Death by catharsis

It is the first of September. Summer is not over, but the days are waning and the leaves are changing color. Soon it will all be over, indeed, it will all be over, as election day is little more than two months away and the nation continues its slide into a shattered visage of its former self. Very soon, we will find out whether the current administration remains in place, free to wreak havoc for another four years, or whether sanity will mount its grand restoration and return us at last to normalcy.

Or at least that's what most commentators want you to think. There are variations on the margins (this is where most variation occurs), but the narrative seems clear. Civil society is broken, dysfunctional, exacerbated by a toxic political culture that just won't quit, indeed, feeds off its own rage and uses it as fuel. But I cannot yet help but think this is nothing more than an unveiling of what was already here. Scenes of burning buildings and bodies in the street alarm those in affluent zip codes, but this is old hat to those tried-and-tested folks in the country who have watched their own prospects crumble around them, their friends and families migrate or fall victim to despair, their lives ruled by addiction and death, left behind by prosperous geographies that snubbed their noses in disdain. A "culture of death", a certain manifesto called it. Now, that culture is spreading like a malignant tumor, an octopus whose tentacles are tightening their grip around the nation's neck. Why not? This is justice. Everyone gets what is theirs. It is unfortunate that so many do not know what they really deserve. 

First they came for the inner cities. The ghetto broke, but its people are a resilient bunch, they created new subcultures which emerged stronger, metamorphosing and strengthening itself until it left the nest (and those who birthed it) behind to conquer the world. Then they came for the country. Its inhabitants do not possess the cultural capital that those in the inner-cities do, so they are unable to lay claim to any innovation in countervailing power that is not political. Instead, they sought to dominate politically in order to survive. They succeeded. For now.

The sickness has never gone away. Now it has come for the suburbs and the wider cities. The perpetrators comprise a class that hardly understands itself, let alone anyone else. Even those who purport to study it cannot yet divine its true motivations, however many attempts might be made to do so. But they are certainly the harbingers of a certain kind of self-destruction which has left a number of their own (and their ostensible enemies) dead. The anarchy in the streets is but an unveiling for the world of the anarchy that has reigned everywhere else for the past thirty years. 

We are getting our just desserts, no? Movements are springing up like weeds. Antifa, Black Lives Matter and Q-Anon chief among them. Political historians have long been attuned to the readiness with which Americans fall victim to allegedly "conspiratorial" thinking, but conspiracies often have a basis in real fact and sentiments. Would the Anti Masonic party have risen to national power without the murder of William Morgan by Freemasons in the backwoods of New York? Unlikely. Would anti vaccine advocates, Infowars, and Q have attained such sway over the hearts and minds of Americans everywhere without two decades of real elite blunders? Unlikely. 

Indeed, the case of Q-Anon points towards a possible, much deserved future. Movement conservatism was born in Sharon, Connecticut, the product of Bill Buckley's upper middle-class gentility and "reason". Its existence, and success, was predicated on its ability to establish itself as a vehicle for serious ideas and policy and on its capacity to present an alternative program for America that was diametrically opposed to that which had monopolized the electorate for three decades under FDR's Democratic Party. To do this, some adjustments at the margins had to be made. The "kooks" that desired to attach themselves to the new liberal conservative coalition would have to be expunged. While this includes the usual suspects, Brent Bozell's papists and the John Birch society, it also included radical egotists like Ayn Rand, who so offended the socially conservative wing of the coalition that a defense of the "permanent things" had to be made in the pages of the National Review. 

Movement conservatism had purged itself of its heresies. But its mistake was in believing that in co-opting the Republican Party to its agenda it had monopolized ideological control over its membership. It should have been clear to them, from Pat Buchanan to Ross Perot to the rise of talk-radio and Fox News all the way to Donald Trump and Breitbart, that they were the junior partner in the relationship. Parties are amorphous and unwieldy and their memberships are vast. Despite perfunctory exhortations to the notion of the "big-tent", it is clear that they saw themselves as ideological gatekeepers, when in matter of fact they were merely loaning themselves. We can think of another word for "loan", can't we? 

This is why the breakdown of party discipline has caught most people flatfooted. The immunological defense that kept the Republican Party from splintering in the past is no more, partly a consequence of its weakened establishment and partly a result of flame-feeding cultural accelerators. A positive-feedback loop is driving people towards ideas that were once unthinkable and which seem downright insane to those of us caught in our ivory towers. Partisan lines have not merely hardened, they are exploding in this era of ubiquitous and instant information transfer. Technology can subvert traditional gatekeepers, and no matter how hard Facebook and Twitter try regain control over their innovation, attempts to quell this incipient public revolt will only serve to increase distrust on the part of those who have accepted seeming-misinformation as truth. The result, funnily enough, is a drift towards national-populism among conservative intellectuals and a widespread embrace of conspiracy on the part of the ostensibly conservative masses. 

So the party may well capitulate to its "kooks". But as other movements which have faced the derision of their supposed superiors, it will channel real grievances at an unanswerable, unaccountable and unresponsive elite. It will embrace blatant falsehoods. It will use bombastic and unbelievable rhetoric to justify a hunt for phantoms that may well be real. It will have little to say about ideology, which makes it the perfect vessel of those who have little concern for it. It is not generational, for while the niche-ideologists pontificating on twitter and branding themselves for the consumption of precocious and naive children may see it as a Facebook phenomenon, there are endless masses of other precocious and naive children who see the value in conspiracy and embrace it. I should know. After all, I was once one of them.

It is for this reason that the decline of the conservative movement as it has been constituted since 1960 has ushered in such diverse responses from the electorate and its representatives. While a faction of populist conservatives establish themselves in Congress and a coterie of intellectuals and commentators begin to make the case for an intellectual Trumpism, those who actually vote for these candidates imagine themselves as having very little at stake when it comes to ideological disputations. Whether this is in fact true or not is somewhat irrelevant. The pressure cooker has exploded. The lid has blasted off. The passions can no longer be contained. An intelligent politician will not only accede to them but  ride them to power. Quite a few have already done so. If the Republican Party is to become the Q Anon party, then so be it. A scenario as epochal as that could only come about as a result of a politics turned utterly sclerotic. It is such a swift and sudden course-correction that it can only be compared with Constantine's conversion to Christianity. But it is a necessary one. It is catharsis.

One might wonder why I am not speaking about the Democrats. After all, their party seems in thrall to shibboleths that appear increasingly inane. Is Black Lives Matter and Antifa not, after all, the left-wing antipodes to Q Anon? The answer is that while they may be, it doesn't matter, because the Democratic establishment has not been defeated, as Bernie Sanders' twin campaigns make abundantly clear. Democratic socialists have demonstrated they can win office in isolated deep-blue districts, but their appeal is limited beyond that. It is at least conceivable to imagine that the economic shocks brought about by coronavirus will plunge the professional-managerial class into large-scale downward mobility, pushing them to close ranks around a candidate like Elizabeth Warren that is, at the very least, outwardly palatable to the highly educated and affluent voters moving into the party. But it remains to be seen what the outcome of a hypothetical Biden presidency would be and what the long-term ramifications of this pandemic will be. It is simply too soon to say. But with the Democratic establishment hoping to transform the party into the home of Buckley-style "rationalism", I would not pin my hopes on a course correction. 

To lean into emotion and grievance does, in fact, produce results. And as we have previously explored, it is possible to ground entire areas of policy on sentiment. Vengeance certainly plays its role here. But it is also more general than that. It is the power of rampant unchecked emotion given space to flourish in the perfect conditions. As Aristotle said, speaking of the passions in his Rhetoric: "They love too much and they hate too much." For those who see the administrative state in exactly the light described above, as a creature of inertia and neglect and subject to meaningless conflict over issues of marginal concern to the lives of those who depend on and despise it in equal measure (something no ideologist in his crystal palace of clear-cut political positioning will ever understand), the notion that paranoiacs at the reins will do a better job of crashing the system than even the intellectuals who lend them their support seems like a safe bet. I would certainly wager on it.

Limitless

Turned 23 the other day and moved out of my house. Drove 5 hours down the eastern seaboard and ended up in some ramshackle locality outside of D.C. It's funny how our nation's lawmakers have allowed the country, even right outside their doorstep, to fall into abject disrepair, but it's not very surprising. I suppose they're mostly commuters anyway. What I did find surprising was how sad I felt when I left. An incomprehensible tightening of the chest and a wavering of the muscles in my face accompanied my flight down the LIE. I always envisioned it as a kind of two-lane runway. The farther east you go, the farther you are spinning out into empty space, taking off over the sparkling blue sea that takes you, if you slog it out long enough, to Portugal (there's a large expatriate community of portugese that reside in my home hamlet and I have often wondered why). Westbound is the frontier, the great American expanse, towards manifest destiny and all that. I get the acute sensation that what I am doing is destined, written in the stars, swept along by causes I can hardly fathom. After all, I left the day after my birthday. Now I'm an adult. The youngest millennial and the oldest of Gen-Z. Gone, cut loose, adrift, all on my own and of my own choosing. This is what I wanted. I get the willies, you know.

Something that's giving me the willies is the continued degradation of the near certainties and convictions I held firm in my mind up until about this moment. In a certain sense this isn't the cataclysm it would appear to be because I have so often espoused the rhetoric of fluidity and adaptability, expressed a casual disdain for fixed beliefs, and praised the virtue, recently, of harnassing the power of mass politics without the ideology. So why the fear? Because I have also spent this past half decade leaning into grievance, solidified a great antipathy for modernity, and pledged fealty, like a bird fluttering between nests, to a variety of exotic and niche ideologies. But this is all part of the game. A small cottage industry is being made out of it on the fringes of social media platforms, where energetic and politically aware young adults gather and hold discourse on hot-button topics and make a show of outdoing each other in posting the most self-gratifying, vacuous and loquacious aphorisms possible. Most of it is laced with profound irony, whatever the seemingly profound disagreements each niche faction has with the other. But that is just the supposed substance. The sentiment behind every such post is very real and masks sincere emotion. Without typing out an essay, the point is (to self-negate once again), there is no real point. It is a game of "clout-chasing", as we've discussed before. It is a transference of real-life interactions, both real and ideal, to the digital sphere. An e-agora. 

