donald trump
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN MIND
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 yaleglobal.yale.edu.
An
open loathing of intellect has become substantially de rigeur
for Donald Trump and his supporters. Accordingly, the nation’s
chief executive regards terms like “intellectual”
or “analytic” as epithets rather than positive attributes
or prospectively gainful expectations.
While
Trump did not create this demeaning subordination of the “mind,”
it is nonetheless an integral component of his bitter and corrosive
presidency. Furthermore, there are particular concerns. Above
all, one must now inquire, how can an American president so
wilfully ignore the obvious foreign and domestic policy manipulations
committed by his Russian counterpart and the deepening concerns
shared by intelligence officials, investigators, congressional
representatives of both parties, allies and other world leaders?
Indeed, even in the absence of any recognizable “high
thinking” in the White House, alarm builds that one superpower
president has become the pawn of another power.
Trump’s
curious ascent to the American presidency did not arise in a
vacuum. Rather, the country’s long history of distrust
for intellect and science conveniently set the stage for such
debilitating and portentous national leadership. In the words
of poet W.B. Yeats, “There is no longer a virtuous nation,
and the best of us live by candlelight.”
We
dare not speak of "tragedy.” Tragedy, unlike catastrophe
and misfortune, is ennobling. It demands a victim, either individual
or societal, who suffers markedly and undeservedly. It follows
that a democratic and presumably virtuous nation that elected
a blustering businessman and reality TV star can hardly be held
blameless.
Today,
not only the crass American “emperor," but also those
still watching the stifling "parade” with unsuitable
deference are similarly "naked." To wit, in Trump's
deeply fractionated American republic, 'we the people' now inhabit
a rapidly descending “hollow” land of unending submission,
crude consumption, dreary profanity and immutably shallow pleasures.
Bored by the suffocating banality of daily life and beaten down
by the grinding struggle to stay hopeful amid ever-widening
polarities of wealth and poverty, Americans grasp anxiously
for almost any available lifeline of promising distraction.
Small wonder that the cavernous opiate crisis is deep enough
to drown whole oceans of a once-sacred poetry.
In
part, at least, because of the grievously misdirected and ineffectual
stewardship of the current president, both the nation and the
much wider system of nation-states are increasingly imperiled.
Where, then, shall people seek to dispel any still-lingering
public apprehensions concerning collective survival and human
improvement? Where, indeed, can they discover any usefully reinforcing
visions of social cooperation and personal growth?
Misled
by the self-destructive syntax of “America First,”
Americans have already forgotten that world politics is inevitably
a system with US prosperity inextricably linked to the calculable
well-being of other societies.
In
Trump's cliché-ridden America, 'we the people' are no
longer shaped by common feelings of reverence or compassion,
or even the tiniest hints of some clarifying analytic thought.
Unsurprisingly, education failures represent a large part of
the anti-intellectual problem. Even in the nation’s best
colleges and universities, there is now far greater interest
in studying “practical” matters than in learning
history, government, literature, music or philosophy. And why
not? In this country, true learning assuredly doesn’t
“pay.”
In
this feverishly disjointed era, the US president fervently encourages
Americans to resist aggressively intellect, science, journalism
and history. Often, too, even the most affluent US citizens
separate themselves to inhabit the loneliest of places. Apart
from their ownership of more conspicuously glittering “stuff,”
there is little about greater wealth than can insulate these
citizens from anomie, alienation and an utterly profound sense
of meaninglessness.
“I
belong, therefore I am” – this is not what philosopher
René Descartes had in mind when he famously urged intellectual
thought and purposeful doubt. It is also a sad credo, an unhesitatingly
pathetic cry that social acceptance and certain related affections
are roughly equivalent to physical survival and that even the
sorely pretended pleasures of inclusion are desperately worth
pursuing. At the same time, Americans shrug off the very real
survival issue of others fleeing war in Syria or hopeless poverty
in Central America. Although international law obliges the United
States to oppose crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity,
Trump remains silent on irremediable war crimes committed by
Syria's murderous dictator and his Russian presidential patron
– this despite the fact that international law represents
an incorporated part of the law of the United States. In the
words of Justice Horace Gray delivering the 1900 US Supreme
Court judgment in Paquete Habana, “International
law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered
by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction . . . ”
For
most of our young people, learning has become a reluctantly
required and inconvenient commodity, nothing more. At the same
time, commodities exist for one overriding purpose. They are
there, much like the newly minted college graduates themselves,
to be marketed, bought and sold.
Though
faced with distinctly genuine threats of war, illness, impoverishment
and terror, vast millions of Americans still choose to distract
and amuse themselves with assorted forms of morbid excitement,
public scandal and the thoroughly inane repetitions of an authentically
illiterate political discourse. Not a day goes by that we don't
notice some premonitory sign of impending catastrophe. Still,
this self-anaesthetized nation continues to impose upon its
exhausted and manipulated people a shamelessly open devaluation
of disciplined thought.
Soon,
even if the United States should somehow manage to avoid nuclear
war and nuclear terrorism under the relentless corrupting Trump
leadership, the swaying of the American ship will become so
violent that even the hardiest lamps will be overturned. Then,
the phantoms of great ships of state, once laden with silver
and gold, may no longer lie forgotten. Instead, citizens will
finally understand that the circumstances that once sent the
great compositions of Homer, Maimonides, Goethe, Milton, Shakespeare,
Freud and Kafka to join the disintegrating works of forgotten
poets were neither unique nor transient.
In
an 1897 essay titled “On Being Human,” Woodrow Wilson,
later president of Princeton and the United States, inquired
coyly about the authenticity of America. “Is it even open
to us to choose to be genuine?” This president answered
“yes,” but only if we first refused to stoop to
join the inglorious “herds” of mass society. Wilson
describes the challenges: “once it was a simple enough
matter to be a human being, but now it is deeply difficult;
because life was once simple, but is now complex, confused,
multifarious. Haste, anxiety, preoccupation, the need to specialize
and make machines of ourselves, have transformed the once simple
world, and we are apprised that it will not be without effort
that we shall keep the broad human traits which have so far
made the earth habitable.”
In
all societies, the meticulous care of individual 'souls' is
critically important. In principle, there can be a better 'American
soul,' but not until we first affirm a prior obligation to shun
the unsustainable and inter-penetrating seductions of mass culture,
rank imitation, shallow thinking, organized mediocrity and as
corollary a manifestly predatory presidential politics of “rallies.”
“This
is the dead land . . .” intones T.S. Eliot in "The
Hollow Men." Here, as the prophetic poet already understood,
those still living must reluctantly plan to receive “the
supplication of a dead man's hand.” For the steadily weakening
United States, now in cascading moral and physical decline,
there does exist a more promising and dignified orientation,
but it would require more conscious acceptance of how far the
nation has fallen during the first years of Trump’s convulsive
presidency.
This
two-year anniversary is not one for anyone to celebrate with
pride – except perhaps for Vladimir Putin and Bashar al
Assad.
