After the Future

Moral Parity

The former president recognized that the fact of an investigation was far more important than the results. It worked with the Benghazi investigation, about which House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was accidentally honest, and in the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails, which didn’t produce charges but did hobble her presidential campaign. By the time Trump was extorting Volodymyr Zelensky by withholding defense supplies in 2019, all Trump wanted was for Ukraine to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden. He didn’t even care whether it actually happened, because the talking point is what he needed.

Each successive new gambit offers the tantalizing prospect that the crooked behavior everyone has seen on public display from Trump over the past seven years is somehow actually the product of nefarious plotting by his opponents. Now Trump is on to a new battle over his alleged absconding with presidential records, including highly sensitive information, to Mar-a-Lago. Once again, he has claims of hoaxes. Once again, they don’t hold water. Yet hope springs eternal among MAGA backers, well fertilized by manure spread by the former president. Trump’s vindication can never be failed; it can only be delayed.  

David Graham

The whole premise of MAGA is that Democrats are so corrupt, so evil, so beyond the moral pale that whatever wild accusations are made about Democrats' crimes only scratch the surface of the dark horror that lies below. Just wait--it will all come out. It's just a matter of time before it all comes to light.

"Sure," those on the religious right argue, "Trump might have crossed the line here and there, but whatever he's done is nothing compared to what these demon-possessed Democrats have done." That the evidence supports the opposite, that more corrupt Republicans get caught than Democrats by a fairly wide margin does not matter because, they think, the Dems are just cleverer in avoiding getting caught or the Liberal Media in collusion with the Deep State insures that they don't. 

The first step toward moral maturity is owning your projections, or as the gospel puts it, "Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but fail to notice the log in your own eye?" That's really at the heart of the problem for those on the religious right in this country. They think they are morally righteous when in fact they haven't even taken most basic steps toward achieving it. Matthew goes on: "You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."

Seeing clearly is not something that happens much in MAGA world because they are so easily manipulated to see what is not there. MAGA folks are too obsessed with seeing evil in the Other. And so they have not the moral maturity or aptitude to recognize that that they see the Other not as they are but through the lens of their own unowned wickedness.

I was talking about Tolkien in my previous post and about how 'fantasy' often finds a way to urgently illuminate truths in a way that plain prose or realistic fiction cannot. This passage from The Silmarillion is about how the fallen Valar Melkor works with ordinary, decent folk who lack the discernment that comes with moral maturity--

Long was he at work, and slow at first and barren was his labour. But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed while others reap and sow in his stead. Ever Melkor found some ears that would heed him, and some tongues that would enlarge what they had heard; and his lies passed from friend to friend, as secrets of which the knowledge proves the teller wise. Bitterly did the Noldor atone for the folly of their open ears in the days that followed after.

When he saw that many leaned towards him, Melkor would often walk among them, and amid his fair words others were woven, so subtly that many who heard them believed in recollection that they arose from their own thought. Visions he would conjure in their hearts of the mighty realms that they could have ruled at their own will, in power and freedom. . .  .

J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion, p. 69

The manipulation of the religious right, Qanon, and others in MAGA world by Melkorian lies is as old as the hills. Liberals, of course, are not immune from such manipulation, but their vulnerabilities lie in their seduction by the material abundance produced by techno-capitalism. "Let the Invisible Hand do its thing," whispers Melkor. "Don't interfere or you'll make things worse. Leave it to the Hand. All shall be free; all shall be well."  And way too many Liberals in the cultural and political spheres kneel to the Hand. 

The delusions of the Cultural Right might lead to the end of democracy in the short term, but the delusions of the Cultural Left might lead to the end of humanity in the long term. So in this sense there is moral parity: the delusions and moral immaturity of both work hand in hand to paralyze the collective will to find a cure for what most deeply ails us. But in order to be able to deal with the long-term threat, we need a vibrant, healthy, democratic open society--a society that is open to allow remedies to arise bottom up, and which has the discernment to know which remedies are delusional and which might actually work. 

Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien's Quest Saga

Instead of watching TV in the evenings this summer, which for lack of energy in my evenings has been the only thing I have felt capable of, I decided to listen to Lord of the Rings and The Silmarilion on Audible. Listening requires less energy than reading, and the narrators are quite good. I was not aware when I did so that Amazon was planning a new series focusing on Galadriel in the Second Age. I was not aware that Queen Elizabeth would die, and England would once again have a king. So both events present an opportunity to reflect a little about my reading LOTR, with an aside to the Parzival or Grail story, in the light of what's really going on in our obsessive fantasies concerning royalty and nobility. 

I first read Tolkien's trilogy when I was in high school, and the last time I read it was in the late 90s to my elementary-school-age son. But I haven't thought much about the trilogy or the Tolkien legendarium since, and I have to say that I have been strangely moved in this most recent reading of it in ways that I was not in earlier readings. There are depths in this story that I missed before, and it's clearer to me now why this "fantasy"  has such cultural resonance.  

I think that what I have found moving in Tolkien's saga relates what in some fictional literature, i.e., some works of the imagination that enable us to transcend the everyday world in such a way as to see it in a broader, potentially more liberating context. That's not something I experience in my watching of, for instance, Game of Thrones, which I gave up on in Season Two because I found it to be an oppressively small, vulgar, predictable world, despite its fantastical elements and its overwrought attempts to titillate and shock. It's fantasy, but it's not escape in the way, as we'll see below, Tolkien thought about it. 

I'll come back to that, but first a thought experiment. Whether or not you believe in angels, let's "fantasize" what it might be like to have an angelic consciousness. If we could look at the world with the non-judgmental dispassionate eyes of an angel, what would we see? By dispassionate, I don't mean unconcerned, I mean without fear and desire. And I don't mean by it without feeling, but rather I mean with a deep compassion for the suffering of humans who are so ignorant about what is best for them. By non-judgmental I don't mean non-discriminating but rather hope without expectation. Angels, in my  imagination of them, hope that humans will make the right choices but have no expectation that they will, and are rather surprised when they do. When it happens they rejoice.

In my fantasy picture of angels I see them as having the long view, as beings who don't have politics, as beings who see the people in one faction being driven by passions as foolish and ignorant as the passions of any other faction. In fact, such a being has no interest in any kind of group mind, or moral systems or principles but only in the individual and his or her choices in a particular moment to do what is called for in that moment. 

And dispassionate does not mean that angels don't suffer, because their own destinies, as I imagine them, are deeply intertwined with human choices. I think of their invovlvement in human affairs as rather like the court of the Fisher King in the Parzival story. Parzival first meets the ailing Fisher King, and the whole court is gathered there because there is a chance that Parzival might ask the key question, and if he does, the King will be healed.

Because this is a fairy story, everybody in the court has what I've been describing as angelic consciousness. Everybody understands what's at stake except Parzival. But nobody can tell Parzival what to do. He has to know from within his own resources what he must do, and because he has not yet developed those resources, he cannot do what the situation requires of him. It's not that he lacks good will; it's that he's too ignorant, too naive, too immature--and so he fails, and the King goes on suffering. It's a remarkable scene and a remarkable metaphor that captures both the significance of human choices and how hard it is for humans to know what the right ones are. And how others--even angelic beings--suffer from human failures. 

It's such a beautiful scene, too, because when you first read it, you wonder how can so much depend on the choice of such a bumpkin, someone so green, so ignorant, so naive? Because by thinking so we are brought into an encounter with our own greenness, ignorance, and naïveté. We are given a parable of what is at stake in our own lives and how all the hosts of heaven are silent witnesses to whether we will be able to become capable of knowing what is called for. And so the point of the story is not that Parzival should just do the right thing--they could have just told him what it was--but that he must become the kind of person who knows what the right thing is and then find the will to do it.

So back to The Fellowship of the Ring: I was reminded of this  scene from the Parzival story when reading the scene about the Council of Elrond in Rivendell when it is decided that the Ring must be destroyed. While everyone is arguing about who should or should not be the ring bearer, the wisest in the group, Elrond and Gandalf, know who alone can do it, but they, like the court of the Fisher King, must wait without importunity to see if he knows what to do and has the courage to do it. Unlike Parzival, Frodo can and does.

He must find from within his own interior resources the ability to choose freely to step forward, to do what is called for. He must choose it, and so much depends on his choice, and he does. And both the book and the film do a good job of establishing what a significant and unexpected moment this is. No one would have expected this of a halfling bumpkin like Frodo, but something in him rises to the occasion and he accepts the burden of the Ring and the all-but-impossible quest to destroy it. No one would have blamed him if he chose not to, and yet so much depended on his ability to understand that this task was his and his alone. 

Parzival, unlike Frodo, fails. But he fails from ignorance not lack of courage. His confrontation shortly after with Cundrie, a being rather like one of the Greek Furies or Erinyes, who rips him up and down, left and right for being such an ignorant dolt. He becomes aware of what was at stake and how he failed, and aware also that the moment has passed, that it's not possible for him to easily correct it--but that his life mission is now to find a way to correct it. It's this idea of mission or quest that Parzival shares with Frodo, and it's only in fairy or fantasy stories that the true nature of this mission can be imagined and explored.

This is his moment when Parzival loses his innocence, when he realizes the consequences of his failure, and is wracked with remorse. How could he have been so stupid? And yet he was, and so we all are. This is the "Fall". This is his waking up to the human condition, to his ignorance. He was always 'fallen', but now he knows it, and that's an important first step. It's the movement from Kierkegaard's Aesthetic to the Ethical. He realizes now that he has a task, a mission and that he must commit his life to it.

Those who remain imprisoned in the Aesthetic continue to stumble ignorantly through life, and they do so until they are confronted with their own ignorance and stupidity, and come to feel an urgent need to undertake a quest to find a remedy. To be in despair is to be in ignorance of the need to undertake this quest. And so his quest to find the Grail Castle begins in earnest. This is the real moment of choice, as was Frodo's choice in Rivendell to find his way to Mt. Orodruin, but undertaking the quest is also to undertake a path fraught with dangers, seductions, dead-ends, and other obstacles one must overcome. But the first step is to choose to undertake the quest, which first requires that one become a person who is capable of making the right choice--not because someone tells you that this is the right choice, but because deep down you know it to be. 

The point is, then, that in matters of the spirit, whether we are sophisticated atheists or religious true believers, we are all alike. Regardless of our bloodline or cultural inheritance, we are all bumpkins until we awake to our need to undertake the lifelong quest for the Grail. In Tolkien's moral world there is no magisterium or rabbinate, but there are the wise and the foolish. There are those--Elves, Men, Dwarves, and even Hobbits--who were seduced or fooled by Melkor or later Sauron, and there are those who resist. Feanor in the First Age fails, Ar-Pharazon fails in the Second Age--and the in Third Age Smeagol fails. Bilbo is sorely tested, but resists. Saruman fails and refuses to repent, Boromir fails and repents, but Faramir resists; Galadriel is sorely tempted but resists and passes the test, and Denethor fails and refuses repentance.

There are always good reasons to do the wrong thing, and to pass the test requires not just that you do the right thing, but that you have developed an interior capacity to know when you are bullshitting yourself. Gandalf and Aragorn seem never to be tempted because they are exemplars in their different ways of characters who are fully formed. They are incapable of bullshitting themselves. They have well developed capacities for moral cognition; they have simply to discern and act. There is never a question whether they will have the courage and will to act, only whether they will know what the right thing to do is, and they usually do. They are all prodigies of the Ethical in their resoluteness in that once a choice or promise has been made to be unwavering in fulfilling it no matter the price, no matter how hopeless, no matter how compelling the reasons might be to justify quitting. This is true nobility of spirit. And this is why The Lord of the Ring has such broad cultural resonance--it provides for the culture what the culture longs for but can no longer find in its most prominent personalities: true nobility of spirit.

Aragorn, like Parzival, has blood nobility that is hidden from the world, and both spend years wandering in obscurity before finally reaching the symbolic culmination of their quests when their inner, now fully achieved nobility is finally recognized in their coronation. Having nobility in the blood is not what makes you noble; rather it's a potential (in all of us) that is achieved only after a lifetime of wandering, learning, and having been tested. How many people today imagine the trajectory of their lives in that way? I think they should, and maybe that requires taking fairy stories more seriously. 

These are old-fashioned virtues only rarely celebrated in contemporary film and fiction. The noblest contemporary protagonists are motivated by a willingness to sacrifice themselves out of loyalty to friends, family, a cause, but there is rarely a character that is motivated by a feeling for this quest to realize his or her inner nobility. The contemporary aesthetic requires that interesting characters be driven by unconscious compulsions of one kind or another, and the character arc focuses on a deconstruction of what might appear at first glance noble in the protagonists but revealed in fact to be Daddy or Mommy issues or insecurities, need for control, vengeance, or just garden-variety egoism.

That's fine so far as it goes because it's generally true about all of us--it's like Parzival's awakening encounter with Cundrie, but it is a wasted moment unless it becomes the first step on the quest. So while there's an implied sense in modern storytelling that there is a right and a wrong choice that confronts the protagonist, there's very little sense about what the stakes are for advancing or regressing the larger story arc of a human life. There's little sense that choices have consequences, not just in the immediate context, but in the larger one that is everyone's life quest story. There's little sense that making the right or the wrong decision is a test, a step in a much longer quest story that has a goal or telos.

Maybe that's not the job of "realistic" fiction, but maybe that's why we need fairy stories. They are fantasies, but not necessarily escapist. Tolkien was quite aware that "escapism" was a criticism that was directed toward his stories, and he rejected it completely. R.J. Reilly addresses this in his Romantic Religion--

Tolkien will not admit that Escape is a bad thing. The word, he thinks, has fallen into disrepute because its users too often confuse "the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter."

Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.

Thus Escape from Hitler's Reich is not desertion, it is really rebellion, a refusal to be identified with Hitler. And, Tolkien thinks, this is often the nature of Escape. A man may refuse to write about the world in which he lives not out of cowardice (which is the usual accusation) but because to write about it is in a sense to accept it. (pp. 206-07)

That is, to accept it as the only possible reality, which is to adopt an attitude of complacency and despair. And that's why Game of Thrones isn't escapist in the healthy Tolkien sense. It's just a fantastical representation of the jail we all live in and assumes there is no escape from. And the point I'm trying to make here is that escape in this healthy sense is only a possibility for those who can "imagine" and be inspired by a life that exists as a possibility outside the prison walls.

We remain imprisoned so long as we accept the prison as the only reality and the life within it as the only thing that can be legitimately discussed. Game of Thrones's most fantastical elements are horrors like dragons and white walkers. There are horrors like that too in Tolkien, but there is also Lorien and Rivendell and the Undying Lands in the true West. Fantasy for the modern sensibility passes sophisticated critical scrutiny so long as it is horrifying, but it goes too far when it strives to represent liberation as beauty and nobility of spirit. Then it becomes escapist in the most pejorative sense. 

