On the Other Hand        

Lamenting the U.S. Decline

 

by Jim Megivern    

 

The strange mix of intertwining currents that pulse through the annals of U. S. politics makes it impossible to predict what novelties may suddenly come into vogue at any given time. When Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter turned the spotlight on “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” over forty years ago, he linked together a painful series of disturbing instances of social sicknesses that had openly infected U.S. politics. We would like to think that such oddities of our past have been left far behind as a more mature, healthier society has developed.

But one need only pause long enough to look around to realize the host of bizarre events that mark the more recent retrogression. Anti-intellectual, anti-religious, anti-semitic, and anti-immigrant forces proliferate, crowding the pages of newspapers and websites. The first half-dozen years of the new millennium have given alarming signals of a society in serious decline. 

Even before Nine-eleven there were commentators drawing attention to the disintegration that suggested certain historical parallels. Morris Berman, e.g., in “The Twilight of American Culture” (2000), compared our time to what had happened in the seventh century “when the proverbial lights went out in Western Europe… The factors of hype, ignorance, potential bankruptcy, and extreme social inequality are overwhelming, and they make a kind of spiritual death ultimately unavoidable.”

In drawing such parallels he wanted to see what might be learned from them for the present, especially wondering “how, in the case of Rome, did the phoenix rise from the ashes six centuries later? After centuries of stagnation, what made the culture of the Latin West a viable option once more? And, if them, why not us and why not much more quickly? What has to be done to preserve the best of a culture during a coming dark age, and who is going to do it?”

These are not questions that most Americans ask or feel comfortable in raising, even though it is no secret that many things today are going very badly. The America we grew up in did not prepare us for the Oz-like atmosphere of the so-called 2007 “State of the Union.” If the wheels have not already fallen off the Washington wagon, they certainly seem to be wobbling wildly in a hazardous state of disrepair.

Berman is undoubtedly correct in highlighting the crucial role that the monasteries played in preserving and nurturing the seeds that made the eleventh-twelfth century cultural reawakening in Europe possible. But it is hard to imagine how any kind of modern parallel to this could be fostered. A whole class of “new monastic individuals” would have to be cultivated, persons who would be willing and able to “reject the corporate mass mind culture” that increasingly blights our society. 

Berman was engaging in a thought experiment and tried to suggest that the basic renunciation that marked the monastic life with vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience would have to take a very different form in today’s “monks.” It would have to be a staunch rejection of “the spin and hype of the global corporate world order.” But, since all our institutions are complicit to one degree or another in that order, and since most have shown little or no inclination to oppose the endemic greed and corruption, the onus would inevitably have to fall on unusual individuals standing up against the modern barbarians by being far more than mere whistle-blowers. What to do in the face of Enron-Abramoff-DeLay-Halliburton corruption?

This is probably what makes any kind of “monastic” solution highly unlikely. So much has gone so wrong in so many parts of the culture, and has elicited so little public protest, that any reversal of the current U.S. decline seems out of reach. The tens of billions of dollars transferred to the corporate elite in recent years serves as only one of the more outrageous manifestations of the demise of American values.

We are living through what Jacob Hacker calls “The Great Risk Shift” (Oxford, 2006), wherein the old-fashioned notion that we are collectively responsible for one another has become a joke and been replaced with the more “modern” notion that each of us is on his own, that no-one is entitled to expect any kind of help, nor is he obliged to offer any aid to anyone else.

The saddest aspect of this shift is that it represents a blatant repudiation of commitment to the common good and the public interest--values traditionally championed in Judaeo-Christian quarters. The story of how this reversal has won so much support from the supposedly religious right is yet to be fully told. The 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, e.g., fundamentally reshaped the nation’s fiscal landscape. They radically yanked tax policy off center making it cater to a partisan and ideological base, while most politicians responsible for this betrayal of the poor and of the middle class managed to escape retribution.

But this is only the beginning of a bewildering litany of turnarounds in both domestic and foreign policies. Ten more points can easily be added to give further substance to the contention that the nation is being steered into an ever deeper decline:

· Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo;

· the trashing of habeas corpus and the rendition of uncharged detainees to foreign hell-holes;

· the explicit approval of inhumane torture “justified” as a standard legal practice, even though contrary to Geneva conventions and to the explicit teachings of the major religions at their best;

· the unparalleled escalation of rates of incarceration of our own citizens (already far higher than in any other “civilized” society; 

· the obscene compensation of corporate CEOs as the pay of their employees slips closer to or actually under the poverty line;

· the deliberate falsification of the results of scientific studies in order to justify irrational polluting of air and water, and the unrestrained rape of every area of the earth so as to leave no vein of coal or pool of oil untouched; 

· the systematic campaign of massive lies that finally led to the spectacular shock and awe invasion and destruction of another nation; 

· the targeting and bombing of civilians by the thousands in a preemptive war that was warned against and opposed by the rest of the world; 

· the irresponsible and chaotic occupation of a country without more than a handful of qualified personnel who knew the language, the culture, or the religious heritage of the occupied people; 

· the continued arrogance of refusing to admit the gigantic folly of pouring trillions from the U.S. treasury into a bottomless pit.

 

The daily slaughter of hundreds of innocent human beings goes on in the snake pit that has resulted from the imperialist blindness that could think of no other path than that of massive violence. Ironically, the hapless leaders who brought us this far can think of no other solution than to continue with more of the same.

 

Jim Megivern is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy and Religion at UNC Wilmington. He is a contributing founder of CCV and a regular columnist.

Carolina Civic Voice

                             Winter 2006-07  Vol.  6, No 4