"The one specific Jeffersonian idea that has negotiated the passage from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century without any significant change in character or coloration," Ellis notes, is "the principle that the government has no business interfering with a person's religious beliefs or practices." Ideas do have consequence, particularly when they are "founding" ideas, and the consequences of Jefferson's idea of "religious freedom," as it is normally popularized, too has had its consequences. One might ask, for example, whether the wall between the state and the church was intended to protect the state from the church or the church from the state? This question doesn't much matter so long as one accepts the reciprocal duty of toleration -- that is to say, so long as I have a duty to accept YOUR set of religious beliefs and institution and you have a duty to accept MY set of religious beliefs and institutions, we are each free to practice our belief within our respective institutions. Religious belief itself -- the demand for faith in the one true god and the institutions that represent that god -- mitigates against this reciprocal duty of toleration, however, and so Jefferson's idea has threaded the needle by changing what had traditionally been government's role. No longer was government charged with championing a specific faith and its institutions, but rather was charged with enforcing the reciprocal duty of toleration, a role that has fallen primarily to the Supreme Court, which has been meticulous in keeping the government and its agencies free from an established religious doctrine. So long as the government merely enforced the reciprocal duty of toleration, the people at large were protected from the impositions of a particular church and conversely the members of a particular church were protected from the impositions of the state.
One characteristic of our country, then, to borrow a phrase from Rorty, is "its thoroughgoing secularism," at least insofar as its government is concerned. Rorty sees Whitman and Dewey as champions of this "thoroughgoing secularism," and it has had its champions, but mostly among people like me, who find all but the most abstract religious tenants, well, silly. To be a good Mormon, for example, I am asked to believe that the angel Moroni directed Joseph Smith to a stone box containing golden plates, covered in "reformed Egyptian" script. "Though he allowed others to heft the box, he said that the angel had forbidden him to show the plates to anyone until they had been translated" at which point, "Smith dictated the text of the Book of Mormon over the next several years, claiming that it was a translation of the plates. He did this by using a seer stone, which he placed in the bottom of a hat and then placed the hat over his face to view the words written within the stone. Smith published the translation in 1830 as the Book of Mormon." OK, really? I am picking on the LDS because they are a truly indigenous American religion, but in all honesty, beyond the paradoxical imperatives (e.g. "love thy neighbor as thyself) I find the particulars of more mainstream christianity no more credible than the LDS belief, indeed the more recent simply parallels the more ancient which in turn has its parallels in even more ancient sacrificial religions. It makes me a poor champion of secularism, however, because Americans simply don't trust atheists.
One characteristic of our government is its thoroughgoing secularism -- it's non-theism, if not atheism -- and consequently we don't trust our government, unless, of course, we populate it with those who profess some level of belief. Daisey Grewal, reporting for Scientific American on a series of studies, noted that Will Garvis of the University of British Columbia "looked at how atheism influences people’s hiring decisions. People were asked to choose between an atheist or a religious candidate for a job requiring either a high or low degree of trust. For the high-trust job of daycare worker, people were more likely to prefer the religious candidate. For the job of waitress, which requires less trust, the atheists fared much better." Government jobs, particularly elective government jobs, require substantial trust. Why? "Gervais and his colleagues discovered that people distrust atheists because of the belief that people behave better when they think that God is watching over them." And why? "Gervais and his colleague Ara Norenzayan have found that reminding people about God’s presence has the same effect as telling people they are being watched by others," which in turn "increases their feelings of self-consciousness and leads them to behave in more socially acceptable ways." Frankly, such descriptions resonate with me, and I find it necessary that a free press watch over our elected officials, which one hopes will lead them to "behave in more socially acceptable ways," but in a world of clearly "fake news" and obviously "partisan media," the free press may still be necessary, but it isn't sufficient. We probably do need elected officials who believe, with some sincerity, that god has a wary eye on them, though Robert Bentley seemed to count on a distracted god. Although "he was an active member of First Baptist Church Tuscaloosa where he served as a deacon and a Sunday School teacher." He has also been "the chairman of the board of deacons four times and a member of the Youth for Christ advisory board," but despite those activities he nevertheless found time to engage "in an 'inappropriate relationship' with his chief adviser, then used intimidation tactics and deployed state law enforcement officials in an effort to cover it up, according to a bruising report released Friday in support of the effort to impeach him." Just saying.
