To return to the subject of the fanatic…
What LI finds fascinating is that the role played by the figure of the bigot or the fanatic in the Enlightenment is played, now, by the fascist. The fascist, in one sense, is useful to the degree that he doesn’t exist. In Italy, where there is a real fascist party, or in France, where La Pen plays with the fascist label, the cry of fascist has a different sense than it has in the U.S. The lack of existence, here, opens up a linguistic opportunity – such figures can become pure figures of discourse, filled in by the play of the language. Not that there are no criteria or determinants for creating a “fascist” – myth, in Barthes sense, is never that liberated from the social whole. But the strictures are those that adhere in the composition of a fiction – that is, the fascist can be reconstituted, his elements can be rearranged, new properties can be attributed to him, others can be erased, and so on. It is even possible to create fictions that use him – for instance, the absurd hybrid, Islamofascist, can carry a real weight. This is because nothing like an Islamofascist exists. In a sense, this inaugurates the real work of imperialism – the imperialist only fights those enemies over whom he first asserts the ethnographic primacy that consists in assuming a complete right to the Name. To plant your flag on the other’s name is the essential step in any conquest. The Spanish conquistadors made this a ritual – they would read, in Latin and Spanish, an official document claiming an area before some gathering of uncomprehending natives in order to legalize their theft. An amusing parallel occurrence: Jay Garner, in the first month of the occupation, gathering various American approved Iraqi politicians together and cobbling together some document and then comparing this bogus process to the "Convention of 1787" (see LI post, Tuesday, April 15, 2003).
Amazing how the pattern persists. In Western eyes, renaming officially negates, with all the sad comedy of an obsessive compulsive ritual, the history of the territories the imperialist claims.
Americans are especially good at negating the history of their various enemies, because they have applied the same operation so often and so consistently to their own history. Since our short term memory loss country only retains a few fragments of history at all, we use those fragments to refer, systematically, to other cultures and territories until we think we are talking about them the way they talk about themselves. Read any NYT report from Baghdad over the past two years for a comic instantiation of this national quirk.
…
On the Left, it is fascinating to see the constellation of authoritarian elements that collect around the Republican party transformed into the figure of the fascist by a conventional rhetorical transformation that leaps from analogy to political ontology.
While we think this kind of verbal aggression is intrinsic to the rules of polemic, we also think that these figures are strategically limited. Which gets us back to the career of the fanatic in the Enlightenment, for the fanatic – unlike the fascist – was a successful invention.
Voltaire was the great inventer of the figures of the Enlightenment polemic. In the fight against the power of the aristocracy and the church, his invention of the fanatic – not that he was alone, but he was the most persistant and creative purveyor of the figure -- did incalculable and wonderful damage to the ancien regime. To see how it gained its force, and how it gradually lost it, is a case study in rhetorical/political strategy.
It is also useful since the fanatic (in the Voltarian sense) is obviously on the rise in Red State America.
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
Sunday, December 5, 2004
LI does not own a tv. We haven’t for years. But we keep up as we can – watching the Simpsons in bars, spending Christmas vacation with relatives, soaking up Seinfeld re-runs, and the like.
From this amateur’s glance at tv, we have to rate Fox highly. Surely, the Simpsons is the best thing ever put on FCC regulated airwaves. That Fox news, and the man who owns Fox, strike us as comically ignorant (the former) and like Goldfinger, only with a less elevated sense of morals (the latter), just shows that capitalist enterprises are full of surprising interstices.
So we were cheered that Fox is challenging the FCC about the fine given to the network for showing some digitally obscured strippers being covered with whip cream on some show – Millionaire Bachelor Parties or something. This is one battle we hope Fox wins. We are solidly behind whip cream on strippers – except of course if the strippers have allergic reactions to whip cream, in which case we are sure there are soy milk substitutes that will do.
On the other hand, there is an irritating strain among progressives that is not all for putting whip cream on strippers. Not, that is, unless it is for the sake of art. Ah, art. Robert Scheer ‘s column in the LA Times Sunday castigates the American public for telling Gallup pollsters that they don’t go for sex, strippers, whip cream, or anything that doesn’t have bunny rabbits and suitably neutered angels in it, by a 70% margin. Or at least that is what I make of Scheer’s first graf.
“What does it mean that a whopping 70% of Americans, according to a recent New York Times-CBS News poll, believe that mass culture is responsible for debasing our moral values? It means, if the poll is accurate, that we are a nation of lascivious hypocrites. In fact, the lure of sin, as represented by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, is as tempting to Americans today as apples ever were to Adam and Eve.”
Scheer points out that, despite the Gallup numbers, Americans prefer Millionaire Batchelor Party to Grandmother Quilts For Abstinence, a Hallmark Hour special. This is good news. While I have expressed my skepticism about the cultural attainments of homo americanus, we think that there is something healthy about setting the channel changer to the channel with semi-nudity and heavy breathing after a workday criminally lacking in same. But Scheer doesn’t:
“On rare occasions, the good triumphs. Religious censors, for example, would have killed D.H. Lawrence's exquisite depiction of Lady Chatterley's affair with her gamekeeper if he hadn't been able to find printers who valued cash over the church's approval. Today, however, the admixture of greed and art allows "Desperate Housewives" to cash in on the same sex-with-a-hireling story line, with more cleavage and far less sincerity. Catering to our base desires also finds us eagerly paying for video games in which one can spend the afternoon slaughtering innocents and monsters alike, while our prime-time television is dominated by "Survivor"-style shows whose logical conclusion seems to be Piggy's execution by the mob in "Lord of the Flies."
My my, that Lawrence fella ain’t writing for TV any more? A shame. I remember his I love Lucy episodes. I particularly cherished the episode where Ricky and Fred wrestled naked in the light cast by the fire in the fireplace. Exquisite depiction, I said.
Scheer’s object is to label the evangelical set wrong, and their congregations hypocritical. The evangelicals blame liberals for Desperate Housewives, which is wrong, and the congregations watch it, which is hypocritical. We think Scheer is wrong, both in his strategy and his lack of sympathy with the great unwashed fantasies that float above the rooftops every night. By Scheer’s own reckoning, Desperate Housewives is number one even in Utah. So why should liberals disclaim the credit? Instead, liberals should welcome the evangelical charge. Yes, they should shout, we are responsible for the most charged up, sexiest tv you ever dreamt of. Give us a chance! Emmanuelle – the REAL X files – at 10! Fanny Hill’s College Days – oops, forgot that crucial digital distortion for a second! – at 11! Talk about an issue that we can ride into the White House.
