There are two models by which the Kingdom of Heaven has been perceived and, more to the point, enacted, on the earth: authoritarian and collectivist. What is difficult, at this space in time, is to recognize that both of these enactions were considered utopian at the outset. Time has taken the sheen off the authoritarian model (in the West, though how many millions had to die for that illusion to fade) but the collectivist model still maintains its allure, an allure that Marx was himself captivated by, and without which, Marxism, as a movement, would have few converts.
Marx himself was a latecomer to the game—one discernable in the various monastic enclaves to some extent or the other— but fully flowering in the Anabaptist movement, a movement which still maintains the longest sustaining utopian communities. Even with the schisms within the Anabaptist movement over the years, those splinter groups still found and sustain successful communal groups for substantially longer periods than anyone else on record. The founding philosophy of those groups is shared communal resources and practiced generosity within that group. This is the very basis for Marxism, and others that preceded it of a more religious vein, but the success of the Anabaptists lies in having not just shared resources, but a shared nature. Anyone who does not lean in that particular direction either leaves on their own or is asked to leave by the group itself. By this “free-acceptance, free-association,” the Anabaptists reveal that they understand full well that human nature is not constant and in this they create insular, but workable communities because of that. There are absolutely no pretensions towards universalism to be found in the Anabaptist doctrines nor in their practices.
This is the problem with utopianism: once the notion of universality enters the frame, the “Kingdom of Heaven” has long since fled the utopia, primarily because no one ever asks: “A utopia for whom?” Not everyone has the same idea of Utopia. In fact, most people do not. The question, once universalism manifests itself, is what to do with those who do not share one’s vision of “paradise.” For the 16th Century Anabaptists, this was a fairly simple solution: ask them to leave. If there were more of them than there were of the Anabaptists, then they would move somewhere else. But universality can accept no distinction in its foundations or it is not universal at all. There is only one way for a universal movement, then, to consider and address the world: those who keep the faith, and those who do not, those who are, by definition, aberrant. Had this come to the fore earlier, this perhaps would have posed too insolvable a problem as to make the enaction of the collectivist model demonstrably impossible. Unfortunately, this was not the case.
The introduction of the study of statistics enters history at this point, and, certainly, and its benefits are hard to argue. The problem, however, with statistics is the mindset it creates, that being generally accurate is to be thoroughly accurate. This is not the case. Statistics can predict, with alarming accuracy, the occupations and fates of the general subject, but it cannot predict that absolutely. It can foresee that a certain percentage of the population will obtain a college degree, but it cannot predict their names, their faces, before or after the fact. What statistics does is create a simulacrum of numerical subjects with which to mathematically compile and experiment upon, and it does this very well. So long as the line between man and his analogue is maintained, this was hardly a problem.
The world, however, had other plans.
________
The Era of Enlightenment began as a throwing off the shackles of the monarchy and the Church, both of whom had long illegitimately influenced—where they had not outright intimidated—human development. But, once the tentacles of both institutions were sought out, they were found to be everywhere, and once they had been severed, found to have run like a flaw through everything. Quite suddenly, the West found itself without any foundation, nor restraint, to the world they found themselves in. And that world now was, quite literally, raw material.
They cut too thoroughly and too deep. If the very value of human life was gauged by those two institutions, then they would have to themselves and all over again measure and enumerate these most basic things as they began to rebuild. How fortuitous, then, that science had made such progress in the interim, and it uncorrupted by Kings and Priests either one, for none ever made so exacting an array of tools as science to be brought to this very task.
Statistics as a science was quite the boon for progressivism, and in particular in a state where holy writ had been abrogated. Stripped of a soul (that which science cannot prove does not exist, not to mention that the existence of a soul might unpleasantly point to God, perish the thought) Man is nothing but upright and walking chemicals. He is material to be experimented on. The terms of the experiment were statistically articulated and for all intents and purposes correct statistically, as a statistical model can express the weaknesses in a society, and can also calculate and model the movements necessary to improve on those weaknesses. Hence the model can suggest where social rearrangement and removal would be most propitious, and that accurately, as simple numbers on paper.
Were Mankind merely numerical this would prove unproblematic. Such is not the case. Social rearrangement entails forced relocation, without any approval from anyone other than their Benefactors. It includes reeducation among social abberants, not simply in how to acclimatize themselves to their new lifestyles but into the proper mindset entirely. If an aberrant is incapable of recognizing Utopia when he sees it, perhaps he might come to see it once he has been reeducated. And if not, as statistical models show, the stubborn aberrant becomes waste material and should be ejected from the experiment. Permanently.
Socialism presented itself as a scientific program. Its varying iterations suggested that if the program were followed to the letter, like all scientific programs, the end would justify the means. The problem is not that none of its iterations succeeded, but that once the “scientific” systematic method was applied, only another systematic program could succeed the previous failure. That is to say, once the programmatic approach is engaged upon, one cannot stop until a program succeeds. And these programs must be systematically total. To suggest a partial program to redress the failed complete program is to suggest the absurd. One iteration must be as comprehensive as the other or it is judged incomplete and unnecessary. And this has been going on in Europe and Asia for a long, long time now. Program after program. Rearrangement and disappearance, one after another. The roles change from one group to next, year after year, down the generations.
