It wouldn't surprise me if some people reading my last post probably responded to it by saying to themselves, "Whatever." How all of that stuff about historical eras connects with them and the way they live their lives could be difficult to see. And what I'm going to say here may not help them much either, but for me it comes down to this: Either history is a random, meaningless process or it is not. The first absurdist position is the typically postmodern one that supplanted modern optimism about human progress; the second is peculiarly rooted in the Judaeo-Christian mindframe of the West. The idea that history has a direction is a hard idea to sell during a period of decadence, but it is one of the basic assumptions lying beneath everything I write. So if you find what I write rubs you the wrong way, it might be because we don't share this very fundamental understanding of history.
For I would argue that the phrase "spirit of the times" is more than a metaphor. It points to something very real. Human beings are more than talking animals because they sense the reality of it and are moved by it. Abraham and Moses were so moved. Socrates and the Buddha were. The apostles after Pentecost were. The Irish monks who spread throughout Europe in the 8th and 9th century were. Dante, Aquinas, and Bonaventure were. Ficino, della Mirandola, Michelangelo, Raphael, DaVinci, Erasmus, Luther, and Shakespeare were. All the great souls of the modern period were, from Kant, Goethe, and Hegel to Newton, Wordsworth, Bach, and Beethoven. And in our own time, Gandhi, King, Mandela, Romero and the Brazilian bishops. The great personalilties of an era best define the character of the spirit of the times, but we all feel it and we all are influenced by it.
These are just the most obvious,well-known names associated with the spirit of their times. Their contemporaries felt it to some extent as well. And a lot depends on whether in feeling it, people work with it or work against it. The forces of progress and reaction are forces that have moral implications. It's not just a matter of political temperament. History has meaning so long as it is working in alliance with the moral forces that are forward moving. Defining what that means, of course, is the rub.
My point yesterday was that during decadent periods the spirit of a particular era recedes and with it the collective will to move forward. Things seem to stall, and the center no longer holds. This is not necessarily a negative time, but it is a difficult one during which people are peculiarly vulnerable to being distracted or diverted. To use a biblical metaphor, it is a time of wandering in the wilderness having left Egypt behind and not yet having arrived in Canaan. It's a time during which we lose our Egyptian habits in order to be open to learn something new when we enter Canaan, or whatever might be the next stage.
When you're in the desert, after a while it's uncomfortable and it's easy to forget why you came into it in the first place. There is no feeling of easy optimism to buoy you up, and it doesn't take long for everything to begin to look pointless. It's understandable that you would want to go back to what is familiar and comfortable. But that is what I've called in another post, drawing on another biblical metaphor, Lot's Wife Syndrome. Zombie traditionalism and its cousins Phariseeism, Fundamentalism, and Dogmatism are symptoms of Lot's Wife Syndrome. You can't look back with nostalgia and longing for the life that was left behind. It mineralizes the soul. To stay supple souled, you have to keep moving forward toward the Absolute Future, even if you're not sure of the route to get there, even if it means just putting one foot in front of the other. It's a time during which it's easy to lose hope, and it's easy to be seduced by those who have other agendas with shorter-term payoffs.
None of the human beings listed above were without their flaws, but they were great nevertheless, and their greatness lay in the suppleness of their souls which made them prodigious in their openness to something bigger than they were, viz., the workings of grace through the spirit of the times. That was their "genius," and it's the genius of all geniuses that bring something truly good into the world. It's what distinguishes them from people who might be genetically as gifted. Genes don't explain genius; they don't explain the spirit. If you think that what the great historical geniuses achieved can be explained by the mechanics of Darwinian evolution, well you've a right to your opinion, but don't you think it's trying to stuff something that doesn't fit into containers that won't really hold it?
I don't deny Darwin and the Darwinists, and I think they accurately explain the mechanics of life processes over time. But I do have a problem with the Richard Dawkins and E.O. Wilsons who seek to explain everything higher as having arisen from what is lower. Theirs is the mentality of the engineer rather than the poet or musician. They are like technicians who have stumbled across a folio of Bach concertos and analyze the acidity of the paper and the ink density and speculate about the printing processes that were used in producing it, and think they have said something significant. They see the notes, but have no clue about the music; their preoccupation with the physicality and mechanics of their discovery has rendered them uninterested in knowing what is really important.
Something else is working in human history that transcends the instinctual. If it were not so, then people would be only motivated by sex, power, and money, and let's face it, an awful lot of what passes for human civilization is the product of libido, ego, and greed. But fortunately, it's not the whole story, for in and through those instinctual drives works something else, and it makes all the difference. For human intelligence left to operate without the influence of grace has no other purpose except to devise ways to get as much of these three as it can for itself.
