Postmodernism, cont. MAGA and WOKE

 

MAGA and WOKE - two sides of the same (idiotic) coin.

   A branch of Postmodern sensibility focuses on “marginalized groups” – mostly based on race and gender (not so much the working class). I would think of what critics call “WOKE” as a sentimentalized version of the most radical of the postmodern thinkers – Derrida, Foucault, Butler, and their followers in academia. I think they would approve of appropriating and popularizing their thought. Sentimentality is a core trait of various forms of narcissism. Curiously, right-wing populism – also a form of identity politics – embraces the exact same postmodern system of thought. I suppose it was a brilliant stroke to see the possibilities of making reality (and self-conception) a matter of “construction” and power (everything being ad hominem) for right-wing politics.

 

Sentimentality (or sentimental) I define thus: The idealizing, distorting, reinventing, and/or falsifying of the complex reality of the objects of the sentimentalizing in order to produce a self-gratifying emotional response, whether of consolation or ego-elevation over others.

 

Narcissism: a variety of psychological conditions characterized by extreme alienation that develops as a result failure of the family and the absence of a community of people who know and respect you as a member in spite of your unavoidable human imperfections. It results in the end from isolation of the ego, a failure of love and a failure to bond with others (a social feature caused by the uprooting inherent in the economy we all must live under). The narcissistic ego must depend entirely on its own resources to find itself loveable – or if that fails, to be feared or otherwise stand out. Since that contradicts the nature of love, which can only be a gift bestowed by another (or God), narcissism is hopelessly doomed to failure. Even the most worthy of love among us can’t love themselves in isolation. Love just is the judgment ‘Good that the loved person exists!’ It is like I can only be given “permission” to exist through the love of others – true love, not a counterfeit narcissistic love that “loves” others only to be able to find themselves loveable: that is, only loves sentimentally.

      Even before we are self-aware we need this. Mother love is the beginning of psychic health, followed by father love; family love; friendship love; love of one’s place on earth and the people who wish to bond to make a life together in that place – all this in different degrees prevents narcissism. If parents themselves are narcissistic and if the bonds of friendship and community are broken, the ego has no choice but to fall back on its own devices. It never “grows up.” It never learns the virtues necessary to live in a common project with others. Narcissism takes many forms. Narcissism is a spectrum: the desire to be worshipped ala Trump at the one extreme and the everyday conflicts between pleasure and duty on the other. Almost all of us born into this economic system fall somewhere on this spectrum.

 

Sentimentality is both a defense mechanism for the narcissistic ego and the means to enhance its self-esteem, which always needs enhancing lest depression results.

 

. . .

 

    Love is a judgment that comes with a range of emotions, but it is above all a judgment: “Good that you exist!” “Wonderful that you are here!” It comes with a corollary: Love – not just a feeling, not just liking or not liking – is the steadfast will to do good to another, whoever it is. What is good for another and within my power. Often it is just giving a hungry beggar something to eat. It can be a form of questioning each other’s life, though only people who know and trust each other can profitably do that as a rule. It means something different between parents and children than it does between friends or strangers – or enemies. We are mortal. Human life is soaked in the injustice and indeed evils of countless generations, which have distorted our nature, our hearts, our reason. Love under the conditions of our life has become extremely difficult.

     The centrality of love, I think, comes from our knowledge of our own mortality and of how fate can destroy our lives or the lives of those we love. It manifests itself in compassion (of which ‘empathy’ is a pale, weak cousin) for the victims of bad fortune; in the remorse evoked by evil done; by grief over the loss of a loved one; in the necessary connection between procreation, sexuality, and love; in parents’ worry about what the future holds for their children; in praying for the broken person who gives into evil; in the love for a precious place on earth or for the beauty still present (though diminishing) in the world. In so many other ways. We want the Good to be in a world in which everything that comes into being passes away and is subject to terrible harm before that. In which so many barriers are placed in the way between the conception and blossoming of every human life.