This also integrated a systemization of thought, a mindset so deeply rooted in the populace that it became impossible for them to address anything without those systems. The question of whether the government (or anyone, for that matter) should even be involved in addressing these problems, systematically or not, was anamethea. It became every bit the blind faith they had stubbornly derided and destroyed in the Faithful, but it was a faith in a manifestly broken machine, a machine which had never so much as worked at all.
It is nearly impossible for anyone in this situation to maintain any faith in anything, with one colossal failure after another, and the ensuing readjustment, when the only means of redressing it is yet another program, another turn at the roulette wheel.
________
Compared to this America presented a considerable problem. It offered no program. Capitalism is what people do naturally. No one has to indoctrinate anyone into capitalism. It is the default of any mode of exchange, even criminal. Couple that with democracy and freedom of speech, both seemingly as natural—one only really needs to instruct the citizens how not to impinge upon other people’s freedoms, not to pursue their own—and the evident lack of any program was remarkably noticeable.
The problem with America’s lack of a program was that it was manifestly imperfect. It widened rather than redressed social inequities. It did not manage anything socially, so that Man’s natural social behavior—ugly as it happens to be on occasion—was not directed in a positive way. To this, America had no plan. Because the Enlightened understand that most people need to be managed, the lack of a plan was alarming. The realization that their plans had failed, over and over again, had never manifested itself, primarily because they were so entrenched in plans—conceiving them, implementing them, adjusting them constantly as the experiment went wildly awry—that the moment to stop and assess had never presented itself either.
No matter how seemingly perfect the plan, no matter how expediently enacted, every plan failed while America, without so much as a program, continued, one age after another, one paradigm shift after another, to not only maintain but thrive. The question seemed never to occur to them as to why, why so many minds and so many plans could not create for a moment the success of the United States.
What immediately becomes noticeable is not the plan but those made subject to them, over and over again. Through one experimental iteration after another—experiments first of all to improve the populace—they have ground that populace down to Subjects only. As any initiative on their parts could run afoul of whatever new program emerges, they refuse initiative. As any individual responsibility is contrary to their masters plans, now or in the future, they refuse that as well. They are like mice in a maze; they may perform but only when prodded to do so and otherwise they sit inert, awaiting the next prodding to come. Not only are they incapable of initiative, they are incapable of repairing the damage in any social program whatsoever; they are not even capable technicians to the machine they exist in. Every generation is poorer the more improvements enacted upon them.
Compared to this what America created, not only through the freedom but also a sense of responsibility, was Individuals. The Individual is not acted upon, he is the actor. It is only through this that the flaws in any machine, business or social, can be addressed, from without, and it is an eternal irony that the Individual, the absolute enemy of Systemization, is still the only one who can maintain the machine of the System. But the US had, because the Individual is so loathe to being acted upon, a peerage of Individuals, all of whom could argue the means of addressing any problem and weigh the means to repair it—or even if such a repair might be too stringent, whether it was anyone’s business to address it at all— before working said repair upon it. Common sense was the linga franca among them as common sense was the best means of persuading the peerage. They are engineers of the moment, addressing problems of the moment, but they are, to their great benefit, not sequestered in any one place, but everywhere— not only existent at the federal or state or even local level of government, but in the business community, churches and schools— moving forward when the others among the peerage have failed to address the emergent problems or been unsuccessful in doing so. If each group singularly moves forward with plans of their own, the most successful plan will in the end rule the day. Success is evident in what works. With this emphasis on the peerage, what emerges is the America was built to be an imperfect machine. Constancy was abhorrent to the founders, who had witnessed with their own eyes the shifting current of change and realized there was never a machine complete enough to adjust, infinitely, to it.
This is where the chasm between these two approaches is most pronounced. The social engineers of the Enlightenment were attempting to create a perpetual motion machine, which, granted, never worked at all, but even if it had worked, would have concreted them in a static system while all around them the rest of the world continued to change. And no means of adjusting it once it had begun. The Kingdom of Heaven was doomed to failure, and with it emerged the Fall of Man; He is no longer a Man but a Subject, denied even His Soul to succor Him. When the pressure becomes unbearable, He may lash out in mob violence, but as a rule He simply submits. It is hardly surprising the alcohol addiction in former Soviet Union; how better to keep the pain away? How better to submit than to foil the tongue from speaking or the mind from loosing its cage? How much better a world of fog and alcoholic vagueries than to stop and realize just how much like cattle the bootheel of the Enlightenment has made of oneself for to whom would one make their case; in the Kingdom of Heaven, even their God is denied them.
No comments:
Post a Comment