Reading Against the Sword
In a year where propaganda, hashtag interventions, and violence continued to sow division throughout our country and world, these were the most important books I read, reread, or attentively revisited.
It was an insightful, enlightening, infuriating, inspiring, and sobering experience. At a time when Americans appear increasingly unsure or embarrassed of themselves, it also reinforced a love of place and country that is far more dynamic and diverse than many care to acknowledge; far more capable of transformative action for a greater good than many are willing to consider. Observing an increasingly tyrannical sensibility pervading every aspect of our techno-political-culture, I have also been informed by dissidents from afar whose ability to transform tragic folly into creative expression and robust communal action may serve as a blueprint for an unwelcomed future.
Exploring items ranging from medicine and human suffering to the folklore of white supremacy, the failed concept of race, the essence of prophetic witness, and the history and founding documents of America, what struck me the most was how juvenile and superficial contemporary discourse, politics, and media have become: how a society trained on consumption of empty calories is now feeding itself on empty symbolism. To borrow from Albert Murray, “producing guilt may or may not be fine, but stimulating intelligent action is better. And intelligent action always needs to have its way paved by a practical estimate of the situation.” Writing fifty years ago, Murray was ahead of his time, noting that if we “mongrel Americans” readily agree to “self-constriction, and even self-enslavement, through self-hypnotic verbalism,” it is always because we are failing to search and secure a better, richer, more humane language. Murray’s search for a more humane language yielded clear conviction: “This just simply is not the time for the politics of unexamined slogans.”
The same must be said today. But the slogans abound and dictate with alarming efficiency, drawing us to the touch screens of mobile-phone-activism, as we increasingly lose touch with reality. Einstein famously noted that problems can’t be solved on the level they were created. In this sense, it should come as no surprise that overly racialized narratives yield more racism, violence more violence, and the private acceptance of dishonesty produces a public that will embrace whatever lies suit their preferences. To think that dishonesty (about any one of these issues) is the province of the enemy, or the other, is not only an insidious fiction; it is a conceptual recipe for societal disaster.
The last eight months should have made this perfectly clear. But if we think that the disasters of 2020 will suddenly disappear based on the outcome of a presidential election, I believe we (whoever we are) will be sorely disappointed. In his chilling analysis of mass movements, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer warned his readers to be suspicious of those who think “that by possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power.” While history persistently proves no such power exists, it also teaches that passion mixed with the absence of historic perspective is a dangerous combination: ideological opportunists always benefit from, and look to stoke, political instability. While it is tempting to think that such instability has a single cause, or is the product of a single person, giving into that temptation is ultimately an abdication of personal and communal responsibility. It is little wonder that as those responsibilities are discharged in angst-ridden assertions of moral superiority, the most pressing issues of the day have been whittled down to one-dimensional ideological grist that, under any serious scrutiny, is as obscure as it is obtuse.
Life is too rich, too tragic, and too beautiful to accept the paucity and simplicity of today’s supposed solutions. And the stakes are always too high to accept emotive posturing over reasonable appeals for moral, spiritual, and communal fortitude: the characteristics that ultimately help discern what is good and what is evil, what is true and what is false. In the supposed post-truth, post-facts era, there is no more pressing challenge than to recover the spiritual depth that Czech dissident and then president, Vaclav Havel, saw as the only way to revive civic life after seasons of profound isolation, loneliness, and uncertainty. For Havel, “if our civilization does not somehow deepen spiritually, if it doesn’t realize anew its own spiritual roots, if it doesn’t start to respect moral principles, we are threatened with a disintegration of our human bonds, the loss of a sense of responsibility, and totally unbridled self-interest.” Having lived through the cold restrictions of the communist bloc, Havel warned that this renewal of spiritual depth was as needed in the West as it was in the surge of economic prosperity after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Havel’s appeal for more spiritual depth aligns with Abraham Joshua Heschel’s study of prophetic witness, which always works against the sanctimonious certainties and “scandalous pretensions” that populate polite society. In Heschel’s telling of the ancient Hebrew tradition, prophecy is not simply a matter of individual revelation. It is a matter of cultivating personal and communal disciplines that resist strategic denialism or hypocritical double standards in the face of abject corruption. Where the opportunist is “intoxicated with the here and now,” the “prophet has a vision of an end.” A vision we ignore, “at the risk of our own despair.”
