Tag Archives: ideology

I am in love with the things of this world. I love the colors, the textures, the shapes, the light and shadow, the sounds and smells, even the tastes of things around me. And I feel it is a love requited. At least, my love has paid me back with profound pleasure.

The world I love has heft. It thumps when you give it a smart fillip. You rub you fingers over its rind and it gives a little, but pushes back. The rind is pebbly, like the surface of an orange. It is physical and present. It surrounds me like an amnion and I am comfortable in its presence.

But don’t think I am talking only about sunsets and rainbows. I love equally such things as discarded hubcaps and old, torn shirts. The feel of linen, the sound of traffic, the look of the palimpsest of graffiti on the sides of a subway car.

You can dismiss me as a sensualist, but I maintain that the world apprehended through the senses is the utmost proof of being alive, Descartes be damned. When I mash potatoes in the pot with butter, salt and a bit of cream, I feel the resistance of the tubers, the thickness of the pulp, the stickiness of the mash on the sides of the pot. I know at such moments that I am living in a world, a world full of the things I love.

(This issue is separate from the question of people I love. The primary importance of that goes without saying.)

There are two larger points I want to make about this. The first is that the world is largely abrasive and difficult. There are wars, famines, drug cartels, disease, deadly parasites, jealousies, greed, death and the deaths of those we love. In other words, there is plenty in the world to level us. But even in the face of all this, people find ways to discover moments of pleasure, even joy. Children and grandchildren, friendships — sometimes even spouses — are, perhaps the primary sources, but there are also quiet moments where you find an attractively colored stone or the birds in the power lines looking like minims and quavers on a music staff.

The world gives us these things and we are offered the opportunity to observe them and find beauty, pleasure and enjoyment. Given the misery around us, such bits are essential.

I cannot claim to have suffered much in life, although it feels as if I have, but the pleasure of things gives me great comfort.

But more, the awareness of the physical existence of our surroundings can make us more immediately aware of being alive. So much of our daily routine is autonomic, barely observed in the passing. But a keen attention paid to the rocks, weeds, doorknobs, faucet handles, cloud patterns, colors of the cars that pass us on the road, dust on the sills, make us recognize that we are living parts of a whole. A stone set in a bezel.

Paying attention fills our selves and enlarges us. This is more than mere pleasure, but the pleasure is central. It is the reason to pay attention in the first place.

It also anchors us in physical reality, or at least our perception of it. If we are open to the things of this world, we are less likely to careen off into various ideological morasses and delusional idealisms. Such are the stuff of words and schema. But the solid world of apples, bottles, pork chops, gudgeons and pintles tethers us to the earth.

There are those who get their satisfaction from ideas, doctrine or ideology, but those are pleasures of the mind, divorced from the muddy, sun-spattered physical world. Words are fine things, but they are always abstracted, like a picture of the world rather than a garden. Framed rather than expansive.

And so, I have to laugh every time I hear of Americans as being “materialists,” when the average citizen barely pays attention to the material world, but rather to ideas about the material world — ideas such as status, acquisition or wealth. These are not material values, but, in a sense, spiritual values. If we were truly materialistic, we would never tolerate walnut-woodgrain plastic.

No, the physical composition of their existence is simply not a high priority for most Americans. When we say Americans “worship the almighty dollar,” we aren’t saying that they value material objects over spiritual ones, but rather that they place worth on one set of spiritual values instead of another, more worthy set.

Money, after all, isn’t a physical object. It isn’t material. It is no more physical than an inch or a pound. It is a measuring item, to measure wealth.

Real wealth is the possession of useful or meaningful things. To own land, or to grow 40 acres of artichokes is to possess wealth. You can eat artichokes; you can’t eat money.

Money cannot be worn, it cannot be used to build with. It must be translated back from its symbolic existence to a material existence by spending it.

I’m not saying that money isn’t nice to have around. But that it is a mental construct, not a physical reality. (This is becoming ever clearer as we give up carrying cash and instead spend immaterial sums by the passing of a plastic card through a reader.) If we want wealth, it isn’t because sewn together, dollar bills make a nice quilt.

Even the things Americans spend their money on tend to be owned for spiritual rather than physical reasons. If we want to own a BMW or a Lexus, it isn’t because these are better cars than a Honda or a Ford — though they may be (I’m not convinced) — but because they are status symbols that let other Americans know where we rank on the totem pole.

Armani suits and Gucci bags are not something most Americans really enjoy on a physical level. They are the civilized equivalent of the eagle feathers the chief wears, or the lion-ruff anklets worn by the Zulu leader: They confer prestige and denote status.