As Rorty points out, however, "in the past, most of the projects that have incited nations to self improvement have been stories about their obligations to one or more gods. For much of European and American history, nations have asked themselves how they appear in the eyes of a Christian God." Having said this, however, "self-improvement" somewhat understates the case. So too does his follow on statement that "American exceptionalism has usually been a belief in a special divine favor, as in the writings of Joseph Smith and Billy Graham." Consider, for example, the following 19th century statement of Albert Beveridge of Indiana in the Senate:
And just beyond the Phillipines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. ... We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustees under god, of the civilization of the world. ... God has marked us as the chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world. ... He made us adept at government that we administer government among savages and senile people.
In some respects, the old-fashioned polish of the rhetoric lets us dismiss such statements as "narrow minded and obsolete nationalism," but we shouldn't be too quick to assume we have transcended such sentiments. One could argue, for example, that part of Trump's appeal lay in precisely those sentiments, or perhaps more precisely the betrayal of an American birthright -- American's role in the "mission of our race," meaning of course the white race, and its obligation to spread our version of civilization, our peculiarly American virtues, throughout the world. Initially, of course, we were to do so "by example," and the sense that America was the exemplary nation pervades the writing of the founders. It begins with John Winthrop's "Model of Christian Charity," where he admonished the pilgrims aboard the Arabella to be "as a city upon a hill" and model christian virtue in the new world or suffer the consequences and be "a story and a by word" of God's judgment. It runs through Jefferson who "envisioned the American Revolution as merely the opening shot in a global struggle that was eventually destined to sweep over the world," as Ellis put it, or in Jefferson's own words, "This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll around the globe." But by the time it gets to Beveridge, it is no longer "by example," but a more purely expressed economic imperialism that sees a god given right to freely exploit "China's illimitable markets," not simply or not only because it serves the economic interest of the emerging class of robber barons, but because our way is the way of future world civilization, and it is our mission to regenerate the world in our own image. Trump, of course, has painted a picture of a world "turned upside down," with our government, the very model of ineptitude allowing China to exploit OUR "illimitable markets." Our particular pieties are no longer a model for the world, and the "civilized" christian world, our nation under god, seems to be, if not exactly in retreat, at least under siege, and the dark forces of the world hold us in obvious contempt. Regardless where one places the particular blame -- whether miscegenation or homosexuality -- we are, as a result of straying from the path of the righteous, we are increasingly sinners in the hands of an angry god.
Another aspect of Jeffersonian thought that has survived almost intact is what might be called the oppositional impulse to nullification, to "just say no." On the individual scale, it reveals itself as a resurgent belief in "individual sovereignty," and the notion that, if offended, one is entitled -- perhaps even obligated -- to issue one's own personal "declaration of independence" and resist the offender. If Jefferson believed that there was an end of history, for him it seemed it was the impulse to get back to where we once belonged, and if there is a human cost to achieving those ends, so be it. As Jefferson put it of the Jacobin excesses of the French Revolution, "The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little blood? My own affections have been deeply wounded by some of the martyrs to this cause, but rather than it should have failed, I would have seen half the earth desolated. Were there but an Adam and Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than it is now." As Ellis notes, this extreme version of what I would call revolutionary deconstructionism "exposes a chilling side of Jefferson's character that seems so thoroughly incongruous with his temperament and so resolutely ideological." There is a "left-ish" version of this resolute ideology. For Ellis it conjures up twentieth century radicals in the Lenin or Mao mold," but for me it conjures up the more Thoreauvian radicalism of the hippie sixties, and one need only google pictures of Woodstock to see the attempt to simply say no to the modern secular state and recapture one's place as Adam and Eve in Eden, naked and not ashamed. If resistance to the Vietnam war marked the late 60s and early 70s, it was less an American populace awaking to the evils of warfare, more a Jeffersonian outrage at the draft as an offense against individual sovereignty, the inalienable right to "just say no" to the imperatives of the "government." Likewise, one need only google the manifestos of the environmental extremists, those raging against the machine, for "left-ish" versions of offenses against "individual sovereignty" that merit violent action, not only against the government, but those corporate entities believed with some justification to be in control of the government. I point this out merely to suggest that, if there is a consensus among the alt-right and the alt-left in this country, it is the overwhelming imperative of "individual sovereignty."
