“looks like freedom but it feels like death
it’s something in between, I guess”
–Leonard Cohen, “Closing Time”
In 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.
In its secular guise, “realism” takes on an even more perverse quality: it erases the hope of any end that is fundamentally different from whatever vision of life currently lies in our sights. What is, is—a condition some may celebrate and some deplore; either way, an enlarged sphere for diabolical mischief emerges. In the absence of a transcendent purpose, the very meaning of human existence becomes the plaything of the great mind-shapers of the age. “The abdication of Belief / Makes the Behavior small,” noted Emily Dickinson—small, and so easily manipulated by anyone with an ounce of power.
Of course, we aren’t consciously extending invitations to the demonic when we succumb to “realism.” We, weary of pressing toward Belief, settle into a state that seems simply more sane, and less exhausting. Or, we conclude that we’re maturing, and ease into our new digs with something like gratitude but more like relief, taking comfort in the “ambiguities” and “complexities” of life in these times. Possibly we just follow the traces of those elders who have instructed us in the ways of the world, and as a matter of habit peer suspiciously at those who doubt the wisdom of that which has brought us to this point. Whatever pathway taken, calling this stopping place “home” signals the deadening of fundamentally healthy, and necessary, human impulses: the longing to be that which we are not but could (and should) become.
In this particular moment, we Americans boast a triumphal form of realism, as what we’re sure will become the American Millennium glides onward. We glory in our power, we delight in our pleasures, we marvel at our conveniences. Cheering the flag, we pity those who lack our attainments and hide our doubts somewhere in the rushing caravan of career, school, and the dozens of other assorted activities we call our “life.” But every now and then one question (asked in many forms) manages to sound loudly enough to slow us down: Is this really life? If “civilization” is meant to help us to choose life, why does it smell so much like death around here?
The simple posing of these questions makes one thing clear: maintaining a civilization is far easier than pursuing our truest ends. Any civilization tends as a matter of course to turn its members toward an elemental dependency of body and soul on the grand, overarching political and economic system it has developed to sustain and organize human life. This dependency is crucially and fundamentally religious: an offering of the self to that which it believes will deliver what it needs. Civilization, rather than being a means to an end, becomes an end in its own right, and so a god. A false god. And in the name of this cult(ure), we end up justifying massive moral, political, and intellectual compromise for the sake of the lower-order pursuits—pleasure, painlessness, power, tranquility, identity, or simply survival—that “civilization” affords.
Take the omnipresent corporations that, with their thundering promise of provision, rule over our nation, and, increasingly, our world. Despite their vaunted version of prosperity, the mavens of corporate capitalism have done little in the past two centuries to inspire confidence in their ability to understand what the earth and its people truly require, much less demonstrate that the corporations they direct will someday operate in a decent fashion, honoring our Maker and prospering our progeny. Rather than embracing nurture and thrift, global capitalists, with legions of the best and the brightest in their employ, have operated at best solipsistically and at worst rapaciously, willing to exploit all that we hold dear—from children to mountains to language to health itself—for their self-absorbed ends. This is the pathway to life? This is provision?
We know that it’s not. But this knowledge we, understandably, would rather repress. So here we are, one hundred and some years into a life-scheme whose promises are as hollow as the TV networks that deliver them. Our religion is failing us—badly.
What to do?
“It is no principle with sensible men, of whatever cast of opinion, to do always what is abstractedly best,” advised John Henry Newman as he was attempting to launch a Catholic university in Dublin in the 1850s. “Where no direct duty forbids, we may be obliged to do, as being best under circumstances, what we murmur and rise against, while we do it. We see that to attempt more is to effect less; that we must accept so much, or gain nothing; and so perforce we reconcile ourselves to what we would have far otherwise, if we could.”
What may seem at first glance to be just one wordy Victorian’s restatement of the realist’s credo—Be satisfied with compromise—on second glance looks less “realistic” and more useful. Note especially that hopeful phrase, “what we murmur and rise against.” Even as Newman chafes against the deficiencies he knows will force him to accept less than he desires, his longing for the good, for the ideal, pulses strongly within. Even as he warns implicitly against what Lasch in 1967 termed “political messianism,” he guards against giving the “consensus” undue honor and so capitulating to that which will weaken his own commitment to see vitality and grace embodied in everyday life. Compromise, in this vision, is driven solely by a hope for real (if incremental) progress toward the ideal. Communal health, Newman knew, is measured not simply by the achievement of the ideal, but, even more crucially, by the image of the ideal the community erects.
