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Thursday, November 13, 2008

The United States of America:  The Miniseries

This post is long and windy, with polish edits
to come at some future date.

It would be interesting, at some future time, to watch a series on the U.S.  It would be like watching a series on Ancient Rome or Greece, with the mistakes that caused their greatness to disappear obvious to the viewer, through the wisdom of hindsight, and knowing how it turned out, before the show began.

Episode I, The Early Years:  This would include Columbus arriving on American shores, the pilgrims, and details about the Mayflower Compact. 

Episode II, The Revolution:  This would detail the events leading up to the American Revolution and the first decades of creating a nation.

Episode III, The First 100 Years:  This would chronicle the people and the events leading up to the Civil War and the Reconstruction Period, following up with the anarchists in the Northern cities and the seeds of discontent they sowed, and explain the concept of:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Episode IV, The War Years:  This would detail our participation in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I.  What would be most interesting about this episode would be the social changes that took place as a result of those wars, with the establishment of FDR’s policies, the rise of the “The Worker” to noble status, and to the irresponsible libertines of the 1960s. 

Episode V, A New Century:  We haven’t lived that chapter of our history yet, but we know the episode would begin with the attack of 9/11.  What follows would be how the reformation of the Middle East turned out, based on American’s resolve (or lack thereof).

This is where my whimsy of my miniseries ends, but what becomes interesting is how one forecasts what happens next, or what they want to happen next.

How many episodes would there be?  Is Episode 5 the last in the series, detailing our fall from Grace?

I think the discussion of that is an interesting one, as a hypothetical, and begins to categorize people into various political and social boxes:

1. One World Box:  America as a separate nation is defeated gradually, adopting the government trends of the EU, and becoming a latecomer member.
2. Muddle Along Box:  Do whatever we can and as best as we can to sway the country to allow us to have many dozens of episodes.
3. Destroy To Rebuild Box:  Throw in the towel, but douse it in gasoline first, abandoning gradualist improvements, and choose all-out war instead. 

* * *

I think the thing that turns most conservatives away from intellectual pursuits (well, besides the endless arguments about how many libertarians can fit on the head of a pin) is that it is mostly lacking compassion.  I’m not talking about memes and oxymorons such as compassionate conservatism.  Intellectualism is, by definition, completely devoid of compassion, as it attempts to survey man’s history (his successes and failures) with dispassionate, level-heads.  It’s history of man at the level of 64,000 feet, only swooping down to glimpse at the details of an individual life when that life made some sort of lasting impact. 

Our miniseries would do that.  We’d swoop down a bit to explore Washington, Adams, Madison, and Jefferson.  We’d look at the lives of Lincoln and Roosevelt.  There would be peripheral swoops to examine the lives of Hitler, Stalin, and Brezhnev comparing and contrasting them to the American view of things at the time, and how they altered the course of history.

But what is often lacking is the compassion and recognition that there were millions and millions of other people who had no paradigm shift impact on history, living ordinary, miserable, and joyful lives.  Intellectualism, certainly in its modern incarnation, is devoid of that.  It is missing the cliché of the common touch, the lives of Les Miserables and the glorious courage of facing the banality of getting up every day, doing the same thing, day after day, for the simplisme of providing food for the table of our children, the warmth of a mother’s love, or the security blanket of a father’s vigilance.

They existed and exist today—people scraping-out as best they can, doing whatever it is they do, hoping (and many praying) that the world will exist tomorrow, reasonably unchanged, so they can continue to live their ordinary lives.  The textbooks or historical record cannot document the lives of every human being who ever lived, yet it is the 300 Pound Gorilla in the room—the subtext of history—that while we hear about the grand plans, schemes and Holocausts caused by the ones who are documented in history, the people who are left undocumented are no less worthy or important… because they’re so anonymous.

Also among the hordes of the undocumented there existed good and bad ones, people of character, courage, and honesty, alongside their boorish, unromantic, thieving fellows.

We have no sense of that in distilled histories, the textbooks that have replaced the detailed accounts of Man, The Human.