These are spiritual values, albeit of questionable worth.

As a matter of fact, America would be a whole lot better off if it were more materialistic. The planet is bursting with stuff: It all has a texture, a feel, a smell, a taste, a sound. If we were materialistic, we would be aware of how much richness the material existence affords, and we would revel in it. We would be mad — as Walt Whitman says — for us to be in contact with it.

And what is more, the deeper we involve ourselves in the physical world, the more spiritualized we would become — that worthy spirituality. It is because we are so un-materialistic that our environment suffers so. We don’t value the physical world we live in. It doesn’t bother us that there are fewer birds singing in the morning, or that codfish are disappearing.

In part, this is a remnant of the contempus mundi that was fostered under Medieval Christianity. It is that suspicion of the physical world that the Old World monks felt would seduce them from the righteousness of prayer and ritual.

We have inherited the contempt, but without the prayer. It leaves us in a hollow place.

As an adult I have come not to trust anyone who doesn’t love the physical world.

I don’t trust such a person to make policy choices about oil drilling or lawn seeding. I cannot imagine how it is possible not to fall in love with the things of this world, but I see just that happening all the time.

(I find it amusing that Republicans and Communists are indistinguishable in their belief that the central truth of existence is economic.)

I pick up the lump of spring earth and squeeze it in my fist to judge whether it is time to plant my potatoes. I listen for the birds globing and twisting in murmuration as they rise from the trees in the morning. I look for the light caught in the cholla spines and the twill in my gabardine. There is velvet in heavy cream and scratchiness in wool blankets.

The physical sensations make us more aware, more awake. The love of the physical world keeps us from becoming dullards. Living in a world of symbol and status dulls us. At its worst, it leads to ideology, and all ideology is a straitjacket, suitable only for a common form of madness.

It is what Carlos Williams means when he says that “So much depends on a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater beside the white chickens.” So much depends. As he wrote in Patterson: “No ideas but in things.”

Yes, I am in love with the things of this world. I lament having eventually to leave it all behind, but am grateful for the years I am alive.

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Descent into the Maelstrom

July 18, 2016

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Maelstrom

“The center cannot hold.”

This is a common saying these days from political commentators on TV or in op-ed pages. The assumption is that there is such a thing as the political center. It is an assumption that needs to be challenged.

We tend to lionize the political center, as if it were the place where sanity is found, battered on left and right by zealots and ideologues. But, in fact, there is no codified political theory that can be tagged with the label. It is, in fact, the bin for dumping the leftovers.

Those who hold genuine political thought fall down the steep slopes of the bell curve on both sides, toward conservatism and reaction on one side, and toward socialism on the other. Marx vs. Ayn Rand. Both sides hold their opinions with passionate intensity. What we call the middle is really just the no-man’s land between them where they battle it out, and with no clear victor, they fall, exhausted, between the two poles, and we have a stalemate. That is what we call the center.

In practice, this has actually worked out quite well for the rest of us, who are not card-carrying members of either side. It is as if two out-of-phase sine waves have cancelled each other out, and we live in relative peace. Politics, when done right, is the clash of interests, where no one interest prevails all the time, and compromises are reached to keep each side, not happy exactly, yet equally miffed, but just under the boiling point.

“The trick from my angle is to make my play strong enough to tie you up, but not make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgment.”

This, then, is the center, where most of us, unafflicted by theoretical strait-jackets, try to live our lives spending the least possible time on policy and government. Government is something up with which we must put. To paraphrase Willie Loman, “Taxes must be paid.”

This doesn’t mean we don’t recognize the importance of social order, or a ruling forum that functions efficiently and cleanly, but more important than making rules about who gets to use which bathroom, are such things as the welfare of our children, our careers, the availability of food, and whether the Cubbies will ever again win the World Series. That a well-run government is necessary for some of those things is acknowledged, but just how much energy we put into politics is the issue. In ancient Athens, you were judged in part by whether or not you were politically aware and active. But for most of us in middle-class America, being politically active is rather more a badge of how misguided you are, how obsessed, how geeky.

We have, since 1789, run on the well-oiled principle that if we let the two sides fight it out, we can comfortably nestle in the hammock left in between them. There have been a few times, like the years from 1861 to 1865, when the center did not hold and the country erupted. We came close again in 1968, as those of us who lived through it remember. The pressure has been building up again. Both political parties found their basic premises threatened this election cycle. Republicans have discovered that the dissension, obstructionism and bigotry they have sowed for the purpose of maintaining power in Congress has come back to bite them. What they hold as true conservative values are shredded by the buzz words and palaver of Donald Trump, who seemingly holds no values whatsoever, outside of Donald Trump. Democrats found that a socialist roused a significant sector of their membership, driving their conventional candidate further to the left and away from the coveted “middle.”

