Pendulum
Leadership Built Upon Lies Will Not Survive
In 2004, a senior advisor to President George W. Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people like him—Suskind—lived in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernable reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete.
“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” the aide said. “We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
But once you have untethered the political narrative from reality, you are at the mercy of anyone who can commandeer that narrative.
That is the world where we live today: one where the US president and his cult of loyalists are willing to create alternative realities and turn truth on its head. Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, “There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth. Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence — violence against those [who] uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.”
Miller could have been accurately describing the soulless Trump cult, but he is saying those traits belong to Democrats and those who uphold traditional American values. It is the Trump regime that is tearing apart families, releasing criminals from prison and inviting other criminals into government, spouting lies that lead inevitably and willfully to violence. It was not a liberal who shot Charlie Kirk; it was a young, white man who embraced white supremacy and felt Kirk was too liberal. Instead of facing the truth, Miller is projecting his foul ideology onto those who simply want a return to civility and empathy.
Paul Kingsnorth has a new book, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, coming out on September 23. In it, he postulates that we are living among the ruins of a civilization that was based on “something called ‘Christendom’, a 1,500-year civilization into which this particular sacred story seeped, informing every aspect of life, bending and changing and transforming everything in its image.”
No aspect of daily life was unaffected by this story: the organization of the working week; the cycle of annual feast days and rest days; the payment of taxes; the moral duties of individuals; the very notion of individuals, with “God-given” rights and duties; the attitude to neighbors and strangers; the obligations of charity; the structure of families; and most of all, the wide picture of the universe—its structure and meaning, and our human place within it.
Current arguments about the state of “the West” usually begin with disputes about what it actually is. For liberals, the West is the “Enlightenment” and everything that followed—parliamentary democracy, human rights, individualism, freedom of speech. For conservatives, it might signal a set of cultural values such as traditional attitudes to family life, religion, and national identity, and probably broad support for capitalist economics. For the kinds of postmodern leftists who have dominated the culture for some time now, the West—assuming they will concede that it even exists—is largely a front for colonization, empire, racism, and various other historical horrors.
All of these things could be true at the same time, but each is also a fairly recent development. The West is a lot older than liberalism, conservatism, or Marxism. The West, in fact, is at the same time a simpler, more ancient, and immensely more complex concoction than any of these could offer. It is the result of the binding together of people and peoples across a continent, over centuries of time, by a sacred order constructed around this particular religious story.
“If you knock out the pillars of a sacred order, the universe itself will change shape,” he writes. “At the primal level, such a change is experienced by people as a deep and lasting trauma, whether they know it or not. No culture can just shrug off, or rationalize away, the metaphysics which underpin it and expect to remain a culture in anything but name — if that. When such an order is broken, what replaces it? The end of the taboos doesn’t bring about some abstract ‘freedom’; it strips a culture of its heart. That heart had, in reality, stopped beating some time before, but once the formal architecture is gone too, there is an empty space waiting to be filled — and nature abhors a vacuum.”
He refers to philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument that the Enlightenment was “an attempt to build a ‘morality’ (a word that had not existed in this sense before that time) loosed from theology. It was the project of constructing a wholly new human being ‘After God,’ in which a new, personal, moral sense — no longer eternal in nature, or accountable to any higher force — would form the basis of the culture and the individual.” MacIntyre considered Enlightenment to be a failure, and Kingsnorth seems to have accepted that view, writing, “Christendom expired over centuries for a complex set of reasons, but it was not killed off by an external enemy. Instead, we dismantled our story from within. What replaced it was not a new sacred order, but a denial that such a thing existed at all.”
That is where Kingsnorth goes wrong, I believe. He writes, “Every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu, or Taoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from.”
I believe the US founders had it right: We don’t need a throne; we need a set of principles upon which we can build a society that is tolerant, respects individual rights and freedom of religion and expression, and seeks to improve society as a whole. The vacuum that has allowed rampant greed and desire for power to take over the country is not due to an abandonment of religion — although faith helps to ground people in values of love and compassion — but in the embrace of self over the community. The rise of the oligarchs has allowed a few wealthy people to exert undue influence over the nation’s laws and attitudes, leaving the majority of citizens with a feeling of helplessness and a desire for someone to come along and make things better. One-third of the country sat out the last election, allowing a small majority of those who did vote to elect a would-be dictator who is quickly transforming the land of the free into a land of the oppressed.
Such power in the hands of the few cannot survive long, however, for, as people become more and more disenchanted with the new fascism, they will turn out to depose the oppressors. No amount of gerrymandering will keep people from choosing those who will oppose tyranny; people will not stay aligned with a party that is so toxic to them. The change will not happen overnight, and repairing the damage will take much longer, but the pendulum will swing back to those who uphold the Enlightenment principles upon which the United States was formed.
Who was the senior advisor?