The age of blood nobility has faded by the end of the Third Age in Middle Earth, and it is given a temporary stay with the return of Isildur's heir to the throne in Gondor, but the story is really about this other kind of nobility that is born from within--the kind that Frodo, the suffering servant, exemplifies. He is the true hero of the story, and all the other more obvious exemplars of blood nobility--Galadriel, Mithrandir, Aragorn, Faramir--recognize this. Their time is over; the time for another kind of nobility is nigh in the Fourth Age, one that no longer comes with the blood, but is achieved. This is Tolkien's foundational metaphor in his remarkable twilight-of-the-gods saga. After the passing of the elves to the West, the time of blood nobility wanes, and thereafter true nobility of spirit is something one must quest for. 

So now in England we have the passing of a noble of the blood--a blood line that traces back over a thousand years according to some sources, and now her heir. And what do we have really? A very ordinary woman and a very ordinary man onto whom the world has projected its longing for another kind of nobility, a nobility of the spirit. Many commentators have pointed out that Elizabeth was shrewd enough to keep her mouth shut and to play the role in such a way that the fantasy or mystique could be maintained, but that's all it was, really. An escapist illusion, but not escapist in the healthy Tolkien sense. She seems to have been a nice enough old girl, but an exemplar of true nobility of spirit? I don't think so. And now Charles? 

And why this week has there been nothing on the news except this story of the passing of the queen and the return of a king? Because the world longs to be inspired by a manifestation of true nobility of spirit. And because such nobility is nowhere to be found in our public figures, we cannot control our need to fetishize certain personalities that have the trappings of nobility while they haven't the substance of it. For that we must look elsewhere--to fictional characters, the Frodos, Aragorns, and Parzivals, the unpretentious folk who are more than the world perceives them to be--and more than they themselves perceive themselves to be--but who undertake the quest to become what the angels hope for them to become and rejoice when they do. 

A Few Thoughts on Ukraine

In observing events unfold in Europe over the last week, it struck me that there was a moment after 9/11 when the U.S enjoyed the world's sympathy as Ukraine enjoys it now. We squandered it, though, in the name of vengeance and Neoconservative, hubristic adventurism. And in doing so the U.S. squandered its credibility and the world's good will toward it.

Eighteen months later the streets of the world's capitals filled to protest the U.S.'s imminent invasion of Iraq as they've been doing nineteen years later to protest Russia's invasion of Ukraine. I'm not saying the situations are equivalent. What was most remarkable was the shift within that eighteen-month period from the U.S. being the good guys to being the bad. At least it's possible for us to be the good guys--we have that potential, even if under blundering, "we-don't-do-nuance", Republican leadership we almost always never realize it. Russia under Putin has never been and can never be the good guys. But for us, there was a lost opportunity then, and we've been paying the price ever since. Iraq was such a foolish disaster on so many levels.

Events since then in the U.S. have further eroded the world's confidence in the U.S. to be a beacon of sane order and democratic values. I'm not surprised at all that Europeans and the Ukrainians themselves didn't trust the U.S.'s warnings about the impending invasion. Liberals should not assume that even though we have with the Democrats' current control of government a short interregnum of sanity, that after Trump the world reverts to its pre-Trump relationship with us. Already the world is making plans for when this sane interregnum is likely to end in the next few years. Already what Americans say or think is not something to be taken seriously in the way that it was. The world looks at America as a fragile democracy, a society in a death spiral that has all but lost its mind with a government that cannot be relied on. 

Naive Idealism

During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever motivated these Christians to kill one another had nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. This pathology that calls itself Christian derives from extreme forms of what I want to describe here as "naive idealism". 

My take on 'naive idealism' flows from a typology I describe elsewhere as the Serpent/Dove personality polarity*. Idealist Doves get you riled up enough to join a Crusades, but savvy Serpents win them.

Serpents are earthbound and worldly wise; they are  shrewd, practical, rational, calculating and concerned primarily about personal and tribal survival and comfort. They accept the world as it is, and look at life as a game that the smartest players win. They don't take rules or ideals of any kind seriously, and rather than change them, they'll just ignore them or stretch them beyond recognition in lawyerly or Jesuitical ways. They look at most of the Doves that they meet as flakes or boy scouts who don't understand how the real world works.

Doves are natural idealists who dream of a better world, a world purged of evil, and they are primarily motivated to do what they can to transform the world into their image of what it ideally should be. Not could be, but should be. Doves care about the rules, and if their group is dominant, they can be ruthless in their enforcement. If their group is not dominant, they quickly join crusades that seek to change the rules.

Serpents would never bother. They'd rather pay their accountants or lawyers to find a loophole or pay enforcers to look the other way.  Doves tend to be uncompromising. The most committed Doves are willing to make huge sacrifices, even to die, in the service of their ideals. Serpents, on the other hand, are always willing to cut a deal. Doves look at most of the Serpents they meet as utilitarian and soulless. 

I think each of us is a mix of Serpent and Dove, but in each of us one is dominant and the other recessive. Being a Dove, despite the Dove's penchant to claim the high moral ground, is in no way morally superior to being a Serpent. But I do believe that there is a moral project that involves both the Serpent and Dove in each of us, and that involves our becoming a "mensch"--someone who integrates both Serpent and Dove. This usually requires first understanding which of these for you is dominant, and then undertaking the lifelong task of integrating the part that is recessive. In other words, a mensch is someone who becomes both shrewd as a serpent and guileless as a dove.

An extremist Dove or Serpent refuses to live in the tension between their dominant and recessive aspects and becomes one-sided in the service of whichever is dominant. One-sidedness is more common than integration, but there are degrees of one-sidedness. An extremist Dove is what I describe below as a "naive idealist", and all fanaticism derives from some form or another of naive idealism. An extremist Serpent is never a fanatic but could be a criminal sociopath--a mob boss or a ruthless CEO. The culture of Wall Street, for instance, is shaped by one-sided serpentine values, as is capitalism in general.

But there are capitalist naive idealists. They call themselves Libertarians. Someone like Milton Friedman was completely sincere in an idealism that ironically came to justify capitalism's becoming dominated by extreme, i.e., utterly non-idealist, one-sided Serpents.  Libertarianism is a form of Dove fanaticism that justifies Serpent sociopathy.  

Naive idealism, as I speak of it here, is a condition of profound alienation. It is an anti-human form of angelism that hates the world as it is and which cannot tolerate the presence of evil in it. Evil for naive idealists is a force that must be purged from the world, and they will do whatever it takes to get the job done. There is no compromise with evil. Inquisitions, witch trials, the French Terror,  Mao's cultural Revolution, the January 6 storming of the Capitol all derive from the kind of naive idealism of which I speak here. The naive idealists who drive these sociopathies see themselves as trying to rid the world of evil, which by definition is incarnated in any group that opposes the realization of their ideals. In their one-sidedness they become, with all the best intentions, a force that promotes evil. This is, I believe, the real point of the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. 

For this reason, naive idealists are a force in the world with enormous potential for destructive violence. Because there is no compromising with evil for extreme, one-sided Doves, they often become explosively enraged when their project to create an ideal society is being undermined by groups who by the very fact of their opposition can be nothing other than evil. This anger at the intractable evil of the world results in escalating levels of violence with each successive failure to force it to conform. This is as much true of Islamic fundamentalists as it is of fervent Marxist revolutionaries as it is for the MAGA minions who stormed the Capitol. 

Again, the worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Religious fanaticism of the Muslim or Christian type is all in the family with the fanaticism of the Hitler youth or the Red Guard in China during its cultural revolution in the sixties. They might have different ideas about what the world would look like if it were cleansed of evil, but they are united in their obsession to cleanse it. This is not a religious phenomenon; it is a psychological pathology that can garb itself in religion, but just as often in secular ideologies like Jacobinism, Marxism, Nazism, and MAGAism. Religion has no corner on the market for fanaticism.

Was John Brown wrong in his goals to abolish slavery? Of course not. But he was nevertheless a delusional fanatic whose hatred of slavery made him more a force for evil and destruction than for good. People cut him slack because he had 'good intentions'; they shouldn't have. He was cut from the same cloth as Timothy McVeigh. Both were fanatics because both believed in the purity of their good intentions. But the impulse to purge evil from the world is in itself evil. It's as if evil creates a system that involves both those who promote it in serpentine sociopathic ways--crimes of greed, powerlust, predatory sexuality--and those who seek to exterminate it in righteous fanaticism. It's a closed system that locks both parties in an endless karmic loop where victory means becoming the evil one sought to purge. Like a parasite, evil just moves from one host to the other.

So the hatred naive idealists have for what they perceive as evil usually winds up sooner or later destroying themselves and a lot of innocents with them. The Jacobins during the French Revolution were paradigmatic in this respect. Jacobinism was marked by increasingly stringent tests of Revolutionary Purity. Recently, we saw this to some extent on the Left leading to the ridiculous purity test that requires that you are not sufficiently woke unless you agree that we must defund the police.

But that is benign when compared to what we see the same thing going on in Republican politics right now. The party is marked by an insane escalation of purity tests based on who is the most anti-vaccine or anti-mask in response to the Covid Crisis or who is the most fervid in his or her belief that the election was stolen from Trump. This is all justified by the  naively idealist, fanatical commitments to a delusional ideal of "Liberty".

One of the great cliches among aspiring writers is their ambition to write the "great American novel." But it has already been written, and it's called Moby Dick. Ahab is the archetype of the American version of the naive idealism that is so deeply woven into our Calvinist national character. Melville is our national prophet, and Ahab's story is the American story now in the fight against Communism and then Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorism in the Middle East. Both stories are about how the hatred of evil and the desire to hunt it down and exterminate it make one profoundly complicit in the system of evil. Ahab does evil's work just as much as the evil he hates, and he thinks he's doing God's work the whole time. And the final result is shipwreck, and the only victor is Evil. The whale swims on.

Moby Dick Syndrome is this tendency deriving from America's Puritan heritage that seeks to create a pure society that is on a mission to eradicate evil. It feeds our current Millennial generation with the expectation that society should be fair, equal, and free everywhere and immediately. It's at the heart of what it means to be "woke". I'm arguing here that as John Brown and Robespierre were not wrong in their ideals, neither are woke Millennials. But both are wrong when their ideals become fanatically one-sided. The challenge is to retain one's ideals while at the same time being shrewd about how to live in a way that is faithful to them. Naive idealism is something conjured in the head; a truly menschy idealism is conjured in the heart.  

Contrast the Naive Idealist attitude toward evil with the gospel depiction** of Jesus' intervention regarding the woman caught in adultery whose Ahab-like accusers were about to stone her to death. Jesus' attitude is "menschy"; It's not one of "whatever", but neither does he condemn. He encounters actors in the eternal action/reaction loop here in the accusers and the accused. Both parties will remain locked within the loop unless there could be an intervention from outside of it. And that's what Jesus' confrontation with the adulteress and her accusers represented--not a condemnation, but the chance to liberate both parties from the loop.

The great saints are not fanatics; they are mensches. Jesus's intervention in this story gives them the opportunity to become released from the loop in which they are trapped, which opens up the possibility for them to move toward greater levels of integration and 'menschiness'.

We are all of us caught in an all-but closed toxic system. Christians call it original sin; Buddhists call it maya.  And we are all suffocating spiritually, whether we are aware of it or not, to the degree that we have no access to sources of clean air from outside this system. We all need to breathe this clean air if we are truly to flourish as human beings. Clean air promotes integration. To the degree that we breathe it, we become healthier and in a curious way we absorb the toxins within the loop and this helps to cleanse the air around us. So when people choose to live from this cleaner air, their lives become infusion points through which clean air enters into the system, and they become filters through whom the toxins around them are removed. This is how real, positive change takes place. Naive idealists do not promote substantive change; they are fanatics, high on the toxins, who just perpetuate a demi-life within the loop.

Most people prefer to breathe clean air if it's available to them. The problem now is that in America, especially in its public personalities and in its public life, it's in such short supply. But I do believe that it's possible, both as individuals and as communities, to create zones within the world that are relatively free from these toxins. We can each of us find our own individual way to breathe clean air, but alone we can find only enough air to stay alive. Alone, we're like someone who has to drag an oxygen tank around with him wherever he goes. Better if we can together create zones where the air is oxygen rich enough so that the tanks are unnecessary. This is the only way in which true integrated, human flourishing--menschiness--on earth becomes real.

Is it naively idealistic of me to hope for such a future? I don't know. We'll see. But I do think I understand enough about human nature and human history to assert that Life within the "Loop" is not the only possibility for humans. Whether or not we survive as a species depends on whether we find a way, step by step, to improve air quality in this metaphorical sense. 

9/26/21 Update: This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters my argument here. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, whether cynically (Trump) or sincerely (Robespierre), work with the energies of one-sided doves, aka Naive Idealists. If you lean Left, you tend to cut some slack for--if not admire--the John Browns while being horrified by the Timothy McVeighs, and vice versa if you lean Right. Nevertheless, there's no question that while the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy and the open society that America has become, whatever its flaws and limitations. For more on this, see Left Authoritarians.

_____________

*The Serpent/Dove archetype suffuses literature and popular culture, and I'd argue it's at the heart of the meaning of the Taoist Yin/Yang symbol. In the Bible: Eve and Adam, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Peter and Paul. In Shakespeare--Iago and Othello, Hamlet and Ophelia, Berowne and Navarre, Antonio and Prospero, Rosalind and Orlando--are just the ones that come to mind off the top of my head. In Dickens Estella and Pip, Dora and Agnes, etc. In 20th Century Comedy Abbot and Costello, Hardy and Laurel, Martin and Lewis. It's central to themes developed in Dostoyevski's Brothers Karamazov and Steinbeck's East of Eden. Watch the recent Disney movie Cruella through this lens.

In most cases the Dove is the dullard, and the more interesting, compelling character is the shrewder, more worldly wise Serpent--Jacob, Hamlet, Berowne, Rosalind. In rare cases the more interesting character is the Dove--St. Paul, Prospero, Alyosha Karamazov.

I'd argue that interesting one-sided Serpents are a dime a dozen and so are easy to write, and the only compelling Doves are fanatics, which are rarely, for good reason, portrayed sympathetically. People have tried see John Brown and Che Guevara as compelling doves, but they are compelling only to the degree that we see them struggling with moral ambiguity in private rather than merely in their public personae as extremists. Interesting Doves like Prospero and Alyosha are compelling because we see them struggling to integrate their Serpent. Dickens' David Copperfield is the story of a Dove-dominant character integrating his Serpent. It's a rare Dove that integrates his Serpent, but it's also the rare Serpent who integrates his Dove. In Shakespeare the Serpent-dominant Rosalind achieves this whereas Hamlet does not. In this post, I argue that Dolly Parton is a Serpent-dominant type who has integrated her Dove. MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela, on the other hand, were Doves who had made more progress than most in having integrated their Serpents. 