There is, of course, a reducto ad absurdum implicit in "individual sovereignty," and it's one that Jefferson recognized. Individual sovereignty exists in inverse proportion to "government sovereignty," and so you have the Jeffersonian assertion that "government is best which governs least." Carried to its logical conclusion, you can have complete individual sovereignty in the absence of government. For Jefferson, the secularist, whose impulse carried him to this logical conclusion, this presented a problem -- how to govern in the absence of government? At the extreme, theoretically, the role of government was simply to protect individual sovereignty. The first and second amendments became the touchstones of "individual sovereignty," with the first amendment guaranteeing those rights of speech, assembly and worship necessary to individual sovereignty, and the second allowing for the possibility of rising up in armed revolt if those rights were abridged. You don't need an AR-15 to hunt deer, but you do need it to mount an effective resistance to an oppressive government, to just say no and reassert individual sovereignty. In the practice of actual (not theoretical) government, for people like Hamilton and Madison, this meant protecting the minority from the impositions of the majority, and the majority from the impositions of a minority, the result being the inspired balancing act of our constitution that works, sorta. Here is not the place to recapitulate the entirety of the Federalist Papers, nor the subsequent political wrangling that followed in the creation of an actual government. Suffice it to say, somewhat simplistically, that the political parties, in their initial formulation, developed around the greatest perceived threat to a rather limited notion of individual sovereignty -- the individual freedom to get and hold property. On the one side, the Hamiltonian Federalists: too much "democracy" resulted in a tyranny of the majority -- i.e. since the majority of people were not particularly wealthy, such tyranny would result in the redistribution of wealth from the rich to those beneath them on the social scale. On the other hand, the Madisonian Republicans: too little "democracy" resulted in a tyranny of the minority -- i.e. since the rich had inherent (and often inherited) advantages over the poor, such tyranny would take the familiar form of aristocratic exploitation of the poor. In the actual practice of government, it was more or less assumed that the House of Representatives represented the "democratic" will of the majority, while the Executive Branch would represent the "aristocratic" will of the minority, and the Senate was the pivot between the two balancing the great teeter-tooter of government. It was conceived and has operated as the "just say no" body of the government -- "no" to an excessively democratic House and "no" to an excessively authoritarian executive.
Which bring me back to my point of departure. Ellis too notes that the first wave crashing over the Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian America of sovereign individuals was the Civil War, which, as Ellis put it, "destroyed slavery, the political primacy of the South, and the doctrine that the states were sovereign agents in the federal compact." It might be more accurate to say "displaced slavery" and implemented systemic apartheid, insofar as blacks were not to attain anything resembling full citizenship under the law until the Johnson era civil rights legislation. Moreover, it should also be noted that civil rights legislation failed, not for lack of trying, but because the political primacy of the South became ensconced in the Senate, enforced by the cloture rule. Here again, it was not positive power, but negative power, insofar as the southern Senators were sure to filibuster civil rights legislation on the one hand and on the other represented a sufficient voting block to "just say no" to calls for cloture and a vote. Insofar as the Senate represented the states, and insofar as the predominantly rural states held equal sway with the predominantly urban states, the sovereignty of the states, like slavery, was simply displaced to a Senate designed from the outset to be oppositional to both the excesses of democratic and executive power. In this light, it is useful to re-read Caro's synoptic history of the Senate that opens the third volume of his monumental biography of Johnson. He writes that, "the framers of the constitution feared the people's power because they were, many of them, members of what in America constituted an aristocracy, an aristocracy of the educated, the well-born, and the well-to-do, and they mistrusted those who were not educated or well-born or well-to-do. More specifically, they feared the people's power because, possessing, and esteeming, property, they wanted the rights of property protected against those that did not possess it." They feared the excesses of democracy in part because they, like Sullivan recently, had read their Plato and they knew that "liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power." The under-educated, the laborer, and the poor were more susceptible to the persuasive powers of the demagogue, not only because they were under-educated and could not see through the snake oil pitch, but because of the "real or supposed difference of interest" between the rich and the poor. As Madison put it, "those who will labor under all the hardships of life, and secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings" will always outnumber those who do not labor, who exist remote from at least the avoidable hardships of life, and secretly fear a loss of power and esteem. As Caro put it, "in creating the Senate for the new nation, its Founding Fathers had tried to create within the government an institution that would speak for the educated, the well-born, the well-to-do, that would protect the rights of property, that would not function as an embodiment of the people's will but would rather stand -- 'firmly' -- as a great bulwark against that will." They succeeded.
