Idealism
from afar isn’t worth much, unless what you later see at close range does not
force you to change your mind.
Having
ventured to explore the roots of my ill-fated yet understandable idealism in
the Spirit of 1776 series, extolling the greatness of the American
nation, the time has come for the much more difficult, and terribly unrewarding,
task of putting under a microscope all that is wrong with this nation in
general, in terms of its mores and attitudes, both inwardly and outwardly
directed.
Recognizing
the enormous complexity of this subject, it is virtually impossible to do it in
one breath; going about it in careful circles is therefore the only feasible
option. The first stage for me here would be simply to group together strings
of previously written entries in this section, united by a common thread, or
subject matter. It goes without saying that in this process I shall endeavor
some necessary revisions, but I will resist overdoing it and will leave much of
the previous material intact, so that none of the more delicate thoughts,
sprinkled throughout the ore of the earlier efforts, get washed out by my
zealous cleaning.
The
very first entry in this subsection looks at American society, and finds not
one, but several personalities within it, each possessing a separate morality
of its own. To make matters worse, some of these “moralities” are already in
internal conflicts against themselves!
In
simple terms, the main trouble with American society lies in its inability to
overcome its divisive multiculturalism, in the absence of a unifying force, the
proverbial melting pot, supposedly bringing all the citizens e pluribus into
a single American culture. The problem of the latter, in my view, is that the
desired and traditionally expected Unum is in reality not an Unum at
all, but a split personality in its own right.
So
let us journey through the identity crisis of American society, seen here as
the existence of several “split” personalities, accounting as a result, for a
complex, inconsistent, and thus internally irreconcilable, multiple
personality. The journey starts with the more generic, moving towards the more
specific.
The
first instance of our split personality is of such general kind. We know that
God and Caesar can easily coexist within one psyche, as long as they are
clearly separated along the dividing line of common morality and
political-economic practicality. Practicality in this case is amoral, as there
can be only one type of recognized morality, customarily tied to religion. The
trouble starts when what is supposed to be mere practicality is infused with a “morality” of its own, immediately
creating an irreconcilable conflict with religion, and woe to them who are
confused and unable (or unwilling!) to recognize and remedy this problem right
away: this incompatible cohabitation of two distinct moralities within one psyche
creates a split, or dual, mind, which is the textbook prerequisite of schizophrenia.
Now, there can be no doubt that religion plays a huge role indeed in the lives
of the majority of Americans, much greater than, say, anywhere in Europe, yet
the national addiction to the essentially immoral mindset of financial capitalism
perpetuates what I call “a contradiction in terms.” I once described
American society as “morally and spiritually schizophrenic, without ever
suspecting it,” because of its subconsciously hostile and obviously irreconcilable
in any meaningful way conflict between the religious morality of God (which is yet to be liberated from
its denominational-sectarian bigotry, to be philosophically sustainable and
socially implementable), and the man-made morality (which is in essence amorality, or,
seen from the religious angle, immorality), or, to put it in stronger terms, outright worship of
capitalism…
(End
of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)
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