June 2, 2023
This newsletter is being written over what in the United States is Memorial Day weekend. One way to honor those who gave their lives for us is to commemorate what they fought for, especially since we, the living, are fighting for it as well. It may seem odd to have to ask “why we fight,” but during World War II the U.S. government felt it necessary to produce a series of documentary films under that title to instruct G.I.’s. The real fight is an ongoing historical struggle over centuries, of which wars, even world wars, are visible outbreaks. The ultimate location of that struggle is the human mind. The final stanza of William Blake’s famous hymn “And did those feet in ancient time,” often known as “Jerusalem,” says, “I will not cease from Mental Fight / Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand / Till we have built Jerusalem.” What is it, then, that we are fighting for?
When I was a hippie in the late 1960’s, reading Blake for the first time, I thought I knew. The hero of Blake’s early poetry is Orc, a fiery haired figure who embodies energy and desire. He is the spirit of liberty, of opposition to tyranny and oppression, the spirit of the French and American revolutions, about which Blake wrote poems siding with the revolutionaries. Orc is also, however, the embodiment of sexual energy: Blake, who knew Mary Wollstonecraft, also wrote poems in favor of sexual liberation. Finally, he is the energy of the imagination itself: Blake speaks of Orc’s “thought-creating fires.” Rousseau had said that humanity was born free but was everywhere in chains. Blake taught me that the first chains we must break are the “mind forg’d manacles.” Outward oppression is kept in place by inward repression, and I was glad to rally behind the cause of the liberation of an inward power that could transform the world. Fifty years later, I do not regret my choice.
My friends and I grew up comfortably middle class, and we were unspoiled enough to realize that we were privileged. But there was real oppression all around us. Someone like the folk singer Pete Seeger showed us that you could stand in solidarity with the real oppressed people of our society and thus help make a difference. Older than us, as far back as the 40’s he was writing protest songs in support of the union movement, opposing the injustices of robber-baron capitalism.
He was blacklisted in the McCarthy era but kept performing on college campuses, enlightening and inspiring students. In the 60’s his “We Shall Overcome” became the anthem of the civil rights movement, and he created a furor when he sang “Waist Deep in Big Muddy,” his song against the Vietnam war, on the Smothers Brothers show. Later he shifted towards environmentalism, leading a crusade to clean up the Hudson River. His half-sister Peggy Seeger wrote an early women’s-movement anthem, “I’m Gonna Be an Engineer.” We tried to be on the side of the angels without getting all self-congratulatory about it, but there was real satisfaction and a sense of hope as we saw the United States moving, however painfully and imperfectly, in the right direction. It was not all idealism. Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities, based on Carlyle’s The French Revolution, as a warning about what might happen if a society oppressed the downtrodden too far, and the race riots in major American cities in the mid-60’s were a warning that the patience of long-suffering African-American people was not limitless.
Still, we identified ourselves with a mysterious creative energy rising up from below against an “establishment” that controlled society from above, a power structure composed of interlocking parts: the military-industrial complex, multi-national corporations, hidden governmental agencies like the CIA that toppled legitimately elected governments and aided dictatorships in the name of the “national interest,” and, as always, corrupt politicians. As in Blake’s time, it was the young against the old: Orc’s opponent is Urizen, whose name echoes “reason” and “horizon,” a white-haired old man on a throne issuing orders, most of which begin with “Thou shalt not.” He is a parody of God, who is in turn a parody of authoritarian rulers everywhere. We had a vision of history as progress: not progress as defined by capitalism—greater affluence, more gadgets, new “improved” models every year—but progress in the fulfilment of real human concerns. Even popular culture accepted this triumph-of-the-underdog view of historical struggle: in the original Star Wars trilogy, a ragtag group of “diverse” marginalized people (outlaws, aliens, robots) eventually triumphed against the totalitarian Empire.