There are many ways to rule the world, and one should not expect the re-emergence of either tyrannical kings or tyrannical dictators. If America is at the vanguard of history, it is in our demonstration that one needs neither to exercise almost unlimited power. If exploitation of the poor and weak is an abuse of power, the Senate has been the body most effectively designed, to borrow a phrase from Krum, to protect the guilty and it does so more effectively than either the Palace of Versailles or the Eagle's Nest. There may be something to the notion that we are caught in 80 year cycles. It was the government's inability to deal with the question of slavery that led, about 80 years after the founding, to the cataclysm of the Civil War. It was the government's inability to deal with the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the industrialists that led, about 80 years after the Civil War, to the cataclysm of the great depression and helped fuel the second world war. And now, about 80 years after the great depression, we find ourselves in similar circumstances, with great and growing disparities of wealth, with great and growing international instability, with closely allied fundamentalist religious and proto-fascist movements gathering steam at home and abroad. It feels as though the government's inability to act, either through democratic consensus or through executive fiat, is leading us willy-nilly toward yet another cataclysm. I don't want to give too much credit to either Neil Howe or William Strauss, but as the Times outlines, “Their 'Fourth Turning,' lays out a theory that American history unfurls in predictable, 80-year cycles of prosperity and catastrophe." I should admit that I haven't read the book, and really don't intend to do so, but it's hard not to "foresee catastrophe right around the corner." Within a world upside down, where China exploits our markets, where American military might is at once unsurpassed and utterly powerless to effectuate world stability, where government cannot seem to get its act together and arrest the increasingly acrimonious divide between the red and the blue, it's a struggle to feel optimism for the future, to feel we're not on the eve of destruction. The new American right had seized upon what might be called the American apocalypse "in the hope of mobilizing Americans as political agents," or perhaps more precisely as "revolutionary agents" in the Jeffersonian vein, to reassert individual sovereignty against an encroaching government. Although less impassioned, the new American left likewise hopes to reassert individual sovereignty against the encroachments of a government that seems ever more willing to institutionalize the encroachments of fundamentalist christian religion on matter of sexuality ranging from abortion to gender preference. They would reassert individual sovereignty against the encroachments of an increasingly monopolized, profits over people, corporate machine. Viva la revolution, but then, of course, we must answer the question, "ok, so now what?"
The difficulty, of course, is that individual sovereignty does not provide a positive governing imperative and so something other than individual sovereignty must provide that imperative. The left no longer has a compelling answer to that question. I think Rorty is dead on when he suggests that "it is impossible to discuss leftist politics in the twentieth century, in any country, without saying something about Marxism." As the right is altogether too fond of pointing out, "Marxism was not only a catastrophe for the all the countries in which Marxists took power," and one can only agree, but as Rorty goes on to point out, it was also "a disaster for the reformist Left in all the countries in which they did not." The anti-communist sentiment is alive and well, having been so thoroughly infused into the rhetoric of the right that any government imposition, particularly in matters aiming at economic or social justice, are seen not only as infringements of individual sovereignty, but as the first step on the slippery slope to communism. One grew inured to hearing Obama, and particularly the Affordable Care Act, as "socialist," not because he came even close to advocating socialism, at least not as it has been traditionally understood, but because he didn't subscribe to the wholesale deconstruction of the so-called administrative state -- that is to say, the wholesale deconstruction of anything that placed limits on the individual sovereignty or too what "one had worked for" in taxes. Such a philosophy, it turns out, is cream to those who hold power, because it allows them to say, with a straight face and a supercilious moral sanctity, that any government action that might limit their ability to exploit markets, any government action that might redistribute a percentage of profit in the name of social justice, was the gateway drug to communism. Even the New Deal initiatives of Roosevelt -- e.g. social security -- were like marijuana to heroin, the first step toward an addiction to "government handouts" that would reduce us all to slaves. When the plebeians, the paroles, the lumpen-proletariats are equally convinced that the "that government is best which governs least," it turns out, give the rich more or less carte blanche in their exploitation of the poor, the powerful unfettered autonomy in their exploitation of the weak. As Caro noted, if the "Senate had been the forum for great debates before the Civil War," after it became the forum for the robber barons who "felt that 'the best government was the least government' -- unless they could mold it as a weapon and tool to help the strongest have their way over the weak.'" A strong