So what kind of civilization-constructing should we give ourselves to? Which compromises will nurture life, and which will endanger it?
Such decisions, if they are to be morally sound as well as politically effective, require (almost by definition) the consent of the communities affected and involved. Only those who have achieved intimacy with a given community can discern well the nature of the threats to it and envision its most hopeful prospects for change. Towns, churches, schools, businesses, counties, neighborhoods, colleges, families: each must be led by elders with a wisdom both broad and deep, men and women guided by an abiding affection for the health of the particular place and its people—and by an adequate understanding of health itself.
The critical question for all of us who in this moment of our civilization’s history seek such health must be: How can we extricate ourselves from degrading dependencies and attachments and replace them with more human, life-giving forms of support and connection? This question forces us to see that our dependencies and attachments both reflect and dictate our true religion—that upon which we most fundamentally as creatures rely. Given the religious quality of our dependencies, it follows that any shifts in them will ramify in an array of cultural directions: into the realms of art, ideas, education, economics, agriculture, manufacturing, research, and more. Understanding that the nature of our cultural crisis is at heart religious prepares us to see, too, that the work of extrication and incarnation will be intense, demanding far more than “rational” decision-making and good “strategy.” The roots of our contemporary assumptions about “reality” run deep—way deep—and up-rooting them will require a form of earthy spirituality inimical to the gnostic materialism of our day.
Such spirituality finds its ground in the abiding reality of goodness, a goodness sourced in a Creator who is present, and who sacramentally draws those who drink of his goodness into a manner of living that more faithfully and wonder-fully reflects our creaturely estate. Because goodness presides and prevails, we gain the courage to pursue another way, defying the common sense of the day with acts that testify to another wisdom, a different vision, a deeper justice: acts as simple as planting a garden, writing a poem, or walking to a church; acts as grand as running for office, starting a grocery store, or having another child. In living our faith in such ways, we place always before us the reminder that the miracle that deserves our deepest respect and allegiance is not what we as a civilization have done with the gift of life, but rather the enormous, mysterious fact of life itself.
A certain variety of realist will scoff at the political drift of this vision, even while agreeing with the contours of the cultural critique. As they tell the story of our civilization, these realists tend to give history ontic status: their overwhelmingly bitter and bleak narrative of our decline and corruption makes any turn-around seem impossible; potential political thrusts, however fledgling and tentative, are straitjacketed into paralysis—our woeful story is, after all, the sum of who we have become, and no movement forward is conceivable. “Turn Left at the Renaissance,” runs the headline of one self-consciously “conservative” magazine, implying a demise so ancient and deep that misery and despair can only follow.
This view is a fallacy. The past does not exist. What exists is the present, shaped profoundly by the past, to be sure, but made possible, moment by moment, by a goodness sourced in a Maker who bids us to reflect his glory, to embody his righteousness, to love his justice, now. This reality must be the starting point for our politics. Sometimes it may require us to do the culturally un-conservative thing of bringing not peace, but a sword. Always it will require a gritty faithfulness to the beauty and justice of a God whose presence alone ensures our hope.
In an important sense, most overarching historical narratives of our life on this plane are going to be bleak—or should be. But the same narratives should also feature stories of those whose love of goodness and justice drove them to embody another way. Occasionally, they triumph.
When they do, something called shalom happens: a peace social and personal at once takes root, fostering the possibility of freedom for those within their reach. They become a foretaste of a fuller shalom yet to come, a promise of a way of life pure, rich, and satisfying. Until that day, they live as Dwight Macdonald once quipped of the radical: “pleased if history is also going his way,” but “stubborn about following his own road.” The road, in this case, is the pathway to our final reality: true realism. It’s the journey that begins when someone dares to believe Christ knew what he was doing when he issued that troubling, yet hopeful command: Be ye perfect.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel 1.3.