What many people fail to understand is that both the Knotheads and the
NOT-heads (i.e., "cancel culture") spring from the same toxic stew of sins:
pluralism.
Pluralism is the belief that we have rights not as citizens of countries but
through the groups we belong to - race, gender, etc. The pluralists think
democracy is useless and unless we bind together into our "group" we can't be
represented. Leaving the group for another or disagreeing with your assigned
"interest" is the deepest betrayal and provokes a backlash imminently Freudian
in its ferocity. I haven't seen anything like it since I argued with the
Communist Party cult remnants in graduate school about the value of money.
They don't accept that "interests" cut across these boundaries. They don't
want to see, for instance, that women have an interest in men graduating from
college so they can have marriageable mates. They're an extension of the
Zuckerberg computerization of our lives that wants to chop us up into
interests so they can monetize us when we connect that way.
NOT-heads aren't "almost angry" at the Constitution; they're in outright
contempt of it because the founders were explicitly against this form of
thinking. In Federalist Paper #10, James Madison warns that giving organized
groups of people the same rights as actual individual citizens will destroy
real rights for those citizens and enable factionalism. This type of group
behavior has to be controlled or it will destroy the community of democracy.
The knotheads are simply a different side of that tribalism - the Confederacy
tribe. This other great enemy of democracy has been engaged in its own long
war against federalism going back to the days of the first Confederacy. The
anger you see on the "right" is seething resentment from having civil rights
legislation shoved down their throats. Since the '70s, the Republican Party
has been fueled by vendetta Dixiecrats fishing for ways to make the Federal
government fail - first with Nixon's failed budget impoundment, then with tax
cuts they hoped would drive up the deficit so high one day they could use it
as an excuse to gut spending. ("We're finally bankrupt. Yay!") But every
escalating disaster caused by their sabotage of government action - 9/11,
credit default swap implosions, Hurricane Katerina, S&L crises - only
increased demand for government action - because, as you see today, there's no
other central actor in America that can handle crises of this magnitude.
These two sides resemble one another because racism - tribal revenge - is a
communicable disease, quickly mutualizing contempt when unchecked. Social
media has brought us into one another's lives like never before and many of us
can't stand what we see. (Maybe better digital fences would make better
digital neighbors.) Contempt breeds contempt and without tolerance for one
another, democratic compromise is impossible and we can't govern ourselves -
which suits the short-term interests of the oligarchs just fine. They need to
dismantle property protections (i.e., the justice system), if they're going to
steal from us.
What does this have to do with anything?
When you leave groups on their own to organize, those with the most money
oraganize the best. Sick people are probably the most important group in the
country because when you become sick, you lose your autonomy and become
dependent upon others. Sick people also have the least influence on the
political system because all our time and money is tied up in being sick.
Ditto for groups like the poor and unemployed - because you need resources to
organize yourselves. Some interests can't organize themselves like this.
That's the function of government - to organize and address the concerns of
all citizens.
What the NOT-heads fail to acknowledge is that their attitudes towards
politics benefit the very oligarchs paying for us to hate each other. The
insidious idea underlying pluralism is that these groups somehow "compete"
with one another for "influence" over the government. That is, they bribe
officials. This is what I mean when I say a coup took place at the Supreme
Court level in the 1970s when unelected judges equated bribery of politicians
with "free speech." If you want to see what the Koch Brother's perfect market
in politics looks like, go visit Mexico today where every official is
available for a price (or soon shot). That's the future that awaits us.
So these two groups, lacking any pragmatic influence on positive agendas,
can't govern. They can only veto, fume and fulminate. That's where we find
ourselves. They both promise heaven on earth but can't even stop graffiti,
much less a pandemic. Reality collides with these delusions and knocks
followers into the same fatalistic flights of fancy that all failed
charismatic cults descend into. Donald Trump becomes the Stokely Carmichael
of white power and the Abbie Hoffman of the pandemic - gonna levitate that
'ronavirus with the good feelings of his mind ray.