      It comes also from plurality: Plurality thus refers both to equality and distinction, to the fact that all human beings belong to the same species and are sufficiently alike to understand one another, but yet no two of them are ever interchangeable, since each of them is an individual endowed with a unique biography and perspective on the world. Hannah Arendt, from whom I learned this, cites the two version of the creation of Man in Genesis. The Genesis 1:26-27 version of the creation story describes God creating humankind in His image, both male and female. Arendt interprets this account as highlighting the concept of plurality. In this version, the simultaneous creation of man and woman underscores the inherent multiplicity and equality among humans from the outset. Humanity is created as a plural entity, emphasizing diversity and the coexistence of different individuals who share the world. Love is possible here because of difference. The love of one’s own self can also only happen in this difference between us. Self-love is only masturbation unless it is a reflection of being loved by others.

    In the Genesis 2:7, 21-22 version God creates Adam first and then Eve from Adam's rib. Arendt interprets this narrative differently. She argues that this account suggests a replication of a master model, implying that subsequent humans are derivations from the original human, Adam. This replication implies a lack of true plurality because humans are seen more as copies of an original rather than unique individuals. This version diminishes the sense of plurality by presenting humanity as less inherently diverse and more as extensions of a primary figure (male). What is interesting here is not the gender aspect – that it is part of it – but the idea that we are more a “what” than a “who.”

   Our condition – this is me, not Arendt – is that these are two poles on a spectrum. We fulfill our nature by becoming a who, which means living in and embracing plurality. The will to form others according to my ego (or some master model of humanity) represents the denial of plurality, of the possibility of love, condemning us to a kind of self-love that can be no more fruitful than masturbation.

    I am trying to ground narcissism and explain it as a failure to become what we were all along meant to be. Sentimentality is a coping mechanism that allows us to live with this failure but also prevents us from overcoming it.

. . .

 

If we as human beings are measured by the appropriate standard, we all to some extent or other fall short. This is the great Truth in Jesus's revolutionary subversion of the division of humanity into the righteous and the (to-be-purged) unrighteous.

Jesus returned to the Mount of Olives, but early the next morning he was back again at the Temple. A crowd soon gathered, and he sat down and taught them. As he was speaking, the teachers of religious law and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. They put her in front of the crowd. “Teacher,” they said to Jesus, “this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The law of Moses says to stone her. What do you say?” They were trying to trap him into saying something they could use against him, but Jesus stooped down and wrote in the dust with his finger. They kept demanding an answer, so he stood up again and said, “All right, but let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” Then he stooped down again and wrote in the dust. When the accusers heard this, they slipped away one by one, beginning with the oldest, until only Jesus was left in the middle of the crowd with the woman. Then Jesus stood up again and said to the woman, “Where are your accusers? Didn’t even one of them condemn you?” “No, Lord,” she said. And Jesus said, “Neither do I. Go and sin no more.” (John 8:1-11)

 

And this:

 

And Jesus said unto him, “Why callest thou Me good? There is none good but One, that is, God. (Mark 10:18)

 

Or this:

 

You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matthew 7:5)

 

Or this:

 

And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ This is the first commandment. And the second, like it, is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12: 30-31)

 

When asked, “Who is my neighbor?,” Jesus responded by telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, pointing out that your neighbor is the person whose need you see and are able to meet (Luke 10:26-37). And the craziest teaching of all, which is part of the love that is the essence of the Creator and thus our essence:

“But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you” (Matthew 5:43–44)

 

These passages taken together represent the heart of Jesus’s teaching about how to live. They are compelling to me quite about from any belief in the incarnation or the resurrection. I am constantly amazed that the Trump-loving Christians in my country – including heart-breakingly for me many in the Catholic clergy – never refer to these teachings of Jesus, always going back to the Old Testament attitudes that Jesus literally and explicitly rejects and corrects. And he rejects and corrects them primarily because of an original sinful attitude: denying a common humanity with others; elevating one’s own ego to the judge over good and evil (real and unreal); dividing humanity up into a camp of the righteous and a camp of the unrighteous, like in a fairy tale or fantasy novel or Hollywood blockbuster.  