The fascination—as well as the despair—of the historian, as he looks back upon Isaiah’s Jewry, upon Plato’s Athens, or upon Rome of the Antonines, is the hope of discovering and laying bare the “substratum of right-thinking and well-doing” which he knows must have existed somewhere in those societies because no kind of collective life can possibly go on without it. He finds tantalizing intimations of it here and there in many places, as in the Greek Anthology, in the scrapbook of Aulus Gellius, in the poems of Ausonius, and in the brief and touching tribute, “Bene merenti”, bestowed upon the unknown occupants of Roman tombs. But these are vague and fragmentary; they lead him nowhere in his search for some kind of measure on this substratum, but merely testify to what he already knew a priori—that the substratum did somewhere exist. Where it was, how substantial it was, what its power of self-assertion and resistance was-of all this they tell him nothing.

— Nock, Isaiah’s Job

It is easy then to forget they exist… to think only in terms of Paradigm Shifts, Cataclysmic Holocausts, or Election Results.

What is the impact of those major events on Mr. Anonymous? 

It is because of that condition that folks can talk casually of things like Resets, of hastening our demise so we can rebuild it.  We look at the events of the day and think of them as chapters in a textbook, as if it is something that has already happened, rather than remembering that these things will have enormous consequences to the people who live and breathe, who get up everyday to go to work, first kissing their spouses and children as they go off to do their menial tasks, to bring food and shelter to their families each day.

In the long term it will be better, folks will say, or they’ll bring up the cliché of the boiling frogs, suggesting that folks would be better off if they were scalded enough to jump from their hot-water-pot-existences.  And so this merry band of clever revolutionaries, in self-contrived acts of good stewardship, turn up the heat, in hopes of seeing millions of frogs released from the confinement of their hot pots, able to live lives of free men again… blinding themselves, of course, to the consequences of their resets and grand Ideas… that millions of those frogs will simply boil, go through life with the scars of third-degree burns, and it will bring about misery, death, and sorrow to millions.

No single individual was the hero of the movement that swallowed up these lives.  The Idea was its hero.  It was, as a historian of the revolt has called it, “a daydream of desperate romantics.” It had its theorists and thinkers, men of intellect, sincere and earnest, who loved humanity.  It also had its tools, the little men whom misfortune or despair or the anger, degradation and hopelessness of poverty made susceptible to the Idea until they became possessed by it and were driven to act.  These became the assassins.  Between the two groups there was no contact.  The thinkers in press and pamphlet constructed marvelous paper models of the Anarchist millennium; poured out tirades of hate and invective upon the ruling class and its despised ally, the bourgeoisie; issued trumpeted calls for action, for a “propaganda of the deed” to accomplish the enemy’s overthrow.  Whom were they calling?  What deed were they asking or?  They did not say precisely.  Unknown to them, down in the lower depths of society lonely men were listening.  They heard the echoes of the tirades and the trumpets and caught a glimpse of a shining millennium that promised a life without hunger and without a boss.  Suddenly one of them, with a sense of injury or a sense of a mission, would rise up, go out and kill—and sacrifice his own life on the altar of the Idea.

—Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower

But it worked out so much better in the end! they’ll say to themselves, seeing the mass of misery as something that wasn’t human, or wasn’t miserable.  It is, regardless of which political sphere is pulling the strings, the psychopathic repeat of any means justifies the end we desire.

Quit it.  We’re not lab rats.  We’re not $30 a day extras in the backdrop of our miniseries, who have no lines, no reactions, and no lives.

From Albert Jay Nock’s Journal (1930):

Nothing can be done about the liquor problem, the farm problem, problems of public ownership, and the other social problems that afflict us. I say, nothing can be done; that is, nothing except the one thing that will never be acknowledged as necessary, the self-imposed discipline of a whole people in acquiring a brand-new ethos. We have been trying to live by mechanics alone, the mechanics of pedagogy, of politics, of industry and commerce; and when we find it cannot be done and that we are making a mess of it, instead of experiencing a change of heart, we bend our wits to devise a change in mechanics, and then another change, and then another… (The) clear insistent testimony that a nation’s life consists not in the abundance of the things that it possesses; that it is the spirit and manners of a people, and not the bewildering multiplicity of its social mechanisms, that determines the quality of its civilization.

