03 January 2015 (114 anniversary of the birth of Eric Voegelin)
Introductory Notes.
What follows is likely to ramble a little, as my mind struggles for clarity, and my body remains affected by an influenza virus most notable for the fevers, chills, and sweats it brings me. Even now I feel a chill in my legs. Despite not feeling well, I still take walks, with loyal Moses. Recently we returned from a short visit to Castner Park in Belt, braving the -10 F weather, and much snow. One must make do, and carry on, eh? How else could one live with reasonable contentment and happiness? In other words, winter, too, must be enjoyed for the good things it brings.
Despite fevers and chills, I find myself returning to questions and issues that have taken some of my attention for years: the nature and use of studying history; the American Civil War; the causes of the war; secession; the moral dilemma of so many, and well known in the person of General Robert E Lee; Lincoln’s attempts to “save the Union,” his analysis of the political problems and his attempt to help refound the American Republic; the seemingly endless and undying feud between the American left and right; and so on. These and related questions press in, not primarily for mere “historical interest,” but because they relate to present existence in the United States of America. This claim can best be clarified through a few questions and basic considerations.
That human beings die was evident to me from my earliest years of consciousness. I saw my first corpse around age 3; and when 4 or 5, a little girl who had been riding next to me in a car opened the door, fell out, and died. In contrast, the physical world around me and our homeland, the United States of America, seemed to endure, and that was comforting. Then came the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, and the tearing apart of our political fabric during the Viet-Nam War and the racial tensions in the late 1960’s. So I had to recognize that countries, too, get sick and perhaps die. Indeed, even the superficial study of history in public school made me aware that empires, kingdoms, cities, states—all pass away. Before leaving high school, I was aware of the tension between political mortality and the claim of the United States to be the “new order of the ages.” Despite the rhetoric, I sensed, thought, and felt that our country, too, would eventually pass away. What I experienced in the turmoil of the 1960’s I interpreted as symptoms of political decadence, or perhaps of a dying Republic.
Initial Questions.
Is the United of America dying? In one sense it is, surely, for “everything that enters being must perish,” as Plato articulates this basic insight into reality in his Republic. It seems healthy and beneficial for a people to accept that their country had a beginning in time, flourishes for a few seasons or centuries, and gradually or sometimes suddenly (as through war) passes away. Or at the very least, one country joins another, or splits into a number of political units, each with its distinct life. In truth, the processes of coming-to-be and passing-away are ever at work, so that at each moment, in some ways, a country is coming into being; and at the very same time, in some ways, it is passing away. Political society is indeed “Man writ large,” again drawing from Plato’s Republic. What is true of the concrete individual human being, is true of a political society: life and death are ever at work, contending. At some point, forces of death seem to gain the upper hand, and the body, or body politic, silently or suddenly slips beneath the waves. In the case of a country, it is possible, even likely, that some of its former citizens survive the regime’s death, and become citizens of other countries. Although Hitler’s Third Reich did not last the promised thousand years, but a mere twelve years, and met a violent death after its vile and violent life, many of its citizens became West or East German citizens, or Americans, or Argentinians, and so on. In short, some citizens outlast the dying regime of which they had been members. And so it may well be with the United States of America, when our country finally falls beneath the waves of time, and ceases to exist.
How or when that will be, no one knows. There is, however, another kind of dying that we experience, and which is not final, and also accompanied with coming-to-be, with new births, growth, blossoming, new possibilities. This kind of process was what many of us experienced in the United States during the turbulent 1960’s: dying of some of our political culture, or at least a sickening and decay of parts; new growths appearing on the scene (whether healthy or cancerous, is another question); new possibilities opening up before our eyes.
Awake or napping? Even as I write, my eyes close and I begin to slip away into sleep. Influenza allows but little time for consciousness. Perhaps it is fitting in a man thinking about the sickness and passing of his own country.
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Coming-to-be and major advancements in the development of American political consciousness.
A people in history gradually becomes conscious of itself as a people. Concrete individuals think of themselves not only in terms of where they were born, their country of origin and early formation, but of where they live now. In time the British colonists in North America—or at least in the colonies stretching from New England south through the Carolinas to Georgia—thought of themselves as Americans. It did not happen at once, or at the same time for everyone. During the Revolutionary War, “Loyalists” conceived of themselves as British, or at least as British subjects; the “Revolutionaries” conceived of themselves far less as subjects of the English Monarch, and more as American colonists, and even as “Americans.” The appearance and use of names for a people’s self-understanding chronicle the flux in consciousness. The coinage and growing usage of the symbol “American” for the British colonists in North America would be a useful study in the formation of American political consciousness: of the coming-to-be of a new regime in history, the United States of America. Note: for years I have observed that this new country lacks a proper name, such as France, Germany, or Great Britain has. By the words “United States of America,” the country could potentially include all of the Americas, continents both North and South. And we did try on several occasions to observe chunks of Canada, and did take over a large piece of Mexico’s territory. So far, Americans have not reached to Patagonia or Tierra del Fuego, except through commerce, technology, advertising, media, and so on.