So, again, why the trouble? Because I too had latched on to strange and niche ideologies, neoreaction, catholic integralism, national syndicalism, and in doing so have left myself open to the quite fitting charge that I too am nothing more than a living, walking, talking charade. I have compromised myself, because by thinking that what I thought was certain and true, by my inflexibility and dogmatic stance towards the world, I have sunken into ignorance. I did not know what I did not know. 

This is tough to grapple with, but I can see now (just as I can see the future, I can now look back and see the past with open eyes) that it's been a long time coming. The tendency to sympathize with quietest thinking is no coincidence. In the vein of Parmenides, Wittgenstein and Pyrrho, self-negating philosophies are the only ones to truly grapple with epistemological limits, something not even Kant (for all his pretensions about "limits that dictate the possibility of experience") could stake a claim to. So what does that mean? What do I believe? 

I don't know (not entirely anyway). But what I do know is that this blog is part of my failure. Adam Tooze summed up in a sub-250 character tweet what I tried to say in an essay-length blogpost. Tiktok is the opium of the zoomers and this has become a threat to national security. Was that so hard? Apparently for small minds such as mine, it is. So once again I am confronted by epistemological crisis, greater perhaps in magnitude than the one that struck me in 2015 and 2016. But it is a natural evolution, just as it was then. The fact that it has led me here, towards these tendencies, is perhaps surprising. But it is a reconciliation of disparate strands I had tried desperately to string together. What is clarity anyway? It is waking up.

The reality of political power

Sometimes I want to let go of all my hatreds, prejudices and biases and accept (even embrace) things as they are, but that would feel too much like a surrender of all principle. The latter sentiment is far stronger than the former, but I wonder what will happen if I give it another decade. Is that part of the maturation process? If my father were in his grave, he would be rolling in it. But I wonder if it's possible to accept things as they are (is, i.e. being) while also retaining great disdain for what-is. A great negation of the All, that's nihilism, isn't it? I'm not a nihilist, haven't been since I had an intellectual growth spurt that took me right out of the progressive-liberal-humanistic-atheistic mentality of my formative years (of which I am eternally thankful, for many people never progress (haha) beyond this point, indeed feel as if they don't have to), but lately I have grown tired, and I have begun to wonder if perhaps some kind of reconciliation isn't possible, if maybe it is right to think it all a waste while still retaining some notion of positive value, if not in what currently is, then in process, style, for lack of a better term: artistry. 

These are hairy questions, not least because there is a long and substantive philosophical debate, stretching back to Plato, over questions concerning the distinction between art and technique, as well as the question of art's utility at all. Plato is hostile to art, sees in it a mere mimicry of true reality. Aristotle concurs, funnily enough, with Oscar Wilde, who says that while art may be useless, it is not its utility that makes it attractive. Fair enough, I err towards Aristotle in his appreciation of art as a vehicle for luxury and intellectual contemplation, but I lean towards Plato when it comes to his more censorious vision. Not all art, as Plato understood well enough, is good for contemplation. Indeed, he should have just taken the extra step and deemed those deity-anthropomorphizing poems he hated so much as non-art. Negate the whole thing. That's courage. That's decision. It's not the knack of the sophists, but it's not art either. It's nothing. 

A lot of things, it seems, have a claim to nothing. I want to share a passage that's stuck with me from Yukio Mishima's greatest book (of the ones I've read anyway) about politics and art. The narrator Mizoguchi and his precocious, deformed friend/mentor Kashiwagi are taking a walk in a nature preserve with two girls and stumble upon the grave of a storied noblewoman. They stop to pray: 'There's something very shabby about a noble grave like this, isn't there?' said Kashiwagi. 'Political power and the power of wealth result in splendid graves. Really impressive graves, you know. Such creatures never had any imagination while they lived, and quite naturally their graves don't leave any room for imagination either. But noble people live only on the imagination of themselves and others, and so they leave graves like this which inevitably stir one's imagination. And this I find even more wretched. Such people, you see, are obliged even after they are dead to continue begging people to use their power of imagination.' 

'You mean that nobility only exists in the power of imagination?'I said, merrily joining in the conversation. 'You often speak of reality. What do you consider to be the reality of nobility?'

'It's this!' said Kashiwagi, slapping the top of the moss-covered pillar. 'It's stone or bone - the inorganic residue that people leave after they are dead.' 

'You're damned Buddhist in your views, aren't you?' I said. 

'What's it got to do with Buddhism or any stuff like that?' said Kashiwagi. 'Nobility, culture, what people consider aesthetic - the reality of all those things is barren and inorganic. It isn't the Ryoan Temple that you see, but simply a pile of stones. Philosophy, art - it's all a lot of stones. The only really organic concern that people have is politics. It's a shame, isn't it? One can almost say that human beings are no more than self-defiling creatures.'

This is what Mishima really acted out when he went and staged an attempted coup at a Tokyo military base in 1970 before committing seppuku, and this is what a lot of people surprisingly fail to get. The term "right-wing nationalist" gets thrown around a lot, and it isn't hard to slap the label on someone like Mishima, who from his writings it is clear opposed westernization, modernization and retained an appreciation for the simplistic, parochial life. But consider the quote above. Have you ever heard a right-winger speak like that? If he really wished to restore imperial authority, why didn't he march into the imperial palace and proclaim the restoration of the empire? How do you reconcile his stated desire to restore power to the emperor with the views on nobility expressed above?

Mishima engaged in something like political action and as a result defiled himself. He knew this well enough, which is why he planned out his suicide in meticulous fashion, complete with the penning of some traditional death poems and apportioning out roles for assistance in his own beheading. He never intended to leave alive. His act was a statement. A play-drama. A statement of what, though? Politics? No. We know that the political, while seemingly the "only organic concern" of human beings, ends, as with everything else, in the shabby moss-covered headstone. Engaging in the political requires a feat of imagination. Aesthetics, then? Maybe. What people consider the aesthetic turns out to be nothing but dust, for if politics is downstream from culture, and culture is faulty aesthetics, then it all ends the same. But he did write books after all. That, manifestly, was useless in the positive sense as opposed to the negative. It allowed the cultivation of a certain vitality, a new aesthetics that can subordinate the political, strip the emperor of his clothes and reveal to us what it all really means: nothing. It is meaningless. The reality is that there is no reality.

Doubtless there are many who would disagree. Can the all-encompassing Political really be subsumed under something else, the (for lack of a better word) Aesthetic? What's so encompassing about it, anyway? The substantive and enduring may not be as such as it claims to be. If that is the case, where does that leave us? It is quite like trying to atemporalize the temporal, to not only throw out the baby with the bathwater but to keep the water from evaporating after it has been tossed, to gather them back up and toss them some more.

Mishima, more than anything else, was just a good Trotskyist, or perhaps an echo of the future Soviet marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who, while imprisoned in the prison-fortress of Ingolstadt during the Great War, had this to do and say: "After a lengthy discussion on literature, he would declare that all books should be burnt so that the soul of man could be truly liberated. One day a French captain found him building a grotesque cardboard monster holding a bomb, which he explained was the God of War and Destruction, Pierun. 'We will enter into the state of Chaos, and will only emerge from it with the total ruin of civlization,' [Tukhachevsky] solemnly told the astonished Frenchman as he prostrated himself before it. 

He continues: 'The Jews brought us Christianity, and that is reason enough to loathe them,' he lectured on another occasion. 'And anyway, they belong to a low race. You cannot understand this, you Frenchmen for whom equality is a dogma. The Jew is a dog, son of a bitch, and he spreads his fleas throughout the world. It is he who has done more than any other to inoculate us to the plague of civilization, and who would like to give us his morality, the morality of money, of capital...The great socialists are Jews, and the socialist doctrine is a branch of universal Christianity...I loathe all socialists, Christians and Jews!'

And critically: 'Why should I care whether it is with the Red Banner or the Orthodox Cross that I conquer Constantinople?' he mused. He never tired of reading about or discussing the feats of Caesar and Napoleon, and was determined to be, in his own words, a general or a corpse by the age of thirty.

In the end, he became both a general and a corpse. Another shabby stone. It is just as well that a man who could say and feel these things would become Marshal of the Soviet Union, just as it's little surprise that someone like Mishima, who evidently sympathized with the spirit of the above quotations, would die for the emperor. It is permanent revolution for revolution's sake. It is, at heart, apolitical. Their nihilisms are a way out. It is the demolition of the political, without a care for its theoretical breadth, and its replacement with a quest for narrative and drama. By seeming to fully embrace what-is, they discover the means by which it can finally be negated. What an insight! 

Lebanon: A future-oriented case study in mass anti-politics

An explosion leveled a good chunk of Beirut yesterday. For a country grown accustomed to its place as a regional punching bag in Levantine wars and no stranger to civil conflict itself, this should have been old hat. But this was something different. Thousands of tons of ammonium nitrate, the same substance Timothy McVeigh used to devastate the federal building in Oklahoma City, caught fire and produced an explosion of such power that its seismic impact was registered as the equivalent of a 3.3 magnitude earthquake. As of now over a hundred are confirmed dead, hundreds more are missing, thousands are wounded, and hundreds of thousands are homeless. Couple this with a polarized political system that makes Congress look like a unity government, a rapidly spreading coronavirus outbreak, and an economy already in total free-fall and you've got all the ingredients necessary to spur the overthrow of the ancien regime. 

