A nation of manufactured tribes

The problem with the American experiment is that it is a nation built on the idea of "a people" rather than the reality of a people. What I mean by that is, you go to Italy, for example, and for the most part, it's populated by Italians. Go to Germany and it's populated, mostly, by Germans. Spain, mostly by Spaniards. I'm simplifying, of course, and thinking in terms of long-term (many generations) inhabitants rather than relatively recent immigrants. So their "tribe," so to speak, is "Italian," "German," "Spanish", etc. (Interestingly, this concept is not the case in France. I've driven through France several times, and thanks to expansion and acquisition, there are people within the borders of France who are from other "tribes." Anywhere east of Aix-en-Provence, the people are Italians (they still call Nice "Nizza"), anywhere west of Arles they are Spanish (from the defunct Hispanic kingdom of Catalan). In Alsace, they're German, and speak French with a delightful German accent. In Brittany, they're genetically identical to the Welsh. But I digress.) But my point is this: these nations have an actual national identity that gives them their tribal definition. In America, we are all immigrants, so our "tribal" definition is based on the "idea of America."

And when that "idea of America" starts to implode, as it has in recent years, and we no longer think of ourselves as "one nation" (under God or not), then we are pulled by centrifugal forces into odd new "tribal" configurations that are not based on genetics or race or a millenium of shared culture, the way it would be in Europe. Without an unwavering belief in the "idea of America," we Americans quite simply don't know what we are.

The New Leviathan

On 9/11, America was shocked to discover that there was an outside world with many, many people in it who quite simply hated America’s guts – and this discovery scared the hell out of America. If the last several years are an indication of what America’s future holds – and I believe they are – then 9/11 will haunt and infest American cultural life for many years to come. Everything that Americans think, write, do and believe will be refracted through this enormous funhouse lens. This event, which contained so much potential to inspire serious-minded reflection and subtle analysis, instead inspired America to do what it does best: unleash its power.

Michel Foucault wrote of:

A power that presented rules and obligations as personal bonds, a breach of which constituted an offense and called for vengeance; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility, the first sign of rebellion .. of a power that had to demonstrate not only why it enforced its laws, but who were its enemies ... of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as ‘superpower.’

America’s favorite ritual display is war, something that seems to have an almost addictive power over Americans. America spends as much on war as the rest of the world combined. This is beyond any sane concept of “security”; this is the behavior of a junkie.

I do not describe this behavior as “addiction” lightly. As writer Chris Hedges pointed out (at a college commencement address at which he was shouted down by an auditorium full of fresh-faced, patriotic young Americans), “the seduction of war is so insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true – it does create a feeling of comradeship which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time in our life, feel we belong.” This is why America – a country full of people who are so un-alike in so many ways – embraces this addictive new chapter in its love affair with war, the “Global War on Terror.” Because as soon as that warm, patriotic glow of togetherness starts to dim (as it appears it is now doing with the “Iraq front in the war on terror”), a new battle in this war without end is served up: pure, uncut, expensive as hell but cheap at twice the price, ready to be mainlined by an eager nation.

America does not view its decades-long string of foreign-policy disasters (most recently the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) as failures of diplomacy and policy. War replaces diplomacy and defines policy. War is the point: so easy, so unambiguous, so damned glamorous compared to the mundane tedium of building consensus and displaying moral leadership.

But what is this frantic, almost compulsive resort to the military option as the default response really in aid of?

I recently found myself re-reading Hobbes’ Leviathan, and I was struck by how easily one can map Hobbes’ mythical authoritarian/submissive society to America in the 21^st century. Hobbes believed that a society’s function was to accrue more and more power, to strive constantly to seize the upper hand, all in aid of defending a passive and cowering populace from a world full of evil enemies. Hobbes argued that humans are always willing to accept submission to a strong and domineering leadership in exchange for protection from evildoers. Protection from fear itself, in effect. The citizens of Leviathan were so riddled with fear and doubt that they surrendered their freedom with breathtaking eagerness. America’s default attitude since 9/11 can best be summed up by Derrida’s wonderful phrase: “manic triumphalism.” However, this is mere posturing, intended to cover a deep core of dread. Underneath all the testosterone-laden, Hoo-Rah bravado, America in the 21^st century is the new Leviathan, in which the citizens cower like whipped dogs.

