We,
the People Are Violent and Filled with
Rage: A Nation Spinning Apart..continued
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While apocalyptic
religious and racist ranting can provoke
emotionally disturbed people, so can
journalism and entertainment that massage
hatreds too diffuse to be called racist,
religious or ideological. Some school
shooters nursed the depictions of violence
and lust that are pumped incessantly
into young Americans’ horizons with
the help of new technologies and investment
strategies that ride reckless misreadings
of the First Amendment. This hasn’t
been done with malevolent intent as
often as it’s been done in a kind of
civic mindlessness by media corporations
incentivized and indeed forced by market
pressures to bypass our brains and hearts
on the way to our lower viscera and
wallets by exaggerating fears of armed
home invasion, government takeover and
vengeful victory by gunplay.
The invisible
disease
Even though relatively few young Americans
follow these siren songs into acts of
destruction, the public fetishizing
of sex and violence without context
or caring dampens many others’ faith
in society during their formative years.
You don’t need to know a lot of developmental
psychology or anthropology to know that
children crave culturally coherent tests
of prowess and loyalty in symbolic rites
of passage that ratify their communal
belonging. When such rites and symbols
fail, some flail about, seeking order
in private delusions, Dartmouth College
fraternities and public orchestrations
of ressentiment.
In 1775, most American communities still
filtered such basic generational and
human needs through traditions that
encompassed kinship bonds and seasonal
rhythms. In “Common Sense,” Thomas Paine
could urge readers to take their recent
experiences of monarchy “to the touchstones
of nature” and decide whether they would
abide the empire’s abuses. Today, those
“touchstones of nature” — and with them,
republican convictions about selfhood
and society — have been torn up by runaway
engines and developments in technology,
communications and even intimate biology
that would terrify Paine, Adam Smith
and John Locke, not to mention those
who fired the first shot at Concord.
This time, we’re all in bed with the
enemy. In “The Cultural Contradictions
of Capitalism” 40 years ago, Daniel
Bell — no anti-capitalist, but prophetic
enough about the worship of Golden Calves
— argued that free markets no longer
make free men because “economic liberalism
has become… corporate oligopoly, and,
in the pursuit of private wants, a hedonism
that is destructive of social needs.”
He warned that consumer capitalism displaces
the needs that the early republic filtered
through nature’s rhythms and kinship
traditions. It displaces those needs
with ginned-up “wants” that “by their
nature, are unlimited and insatiable….
[T]he rational calculation of efficiency
and return” displace “the principle
of the public household,” strip-mining
and selling off fragments of cultural
narratives.
Without civic wellsprings and narratives
deep and compelling enough to strengthen
a society’s adhesives and disciplines
in the hearts of its young, neither
free-market conservatives nor world-is-flat
neoliberal cosmopolitans can reconcile
their professed commitments to ordered,
republican liberty with their knee-jerk
obedience to riptides of destructive
investment that are dissolving republican
virtue and sovereignty before our eyes.
No wonder
we’re losing our vision, in both senses
of the word:
▪ Our foreign-policy savants across
the ideological spectrum were too blind
see that the Soviet Union was so much
weaker than American Cold War propaganda
and hysteria insisted that it imploded
in 1989. The fabled “missile gap” that
John F. Kennedy ran on in 1960 was as
imaginary as Saddam Hussein’s WMD, but
anyone who tried telling either of those
truths was charged with a “failure of
nerve” or worse by the blind war-mongers
in our midst.
▪ Our business press was too blind to
see that a tsunami of predatory lending
would wreck the national economy and
throw millions from their homes.
▪ Our market-addled Congressional committees
and blue-ribbon commissions on national
intelligence couldn’t discover, until
Edward Snowden revealed it, that public
surveillance had taken on an all-devouring
life of its own.
▪ Neo-conservative and Vulcan conservative
advocates of using American military
force to spread democracy abroad couldn’t
see that their strategy was doomed because
democracy isn’t woven that way and because
it was destroying democracy at home
in ways that, if unchecked, will destroy
the republic whose strengths they’ve
so badly misconstrued and betrayed.
▪ Our consumer society, addicted to
cheap comforts and quick fixes, can’t
see its own Orwellian ensnarement by
commercial censors, and it couldn’t
take Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”
about global warming seriously enough
to offset the onrushing damage with
the serious sacrifices we have yet to
make.
▪ Our gilded political consultants,
pollsters and campaign donors were too
blind to see the boiling undercurrents
that have swept away House Majority
Leader Eric Cantor. Nor can they see
that Cantor’s political demise presages
an inflammation of ressentiment so wild
that the coming, specious, “Who Lost
Iraq?” debate will be accompanied by
the shot that some military veteran
who feels betrayed will fire at a politician
who’s been left holding the empty bag
of our civic-republican hopes.
So we are flying almost totally blind,
punched bloody by a Hand that we keep
insisting is Invisible. We can see only
the sickness of the gunmen and of the
proliferation of their guns. Treatment
of those symptoms is urgently needed,
but it will be insufficient to curb
the wrecking ball that global capitalism
has become on our willfully blind watch,
and triage won’t renew the civic fabric.
Exemplary
defiance has its place
Whenever republican candor and courage
have seemed about to succumb like this
to tribal and theocratic delusions or
to force and fraud in the past, some
citizens have roused others to fend
off threats to republican premises and
practices:
▪ In 1776 a young schoolteacher named
Nathan Hale was caught trying to track
and expose the military and intelligence
operations of the only established,
legitimate government of his time. But
just before his hanging he said, “I
only regret that I have but one life
to give for my country” and became an
incarnation of a nascent republic.