Contemporary literature and literary criticism is almost completely circumscribed by Serpent-dominant values and so is inclined to dismiss any depiction of successful integration as sentimental. I think that most of the Shakespearean comedies are parables of integration. As is Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which is the story of the Dove-dominant character George Bailey integrating his Serpent. A litmus test for me as to whether someone has a shred of the Dove's guileless spiritual vitality in him is whether he dismisses this movie as sentimental nonsense or finds in it something vital.

It's a fairy tale, but like many fairy tales it points to an important truth about what it means to be human. You need to have some Dove life working in your soul to enable at least a minimal level of 'second naïveté'. It's second naïveté that allows you to appreciate what Capra achieves in this movie. Second naïveté is essential in a Serpent-dominated cultural milieu where a kind of worldly-wise cynicism plays such a dominant shaping role on the worldviews of, especially, the well-educated. 

**John 8: 1-11

 

During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever motivated these Christians to kill one another had nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. This pathology that calls itself Christian derives from extreme forms of what I want to describe here as "naive idealism". 

My take on 'naive idealism' flows from a typology I describe elsewhere as the Serpent/Dove personality polarity*. Idealist Doves get you riled up enough to join a Crusades, but savvy Serpents win them.

Serpents are earthbound and worldly wise; they are  shrewd, practical, rational, calculating and concerned primarily about personal and tribal survival and comfort. They accept the world as it is, and look at life as a game that the smartest players win. They don't take rules or ideals of any kind seriously, and rather than change them, they'll just ignore them or stretch them beyond recognition in lawyerly or Jesuitical ways. They look at most of the Doves that they meet as flakes or boy scouts who don't understand how the real world works.

Doves are natural idealists who dream of a better world, a world purged of evil, and they are primarily motivated to do what they can to transform the world into their image of what it ideally should be. Not could be, but should be. Doves care about the rules, and if their group is dominant, they can be ruthless in their enforcement. If their group is not dominant, they quickly join crusades that seek to change the rules.

Serpents would never bother. They'd rather pay their accountants or lawyers to find a loophole or pay enforcers to look the other way.  Doves tend to be uncompromising. The most committed Doves are willing to make huge sacrifices, even to die, in the service of their ideals. Serpents, on the other hand, are always willing to cut a deal. Doves look at most of the Serpents they meet as utilitarian and soulless. 

I think each of us is a mix of Serpent and Dove, but in each of us one is dominant and the other recessive. Being a Dove, despite the Dove's penchant to claim the high moral ground, is in no way morally superior to being a Serpent. But I do believe that there is a moral project that involves both the Serpent and Dove in each of us, and that involves our becoming a "mensch"--someone who integrates both Serpent and Dove. This usually requires first understanding which of these for you is dominant, and then undertaking the lifelong task of integrating the part that is recessive. In other words, a mensch is someone who becomes both shrewd as a serpent and guileless as a dove.

An extremist Dove or Serpent refuses to live in the tension between their dominant and recessive aspects and becomes one-sided in the service of whichever is dominant. One-sidedness is more common than integration, but there are degrees of one-sidedness. An extremist Dove is what I describe below as a "naive idealist", and all fanaticism derives from some form or another of naive idealism. An extremist Serpent is never a fanatic but could be a criminal sociopath--a mob boss or a ruthless CEO. The culture of Wall Street, for instance, is shaped by one-sided serpentine values, as is capitalism in general.

But there are capitalist naive idealists. They call themselves Libertarians. Someone like Milton Friedman was completely sincere in an idealism that ironically came to justify capitalism's becoming dominated by extreme, i.e., utterly non-idealist, one-sided Serpents.  Libertarianism is a form of Dove fanaticism that justifies Serpent sociopathy.  

Naive idealism, as I speak of it here, is a condition of profound alienation. It is an anti-human form of angelism that hates the world as it is and which cannot tolerate the presence of evil in it. Evil for naive idealists is a force that must be purged from the world, and they will do whatever it takes to get the job done. There is no compromise with evil. Inquisitions, witch trials, the French Terror,  Mao's cultural Revolution, the January 6 storming of the Capitol all derive from the kind of naive idealism of which I speak here. The naive idealists who drive these sociopathies see themselves as trying to rid the world of evil, which by definition is incarnated in any group that opposes the realization of their ideals. In their one-sidedness they become, with all the best intentions, a force that promotes evil. This is, I believe, the real point of the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. 

For this reason, naive idealists are a force in the world with enormous potential for destructive violence. Because there is no compromising with evil for extreme, one-sided Doves, they often become explosively enraged when their project to create an ideal society is being undermined by groups who by the very fact of their opposition can be nothing other than evil. This anger at the intractable evil of the world results in escalating levels of violence with each successive failure to force it to conform. This is as much true of Islamic fundamentalists as it is of fervent Marxist revolutionaries as it is for the MAGA minions who stormed the Capitol. 

Again, the worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Religious fanaticism of the Muslim or Christian type is all in the family with the fanaticism of the Hitler youth or the Red Guard in China during its cultural revolution in the sixties. They might have different ideas about what the world would look like if it were cleansed of evil, but they are united in their obsession to cleanse it. This is not a religious phenomenon; it is a psychological pathology that can garb itself in religion, but just as often in secular ideologies like Jacobinism, Marxism, Nazism, and MAGAism. Religion has no corner on the market for fanaticism.

Was John Brown wrong in his goals to abolish slavery? Of course not. But he was nevertheless a delusional fanatic whose hatred of slavery made him more a force for evil and destruction than for good. People cut him slack because he had 'good intentions'; they shouldn't have. He was cut from the same cloth as Timothy McVeigh. Both were fanatics because both believed in the purity of their good intentions. But the impulse to purge evil from the world is in itself evil. It's as if evil creates a system that involves both those who promote it in serpentine sociopathic ways--crimes of greed, powerlust, predatory sexuality--and those who seek to exterminate it in righteous fanaticism. It's a closed system that locks both parties in an endless karmic loop where victory means becoming the evil one sought to purge. Like a parasite, evil just moves from one host to the other.

So the hatred naive idealists have for what they perceive as evil usually winds up sooner or later destroying themselves and a lot of innocents with them. The Jacobins during the French Revolution were paradigmatic in this respect. Jacobinism was marked by increasingly stringent tests of Revolutionary Purity. Recently, we saw this to some extent on the Left leading to the ridiculous purity test that requires that you are not sufficiently woke unless you agree that we must defund the police.

But that is benign when compared to what we see the same thing going on in Republican politics right now. The party is marked by an insane escalation of purity tests based on who is the most anti-vaccine or anti-mask in response to the Covid Crisis or who is the most fervid in his or her belief that the election was stolen from Trump. This is all justified by the  naively idealist, fanatical commitments to a delusional ideal of "Liberty".

One of the great cliches among aspiring writers is their ambition to write the "great American novel." But it has already been written, and it's called Moby Dick. Ahab is the archetype of the American version of the naive idealism that is so deeply woven into our Calvinist national character. Melville is our national prophet, and Ahab's story is the American story now in the fight against Communism and then Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorism in the Middle East. Both stories are about how the hatred of evil and the desire to hunt it down and exterminate it make one profoundly complicit in the system of evil. Ahab does evil's work just as much as the evil he hates, and he thinks he's doing God's work the whole time. And the final result is shipwreck, and the only victor is Evil. The whale swims on.

Moby Dick Syndrome is this tendency deriving from America's Puritan heritage that seeks to create a pure society that is on a mission to eradicate evil. It feeds our current Millennial generation with the expectation that society should be fair, equal, and free everywhere and immediately. It's at the heart of what it means to be "woke". I'm arguing here that as John Brown and Robespierre were not wrong in their ideals, neither are woke Millennials. But both are wrong when their ideals become fanatically one-sided. The challenge is to retain one's ideals while at the same time being shrewd about how to live in a way that is faithful to them. Naive idealism is something conjured in the head; a truly menschy idealism is conjured in the heart.  

Contrast the Naive Idealist attitude toward evil with the gospel depiction** of Jesus' intervention regarding the woman caught in adultery whose Ahab-like accusers were about to stone her to death. Jesus' attitude is "menschy"; It's not one of "whatever", but neither does he condemn. He encounters actors in the eternal action/reaction loop here in the accusers and the accused. Both parties will remain locked within the loop unless there could be an intervention from outside of it. And that's what Jesus' confrontation with the adulteress and her accusers represented--not a condemnation, but the chance to liberate both parties from the loop.

The great saints are not fanatics; they are mensches. Jesus's intervention in this story gives them the opportunity to become released from the loop in which they are trapped, which opens up the possibility for them to move toward greater levels of integration and 'menschiness'.

We are all of us caught in an all-but closed toxic system. Christians call it original sin; Buddhists call it maya.  And we are all suffocating spiritually, whether we are aware of it or not, to the degree that we have no access to sources of clean air from outside this system. We all need to breathe this clean air if we are truly to flourish as human beings. Clean air promotes integration. To the degree that we breathe it, we become healthier and in a curious way we absorb the toxins within the loop and this helps to cleanse the air around us. So when people choose to live from this cleaner air, their lives become infusion points through which clean air enters into the system, and they become filters through whom the toxins around them are removed. This is how real, positive change takes place. Naive idealists do not promote substantive change; they are fanatics, high on the toxins, who just perpetuate a demi-life within the loop.

Most people prefer to breathe clean air if it's available to them. The problem now is that in America, especially in its public personalities and in its public life, it's in such short supply. But I do believe that it's possible, both as individuals and as communities, to create zones within the world that are relatively free from these toxins. We can each of us find our own individual way to breathe clean air, but alone we can find only enough air to stay alive. Alone, we're like someone who has to drag an oxygen tank around with him wherever he goes. Better if we can together create zones where the air is oxygen rich enough so that the tanks are unnecessary. This is the only way in which true integrated, human flourishing--menschiness--on earth becomes real.

Is it naively idealistic of me to hope for such a future? I don't know. We'll see. But I do think I understand enough about human nature and human history to assert that Life within the "Loop" is not the only possibility for humans. Whether or not we survive as a species depends on whether we find a way, step by step, to improve air quality in this metaphorical sense. 

9/26/21 Update: This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters my argument here. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, whether cynically (Trump) or sincerely (Robespierre), work with the energies of one-sided doves, aka Naive Idealists. If you lean Left, you tend to cut some slack for--if not admire--the John Browns while being horrified by the Timothy McVeighs, and vice versa if you lean Right. Nevertheless, there's no question that while the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy and the open society that America has become, whatever its flaws and limitations. For more on this, see Left Authoritarians.

_____________

*The Serpent/Dove archetype suffuses literature and popular culture, and I'd argue it's at the heart of the meaning of the Taoist Yin/Yang symbol. In the Bible: Eve and Adam, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Peter and Paul. In Shakespeare--Iago and Othello, Hamlet and Ophelia, Berowne and Navarre, Antonio and Prospero, Rosalind and Orlando--are just the ones that come to mind off the top of my head. In Dickens Estella and Pip, Dora and Agnes, etc. In 20th Century Comedy Abbot and Costello, Hardy and Laurel, Martin and Lewis. It's central to themes developed in Dostoyevski's Brothers Karamazov and Steinbeck's East of Eden. Watch the recent Disney movie Cruella through this lens.

In most cases the Dove is the dullard, and the more interesting, compelling character is the shrewder, more worldly wise Serpent--Jacob, Hamlet, Berowne, Rosalind. In rare cases the more interesting character is the Dove--St. Paul, Prospero, Alyosha Karamazov.

I'd argue that interesting one-sided Serpents are a dime a dozen and so are easy to write, and the only compelling Doves are fanatics, which are rarely, for good reason, portrayed sympathetically. People have tried see John Brown and Che Guevara as compelling doves, but they are compelling only to the degree that we see them struggling with moral ambiguity in private rather than merely in their public personae as extremists. Interesting Doves like Prospero and Alyosha are compelling because we see them struggling to integrate their Serpent. Dickens' David Copperfield is the story of a Dove-dominant character integrating his Serpent. It's a rare Dove that integrates his Serpent, but it's also the rare Serpent who integrates his Dove. In Shakespeare the Serpent-dominant Rosalind achieves this whereas Hamlet does not. In this post, I argue that Dolly Parton is a Serpent-dominant type who has integrated her Dove. MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela, on the other hand, were Doves who had made more progress than most in having integrated their Serpents. 

Contemporary literature and literary criticism is almost completely circumscribed by Serpent-dominant values and so is inclined to dismiss any depiction of successful integration as sentimental. I think that most of the Shakespearean comedies are parables of integration. As is Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which is the story of the Dove-dominant character George Bailey integrating his Serpent. A litmus test for me as to whether someone has a shred of the Dove's guileless spiritual vitality in him is whether he dismisses this movie as sentimental nonsense or finds in it something vital.

It's a fairy tale, but like many fairy tales it points to an important truth about what it means to be human. You need to have some Dove life working in your soul to enable at least a minimal level of 'second naïveté'. It's second naïveté that allows you to appreciate what Capra achieves in this movie. Second naïveté is essential in a Serpent-dominated cultural milieu where a kind of worldly-wise cynicism plays such a dominant shaping role on the worldviews of, especially, the well-educated. 

**John 8: 1-11

The Failure of Democracy is the Failure of Elites

For all our talk of democracy, it's pretty obvious that the country is run by elites in business, media, and politics. The rest of us get to ratify the general leftish or rightish direction they seem to be going, but the actual power of the people is pretty crude and is in effect plebiscitary. Elite thinking is the only thinking that really matters, and all talk about the will of the people is really pretty fanciful.

And so people across the political spectrum are for their different reasons have become extremely frustrated that the political system seems so utterly unresponsive to their will that it's completely understandable that cynicism about politics should be so pervasive. This cynicism has turned toxic in the more populist precincts of American society, and Democratic elites bear much of the responsibility for the loss of the white working class to that was solidly Democratic before Reagan to the current fever dreams of the Right.  

So we can talk all we want about how delusional Trump supporters are, but it wouldn't have come to this if it weren't for a fundamental nihilism or fecklessness among the country's elites--including its Liberal elites. I hold the Bill Clintons, Dick Morrises, Rahm Emmanuels, Larry Summers, and the whole Neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party as significantly responsible for the rise of the Tea Party, Trumpism, and  Q anon--if not quite as responsible as spineless Republican elites like Kevin McCarthy and Marco Rubio or the calculating cynicism of Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz and so many other game players like them. Not to mention Rupert Murdoch.

My point here is that the Democratic elites were criminally negligent in their Neoliberal Washington Consensus cluelessness, and that combined with their run-of-the mill Beltway swampiness and their capture by a kind politically correct silliness they gave Fox and Limbaugh enough to work with so that even sane people began believing the worst about them. So I think it's fair to say that If Democracy fails in the United States in the next decade, it won't be caused by White Supremacist militias and Q anon conspiracists, but because of the accumulated failures of elites that created the conditions for their emergence. 