Liberal culture has made sex one of the regular bourgeois pleasures. The evangelicals are right. Let them gnash their teeth in the dark. Two cheers for liberal culture.
ps -- Media week inveigled some truly timeless stats from the FCC, which has been acting like American sexual standards, circa 2004, should please Torquemada or your average Oklahoma senator, circa 1590:
"... For example, the agency on Oct. 12, in proposing fines of nearly $1.2 million against Fox Broadcasting and its affiliates, said it received 159 complaints against Married by America, which featured strippers partly obscured by pixilation.
But when asked, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau said it could find only 90 complaints from 23 individuals. (The smaller total was first reported by Internet-based TV writer Jeff Jarvis; Mediaweek independently obtained the Enforcement Bureau’s calculation.)"
Well, those 23 invididuals are getting Rolls Royce treatment -- unless, of course, one considers that the fines are part of the general sliminess of a corrupt Bush administration that panders to the lowest element in the electorate. But LI considers that only a hypothesis. You understand, we are trying to be fair to the junta that rules us.
However, what about other complaints about all that indecent tv?
"The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, “a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes.”
What Powell did not reveal—apparently because he was unaware—was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group."
Well well. Who would have thought? Of course, Powell does have the courage, the dignity, to ignore complaints. For instance, the complaints that the FCC was rolling over like a pliant oenophile to allow media monopolies in metropolitan media markets, due to the fact that surely, all the Republican members of the FCC will find lucrative posts as members of boards of various of the major benificiaries of that permission.
From this amateur’s glance at tv, we have to rate Fox highly. Surely, the Simpsons is the best thing ever put on FCC regulated airwaves. That Fox news, and the man who owns Fox, strike us as comically ignorant (the former) and like Goldfinger, only with a less elevated sense of morals (the latter), just shows that capitalist enterprises are full of surprising interstices.
So we were cheered that Fox is challenging the FCC about the fine given to the network for showing some digitally obscured strippers being covered with whip cream on some show – Millionaire Bachelor Parties or something. This is one battle we hope Fox wins. We are solidly behind whip cream on strippers – except of course if the strippers have allergic reactions to whip cream, in which case we are sure there are soy milk substitutes that will do.
On the other hand, there is an irritating strain among progressives that is not all for putting whip cream on strippers. Not, that is, unless it is for the sake of art. Ah, art. Robert Scheer ‘s column in the LA Times Sunday castigates the American public for telling Gallup pollsters that they don’t go for sex, strippers, whip cream, or anything that doesn’t have bunny rabbits and suitably neutered angels in it, by a 70% margin. Or at least that is what I make of Scheer’s first graf.
“What does it mean that a whopping 70% of Americans, according to a recent New York Times-CBS News poll, believe that mass culture is responsible for debasing our moral values? It means, if the poll is accurate, that we are a nation of lascivious hypocrites. In fact, the lure of sin, as represented by Hollywood and the entertainment industry, is as tempting to Americans today as apples ever were to Adam and Eve.”
Scheer points out that, despite the Gallup numbers, Americans prefer Millionaire Batchelor Party to Grandmother Quilts For Abstinence, a Hallmark Hour special. This is good news. While I have expressed my skepticism about the cultural attainments of homo americanus, we think that there is something healthy about setting the channel changer to the channel with semi-nudity and heavy breathing after a workday criminally lacking in same. But Scheer doesn’t:
“On rare occasions, the good triumphs. Religious censors, for example, would have killed D.H. Lawrence's exquisite depiction of Lady Chatterley's affair with her gamekeeper if he hadn't been able to find printers who valued cash over the church's approval. Today, however, the admixture of greed and art allows "Desperate Housewives" to cash in on the same sex-with-a-hireling story line, with more cleavage and far less sincerity. Catering to our base desires also finds us eagerly paying for video games in which one can spend the afternoon slaughtering innocents and monsters alike, while our prime-time television is dominated by "Survivor"-style shows whose logical conclusion seems to be Piggy's execution by the mob in "Lord of the Flies."
My my, that Lawrence fella ain’t writing for TV any more? A shame. I remember his I love Lucy episodes. I particularly cherished the episode where Ricky and Fred wrestled naked in the light cast by the fire in the fireplace. Exquisite depiction, I said.
Scheer’s object is to label the evangelical set wrong, and their congregations hypocritical. The evangelicals blame liberals for Desperate Housewives, which is wrong, and the congregations watch it, which is hypocritical. We think Scheer is wrong, both in his strategy and his lack of sympathy with the great unwashed fantasies that float above the rooftops every night. By Scheer’s own reckoning, Desperate Housewives is number one even in Utah. So why should liberals disclaim the credit? Instead, liberals should welcome the evangelical charge. Yes, they should shout, we are responsible for the most charged up, sexiest tv you ever dreamt of. Give us a chance! Emmanuelle – the REAL X files – at 10! Fanny Hill’s College Days – oops, forgot that crucial digital distortion for a second! – at 11! Talk about an issue that we can ride into the White House.
Liberal culture has made sex one of the regular bourgeois pleasures. The evangelicals are right. Let them gnash their teeth in the dark. Two cheers for liberal culture.
ps -- Media week inveigled some truly timeless stats from the FCC, which has been acting like American sexual standards, circa 2004, should please Torquemada or your average Oklahoma senator, circa 1590:
"... For example, the agency on Oct. 12, in proposing fines of nearly $1.2 million against Fox Broadcasting and its affiliates, said it received 159 complaints against Married by America, which featured strippers partly obscured by pixilation.
But when asked, the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau said it could find only 90 complaints from 23 individuals. (The smaller total was first reported by Internet-based TV writer Jeff Jarvis; Mediaweek independently obtained the Enforcement Bureau’s calculation.)"
Well, those 23 invididuals are getting Rolls Royce treatment -- unless, of course, one considers that the fines are part of the general sliminess of a corrupt Bush administration that panders to the lowest element in the electorate. But LI considers that only a hypothesis. You understand, we are trying to be fair to the junta that rules us.
However, what about other complaints about all that indecent tv?
"The number of indecency complaints had soared dramatically to more than 240,000 in the previous year, Powell said. The figure was up from roughly 14,000 in 2002, and from fewer than 350 in each of the two previous years. There was, Powell said, “a dramatic rise in public concern and outrage about what is being broadcast into their homes.”
What Powell did not reveal—apparently because he was unaware—was the source of the complaints. According to a new FCC estimate obtained by Mediaweek, nearly all indecency complaints in 2003—99.8 percent—were filed by the Parents Television Council, an activist group."