Now, my generation all looks like Urizen, and what we are witnessing is another type of uprising from below, one that calls our progressive faith into question. For this is definitely not an uprising of the oppressed, not the French Revolution come again. No, what is rising up, both domestically and worldwide, is fascism come again. When Trump was elected in 2016, spouting a populist rhetoric championing the little guy against “elites,” I was inclined to take him tentatively at his word. Despite my leftist proclivities, in the 1990’s I voted for Bill Clinton and his centrist “neoliberalism,” as it came to be called, as a kind of deal with the devil. I was afraid that without that kind of compromise, the Democratic Party would be steamrollered by the trickle-down lies of Reaganomics, and become like a splinter party in a European country, getting 10 percent of the vote.
But the devil always comes to collect. Neoliberalism rejuvenated a failing Democratic Party, but at the cost of splitting it into an upper and lower tier. The upper tier was college-educated, prospering as what Robert Reich, Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, called “symbolic analysts,” doing jobs that involved manipulation of information. But the lower tier was the traditional Democratic constituency, working class become precariously middle class—people like my parents. And this group was failing as the blue collar work that had sustained it was steadily automated and outsourced by the neoliberal greed for “globalization.” Many families sustained their middle class lifestyle only by the entry of women into the workforce: a family could no longer be supported by a single breadwinner. Unions were smashed, and, though the unemployment rate remained low, many middle class families lived, and still live, in stressful economic insecurity, without savings, one paycheck away from disaster, their children accruing massive college debt. It is a well known story: Trump made promises to the stressed and disgruntled little guys, his cause helped by the evident smugness of Hillary Clinton and her obvious disdain for the lower orders. I later became a fan of Bernie Sanders, who I still think has the right idea: the remaking of American society has to begin with economic justice, which means reining in the excesses of capitalism. Instead, the progressive movement has allowed itself to become mired in the culture wars, a deliberate distraction fomented by the reactionaries, so much so that these days the rhetoric of woke and anti-woke factions seems equally divorced from reality.
Of course Trump turned out to be as big a con artist in politics as he had been in business. But what is more disturbing is the nature of his followers. Yes, they include coal miners in West Virginia and rural voters on failing family farms. But it appears that the main MAGA constituency is reasonably well off, members of what the European tradition would call the petit bourgeoisie, suburban middle managers and the like. Trump is, or at least pretends to be, a billionaire, a member of the 1%, and it is right-wing billionaires who are bankrolling the fascist uprising: subsidizing political campaigns and a media empire whose flagship is Fox News, buying at least one member of the Supreme Court with lavish gifts. These manipulators have fanned a lynch-mob mentality through phony “culture wars,” so that presently the Romantic model of historical process seems to be upended. An ascendent authoritarianism is opposed by the federal government led by a president who was elected as a moderate but who has governed as a progressive. The hopeful scenario of the 60’s seems to have been replaced by the model of a horror film, in which dark forces are unleashed from below and invade the peace and safety of the ordinary surface world.
What is even more disturbing is that there is historical precedent for this reversal. The January 6 insurrectionists regarded themselves as spearheading a second American Revolution. Yet what they truly resembled was the lynch mob violence into which the French Revolution devolved, shattering Romantic hopes. Northrop Frye, from whose study of William Blake, Fearful Symmetry, I first learned about the Romantic revolutionary spirit, has a later article called “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism” that makes clear how the disillusionment presently being suffered by latter-day 60’s idealists is, alas, merely a replay of the darkening of Western historical consciousness throughout the later 19th century. The reference to Rimbaud’s bateau ivre or drunken boat is to the Romantic image of a vessel floating upon and being driven by some greater power, but represents “a later and a different conception of it”:
Here the boat is usually in the position of Noah’s ark, a fragile container of sensitive and imaginative values threatened by a chaotic and unconscious power below it. In Schopenhauer, the world as idea rides precariously on top of a “world as will” which engulfs practically the whole of existence with its moral indifference. In Darwin, who readily combines with Schopenhauer, as the later work of Hardy illustrates, consciousness and morality are accidental sports from a ruthlessly competitive evolutionary structure. In Freud, who has noted the resemblance of his mythical structure to Schopenhauer’s, the conscious ego struggles to keep afloat on a sea of libidinous impulse. In Kierkegaard, all the “higher” impulses of fallen man pitch and roll on the surface of a huge and shapeless “dread.” (89)
So here we are, still pitching and rolling, seasick, with every news cycle, wondering whether there is any more helpful suggestion than “don’t look down.”
