Doing the Cave Man Stomp
Watching George Bush’s acceptance speech at the convention was a revelation. Like Kerry’s speech, it could reach across boundaries and appeal even to those who would never see the world his way - in this case people like me. In the moment when W. was saying “Whatever it takes”, I understood his appeal.
Translating that gut recognition into words has not been easy. This guy is in tune with something deep in the human spirit. “Whatever it takes,” our side will win. We will not be pushed around. We are in a clash of civilizations, and ours will emerge on top. In a rhetoric class, I once heard this classified as pugilism, but that is too small and too superior. This is the language of the street brawl, and everyone feels it.
There are, of course, a few problems with it. One is that the street brawl has long since ceased to be relevant. We got the H-bomb, and there is no "up" to escalate to from there. Escalating further only takes us down, to use an image so post-Newtonian that you wonder if even Lewis Carroll could do it justice. Bush doesn’t care how absurd this attitude has become. The American military doesn’t care. (For that I suppose we should be profoundly grateful, since these people have been dragged kicking and screaming into accepting African-Americans and then Female-Americans, and all the while have never seen their sense of order so upset that they felt they must take control of the government and destroy the Constitution to save it).
By sheer force of will, these people will define the problem as “them” and their man in the White House will dominate “them”. Like America’s 40 year old War on Drugs, it is so profoundly misguided that it is hard to know where to start on helping the warriors to see reality. (I am reminded of the “de-programmers” who used to kidnap and confront Moonies and Hari Krishnas.) When Bush says, “whatever it takes,” he means, as long as it takes firepower and smart bombs and the ability to destroy and dominate. He also means, though he would deny it even to itself, torture and genocide. In the end, if “they” insist on continuing to fight us and will not go live in squalor on their reservation, we will do whatever it takes.
Which brings us to the next problem with Bush’s seductive bellicosity. It is ultimately a phony. The spirit of domination is willing to use all the pious phrases to appeal to those not sufficiently impressed by the spirit itself. It is willing to claim that it makes the tough decision to overthrow a madman because the workers cleaning up Ground Zero begged it to. By scaring us with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein (who blur together into The Madman in their minds and in the streetfight part of ours) the Tough Guys want to convince us that only the most ruthless will survive. But the animal cunning that demands to win by any means necessary is really demanding dominance for its own sake. It is not sadistic, in the sense of enjoying the pain its dominance can bring, but is equally happy with triumph by subterfuge and triumph by battering into submission.
The real revelation to me is to see how the hypocrisy works. I was having trouble understanding how the rulers of this bunch could soldier on in the face of bankrupt ideology. Like the Soviet Union, I was thinking this charade would eventually collapse under the Red Face test. How can they go on asserting their veneer of civilized propriety, when their true goal is to pamper the plutocracy? Bush made all plain - they are themselves in the grip of the illusion.
They do not have to admit to themselves that what they are really about is accumulation and privilege. It is not too difficult to believe that Accumulation, by producing what people want with the greatest efficiency of resource use, serves the interest of society as a whole. It is no great challenge to believe that privilege is deserved by those of greatest wisdom and Will. These insights are apparent enough to preserve themselves in the face of a contrary idealism, even when that idealism is an internal voice protesting against the use of lies to preserve power. But in case the appearance of personal Wisdom is not sufficient to shore up resolve against the Chattering Classes, it is also preserved by the intellectual firepower of neo-Conservatism. That movement finds itself seeing through the naivete of phony unselfishness and the self-deception of those who deny the obvious truth that only the gifted few are fit to rule.
This trick by the spirit of domination is so brilliant, it is worthy of the mole in LeCarre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The mole intentionally gave his adversaries reasons to hate him, at best petty personal reasons, so that their suspicions would be diverted into conviction of their own guilt. To preserve the all-important Will in the face of doubts, the ideology of Noble Elitism casts the believer’s own troubling sense of integrity as itself a pawn of some other demon, be it Envy or Fastidiousness.
The cunning of George W. Bush is there for all to see. What he really believes in is the validity of Will. Whatever it takes. But he has been taught all his life that Will must tell itself it is serving some higher good, so that it can be preserved against the onslaughts of baser motivations, of accusations and nagging by the petty and the inhibited. These are the lessons of omission - the lessons of never admitting either one’s own true motivations or the possibility that failure could be due to anything except lack of resolve.
But let’s be honest. Our hearts vibrate to that iron string. We would rather identify with the winners than with the losers. We would rather see ourselves as potentially rich than potentially poor. What Kerry has to offer is perspective, and the humility of striving to be on the side of God. Those have a very different kind of appeal. You could feel the cleansing breath of relief when Bush mocked Kerry’s declaration that the matter of Iraq is complicated. Yeah, none of this complication stuff. We are going to win, or go down trying. Nobody stands up to us and gets away with it. We know whose side we are on.
