I saw this morning that I posted a rough draft of this post instead of a more finished one, so I'm posting it with corrections today. Sorry.
This is the year now in which we decide for the foreseeable future what kind of government we want. But, while we’re making up our woolly minds about it, the world is rolling on. Australia literally is burning down. In Europe, the EU is falling apart and people are slapping on armbands again. The Middle East is what it’s been for 40 years—a hot, angry region in which we truly have no place and no idea what to do there. This is a really bad time for American democracy to be deciding whether it wants to go into the future merely as an extended exercise in performance art.
Optimism is not exactly something that’s just lying around on the floor, waiting to be picked up. It’s something we have to work for again. It’s a heavy lift, but a necessary one. All we have as we enter 2020 is, well, us. In 1979, I was just starting out in this racket and there was so much I didn’t know about anything. As 2019 ends, I have come to wonder if everything I’ve learned is wrong. An open question for the opening of the new year. Comfort and joy to you all from all of us.
Charles Pierce As 2019 Ends, I Have to Wonder Whether Everything I've Learned Is Wrong Optimism is something we have to work for again.
I am sure I would risk offending if I were to say outright that modern thought is a failed project. Still, clearly it partakes as much of error as the worst thinking that it has displaced.
Marilynne Robinson: The Death of Adam: Darwinism
The Robinson quote gives the estimable Mr. Charles Pierce his answer. It is also an example of what I said yesterday morning about several slogans of our most piously recited secular-civic faith which is as good an example of the failed project, modernism, as anything.
By "modernism" I'm, of course, not talking about "modern music" ("modernism" doesn't really work for music) or as much the visual arts, though any which use text and some that doesn't might have some modernism in their content. I'm talking about the scientific-secular world view which dominates everything and has for generations.
I didn't realize the other day when I said that some figured I wanted to return to some pre-"enlightenment" past in my criticism of modernism, they couldn't be more wrong.
The "enlightenment" is a highly flawed, deeply mistaken response to what came before it - all human intellectual movements are flawed and deeply mistaken responses, none of those in the past is worth trying to repeat, though there may be much to learn from them in a positive sense as well as in what not to retry.
There is a lot wrong with the project called "enlightenment" that is closely related to modernism, and the extent to which our notions of democracy and democratic government have been glued to it, that has been a source of huge problems, many of which are reaching maturity right now.
We fetishize something we call "freedom" and as in several of the other words I've noted problems with, "freedom" is one of the most seriously in need of consideration. There is nothing good about a libertarian, libertine, freedom such as we are governed by in the post-WWII period. A lot of that was expressed in the literature, the fiction, the movie-scripts, the drama of the post-war writers who so inform our imagination - many of them were suckers for some of the dumbest of propaganda, especially involving "freedom" of the kind that doesn't make us free.
I find it incredible that we have the perfect example of a specimen of complete personal freedom such as the kind we imagine we hanker after in "democracy" in the post-war, modernist period in Donald Trump and that example of this kind of dystopian freedom isn't more fully understood after this many years of seeing him in action.
He is a man who has done exactly what he has wanted to, using his daddy's gangster money and money they've conned and stolen from banks which - no doubt due to heavy government subsidy - have allowed him to go on a spree of borrowing, bankruptcy, borrowing from other, ever more shady lenders - living large, what is called in one of the most detestable of post-war ballads "The good-life." Only not so much on having friends as people eager to benefit from association with him and who he uses before he discards them.
I could go on and on and on describing how the 12-year-old boy brat good-life of Donald Trump and how the law, big business, the whole edifice of unillegalized theft and graft which is the crown of curremt capitalist-liberalism - the mature form of that "enligthenment" 18th century secular horror that goes by the word "liberalism" - support him. It's a decades long, two-generations and counting quintessence of total libertarian freedom as only rich, white, Americans can perfect it, though rich white and a few non-whites in the wider world of 2100 billionaires can provide other examples of the type.