A. No doubt the development of American consciousness is rooted in the England from which most (but surely not all) of the colonists came, and at least three significant advancements stand out that in time erupt into American consciousness: First, the limited but real breaking away of England from the Catholic Church, and emergence of a religion steeped in Christian experience and symbol, but also suffused with national self-consciousness: the Church of England. This religious faith was still mainly Catholic, although the King of England, not the Pope, was the recognized head of the church. Although not intended to be so by King Henry VIII, in principle this move lent itself to becoming Protestant. Second, the wave of extreme Protestant experience known succinctly as the Puritan Revolution that swept over England in the 17th century, affected probably every significant aspect of English life and self-understanding. The Puritan Revolution, although having Protestant-Christian elements, also contained massive doses of Gnostic experience, as Voegelin and other scholars have shown. In time, both the Protestant and Gnostic elements of Puritanism fed massively into American self-consciousness. I have long seen the Puritan seed as the basic germ giving rise to American political consciousness; and many of the Gnostic movements in American history were engendered out of the fertilizer of Puritan culture. Third, and related to the Puritan Revolution, but also with roots back at least as far as the Magna Carta, one must acknowledge the growth of English Republicanism as crucial to what becomes American self-understanding. Protestant, Puritan, and Republican experience and symbol all emphasize the concrete individual as the primary unit of society, and as the person which must be represented by and in the political community and its Representative. Here we find the belief and firm conviction that each individual human being is unique and must somehow be represented in the political community, unless that community is tyrannical, dominated from above, without respecting the real or imagined “rights” of the individual person.
B. A second major source for the development of American political consciousness as it erupted at the time of the American Revolution of 1775-1783 would be the colonial experience. Several facets of this experience stand out as salient and especially formative. First, men and women coming to shores of “the New World,” or “New England,” and so on, conceived themselves as English, but also as Christians seeking to establish some form of “the Kingdom of God” on earth. The most significant early formulation of this self-understanding is found in the Mayflower Compact of 1620, signed by men on board ship before landing at a place they would name “Plymouth,” honoring their English roots. The Mayflower Compact can be seen as an early eruption of what will in time become American self-understanding; when written, the men clearly think of themselves first and foremost as “Christians.” (Here I could insert the brief Compact to illustrate the predominant sentiments of the men in this historically highly significant political-religious action.)
Second, as one studies other founding charters of the several English colonies, one finds similar conceptions, and especially the notion of each individual man having the ability and freedom to speak for himself as the new community is formed. At work in each is the principle of individual representation for men (women were still considered as represented through father or husband, and children through their father.) These communities, even when formed by permission of the King, are Republican in spirit, and loyal to the King as the ultimate head of the Realm back in England, and one to whom they swear ready loyalty and obedience. Of especial significance, in my opinion, are the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, and the various founding documents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony also established by Puritans. Looking back from the Constitution of 1787, such documents stand out as significant milestones in the development of American political consciousness. The “We the People” of the Constitution of 1787 arose in continuity, not only with earlier American colonial documents, but more essentially with common colonial experiences and symbols, not least of which is “the People,” and the belief that individuals can freely associate themselves into a body politic and choose a Representative, who, in the colonial experience, would be accountable both to the King more distantly, and to the People out of which they arose, and whom they were to represent in their decisions. In most cases, the Governor was an appointee of the King, but the colonial legislature was directly elected by white men holding property. Through this process, “the People” were being gradually formed in responsible self-government, as they would experience directly the consequences of their choices in local and colonial government.
C. A third stream flowing into the growing national consciousness would come from “dissenters,” from men and women deliberately out of the English-Puritan mainstream: Roger Williams and the founding of what became Rhode Island; William Penn, the Quaker identified with the founding of Pennsylvania. Religious dissent, or the breach from Puritan and Protestant Orthodoxy, was in effect a more radical and individualistic form of the Puritan experience. If the Puritans still recognized the authority of King [if they did], Church, Scripture, dissenters were more closely identified with the “godded men” of the left-wing of the Puritan Revolution. The source of authority is the individual self, and these “dissenters,” as they often styled themselves, were not in principle prepared to recognize any authority other than the self, or that to which they freely chose to grant limited service.
Stop. What am I writing, and why? It seems that I am regurgitating information, without a proper theoretical framework founded on right questions and existential issues. Translation, please: Facts remembered are not the way to begin. What are the questions I wish to ask about American political experience, and why am I presently motivated to ask any questions at all?
