If you've read this blog for any length of time, you'll have come across some harping on the way we increasingly have abandoned real goods -- nouns, things -- in preference for a disillusioned kind of flight into the idea that the closest we can ever get to those real things is to experience a fleeting 'sense of' them. At Obsidian Wings, Publius proves me out [H/T Andrew]. The emphases below are mine:
[Secular] Progressives have a strange relationship with religion. Many are (at least privately) contemptuous of it, but the depths of hostility often betrays a lingering, if subconscious, jealousy of those who believe. Religion, after all, provides a sense of togetherness and a sense of belonging to something higher. In short, a purpose. [...] They want to fill the void with purpose.
[...] Whether the enthusiasm stems from youth’s susceptibility to romantic idealism, or instead from the longing caused by the slow lonely grind of professional life, something is causing these people to see in Obama something more than politics. They’re seeing – and feeling – something higher.
[...] Obama is offering something we often don’t have, but that we similarly crave and need – a higher purpose, a sense of connectedness and community. In short, Obama is providing a secular religion. More cynically, it’s wine-track demagoguery. Although I remain an Obama supporter, I do fear that I’m allowing myself to be enchanted in an intellectually juvenile way.
Or, as I diagnosed a couple days ago:
Our great longing to express authentic agency, combined with our anxious feeling that we can only gin up a shared experience of a mere sense of that expression from within the confines of our failed politics, leads us to therapeutically amp ourselves up by exaggerating the active portion of our exhaustion in order to feel like the wind's rushing through our psychological hair.
And before that:
The therapeutic new-skool says: "Even though we know that power is corrupt -- and that, to the extent that we have power, even though we revel in the feeling of ending our powerlessness, we are corrupt -- by applying the right shared attitude about that power, we can create -- if only for a moment -- the fleeting but completely convincing sensation that we are redeeming it in the very act of exercising it."
And before that:
true aristocracy is beyond us, and the faux aristocracy -- the experience of a sense of aristocratic-ish-ness -- that we're left with now, the therapeutic commodity of anxious democratic souls, gives us fleeting moments of 'powerful' aristocratic indulgence as the preferred acting-out method of our infantile fantasies.
And before that:
On the one hand, we want real change, and people who promise, or evoke the promise, of real change therefore generate much genuine enthusiasm. On the other hand, we also long for the simple enjoyment of a sense of change. We've revised our expectations about politics downward, as a therapeutic prophylactic and analgesic, against the agony of realizing that the major structural change necessary to truly solve the huge problems that we can only cope with from year to year is actually impossible. With the feverish dislocation and trivial pursuit of the market, the dissolution of authority in our personal relationships, and the ominous contingency of terrorism and ecological change, we want to 'live in the moment', to be 'heroes for just one day', we want the freedom to be carried away without guilt or nervousness into the swell and flush of true fellow-feeling, following the proud yet inclusive call of politicians that seem to redeem politics by transcending it. Yet we struggle to repress the knowledge that transcending politics from within politics can't really redeem it. It's a stage trick.
Your anxiety will not go away, Publius -- not if you attempt to repress it with a Clinton or massage it with an Obama. Yet whether or not it's worth enduring is a question that can't just be answered in terms of the feeling of enduring it. Attempting to reenchant politics because you think religion is dead is a dreadful mistake, as smart liberals already know in their souls. The leading secular alternative, for that reason, is freedom from politics. And for that reason I look to explain merely cultural libertarians as liberals who have learned the therapeutic 'wisdom' of abandoning politics. But who, then, takes over our politics? Clintons and Bushes, my friends. Some wisdom, right? But the pink police state abides all the pleasures we can hold, and more. Our cup will run over, though our wrists will be in chains.
Comments