This contest is primal. It is not a streetfight, but it is as deep as those moments when the fates of marriages and families are decided. This is Andrew Jackson against Woodrow Wilson. Jackson, as forceful a war hero as America has ever elected, established the spoils system, that took more than fifty years to get rid of. He was not bothered by self-doubt, and, by God, he and his friends had won! Wilson stood up for the League of Nations, which failed because practical men would not trust it, and perhaps because he did not engage powerful rivals like Henry Cabot Lodge in dialog, and give them a seat at the table when the decisions were being made.
It is easy to mock Wilson, as Keynes did. “The theologian” he called him. But his vision, derived from the realist philosopher George Santayana, is the voice of hope in the modern world. The reason this election is not a streetfight is that civilization in its broad sweep has grown away from primitive power plays, and will in the long run follow the humble vision of a world of balanced power and distributed responsibility, and grow along its capable structures. The neo-Cons, despite declarations to the contrary by such “realists” as Charles Krauthammer and Richard Perle, have adopted the Wilsonian ideals of Self-Determination and Collective Security as both the goals and the most effective means for modern power systems.
But the example of Wilson, readily recognized as the type for Kerry, makes a person long for the few leaders who could unite vision with decisiveness. For a Lincoln, who could measure out the quantities of blood and wrath needed to hold together the world’s fragile hope of democracy; who could look deeply enough into the hearts of men to see their better angels amid the darkness of self-interest and the chaos of struggling for domination; and who could hold out a hand of forgiveness to the defeated South. For a Truman, who could follow through on the wartime vision of setting up a more durable peace, who could respond to the ruthless threat of Stalinism with the complicated strategy of containment, and who could pass up a no-win battle on the simple principle that it was folly to get into a land war in Asia.
But come to think of it, maybe those qualities are brought to the fore by their times. Perhaps we should be thankful to be in times when we don’t have to look so deep. Perhaps today the choice must inevitably be between the muscular obsessiveness of a Thatcher and the self-deceptive idealism of a Blair. Perhaps pop culture democracy implies that all sides must be cunning, and those who know more than Fox News wants us to will simply have to decide which pretense of a strategic vision seems most likely to get us where we want to go.
Yet I am not convinced. Not only do I think it is a matter of integrity to stand on the side of those ideals, but I also think that these are perilous times still. We stand at the balance point between population pressure and environmental capacity. We all have to grapple with the spiritual implications of the vastness of poverty and misery in the world, not least because it is in our capacity to really lift up the masses of the poor. And we have to choose whether privilege will extend to making the fortunate into post-Human UberMen using biotechnology, and in general whether technology will enslave us with its false promise of superiority, or whether it will become a servant of our Higher Power.
Translating that gut recognition into words has not been easy. This guy is in tune with something deep in the human spirit. “Whatever it takes,” our side will win. We will not be pushed around. We are in a clash of civilizations, and ours will emerge on top. In a rhetoric class, I once heard this classified as pugilism, but that is too small and too superior. This is the language of the street brawl, and everyone feels it.
There are, of course, a few problems with it. One is that the street brawl has long since ceased to be relevant. We got the H-bomb, and there is no "up" to escalate to from there. Escalating further only takes us down, to use an image so post-Newtonian that you wonder if even Lewis Carroll could do it justice. Bush doesn’t care how absurd this attitude has become. The American military doesn’t care. (For that I suppose we should be profoundly grateful, since these people have been dragged kicking and screaming into accepting African-Americans and then Female-Americans, and all the while have never seen their sense of order so upset that they felt they must take control of the government and destroy the Constitution to save it).
By sheer force of will, these people will define the problem as “them” and their man in the White House will dominate “them”. Like America’s 40 year old War on Drugs, it is so profoundly misguided that it is hard to know where to start on helping the warriors to see reality. (I am reminded of the “de-programmers” who used to kidnap and confront Moonies and Hari Krishnas.) When Bush says, “whatever it takes,” he means, as long as it takes firepower and smart bombs and the ability to destroy and dominate. He also means, though he would deny it even to itself, torture and genocide. In the end, if “they” insist on continuing to fight us and will not go live in squalor on their reservation, we will do whatever it takes.
Which brings us to the next problem with Bush’s seductive bellicosity. It is ultimately a phony. The spirit of domination is willing to use all the pious phrases to appeal to those not sufficiently impressed by the spirit itself. It is willing to claim that it makes the tough decision to overthrow a madman because the workers cleaning up Ground Zero begged it to. By scaring us with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein (who blur together into The Madman in their minds and in the streetfight part of ours) the Tough Guys want to convince us that only the most ruthless will survive. But the animal cunning that demands to win by any means necessary is really demanding dominance for its own sake. It is not sadistic, in the sense of enjoying the pain its dominance can bring, but is equally happy with triumph by subterfuge and triumph by battering into submission.
