“Whoever lives long on earth, endures the unrest of these times, will be involved in much good and much evil.” — Beowulf
What can I tell you about my recent—no, current— obsession with Beowulf, except that it’s caught me like a healthy virus, drawing me through a fiery portal into Denmark in the 9th century? In one of those serendipitous grazings through my library that I’ve come to see as a deja vu in the making, I pulled down The Anglo-Saxon World: An Anthology, Including the complete Beowulf—the full title—and began to read the main feature. It had been years since I had first ventured into the story, probably through an assignment, and as these things go it had gone poorly. I read as much as was required, did the assignment, and placed it on a mental shelf of books that I resolved to get back to in due time. Apparently the time had come because I read through it in two days and came back for more.
By now Beowulf has been translated many times, edited, commented upon, anthologized, stretched upon the rack of many a Ph.D. dissertation, and even filmed, but its power to enthrall has not diminished. Seamus Heaney, one of the finest poets in the English-speaking world, comments in his translation of Beowulf, that “It is impossible to attain a full understanding and estimate of Beowulf without recourse to this immense body of commentary and elucidation,” but first-time readers, he notes, will be as delighted as they are discomfited by the strangeness of that world.
The strangeness derives from the names (Hrothgar, Hnaef, Hilderburh, Ecglaf, and Ecgtheow), the places (‘the land of the Scyldings’), and the style, but most of all from what counts the most—the virtues they honored and strove to live by.
The story was written by someone in England who wrote about the Swedes, the Danes, and the Geats, the forebears of many who called themselves English in the centuries after the Romans left. Christianity shaped their world but the old gods lingered in stories and songs. The poet lives and breathes a robust Christianity and ascribes belief to Beowulf and his companions. He pities those whose gods are idols and who cannot count on them for deliverance.
Midway through the poem, jacked up on various translators notes, it dawned on me that the author and I have something in common: we both look back in wonder on those times. For him they are the exploits of his distant ancestors; for me they walk in the realm between myth and history. For both of us the poem reveals the epic conflicts of life and death, good and evil, chaos and harmony, light and darkness. In other words, like all great literature Beowulf illumines human experience.
The hero faces three consuming tests of strength and character: he battles Grendel and defeats him, he battles Grendel’s demon mother and defeats her, and late in life he battles the dragon that threatens his people. He battles the first two monsters alone because he is determined to win renown and glory, to be known throughout the world for his strength and prowess. Fifty years later, facing the dragon that is terrorizing his people, he stands alone again. But this time, when he needs them most, his warrior band melts back into the forest, sorrowful in their cowardice. Only one stands with him—Wiglaf—a young man whose loyalty to his king overrides his terror. When Beowulf finally falls it is Wiglaf who buys time, driving his sword into the belly of the beast. The king, his life ebbing away, draws his sword and kills the dragon. “That,” says the author, “was the last of all the king’s achievements, his last exploit in the world.”
As the poem draws to a close, Beowulf’s body is burned on the pyre, a massive barrow is raised in his memory, and his deeds are recounted in song. His people, now defenseless, await with dread the attack of their enemies.
The values of honor, loyalty, and courage came to mind as I watched The Hobbit this week. Tolkien, whose epic story of the battle for Middle-earth drew on his deep knowledge of Beowulf, had given the twentieth-century its own ‘ring-cycle’ in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It was Tolkien’s seminal essay, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, published in 1936, that changed perspectives on the poem because he assumed, and proceeded to show, the artistic integrity of the piece. It was Tolkien’s view that the author had melded the traditional stories of a heroic past together with the mythic qualities, and through his own oracular artistry had created a masterpiece for the ages.
It does us well to ask why our children are so drawn to heroes such as Superman, Spiderman, Batman, and the myriad creatures that sweep across their gaming devices. Could it be that this hunger for the heroic is a necessary element in their own character formation? The heroic age of the earth is over, but our fascination with them continues.
Coursing through Beowulf, The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings and many other epics is the loyalty to family and clan. Loyalties are put to the test time and time again, and as Michael Alexander, translator of one of the most well-known versions of Beowulf puts it: “Northern heroic tales involve a conflict between the obligation to lord or kinsman and obligations to an ally, a spouse, a host or a guest.” Later in his introduction to BeowulfI Alexander remarks that, “an ethos of retribution for slighted honor or slain kindred governs most of the stories behind the central action.”
It is striking that we do not condone this way any longer. The Enlightenment emphasis on individuality, personal autonomy, and an ethic of responsibility helped to erode the ties to clan and family. In Western societies the individual’s rights are claimed above all else, often times to the detriment of the community or the family. When we do hear of such things it’s usually in the context of ‘warlords’ in Afghanistan or Pakistan, and it’s anything but heroic.
So I read it in Beowulf and I’m drawn to the courage and the honor exemplified; the idea of following a leader worth following stirs up something deep inside me. Yet, blood feuds sicken me as does any war that purports to defend God’s name. Can we aspire to such virtues without bloody conflict? Can we hold to a view of life that rules out any war on evil? Gandalf, the formidable wizard of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, didn’t think so. Evil is always looking to break, corrupt, and destroy, he said.
Is our natural state of existence one of constant conflict, like Hobbes believed? Are we doomed to be cannon fodder for the powers that be? The evil that arises in Beowulf and in Lord of the Rings comes from greed and aggression that is unrelenting and remorseless, serving no end but destruction and chaos. The tragedy for the valiant and the brave is that their nobility is seen only in war and destruction.
Why does it seem that the choices back then, though hard, were at least clear? Either you fought for the right or you capitulated to evil. It was never that easy then and it still isn’t easy today. One enduring lesson of Beowulf is that evil is never just Out There in the darkness of the night; it runs right through us, all of us. In the moment of our greatest triumph we can succumb to the lure of power, fame, and wealth. Our true heroism lies in understanding that we are all ‘poor, blind, and naked’—and fighting bravely anyway.
Recognizing reality and demanding to change it are fundamentally different activities. Both wisdom and virtue depend on keeping them separate, but all our hopes are directed to joining them." — Susan Neiman, Evil in Modern Thought, 60-61.
In a relativistic world a murder mystery in the hands of a master writer can be a sword, rightly dividing hypocrisy from truth. The mystery writer is also a problem-solver and a moral arbiter; the pleasure for the reader is in the careful twining of many threads to make a coat of justice.
James Lee Burke, author of 30 novels and two collections of short stories, is a master of the genre—indeed, he was named a Grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America in 2009 and has twice won their Crime Novel of the year.
Dave Robicheaux, former cop for the New Orleans Police Department, a dry alcoholic, and a police detective in Iberia Parish, is one of Burke’s most compelling literary creations. Robicheaux, a Vietnam War vet and a life-long resident of coastal Louisiana, has no qualms about calling out the evil ones in our midst.
