Center-Right the Natural Fulcrum?

Jon Meacham argues that the United States is a center-right nation, based on the observation that recently we have tended to elect Republicans to the White House. But the matter is more complex than that one barometer would indicate. During the period of Republican presidential ascendancy, the American people have also tended to elect Democratic congresses, suggesting a center-left nation. What does it mean for a voter to prefer a Republican president and a Democratic representative or senator?

This may be more a matter of social psychology than of political or economic ideology. While there is in the American character a deeply patriotic, traditional and libertarian streak, there is also a strong bent for progress, change, increasing democratization and reinvention. This schizophrenic voter preference—for Republicans in presidents but Democrats in legislators—reflects both tendencies, which together comprise a paradox at the heart of American character. This has been the case from the beginning. At the very founding of the nation, there were many conservatives who would have preferred to have a King George rather than a President Washington. That throwback to a pre-republican sensibility suggests how our presidents have always symbolically embodied for us our most traditional sense of national identity. The president’s policies and principles are important, but he or she is also important to us as a quasi-royal embodiment of the national self. We invest our feelings of identity and safety more with them than with our legislative representatives, whom we tend to vote into office to invent solutions to current national problems and make progress in national policy.

This being the case, the Republican playbook in presidential politics appeals to our existential fears and sense of national identity more effectively than does that of the Democrats. The Democratic presidential playbook has during the recent Republican dominance of the White House tended to emphasize policy. These existential and patriotic themes resonate most vibrantly in the center-right of our political spectrum, and Americans look more to the executive sphere of our tripartite system of government for assurance in these matters. The Republican run in presidential politics may be more a matter of political and sociological savvy in catering to these primal needs, in contrast to the Democrats’ inattentiveness on this score, than of where the fulcrum-center is in our political spectrum.

A good part of the political talent of Barack Obama consists in neutralizing the Republican advantage in this regard, and that political talent dovetails with a potential for ingenious statecraft, inasmuch as he and his advisors seem to understand the symbolic function of the presidency as well as their Republican counterparts recently have. He cedes no advantage to the Republicans on the importance of national identity and religious faith. He is campaigning in a way that provides assurance to the nation’s psyche, despite Republican attempts to paint him as the un-American other. His assuring bearing in symbolic and psychic politics will allow him to govern from the center-left, leaving citizens’ sense of national pride intact, appealing not to fear, but instead to hope (much as Reagan in some ways did, by the way) and massaging the electorate toward a more inclusive, less divisive, less jingoistic patriotism. At the same time as he is careful to embody a healthy American self-regard, he will pursue innovative and progressive policies. His approach perhaps represents a decisive and psychically safe shift away from the center-right toward the center-left, or the true center, in presidential, symbolic politics, which is where the nation tends to settle in legislative, policy politics. He is working concertedly to make it symbolically and psychically safe for citizens to support executive efforts to do what needs to be done in policy.

Conservative Political Rhetoric

Demagoguery and jingoism are modes used by Republican politicians and their consultants to appeal to voters. These tricks simplify issues and substitute slogans and vapid labels for ideas and for a pragmatic sense of reality. They shut down thinking, which shuts down conversation, which shuts down democracy. After William F. Buckley’s heyday, we descend back again to Rush Limbaugh and the rest. Regarding the way mainstream Republican operatives operate and the way their electoral base responds, Trilling had it mainly right when he said, “[T]he conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” These pseudo-ideational “irritable mental gestures” are on prominent display this time around with the ever-reliable “liberal” label, ignoring subtleties of Obama’s plans such as tax cuts for the middle class, and in talk about “victory” in Iraq, which David Petreus himself specifically derides as an inappropriate term to use in the context of Iraq. When on a Sunday-morning news interview show McCain’s top campaign aide was called on his use of the term by being referred to Petreus’s statement, he totally ignored the general’s statement and continued to bang home the term. The strategy is that of totalitarian propaganda: if you forcefully say it often enough, it will become the common wisdom. This is profoundly disrespectful of the public and of the principles of democracy, which depends on rational debate in which words are used meaningfully and fairly in order to hash out differing points of view and persuade a majority on the merits of an argument over best ways to serve self- and common-interest. A particular shame is due to such political operatives and candidates, but also due to those citizens who buy these goods. It is demagoguery and jingoism parading as principle and patriotism. The press and more-rational citizenry should call the perpetrators on this stuff more frequently and vigorously.

