In community college years back, I had a favorite professor of history who had several recurring themes in his presentations on finding the meanings of the American experiment. One of them, was the continual conflict between utopian idealism in its endless forms, and hardcore everyday pragmatism right alongside it. He loved to refer to both the Horace Greeleys and the Joseph Smiths in American life, as a way of illustrating that religious fanaticism and secular fanaticism were not really all that much different in their essential character.
And in my own life, growing up in the 60s and 70s, I have witnessed continually how this bizarre alliance of designated utopianism and a self-proclaimed fingers-to-the-bone work ethic have been applied. The predictable outcome, always, is failure, as often as not attended by behavior along the path to it ranging from ignominious to horrific. The impulse to change the world by starting a cult had been temporarily discredited and stunted by the horrors of the Manson cult and the tragedy of Jonestown, but even as a new cult of personality in the person of Ronald Reagan was rising to prominence, offering flag-waving patriotism as a new utopian ideal for justifying any means to the eventual end of communism as a way of feeling good about oneself and the making of a better world.
By my reading of history, the Reagan era was more an experiment in utopian self-delusion then, than this SJW phenomenon is today: the ideal held out, was a world where winning the “cold war” amounted to an unleashing of any and every form of madness that might be put to good use in opposing communism, regardless of its true intent or its eventual unintended consequences. It could be effectively argued that the lasting legacy of the Reagan utopianism is this endless “war on terror” which shows no sign of ever being winnable by means of propagating an impossible arms race, tearing down a wall and watching idly while a few disapproved regimes fall eventually under their own dead weight. By arming the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in the 1980s with sophisticated weaponry and tactical training, the Reagan administration assured that the 21st century would be one of bloody religious violence of a nature never envisioned during the fight against socialism.
But as my professor always stressed as the main point, fanaticism built on utopian ideals has no boundaries of either ideology or religion. We can see the exact same self-convinced moralism in this Violence Against Women Act, with its promoters on the one hand promising to “eradicate” a named enemy of human well-being, and meanwhile using language like “in the trenches” to explain where all that grant money goes year after year, and to hand-washingly confess that no such eradication is likely to occur any time soon.
What all fanaticism has in common regardless of the specific nature of its rhetoric, is the belief in an enemy so manifestly evil that no means of opposing it is unjustified. While Christian fanaticism cultivates and cherishes its “prince of darkness” to explain away everything being allegedly done to oppose it, this “antifa” lovingly nurtures its fever dreams of “fascism” around every corner for the precise same purpose:
to justify any means, toward achieving an impossible end.
The world will never be rid of evil, whether it is of a religious or secular or political or interpersonal nature. This is as much a cardinal rule of human life as any one grasp on reality can provide. The project of a human life, is one of learning how to both oppose evil as and when one can do or believes one must do, and to coexist with it when seeking to destroy it requires one to mirror the ways of evil with one’s own actions.
What every form of utopian idealism offers, more than anything, is simplicity. Those who fall prey to the rule of idealists and their slogans and their seemingly easy solutions, are those who for whatever reason find it beyond their own capacity to deal with life as it is: complex, paradoxical, nonsensical and attended by too many forms of evil to keep track of much less to oppose in detail. One need only to look at any comment thread on any controversial topic under the sun these days, to find a continual indication of widespread beliefs in simplistic solutions to problems seen as easy ones to solve, and an epidemic delusion that their not having been solved yet is merely an indication that someone’s evildoing is behind them.
I may or may not believe, for instance, that some old man named Soros is the Prince of Darkness His Ownself, that he personally is manipulating the marionette strings of public mayhem just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of it. So what if I did believe that? Every day on Twitter one can find some schlub with an IP making some moralistic pronouncement that arresting George Soros will result (apparently) in order being restored and faith in America being allowed once again to miraculously reign supreme.
As if….
And the cult impulse is alive and well in such outpourings of pure emotive hogwash. If such a man were what he is claimed to be, and such a man were duly arrested and put on trial for Being George Soros, within days another encompassingly-evil scapegoat-antichrist figure would be assigned his place.
This business of the Civil War is in the headlines a lot these days. What I see through that lens as offered years ago by a favorite teacher in American history, is two sides fighting to preserve and uphold two different forms of slavery: one side had cotton to harvest and claimed it needed slaves to harvest it, while the other side had a railroad to build and a continent to conquer, and went on to show in the wake of military victory that it was every bit as willing to harness masses of humanity to a task and deny its labor force anything resembling dignity or liberty in the doing of it. If the American civil war had any one victor, it was not either side fighting it but rather the vindication for decades to come the notion that any means necessary and at any human cost were justifiable in the pursuits of utopian ideals. The south had its “The Cause”, whatever that meant, and it lost. The north had its Jeffersonian dream of a continental empire from ocean to ocean, the one Lewis and Clark had set out decades before to map out and begin to strategize. It would be simply naive to conclude that Appomattox and the 13th Amendment somehow miraculously wiped human slavery from the American landscape, if one goes on to examine the horrific human costs to come in building Jefferson’s empire.
For myself, I love my country because it is my home and for really no other reason. But I despise and fear its continual pre-disposition to be led by utopian idealists. I see little moral distinction between a Ronald Reagan and a George Soros and a Hillary Clinton and a 2x4-wielding basement-dweller in a black mask: ALL are pitching the same dangerous and idiotic notion, that there is a simple shortcut to solving the human condition. And none believes it themselves. No more than any junkie truly believes that this next fix really is what is best for them, and no more than their pusher believes they are selling them a product intended for their ultimate well-being.
Fanaticism as a drug provides both fix for the addict and profit for the distributor, their common thread being that both fix and profit are terminally addictive.
I hold out no hope for some brighter or more just future, not for America and not for the world. I don’t consider those objectives as duties to be upheld on my watch. There is little evidence in the historic record to indicate that anyone’s model for a “better world” has ever resulted in anything other than a re-alignment of tyrannies, perhaps at best attended by temporary and unsustainable (and thoroughly illusory) reprieves from the worst of tyranny’s excesses.
I don’t consider this “liberty” held out by the right as something left to me by battlefields of ancestors, but rather as something available but not guaranteed which I must secure for myself at whatever cost and under whatever terms I can manage to secure it by. And there are plenty of impediments to my liberty left fully intact by those very ancestors, such as the absolutely enslaving income tax code which I have declined to capitulate to for nearly two decades, and at great personal cost. Whether the cost was ever worth the benefit, is my business to determine: THAT is freedom.
But I also don’t consider this “social justice” held out by another faction of delusional utopian fanatics as either any more my problem to solve or any attainment even possible to attain. The extent to which I practice justice by my own actions and decisions, for myself and for others, is the extent to which a just society is my row to hoe, and I will not row it one inch beyond that limit. That also, is freedom: to decide for myself, and not on the basis of slogans and moralistic pronouncements by opportunistic hypocrites, how much or how little “social justice” for all humanity I can find tolerable.
Looking at human life through this lens and seeing utopian idealism and its attendant vicious fanaticism rearing its head up from every cause of any nature which allows it to become a set of guidelines for interpersonal conduct, I have ultimately concluded that the ultimate cause of all, is the self. One may call this “selfish” or “self-centered”, and I’d say “guilty as charged.” In a universe which by all indications is an infinite one, the very laws of geometry postulate that one point designated as its center is as accurate a placement as any other. Where better to fight the fight and seek what is right, than from a center of the universe one actually has some say-so in? And just let the results stand for themselves.