In Robicheaux’s cultural hierarchy the small-time hoods and grifters make up the lowest level. They are the bottom-feeders, those desperate enough to attach themselves to powerful and twisted people whose need for distance and deniability make them almost invulnerable. Robicheaux is not without sympathy for these figures whose lives are steeped in violence and despair. It’s a measure of Burke’s vision and compassion that he gives them a solid dignity in the midst of every trigger pulled or fist cocked. As for the rich, morally bent, and self-righteous, Robicheaux finds them, binds them to the case, and pulls the threads together.
Reading Burke at his best is like swallowing nails dipped in chocolate. On the one hand, he’s a word-painter who can put you in a late-summer electrical storm along the bayou in a flash. In the next moment, violence erupts as inevitably as lightening. Robicheaux believes in evil because he has seen it in the eyes of the wealthiest, the most powerful, and often, the most revered in his society. What truly distinguishes these people from their small-time counterparts is the level of self-deception they are capable of maintaining. While they believe themselves to be virtuous, natural-born citizens of the elite, educated, and genteel, their feral nature is only a few insults from the surface. In those moments Burke’s prose reveals the skull beneath the skin. It’s like walking in a thoughtful daze through a gallery of impressionist paintings and rounding a corner to find George Bellow’s paintings of bare-knuckled and bloodied fighters surrounded by dissolute ghouls.
But Robicheaux—and Burke—live in a universe that is tragically evil, that is, those who are marked as evil may have chosen their actions, but were acting on compulsions beyond their control. Through a long apprenticeship in deceit and denial, they now look back in anger to see how far from their innocence they have come. There was no moment in which they stepped across a threshold into evil, but they are undeniably in that far country now.
Perhaps the one thing, besides shock and grief, that unites us in the face of an unspeakable tragedy like the shooting of schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, is that we search for a reason Why? We look for trace elements of aggression in the killer’s childhood, we mine the memories of his neighbors, we sift the impressions of doctors, teachers, relatives—anyone who might be able to put the mark of Cain on his forehead with some degree of certainty. Psychologists and pundits stack up the similarities in the profiles of mass murderers and we all look for patterns. This is natural and even noteworthy, futile though it is for determining cause. But if society does not care enough to search for answers in the face of such tragedies, then we are truly at a moral tipping point. Outrage is a sign of conscience: the lack of it may be the first symptom of moral paralysis.
The moral philosophers of the Enlightenment separated natural evil from moral evil. Tsunamis, wildfires, hurricanes, avalanches had all been thought to issue from the hand of God as punishment for sin. But Rousseau took the evil out of natural evil by thinking of them as simply nature following the laws of God. What mattered more was the ‘evil that men do,’ and especially so since we are beings endowed with reason. Why do we do evil then? It makes no sense from a rational standpoint, so we have to seek an explanation elsewhere. Broadly speaking, Rousseau located the cause of evil in the subversion of the individual by society. Kant saw moral evil arising from our denial of our autonomy and our moral duty.
Rousseau thought the key to moral improvement was education. He spent much of his time trying to work out a social contract between the individual and society. Most problems, he thought, could be negotiated by reasonable people working together. One result of this was the decreasing role of God in human affairs. In her rewriting of the history of philosophy in Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman says, “The more responsibility for evil accrues to the human, the less belongs to the divine.”
This resistance of nature that we see and experience, says Neiman, is not the work of angry gods “but simply part of the arbitrary stuff of the universe.” They are part of living with limits. Finitude isn’t a punishment, it’s simply part of our structural framework. As Neiman so succinctly puts it: “We have purposes; the world does not.”
So the problem of evil became irresolvable. The way Kant figured it the problem of evil was one of us being dissatisfied with the difference between the way things are and the way they should be. The first is the realm of nature, the second of reason. “Happiness depends on events in the natural world,” comments Neiman, and virtue depends on us exercising our reason. We can’t control much in nature—and that includes our happiness—but we may have more control in the realm of virtue driven by reason. “The one [reason] is a matter of what ought to be; the other [nature] is a matter of what is.” For Kant, what was most important was distinguishing between the two. “Recognizing reality and demanding to change it are fundamentally different activities. Both wisdom and virtue depend on keeping them separate, but all our hopes are directed to joining them.”
Or as the Rolling Stones said: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need.”
Kant would agree. The gap between the is—the way things are—and the ought—the way things should be will never be entirely bridged. But we’ve got to try: our dignity as humans and our hopes for this world demand it.
Such tragedies as the Newtown shooting, the Aurora killings, the Columbine massacre, demand a rational explanation. We struggle to find one and if we can’t find a common pattern or a series of movements we despair because above all else we want to live in a rational universe. We shudder to think—and we dare not say—that there may not be a rational explanation for these people running amok. If that is true then we are faced with the fact that without a clear cause these events cannot be predicted nor can they be prevented. And the tragic result of that is a fortress mentality and officially sponsored societal paranoia.
We may find a cause someday that will explain—as fully and as clearly as possible—why these killings occur. We should continue to gather evidence, try out theories, hope to understand. But we must also realize, as Kant so brilliantly works it out and as most scriptures testify, that we humans are limited, finite, even broken and fractured. This is not a cause for despair, said Kant, but rather simply the way things are. We can do better and we should try to, even while realizing that all our efforts will fall short of perfection.
And the worth of our striving can be measured by the degree to which we act with compassion toward those who are suffering and with humility and wisdom toward those who bring the suffering.
Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns. Most of this is held unconsciously, which means that our imaginations may recognize elements of it, when presented in art or literature, without consciously understanding what it is that we recognize. — Northrop Frye, The Great Code
In Augustine’s Confessions—the original of the species of literary prayers—he devotes a whole chapter to memory. It is as fine a psychological and spiritual study of that faculty as you could find anywhere today. Like a stone in the palm he turns it over and over, tracing out the striata, smoothing its roughness, feeling its weight and shape. He ponders the strangeness that he can remember remembering just as he can remember forgetting, and that somehow forgetting must also be in his memory. “Who can fathom such a thing,” he marvels, “or make any sense of it?”
The book was written a decade after his baptism into the Catholic Church on April 25, 387 CE. The chapter is iike a traffic roundabout that directs the story of the events that drew him—both feverish for God and anguished at surrendering up his old ways—around toward the climatic moment in the garden of a friend’s house when his defenses gave way before a tidal surge of longing for belonging. All of that before he spun off in another direction to discuss the Trinity.
Like a viral agent Augustine gets in through the weak places in our skin of defenses. As much as I rise with him to that summit of emotion at conversion, it’s the passages on memory that I’m most vulnerable to these days since my memory itself seems increasingly vulnerable. Of all the potholes in the road to life’s end the ones that I swerve to avoid the most have to do with losing my memory. Even more than going blind, that seems the worst of the fates, because as Augustine says, “my memory is me.” So I build habits and routines that can bridge my absentmindedness and defuse my anxiety.