That middle has become a vacuum as the polar sides pull apart and we suffer the pain.

The central problem is that, because the middle is not a platform, not a policy, not an ideology, it cannot clearly enunciate its principles, outside of a basic, “Don’t go nuts.” The Right and Left have manifestoes and position papers, arguing with faultless logic the rightness of their causes — albeit within the confines of the definitions they use and the axioms they leave unexamined. We in the middle have only a defensive “please go away” and “leave us in peace.”

Once in a while, however, we are called upon to slough off our natural passivity and take a stand. In the 1960s, we had to decide whether segregation was morally defensible, as a hundred years before, we had to pick a side on slavery. When we didn’t step in, as with the Know-Nothings of the 1840s, or the McCarthy era in the 1950s, the country went off the rails and the looneys took over. We face something of the same now, with Donald Trump, whose unfinished sentences pile cliche on cliche, Ossa on Pelion, and we are buried under a mountain of verbal garbage, un-thought-through, indefensible, and outright dangerous.

My great friend, the late Dimitri Drobatschewsky, grew up in pre-war Berlin. His family was forced to flee the Nazis, and his father eventually died at Auschwitz. He remembers as an adolescent hearing Adolf Hitler speaking live. “Everything he said was a banal platitude,” Dimitri recalled. “It was meaningless cliche piled on meaningless cliche. But he was such a persuasive and hypnotic speaker that I found myself, a Jew in Germany, that it was all I could do to keep my arm from raising in the Nazi salute.” Dimitri eventually left Germany for France, and after the fall of that country, joined the Free French forces under De Gaulle.

But Dimitri reminded me that Hitler didn’t usually come right out and say specific things. He let his minions do that. Hitler spoke of vague ideas, such as “Germany for the Germans,” and “Make Germany great again,” which are hardly controversial on the surface, but underneath was an unspoken agenda, heard by his followers as clear as a gong. One after another the meaningless platitudes piled up until an entire nation found themselves committing atrocities their grandchildren are still ashamed of.

One doesn’t want to pull out the Nazi trump card too easily. One gets tired of calling any opponent a “Hitler.” It too often trivializes the insult. But there is the parallel, too easily overlooked, especially by his followers. If we don’t want to discover in four or five years that we were “good Germans,” we had better decide now that even if we are not enthusiastic about the choice we have to make in November, we had better not give in to apathy, we had better make the effort to go to the polls, else we could wind up somewhere very dark, very violent, very shameful.

Cartological myopia

May 9, 2016

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An ideology is like a road map. It contains a schematized version of the world. But, it is always a simplified and distorted version. It may show the roads, or be covered with circles of topographic tree rings, or be great blotches of geological information. But it by necessity ignores a great deal of information to clarify some single small aspect.

It is hardly surprising, then, that a conservative sees a different world from a liberal; one is looking at highways and the other is looking at landforms. But this is not simply binary: The libertarian has a different map from a neocon, the religious right has yet another map, and the fiscal conservative yet another — and all call themselves, in one sense or another, conservative. The same variety can be found at every point in the political spectrum. Just consider how many spatting socialist parties join in war against each other.

And all of this is only the plethora of maps held by political enthusiasts. Politics, after all, is only one tiny corner of human consideration. Look at the range of literary theory, from Formalism through Structuralism to Post-structuralism, from deconstruction to neo-Marxian criticism. Each of them has its own roadmap and each ignores any tiny detail that might confuse the clarity of their ideology.

Or religion. No, let’s narrow it to Christianity. Or further, let’s narrow it to Protestant Christianity with its Methodists, Lutherans, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists — oh, heck, lets just look at Baptists. There are Free Will Baptists, Primitive Baptists, African-American Baptists, Landmarkism, Missionary Baptists, Fundamental Baptists, Progressive Baptists, Reformed Baptists, Sovereign Grace Baptists, Southern Baptists and Two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Predestination Baptists. And that only scratches the surface. Each is separated from the others by a map that emphasizes some single detail that serves as sufficient cause for a schism from some parent group, whose roadmap leads directly to Hell.