Still, the unabashed willingness with which Americans surrendered their freedoms must give us pause. Because at the end of the day, that is the fundamental question: why did so many Americans toss off the burden of freedom with such eagerness? I would like to propose at least a partial answer. America is a country where 90% of the people describe themselves as “religious” and 46% describe themselves as “evangelical.” Eighty-six percent of Americans believe in miracles; 83% believe in a real, literal Virgin Birth. Over 40% of Americans believe the world will end in an actual battle of Armageddon, and a stunning 45% believe in a real, anthropomorphic Devil. To the majority of Americans, those who live and die within such a belief system, America’s vaunted “freedom” – and, more importantly, the consequences of that freedom – is, quite simply, horrifying. Profanity and nudity on TV, gay marriage and adoption, “Feces Madonna” and “Piss Jesus” and Mapplethorpe’s photos of men with bullwhips jammed up their asses, on and on and on. They look at America’s free society, they look at the things that this free society permits to happen and they hate what they see. They absolutely hate modern America, and they believe that surrendering their freedom is a very small price to pay in order to make it stop. These Americans have more in common with Muslim fundamentalists than they can ever admit to themselves. This is the secret heart of darkness in 21^st century America. America will have another Bush some day, because it is what so many Americans want and need.

In my next essay, “Mister Bush’s Sermon,” I will analyze how George W. Bush used finely honed rhetoric of a uniquely American flavor to frighten and then seduce a credulous population, a population that desperately wanted to be seduced.

Nietzsche: The Most Crusty Polemicist Of Them All

At the age of 14, I sat in the cavernous balcony of the Stanley Theatre in Jersey City, waiting for the science fiction movie with the odd title to begin. The house lights went down and I settled deeper into my seat, ready to begin the familiar, beloved ritual.

The screen was completely dark. Slowly I became aware of a strange, deep bass rumble coming from the enormous Dolby speakers on the walls. The floor itself, the seats, were vibrating. On the screen, the camera was panning up over the dark side of the moon. Three brass notes sounded, rising; the music suggested infinite distance and enormous possibility. On the screen, Earth broke above the curve of the moon, and an enormous orchestral outburst slammed me back into my seat. As the fanfare continued, I experienced something I’ve never experienced since: the hair on the back of my neck and my arms stood up. I had to know what this music was, what it meant. The subject was not open for discussion. It was an obsession, you understand.

My investigations took me to the King Kullen record store in one of the sleazier neighborhoods of midtown Manhattan, where I bought the sound track for 2001: A Space Odyssey. I played that LP until it became unplayable, its uneven grooves reamed smooth by the needle. The liner notes told me that the piece that possessed me had an odd title, in a language I didn’t recognize: Also Sprach Zarathustra. The liner notes explained that it was composed by Richard Strauss as homage to a book with the same strange, incomprehensible title, written by some man with an equally comprehensible name. How exactly should I pronounce that name? Nye-chy? Nitch-key? Nysh?

Another (warning: bad pun ahead) odyssey to Manhattan secured me a copy of The Portable Nietzsche, which contained Zarathustra and several other works. And so I started reading.

Let me be clear: had it not been for Nietzsche, I would have wound up just another dead junkie in the low, dangerous, feral neighborhood where I grew up. I damn near wound up that way anyway, which is a whole other story. I have a t-shirt that reads, “Friedrich Nietzsche Saved My Soul.” People tell me how witty and totally post-modern it is. I tell them I'm dead serious.

Miraculously, I escaped to a small Jesuit college, where I majored in Philosophy and went head-to-head with the priests, full of the sort of tedious, humorless sincerity that only Humanities undergrads can muster. Nietzsche led me and my college peers to Camus and Sartre, and we all styled ourselves as engaged, indignant Existentialists, determined to change the world or at least change a few lives. You were either a Camusien or a Sartrean, and your life wasn’t worth a plugged franc if you got caught after dark on the Sartre gang’s turf with a copy of L’Etranger in your back pocket. We all wrote boatloads of philosophy, but in the spirit of our heroes we also wrote novels and plays and short stories. All of what we wrote was completely awful, of course, full of trite, portentous bathos and strident poseur bravado. What the hell; we put our hearts and souls into it, and we lived and wrote like we meant it.

You know the next chapter: life got in the way, as it always does, and I got waylaid, sidetracked, stopped ... for 30 years. And then one day five years ago, I found myself working on a software development project far from home, driving hours to and from work in the dark. With nothing in front of me but the cone of headlight, and no radio stations that far out, my quotidian mind slowed down and finally became quiet for the first time in decades. And that’s when I heard the little voice. Lethargically at first, as if struggling to wake from a long, drugged sleep, and then with increasing urgency, the small still voice said: Become who you are! At that moment, I felt something slip. It was a sensation, an actual physical sensation of a deep slippage inside my head. Something broke free, some great inner dam gave way and ideas poured through the breach and into my mind. An enormous flood of ideas, each demanding not only that I pay attention to it, but that I help it on its way out into the world.

And so, this blog. A place in the world for those ideas that are unlikely to grow into full-fledged essays, or books. I write constantly now, and am having some modest success in placing my work. But this place here, this is the place for the runts of my litter, my beloved runts.