It's clear how the Confederacy keeps winding up in the same spot. It's more
interesting how the Left fell into this heresy. Basically, in the '60s and
'70s, Nixon destroyed the Left with targeted assassinations of Black Panther
leadership, the War on Drugs, Cointelpro and other programs. The apparatus
developed against democracy in Vietnam and Indonesia was reimported to
"deradicalize" urban resistance to the new oil imperialist/banking oligarchy
that you now see coming apart. This is why, today, we have such high
incarceration rates: Jim Crow Part II.
With both parties now locked down by bribery, unions getting dismantled and
wages driven down, there was no room anymore for the Left outside academia and
to succeed on the Left there, you had to abandon claims on material wealth and
economic justice or you'd be dealt with too. Courses on Locke, Rousseau and
Madison were shunted aside and restricted to graduate school - if available at
all - so no uppity undergrads would ever have the gall to attack undemocratic
militarism with democratic theory ever again. That forced the Left into a
peculiarly sterile conversation about race and sex - not the underlying
sources of injustice there that could never be questioned but rather on
personal experience - to a fatalistically myopic degree. The end result of
this is something called, bizarrely, Boasian antiracism
A similar defenestration of Christianity occurred on the right. It's
considered "heresy" now to discuss the fact that Jesus wanted debt
cancellation - when in fact the heresy is failing to point out that he did and
that led to the crucifixion.
Blame it all on the "Me Decade" of the '70s. Both the right and the left
turned toward the personal, especially personal narrative and confessional -
and new forms of communication gave them this power. Both sides fell prey to
exaggerated doctrines of Deconstruction, elevating personal revelation above
law, constitution and Gospel truth enabling the "will-to-power" movements
common in fascism. Out went universal meaning and in swept wishy-washy
relativism with "safe spaces" where nobody has to be overruled.
Charismatic evangelicals (read: segregationists) substituted personal
confession for Biblical truth. Witness George Zimmerman claiming it was part
of God's plan he shoot an unarmed black boy walking home at night. The Right
ate it up forgetting that
1) No greater love has a man than he gives up his life to save another (*not*
takes another).
2) Do not be overcome by evil but rather overcome evil with good.
3) There is no fear in love. Love casts out fear.
Zimmerman got out of the car that night armed with a gun because he was afraid
he might die and unafraid to kill - pretty much the opposite of a Christian.
But the anti-Christian charismatics ate it up in their culture war because he
hated the right people.
Of course, on the Left, these ironic contradictions abound too.
When I heard Bruce Jenner confessing happiness at no longer having to lie to
everybody, my first thought was, "He's admitting to cheating with steroids
like I'm positive almost everybody in track and field at the Olympic level has
been doing since the '50s?"
No.
My second thought was, "He's apologizing for giving people cancer and diabetes
by selling us Wheaties?"
Nope again.
He's transgendered.
Oh.
How was that ever my business?
What about all the people harmed by the cheating?
Oh, well…
In the future, we did get our fifteen minutes of fame and now we're all
trapped in our own personality cults. We're one big self-published, unedited
echo chamber of one. Ours is an era of personal narrative devoid of genuine
readers. Reading takes kindness. Reading takes reflection and reflection is
the enemy of sensationalist tweets. (Got to move those ads.) Bridging these
islands of self presupposes an objective reality that can sustain us while
we're "at sea" off your own island. I think Percy referred to this as the
"intersubjective."
But politically speaking, no man is an island. We can't be our own subjects
of one, which was Madison's point. Substituting mob gangs does not give you a
better form of government.
We all fall prey to different heresies of perfection. Tech bros seem to think
the world will become a perfect place with enough microchips thrown at it.
(I've debugged too much code to believe that one.) The flip side of that is
nasty too. Nostalgia is the enemy of forgiveness, which was a major theme of
Percy's. Nostalgia imagines a perfect past. If the past was once perfect -
or at least better - then the screwed up way things are today is unnecessary
and we need no forgiveness. We just need to travel back in our memory to get
there.
But there's no one left showing us how fallible that memory is. Those critics
disappeared in our flattened new perspective on life.
