the New Pantagruel

Realism Against Reality

by Eric Miller

“looks like freedom but it feels like death
it’s something in between, I guess”

–Leonard Cohen, “Closing Time”

n a 1967 book review fraught with Cold War anger and anxieties, the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch denounced a political stance he dubbed “vulgar realism,” a way of seeing that, by his lights, had locked up the American political imagination and paralyzed the body politic. By smugly resisting any thrusts for structural change in American political life, self-proclaimed “realists” were pronouncing a covering blessing on all that the nation had by the 1960s become. This so-called realism, Lasch warned, actually amounted to “the abdication of moral judgment, the appeal to some abstract and impersonal necessity which is supposed to make questions of right and wrong irrelevant.” “What we need,” he concluded, “are books critical of political messianism but equally critical of ‘consensus.’”

Four decades later, that need persists. The American “consensus,” and the “realism” that underpins it, have changed shape in the post-Cold War world, to be sure, but the broad political and ideological trajectory that so troubled Lasch rumbles on, and with it the great monotonous modern mantra: The system is sufficient, devotion to it is necessary. We will follow it to the end.

The hope, of course, is that our system will lead us to an “end” in the Aristotelian sense, with progress, prosperity, and happiness rewarding those who give themselves over to our way of pursuing life. But the forms of progress, prosperity, and happiness that our civilization has in the past century delivered suggest that it’s just The End that we’ve been moving toward—“end” in the sense of finality, cessation, death.

Estimates of our mortal sins differ, of course. Some point to the unprecedented forms of human bondage developed by the West as most profoundly reflective of the condition of our collective soul, while others seem more unsettled by the peace we’ve made with destroying human fetuses as (remarkably) a way of life. Christians of varying sorts have affirmed both judgments while also citing other civilizational pathologies, among them: deepening and bewildering forms of sexual promiscuity, a mass idolatry of technology, the erosion of neighborhoods and other forms of local community, and the degradation of the earth itself. On the American watch, the “home” has morphed into a self-contained entertainment-center, aging has become a source of shame, and humans have been reduced to individual wills, creatures who don’t mature so much as simply exist, doing (as it were) what they will.

“Ah,” sighs the Christian realist, “there you go again—failing to affirm the good that we’ve achieved, and expecting too much from a race that is, after all, corrupt. The evil that you see now isn’t such a departure from what we have always been. And the good that you refuse to see is worth more than you know. Behold the wheat; behold the tares: they go together. Besides, would you really choose to live at any other time?”

Knock-out blow delivered. Head back in book. Peace restored.

Except for that alarm that must be sounding somewhere, vibrating down a darkened hall toward the realist’s sleepy sound-proof den. It’s the alarm that goes off whenever we mistake the counterfeit for the real, whenever we grant substance to shadows, whenever we laud the compromise as the ideal. As the deception worms its way in, despair, with a quiet air of righteousness, begins to justify its presence. How? With an arsenal of “realistic” arguments.

What is wrong with this “realism”? It is, most fundamentally, an offense against reality: the reality of our true creaturely ends. In its Christian guise, it denies not that we are made to live in distinct, particular ways, but rather it denies the belief that we can, and should, seek to inhabit them. Its way of honoring the ideal—by placing it far into our past or far into our future—actually removes the ideal from our grasp. If the true task of “civilization” is to guide our corporate life toward the ways in which we as a race were meant to live, “realism” blinds us to those ends by constantly reminding us of what we are not; the effect is to make us aim lower, and lower, and lower, until transcending our current circumstance becomes a mere act of fantasy—if it remains an activity at all.

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