Well well. Who would have thought? Of course, Powell does have the courage, the dignity, to ignore complaints. For instance, the complaints that the FCC was rolling over like a pliant oenophile to allow media monopolies in metropolitan media markets, due to the fact that surely, all the Republican members of the FCC will find lucrative posts as members of boards of various of the major benificiaries of that permission.
Saturday, December 4, 2004
According to Charles Beard, George Bancroft was the historian who was to blame for the theory that the U.S. was founded as a particularly religious nation.. Bancroft, who studied under Schleiermacher in Germany in the 1820s, wrote a history of the formation of the U.S. Constitution in his dotage, the 1880s, in which he attributed the outline of it to the busybodyiness of the divine mind. Apparently, the divine mind couldn’t resist sticking its nose into the affairs of a bunch of provincial planters and middlemen in the rum tradde. By the 1880s, such an interpretation was congenial to the respectable classes, and they swallowed it down with the alacrity that their ancestors imbibed the aforesaid rum.. Beard, writing in the 1930s, attributed the Constitution to more mundane forces, i.e. economics. Although Beard is not popular at the moment, his hypothesis seems much more sensible, even if not sufficient.
At about the time Bancroft was injecting a mendacious and nauseating piety in the National story, Josiah Royce was starting his career. Royce is probably the most original religious philosopher ever to be hatched in these states. Unlike the man who had been blinded by the perfumed pettifogeries of romantic Protestantism when a mere pup, Royce had to struggle with tougher philosophical currents – pragmatism, Darwinism and the like – which disinclined him to merely, patriotically, dribble. In his clear eyed sense of the intellectual life of the eighteenth century (and the U.S. was nothing if it wasn’t a quintessential product of that century) what stand outs is the loss of the inner life: In this passage, he compares the century of the philosophes to that of Spinoza:
“When I undertake to describe such a time, 1 therefore feel in its spirit a strong contrast to that curious but profound sort of piety which we were describing in the last lecture in the case of Spinoza. Spinoza, indeed, was in respect of his piety a man of marked limitations. His world bad but one sublime feature in it, one element of religious significance, namely, the perfection of the divine substance. But then this one element was enough, from his point of view, to insure an elevated and untroubled repose of faith and love, which justified us in drawing a parallel between his religious consciousness and that of the author of the "Imitation of Christ." This sort of piety almost disappears from the popular philosophy of the early eighteenth century. What the people of that time want is more light and fewer unproved assumptions. As against the earlier seventeenth-century thinkers, who, as you remember, also abhorred the occult, and trusted in reason, the thinkers of this new age are characterized by the fact that on the whole they have a great and increasing suspicion of even that rigid mathematical method of research itself upon which men like Spinoza bad relied. In other words, whereas the men of the middle of the seventeenth century had trusted to reason Alone, the men of the subsequent period began, first hesitatingly, and then more and more seriously, to distrust even human reason itself. After all, can you spin a world, as Spinoza did, out of a few axioms? Can you permanently revere a divine order that is perhaps the mere creature of the assumptions with which your system happened to start ? The men of the new age are not ready to answer " Yes " to such questions. They must reflect, they must peer into reason itself. They must ask, Whence arise these axioms, how come we by our knowledge, of what account are our mathematical demonstrations, and of what, after all, does our limited human nature permit us to be sure ? Once started upon this career, the thought of the time is driven more and more, as we have already said, to the study of human nature, as opposed to the exclusive study of the physical universe. The whole range of human passion, so far as the eighteenth century knew about it, is criticised, but for a good while in a cautious, analytical, cruelly scrutinizing way, as if it were all something suspicious, misleading, superstitious. The coldness of the seventeenth century is still in the air ; but Spinoza's sense of sublimity is gone.”
From the enlightenment point of view, of course, it all looks quite different. It looks like the re-discovery of happiness – and if sublimity is lost in the exchange, good riddance. Actually, though, sublimity, within the bounds of pleasure, wasn’t so much expelled as given a sort of reservation, composed of artfully arranged grottos and Pirenesi perspectives and, among certain chateaux, Sadean orgies. The eighteenth century made possible the respectable society of the nineteenth centiury. The nineteenth century returned the favor by systematically distoriting, censoring, and being shocked at their forebears.
The discovery of happinesss was cast as a“rediscovery”, given the Enlightenment obsession with the (mostly fictitious) pre-suppositions of the ancients. The Enlightenment thinkers needed this legitimating fiction, this alter image against which they could judge Christianity. This is why the figure of the fanatic was so important for the philosophes. Diderot condensces the Enlightenment thematic to its essential elements when he remarks, ‘however difficult it is to discern the limits that separate the empire of faith from that of reason, the philosopher does not confound the objects; without aspiring to the chimeric honor of conciliating them, as a good citizen, he has for them both attachment and respect. From philosophy to impiety, it is as far as from religion to fanaticism. But from fanaticism to barbarism, there is only a step.”
PS -- We have one more post on the figure of the fanatic in Voltaire, and a letter from our correspondent T. For a fascinating discussion of the migration of the vocabulary of enthusiasm to literary criticism in the 18th century, see this essay by Jon Mee. We can't resist excerpting a paragraph:
"Geoffrey Hartman has traced the origins of modern literary criticism in English to a tradition of "civility" designed as a defense against what he calls "enthusiasm, religious or secular, private or collective" (177). Using Addison and Steele's essays for the Spectator as his primary example, he suggests that "literature" came into being at the turn of the eighteenth century as a category defined against the intemperate ranting and preaching of hacks and evangelists. Hartman's primary concern is to defend the literary essay as such against the incursions of latter-day hacks and evangelists among whom, I fear, he would number myself. For what I do in this essay is to treat Hartman's historical claims about the relationship between enthusiasm and literature seriously and examine their significance for a later period as a form of cultural control. By 1735, the Gentleman's Magazine could publish a definition of enthusiasm in terms of "any exorbitant monstrous Appetite of the human Mind" (Grubstreet Journal 203). The secularization with which Irlam is concerned can be witnessed in such definitions, but it is not a transformation that makes the term safe. Rather, the term retains the association with the vulgar passions of the crowd, and the confusions of appetites with profound feeling. Two years later, the same magazine reported a parliamentary speech confirming that "the lowest Class of People [...] have, generally speaking a turn to Enthusiasm, and so strong is the Influence, such is the force of Delusion, that they can work themselves up to a firm Persuasion and thorough belief that any Mischief they are able to do, is not only lawful but laudable" ("An Account" 458). For the Romantic period, whether in its religious or secular forms, enthusiasm remained dangerously intertwined with the idea of the being transported into the amorphous and unstable hyper-sociability of the crowd."