In a very blunt sense, Q anon, insane as its specific assertions are, isn't wrong. Elite culture may not be dominated by Satan-worshipping pedophiles with space lasers made by Jews, but there is a kind of nihilism in which ego, greed, and will to power are simply accepted as normative as the main motivating driving forces in politics, business, and media. Mythologizing that nihilism by way of demonizing it in conspiracy theories takes what is kinda true and twists it into something that just isn't, but that doesn't mean that the kinda true part of it can be dismissed because of the crazy way it's being distorted. 

This is not an indictment of many individuals in business, media, and politics because clearly there are many fine people in each of these areas, but there is a pervasive cynicism about the corruption of our institutions that pervades popular culture for good reason. It's understandable why so many people are inclined to think the worst of someone like Joe Biden even if he doesn't deserve it. But why anyone can think the best of a sleazy crackpot like Donald Trump--that he is a better man, a truer American than Joe Biden or Barrack Obama--is one of the most astonishing feats of political jiujitsu in my lifetime. The irony of Trump being adopted as if he were Michael the Archangel leading an army to slay the Satanic armies is so absurdly whackadoodle, it leaves one speechless. 

During most of my adult life, media--especially prestige fiction, film, and TV--present a picture of American institutions that are run by psychopaths whose ego, greed, and will to power are the ugly truth that determines policy no matter what the decent people who work in these institutions would prefer. There is a feeling that the evil power that they and their institutions represent has a kind of stolid inevitability, that Don Quixotes can break their lances tilting at it and might win a victory here or there, but that the power and inevitability of this evil power is implacable. At best the decent folk are the John Kellys or Jim Mattises who try to provide some check on the worst instincts of the really terrible people who rise to the pinnacles of power in these spheres. But in the end, the good people either are either coopted or purged.

Trump isn't an aberration; he's just someone who daylights, magnifies, and exaggerates what's already there almost everywhere. He's somebody who believes that everybody is as bad as he, as cynical and self-interested in his or her motivations as he, and he's more right than wrong about that when it comes to so many of the people who rise to positions of power and influence in this country. 

Does that sound extreme or overly cynical on my part? Maybe, but it seems pretty clear to me that those motivations are by and large accepted as normative within these elite spheres. People working in these institutions as individuals may be more or less decent, but the institutional ethos is deeply corrupted by the exigencies of capitalism, and it makes sense that those who are most successful in such a corrupt values environment are those who have the least compunction about behaving corruptly. Is there any wonder that decent, but poorly informed people in great swaths of America are inclined see the ruling elites the way they do?

But perhaps that's why I feel a scintilla of hope. Yes, it might prove naive, but it's precisely because Trump has daylighted and magnified for all to see what we have in fact become that maybe, just maybe, especially as more comes out about him in coming months, that we will come to some broad collective resolution to reject elite nihilism for something better. The catch, of course, is whether something better will present itself. Biden might buy us some time, but he's not it. Will it come from within elite precincts of American society or from somewhere else? Don't know. But it's more likely to come from African American people of faith than from a soul-eviserated white elite, imo. Not the Kamala Harrises, but the Stacey Abrams. Not the Corey Bookers, but the Raphael Warnocks. We'll see. 

Milton Friedman: Proto-Sociopath

But while economists still argue over Friedman’s theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists — the Friedman doctrine — turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life — and his name became a synonym for miserliness. Likewise, a century later, in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the banker Mr. Potter is the evil, unredeemable, un-American villain. Here was Milton Friedman telling businesspeople that they’d been tricked by the liberal elite, that Scrooge and Potter were heroes they ought to emulate.

Kurt Anderson, "How Liberals Opened the Door to [Crank] Libertarian Economics"

Milton Friedman was a crank, a fanatic Libertarian, whose views through much of his early career were relegated to the fringes. The Friedman Doctrine did not cause the problems we are dealing with now--Trumpism, huge economic inequality, intensified racial conflict--but legitimated the worst human impulses that led to their becoming as bad as they are now. Milton Friedman's ideas did not make men greedy; he legitimated greed. He removed the constraints and social norms that impeded people in business from giving their inner Scrooge or Mr. Potter free rein.

There's a direct line from Friedman to the corporate ethos that led to the 2008 meltdown and to the kind of mentality among many business types, especially on Wall Street, that leads them to embrace Trump. Like Friedman, Trump legitimates the worst human impulses. He brazenly acts out what normal people would feel ashamed to do, and so that makes people think he's honest or un-hypocritical. People see the president of the U.S. acting out their own secret, dark fantasies, and admire his "courage". But he's not courageous; he's a sociopath. 

The curious thing about Friedman is that he's an idealist about something that legitimates the worst impulses in human beings. That is a kind of sociopathy that he shares with most religious fanatics. His is a personal psychopathy that justifies Capitalist sociopathy. 

Libertarianism attracts a lot of smart people who are uncomfortable with complexity, who feel insecure at a deep ontological level, and so gravitate toward simplistic solutions that appear smart or edgy. It's the kind of thing that nerdy, emotionally stunted high schoolers get into, like reading Ayn Rand, as if she's really, really, you know, profound. But it's the kind of thing that if you don't outgrow it by your early twenties, you easily meld into the kind of sociopathic ethos that rules on Wall Street and shaped the ethos of Enron.  

Jesus said that the poor we shall have always with us. He forgot to mention that the sociopaths we shall have always with us, too. Unfortunately they're the ones who run things because normal, healthy people don't have their ruthlessness, monomania, and need to dominate. And most decent people tend to give even the worst people, if they're white and rich, the benefit of the doubt until it's too late. Any grifter or con artist understands this tendency among normal, decent human beings, and they know how to take advantage of it. 

The problem with America right now is that a grifter sociopath like Trump has shown other grifter sociopaths that there is a huge swath of the American public--40%+--who are ripe to be massively conned. Certainly more than I thought before Trump got elected--I would have guessed the number closer to 25%. There is nothing to hold back the next grifter sociopath to come along because Trump completed what Friedman began in destroying the decency norms that used to play a role in restraining what's worst in human nature. 

I assume that unless Trump stooges and the Russians are successful somehow in creating enough chaos and confusion to allow Trump to steal the election (a real possibility), Biden will win in November. But unless something even more unexpected happens, it's pretty clear that Biden and the Democrats haven't the imagination or strength of mind to fix what ails us. If 40%+ of the country prefers someone as comically crackpot as Trump now, 50%+ will prefer some future grifter selling the same snake oil but with more sophistication.

They'll find all kinds of crazy ways to justify their support for him or her, but it comes down to the con man's ability to persuade people that what they feel shameful about is really ok. As Gordon Gecko said echoing Friedman, "Greed is good... it captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind." It's a great con because it makes you feel good about acting out what's worst. 

12/27/23 Update: I still think that the basic thrust of what I wrote here stands, but maybe softened somewhat by the more complex picture presented in Jennifer Burn's new book Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Read it and judge for yourself. Friedman, as were many other economists in the neoclassical school that became so influential in the late 20th century, was a true believer in the Cult of the Invisible Hand. He seemed to suffer from whatever the pathology is that leads people to join cults, and that cult produced beliefs and policies that, imo, are sociopathic. And is there any question that he was a fervent evangelist in the spreading of those beliefs and practices? Maybe that's too harsh. To what degree he is morally culpable is not for me to say. He started out as a New Dealer, but in later years he seemed oblivious of how his ideas had such negative impacts on the lives of ordinary people. He was in many ways just a man of his times, and when the times normalize sociopathy everybody shares in it some extent, me included. 

Dolly Parton and the Coincidentia Oppositorum

There’s a mesmerizing and ironic artifice to Dolly Parton—a sincere and relatable duality. She’s one of those icons in whom seemingly opposing forces naturally connect: poverty and folksiness against the power of enormous success, vulnerability and tenderness against effervescent self-assuredness, a story of honesty and heartache under an image so artfully plastic it seems to turn in on itself. Her brand of iconography feels so aware of its own longing for beauty that it somehow trips over superficiality and falls back into the deepest reverence. What else is her appearance but a lie she’s telling us because she knows we love to hear it? “I think part of my magic, if I have any at all,” she once said on Australia’s 60 Minutes, “is that I look totally fake but am so totally real.” 

--Chris Dennis in Guernica

I'm sure that if DP saw her name associated with such a pretentious sounding Latin phrase such as coincidentia oppositorum, she'd have a good laugh, but one of the commonest of commonplaces associated with her is how she transcends her contradictions. But it's true--she has significant contradictions and she does transcend them. So I thought it might be important to at least try to understand how she does it. So here are some preliminary thoughts along those lines.

First, If you haven't listened to the nine-part WNYC podcast about her, Dolly Parton's America, you should definitely do that and soon. If you have only time for one, listen to Episode 2, "I will Always Leave You", which is mostly about her fraught relationship with Porter Wagoner. And the Netflix series entitled Dolly Parton's Heartstrings is worth watching too. Most of what I have to say about DP reflects what I learned about her from those two sources. There's a kind of Fichtean theme that runs through both: there are powerful obstacles that separate us. These obstacles and the conflicts they create are not a bug but a feature of life because without them human beings would not have the opportunity to discover who they are as free spiritual beings. We can choose to overcome them, or we can make them worse by ignoring them or feeding the resentment, anger, and fear that fuels them. Each of the Heartstrings stories is about people who choose to confront and overcome these obstacles and in doing so to become more themselves. 

So the goal is not only a Fichtean affirmation of self in overcoming the enemy, but more importantly that we only become more ourselves when we recognize the selfhood and dignity of the "enemy". That's more of a Christian idea than a Fichtean one. The endings in the Heartstring series might be seen as sentimental by some, but I'd say that they are deeply true in the same way as at the end of Shakespeare's comedies. After the conflicts and misunderstandings are resolved, there's usually a wedding or a circle dance, and when well-performed, the audience is caught up in a deep, archetypal joy. This dynamic is at work at the end of Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, and it is at work in the Heartstring stories in a similar way. Those who dismiss this as not real or as overly sentimental misread these moments in a very significant way.

On one level such positive outcomes seem unrealistic, but that's because they're hyperrealistic, that is, they tap into the the transformative energy of an archetype, and the archetype active in these stories I'd call the "Communion Archetype". To feel its power is to feel its joy. It's an archetype that that Owen Barfield describes as defining the end of history--Final Participation--that we can now experience proleptically, that is, through a glass darkly. It's an archetype that I'd like to think in its modest way is an inspiration for this blog called "After the Future". 

If these endings feel contrived and sentimental to you, that means that you don't feel the energy of the archetype. And there are many obstacles that prevent our feeling it when it's there. If now, for instance, I was to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, I doubt I would feel its power, but that does not mean that the power isn't there. I know it's there because I have memories of experiencing it. The problem now is not with the music, but with something in me--some obstacle--that prevents me from responding to what is there. I don't want to get sidetracked explaining all the "jading" factors that create this obstacle, but to be jaded is not the same thing as to be discriminating. My point is, first, that the effort to overcome such an obstacle is analogous to the overcoming what is dramatized in the stories mentioned above. And, second, if you don't believe there's anything beyond the obstacle, you won't make the effort to overcome it; if you do believe something's there, you will. Our condition as late moderns is to be largely skeptical that there is anything there, and that paralyzes us.

So the goal in Shakespeare, Capra, Heartstrings, and other classic comedies is not the triumph of the individual over the forces of evil, but rather the triumph that overcomes conflict itself in the experience of reconciliation and communion. Communion is the antithesis of the hive mind or the mob because it involves free individuals having to choose it and in choosing it to become more themselves. There is neither individuality nor freedom in the hive or the mob. True communion is only possible among people who are truly themselves, and to be in a hive or mob is by definition to abdicate both. And so the biggest obstacles to communion are the myriad ways we all live false versions of ourselves. And that's what the Heartstings stories are about--people learning that they are trapped in false versions of themselves and then finding a way to free themselves and in doing so to discover the power that lies in communion at a deeper, truer level with others.

This overcoming of false versions of oneself, i.e., to move toward deeper levels of communion, is Dolly Parton's truth, and I think it's the key to understanding what enables her to transcend her contradictions. There is so much about her that seems fake--like her surgically manufactured appearance. But because of the way she jokes about it -- "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap", we can feel confident that she doesn't take that aspect of herself seriously. Like the Wizard of Oz she projects a persona that's bigger than life, but she has no delusions of grandeur. She knows who she is, which is just the little guy behind the curtain having fun trying to put on a good show. She knows the difference between what she projects and who she truly is. I think of Lady Gaga as doing much the same thing. This is completely different from what Donald Trump does. For him there is only the projected image, and that image is an expression of what is truest about him, which is his dishonesty. He's a con man, a modern day P.T. Barnum, and he cons himself as much as he attempts to con others. 

So perhaps because I'm writing this the day after Trump's third State of the Union Address and on the day that he's being acquitted in the Senate, I feel compelled to make the comparison between him and Parton. I'm sure there are many Dolly fans who are also Trump supporters, and they see in him much of what they see in her. It's easy to see why: both are successful entertainers, both wealthy businesspeople, both, though way past their prime, still highly sexualized, both trade on their name branding. What makes Dollywood any different from Trump Tower? Aren't both monuments to inflated ego? I don't think so, but let's suss out why.

Is it possible make such a distinction without knowing either of them personally? Yes and No. It could be that I have it completely wrong, I could find out someday that Trump really was Atticus Finch to those who really knew him and Parton was Cruella DeVil, but I doubt it. There's enough evidence in the public record for both to make some educated guesses we can feel confident about. And I think an exercise like this is instructive for understanding this coincidentia oppositorum theme. I want to argue that each derives her or his power by virtue of an archetype--for Dolly Parton, it's the Communion Archetype; for Trump, the Chaos Archetype. The first has an integrating effect on those who 'participate' in it; the second a disintegrative effect in those it possesses. 

I think a post for another day might be to tease out to what degree bigger-than-life people are free and to what degree they are determined (trapped) by the power of the archetypes that energize them. Was Napoleon free? Was Mozart? I have some ideas about that, but let me stipulate in provisional way for now that the Communion Archetype operates in a way that enhances a fully developed, free human being, and the Chaos Archetype in its many variations requires only raw instinct and animal cunning. The first works to integrate the serpent with the dove, the beast with the angel; the second is the serpent without the dove, the beast without the angel. The Great Chain of Being no longer shapes our cosmic imaginary, but it still works metaphorically. Chaos is at the bottom of the chain; Communion with the godhead is at the top. 