Human cunning in the service of the three instincts causes most of the woe in the world. For human intelligence is only a tool, and everything depends on which master it serves, and if there was only instinct to rule it, then we'd all be living in social hells ruled by those who have used their cunning to dominate the rest of us. Isn't that what we see wherever a society has collapsed and the rule of law or the norms of tradition have been discarded? Why are we so sure that such a thing could never happen here? Especially when we so cavalierly let our leaders discard elements of the rule of law that have been sacrosanct for centuries. To me it's astonishing.
A decadent time, as I discussed it in my last post, is a period during which the spirit of the times has withdrawn, and since we cannot feel its influence in human affairs, there is a tendency for a society to be dominated by those who are driven by instinct rather than those who are inspired by spirit. Sex, power, and money are the ruling gods during a decadent period. Their influence is felt in every age, but during a decadent period there is no counterbalance, and so they tend to dominate the proceedings.
And those who are prodigiously ruled by those gods are attracted to those places where they rule and their influence is most powerful. Washington seems to be where all three gods have presently set up world headquarters. Not everyone who works there is ruled by these gods, but it seems obvious that these gods set the tone and shape the Beltway culture. There's a reason that what goes on there seems so disconnected from what goes on in the rest of the country–everything there is distorted by the mentally destablizing influence of the Power and Money gods. The Sex god plays a minor role as well, but its influence is the only one Americans really seem to get upset about anymore. I suppose we should be grateful for that, if it's the only thing that puts a check on the influence of the other two.
The best people in such an environment are relatively impotent–unless they organize to resist, especially to resist those ruled by the Power god who are working to reverse the gains that have already been made. During a decadent time there are no clear lines of advance, but decent people must be vigilant to protect from regression the forward movement that has already been achieved.
In his two most famous films, "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" and "It's a Wonderful Life" Frank Capra gives us fairy tales (I mean it in the good sense of mythos) which are testaments to the spirit of resistance about which I speak here. We need a similar mythos for resistance that will inspire us to resist the forces of regression now. And unlike the Capra mythos, it needs to focus on how we can work not as individuals but together. We do what we can alone, but especially during decadent times we must organize to resist erosion and regression.
This administration of George Bush, more than any in my lifetime, including Nixon's, represents the forces of regression. And when readers, as some have done, want to dismiss the outrage I have expressed here as due to the distortions of my leftist prejudices, I reject the label. I am neither Liberal nor leftist. I consider myself to be a man of the center, just as an American Whig like Frank Capra used to the thought to represent the decent center in America. If what I write here appears too far to the left for you, maybe you should consider the degree to which you've been seduced by the right.
If Money was the god that corrupted the Washington of the Mr. Smith story, Power is the god that corrupts it now. Of the three gods, the Power god worries me most because it has the greatest destructive potential. The greed and venality evoked by the Money god are not nearly so worrisome as the powerlust and sadism unleashed by the god of Power. For the Power god is the god of brutality, and when left unchecked it's a god that loves to throw its weight around and blow things up. It loves the feeling of putting its foot on someone's throat. It longs to impose its will without restraint, and to be bigger than everyone else, and it will brook no rivals, and it will fight all constraints. For this reason the Power god has no respect for the rule of law, and will do everything it can to dismantle it all at once or piece by piece. And eventually the meaning of the word law becomes transformed into nothing other than an expression of the will of the Leader.
So let me say this to any of the self-defined moderate readers who still check in here: Forgive me if I seem too alarmed. Forgive me if I see the fingerprints of the Power god in the treatment of Maher Arar and the prisoners of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and on the passage last week of the Military Commissions Act. Forgive me if I see its prints all over the hundreds of signing statements exempting our leader from the rule of law. Forgive me if I seem too alarmed at the easy disregard for the need for warrants for wiretaps, and the looser and looser criteria to justify invasions of privacy. Forgive me if I see it in the "irregularities" surrounding the votes in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004. Forgive me if I see it in the grandiosity of the neocons project for a new American century in the Middle East, and in their bullying, unilateral, my-way-or-the-highway attitude toward American allies. Forgive me for worrying about the pattern of deceit and Big Lies and the blatant manipulation of popular opinion by the crudest fear tactics and propaganda. Forgive me if I see its fingerprints in a GOP partisanship that exhibits an unprecedented virulence in a take-no-prisoners war with the Democrats. And forgive me if I see a pattern in so many more little things that taken alone seem insignificant but when seen in relationship to everything else become very unsettling. So forgive me if I have appeared a little too alarmed about these developments, and forgive me if I have wondered a little impolitely how any genuine centrist could not be.
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