Embedding 'enthusiasm' in class conflict works, to an extent, for England. But it doesn't for France. What's missing in France are the class "go betweens' -- the dissenting ministers. In the place of England's Richard Prices, in France you get Denis Diderots.
And -- on the topic of using religion to legitimate a configuration of state power -- LI suggests that the reader go to the Constitution site and compare such English declarations as that of Charles II renouncing the intention of prosecuting puritans, or the declaration of the Lords Temporal and Spiritual that defended the accession of William and Mary to the throne of England, and the rejection of James II. If you want to know what a real specific religious reference looks like, look at a phrase like "Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom..."
Jefferson's "nature's God" is, by comparison, a relatively benign gaseous substance, with the same relationship to the Protestant God as Mr. Priestly's recently discovered Oxygen had to Phlogistan.
At about the time Bancroft was injecting a mendacious and nauseating piety in the National story, Josiah Royce was starting his career. Royce is probably the most original religious philosopher ever to be hatched in these states. Unlike the man who had been blinded by the perfumed pettifogeries of romantic Protestantism when a mere pup, Royce had to struggle with tougher philosophical currents – pragmatism, Darwinism and the like – which disinclined him to merely, patriotically, dribble. In his clear eyed sense of the intellectual life of the eighteenth century (and the U.S. was nothing if it wasn’t a quintessential product of that century) what stand outs is the loss of the inner life: In this passage, he compares the century of the philosophes to that of Spinoza:
“When I undertake to describe such a time, 1 therefore feel in its spirit a strong contrast to that curious but profound sort of piety which we were describing in the last lecture in the case of Spinoza. Spinoza, indeed, was in respect of his piety a man of marked limitations. His world bad but one sublime feature in it, one element of religious significance, namely, the perfection of the divine substance. But then this one element was enough, from his point of view, to insure an elevated and untroubled repose of faith and love, which justified us in drawing a parallel between his religious consciousness and that of the author of the "Imitation of Christ." This sort of piety almost disappears from the popular philosophy of the early eighteenth century. What the people of that time want is more light and fewer unproved assumptions. As against the earlier seventeenth-century thinkers, who, as you remember, also abhorred the occult, and trusted in reason, the thinkers of this new age are characterized by the fact that on the whole they have a great and increasing suspicion of even that rigid mathematical method of research itself upon which men like Spinoza bad relied. In other words, whereas the men of the middle of the seventeenth century had trusted to reason Alone, the men of the subsequent period began, first hesitatingly, and then more and more seriously, to distrust even human reason itself. After all, can you spin a world, as Spinoza did, out of a few axioms? Can you permanently revere a divine order that is perhaps the mere creature of the assumptions with which your system happened to start ? The men of the new age are not ready to answer " Yes " to such questions. They must reflect, they must peer into reason itself. They must ask, Whence arise these axioms, how come we by our knowledge, of what account are our mathematical demonstrations, and of what, after all, does our limited human nature permit us to be sure ? Once started upon this career, the thought of the time is driven more and more, as we have already said, to the study of human nature, as opposed to the exclusive study of the physical universe. The whole range of human passion, so far as the eighteenth century knew about it, is criticised, but for a good while in a cautious, analytical, cruelly scrutinizing way, as if it were all something suspicious, misleading, superstitious. The coldness of the seventeenth century is still in the air ; but Spinoza's sense of sublimity is gone.”
From the enlightenment point of view, of course, it all looks quite different. It looks like the re-discovery of happiness – and if sublimity is lost in the exchange, good riddance. Actually, though, sublimity, within the bounds of pleasure, wasn’t so much expelled as given a sort of reservation, composed of artfully arranged grottos and Pirenesi perspectives and, among certain chateaux, Sadean orgies. The eighteenth century made possible the respectable society of the nineteenth centiury. The nineteenth century returned the favor by systematically distoriting, censoring, and being shocked at their forebears.
The discovery of happinesss was cast as a“rediscovery”, given the Enlightenment obsession with the (mostly fictitious) pre-suppositions of the ancients. The Enlightenment thinkers needed this legitimating fiction, this alter image against which they could judge Christianity. This is why the figure of the fanatic was so important for the philosophes. Diderot condensces the Enlightenment thematic to its essential elements when he remarks, ‘however difficult it is to discern the limits that separate the empire of faith from that of reason, the philosopher does not confound the objects; without aspiring to the chimeric honor of conciliating them, as a good citizen, he has for them both attachment and respect. From philosophy to impiety, it is as far as from religion to fanaticism. But from fanaticism to barbarism, there is only a step.”
PS -- We have one more post on the figure of the fanatic in Voltaire, and a letter from our correspondent T. For a fascinating discussion of the migration of the vocabulary of enthusiasm to literary criticism in the 18th century, see this essay by Jon Mee. We can't resist excerpting a paragraph:
"Geoffrey Hartman has traced the origins of modern literary criticism in English to a tradition of "civility" designed as a defense against what he calls "enthusiasm, religious or secular, private or collective" (177). Using Addison and Steele's essays for the Spectator as his primary example, he suggests that "literature" came into being at the turn of the eighteenth century as a category defined against the intemperate ranting and preaching of hacks and evangelists. Hartman's primary concern is to defend the literary essay as such against the incursions of latter-day hacks and evangelists among whom, I fear, he would number myself. For what I do in this essay is to treat Hartman's historical claims about the relationship between enthusiasm and literature seriously and examine their significance for a later period as a form of cultural control. By 1735, the Gentleman's Magazine could publish a definition of enthusiasm in terms of "any exorbitant monstrous Appetite of the human Mind" (Grubstreet Journal 203). The secularization with which Irlam is concerned can be witnessed in such definitions, but it is not a transformation that makes the term safe. Rather, the term retains the association with the vulgar passions of the crowd, and the confusions of appetites with profound feeling. Two years later, the same magazine reported a parliamentary speech confirming that "the lowest Class of People [...] have, generally speaking a turn to Enthusiasm, and so strong is the Influence, such is the force of Delusion, that they can work themselves up to a firm Persuasion and thorough belief that any Mischief they are able to do, is not only lawful but laudable" ("An Account" 458). For the Romantic period, whether in its religious or secular forms, enthusiasm remained dangerously intertwined with the idea of the being transported into the amorphous and unstable hyper-sociability of the crowd."