Actually, I learned part of the answer from Fearful Symmetry early on. While the failure of the French Revolution shocked some Romantics, including Wordsworth and Coleridge, into political conservatism, Blake wrote his greatest poetry in later life analyzing the causes of revolutionary failure and formulating an alternative response. Outward revolutions will always fail, he saw, unless there is a corresponding revolution within. Otherwise, revolution and reaction will go around in a vicious circle that Frye called the “Orc cycle.” Orc may temporarily succeed in driving Urizen off his throne. But, in the famous words of Star Wars, “the empire strikes back.” The forces of political tyranny, economic greed, sexual neurosis, and intellectual nihilism may be defeated partly or temporarily; however, although they sink out of sight, they hide out below or within the ordinary surface of life, biding their time, awaiting the moment for a comeback. We should know this from popular culture. Comic book supervillains invariably return and have to be defeated anew, and so do the serial killers of horror. The cyclical pessimism of Spengler’s Decline of the West was powerfully persuasive after the First World War because it so rudely contradicted liberal faith in the optimistic rationalism of the Enlightenment.
Spengler’s response to his own vision of cultures rising, declining, and falling as their energy failed them was to go over to the dark side and become a Nazi sympathizer. But in his later work Blake showed that the Orc cycle could become progressive through the slow work of the imagination over time. The work of his new hero, Los, the constructive imagination, turned the cycles of history into “expanding eyes,” which, in a Biblical allusion, he called the “seven eyes of God.” In each generation or historical period, Orc rises like the sun. Then, at the zenith, his vital energies fail: he declines in the West, and darkness returns. This is not a modern phenomenon: it is already clear in Beowulf, the first great English poem. Beowulf in his prime defeats Grendel and Grendel’s mother, and by doing so sustains the civilization symbolized by the great hall of Heorot. Nevertheless, in his old age, an even greater foe arises, a dragon. Beowulf defeats the dragon but dies in the process, and the poem’s closing foresees the coming end of Beowulf’s people after the loss of their protector. In the face of such “sun also rises” pessimism, though, Blake offers the possibility of a progressive awakening. What sustains me in these terrible times is the knowledge that Blake was right. There has been progress, and eyes are expanding. The enemies of human concern are quite aware of it, and indeed what we are living through is a panicked reactionary backlash, an attempt to reverse that progress.
We are in the second phase of modern history. The first phase was dominated by what, for convenience, I usually call “traditional mythology.” Traditional mythology is hierarchical and top-down: the Christian version is represented by the scheme of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Up is good, down is bad, and social authority proceeds from on high, from God to his earthly agents—kings, aristocracies, religious authorities—who rule over a whole Chain of Being. The Romantic period of the late 18th and early 19th centuries is the true beginning of modernity, represented mythologically by what, in a central essay, Northrop Frye called “New Directions from Old.” The new mythology is potentially revolutionary and turns traditional mythology upside down. A power that can be creative or destructive depending on how it is used rises from mysterious depths. The first democracies since Athens emerged during this period because the locus of political and social authority is from the ground up. At least in theory, power comes from “the people,” and political leaders are servants of the general public, not their masters. The second modern ideal after liberty is equality. All people are created equal, and have an equal right to the fulfilment of what Frye has called primary concerns, the needs that human beings have in common no matter what their social station. This has led to the idea of social welfare, of a social safety net.
