In the last two issues, I have commented on certain things that concern me with modern life. The first, For God’s Sake, Shut Up! (Northshore Conifer, May, 2009), dealt with today’s cult of celebrity, wherein simply being famous is enough to guarantee that one’s views will be broadcast by the media. Further, this is not limited to those who have gained fame by accomplishment, however dubious, but also includes those who are famous merely, well, for being famous. I would submit that the silly Paris Hilton currently serves as high priestess at this altar of self-worship. Interestingly, my article was poorly received by at least one reader, whom I will call “Dick” to protect him from his neighbors, of parts undisclosed, who wrote the following:
What makes you the voice of reason that wants people that are not right wing Bible thumpers to shut up? It’s no wonder that the rest of the country thinks that all people from Louisiana are a bunch of jackasses. Get this: The wind in the entire country has shifted, you can see it everywhere, but down here it’s business as usual. I find that fact very sad.
Actually, what’s sad is that Dick missed the point of my column, which was the media’s deplorable fascination with the utterances of the celebrity class. Without this, they would disappear like a “sigh in a windstorm,” to be polite. In fact, my column went so far as to acknowledge that “celebrities are also guaranteed (the right to) free speech” by the U.S. Constitution, although Dick apparently did not read that far.
Dick’s passion was stirred, assuming as he did that I was only calling upon “people that are not right wing Bible thumpers” to shut up. Actually, I can think of a number of left wing Bible thumpers that could stand to shut up, such as our president’s erstwhile minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the Rev. Al Sharpton, the Rev. Rick Warren, and everyone’s favorite gaffe-master and minister to the rich and famous, the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Of course, I suppose that Dick’s prime pejorative was not “Bible thumper” at all, but rather “right wing.” My article said nothing of ideology, although my examples could all be fairly considered somewhat left of center. I would submit that you’d have to ask the media why Dick’s ideological peers get all of the press. Dick reacted as the proverbial hammer, to which every challenge to his world-view appears as a nail. However, in his histrionic attempt to pound me with the blunt instrument of his left-wing pathos, he missed, just as he missed the point of my article.
Dick appears comfortable in speaking for “the rest of the country,’ although the news is apparently not good. According to Dick, “all people from Louisiana” are perceived as “a bunch of jackasses,” and, from his prior outburst, I must conclude that Dick feels that this bears some causal relationship with either Bible thumping or a right wing ideology. This kind of blanket statement always makes me wonder why a person like Dick remains in Louisiana, instead of joining his fellow travelers in “the rest of the country.”
At any rate, Dick concludes with an awkward metaphor, in which “the wind has shifted,” and “you can see it everywhere.” We don’t generally see the wind in Mandeville, although we occasionally feel it, hear it and, rarely, smell it. However, if Dick is any indication of what is blowing in “the rest of the country,” I think that I’d just as soon stay upwind, thank you very much.
Last month’s column was titled Dressing Like an Anarchist (Northshore Conifer, June, 2009), and in it I mused over the compulsion of many of today’s youth to abandon any pretense at civility, manifested in answering court summons while dressed as if they already had been convicted. What made this notable to me was the abandonment by the individual of any pretense of a role in the Social Contract, even when it was in the individual’s best interest.
The concept of a Social Contract first emerged in modern philosophy in Leviathan (1651), wherein Thomas Hobbes spoke of individuals ceding individual rights to the state, in exchange for protection. In his Second Treatise of Government (1689), John Locke agreed that the state needed to provide a “neutral judge” to protect the life, liberty, and possessions of its citizens. It wasn’t until Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du Contrat Social ou Principes du Droit Politique(1762), however, that it was clearly stated that the constraint of citizens by the law (criminal or otherwise) is an expression of individual freedom, not a limitation, since it represents what was given up to secure such freedoms. In simple terms, with respect to governance, the Social Contract is what separates us from the animals. We submit to its call to responsibility and accountability voluntarily, albeit largely tacitly, and we receive its protection and its freedoms. It is what prevents “mere anarchy” from being “loosed upon the world.”[i]
It may seem a reach to analogize sloppy clothing with a breakdown of the Social Contract, or it may represent the camel’s nose under the edge of the tent. World events argue against the spread of civilization, or even how to recognize it when one sees it. Mohandas Gandhi, when asked what he thought of Western Civilization, is said to have remarked that he thought “it would be a very good idea.” Civility is in short supply, whether in traffic, in the courtroom or in government. We are losing respect for our fellow citizens at a record pace, but not as fast as we are losing our concern for whether or not they know it. In short, we are becoming a society of selfish egoists, concerned with our own needs and desires to such an extent that we cannot even defer to the sensibilities of others when it is in our own self-interest.
Instead of decrying and cautioning against this, the fourth estate revels in it as long as it moves product off the shelves. The entertainment industry exposes us to “reality,” about which we once only heard whispers, if that; now it is given its own prime-time forum. Further, enough of us tune in to it that this programming proliferates. Where we once watched Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, we now watch Ozzie Osbourne, whose saving grace is that we cannot understand a word that he says. We seem helpless to resist; as we do when confronted with traffic accidents or train wrecks, we cannot turn away. There is something perverse in human nature that lures us to what harms us. Perhaps it is the Garden of Eden Redux, because make no mistake about it, our wholesale desensitization to the vulgar, the profane, the mean, the vicious, the violent, the dishonest, the selfish, the hypocritical – in short, the uncivilized, is what is destroying our society. Abandonment of the Social Contract, even in something as mundane as “dressing like an anarchist” for a court appearance, clearly heralds that “[t]he falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. . . .”[ii]
Last month I quoted Yeats’ Second Coming, a poem prophetically written in 1919 following World War I. Yeats was heavily influenced by Shelley’s chilling words written almost a century earlier in 1820, to-wit:
In each human heart terror survives
The ravin it has gorged: the loftiest fear
All that they would disdain to think were true: [1.620]
Hypocrisy and custom make their minds
The fanes of many a worship, now outworn.
They dare not devise good for man's estate,
And yet they know not that they do not dare.[iii]
In Prometheus Unbound, Shelley had these words spoken by one of the Furies (Erinyes), who in Greek mythology were the personification of the anger of the dead, and represented regeneration and the potency of creation. How ironic is it that a society roused by the very concept of “Hope and Change” is so neatly and cogently represented by the scorning voices of regeneration?
Dick may be right about the wind shifting, but it’s an ill wind.
[i] William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
[iii] Percy Bysse Shelley, Prometheus Unbound