Embedding 'enthusiasm' in class conflict works, to an extent, for England. But it doesn't for France. What's missing in France are the class "go betweens' -- the dissenting ministers. In the place of England's Richard Prices, in France you get Denis Diderots.
And -- on the topic of using religion to legitimate a configuration of state power -- LI suggests that the reader go to the Constitution site and compare such English declarations as that of Charles II renouncing the intention of prosecuting puritans, or the declaration of the Lords Temporal and Spiritual that defended the accession of William and Mary to the throne of England, and the rejection of James II. If you want to know what a real specific religious reference looks like, look at a phrase like "Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom..."
Jefferson's "nature's God" is, by comparison, a relatively benign gaseous substance, with the same relationship to the Protestant God as Mr. Priestly's recently discovered Oxygen had to Phlogistan.
The Bush era is a strange amalgam of conservative beliefs that have their roots in Latin American juntas rather than British toryism. One of the beliefs that is sadly lacking is the belief in a free market. If the Bush people actually believed that currencies are subject to market pressure, they would be trembling in their beds. Why? Reading the NYT story, today, about the Japanese and Chinese position in American dollars explains why.
Intro grafs:
“As Americans embark on another season of debt-supported holiday spending, they might want to give thanks that Masatsugu Asakawa is still buying in America, too.
Mr. Asakawa, 46, is the top official at the Finance Ministry here responsible for managing the largest portfolio of United States government securities in the world, worth a staggering $720 billion. As the dollar has slumped this fall, many investors have started to worry that Mr. Asakawa and his counterparts elsewhere in Asia will be tempted to pare their holdings, perhaps causing the currency to plunge much further and setting off a round of interest rate increases in the United States that could send the global economy into a tailspin.”
Basically, America has been playing a con game with Japan. There’s a tradition here. Supposedly, in the early nineties, when an investment bank wanted to make a quick killing, it would devise some truly gross financial instrument – some derivative Frankenstein compounded of options on a peso-baht ratio or other equally mad bets – and stuff them down the throats of Japanese bankers. What did Japanese bankers get out of it? They were able to disguise their enormous losses, the result of the collapse of the Japanese bubble, through shifting the figures, by way of options, so that they didn’t appear on the accounting ledgers as such. However, you can only disguise reality for so long.
Con game might not actually capture the flavor of this. I'm reminded of the scene in Goodfellas where the owner of a restaurant goes to see a capo about receiving protection for his place. The owner's idea is that the capo should get a piece of the restaurant -- a tribute, out of respect. The owner takes it -- his men start ripping off the restaurant big time -- the owner can't pay his legitimate bills -- and the wiseguys end up torching the place for the insurance.
That, in abbreviated form, is Bush's fiscal policy.
Perhaps, as we watch the other legacies of WWII being destroyed under Bush – social security, education loans, the whole system of entitlements that have made life better in America for three generations – the irony is that we can afford to do it because of the most lasting WWII legacy – Japan’s semi-colonized status. Even Italy, at the end of the Cold War, experienced a profound shift in its governing structure. But Japan is still ruled by the same old oligarchy that the Americans vetted during the occupation, and that oligarchy has the same principles it did in 1950: please the Americans in order to stay in power.
Supporting the Americans is one thing, but markets are another. There is no way that this is going to continue:
“For all the interest in the other players, currency markets remain focused on Japan, which has aggressively bought dollars, doubling its investment in Treasuries over the last two years. During a 15-month period that ended in March, the Japanese government bought $340 billion of dollar-denominated securities with its yen. The buying spree so stunned speculators that Japan has not had to intervene in the markets since.
But now with Japan's huge stake in the dollar losing value, the question is, What will Tokyo do next?
The problem for Japan is that it is in so deep that to a large degree it is chained to its American debtor.
"Imagine that tomorrow people hear, 'Hey, Japan has decided to divert from U.S. dollars to euros,' " Mr. Asakawa said. "That would create a hugely undesirable impact on the U.S. Treasury market, and we have no intention at all to make an unfortunate impact on the U.S. Treasury market."
This is the kind of situation set up for currency traders to bet against. As the dollar falls and the Bush people pay no attention (military adventurism gets you attention in D.C., not dealing with the government’s debt), the horde of the Nibelungen storesd in Japanese banks will be turning so obviously into fool’s gold that no hocus pocus or chorus of Valkyrie will disguise it.
In this climate, the Bushies want to privatize social security, which could cost, in terms of borrowing to pay out current obligations, as much as the ill fated pill bill – 500 billion?
We’ll see. At least the Bush foreign policy is coherent on both the military and economic front: unmitigated piracy. LI’s suggestion: a truth in flags law that would replace the stars and bars with the skull and crossbones.
PS -- For those interested in things Derridian, LI posted this response to Leiter's attack on Derrida at Butterflies and Wheels.
Intro grafs:
“As Americans embark on another season of debt-supported holiday spending, they might want to give thanks that Masatsugu Asakawa is still buying in America, too.
Mr. Asakawa, 46, is the top official at the Finance Ministry here responsible for managing the largest portfolio of United States government securities in the world, worth a staggering $720 billion. As the dollar has slumped this fall, many investors have started to worry that Mr. Asakawa and his counterparts elsewhere in Asia will be tempted to pare their holdings, perhaps causing the currency to plunge much further and setting off a round of interest rate increases in the United States that could send the global economy into a tailspin.”
Basically, America has been playing a con game with Japan. There’s a tradition here. Supposedly, in the early nineties, when an investment bank wanted to make a quick killing, it would devise some truly gross financial instrument – some derivative Frankenstein compounded of options on a peso-baht ratio or other equally mad bets – and stuff them down the throats of Japanese bankers. What did Japanese bankers get out of it? They were able to disguise their enormous losses, the result of the collapse of the Japanese bubble, through shifting the figures, by way of options, so that they didn’t appear on the accounting ledgers as such. However, you can only disguise reality for so long.
Con game might not actually capture the flavor of this. I'm reminded of the scene in Goodfellas where the owner of a restaurant goes to see a capo about receiving protection for his place. The owner's idea is that the capo should get a piece of the restaurant -- a tribute, out of respect. The owner takes it -- his men start ripping off the restaurant big time -- the owner can't pay his legitimate bills -- and the wiseguys end up torching the place for the insurance.
That, in abbreviated form, is Bush's fiscal policy.
