Note: I'd written this post and thought I'd already posted it but, apparently not. I have rewritten it because I can't find what I'd originally intended, I think the commentary is pretty much the same. I will not give it a last edit because the electricity is flickering here and I don't want to lose it, again.
Continuing on with Marilynne Robinson's Preface:
Whitman was a Quaker and he wrote as one: "I say the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion,/ Otherwise there is just no real and permanent grandeur,/ nor character nor life worthy the name without religion . . . )." This is from Leaves of Grass, and so is this: "All parts away for the progress of souls,/ All religion, all solid things, arts, governments, all that was or is/ apparent upon this globe or any globe,/ falls into niches and corners/ before the procession of souls along / the grand roads of the universe." The vision of this soul, all souls, realizing itself in the course of transforming everything that has constrained it and them, finds expression in many writers of the period, prominent among them Emerson, Melville, and Dickinson, and in later writers such as William James and Wallace Stevens. For all of them creeds fall away and consciousness has the character of revelation. To identify sacred mystery with every individual experience, every life, giving the word its largest sense, is to arrive at democracy as an ideal and to accept the difficult obligation to honor others and oneself with something approaching due reverence. It is a vision that is wholly religious though by no means sectarian, wholly realist in acknowledging the great truth of the centrality of human consciousness, wholly open in that it anticipates and welcomes the disruption of present values in the course of finding truer ones. And it is fully as well attested as America's old-time religion as is any exclusivist or backward-looking tradition, though our ill-informed nostalgias elevate what is called fundamentalism to that place, with the result that those who cannot endorse fundamentalist religion scorn the past while those who embrace it despise the present.
I will point out again that Walt Whitman anticipated one of the greatest and most important discoveries of modern physics by a half a century, the centrality of the individual mind observing and thinking about anything is all we have, we can't have that theoretical and mythical scientific point of view, an "objective" point of view of anything. One of the reasons that so many in science and outside of it acts as if that isn't the truth is because it is, actually rather frightening because so many points of view are so focused on self-gain, self-importance, selfishness and the selfishness that is at the bottom of all parochialisms, those which are merely annoying to those that are as dangerous as Trump's or Putins or Xi's or MBS's, . . . *
I have spent most of my life studying American history and literature. I have studied other histories and literature largely to gain perspective on this civilization. The magnanimity of its greatest laws and institutions as well as its finest poetry and philosophy move me very deeply. I know that there are numberless acts of generosity,m moral as well as material, carried out among its people every hour of the day. But the language of public life has lost the character of generosity and the largeness of spirit that has created and supported the best of our institutions and brought reform to the worst of them has been erased out of historical memory. On both sides the sole motive force in our past is now said to have been capitalism. On both sides capitalism is understood as grasping materialism that has somehow or other yielded the comforts and liberties of modern life. Capitalism thus understood is seen on one side as providential, so good in its effects that it reduces Scripture with its do-unto-others to shibboleth. The other side sees it as more or less corrupting and contemptible but beyond human powers to resist.
And no one offers a definition of it. But in these days when its imperium is granted by virtually anyone who attends to such things, our great public education system is being starved and abandoned and our prisons have declined to levels that disgrace us. The economics of the moment, and of the last several decades, is a corrosive influence, undermining everything it touches, from the industrial strength of our research capacity to the well-being of our children. I am not the first to suggest that it is undermining our politics as well.
One of the things which troubles me about this essay is that as astute an observer as Marilynne Robinson doesn't take into account the centrality that the media plays in the actual lives of almost all Americans and, in fact, in almost all of the world which has access to mass media or merely electronic media, especially when they can go online. Before the internet it was television and radio and the movies (especially when those became available for in-home watching), before that it was radio and the movies. The United States, or, rather the various states didn't try to raise the financial resources to allow the public schools to even try to compete with them for the time and, so, minds of students. I doubt that even if they had it would have been very effective in countering the effect of that all encompassing difference in the United States and, in fact, the possibility of democracy from before the mass media and its ever diminishing prospects afterwards.