Treasure Island map

(This is the sticking point for Pascal’s wager: That if you don’t believe in God and he exists, you go to eternal damnation; if you do believe and there turns out not to be a God, then you are no worse off than if you didn’t believe. Therefore, said Pascal, the smart money is on believing: You have a one-in-four chance of salvation; the atheist belief has a certainty of annihilation. The fly in the ointment is this proliferation of sects. Which God do you place your wager upon? Choose wrong and, whoosh, you slide down the chute to perdition. That one-in-four bet now looks more like the state lottery.)

Mercator projection

The world map most of us remember from the walls of our schoolrooms was the Mercator map, which attempted to show the oceans most accurately to aid navigation, while distorting the landmasses to accommodate that. We have become so used to the Mercator look, that any other map looks somehow “wrong.” If you take the Peters map, for instance, it looks highly ideological, as if it’s trying to make a propaganda point. Of course, it is, but so was the Mercator map. Where is Europe? Why shouldn’t China be at the center?

Gall-Peters projection

Try to take the globe and flatten it into a map and you are forced to distort. No way around it. The problem is that a map is not an accurate depiction of reality, but a schema, a simplified, diagrammatic visual representation.

Goode homolosine projection

Comedian Steven Wright once said, “I have a map of the United States … Actual size. It says, ‘Scale: 1 mile equals 1 mile.’ I spent last summer folding it. I hardly ever unroll it. People ask me where I live, and I say, ‘E6.’ ”

But even life size, the map is still flat when the world is all bumpy, and Wright’s lifesize map is still on the human scale.

Consider the fractal nature of the Norwegian coast (as designed by Slartibartfast). How many miles of coastline is there in Norway? Depends entirely on how accurate you want to be. If you look at it as the crow flies, it is something like a thousand miles. But there are all those fjords and inlets. Add them to the calculation and you wind up with an accepted length of 25,000 miles — enough to circle the globe. But that doesn’t count the islands. Add those and you are up to 80,000 miles. But let’s lower the fractal scale: The usual numbers are calculated in a rather crude way. The fjords might be considered, but how about the river mouths leading to the fjords, the creeks feeding the rivers, the constant wavering of shoreline zigging and zagging. Look at it not at a mere human scale, but on the microscopic, and you realize that you can re-add-up the length of the coast of Norway to something like infinity. Reality is that infinity. Existence is overwhelming. So forgive me if I snort at your conservative roadmap, or your Marxist theory of history, or your prescriptive grammar.

It is no different from any other version of reality, any ideology, religion, artistic convention or psychological theory. Reality is maimed.

And so, ideology is always mistaken. Always. It cannot be otherwise.

Every ideology is based on a synoptic description of the world, a limited model of the way things are: a map. That map, whether it is the right-wing Mercator of nationalism, privatized economy, traditional marriage and organized religion, or the left-wing Peters of fair distribution of wealth, cultural tolerance, the evils of a class system and mistrust of big business – that model is always too simplistic, too limited, too rationalized, too coherent, to encompass the vast, unwieldy, incoherent, and imponderable experience of being alive.

Our lives, among the swirling trillions of stars, the millions of species of plant and animal, in the midst of an atmosphere ruled by chaos theory, with the billions of synapses in each of the billions of brains that populate this ball of dirt, are too complex to fit into any ideology. Is the standard-bearer of Progressivism a millionaire? Is the Christian conservative a secret frottagist or Republican pedophile? Is the classical scholar a fan of hip-hop? Does the Andean priest speak Church Latin? We should never be surprised.

No ideology can grasp the shifting variety of the world: When we look for the particle, we find the wave; when we look for the wave, we find the particle.

The chink of Pyramus and Thisbe

April 19, 2016

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There is a line in Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” that should be a starting point: “The mind, that ocean where each kind/ Does straight its own resemblance find.”

These are two primary foci for our existence: There is the world and there is our mind working on the world. Mind and world, the face and the mirror. The central problem is that the world is incomprehensible, multifarious, immense and unimaginably complicated, self-entwined and raw, while our minds, however brilliant, are puny organizers and pattern-finders. What we believe of the world is what we have been able to make of it, and we are simply not humble enough to recognize the insufficiency.

Take something as basic as sight. We look upon the world and take what we see as something “real,” something actually “out there.” Yet, we know that visible light is such a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, that our human vision is essentially nothing more than the chink of Pyramus and Thisbe, the slat of a Venetian blind lifted to see a wedge of the world outside the window. Other animals are sensitive to different parts of the spectrum, and for them, the world is a different world: The bee sees not the daisy that you or I see.

We know this because human ingenuity has given us instruments that can measure those portions of the wavelengths that we cannot apprehend directly, and proves their existence. But we cannot know them directly: We are too limited. For that matter, so are the instruments.