Perhaps, as we watch the other legacies of WWII being destroyed under Bush – social security, education loans, the whole system of entitlements that have made life better in America for three generations – the irony is that we can afford to do it because of the most lasting WWII legacy – Japan’s semi-colonized status. Even Italy, at the end of the Cold War, experienced a profound shift in its governing structure. But Japan is still ruled by the same old oligarchy that the Americans vetted during the occupation, and that oligarchy has the same principles it did in 1950: please the Americans in order to stay in power.
Supporting the Americans is one thing, but markets are another. There is no way that this is going to continue:
“For all the interest in the other players, currency markets remain focused on Japan, which has aggressively bought dollars, doubling its investment in Treasuries over the last two years. During a 15-month period that ended in March, the Japanese government bought $340 billion of dollar-denominated securities with its yen. The buying spree so stunned speculators that Japan has not had to intervene in the markets since.
But now with Japan's huge stake in the dollar losing value, the question is, What will Tokyo do next?
The problem for Japan is that it is in so deep that to a large degree it is chained to its American debtor.
"Imagine that tomorrow people hear, 'Hey, Japan has decided to divert from U.S. dollars to euros,' " Mr. Asakawa said. "That would create a hugely undesirable impact on the U.S. Treasury market, and we have no intention at all to make an unfortunate impact on the U.S. Treasury market."
This is the kind of situation set up for currency traders to bet against. As the dollar falls and the Bush people pay no attention (military adventurism gets you attention in D.C., not dealing with the government’s debt), the horde of the Nibelungen storesd in Japanese banks will be turning so obviously into fool’s gold that no hocus pocus or chorus of Valkyrie will disguise it.
In this climate, the Bushies want to privatize social security, which could cost, in terms of borrowing to pay out current obligations, as much as the ill fated pill bill – 500 billion?
We’ll see. At least the Bush foreign policy is coherent on both the military and economic front: unmitigated piracy. LI’s suggestion: a truth in flags law that would replace the stars and bars with the skull and crossbones.
PS -- For those interested in things Derridian, LI posted this response to Leiter's attack on Derrida at Butterflies and Wheels.
Friday, December 3, 2004
Our friend Paul has been on LI’s back for some time about upgrading this site. Putting in, for instance, the standard roll of links.
We resisted. LI has been around for three years and some fraction. During this time, we have done an admirable amount of linking from our posts. We admire it, at least. Most of that linking, the diligent reader will discover, is not to other blogs. This doesn’t reflect the fact that we don’t go to other blogs – we do. But, in LI’s view, the blogocentric viewpoint of the Web taken by all too many bloggers actually impoverishes the ‘surfin’ experience’. Blogs, journals, pix, stories, texts – there is an incredible diversity out there. The flora and fauna are as outlandish as were the plants and animals of the New World to the first European travelers.
However, it is time to surrender to the debile Zeitgeist. LI is going to be making some changes and trying to become more popular. There is one reason for this: November 2. LI originally wanted this site to be as caviar to hoi polloi – not to everybody’s taste. Snobbishness, for us, is not just an attitude – it’s an aesthetic imperative. But the election has left us with a sense of ulcerated alienation that has made us crave popularity the way a psycho gunman on a tower craves more moving targets.
Beyond the psychopathology, however, LI still aims to serve. So our list of links is not going to include links you probably have. If you are reading this and you don’t go to Crooked Timber, for instance, you should. It is the best blog on the web, in our opinion. Not the best written, or even the most creative, but the most consistently interesting, the one blog that we can think of that can compete with a magazine like Slate. Nor did we include the Online Library at UPenn on our list, since we presume that you know about it. Black Mask, however, which, along with a for profit download part, essentially hijacks texts from around the Net and conveniently puts them into various readable formats, is perhaps less known. We could have linked to our archive of articles at the Austin Chronicle, but that somehow didn’t appeal to us. Does any reader of LI really want MORE Roger G.?
If you have a link you want us to put in, send it to us. Use the comments section, or send it to rgathman@netzero.net.
We resisted. LI has been around for three years and some fraction. During this time, we have done an admirable amount of linking from our posts. We admire it, at least. Most of that linking, the diligent reader will discover, is not to other blogs. This doesn’t reflect the fact that we don’t go to other blogs – we do. But, in LI’s view, the blogocentric viewpoint of the Web taken by all too many bloggers actually impoverishes the ‘surfin’ experience’. Blogs, journals, pix, stories, texts – there is an incredible diversity out there. The flora and fauna are as outlandish as were the plants and animals of the New World to the first European travelers.
However, it is time to surrender to the debile Zeitgeist. LI is going to be making some changes and trying to become more popular. There is one reason for this: November 2. LI originally wanted this site to be as caviar to hoi polloi – not to everybody’s taste. Snobbishness, for us, is not just an attitude – it’s an aesthetic imperative. But the election has left us with a sense of ulcerated alienation that has made us crave popularity the way a psycho gunman on a tower craves more moving targets.
Beyond the psychopathology, however, LI still aims to serve. So our list of links is not going to include links you probably have. If you are reading this and you don’t go to Crooked Timber, for instance, you should. It is the best blog on the web, in our opinion. Not the best written, or even the most creative, but the most consistently interesting, the one blog that we can think of that can compete with a magazine like Slate. Nor did we include the Online Library at UPenn on our list, since we presume that you know about it. Black Mask, however, which, along with a for profit download part, essentially hijacks texts from around the Net and conveniently puts them into various readable formats, is perhaps less known. We could have linked to our archive of articles at the Austin Chronicle, but that somehow didn’t appeal to us. Does any reader of LI really want MORE Roger G.?
If you have a link you want us to put in, send it to us. Use the comments section, or send it to rgathman@netzero.net.
Thursday, December 2, 2004
While idling through the blogs, yesterday, I came upon a rightwing blog that referred (disapprovingly) to a news story from Alabama.
The story goes like this:
“A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."
There were further entertaining touches in the story, including Allen’s suggestion that Tennessee Williams plays be banned and his idea that, since “novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed,” the thing to do would be to “dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them.”
So, I copied the article and pasted it into an email and made a few sarcastic comments and was about to send it off to a friend when I thought – what am I doing?
This is a story of a type that Mencken liked to collect for the Smart Set: cretinous Americana. Both the right and the left, on the web, love to find stories that report some aberrant act or another and pass them around. It is a genre that has, as yet, not found its Barthes.
There are several things that are interesting about this type of story.
1. It aims at a visceral response. My response to it is pre-set: well, here’s another example of what Bush America is about. Actually, I know that if Bush America was really just about bozos like Allen, it would be very easily disposed of. I also know that the sour gastric juices that constitute the Allen Politik do have a use-value for the Politik of Karl Rove. It has use-value in two ways -- first, that it exists pleases many of the Bush constituency -- and that it is put down pleases even more of the Bush constituency. One gains an advantage just by ingeniously depending on one's opponent to do the job of putting down these kinds of efforts.