Senate, with a weak executive, worked rather well for seventy odd years, until the Gatsby optimism of the roaring twenties crashed into the great depression, and those who held firm to the doctrine of individual sovereignty, and its economic counterpart laissez faire, simply had nothing to say and were swept from office. The reformist left stepped in, Roosevelt and those Americans who, as Rorty defined it, "struggled within the framework of constitutional democracy to protect the weak from the strong." Now, of course, with the catastrophe of the 30s rapidly becoming ancient history, and with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the cold war also fading into the past, the Jeffersonian imperative has been steadily reasserting itself. "Starting with Barry Goldwater in the 1960s, then reaching a crescendo of national success with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s and continuing with Newt Gingrich's Contract with America in the 1990s," as Ellis put it, "the conservative movement has campaigned against the encroaching character of the federal government." There was an interregnum, when the world economy seemed once again on the verge of collapse, and once again the reformist left, in the person of Obama, responded with a Keynesian bailout and a social justice program reminiscent of the New Deal, but it proved to be just that -- an interregnum -- and the conservative movement, reacting in part to his race and the unresolved issues of our founding, came back with a vengeance. A strong Senate, moreover a strong conservative Senate, coupled with an executive unable (and perhaps unwilling) to overcome its founding role as an impediment. The robber barons were back, and the GOP, surprise! even succeeded in electing one to the white house, but despite hegemony in all three branches of government, despite the executive's messianic bluster, and a sense that the apocalypse is right around the corner, conservatism still has little to say. As the debacle of the ACA replacement demonstrates, they can oppose, but they cannot propose legislation that actually addresses the issues of the day. So now what?
Nevertheless, conservatism remains alive and well. I was struck the other day with a David Brooks editorial, where he writes, "if you were a certain sort of ideas-oriented young person coming of age in the 20th century, it was very likely you would give yourself a label and join some movement. You’d call yourself a Marxist, a neoconservative, a Freudian, an existentialist or a New Deal liberal." I don't recall ever hearing of a "freudian or existentialist" movement, and the "New Deal" was more a program for specific economic "fixes" than a coherent movement, but certainly marxism and neoconservatism can be characterized as "movements." In many ways, they are mirror images of each other -- opposites ultimately without a distinction -- and that is the problem. Despite its thoroughgoing atheism, "marxism was, as Paul Tillich and others have rightly noted, more of a religion than a secularist program for social change" like the new deal, and as Rorty goes on to suggest, "like all fundamentalist sects, [Marxism] emphasized purity. Lenin, like Savaronola, demanded complete freedom from sin and undeviating obedience." The thoroughly political conservative movement too is more of a religion than a secularist program for social change." As the Freedom Caucus' response to the ACA repeal demonstrated, they too were less interested in actually governing, more interested in insisting on a form of purity, even if that insistence derailed a cherished, but more immediate goal. As movements, both marxists and neoconservatives have, as I have pointed out before, an eschatology, an end game, the paradise which follows on a complete "freedom from sin" and an "undeviating obedience" to authority. Brooks paraphrases the book, “The Ideas Industry,” by Daniel W. Drezner, which claims that "we’ve shifted from a landscape dominated by public intellectuals to a world dominated by thought leaders." As rather rough definitions, "a public intellectual is someone like Isaiah Berlin, who is trained to comment on a wide array of public concerns from a specific moral stance," whereas "a thought leader champions one big idea to improve the world — think Al Gore’s work on global warming." His choice of Isaiah Berlin, however, is a curious one, in part because Berlin himself was skeptical of the specificity of any "specific moral stance" -- that is to say, the governing eschatology of any movement -- and in that sense opened the field for the different form of specificity represented by the likes of Al Gore -- that is to say, someone who weighs competing values and comes down on the side of one particular value. There is the value of having individual sovereignty within a laissez faire capitalism that eschews the regulatory regime of the EPA, and there is the more communal value of policy aimed at a reduction of the potential causes of environmental climate change, and in this particular instance, on this particular issue, Al Gore comes down on the side of policy. Such "policy" is not an embrace of "party sovereignty within a controlled economy," nor is it a repudiation of "individual sovereignty within a laissez faire capitalism," but simply a response to a specific problem here and now -- a problem, moreover, that can be solved with government action of a certain sort. If the Freedom Caucus, and the GOP more broadly, reject such policy, it is not because they have a "better" idea, it is because it sins against a core tenant of faith, individual autonomy, to include the individual autonomy of those who benefit from the destruction of our environment, like the Koch brothers.
