why american political
life is increasingly deformed
THE CROWD IS UNTRUTH
by
LOUIS RENÉ BERES
___________________________
Louis
René Beres is Emeritus Professor of Political Science
and International Law (Purdue University). He is author of many
books and articles dealing with international politics. His
columns have appeared in the New York Times, Washington
Post, The Jerusalem Post and OUPblog
(Oxford University Press). This article was originally published
in Jewish Business News.
To understand the broadly dysfunctional nature of current American
politics, we must first learn to look more capably behind the
news. There, suitably distant from any adrenalized jumble of
private fears and collective concerns, we could finally uncover
what is actually underway. This effort would reveal the obligatory
struggle of each individual person against mass, and derivatively,
the significance of this struggle for every American.
Albeit
rare, this individual is potentially the singular “One,”
the still-independent human being who somehow remains willing
to express genuinely critical thought and to defy the “crowd.”
The
stakes are very high. Without such indispensable defiance, this
country’s already weakened democratic ethos will continue
to slide ever more deeply into a dense primeval forest of personal
and national evasions. By excluding everything excellent once
taught by Thomas Jefferson and his patriotic contemporaries
about erudition and democracy, this attenuated ethos will crumble
even further. Ultimately, it will devolve into a shapeless and
incoherent heap of banalities, clichés, and doggedly
empty witticisms.
The
crowd, recognized the 19th century Danish philosopher, Soren
Kierkegaard, any crowd, is “untruth.” Accordingly,
whatever side one takes on the current American president, there
is never any palpable reward for expressing “rugged individualism.”
Contrary to the familiar stock reassurances of our high school
and university history textbooks, this nation most enthusiastically
smiles not upon any stubborn independence of mind, but rather
on meek conformance and visceral submissions.
America’s
prevailing rituals and rules generally disapprove and simultaneously
seek to crush any residual dint of critical questioning or divergent
thought.
To
look beyond the headlines, which is critical, a single overarching
“lesson” emerges. This lesson instructs that our
most insidious national enemy is not one political party or
another – and not any particular orientation or ideology
– but instead a crudely unphilosophical spirit that knows
nothing and demonstrably wants to know nothing, of truth. Now,
more than ever, Americans feel most comfortable when they can
chant in chorus. “America First,” “We’re
number one;” “Who will pay for the wall, Mexico;”
etc., etc.
Blather
is not only taken seriously, it seeks conspicuously elevated
status as a dominant orthodoxy. Always lacking any dignified
grace of real learning, the crowd shouts as one voice, reflexively,
meaninglessly, menacingly, and even as the country’s ascertainable
capacity to project global power and influence continually withers.
All this deterioration transpires, moreover, even as the grievously
stark polarization of rich and poor has come to resemble certain
stark inequalities of the most downtrodden nations on earth.
To
be sure, America’s poor do have the formal right to vote
(at least in principle), but not to keep their teeth. And of
what use is voting to sheep? They stick only to bleating.
The
reasons for our expanding predicament are largely unhidden.
Plainly uncomfortable with meeting any genuine intellectual
demands, Americans remain openly annoyed with difficult concepts
or challengingly complex ideas. It is much easier, after all,
to fashion personal judgments and opinions on the basis of some
conveniently pre-formed political discourse; that is, to remain
securely sheltered within the ritualistically chanting crowd.
For most of this fragmenting country, moreover, shallow and
numbing entertainments remain the only expected compensation
for a distressingly barren life of tedious routine and stultifying
work.
It’s
not complicated. Everyone here is the other, and no one is himself.
An “abundant” portion of the afflicted populace,
carefully trying to keep itself distant from any true personal
growth (and by means of every imaginable social and economic
buffer), seeks leftover compensations. For the most part, this
pitiful search is founded upon the embarrassingly silly slogans
of an illiterate national politics.
This
ubiquitous illiteracy is discoverable not only in the inane
tweets of a sitting president, but just as resoundingly, in
the self-serving programs of this president’s “cabinet.”
There
is more. As Americans, we must finally understand that no nation
can ever be “first” that does not first hold the
individual sacred. At one long-forgotten time in our national
history, even after Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau
had brilliantly showcased the American Transcendentalists, a
tangible spirit of personal accomplishment could sometimes still
earn high marks. Then, young people especially could strive
to rise interestingly, not just as the shamelessly obedient
servants of a markedly vulgar politics and commerce, but as
the singularly proud owners of a unique and cultivated Self.
Alas,
today, most Americans “live” in long lines of anarchic
traffic, and, more or less cheerlessly, on the cell phone or
“personal device.” Whether we would prefer to become
more expressly secular or more reverent, to grant government
more authority over our lives, or less, a willing submission
to multitudes has become our most common and enthusiastic inclination.
In
essence, it has already become our uncontested national “religion.”
There
is more. Such crowd-like sentiments are not entirely unique
to the present-day United States. On the contrary, they have
a long and even diversified planetary history. We are, to be
fair, not the very first people to so abjectly surrender to
crowds. Still, conspicuously, our driving movements in this
regard have been backward, or retrograde. The contemporary American
crowd-man or woman is, therefore, a sorely primal and universal
being, one who has somehow “slipped back,” in the
words of the great Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset,
“through the wings, and on to the age-old stage of civilization.”
