A 'felt sense of destiny', a 'historic sense of mission' -- these are emotions, attitudes, adverbs applied to the most immaterial of material nouns; they make, as Mark Danner points out well enough in the NYRB, a poor substitute for factual truth. Don't get me wrong -- I accredit immaterial nouns like 'honor', 'courage', and 'justice' with real ontological status. A world in which the only real nouns are present in the material world is an impoverished one. Yet just so it drives the human longing to recognize the reality of immaterial nouns inward, into the loony bin of the frustrated psyche. A conjured-up image of Iraq becomes a virtual symbol in a virtual pageant of History; Iraq gets invaded 'destinyishly', 'momentousishly'. These Frankenstein adverbs, monstrous attitudes which substitute emotional postures for fact-things like invasions as the hinge on which their qualitative character turns, become as decisive as they are vague and abstract.
The wrinkle here is that Bush as Master of Instrumental Adverbs is being translated into that language by people who either do not understand or despise convictions of faith as distinct from senses of history. Indeed, people get even more worried when they contemplate Bush as acting not from sort of a vague Hegelian notion of Spreading Freedom but from a conviction that he has been divinely elected to carry out the Orders of God. And yet I really do think that if it were the latter going on only and not also the former, we'd have a different Bush on our hands. I'll leave it to a good paleo to flesh out the argument, but it seems to me someone could persuasively claim that it's Bush's departure from true Christian conviction that has made his foreign policy what it is. (And now I'm recalling that this is essentially the Pope's argument.)
Hat tip Ross.
Comments