Also limited are the odors we can smell, the sounds we can hear, the tastes we can enjoy or revile, or, for that matter, the languages we can understand or the names we have for the emotions we feel. And yet, somehow we feel we can say we know the world.

I am constantly amazed at human arrogance in the face of the vast ignorance we daily confront. Perhaps it is unavoidable that we have faith in our senses and our minds, that we believe what we have learned of the world is the way the world in actuality, is. It takes an act of imagination to escape our shortsightedness.

And it is not only the world beyond our skins that escapes us: The conscious mind — that part of ourselves we generally consider to be “us” — is such a small part of what our brains do for us. We are not consciously aware of our guts squeezing the chyme along our bowel, not aware of our capillaries constricting, our irises expanding, our hearts beating faster or slower, depending on the unconscious monitoring of our inner bodily needs. Consider yourself at this very second, sitting or standing. Are you fingers curled? Are you tapping them? Is your head tilted slightly? Are you yawning? Have you sneezed? Did you “decide” to do any of those things? Your body seems to work quite autonomously, and your administration has delegated authority to its constituent parts to act on their own. Let’s face it, you would die if you had to will each heartbeat, each breath, each eye blink: Keeping track of it all would be impossible.

And yet, we have faith in that little voice in our heads that seems to be in charge: It blithely makes assumptions that cannot be justified.

This is not to toss out the little voice: We could not operate in the world if we did not simplify it to our purpose; we would be overwhelmed. We make schemas and function within those schemas quite happily, but are seldom aware of their artificiality.

A good deal of trouble is caused by our unawareness. In politics, for instance, one side believes in pure capitalism, the other in socialism, but each view is only a schema, and takes not into account the great variability of human want, need, ability, and the inevitability of change, both historical and social. Remember feudalism? Monarchy and aristocracy? These were earlier schema, and sustained over centuries, even millennia. One thing might work better at some point, while its opposite might be more functional at another, neither perfectly, while all are always mere band-aids. No human reality can be encompassed by an ideology. They are all simplifications to the point of absurdity.

Republicans who now believe things diametrically opposed to what they had once believed, think that if they can finally pass the laws they want, everything will work like a well-oiled machine from thence onward. Conservatives, who once championed strong central power, now believe the least government is best. (In reality, they believe in whatever will best preserve their own hegemony and wealth and if that changes, so will their ideal of proper government). But in practice, nothing is ideal, nothing is unchanging and perfect: Politics is always ad hoc. It doesn’t fit into cardboard pint containers like so much chop suey.

Religions, political ideologies, psychologies, even science are all such partial schemata and none can be said to encompass all of existence. It isn’t that we should trash all of them, but rather that we should recognize their agendas. And beyond that we should embrace, enjoy and revel in all that is not contained therein. The universe is vast, it contains multitudes. It is this plenitude and fecundity that ultimately sustains us. No system is enough.

What wakes us to the complexity is experience: travel, reading, learning other languages, meeting other people (as a “thou” not an “it”), education, and most of all, the exercise and strengthening of imagination, which all the previous foster. Openness to the world rather than stricture according to ideology or schema. Pulling our turtle heads into the shells of our small perceptions is nothing but retreat.

And whenever possible — and this is the biggest lesson I have swallowed in 68 years on this round, bubbly planet — to love the things of this world. All of it, helter-skelter, unapologetic and enthusiastic, chaotic, overwhelming, incomprehensible and glorious. And recognize our smallness, our ignorance, in the face of it.

The lions and the lambs

July 21, 2013

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“Peaceable Kingdom” by Edward Hicks

We have a two-party system in this country, but until recent decades, it wasn’t always easy to tell them apart. Southern conservatives tended to be Democrats and Northern liberals were just as likely to be Republicans.

In the old days, the parties were more like clubs, each with a full range of ideologies represented in their membership. When Eisenhower’s name came up for president before the 1952 elections, he could have run comfortably in either party. Sure, the Republicans were a wealthier club and tended to think kindly of big business and leather furniture. Democrats were always a little more scruffy.

”I’ve never been a member of any organized political party,” Will Rogers said. ”I’m a Democrat.”

The current trend, however, is to understand the parties as standing for ideologies.

But what those ideologies are has been harder to pinpoint. After all, the people calling themselves conservatives are no longer for conserving anything. Conservatives used to believe in the status quo; liberals wanted change.

Nowadays, the conservatives are calling for a radical agenda. That is what they used to accuse liberals of wanting.