Augustine’s analogies reveal him seeking out the deep crevices where memory hides in the mind or striding down the aisles in a capacious warehouse, or pausing at one of many doors in a long corridor to the past. He searches confusedly until “the dim thing sought arrives at last, fresh from depths.” In an envy-producing flourish he boasts that some things are brought up easily, properly sequenced and recalled at will, “which happens whenever I recite a literary passage by heart.” We should all be so lucky.
Alas, my current experience has me hacking my way through a landscape kudzued into a formless forest with few distinguishing marks. More positively, I could see myself swimming from island to island in the sea of memory, regarding them as the tips of sea mounts that go down into the darkest depths but give us stability in the meantime.
Recently, I’ve realized that for months I’ve been re-experiencing some of the pivotal artists and musicians who have helped to construct my inner world. Without design, but surely with some intent, I’ve collected concert videos of Paul Simon, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Paul McCartney’s “Good Evening New York!” and Billy Joel’s “Live at Shea” concert, as well as reading biographies of Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Carly Simon, CSN, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger. These are of a piece with going back to books I’ve picked up over the years about Edward Hopper, Paul Klee, Georges Roualt, Marc Chagall, and Kandinsky—artists whose works are the windows of my soul.
As I write, it is 32 years to the day that John Lennon was shot outside the Dakota in New York City. As hard as it is to imagine, he would have been 72 this year. He died at 40 in 1980 and will be, as Dylan sang, ‘forever young.’ Like many of us, ‘midway through this life he awoke in a dark wood.’ I wanted to see him grow older, and to understand how he found his way out, and what his wit and wonder might have created had he lived.
Which brings me back to memories and the loss thereof and the regaining of them through our tricks to stay afloat, as well as the silent entrance of memories half-formed but more strongly sensed only when our striving ceases and our fences drop.
All those years ago, John said it well:
There are places I remember
All my life, though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all
— In My Life
We are both the shapers and the shaped when it comes to our identities. We are drawn to those in the arts who sing our stuttering words, who sculpt our unformed desires and paint our fears in light. As Northrop Frye says in the epigram, our imaginations recognize what we may not consciously see. When we need it it will appear. Like the Zen saying goes, “When the pupil is ready, the teacher will arrive.”
Sometimes memory is a slow train.
“Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment.” — Henri Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son
It is fortunate that at least once a year we are reminded of thankfulness and gratitude—lest we forget. To the market forces Thanksgiving is the occasion for the holiest day of the year—Black Friday—when all the bare-knuckled commercialism that has been throbbing resentfully since Halloween can finally burst into the open. From Black Friday until Christmas it is open season on consumers, a vortex of induced guilt that results in final quarter earnings and the measure of economic success.
But Thanksgiving as a concept is harder to identify. For many, “thanksgiving” is part of religious services, a pouring out of praise to God in return for all the blessings received. Thanksgiving, Thankfulness, Gratitude—all live in the same neighborhood, but Gratitude doesn’t get out as much as the other two. Call it reticence or shyness on their part, or even general neglect or misunderstanding on the part of the public, but Gratitude and its sibling Gratefulness do not make it into the public’s eye on many occasions.
Gratitude doesn’t appear on Aristotle’s list of virtues nor does it show up in St. Paul’s fruits of the Spirit. You won’t hear it mentioned much, if at all, in politics, except during victory or concession speeches and almost never in the entertainment industry except for Oscar night.
I’ve wondered why we seem to find it difficult to utter the words, “I’m grateful for. . . “ or “I have gratitude for . . . “ Perhaps it’s just awkward to speak the words or we find ourselves slightly embarrassed to be uttering them because one never knows where emotions such as these will go.
But it’s more likely, I think, that gratitude is seen as weakness or even a craven kissing-up to those who wield power over us. Who wants to be seen as being in debt to another, especially if that person is someone for whom we also feel resentment? Having to call on someone else for help is embarrassing; it taps into our fears of becoming redundant and it might allow others to see our incompetence.
There are days when I walk out of the classroom absolutely convinced that every student there sees me for what I am—an imposter. What gives me the right, I rage to myself, to imagine that my pitiful scraps of shared knowledge will be of use to anyone? Where do I get off thinking that my explanations and descriptions are clear, that my logic convinces and my credibility isn’t fragmented by a well-lobbed question? The dark magic of pride, hypocrisy, and self-doubt combine to become a catalytic converter for resentment. What begins as an opportunity for reflection sours into excuses: If I had better students . . . . If I had more time . . . . If they’d pay more attention and actually study the readings. . . .
It’s all a dodge, a pitiful attempt to salvage some self-respect on the barest of pretenses. Other professors make it look so easy. Their discussions flow like cream, their questions are simple and yet profound, their students cannot help but be enlightened. In Kurt Vonnegut’s vivid phrase, ‘they glow like bass drums with lights inside.” Do I forget those who have helped me over the years? No! In moments like these I remember them with shame and embarrassment and shame finds it difficult to be grateful.
Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) was a Catholic priest and author of 40 books. In his commentary, The Return of the Prodigal Son, a meditation on the parable of Jesus and the painting of the same name by Rembrandt, Nouwen says, “Resentment and gratitude cannot coexist, since resentment blocks the perception and experience of life as a gift. My resentment tells me that I don’t receive what I deserve. It always manifests itself in envy.”
There is in ungratefulness a rough shouldering aside of others, a terseness of speech and a looming sense of denial. In his multi-layered biography, John Lennon: The Life, Philip Norman notes Lennon’s frequent callousness toward those who had served him without complaint, in some cases for decades. Employees were dropped without warning, the prodigious artistry of the Beatles’ producer, George Martin, was dismissed by John as “production shit,” and lifelong friendships jeopardized by his impatience and insecurity. Yet those who knew him best and loved him most could cite many more instances of his kindness and thoughtfulness than of the cutting remarks and cruel comments. As his self-confidence waxed and waned his gratitude did so also. At times his vulnerability was achingly apparent such as in the lyrics to Help!:
But every now and then I feel so insecure/I know that I just need you like I’ve never done before.
In the last years of his life, before he was murdered outside the Dakota on December 8, 1980, he reached out to people he had hurt over the years and thanked them for what they had done for him. Spending so much time with his infant son, Sean, taught him patience and brought out in him a paternal instinct that he was not at all sure existed. As he took less and gave more his need to impose his will on others diminished and his generous nature became more evident.
So perhaps that provides a clue to gratitude, that it is there to be drawn upon when we relax our grip and learn to open up to others. Nouwen says that gratitude is a spontaneous response to our awareness of gifts received, but also that gratitude can be lived as a discipline. “The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.”
