Blasts From The Past (#2)

Today's post refers to a two-part posting regarding the secularization process in American culture.  The discussion is based on Harry Ausmus's book "The Polite Escape: On the Myth of Secularization" (Ohio University Press, 1982) which I worked on as a literary consultant.  Part two of the original post looks at the difference between the secularization process and secularism, and, perhaps, sees that there is more to this cultural gap than folks even want to consider.  In our current cultural context, we might want to give secularization serious thought.

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"The Polite Escape Revisited (Part Two)"   (November 19, 2004)

So the secularization process in our culture moves on apace as long as things are steady, and there is no threat to the status quo.  During many of our conversations back in the 70s, Harry would tell me to mark his word:  All the moralizing about the Vietnam War was going to create an outbreak of fundamental believers that would make the Second Great Awakening look tame.  Well here we are.  The chicken hawks and Bible thumpers have come home to roost.  And perhaps at no other time in American history has a challenge to the status quo been so great and our senses of normality so uncertain.

We are stumbling and twitching through an age of anxiety.  Our faith in The Republic has been shaken by more than 9/11.  It has been shaken by an enforced necessity to live in a global community engineered by technology that we can't really see and don't understand and by a real world in which none of our secularized values seem to obtain.  We are used to easy solutions and the barriers of two oceans, but now we seem bereft of worldly direction and The Republic seems impotent.  This is why so many of us call on the power of an Absolute.  Nobody can claim you're wrong if you do that.  Does this mean we have leapt out of secularization into a cultural face off between secularism and divinity?

First, secularization is different from secularism.  Secularism is a philosophy professing that religion and social institutions of a society should be distinct and forever separate.  Religion can voice opinions about societal institutions, but it has no authority or power to alter those institutions.  Traditionally, secularization represents an implementation of secularism, and many in America today fear that is what got us in this terrifying situation (Ausmus to the contrary notwithstanding),  Hence we have the face off.  Did anyone see this coming, and what alternative was offered?

Many historians consider Reinhold Niebuhr to be the second greatest native-born theologian in American cultural history (the first being Jonathan Edwards).  Expressed in the 1950s, his so-called neo-orthodoxy proposed an ideology known as  "Christian Realism," what he called his practical  theology.  Jerry Falwell, George W. Bush and their ilk would consider him heretical for showing more interest in the paradoxes of human life than in the salvation offered through Christ.  Niebuhr felt we must take "myths" seriously, but not literally.  For example, the cross of Christ was a particularly important theme for Niebuhr since it revealed the great paradox of powerlessness turned into power, of a love in justice that overcame the sinful world.  He "focused more on the doctrine of man than on the doctrine of God, and showed more concern for life in society than for life in the church."

Niebuhr was prescient about religion in American modern life.  He contended that the major heresy for the Church, be it Catholic or Protestant, is for it to identify itself with God, to suppose the opposition to its way is opposition to God's ways.  When the Church is guilty of such pretensions, it needs to be, and usually is, attacked by a secular force.  The secular voice becomes a judgment of God upon a Church that has forgotten its true nature.  This sounds reasonable and modern, but Niebuhr offered struggle, not absolute hope.  And so here we are at the face off.  When The Transcendent Mystery confronts secularism. secularism withers.  Currently, secularism seems to be weak and fading.  Fear of the unknown has generated reliance on the unknowable.

The rise of Christian fundamentalism in everything (including in rap and hip hop) is consistent with other periods in our history, sometimes as part of turn-of-the-century phenomena and sometimes as precedent to a major cultural cataclysm especially when the period is marked by significant shifts in or threats to the culture.  That we are experiencing the Third Great Awakening will be up to the historians, but for now, if we look, we can see the signs.

