What Lies Beneath

 

June 22, 2018

"There was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be 'the man in the street.'  Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect. Truth was unimportant and entirely subordinate to tactics and psychology." 

We must ask ourselves whether we are intellectuals, or easy marks for the crude and forcible?

Propagandists in the footsteps of Josef Goebbels understand that a certain measure of any population requires an enemy, someone to hate, someone to blame. So, they give them one – understanding that when caught and spinning in their vortex of anger and resentments, people no longer seek truth.

In a nation which celebrates unpreparedness and ignorance, we are exploring new levels of revelry. In a nation so long a beacon to those yearning to breathe free, we plumb uncharted depths of antipathy and hostility. The widespread public acceptance of frequent political prevarications and contradictions has been easy to observe. It's out there in the open, right in front of us to see and to hear, yet when dissenting voices acknowledge the cognitive dissonance and abnormality, they are mercilessly pilloried with absurd whataboutism and assertions of equivalency – themselves inherent contradictions to the blanket scree of spurious moral outrage on full display just a couple of short years ago. 

What lies beneath the thin veneer of civility in men and a nation are the seeds of terror and destruction, which we have recklessly sown, and the silence and vitriol sure to follow this essay will tell the story.  We willfully and steadily chip away at the democratic norms and foundations binding us together, those same seeds wedging inside and widening the cracks, and our footings are close to failure.  

Because it’s no longer about the truth.  It's about identity.  Were it not, a dispiriting number of voters and elected officials wouldn't cravenly cite party loyalty above all to support child molesters, pimps, and self-proclaimed Nazis running for office. They wouldn’t stockpile firearms ostensibly to defend against a shadowy government one day, and the very next cite biblical passages exhorting their countrymen to obey the law and kneel before that same thuggish and nefarious government. Or demand we kneel before our God in reverence, but not the flag. Or put small children in cages while throwing up billboards displaying infants, extolling their virtue and the sanctity of life.  And ladies from church wouldn’t tell us that these aren't our kids, and anyway their parents should have known better.

We've all come out, so to speak, over the last several years in America; especially in the past two, and we now hold a remarkably clear view into the hearts of our friends, our families, our neighbors, our countrymen. More than disturbing and at times shocking, our empathy has evaporated like water cast away from a dying man. These years have been an abrupt and frightening eye-opener, a disorienting and terrible awakening.  To be Frank, these are the demons that come in the night: we now know who will refuse to hide you in their attic and will report you to the secret police.  We now know who, with tightly clutched bible and pensive glare, will point their finger at you when they come.  

And stand silent as they take you away.

Those of us less susceptible to the crude and to the forcible understand full well where this is all leading, and the cold light and dark stains on the pages of history make it clear: if we continue our path, come they will.

To Rationalize is American

December 9, 2017

In the days after 9/11, Americans decried with one voice the theocratic autocracies which rained down misery while professing piety.  Their leaders spinning conspiracy theories from the minbar, their seething hatred of other religions and people as cultural cornerstone, their men praying upon young girls with the blessing of community elders, and their hastening of us all toward some glorious end of days, our nation recoiled at this abhorrent display of such feverish and misdirected anger among the devout. 

Now we must all look in the mirror.  We have become what we fear most: a nation capable of rationalizing nearly anything. 

A PRRI/Brookings poll of evangelical Christians found in 2016 that 72 percent said, "an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life."  In 2011, that number was just 30 percent.  So please, let’s all dispense with the shameless piety and finger-wagging.  As I wrote in a prior piece, the blue states have lower rates of divorce, prostitution, teen pregnancy, and opioid addiction than their red counterparts.  And yet, courtesy of the religious/political leaders in those red states and their commanding heights of morality and ethics, we’re all faced with the specter of occupants in our highest offices who shamelessly prey upon young women and spout dangerous conspiracy theories from their bully pulpits, dragging our nation into a bereft and barren landscape of dust and dirt along with them.