I’d like to think of gratitude as both a virtue to be practiced and a gift to be received. In receiving there is re-cognition, a rethinking of who we are and how much we have been given. In the practicing of gratitude there is constancy and commitment. How much we could transform our world through such simple acts!
“The inevitability of cynicism often looks like the twentieth-century legacy, but one goal of philosophy is to enlarge our ideas of what is possible.” — Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists
Now that our long national nightmare is over we can take up a new opportunity for idealism. In the rather confined circles that I spend my working days and nights in, there was relief rather than ecstasy at President Obama’s re-election. In other parts of the country—and, no doubt, in our fair city—they were dancing in the streets, provided they weren’t splashing through water up to their knees or slogging through sand and mud in the aftermath of Sandy.
Immediately after a battle is as good a time as any to ask oneself, was it worth it? And while I watched the fight from the middle distance, I was fascinated enough by the posturing and the propaganda from both ends of the political spectrum to ask myself some questions: Does it make a difference (the “it” being the right to vote)? Is there still a place for hope in these post-apocalyptic days? What, if anything, does a progressive Christian faith have to offer a society that is fed up with fundamentalists of all stripes?
[Full disclosure: I do not vote, since my citizenship is Canadian and my card is green, but having lived in this country most of my life I travel on parallel paths.]
It does make a difference, for a number of reasons, whether the citizens vote or not. The usual reason is that every vote counts, a truism which cannot be denied in states like Florida for example. But surely casting a vote, as commonplace as the action itself might be, has some kind of moral validation to it? If we act on our best judgment we make that which we might only tentatively hold dear all the more real.
As Susan Neiman points out in her enthralling argument for a reasoned idealism (Moral Clarity, 2008), “. . . . the American revolution was nothing short of miraculous. ‘We hold these truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’ was, metaphysically speaking, an astounding move. . . . In 1776 a band of colonials had the audacity to declare the idea self-evident—and thereby began to make it come true.”
Even aside from the obvious reasons, the act of voting, like the efficacy of prayer, has less to do with tracing the cause to the effect as it does with changing our attitudes toward “we the people.” Maybe the American people aren’t quite as passive and imbecilic as they are made out to be if they can resist the millions of dollars pumped into the media-political pipeline by Citizens United, Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch brothers.
These people certainly have the right to spend their money as they wish—after all, the Supreme Court likened that spending to a form of free speech—but it’s still somewhat reassuring to see that this time around such blatant manipulating of a Constitutional right came up way short of the goals. And that would still be the case had the Democrats done the same.
Is there hope for those on the left of the political spectrum? If this election served as a wakeup call to the Democratic Party and those affiliated with it, then an unintended consequence of good has glimmered into light. Against the odds, the President has been re-elected, despite a dragging economy, a dragged-out war, and some liberal measures that might not have flown four years ago. Despite four years of ideological gun-slinging progress has been made in human rights, restoring the infrastructure, and setting new directions.
This election blew the gaskets of some on the right to a degree I’ve not seen before. Donald Trump, Ted Nugent, Victoria Jackson and others were apoplectic over the election results. This would almost be funny if it were not for their malignant disavowal of democratic principles. Apparently—if Donald Trump had his way—there would be lynch mobs marching with pitchforks up Pennsylvania Avenue as we speak. Isn’t it time the media fired Donald Trump?
Nevertheless, free elections were held, no one was machine-gunned in the waiting lines, millions of people of good will and conviction—Democrats and Republicans alike—made their wishes known and moved the country fractionally ahead by the sheer virtue of acting on their convictions. This is no small thing in today’s world and we should be grateful for it. Immanuel Kant said, “If we depreciate the value of human virtues we do harm, because if we deny good intentions to the man who lives aright, where is the difference between him and the evil-doer?”
So how can idealism be taken seriously again? Susan Neiman, a philosopher who is also an expert on Kant, looks to him: “Kant says you do it by talking about heroes: those who risk their lives rather than resign themselves to injustice.”
The form of religion expressed in a twisted and malevolent way by those on the right is seen for what it is by its fruits. By contrast, as a knee-jerk reaction, those on the left who reject religion do so by allowing their understanding of it to be defined by the distorters of it. There is no reason why religion cannot have a voice in the political realm if those who speak for it point us away from the naked grab for power and if they hold out for something better in the world. This is transcendence and Neiman says that the urge for transcendence expresses two drives. “One is to criticize the present in the name of the future, to keep longing alive for ideas the world has yet to see. The other is to prove our freedom, and dignity, by having a hand in bringing those ideals about through some form of human creativity.”
The criticism that we fall short of our ideals is no thunderbolt of truth—our sins are ever before us. But neither is it an excuse not to try. As Kant reminds us in his Lectures on Ethics: “The remedy against such dejection and inertia is to be found in our being able to hope that our weakness and infirmity will be supplemented by the help of God if we but do the utmost that the consciousness of our capacity tells us we are able to do.”
It would be a change for the better if those who invoked God did so from the humility of hope rather than the hubris of hypocrisy.
“Culture is man’s medium; there is not one aspect of human life that is not touched and altered by culture.” — Edward T. Hall, Beyond Culture
According to Ed Hall, American anthropologist and writer, culture is not innate but learned, all of it. Everything in a culture is bound together and culture sets the boundaries that define one tribe or group from another. The odd thing about this is not that we have to learn our culture, but that having learned it we are no longer aware of it. Knowing our context so well we take everything for granted and only pay attention when we stub our toes in the dark because someone moved the furniture. In other words, we only see what we are when we come up against someone who is not like us.
This can be a profoundly disturbing experience, one that sets us back on our heels and causes tempers to flare. Since we learn best through comparison and contrast we should not be surprised when the contrasts between what we think we know about the world, and the way others experience and shape the world, get up in our face. That becomes an ordinance of humility, a teachable moment, an occasion to learn from our mistakes without rubbing out the one who points out our mistakes.
Amartya Sen, Harvard economist and Nobel Prize winner, explores the presumption that we live in an overarching system which categorizes all of us in exactly the same way. This way can be either religious or cultural, but inevitably it sets us against each other. “A solitarist approach,” writes Sen in Identity and Violence, “can be a good way of misunderstanding nearly everyone in the world.” Sen’s reflection on this leads him to the conclusion that when we are assigned one dominant classification —whether it be religion, or community. or culture, or nation, or civilization — which ignores so much that is essential to our personal identity, the many diverse roles that we play and the interlocking communities we move through — violence is almost always the result. Holding hands and singing Kumbaya no longer works in promoting peace, and the wish to see ourselves as really all the same under our skin ignores the recognition that we are, says Sen, “diversely different (italics the author’s).”