Brooks seems to lament "people’s relationship to ideas has changed." Part of it, he suggests, was a greater sense "that the very nature of society was up for grabs. Call it a vestige from Marxism or maybe Christianity, but there was a sense that the current fallen order was fragile and that a more just mode of living was out there to be imagined." Beyond its utter practical failure, there is another reason the "vestige from Marxism" fell out of favor. It had, so to speak, theorized itself into an impasse or, as Rorty put it, "a revival of ineffability." As Rorty put it,
We are told over and over again that Lacan has shown human desire to be inherently unsatisfiable, that Derrida has shown meaning to be undecidable, that Lyotard has shown commensuration between oppressed and oppressors to be impossible, and that events such as the Holocaust or the massacre of the original Americans are unrepresentable. Hopelessness has become fashionable on the left -- principled, theorized, philosophical hopelessness.
If Rorty is correct, and I think he is, the intellectually dazzling, but ultimately nihilistic rhetoric of the deconstructionist left is not the basis on which to form a movement. To form a movement, one must "describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will become, as well as in terms of what you know it be now." Moreover, "you have to be loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake every morning." No matter how principled, theorized, or philosophical, the hopelessness offered by the left points nowhere, certainly not a dream country. The right's answer is, perhaps, more compelling because less recent. The vestiges of Christianity offers a movement, specifically a religious movement, as the governing imperative. They do describe the country in terms of what they passionately hope it will become, and despite the left's attempt to paint them with the brush of cynicism, one suspects that their passion is real. They want a country completely purged of sin, which, in an American context, means essentially a return to the pre-lapsarian conditions implicit to Adam and Eve in Eden -- that is to say, a state of absolute individual autonomy within a frontier paradise where "The earth brought forth spontaneously all things that were good in profuse abundance," but did so if and only if man exercised his individual autonomy in undeviating obedience to the authority of god. If the country we wake to every morning leaves something to be desired, it is because, and only because, we continue on the path of sin in disobedience to the will of god. Unless we are reborn, not only as individuals, but as a country, "the ideal has no chance of becoming actual." Such represents, of course, the revival of a different sort of ineffability, the will of God, but it has a long, a very long history of principled, theologized, philosophical hopefulness to offer. It is a hopefulness that embraces the core of Jefferson's revolutionary thought, but does so on the assumption that Jefferson REALLY had in mind as the "pursuit of happiness" more akin to the austerities John Winthrop or Jonathan Edwards than more contemporary ideas of "personal fulfillment." We have been down this road before, and human impatience to reach the final destination will out. If the marxist desire to purge sins against the worker's paradise led to the gulag, the christian desire to purge sins against God has led to the inquisition, the reformation, and on native soil the Salem witch trials. The urge to purge sin, ultimately and without fail, leads to the purge of sinners, and when coupled with the punishing power of the state, the purge will be oppressive and bloody.
