Wednesday, March 29, 2006
(3:12 PM) | Brad:
A Lengthy, But Well-Deserved, Block Quote
Curtis White, author of the fairly recent book The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves (which I blogged about here), has somehow channeled a year or so worth of Weblog posts, comments, and errant IMs and emails about political and civil disobedience and resistance into a nine-page article in the April issue of Harpers. It is, of course, not yet online, but I highly recommend you find a print copy somewhere and read it.White is, in my opinion, an uneven thinker, and I'm not going to be so bold and endorse everything he says (though I'm far less ambivalent about this article than I was his book) -- e.g., he alludes to"Christ" in a fairly problematic sense, I think -- but there is enough there to more than balance out the weaker parts. For legal reasons, I cannot reproduce the whole thing, though I have scanned a copy so if you want it let me know, but here's a taste:
According to our leading wise men, the great contemporary moral and political question of the age is: Are we fundamentally a Christian or an Enlightenment culture?...What's doubly strange is that Americans should follow with such fascination and intensity this old dispute over our national character while entirely ignoring the dominant ethos of our culture for the last two hundred years. It should go without saying that it is capitalism that most defines our national character, not Christianity or the Enlightenment....
If we live in a "culture of death," as Pope John Paul II put it, it is a culture that is made possible by the advocates of both Reason and Revelation.... Ours is a culture in which death has taken refuge in a [capitalist] legality that is supported by both reasonable liberals and Christian conservatives.... When Wal-Mart pays its employees impoverishing wages without adequate health or retirement benefits, we justify it out of respect for Wal-Mart's "freedom," its "reasonable" need to make itself "competitive," and because what it does is legal.... Or, perhaps most destructively, the legality of property rights condemns nature itself to annihilation even as we call it the freedom to pursue personal happiness and prosperity through the ownership of private property.... In its most extreme and universal form, our constitutional rights are reducible to the right not to have to love our neighbor. The irony is that the more energetically we pursue our individual, socially isolated right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," the deader the social life and natural worlds become.
And yet for all the inevitability that surrounds the Christian/Enlightenment divide, it should not be so difficult for us to find a third option in our intellectual traditions, even if this tradition seems mostly defeated and lost.... This tradition began in Europe with Romanticism and in America with the Concord Transcendentalists.... [Ralph Waldo] Emerson imagined that the world is held together by a spirit that is not of the Church, and certainly not of Reason, but of a direct experience of the world. Emerson made this Romantic idea American, and he gave it first to Henry David Thoreau....
For Thoreau, when the time was out of joint, when the state had failed its own idea of itself, he felt a necessity to remove himself from it, to refuse its social order, in spite of the personal price he would have to pay for the gesture.... For us, too, things seem out of joint. America is not America.... Thoreau's disobedience is disobedience as refusal. I won't live in your world. I will live as if your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end. I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it....
Thoreau was no Marxist, but he was, like Marx, appalled by what work did to human beings.... Thoreau saw much of the horror of work in the way it incorporated the human into the machine.... Money does not fool Thoreau. Money always wears the face of the boss. It represents the loss of freedom and ultimately the loss of self. One is not human in the unequal world of work for exchange. One is compost in the making....
A national culture based on the universalizing of money and ever more possessions is ultimately, as we say now, "unsustainable." Which is a euphemistic way of saying that it is a culture bent on making provision for its own death.... How right the anti-abortionists are to urge us to "choose life," but how wrong they are to imagine that the culture of death is limited to abortion. Our entire disposition toward one another and toward...the world of nature, is a disposition to death... For Thoreau, the most basic question to ask of a society is, What kind of human beings does it produce?....
I would contend that what is needed is not simply the overthrowing of the present corrupt system... Or, worse than that, endless boring meetings with the next "progressive" Democratic candidate... All you really need to ask the John Kerrys or Howard Deans of the world is where they stand on free-market trade issues. They all ultimately for it.... The rest -- corporatism, militarism, environmental disaster, human disaster -- follows automatically.
So what should we do if we can't look to the self-styled revolutionaries and the establishment progressives? Thoreau's suggestion should still be ours: a return to the fundamentals of being human.... First, a refusal of the world as it stands. Second, a recommitment to fundamentals. What does it means for a human being to need a house? Food? Clothing? Is the prefabricated suburban box a human home?... Third, an understanding that to stand before the question of these fundamentals requires spirit. Thoreau called it awareness. I make my home with this plank. I make my food with this seed. This awareness is really a form of prayer, and our culture is nearly bereft of it. As Simone Weil -- perhaps the strangest and most unlikely Thoreauvian solitary, outcast, and transcendentalist of all—wrote, echoing Thoreau's sense of awareness: "The authentic and pure values—truth, beauty, and goodness -- in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object." Or, more tersely yet: "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."
It is perhaps the saddest, most hopeless thing we can say about our culture that it is a culture of distraction....
If the work we do produces mostly bad, ugly, and destructive things, those things in turn will tend to re-create us in their image. We need to turn to good, useful, and beautiful work....
Reclaiming the right to ask the serious questions is no doubt an invitation to utopian thinking.... But what utopian thinkers have understood best is that if utopia is "nowhere," so is everywhere else. "Reality," whether defined by evangelical Christians or empiricists, is a form of disenchantment. The Real, on the other hand, is up for grabs. What the earliest utopians -- Montiagne, Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella -- understood was that they fought not for a place but for a new set of ideas through which to recognize what would count as Real: Equality, not hierarchical authority. Individual dignity, not slavish subservience. Our pre-eminent problem is that we recognize the Real in what is most deadly: a culture of duty to legalities that are, finally, cruel and destructive. We need to work inventively -- as Christ did, as Thoreau did -- in the spirit of disobedience for the purpose of refusing the social order into which we happen to have been born and putting in its place a culture of life-giving things....
So let the Age turn, as St. Paul promised. We're well done with this world.