Consider the call for "strict constructionists" as judges and justices. This regards the Constitution as holy writ (like the Talmud and the Koran), as inviolable, not open to "deconstruction" — and thus we have an ironclad, absolute secularization of state as god/God.  And justices of the Supreme Court have become high priests, alone aware of the "true" meaning of the ancient text.  Consider the Bush administration's foreign policy framed as "Liberty is God's gift to people" around the world, thus justifying empire as deliverance.  And in the response to the defeat of its candidate for President, the Democratic Leadership Council has announced it is time for Democrats to shake off their secular image, to rephrase their position in moral and religious language.  They are stepping up their efforts to rally religious and church groups to their side (NY Times, 11/17/04, p. A20).  And there are bushels of examples from popular culture.

The real test is our answer to this question:  Do Americans have more faith in "Americanism" or in their personal religions?  And then the hypothetical:  If they were faced with giving up their religion or giving up America, which would they choose?  (historically, not much of a hypothetical; the Puritans, Pilgrims, Jews, Huguenots and others had to answer it.)  Ironically, much of America was settled by people fleeing an oppression of church run states, most of which have evolved into quite secularized states, keeping religion private and apart from the public domain...while America now seems to feel that it has had enough of its presumed secularization and prefers some sort of nationalized divine Awakening.

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Such litanies as "Make America great again" hearken to this need for the the Republic—not the government—to be recognized as the divinely inspired salvation of the people, especially the non-elites.  "Fear of the unknown has generated reliance on the unknowable."

Some Blasts From The Past

Now that I've simmered down from the anger and flight reaction of the election and submerged into a welcome numbness, I've taken some time to consider if I've been here before.  And with the benefit of having done a blog in the beginning years of the 21st century, I went back to some of them and discovered that, yes, I've been here before, albeit with less fear, less anger and no numbness.

So I've decided to resurrect three of those posts to share with you to see if you might feel the same way.  They all come from 2004, a year, in hindsight, which just might have been a kind of watershed leading to our current situation.  You can decide for yourself.

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Blast #1: "We Have Exactly What We're Told We Want."      (October 19, 2004)

Lots of my friends and family are gnawing at their knuckles in fear that John Kerry and the Democratic Party don't have the stuff to stop the fundamentalist terror machine of The Bushies.  Yep. And that bothers me, too.  But something else bothers me more.  When you step back from all the lies of the campaign trail, when you listen to what people are parroting from the media mouthpieces, you begin to understand that we, the US, think it's all just a big mosh pit anyway, so let's just keep moshing.  Based on the evidence in recent polls, the truth is we don't want a president, we don't want a leader...we want a body we can point to and complain about.

Of the two candidates, half the US wants a cheerleader who they think will leave them alone in their loneliness, and the other half don't know what they want (or can't articulate it) but are willing to accept whoever isn't the other guy.  We're all mostly lazy, busy making money, or struggling to breathe, and we don't or won't do the work to get some decent, truthful information.  So we rely on various media to spew their thoughts or news.  When that happens (as it has elsewhere in the past) we get exactly what we're told we want.  When I thought about this, an old phrase crept into my muddled mind...the fourth estate.  When I looked it up, I discovered an important discourse.

According to "The Mass Media as Fourth Estate," Thomas Carlyle (19th century historian) once quoted Edmund Burke (18th century philosopher/statesman) who coined the phrase, saying there are three cultural estates, but "in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important than they all.  It is not a figure of speech...Whoever can speak, speaking now to the whole nation, becomes a power, a branch of government, with inalienable weight in law-making, in all acts of authority.  It matters not what rank he has, what revenues or garnitures: the requisite thing is that he have a tongue which others will listen to; this and nothing more is requisite."  Sounds pretty good.  And how does the modern fourth estate measure up?  The article continues, "We need to bear in mind that the prime function of most media organs today is to provoke the public with entertainment.  That naturally tends to negate any supposed fourth estate function, since there is not even much coverage of state practices in the first place, let alone any rational debate and criticism of them...it is always pertinent to ask whose fourth estate is this and in whose interest does it operate?"

