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Moral Endo-skeletons and Exo-skeletons: A Perspective on America's Cultural Divide and Current Crisis

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Then every thing includes itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite;
And appetite, an universal wolf,
So doubly seconded with will and power,
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself.


And the same harsh morality that goads this wolf into life will also --when it is intact-- help confine that beast its cage.

That wolf --the lust for power and the rage for revenge-- has always been there, and it has played a role in the dark parts of American history. But it was largely, more than now, kept from running rampant.

The loosening of the cage of America's social morality had one meaning, therefore, among America's endo-skeletons, but another darker meaning among America's exo-skeletons. It is as though a boat was tipped by the left, but it was the right that got wet.

It was not just id that was loosed on the cultural right, but also unleashed were those impulses that their sub-culture's harshness had made dark. (One thinks of that famous passage in Carl Jung, written in the years before the rise of the Nazis, about the "blond beast stirring in its subterranean prison...threatening us with an outbreak that will have devastating consequences." )

The wolf has now broken from its cage. We in the counterculture who wanted to liberate, for example, the natural sexual energies of the human creature also, unwittingly, weakened the checks on the lust for power, on greed, on self-aggrandisement. Morality, it turns out, is of a piece. And so is our culture.

"Make love, not war," we chanted. But now, being undisciplined in our approach to the moral issues of making love, we live in a country that defies all international laws in its making of war.


Now it is the wolf that rules America.

Turning Back from Fascism

Fascism arises from the sense that the choice is between its tyranny and mere anarchy.

Never mind that the fascists merely bring the anarchy of the enraged wolf, hiding under the national flag, to prowl around society. They do it from the precincts of power, and they fool enough of the people into thinking that what they're bringing is order.

But there are, in any event, better options than either tyranny or anarchy. But they are to be achieved. Good order in the human realm does not happen except through wise and hard human effort.

The task then is two-fold. It is not only to remove that wolf from power, but it is also to help reconstruct the cage --those structures of morality-- that kept it in check.

Ideally, we'd do much better than merely "reconstruct" the moral cage of an earlier era. That would be an improvement over this loosening, which has unleashed these dark forces. But still better would be to find a better means of containment, even a more harmonious form of domestication that does not need to abuse the creature it brings into the social fold. That old order was far from ideal.

That much the counter-culture recognized, but it failed to realize that a truly beneficent revolution is not accomplished by the storming of the Bastille. And it failed to recognize that the movement of a culture to its next, more advanced form is a long-term and difficult process.

What is needed this time around is not a wanton rejection of the old structures, replacing them with nothing. We endo-skeletons must understand more fully the structures that hold us together. We must understand, that is, that the endo-skeleton is not nothing.

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Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District. His new book -- written to have an impact on the central political battle of our time -- is (more...)
 
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