In a ‘Free’ Country Should Not Every Vote Be of Conscience? Or,  the “Mystery of Iniquity

[Men like Master-at-Arms Claggart] are madmen of the most dangerous sort…for their lunacy is…occasional;…it is self-contained so that…it is to the average mind indistinguishable from sanity [because] whatever the aims may be…the method and the outward proceeding are always perfectly rational.

…such an one was Claggart, in whom was “a depravity according to nature.”

Dark sayings are these, some will say.  But why?  Is it because they somewhat savor of Holy Writ in its phrase “mystery of iniquity?”

– Herman Melville, Billy Budd

[On social media] positive messages simply can’t compete with negative ones. Tribalism, conflict and extremism provide responses and are rewarded with algorithms.  Moderation, compromise and nuance suppress engagement and are demoted….The platforms’ algorithms are content agnostic.    

– Reinhold Niebuhr

No question, , the danger of the Trump Presidency is real and terrifying. But we must not forget the backstory that got us here: at least in part this is a story of false faith in electoral politics and willingness among liberals to vote for the lesser evil. What would it take for liberals to no longer be able to countenance voting for evil, lesser or otherwise?

Melville’s analysis of evil in the man Claggart in Billy Budd may offer a clue,  in that it speaks to evil’s innocuous appearance among those of us not directly its victims.  The great danger that is within our power to do something about may not be the insanity of Trump and the extremists he appoints but a different insanity underlying liberal voters.  It is the banality that keeps us,  though we may deplore the choices offered,  in step with neoliberal Democratic Party machinations, even unto voting for the candidate supporting genocide.  (From a strictly moral viewpoint, would it not be better to refrain from voting at all?) Though surely reflecting an untreated, undiagnosed “depravity according to nature,” these rational electoral proceedings are for most liberals “indistinguishable from sanity.”

Even in Melville’s time, writing about the dark side of human nature for the enlightened minds of his day, he realized, was too close for comfort to “irrationality,” to suggesting the mysteries of sin and damnation might be about something real.   Today we have access to means, coming from science, psychology, and from eastern spiritual traditions, for delving deeper into the “mystery of iniquity.” But I’m with Melville in what he seems to hint at: enlightened distaste for mystery blinds people to the fact that religion, or religious myth, grasps “dark” reality in a way the rational mind cannot.  What if, rejecting bible literalism with all our might, we still can realize that we have not eliminated mystery, and our efforts to pretend the rational mind can explain everything serves to make us complicit in evil,  collectively insane!  I speak here of and to educated liberals, we who have access to understanding that could help us, not to solve or cure the mystery, but to not refuse it, for it is the refusal that is opening wide the door to dreaded fascism.

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A new acquaintance of mine comes from North Carolina to Utica with her husband a few times a year to spend time with her only grandchild and his parents. I like her, not least because she and her family all were loyal customers of our Cafe, the one whose loss I’m still mourning, and I’m quite sure understood it as a kind of enclave of sanity amidst this provincial, narrow-minded upstate NY environment.

Everyone moves cautiously these days in expressing themselves in the socially unsafe discourse of politics. One day recently, she began to engage me in what I feared would be the “anti-Trump commiseration conversation” that I resist getting sucked into with all my might. I was thankful when she did not pursue it; instead she mentioned she’s missing the little liberal bubble inside which she lives, on the outskirts of a city (which one I don’t recall).

So, while at first take my imagination conjured this bubble as the kind of liberal enclave perceived by wronged and embittered others as enclosure of blind and insensitive elitism, I was forced to see that up to March 30 this year, I’d taken safety in a bubble too.  The “bubble” that was our Cafe, however, was formed not to be a safe place for people sharing solid liberal values, but from our having taken our “pipedreams” seriously. Though we might not have put it into words back then,  being unapologetic idealists we’d learned  that imagination – that is, the poetic soul taken seriously – made us outsiders, vulnerable to  liberalism’s denial of mystery, of any reality other than the empirical and the positive.  For its sake, we needed a more potent kind of protection than liberalism could provide.

Might, then, this awful moment in our history be an opportunity to allow the bubbles of positive thinking to be burst?  Liberal thinking, once known for its role in protecting society’s more vulnerable,  camouflaged behind the rationality of its “proceedings”  has solidified into neoliberalism.  If responded to wisely, might this moment be not only a time for anti-fascist resistance, but an opportunity for the restoration of sanity? That is, it must at last register on liberal minds that in the world defined according to neoliberal positivity, evil has gained strength, not diminished.  And this is so not because their goodness is in question, but because in liberal reality,  evil is not real.  They do not know that by disallowing mystery, their stubborn ban against imagination has resulted in a society of specializations and divisions whereby some few individual geniuses become artists, poets and prophets, often revered, while the majority fill up the career ranks from which perspective the heart’s values seem good enough for charitable organizations but not for Wall Street.  Money has real value (which indeed it does such that even charitable organizations must support a staff that can assure there is plenty of it) but  hippie pipedreams like peace and brotherhood do not.

For proof of what I’m saying, one need look no further than Mermin’s article, about how social media favors a Trump or an Andrew Tate. Boiled down,  blame and resentment are profitable, “moderation and nuance” are not: what Cornel West calls “gangsterism” wins the day. What is it that has made blame, resentment, fear, more engaging to the hearts and souls of so many young men than the higher call to our better natures proclaimed by liberals?