Think about it.  We are mostly childish people, arrogant of our ignorance, seeking entertainment, not information.  Who needs information as long as we have our stuff?  Most of our "fourth estate" is a gaggle of shills, promoting themselves, their media corporations and their advertisers.  Oh, yes, some newspapers take risks (see "Catastrophic Success" in the NY Times), but how many of US read them?  News magazines run whatever pop pap ran longest the previous week.  Cable news is pure entertainment:  "Hardball" isn't hard, "Crossfire" is a minstrel show, "The MacLaughlin Group" is who's your daddy, "Hannity and Colmes" is guff and gutless, and "Reliable Sources" are not, to name a few.

So we get what we're told we want: a non-president and legislators who stuff pork into each bill they pass to satisfy our gluttony for stuff.  Or we can listen to Green Day's latest warning: "Don't wanna be an American idiot/One nation controlled by the media/Information age of hysteria/It's calling out to idiot America."

And that was 12 years ago, and the only change is that the media manipulators have honed their skills to a very fine edge that slices so fine we don't even feels it until it's too late.

The Irrepressible Conflict ver.2

Perhaps we are on the cusp of our second “irrepressible conflict,” the first being to “determine whether the nation would be dominated by a system of free labor or slave labor.” That first conflict ushered in our first American Civil War.  And, yes, it was about slavery, mostly.  But for now, what if we changed “free labor” to “higher educated” and “slave labor” to “under-educated”?  Could we be talking about another such conflict, a social and cultural condition of irresolvable differences based on distinctly differing core understandings of our society’s traditions and values?  Opposing views of the meaning of “freedom,” the Bill of Rights, “democracy,” “republic,”  “hard earned money,” representative government, “justice,” and so on—are thought to be universal concepts that all citizens agree on.  But do all of us citizens actually agree?  Or have we reached the point in our evolution at which each of us by our individual “right” can determine what these concepts mean?  And if we have reached that point, are we then no longer a unified pluralistic and secular society—no longer e pluribus unum?  And if we are not, what can the consequences be?

In his 1858 speech (the source of the quotation), William H. Seward felt that final question had been answered—the only way to resolve the irrepressible differences was to enter a conflict that risked the destruction of the nation.  His proclamation became the underlying principle of what followed.

I think we will avoid civil war.  I don’t think we have the courage for that.  But I do think that the people of the United States will no longer share an interest in accepting or believing in our cultural commonality, an agreed upon system of values.  What we are experiencing is a shift from our acceptance that we are a nation of diversity to an acceptance that we are a nation of divergence, of turning away from and turning inward.  As the street protests grow in their response to the absurdity of the election of 2016, we will hear much about our “belief” that we are a nation of laws.  But, in fact, we are a nation of money and its power to control every facet and need of our daily lives, from our education to our health to our identity to our longevity, and so on.  Whatever laws enter or are a part of that, those laws exist merely to justify and sustain that power.  One of the great ironies inherent in our condition is that virtually the rest of the world understands the truth of it.

I reach this conclusion reluctantly and unhappily.  I have written on this blog and elsewhere about how the creep of various forms of insular and self-absorbing media formats (such as this blog) and other cultural stressors have undermined our cultural cohesion.  We have become alone together.  Add to that the loss for millions of Americans of the stability and reliability of a reasonable means of sustenance and community, which includes their cherished belief system, and you have an unforgiving gulf between those people and the others for whom that loss is not so perilously felt and experienced (see J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy).  For people on either side of this gulf, fear has risen from an incidental emotion to a metastasizing central part of their consciousness.  And that experience becomes a vigorous motivator. 

Some observers have decided that the street protests we’re experiencing are no more than the same things that happened in the 60s.  I disagree.  The 60s protests were opposed to a war, to its execution and to its consequences that were seen to be detrimental to our culture and our government.  Our current protests oppose what is seen as the destruction of our traditions and values.  The threat is seen very much as internal, rather than external.  To avoid an irrepressible conflict Americans must seek to restore their commonality.  If what have become labeled as the so-called coastal elites and the fly-over states as geographical representations of the gulf and become acceptable (as in North vs. South), we will be headed for a more serious dilemma than an absurd election.  It will be our time “for something entirely different.”