▪ Hale’s dignity in adversity, unfathomable
to many of us these days, anticipated
that of Martin Luther King, Jr., and
black churchgoers who walked unarmed
and trembling toward armed men and dogs
with nothing but their faith and their
long-shot strategy to delegitimate the
seemingly impregnable segregationist
establishment of their time by appealing
to republican principles and an American
civil religion whose theology was as
vague as that of the founders.
▪ Hale’s dignity also anticipated that
of three Yale seniors I came upon one
wintry morning in 1968 as they gave
university chaplain William Sloane Coffin,
Jr., their military draft cards to announce
their resistance to the U. S. Government
on behalf of the American republic.
“The government says we’re criminals,
but we say the government is criminal
for waging this war,” said one of the
seniors, struggling to find his voice.
For all we knew, these guys were about
to be arrested on the spot, and some
of us felt arrested morally by their
example because they were ready to pay
the penalty of law in order to affirm
their commitment to honest law itself.
Coffin, who held to a Calvinist theology
that, like King’s, saw resistance to
tyranny as obedience to God, was present
to bless a courage that few national-security
state conservatives understand, in the
idiom of an American civil-religion
few neoliberals and post-modern leftists
understand. When he quoted Dylan Thomas’
“Do not go gentle into that good night;
rage, rage, against the dying of the
light,” that civil religion seemed to
awaken briefly and to walk and talk
again, re-moralizing the state and the
law, and the silent, wild confusion
I was feeling gave way to something
like awe. (I described this experience
in The Washington Monthly in 2000, during
the protracted “election” of George
W. Bush.)
▪ Hale’s courage also anticipated Edward
Snowden’s. Both young men may have been
impetuous and otherwise flawed in some
respects, but they showed that resistance
to corrupted power requires not only
prowess, means, and will, but an elusive,
republican sensibility that’s cultivated
in civil society and confirmed in little
daily interactions long before it emerges
in demonstrations of civic courage that
startle and move other citizens.
With a wonderment somewhat like Hegel’s,
the German political philosopher Jurgen
Habermas marveled at this “constitutional
patriotism” in American citizens who
possessed what Gibbon described as “that
public courage which is nourished by
the love of independence, the sense
of national honor, the presence of danger,
and the habit of command.”
When I tell young millennials these
stories, though, many of them listen
pretty much as they would to tales about
knights in shining armor, long ago and
far away. Much closer to them are the
school shootings and Internet mayhem
that make brave citizenship seem archaic,
implausible, and irrelevant to self-discovery
and social change.
Yet republican expectations do have
ways of resurfacing whenever “We, the
people” begin to imagine what our lives
would be like, singly and together,
if we had to live without them. Not
everyone can be seduced or intimidated
away from them.
Still, so many Americans are generations
removed from any easily recoverable
religious or ethno-racial identity or
other adhesive that we have to ask:
Where are the touchstones or narratives
strong enough renew public virtues and
beliefs that neither markets nor the
liberal state do much to nourish or
defend?
Nourishing
a new liberal order
The question should prompt a quest for
a political culture that isn’t too commercial
and vapid and that isn’t held together
only by demagoguery and delusion. No
reconfiguration of today’s capitalism
will be possible without something better
than that. Yet no think tank, legislature
or foundation can carry that quest or
that reconfiguration to a just conclusion.
Nor can an Occupy Wall Street that isn’t
grounded in something deeper than its
own noble effort to be the change it
wants us all to make.
Nor can our “illness” be cured by champions
of a new foreign-policy “realism” such
as Robert Kagan, who urge us to face
the inevitable challenges of a world
where only willpower and force can sustain
the liberal order that many Americans
take for granted. That’s right as far
as it goes, but it begs the question
of where willpower comes from and what,
within the liberal order itself, is
sapping that willpower.
Quoting Michael Ignatieff, Kagan speculates
candidly that liberal civilization itself
“runs deeply against the human grain
and is achieved and sustained only by
the most unremitting struggle against
human nature.” Perhaps, Kagan adds,
“this fragile democratic garden requires
the protection of a liberal world order,
with constant feeding, watering, weeding,
and the fencing off of an ever-encroaching
jungle.” But he can’t seem to face the
challenge posed by the new shots heard
’round the world from America: The jungle
and its encroachments begin not only
abroad but within our own garden.
What seems our greatest weakness could
be one of our greatest strengths, although
it, too, won’t be enough: Even 150 years
after the founding, the philosopher
George Santayana wrote that Americans
still heralded the Enlightenment’s entry
into history precisely because they’d
“all been uprooted from their several
soils and ancestries and plunged together
into one vortex, whirling irresistible
in a space otherwise quite empty. To
be an American is of itself almost a
moral condition, an education and a
career….”
Although there’s plenty to regret and
respect in the traditions we’ve lost,
there’s no turning back from the “moral
condition” and “career” we face as citizens.
We have no choice but to keep faith
with the republic and one another. If
Americans have a manifest destiny now,
it’s to lead in weaving a new republican
fabric that markets can serve but not
subvert.
In 2008, Barack Obama seemed to incarnate
so brilliantly the promise of weaving
our diversity into a new republican
discipline — he even invoked Puritan
and biblical wellsprings in some of
his speeches — that many people ’round
the world considered him a prophet who
would satisfy their hunger for new narratives.
Probably no national political leader
ever can do that.
The narratives the world needs now will
have to come from other prophets and
leaders yet unsung. I do think that
Americans will be strong among them,
if only because we’ve had so much experience
generating that hunger by generating
the civic-republican-capitalist effort
that has failed. |
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