Letter from the Editors:
The Kingdom of Magical Thinking
Christopher Bernard
America has always been a dream fighting the good fight against reality. What drove the much reviled Columbus (without whom the pointless destroyers of his monuments would have no world to exist in: his real monument is the world that made them) was an audacious piece of speculation. Cortez, Balboa, Pizarro, Cabot, Hudson, Cartier, La Salle, the seekers of El Dorado and the fountain of youth, the lost settlers of Roanoke, the pilgrims of Plymouth, the toilers under John Smith, the generations of colonists, immigrants, “invaders,” were, have been, and continue, today, to be driven by an idea, hopeful, wishful, magical: America, a country of personal freedom and political self-governance, a place of opportunity and prosperity, the land where hope is real, where happiness is possible.
This element of fantasy runs very deep, not only in those who dream of America before coming here, but in how many of us see both our country and ourselves. It includes, notoriously, the idea of self-invention—what other cultures might call “living a lie,” we call, more generously, self- reinvention. It includes, on the left, the high moral standards against which a noisy handful of Americans judge their country’s destructive behavior down the generations, periodically reveling in nation-wide protests, marches, demonstrations, even riots, that result in a few demolished monuments, a handful of new laws, a bookshelf of self-flagellating editorials, and then a relieved return to old habits followed by decades of right-wing reaction.
Among so-called “conservatives” (though the only thing American conservatives wish to conserve is their “freedom” to demolish the country and the world in their quest to increase their wealth to levels unheard of in human history; they are the bomb-throwing anarchists of our age, murderers with magnificent bottom lines), it includes an obstinate refusal to face the country’s cascades of crimes, against humanity, against the governments of other countries that dared to defy it, and against its own citizens and moral being—a nation that has too often betrayed freedom for wealth, human dignity for power, truthfulness for hypocrisy, decency for bigotry and group hatreds. It is embodied in the knot of moral truth and practical fraud that both charges and corrupts much of American culture; that, by turns, delusionally wishful and brutally candid mirror that Americans turn on themselves and each other in their often hapless attempt to make sense of themselves and their condition.
Today we see this on every side in a culture that has taken its own fantasy of itself very far. On the paranoid and delusional right, there are the moral monstrosities of white supremacy and political dominance by one of history’s supreme grotesqueries, the know-nothing white American male, proud owner of a loaded assault weapon, a half-understood Bible, and a skull rattling with delusions of omnipotence alternating with paranoias about global conspiracies dating back to the Protocols of Zion; the horror show of the neo-nazis, a criminally fraudulent claim to represent the values of “western civilization” (about which the cultural illiteracy on display is as breathtakingly contemptible as it is wondrously obtuse), a political party locked inside a nightmare partly of its own creation – racist, sexist, capitalist, destructive of the global ecosystem to the point of genocide and global extinctions, one of which will be the human species itself if it is not rendered permanently powerless, all because of a collective refusal to face a reality that seems overwhelming and yet was created by humans and therefore can, in theory, be controlled by them. (But, as Marx noted, we human beings have a way of creating things which we then cower before and worship, even as they destroy us.)
On the left, which is locked in an eternal adolescence, there is an array of ever sillier and more irritating, intellectually vacuous and politically impotent positions, largely based on half-truths about the social construction of reality (which looks on, half-amused, before delivering a “reality bite” or, more pointedly, a gut punch) and something called “identity,” an amorphous term that shape-shifts with passing political seasons and reinforces the very cages (race, gender, class, sex) the left pretends to fight. The left can be irritating and culturally badgering, but, though it has been known to destroy an occasional career when its self -righteousness, cruelty and hypocrisy get the better of it, it does not (at least in this country) actually murder people in cold blood, as those on the right increasingly do. Both sides, at their extremes, are inhumane and morally reckless, sometimes despicable, but there has been no moral equivalence between them: the left is comparatively impotent in the United States, though the media likes to pretend otherwise (the blood that leads is as much on the media’s hands as on their pages and screens). But the money, the power, and the guns—and the moral cowardice that thinks endless supplies of guns, power, and money will save it—are almost entirely on the right. The left can be terminally annoying, but one can laugh them off; the right can be terrifyingly terminal.
For a country putatively founded on the principles of the Enlightenment—reason, observation, experiment, and belief in the power of human beings to work nature and human nature for the benefit of all—how have we gotten here?
