It is here we have paid the greatest price for Liberal America's loss of moral and spiritual passion. The response from the liberal quarter to the rise of this destructive force on the right has been woefully inadequate.
This combination of the destructiveness of the right and the weakness of the left has resulted in one of the most profound crises in American history. [Note: this was written before the Trump presidency threatened.]
It is a time when, as the poet Yeats said, "the best lack all conviction, while the worst / are filled with a passionate intensity." A time when, as a result, the lie has too often defeated the truth. [Note: this "passionate intensity" gap has fortunately closed since the election of Trump.]
This bring us to the press, whose essential job is to tell us the truths we need to know in order to function as competent citizens.
For more than a decade, we have been living through of one of the most politically dangerous periods in American history:
- an extraordinary presidential assault on the rule of law (2001-09), including the torture memos, which provide a template any future president can use to break any law with impunity;
- a massive transfer of power from the people to Big Money, aided by Supreme Court justices willing to sweep away precedent and contort the Constitution to bolster the power of the corporate system;
- the deliberate sabotage of the government for political advantage by the opposition party, which refuses to do the people's business in a determined campaign to obstruct the president, resulting in the least productive Congresses of modern times;
- the crippling of the nation's ability to respond to the greatest challenge humankind has ever faced -- climate disruption -- by those who refuse to heed the most urgent warnings ever issued by the scientific community.
All these unprecedented and degraded political developments are manifestations of the same coherent, destructive force damaging the nation.
Yet much of the press on which our citizens rely for their understanding of events, has hardly noted how extraordinary and dangerous these times are. The unprecedented has been treated as normal, the scandalous as acceptable.
It was not always thus in America. Our nation was once a beacon to the world, and could be again -- but only if we can recognize, understand, and reverse the shift in the balance between the constructive and destructive forces at work in our nation.
Patterns of wholeness and brokenness are continually being transmitted through civilized systems. Truth-telling versus the lie. The drive for justice (embodied in values and institutions) verses the drive to take more than one's share (embodied in the structures organized by the logic of the maximization of wealth and power as well as in the psychic structure of individuals). The nurturing power of love versus the injurious dynamics of indifference and cruelty. Etc.
Each set of patterns is integrated within itself, and each set requires effective work to maintain and extend their power within the human system.
(Though "each set of patterns is integrated within itself," nonetheless each entity--whether individuals or organizations -- is likely to be a mixture of elements of wholeness and brokenness.)
In the United States, over the past generation, we have witnessed the force of wholeness failing to maintain its previous strength, failing to defend what has been best about America, as the force of brokenness has waged a systematic and effective assault on the strong-holds of traditional American wholeness, whether it be in degrading the understanding of millions of Americans, or in undermining the rule of law and the constitutional order, or in diminishing the commitment to anything like "the common good" or "the good of the nation," versus mere advantage for oneself and one's side.
The picture of how these patterns compete to shape the human world is what I've been offering as "A Secular Understanding of 'The Battle Between Good and Evil.'" And it is this picture that I will try to clarify further in the coming installments.
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