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Notes -
No one else has something for me to offer Jack Handy thoughts on this morning?
Really bad idea I'm playing with right now: Given our emerging consensus that politics is replacing religion as the dividing line of society, and taking on many of the same functions, perhaps we should try to formalize it and create an Ecumenical Political Church, espousing a very vague and general set of principles to bound the acceptable limits of politics, that recognizes the fundamental tension of politics and is maximally inclusive.
Left and right, male and female, white and black, rich and poor, oligarchy vs. monarchy, freedom vs. order, light and dark, etc. Being a politically sophisticated person means being able to articulate fully the fundamental forces behind these human tensions that form our society. It means understanding that there is no "right side of history", no perfect past to retVrn to. It means accepting that progress and change are both inevitable and not inevitably positive. Liberalism and conservatism, or whatever they call the social division of your society, exist because they are both partially right and partially wrong. Good and bad, strengths and weaknesses. Our personal political ideology can sit anywhere, based on our read of what direction the country or world needs to move. But we should all at least respect that the politics of others come from the same forces and choices that produce our own. And do our best to solve our issues peacefully and productively.
Politics is disgusting, but it is the most preferable way of working out our differences. Come join the most holy church of venal lawyers and unprincipled hacks. Let's all have a bit more fun with it. The tenor of politics should be more college football than eternal Poland 1939. True believers are suckers. Cynicism will set you free!
If The Church is any consideration, universalism is not a draw. The liberal branches are dying and the conservative ones are expanding. In my estimate, you can’t organize people around a belief in nothing in particular, nor can any religion exist which asks nothing of its parishioners. How do you evangelize when you don’t have the Truth and everyone else’s truth is just as valid?
The left and the right have conflicting myths about the reason for the country - a city on a hill versus original sin. We can replace those myths with another, but not with Political Unitarianism.
Funny thing is, a mixture of the "city on a hill" myth and the "original sin" myth would come pretty close to the reality. Historically, America has been both a radically successful experiment in liberty which has been a light to other countries, and a genocidal, slave-holding, hypocritical empire that has committed horrible atrocities against many people all over the world.
These myths almost seem to originate when the light of truth gets filtered into two separate beams by the prism of ideological delusion.
What if the real delusion is choosing such a moralistic framework for interpreting history in the first place? Perhaps if your worldview has got you thinking in terms of “horrible atrocities” and “radical experiments in liberty”, you’ve already lost the plot, and the answer is to stop viewing the United States - or any other country! - as a moral/ideological project.
But what else is there to ground the idea of America? You can't really rely on "descent from a special peoples/place" or what-have-you, because the US was founded explicitly on jettisoning ties to, and control by, the British Empire (and also the French and Spanish Empires) that laid the foundation of the 13 Colonies. We can admit that "the Great American Experiment" is maybe overblown/overrated, but the US was explicitly founded in reference to the Roman Republic, no?
I think that coming to terms with the failure of the “American idea” - the realization that it was a house of cards from the very beginning - entails a sort of “death of the author” interpretation of the Founding; these men, to the extent that they had any coherent idea of what they were creating, were basically super-fallible autists who were LARPing as Enlightenment-flavored Platonic philosopher-kings. Their project should not be taken seriously as a credible long-term basis for a functional society.
Whatever we have now looks nothing remotely like what they had in mind. While part of that is due to a failure of stewardship on the part of the intervening generations, the bulk of the failure rests on the guys who actually thought you could found a whole-ass country around some academic theories and poster-board slogans. That the country succeeded for as long as it did is a testament not to “the founding documents”, but to the very high level of human capital of the founding ethnic stock of the country, and to some incredibly favorable geographic factors.
That none of this allows us to project forward a coherent vision for how future generations, unrelated in any way to the founding stock of the country, can achieve buy-in to this interpretation of events… well, that’s why, as I’ve made clear in previous posts, I’m not “patriotic”. There’s no “there” there at this point. The story was too full of plot-holes, and the authors barely understood their own motivations for writing it in the first place.
This sort of reinterpretation is already near-universal. There are a few libertarian weirdoes who think you can have a country of 330 million yeoman-farmers in the 21st century; everyone else invoking the Founding Fathers, the Declaration of Independence, etc., is already straying far from the original meaning.
When MLK said:
Do you think he didn't know that a large portion of those "architects", maybe even a majority, were slave-owners at the time they "wrote the magnificent words"? He was clearly already doing a "death of the author"-type interpretation.
That’s fair, but I think that most people do the MLK thing, which is to say, “Yes, the real Founders were hypocrites and not particularly impressive, but the idea of the Founders - the most positive and charitable interpretation of their own words - is a great and morally significant mythos.” Whereas I’m saying, “No, even if those men genuinely believed every word they said and lived their lives as exemplars of those Enlightenment values, those values are bad and not something on which we should try to build a society. In fact, to the extent that the Founders were hypocrites, this is actually a point in their favor, because it implies that on some level they understood that their lofty ideals were not a reliable guide to actual living.”
Which enlightenment values are you in favor of throwing away?
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