A Few Shiny Pebbles

I ended Culture War: Part Two with the statements that the Left has convinced too many people to fight against their own interest, and it’s time people started recognizing what their true interest really is. Along with writing about the War on Terror, it is imperative that we all examine the Cultural War we are fighting at the same time. We need to investigate what is happening, and what it means, and how it is that these two battlefields of ideas are feeding off each other in the attempt to hurt those of us who believe in what America represents.

The Terror War and the Culture War are both threatening America’s existence. Most people are not truly aware of how much danger we are in. Our level of civilization buffers us from much of the evil in the world in ways we rarely realize. If you were lost in a wilderness, you would be painfully aware that each move you made was part of the battle to stay alive. Before you ate anything, or went to sleep, or moved in a certain direction, you would have to consider your options carefully. A mistake could mean serious injury or death. Even if you were an experienced outdoors man, you would know that you were involved in a war of survival. Every year a number of people get lost and die in wilderness areas. In some ways the people in this country, in the whole Western world, are lost and in great danger in a growing manmade wilderness.

Civilization gives us the illusion that our existence as a culture, and as a particular kind of culture that we call American, is not a similar struggle; yet anyone who has lived through an earthquake, hurricane, tornado, or similar disaster knows how quickly conditions can deteriorate. Absolute necessities—water, sanitation, food, shelter, medical care, security, communication, hope for recovery—become objectives of serious struggle and planning. The layer of civilization is remarkably fragile, as we saw in Ruwanda and in Serajevo. The benefits of our particular civilization would be short-lived if we didn’t constantly work to maintain them, and the enemies of our culture, the anti-Americans, are ever on the watch for any weakness they can exploit to hurt us. The truth is that we are under attack by people who don’t want America to survive as the JudeoChristian, freedom-loving, Constitutional America set up by our forefathers. Some of these people are terrorists, and some are Leftist ideological anti-Americans and their followers, and they are often working in parallel efforts to destroy that America and its influence around the world.

While reading some essays written in the late 1940’s in an old textbook, The Essential Prose, I came upon a description of a far off land that reminded me of much that is going on now in America and in Europe. It was written by a man named Laurens Van der Post, when he returned to his home in Africa at a time of crisis in his country:

. . . wherever I went I was horrified by the change. Events that were rarities in my childhood days were commonplace . . . [among them] the increase of political agitation and social confusion, the apparently senseless smashing of shop windows and inexplicable riots in civilized streets. . . . . The windows of the individual mind are shattered long before stones are thrown in the street and the police put to flight by the mob. There is a riot in the human heart and the forces of law and order in the spirit are first overthrown by a nightmare horde. Already deep down in the human soul the individual is melting into the crowd.

Does this sound familiar to you? “There is a riot in the human heart. . .” All around us, our country, the whole Western world, is facing a crisis. It is a crisis of the heart and mind, and we must find answers if we are to survive as a civilization. The future awaits us, but we have yet to build it into what it will become. We are the actors, now, on this stage that history has made for us. It is up to us.

We Americans are always trying to create policies and programs to improve our country and solve social problems. We spent the past half-century specifically relying on experts, authorities, professors, social workers, social engineers, educators, politicians, government programs, lawyers, judges, and many others in official and semi-official standing to come up with solution to our problems. Over this time thousands of social programs have been put into place in an attempt to find solutions, most of them relying on the ideological beliefs that fueled the social, political, revolutionary, and student movements of the century.

Yet beyond the initial Civil Rights Movement, this formidable assault didn’t improve things. Over time, our problems have grown. Eric Hoffer, an American philosopher, wrote:

We of the present have a more vivid awareness of the tragic paradox central to the human condition than had any before us. . . . . Our increased awareness has come from new revelations not about the nature of evil but about the nature of the good. No other generation has been made so poignantly conscious of the perils of doing good. We know that to set out to do good is to run the gauntlet of baffling, grotesque side effects. . . . . The ills and woes which beset our society at present and strain it to the breaking point were born of a concerted effort to right wrongs and do good. . . .

How can we make the necessary changes when we don’t know why setting out to do good has so many “grotesque side effects”, why our “ills and woes” came from the “concerted effort to right wrongs and do good”. . . . We have so many questions, so many uncertainties, so many puzzlements. And yet—

The future awaits us. We sense it just over the horizon, just around the corner, just outside our door. But is the red shimmer in the darkness ahead a welcoming dawn, or an endless riot? Is it a shining opportunity—or a mugging—that awaits us around the next corner, that will come to us as we open that door? Is there anything we can do—we ourselves—to reach forward and grasp the future and write our will into it? We are the actors on this stage of history—is there any way for us to write the script and set the scene? Can we find a way to awaken ourselves from any nightmare we may find ourselves in?

I believe that it is possible to examine the events and beliefs of the past century in a way that will make it all clear, that will show us how and why we are in the peril we face, and that will show us the way to find the answers we need, answers that will carry the imprimatur of truth.

During the time between now and the next election, I am going to try in my blog to examine the problems involved in this growing, manmade wilderness we are in, in a way that may bring clarity and solutions for us to try. It will take time to present my analysis and arguments of the Culture War and the War on Terror, and at the same time to comment on current events. I invite you along on this journey of the heart and mind and soul.

It will involve going through a serious of investigations of articles and quotes and passages from books combined with analogies and illustrations I have created in the past decade or so. It will involve changing a lot of unorganized material into what I hope will be cogent arguments.

In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he pointed out the difference between what can be called bricolage, an assemblage of things gathered together without apparent relationships to each other, and an organic whole, where everything fits and speaks of meanings greater than itself. The crowd at the beach on a hot day is a bricolage, just a jumble of people and items; a football game is an organic whole. The organic whole is special, because it has known (or discoverable) inter-relationships between items, and it shows where the gaps in knowledge are, just as you know when there are too few players from your team on the field, and you start yelling for the punter, or for the offensive right guard to get on to the field. You know what’s missing, what to look for. You know when to cheer.

The best example I know is the invention of the Periodic Chart of the Elements, which explained not only what science knew about the elements it was familiar with, but it also put them into incredibly significant patterns, and it thus also showed that there were unknown elements and exactly what their characteristics would be. This set off a successful search for the elements to fit into the “gaps”, and it also gave a fundamentally straightforward method of dealing with what had seemed a huge pile of disparate, complicated facts. Serious Chemistry was born.

In much the same way, though it may be only at a personal level, a blog gives people the chance to take their mentally jumbled bricolage of thoughts, acquired over a lifetime, and to form an organic whole of them, a cohesive, extended body of thought over time. Moreover, it may help to point out the geography and genealogy of the “gaps” and give a great idea of what kind of answers can be found to “fit” into them.

This is my blog, and I intend to use it.

UPDATE: 040707 I have used a better word for the assemblage of items: bricolage.

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