I see a confluence of forces, partly of history, partly of nature. The first is the human drive for dominance and power, whether over the natural or human world. This is the bedrock of human motivation once others—the needs for food, shelter, safety, and sexual and social satisfaction— are secured. This drive is universal, east and west, north and south; it has driven the cultures of Africa, Melanesia, even the Arctic, as well as the classic civilizations of China, India, Japan, the Indomericas, Europe. It has been on florid display among Europeans in the New World since Columbus set foot on Hispaniola. It is no European invention, pace the more hysterical left, but Europeans were among the most successful in securing it outside the higher realms of political power: of courts and emperors, popes and caliphs, generals and kings.
Another force is the peculiar combination of irrationalism in service of the spirit, instrumental reason for service in the material world, and the extreme individualism that was unleashed by the Reformation, itself rooted in Pauline Christianity, a fanaticism of will and belief that has had a peculiar power of persuasion for many centuries and found fertile ground in North America. Christianity, with the admirable morality that has enlightened its most sincere believers, is also a form of training in irrationalist fantasy, an extreme kind of wishful thinking that no amount of rational skepticism can dislodge, partly because it has found a way to turn rational skepticism against itself: it is unreason throwing the culture of doubt back on reason itself, leaving it helpless before its own most powerful weapons. With its belief in the Last Judgement and the ending days, Christianity has always been something of a death cult, though only today does it have the means of bringing its particular worship of the destruction of humanity in a secular simulacrum of the Last Judgement to fruition.
Another force, more peculiarly American, has been America’s unique historical and geographical advantages: a vulnerable continent separated from other great national and imperial powers by enormous oceans, a place where excess populations, impoverished and politically impotent, from across the globe were invited to exploit its resources at a time when the materialist advantages prompted by the industrial and scientific revolutions were at their height and any sense of moral boundaries for the culturally empowered, or any sense of moral protections for the disempowered, were at their weakest: little Nietzscheans gaily plundered the continents for generations before the philosopher was even born. Never before could so much wealth be created by so many in a land so vast and welcoming—and populated by the primitive and the weak; that is, peoples without any rights at all. Might made right, and wealth went, first on a continental, then on a global tear. America became fully what it had been flirting with since its discovery by Europeans: a delirium of greed meeting a hysteria of belief that has lasted for centuries. We came to believe that dreams governed reality because, in just enough cases to be persuasive, it did.
America’s power in the world, for both good and evil, seemed to reach a climax after the collapse, in the 1990s, of the Soviet Union and its client states in eastern Europe, despite the fact that the world’s scientific community was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the industrial and economic basis for America’s and indeed the world’s successes was based on an economic model that was unsustainable, ecologically catastrophic, and, if not stopped, probably suicidal. The success of capitalist industrialism was racing toward likely, if not inevitable, collapse and the destruction, not only of civilization, but of the human race itself and much of the web of life on earth. But that dream was still only a nightmare for a few; many of the powerful understood the dangers but wanted to keep the wealth that imperiled all of us rolling into their bank accounts (themselves based on the magical thinking of numbers: adding zeros to zeros has no effect on an original nullity, after all), and either out of willful evil or an obstinate denial of reality, or a monstrous hybrid of the two, did everything they could to undermine the credibility of the scientists who, overly cautious as it turns out that, for professional reasons, they were, and easily cowed into seeming to doubt their own findings and so terribly afraid of being wrong they underplayed the threat to our very existence for decades, nonetheless brought the most threatening message that the human race has ever received.
America’s global dominance, seemingly so assured in the final decade of the twentieth century, was confronted and challenged, directly and horrifically, on September 11, 2001, and for the first time in its history, America was a beneficiary of the heartfelt pity of much of the world, though there was also no little schadenfreude as the world’s policeman, and would-be despot, was briefly brought to its knees.
That America would not so much lose as disdainfully cast aside the world’s good will was easy enough to predict by the realists among us: the revenge of the pitied is an old story, especially when the pitied, like America itself, is used to being admired by the ignorant and feared by the powerful. But that America would do it in so flagrantly destructive and self-destructive a manner is still something of a mystery—though self-destruction is an essential move in every experiment in self-reinvention. The futile, vastly destructive invasion of Iraq, for which future historians, if there are any, are unlikely to forgive the United States, and that caused chaos in the Middle East that still sees little hope of ending (despite a few little desperate alliances signed into treaties here and there) and has left hundreds of thousands dead and displaced, and insensate losses of wealth that could have been used to rebuild vast swathes of economically ruined cities in America itself—such an example of the pathologies of a revenge that would wound itself almost fatally rather than let an insult pass seems to belong more to the pathology of individuals than to the peculiar insanity of nations.