Is there another type that is the Dove without the Serpent? Yes. I write about that in this post about Steinbeck's East of Eden. Doves without Serpents tend to be idealist flakes or hippies in the most benign cases, but in the most malign cases they can be rigid, purist, morally fanatic ideologues--Savonarolas, Robespierres, Inquisitors. Alcoholics and other addictive personality types are often idealist Doves who refuse to deal with the hard realities that the serpent thrives in. Serpents are drug dealers, not users. Or Doves enact an enantiodromia in which in their disillusionment they completely reverse poles from unbalanced, naive Doves to unbalanced, cynical Serpents. Extremely unbalanced Doves or Serpents spin off in one way or another into psychic disintegration and become captured by the Chaos Archetype. And when they do, they wreak havoc in the lives of those around them. 

In the East of Eden post, I talk about how each of us is either a dove-dominant type or a serpent-dominant type, and that neither is morally superior, even if doves tend to be more socially acceptable in a boy-scouty way. Moral development is measured to the degree that doves integrate the recessive serpent aspects of their psyches, and serpents integrate the recessive dove aspects. In other words, we become successful human beings to the degree that we enact the coincidentia oppositorum. The marriage of the serpent-dominant Cal and the dove-dominant Abbra in East of Eden signifies a successful coincidentia oppositorum, the hieros gamos. The Dove-dominant Aron fails and is destroyed as he spins off into fanatic madness.  

I would say that DP is an earthy, savvy Serpent-dominant type who has largely succeeded in integrating her recessive Dove aspect, and Trump is also a serpent-dominant type, who failed to integrate his Dove. He probably at this point in his life has no idea that it even exists. This is what makes him a madman. To what degree he has any culpability in becoming such a truly horrible human being us between him and God, but the fact remains that he is a truly horrible human being and is extremely dangerous because he is so unbalanced. His personal imbalance is bigger than life because of the way that the Chaos Archetype works in him, and he becomes a vortex that sucks into his chaos anyone near him who hasn't a firm foothold to prevent him from being swept off his feet. Until recently the Trumpian vortex was little more than a dust devil. But his election to president has made him a good-sized tornado--a 2 or a 3 on the Fujita scale. God help us if we don't find a way to contain him before he becomes a 5. 

I should say, since I've been writing about it so much recently, that this aligns with Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and the Emissary. My 'dove' correlates with McG's depiction of how the right hemisphere opens us up to the utter uselessness and wonder of Being, and my 'serpent' with how McG's left hemisphere reduces Being to a useful abstraction. The left hemisphere values what is useful, graspable, controllable. In other words it values maps over the the concrete lifeworld of landscapes. Maps are useful in helping us to navigate in the life world, but they are not the life world. There's nothing wrong with maps except when they become valued more than what they represent, especially if they come to substitute for it. 

Thus, Magritte's famous--

We need the the utilitarian serpent and its clever, instrumental reason in order to work effectively and safely in a hostile world teeming with wolves. But when it becomes an end in itself, when it loses its grounding in the right hemisphere, it squeezes the life out of the soul. McG's argument, using my Serpent/Dove analogy (which he does not use), is that we currently live in a Serpent-dominant cultural milieu, and we have to find a way of opening up and reintegrating the repressed Dove, an aspect that the left-dominant elites regard as flaky and naive, subjective and unverifiable. The culture, in other words, is like Trump--dominated by the Serpent and either forgetful or contemptuous of the Dove. 

Dolly Parton is a wealthy entertainer and a shrewd, practical business woman. That's her Serpent part, but she's not just that. In DP we see a model of integration of the Dove with the Serpent, indeed the Serpent is in the service of the Dove, and if this reading of her is correct, it's her ability to keep those two aspects in the right relationship that makes her a model of the coincidentia oppositorum. And that's what makes her so different from Donald Trump, whatever the appearances might indicate otherwise.  

When people effect this reconciliation of opposites in their own lives, it affects those around them. That's why she's a unifying figure while Trump is a polarizing one. Her fraught relationship with Porter Wagoner exemplifies this. It could have been one of the Heartstrings stories. It's about conflict and reconciliation, but not a reconciliation that was effected by giving in on what was essential for the maintenance and growth of her integrity. Their conflict was born of DP's need to be her own woman, and of PW's inability to accept that. This was his failure not hers, because he, not she, was trapped in a false version of himself, and he probably would have stayed stuck in that false version of himself had Dolly not insisted on (1) being her own woman, while at the same time (2) refusing to let PW's bitterness to define the relationship. In refusing to be a false version of herself, she in the end enabled PW to become a better version of himself. In the end, the Communion Archetype  shining through her effected their reconciliation. That's a powerful story because it's a real-life enactment of the Communion Archetype. It's the circle dance at the end of a Shakespeare comedy. 

Not giving-in in the service of one's integrity is completely different from digging-in in the service of protecting one's false version of oneself. (Hat's off to Mitt Romney, btw, for being at this point the only Republican Senator who seems to understand the difference between not giving in and digging in.) At first Porter Wagoner got himself very dug in, and so was like Donald Trump and all the senators who are digging in with him. We'e all been there; we've all dug in to defend false versions of ourselves at different points in our lives. The difference between Wagoner and Trump lies in that Wagoner had a Dolly Parton in his life whereas Trump seems only to have had variations of Stormy Daniels, big-boobed Parton parodies.

That's why Dollywood isn't Trump Tower. Both are expressions of what's real in each, and neither would be possible without their potent fantasy projections, their dreams. But whatever its flaws or whatever criticisms one might direct toward Dollywood, it's something she built to be a source of enjoyment and employment for her people in east Tennessee. I see it as an expression of her Dove and its intimate connection to the lifeworld/culture of her people that shaped her and enabled her to become whom she became. It was a way of giving back. Trump Tower is pure Serpent. 

There's another archetype DP reminds me of--the Samaritain woman Jesus meets at Jacob's Well, Photine (Jolene in Heartsrings?). She's the archetype of a kind of a lively, bawdy sinfulness that is yet supple-hearted and naive enough to respond to the intrusion of a disruptive, transcendent power into her life. Dolly's moment at the well happened when she was younger, in that boarded-up church she used to visit with all the pornographic graffiti decorating it. That's when the Serpent in her bowed to the Dove. She talks about that in episode 9 of the Dolly Parton's America podcast. I think of Jacob's Well as a symbol for the source of the obstacle-shattering life that enables us to become our best selves. It's there for each of us. But while you can lead a horse to water you can't make him drink. I was thinking of bringing in Dorothy Parker here, but it's not apt. The important part about Dolly is that she did drink, and she does think, and that's what makes her the anti-Trump, whether she sees herself that way or not. 

Some Random Thoughts on the American Character

I never quite grasped why Jefferson and Adams were so discouraged by the way the country had democratized by the 1820s. Wasn't that what they, especially Jefferson, had hoped for? I tended to dismiss their concerns as a snooty elitism. But I understand it differently now, especially in light of Trump’s ascendancy. Reading Wood, Howe, and Potter over the last several months has set me straight about that. There was a snootiness in it, but also there were good reasons for them to be appalled. 

The “populism” that dismayed Jefferson and Adams was the kind of populism that lifted Trump into power. Adams's and Jefferson’s republican ideals —and really the ideals of the entire revolutionary generation—seem quaintly naïve over against the crude, myopically interest-driven energies released after the Revolution. The most active Americans were remarkably ignorant and short-sighted, they were drunks, they were all too inclined to run with the mob, they were white supremacists and nativists who exhibited a barbaric violence toward Blacks and Indians, and they indulged in a kind of grandiosity about being an American that fed their delusions and their worst instincts. America was a nasty, nasty place in the 19th Century. There is very little about it to be nostalgic about. 

The old republican ideals were payed lip service to, but played hardly any role in the dynamic realities shaping the political and economic spheres. Everything was transactional. Everybody in the private sector was on the make and in the public sector you were considered an idiot if you weren't on the take. You know the picture we have about the lawless, wild west in the period after the Civil War? That's the way it was back East before it.

It's a mentality that made America economically dynamic, for sure, but also what made it shallow and cruel. It's the America that Trump envisions when he wants to make it great again because Trump's America appeals to whatever is shallow, cruel, and short-sighted in the American character. Trump's candidacy and now his presidency have shown how fragile the norms that have suppressed what has always been there as the ugliest aspects of the American character. And what has become clearer to me is not that Trump is an aberration, but rather he is a reversion to the 19th century, pre-Progressive Era norm. He's the culmination, if not the reductio ad absurdum, of the Republican project that began with Reagan in 1980 to dismantle the reforms that made the U.S. a relatively decent place to live for a while.

What we see in Trump's kakistocracy (look it up) is very much in line with that part of the American character. The Mueller investigation seems to be approaching its climax. It seems to be big news that Cohen has come public about lying about not having contact with the Russians during Trump’s 2016 campaign. People think this is a big deal because it shows that Trump was dealing with the Russians to promote his own business interests in such a way that could compromise the country’s interests. But we know this already, and do we have any confidence that Mueller's proving it will make a difference?

The talking heads on TV keep telling us that the Trump people are second raters who cannot withstand Mueller’s attack. But it’s amazing to me that the elites in this country have put up with Trump this long, and it’s simply because the elite factions disgusted by Trump simply don’t have enough power anymore to push him out.  A piece in the NYT today sums it up:

The allure of a Mueller report lies in its imagined promise of a single, definitive truth capable of cutting through the haze of lies, confusion and “alternative facts.” But Mr. Corsi’s and Mr. Papadopoulos’s antics are a warning that this hope will inevitably fall short. Conspiracy theorists and prosecutors live in different worlds: The first, unmoored from truth; the second, devoted to proving facts beyond a reasonable doubt. Mr. Mueller has the power to charge Mr. Corsi for lying; he has already done so to Mr. Papadopoulos. Rather than crumbling, though, their falsehoods have continued to spread and grow — and they’ve taken root in the media ecosystem in which the president chooses to spend his days. 

In this environment, the question is less what Mr. Mueller will do next and more what Congress and the American people will do with the information they already have.

By now it’s clear that the special counsel is not armed with a silver bullet, not because the facts are not bad for the president but precisely because they are. If facts were enough, Mr. Trump would already have been impeached.

The Republican Party and Fox News are more than ok with Trump and his unprecedented awfulness. They represent the America that appalled Jefferson and Adams that I described above. The Republicans have become the party of incompetent ideologues and grifters who think that America is at its best when it is a crude, un-regulated circus where the most cunning kleptocrats can engorge themselves on the public teat. They want to destroy the whole American public infrastructure for reasons they don’t even understand because their ignorance, venality, and short-term thinking blinds them to the consequences of their actions. (If this isn't obvious to you already, read Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk.) But tens of millions of American think that any accusations about Trump and his cronies' corruption and incompetence is fake news. The Democrats are just as bad, they argue. How do you penetrate that kind of filter?

***

Trump doesn't frighten me nearly as much as the breathtaking stupidity, the willful ignorance, the childish resentfulness, and the ideological blindness of the Americans who allowed themselves to be conned by him. Their psychology is very similar to the kind of delusional psychology that led to the Civil War. I understand better now how this kind of ignorance and stupidity can take hold after reading Howe and Potter. At the time of the founding and even into the first couple of decades of the 19^thcentury, everyone, including southern elites, was embarrassed about slavery. It was an unhealthy thing, like smoking or drinking too much. It's something that everybody wanted to stop, but they kept procrastinating about because it would be hard to do. 

And then around 1820 with the Missouri crisis, it became clear that the slaveholders no longer wanted to give slavery up, and they started looking for ways to justify it. They were  rather like the drunk who comes up with any rationalization to keep drinking. And like the drunk who is really deeply ashamed of his having a problem, he denies he has one. And because he cannot face it, he becomes indignant when someone confronts him about it. He tells the person to mind his own business, and maybe takes a swing at him. 

States Rights and Nullification become the ideological justifications to beat back the busy-body northerners. Heretofore American nationalists like Calhoun become localists in the name of protecting slavery from Federal interdict. And after 1830, in the wake of the Nat Turner slave rebellion, this shame is compounded by an intensified fear that the cruelty that they have inflicted on their slaves will in turn be inflicted on them if the slaves are ever freed. What goes around comes around is a deep source of fear for the violent and cruel. Black slaves come to represent all their repressed fear and shame, and rather than face it, they must double down to make sure they keep it repressed. This subconscious drama gets acted out in ante-bellum Slavery politics and after the war in the fantasy of the Lost Cause and the cruelty of Jim Crow. 

Anything that threatened to weaken Slaveholder control threatened to unleash all these dark, repressed, violently irrational parts of the Southern psyche. A fantasy about Southern nobility and gentility begins to develop. Southern elites begin to think they are not morally inferior for being slaveholders, but rather morally superior to Northerners. Those Yankees don’t have the nobility of soul to understand what makes their Southern way of life so sweet, so civilized as compared to their money-grubbing, mercantile ways.

Theological digression: Everybody feels ontological shame; all humans feel that they don’t measure up, that they’ve failed, even if they cannot understand quite why. Call it original sin or whatever you please; it's just built in to the human condition. And so much of human motivation is about compensating for the feeling of shame and inadequacy that is its chief symptom. It might be a cliché, but it points to a real truth about why the greatest achievers are often those who feel most intensely this “ontological” inadequacy. It drives them to do almost anything to get rid of it.

And that's why 'pride' is considered by the wise to be among the worst human characteristics. Pride is not a sense of one's inherent dignity as someone born in the image and likeness of God. Pride is a false image of ourselves that we fabricate to overcome our sense of ontological shame. That's why the tradition has always been suspicious about human effort. It's not that effort is bad in itself, but rather that the effort is more often than not in the service of the wrong motivation--that it's a causa sui project, and as such delusional because we are not causa sui. That is the fundamental insight of the person of faith and the reason why gratitude, not pride, is the fundamental precondition of a life well lived. And this is why American culture, for all its ostensible religiosity, is fundamentally delusional. It is a prideful, greedy, and ungrateful culture through and through

And so the one thing that people cannot stand is to be accused of doing anything shameful by someone whom they see as no better. And in a kind of deep ontological sense we are right to think that our accusers are no better. We’re all projecting our deep-down ontological sense of shame onto others. And that’s why the gospels admonish us not to judge or accuse others, because more likely than not what we see in others is just a reflection of what is in ourselves that we don’t want to face.

But complementing this suppressed shame is a transcultural honor fantasy that is central to sustaining this pathology. It's called "losing face", when the "face" is the delusional construct, the mask we wear that masks the deep truth about who we are. The honor fantasy is a delusional fantasy about our identity being the same as the mask we present to the world, that part of ourselves we've constructed that’s captured in our reputation. And when that reputation is challenged as fraudulent by someone, we feel a deep, angry hostility toward whoever would shame us by doing so.

But everyone captured by the honor fantasy is by definition a fraud because the whole idea of one's 'honor' is a delusional construct designed to keep you from confronting who you really are. If you lived in ante-bellum America and other places, your honor would require you to fight to the death to defend this fantasy, because nothing is more unbearable to people who have become identified with their "honor" than to face the deep truth about their ontological inadequacy. And this, in brief, is why we fought the Civil War, and it's why so many Americans cannot admit why their vote for Donald Trump was a disaster. You must cling to the fantasy at all costs, because once it bursts there's nothing to hold onto to prevent your plunge into that deep vat of ontological shame. 