Our Troubles

Lately some of the more honest writers I've been reading have been sniffing out the same seriousness I've been suspecting before and during this nightmare we think is an election.  George Packer (see The New Yorker, 11/7/16) and many of the online writers at the strident websites have toned down the sarcasm and cosmopolitanism and seem to think something serious and ambiguous is, or has been, going on, that this surreality we're enduring will not resolve into a more or less familiar actuality, a comforting new American Dream. 

Instead, they share, as I do, a suspicion that the rage and force of the 40 million and the malaise of the rest will not be assuaged and will not go away. To paraphrase the song from the 60s, something has been going on, and what it is refuses to be clear.  The U.S. has changed, but no one can articulate that change, because the change seems to indicate that what have been the reliable leverages and shibboleths no longer apply...even the meaning of "Great." 

Part of our problem is that the language we are using to discuss what's going on in our country—and not just about the election but about virtually everything in our culture—has no relevance to what we experience and feel.  I just watched an interview with Lewis Black in which he lamented that it's getting almost impossible to do his job, because he can't satirize what's going on—we in fact are experiencing the intersection of satire and reality, our national life, a ridiculing ache.  Satire is meant to evoke humor, but the satire in our reality evokes at best alienation and at worst horror.

In my perspective, I have the excuse of being a 20th century mindset per force evolving into a very alienating 21st century existence.  I tread water, growing old, as much as possible staying away from crowded places which have willy-nilly become random shooting ranges, listening to insipid language being used by mouthpieces for infotainment networks, and seeking something, anything that resembles engaging writing on the printed page or electronic sources.  I am, in short, so 20th century.  

But I wonder if feeling that difference, feeling that confusion isn't what so many of us are experiencing.  People around my age must strain to realize the mindset and thought processes revealed in the language of the millennials.  And likewise, millennials and those younger lack any semblance of our understanding of the relationship between the past and the present, and the effects each has on the other.  Their understanding is primarily of the present and the future.  We should not be surprised by what we hear and overhear as very much a babel of freelancing miscommunication.

Bill Clinton spoke of technology being the bridge to the 21st century.  I disagree.  Technology and its liturgy of disruption leapt us over an abyss.  A bridge suggests safety and reliability.  A leap over emptiness suggests extraordinary risk and danger.  I think the latter is what we are feeling, no matter what we think we're experiencing.  Our leap has left the reliable traditions and secular bonds behind.  And as of right now we can't seem to know the beginnings of how to muster their replacements.  These will be difficult years ahead.  I suspect the result of this election will provide very little by way of easing our difficulty.  We can call this our version of The Troubles.

Spate of the Union

“We have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness.” ­—from March, a graphic novel by John Lewis, et al.

Look at the other

One or tens or 38 million or

50 million or 14 million or 2 million

Or whatever, as they say,

and each one, each singularly

moshing a life and

what do I see, and hear, and smell?

Is it something new and

Pleasant, like a delicious and

Strange meal or nothing,

An indifferent shadow lacking familia?

The shadow falls

And disconnects, as they say.

So strange to be part of

So many disconnections in

A world like mine,

E pluribus animus.

Because there are

So many others, each to

Each and other to other,

What is a person,

What am I, to do?

So much else to do,

Who has the time,

The desire?

Your Land Is…This Land Is…

[With a nod and many thanks to Colson Whitehead, Leo Connellan and some others subrosa-ly mentioned]

This is not a cactus land,

a dead land, but

a dread land, a land of crusted 

vision and lonely love, vacant

going forward 

to wherever that could be

…or so it seems, maybe, 

always maybe, the risk is worth 

the value, isn’t it?  Isn’t it?

Be smart, more smart than the rest,

very smart, depart, leaving the rest,

leaving the best for the most, the mess.

What’s best is to keep busy, to keep 

as much friending as possible, to keep,

yes, to keep so that collecting is

owning and that’s this, this land of

promised promises…yes, and that, 

yes, with so fun! so pretty fun!