For a brief eight years, the drive toward self-harm and learned helplessness seemed to halt— though only seemingly. Barack Obama’s failure to bring the banks to heel and make the financial industry pay for the economic crimes that helped cause the Great Recession, and his policies of punishment of journalists and murder by drone, will not soon be forgotten, despite the historic achievement of a still-wobbly national healthcare law, made in the teeth of a power-drunk and willfully blind opposition; an opposition that would willingly march the rest of us over the precipice with them rather than give up the cherished myths that protect their poor psyches from the stones of reality.
But then, as Obama’s administration came to its legal end, America tanked into an orgy of self- wounding: the election of a man, if one so wishes to describe him, named Donald J. Trump, a person given to serial violations of any woman and all men who come between him and his self - inflation, the most grotesque caricature of the enduring American drive to power, wealth, celebrity, “positive thinking” and self-promotion, no matter who or what else gets hurt or, if need be, destroyed in the process. Here is someone who is so certain he can bend reality to his most grandiose delusions that he seems incapable of speaking the truth for more than, and almost inadvertently, a few sentences at a time. It is as though he had taken William James’s famous advice, colloquially translated as “fake it till you make it,” more to heart than even the wishful, echt American, William could possibly have meant. And this person, now president of a republic that is stymied in its attempts to disown him (perhaps because, after all, even more than its formal president, he is its secret emperor, its secret hero, its little, megalomaniacal god), now commands a society reeling from a global pandemic and a comatose economy, states stalked by wildfires and entire regions wrecked by storms destructive on an almost unheard-of scale, riots amid a confrontation with generations of racial bigotry and violence, and now facing the possible loss of a century of legal protections for the populace because a rightward tilt in the Supreme Court threatens to become a political collapse into rightwing anarchy leading to the legal indemnification of a dictatorship, half corporate, half theocratic, that has “I’ve got mine! Death to the future!” written across its banner.
We now face a complex of crises, partly of our own making, that are shaking our culture of magical thinking to its core. The pandemic. Storms and wild fires burning across states, regions, even countries. An information system imploding, from corrupt players seeding it with fraud, from an economic model that privileges self-destructive behaviors on the part of its consumers, from magical thinking gone madly paranoid and grandiose. A global economic system itself that has learned to make vast amounts of money on products and services that endanger the lives of its own users and promises of “magical” future solutions to its own self -caused catastrophes. The first act of what is certain to be a decades-long series of climate and ecological catastrophes caused by our spilling of fossil carbon into the atmosphere and of tens of thousands of invented substances into a global ecosystem that cannot metabolize them and that is choking on human waste.
And then there is the next national election, an almost quaint institution to mention in our context of crisis, collapse and malignancy; an election that may test our political system, such as it is, to its limits.
America has always been a lame democracy. Mike Lee, the ineffable Utahan senator, was uncomfortably close to the mark when he said we are not one at all; calling ourselves a “democracy” is just one more of the library of pious falsehoods we tell ourselves, though for a few decades it was almost true, and it remains a possibility, though one for which we may have to fight harder than we ever imagined. At present we seem to be well on our way to being as much a one as the Roman empire was a republic: with still a few official empty symbols, powerless offices, and vacant gestures, a mocking speech here, a futile election there, while we learn to live with a minority party in power, corporate lobbyists writing our laws, and a judiciary keen to turn the clock back to the patriarchal oligarchy that ran the United States of America, fresh out of bondage to the British, but still ruled by rich white males, many of them contented slave holders, in 1791.
What will we do? Wake up from our dream? Face reality? Slap ourselves for having been such fools for so long, pull ourselves together, deal with our problems—first of all, by taking down those who would destroy us? Well? Will we?
I’m not so sure. I have read too much history, and the moral is not a pleasant one.
I write this before the election has been decided. And the deciding may take longer, and is likely to be more fractious, even violent, than any we have had since 1860. My crystal ball has grown perniciously cloudy, but most of my readers will know the results.
Have we survived? And will we?
Christopher Bernard is a founder and co-editor of Caveat Lector. His latest work is The Socialist's Garden of Verses, published by Regent Press. More of his writing can be found at The Bog of St. Philinte.