Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Monday, February 28, 2005

Tribal Realities Against Democratic Realities

I like to listen to Air America Radio’s Unfiltered Show in the mornings (along with Randi Rhodes and Laura Flanders, I find Unfiltered’s Lizz Winstead and Rachel Maddow among the most consistently funny and right-on-with-your-right-on personalities on the network). Anyway, this morning Liz and Rachel interviewed Tim Lahaye, co-author of the stupendously popular Left Behind series of books dramatizing “the Rapture,” an apocalyptic end-time event that preoccupies the imaginations of many American Christian fundamentalists. I was rather flabbergasted to hear that something like one in eight Americans has read at least one of these books. Clearly, the popularity of the series is part of the tide (or possibly part of the Lunacy that draws the tide) that is the Rapture Right in American politics and culture in this moment.

Lahaye was very insistent that “good works,” compassionate conduct, efforts to relieve suffering, stewardship of the environment and communities, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of reasonable and moral good-behavior as these things are usually conceived in my neck of the woods are not in fact avenues to salvation in his view of Christianity, but very much just distractions from what really matters – which is that a person enter into a “personal relationship” with Jesus as their Lord and Savior. All of which is to say, so far as salvation is concerned, what matters in the end is simply whether or not one affirms membership in the tribe of fundamentalist Christianity.

Liberal and social democrats lately like to distinguish themselves as a “reality-based community” working together to solve real problems with good government, as against a “faith-based” community of religious and market fundamentalists driven by abstract ideals and indifferent to contrary evidence. Listening to Lahaye I was struck by the fact that the divide may not be so much between reality and faith as between inhabitants of two altogether different realities.

Part of what I am getting at is apparent as well in the ongoing exasperation of progressives at the rampaging hypocrisy and exceptionalism of so many of the most vocal and exemplary conservatives in contemporary American politics and culture. The frustration is so ubiquitous it has an acronym now: “IOKIYAR” (It’s okay if you are Republican”)…

Big government is bad, but it’s okay if it’s a Republican Administration that swells the ranks of government, corruption is bad, but it’s okay if it’s friends of Republicans who skim billions from no-bid contracts and gulp down subsidies and defraud consumers and investors with backroom deals among players with conspicuous conflicts of interest, election fraud is bad, but it’s okay if Republicans obstruct and manipulate voting processes and results, nation-building is bad, but it’s okay if Republicans prop up dictators and build and maintain military bases across the globe, traditional values are key, but it’s okay if it’s a Republican who is committing the adultery, chewing some hooker’s foot in a hotel every weekend, banging big-wigs as a rentboy between gigs insinuating the party line into the mainstream media, sniffing coke, lying into the teleprompter, lying under oath, blunting the definition of torture to facilitate its use, and on and on and on…. It’s okay just so long as whoever is doing it is on the Team.

But what if all this bewildering and utterly crazy-making hypocrisy isn’t really hypocrisy at all, strictly speaking? What if these people aren’t lying to us? What if they aren’t blind to the obvious? What if they simply see things radically differently?

When Bush promotes to his cabinet conspicuously unqualified incompetents and outright criminals in the eyes of the world to whom they presumably represent us all, and all for no other reason than that they are loyal to him, this seems to me precisely the same kind of judgment that guides Lahaye to say that initiation into the tribe of the Saved is all that matters.

Membership in the tribe is the only reality that counts. However one acts, whatever one has done, whatever one plans to do, whatever the probable consequences of one’s conduct, these are all details that derive their meaning by their location within the narrative in which one came to be a member in the tribe and exhibits proper loyalty to it. Every other consideration is a distraction from the reality of “character” that resonates between tribal members when they are in one another’s presence. Of one’s fellow-members one says, “he’s a good man,” and, being good, one renders honor and effort unto him. (Don’t even get me started about the women I – and they – are excluding in all these creepy locutions.) To look to deeds, to look to accomplishments, to look to intentions, to look to consequences is to be distracted from what is good in a good member of the tribe, what matters in a member: “one of us.”

Make no mistake: This is a deep clash in the sense of what is the proper reality on which we base political life in the first place. This is not a clash between the faithful and the realistic. This is a war of the worlds. This is a clash between the reality created by tribal membership against the reality created by democratic participation. I cannot even snarkily describe this as a “clash of civilizations,” because the tribalism I am talking about is in a key sense a non-civilizational mode of sociality.

That we are different from one another, that there are ineradicable differences in the aims and aspirations of human beings who must nevertheless live together and collaborate in some measure in the making and re-making of the world is, for Hannah Arendt, the inaugural insight of political thinking. “Plurality,” she wrote, “is the law of the earth.”

That more intimate, powerfully meaningful communities of affinity and conformity also arise in the midst of this deeper ineradicable churn of plurality is the reality that drives specifically moral, and not political, life. By morality I mean what Wilfred Sellars called the formulation and profession of “we intentions.” Morals, from mores: the acts of identification and disidentification that conjoin individual values with community standards.

But the “us” of morality, of identification, always relies for its force and intelligibility on the “them” of the immoral, the strange, the heathen, the other with whom one just as actively dis-identifies as one identifies with one’s fellows.

There can be no universal moral community. Even in their most evangelical, proselytizing, genocidal rages for order moralists require outsides against which to define the inside they cherish. And since there is no possible and perfect withdrawal, no feasible pure separation, no final (re)solution to the interminable, ineradicable plurality of human experiences and aspirations, eventually even the moralist must be reconciled in difference else be overwhelmed in it and undermined by it.

That recognition is the point of departure for properly political life, for immersion in the world of ongoing reconciliation that is at once the unmaking and the making of the world we share and of the wider we who share it.

The tribalists of the newly ascendant and ruling American conservative movement do not confront us with a new politics, but literally with the repudiation of politics from the perspective of a morality that cannot grasp its limitations (which is always what distinguishes morality from moralism).

And because we all live in the world whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not, the only way to defeat the moralism of these tribalists (or at any rate protect democratic civilization and rights culture, such as it is, from the worst excesses of conservative religious and market moralisms) is to render as conspicuous as possible their own ineliminable reliance on the political reality they otherwise disdain.

The tribe of religious and market moralists consists primarily of pampered people altogether oblivious to the reality of the plurality of cultures, practices, and ways of life on earth, and they must be forcibly confronted with the reality of their impact and dependence on that plurality.

Democrats cannot continue to mistake as an example of political plurality the antipolitical hostility to plurality of the tribal moralists.

Especially, privileged Americans are too insulated from the consequences of their own decisions. They are cocooned even from the sense that they are making decisions at all, that their conduct could be otherwise, that their conduct has consequences other than the satisfaction or frustration of their own desires... And this state of affairs is an incubator for the worst kinds of moralism and hostility to political realism.

Only when the prices of the goods Americans and Europeans consume actually reflect their environmental costs, the costs to the lives of the laborers who make them, the costs to global justice of propping up the “friendly” regimes in which they are made, only then can we realistically expect the tribalists to re-enter the world they would rule as the global citizens we must all be if we are to survive, especially in this era of emerging technological marvels and horrors in which we find ourselves now. The “reality based” community must face the faithful with the realities in which they too are actors.

No comments: