in the first place. I see now that he really wasn't intellectually or temperamentally capable of doing more, but his was nevertheless a missed opportunity. He was in the middle of a crisis caused by GOP Neoliberals and Neoconservatives, and instead of trying to change the basic ideas and assumptions at a moment when the country would have been most receptive to it, he continued to govern with Neoliberal and Neoconservative assumptions.

I argue that the country, if not Beltway insiders, would have been willing to support him if he was more aggressive in first condemning those ideas as having failed spectacularly, and then appealing to the ideas that shaped policy during the Trente Glorieuses. It wouldn't even have required introducing anything new and exotic; it could have been a conservative argument to return to time when America actually worked under Democratic leadership within a social democratic policy frame, in other words with the assumptions that made the New Deal possible. 

He tried hard to get healthcare reform, but the ACA is a Rube-Goldberg mess because it is a solution that makes no practical sense except within a Neoliberal frame. It doesn't begin to address the underlying problems with our dysfunctional health care system. I'd argue, following Perlstein's logic, that it would have been better for him to fight for a Medicare-for-all solution and fail than to have succeeded with the ACA. The first battle is the battle for ideas, and the success of a real solution requires the legitimation of a social democratic policy frame. It would have been better for him, in other words to make the argument for single payer because to do so he would have had to argue from social democratic assumptions rather than Neoliberal ones. Making that argument is the more important task right now than getting anything done. 

And so now we have this continuing healthcare mess to deal with, and Clinton is right when she criticizes Sanders's single payer ideas because it would require the dismantlement of Obamacare. What would have been already very difficult is now even more so. It's harder now to find a real solution than it was before the ACA because the ACA has created such a convoluted mess from which me must get disentangled. 

Perlstein seems to be arguing that it might be too late, and that's something that I've worried about and written about here as well. But that's also why after an initial stage of skepticism about Sanders's prospects, I became a more enthusiastic supporter. For me the question is not whether he will be able to accomplish what he says he can; the question is whether he will be able to change the ethos, the ideas environment. Even if he didn't pass one piece of legislation, I'd consider his presidency to be a success if (1) he could legitimate a basic social democratic policy ethos, and (2) create a political energy in which his efforts would galvanize the American public to support him by throwing out the obstructionists GOP--and corporate Dems--and to replace them with 'Sandersistas'. His presidency, in other words, would be a success if he could lay a foundation that Elizabeth Warren or someone like her could come in with a ruling majority in 2020 or 2024 to build on.

It's all about the long game now. Are there any influential progressives out there thinking in longer-range terms? The task now is to change the ethos in Washington and in legislatures throughout the country. Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism have been disastrous, and yet our political leaders persist in thinking in Neoliberal and Neoconservative terms because nobody in any real positions of power has robustly argued for an alternative. Clinton is not arguing for an alternative, but Sanders is, and that's why his candidacy is so important. It's not about whether he can get anything done; it's about whether he can change the ethos.

 

Is It Over for Sanders?

Probably. Things can change, but it doesn't look good. I'd argue that a real evaluation of Sanders's performance should be restricted to how he does in blue and purple states because those are the ones that will matter in November. He has to prove he can win not just by edging Clinton out, but by overwhelming her in blue states like MA and purple states like FL. He didn't even win in MA, and he's way behind now in the FL polls. He's just not generating the excitement that he needs to do, and if he can't do that, then there's no point. He crushed Clinton in MN, and who cares about VT and OK. The real success of his candidacy depends on creating momentum--the "revolution" and the energy that comes with it--that will in turn create the kind of coattails that will give him a senate majority and to make some significant gains in the House. It's just not happening, at least not yet.