* * *

Folks just want to be left alone they’ll say, and we’re going to force changes that will restore their ability to be left alone, they’ll continue.  This is a grave error, one of the failures of anonymous, common touch-less intellectual study.  It misses the point thoroughly.  People do not want to be left alone.  We never have and never will.  We want to feel important, in whatever way we define that.  We want the power to tell others what to do, or have a chance to be respected by others, though acts of greatness, or acknowledged as being something above the mediocre.  It is why we developed the ability to speak and to communicate.  A species that developed sophisticated methods of communing and communicating with others is not a species that wants to be “left alone.”

People want to be led or be leaders, in our various castes, tribes or neighborhoods.  They want to be rich (however that is defined), and rise above their circumstance, or want their children to rise above and be recognized.  We’re a pack species, not lone wolves.  And with pack animals, with animal groups who form social networks, there will always be leaders and followers, good or evil, and noble or gullible. They want their neighborhood, tribe, village, city, or country to be First Round Draft picks, first to the table for the hot entrées.

There are modern, pseudo-intellectuals who pride themselves on being able to detail the lives of Machiavelli, Rousseau, Roosevelt, Edison, or Ford.  They focus their energy on understanding the documented-men whose actions were so remarkable that they have sub-chapters of our miniseries-of-man devoted to them.  Those who know of them think themselves quite clever and educated, knowing who all the great leaders and creators were, quick to add their Jeopardy-style factoids to any discussion, correcting errors of omission, dates, or historical events for which they played a part.

They have learned nothing.  Their educations, as they are, have taught them nothing about who man is, only who the Star Search winners of history have been.  They are not the people who enable us to carry on, to remake societies, or to abide by and create social compacts.  Those carriers of all things good and noble are anonymous faces of history, the undocumented, and those for which we have no census.  I’m not suggesting that a true intellectual, the one who really is about finding truths, can skip over the Star Search winners, but it doesn’t end there.  That’s only the beginning of finding truth.

The ordinary man existed and exists today, but they will, as they have always been, be ignored.  Their role in shaping history is thought not to be, simply because there are no chapter headings with their names on it.  That is what makes intellectual pursuits so challenging and so interesting, because so much of what really mattered, and what really happened, is left undocumented, and we have to fill in those chapters ourselves. 

What do we mean by the masses, and what by the Remnant? Albert Jay Nock asks in his essay, Isaiah’s Job:

As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, labouring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.

It is the Remnant that carries the baton, differentiated from everyone else (as Nock describes) by quality, rather than numbers or circumstance.  And as Nock further detailed in his essay, we have no idea how many there were, how they accomplished what they did with any certainty, but those of us who spend time looking at the great Gantt Chart of man’s existence know that they had to be there. 

They’re the ones who taught their children to say please and thank you.  They’re the ones who made up the fairy tales to soothe a child’s nightmare to help a child transition from awake to sleep.  They’re the ones who showed up for the barn raisings, carried fire buckets to a neighbor’s barn fire, blew the horn or beat the drum when the Barbarians were at the gates, and didn’t think twice about leading other men in a charge up a hill, into a stream, or over a barricade to keep the Barbarians at bay. They muddled along, not as individuals, but as members of a kind of collective or secret society, bonded, and well aware of their duties and responsibilities to others, fully recognizing that they were not important as individual, autonomous persons, but only as a member of a greater community of humane-kind.

(It has always been interesting to me that the single letter “E” transforms human to humane.  Would that being humane, and all that it entails, be as simple as adding a letter to our lives.)

Man is not, as a whole, humane, nor could we describe all of man’s existence as human, finding little to distinguish him from beast in the way he behaves and conducts his life.

* * *

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