Despair is embodied in unbridled self-interest, unyielding global consumerism, the denial of dignity, and alarming infringements on basic human freedoms. All of which invites what the late Stanley Crouch called a “retreat into pouting anarchy … defeatist visions” and “ersatz savagery,” underwritten and reinforced by “substandard levels of scholarship.” It’s clear by now that substandard levels of scholarship can do wonders for increasing one’s followers on Twitter. But it will do nothing to offer a more supple capacity to confront the pick-a-side pronouncements, for-us-or-against-us logic, line-in-the-sand narratives that are as tired and predictable as they are bathed in what Crouch labeled “unearned cynicism.” For Crouch, Americans need look no further than the tragic and heroic optimism of our Constitution to find the source of our greatest strength. But we have to look, with humility and sincerity, if we are to rise from our knees “and begin taking names.” While many, I trust, are not ready to give up on our country because of its imperfect history, Crouch warned that we need to resist the culture of “professional alienation and complaint that is joined at the hip to youth rebellion and has hammered out the shape of its iron suit on the anvil formed of antiestablishment social movements and the disillusionments they express.”
For a deeper understanding of the disillusionment, cynicism, and chaos that Crouch identified, we would do well to attentively observe what Rebecca West called, the “vaster, darker, wisdom,” that constitutes the history of Eastern Europe. In a work of staggering scope, Black Lamb & Grey Falcon details the pulsing confluence of tribal violence at the epicenters of Europe’s most harrowing wreckage in the 20th century. But as West’s account clearly illustrates, the seeds of endless war in the Balkans were planted long before totalitarian regimes were ever conceived. Under careful scrutiny, we often discover that deeply seeded tribal rivalry is very often an arbitrary conceit, morphing into centuries long battles where the combatants eventually forget, or never even knew, what they are even fighting for. In 21st century America it is not just that this form of conceitedness appears increasingly accepted. It is now celebrated. The result of which appears to be the justification of all manner of thoughtlessness, cruelty, violence, and wickedness. If this trend persists we will undoubtedly become “a society ruled by the sword,” which West warned “can never be stable, if only because the sword is always passing from hand to hand, from the ageing to the young.”
Today, we may still have a choice: to continue to build a more perfect union, or to break it. Even though we live in an age that rewards instant gratification, and it is much easier to break than to build, I refuse to accept the destructive path so many have chosen. I also refuse to accept the idea that we should be embarrassed by who we are as individuals or as a people. Instead, we should be repentant for our sins (individual and collective), grateful for our accomplishments, and earnestly pursuing a greater and more dignified good for every human being. It would be rather easy to fall into the “moral fatalism” and “know-nothing-irrationalism,” Jacques Barzun (nearly a century ago) anticipated would stem from our culture’s emotivist, materialists, and militaristic tendencies. Accurately, he warned that such fatalism and irrationalism would (for some) be confused and “exalted as virtue.” For Toni Morrison this confusion is predicated on the strip mining of our “moral imagination” and “concepts of liberty,” ultimately reducing our consciousnesses to “self-commodification.”
“Resist” has been a popular and commodifiable slogan in recent years. But what we need is the resolve exemplified in America’s greatest prophet, whose message today is as needed as it is overlooked and misappropriated. Martin Luther King, Jr., knew and proved that we can always logically explain acts of violence. But there is no spiritual edification that comes from meeting injustice and oppression with it. King knew that what is morally incoherent is also societally unsustainable. This is why he wisely looked beyond the surface to history and philosophy, where he harnessed a richer account of the human condition and expressed the material and spiritual underpinnings of the stakes with supreme clarity. “Man,” he said, “was born into barbarism when killing his fellow man was a normal condition of existence. He became endowed with a conscience. And he has now reached the day when violence toward another human being must become as abhorrent as eating another’s flesh. Nonviolence,” he argued, “may become the answer to the most desperate need of all humanity.” In the year to come I hope we do a better job meeting it.
Albert Murray – The Omni-Americans: Some Alternatives to the Folklore of White Supremacy
Ralph Ellison – The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
Martin Luther King, Jr. – Why We Can’t Wait
Martin Luther King, Jr. – Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos of Community
Abraham Joshua Heschel – The Prophets
Stanley Hauerwas – God, Medicine, and Suffering
Carol M. Swain – The New White Nationalism in America: Its Threat to Integration
Stanley Crouch – The All American Skin Game: Or, The Decoy of Race
Eric Hoffer – The True Believer
Rebecca West – Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Toni Morrison – The Source of Self-Regard
Thomas Chatterton Williams – Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race
Vaclav Havel – Living in Truth
Elzbieta Matynia – An Uncanny Era: Conversations Between Vaclav Havel & Adam Michnik
Howard Thurman – A Strange Freedom
Abraham Lincoln – Selected Speeches and Writings
Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – The Federalist Papers
Albert Hirschman – The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy
Jacques Barzun – Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage
Vasily Grossman – Stalingrad