Get!  Spend!  Consume!  Have!

These are the meaning, oh my!

right from the start, even before the

beginning, but if we only had an image, 

what would we look like?  The meaning

must have substance, some thing, 

something, yes, the need to have

to have the thing to believe in,

that’s it.  Isn’t it?  How much much, how much

believing can you heap on having?

Part One

They left from the East, from clogs

and slogs of salient dreams, schemes

and sounds of creation in a new

world, dream images posted by cash 

hounds but no, not like that, not

exactly, so it was like, it was like a motion, 

you know, like moving, that was it, like a big 

thing only not a thing,

I mean, you know, like that.

This is much later, after things got

to be so fun, even going forward, even

that was fun, nothing grubby and loose

and real, you know, I mean it was 

really something,

When they looked they actually

thought that they could see just 

imagine that they could think that

way, looking beyond even the next

trial and try-works as they might have

said, yes, they looked for that next

hill, the one with the fringe on top.

Boppledock told this tale much better back

then when they ignored experience and 

thinking, looking inward away from the only story that

mattered and there was Bop staring them down and

grabbing them by the collar he hollered more than they

would care and moved along to nowhere they were

going and he growled and strafed their mortarboards.

He had more love in his pinky toe than all the churches 

around Orchard Beach and so-called poetry. Ya see,

dantchaknow

Would he take us by the hand and show us the way

crossing America this way?  I don’t think so, not now,

not him, not Bop, cause he knew Bop couldn’t lead

now, not now, with so little love, so little caring around.

We miss Bop but we don’t even know it,

it’s no matter as we say whatever and

he’d hate that in any way,

Anyway, that’s over, and this is

only part one, pursuing, maybe 

becoming for once, just this once

maybe, so we’ll keep trying, I guess.

Part Two

They said, when cracking parched earth, rocky soil

and Indian heads, they said, freedom’s just another

word for license, and some still feel that way, so

long as it’s other folks doing the freedom and worse

it becomes a curse when it’s thrown around so.

He said you could be amusing yourselves to death,

indeed, just narcissusing, your selfies and friending, 

trending and unfriending, sexting and texting, 

twitching and bitching… is all naval gazing, 

all selfie amazing beyond your depth—but awesome, 

in sum, you say, like pretty fun or 

ugly fun and maybe even wholesome? And there

it is, like interesting, like nice, like, I mean,

be real, really like dread (see above) mixed with

awe, a flawless national anathema anthem for a new nation,

yes, this, awesomeness mess.

Yes, you guess, so what is it, vision or revision? Which

turn to take, to tour again, along the now trammeled trails, or

break out to dare a spare hope in the one not taken?  Let’s

see, a sea change, perhaps, but no, too long, too glacial, so 

to speak, ha! that’s a not so good one that no one cares

to share but still can’t duck and cover from the creepy,

crawling, mauling salty spraying high rise.

OK, enough of this stuff, this crabby nega-natality, baggage 

unclaimed remaindered under the skin of septas and octos

not so smart old farts with old eyes unseeing horizons, back

then, as kids, myops wishing for another Bop who never was 

with them, not Bop…and so we end this part for you, 

but not for us.

Part Three

And so, turn or return? re-

Turn to what and where, the exit’s closed…

YIKES! Closed! so we have to deal, make another

real, to turn, really? we might get an erection or

election, yes, really, no time to be needy, but real?

do we know, have we ever had it? we know we

thought we did, as kids, then, but now we ask,

can we miss The Con this time, stay on-a-line this

time can we walk past the emperor of ice cream, and 

not seem but be, can we see past hoping and wanting

and grasp living and loving, that’s the matter, can 

we not be Gogo and Didi, and step past the tree?