Crises can lead to opportunities for us to learn more about our pluralistic human identities and to use those very differences to wake up and hone our sensitivities. Sen and Hall do not exaggerate when they suggest that our very survival as a species may rely on us understanding those diverse differences, not in seeking to conform us all to one identity.
This understanding is hard work, very hard work. In fact, some virulent strains in our own culture inoculate us to these exposures. Religion and politics, the two things most avoided in close relationships, seem to thrive on the us-them dichotomy. Since we tend to grow our own identities in proportion to acceptance by our groups, the easiest way, apparently, to quickly build solidarity in the group is to turn it against other groups. That’s a shortcut we cannot afford these days. This is such a natural law of group formation, in my experience, that we may well expect it sooner rather than later in the life cycle of the groups we belong to or desire to join.
Many years ago, in the wake of the Second World War, Gabriel Marcel, the French Catholic existentialist philosopher and playwright, grappled with parallel issues of individuality and freedom. Writing in Man Against Mass Society, Marcel asked what freedom meant in a society which routinely places us in situations that erode our ethics. We have a choice, of course, but we may not always have the means to live out our convictions. There are others who rely on us and for whom we make compromises just to survive to fight another day. In a materialist culture, says Marcel, everything is reduced to commodities and objects, even human beings.
While he could not have foreseen the reach and scope of the global economy of today, he seemed acutely aware of how entangled our convictions and duties are. If you have a problem with the economic conditions that make affordable clothes, food, and electronics, how far will you go to buy only those goods produced in fair labor conditions?
We don’t know the future, Marcel says, but it is that very ignorance that keeps us hopeful. By way of revolt against the mass society, Marcel argues that “all philosophies of immanence have had their day (italics his).” And we are called to fight against the idolatries of race and class that they foster. Such a fight, he intimates, isn’t just reserved for those with power, assuming of course, that they haven’t already succumbed to the degradations that go with power over others. He puts it in a sentence: “A man cannot be free or remain free, except in the degree to which he remains linked with that which transcends him, whatever the particular form of that link may be. . . .”
Artists have the possibility of creative action against this materialism more readily than most of us, says Marcel. But he’s quick to note that being an artist brings temptations to startle, to innovate at all costs, to sell oneself to the highest bidder or to retreat into the world of the aesthete. All of us are called to be creators of our own freedom. And the way to that freedom lies through remaining open to others. Materialistic societies like ours, says Marcel, sin against this freedom by excluding as forcefully as possible this openness to others. For Marcel the individual could not claim to be free in a culture which callously excludes some and commoditizes almost everything.
It’s not easy to reach for the transcendent in a culture that rewards selfishness nor should we presume that our mere opposition to such a culture means that we are open and unselfish. But on the eve of a bitterly fought election perhaps we can remind ourselves that no matter the outcome we may choose the side of the transcendent by learning to listen and to understand those unlike ourselves.
“Life is long if you know how to use it.” — Seneca
When someone in the public eye passes away it causes us to refurbish old memories. Such was the case when Senator George McGovern died at 90 this week, and Jacques Barzun, perhaps our last public intellectual, died at the age of 104 in San Antonio, Texas. Both men were, in their own ways, the last of a kind, the public figure who lives out his or her convictions with grace and irony right up to the end.
McGovern is often remembered as the man who lost to Richard Nixon by a landslide in the 1972 presidential election. Nixon, our most paranoid of presidents, was fearful that George Wallace would take away votes and sought to find anything he could to smear Wallace. The assassination attempt that left Wallace paralyzed took him out of the race and all but assured Nixon the victory. While he sympathized with Wallace in public Nixon privately exulted that the way was now clear. As for McGovern, Nixon’s men explored the possibility of trying to link his campaign with funding from Castro’s government. That particular move proved unnecessary: the country resoundingly rejected McGovern and his liberal politics. Nixon went on triumphantly to a second term in which he disgraced himself and the country by attempting to subvert the Constitution. He avoided impeachment only by resigning on Friday, August 9, 1974.
Nixon’s resignation speech, a rambling, self-indulgent paean to his mother and his lack of money, was picked up by radio by a group of us that day on a windy, rain-swept headland overlooking the sea in the south of Wales. At the time I remember feeling relief that the whole sordid episode was finally over and that we wouldn’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore.
In moments like that you wonder what alternate history might have been written had McGovern miraculously won. The Democratic Party was never so aligned again with politics that was unabashedly for the rights of women, blacks, the poor, the lame, the halt, and the blind. After defeat McGovern went on to devote himself to the war against hunger in the world. Richard Nixon resurrected himself in time as an elder statesman and at his death was feted by the living presidents of the time. McGovern’s political beliefs seem almost impossibly naive by today’s “whatever” standards. Forty years of Democratic centrism has meant that the party has all but abandoned its constituency of the marginalized.
History unreels behind us, not so much a transcript of orderly actions, but rather a confession of conflicting desires. We gather it up occasionally, expecting a confirmation of our cherished memories. We are often rudely shocked by the distance between our present selves and our reverenced past. The passing of George McGovern, himself a scholar of American history, reminds us that there is more to life than Real Housewives and that we learn best from that which we have understood.
Jacques Barzun, in the words of the New York Times’ obituary for him, was a “distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history.” A man who resisted authoritarianism and the dominance of systems, he lived and breathed a liberal humanism that treasured reflection and gratitude for great learning.
Barzun’s bemused and ironic sensibilities could be read as support for the status quo. In his last major work, From Dawn to Decadence, he notes that “most of what government sets out to do for the public good is resisted as soon as proposed,” and that “The upshot is a floating hostility to things as they are. . . . The hope is that getting rid of what is will by itself generate the new life.” The answer, he suggests, is neither in baptizing the past nor in embracing the new. Rather, “Our distinctive attitude toward history, our habit of arguing from it, turns events into ideas charged with power.”
Both George McGovern and Jacques Barzun lived with the assurance that ideas matter—profoundly—and that what today seems so new and unprecedented may have already appeared in our past, either as an Angel of Light or of Darkness. What we do with our interpretations will create our futures.
“If monarchs have little sympathy with mankind, mankind have even less with monarchs. They are merely to us a sort of state-puppets or royal waxwork, which we may gaze at with superstitious wonder, but have no wish to become . . . .” — William Hazlitt, On Personal Identity.
Why would anyone wish to become president? On the face of it, the highest office that we were told anyone could aspire to and some could attain, is a thankless job. Daily the president is assailed on all sides, sometimes by his own kind, but relentlessly by the disloyal opposition. When he does something that approximates the right thing to do, someone—Charles Krauthammer, most likely—will thunder from the Washington Post and George Will will mutter and mewl. Everything he says and does is subject to the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for “persons of interest” by the FBI or Kim Kardashian.
