America's Ancient Madness

NOTE: Ancient madness. Which is to say, ancient by American standards. Meaning at least as old as our Constitution and Revolution. And since there are those who, not without reason, hold that the precepts underlying both Revolution and Constitution are every bit as old as the Universe, or older than Time, or even as old as God Himself - why, who's to say that these precepts' accompanying vices, or downsides, aren't equally ancient?

And no, it's not just American racism that's being implied in the title. Though that may in fact be the one most telling symptom of a far more complicated Disease. What I'd like you to consider for a moment is a certain strand, or tradition, or current within our American political culture. One that's well over 200 years old, but by no means unrespected even today. A tradition perhaps best articulated in the Founders' Era by Thomas Jefferson; and in the pre-Civil War decades by "Manifest Destiny" Democrats like Thomas Hart Benton, or Lewis Cass, or Caleb Cushing. And yet not without its far subtler exponents in our own times (most of them, I suspect, largely unwitting of the fact, or at least unwilling to connect the dots in their own thought-processes).

I mean the tendency among some of our intellectual leaders, both then and now, to default to - to fall back on - an unofficial, wholly unsystematic, yet highly practical scheme of racial/cultural hierarchy. One that has, on the one hand, tended to "superhumanize" Imperially-minded mainland Chinese, particularly of the official and wealthier classes. Even as it has tended to "subhumanize" poor or disadvantaged Americans of African and Latin American descent. But more on that - especially the Sino-American Connection - in an upcoming post.

Right now, what most fascinates me is how those same eras - e.g., 1820-1860 - in which large segments of America tended to think in terms of (1) racial hierarchy, were also periods of (2) extreme political polarization, (3) "Manifest Destiny" kinds of expansionism, and (4) the wildest optimism concerning our trade, cultural and other ties with Imperial China (almost as if we couldn't get far enough from our European past except by getting as close as possible to our Chinese future). And what I keep seeing - but maybe I'm looking too long, and getting enthralled, mesmerized? etc - is a Thread of Madness running through all four patterns. The sort of madness that may still be with us, not merely in vestiges, but in the form of a hearty, robust, flourishing life - of an Idea - such as we haven't seen in America for over a century. Or possibly even since those glorious pre-Civil War decades.

Picture a kind of collective insanity. Picture the kind of mania in which you and I are so violently possessed, as it were, by the rightness of our own positions - say, of racial/cultural superiority, or of China-worship, or rabidly ultrapartisan dogmatism, or the Messianic/apocalyptic nature and mission of our exceptionalist country - that it's getting harder and harder for me to see the humanity of, e.g., you, because your positions happen to be different from mine. Even slightly different. Yes, even though you may be living right next door, or down the block from me. And despite the fact that we both may be threatened more or less equally by, let's say, the same public health crisis. A crisis that, whatever its degree of real seriousness or inflatedness, is in its effects no respecter of the political persuasions of either of us. Imagine, then, a kind of political madness that denies, or overlooks, or makes light of, or pretends not to see, the common interest, and by implication the common humanity, of people living closely together in a particular place. Usually for the sake of some fierce ideological preconviction: some preconceived or pre-judged ideology that, whether it intends the result or not, is in fact driving the residents of that place ever farther apart. And then, predictably enough, bringing them to blows.

My public-health case is of course just one example; our mutual madness may have any number of contexts and pretexts. It may lie in our stubborn attachment-to-division-and-hostility in the face of a common environmental threat - say, an approaching wildfire. Or a common security threat, like a jihadically-inspired self-detonation right in our own downtown. But where I see it best illustrated today is in our present lines of confrontation over the question of degrees of appropriate police force. A sort of confrontation that, pressed too far to its logical extremes, bids to make many of our urban neighborhoods both unliveable and uninvestible. For surely that's the problem with all police presence? Too much or too little of it can have more or less the same effect - namely, the creation of one kind or another of urban wilderness. Or wasteland.