It's a little early to break out the guillotines. They're still sifting through the rubble. But the past decade of Lebanese politics will be instructive in predicting what comes next. As I've said, Lebanon is no stranger to turmoil and has not been since it was granted independence by the French in 1945. In the 19th century, the colonial authorities, finding that ruling over a hostile foreign population was not particularly easy, chose to empower certain sectarian minorities to promote their interests at the expense of others, tying native fortunes to those of the colonizer and ensuring that they would maintain their rule through proxy and division.

Despite the absence of French authority, this model of politics has continued in Lebanon to the present day. Breakdown in the relations between Maronite Christians and Muslims of all stripes triggered a twenty year sectarian civil war that drew in regional and international powers and became a test-ground for the exportation of Iranian revolutionary politics. Though a tentative power-sharing accord was reached between the warring parties in 1990, domestic stability has remained precarious since then. Hezbollah, the paramilitary brainchild of the late General Soleimani and his Quds Force, managed to force an Israeli retreat from the south in 2000 and held its ground against an IDF offensive in 2006. The success of this predominantly Shiite force in resisting the hated-and-feared Zionist bogeyman increased its fortunes in Lebanese politics dramatically and so it did what any maturing and politically conscious non-state organization will do to enhance its respectability: it entered domestic politics.

This is not the whole story, of course, though Israeli apologists would certainly like to make it all about Israel. Hezbollah is something like a state-within-a-state, providing essential services to the people who dwell within its power-base, particularly in southern Lebanon. Its popularity, military strength and important political and religious connections to the Syrian Baathists (who occupied the country until a 2005 protest movement forced them out - more on that later) and Iran have enabled it to wield veto power over the formation of new governing cabinets and coerce those who oppose it. The current government, while by no means orchestrated by Hezbollah, is certainly oriented towards it. Party politics in Lebanon, funnily enough, has been split along lines of division over relations with the Syrian government. The March-8th Alliance, led by Hezbollah, supports a close relationship with the Assad regime and is comprised of a number of left-nationalist and nominally populist parties. The March-14th Alliance, on the other hand, is anti-Syrian, mostly comprised of liberal parties, and led by Saad Hariri's Future Movement. The Hairis have a colorful history (no pun intended) of shaping the politics of post-war Lebanon. The father, Rafic Hariri, was assassinated by Hezbollah in 2005, which inadvertently precipitated the Cedar Revolution, which led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from the country. There is a sectarian element to all this, with Saad being a Sunni and aligned with Saudi Arabia, and Hassan Nasrallah's Hezbollah being Shiite and aligned with Iran. A hodgepodge of other religious minorities, Druze and Christians among them, have their own political parties to represent their interests as per the peace agreement. Tellingly, most have chosen to align themselves with Hezbollah and March 8th.

The Syrian civil war, which has been raging for 9 years, has done much to unravel the Taif Agreement that ended Lebanon's own war. The Future Movement, at least in the early years of the war, was not very quiet about its support, both rhetorical and material, for the Syrian opposition. Hezbollah, after two years of mounting support, went all in and intervened in the war on the side of Assad in 2013. It did much to turn the tide and the next 7 years have been a slow reconquest of the territories that have fallen out of Assad's grip. Tensions in Syria spilled over into Lebanon, clans that supported opposing sides engaged in firefights on the streets, firebrand salafist clerics like Ahmed al-Assir led their followers into armed clashes with Hezbollah, suicide and car bombs detonated with alarming regularity from 2013 to 2015. The Islamic State surged across the Qalamoun mountains and captured the border town of Arsal in 2014. Millions of refugees have flooded into the country and now comprise approximately a quarter of its population. Gridlock between March 8th and 14th led to caretaker governments from 2013 on. All the while the culture of nepotism, patronage and sectarianism continued to corrode state capacity, the government failed to render essential services, the country's currency has dropped precipitously in value, trash has piled up on the streets. In 2017, proposed tax hikes triggered widespread protests that forced the government to backpedal. In 2019, another tax, this time on WhatsApp, exploded into a revolt against politicians in general and forced the resignation of Saad Hariri, who until then had been enjoying the fruits of being prime minister. Before that, he had been kept in limbo by the House of Saud in late 2017, forced to announce his resignation (which was swiftly reversed) from the premiership in what amounted to nothing more than a big tantrum on the part of his patrons, who naturally cannot figure out how to exercise real influence in the country (they are better at chopping up foreign journalists). Now here we are: after seven years of repeated inquiries from customs officials at the port of Beirut seeking guidance on how to safely dispose of the ammonium nitrate piled up in their storage facilities, the problem has taken care of itself quite fittingly.

So why the history lesson? To tell you that none of it really matters of course. Saudi Arabia and Iran, Syria and Lebanon, Hezbollah and the Future Movement, all the days and ides of March cannot measure up to the fact that the central Lebanese problem is stagnation and the only solution is change - whatever the cost and whatever shape such change might take. Notice how the only time the system has really been rocked has been when protest on the part of the capital-p People have broken out over some issue. The assassination of Hariri led to a revolution that ended a foreign occupation. The 2017 and 2019 street protests were ostensibly about taxes; in reality they were successive straws flattening the humps on the camel's back, and the camel is now slouching not towards Bethlehem as its Shiite retainers might wish it to but towards the abyss that its Syrian neighbors have already plunged over. This explosion was the last straw. Something has to give.

I don't think Lebanon is interested in another round of civil war. Each side, quite unlike the informational asymmetry that allows most wars to break out in the first place, has a clear idea of what to expect from the other and collective memory of the devastation wrought by the 25 years of fighting that flattened the country has proved to be a useful check when things have threatened to spiral out of control in the past. However, the situation now is so bad, the degradation of the country's politics and economics so acute, that the social sphere has no recourse but to exercise a commanding demonstration of power. It must, in essence, seize back control of the state from those who have made it a chessboard. A revolt against not any specific politics but against the political writ large is now necessary to reverse the decline. After all, the fault lies with no specific political party, really. March 8th and 14th respond to different sectors of society, but their constituents are now feeling the squeeze all the same. The spoils of a rapacious system that has raped Lebanon and removed from it its riches, stolen from its people and rendered them destitute is built into the structure of the political arrangement agreed upon by the heads of Lebanon's interest groups. It is politics that is the problem.

This line of thinking might be considered dangerous by more thoughtful observers, since a rejection of the political as such leads us down the dangerous road to apolitical technocracy, in which decision making is located in a small group of experts, and "scientific public policy" becomes the means by which social, political and economic questions are adjudicated. This is exactly the kind of state-capture by expertise that produced two decades of blundering errors and ultimately resulted in the populist explosions wracking the west. If the previous two decades have shown us anything, it's that "experts", when allowed to pursue the policies they feel best serve their countries, more often produce ruin and misery for themselves and others than anything else. How, then, to reconcile the necessity of the political with a mass-movement committed to anti-politics?

Something curious is happening in other countries bordering the Mediterranean sea whose political economies are facing equally dire circumstances. A new party family, dubbed techno-populist by observers, is emerging in those nations of southern Europe which continue to face stagnating economic conditions, high unemployment, painful austerity, and where debt service as a proportion of GDP continues to rise dramatically. These debtor nations, having failed to recover from the systemic crisis of the Eurozone triggered by the Great Recession, have watched as what had once been solid party systems crumble under the strains of the slow-moving crisis. In some countries, the result has been a turn towards left-populism. In others, right-wing populism. But in some states, particularly Italy, something new has been born. The people have taken their anti-system and anti-establishment sentiments and channeled them into the creation of new, explicitly non-ideological parties that nevertheless retain the discourse of populism.

This is curious, because populism, despite its occasional designation as a "thin ideology", is associated not merely with mass movements but with ideological mass politics. Indeed, someone who considers the history of populist movements, particularly the agrarian radicals of the 1890s, might be inclined to interpret their later embrace of targeted interest group tactics and incorporation into the federal bureaucracy as the resignation of politics in the face of the unconquerable logic of the administrative state. If you can't beat them, join them. But the collision between ideological mass movements and what has been dubbed by some as the "technostructure" need not, as a rule, result in the dissipation of mass politics into the machinery of the state. Indeed, the new challenge for populists seems not to be the question of how to win power (the people seem quite satisfied to elevate them there) but how to master the problem of hostile administration after their ascent.

One solution seems to be to abandon ideology without abandoning mass politics. In essence, we are separating politics from ideology. On the face of it, this is absurd. What is politics without ideology? Simple. It's mass anti-politics. To prevent co-optation, the movement must, after it wins power, continue to govern as if it is not in power. Given a minute's consideration, this appears to be a feature and not a bug. The entire point of an anti-system, anti-establishment movement is to destroy the system and the establishment it supports. In order to prevent capture by the system, it must level everything even after it wins power, including itself. Short of civil war, the only way for anti-politics to defeat politics is to wash it all away from the inside. To halt the game, you must flip the board.

This is why "post-ideological" parties like Italy's Five Star Movement are so puzzling to observers. Its schizophrenic governing style and continued hostile rhetoric against the "system" appear to be undercutting its ability to deliver on its promises. But this was its promise. It demanded an end to elite-driven politics, it promised the introduction of technology as a direct mediator between the people and its representatives, its plebiscitarian character and fondness for referendums, its mishmash of positions taken from both left and right, its focus on "apolitical" problems as represented by the five stars - water, development, transportation, environment and digital access - are all indicative of its desire to transcend polarization and politics. It does not refer to itself as a political party. It's a broad-based cross-party post-ideological anti-political movement and its inability to govern is of no moment. They are there, first and foremost, to destroy.