The problem is that we have defined the two points of view wrongly. They are not merely conservative vs. liberal. In fact, the specific ”litmus test” issues raised by them are fairly recent. Those issues — welfare reform, reduced taxes and prayer in school on the so-called ”conservative” side and gender equity, racial equality and food labeling on the liberal side — are not beliefs held in a vacuum, but represent a deeper difference in how the two sides understand the world.

Underneath the specific issues there are deeper tendencies: Government redress of social inequity and regulation of powerful entities to protect the consumer and environment on the one side and smaller government and individual responsibility on the other.

Those competing world views can best be understood as the view of the lions and that of the lambs.

The lions are in charge of their lives. They do what they want when they want to do it. Food is there for the taking and they are king of all they survey. It is hardly surprising they value initiative.

Lions start businesses and create jobs; they provide leadership.

Ah, but the lambs flock together helplessly, blown about by fortune and foul winds. And they have a worrisome likelihood of becoming someone’s bowl of Cheerios. Initiative doesn’t have much to do with it.

In reality, the world is made up of both lambs and lions, and a sound public policy needs to accept this duality. The problems and arguments arise because Republicans create policy based on their belief that everyone is a lion. Democrats make policy believing that everyone is a lamb.

Neither will make lasting, effective policy beginning from such partial visions of human nature.

You can see the reality of the metaphor in the culture of victimhood that pervades Democratic constituency.

”I can’t succeed because X won’t let me.” Let X stand for white males, poverty, lack of self-esteem, or any of a host of bogeymen.

In each, the victim remains passive, a lamb bleating helplessly.

As for the Republicans, their rhetoric is largely a holdover from Victorian Horatio Alger books, where to be poor is to be lazy, and anyone with gumption can become a millionaire and smoke large, smelly cigars.

Neither world view alone is sufficient and true.

Lions recognize that ”empowerment” doesn’t come from committees, it comes from within. Lambs recognize that if the lion is allowed to have his way, someone will get hurt.

So Republicans hate any law that holds personal initiative in check, even when that initiative may pollute our air or enslave our populace.

And Democrats hate any law that fails to protect the helpless, even when the helpless may not need protecting.

One irony is that although most Republican movers and shakers are in fact lions, many of their constituents are helpless lambs who feel powerful by proxy, growing puff-cheeked in the fantasy of individual freedom and power.

Look at any Klan meeting in the South or any militia in Idaho and you will see a flock of losers strutting their stuff.

Concomitantly, although Democrats act as if everyone were a lamb, the party leadership is almost wholly made up of lions. At some level, they must recognize this disparity.

Nancy Pelosi doesn’t need welfare.

A lot of vitriol is thrown in the mistaken belief that Republicans or Democrats are the Great Satan who either oppresses the little guy or constrains our initiative.

As English poet William Blake would have it, “One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.”

In fact, the balance of carnivore and herbivore is a sign of ecological health.

Without a certain amount of regulation, we would have no air to breathe and no water to drink. With no regulation, what you get is Bhopal, Minimata and Chernobyl.

But too much regulation and you get a nation of faceless bureaucrats.

It is the nature of politics, as that of animals, to find its balance precariously and fitfully.

Political art: Ideas vs. Ideology

July 20, 2013

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Politics and art; oil and water; Mitch McConnell and charisma.

Like alternate universes, the oppositions seem utterly irreconcilable.

”The only thing poetry and politics have in common are the letters P and O,” the late poet Joseph Brodsky once quipped.

Yet, there are clearly many cases of political art. Much of the world’s greatest art, from the Antigone to Angels in America, has concerned politics.

So when I say art and politics are death to each other, what I mean is not politics as a subject — anything in life is fit subject for art — but politics as a lens, as dictator of what is permissible. If you have a political ax to grind, don’t try hacking tree stumps with it, hoping to make a masterpiece.

Another way of looking at it is that there are two types of political art.

The good and the bad.

If you are politically inclined, good political art is art that advances your ideology, and bad art is anything else. This was the inspiration for most Socialist Realism, and it’s making a comeback in a raft of forgettable politically correct art and theater.

But if you are aesthetically inclined, the good and bad are not defined by ideology but by aesthetic persuasiveness. Does the work ring true?

Politics itself can be seen as two separate, almost incompatible things. On the basic level, politics is the acquisition and use of power. It is a basic characteristic of humanity. Politics on this level can be used for ill or good. It is not a thing about which a value judgment can be made. Like gravity, it just is.

But to too many people, ”politics” means political theory. It means not the way things are, but the way things should be. Life should be more fair, the aristocracy should rule, power to the people, a flat tax will solve all ills. Name your poison.