2. Being visceral, the response blanks out the circumstances. In truth, Allen has proposed other anti-gay legislation, and it has failed – as the story points out. So Allen doesn’t represent the Alabama essence. He does probably represent poor, benighted Cottonville. Allen’s sensual image of burying gay books in a hole is such an obvious substitute for his own ill concealed s/m fantasies that the unconscious, here, is operating carelessly on the surface. He is going down a well travelled route, one that has been trod by many an evangelical preacher before him. It all ends up with some tawdry, blurry snapshots from some tawdry blurry hotel room featuring his naked butt and and somebody else’s. It is all so meaningless. Furthermore, part of me knows this.
3. But it is also all so mean, this sending of stories, broadcasting of stories, commenting on stories. The point of these stories is, in a sense, the opposite of the sociological sample – we know that the story doesn’t really illuminate some normal disposition of affairs, but it does light up our fantasy version of affairs – our fantasy, on the left, that Bush is really like Hitler, or the fantasy on the Right, which makes much greater use of these kinds of stories, that Liberals are really the disciples of the Marquis de Sade. When reality is used specifically to assume a substitute role, we know, we Freudians, that we are in the realm of the fetish. In the realm of the fetish, another logic rules. In this logic, the verbal is subservient to its intensity. You can see this happening in comments sections on certain blogs – the intensity of anger mounts in the counterpointing of comments in a very sexual way. It is a sort of anger jerk off.
What isn’t remarked upon enough is how important the anger jerk off is to our present state of politics. In fact, it is why American politics seems to be in a state of permanent after-burn. Where’s the old Village Voice when you need it? Where’s Norman Mailer? These are the sexual politics we just aren't talking about.
What, the question should be asked, is being substituted for what in the political logic we are tracing? It is not as evident as it first appears. For the desire I have, in the case of Allen, is that Allen’s desire be acknowledged to be the true desire of the Right. In other words, the fantasy, on my part, is that the truth about the Right is the fantasy entertained by the Right, which in turn is denied by the Right. My fantasy is about their fantasy – my desire is that they should show their desire – their differing of that desire – their denial that it is their desire – arouses a response of anger (finding its verbal equivalent in the ‘accusation’). That anger is that my desire to see the Other’s desire is thwarted by the Other – and that thwarting I take to be the strategy by which the Other intends to achieve its real desire. And what is that strategy? Seduction. And who is the seduced? Ah, the seduced is the Other’s other – not me, who sees through the false desire to the real one, but some innocent outside of me, lacking my knowledge.
When that other outside of me falls – when the other outside of me takes the bait, so to speak – my own latent identity with that other becomes a possible channel of pollution.
4. Fanaticism. I referred, in a previous post, to the essential dialectical role of the fanatic for Enlightenment thinkers. This will require another post. Which I promise I will write.
The story goes like this:
“A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."
There were further entertaining touches in the story, including Allen’s suggestion that Tennessee Williams plays be banned and his idea that, since “novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed,” the thing to do would be to “dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them.”
So, I copied the article and pasted it into an email and made a few sarcastic comments and was about to send it off to a friend when I thought – what am I doing?
This is a story of a type that Mencken liked to collect for the Smart Set: cretinous Americana. Both the right and the left, on the web, love to find stories that report some aberrant act or another and pass them around. It is a genre that has, as yet, not found its Barthes.
There are several things that are interesting about this type of story.
1. It aims at a visceral response. My response to it is pre-set: well, here’s another example of what Bush America is about. Actually, I know that if Bush America was really just about bozos like Allen, it would be very easily disposed of. I also know that the sour gastric juices that constitute the Allen Politik do have a use-value for the Politik of Karl Rove. It has use-value in two ways -- first, that it exists pleases many of the Bush constituency -- and that it is put down pleases even more of the Bush constituency. One gains an advantage just by ingeniously depending on one's opponent to do the job of putting down these kinds of efforts.
2. Being visceral, the response blanks out the circumstances. In truth, Allen has proposed other anti-gay legislation, and it has failed – as the story points out. So Allen doesn’t represent the Alabama essence. He does probably represent poor, benighted Cottonville. Allen’s sensual image of burying gay books in a hole is such an obvious substitute for his own ill concealed s/m fantasies that the unconscious, here, is operating carelessly on the surface. He is going down a well travelled route, one that has been trod by many an evangelical preacher before him. It all ends up with some tawdry, blurry snapshots from some tawdry blurry hotel room featuring his naked butt and and somebody else’s. It is all so meaningless. Furthermore, part of me knows this.
3. But it is also all so mean, this sending of stories, broadcasting of stories, commenting on stories. The point of these stories is, in a sense, the opposite of the sociological sample – we know that the story doesn’t really illuminate some normal disposition of affairs, but it does light up our fantasy version of affairs – our fantasy, on the left, that Bush is really like Hitler, or the fantasy on the Right, which makes much greater use of these kinds of stories, that Liberals are really the disciples of the Marquis de Sade. When reality is used specifically to assume a substitute role, we know, we Freudians, that we are in the realm of the fetish. In the realm of the fetish, another logic rules. In this logic, the verbal is subservient to its intensity. You can see this happening in comments sections on certain blogs – the intensity of anger mounts in the counterpointing of comments in a very sexual way. It is a sort of anger jerk off.
What isn’t remarked upon enough is how important the anger jerk off is to our present state of politics. In fact, it is why American politics seems to be in a state of permanent after-burn. Where’s the old Village Voice when you need it? Where’s Norman Mailer? These are the sexual politics we just aren't talking about.
What, the question should be asked, is being substituted for what in the political logic we are tracing? It is not as evident as it first appears. For the desire I have, in the case of Allen, is that Allen’s desire be acknowledged to be the true desire of the Right. In other words, the fantasy, on my part, is that the truth about the Right is the fantasy entertained by the Right, which in turn is denied by the Right. My fantasy is about their fantasy – my desire is that they should show their desire – their differing of that desire – their denial that it is their desire – arouses a response of anger (finding its verbal equivalent in the ‘accusation’). That anger is that my desire to see the Other’s desire is thwarted by the Other – and that thwarting I take to be the strategy by which the Other intends to achieve its real desire. And what is that strategy? Seduction. And who is the seduced? Ah, the seduced is the Other’s other – not me, who sees through the false desire to the real one, but some innocent outside of me, lacking my knowledge.