One must admit a certain amount of flexibility in our use of terminology here. This is not merely a semantic issue. Five Star is certainly non-ideological and hostile to politics as such, even as it has embraced the power of the masses and has committed itself to direct democracy. The party is certainly riven with dispute and its ability to adequately destroy the liberal institutions that seek to undermine it has been hampered by political expediencies and conflict with other parties and supranational entities. The vestiges of political DNA remain within it, that is the danger of such a movement. When the conditions are right, the only power on Earth that can defeat it is itself. By attaching itself to Italy's Democratic Party in a new coalition, it has surrendered ever more of itself to a political configuration that separates it from the masses, hence its dramatic drop in the polls. Its "government of change" with Lega Nord ended not because it was unworkable, but because Lega's leading personality is an egotist. They entered government with the right impulses.

What does this mean for Lebanon? For a mass anti-politics to succeed, they must replicate the successes of past protest by adopting the Five Star model as a guide. In 2005, the People secured the withdrawal of the Syrian army. In 2017, they forced the state to roll back its taxation scheme. In 2019, they forced the resignation of Saad Hariri as prime minister. Now, in the wake of Beirut's disaster, they have an opportunity to put an end to the whole thing. The history, the politics, none of it is relevant any longer. All that matters is the all-consuming tide of rage that can sweep away Lebanon's decrepit institutions. Everything must go. The system must be demolished, smashed, obliterated, incinerated, annihilated, inundated by the ravenous desire for change-at-all-costs.

Will they? Won't they? Anger is simmering in the streets as we speak. There will surely be a reckoning. But what form it takes is up to them. Surely the Lebanese will decide to replicate their previous experiences in mass protest. Past experience tells us that the state, brittle and enervated as it is, will capitulate fairly quickly to demands. The question is whether the demands will be specific, substantive and politically motivated, or broad, non-ideological, and anti-political. An inability to pinpoint specific actions it can stake to quell discontent may lead the state to violent action in order to defend itself. But the army is widely praised as an apolitical institution and with the salary of the individual soldier in steep decline it seems unlikely that they will come to its defense.

Say the protests adapt the Five Star model as a principle of organization. Let's say it even succeeds. The inevitable question among horrified commentators and observers will be: What comes next? To that I have to say: Who cares?

Beneath the 'wheeling stars'

It is often stated that the less people know, the more they opine on the matters of which they know little. Consider that the Socratic thesis we have spoken so much about: that people are generally ignorant when they make assertions concerning matters of which they believe they are intellectually equipped to speak when in fact they are not. We all know people like this as surely as we know ourselves. Because whether you know it or not, you are likely guilty of this very offense.

To my everlasting shame, I am also guilty of indulging in the act. It is almost irresistible and to this I wonder why. What compels us to speak so freely about matters of which we know little? On the one hand, I believe it to be a matter of showmanship. Despite a century of degradation, intellectualism still instills envy and enmity in the hearts of those who lack it. On the other hand however, I find that we are most often compelled to argue against matters which threaten to encroach on cherished beliefs and values. When we find ourselves in the realm of belligerent ideologies and rival philosophies, we are entering the twilight zone, a free-for-all where anything and everything goes, where popular canards and simplified recapitulations of complex arguments become the means by which partisans wage war. Hence the state of political discourse at the present moment, where oftentimes incoherent screaming seems to serve its interlocutors just as well as reasoned discourse. Who wants to read a book in the age of digitized revolution?

Once again, I am guilty of just this very offense. Though I will stake out my nonexistent credibility to reassure the enterprising reader that I will, for the most part, concede my deficiency in matters of which I know little. My ire usually arises as a result of an acutely felt intuition that the characteristics of a particular philosophy's supporters reflect the substantive content (and therefore value) of that philosophy. This is somewhat off the mark, but I believe it approaches something closer to truth when we consider one particularly popular philosophy: stoicism.

If any philosophy has ever suffered immense bastardization, popularization, and intellectual pauperization, it is stoicism. Willingly or not, the content of stoicism has served, consciously and unconsciously, as the basis from which a whole new therapeutic vernacular has been cultivated by a cottage-industry of inward-directed self-help bestsellers. Most of them skyrocket to the top of the New York Times' bestseller list and stay there for weeks or months. What do all these buzzwords mean? It's not terribly difficult. I've said it before. We live in a strange time, where multiplying identities are fueling the balkanization of society into disparate groups, where everything from depression to autism to self-harm are held up like merit badges. It is a brand new culture of individuality. Or to echo the late Christopher Lasch: an ethos of narcissism. The pharmaceutical industry, ever ready to make profit, has few qualms in aiding children and adult-children (it is sometimes hard to tell the difference) alike in their quest to portray themselves as the world's greatest victim by pumping them full of Zoloft. An army of degree-wielding "professionals" on the other hand are plenty pleased to play at perennial extortion by treating symptoms and not causes by pushing treatments like cognitive-behavioral therapy. Instead of concerning themselves with nosology and ultimate causation, they are content to sit behind the desk and provide the validation their victims crave.

A new language has inevitably arisen to cope with the new demands of the day. "Wellness", "self-care", "mindfulness", "personal growth", "self-improvement", "self- actualization". The new mindset preaches (funnily enough) a disinterested attitude towards aspects of the world that seem to infringe of the wellness of the individual. It suggests that withdrawal, nonchalance, and imperturbability are the goals to strive for. People on both sides of the political aisle use this language to describe their real or ideal responses to everyday inconveniences. "I cut off toxic people". "I needed a mental health day". Some of these are old words in new guises. Some of these phrases clash with the demands of permanent victimhood. All use it to describe their ideal state of neo-apatheia, the stoic equivalent to the epicurean ataraxia (of which more is to follow).

The ideal of stoicism is attractive to psychological man because it seems to offer a vindication of everything they desire, perhaps summed up best by the enduring popularity of the crassly titled "book" The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck. The dilemma that arises from self-help of this kind isn't hard to see: never mind the fact that those who write these things disguise pandering trite and pithy statements as profound and life-altering ethical guidance, what people want is to simply not give a fuck about the things that harangue them on a daily basis, but they never seem to succeed in reaching that euphoric state of apathy. They want to craft an image of themselves as disinterested, unbothered and eminently rational. There is an obvious affinity here to a philosophy that preaches a certain kind of ethical and ontological individualism, where the only thing within our control is rational judgment, and everything outside of this judgment is relegated to matters outside of our control. It is quite like that other imported fashion: Buddhism.

Therein lies the issue. Stoicism is not dangerous because its followers are confused and uncouth philistines merely grafting onto its philosophy like a fad. It is dangerous because there is a genuine affinity between the individualism of the stoa and the individualism of therapeutic society. Furthermore, stoicism at its heart is not merely a peculiar application of virtue ethics whose primary difference from other ethical systems stems from mere matters of emphases, but because stoicism at heart is actually self-mastery supplemented by virtue ethics. Self-mastery is morally neutral and not of necessity virtuous. Consider this quote from Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the eponymous protagonist considers his relentless pursuit of sensual experience:

"What has the actual passage of time got to do with it? It is only shallow people who require years to get rid of an emotion. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don't want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them."

Quite apart from the stoic conception of self-mastery + virtue ethics, what we have here is self-mastery put in service of libertinism. It is the conquest of the self for its own gratification, through indulgence in externalities. So quite apart from the "moral freedom" preached by the likes of Epictetus, we find that self-mastery, the "rational check" on our impulses, can actually be used to cultivate and indulge said impulses. Stoicism contains the seeds of its own destruction.

All well and good, psychological man might say, but there is clearly a choice to be had here. The rational man who exercises mastery of his judgment can still choose virtue over vice. Just because there is no inseparable linkage between control and virtue does not mean that the two cannot be cobbled together into a useful fusion. That may be so, but with the umbilical cord between the two severed, the tensions that had been papered over burst out into full view, for the Stoics themselves conceived of the relationship between the two as inextricable and equivalent. Consider Epictetus's assertion: "Freedom is not obtained through the satisfaction of desires, but through the suppression of desires". Unfortunately for him, the only way forward appears to be through the conquest of the self. But the suppression by itself is not virtuous, as we have seen. Virtue must be tacked on after the fact. It is a junior partner in this relationship, for the suppression of desire, the moral purity of the stoic, can come only after we have purged ourselves of positive interest in things outside our control (judgment). But virtue demands positive interest in the world outside of ourselves, in our community, in our friends and neighbors and relatives. And to the credit of the stoics, they acknowledged these things and sincerely believed the two were compatible. Unfortunately, their mistake reveals discord at best and incompatibility at worst. For a separation of self from world, a retreat into the "inner citadel", cannot possibly accord with the demands and obligations that come from our virtuous investments in the world outside of ourselves. Seneca says we ought to kill ourselves in the face of unbearable indignity and shame. He similarly advises that one ought not to grieve the sudden death of loved ones, for we should have already reconciled ourselves to the expectation of death. One can only wonder what becomes of customs that dictated social relations in every society from Rome to the present day. One wonders what becomes of justice, injustice, honor, dishonor, love, grief, happiness, sadness and the physical expressions and ritual manifestations of them all. I loathe to find myself in concord with anything Nietzsche said, for I find his fanatical fanbase very similar to those of the stoics, but I can only concede the aptness of his statement that such a life is not very much in accord with the diktat of Nature. It is rather hostile to an aesthetics of living.

And so my taste for Hellenic ethics soured somewhat upon encountering this strange alliance between therapeutic man and ancient stoicism. Being the generalist that I am, this naturally made me skeptical of most post-peripatetic ethical systems. But my recent encounter with Lucretius has forced me to rethink what I impulsively assumed. What I found in his famous poem de rerum natura was an altogether more subtle appreciation for the art of living. It was, in fact, a definitive statement of the life that I believe most people would like to lead, if only they would mount an intifada against the shackles they have unthinkingly placed upon themselves.