The real revelation to me is to see how the hypocrisy works. I was having trouble understanding how the rulers of this bunch could soldier on in the face of bankrupt ideology. Like the Soviet Union, I was thinking this charade would eventually collapse under the Red Face test. How can they go on asserting their veneer of civilized propriety, when their true goal is to pamper the plutocracy? Bush made all plain - they are themselves in the grip of the illusion.
They do not have to admit to themselves that what they are really about is accumulation and privilege. It is not too difficult to believe that Accumulation, by producing what people want with the greatest efficiency of resource use, serves the interest of society as a whole. It is no great challenge to believe that privilege is deserved by those of greatest wisdom and Will. These insights are apparent enough to preserve themselves in the face of a contrary idealism, even when that idealism is an internal voice protesting against the use of lies to preserve power. But in case the appearance of personal Wisdom is not sufficient to shore up resolve against the Chattering Classes, it is also preserved by the intellectual firepower of neo-Conservatism. That movement finds itself seeing through the naivete of phony unselfishness and the self-deception of those who deny the obvious truth that only the gifted few are fit to rule.
This trick by the spirit of domination is so brilliant, it is worthy of the mole in LeCarre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The mole intentionally gave his adversaries reasons to hate him, at best petty personal reasons, so that their suspicions would be diverted into conviction of their own guilt. To preserve the all-important Will in the face of doubts, the ideology of Noble Elitism casts the believer’s own troubling sense of integrity as itself a pawn of some other demon, be it Envy or Fastidiousness.
The cunning of George W. Bush is there for all to see. What he really believes in is the validity of Will. Whatever it takes. But he has been taught all his life that Will must tell itself it is serving some higher good, so that it can be preserved against the onslaughts of baser motivations, of accusations and nagging by the petty and the inhibited. These are the lessons of omission - the lessons of never admitting either one’s own true motivations or the possibility that failure could be due to anything except lack of resolve.
But let’s be honest. Our hearts vibrate to that iron string. We would rather identify with the winners than with the losers. We would rather see ourselves as potentially rich than potentially poor. What Kerry has to offer is perspective, and the humility of striving to be on the side of God. Those have a very different kind of appeal. You could feel the cleansing breath of relief when Bush mocked Kerry’s declaration that the matter of Iraq is complicated. Yeah, none of this complication stuff. We are going to win, or go down trying. Nobody stands up to us and gets away with it. We know whose side we are on.
This contest is primal. It is not a streetfight, but it is as deep as those moments when the fates of marriages and families are decided. This is Andrew Jackson against Woodrow Wilson. Jackson, as forceful a war hero as America has ever elected, established the spoils system, that took more than fifty years to get rid of. He was not bothered by self-doubt, and, by God, he and his friends had won! Wilson stood up for the League of Nations, which failed because practical men would not trust it, and perhaps because he did not engage powerful rivals like Henry Cabot Lodge in dialog, and give them a seat at the table when the decisions were being made.
It is easy to mock Wilson, as Keynes did. “The theologian” he called him. But his vision, derived from the realist philosopher George Santayana, is the voice of hope in the modern world. The reason this election is not a streetfight is that civilization in its broad sweep has grown away from primitive power plays, and will in the long run follow the humble vision of a world of balanced power and distributed responsibility, and grow along its capable structures. The neo-Cons, despite declarations to the contrary by such “realists” as Charles Krauthammer and Richard Perle, have adopted the Wilsonian ideals of Self-Determination and Collective Security as both the goals and the most effective means for modern power systems.
But the example of Wilson, readily recognized as the type for Kerry, makes a person long for the few leaders who could unite vision with decisiveness. For a Lincoln, who could measure out the quantities of blood and wrath needed to hold together the world’s fragile hope of democracy; who could look deeply enough into the hearts of men to see their better angels amid the darkness of self-interest and the chaos of struggling for domination; and who could hold out a hand of forgiveness to the defeated South. For a Truman, who could follow through on the wartime vision of setting up a more durable peace, who could respond to the ruthless threat of Stalinism with the complicated strategy of containment, and who could pass up a no-win battle on the simple principle that it was folly to get into a land war in Asia.
But come to think of it, maybe those qualities are brought to the fore by their times. Perhaps we should be thankful to be in times when we don’t have to look so deep. Perhaps today the choice must inevitably be between the muscular obsessiveness of a Thatcher and the self-deceptive idealism of a Blair. Perhaps pop culture democracy implies that all sides must be cunning, and those who know more than Fox News wants us to will simply have to decide which pretense of a strategic vision seems most likely to get us where we want to go.
Yet I am not convinced. Not only do I think it is a matter of integrity to stand on the side of those ideals, but I also think that these are perilous times still. We stand at the balance point between population pressure and environmental capacity. We all have to grapple with the spiritual implications of the vastness of poverty and misery in the world, not least because it is in our capacity to really lift up the masses of the poor. And we have to choose whether privilege will extend to making the fortunate into post-Human UberMen using biotechnology, and in general whether technology will enslave us with its false promise of superiority, or whether it will become a servant of our Higher Power.
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