Even Barry Goldwater – no friend to liberal policies – understood what is at stake, saying, “Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in our public policy.”  He’d read our founding fathers, it seems.  As James Madison, the father of the Constitution to which conservatives ascribe so much of our national ethos, put it so very well, “religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together.”  Is that not what we all seek?  A church pure in spirit, and a government pure in practice?

Too many of our citizens today are far from home, having searched for (and finally found) inclusive and supportive communities where they may live their lives, raise their families, and practice their faith, with welcoming friendships and greater measures of academic, cultural, and socioeconomic parity.  They well remember the people at whose hands they suffered as children and all of those who looked the other way.  We cannot continue the attitudes and resentments that have driven such separation in us and hope to thrive.  We cannot live as two nations claiming to be one.  Our great country finds itself at the mercy of a (new?) plurality which seemingly aspires to wealth without enlightenment, leadership without kindness, and reverence without compassion.  We pursue a cognitively dissonant and intellectually incoherent narrowing of national horizons and upward redistribution of wealth, while defiance, anger, and resentments fuel the plurality’s rise to power as it dismantles any remaining accomplishments of the 20^th century – that time, ironically, when America was great.

It’s all starting to feel a bit hopeless, and one might be forgiven for concluding there is little more we can do to avoid the wreckage ahead.  Evangelical Christian apologia for and support of ethical and moral transgressions (which in recent memory would have ended any prayer of public aspiration) demonstrates that there is, effectively, no bottom for a large portion of this block; and if there is no bottom, there is neither rationality nor reason.  Therefore, the horror show must be visited upon their own doorstep for them to admit it, and what form that will take is in equal measure both frightening and unknown.  They cannot simply hear of it and change.  They cannot simply witness it and change.  They must live it, which means we must all live it.  And America will never be the same.

How We Got Here

November 15, 2017

I’ve been wrong.  Wrong about so many things.  Wrong in what I felt was important, wrong in how I thought about other people, wrong in ways I approached difficulties in my work and my life.  Eventually, however, truth would win.  Reason and rationality would take hold, and a more circumspect path would appear.  But walking such a path is difficult and lonely.  One must accept one’s own faults and failings; one must embrace the idea that learning does not stop with the final bell, and that the forward progression of humanity and its circumstances requires vigilant and critical pursuit of knowledge.  We once prided ourselves in this.  William F. Buckley was for decades recognized as our leading conservative intellectual, a relic long forgotten by those who wear our brand today, who presciently wrote, “Truth is a demure lady, much too ladylike to knock you on your head and drag you to her cave. She is there, but people must want her, and seek her out.” 

We stopped seeking her some time ago.  Our intellectual elites are subject now to derision in a farcical quest for piety, purity, and loyal obedience.  We are thinkers no more.  We are willing to countenance brazen transgressions that once disqualified other nations and their leaders from sharing our stage, as our nation slides toward theocratic autocracy, and a slavish devotion to an odd freedom that demands uniformity.  Asimov observed that, “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” 

It is not.

The pillars of achievement on which we place our abundant pride were not built on willful ignorance nor a version of truth confined solely to our notion of it.  We find ourselves in a state where our chosen color cannot be questioned.  We find ourselves in a state of warring tribes, one side versus another, many not even understanding why we fight.  We swap what were once policy disagreements for emotionally charged cultural resentments, in a bizarre emotional frenzy of old hatreds based upon perceived slights and advantages, fed to us by a constant media stream in which we ourselves are the product to be consumed, along with our resources and our votes.  Buckley considered those who stoked the flames of racism and resentment unworthy of the conservative moniker; he decried "the incongruity of tone, that hard, schematic, implacable, unyielding, dogmatism that is in itself intrinsically objectionable” of which we witness so much in today’s discourse.  We find ourselves in a place where no moral bottom exists, where we will sooner rationalize behavior we once found without question beyond the pale, rather than admit one of our own might be unworthy.  The fortitude to seek and to question is the true source of strength.