Speaking as if to and among incipient elders in this society, were we to accept the current crisis as crisis, we could, instead of starting to direct our hope toward the  2028 election,  deepen our  understanding of the psycho-spiritual – and we must not rule out – metaphysical! – origins of the “mystery of iniquity.” There needs to be an attempt to go to the source of where goodness, or innocence,  gets derailed, a quest made by individuals who will risk outsiderhood on behalf of the disquiet, trouble, misery, in their own voiceless heart.  Under neoliberalism, many if not all “better natures” get thwarted early due to near-universal childhood trauma resulting from the failure to protect the most vulnerable, i.e., those who cannot speak up for themselves and thus are wholly and fatefully dependent upon adult others, caretakers, for feelings of protectedness and safety.

Failure to protect the vulnerable is consequence of failed imagination.  Growing up resiliently, in the American neoliberal way, means bottomline feelings of unsafety must be treated as personal weakness, turned into neuroses and compulsions, some of these socially or economically useful. By the stage of adulthood the personality has been built upon the assumption that whatever lay behind those feelings is not real, only the damage is real.  Society accommodates the new adulthood, except with those too impaired to function; we let “let bygones be bygones” and “sleeping dogs lie.” But once the monitions of one’s own heart have been relativized, how can one empathize with the infant’s non-negotiable need to feel wholly safe, to nest in a culture in which kindness and tenderness are consistent,  given the extreme demand such needs make upon the caregiver’s – and the society’s – time and energy?

Simple enough to convince people no such thing as an Eden ever existed, when in fact their infancy was not protected, not made to feel safe as if this were the sacred non-negotiable duty.  It is at the point when this truth is revealed in therapy, we are tempted to blame our parents, who in some cases performed wretchedly, sometimes but not always due to poverty, but whose intentions in most cases are loving.  But the blame properly belongs with the aims of empire, with capitalism’s inflexible demand  to consider other things more important than making the vulnerable hearts – including one’s own – among us feel safe.

If evil, now flourishing, is to be thwarted it will not be by convincing the public to aim high, in the liberal way, but to heal as much as possible the wounds of trauma that now are ubiquitous and underlie our entire society, holding so many hearts hostage.  Unrecognized and in most cases denied by the person afflicted, trauma wounds prevent the genuine fire of passion that can energize “the best.” Those who would have been the  elders of our society no longer have the energy to “stretch” beyond the daily aims and concerns of socially fragmented bourgeois existence; in “the worst,” denial adds intensity to anger and resentment.

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Mermin’s choice of word for the algorithms used to establish social media content preferences is telling.   In common usage, to call oneself agnostic is to hedge one’s bets on the question of belief in God, never outright proclaiming oneself to be an atheist; it is a refusal to wonder or muse about the unknowable.  However,  the fact it is a hedge suggests the capacity to believe irrationally has not been entirely usurped.   Mermin suggests that different social media content (she points to Fellini)  might “lead to a new enlightenment.”  But re-enlightenment is not what’s needed; enlightened certainty is the problem.   Fellini-type iconoclasm inspires, yes, but may not the reality of dreams being followed right in one’s own neighborhood, of lives changing in a way that engages imagination about how to live in a place, in community, amidst longterm loyalties and commitments, otherwise known as old-fashioned “family values” be more what is needed to address the failure to provide safety for vulnerable souls?

In other words, social media algorithms will be defeated with belief, not more agnosticism. Needed is engagement with the natural human passion for justice, for a  peaceable world and above all with the transformative power of imagination that can allow us to fight the fight here, in our own places and lives.  In the absence of a peace movement it’s up to each person  to walk the talk of what it means to create the peaceful world where you live, amidst the impossibilities of a society that has learned the only heroic sacrifice is on the battlefield, not in the simple living of a life whose central meaning  – the purpose of warrior fierceness –  is to protect the vulnerable heart.

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In the intervening decades since WWII, when what many of us growing up believed to be the worst happened (the Holocaust), we increasingly hear the voices of the colonized that give a different view of  Western civilization,  of empire.  Equally with its triumphs and successes, it has been a history of depravity and evil, of one people imposing suffering on another, weaker, people. James Cone, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, quotes Martin Luther King, Jr. telling his wife at the time of John Kennedy’s assassination, “This is what is going to happen to me also.  I keep telling you, this is such a sick society.”  A sick society is sick in all of its parts.   Banality = white supremacy = male supremacy, all wrapped in blindness.  The lens we have used up to now, always lighted by civilization’s “light pollution,” the light  of the victors, is finally being replaced.  To change what we’re doing we first have to see what we’re doing!  For that, a darker lens is called for.

Individually – not just those whose despair is more obvious –  each person contains a darkness that is hers to enter if she will just continue, against the sirens of neoliberal positivity, against fear of “going crazy,”  to continue the personal initiation launched at each birth.  The point of which is not the despair, not to get swallowed in the darkness, but to experience the terrible truth, the mystery recognized in religious myth of a “higher” reality in which one is included.  It is the way to one’s true otherness,  the forgiveness implicit in that,  the joy of that.  This joy,  not the fatuous one of Christmas greeting cards comes, like the images in Negro spirituals, from being seared in the flames of withering injustice. Such injustice some few of us may have allowed ourselves to imagine was the case for Black Americans, with the history of enslavement, segregation and lynching under white supremacy,  never the case for ourselves.

In Christian terms, there’s a cross waiting for each one; one has but to pick it up. The reckoning with the trauma suffered during the stages of utter helplessness and dependency of human infancy is long overdue. If white supremacy is to be vanquished, if irrational repulsion for otherness, as in the fictional Claggart,  or indifference to the suffering of others, as in a Biden  – is to become  love instead of hate,  this irrational means is the way. The sufferer from pain that is real is not in a position to bargain agnostically but can only receive from a higher power which is love, and walk that walk. That does not mean all  rough places will disappear; it means that in the darkened light of the heart’s perspective, the necessary energy to protect the innocent, and never to harm, can be found.