Of course, anyone in that position should expect that they’ll be held “accountable”—our favorite euphemism for who is to blame—but the accountability factor often becomes a political football and a blanket term for general dissatisfaction. We don’t often hear that someone is held to be responsible, perhaps because that implies actions governed by ethics rather than just a faux economic term.
William Hazlitt, writing in the early 19th century, had in mind kings and princes when he disavowed any interest in changing places with them, but his words could apply almost as well with the office of the President. In a way we ask the impossible of our presidents. We expect them to be extraordinary communicators who can talk to anybody—Saudi princes or Joe the Plumber, pizza makers or heads of state. We expect them to have the intel at their fingertips to make a definitive statement on horrific acts that are still unfolding. And we believe that everything that happens between their inauguration and their reelection—or defeat—is a direct result of some action they’ve taken or left out.
They must be one of us, yet without our annoying and petty grievances. They should be smart enough to solve world economic problems but they shouldn’t be tarred as one of the ’Harvard elite.’ We ask them to maintain America’s dominance by any means necessary but we don’t want to pay for it. We want them to tell the truth but we don’t want to hear it.
There are a number of reasons why a person might want to be president. First, they want the perks and the power. It’s not the money: the President makes $400,000 per year plus expenses. The CEO of Goldman Sachs made $16.5 million in 2011; John Hammergren of McKesson made $131.19 million in a recent year. But they get the use of a plane, Air Force One, a helicopter, Marine One, a nice place in the country—Camp David—and a tony address in downtown Washington. They’re referred to as “the most powerful person in the world,” and people wave as they drive by in motorcades.
Another reason is that they might be driven to accomplish what few people do—make it to the top in a profession. If you’re a lawyer I suppose the Supreme Court would be your last and best job offer. Some academics aspire to be presidents of universities, actors to win Oscars, and athletes to compete and win in the Olympics, the Superbowl or the World Cup. And politicians want the White House. Lyndon Johnson ran for the Vice Presidency, not because he wanted it, but because his mentor, Sam Rayburn, couldn’t bear the thought of Richard Nixon getting it. In time and tragically, Johnson got his turn and his term, a position he’d been climbing toward since his early days as a Texas congressman. Bill Clinton found his inspiration in a meeting with President Kennedy as a teenager. Kennedy himself was groomed for the presidency by his father, so the legend goes.
And no doubt there are those who believe they might do some good, might shape the events of history toward justice or freedom or prosperity. We believe them enough to elect them but we doubt them before they are done. “Why will Mr. Cobbett persist in getting into Parliament?”, asked Hazlitt about a perennial candidate. “He would find himself no longer the same man.” There’s the rub: if you’re man (or woman) enough for the job are you willing to pay the price?
The price is literally in the millions. Some estimates put the total cost of the 2012 election at over $5 billion, an obscene amount for the return on investment. At least three times a week I get an urgent email from Democratic headquarters: for a mere $3 I can help turn the tide and rout the Republican berserkers. The money will go, I am assured, to paying for ads to refute the latest lies the Romney camp is spouting. Money for truth. . . .
To run, to put yourself and your family through the merciless gauntlet of American public opinion, you’ve got to have a massive ego, strong enough to withstand the constant criticism, supple enough to dodge the blows and yet deep enough to listen to counsel. You have to realize that you ran to make a solid difference in the world, but now it’s not about you, but the myriad powers that be. And if you have anything different to say about it you’d better be sure the mic isn’t hot and it’s off the record. Because you didn’t get there on your own. There are many who put you there for reasons of their own, reasons that will demand a return on their investment.
But at the end of the day, climbing the stairs to bed like any other person, can you look back on your efforts that day and feel like you rolled the rock up the mountain with purpose and intention? Can you be glad for small victories and brush off the defeats? If you’ve got the ego strength and the humility to realize that the hinge of history may not turn on your command, but you might have pushed the door open just a bit wider for Goodness—then may you sleep well.
They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another and saying, ‘We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.’ — Luke 7:32, 21st Century King James Bible
When I have a bad day the world does not swerve, is not shaken to its foundations nor rattled to its timbers. This is as it should be. Yet, when Barack Obama has a bad day Democrats gasp and clutch at their hearts, Republicans sneer, and Mr. Mitt comes off a winner.
The wonder of it all! In the hours that followed the first presidential debate of the season, liberal commentators cried out to their deities, examined the entrails of small animals sacrificed to cast light on the mysteries, and pronounced the President unfit for reelection. With the insight only those blind with fury can have, they looked deep into Barack Obama’s psyche and recoiled at what they saw. Ennui, arrogance, an insouciant desire to hang it all up and knock out a few rounds on the links—it was all there. They shuddered. The President does not want to win! He has thrown the election! My high school debate team could have done better! Alarum!
David Graham of The Atlantic took people like The Beast’s Michael Tomasky, Harper’s Kevin Baker, and unliberal Byron York of The Washington Examiner to task in a perceptive piece which included the great line, “I’m old enough to remember when Obama was running away with the election. It was early last week.”
Perhaps in a horse-race where the lead changes from moment to moment those backing a particular steed can be forgiven if their hearts freeze in terror when it stumbles. But let’s be real: no legs were broken. This horse need not be put down just yet.
An hour after the debate I read most of the transcript and I thought the candidates had dealt with some substantive issues. I missed the head-shakes, the downcast eyes, and the pursed lips of Obama, but I also missed the bright gleam in Romney’s eyes as he shape-shifted yet again.
It’s an interesting experience, reading a debate: it focuses attention on the words and their meanings, not on the gestures, expressions, signals, sounds, and the myriad motions that burn impressions into one’s memory. Researchers in cognitive and perceptual studies tell us that we remember little of what was said but much of what was seen, a fact not lost on political handlers, pole dancers, sales people and senators.
In a mediasphere formed around images, sound bites, and opinions it might not matter all that much what the candidates think or even less, what they believe in. They are blurred in our eyes, distinguishable only by the captions they are tagged with by the media. Like modernist paintings, they take on the shape suggested by the titles conveniently mounted on the wall next to them. “The new Mitt!” “Obama sags!” “Romney takes command!”
George Gerbner, a communications scholar who studied media effects for decades, believed that the media don’t tell us what to think—they tell us what to think about. They set the agenda; we carry it out and pride ourselves on knowing what’s current. That may not be entirely true anymore. Public figures are primed, prepped, and produced. Like a new line of frozen dinners they come with ingredients listed on the side, a banner with the magic words, “New and improved!,” and attractive packaging. We don’t know what we’ve got until we open it up—and by then we can’t take it back for a refund. This is more than agenda-setting. News organizations used to counter the spin of the public relations people; now they work for them.