So I found my way back, at the end, to Philosophy, to all of it, and when I’m grinding out the miles on the treadmill at my gym I wear my t-shirt proudly. And last March, I made an important pilgrimage, and stood at the head of the “Nietzsche Trail” in the mountaintop Hobbit village of Eze, the trail he walked up and down every day when he was writing Zarathustra. Standing there, I finally understood Nietzsche’s poetry of the great heights, his poetry of over-coming and under-going.

On this date in 399 BC ...

... the Athenian gadfly Socrates was sentenced to death for "corrupting the youth of Athens." I firmly believe that Socrates was guilty as charged, but also believe that the elders of Athens had no understanding of the nature of this corruption. Socrates was -- and remains -- a much more dangerous man than they could have imagined. I shall have a lot to say going forward about this man. For starters, I accuse Socrates of hating life more than any human being before or since. For this crime alone, he deserved the hemlock.

Horror has a face

I like to present myself as pretty resistant to horror. It is difficult, after all, to maintain my crusty persona (The Crusty Polemicist, after all) if I am constantly being brought to outbursts of pubescent blubbing by the endless smorgasbord of mundane nightmares that life serves up to us with such seeming gusto. So I’m surprised at how horrified I was – and how horrified I remain, days later – by the latest outrage out of Iraq.

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Two mentally disabled women were strapped with explosives Friday and sent into busy Baghdad markets, where they were blown up by remote control, a top Iraqi government official said.

The bombs killed at least 98 people and wounded more than 200 at two popular pet markets on the holiest day of the week for Muslims, authorities said.

As the parent of a mentally-disabled child, this incident has got hold of me, and I can’t seem to get it out of my mind. For several days, I've also been unable to shake the feeling that this reminded me of something. And this morning, I remembered what it was, and I remembered the words of poor, mad, doomed Colonel Kurtz.

It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face... and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn't see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember... I... I... I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized... like I was shot... like I was shot with a diamond... a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God... the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that. These were not monsters. These were men... trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love... but they had the strength... the strength... to do that.

Polemic: The Art of War

The role of “public intellectual” never really took hold in America. Specifically, the public intellectual as political and cultural polemicist has been absent from the American scene. There have been exceptions (Mencken comes to mind) but they stand out precisely because of their status as “exceptions.” There has always been an enormous gulf between the “pointy headed intellectual” and the rough, broad-shouldered “man of action.” Say what one will about Teddy Roosevelt (and, dog knows, the man contained within his doughy body a breathtaking variety of uniquely American intellectual and emotional defects), the guy was always good for a useful quote.

"Great thoughts speak only to the thoughtful mind, but great actions speak to all mankind."

In America, action has always trumped reflection, and the wellspring for action has always been emotionalism rather than reason. But can’t we advocate another view, the idea that thoughts can be a form of action, if they are communicated? Friedrich Nietzsche (someone I will trot out often on this blog as he so often suits my purposes) never really “did” anything in any sense that an American would understand. He had thoughts, he wrote them down and he got them out into the world. And yet Europeans – and civilized people in general – would have no problem with the idea that Nietzsche’s thoughts moved the world. Karl Marx also comes to mind, with his endless sedentary ruminations in the libraries of England: the thoughts he put to paper moved the world.

For rational, civilized people, there is no dichotomy between thought and action. Right thinking is seen as a form of action, and leads in a natural and unforced way to even more right action. And right action completes the loop by helping to shape more right thinking. This view of things is met with slow, blinking incomprehension in America. It’s time for us to engage in a bit of intellectual education. It’s time for those Americans who I refer to as “the sane, the secular, and the sensible" to go to war. Time to fight the most important war of our century, the war of ideas against the obscurantists, the fanatics, and the purveyors of offhand murder in the name of some “higher cause,” whether that higher cause be religion, some idealistic “ism,” or that most pernicious of alibis, “the spread of democracy.”

Who am I at war against? I am at war against “isms” of all kinds. Specifically, I am against those “isms” that seduce humans to yearn for some “Beyond” at the expense of this world. Because it is those who are focused on some “other life” that seem to find it all too easy to commit any outrage in this life, the only life there is. All those people who want to “change the world” scare the hell out of me. I’m with Camus: I don’t want to change the world; I just want to change lives. I think changing lives has much more value.

In America, we have an uphill slog, to say the least. American “thinkers,” such as they are, tend to be the sort of people that inspire a sort of bemused contempt in the typical American “men of action.” The enemies of reason have long known that we lovers of reason just don’t “get it.” Well, we need to “get it,” and sooner rather than later. The stakes couldn’t be higher. It’s time; long past time, maybe. Time for an end to the kind of ingrown, masturbatory self-regard that is the defining characteristic of the American intellectual. Time to move beyond the cowardice of excuses and alibis and “other priorities.” Time to stop asking our enemies to hold our hands and sing “Kumbaya” with us. It’s time to marshal our intellectual resources and go to war.