So whenever we judge or accuse others, it's more likely than not that they are just going to dig in and come to a far more rigid defense of their delusional thinking. So better not to judge, right?  But then you have this problem of an entire social system behaving toward other human beings in a way that is horrifically cruel and living in a fantasy that justifies it. And just as you have a loved one with a wife-beating problem, you can’t just do nothing. You have to intervene. And this is where things tend to go off the rails, especially when you call the police, all of whom have a wife-beating problem, metaphorically speaking. This was essentially the situation that the relatively sane and decent people had in confronting slaveholder delusions in the ante-bellum south.

Now while the Abolitionists wanted the southerners to go cold turkey, the free-soil types thought that it was impossible to tell the southerners to quit, so they adopted a strategy of containment. The Wilmot Proviso introduced in 1846 initiates a pitched battle fought not about the existence of slavery where it already existed, but about whether slavery, in principle, should be allowed in the territories opened up by the Mexican cession. Here’s it’s wording:

Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.

Ironically this statement is modeled on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was uncontroversial when formulated for reasons explained above, and it shows how much things had changed since the founding. The slaveholders didn’t want to be contained anymore. To agree to a containment policy in the new territories would be "dishonorable"; it would imply that to be a slaveholder was to be morally inferior, and the Southern honor fantasy could not be sustained if they were to give in on that.

There were other factors besides honor, of course. The economic and power dynamic was always a factor, and the southerners were justifiably afraid of being outnumbered in Congress if they didn’t match the admission of each new ‘free’ state with a ‘slave’ state. And they understandably feared that no matter what people said in 1846, they would not have the power to resist a future abolitionist congress. The slaveholders understood deep down that they were on the wrong side of history, and they did everything they could to keep the tide from rising.

And in the short run they succeeded. They controlled the Senate, and their threats of secession forced concessions that were wins for them:  In the Compromise of 1850 with its notorious Fugitive Slave Act, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1855 that repealed the Missouri Compromise, in the Dred Scott decision in '57 that made slavery legal even in the states that had banned it, and in '58 the astonishingly fraudulent pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution for Bleeding Kansas that President Buchanan rammed through. Mitch McConnell is playing the same game. He's read his history, and he's learned a thing or two from his ante-bellum ancestors. It remains to be seen whether his victories will be as Pyrrhic. 

So the Civil War ends in slavehollder defeat. Six hundred thousand dead. For what? For Southern honor? If it was just about the money, they could have worked it out. The Civil War, like most wars, is always about something else, something deeper  and darker in the human psyche. Sometimes, a war though, knocks some sense into those who waged it, but not true for the South. The honor fantasy morphs into the Lost Cause fantasy, and a deep-seated culture of resentment develops there. Slavery ends officially, and while Black Americans get a taste of freedom for a decade or so, it's quickly back to the same old, same old as the white shame-repression fantasy reasserts itself. Black Americans find themselves getting 'repressed' in whatever way it's still possible for white people to do it. 

A part of the fantasy is still to see Northerners as soulless, money-grubbing grifters, which, of course, many are. But then this curious thing happens when Donald Trump runs for office. There is no one in the history of American politics who embodies the kind of person Southerners hate more than Donald Trump. He is the king of the grifters. He owns casinos, for gods sakes. And yet there he is, playing his blatant, pandering con, and they embrace him like a long, lost brother. So now we've got the worst of the North embraced by the worst of the South.

And we have to ask what is there in the American character in the long term to push back against this deep-seated worst? In the short term, sure, people in the mushy middle who voted for him and kakistocrats like him vote for the other party. We saw this a couple of weeks ago. Why am I not relieved? Because too many deeply awful, ignorant, delusional people beat truly decent and intelligent ones, and because it won't take long for the kakisitocrats to regroup where they've lost. They want power in a way that ordinary, decent Americans don't. Decent Americans can say No when things get egregiously bad, but they can't win in the long run until there's something truly decent to which they can say Yes. 

Donald Trump is not an aberration, he is an exemplar of a long tradition of American bad actors who have played too large a role in shaping our history. People like him and his supporters are deeply ignorant, delusional people living in a self-worth magnification fantasy. The only real cure is intervention by people who are wise and compassionate, and who can point to an alternative, reality-based meaning story that gives all Americans a robust imagination of future possibility. We have to hope and pray that some how, some way, a movement will arise in America that can promote such an alternative. I think there is a fundamental, latent decency in every human being, but you have to have a cultural story that activates it. And until we do, MAGA, or variations of it. wins by default. 

Inferno/Purgatorio/Paradiso

I am a part-time novelist who happens also to be a part-time Christian because part of the time seems to be the most I can manage to live out my faith: Christian part of the time when certain things seem real and important to me and the rest of the time not Christian in any sense that I can believe matters much to Christ or anybody else. Any Christian who is not a hero, Léon Bloy wrote, is a pig, which is a harder way of saying the same thing. From time to time I find a kind of heroism momentarily possible—a seeing, doing, telling of Christly truth—but most of the time I am indistinguishable from the rest of the herd that jostles and snuffles at the great trough of life. Part-time novelist, Christian, pig.

Frederick Buechner

In the Third Canto of Inferno, Dante says there "...trailed so long a file of people--I should never have believed that death could have unmade so many souls". Vergil tells Dante that they are the  sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise because they never chose sides. They are the "moderates," the nowhere men, those who take refuge in the mushy middle and praise themselves for their prudence and good sense. They now commingle with the cowardly angels, those who were neither rebels nor faithful, but stood apart, afraid to choose. 

It wouldn't surprise me if Buechner was thinking of this passage or of Eliot's allusion to it in The Wasteland.  But I would qualify it somewhat. I don't think the objective is to be heroic, because more often than not the pursuit of heroism devolves into a crude causa sui project. Muscular Christianity has little to do with the spirit of the gospels. I'd argue that the normal is ok, but that being normal is not normative; for the Christian impulse is about loving the normal and yet not accepting it as all there is, and from time to time acting in such a way as to subvert it. Whether those actions are modest ones or heroic matters less than whether they were inspired by grace. 

Despite the pejorative connotations, I don't think it's such a bad thing to be a pig.  It's simply a metaphor for our normal, natural life in a fallen world. There is so much that is good about that. Going to ballgames and hoping your team wins. Raising your kids to do well in school and to get decent jobs. Normal is the ordinary joys and sorrows, the tedium and excitement of a life lived through its different rhythms. It means arguing about politics and mowing your lawn. It's about falling in and out of love, and about our dreams for a better future. It's our life as talking, self-aware animals, piggies if you will, living on the earth, and if we see our normal life in this way, it's hard to take it too seriously, because really it shouldn't be.

This is not an argument for complacency, because while there is much in the normal that is truly good, it's not the only possibility. We may be little piggies, but we are capable being more. We want to be more or to think of ourselves as more, but there is a right way and a wrong way of going about it. The normal route people take to being more has to do with ambition and pride, this always leads to problems. The non-normal route is to recognize oneself for the piggy one is and then work with something that we don't think of as natural, but which is as much a part of our daily experience as the air we breathe. 

You know the movie A Day without a Mexican?  It tries to show how important to the life of L.A. is the mostly taken-for-granted presence of Mexicans. Well imagine the world without the taken-for-granted presence of grace. Maybe Quentin Tarrantino could be hired to do the movie about a world without grace--or maybe he already has.  For surely he has a knack for showing us the lives of people who live in a world of banal vileness, banal and vile to the degree that they are closed off from the reality of grace.

I believe there is a principle of metaphysical evil that operates in the world, and its purpose is to close humans off from the possibility of grace. Hell is the soul's state when it has become completely impenetrable by grace. But I doubt anybody takes up permanent residence in downtown Infernoville.  There are, though, plenty of people who live in its suburbs.  And there are people who likewise live in the suburbs of Paradiso.  But most of us live in the murky, in-between burb, which is downtown Purgatorio. It's the place we call normal, neither filled with grace, nor completely cut off from it. Dante puts the nowhere men in Inferno and they belong there if their indecision was a purposeful refusal of grace, but while sometimes it does, mostly it doesn't require of us heroic reaction to choose grace rather than to refuse it.

And so while these are metaphorical places, they are also metaphysical ones.  It's the condition of all of us who live in a fallen world. Paradiso is not a physical place, but the physical world is changed when it is within the gravitational pull of those people who have Paradiso within them. Non-normal things can happen.

Natura est vulnerata, non delenda.  Nature is wounded, not destroyed. I'm going from memory here, so I'm not sure, but think it's Aquinas who said it. It makes a difference if you think of the world as we live in it as wounded, because it suggests that health and wholeness was something lost and also that it can be regained. It suggests that what we have come to take for granted as normal is not necessarily healthful. It makes a difference because it contrasts with the naturalistic understanding that accepts the normal, natural world as the only possibility. And it makes a difference in contrast with the view, Eastern or Western, that understands the world as a prison with no possibilities other than to be a prison, so therefore a place that must be escaped.

It makes a difference because it frames for us the nature of the "heroic" work that we are called to do--the work that truly makes us more than piggies eating at life's trough.  And it defines what heroic means in ways that circumvent all the recognition-driven motivations that are at the heart of the traditional meaning of heroism. Natural heroism is piggy heroism, insofar as it's driven by adrenaline and testosterone. It is in my view morally neutral because it's natural and it’s instinct driven, even if prodigious in its accomplishment. It's usually nothing more than bucks bashing one another in a battle for dominance. Such heroism that is neither here nor there. For the heroism about which Bloy and Buechner speak is not about the performance of tasks that require extraordinary gifts. It is a heroism inspired by grace.

Heroism in this sense is the cumulative record of a life lived, usually obscurely, in response to the presence of the possibility of true freedom or grace. It is about the development of the kind of character, which, because it is capable of responding to grace in small ways over the course of a lifetime, is then also capable, if the occasion arises, of responding in a big way. It is only because of a lifetime of small decisions, small gestures, and the habits of soul that are developed as a result, that if something big comes, and even if notoriety comes with it, there is enough ballast to keep him or her from being blown over. 

More on the Torture Report

If our leaders were more honest, they’d admit that the CIA’s recently revealed torture isn’t a break from this legacy, but the fruit of it – the product of decades of dehumanizing counter-insurgency warfare that expanded the USA from 13 colonies on the East Coast to much of North America and, ultimately, a global empire (it’s no coincidence that the code-name for Osama bin Laden was “Geronimo,” taken from the famed Apache leader).

After almost wiping out America’s original inhabitants, the U.S. government went on to declare total war on differently pigmented people around the globe. President Woodrow Wilson re-instituted slavery (or “forced labor”) in Haiti after its political class proved insufficiently compliant, his famed commitment to the right of self-determination not extending to those darker than pasty white. In Vietnam, the CIA’s “Phoenix Program” saw those accused of collaborating with the North Vietnamese subjected to “assassination, kidnapping, and systematic torture,” according to historian Douglas Valentine. Inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were raped and murdered. And today, amid official proclamations that we live in a post-torture age, inmates held in Guantanamo Bay – many of whom could never even go to a show trial because insofar as there’s any real evidence against them it was gained through torture – continue to be subjected to torturous force-feedings that have been condemned by the United Nations.

The abuse, exported across Latin America through the torture-training School of the Americas, also continues here at home, with tens of thousands of black and brown and poor white US citizens currently languishing in mind-destroying solitary confinement, California’s Pelican Bay State Prison alone holding over 500 people in isolation for a decade or more. In Chicago, a cop who electrocuted and otherwise tortured more than 200 people until they confessed to crimes they didn’t do, got off with about 3 years behind bars after the evidence of his sadism became too great to ignore; that’s less prison time than if he had been caught with a gram of crack cocaine.

I don't dispute the facts--in fact, he left out the American brutality during the Filipino Insurgency after the Spanish American War--but I find the narrative into which they are woven to be too one-sided and self-defeating. He describes Thomas Jefferson as a "savage white supremacist who in practice if not always in speech believed that people of color (“slaves” and “savages” as they were known then; “thugs” and “terrorists” as they’re often called today) did not deserve all the same rights as wealthy white Americans like him." Come on. There has always been this split in the American soul, and I think it's wrong to say that the darker side of that split is the 'real' or the 'only' truth, as if there is no other story to be told. 

The darker side follows the logic of the serpent, which is the human default if you accept the Christian story that all human beings are fallen. 'Being fallen' means doing what comes naturally, if by that we mean how animals behave, i.e., acting as either predator or prey. Hegel uses the terms master and slave, but it's a more sophisticated variant on the same theme. We are programmed by the logic of the serpent whether we consciously acknowledge it or not. And so we shouldn't be surprised that most Americans are inclined to follow this script, i.e., it's normal for anyone to follow his natural inclination to advance his own interests without regard to their harmful effects on others, especially when the Other belongs to another tribe. White racism toward black and brown people is just a relatively recent variety of a tribalism that has organized social power relations for millennia. It's normal. The miracle happens when people don't act normally. 

And 'being nice' is too often just the way we humans have been domesticated; we are almost as easy to train as dogs and horses. And that's fine for laying a foundation of habits that enable us to operate within the consensus reality, but It is just a form of slavishness until we find some way of transcending it. Contemporary culture celebrates in film, in video games, and elsewhere pop forms of the Nietzschean Master, the uebermensch, who rejects all forms slavishness, the live-free-or-die guy who refuses to be bound by the conventions determined by the play-nice consensus reality and the clueless bureaucrats who set the rules. But the logic of the uebermensch is the logic of the serpent, and it is always regressive. The only truly progressive way to subvert the consensus reality is to reach toward the Absolute Future, and in doing so to awaken the Logos slumbering within. This is the only true Liberty. 

So the master/slave pattern is not abnormal behavior. Nothing could be more normal. Look around you. You see it everywhere. It's only in its most brutal manifestations that we find ourselves upset by it. But these brutal extremes, to take torture for an example, are behaviors that aren't different in kind, only in degree, from our everyday experience of the master slave dynamic in our families, at work, in sports, in politics. Cheney understands that, and he has no patience for anybody who doesn't. He understands that nothing could be more normal or natural; that it's either be master or slave, rule or be ruled, eat or be eaten. Any other way of understanding how the world works is a fairy tale. There are no miracles.

But that's where he's wrong. There are miracles and they occur individuals or groups find a way to transcend normalcy. And I think there have been plenty of miracles, often effected by people who in most ways we find it hard to admire. We should nevertheless celebrate the miracles, no matter who performs them, because every miracle advances the ball a little farther toward the Absolute Future. 