In
such matters, a backward movement is far worse than no movement
at all. Plausibly, this grotesque American stage is now preparing
to join the lacquered corpses of other assorted dead or dying
civilizations. Whatever its purported ideologies, the American
crowd indiscriminately defiles all that is still most gracious
and promising in society. Charles Dickens, during his first
visit to America, had already observed back in 1842: “I
do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be
dealt by this country in the failure of its example to the earth.”
To
our partial credit, perhaps, we Americans have thus far maintained
our political freedom from traditional political tyrannies and
from formalized sorts of oppression, but we have also cravenly
surrendered certain corollary liberties to become inauthentic
persons. Very openly deploring an enriching life of meaning
and sincerity, we foolishly conflate wealth with success, and
cheerlessly blurt out inanely rhythmic chants of patriotic celebration.
This happens even as our rudderless and incrementally cheapened
democracy continues to vanish into a noiseless but expansive
suffering.
Whatever
its origin, there is a readily identifiable “reason”
behind all this carefully synchronized delirium. Above all,
such fevered babble seeks to protect us from a terrifying and
unbearable loneliness, a fearful condition that a great many
Americans may literally fear more than death. In the end, however,
it will turn out to have been a contrived and progressively
lethal “solution.”
The
courageous “single” American who might still seek
to escape from the masquerading crowd, the rare “One”
who opts heroically for disciplined individual thought over
effortless and jingoistic conformance, feels most deeply alone.
This is not difficult to explain. “The most radical division,”
asserted José Ortega y Gasset in 1930, “is that
which splits humanity…. those who make great demands on
themselves…and those who demand nothing special of themselves
. . . ”
In
1965, the Jewish philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, offered
an almost identical argument. Lamenting, “The emancipated
man is yet to emerge,”Heschel then asked each one to inquire:
“What is expected of me? What is demanded of me?”
It
is finally time for camouflage and concealment in the pitiful
American crowd to yield to what Heschel had aptly called “being-challenged-in-the-world.”
Individuals who might dare to read books for more than transient
entertainment, and who are still willing to risk social and
material disapproval in exchange for exiting the crowd, offer
America its only potentially lasting hope. To be sure, these
rare souls can seldom be found in politics, universities or
corporate boardrooms.
But
there will be some.
Always,
wherever they might be discovered, their critical inner strength
will lie not in any contrived or baseless oratory, in silly
or catchy phrases, or in visibly large accumulations of personal
wealth. This commendable strength will lie, instead, in the
substantially more ample powers of genuineness, reason and serious
thought. These exemplary powers, in turn, will represent the
enviable antithesis of crowd “thinking,” the welcome
reciprocal of those properly challenged individuals who can
still recognize the crowd as “untruth.”
Presently,
not even the flimsiest ghost of intellectual originality haunts
our public discussions of politics and economics. Now that our
self-deceiving citizenry has seemingly lost all sense of awe
in the world, the homogenized American public not only studiously
avoids authenticity, it positively loathes it. In a nation that
has lost absolutely all regard for the Western literary canon,
American crowds routinely seek comfort and fraternity largely
in their common and openly shared illiteracy.
Indeed,
the core reason for hyperbole now heard everywhere (absolutely
everything one reads or hears these days is “incredible,”
“amazing” or “awesome”) is a flagrantly
cascading incapacity to think seriously.
The
simple division of American society into few and mass may represent
a useful separation of those who are casual imitators from those
who would initiate true understanding. “The mass,”
said Jose Ortega y Gasset (The Dehumanization of Art),
“crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything
that is excellent, individual, qualified and select.”
Today, in ready deference to this mass, the intellectually un-ambitious
American not only wallows lazily in nonsensical political and
cultural phrases; he or she dutifully applauds a manifestly
shallow ethos of complete personal surrender.
By
definition, the mass, or crowd, can never become few. Yet, some
individual members of the mass can make the difficult transformation.
Those who are already part of the few must somehow announce
and maintain their courageously determined stance. Should they
fail or refuse, America would abandon both its historical and
philosophic obligations. According to the Founding Fathers of
the United States, there was considerably more to the Declaration
and Constitution than a seemingly calculable right to bear arms.
These
still-authentic thinkers were well familiar with the complex
jurisprudential writings of Hugo Grotius, Thomas Hobbes, John
Locke, Samuel Pufendorff, and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Fortunately,
they did not craft their obviously informed points of view from
any eighteenth-century equivalents of bumper stickers.
Aware
that they might comprise a commendably core barrier to our further
spiritual, cultural, intellectual and political declensions,
resolute opponents of the American crowd will steadfastly refuse
to chant in chorus. Ultimately, therefore, in the best of all
possible worlds, they will remind us of something most notably
urgent. It is that staying the predictably lonely course of
personal self-actualization and self-renewal – a focused
course of consciousness rather than delusion – can be
the only honest and purposeful option for a starkly imperiled
country.
Today,
unhindered in their misguided efforts, national cheerleaders
in all walks of American life still draw feverishly upon the
sovereignty of an unqualified crowd. This defiling crowd depends
for its very breath of life on the relentless withering of others’
personal dignity, and also on the witting servitude of a prospectively
more independent national consciousness. But before its “respiration”
can be drawn from more evidently robust and healthy sources,
this collective voice must somehow learn to reflect the insights
of more genuine individuals.
Otherwise,
here in America, the madding crowd will remain “untruth.”