We shouldn't idealize the past or despise it. Nor should we idealize the
future. We should be, in our dire time of need, raging Pragmatists and
radicalized moderates.
Wade Riddick
------ Original Message ------
Received: Thu, 06 Aug 2020 10:43:12 AM EDT
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion"
Subject: Re: [percy-l] Percy-L Digest, Vol 162, Issue 11
Hazel Motes (in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood), searches for God by
railing against organized religion. But in doing so, he prophesizes the
authoritarian end-state pushed by today’s cancel culture: ‘Where you come
from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where
you are is no good unless you can get away from it.’
O’Connor had it right, and is now a victim of her own perspicacity. This
reign of terror is destroying us all!
Ernie Hutton
Sent from my iPhone
Ernest W Hutton Jr. FAICP Assoc AIA
Hutton Associates Inc.
New York/ Westhampton
917.836.7902
17 Woodbridge Lane, Quiogue
Westhampton Beach NY 11978
wrote:
>
> Patrick Connelly, a Percy scholar, spoke on Percy and race at one of the
former Walker Percy Weekends. He commonly referenced a quote from Percy (I
wish I knew the original source) about the eternal “problem of human frailty
trapped in historical circumstance”. That quote has stuck with me. It has
echoes of Pompeii, especially as we seem to be entering a whole new era of
cancel culture. The extreme left’s iconoclasm frightens me almost as much as
that of the Knotheads. I wish people could devote more energy inward toward
themselves and the current state of things. While dissecting the past will
always have some merit, what are we ourselves going to be judged on, fifty
years from now? Even five years from this pandemic? Percy was imperfect as the
best of us, but he and his family also slept in their attic for two weeks
after a bomb threat from the local Klan in 1969, after defending the removal
of the Confederate flag from the principal’s office of the local high
school.
>
> Zadie Smith took a stab recently attempting to answer the question of the
purpose of fiction. “Does it seem at all surprising in 2019...that we should
have this hypersensitivity?... Whereas many more material issues—economic
inequality, criminal justice reform, immigration—prove frighteningly
intractable, language becomes the convenient battlefield.”
>
> Apologies for the long-winded rant. I read the New Yorker article. It taught
me nothing new. Flannery was trapped as anyone. Her poor physical health is
often overlooked. Lupus is a horrible disease and there were little options
for treatment or even simple relief in her time. Again, “historical
circumstance”. I like to think if her disease hadn’t claimed her at 39,
her views might have evolved, too. I guess we’ll never know.
>
> Gregory Plemmons, MD
>
wrote:
>>
>> Just to weigh in on the Flannery O’Connor/ Paul Elie scrum.
>> At the seminary (Episcopal) that I attended, a professor had included the
short story “The Artificial N____” in his compendium of short stories
matched up to the preaching lectionary. (Flannery O’Connor fiction is VERY
popular in Episcopal circles.)
>> A draft copy somehow was made available to my fellow students, who opposed
the inclusion. There was a big townhall meeting, a student petition,
eventually the professor/author agreed to remove the story.
>> This was about 3 years ago.
>> I offer that up merely as another tiny data point in whatever this
particular moment is all about. I know that Walker Percy spoke on that short
story specifically but cannot find it, it’s in CONVERSATIONS with WALKER
PECY.
>> I do think that it’s a topic that we can discuss on this forum with care
and concern and kindness for one another.
>> Also, I have been reading THE NEW YORKER all my life (“a wonderful Yankee
magazine”- my Dad always would say!). Only with this article the magazine it
reveal how detached it is, as a source of journalism, from the world. It
reminded me of Percy’s dislike (too soft a word?) for Descartes. Instead,
Percy believed we are all embodied creatures, fallen and stumbling in the
world. Whereas the New Yorker writes an article with the title: “How Racist
was Flannery O’Connor?” without any source of social location of time and
place.
>> All my best,
>> Charles Cowherd
>> [ WARNING : This email came from an external source. Please treat this
message with additional caution.]
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>
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>
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