BEYOND THE TWILIGHT OF REASON
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Great googamooga: We have a hard way to go.
Moving Back to the Outskirts
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History
Since our story is about the ongoing conflict between our aspirations
and our discontents, the fundamental fact of our development is, essen–
tially, redefinition. We have inherited every great idea that has come out
of the Western world, especially the various ways in which the New
Testament rejected the tribalism of the Old Testament, laying the foun–
dation for what was to evolve into the secular ideas of the Enlightenment,
when the conception of our common humanity was to slowly override all
distinctions of national boundary, religion, and politics. As we know, this
was seen as a rational rejection of xenophobia. The deep, imperishable
condition was humanity; the rest was what we might now call cultural
evening clothes for the infinite
hal masque.
And though most of our great
arguments have to do with the relationships of style, taste, and belief to
consequences, the Enlightenment opened the way for us to understand
that humanity is the essence which precedes the existence of the cultur–
ally unique.
In our own democracy, an innovative sense of freedom was invented
based on the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The in–
tention was that we would be judged by our deeds, not by our
backgrounds. Yet we have been long trading blows with the refinement
of the tribal idea as it appears in the proposition of an aristocracy. That is
because our various prejudices on the planes of race, religion, class, and
sex have appeared over and over, almost always as stubborn versions of
aristocratic privilege which keep us from easily realizing the grandest ide–
als of our democracy. This explains why our story, our evolution, is about
the discontented passion that rises into action whenever our aspirations
are limited by presumptions that do not hold sacred the democratic vision
of no aristocracies other than those of merit. So redefinition in our nation
always arrives at the point of struggle against the ideas that both deny
human commonality and have been written into law, determining how
we relate to one another, both on the federal and the local levels.
Today, right now, is a period of protean turmoil. The increasingly
technological world is a merry-go-round moving at an ever faster clip,
and we seem to find ourselves only bruising or breaking our fingers if we
try to snatch the brass ring. Discontent is thick in the air, yet our aspira–
tions may not really be, at least for now, up to the democratic vision that
would ennoble them and further the strengths of the society. That is be–
cause our present moment is one of excessive narcissism, and exaggerated
