crowds and
THE SLOW DEATH OF AMERICA
by
LOUIS RENÉ BERES
___________________________
Louis
René Beres is Professor of Political Science at Purdue
University. He is author of many books and articles dealing
with international politics. His columns have appeared in the
New York Times, Washington Post, The Jerusalem
Post and OUPblog
(Oxford University Press).
The
crowd is untruth.
Soren Kierkegaard
Sometimes,
seeing requires distance. Now, suffocating daily in political
and economic rants from both the Right and the Left, we Americans
must promptly confront a critical need to look beyond the historical
moment, to seek both meaning and truth behind the news. There,
suitably distant from the endlessly adrenalized jumble of current
fears and concerns, we could finally understand the timeless
struggle of individual against mass, of the beleaguered singular
person against the “crowd.”
The
crowd, recognized the great Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard,
any crowd, is “untruth.” Whatever side one takes
in the current American culture wars, there is assuredly never
any palpable reward for “rugged individualism.”
Rather, contrary to the stock reassurances of our high school
and university history textbooks, this nation routinely smiles
upon visceral conformance and cliché, while disapproving,
and even crushing, any dint of critical questioning, or any
hint of independent thought.
Our
most insidious enemy is an unphilosophical spirit that knows
nothing, and seeks to know nothing, of truth. Now, facing an
unprecedented and staggering economic crisis, we Americans still
feel most comfortable when we can chant in chorus. “We’re
number one; we’re number one,” we shout reflexively,
even as our capacity to project global power withers visibly,
and even as the stark national separation of rich and poor has
come to mimic the most depressed and downtrodden nations on
earth.
Always
uncomfortable with intellect or real learning (in contrast to
vocational or “practical” training), America is
utterly bored or annoyed with difficult concepts and complex
ideas. After all, it is much easier to fashion our personal
judgments and opinions on the basis of a pre-formed political
discourse.
Now,
Americans are sharply polarized not only by race, ethnicity
and class, but also by inclination to consider serious thought.
For most of this broken country, shallow entertainments remain
the only expected (and affordable) compensation for a shallow
life of tedious obligation and meaningless work. This huge portion
of the populace, kept distant from any true personal growth
by every imaginable social and economic obstacle, desperately
seeks some residual compensations in silly slogans, status-bearing
affiliations, and, of course, the manifestly empty witticisms
of politics.
As
Americans, we must soon understand that no nation can ever be
first that does not hold the individual sacred. At one time
in our collective history, after Emerson and Thoreau, a spirit
of personal accomplishment did earn high marks in this land.
Young people, especially, strove to rise interestingly, not
as the embarrassingly obedient servants of crude power and raw
commerce, but as distinctly proud owners of a unique and personal
Self.
Alas,
today, this Self lives in lines of traffic and on the cell phone.
Whether we Americans would prefer to become more secular, or
more reverent, to grant government more authority over our lives,
or less, a willing submission to multitudes has become our unifying
national religion.
Such
crowd-like sentiments have a long and diversified planetary
history. We are, to be fair, hardly the first people to surrender
to crowds.
The
contemporary crowd-man or woman is, in fact, a primitive and
universal being, one who has “slipped back,” in
the words of the great Spanish philosopher, Jose Ortega y Gasset,
“through the wings, on to the age-old stage of civilization.”
This
grotesque stage is littered with the corpses of dead civilizations.
Left-wing or Right-wing, tea-party or no-party, college educated
or high school graduates, the crowd indiscriminately defiles
all that is most gracious and still-promising in American society.
Charles Dickens, during his first visit to America, had already
observed in 1842: “I do fear that the heaviest blow ever
dealt at liberty will be dealt by this country in the failure
of its example to the earth.”
To
our credit, we Americans have successfully maintained our political
freedom from traditional political tyranny and oppression, but
we have also cravenly surrendered our corollary liberty to become
authentic persons. Openly deploring a life of meaning and sincerity,
we stubbornly confuse wealth with success, and blurt out rhythmic
chants of patriotic celebration even as our cheerless democracy
vanishes into meaninglessness and wider suffering.
Whatever
its origin, there is an identifiable reason behind this carefully
synchronized delirium. Such babble seeks to protect us all from
a terrifying and unbearable loneliness. In the end, however,
it is a contrived and inevitably lethal solution.
The
courageous American who still seeks escape from the crowd, who
opts heroically for disciplined individual thought over effortless
conformance, must feel deeply alone. “The most radical
division,” asserted José Ortega y Gasset in 1930,
“is that which splits humanity . . . those who make great
demands on themselves . . . and those who demand nothing special
of themselves . . ” In 1965, the Jewish philosopher, Abraham
Joshua Heschel, offered an almost identical argument. Lamenting,
“The emancipated man is yet to emerge,” Heschel
then asked each one to inquire: “What is expected of me?
What is demanded of me?”
It
is time for camouflage and concealment in the pitiful American
crowd to yield to what Heschel had called “being-challenged-in-the-world.”
Individuals who dare to read books for more than transient entertainment,
and who are willing to risk social and material disapproval
in exchange for exiting the crowd, offer America its only real
and lasting hope. To be sure, these rare souls can seldom be
found in politics, in universities, in corporate boardrooms,
or anywhere on radio, television or in the movies. Always, their
critical inner strength lies not in elegant oratory, in catchy
phrases, or in large accumulations of personal wealth, but in
the considerably more ample powers of genuineness, reason and
thought.
Not
even the flimsiest ghost of intellectual originality still haunts
our public discussions of politics and economics. Now that our
self-deceiving citizenry has lost all sense of awe in the world,
this American public not only avoids authenticity, it positively
loathes it. Indeed, in a nation that has lost all regard for
even the Western literary canon, our American crowds shamelessly
seek comfort and fraternity in a common and conveniently shared
illiteracy.
The
division of American society into few and mass represents a
useful separation of those who are imitators from those who
would initiate real understanding. “The mass,” said
Jose Ortega y Gasset, “crushes beneath it everything that
is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified
and select.” Today, in deference to this mass, the intellectually
un-ambitious American not only wallows lazily in nonsensical
political and cultural phrases, he or she also dutifully applauds
a manifestly shallow ethos of personal surrender and social
mediocrity.
By
definition, the mass, or crowd, can never become few. Yet, some
individual members of the mass can make the difficult transformation.
Those who are already part of the few must announce and maintain
their determined stance. “One must become accustomed to
living on mountains,” says Nietzsche, “to seeing
the wretched ephemeral chatter of politics and national egotism
beneath one.”
Aware
that they comprise a core barrier to America’s spiritual,
cultural, intellectual and political disintegration, these resolute
opponents of the crowd will knowingly refuse to chant in chorus.
Ultimately, they will remind us of something very important:
Individually and collectively, staying the lonely course of
self-actualization and self-renewal–a course of consciousness
rather than delusion–is the only honest and purposeful
option for our imperiled country.
Today,
unhindered in their misguided work, our national cheerleaders
in all walks of life draw feverishly upon the sovereignty of
the unqualified crowd. This mass depends for its very breath
of life on the relentless withering of personal dignity, and
on the continued servitude of any independent consciousness.
Oddly, still unaware of this parasitism, we the people are passively
converted into fuel to feed the omnivorous machine of “democracy,”
a system of governance in which the American citizenry is certainly
permitted to speak and interact freely, but which is now also
an undisguised and anti-human plutocracy.
The
crowd is untruth.
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