Where to start, then, send out a shout as they tried, 

no, not them, not G and D, the others, the ones from 

the street, pushing you to the curb, up in your face,

they tried, but you worked The Con and gave them 

bling to cleanse them of the hope they were shouting

about, about that, let’s move on, going forward, to what ,

to where? you ask, but is to ask to deny, and then why 

bother? well, because dread gets to be souring, and 

bilious—or something like that?—so let’s start and forget 

about one and two, that’s what you did, have done, always

do, but it feels good, so why not? Oh my, all these 

questions! Let’s see, maybe we can reach into pop,

get this gig going with a little snark, a nipsy shark.

So let’s do happy, happy joy, joy, oh boy, boy toys and

ms’s, wagons ho!, oy, oy, the real McCoy boy is what

you want, it is is it?  wait, what? happiness, you guess

and distress, what a mess, they hippity-hopped to their revolt

over there, and was it very fun? you ask. I don’t think

so, no, no bling for them, they know if you want to mend 

and when, then, seem gets to be an actual be and fun 

is a pun for unthinking trickster-hipsters, yes then, a sun 

will shine on some smiling faces, but then, that’s a long way 

off.

So that’s it, that’s the cause and symptom you’ll know,

maybe a glow, a little, maybe, not like before, but more

like a little while ago, you wouldn’t know,

you weren’t there, so you won’t know but will feel it.

and that’s better and makes all the difference.

Colson Whitehead's Chilling Wisdom

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable."
              T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," The Four Quartets

As I was finishing Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, a passage from the chapter "Ridgeway" kept creeping into my thoughts.  Ridgeway is the unique villain of this novel, much more than the "catcher" role he plays rounding up freedom seeking slaves. He, in fact, belongs to a rich tradition of such chilling characters created by American authors (more on that later)—they embrace their villainy and disparage those who think they are better than villains.  The narrator is inside Ridgeway's mind, summarizing Ridgeway's perspective of the American experience:

     "They'd never seen the likes of this, but they'd leave their mark on this new land,
     as surely as those famous souls at Jamestown, making it theirs through unstoppable
     racial logic.  If niggers were supposed to have their freedom, they wouldn't be in chains.
     If the red man was supposed to keep hold of his land, it'd still be his.  If the white man
     wasn't destined to take this new world, he wouldn't own it now.

     Here was the true Great Spirit, the divine thread connecting all human endeavor—if
     you can keep it, it is yours.  Your property, slave or continent.  The American
     imperative."

What's chilling in this perspective are not only its hubris and dismissiveness, but also its exclusion of human dignity.  Of all the "catchers" and "patrollers" that dog the terrified slaves' efforts to survive and resurrect their personhood, Ridgeway prevails right up to the last chapter and is forever ensconced in the mind of Cora, the central character.  As he remains in ours, for we know him very well.

He is Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger,  Melville's Confidence Man, and Flannery O'Connor's Misfit.  But those are only a few of his literary likenesses.  We know Ridgeway each time we hear our fellow citizens and leaders justify the exploitation of others in the name of proprietariness and expedience.  We know him each time we hear and read about slavery as the "peculiar institution" and about Native Americans as beneficiaries of European largesse.

One characteristic of "American exceptionalism" is the ease with which we erase the unattractive and cruel events in our history.  We, in fact, are internationally renown for our short and long term memory loss.  And we ought to be grateful for Colson Whitehead's intensely vivid reminder of exactly what is essentially our heritage, our American imperative.

We are what we are.  Whatever we tell ourselves our values are and however we imagine the brilliant light our City on a Hill shines across the globe, we cannot shake the Great Spirit that guides us—if you can keep it, it's yours.

And think for a moment how this underscores the bizarre political season we are experiencing.  This is why I led this post with the quotation from Eliot.  It is safe to say that Donald Trump and, especially, the millions of his true believers embody the American imperative.  We seem to have come to a point in the movement of our society where, indeed, all time and the baggage contained within it are unredeemable.

For me, this is the message of The Underground Railroad.  The metaphor of the novel is not so much escape for Cora and all the thousands of others in 19th century America.  The metaphor is about America's unredeemable time.