When that other outside of me falls – when the other outside of me takes the bait, so to speak – my own latent identity with that other becomes a possible channel of pollution.
4. Fanaticism. I referred, in a previous post, to the essential dialectical role of the fanatic for Enlightenment thinkers. This will require another post. Which I promise I will write.
Wednesday, December 1, 2004
Perhaps I do not go too far when I say that, next to the introduction of Christianity among mankind, the American revolution may prove the most important step in the progressive course of improvement. It is an event which may produce a general diffusion of the principles of humanity, and become the means of setting free mankind from the shackles of superstition and tyranny, by leading them to see and know 'that nothing is fundamental but impartial enquiry, an honest mind, and virtuous practice, that state policy ought not to be applied to the support of speculative opinions and formularies of faith'. 'That the members of a civil community are confederates not subjects, and their rulers, servants not masters. And that all legitimate government consists in the dominion of equal laws made with common consent, that is, in the dominion of men over themselves, and not in the dominion of communities over communities, or of any men over other men.' – Richard Price, Observations on the Importance of the American Revolution and The Means of making it a Benefit to the World, 1785
Perhaps nothing is as comic, in Bush America, than the idea that the United States was founded on religious principles.
Only among a people who have been taught nothing about their own history, and are proudly ignorant of anybody else’s, could an idea like this be paraded around like a circus geek, performing its astonishing feats in the outlying provinces (Alabama, Mississippi, etc.)
In fact, it is easy to see how this molding of rank prejudice into factual claims could only happen in a state like Alabama, which officially voted, in the last election, that the State has no obligation to provide an education for its citizenry, and which would certainly vote down any politician who possessed the beliefs of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or Benjamin Franklin “right quick.” As in so many of the Red states, the preservation of the yahoo like fantasies of the average citizen is considered to be the first duty of the government. The reality principle, whether it consists of evolution or the fact that eventually, a government has to pay for its services through taxation, is devoutly to be skirted, or even derided.
In 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was written, there existed no state in Europe that did not claim the sanction of being a Christian commonwealth. From the Calvinists of Geneva to the Bourbons in Paris, the legitimacy of state power was expressly dependent upon an official belief in divine history.
This is what is unique about the Declaration’s God. “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” The trumpet flourish of Nature’s God makes it clear from the outset that this is not the God of the fathers – this is not, in fact, God the Father at all. This is God as the ultimate variable. Freeing the populace to fill in that variable had the meaning that Richard Price, the dissenting minister we quoted above, recognized and welcomed.
Price, you will recall, was the immediate stimulus to Burke’s Considerations on the French Revolution. Under that gorgeous onslaught, Price rather disappeared, into footnote status. But during his lifetime he was connected with a network of English radicals, including Joseph Priestly, who recognized, in the features of the American Revolution, the great emergence of a secular civil society.
The break, of course, though large, retained some of the oppressive legacy of the past – notably the notion that there were such things as nature’s laws. One must remember that the Declaration faces two ways. One way is the official separation from a Christian commonwealth, Great Britain. The other way is to the official sanction on a society that imported slaves and held its territory in the very blood of the Indians it slaughtered. Here, the sanction of Nature’s Law was, a flimsy disguise for the arbitrary exercize of power.
Yet the beauty of the Declaration is the tension between the two functions it assumes. By granting human events an autonomous history, Jefferson actually losens the iron and oppressive grip of natural law. It is a breach that will only get wider as human events sweep us into an ever more human world, one from which we chase even the last God – Natura. Rather than a brooding, protective spirit, Nature can well become, as happens in the next century with Darwin, an infinite series of games.
In fact, there were hints that this was so even in 1776. Remember, that date marks not only the writing of the Declaration, but also the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which rediscovered, seventeen hundred years after St. Paul, the unknown God. This one consists of only one attribute : an invisible hand.
Perhaps nothing is as comic, in Bush America, than the idea that the United States was founded on religious principles.
Only among a people who have been taught nothing about their own history, and are proudly ignorant of anybody else’s, could an idea like this be paraded around like a circus geek, performing its astonishing feats in the outlying provinces (Alabama, Mississippi, etc.)
In fact, it is easy to see how this molding of rank prejudice into factual claims could only happen in a state like Alabama, which officially voted, in the last election, that the State has no obligation to provide an education for its citizenry, and which would certainly vote down any politician who possessed the beliefs of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, or Benjamin Franklin “right quick.” As in so many of the Red states, the preservation of the yahoo like fantasies of the average citizen is considered to be the first duty of the government. The reality principle, whether it consists of evolution or the fact that eventually, a government has to pay for its services through taxation, is devoutly to be skirted, or even derided.
In 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was written, there existed no state in Europe that did not claim the sanction of being a Christian commonwealth. From the Calvinists of Geneva to the Bourbons in Paris, the legitimacy of state power was expressly dependent upon an official belief in divine history.
This is what is unique about the Declaration’s God. “When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.” The trumpet flourish of Nature’s God makes it clear from the outset that this is not the God of the fathers – this is not, in fact, God the Father at all. This is God as the ultimate variable. Freeing the populace to fill in that variable had the meaning that Richard Price, the dissenting minister we quoted above, recognized and welcomed.
Price, you will recall, was the immediate stimulus to Burke’s Considerations on the French Revolution. Under that gorgeous onslaught, Price rather disappeared, into footnote status. But during his lifetime he was connected with a network of English radicals, including Joseph Priestly, who recognized, in the features of the American Revolution, the great emergence of a secular civil society.
The break, of course, though large, retained some of the oppressive legacy of the past – notably the notion that there were such things as nature’s laws. One must remember that the Declaration faces two ways. One way is the official separation from a Christian commonwealth, Great Britain. The other way is to the official sanction on a society that imported slaves and held its territory in the very blood of the Indians it slaughtered. Here, the sanction of Nature’s Law was, a flimsy disguise for the arbitrary exercize of power.
Yet the beauty of the Declaration is the tension between the two functions it assumes. By granting human events an autonomous history, Jefferson actually losens the iron and oppressive grip of natural law. It is a breach that will only get wider as human events sweep us into an ever more human world, one from which we chase even the last God – Natura. Rather than a brooding, protective spirit, Nature can well become, as happens in the next century with Darwin, an infinite series of games.
In fact, there were hints that this was so even in 1776. Remember, that date marks not only the writing of the Declaration, but also the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which rediscovered, seventeen hundred years after St. Paul, the unknown God. This one consists of only one attribute : an invisible hand.
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