I called my friend Judy recently. We haven’t seen each other in easily twenty years. But every few months we get on the phone to compare notes about the state of the world. She was upset straight away. She’d been reading an article about one of Cheney’s advisors. The bile rose in her throat.
“I feel so helpless,” she said. “Nothing we do seems to matter. These people are in complete control and they’re going to destroy the country.”
Judy and I go way back. We met in the “GI movement” that supported active duty military personnel who opposed the war in Vietnam. We’ve tried, each in our own way, to stay politically active. Our discussions often turn to theory and strategy.
I made a perfunctory stab at boltsering her spirit, invoked the need to keep up the struggle. Then I heard the emptiness of my words. “I know what you mean,” I said. “I haven’t got anything to offer. It’s been a long time since I’ve made anything but a token effort.”
It’s not that I’m a pessimist. There’s a lot of good in what’s going on, none of it my doing. But my preference for, if not faith in, democracy requires that others have their say. I’d like to flat win out over these fools who are sapping our social infrastructure and squandering our good name abroad. But I don’t know what we’d do with them then. Re-education camps? Nah, it’d only breed resentment. The problems we’re faced with are going to require everyone’s (more or less willing) co-operation. A good deal of the struggle that’s going on is about figuring that out. It’s messy and it takes time.
So why don’t I just jump in and get busy on the side of clean water and fair elections? The worthy stuff that needs everyone’s support.
Aside from pride and sloth, there’s that pesky addiction to theory I suffer from. I want to see the goal and the path before I put my shoes on. The trouble is that there’s not a big market for universal truths. They’ve all been tried and found wanting. And almost everyone can spot the embryo of a political agenda inside an ontological first principle.
It’s not that we don’t occasionally mouth the words to some old tune, but we don’t march to any of them. That’s part of the renewed appeal of relgion: no reliance on reason required. It turns out, though, that we don’t love God so much as we love tradition. And it’s doing things the old way that’s gotten us in this mess. Better that we not aspire to vision so that we may grope our way slowly, admiring the darkness as we go.
While I can see the need for such an approach, it’s still hard for me to take. I was promised a career as a manipulator of abstractions. There’s not much call for that anymore.
Ascending civilizations tend to announce (and anoint) themselves with explantions of nature and their place in it. Increasingly it is not nature we live in but our own works. These works require no explanation; they are their own meaning. We are explained by them, not they by us. Our theories belong to an earlier era when we imagined we were the makers of our world. Now our world makes us.
Most of the time this is not so bad; we rather like it: "Most unfortunate that we are consuming our resources, but we are a builder species. We don’t know any other way."
I didn’t try any of this on Judy. She wouldn’t have sat still for it. I did mention the strange disjunction that exists in Japan between the stated purpose of its institutions and the way they actually function. “That may be how it is with us,” I suggested. “We have evolved to the point that the will of the people is incidental to the operation of the government. But our values haven’t caught up with that. We still think this is a democracy.”
Judy hesitated half a beat, just long enough for me to think she might be impressed with my insight. “That may be what they want us to believe,” she said, “but I haven’t given up on democracy.”
politics
cheney
democracy
despair
future
theory
abstractions
“I feel so helpless,” she said. “Nothing we do seems to matter. These people are in complete control and they’re going to destroy the country.”
Judy and I go way back. We met in the “GI movement” that supported active duty military personnel who opposed the war in Vietnam. We’ve tried, each in our own way, to stay politically active. Our discussions often turn to theory and strategy.
I made a perfunctory stab at boltsering her spirit, invoked the need to keep up the struggle. Then I heard the emptiness of my words. “I know what you mean,” I said. “I haven’t got anything to offer. It’s been a long time since I’ve made anything but a token effort.”
It’s not that I’m a pessimist. There’s a lot of good in what’s going on, none of it my doing. But my preference for, if not faith in, democracy requires that others have their say. I’d like to flat win out over these fools who are sapping our social infrastructure and squandering our good name abroad. But I don’t know what we’d do with them then. Re-education camps? Nah, it’d only breed resentment. The problems we’re faced with are going to require everyone’s (more or less willing) co-operation. A good deal of the struggle that’s going on is about figuring that out. It’s messy and it takes time.
So why don’t I just jump in and get busy on the side of clean water and fair elections? The worthy stuff that needs everyone’s support.
Aside from pride and sloth, there’s that pesky addiction to theory I suffer from. I want to see the goal and the path before I put my shoes on. The trouble is that there’s not a big market for universal truths. They’ve all been tried and found wanting. And almost everyone can spot the embryo of a political agenda inside an ontological first principle.
It’s not that we don’t occasionally mouth the words to some old tune, but we don’t march to any of them. That’s part of the renewed appeal of relgion: no reliance on reason required. It turns out, though, that we don’t love God so much as we love tradition. And it’s doing things the old way that’s gotten us in this mess. Better that we not aspire to vision so that we may grope our way slowly, admiring the darkness as we go.
While I can see the need for such an approach, it’s still hard for me to take. I was promised a career as a manipulator of abstractions. There’s not much call for that anymore.
Ascending civilizations tend to announce (and anoint) themselves with explantions of nature and their place in it. Increasingly it is not nature we live in but our own works. These works require no explanation; they are their own meaning. We are explained by them, not they by us. Our theories belong to an earlier era when we imagined we were the makers of our world. Now our world makes us.
Most of the time this is not so bad; we rather like it: "Most unfortunate that we are consuming our resources, but we are a builder species. We don’t know any other way."
I didn’t try any of this on Judy. She wouldn’t have sat still for it. I did mention the strange disjunction that exists in Japan between the stated purpose of its institutions and the way they actually function. “That may be how it is with us,” I suggested. “We have evolved to the point that the will of the people is incidental to the operation of the government. But our values haven’t caught up with that. We still think this is a democracy.”
Judy hesitated half a beat, just long enough for me to think she might be impressed with my insight. “That may be what they want us to believe,” she said, “but I haven’t given up on democracy.”
politics
cheney
democracy
despair
future
theory
abstractions
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