Honestly, I have not missed this business of waking up in the morning and finding my newsfeed overrun with headlines generated by late-night tweets. Coincidentally, one of my friends behind the blue-and-white velvet rope has also been uncharacteristically mute these past seven days. This morning he returned to inform one and all it was not a self-imposed exile he endured. Lessons have been learned by all, I am sure.
The surest way we may know, for now, that the January 6 insurrection is a lost cause, is to see that capital is circling its wagons and consolidating a new post-Trump order. One would have liked peace to be made on other terms than this: cutting the deplorables off from their social-media, from their air miles, from their Olive Garden unlimited pasta passes. There is no real justice here; it is only capitalism’s enantiamorphic alternative to China’s state social-credit system. It is arbitrary, discriminatory, and undemocratic. Olive Garden can of course do what it wants, but when society is nothing but an aggregate of Olive Gardens, including the massively hypertrophied Olive Gardens that run the internet, when citizenship has disintegrated into a vast constellation of customer-loyalty rewards and there is no neutral space in which citizens can adjudicate their disputes with the managers, we’ve got a problem — JEH Smith
I’ve been trying to learn a few lessons myself, though I can’t quite put a name to the ignorance that besets me — I am beset by “unknown unknowns.”
If you were a forty-year-old in 1955, your life would have already spanned most of World War I, the Spanish flu pandemic, the convulsive birth of the Soviet Union, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, World War II, the communist takeover in China, and the Korean War; closer to home, you would have witnessed McCarthyism and the growing pressures for remediation of ongoing and unresolved racial injustice — for all of the manifest good of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. During those four decades from 1915 to 1955, the nation had faced crisis after crisis, and, had this been your life, you would have known little else but a nation on the brink.
Then, as now, these national trials were rightly recognized as existentially momentous, and then, as now, there was wide and deep controversy over how to make sense of them. Over this span, sensible voices across the political spectrum — John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann, Richard Weaver, Peter Viereck, and Russell Kirk, among others — simultaneously worried that the normative resources that underwrote liberal democracy in America were flagging and committed themselves to addressing these challenges. They differed aggressively over how.
James Davison Hunter reassesses these voices and contrasts them with another — that of Martin Luther King, Jr. Reading this I can’t shake the notion that here are the lessons I need to learn. And none of them will be easy.
3 comments:
I hadn’t seen (or if I did, anyway, hadn’t taken time to read) Hunter’s article. Reading it now, slowly & with interruptions as per usual — thanks! The opening bit you excerpt is very much where my thoughts were in this, with little surge of posting in October, as is obvious I guess.
(Grandparents were precisely that bracket, mid-30s to mid-40s in 1955.)
Another crisis from that era was polio. My grandmother was a faithful journal keeper -- short notes at the end of the day. But there's no written record of my father's illness as a child. My grandmother's youngest brother is only a year or two older than dad, and he had it worse than pop did -- was sequestered in a hospital ward in the city for just over a year. I can't imagine.
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