Brooks notes that "When George Orwell, Simone de Beauvoir or even Ralph Waldo Emerson were writing, they were hoping to radically change society, but nobody would confuse them with policy wonks." No, one would not, and again I am somewhat intrigued by his choice of examples. Leaving aside Orwell and de Beauvoir, in the native strain, Emerson may have imagined a changed society, but those changes were to come through a thoroughly theorized individual sovereignty. For Emerson, echoing Rousseau, one could "believe that society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, and they have faith that people are at their best when truly 'self-reliant' and independent." In any case, he didn't seem to care much for the sorts of incremental social changes that would make a difference in the here and how, and both took a sort of refuge in an atemporalized transcendence that returned individuals, if not societies, to an Edenic state. Although I'm sure some would quibble with "atemporalized," I would simply assert of Emerson what Rorty asserted of Hegel, that despite any residual historicism, they "could never bring [themselves] to assert the primacy of the practical over the theoretical." Emerson defined what was "true"and "right" against some "antecedently existing thing," if not "god's will" of the christian eschatology, or the "intrinsic nature of objective reality as revealed in history" of the hegelian-marxist eschatology, then in an apotheosis of the individual, the one who "presses eagerly onward to the impersonal and illimitable." The desire to purge sin remains, but "the only sin is limitation," and there is nothing quite like government, or a more broadly conceived "society," to place limits on individuals. If we sin by acquiescing to our limitations, then government and society sin against us by limiting the infinite potential we all feel within ourselves. Although Emerson set himself in opposition to the "dogmatism of bigots," there is an Emersonian strain in much of DIY evangelicalism, which, to put it bluntly, emphasizes the "infinite potential and purity of individuals," defined against an ineffable and illimitable god. When we inevitably fall short of that potential and purity, DIY evangelicalism simply feeds an anger toward anything and everything limiting that potential, and again there is nothing quite like the corruptions of government and society to fuel frustration and anger. And so, again, no, one would not mistake Emerson for a "policy wonk," or for that matter a "practical thinker," much less a "legislative adviser." Brooks goes on to note that "public thinkers now conceive of themselves as legislative advisers. Drezner writes a book called “The Ideas Industry,” but he is really writing about public policy." Brooks, it seems, mourns the loss of the good old days, "when intellectual life was just seen as more central to progress." He goes on to say, "intellectuals establish the criteria by which things are measured and goals are set. Intellectuals create the frameworks within which politicians operate. How can you have a plan unless you are given a theory?" and through theory, "intellectuals create the age." This is, of course, one account of progress, or as Rorty would say, "a matter of getting closer to something specifiable in advance," or "proximity to a goal," and then not just any goal, but THE goal. Brooks seems to mourn the loss of "final authority," the intellectual who articulates, once and for all, the criteria by which things are measured, the moral and ethical framework within which politicians must (or at least should) operate to move us toward THE goal.
The challenge, as Rorty put it, is to "immunize ourselves against the passion for the infinite." It is never a far step from frustration and anger to violence, and there is nothing quite like a "passion for the infinite" to justify violence, particularly when it is the sort of shared passion that, in Brooks words, "meant leading the sort of exceptional life that allowed you to emerge from the cave -- to see truth squarely and to be fully committed to the cause." He writes wistfully and ecumenically of the good old days when a shared passion for the infinite "also meant joining a tradition and a team," where "there were a whole set of moral tests involved with obedience to the movement, breaking ranks when necessary, facing unpleasant truths, pioneering a collective way of living, whether feminist, Marxist or libertarian." It seems benign enough, but when one presses the issue, the clouds begin gathering ominously on the horizon. What exactly are the moral tests involved with obedience to a movement? Who gets to decide, and to whom does it apply? What happens when one fails those tests? When one lacks obedience to the movement? What exactly are those unpleasant truths and how have they been faced? What happens to those who do not quite fit the collective way of living? One doesn't need to be a history "fan" to know that the "team" is not just a "team," and they aren't just traded to White Sox for a pitcher and prospect to be named later. For Brooks, "creating a just society was the same thing as transforming yourself into a moral person," but it depends, does not it not, on exactly what is meant by a just society and what it means to be a moral person. And really, is "creating a just society" just an exercise in "transforming yourself?" Yet another way, along with EST and Scientology, of self-fulfillment through self-improvement? He goes on to point out that "The 20th century held up intellectuals like that," those with a clear and compelling eschatology, a once and for all goal, "and then discredited them — too many were too wrong about communism and fascism." That's good, perhaps, but Brooks remains nostalgic, suggesting that "we’ve probably over-adjusted, and deprived a generation of a vision of the heroic intellectual. It’s good to have people who think about North Korean disarmament. But politics is most real at a more essential level." More compelling, perhaps, but not more "real." They had climbed out of Plato's cave only to discover that the glaring sunlight of an infinite truth was merely blinding -- that's it, nothing else, just blinding -- and Brook's heroic intellectual finds himself in service to sociopathic power, those quite willing to "face unpleasant truths" and break a few eggs to create the omelet, those quite willing to inflict suffering to gain obedience to a movement that ultimately proves itself to be a means to a more mundane and more malignant end. Their "heroic truth" will always seem, in retrospect, not so much a step on the way to a "just society," but rather just another example, among many examples, of a blinkered human hope for an end to suffering.
