"it makes a little narrative that makes you the hero in an imagined drama" - “the broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global."

Trying to think over the past two weeks over how we could have gone from my parents generation which, after suffering in the millionaire caused depression fought and defeated Nazis, fascism and the Japanese imperial military fascists in two simultaneous wars to a country ruled by an ignorant, insane fascist who has allowed him to stay in the office of president after he defended Nazis terrorizing an American city,  I recalled the interview Bill Moyers did with the great American novelist and perhaps even greater essayist, Marilynne Robinson.  This part of the transcript showed that her mind had such insight into how things went so wrong, touching lightly on points that could make an essay in themselves, if not a book*

BILL MOYERS: And you make the case in, “When I Was a Child I Read Books,” you make the case that after generations of attention to public education, public health, public safety, access to suffrage and equality under the law, those values are now under siege.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: They are. These voter identification things, you know, the whole public education, these attempts at reforming public education that seem to me to be designed to model people into a kind of productivity again, making them useful for other people's purposes rather than making their education an end in itself. You know, I went, I'm a proud product of public education until college.

It was probably a very eccentric little establishment by most standards. But I was taught very optimistically in the sense that people always conveyed the idea that they were giving me something really of value, something that would make me richer no matter what I did, you know, in life.

That, you know, giving me my mind, you know? And I think that this is a spectacularly efficient model of education. I think that these assumptions that, you know, making everybody teach to a test, and so on, is valuable in some way. We're just destroying what’s the best impulse, the most successful impulse in our educational system.

BILL MOYERS: So what's happened to that old impulse you once described, that lay behind, and I'm quoting you, "the dissemination of information and learning, the will to ensure that the public will be competent to make the weightiest decisions and to conform society to its best sense of the possible..." What's happened to that impulse?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I don't know. I think that people, you know, it was, it's always been a human temptation. But it has been an ethics and an ideology among us lately to say all that matters is money, basically, you know? I don't think people believe that instinctively, or that they live their lives in those terms.

But I think a lot of people who find their way into prominent places in the culture are happy to proceed on that assumption. I mean, if you have a cable program that scares every little old lady in America by the standard of public support, maybe, you know, you can say you've accomplished something. They send you their social security checks, you know? It's terrible to suggest that people proceed on such vulgar motives, but I frankly have to assume it's true.

BILL MOYERS: You write a lot about fear lately.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: About not your fear, but fear abroad in the land.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: Exactly.

BILL MOYERS: What's the source of it?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I think that, I mean, it's exciting to people.

BILL MOYERS: Fear?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: Fear. Yes. I mean, look at the ways in which fear manifests itself. You know, this sort of anti-immigration feelings, you know, that people with these crazy weapons, people, you know, buying apocalyptic money, or freeze-dried apocalypse dinners and things like that. You know, I think that it makes a little narrative that makes you the hero in an imagined drama. It makes anybody else a potential threat. It's like late-night TV or something, you know? And I think that it has been pushed on people, it's used as a stimulus to make people watch cable network A rather than B and so on. And it's become a kind of addiction, I think. There's been this amazing reversal that the NRA is probably disproportionately responsible for.

BILL MOYERS: National Rifle Association?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: Yes, exactly, that makes fear look like courage to so many people. You can't drive your car if you don't have a gun in the glove compartment? Well, what nonsense is that? You know, it's not bold and brave to go around acting like you think everybody's going to be some kind of threat to you. It's psychotic really.

Looking at the pasty, slacker Nazis, listening to them, it's clear they were playing out just such a drama, based in some pathological heroic response to an imaginary and inverted reality moral peril based in the kind of instilled paranoia that is the constant fare of cabloid TV and cheap, hack written TV shows and movies.  Point for point, I don't think I've ever read something more insightful in such a small space that grasps the cause of the rise of American fascism.   It is, as every other thing in human life, a product of human imaginations manipulated and moulded by messaging that discourages imagining something more and better and which produces the scary story it is based in.

Modernism, of which the twin, supposed ideological opposites of Nazism and Marxism in real life, as opposed to supposedly scientific fantasy are a product of modernism.  The evils of the Nazis, the mass murders the machines and industries of death are matched, at least as characteristically, with the same under their alleged opposites in Marxism.  The particular circumstances of the on the ground setting of the Second World War made the Nazis and their fascist allies the common enemy of the Allies in the West and the Stalinist dictatorship in Russia - though it should never be forgotten that Stalin had tried to change that by allying himself with Hitler for a very short period - America's Stalinists did a complete U-turn for a number of months, no doubt ordered to suddenly turn from the anti-Nazis of the Spanish Civil War into asserting that you could do business with Hitler like Republican businessmen.

Both Nazism and Marxism were and are part of modernism, both of them claiming the authority of science for their intellectual validation, as does, in fact, that other alleged good and inevitable system, capitalism.   All of them find their roots in that most oversold of all intellectual fashions, the so-called enlightenment, in which the great but limited success of the hard sciences was asserted to have changed everything, including dispelling illusion, decisively, through applying the methods of study that work to describe objects in motion, physics, and in combination, chemistry, to phenomena which were so obviously not simple enough to apply them to.   The irony of the extension of the methods of 18th and 19th century physics to other, far more complex phenomena which were not reducible into the same kind of characteristic and so accurate description is that it, itself is an illusion based in a misapplication of the same kind of imagination, so despised in the scientism that is the basis of the effort.**

The decisive role that demotion of imagination, part of the wider demotion of the mind and so lives of human beings plays in the kind of mass, social and political disasters of Nazism and Stalinism and, frankly, capitalism, which so blithly and with an inverted sense of moral purpose kills millions of people and which, today, carries the potential to kill us all, quickly or slowly,  is also touched on in the interview:

BILL MOYERS: I was particularly struck with one from “The New York Times” praising you for frankness about a “truly shocking subject: the damage to the human personality done by poverty, neglect and abandonment.” And I wondered, why should anyone be shocked to discover today what can happen to a young girl like Lila?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I was also struck by that. It seems, you know, when you, you know, read Dickens or something, I mean, the great subject really of the democratization of Western culture has been the abuse and entrapment of people on the basis of economics or class or whatever, who are capable of wonderful things, you know, and the fact that they are mistreated ought not to be shocking. They're mistreated against the standard of what they're capable of and what they are.

