For one thing, as I’ve been arguing, we should acknowledge the wise as well as the crazy aspects of America's caring about such strength in their leaders. If one insists on seeing only one side of a double-sided truth, one can simply applaud (like some on the right) or simply be outraged (like some on the left). Half-truths are not wisdom, however.
But beyond that, even with the crazy part, I do not think that outrage is the emotional stance well-tuned to the problem. Most of this “excess of the warrior spirit” is NOT new, but is deeply woven into the very texture --culturally, emotionally, spiritually-- of the world. The disease that afflicts America is a world-wide disease. It is written across the face of human history through the millennia. This pattern of excess macho is what OUT OF WEAKNESS is about, and it is about the pattern of trauma and denial of vulnerability and acting out of fear and pain that are not acknowledged, and about how that pattern has helped feed the traumatic nature of human history.
With a problem so deep-seated in the emotional fiber of the world’s peoples and cultures, the compassion in our response is more valuable than our outrage. One could as well be outraged at cancer, or at the vagaries of the climate. The world is not going to change very much in these respects during our life-time. Such things change slowly.
At that time, I was filled with a vision of the markedly better civilization of which humankind is ultimately capable. And, when I was younger, I imagined that the world might speedily turn its sails to head toward that destination. It might take a century, I thought, but by now that progress would already be well along.
But, I have observed since, the world is more resistant to change than I imagined.
True, if we had better luck with our leadership, we might have done a whole lot better than we have. An FDR or a Lincoln, not a Bush I, or a Clinton, and even much more so a Bush II. I do regard the present world situation is a profound failure for humankind.
But even with decent leadership, the world was going to be a very difficult place to change. The forces that make the world what it is are deeply ingrained and persistent, and can be overcome and directed toward a better destination only across stretches of time. Most of the change has to be organic in nature, and it takes generations.
Take a look at the process that the Germans went through --and there's is one of the most dramatic transformations I'm aware of-- from strutting, jack-booted goose-steppers in the 1930s through to humbled but in some ways unrepentant or at least unwilling to confront the full truth of their past, to the more recent generation that seem to have a kind of basic sweetness in them (take a look at the Israeli film WALK ON WATER, and I also had an exchange student with the same quality that one sees in the young Germans in the film).
They traveled a very long way in a comparatively short time --because of the very profound nature of the national trauma, and the insistence of the whole world on speaking about it-- but even that short time was a matter of at least two generations.
Why be outraged about things that are millennia old, and that in any case cannot change at a rate that would be satisfying to us?
Why not accept certain basic truths about the world, such as that the struggle for power over the past 10,000 years has made people pretty screwed up (for reasons and in ways described in my book THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES).
I believe that a compassionate and caring and healing approach to a wounded humanity is more likely to get us from here to there on a problem of this sort than is anything we're likely to say or do out of OUTRAGE.
When it comes to the localizable and the specific and the worst --like Bush and Rove and Cheney-- I am in favor of outrage. That's because this is a kind of change that is best made by destroying, by defeating an identifiable enemy. We are not interested in healing these foci of the disease, the tumours on the American body politic. We are interested in surgically removing them.
That's where our outrage should be focused-- on immediate and localized evils that drag the system downward. But, where the problems are so ingrained that you would have to amputate the whole body to get rid of it, outrage is not the most useful posture.
(Part II, briefer than Part I, will consist of a bit more of the exchange.)
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