Suffering is real. Suffering can be overwhelming, but it is never infinite. It is always present, right here, right now, and it is always subjective. Neither God, nor Satan, nor his interlocutors suffered what Job suffered. Only Job suffered what Job suffered, but reading the story of Job, I cannot help but feel uneasy. Job may have demonstrated his faith by enduring suffering without complaint, but the challenge that precipitated the suffering seems, well, petty and pernicious and the suffering ultimately unnecessary. Moreover, Job may have been rewarded in the end for his demonstration of faith, but it seems, in the initial conditions of this grudge match between god and satan, that Job himself not be touched, created significant collateral damage to his wife and his children, none of whom quite seem to be worthy of consideration, except insofar as Job suffered at their loss. They were, not unlike his oxen, simply chattel in the cosmicomic scheme of things. I'm sure I'm not the first to point this out, and I won't be the last, but it strikes me that Job may be a faithful man, but his victimization did not make him a moral man. His victimization may have made him an object of compassion, and while compassion may be a necessary condition for morality, it is ultimately insufficient. I might need compassion for Job's suffering, and having compassion is better than having none, but my compassion alone does not make me a moral human being. Unless I do something, I remain at best a spectator watching the trains roll past on their way to the gas chambers, at worst complicitous in their suffering. Unless, that is, I do something to reduce the store of suffering in the world, I cannot be a fully moral human being. Job is simply a powerless pawn in a high stakes game between god and satan, but then I would have to say that, neither satan by offering nor god by accepting satan's challenge, strike me as moral either. Both, it seemed, by positive act, increased the store of suffering in the world, and they did so why? To prove that Job was worthy of the restitution that came later? Job may have hitched his wagon to the right train. Had satan won the challenge, its difficult to imagine the font of all evil providing the restitution that finally relieved Job's suffering, but insofar as the suffering was unnecessary and imperiously unjustified, even God's restitution feels tainted to me, not unlike a pay off to avoid the embarrassment of a public trial.
So again, suffering is real. Suffering can be overwhelming, but it is never infinite. It is always present, right here, right now, and it is always subjective. Only I suffer what I suffer. My suffering is real, but another's suffering is always a matter of conjecture. I cannot be oblivious to my own suffering, but I can be oblivious to another's suffering, and therein lies the crux of morality. Self-interest demands that I end my suffering, but self-interest alone makes no demand on me to end another's suffering, only my own. In the end, the Jeffersonian legacy of individual sovereignty is no more than a legacy of selfishness, coupled with the vague hope that competing self-interest, left free to govern itself, will produce better and better social results. Along with many of the other stories we tell ourselves, there is some good embedded in the myth. Individual sovereignty encourages, after all, the individually aspirational, but the desire to win the competition, to gather the applause that comes with being a winner, can produce good results. The desire to be, for example, the ONE who cures cancer may be driven by individual aspiration, but it does, after all, produce something good for all. Being the one who cures cancer, however, gets one a few moments of applause, a notice in the paper quickly forgotten, unless, of course, one can patent the cure, claim ownership of it, and be the one who grows extraordinarily wealthy profiting from those who suffer from cancer. At that point, however, the distinction between the hard work that finds a cure for cancer and the hard work that finds a way profit from mortgage default, the infamous derivative, is subsumed in the glow of wealth. One diminishes the store of human suffering by curing cancer, another increases the store of human suffering by creating financial ruin, but the REAL goal is the same, the REAL aspiration is the same, extraordinary wealth. Behind both is the assumption that we cannot have one without the other, that the only REAL motivation is an invidious comparison of wealth, the smug satisfaction of having more than some and the nagging envy at having less than others. Nevertheless, we know that there is a distinction between wealth derived from a cancer cure and wealth derived from mortgage defaults, EVEN IF someone benefits from it, EVEN IF the cancer cure is expensive and creates some degree of economic suffering among those cured. In the end, the cure reduces human suffering, and should be encouraged. Mortgage defaults increase unnecessary human suffering, and should be discouraged, and should be doubly discouraged insofar as mortgage defaults are not an "act of god." They are caused by humans, acting on humans, and unlike cancer can be easily cured by changes in the laws of a real, not theoretical, country. Suffering is real, and until we decide that we live in "a real country," as Rorty put it, "inhabited by real people who are enduring unnecessary suffering, much of which can be cured by government action," we will never be a fully moral country.
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