Christians are not exempt from the logic of the serpent. It is the Christian's default programming as it is everyone else's. But if honest Christians have any advantage, it lies in their having a heightened awareness of their default programming and have at their disposal tools that (should) help them to resist and transcend it. The honest Christian realizes that it's not enough to decide to follow the tribal rules, to think benevolent thoughts, and not "be evil". It's not good enough to be simply domesticated into Christian habits. 

Our social or group acculturation can, depending on the group, provide tools for resistance, but they are like apps that still must work with the underlying operating system. The real task is to reprogram the operating system, and that is a lifelong struggle individually and an eons-long struggle for humans as a species. As badly as we still mostly behave, I'd argue that the ball has been advanced by our intermittently idealistically motivated ancestors. The task is to increase the frequency of these moments of response to the ideal, and to find ways to consolidate the gains. 

So why do I describe the story told in the excerpt quoted above as self-defeating? Because it's not telling us anything new. It holds Jefferson and the other founding fathers to an impossibly high standard, and its goal is wrongly to negate the good in what they did because they also behaved, as most all of us do, according to the default programming. There is such a thing as cheap grace, but there is also cheap cynicism. To expect any human being, especially those who have had public careers, to be anything but a mix of good and bad is silly and naive. 80:20 bad to good advances the ball, I'd say.  The best among us are maybe 50:50. So I see nothing wrong in celebrating the miracles of grace when someone, even if it was only once in his or her life, chooses the Absolute Future, that is, reached toward it as Peter reached impulsively toward Jesus as he walked on the waves, only to slip back again into the flood. It's our reaching out that matters, even if we can't sustain it.

Reaching out is a skill that needs to be learned, and like any other skill you get better at it with practice. But it's hard to practice if you don't believe there's anything there toward which to reach.

Silicon Valley Utopian Nerdthink

In five years, an estimated 5.9 billion people will own smartphones. Anyone who can code, or who has something to sell, can be a free agent on the global marketplace. You can work from anywhere on your laptop and talk to anyone in the world; you can receive goods anywhere via drone and pay for them with bitcoins — that is, if you can’t 3-D print them at home. As software eats everything, prices will plunge. You won’t need much money to live like a king; it won’t be a big deal if your job is made obsolete by code or a robot. The rich will enjoy bespoke luxury goods and be first in line for new experiences, but otherwise there will be no differences among people; inequality will increase but cease to matter. Politics as we know it will lose relevance. Large, gridlocked states will be disrupted like any monopoly. Customer-citizens, armed with information, will demand transparency, accountability, choice. They will want their countries to be run as well as a start-up. There might be some civil wars, there might be many new nations, but the stabilizing force will be corporations, which will become even more like parts of a global government than they are today. Google and Facebook, for instance, will be bigger and better than ever: highly functional, monopolistic technocracies that will build out the world’s infrastructure. Facebook will be the new home of the public sphere; Google will automate everything.

Thiel and Vassar and Yudkowsky, for all their far-out rhetoric, take it on faith that corporate capitalism, unchecked just a little longer, will bring about this era of widespread abundance. Progress, Thiel thinks, is threatened mostly by the political power of what he calls the “unthinking demos.”

i think it's worth thinking a little bit about an article that came out in the most recent Harper's Magazine entitled "Come with Us if You Want to Live: Among the Apocalyptic Libertarians in Silicon Valley from which this quote by Michael Vassar was excerpted. The article is  behind a pay wall, so I'll quote liberally from it, but it focuses on what Elieazar Yudkowsky calls the "New Enlightenment".

"We’re part of the continuation of the Enlightenment, the Old Enlightenment. This is the New Enlightenment,” he said. “Old project’s finished. We actually have science now, now we have the next part of the Enlightenment project.”

It's all about very smart, post-political, radical libertarian, singularitarian rationalists who think they can carry us into the New Jerusalem with code and entrepreneurism and tech. For them it's all about engineering a utopian transhuman fantasy. Postmodern ennui and skepticism about grand narratives are not in their m.o. If you've been following the blowing up of the New Republic under the ownership of Chris Hughes and his new CEO, Guy Vidra, you have some feel for the mindset, but this article goes into the heart from which so many of these ideas flow and in doing so shapes these, alas, very powerful shapers of our economy and culture. 

I found the article fascinating for introducing me to a world I have some vague awareness of, but no real feel for. So assuming you are as unfamiliar with this world as I am, you should read it or just take the following abbreviated tour with me. One of the key shapers of that ethos is Peter Thiel,

a billionaire who cofounded PayPal with Elon Musk and invested early in Facebook. His companies Palantir Technologies and Mithril Capital Management had borrowed their names from Tolkien. Thiel was a heterodox contrarian, a Manichaean libertarian, a reactionary futurist. 

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. Freedom might be possible, he imagined, in cyberspace, in outer space, or on high-seas homesteads, where individualists could escape the “terrible arc of the political.” Lecturing in Palo Alto, California, Thiel cast self-made company founders as saviors of the world . . . .

Thiel’s lectures posited a world in which democratic universalism had failed, and all that was left was a heroic, particularist, benevolent libertarianism. 

It's understandable why many people might have given up on politics and are looking for ways to circumvent it, but these guys take it to the next level. I love that the perverse Tolkien connection because salvation for these folks lies with technological and entrepreneurial innovation and markets, hardly elvish institutions. 

We meet Michael Vassar, 34, quoted above. He  went "to college at seventeen, and had worked as an actuary, as a teacher, in nanotech, and in the Peace Corps. He’d founded a music-licensing start-up called Sir Groovy. Early in 2012, he had stepped down as president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, now called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)."

"There are all of these different countdowns going on,” he said. “There’s the countdown to the broad postmodern memeplex undermining our civilization and causing everything to break down, there’s the countdown to the broad modernist memeplex destroying our environment or killing everyone in a nuclear war, and there’s the countdown to the modernist civilization learning to critique itself fully and creating an artificial intelligence that it can’t control. There are so many different — on different timescales — ways in which the self-modifying intelligent processes that we are embedded in undermine themselves. I’m trying to figure out ways of disentangling all of that. . . .

“I’m not sure that what I’m trying to do is as hard as founding the Roman Empire or the Catholic Church or something. But it’s harder than people’s normal big-picture ambitions, like making a billion dollars.”

It's funny, except, it's kind of not. And then we meet to Eliezer Yudkowsky:

In 2006, Yudkowsky began writing a hydra-headed series of blog posts: science-fictionish parables, thought experiments, and explainers encompassing cognitive biases, self-improvement, and many-worlds quantum mechanics that funneled lay readers into his theory of friendly AI. Rationality workshops and Meetups began soon after.

In 2009, the blog posts became what he called Sequences on a new website: Less Wrong.

The next year, Yudkowsky began publishing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality at fanfiction.net. The Harry Potter category is the site’s most popular, with almost 700,000 stories; of these, HPMoR is the most reviewed and the second-most favorited. The last comment that the programmer and activist Aaron Swartz left on Reddit before his suicide in 2013 was on /r/hpmor.  

Who is attracted to  Less Wrong his website devoted to human improvement through Bayesian probability models:

Of the 1,636 people who responded to a 2013 survey of Less Wrong’s readers, one quarter had found the site thanks to HPMoR, and many more had read the book. Their average age was 27.4, their average IQ 138.2. Men made up 88.8 percent of respondents; 78.7 percent were straight, 1.5 percent transgender, 54.7 percent American, 89.3 percent atheist or agnostic. The catastrophes they thought most likely to wipe out at least 90 percent of humanity before the year 2100 were, in descending order, pandemic (bioengineered), environmental collapse, unfriendly AI, nuclear war, pandemic (natural), economic/political collapse, asteroid, nanotech/gray goo.

Forty-two people, 2.6 percent, called themselves futarchists, after an idea from Robin Hanson, an economist and Yudkowsky’s former co-blogger, for reengineering democracy into a set of prediction markets in which speculators can bet on the best policies. Forty people called themselves reactionaries, a grab bag of former libertarians, ethnonationalists, Social Darwinists, scientific racists, patriarchists, pickup artists, and atavistic “traditionalists,” who Internet-argue about antidemocratic futures, plumping variously for fascism or monarchism or corporatism or rule by an all-powerful, gold-seeking alien named Fnargl who will free the markets and stabilize everything else.

These folks have moved, in their thinking at least, way past any sense of frustration or malaise about our current political and economic arrangements:

 On October 1, 2013, Republicans in Congress shut down the government. The venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya made news for crowing about how great the stagnation was for Silicon Valley. “It’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in L.A.,” he said. “It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area. . . . Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse. If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn’t matter.”

These utopian New Enlightenment nerds are not interested in reforming the current system; they are "post-political" and are working to create a world that can bypass political institutions altogether as an anarchic, radically decentralized new technno-social order emerges from the ruins of the current institutions of the Old Enlightenment.

It sounds naively delusional at first glance, and yet it's been clear to me for some time that something, some kind of radical discontinuity is inevitable in the next fifty years or so. I have argued that evolution has until our own time been the unconscious, random process described by Darwin, but it no longer has to be because of the possible role that human consciousness and human choices can make. Will humans choose the Absolute Future, or will they just be swept along by the Flood?

The Cosmic Flood is metaphor I've been playing with for the cruel, impersonal, random process that scientists describe as having formed the universe and more locally the solar system, the earth, and the random, adaptive processes on it Darwin describes as biological evolution. I will leave aside for now any consideration of the degree to which transcendent forces played a shaping role in the universe and accept the scientific account as mostly correct, i.e., as describing 99%+ of what has happened in the history of our universe since the Big Bang.

But I would argue that's precisely what we needed saving from. And that the Event, the incarnation of the Logos 2000 years ago, introduced a new factor into evolution, and while its influence has been significant, it has gone and continues to go largely unnoticed. This was the moment when the Cosmic Flood met the Absolute Future. And since then, in a slow but persistent way, something has been happening in human beings that allows for a different possibility in history: the resistance and subversion of the random, impersonal processes of evolution driven by the logic of the Flood--or to use another metaphor, the logic of the Serpent.

Both metaphors describe the principle of evolution without grace. If you want to personalize this principle, go ahead: Call it Mephistopheles, Satan, Lucifer, or whatever. I don't want the suggeston that there might be a higher intelligence driving this process to stop any conversations, because I"m not sure there is. But I am talking  about what otherwise is a widely recognized phenomenon. But, whether it is a higher intelligence or just a blind force, I would not describe it as  evil for the same reason that I would not describe an earthquake or a tsunami as evil--it is just massively impersonal and cruel. It doesn't care about persons.

I would argue that this is the principle of civilization, that it drives the impersonal process that builds empires and promotes advances in science and technology. It thinks, but it thiniks with the logic of the serpent, the principle of intelligence without mercy, of the cold, purely rational calculation that needs no moral justification for its choices except to exclaim, "I am the spirit of evolution". "Greed is good", said the Ayn Rand-parroting Gordon Gecko:

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 . . .

This is the logic of the serpent. It was his logic in the Garden of Eden, wherever or whatever that was, and it's its logic now.

So the Silicon Valley utopia is for me a description of the world and the development of a human being that follows the logic of the serpent. Clearly a lot of what these people are talking about is going to happen whether it's a good idea or not. Perhaps some of it can be redemptively transformed, so I'm not saying that the world they are hoping for is impervious to the influence of grace, but I am saying that to the degree that the New Enlightenment is about building a world without grace, to the degree that its thinking follows the logic of the serpent, the utopia they envision will turn out to be hell on earth. 

The Torture Report (Updated)

From an interview with Glen Greenwald:

The more you look at just how many people and institutions were involved (either actively or by looking the other way) — the doctors, the psychiatrists, the media, members of Congress — the more it starts to sound like a society-wide failure. It reminds me of what Arendt wrote about Germany (and Europe in general) in the interwar and World War II periods, how she described it as a kind of civilizational collapse. Tell me if you think I’m going too far.

I think there are several similar dynamics. For one thing, after World War II, when the full history got told, lots of people who had every way to know what was happening under their noses pretended they didn’t because the recognition of their complicity was just too painful. So they denied it and pretended they didn’t know and claimed that, had they known, they would have reacted a lot more strongly. That reminds me a lot of Tuesday’s reaction on the part of political and media circles in the United States.

And I also agree with your observation that the way in which values get jettisoned and standards get violated is incremental. It’s the frog in the boiling pot analogy; it just incrementally and slowly but inexorably keeps moving away from this point where you think you’re at [vis-à-vis norms and values], but because it’s incremental you feel like you’re always close enough to the prior point that you don’t actually feel like it’s a radical departure. And that has been the story of the United States not just under the Bush administration but for the last 13 years, where everything that happens that seems shocking becomes the justification for the next step.

So what's the next step? Do we really want to know? Is there anything anybody can do about it?

Remember how self-congratulatory the media and political class were after driving Nixon from office? They thought they proved that the system worked, that it was capable of self-correcting when things went wrong. It all seems rather quaint now, especially the idea that driving Nixon out of office was a significant corrective move, that we had then a political culture of accountability that we have since lost.

Update: Noah Millman on the report:

Willingness to torture became, first within elite government and opinion-making circles, then in the culture generally, and finally as a partisan GOP talking point, a litmus test of seriousness with respect to the fight against terrorism. That – proving one’s seriousness in the fight – was its primary purpose from the beginning, in my view. It was only secondarily about extracting intelligence. It certainly wasn’t about instilling fear or extracting false confessions – these would not have served American purposes. It was never about “them” at all. It was about us. It was our psychological security blanket, our best evidence that we were “all-in” in this war, the thing that proved to us that we were fierce enough to win.

I’ve used “we” all through this piece, and the reason is not just because America is a democracy. Our government tortured for us, not just in the sense that it is our representative nor in the sense that its motive was our protection, but in the sense that we, as a country in aggregate, really wanted the proof of seriousness that torture provided.

That’s something we’ll have to grapple with, as a country, if we’re ever to have the strength to follow our own laws and bring the guilty to justice.

Well, will we grapple with it. Obama wants to move on. We have the two legislatures after January whose thinking is shaped by Fox News. No grappling is likely to come from Washington. I hope I'm wrong, but by the middle of January this will likely all be forgotten. 

The Silicon Valley Flood

The culture of Silicon Valley today sits somewhere on the autistic spectrum and exhibits the elemental qualities of water. Water will always find its way, it will find the unseen cracks, and find ways through obstacles and even tear them down, as a tiny leak can bring down a mighty dam.

Water is an amazing disruptor in nature -- materializing from thin air, it can torrent and push aside mountains, or it can patiently work at opening up tiny cracks in solid stone, freezing and expanding, thawing and flowing.

Water doesn't need ethics or morality it is a force of nature. It will always find its right level. It's an appropriate metaphor for Silicon Valley's culture of amorality. (Tom Forensky)

I am trying to formulate a way of thinking about "progress" that fits into a bigger evolutionary narrative, and so any notion of progress for me must embrace a notion of moral development. It is certainly possible to progress economically and technologically and to regress morally. it happens all the time, and Google is a case study over the last ten years. Earlier in the article Forenski points out:

Google became an important thought leader in the burgeoning social corporate responsibility movement, which was kick-started earlier by Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff. 