And most telling of all, Donald Trump, the Donald Trump that millions of Americans voted for, is a 100% creation of the freest of free-presses in the freest of free-speech regimes in history, under the Warren Court, ACLU notion of free speech-free press.
That his major vehicle to the presidency was something called a REALITY SHOW, "reality" as a show, a "REALITY" which was a totally phony, scripted presentation of the gangster-businessman that he played in "real life" only as propped up by gangster lawyers and others and as supported by the national and, especially New York City media. The phony "reality" scripted and planned to attract the most easily gulled eyes to sell advertising, using all of the deceptive methods of the PR and ad industry to do that.
Yet people were shocked at how fast the post-truth nature of the Trump years have been made normal to those trained by TV viewing to accept such "reality."
Jesus says, in the Gospel of John, "You will know the truth and the truth will make you free." The truth isn't generally compatible with a libertarian notion of freedom, it's a harsh and often unwelcomed thing, not the seductive, attractive crap that the entertainment and infotanement media provide us. We were warned that if we want freedom in any livable and important meaning of the word, it was going to be on such terms as the truth sets, not what was most pleasing. That well known passage is closely followed by, "Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin." And so we are enslaved by the seductions presented to us as seen on TV.
Modernism, many of its assumptions, from the most obviously scuzzy and sleazy to its loftiest sounding mistakes is unsustainable, it is certainly destructive of egalitarian democracy, economic justice and a livable environment. The very language of it corrupts even the most lofty seeming of terms.
That definition of "freedom" and, even more so "liberty" not to mention such other things as "relativity" are dangerously flawed. And then there's "justice."
So is the bizarre notion of "fairness" in which some of the worst desires of some of the worst of us are to be allowed and permitted and promoted and encouraged out of "fairness" not to mention the use of the term by the media in order to promote Trumpian lies, especially when called "balance". Which is a method of the "press" the media lying for its own benefit. Just as an example, there is no rational "fairness" given to those who want to destroy equality. There is nothing fair about giving those who would destroy the rights and lives of innocent people the chance to succeed in doing so. There is no right for those who want to destroy the rights and lives of others the chance to try to.
There is nothing nice about being nice to Nazis in that idiotic, irresponsible, post-war ACLU way, there is nothing fair about being fair to fascists, and they are the ones who make that so because they are not for fairness and they are certainly not for niceness. It is not moral to give such people any chance to do what they want to do, egalitarian democracy is not under any moral obligation to give them the chance to destroy egalitarian democracy. And if the law cannot sort that out then the law needs to be changed for that which can sort it out. Even if we have to dump the entire legal code and the theory that supports the mentally defective thing we've got there now.
Those are what brought us here.
We are living the inversion of values that Nietzsche predicted would come with the triumph of materialist-atheist-scientism, the death of God, which he welcomed. And which is going to kill us all - as Mr. Pierce asks, have you been watching Australia this month?
It doesn't work and there is no going back. We couldn't if we wanted to and we shouldn't want to. What modernism replaced didn't work, we have no choice but to go on to a future learning the disaster we have wrought in the name of freedom and fairness. Though those were only ever a cover up for the interests of the billionaire owners and the millionaire employees of the media. They sounded better than what they were really up to.
I'm not optimistic that we will change fast enough to avoid our own extinction and certainly not the extinction of myriads of other species. But we have to try, we have an obligation to try.
Trump is still there, so is Boris Johnson and Viktor Orban etc. Putin, the puppet master of the West under unlimited free speech-free press is still jerking us around as we still pretend it's the late 18th century. We are still stuck in the same thing the 18th century slave-owners, sharp businessmen and crooked lawyers and bankers of then gave us and we are suckered into not fixing it. We've still got the Electoral college and the travesty of the anti-democratically constructed Senate. We have retained the unconstitutional government by Court that the Supreme Court gave itself with no vote from The People or The Peoples' representatives.
Like Charles Pierce, I grew up with a lot of the same things learned and, yes, they were wrong. That's why we're in such trouble.
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