Epicureanism is curious in that is one of the few philosophies whose entire rationale for existence is the fixation on and widespread fear of death. Epicurus inaugurated a line of thinking that still resonates today when he argued against the fear of death via this rather simple syllogism:

P1: When I am, death is not

P2: When I am not, death is

C: Fear of death is unwarranted

This is compelling enough by itself. I have encountered a surprising number of people who don't fear death and, when pressed to explain their views, echo some variation of this argument. I believe the opposite conclusion to be warranted by the premises, but that's neither here nor there. Wittgenstein would later pick up on this, but rather than use it in service of ethics, he was focused instead on making a transcendental argument concerning the nature of death. Fascinating stuff, but somewhat beyond the scope of this post. For our present purposes, what matters is that epicureanism is so concerned with death to the point where I do not think it hyperbole to assert that its life-ethos revolves around it. For Epicurus and Lucretius were primarily concerned with the abundance of religiosity in their day. They found organized belief ridiculous, they were atomists, materialists (in a rather loose sense), maybe not atheists but at the very least unconvinced that the Gods would concern themselves with human affairs. They saw the fear of death as the primary motivating factor in bringing people around to the idea that Zeus would smite you with a lightning bolt if he was displeased with your votive offerings.

Perhaps they were right about this. They were on the right track in their positing of atoms as ultimate causes, after all. Their refusal to embrace theology sent them towards natural philosophy and metaphysics instead, and opened the door to (as far as I can tell) the first formulation of underdetermination as a principle of physical theorizing, as Lucretius recounts:

To settle upon what's certain in this world,

That's hard. But what might possibly apply

In various worlds arranged in various ways,

That I can show, and set forth many causes

Of stellar motion through the universe.

One of those anyway must be what stirs

The stars to move; but to find which it is

Is not for our slow, step-by-step advance.

There is some humility in there. But the humility sometimes curdles into revelry:

One thing restores another; it must be.

And no one's flung to the pit or the pains of Hell.

We need those atoms for our progeny.

Who, though they live life full, shall follow us.

Before you came, men died - and they will die.

One thing gives rise to another, incessantly;

Life's given to no one outright; all must borrow.

Reflect how the span of the endless past

Before our births mean nothing at all to us.

Here Nature has provided us a mirror

Of the time to come when we at last have died.

Is there horror in the prospect? Any sorrow?

Isn't it freer from care than the sweetest sleep?

We frighten ourselves with stories of heaven and hell. What really ails us are our anxieties and fears about what-is-not, we cling (cravenly) to life when we should instead accept it as a natural progression in the endless All, the void in which atoms clash and clang and weave together to form the universe. Despite his hostility to Heraclitean ontology, the epicurean world is a world of ceaseless change, of reformation and destruction, life and death, it is a unity of opposites. Epicureanism tells us that we are born to die. We must embrace death to truly live.

Not content with his exhortations, Lucretius describes the fear of death as a consequence of man's ascent from a state of savagery to civilization, for death was of no moment to man before he discovered community:

Nor did those mortals much more often then

Lament their leaving the sweet light of life.

More often it happened then that someone snatched

By the fangs of a beast gave him living feed to gobble,

Filled hills and forests with his cry, alive

But watching his vitals interred in a living tomb.

And those who could flee to safety with half-gnawed bodies

Later would press their festering sores, their palms

In a palsy, and call for Death with dreadful cries,

Til the grip of lockjaw took their lives away,

Helpless, not knowing how to treat a wound.

From this it is not a long pathway to inventing the Gods, and from there we are not very far from ascribing to them vindictiveness and a willingness to "aim at us" the "limitless power" that "wheels the planets and stars".

And what does it mean to truly live? We find a description of tranquility in the latter half of the poem:

And echoing the liquid warble of birds

Came long before men gathered together to sing

Fine polished carols to delight the ear.

And the winds whistling in the hollow of reeds

Taught them to play the rustic hemlock pipe.

Then little by little they learned the sweet complaints

That the pipe pours forth at the fingering-pulse of the players,

Heard in the trackless forests, the shepherds' dells,

Places of sunlit solitude and peace.

After a hearty meal these songs caressed

And pleased them all - for then things touch the heart.

Often they lay at ease in the soft grass,

In the shade of a tall tree by the riverside,

Their bodies refreshed and gladdened, at no great cost,

Especially when the weather smiled, and the season

Stippled the meadow with fresh and lusty flowers.

Then they had games, and talking, and sweet laughter,

For then the rustic Muse was in her prime;

Then prompted by merry foolery they would garland

Their heads and shoulders with a crown of flowers,

And move their limbs in a rough rhythm and dance,

Pounding their mother Earth with their rough feet.

Then they would smile at themselves and merrily laugh -

It was all new to them then, and wonderful!

Whatever my deep disagreements with him about what our proper response to death ought to be, it is hard not to see in this the kind of peace and tranquility that we all aspire to achieve. Resting in the shade by the riverside, free of worry and care, playing music and dancing in languorous delight with friends. The question of how to get there aside, this is what it ought to be like, this is the end to strive for. That all being said, it seems clear to me that the epicurean has far less to concern himself with when it comes to reconciling community and the individual than the stoic does. The epicurean admits a certain amount of indulgence, a certain appreciation for both pleasures and pains. Keeping limits in mind (and even here we find a curious resemblance to the notion that death is a transcendental limit), the self is allowed to pursue the maximization of pleasant sensation however he may see fit, so long as he keeps the ends of ataraxia as described above in clear sight.

Later commentators have taken this to constitute a ringing endorsement of unrestrained hedonism, without taking care to consider that Epicurus and Lucretius both find a lack of equilibrium in the pursuit of sensation to be the primary cause of man's downfall, for the ever-increasing desire for more, the relentless drive for pleasure, profit and power, often leads men towards that same end from which they were striving to protect themselves against in the first place: death. As Epicurus intones: "When it comes to death, we are like a city without walls". But I would be remiss not to acknowledge that the epicurean leaves himself open to such charges so long as he stresses the primacy of pleasant sensation.

So we see in epicureanism what both the stoic and the libertine lack: an appreciation for limits, an acknowledgement that self-mastery might just require a leveling of all that really matters, both within and without, for it to truly succeed. And if it does leave open a crack in the door for a bit of excess, well, sometimes a little radicalism is needed in order to secure tranquility. The ends are quite alright. It is the means for which we still have occasion to debate.

In Memoriam

As of this writing, twenty four years ago, two hundred and thirty people had but 2 hours and 15 minutes to live. They were people like you and me, they were women and men, young and old, mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children. They were students, they were engaged, they were friends, neighbors, relatives, participants in a vast web of social entanglements that would be, in two hours and fifteen minutes, torn asunder, literally, over the twilit skies of Long Island. I am speaking of the detonation of Trans World Airlines Flight 800.

The first question that pops to mind is Why? What difference does it make? Planes crash with perturbing regularity and, though the United States has managed to go a lucky two decades without a catastrophic structural failure (the last would be American Airlines Flight 587, just two short months after 9/11), the rest of the world has seen calamities in recent years that rival the horrors we knew in the past. Malaysian Airlines' twin 2014 disasters spring to mind. Indonesia has had its fair share recently, if I recall correctly. This year Iran, in a stunning display of history's capacity for the ironic, shot down a passenger jet it believed to be a hostile aviation unit. Fair enough. What's so bad about TWA 800, then?

The answer to Why is in the How. A short circuit in the fuel tank led to a spark that, mixed with explosive vapours in the central coolant system, produced a blast that tore through the fuselage, tore the cockpit from the body, and sent the ascending plane spiraling upwards, functioning engines still thrusting the plane upwards before it careened across the sky in a long, wide arc and began its turbulent descent, left wing shearing off, creating another fireball on a plane already aflame, before finally, finally, crashing into the ocean. The whole thing took maybe a little longer than a minute, but it was enough time for every passenger still conscious on that plane, and there were quite a few, to experience the full and complete terror of a fiery mid-air breakup. There are few plane crashes in history that can match the sheer horror which met the passengers of TWA 800.

I once said that the problem of experience is the most profound problem facing us today and I stand by that statement. There are singular experiences so terrifying, so horrific, that they not only produce obsession but demand it. I am sometimes given flack from people who question the motives of anyone who would focus on this aspect of the tragedy. They're dead, they're victims, but we ought to honor them by memorializing who they were in life, yes? No. I don't think it does any good to wipe clean from the annals of collective memory those last minutes of their lives. For all the talk of denying the "experiences" of marginal groups of people, there is a surprising willingness on the part of just about everyone to deny, turn away, shield our eyes, from uniquely difficult moments in history. Recall the jumpers on 9/11, recall (and I will not type the key words for this as I am intimately acquainted now with Google's algorithms) certain incidents that befell certain popular locales of a certain kind of sport in Europe during the latter half of the 20th century. To witness extraordinarily public deaths tend to conjure up in people the image of the voyeur, peering into a moment of great "privacy" that ought not to be shared. This public/private mismatch is, I think, what might account for some of the horror. The public element exposes an experience, sometimes from a mere few inches, afflicting people faced with a nigh unimaginable situation. And to think we might bear witness to that pain from just a few inches without necessarily partaking in it as at once horrifying and intriguing. There are spaces so close to each other, but so different in nature, that to view that offending space is to see something one ought not to. As Herodotus reminds us, Heracles' dynasty ended when King Candaules forced his bodyguard Gyges to watch as his queen undressed. When she discovered this transgression, she had Candaules killed, and so ended the dynasty of Heracles. Such acts produce grave consequences. In the case of the queen it was beauty that produced tragedy. In the case of these disasters, it is death that produces suffering. But both necessitate a fascination. Why do beauty and death stir in us such similar emotions?