When American politics works as it is supposed to, factions promote their causes and compromise is reached. The result is a continuous tension of interests, like a human pyramid in the circus.

But when ideology takes over, compromise is seen as an evil. Through the ideological lens, there is only one truth and everything else will lead to ruin. This is equally the case with Marxists and the Christian right.

”One law, one God, one king,” as William Blake has it. You are either with us or against us.

So, lost in the discussion is the fact that when we say something is ”political art,” we mean two very different things. On one side, there is partisan art, which takes a political stand and uses the art to proselytize. It is the art of the street theater, meant to persuade — although more often than not, its audience has already signed on, so its purpose really is to reinforce beliefs already held.

At its worst, partisan art is Nazi and Soviet propaganda; at its best, it is Brecht. Always, it is didactic, and more often than not, it is forgotten by the following year. Name a Socialist Realist painter, I challenge you.

But art may approach political questions from another direction:

There is an art that is interested in the ironies and passions of politics, in its human toll, not its theories.

Partisan art is interested in answers, certainty and action; the other direction is interested in questions, ambiguity and contemplation.

The problem is that ideology is system, and systems are dehumanizing. It matters not whether it is left- or right-wing. The machine is supreme: We measure success not in human terms, but by whether it adheres to theory. Read any Marxist criticism and you will see such. Or listen to a House Republican talking about the National Endowment for the Arts.

In both cases, the question is whether the art is orthodox — does it adhere to the party line.

It is a mark of critic John Berger’s intelligence that his Marxist theory inevitably leads to gibberish and double talk. He must wind up saying something patently silly or else he must ultimately abandon the theory.

People simply do not act the way Marxist theoreticians say they do; neither do they act the way capitalist theoreticians say. Humans are much more complex, much more contradictory.

No, art, if it is to last, must concern itself with the human, not the system.

Goya’s Disasters of War, Picasso’s Guernica, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, even Homer’s Iliad, all approach political questions from a human point of view.

So do Citizen Kane and Oliver Stone’s Nixon. And so does Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror. It does not take a stand on one side or the other; rather, it allows each side to say its piece, incompatible as those sides may be.

Such art examines the possibilities and tests them against the human heart.

Such art is dedicated to this one human truth: There is always a larger context.

Compare Maria Irene Fornes’ A Conduct of Life with Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden. The first deals with the rape of a 12-year-old girl; it knows who the villains are and what we should think of them, and it tells us in no uncertain terms.

Death and the Maiden, about a woman brutally tortured under a South American military regime, is much more equivocal. We are never quite sure whether the man she accuses of carrying out the torture is guilty or innocent, and we surely find that the woman’s revenge on him is brutal in return. There is blame to go around.

As W.H. Auden wrote, ”Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”

Or Barbara Garson’s MacBird, which lampooned Lyndon Johnson as a Macbeth who killed his Kennedy/Duncan for his own political ends. It is a sour-toned comedy and nearly forgotten except by graduate students with theses to complete.

And that brings up another reason the narrow partisan art dies such a stiff death. Its concerns are almost always so transitory. Does MacBird still have meaning 45 years after the events it describes?

Nothing is more dated than a superannuated political idea. We’ve moved on; we have our own problems, thank you.

Compare that with Citizen Kane, which is equally a hatchet job on a public figure. But because filmmaker Orson Welles concentrates on the human rather than the partisan, it still contains meaning, still has that resonance which is the ultimate test of a work of art.

The REAL Great Satan

March 23, 2013

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There is so much twaddle written about politics – and even more of it shouted on cable TV – that perhaps it’s time to slow down, take a breath and cast a cold eye.

You listen to both sides of the acrid political squabbles of the past few decades, and you’d swear the survival of civilization hangs in the balance.

In part, this is only the standard-issue partisan politics. No different now between Republicans and Democrats than it was between Federalists and Jeffersonians, between the Girondists and Montagnards or between factions at any time through history.

Today, the two sides are called conservative and liberal: conflicting ideologies.

The problem is, they aren’t really ideologies. They pretend to be fully-formed reasoned arguments on each side, but in fact, they are really just personality traits.

Calling them ideologies makes them seem impersonal and rational, but in fact, they are purely emotional responses to the world.

That is, the essential emotional approach one takes to living in the world.

Some people are by nature conservative, which means they mistrust change and cling to what they already know. Others are by nature adventurous and see only benefit coming from trying out new stuff.

This, more than political theory, defines the two sides. The ideology follows, not precedes.