Victory in Iraq: Debasing Public Discourse in a Democracy

The president talks often of victory or success in Iraq, of winning or losing the war, and he brands opponents or skeptics of his policies as advocates of surrender, as defeatists. But this is a gross distortion of the reality of the situation, which is that we have already lost much in this self-imposed disaster, in creating a breeding ground for terrorists, in destabilizing a hotspot, in ceding influence to Iran, in stretching our armed forces thin in an era that requires alertness on many fronts, in dissolving the aura of invincibility around those armed forces, in setting back efforts to win over the hearts of Arabs by decades, and in dreadfully diminishing American prestige in the world. These are the consequences of the president’s ill-advised, unnecessary enterprise in Iraq, and it makes no sense to talk of victory. The best we can hope for is to minimize the awful consequences of consistent past blundering. It is important to define the situation realistically and to not allow the president and his allies to establish in public discourse this confusing dichotomy of victory and defeat that debilitates meaningful debate about the way ahead. It’s not about winning; it’s about salvaging whatever we can out of the wreckage and preventing its spread. Such debasement of discourse is a clear and present danger to a democracy.

Televangelist Reaches Heaven

Televangelist Reaches Heaven; or, A Bumper Sticker We’d Like to See

Surprise . . . God is a Democrat! And He favors universal health insurance.
Matthew 7:21-23 and 25:34-46

A Perfect Storm of Illusions

It’s amazing, seemingly providential (or would be under the aegis of a trickster god), how neatly the illusions of the Bush team worked together to create such a perfect storm of disaster in Iraq.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld set out to make a lean army, to slash the military bureaucracy and fashion a 21st century American fighting force, light, mobile and technology-laden, ready to move swiftly and win battles with overwhelming equipment and few soldiers. He got away with success using this strategy in Afghanistan; in Iraq, not so much. In theory, adapting a nation’s basic military posture and strategy to a new era using current technology to advantage is a good idea. But it has been truly bizarre how blind to facts and wedded to doctrine the secretary was after events in Iraq presented problems not soluble with that approach. Even beforehand, voices were predicting bad results from the projected dismantling of a government and military without planning for reconstruction. What a willful lack of foresight was there!

The neoconservative advisers to Secretary Rumsfeld were deluded in thinking that in Iraq the populace would rise up in gratitude and that democracy would fall nimbly into place like smooth lock tumblers under the caresses of a master safecracker. They sought to reach over the heads of the American public, casting the smoke of WMD and terrorism in its eyes, in order to reform by imposition the Middle East. Their plan to spread democracy at bayonet point is profoundly hypocritical as well as profoundly deluded. Cooking data, lying to the public, these reputed wise men, these self-conceived philosopher-kings, have been astonishingly oblivious to the reality of the world.

And then, what about Mr. Bush? His compatible illusion continues to be that the proper approach to our conflict with the extremist Islamists is to frame the situation as a “war on terror,” and that it just a matter of killing a certain number of bad guys. And in terms of illusions, that is the mildest indictment to be leveled, reaching short of the personal and theological ones.

This perfect storm of illusions is bad enough, and grave difficulties attend extrication from it. But lo and behold, the commander in chief has no intention to extricate us and, as they say in television commercials, wait, there’s more . . .

Now President Bush wants to “surge” more troops into the theater. It is sad to think that, while in some deluded neoconservative way there may be some kind of a coherent, if wrong-headed, rationale for this strategy, the more proximate and deeper motive is a politician’s concern for his legacy. With every rhetorical shift, one sniffs trailing wisps of egoism that suffocate statesmanship, the drive for political advantage and justification. After the initial plan, which was to result in the warm embrace of their liberators by a liberated people yearning to be free, dissolved in an abysmal failure of fractionalism and chaos (but a predictable one, given the shortage of troops and of planning), all the vaunted firmness and resolve of George W. Bush, initially to disarm a terrorist-friendly dictator with weapons of mass destruction and keep our nation secure, then to free an oppressed people from a despot, then to spread democracy in the Middle East, appears cumulatively at every turn as pigheadedness, as pollster-driven, marketing-trusting stubbornness supporting misguided, zealous self-righteousness and lust for reputation. How Mr. Bush and his administration will be judged by history—that lies closer to the core of the “surge” than does statesmanship.

Mr. Bush, abetted by evangelical supporters with a pinched view of American history and destiny, postures as a servant of God, of the Prince of Peace yet. He believes he has a pipeline of communication, of resonant intention in shared purpose, with the Almighty. On his gut feeling that our providential nation and cause must prevail, he condemns more, and yet more, and yet more sons and daughters of the republic to perish in futility in the sands of Iraq. Surely a sane God is not smiling on his plans any more than the wised-up public is. Does he think to lead us where we would not go, for our own good? For whose good? What sort of Moses does he pretend to be? What littleness of soul, what frat boy conceit, wheedling, at the expense of lives and treasure and national standing, for reputation when given the opportunity to act on the stage of history. What presumption upon us and upon the tolerance of liberal democratic institutions!

Our Constitution makes ours a government of laws, not men. This cuts both ways, tolerating dismal failure as well as stifling overweaning ambition. We cannot simply dismiss Mr. Bush as a monarch would a failed minister. Our sovereignty works more slowly and deliberately. But with due respect for the office and the officeholder, I am ashamed at what the city on the hill has become under the leadership of this president and this administration.