TWA 800 was not quite so public, and so any reconstruction of what it was like to be in that aircraft necessarily involves some mental legwork. It is impossible to know. But it is possible to imagine. This tension is the source of some of the obsession, undoubtedly. It is the knowledge that this happened, and to imagine what it was like, that ought not to be shunted off into the dark. In an hour and twenty five minutes twenty four years ago, the only people in the world who will ever know what that was like got to find out. There's little room for metaphysics here. It is all a mechanical process. It is the physics of death that we know, and from this we can only hope to imagine.

I would imagine that in a moral universe whose arc bends towards revenge I ought to be punished for the transgression of deigning to know and worse - to imagine. I've often used and exploited the memories of those people and the knowledge of their final harrowing moments as a kind of exercise in self-indulgence. It is all purely selfish, as any voyeuristic act must be. I have lorded it clandestinely over others. I have used my knowledge of supreme tragedies to inflate the ego. I am no stranger to terror. I revel in it. I see it as not only a useful organizing principle, but also a useful governing one, as the French and Russian revolutionaries did. But this is small scale terror writ large, this is terror that aims to turn the private into the public, to disseminate a knowledge of terror, to hammer it home, to produce obsessions and hauntings, that is a vengeful memory. But whose vengeance? It is the deliberate spread of anomie, but I maintain that buried beneath all of this there is merely the impulse to make others understand that such experiences exist, have existed, ought not to but did, and that to forget them is to make it as if it never happened. So perhaps some justice is being served, in a roundabout way that serves both parties.

But for now let us simply bend our heads, close our eyes, and remember. Life and death cannot be separated and should not be, whatever the horror that death brings us, for without it the story of a life cannot be complete.

An Addendum to Percy

I'm trying to account for my growing rage at Catholics. It's rather funny, because not too long ago I felt political Catholicism was the path to national regeneration. I suppose I do still feel something like that. At least in the sense that I see Catholic summer camps as a useful model to build on. But one could say that about any religion. It is a dreadful thing to recognize that it is others' happiness that stokes fury in oneself. But having come to the conclusion of a great work written by a great Catholic author, I must allow myself a moment of reflection.

I'll admit, Lancelot kept me guessing the whole way through, and while others seem willing to afford the character a more generous interpretation, as one the author means us to reject, I am too familiar with the scathing screeds he brings forth, too familiar with that train of thought, to dismiss it so casually. The truth is that he is a jumbled mass of confusion, but only because at base he is a confused protagonist, and maybe the confusion has - truly - been transferred from pen to paper, from the heart to the ink. Lancelot's "big secret of life", for instance, rings both true and false to me. He sees it that all women at heart, their function, their own (un)conscious purpose, is to have sex. But Percy ups the ante. They do not merely want to have sex. They want to be assaulted. They want to be raped. And conversely, it is man's job to rape. To assault. It rings true because the dominant impulse in man really is sex and power - two corollaries that are inextricably bound up in each other - while it rings false because it disregards the distinction between persuasion and force. For Lancelot, the two collapse into one another. Perhaps this is just an example of extreme hyperbole and what he really means to convey is simply that women consent to being raped. That sex, necessarily involving a dominant and submissive party, is essentially rape, regardless of what the involved parties think. But Percy appears to hint that this isn't right, and that Lancelot's view of the world really is wrong, when first his promiscuous wife Margot and the women he plans to steal away with, Anna, both reject sex as a necessity, chastise men for fixating on it, and in Anna's case admonishes Lancelot for intimating that she enjoyed her own sexual assault.

So there is a mixture of truth and lies here, the kind that makes it difficult to discern where truth ends and lies begin. The root of the problem in my mind is that Lancelot is suffering not from merely having gone insane (although he may well be. it is often the irrational who see things more clearly than the rational) but from realizing that he has all along been a purveyor of inconclusive experiences, much in the same way that Joseph Conrad's Marlowe found himself horror-stricken at the sight of Kurtz in the jungle, and at truths half-glimpsed in the hollowness of his heart - instantiations of greater uncertainties. That's enough to drive anyone to madness. It may well take me there. It certainly hollowed out Lancelot. And at the end this hollowness is given voice by what I take to be the real terrible secret:

What? You remind me that I said in the beginning that there was something I wanted to ask you. Ah yes. Well, it doesn't seem important, no. Because there is no answer to the question. The question? Very well The question is: Why did I discover nothing at the heart of evil? There was no "secret" after all, no discovery, no flickering of interest, not even any evil. There was no sense of coming close to the "answer" as there had been when I discovered the stolen money in my father's sock drawer. As I held that wretched Jacoby by the throat, I felt nothing except the itch of the fiberglass particles under my collar. So I have nothing to ask you after all because there is no answer. There is no question. There is no unholy grail just as there was no Holy Grail.

Lancelot effectively concedes defeat. He tried and failed to find absolute evil, and with it vanished any possibility of grasping anything close to the infinite, or God. It is funny that he mentions Jacoby, for just before Lancelot cuts his throat Jacoby nearly reveals what it is he "really wants" and notes that he suspects it is the same for Lance. Margot explodes before she can reveal whether she really thinks there's any hope of salvaging them. Lance's Percival-priest has something he wants to say to Lance as the two finally come to grips with where they stand, but the book concludes with a simple Yes and nothing more. And why not? All has been revealed. Percival played Lancelot's little game, humored him, let himself get strung along, perhaps even discerned nuggets of truth in his ranting and raving. And at the end perhaps Lancelot has established not his much vaunted new reconciliation between man and woman but between man and man, between confessor and confession, between two opposing ideas. Percival knows where he stands and he intends to tell Lancelot all about the Holy Grail.

So is Lancelot right? Does Percy sympathize - empathize, even - with his protagonist? Yes and no. Epoche strikes again. I daresay it is much easier to throw one's hands in the air, shrug the shoulders, and follow Pyrrho into acceptance. Hah, how's that for psychiatric language?

Fuming in the dark

Here I am, at the "epicenter of instability in the world", caught in the liminal space between old day and new, the sun set and shadows cast across the hotel room. Why does it feel like I'm marooned on some far flung polar fringe, when in reality I'm smack dab in the middle of the global superpower's capital city?

The clock is about to strike twelve, and in a funny way the clock is ticking down on (and has been for a long while) my life. But that's just hyperbole, isn't it? Nothing ever happens. The old day passes into the new, the sun always rises and never ceases to set, the present drowns in the past, becomes another trophy in the past's long march backwards, gathering spaces in the annals and recesses of memory, until it consumes all, until it eats everything propped up to resist it.

How's that for bombastic language? Unnecessary, I'd think. And to the extent it reflects my views on time, rather uninteresting. For who hasn't felt like this, and who hasn't said or thought these things? I am just now reading a Walker Percy novel, my second in five years, titled Lancelot. It tells the story of a man nearing or at middle age, who discovers an adultery, and not merely any adultery, but an adultery that produced the daughter he believed was his. This discovery catalyzes something like a religious awakening in him, and for the first time in a long time he becomes aware that he has been merely wiling away his life and times, and that by conforming to his set-stupor he has submerged himself into a kind of unconsciousness, completely unaware of time's passing, and this stupor has stoked in him a kind of aimlessness, a lack of conviction, an inability to set a goal, to know "what to do".

Evidently he changes his views, for while this awakening is surely an inspiration, something catastrophic occurs (I have not yet finished the novel, so I do not know what the nature of this disaster is) that changes his views on time. Locked up (voluntarily, perhaps) at an institution of some sort, he confesses to his nameless visitor an altogether different view of time:

You must believe me when I tell you that it is the banality of the past which puts me off. There is only one reason why I am telling you about these old sad things, or rather trying to remember them, and it has nothing to do with not being able to remember. I can remember. I can remember every word Elgin said to me in the pigeonnier. It is because the past, any past, is intolerable, not because it is violent, or terrible or doom-struck or any such thing, but just because it is so goddamn banal and feckless and useless. And violence is the most banal and boring of all. It is horrible not because it is bloody but because it is meaningless. It does not signify.

He goes on to compare himself to a tape head, to see the past as an encroachment of banality on the present, and the devourer of future possibility. In doing so, it robs one of a way out, and condemns them to a life of stagnation. Maybe Lancelot's awakening was true and sincere, albeit brief, and whatever tragedy occurred at least left him with this newfound knowledge without possibility to act on it. The pure possibility grasped in the present was ripped away not by time's banality, but by whatever bad fortune struck him down and killed his wife. Frankly, I do not yet understand Lancelot, am unable to get a good grasp on his true motives, what he really believes (perhaps because he truly does not believe in anything, perhaps because he is truly a madman). Do I believe in the banality of time? Do I believe that the encroachment of this banality is the source of the acute sense of anxiety that befalls one (me) when the thought of its passage strikes? I believe in its banality, I suppose, but not the rapacious all-consuming quality he ascribes to it. After all, the Biblical discussion of banality is supposed to be liberating. The futility of all action. I have quoted it before. "Nothing new under the sun". What is the problem with that? This has all happened before, and what has happened before will determine what happens again.

But it is true (and it is really this that is more important than anything), that what Lancelot undergoes is a strictly theological experience. He awakens to the reality that the life he leads is something less than reality, or at least reality as it ought to be - in an ideal sense, in that sense that means happiness, contentment, peace, tranquility, ataraxia. He is much like Percy's more famous protagonist, Binx Bolling, whose own struggle to find that "something else" electrified me those five years ago. Who doesn't feel terribly hollow? Who doesn't feel fulfilled? Bolling muses that that something else might be God. Lancelot awakens to a world in which the ought does not quite conform to the is. He would much prefer to deal in absolutes, believes even that he once did (love is infinite, love is absolute), but confronts the disquieting fact that the world (we) appears to have moved on from such simple binaries, has adopted the psychiatric language of "madness" and speaks often only of "troubled" individuals. There is no room for God here. No room for lost causes. Maybe there is room for sin. But the jury, as of page 176, is still out.