For all the scrutiny that candidates for the presidency go through in the long and excruciating path to election, we may not know much about their souls. We see what we’re allowed to see, hear what’s been scripted, and realize that we’re seeing shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave. None of this is deliberately malevolent or deceitful. It’s simply how business works in a contemporary news cycle.
The best illusions are those in which the audience trusts the illusionist. Oddly enough, it’s the burden, the weight, the power of the idea of trust between the people and their leaders that can, occasionally, elude the barriers set in place. If there’s any integrity at all in the leader the trust of the people will elicit a genuine response, one that will be evident in the moment. The unspoken hope that keeps this experiment going is the belief in those moments of truth.
“The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality.” — Walden, Henry David Thoreau
How much of our life do we truly comprehend? We may feel like political observers at a rigged election: we can see what’s going on but we lack the power to change it. Caught up in our routines, not daring to vary from them lest we lose a step, we see the surface changes of light and shadow, while we sense that tectonic shifts are taking place beneath us.
At a corner of an intersection frequented by panhandlers a man held a hand-lettered sign which proclaimed him to be God’s anointed, a “prophetic, proud, American preacher.” I held a dollar out to him while waiting for the light to change, and listened while he spoke about his ministry. He was a handyman who had been touched by the Lord some years ago and sent on a mission to bring a message of hope, prosperity, happiness, and health to all who would listen. He gave me a flyer he had written up, complete with a website, and resources that, if ordered, would restore a sense of pride in America and gratitude to the Almighty. There was no irony for him in the fact that as the bearer of the message he was a walking refutation of its benefits. But that suspicion was answered by his earnest claim that it was his humility which marked him out for the divine dispensation.
His jaunty sanctity was touching. Far from being an object of pity he thought of himself as a man with a mission. He wasn’t begging, he was witnessing. The transactional nature of his work called for him to give as well as to receive. If I gave a dollar he was happy to bless me and share with me the nature of his work. The dollar, a gesture of solidarity, was less a donation to an indigent than it was a validation of his calling. You’ve got to respect a man like that. As the light changed and the phalanx of cars pulled away, he proclaimed his willingness to work at anything—car repair, house painting, yard work, preaching.
I’ve wondered at the necessities and rules of panhandling. No doubt there are social norms that come with the occupation, perhaps even vocabularies and expectations that must be met. Does a median strip belong to those with seniority or is it ‘first come, first served’? Do you dress for the neighborhood or for the rigors of the job? On blazing hot days can the men go shirtless or is that a social faux pas that cannot be tolerated? Must the women always be mothers with four children and no rent money or can they be young, single, and brave—with time on their hands? How does the body adapt to or resist the thrumming roar of traffic, the waves of heat radiated from exhausts, engines, and metal surfaces? Do you stay on the median or walk between the lanes? Smile and thank whoever pauses or keep it to a minimum of gestures?
These are the lines of adaptation to which the organism conforms, the terrain that must be plowed, the rules of engagement for a public transaction of a moment. I’ve seen lithe, well-dressed young men, affable and surefooted in the traffic, whose only indication of need was the hand-lettered sign they carried. And I’ve seen men, perhaps veterans of our interminable wars, whose faces were roasted red from the heat, whose hair was bleached and lifeless from the exhaust and the wind, and whose clothes had lost all semblance of garments.
I have found myself imagining, while waiting out the light, what slight movements of the spirit brought them to this place and this moment. What butterfly, blithely flitting from flower to bush in a garden on an island in Japan, set in motion the winds that blew these people up on our concrete beaches? Alone in a crowd, islands in a river of molded plastic and glass, do they wonder as they pace their walkways, if there was an inexorable fate that brought them here? Were they singled out for punishment or just slower than the rest sprinting for the exits?
Matthew Arnold’s The Buried Life comes to mind:
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
The consistency and persistence of these people is what lingers in the memory. Every day they are out there in all weathers, working the lanes, radiating discomfort and regret, regulating their practice according to the elements they have found that work through necessity and chance.
Every one of them began as a child without guile. Most were loved, some no doubt carried the hopes of the family on their shoulders. I don’t want to romanticize them or bill them as urban artists; they have too much dignity in themselves to be the object of our casual pity.
Perhaps they live with the facts, the bare unadorned necessities of survival. They are not a tribe apart, they are the rest of us stripped down, without our pretense and assurances, without our bored indifference. There was a time when the Fates got the credit for having twisted up these lives in ways that could not easily be undone. Now they are proxies for the millions whose existence is noted by a downward tick on a graph.
“We know not where we are,” says Thoreau near the end of Walden. “Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface.”
“It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.” — Niccolo Machiavelli, c. 1515.
Soon after Paul Ryan’s ascendancy to the Republican Vice Presidential candidacy, he flew to Las Vegas to meet with a hotel room full of wealthy investors. They were there, we might suppose, to look over the merchandise and to assess its value to them in the coming months and years, provided—God willing—that their money and influence prevailed and the American people returned the throne to its rightful owners after a brief hiatus. That such bald-faced dealing goes on in American politics is no surprise. After all, this is the old normal brought out of the smoke-filled back rooms and given a shave, a fresh suit of clothes, some cheery one-liners about “opportunity” and “economic realignment” and made to sing and dance in the public square. We’re used to it by now. And that is what is disheartening about the current grand experiment in democracy.
Those who lean toward the liberal tradition should not congratulate themselves for good taste in morality either, since no one ascends Capitol Hill without having first bowed the knee to Mammon. At least that is what we are led to believe, and without first-hand experience how are we to refute it? There is so much that relies on trust in the political realm that we find our limited supply used up with nothing much to show for it.
We like to think that in electing a person to the Presidency we have first fairly assessed his character. We look to opinions by the press, statements by the candidates, endorsements by the parties, and most especially, actions taken. In the glare of campaign publicity every flaw, every hot mike statement, every photo op becomes a lens through which we might examine them with a critical, if not discerning, eye.
Cicero, Roman statesman and grand orator, wrote to his brother Marcus in 64 BC, advising him on running a campaign for political office, by counseling, “For a candidate must be a chameleon, adapting to each person he meets, changing his expression and speech as necessary.” Cicero notes that Marcus is courteous and thoughtful, “but you can be rather stiff at times.” No stranger to political machinations and intrigues, Cicero urges his brother to learn the art of flattery, “a disgraceful thing in normal life but essential when you are running for office.” In other words, even in ancient Rome, the campaign was all about appearances, not about substance.
Cicero is up front and center in this season, especially his letter to his brother. James Carville, former Machiavelli to Bill Clinton, has quoted it at length with approval as an effective playbook for candidate Obama to follow. Others have done so for Romney. The letter appears, with irony, in Lapham’s Quarterly for Fall 2012. Although Cicero may appear calculating by our standards, he was, in his own time, something of a model for public officials. Incorruptible and uncompromising in his personal morality, he nevertheless knew his way around Roman politics and, more importantly, he understood human nature. It is both disconcerting and strangely reassuring that so little has changed over the centuries.
