It seems to me Percy has usually been concerned with a very specific type
of crisis - the man vs. nature type which shows man how discontinuous the
world is. Alienation for Percy is when man becomes an alien from himself,
the creation, but not from someone else. There are wars and conflicts and
crimes, but they exist as backdrop. They're not sharply felt in the sense
that no one shoots Tom Moore. Percy tackles personal violence somewhat in
_Lancelot_ but there's evidence in interviews he thought of this work as
something of an oddball and a misfire.
Whoever seized on sense of self is entirely right. It's this concept
around which most of the nationalism literature revolves (Benedict
Anderson, Said, Taylor(?) & _Sources of Self_, etc.) It's very difficult
to get a thumb on why Louis goes from being King of France to King of the
French, but nationalism is a phenomenon tightly wrapped up in modernity.
Part of that nationlistic impulse in the mideast today has to do with the
spread of modern economic prosperity and western ideas related to science,
progress and politics - the same process we underwent a century ago across
Eastern Europe, where the boundaries and the peoples were so confused that
building political entities based on "nations" instead of "realms" lead to
two world wars (well, one really; the hostilities never stopped in some
spots).
The march of progress uproots people. It generates a backlash.
These are complex times with compless questions. Some people want them to
go away and they want the world to be simplified according to a few
principles like the Khmer Rouge or the Taliban (the two groups are twins
separated at birth). Bill Moyers had an excellent program the other night
discussing this very issue with a NYC psychologist. They are fundamentally
insecure because their world is literally being uprooted. You see it in
the ennui of Flaubert's petit bourg. and you see it in the Taliban. Both
take up fetishes. Charles Bovary develops erotic attachments to household
furniture (spirit has to go seomwhere when you squeeze it out of people).
In the case of Bin Laden, he reduces other people to objects so he can
murder them. Of course, in doing so, he flattens himself as much as the
landscape and falls into the same trap as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and, dare
one say, Robspiere..
These people have a utopia toward which they want the world to move,
whether it's Marx's dictatorship of the proletariat (did he have in mind
Stalin or 401Ks and shareholder lawsuits?) or Bin Laden's sharia, they are
all unattainable, idealized paradises. To get there, of course, they have
to suggest that they at least have existed in the past. So they set about
idealizing the past. Like with Hitler and German mythology, they try to
create an idealized past. American used to be a great country until - uh,
what day is it? - 403 Communists infiltrated Foggy Bottom or the German
people would have been great once but were betrayed by blood sucking Jews
or we must return to the pure vision of Muhammed.
Bill Moyers wife said the most remarkable thing which he repeated in this
context. She said forgiveness is giving up the idea of a better past.
That is exactly what fanatics like Bin Laden and others are incapable of
doing. They hate democracy because it means compromise. It means
admitting they might have been wrong about something - which is peculiar
because they almost always claim to be doing this on behalf of "the
people." (We must kill you to save you. Or: Kill them all; God will know
his own - an actual quote from a Christian in the Crusades.) Go read Ed.
Burke on the French Revolution. Read how depressed Tom Paine gets once
he's put in jail and realizes the revolution isn't about ideas and freedom,
it's become about being right.
This is a war for legitimacy. The bombings in NYC were to provoke us to
visit great pain on the mideast and inspire people to follow Bin Laden
against the Satan. We must battle him for those people's hearts and minds
and we must do that by fully realizing the promise of free polities and
free economies. If we do not bring peace, prosperity and freedom to the
region, guys like Bin Laden will continue to thrive. That money we sent
there by pumping oil into our gas tanks will come back and bite us.
People get insecure because their world view breaks down. They become
uprooted, free radicals. Charismatic con men can latch onto them. They
get told the King is supposed to be God's representative on Earth here to
rule France for the benefit of the French and instead they see profligate
spending, military defeats, widespread poverty and a king who doesn't give
a damn. Same with the Russians and their Czar. And they end up tossing
out God with the king because, well, to be frank in those countries that's
all God was mostly - a prop in the political system. The world is a pretty
terrifying place without a place from which to view it. And a pretty
insulated place if you're assured a place in heaven as a martyr and don't
have to worry about Moyer's forgiveness.
Apologies to Donald Horne, but America is the original lucky country, a
pre-modern Tudor polity, isolated from the hatred of modern times (yes,
it's got plenty of it's own kind), without borders to defend and long seas
to cushion it. How appropriate that the things of transcontinental
commerce, jets, should rouse it from its slumber. We have enemies, but
they are outside our world view. They don't sit beside us on the bus
everyday like Israelis and Palestinians. Like children, our reactions to
the boogeymen aren't always very mature. We haven't seen him much. (You
can read more about this in Louis Hartz' _The Liberal Tradition_ or on my
website.) The Indians and slaves don't put up much of a fight. There's no
"other" really to reach critical mass and need repressing, so there's no
"repressed" to "return" - no King of the second Republic waiting around the
corner to come after Napoleon.
We've had a taste of that terror now. It wasn't distant, off in Hawaii or
Japan. It was in our own backyard.
Poe had a taste for that dark terror. That's why the French gravitated
toward him so - and to Faulkner and other Southerners with ghosts in their
closets.
Percy didn't have a sharp sense of a repressed other - not the kind of
dusty Faulknerian ghost that drives men insane. There's no um-welt, no
return of the repressed one might expect to see in Poe's "Man of the
Crowd," no unholy terror which has Jim Bond screaming in Faulkner. These
would all involve some animated force we tried to forget. When you get
down to it, that's a "man vs. man" story.
Percy's more interested in showing us how dead the world is. It's
stoicism. Man vs. nature. When he talks about "war" it's always something
that's very distant and it doesn't usu. wrap the protagonist up in active
hatred. He sits back and wanders about the Nazis, but they're in such a
deep, dark pit he doesn't have a clue about what's spinning the wheels in
their mind. He may analyze it intellectually, but he doesn't feel it.
Indeed, most of us aren't used to that terror of not knowing if we or our
loved ones will be alive from one day to the next. Maybe that's why our
modern Shakespeares choose the mafia so often to expend their flowery prose
on. Law-abiding citizens are so uncomplicated.
Thanks for the well wishers. Although these issues concern me greatly, I
really need to rest for a while. Had my own encounter with terror this
morning in the form of claustrophobia and an MRI. I took one look and
joked to the operator, "Let me guess. It's from the same guys who make
airline seats."
He said, "Yeah. Now that you mention it - GE, Honeywell, the same companies."
I would have rather he laughed.
Then I wouldn't have felt so alienated. So much for getting close to the
divine today. I suppose we all have our encounters with the humorless
bureaucracy to make.
Wade Riddick
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Jun 22 2002 - 20:15:02 EDT