A message to my fellow citizens:
Blind Children Studying the Globe, Julius Kirschner (1914)
To those who imbibed the toxic cocktail of denial,
self-deception, and wishful thinking in the last presidential election, there’s
still hope for a full recovery. Your fears, anger and insecurities are
ill-served by a fascist populist and his would-be kleptocratic cronies whose
narcissistic megalomania and Midas complex glorify the conspicuous vices of
contemporary capitalism in a manner that seeks to trump democratic
institutions, values and principles as it eviscerates the triune principles and
virtues of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. It is still possible to awaken your potential to
exercise the tenacity and courage needed to break through the authoritarian
character armor sub-consciously constructed out of the fragile and feeble
fabric provided by the more regressive and perverse socio-cultural materials
found in this country’s history: conformism, homophobia, (white and
‘Christian’) ethno-nationalism, militarism, parochialism, racism, sexism,
conspicuous consumption and acquisitiveness, unbridled ambition, celebrity
worship and fame-seeking, the will to dominate others, in short, the “false consciousness”
well-captured in Erich Fromm’s locution, “the pathology of normalcy.” We know
too well the debilitating and deadly powers of human vengeance, senseless
destructiveness, and violence, the ease with which even the most “civilized”
peoples can descend into the dark vortex of chaos, needless suffering and evil.
The need to “fight fire with fire” is rare and regrettable, and certainly
avoidable should we learn to build the emancipatory structures of the Good
Society.
Abandon the residual messianic tribalism incarnate in the
idea of a “chosen people” atop a “city on a hill.” In other words, to the
avowed Christians in your ranks, recall that all human beings are created in
the image of God, that God’s covenant is thus with humanity as such, and that Jesus’s
foremost moral and spiritual teachings revolve around the Golden Rule and the
double commandment of love (hence the Christ of Tolstoy, not Constantine), and
it is that which should provide the pile-like foundations of your social life
and democratic politics. As Daniel Burston writes in his book on Fromm, “the
Hebrew concept of idolatry implies the misrecognition and reification of our
own divinely begotten essence [an idea found in Stoic thought as well], which,
like the burning bush, is in a process of continuous and inextinguishable
becoming, and is not something finite, static, or dead, like a graven image.”
“The Circle,” LaSalle at Amsterdam, Todd Webb (1946)
It is not easy to cultivate a disposition to truth (which
depends in the first instance on the power of sublimation and thereafter on
individuation), an elusive character trait indispensable for a full-bodied
appreciation of the moral requisites of human dignity, the power of virtue, and
a lifelong commitment to the Good. It is this dignity, virtue and commitment
that, historically speaking, first found moral, legal, and political expression
in the notion of human rights, in the idea of jus cogens norms, and the Liberal principles of democratic
constitutionalism. It is such dignity, virtue and commitment that allows us to
imagine a socio-economic system beyond capitalism, one that extends the logic
of democracy and principles of environmental sustainability throughout the
social order such that all human beings on this planet are accorded the
capacity for the development of their basic capabilities, thereby encouraged to
ascend the mountain of self-realization while discovering, creating and
exploiting ample opportunities for human flourishing in harmony with the motley
and marvelous (non-human) animal creatures that likewise partake of the precious
“breath” of life.
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