Evolution and Spirit: The Spires of Form

Must Darwinian evolution entail materialism? Can evolution and the hypothesis that there are nonmaterial dimensions of existence both be true?

Why not? The notion that life forms develop through mutations under the pressure of natural selection is an elegant complex of ideas that is mutually contradictory with some spiritual notions, especially with a simplistic literalist reading of the Bible’s creation story, so-called creationism. But that is not the only spiritual view. There are other, subtler versions of the nonmaterial hypothesis that seem compatible with the idea of evolution.

While the theory of evolution powerfully explains the material and efficient causes of physical forms and some attributes of those forms, it cannot, nor can any materialist theory so far, compellingly explain or explain away the phenomenon of consciousness itself, which in human experience is felt as the subject, the self, more immediately than is the body.

In the writings of Emerson and the Persian poet Rumi, we find spiritual conceptions that actually embrace the idea of evolution.

Emerson

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

Rumi

I have again and again grown like grass;
I have experienced seven hundred and seventy moulds.
I died from minerality and became vegetable;
And from vegetativeness I died and became animal.
I died from animality and became man.
Then why fear disappearance through death?
Next time I shall die
Bringing forth wings and feathers like angels;
After that soaring higher than angels—
What you cannot imagine. I shall be that.

Not only is there in such spiritual conceptions no creationist denial of evolution, but the view of these poets is that the life of the soul is an unfolding analogous to evolution. As Emerson and his compatriots, the Transcendentalists, held, nature mirrors spirit. In this view, similar dynamics drive both form and essence, anatomy and psyche. From this perspective, development in consciousness mirrors physical, morphological development, almost as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, in every case progressing from rudimentary to subtler and more powerful. Bits of consciousness that currently experience themselves as human beings thus are spiritually like larva, then chrysalis, then butterfly, or mineral, plant, fish, mammal, primate, human, angel, god.

But this is still a bit vague, an approximation based on a general notion of development. To make the spiritual analogy to Darwinian evolution more specific, in the place of evolutionary mutation we can posit spiritually transformative experience, James’s and Maslow’s peak experiences, and corresponding to natural selection we have the crucible of physical life, what Emerson in Nature called “discipline” and Keats in one of his remarkable letters named the “vale of soul-making.” Just as natural selection drives fitting mutations in physical life forms, an intentional and adaptive encounter with the phenomenal world (including the inner phenomena of consciousness) drives transformative spiritual experience.

Simplistic superstitions and irrational fundamentalisms aside, there remains in many thoughtful human beings a primal and primeval urge toward the transcendent that endures all the empirical discipline and prowess of the Enlightenment. Spirituality is not limited to faith nor necessarily at odds with science and experiment. On the contrary, the experimental attitude can prevail in exploring the spiritual as well as the physical worlds; many spiritual conceptions advocate testing theories through personal practice and experience, renouncing blind faith for meditation practice and other sorts of so-called inner work. Though Kant, the theodicist of both science and religion, the great mediator between faith and the Enlightenment, might not have approved, branding this middle way mere and unaccountable mysticism, such practices can evidently be fruitful, or at least suggestive. And perhaps Kant, for all his magisterial insight, had not covered all the bases. Perhaps such experimental spirituality, or higher empiricism, if you will, can show the way forward through the apparent impasse of conflict between science and religion, without our having to give up one for the other. When such work is fruitful, evolution stands unperturbed, coexisting with direct, first-hand, apparently transcendental experience, and blind faith is a superfluous impertinence.

The fact that such experience is subjective and cannot be put under objective empirical protocols is grounds for ignoring it as a legitimate factor in the shaping of a public scientific consensus, but is not in itself sufficient to conclusively deny the validity of the experience. We do, after all, leave this life on our own, and in such a personal plight we need not limit ourselves to majority opinion or to objective shared knowledge regarding our confrontation with the great unknown. One can refuse to be persuaded by another’s allegedly transcendent experience, but one cannot, without assuming more than empiricism justifies, assert that the other’s experience is illusory. And one is free to test the hypothesis oneself, in one’s own laboratory, as it were, of consciousness, under similar test conditions and protocols.

The world and its species of life were certainly not created in a period of six solar days, but evolution versus creationism is a battle with a man of straw that seems hardly conclusive regarding the question of whether there are nonmaterial dimensions of existence.

10/14/06

Unintended Consequence

The war of choice in Iraq is disaster enough in itself, but it also multiplies sins of commission by those of omission, compounding debits on the American moral ledger. A consequence of this disturbing enterprise is that American forces and focus are not available to address problems around the world which could and should be subject to American influence. One such unhandled problem that redounds to American shame is the massacre in Darfur.

10/12/06