But the old mythology did not fade away. The “Mental Fight” since the late 18th century has been a battle of mythologies, between the new mythology of bottom-up liberty and equality and the old mythology based on the idea that some people are superior to others and deserve to rule others. Internationally, the old mythology, now turned reactionary, gave birth to the ideology of imperialism, the idea that some people—European and American white male people—possess an innate superiority that gives them not only the right but the duty to rule over other peoples, for their own good. The American form of such ideology is “American exceptionalism,” the idea that the United States is superior to other countries and is justified in dominating the world arena both politically and economically. This belief has led the United States into a string of quasi-imperialistic wars, including those of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as covert operations that subverted legitimate governments and propped up dictatorships. Domestically, it has produced the long history of American paranoid craziness puppeteered by an oligarchy that sees, rightly, democracy as a threat to its power and privilege. In each era, the reactionary backlash takes a new form, but remains essentially the same. Heather Cox Richardson’s knowledge, as a historian, of post-Civil War America enables her to demonstrate in her Substack newsletter, week after week, how the racist, elitist, anti-democratic power plays we are witnessing right now replicate attempts made 150 years ago to enforce white supremacist control over African Americans and immigrants. At the same time, the 1% are doing everything they can to wipe out the social safety net established by Roosevelt’s New Deal, decrying it as “socialism.” In the Trump and post-Trump era, the culture wars are directed against the rights of women and of those whose gender and sexual identity are diverse.
Despite all of this, the United States has made remarkable progress in the quest to ensure life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all Americans, and to widen the range of empathy and toleration of difference. No, things are not good. But it is mere cynicism to deny that things are one hell of a lot better for just about every group other than white heterosexual males than they were when I was born in 1951. There is at least an ideal of respecting and providing the basic human needs for everyone without exception. Yes, I understand that I speak for a position of privilege when I say this. That does not mean it is not true. Because many people are still mired in poverty and suffering from hatred and persecution does not mean that no progress has been made. It is important to insist on this because the progress, however inadequate, that has been made is evidence that progress can continue to be made. There is a tendency to underestimate the resistance to social justice, to be caught off guard and surprised when the forces of reaction band together in well organized and well funded attempts to turn back the clock. People of good will then get demoralized and paralyzed with doubt. However, Bob Dylan’s “When the Ship Comes In” is still a rallying cry:
But we'll shout from the bow “your days are numbered" And like pharaohs tribe they'll be drownded in the tide And like Goliath, they'll be conquered
Nevertheless, there is something else happening, on a deeper, psychological level. A recent article in Salon.com by Mike Lofgren, who describes himself as a disillusioned former GOP operative, articulates it with fierce incisiveness in an article called “The GOP’s Heart of Darkness” (Mike Lofgren):
The GOP has attracted to its base the hitherto apolitical and disregarded: rednecks living off the grid, armed-to-the-teeth survivalists, psychopathic grifters and con artists (who may have been attracted by Trump's transparently crooked fundraising), violent criminals, the borderline psychotic, incels living in their mothers' basements, hitherto tiny political extremist groups. | In better times, these disparate groups of antisocial lunatics were institutionalized, socially marginalized or physically isolated from each other. The GOP's vast media-entertainment complex has given them a cause, mobilized them and made them march in unison.
But there is more:
If these groups' demographic weight in the GOP weren't enough, they are augmented by heretofore ostensibly sane people who have gone around the bend. To put it bluntly, four years of nonstop bellicose shrieking from the Trump White House, culminating in the most deadly pandemic in living memory, caused a lot of formerly stable Americans to go nuts. Over the last decade, virtually every one of us has known a friend, a co-worker, or an Uncle Ned who was previously personable, but now rants about how George Soros controls the weather.
That nails it. I think Lofgren is right that the media are reluctant to question the sanity of the far right, but he responds to those who accuse him of practicing psychiatry without a license that it is hard to explain the cult of Trump in any way other than as a collective and highly contagious psychosis. What do Trump’s followers want?
They don't necessarily even want a competently administered fascist state such as DeSantis or any number of other Republicans might bring them. The result would bore them; what use do "burn it all down" nihilists have for a detailed political platform?