There is that question I always ask myself, when considering Percy and his characters. Am I awake? How would I know it if I was? There is always that sense of something just out of reach. One revelation, one epiphany, one striking moment of absolute clarity to rip me straight from the doldrums and onto a higher plane of understanding. It has never come. Time marches forward. It is all banal. The cancellation of possibility is horrendous, a horrific consideration that haunts me awake and asleep. But what we are concerned with here is habit. Temporal reinforcement tightens its stranglehold, squeezes the neck, throttles you. Leaving the "well worn path of my life" is not easy. But I have come to learn that it is that interior state, that psychological barrier, that is hardest to break through. Once you have triumphed over yourself, everything falls into place. It is a problem of time (an incidental one), but not the problem of time.

Still, extenuating circumstances have precluded me from acting and I do not believe I will have enough time to act before I am off to start my "new life" in our nation's storied capital. So the destabilization paradoxically intensifies with this newfound willingness to change. The old not yet dead, the new waiting to be born and all that. I am indeed caught in a liminal space and my frustrations have only grown with this progress. I do feel like a tape head, the worm eating away at future possibilities. How much easier it would be to simply find God! But reading about the dating lives of Catholic integralists on Twitter makes me want to raze the Vatican. Despite the feeling that things are slipping away from them, they have somewhere they can go, somewhere they belong, a community they can live, laugh and love with (maybe, maybe, maybe, this is the impression I get. One can still, after all, go to Church, if nothing else). I'm much too craven to take such a step. Think of all the possibilities that might be canceled!

The fall of goodness

My regular references to self-knowledge should make it pretty clear that I owe a heavy intellectual debt to Socrates. There are worlds to be found within the dialogues and the manner in which they were written lend themselves to infinite re-readability. When it comes to the Platonic corpus, it is those earliest works, the ones which portray the trial and death of Socrates, that perhaps reach a characterization of the man which is closer to authentic than not. But this acknowledgement that some portrayals are more sincere than others gets to the heart of the issue. How much is the Socrates of Plato his own man, and how much is a puppet of penmanship? And what of that other disciple of his? Xenophon, whose works present the only other surviving primary source documentation of what it must have been like to consort with Socrates, to engage him in the streets and the agora, to lay in languor and luxury at a nobleman's symposium, presents a portrait of a man who is much less cerebral, much more particularist and even parochial in his concerns. Xenophon's Socrates is closer to the agrarian wisdom and moralizing of someone like Hesiod than the stratospheric intellectual concerns of Plato's characterization. Which, then, is right?

Robin Waterfield, translator of Penguin's edition of Xenophon's Socratic dialogues, believes that the only proper way to get at the "true" character of Socrates by way of his followers is to compare the broad principles that underlay the portrayals of him. Since he was notorious for leaving behind no written word (and at least the Platonic Socrates being philosophically hostile to the written word - hence his style might best be characterized as "esoteric" - in that the words written on the page are not reflective of his true thinking), his thought must be deduced via comparison of the accounts left behind by his disciples. While Plato and Xenophon's Socrates may differ in what they emphasize, they agree on the broad idea that the virtuous, wise and moral life is one that is self-reflective, one that is capable of discovering and maintaining knowledge about the individual's own self, his capabilities and the limits of his understanding. For Plato, this becomes an almost ascetic commitment to the reality behind appearances, to the cultivation of wisdom via learning (or remembering), and to the transformation of citizen and state through the inculcation of celestial (read: intellectual) contemplation and moral education at the expense of pleasure and unconstrained passion (hence the (in)famous hostility to certain types of art and poetry on the part of the philosopher-king - in the Platonic utopia only those artistic representations that reflect the virtues of the upstanding moral citizen ought to be publicly displayed). For Xenophon, his understanding of Socratic wisdom entails a more practical understanding of virtue; virtue as friendship, virtue as efficient management of the individual and his affairs, virtue as the ideal regulation of wants and desires in favor of equanimity, of facilitating concord and lawfulness in the state. Plato diverges into matters of metaphysics and epistemology later in his life, and his Socrates goes with him. Xenophon doesn't bother to put on airs, he simply has Socrates dance to the notes of his tune.

All this aside, it isn't hard to see the broad agreements here. It is a problem encountered when it comes to distinguishing all strains of Hellenic ethics from each other. What is the functional difference between Socratic asceticism and Epictetus's stoicism? Or cynicism and stoicism? Even epicureanism becomes difficult to untangle from the rest when you recognize that Epicurus's "hedonism" is merely the elimination of unpleasurable sensation and not an endorsement of unabashed indulgence. Of them all, it seems only Aristotle was successful in differentiating and specializing his ethical system to the extent where clear lines of division can be drawn - but ultimately it remains a matter of virtue ethics. It seems that most schools of Hellenic thought see virtue as the goal towards which to strive and the differences, as between Plato and Xenophon, lay merely in matters of emphases. Though I suppose (and perhaps this crucial point will undercut my entire thesis), those matters of emphases may lead to wildly different conclusions. Is Crates of Thebes' state the same as Plato's? Hardly. Though both would claim it to be the virtuous one. The ends are ostensibly the same, the means are different, but in practice each consummation of the end leads to a different place. Means and ends matter more than we think (or than I thought) at least when it comes to issues as sticky as virtue.

Lucky them, to be so close to general concord, separated by mere superficiality and not in the fundamentals. For us, it is a much different story. Plato and Xenophon both internalize Socrates's central point: that self-knowledge is wisdom and leads to virtue and an upstanding moral character, provided one heeds its lessons. We can't quite get that far. Somewhere along the way, the message was lost. That individual man, whose life to Xenophon seemed the perfect picture of goodness and happiness, was not so much erased by History as disregarded by it. We pay lip service to his name, just as we do to that of Jesus Christ, but we are not devout in following His message. And along the way that message has been twisted and distorted, reflected and contorted, bent and broken, regurgitated and turned inside out and sideways. How many times have we heard those platitudes to just "do better", to disregard negative energies, to "vibe", and my personal favorite, to "focus on yourself". Focusing on yourself entails something much different than Socrates's cultivation of self-knowledge. Amazingly, the ends typically lead to exact opposites, which indicates that what the inward-directed men and women of today, young and old alike, have in mind is something rather different from what the Delphic maxim intended. Because the same people that are spouting and sharing their nonsense platitudes on their social media feeds have an idea of self-improvement dedicated only to exoteric improvement. What is the purpose of an exercise regimen today? Not to enhance one's capacity to fulfill noble acts in service of the state or fellow citizens, but to maximize physical beauty, to score as many conquests at the bar as is conceivable. Look at any college campus today, the tacit endorsement of flagrant moral outrage on the part of the youth, a concession to the overriding desire on their part to acquire access to money, sex, alcohol and drugs - whatever the cost. Now compare that to Socratic moral education found in the Apology or Memoirs and tell me where the difference lies, besides the mere superficial similarity in their words. Socratic-ism today would be labeled "authoritarian" at best.

This is not really a problem exclusive to our own time, I will concede. It must come as quite the shock to the self-proclaimed traditionalist to discover that Ancient Athens, for instance, was rife with homosexual indulgence among its upper classes. Its people were known for their excessive hedonism, particularly at symposiums, as Plato and Xenophon make clear. Indeed, the entire purpose of Socrates's dialectics on Love are to disabuse us of the notion that indulgence and physical desire might be equated with the true educational power imbued in erotics. For Plato, Love is a stepping stone towards conceptualization of Beauty-in-itself. For Xenophon, Love is something of a leveling force between a mentor and his protege, it is directed towards the mutual improvement of the participants' characters by means of each other. Both were writing in reaction to what must surely have been a vexing and dominant impulse rampant among their fellow citizens. Little more needs to be said beyond the fact that adultery was punished more harshly than rape, for a willing consummation of carnal desire between two individuals was more destructive of their individual characters and the ties that bound them to others than the unwilling defiling of one pure soul for the gratification of a wicked one. Force is more moral than persuasion, even when it is used to achieve identical immoral ends. What does that say about force utilized in service of moral ends?

Today there is nothing but persuasion. Nothing but gratification. Nothing but "self-improvement" aimed not towards contemplation of self (and thus a deeper understanding of how to conduct oneself in righteous fashion) but toward self-gratification. In a world of autonomous individuals left to bump and grind upon one another, sinking further and further into an abyss of intellectual incontinence and ostentatious self-regard, we are cut adrift from any understanding of ourselves and thus what makes for a good society. In such a world we have forgotten what it means to be good. If knowledge is recollection, why leave us to remember the bad and not the good? If persuasion has lost all force to achieve good ends, why not utilize force in order to eliminate knowledge of what is bad? Goodness was sacrificed on the altar for a false vision of liberty and much of what had been known to the past has now been lost to us. The people know little else. This is a positional problem. It is merely a matter of memory. All it requires is a bit of tinkering with time, and some time for tinkering.

Some remarks on American isolationism

While the United States' meltdown continues apace, it has become something of a challenge to maintain focus on affairs going on outside of the immediate national context. But rest assured the globe continues to revolve, upwards of twenty Indian soldiers killed in clashes with the Chinese military, the legal philosophy formerly known as "originalism" committed suicide in a dramatic (if not totally unexpected) display of self-debasement when a Trump appointed justice sided with progressive sentiment in advancing LGBTQ "rights" and defending sanctuary cities, oh, and America is withdrawing half of its German garrison.

The move was something of a shock to those paying attention (though it really shouldn't be). It probably helps that not many people are paying attention at the moment, given the multiplicity of concurrent global crises, but it is a profoundly significant decision, not simply because it tells us something of this administration's true intentions nor because of the acceleration of weakening transatlantic ties, but also because it is a present day instantiation of historical forces that still act upon the psyche of this country, because it is an action born of pure emotion, carried out emotionally towards ends that are at once substantive while also doubling as a vindictive display of will. It is, in short, the starkest demonstration of irrationalism's capacity to satiate itself while also producing results conducive to the common good.

