Summary: Left and Right in America are in many ways mirror images of each other, as many posts here have shown. No surprise, since we’re all Americans. If we recognize this, perhaps we can better communicate with each other, and perhaps even work together better. {1st of 2 posts today.}
Left and Right share a belief in the coming apocalypse, although they differ in the nature of the end times. Is it Cultural collapse or resource exhaustion? National bankruptcy and currency collapse or climate catastrophe? Mass social disruption or … they both agree on that.
These nightmares seem to be gaining an increasing grip on the American imagination, as fear becomes the major marketing tool in our politics — across our political spectrum. Does this provide a basis for communication, and perhaps working together?
Here are excerpts from two books I recommend that give deep insights into our culture. The first is by one of the top social critics of our generation. The second is deep and complex but brilliant, well-worth the effort to carefully read it (his description of us is imo dead on target).
An excerpt from Christopher Lasch’s
The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
The Waning of the Sense of Historical Time
As the twentieth century approaches its end, the conviction grows that many other things are ending too. Storm warnings, portents, hints of catastrophe haunt our times. The “sense of an ending,” which has given shape to so much of twentieth-century literature, now pervades the popular imagination as well. The Nazi holocaust, the threat of nuclear annihilation, the depletion of natural resources, well-founded predictions of ecological disaster have fulfilled poetic prophecy, giving concrete historical substance to the nightmare, or death wish, that avant-garde artists were the first to express. The question of whether the world will end in fire or in ice, with a bang or a whimper, no longer interests artists alone.
Impending disaster has become an everyday concern, so commonplace and familiar that nobody gives much thought to how disaster might be averted. … After the political turmoil of the sixties people have retreated to purely personal preoccupations. … people have convinced themselves that what matter is psychic self-improvement … Harmless in themselves, these pursuits … signify a retreat from politics and a repudiation of the past.
… Woody Allen’s movie Sleeper, issued in 1973, accurately caught the mood of the seventies. Appropriately cast in the form of a parody of futuristic science fiction, the film finds a great many ways to convey the message that “political solutions don’t work,” as Allen flatly announces at one point. When asked what he believes in, Allen, having ruled out politics, religion, and science, declares: ‘I believe in sex and death — two experiences that come once in a lifetime.’
… To live for the moment is the prevailing passion — to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity. We are fast losing our sense of historical continuity, the sense of belonging to a succession of generations originating in the past and stretching into the future.
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An excerpt from Frank Kermode’s
The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident.
… What is certain is that we are interested in decadence and renovation; the basis of this is perhaps primitive, though its expression can be extremely sophisticated. For example, the original Marxist ideology, however tenuously it survives in modern Communism, has not only an inherent utopian element but an element of annunciatory violence. If there is something of this in the modern revolt of the young, as there is also in the revolt of the Negro, we must not expect to limit it to such special groups.
In general, we seem to combine a sense of decadence in society — as evidenced by the concept of alienation, which, supported by a new interest in the early Marx, has never enjoyed more esteem — with a technological utopianism. In our ways of thinking about the future there are contradictions which, if we were willing to consider them openly, might call for some effort towards complementarity. But they lie, as a rule, too deep.
… This is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience. It can also absorb changing interests and rival apocalypses.
… We continue to assume, as people always have done, that there is a tolerable degree of conformity between the disconfirmed apocalypse and a respectably modern view of reality and the powers of the mind. In short, we retain our fictions of epoch, of decadence and renovation, and satisfy in various ways our clerkly scepticism about these and similar fictions.
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For More Information
If you liked this post, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. See all posts about mirrors in which we can see ourselves, especially these posts about our culture:
- Know thyself, America.
- Another look in the mirror at America.
- Diagnosing the Eagle: Alienation.
- The similar delusions of America’s Left and Right show our common culture – and weakness.