It is why we could talk about Kremlin conservatives wanting to preserve Communism, or Chinese liberals wanting to open up the market economy. The stance isn’t ideology, but inclination.

Neither inclination is by itself good or bad. Or rather, they are both both.

Conservatism seeks to preserve the status quo. “Whatever is, is right,” said poet Alexander Pope.

Unfortunately, the historical record of conservatives has quite a bit to answer for. It was conservatives who fought civil rights tooth and nail. It was an ugly time, and their use of an argument in favor of states’ rights to cover a craven racism has forever destroyed the utility of the states’ rights argument.

Perhaps that is why conservatives now don’t seem to notice the contradiction when they oppose state laws allowing same-sex marriage, medical marijuana or assisted suicide.

It’s not an ideological argument, but a desire to keep things the way they have “always been,” although that usually means the way they were when the speaker grew up.

The call for small government is the same: We want the government off our backs, unless it comes to abortion or homosexuality.

That is because, the real watch-spring of conservatism isn’t anything so high-flown as principle, but rather, a constitutional disinclination to try anything different. There is comfort in the familiar.

Yet, that mistrust of the new may sometimes be quite healthy. And sometimes, the tried-and-true is worth keeping. Not everything new is good.

Sometimes it is a fad, sometimes it is truly misguided.

For liberals have a lot to answer for, also. “I have seen the future and it works,” said liberal American writer Lincoln Steffens on visiting the Soviet Union in 1921. He was referring to Lenin’s Soviet Union, where, during the time Steffens was visiting, some 280,000 people were killed in the government-sponsored “Red Terror.” To say nothing of the between 3 million and 10 million peasants who died of starvation that year, due in part to government policy.

Talk about backing the wrong horse!

The fact is, with all this talk about ideology, we have forgotten the basic truth: Politics isn’t about ideology.

It might be hard to remember that when listening to the yammering heads on Fox News or MSNBC, each side so convinced of the purity of its views.

Politics is now, has always been, and always will be the contention of conflicting interests, and the necessary accommodations that must be made, depending on the temper of the times, the political – or physical – strength of the contending sides, the willingness to compromise, the moral persuasiveness of one side or another on an issue, and the confluence of historical forces.

We each have things we want: core beliefs, economic desires, the wish not to have a new freeway cut our neighborhood in half, or to avoid paying taxes. Some of these we’re willing to trade away, if we gain something we want more.

But one person’s wasteful government spending is another person’s crop subsidy and yet another’s government cheese.

Politics, whether local, national or international, is always a competition of interests.

It is not a fight between good and evil, pace Rush Limbaugh. In fact, there are almost always not two sides to an issue, but a dozen or more, each with something to lose or gain. We can see this multifariousness in the current splintering of the Republican party among its many factions.

If there is an evil, it is ideology, itself. It is the true Great Satan. It is ideology that builds gulags, ideology that carpet bombs, ideology that gasses Jews and exterminates Indians, blows up Iraqi markets or Hindu temples. It makes Robespierres, Bin Ladens, Father Coughlins.

Ideology is the enemy of politics: It is the great conversation stopper.

And ideology is always mistaken. Always. It cannot be otherwise.

The reason is that every ideology is based on a synoptic description of the world, a limited model of the way things are. That model, whether it is the right-wing model of nationalism, privatized economy, traditional marriage and organized religion, or the left-wing model of fair distribution of wealth, cultural tolerance, the evils of a class system and mistrust of big business – that model is always too simplistic, too limited, too rationalized, too coherent, to encompass the vast, unwieldy, incoherent, and imponderable experience of being alive.

No ideology can grasp the shifting variety of the world: When we look for the particle, we find the wave; when we look for the wave, we find the particle.

The fact is, the world is way too diverse to be summarized in a party platform.

Ideology also posits a static, teleological end of history: When we have finally achieved everything we set out to, the world will be perfect, will run forever on the principles we have set down. That was true for Marxism, and for the National Review. Well, unfortunately, things change, time moves on. Something that may have worked in 1787 may no longer make sense (the “three-fifths rule,” or the mechanism for electing vice presidents, say), and both science and technology create new problems along with new solutions. New political processes will be needed for them. Ideology is a strait-jacket.

“Panta rei,” as Heraclitus said: “Everything flows.”

That is why that politics in practice, if not in theory, will always be sausage-making. This is not a fault, but a strength of politics.

—Richard Nilsen

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In love with the things of this world

Descent into the Maelstrom

Cartological myopia

The chink of Pyramus and Thisbe

Political art: Ideas vs. Ideology

The REAL Great Satan