Corporate Social Responsibility was important because it was important to the software engineering community. It was essential in recruiting the best engineers. A company bus and a company lunch didn't cut it with that generation of coders.

Today's Silicon Valley culture is dominated by a peculiar amorality, a narcissism that claims Ayn Rand for its aspirations, even though few have read her books or even their dust jackets.

It's as if everyone has forgotten, "What the right thing to do is." And Google has worked hard to play down its "Don't be evil" rule.

There are moments in time when human beings have a glimpse of the transcendent, but usually that's all they get, and they either remain faithful to the memory of what they came to understand in this glimpse, or they allow themselves to be swept away by the primordial flood, the forces in nature and within ourselves that trend toward entropy and dissolution. And it was so easy for the elites at Google, who had such a glimpse, to allow themselves to be swept away.There are always elaborately contrived justifications for being swept away. In this case, a little Ayn Rand here, some neoliberal market ideology there.  It's not something most people in Silicon Valley (or anywhere in our consumer culture0 think about; there are these occasional moments of wakefulness, and then it's back to sleep in submerged in the flood.

So the other day in my post "Sacramental Semiotics" and the comments that follow it, I was tentatively feeling my way toward explaining the "Big History" understanding of how evolution works that I have been thinking about that moves beyond purely naturalistic metaphysics. A naturalist metaphysics is a closed system; a metaphysics that is open to transcendence embraces the naturalistic "facts", but does not see them as the only shaping force in history or evolution. 

A purely naturalist metaphysics presents a universe and the life world on earth as dominated by  randomness, chance, sometimes stunning beauty, and often impersonal cruelty. Heat death is its telos. Why anybody chooses to embrace a purely naturalistic metaphysics (IMO) has little to do with seeing the world as it is; it has everything to do with seeing the world through a certain world-weary lens skeptical about, if not cynical about, all grand narratives. 

Through such a grand-narrative skeptic's lens, the old religious orthodoxies seem antiquated and absurd. And while the great Eastern religious and philosophical traditions may for a while (in the sixties and seventies) have seemed to provide a possible legitimate alternative for allowing the possibility of a spiritual dimension, those traditions have been trivialized by Hollywood and New Age flakiness. So without a credible, robust narrative that presents a credible spiritual alternative, the intellectual class reverts to a complacent, soft nihilism. Nihilist, because when people in this class have an encounter with the transcendent, as all humans do whether they recognize it as such or not, they have no way to hold onto it or understand it, so they reduce it to the aesthetic. The soft nihilist narrative allows for an appreciation of the "spiritual" experience, but cannot give it any meaning, because, a priori there is no meaning.  

This nihilism leads to moral complacency because while your typical secular intellectual wants to be moral, that means little more than being nice in a politically correct kind of way. And they are nice, but because there is no grounding for deeper moral commitments, those moral commitments are easily discarded when they become inconvenient. That's my reading about what happened at Google. It was "nice"  for a while not to be evil; now it's ok. Whatever momentary glimpse some had about the importance of 'not being evil', it was too easily swept away by the flood, by the primordial, amoral forces that grope randomly for primitive survival and advantage. 

And these points reinforce the argument I've been making over the years that the secular Left offers no real promise of a progressive or more just future, not because at some level many who are at home in the secular Left don't sincerely want Justice. Many do. It's just that they don't have a way to hold on to it because they don't believe in it as a transcendent ideal. If the bigger meta-story is randomness and senselessness, and if it just ends in heat death, why should anybody care deeply about the future, especially if one is relatively comfortable in the present?  Why would anybody choose to suffer and sacrifice for a purpose larger than maintaining his comfort? Yes, there are the few romantic nihilists, the Che Guevara types, who are willing to make that sacrifice. But in a comfortable country like the U.S. all they can do is criticize the injustices that pile up left and right and wait for the contradictions to heighten enough so that the masses become uncomfortable enough to find the resentment that will motivate them to act.  

But a politics of resentment is just another way that the primordial flood works; it leads nowhere good, and certainly not in a direction that I would call progressive. Justice, if it is to have any real staying power and any transformational effect, has to be grounded in more than a passing social mood inspired by a fleeting glimpse of the Transcendent. A commitment to transcendent ideals has to be grounded deeply in peoples' souls, in their collective imaginations and traditions, where it is understood that the Absolute Future is the only truly progressive transformational force in history. 

So the counternarrative that I am trying to articulate would embrace Justice, for instance, as a transcendent ideal, if by transcendent we mean something that exists outside a system that in our experience of it is best explained in naturalistic language. But rather than imagine this transcendent realm as something that works from above,  in some static Platonic world of ideas, we imagine it as working dynamically toward us from the future, the Abolute Future, working in time shaping history and evolution. I imagine history as being propelled by this raw, primitive energy that pushes from behind us, but which is given shape as it meets the Absolute Future which is flowing against it. Let me repeat here what I wrote as a comment in the preceding post:

It's all about the future, the Absolute Future, streaming toward us in a counterflow against the chaotic noise released in the big Bang. That's the story of evolution for me: the groping, random, cruel, noisy, chaotic entropic energies streaming from the past--Teilhard's Alpha point--and the ordering, coding, truth and beautifying flow coming to meet it from the future--the Omega point. And caught right in the middle is the human being, who determines whether the forces of the past win or the forces of the future do. Goodness, deep goodness, comes into the world when humans choose the Future, even in the smallest of matters. 

The angel Gabriel was in this sense a herald of the Future. A simple choice is presented to Mary: yes or no, no matter what the cost, choose. Refusal or Amen. So must we all choose. The Magnificat is an eschatological song of deep truth and beauty inspired by her encounter with the Absolute Future. This is the archetypal choice for any of us who long for peace and justice. It is the template for analogous choices we too must make all the time.

So I don't know if this orientation of our spiritual imagination toward the future is helpful for anybody else, but it works for me because of the problems it solves on so many levels. And not the least of which among them is to introduce a way of thinking about history as having a purpose while at the same time recognizing that much if not most of what works in history is random, cruel, and amoral. And to recognize that randomness, cruelty and amorality are the default unless resisted. Amorality becomes 'evil' when humans fail to resist and allow themselves to be swept away by the Flood. Good comes into the world humans resist by choosing a place to stand in the Absolute Future. Good and Evil have no meaning except as they relate to the fundamental human choice to either choose the Absolute Future or to refuse it.

Gyges' Ring

This American Life did a show some time ago about superpowers, and in Act One John Hodgeman asks which superpower, if only one were possible, would we choose--Invisibility or Flight. The answers given by people he interviewed were, I thought, rather depressing.

One person talked about how she would choose Invisibility so that she could steal sweaters from Brooks Brothers, and another about how he would choose it so he could watch different beautiful women taking showers--but then changed his mind because he knew that was unacceptable. In the end he would choose Flight to prevent himself from using Invisibility as a Peeping Tom. He would not be able to control himself if he had Invisibility. Another person speculated that most people would choose Flight, but that they would be lying because they don't want to admit to all the sneaky ways they would use Invisibility. It's interesting how sneaky people assume everyone else is. I suppose Hodgeman's choice of these people reflects his own bias that they are admirable because they are honest. Or maybe it's just that there's little entertainment value in the non-transgressive. 

Although Hodgeman tried to frame his own thoughts on the matter ambiguously, the thrust of the piece was shaped by what I think of as the Tarantino aesthetic, a sophisticated nihilism that assumes that the only thing that is truly, deeply, unambiguously real in human beings is their base instincts. Or as a character on "Mad Men" said a couple of weeks ago, people are unhappy because they're living to meet other people's expectations instead of doing what they really want, and for folks like Don Draper, for want of any other ideas about it, what they want is defined by lust, greed, and the will to power.

In Freudian terms we restrain our indulgence of these instinctual drives because they are proscribed by the superego, the rules of the tribe, not because there is something inherently good that it is possible to choose. We do "good" to avoid the shame of being caught and punished, not because there is actually something Good to choose.

So there's what we do to get along in society--being nice, following the rules, etc., which is alienating, and there's doing what we want to do, which is to live instinctually, which is fulfilling. We'd all be HBO Rome's Mark Antony, if we could be--the model of the uninhibited pursuit and fulfillment of lust, greed, and the will to power. "Oh, how we lived," he says to Cleopatra shortly before killing himself. He went for it, and so would the rest of us if we had his balls, according to the Tarantino aesthetic.

Antony's character is contrasted with Octavian's, who is no less single-minded in his instinctual pursuits, particularly the will to power, but he wants the appearances of virtue and decorum. Antony could care less about appearances, and he is the more appealing character. Antony is honest and straightforward, guileless in his own way; the priggish Octavian is not.

These  assumptions--that the only reason we behave well is in order to get along in society, but we wouldn't if there were no price to pay--frame the Hodgeman piece.  We've heard it a thousand times since we were in college: "I may be a selfish, manipulative bitch, but at least I'm honest." Virtue, decency, kindness are always a lie, a kind of sucking up, a refusal to be "real". It's interesting how there's always a tone of sanctimony in people who think like this, as if their position is the only morally acceptable one.

I accept that each of us in a fallen world has a dark side, each of us has transgressive urges and desires, but the Tarantino aesthetic assumes that those urges and desires are more real, more truthful, more authentic than those impulses that would restrain us from doing something that is intrinsically morally ugly. For the Tarantino aesthetic, those restraints or any impulse that would lead us to do the Good are mere acculturation, a trip that's laid on us by "society" so that we "share" and "play nice" and "use our words" instead of "hitting with our hands". They are fictions that keep us from tearing one another to pieces, and the Tarantino aesthetic assumes that there is nothing in humans that intrinsically wills to do the Good because there is no Good to will. 

***

In the summer of 2007, I put up a series of posts entitled Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism I, II, III, and IV. If you've some time and the subject interests you, take a look. It lays out an alternative set of assumptions to those of the Tarantino aesthetic. The discussion that went on in comments was pretty interesting as well. And I remember the one thing that discussion brought into clearer focus for me was  the argument that moral behavior, doing the Good, does not depend on a set of religious beliefs. I said somewhere a la Dostoyevski, If there is no God, then nothing is impermissible. And some commenters objected.

The most robust objection was the social-contract argument--people behave well because it's in their self-interest to do so because a society of law-abiding citizens is a society in which everyone prospers, not just the powerful who do what they please with impunity. You don't need God to be the enforcer; the law and customary norms are sufficient. But isn't being a law-abiding boy scout in this way precisely what the Tarantino aesthetic rejects as the alienation of living up to other people's expectations?  Isn't that precisely why the transgressive man is celebrated in popular culture?  He's the one who does what he wants, not what is expected of him. He is powerful and charismatic, and the rest are grayed-out, bourgeois Last Men whose lives are a mere going through the prescribed, socially acceptable motions.

The social-contract argument refutes the nothing is impermissible argument, but not Glaucon's argument in Plato's Republic, which is Hodgeman's argument, that if we were invisible all of us would transgress because we could do what we really wanted with impunity. And it doesn't solve the deeper problem of alienation and fulfillment. There is a deep sense in each of us that fulfillment lies in the transgressive, that the law and our acculturation are a kind of prison from which we must be liberated. That problem is solved either by embracing the human being as instinct-driven talking animal, which is at the heart of the Tarantino aesthetic and the Hodgeman piece, or by embracing the idea that the human being is in addition to being an animal, also a spiritual being with a  conscience, the faculty that enables us to cognize the Good, and a will capable of freely choosing it.

The great spiritual traditions offer a path to fulfillment, but it is not a fulfillment immediately realized or easily achieved. In the Christian tradition that fulfillment has more to do with following the dictates of conscience and not superego. And it requires behaviors that are transgressive and at times subversive of the social contract when the laws and customs are abusive of human dignity, as they were, for instance, in the South in the days of slavery and Jim Crow.

Paul's epistle to the Romans talks about liberation from the law; Kierkegaard's teleological suspension of the ethical explores how conscience can lead one to commit criminal acts when conscience requires them; Dostoyevski celebrates the transgressive, freedom-embracing character of the Christian message in his depiction of the encounter between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor. Gandhi, King, the Berrigans, Mandela were all transgressors in the service of the Good.

So it's not just a choice between living out others' expectations or doing what you want.  There are also the transgressions in the service of the Good. And I think that while it is easier to do the Good if you believe there is such a thing, it's not essentially a head thing. It's a will thing, and a belief in God as enforcer is not necessary for people to will it. I think that believers don't have a significantly bigger advantage than non-believers. Grace is ubiquitous. I think that coming under the spell of the Tarantino aesthetic, however, makes it harder insofar as it smugly celebrates what is worst in us while sneering at what is best. It's harder to embrace possibilities that you assume are impossible.

There is something in each of us, regardless of our beliefs, that wills the Good, and this is the second, I think deeper, objection to the assertion that without God any atrocity is permissible. Call it natural law, call it the Tao, call it what you want, but it's intrinsic to human nature to long for and to do the Good, even if it is also intrinsic to our natures to revert to behaviors motivated by the baser instincts. Both are intrinsic to our human nature; they live side by side in our souls.  But in the long run what matters is which one plays the dominant role in shaping the lives we live. Because we often want and do what is not Good does not mean that there is no Good and that it is impossible to want to do it. The Tarantino aesthetic finds such an idea embarrassing.

This American Life does not, on the whole, embrace the Tarantino aesthetic, even if occasionally stories like the Hodgeman piece do. The great thing about Glass's show is that in so many of the stories on it are the stories of people who are sniffing out and doing the Good whether they think about it in spiritual/religious terms or not. Because in the long run it doesn't matter what you think or say about it, it only matters what you choose to do. It's just that there are more possibilities for authentic choices than Hodgeman seems to understand.

[This is a slightly reivised re-post of "Superpowers: Invsibility vs. Flight" from August 2010.]

Superpowers: Invisibility vs. Flight

In this week's This American Life the theme is superpowers, and in Act One The Daily Show's John Hodgeman asks which superpower, if only one were possible, would we choose--Invisibility or Flight. The answers given by people he interviewed were, I thought, rather depressing.

One person talked about how she would choose Invisibility so that she could steal sweaters from Brooks Brothers, and another about how he would choose it so he could watch different beautiful women taking showers--but then changed his mind because he knew that was unacceptable. In the end he would choose Flight to prevent himself from using Invisibility as a Peeping Tom. He would not be able to control himself if he had Invisibility. Another person speculated that most people would choose Flight, but that they would be lying because they don't want to admit to all the sneaky ways they would use Invisibility. It's interesting how sneaky people assume everyone else is. I suppose Hodgeman's choice of these people reflects his own bias that they are admirable because they are honest.