It’s a game, Cicero seems to be hinting; play it well and you can change things for the better. It’s a utilitarian argument that many a public official, church leader, statesman, and citizen has used to justify bent actions leading to a straight-arrow outcome. But there are two potential outcomes of such actions that cannot be dismissed.
The first is the polarization of positions, each extreme quick to portray the other in the worst possible light. While the name-calling and mud-slinging is irritating and distracting, it’s not dangerous unless it actually threatens our position in the world. Politicians can kick sand in each others’ faces in their own playground, but when lies are daily compounded with interest on the world stage then it’s time to put the country ahead of the candidates.
The second—and by far the more dangerous of the two— is that the citizenry, in every generation, comes to realize that politics falls far short of the enterprise it claims to be. Far from advocating on behalf of the people, the elected enjoy the spoils of their war upon the electorate. We’d be touchingly naive not to recognize this, but that betrayal of trust corrodes the very beams and braces that support the structure of government. Realizing this provokes cynicism and indifference. The game is rigged and we find ourselves, like the farmyard animals in Orwell’s Animal Farm, unable to tell the pigs from the humans. Jean-Jacques Rousseau presumes us to be in a social contract and says, “As soon as public service ceases to be the main concern of the citizens and they come to prefer to serve the state with their purse rather than their person, the state is already close to ruin. . . As soon as someone says of the business of the state, ‘What does it matter to me?’—then the state must be reckoned lost.”
Sometimes it feels like we’re living out Yeats’ Second Coming: “The best lack all conviction/While the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Is it wrong to believe in the promise of democracy even though those who would govern us don’t seem to?
“. . . . [B]y keeping a watchful eye on men of extraordinary rank I have discovered that they are, for the most part, just like the rest of us.” — Michel de Montaigne, On Friendship
The Republican and Democratic conventions are over. The confetti has landed and the balloons have popped. The circumstances of the scripted pomp made it possible to see in the faces of the attending faithful both the past and the future: for Republicans a virtual sea of white, for Democrats a fair slice of what America looks like now and shall be evermore.
Pundits (a Sanskrit word for explorers; now referring to scholarly commentators for media outlets) were surprised at Romney’s modesty and lack of viciousness. Some were underwhelmed by the President’s speech and angered that he didn’t use the occasion to bludgeon his opponents or at least box them about the head and ears.
We can imagine that such events are carefully scripted to avoid such embarrassments as Clint Eastwood’s amateur hour show, but it is a measure of the political expectations of the day when the President is faulted for a speech that does not promise the moon, but remains firmly planted on this earth.
I’m not sure where the truth about the state of the country lies, but I am fairly certain that the lies about the country will be stated ad nauseam in the weeks that remain before Election Day. Both sides will endeavor to influence us—the masses—through sophisticated techniques of propaganda. Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, authors of a respected textbook in communication studies entitled Propaganda and Persuasion, conclude their fourth edition, released just after 9/11, with some generalizations about propaganda. Several of these bear repeating for they can serve as litmus tests—if the water turns red or blue as a result, there must be some propaganda about.
Propaganda, say Jowett and O’Donnell, tells people what to think and how to behave. When we get most of our information from the media we become the unwitting supporters of an invisible institution.
Even when it’s clear that we are receiving propaganda, we’ll still react favorably toward it. The familiarity of the message through the constant repetition gives us the comfort of the ‘known’ and creates resonance where there may have been none before.
People form up into opposing camps in response to propaganda and ‘fight’ for their ideological truths. How many candidates for public office offer to ‘negotiate’ or ‘compromise’ or ‘dialogue’ over the issues? Ummmmm. . . . almost one. Most of them assure us they’ll be off to Washington to fight corruption, cut our taxes, and defend our God-given values.
Media techniques and technologies operate 24/7, compiling research and data that can be mined, filtered, sorted, dispersed, compressed, and reconstituted by simply adding money. Jowett and O’Donnell note that, “People’s predispositions are easily identifiable through market research, making them easy targets for propaganda.”
Displays of aggression toward the enemy are likely manufactured for internal consumption. The authors add drily that these displays “may not phase the enemy, but they can bolster morale at home.”
Finally, propaganda may not be an evil thing in itself. It all depends on the context: one man’s assault weapon may be another’s Constitutional right. Propaganda comes in many guises, some of which are closer to the truth than others. The difficulty, of course, is finding the distinction between them.
The authors close with the somewhat world-weary hope that “in a free society, somewhere, somehow, alternative message systems always appear.”
Montaigne had another take on the matter of political leadership. Having served in public office and been welcomed at the courts of various European countries, he had opportunity to observe the rich and powerful close up. He likens the entourage around public figures to a religious cult and cheerfully observes that “the gravity, academic robes and rank of the man who is speaking often lend credence to arguments which are vain and silly . . . . or that a man who is entrusted with so many missions and offices of state, a man so disdainful and so arrogant, is not cleverer than another man who bows to him from afar and whom nobody ever employs!”
Religious politics, like secular politics, is never far from mind-bending justifications for its follies. There, too, we find fertile land for propaganda, for the very word, derived from a Latin term for propagating or sowing, was embodied by the Vatican in 1622 in the institution responsible for propagating the faith of the Roman Catholic Church. While it was thus originally a positive term it later came to have pejorative connotations through Catholic opposition to Protestantism.
When a religious institution feels its foundations to be threatened, either by a shift of the theological tectonic plates or the drift of social ethics, it often responds with a swift denunciation of the new and a demand for conformity. Falling into line is never referred to by such a gauche term however; the usual language is for unity over dissension, the preservation of the church as a structure being paramount over ethical considerations. In such ways, the church might actually lag behind society on important issues like gender discrimination, the ordination of women, and the role of women in an institution that has traditionally been supported and sustained more by women than by men.
Perhaps what we might come to reluctantly is the understanding that since propaganda, like the poor, is always with us, we have ample opportunity to study it and learn its forms and range. In politics, as in religion, there is much at stake, not the least of which is the universal desire for power and status. Propaganda arises from fear, the fear of losing control. Montaigne lightly dismissed such fears by saying, “Most of this world’s events happen by themselves,” and concludes, “The outcome often lends authority to the most inept leadership.”
But we do not have to leave it up to Fate. In a democracy, however fractious and fearful it is, the hope remains that where people act for the good of all their own needs are most often met. The process is slow, change is incremental, solutions will not be found through vilification or greed, but at some point we can turn around, look back, and see that the dots actually connected. Truth was lived in the struggle.