What they truly want is demons to wrestle with till the end of time. They want revenge. That is why the people they elect to Congress are such a bad fit for a system that requires consensus and compromise. They crave contentiousness and conflict 24/7….
Whether they believe is probably unknowable, but that is less important than the fact that loudly saying they believe it creates endless friction with relatives, co-workers, and neighbors. Being abrasive, if not actually threatening, gives them a sense of identity and attention they would otherwise lack….
The real glue between Trump and his devotees is his endless assurances that their lot in life is not the result of their own laziness, irresponsibility or failure to seek counseling. No, they are innocent victims, endlessly picked on by elitists, socialists and foreigners. These sinister groups are constantly changing according to expediency, but the point is to keep his acolytes in a constant state of agitation….
It is not just the media who cringe from such harsh judgments. We are told that we should not assume that we are right and the other side is wrong, but patiently and respectfully listen to what they have to say, and try to build bridges in order to meet in the middle. So we feel guilty at feeling angry and frustrated by the latest delusional statement by Trump, one of his followers, or just someone on Facebook. At the same time, we are told that we have a responsibility to speak out for the sake of social justice when we hear something bigoted—we must be actively anti-racist, anti-homophobic, or we ourselves are guilty. This no-win dilemma is the latest version of “liberal guilt.” But the attitude that “both sides have their valid point of view” is only true in a situation of social sanity, whereas the feeling right now is that a frightening percentage of the population is not connected to reality. Conventional opinion draws back from this conclusion because it seems extreme and in fact arrogantly self-righteous—how can millions of people all be mentally ill at once? Isn’t calling them crazy just an ad hominem attack? Most people prefer not even to think about irrationality because it is so disturbing. But in fact we have to begin confronting what is in fact not a one-time bizarre event but a pattern—the pattern of modern history, starting with the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. The big one, of course, is Hitler. Lofgren’s analysis implies that the term “fascist,” though by now almost universal in media analyses, may not be the right term for what has come to dominate the Republican Party. Fascism is a will-to-order: DeSantis is indeed a fascist, like Orbán in Hungary. But the Trump phenomenon is, like Hitler’s Nazism, a will-to-disorder, ultimately a nihilism fueled by a death wish. “Burn it all down,” which the Republicans have just barely failed to do in the debt-ceiling crisis, is not a fascist motto.
Calling the far right crazy is not a way of insulting or dismissing them. It is not an emotional reaction but an analysis. Large numbers of people are in the grip of something out of the collective unconscious: they are possessed, their individual egos dissolved. You do not have to be a psychiatrist to understand this. We all know that it happens in crowds, as in sporting events or rock concerts. Emotion is contagious and spreads by psychic contagion. Human beings differ from animals by the development of ego consciousness. Animals are conscious, but the self-awareness we call ego consciousness is the growing point of individual personality. As we saw in the last two newsletters, a baby begins with no real distinction between self and not-self. Only gradually does the split between the subject and the object develop. Young children are individuals, yet not fully individuated, which is why they have a tendency to run in packs, and sometimes to reinforce group solidarity by ganging up on and bullying some scapegoat. The hierarchical, authoritarian structure of traditional mythology, hence of pre-democratic societies, is highly collective. Individuals remain strongly rooted in, and to some degree subordinated to, the larger social structure. Members of a pre-modern society are not “childlike” or “primitive”: they do not wander around in some kind of naïve dream state. On the other hand, they are part of something—of everything. They are not isolated, atomized centers of awareness alienated from an objective world. They are individuals, in other words, but not “individualists.”
