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O’Hehir on American Dystopia

Are we there yet? O'Hehir has an interesting piece that complements the discussion in comments about my last post. He quotes Neil Postman echoing a comment made by Jonathan about…

Are we there yet?

O'Hehir has an interesting piece that complements the discussion in comments about my last post. He quotes Neil Postman echoing a comment made by Jonathan about how Huxley was perhaps a more accurate predictor of our future:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy.

O'Hehir then comments on this passage:

That’s wonderfully vivid writing, but almost three decades later the question doesn’t look quite so clear-cut. What I see in the paradoxical America of 2013 still looks like Huxley on the surface, with Orwell making a strong comeback underneath. Banning books has largely proven both impractical and unnecessary, as Postman says (which is not to say it doesn’t happen here and there). But as we have seen more than once recently, the government’s security forces and even more sinister pals in the private sector guard their secrets fervently, and react with fury when some of them are exposed. The truth can be kept from us and also drowned in irrelevance, and what Postman calls a trivial culture (Postman’s argument, here and elsewhere, has more than a whiff of anti-pop snobbery) can also be a captive culture.

In many respects American culture, seen from the inside, is more diverse, tolerant and interesting than ever before. Yet the American nation-state seems to be in terminal decline. It is politically ungovernable, bitterly divided by class, caste, region and ideology. The executive branch and the “military-industrial complex” have expanded exponentially since Eisenhower’s day, accumulating more and more power where it can’t be seen.

I mostly agree with O'Hehir: Yes to Huxley on the Surface and Orwell underneath, but I do not think that diverse, tolerant, and interesting means healthy. You could describe the late Roman Empire with those adjectives. And I think that Postman and Jonathan are right to describe us having become a passive, spiritually inert, bread-and-circuses culture. I'm all for diversity, but it becomes a problem when it is so divisive and fragmenting that it makes resistance to the power virus all but impossible. As I wrote in comments yesterday, it's precisely the lack of core, animating, collective cultural values that weakens us and makes American society a vulnerable host for a technologically enhanced power virus that is inflaming the whole system. 

 

Comments

10 responses

  1. JP Avatar
    JP

    “I’m all for diversity, but it becomes a problem when it is so divisive and fragmenting that it makes resistance to the power virus all but impossible. As I wrote in comments yesterday, it’s precisely the lack of a core animating collective cultural values that weakens us and makes American society a vulnerable host for a technologically enhanced power virus that has infected the whole system.”
    We’re (Americans) always fragmented at this stage of the longer credit-social waves.
    We’re in the so-called Post-Unraveling period of the Crisis Era, 46 years out from the Summer of Love and 72 years out from the last great unifying event, Pearl Harbor.
    The post-unraveling just began in 2008, being pushed back by the massive credit-housing bubble.
    Generally, we have 20 years or so to be in the Crisis Era, and this is year 5.
    So, expect something in the next 10-15 years that will provide you with the core values that will be selected this go round. Selected from the smorgasbord of the Consciousness Revolution.
    What impact this will have on the technocratic oligarchy that you dislike will remain to be seen.
    What Jonathan is concerned about, the Brave New World, hit’s its apogee in 2008. It is now in decline because of the same forces (massive credit expansion and the unraveling of prior values) that caused it in the first place.
    This has all happened before.
    This will all happen again.

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  2. Patrick Avatar
    Patrick

    You gesture toward this in your response, but perhaps the “more diverse, tolerant and interesting” culture is the very reason we don’t care.
    One of your major insights has been the extent to which liberals are willing to stand down when it comes to dangerous concentrations of power in government, the economy, or the top 1%. So long as the general social trends are toward liberalization with respect to immigration, abortion, and tolerance of various Others, liberals have no appetite to throw down when it comes to the continued destruction of our Constitutional inheritance.
    In recent days there has been a re-emergence of a reactionary, misogynist and nativist sentiment. This is troubling, but what’s more troubling is that the fringe extremists have a monopoly on speaking about the interplay between these issues.
    Our national conversation suffers when Marxists are the only ones willing to perceive and talk about massive structural changes in our economy, and reactionaries are the only ones willing to talk about the same kinds of shifts in our cultural values. These things are related to one another, but neither are topics for respectable discussion. Instead, elites inhabit a rhetorical world defined on one hand by an absurd economic ideology, and on the other hand by an even more fanciful anthropology.