   A common humanity means that every other human being is a limit to my will in a way nothing else in nature is. And part of that stems from a solidarity in sin, a realization that we all fall short and the role of chance in human life. This teaching is not new; it is part of our culture as marked by sayings like "Don’t judge me until you’ve walked a mile in my shoes" or "There but for the grace of God go you or I." 

   I will just assert here – and I recognize it is a gift of culture, that the Spartans or Nazis (and the most radical postmodernist-type thinkers) could have nothing but contempt for it – that we all fall short of perfect goodness; that it is rare and difficult for a human being to become either a saint or a demon; that we therefore depend on forgiveness to live together, which is the only way for finite and fallible beings to live together. I would gladly debate this with any well-meaning person.

   If you read who is most in danger of Hell according to Jesus, it is the self-righteous hypocrite. The Christian nationalist is thus closest to Hell.

. . .

   The extreme aspects of postmodernity – the metaphysics that all reality is socially or individually constructed (solipsism); that truth is social or person; that there is thus no standard to make judgments beyond the social or the personal; that life is a game of power; that every disagreement is a power conflict, necessarily ad hominem – are perfect for sentimentality. The narcissistic self – whether MAGA or WOKE (and much else) – idealizes itself as an innocent victim and demonizes the ‘other’ as evil, unrepentant perpetrator. All of history is reduced to a Gnostic battle of Good verses Evil.

   WOKE – again, I don’t like this because the origin of it was good – and MAGA (rotten from the beginning) settles on a small number of sins, as Wendell Berry points out: racism, misogyny, and Homophobia vs. abortion and traditional male and female roles. These public sins have the virtue that one is either a sinner or not a sinner. Those who condemn the women who have had abortions are as clean as a new fallen snow with respect to this one sin. Those who condemn racists and their attitudes and actions are likewise a pure as a new fallen snow in this respect, though by reducing all people to "binaries" like black/white, pure/impure, moral/immoral, man/non-man, etc. they are closer to a different kind of prejudice than they think. 

    These folks are the situation in which of those who were about to stone the adulteress (the righteous) and the adulteress (the sinner who had to be purged from the community). These absolute differences, denying the solidarity of sin, denying a common humanity, fight it out, ratcheting up hate and love: love for the self and their identity group; hatred for the other. The cost of living in the illusion of being pure and righteous is the hatred of the other. 

  If reality is constructed and relative power informs the construction, this is perfectly natural.

  I say: it is nothing but the fat, relentless ego, the ego that never had the chance to develop into a soul. It is a denial of reality, goodness, and love.

  If we hold the full picture of goodness up before us – the seven deadly sins, all of the Ten Commandments, the life of Jesus and the saints for Christians – we could not think of ourselves as belonging to a saving remnant. We might do well avoiding racist feelings and thoughts or avoiding an abortion. But who of us avoids failures of justice and love; of sentimentality and truthfulness; of chastity and self-restraint? Don't all these failures collectively make the world what it is? Not just the one or other publicly emphasized sin? 

    C. S. Lewis refused to write critically of sins that he was in little danger of committing. He wrote only of those sins he was most guilty of. He knew them best and was least of danger of feeling self-righteous in the act of criticizing. That seems to me to be a good principle.

   WOKE and MAGA – the sentimental politics of suffering children in adult bodies.

And it is not like there are no deep issues worthy of serious discussion underneath the surface of all this public idiocy. What does justice require? What does a good society look like? How to think about past wrongs and the individual people alive today who have inherited this mess? What does love - or human dignity - require of us? Why does our political process fail on so many fronts? How can we ensure sources of information that value truth over 'narratives'? And more. I have tried to write about some of them in a serious way in my journal. But this public adolescence makes genuine dialog - learning from one another - impossible. 

see Wendell Berry, "Sin" in The Need to be Whole.