Individualism, in the sense of an autonomous ego independent of the community it has grown out of, seems to be a relatively new phenomenon, at least on a mass basis. It is the essence of what we call “modern,” and modern phenomena such as democracy, capitalism, and, in Christianity, Protestantism, with its ideal of individual conscience rather than obedience to the church, are individualistic phenomena. The human race seems to have reached a crisis comparable to adolescence in individual development. The life task at that stage is to detach from the collective identity of the family and social group, to stand on one’s own two feet without losing the sense of participation in a larger identity. It is a crisis because the task is difficult. We have to learn to develop and live within a paradoxical consciousness, part and yet not part of the group, detached and yet not alienated. An adolescent vacillates from feeling utterly, even suicidally, alone, to being a herd animal eager, even desperate, to fit in with the group. Modern society has produced large numbers of people caught in such a vacillating state. There are a lot of unmoored egos floating in a sea of alienation, and such egos are easily collectivized. Hence the cultism we see everywhere, exemplified by Trump rallies, which are like old-time revival meetings, everyone caught up in the hysterical fervor that the 18th century called “enthusiasm.” Hence also, however, the opposite tendency: the narcissistic megalomania that elevates itself to godlike status, the “libertarian” denial of any participation in or responsibility to the larger community, the Nietzschean pose of superiority, popularized by Ayn Rand. And of course these are two aspects of a single phenomenon, for the cultists worship the megalomaniacs, who despise their worshippers and yet secretly depend on their adulation.
Waves of collective psychosis have been crashing upon the shore of the modern world for several centuries now, and it is understandable if people wonder whether the human race has some fatal psychic defect that will destroy it in the long term. I am more optimistic than that, because I retain faith in the mysterious power of the imagination, whose inward workings are what Jung called the process of individuation, and what visionary Christians like Blake and Frye identified with the spirit of God that moves within all things. Still, what practical, down-to-earth measures may those of good will adopt, as an alternative to helplessness and hand-wringing, to deal with the pathological upheaval of this present hour?
1. The patience of Job is a good beginning. This too shall pass, thank heaven. Trump will not be around forever, ten more years at the most, and the same is true of most of his followers. He is the instigator, like the ringleader in an unruly class, and it is doubtful that the many Trump wannabes will have what it takes to replace him. He has been a lightning rod, attracting demonic energies out of the unconscious.
2. We have to provide economic security and a decent life for all members of American society, rejecting the Social Darwinism that masquerades as “conservatism.” This will probably include a guaranteed minimum income; it will certainly include both a European-style social safety net and European-style leisure and vacation time. The left has to accept that “social justice” as the culture warriors define it can only grow out of economic security. In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the lower physiological and safety needs have to be satisfied before attention can be paid to the higher needs. As we have said, economic security alone will not prevent pathology: still, it is a necessary precondition for psychic health.
3. This will involve breaking the power of the 1%, defeating the economic and political domination of an oligarchy whose members have become as insane as Egyptian pharaohs or decadent Roman emperors. The enormous popularity of the television show Succession is heartening. After years of glamorizing and idolizing the ruling elite, at least some of the public is becoming educated to what they really are: namely, pathological monsters. They will not go lightly, and dislodging them will involve some social activism of the Martin Luther King variety. I do not choose that example lightly, for King’s “dream” was of a world of peace and justice born of an awareness that we all belong to one another.
4. These changes in turn will relax the pressure to turn education into job training. What is desperately needed is a return of the liberal arts to their rightful position at the center of education, with the arts at the center of the center, so to speak. It is possible for the ego to undergo, through the power of the imagination, a death-and-rebirth process out of which is born a greater identity that Jung called the Self. This is not a one-time experience but rather a lifelong “process of individuation” that Jung saw as the meaning of life. The role of the arts and humanities is to facilitate this process, and thus provide an alternative to the cults and fanatical ideologies that beckon uncertain people into the wilderness to be devoured from within by their own invisible demons, like the mad Arab who wrote the Necronomicon in H.P. Lovecraft. Without vision, the people perish.
None of this, even if it were all to be accomplished, will make life perfect. But it would make life worth living, love worth having, and death worth dying. It would make life what Shakespeare saw it as in his final plays, a “tragicomedy.” It would be enough.
References
Frye, Northrop. “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism.” In Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Edited by Imre Salusinszky. Volume 17 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2005. 75-91. Also published in The Stubborn Structure (1970).