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  3. JP Avatar
    JP

    “As I wrote in comments yesterday, it’s precisely the lack of core, animating, collective cultural values that weakens us and makes American society a vulnerable host for a technologically enhanced power virus that is inflaming the whole system.”
    Because the core, animating, collective cultural values of the Faustian West are exhausted.
    Kind of like Greco-Roman culture during the Dominate, eh?

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  4. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    “The American nation-state” . . .
    I sometimes wonder if one of the greatest sources of woe in the history of this country is that we have always tried to be a nation-state, when we have always in fact been an empire.

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  5. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Interesting comments across the board. A couple of thoughts. The challenge ultimately is to find a balance between local and central, periphery and core, between diversity and a shared vision of future possibility. Because American society has a weak to nonexistent shared sense of future possibility it has become imbalanced toward diversity, fragmentation, and the paralysis that follows from it. And it is because the life on the local level is so paralyzed because so fragmented, distracted, tolerant, and so ‘whatever’, the forces of centralization grow unchecked.
    Don MacLean’s song ‘Bye Bye Miss American Pie’ still resonates. It is the anthem of the 70s, which is the decade during which Americans lost their sense of future possibility. It’s when the ‘music died’. And when it died, it created room for the nostalgists to move in, and the country fell in love with Reagan and his 19th century fantasy of America.
    There will always be forces on the Right, but they play a dominant, unbalanced role in a society when it has no sense of a shared future to believe in and/or when it feels its physical security is threatened. The Left dominates when a sense of future possibility is shared by most of the people in the society and its sense of the future becomes a commonplace in the media. The Left, when it is in the driver’s seat, is held in check by those on the Right, and this was pretty much the American ethos from the thirties to the seventies. That’s healthy, if frustrating to people on the far Left. Nevertheless, we need the tension.
    And so one could argue that we’re simply in the part of the cycle when the the Right is in the driver’s seat, and it is held in check by the Left. But the difference now is technology, and the way it enhances the power of the Right, and because the Right possesses a mindset that is continuously anxious about its survival, it doesn’t play by the rules. People who feel deeply threatened don’t care about rules; they do what it takes to survive. And that’s the kind of mentality that I assume dominates within the NSA, and it is abetted by the Rightist tilt of the entire elite establishment.
    So we have a situation in which the Right no longer plays by the rules (or stretches them beyond recognition) justifying its disregard for them in the name of security/survival, and the Liberal types insist that anybody who opposes this lawlessness must play by the rules, and the asymmetry is obvious. it’s a losers game, and it will remain so until we regain the future.

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  6. JP Avatar
    JP

    “I sometimes wonder if one of the greatest sources of woe in the history of this country is that we have always tried to be a nation-state, when we have always in fact been an empire.”
    Nah.
    The real woe will start once America loses access to the imperial wealth pumps, which drive 25% of the energy and products of the world to 5% of the population.

    Reply
  7. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    JP’s point raises the question of the problem of power from a Christian perspective. It’s not an easy one to deal with. I have the Niebuhr quote as an epigraph in the blog title box for a reason. I think the Christian relationship with power always has a paradoxical character. We reject its premises, but we have to live with its effects. I am not among those who think that Christians have to passively suffer them.
    We live in a fallen world, but we don’t accept that the world’s rules are definitive. We see them at best as deeply flawed and tending to favor the forces of fallenness unless there is some pushback from the forces of grace. This pushback is effected only by those, whether consciously aware of it or not, are open and responsive to the movement of grace in their lives, i.e., if they are men and women of conscience.
    Some Christians have to get involved in the power game if for no other reason than to work to insure that there be some vulnerability within the system to the influence of grace. I think the power system seeks to be a closed system, because a system that is absolutely closed is one that can be absolutely controlled. Centralized control is the essential project of the power system, and that project must be resisted.
    So Christians are mistaken when they become too identified with the power system or use the power system to implement what it believes to be its “godly” agenda. The union of Christianity or any religion with the power system causes the religion to be subordinated to the power system’s control project. The Roman Church in particular has been an egregious offender in this regard, but we see a similar subordination now in the American evangelical right.
    The spirit of the power system and the spirit of the gospels are diametrically opposed, and yet I’d argue that actors within the power system, if they are men and women of conscience, can work to mitigate or even subvert the power system’s control project.
    Gandhi and Mandela are exemplars in this regard. They are from one point of view a disappointment, but that’s only if you expect more from them than what is possible. The disappointment with Obama is different. There is not even the slightest impulse toward subversion in his personality–at best he’s a mitigator, but unless there’s a lot going on behind the scenes that I don’t know about, not a very potent one. But Mandela and Gandhi were both potent subverters and mitigators. Their successes, however, are not permanent.They were simply short-term efforts to push back against the darkness But they have proved that the effort to push back is not always quixotic or futile, and as such they lead the way for the rest of us to emulate one way or the other, even if temporary and limited is as good as it gets.