Considering the place that the mass media, the most consumed "entertainment division" far more than the "news division," has played in exactly the production of the things that she rightly bemoans about our culture, society and, so, government it is extraordinary that she has left it so much out of the discussion.
Considering the role that mistrelsy had in promoting racism and chattel slavery in the time of those 19th century writers and, especially the role that Uncle Tom's Cabin played in, as Lincoln said, fomenting the Civil War, it is hardly a new thing in American life, though never as ubiquitous as it became when it was distributed by Hollywood, starting at least as early as Birth of a Nation and, especially, when it became available in the home at the turn of a dial.
Dealing with the fact that the media is what has most corrupted Americans and thwarted equality and, so, any democracy that is worthy of mentioning in a positive manner, to mention it is to risk being blackballed or drilled out of the realm of respectability or to just get ignored.
Despite what the still fashionable new atheism held, what vulgar (both in terms of crudeness and ubiquity) academic culture held and still holds, religion as such is hardly the dominant feature of our decadence. As an attempt to discern the meaning of Scripture, institutions such as the incumbent U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the Southern Baptists, and the other churches held to have some sway over large numbers of allegedly church going Americans is far less accurate than that they are, in fact forces for the worst of capitalism in its current, billionaire-millionaire dominated investor-crook, non-produing form. That was, of course, nothing new, similar things could be said for the Roman Catholic Church and most of the national Protestant and Orthodox religious establishments in the long history of Christianity in Europe and elsewhere. The extent to which the disestablishment of churches held that off for a time in the United States is probably related to the rise of radio and then TV "ministries," who financed and sponsored them and their propensity for propping up capitalism and such things as white supremacy, too. The worst of that, coming in the 1970s, with the rise of Jerry Falwell (motivated in the first instance by white supremacist rebellion against equality, not least of all his own enrichment) and such as Pat Robinson, Jim Baker, etc. (mostly in it for the money) and the others cannot be considered without the centrality of the mass media promoting them, as well. In Catholic terms it would be the putrid Mother Angelica and her ETWN and, now, Robert Barron's Word on Fire. All of which is intimately tied up with the corruption that mass media is allowed to have under our Constitution.
I am ever more certain that American democracy as a decent thing, apart from elections that turn ever more into shams of exclusion under Roberts Court overturning of the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, the Republican controlled states reimposing Jim Crow apartheid, cannot escape the necessity of rewriting the rules, the laws, the Bill of Rights to save American equality and, so democracy from the media which is a cesspool of stupidity and lying. I agree with Walt Whitman that America is only as good as its religious adherence to those principles of equality, of the equal distribution of the good of life, the distribution of wealth from its massive concentrations in few hands to its equal possession all over, not only the discouragement of bigotry and discrimination but the full out attacks on those, making them that most deadly of things, unfashionable, is included in that religion.
You might get the idea from this series that I have gone off of Marilynne Robinson but that couldn't be farther from the truth. I think that her work holds up to rigorous criticism and I think she is America's best living novelist and essayist. I encourage everyone to read her. I only half agree with her on Calvin, though more on the actual role that 19th century descendants of Calvinists had in creating American style liberalism based on the liberal distribution of material wealth to the least among us. I think the Anabaptists have an outsized role in that, though you always have to distinguish those who held with slavery and other forms of oppression from those who were among the first of our abolitionists and Women's suffrage agitators. As Marilynne Robinson points out, Walt Whitman was an Anabaptist, a Quaker. He was no Southern Baptist.
* I can never hear Emerson's or Thoreau's name without recalling them being invoked by the late anti-tax activist in Massachusetts, Barbara Anderson, a truly awful person whose stinginess was overtly claimed to be part of the rugged independence preached by the transcendentalists. Though what she was was your typical 2-year-old 20th century libertarian, I can honestly say that I despised her so, perhaps, that has tended to prejudice me against that tradition. I have never found anything in Dickinson or Whitman to put me off of them.