BILL MOYERS: Are we suffering some kind of loss of imagination that we cannot perceive the lived experience of other people?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I think it is true. And I think that it's having effects all across the culture. Education, for example, which has very subtly turned toward making a good working class, however well-paid, rather than humanizing people's experience, making them feel what it is to be a human being in the stream of history on this strange planet, you know?

BILL MOYERS: So what's happened to imagination?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: I think in a way, we've been talked out of it. But I think that there's kind of a influence of crude scientism that--

BILL MOYERS: Crude scientism?

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: Crude scientism that has no way of articulating the fact of mind, the fact of imagination, the complexity of consciousness. And what they can't articulate, they exclude as being not real, being illusory in some way. If you think that a human mind is a wonderful thing, there's an infinite interest in cultivating it.

And if you think it's simply someone who works more expensively than a worker in the third world, you know, you have no interest in people except to make them, you know, a part of the utilitarian system that produces for the sake of producing.

BILL MOYERS: That would explain, I think, why you wrote that “the broadest possible exercise of imagination is the thing most conducive to human health, individual and global.”

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: Yes. It's impossible to achieve things like justice if you don't have enough compassionate imagination for any other human being to understand that they deserve justice. That shorthand justice is not the thing at all. You know, what can I say, I mean, my deepest, I think, religious belief is that we are amongst souls and we have souls.

BILL MOYERS: We are among souls.

MARILYNNE ROBINSON: And that it is a kind, it's a blasphemy. It's not simply an ordinary offense to insult or to deprive another human being. I think that at our best, that has been the assumption we've proceeded from. And at our worst, it's an assumption we don't want to be bothered by.

The slacker-Nazis, and let's be grateful that they are slackers because slacking could be the only thing that stands between us and their eventual success,  have learned through the mass media, mostly entertainment but also the pseudo-journalism of TV propaganda, to consider indifference to other people as a manly virtue.   That didn't start with TV or even with modernism, that is as old as human militarism and has had few opposing cultural or intellectual impulses.  The pacifism taught by religion is the most significant of those.  Though in their actual histories as cultural and social entities, always tempted to reversion to violence, in a few cases repented of later, some religions have been the strongest of the weak forces against that.  And, in every case I'm aware of, they oppose violence and murder on the basis of the elevation of human lives through an identification with the divine.  The removal of that belief in a divine and a human aspiration to be valued by identification with God, by the crude scientisim that is endemic to modernism can account for why modernism is so productive of violent ideologies.   That habit of thought, of unadmitted to imagination, which reduces the enormously complex phenomena of human beings to being considered in terms of atoms and molecules, their motions and combinations, what I touched on the other day, is about as dependable a result of that reduction as can be found.  Though such a determined and consciously chosen, though unadmitted act of willful imagination is the basis of the social sciences and the modernist conception of human beings.  It is a sickness that ails us and our societies and our government.  Perhaps one of many such sicknesses but one which has killed millions in the past century.

But the individual, be they billionaires or mere millionaires, middle-class, poor or even destitute, even if they buy into the total objectification of others, will not imagine itself in those terms.   The difference between continual and even ultimate murder and destruction and despoliation and a decent life depends on the act of extending that feeling for oneself universally, the whole difference between Nazism or Stalinism or genocidal capitalism and a decent life, an egalitarian democracy is summed up in doing to other people what you would like them to do to you.  There is nothing more effective in the effort against our worse impulses than the belief that that is a commandment which we are bound by, to live our lives, individually and in society in accordance with that than the thin reed of choosing to accept it.  And that is something which all of those things have tried to talk us out of.  It is certainly not a TV or Hollywood value in any essential sense, the things that have done more than anything to direct Americans imaginations in the past century, far more so in the post-war period, more so since the 1960s.

You certainly can't get yourself out of that if you deny that getting yourself out of it requires an act of imagination, not least of which will be imagining other people as having the same rights we do and our moral obligation to respect them, even at personal cost to ourselves.  I can't think of anything more foreign to modernist scientism or the inverted values of it due to the devaluation of people through the denial of God, moral commandments and metaphysical realities, including our minds.

*  Reading and rereading her essays and books, closely and well can change your life for the better.  She is one of the most important American writers, I will assert that Lila is certainly more worthy of the title " THE great American novel" than those generally given that position.  It's miles ahead of Huckleberry Finn, though Twain's novel gains its claim from being exactly the kind of extension of identification outside of the individual mentioned above.  The, so far, three Gilead novels of Marilynne Robinson do that even more so, perhaps why three books from different points of view were needed to express that.  Unlike Twain, she has both genders in the books.

** See her four essays and introductory essays collected in the book, Absence of Mind, for more insights.   You can hear her deliver the last of the essays, written to be delivered  as Terry Lectures at Yale in 2009.

Note:  Listening to the expansive, generous imaginations of Marilynne Robinson and, lest it be forgotten, the great journalist Bill Moyers can be contrasted dramatically with the narrow self-interest of the slave owners as expressed by two of their foremost thinkers, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the authors of so much that turned so bad in American History.  I would recommend both that book by Wendell Phillips and the papers and articles by Paul Finkelman I linked to the last few days.