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  8. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Jack, I have two questions based on your latest here.
    1. Must all power be bad? I mean, is power, as such, bad in your account? Are you against all hierarchical structure? Even ‘the first shall be last and the last shall be first’ is a hierarchy.
    2. When you set up Mandela and Gandhi as our models, are you implying that the only ‘good fight’ is the political one? I have to say I don’t buy that. I am the kind of person who is by nature very unmoved by politics (except, sometimes, the local). But that doesn’t mean I’m disengaged or apathetic. The register of life that I am invested in is that of the arts. I claim no special virtue for myself, but I have to assert that there are plenty of people who do just as heroically as the “imitators” of Gandhi or whoever, by “imitating” the great artists (of whom there are for more than great statesmen). To me a politically just world devoid of great art and spiritual geniuses would not be worth living in, whereas the reverse, an art-filled, spirit-filled world oppressed by tyranny would be livable. People say art needs political freedom to flourish, but it just isn’t true, at least not if by freedom we mean self-determining. How do you explain that? Could it be that historically justice has not been as divine a value as beauty? But where do the Gospels speak of beauty?

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  9. Jack Whelan Avatar
    Jack Whelan

    Jonathan–I’m not attacking power, but the will to power, and yes the latter is always bad–it’s the virus. I point to Mandela and Gandhi because I think they understood the difference between power and the will to power, and they found a way to work with the former to push back against the latter.
    In the post I put up today, I point out that I believe it’s possible to work with power and with hierarchies, and that I believe they are necessary if there is to be any pushback against the will to power, and that I am skeptical about Occupy precisely because they go too far in the anti-hierarchical direction.
    But I think Occupy understands how very easy it is for any structure or hierarchy to become coopted by the will to power, and that decent people need to be extraordinarily vigilant to prevent such a co-optation from happening. It’s not obvious, and it’s always done under the cover of the best intentions. There are always good reasons for doing the wrong thing.
    I have been pretty negative in what I’ve written lately, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is enough health in the culture to use power to contain the will to power without being infected by it. But it’s very, very hard to do. It requires a very high level of self awareness in the people who attempt it and to demand the discipline required to actually do it.
    Regarding your second question: No, I don’t think the political fight is the only one worth fighting–it may in fact be too late for any such fight anyway, and things just have to run their course. But don’t underestimate the soul-crushing effect that a materialistic economic political machine has in the cultural sphere. The health of any society is defined by the vibrancy or the lack of it in its soul or cultural life, but an important indicator of the health and vitality of a culture is the kind of political and economic arrangements it embraces and how they work to support or undermine flourishing in the cultural sphere.

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  10. Jonathan Avatar
    Jonathan

    Jack, I couldn’t agree more with your final paragraph — until the lasl two clauses of the last sentence. I have to go against my American catechism and say I don’t think it matters too much for cultural vitality — except in worst case scenarios — what sort of government or economy is in place. There have just been too many brilliant, wonderful cultures, too many renaissances and flowerings of talent, under too many “barbaric” forms of government or no government at all, and in too many periods of economic distress, for me to believe the basic American gospel that says any land not governed by a representative system and endowed with prosperity is brutal and bad. It’s one of the fundamental paradoxes of our condition that some of the greatest cultural achievements have come out of the worst sociopolitical and economic situations. Actually, change that “some” to “all.” I’ve been wrestling with that fact for years: it’s tantamount to the Problem of Evil.
    And to briefly get at a similar and related paradox: If people have good reasons to do the wrong thing, people often also have wrong reasons to do the right thing (or I would be more inclined to say, the beautiful thing.) What we’re calling the will to power is also, with only the tiniest mutation, the ambition to achieve greatly in the artistic and intellectual spheres. It’s true, though, that that ambition, too, can be quite sordid and harmful to the very art or thought in question. The will to power as you’re referring to it is certainly largely harmful. But at the end of the day, it is a species of desire, and as such something not to be exterminated but held in awe — and curbed.

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