At root our problem is this: it is easy to separate naive idealists from their belief in a perfect America; it is easy to separate people who have been taught submission to authority from the notion that God is even a relevant conjecture; and having done both of these things, it is easy to create an irresistible impulse to join a new tribe, a new group, to obtain a new source of meaning, of belonging, of place, of home.
Until we can offer an alternative other than family, country, God and tradition, people of genuine good will will lose the cultural battle, and that battle in turn fuels what happens in Congress.
Consider that we are borrowing NOW almost half of a very large budget, and that the Baby Boomers have not even hit, and that we just massively expanded entitlements through Obamacare.
How is there even a debate? How is there even a question as to what must be done?
There is a debate because the tribe members are coercive, powerful. They are not happy. This is not a good solution to the problem of generating human community and a sense of personal meaning; but until they have something else, they will cling to it with every ounce of their being.
3 replies on “Politics”
Sorry to come on here and post a link to another blog, but I really thought you might find this essay interesting (perhaps because of the de Sade references 😉 It comes from a Russian who (like rapidly-increasing numbers of Russians and other non-Americans) are beginning to see the American empire and its much-vaunted "Western values" as corrosive, insidious and evil.
http://vladimirsuchan.blogspot.com/2014/09/what-can-dostoevsky-teach-russian.html
I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.
I'll offer a few musings. I am too busy and stressed to do much more.
First off, I can't comment with any authority at all on the events and personalities in Russia and the Ukraine. I am aware in broad stroke fashion what seems to be going on, but to say anything with confidence would be foolish.
It does seem to me that I have seen frequent deep musings on the nature of Russian identity forever. I think, for example, of Solzhenitsyn's famous speech: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/alexandersolzhenitsynharvard.htm
This quote is perhaps apposite:
"A fact which cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger — 60 years for our people and 30 years for the people of Eastern Europe. During that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. Life's complexity and mortal weight have produced stronger, deeper, and more interesting characters than those generally [produced] by standardized Western well-being."
I first read this speech perhaps 15 years ago, and have pondered it. The virtue of suffering is something worth pondering. Certainly, one can accuse many modern Americans and Europeans and Japanese of materialistic superficiality. I don't dispute this.
But I decided, finally, that he was wrong. The Russia I read about today is one filled with gangsterism differing only in extent and precise form from that of the Soviets, and the aristocratic regimes that preceded them. What I read about is a nation of drunks, one where people are commonly run over and left for dead, widespread corruption, increasing autocratic impulses from a government led by a former KGB agent.
There is something in suffering which begs for explanation. These explanations, in turn, can and often do posit the need for such suffering. They elevate it, make it meaningful.
One can develop a simple logical chain: Russians suffer; suffering ennobles them; therefore they are noble.
But I would argue that only suffering TRANSCENDED is ennobling. Until then, it is just garden variety misery. Trust me, I've had plenty of it. Not on the scales which are possible, of course–I have never been in war, or suffered unwanted hunger, or any of dozens of other major horrors that happen to people–but to the point where every cell in my body ached and it was hard to move, hard to think, and impossible to imagine the future.
We need difficulty. Human beings will grow in no other way. But too much breaks people, fragments them, hardens them, makes the experience of God impossible.
And I will address the void, too. It is interesting this popped up, as I had some very interesting experiences last night.
I don't care to share the details, but the net is that the Void is us. We exist in it. We are it. And it has no power over us. You can bring light to the darkness, which is what I did. You can set off flares, great explosions of light.
It would be inappropriate to say you can conquer the void, but you can live with it.
Most Western (and I would count Dostoevsky in this) intellectuals are in mind insipid. Gurdjieff goes on about this at some length as I recall in "Meetings with Great Men." He finds profundity in Gilgamesh, and in my recollection not much in the last 500 years, at least in the public domain.
But I have argued for years that the political system should be viewed as separate from the meaning system. I am head to toe a Liberal in the Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill tradition, without sharing much at all of their views about meaning formation.
A meaning system is one within which truth narratives operate. Political systems operate within it, as do economic systems, which are the four domains constituting culture in my rendering.
Corruption in meaning will lead to corruption in truth, power, and wealth distribution.
That's all I want to say for now. I doubt I addressed this very well, but hopefully it's useful for something.
I will add, I defined love a while back as "seeing someone as they are, and accepting them as who they want to be."
This is not quite what Dostoevsky said, but at the same time, I have no idea what God is. I am obviously no atheist, but one can and should only speak with confidence about what one knows. I look for God, and am seeking to improve the equipment–me–through which God might speak.