I should preface all of this by asserting that isolationism is not, in itself, irrational. Many states practiced isolationism and its attraction was once such that it would not be a total exaggeration to call it the default foreign policy for those states which could afford to maintain it. Europe, with its hodgepodge of competing and fragmented polities, as well as perennial concerns over such nebulous notions as the "balance of power", was not able to avail itself of the same luxuries available to China, Japan, and the United States in its infancy. It was a perfectly rational disposition born of immense wealth, security, and geographical unassailability. This attitude is perfectly summed up by the Qing emperor's response to Her Majesty's ambassador when said ambassador arrived bearing gifts: We possess all things. A state that possesses all things has little positive interest in games played outside of its borders. The difference between then and now is that the interdependency of the world in the 18th century was far less than that of the world today. Today, the United States has inexplicably decided that it does have positive interests outside of its borders. In fact, it has decided that it has positive interests everywhere. Even more inexplicably, it has decided to hitch its economic fortunes to other countries (even adversaries!) in the hopes of actively facilitating this interdependency. In the minds of those conspirators who have formulated this policy, the net result is an increase in influence over events in the world outside of its borders. Even events that are as far removed from the immediate national context as a border clash between India and China, or an autocrat rattling his saber in the Levant.

You see where I'm going with this? Such a policy may have its benefits when a country must grapple with insuperable military, political, or geographical necessities, such as the kind that necessitated the Pax Britannica, Pax Mongolica and so on, but for a country separated from the world by two oceans, from a country founded on ideas of self-sufficiency and autarky, this seems self-defeating. One would also be remiss to avoid acknowledging that even in Europe increasing insecurity has often powered a drive towards autarky. Both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia found itself beset by enemies, real and imagined, and such internal instability energized broad-based national economic programs to lessen reliance on outside economic and political factors. Interdependency, quite apart from reducing power disparities, exacerbates them, and such disparities drive states to lash out in unpredictable ways if conditions do not exist to enable the kind of self-sufficiency enjoyed by those lucky states which inherit them. In layman's terms: you stick with your own people, and this is how most units of analysis, whether it is the individual or the state, seem to prefer it.

So to isolate is perhaps a completely rational desire, and to pursue a foreign policy with this ultimate aim in mind is evidently reasonable. For a country that has already gone so far down the path towards encouraging interdependency to suddenly get cold feet may appear to be capricious and imprudent when in reality it is a perfectly natural course correction. There may be painful, even wrenching consequences to such a correction, but the blame should lie at the feet of those "liberal hegemonists" who thought they were building a better world (and they certainly did not), and not with the status quo they smashed. But the deceptively simple act of moving to overturn one status quo in favor of another should not escape our notice, for oftentimes it is the means by which such overturning occurs that matters.

The liberal hegemonists did believe they were building a better world. They were moved to act in service of lofty ideals, pacifistic universality combined with enough firepower to enforce it. Those old wry refrains - peace and democracy at the point of a gun - ring true. They were guided by the light of reason, by the dream of a shining city on a hill, by the promise of internationalism and globalism. They have failed because they weren't strong enough to push against the tide of American history, founded on those aforementioned ideals of self-sufficiency, which has so often ruled against interest in overseas affairs. When their efforts floundered, they did not course correct, but stayed the course. It is hard to deprogram people who believe themselves to have thought up one good idea, particularly if they don't have many to begin with. Their procedure is eminently rational, but they have inculcated an irrational mindset, a "fanatical center", a "paranoid establishment".

If rational means can be deployed to irrational ends. Might the inverse be true? And if such a thing is possible, might it produce better results? Believe it or not, there is a literature on this topic as it pertains to this specific national context. We will have to trace the linkages of meaning in order to answer our question.

My interest in this subject was first roused by a curious little footnote buried deep in Richard Hofstadter's essay on what he called the "pseudo-conservative revolt". Writing in the time of Joseph McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Robert Welch Jr., Hofstadter had much to be paranoid about. He saw the rising of what would become movement conservatism as inherently unconservative in its disposition towards the world (he was right, but not for the reasons he thinks). He saw it as  fundamentally characteristic of that paranoid style for which he has become so well known, and as representative of the triumph of status politics over interest politics (as a self-proclaimed chronicler of historico-political "moods" and "culture", he displayed much interest in psychologizing his subjects). It is also lesser remarked upon that the paranoid "style" of which he spoke could be used, in his words, to convey ideas that are eminently rational. There were plenty of intelligent men, in his estimation, who could fall victim, or use deliberately, the thrilling power of paranoia and deploy it in service of ends quite distinct from the mood of its adherents. Hence, Goldwater, who in reality was a quite conventional laissez-faire acolyte and prone to frequent flip flops, cobbled together a movement of millions in service of ideas that I think many today would see as "rational" (constitutionalism, rule of law, etc.) conveyed in an "irrational" or "paranoid" style by framing the political conflict (in Hofstadter's words) as a simple Manichean struggle between good and evil, against forces wishing to smother the American experiment, against the power of those above to squash the ordinary man.

But the distinction between intent and outcome is a glaring disparity that must be addressed. Goldwater, you see, was a liar, and while his failure to understand his voters was not what cost him the election, it is an embarrassment that should sweep from history any claim on his part to that of "standard bearer". The fact that the states that voted for Barry went for George Wallace four years later should clue us in to the fact that certain core aspects of Goldwater's platform was, at best, a nonissue for his voters. Hofstadter gets it right when he says that those voting for the new conservative movement were doing so in part because they had become aware that they were shouldering the burden of global responsibility and found it not to their liking. For them, Goldwater was a useful vessel, or idiot, that could project their frustration and anger. He was able to channel vague intent and assemble it into a coherent message and policy program that promised certain outcomes (with the aid of some fiery if impotent rhetoric), but only because there was no one else playing even close to the same ballpark. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

This leads me to the footnote. In his discussion of this new unconservative sentiment, he endorses a political tract by one Sam Lubell and gestures vaguely at the structure of isolationism as Sam sees it - as "a vengeful memory". This is a profound assertion. Mr. Lubell is apparently not content to have isolationism be the mere product of "a vengeful memory". Isolationism is a vengeful memory. What ever could this mean? Indeed, further inquiry into Mr. Lubell's work finds an interesting thesis spread out over a number of books and papers. It is his contention that isolationism is the product of ethnic attitudes derived from historical experience. Analysis of voting patterns in the 1940 election, which pitted the interventionist FDR against Wendell Wilkie, exposed an interesting shift: Democratic vote shares declined considerably in areas populated by German and Irish-Americans. In his telling, what pushed these groups against FDR was "First, the existence of pro-German and anti-British ethnic prejudices. Second, the exploiting of these prejudices by an opposition party" and that the genesis of isolationist sentiment in the United States was ultimately "ethnic and emotional".

It is not hard to see why this might be. Germany and the United Kingdom had spent the previous three decades at bitter odds, while the Irish had an even lengthier catalogue of grievances against the British. It is important to note that the ultimate question of the wisdom of intervention was set aside by these groups. If these groups did not have the historical encounters with Britain that they did, perhaps their response to the question would be different, or perhaps there would be other reasons to feel the same. Rational consideration of the issue was hardly at play. This was a simple matter of revenge, and it overrode all else. The geographical relationship to isolationist sentiment is merely incidental. The American interior, particularly the Middle West, is where most German-Americans ended up settling. It is hardly a coincidence that La Follette's third-party insurgency in the election of 1924 was built on similar isolationist sentiment, that a large share of his vote came from this region (he was a veteran of Wisconsin machine politics), and that many of them were temporary defectors from the Republican Party.

So it is certainly possible to imagine that what is essentially an irrational sentiment might have led to rational policy outcomes. Was Wendell Wilkie a raging sentimentalist? I can hardly imagine that he would have conceived of himself this way. He simply believed himself to be defending the American traditions of virtuosity, self-sufficiency, and benign neglect. But he did channel similar sentiments to those tapped by Goldwater three decades later, sentiments that ended up bearing little resemblance to those mythic attributes of the American tradition. Rather, it appears that many of these political figures are borne aloft the tide. Sometimes they manage to swim with it, but most of the time they drown, if only because they are incapable of fully committing or because foreign policy issues are just not salient in certain contexts. Whatever the case, it's irrelevant. What matters is that isolationism is a weapon that can be wielded by the discontented and aggrieved, that for many it is not a means to an end, but merely means to hurt. It is historical vengeance personified in a single position, it is grievance emblazoned in a platform. The difference between intent and outcome turns out to be meaningful after all. For quite a few of us isolationism is a cathartic act, consequences be damned.

But the world of objective analysis, separate from emotion, still exists, which is where this recent decision to pull troops from Germany comes in. Ironic that it would be them, isn't it? In contrast to Wendell, Donald Trump is a raging sentimentalist. He sees Germany as derelict and delinquent, and he means to hurt. The intent is perhaps little more than punishment, but that should not stop us from considering the positive outcomes that may be achieved. Whatever the ultimate motive, the outcome seems clear. The burden of military responsibility is being redistributed, the world is doing more, America is doing less, the global policeman is retreating from his domain, hegemony is being surrendered, the state has found it not to its liking, the troops are coming home, the taxpayer is getting his due, outdated modes of thinking are coming under scrutiny, the delusions masquerading as dreams are being revealed for what they always were.

Does any of this matter? Do people think in these terms? Probably not. But it is the practical result of a wrecking ball made to swing freely. For those of us with revenge on our individual mind, this is one way of seeing those dreams realized on an international scale. To paraphrase grossly out of context: Life and world are one.