Now, based on the present media coverage, you'd swear the gulf between the two sides was a difference of Cosmic Light and Darkness. Yet the fact remains: they are both agreeing to hate, or despise, or at very least misunderstand each other. So that, instead, what I'm most forcefully struck by is what the opposing sides have in common - both those looking to defang and defund the local police, and those who seek to further extend and militarize its powers of repression. Neither do I find this common element confined to just our angriest protesters, or most indignant extremists: if anything, here is a Faith that, for some time now, has been whispering, calling, screaming out to us Americans from every corner of our media, whether of opinion, instruction or entertainment.

I mean this quaint, unflagging old faith we have - at least as old as the presidency of Andrew Jackson - in a certain venerable three American "institutions of sentiment."  Three institutions of which the general assumption seems to be that, having made us Yanks so well-liked and effective overseas during these past 30 years, surely they can only be twice as serviceable in enforcing our domestic peace? Three institutions that, however much or little they've been lionized by previous American generations, in our own time seem well on their way to becoming as American as baseball and apple pie.

I mean, of course, our more-than-ever-popular American faith in (1) violence, (2) arrogance, and (3) confidence in the rightness - if not Divine righteousness - of one's own judgment. Attitudes that, when exhibited separately, can be mild enough in their short-term effects. But when yoked together can have an uncanny way of ministering to long-term political rage: intransigent wrath being apparently a further measure or confirmation of one's righteous confidence. So that, even when you and I find ourselves on diametrically opposite sides of an issue, somehow we're redeemed from real error, from real sin and wickedness by our positions of staunch, "dug-in" irreconcilability. As if, really, nobody could be ALL THAT BAD who holds to such dogged convictions.

And I suppose there is a kind of not wholly incoherent logic to such an argument. After all, whether we happen to be fierce, take-no-prisoners, no-margin-for-error despisers of the local police, or exalters of the same - oh, granted we're none of us anywhere near perfect - but still in all, we can hardly be evil, can we? I mean, look how angry and indignant and OUTRAGED we are. Whereas really nasty evil is cut from a different cloth altogether. Everyone knows, for instance, that Satan (so far as he exists at all) is a languid, leisurely, almost blithely indifferent sort of cultured gentleman. One who instigates evil mostly from sheer boredom, or for the aesthetic diversion of it all. And who, besides, has all the time in the world, and hence NOTHING to get worked up about. Much less irreconcilably embittered. Whereas we time-urgent, impassioned, laborious agitators and "up-in-arms"-ers . . .

So in conclusion, what I marvel most at is the sheer number of actively, angrily decisive people in America - the kind who shape and steer whole policies - who seem to take great pride in their moral entrenchedness and sureness. And even see their positions as a sort of insurance or stopgap against falling into worse forms of badness. Folks who care very intensely about their respective (often extremely violent, when not deadly) Ideals of Law and Order, or of Social Justice. And who may carry this caring to the extreme degree of forgetting about a prior public health threat (still very much with us) - one that they may feel themselves now immune to, but from whose more unpredictable effects they have no sure way of guaranteeing the immunity of their loved ones. A threat that, however much it may have been minimized or exaggerated, under- or over-reacted to, neither side can hope to get a clearer, more empirical and scientific handle on, by facing as mutual antagonists.

What it would seem, then, that neither side cares much about at all is the coronavirus in itself, and how best to overcome it. As distinct from best politically. Rather, more than ever their main concern seems to be with how pandemic can best be used to confirm and illustrate their own Most Favored Narrative. Apparently COVID-19 poses no real threat to us merely as human beings - no danger to what we call our common humanity - but only so far as we provoke or antagonize it, by making the wrong political choices: in this case, the choice being whether to damn to Hell, or to exalt to some kind of municipal heaven, an over-armed, fear-ridden and at times savagely arrogant municipal police force. "Make but the right Choice, my children, and lo, you shall have nothing to fear from the most contagiously human-hating respiratory virus. Your mere courage and conviction will set you free."

Welcome to heaven on earth. AKA Righteous America. And God help us all.