Lost Along the Way

"I was once asked if the messianic idea still had meaning for me, and if it were necessary to retain the idea of an ultimate stage of history where humanity would no longer be violent, where humanity would have broken definitely through the crust of being, and where everything would be clear. I answered that to be worthy of the messianic era one must admit that ethics has a meaning, even without the promises of the Messiah."

(Levinas, Emanual. Ethics & Infinity)

***

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last day.

(Kafka, Parables & Paradoxes)

***

I heartily accept the motto, "That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

(Thoreau, Henry David. "Resistance to Civil Government")

***

I grant that I cannot really reconcile myself to the following expressions made use of even by clever men: “A certain people (engaged in a struggle for civil freedom) is not yet ripe for freedom”; “The bondmen of a landed proprietor are not yet ready for freedom”; and hence, likewise; “Mankind in general is not yet ripe for freedom of belief.” For according to such a presupposition, freedom will never arrive, since we cannot ripen to this freedom if we are not first of all placed therein (we must be free in order to be able to make purposive use of our powers in freedom). The first attempts will indeed be crude and usually will be attended by a more painful and more dangerous state than that in which we are still under the orders and also the care of others; yet we never ripen with respect to reason except through our own efforts (which we can make only when we are free). I raise no protest when those who hold power in their hands, being constrained by the circumstances of the times, postpone far, very far, into the future the sundering of these bonds. But to proceed on the principle that those who are once subjected to these bonds are essentially unfit for freedom and that one is justified in continually removing them farther from it is to usurp the prerogatives of Divinity itself, which created men for freedom. It is certainly more convenient to rule in state, household, and church if one is able to carry out such a principle. But is it also more just?  

(Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 1793)

***

So the real question we have to ask becomes: what is it about the experience of living under a state, that is, in a society where rules are enforced by the threat of prisons and police, and all the forms of inequality and alienation that makes possible, that makes it seem obvious to us that people, under such conditions, would behave in a way that it turns out they don't actually behave?

The anarchist answer is simple. If you treat people like children, they will tend to act like children. The only successful method anyone has ever devised to encourage others to act like adults is to treat them as if they already are.

(Graeber, David. The Democracy Project)

American Liberty

"Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,--as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology." HDT

"And in this country one sees that there is always margin enough in the statute for a liberal judge to read one way and a servile judge another." RWE

[I'll admit to a slight grin as I typed "servile judge".]

It was not until 1828 that Dissenters gained legal equality in matters of religion and education in England. Hazlitt, in 1818, wrote the following eloquent praise of his coreligionists, the sectaries--the men and women who embodied what Edmund Burke had called "the dissidence of dissent and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion." The nonconformists, Hazlitt wrote, "are the steadiest supporters of [England's] liberties and laws, they are the checks and barriers against the insidious or avowed encroachments of arbitrary power: and they are depositaries of the love of truth." Dissent or religious individualism was always more a state of mind than a doctrine, and it was opposed to the Establishment...[emphasis added]
--Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company

"The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Handle With Care", Esquire Magazine (March 1936).

I would like to think one might be able to conceptualize "individualism" in two distinct ways, both of which seem readily applicable to what we think of as "mine".

1) Property
2) Liberty

You can see how these two "ideas" are difficult to hold in the mind at the same time. And perhaps we are coming to what seems like a clear rift in our national consciousness in consequence of these ideas "coming apart" in our minds.

Let's define the terms:

1) ownership; right of possession, enjoyment, or disposal of anything, especially of something tangible

2) freedom from control, interference, obligation, restriction, hampering conditions, etc.; power or right of doing, thinking, speaking, etc., according to choice.

We are a nation beholden to propertied interests--and that includes our own if we are owners or debtors--houses, cars, land, etc., yet we are a nation whose mythology is one where Liberty is a central tenet.

It turns out, though, that Liberty is only an abstraction (a powerful one to be sure, but most useful for the human drive to creativity); and that Property is regnant in the world at large.

1) Conservative: Possessive: Tradition: Establishment: Servile
2) Liberal: Creative: Subversive: Dissident: Equality

Which do you prefer?

I saw the Sacs & Foxes at the Statehouse on Monday--about 30 in number. Edward Everett addressed them & they replied. One chief said "They had no land to put their words upon, but they were nevertheless true." RWE

Shouting About the Things They Are Not

Apparently I have been channeling D. H. Lawrence (could be worse, I guess).

...Americans refuse everything explicit and always put up a sort of double meaning. they revel in subterfuge. They prefer their truth safely swaddled in an ark of bulrushes, and deposited among he reeds until some friendly Egyptian princess comes to rescue the babe...

Now listen to me, don't listen to him. He'll tell you the lie you expect. Which is partly your fault for expecting it.

He didn't come in search of freedom of worship. England had more freedom of worship in the year 1700 than America had. Won by Englishmen who wanted freedom, and so stopped at home and fought for it. And got it. Freedom of worship? Read the history of New England during the first century of its existence.

Freedom anyhow? The land of the free! This the land of the free! Why, if I say anything that displeases them, the free mob will lynch me, and that's my freedom. Free ? Why, I have never been in any country where the individual has such an abject fear of his fellow countrymen. Because, as I say, they are free to lynch the moment he shows he is not one of them.

******

Those Pilgrim Fathers and their successors never came here for freedom of worship. What did they set up when they got here? Freedom, would you call it?

They came largely to get away - that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That's why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

'Henceforth be masterless.'

Which is all very well, but it isn't freedom. Rather the reverse. A hopeless sort of constraint. It is never freedom till you find something you really positively want to be. And people in America have always been shouting about the things they are not. Unless, of course, they are millionaires, made or in the making.

Studies in Classic American Literature