The policy analysts, Right and Left, are working hard to assign blame for the problems of modern economies and polities. In the United States, they examine taxation and regulation policies of governments from Washington’s administration right to that of Obama. They also examine the strong dislike Americans have for taxes along with the longing they have for the promises of security which can be fulfilled in the short-run only by a government with strong powers of taxation. We argue about social security but few get to the real point — social bonds are formed by our dependencies upon each other and our willingness, even the desire of many, to be dependent upon a central government rather than upon relatives and neighbors speaks of matters deeper than the technical details of financing our elderly years.
Americans, modern men of the West in general, are willfully stupid and ignorant creatures. I’ve spoken of this often, as have the likes of Tocqueville, Hawthorne, Melville, Ray Bradbury, Solzhenitsyn, and Gore Vidal. Seemingly a strange group, especially with Bradbury, an interesting writer and thinker but hardly one at the level of the others in the list. He joins them in his sensitivity to moral issues and his willingness to ask tough questions. Way back in the 1950s, as one example, he was one of a handful greatly worried about the power of television to suck out our minds and souls.
Melville wrote about his fears of a basic defect in the moral character of Americans, one which may now be found around the world. More exactly, Melville first saw a deep flaw in the expressed thoughts of Emerson and Thoreau and then began to fear it was a true sign of a basic American trait. What was this trait? He wrote in his diaries at one time of hearing Emerson speak for the first time and being impressed in some regards but feeling that the sage of Cambridge, if he’d been present at the moment of Creation, would have had some good advice for the Almighty. In the margins of a copy of Emerson’s writings, he was said to have written a plea for God to help the poor man who organized his soul according to these teachings. In the strange and interesting novel, The Confidence Man, he portrayed Emerson as the philosopher who spoke gobbledy-gook, who advocated a genteel sort of self-centeredness that denied true love for the other. Thoreau was portrayed as his practical pupil who put this perverse morality into words that appealed to the many who couldn’t read Emerson. Melville once described Emerson’s teachings as a sort of spiritualized materialism. And he wrote Moby Dick as his awareness of this moral defect in the American mind and soul was growing. That novel, which breaks all the rules taught by advocates of mediocrity, had some interesting scenes such as the brutal behavior of the American whalers who stumbled upon a birthing ground and bloodied the waters killing the mothers and their calves, not only showing an opportunistically murderous streak but also a lack of concern for the future of their own way of making a living. And, of course, there was Captain Ahab. Was he Ralph Waldo Emerson with the courage of his convictions? Was he the ‘mainstream’ American who had the strength to attack a Creation which didn’t meet his standards and the honesty to refuse to willingly accept his status as a creature?
Were all the American war-crimes from the time of the early wars against American Indians acts which ring true to some evil deep inside of us rather than being just temporary aberrations? I’ve written of King Phillip’s War recently (see The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding) and my belief that the crimes committed by the colonists from Europe (the American Indians were far from innocence), and perhaps their prosecution of the war as a whole, came as the colonists — for all the high education of their leaders and scholars — proved incapable of generalizing from their own ways of life to wider human possibilities. They thought the Indians were evil because they resisted becoming a certain type of middle-class, dissenting Englishman.
The Puritan leaders and thinkers feared signs of something I would have considered good — some of the European settlers were adopting some Indian ways. Two peoples (speaking very simplistically) were living in the same region and might have been able to form a new way of life, but the Puritan leaders thought any compromise of their ways of life to be a surrender to Satan and some of the Indian leaders, including King Phillip, saw that a compromise would force the Indians to adopt a more settled way of life. They preferred to die and to lead their followers to death rather than give up that nomadic life.
Modern Americans are much like those Puritan leaders — precocious adolescents. We’ve advanced to a high level of concrete and moralistic ways of thought, but we’ve refused to even see the need and desirability to move on towards adulthood. This is almost certainly the explanation for the phenomena noticed many years ago by some European observer: The United States is the first country to go directly from barbarism to decadence without passing through the state of civilization. Mom and Dad have gone away and the kids have control over the house and the checkbook. Those kids were well-raised and go off to work each day, even with Mom and Dad gone, but they don’t know how to spend their leisure hours in activities which will enrich their human beings. It’s hardly surprising that the thugs down the street have taken over the neighborhood and are grabbing up what hasn’t yet been destroyed or used up in the name of a good time.
This claim isn’t in conflict with the great success of Americans in many realms, nor is it in conflict with the reality of promising American cultures, even hints of a civilization, which showed themselves regularly in the 1800s and less frequently since then. An immature people might be precocious and high-achieving barbarians so long as they are able to inhabit a civilization built and maintained by others. We Americans were, in a deep sense though not a political sense, colonists of Western Civilization as incarnated in the British Isles in recent years. Then, the highly honored idiot-leaders of Europe decided, beginning in the early 1900s, to destroy each other’s countries over differences that could have barely justified an old-fashioned, pre-modern duel between warlords and a few thousand of their mercenaries. Since then, the Europeans and Americans have become parasites of a sort, drawing down the bank-accounts left us by centuries of thinkers and doers.
In any case, our problems are deeper than even the inability of the bankers and corporate executives and politicians of the West to make money any way other than selling productive assets overseas. Our basic problems reach down into our very souls and minds, into our most fundamental relationships to God and Creation and man. Those basic problems are the cause of, the lack of intelligence and lack of moral integrity that lies behind the American belief that we can make our livings by selling to each other goods made overseas and serving each other steaks and microbrews. Those basic problems help to explain the American belief we bankrupt citizens can somehow get together to pay each other’s mortgages — with Washington and Wall Street taking a cut in the process.
Many are the classical liberals and libertarians who seem to think that we can solve our problems by getting the government off our back and getting back to work, unlikely as it is that Washington or Boston/Albany/Sacramento/… will shrink to more appropriate sizes. The problem is that, as I’ve discussed in a few entries, the human mind which is so important to our ability to function in a complex civilization has developed along with that civilization. If that civilization has decayed, or has never taken root in the case of the United States, that tells us that few are those who have minds well-formed enough to really understand themselves as individuals living in complex societies embedded in complex political structures embedded in a much more complex civilization. Few can even understand such abstract concepts as property rights or even rights over their own persons. It takes many generations to build a civilization that can be destroyed in a single generation, but that destruction reaches down into the minds and souls of the resulting barbarian children. Such barbaric children are incapable of understanding the meaning of the ruins they inhabit and can’t see those ruins as more than a source for materials to build their shacks or their war-machines.
I’ve written of the contingent nature of the human mind, that is the aspects of a human being that work with abstractions — see Preliminary Thoughts on the Evolution of the Human Mind. Simplistically, the human mind has evolved over eons at the species level though it doesn’t seem to have shown itself until circa 600BC when Homer and the succeeding lyric poets had made philosophy and mathematics possible, when some unknown Israelites put together the complex mosaic known as the Books of Moses, when some unknown Vedic geniuses created Hinduism. No matter how poor or rich the social environment, the individual mind must develop over a lifetime. Clearly, there are going to be complications as a result of intermediary relationships and entities such as large-scale civilizations and smaller-scale societies, including towns and church communities and extended families. It took centuries, and a lot of hard work on the part of butchers and bakers and poetry-makers, to build Western civilization with its unique, and now gone-away, inclination to struggle to understand God’s Creation. In the case of the most recent cycle of Western Civilization, it has taken about five centuries of growth and then decay in literacy and reasoning skills to bring us to a sad point — see Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence for a powerful narration of this most recent major period in the West. Notice that there is possibility of separating mind and external aspects of civilization in the West.
We aren’t those Glasgow Scots of the mid-1700s who produced the economic miracles which so fascinated Adam Smith. Those Scots had imperfect but strong moral and social structures. We should be careful in applying Adam Smith’s thought to modern Americans. It was those structures which made possible Smith’s free-market. Those Scotsmen lived in a society that demanded certain types of behavior from its merchants and professionals. Whatever one thinks of the specifics of that morality, it provided a good framework for freedom in the marketplace, that is, one merchant could trust another if only because he knew the price the other would pay for behavior seen as wrongful.
Imperfect as he was, western man was moving in the right direction. That Glasgow Scot of Adam Smith’s day was a hint of greater possibilities. Then, perhaps because of his very success, Western man was diverted by a struggle for forms of material prosperity not fit for human beings — we sought prosperity for its own sake and not for the sake of what it makes possible for us and our children. Having lost his bearings, Western man, in his political collectives, has become a murderous and treacherous beast indeed.
In any case, we are in the presence of that famous cliche, a two-sided coin. On one side, we find my claim that our main problem is more profound than the problems discussed on so many websites and on all the cable news channels. In future generations, those lesser problems will likely be seen as symptoms of the more profound breakdown of Western Civilization. One way of seeing the nature of this breakdown is to simply ask: What understanding do men of the West now have of Creation? Any answer would be an incoherent mixture of contradictory elements. We don’t exist to advance towards heaven, at least not as the West as a whole. We move as a herd of anthropoid creatures, but we don’t really move with a common purpose beyond the satisfication of needs and desires which are unnecessary and sometimes dehumanizing.
On the other side of the coin is the open possibilities of building a new phase of Western Civilization. If the people of the West prove not to be interested, even if they do show themselves up to the task, those who can produce a greater understanding of Creation and of man’s place in it can teach the men of the recovering civilizations of the East, and also teach men in regions where new civilizations might arise. In any case, this work of understanding Creation can be quite demanding but also great fun much of the time. Always demanding and sometimes fun. Even when I struggle, doing odd jobs sometimes, to get a pittance to pay my small bills, I’d rather be doing what I’m doing than what the great predators of the decaying West are doing. And what I’m doing right now is contemplating what I’ve written and wondering how much of the analysis can be enriched but also made more rigorous by applying the understandings of time and space and matter which come from modern physics and mathematics. For example, is there a better way, in terms drawn from modern geometry or tensor calculus, to speak of the multiple levels of development of the human mind: species and civilizational and individual?