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Beginning afresh: What moves me to try to understand American political consciousness now? Here is the present experience and concern: That the kind of deep divisiveness now present in the American regime is not unlike the divisiveness that dominated American politics and consciousness between about 1820 and into the Civil War. In the 19th-century case, hostile politics and the divided consciousness clearly promoted outrage and violence, and also helped to incite a large segment of the country to seek to “dissolve the political bands” with the Constitutional order established with the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. A sizable part of the body politic chose secession from the Union rather than remaining in a political order they deemed beyond possible remedy. Rather than remain in the Union and see their way of life (including slavery) threatened, they chose to secede, to declare complete political independence from the Federal Government. As Lincoln said so succinctly, “And the war came.” The Northern forces would not let the Southern States depart without a very costly fight. (I have often wondered: Why not just let them secede, and try to woo them back gradually? One may wonder, but the past is unchangeable, having been sealed by “the spindle of Necessity.)
It seems to me that before engaging in any study, one must have some knowledge of what he is seeking, and why. The study of “history” in particular easily lends itself to a kind of “vacuum-cleaner” approach to reality, as one just discovers and recounts various more or less true, more or less undigested pieces of information—“facts” as they are styled. To what purpose? The ocean of information is relatively boundless. One must ever seek to discover what matters, and why. Consider how Voegelin keeps before his readers the sentence from St. Augustine’s De Vera Religione: “In the study of creatures, one should not exercise a vain and perishing curiosity, but take steps to advance towards that which is immortal and everlasting.” Remember what you are about, and what the final goal is. The ascent of the mind into the divine must be the ultimate end of any study, as it is the final end of human being. Those unaware of the final end—known through faith, Augustine’s “cognition of faith”—may heap up mounds of fascinating facts with or without a degree of theoretical framework. But still one must ask: “To what purpose?”
In the present case, how on earth can my concern with present political disorder in the United States of America aid in the human duty of “taking steps to ascend to that which is everlasting and immortal”? The question is all the more urgent, perhaps, given that this country was founded in part in the wake of the Enlightenment. And if anything characterizes the Enlightenment, it is the explicit rejection of the divine End for man, and the liberation of human beings from divine order. In the dark, seductive light of the Enlightenment, Americans sought to establish “a new order of the ages,” and in effect sought to replace the divine order and “that which is immortal and everlasting” by nature with a humanly created “new order” that “will not perish from the earth,” borrowing a phrase from Lincoln. America founded itself on a strange and unstable concoction of Judaeo-Christian faith in God, and of God’s Law, with a belief that “we, even we here,” can create a “new order” that presents itself as “the Kingdom of God on earth,” as “the last best hope for mankind,” as that “new order of the ages” which will not pass away. (Keep in mind that “New Order of the Ages” is our official motto, seen on the Great Seal of the United States of America, and reproduced on our dollar bills). America’s founding was ever split between a vision of faith in God and a secular, even utopian dream of creating the world anew. Often the same human beings entertained both conceptions at once. This tension runs throughout the fabric of human life, and it clearly colors and distorts the entire unfolding of the history of the United States of America. Are we one nation under God, and one nation among many, having a beginning and end in time; or are we this “new order” that brings peace and freedom to all, “by shedding its blood” on the battlefields of the world, as Present Wilson articulated his Gnostic-utopian dream.
It is possible that this psychic split is inherent in all politics: that even when people know themselves as participants in the whole of reality, yet they may conceive their political community as not only representative of divine order, as in ancient Egypt, but a replacement of transcendent order with “the Kingdom of God on earth.” Every political order may be based on the belief that it is, somehow, ultimate reality, the final human community. I have not found this awareness among the ancients, however, with the exception of a streak in the Hebrew prophets and priests who treat the Chosen People as the ultimate community under God. The conception seems to be dangerous, fraught with serious consequences. It shows up again in much of Christian self-understanding, with the Church or a part of it as representing God on earth. The same divinization of a part of reality shows up in Islam, with God, his prophet, and the community of believers destined to spread over the whole world, and rightly so. As noted, dangerous stuff to any who resist. To the Chosen People, to the Church, to Islam, to the Soviet Union, to Nazi Germany, to the United States of America, and to all such self-proclaimed embodiments of truth and justice, I ask, a little freshly: Will the real God please stand up?
That is the problem. We have made out of politics what it is not, and cannot be: the ultimate and final realization of divine order in time. A largely Christian-inspired section of American believes that this divine mission requires the spread and dominance of Christian faith. The secular, unbelieving, Enlightenment-formed part of the American body politic (dominant in universities, the media, the learned folks) believe that America’s purpose is to spread freedom, peace, democracy, science all over the world, a kind of “light to the nations,” borrowing Deutero-Isaiah’s symbol (which had already been used to apply to Jesus, as in St. Luke, and to the Apostle Paul, in whose letters, and especially in the one to Christians in Rome). The two visions have a common core, but differ in expression and means. The Christians emphasize faith in God and keeping His Law, and America’s mission based on our so-called “Christian values.” And the secular intellectuals emphasize faith in Science, in knowledge, in technology, and in their own “good intentions” to seek to benefit everyone. Two ultimate world views, with a common core: we Americans are unique and “special,” and have a duty to serve mankind at large.In simplest terminology, one group wants to evangelize with the gospel of Christ, and the other wants to evangelize with knowledge based on Science.
This much must suffice for the present.
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