Still Processing the Day Before Yesterday

Yesterday I did as I have regularly done for 16 years now, and replaced my Wednesday morning, post-Election Day classes with an open conversation, to which I invited any and all who are interested, from around Friends and throughout Wichita and beyond. I’ve had some real successes, I think, with these post-election forums—both in terms of just responding to students’ questions about election minutiae as well as in providing an opportunity for people to vent—but yesterday’s couldn’t have gone better. For close to three hours, going into and through the lunch hour, over 40 students, former students, faculty, administrators, friends, and a couple of television journalists shared thoughts, ideas, concerns, and—in the case of multiple individuals—despair. (The queer students and first-generation immigrants who talked about feeling less safe in an America that has just returned to the White House a man whose campaign regularly promulgated lies about their communities were particularly poignant.)

Processing despair is something I’m seeing all around me, as well as within myself. Donald Trump will be president, will almost certainly never face justice for his crimes and unconstitutional actions, and will be able, with the strong support of a party which, despite its own divisions (and, I still suspect, to its own eventual corruption), will unitedly assist him in pursuing—or, more accurately, get his lackadaisical approval to present in his name—policies that I consider harmful and wrong. That’s depressing, and there are millions of people feeling that depression right now, including people I love dearly. What all of their processing of these depressing facts will lead to remains to be seen. Everyone shares social media stories about people planning to leave the country after an electoral defeat which they find appalling, but in this case I do know one person actively working in that direction, convinced as he is that Trump is going to lay the foundations of an undemocratic, authoritarian state that we won’t be able turn back from.

I don’t think that’s likely, but I do think it’s possible. I also think that the best way to deal with such possibilities is to involve oneself—or, if you’re already involved, get involved even more—with one’s local community, culture, service opportunities, and politics. So today I went to another meeting about parking in downtown Wichita, got into some entirely graspable, non-theoretical, non-fascist arguments with local leaders and others whom I both agree and disagree with (many of whom surely voted for Trump), and it was wonderful. No doubt I’ll once again have something to say about it all soon.

In meantime, I’m an extrovert—I process through talking, writing, sharing thoughts and worries and ideas—as well as a political nerd, and so I have thoughts about Tuesday, beyond my early morning reflections from yesterday. None of them are original, but I may be able to suggest some additions or comparisons to or among them. Basically, I am seeing four main lines of argument emerging among the hot-takes and the as-yet-incomplete electoral and exit polling and survey data out there, at least among the actually serious pundits and observers I follow. The goal is to account for the electoral reality that was clear by late Tuesday night: that support for Donald Trump and the Republicans increased has increased (in general overall, save with white women, but especially among Hispanic men) and that support for the Democratic coalition, under the leadership of Kamala Harris, dropped dramatically (particularly among self-defined Independents).

First, there is the anti-establishment/anti-incumbent/anti-government argument, expertly expressed by my old friend Damon Linker here. Basically, we see throughout the world a profound distrust in all governing institutions and in anyone who defends or seems to represent those governing institutions. Which means that meaning that Harris’s affirmation of Biden’s government programs, her invoking the support of established institutional bodies or agencies or leaders, or her trying to rile people up by accusing Trump (accurately!) of attacking said institutions and programs, just can't capture as many votes as people thought it might (particularly on the basis of the apparent effectiveness of that argument for Biden in the 2022 midterms).

Second, there is the economic argument. So many people have either explicit or, more commonly, vague concerns about their own economic prospects or stability (remember that most people who report concerns about the economy also report that they are personally doing okay), particularly as regards big ticket items--buying a house, paying for college, surviving surgery—that inflation-inflected costs which are, both historically and comparatively, manageable  (gas and food prices) are legitimately magnified in peoples' (particularly low income or entrepreneurial/self-employed peoples') minds, and thus economic worries punch above their weight.

 Third, there is the racism and sexism argument, in all its varieties (though I like the way Tom Nichols expressed it here). One doesn’t have to believe that the majority, or even a plurality, of Trump voters are committed white supremacists to recognize that the number of Independents and moderate Republicans who are open to voting against their own partisan socialization and/or social group when given a message they like or at least are okay that is expressed by an older white male just might be larger than the number of Independents and moderate Republicans who are open to doing the same when the message is expressed by a black female. The messenger matters, in other words.

Fourth, the structural or small-d democratic argument, which Ezra Klein partly makes here. The argument is that, when Biden declared that he was running for re-election after the 2022 midterms, certain restrictions were locked in as far the Democratic party was concerned. There was no Democratic primary, which had two results: 1) it provided the Republicans with an actually persuasive (even if duplicitous) argument that the Democratic nominee had never won an election on her own, thus undermining, particularly among low-information voters, arguments against Trump's authoritarianism, and 2) it robbed Harris and the Democrat party itself of all the procedural campaign advantages (name recognition, position polishing, candidacy distinguishing, etc.) which come along with the way general elections operate in the United States. In lacking this, Harris went into a profoundly shortened general election (and it’s worth noting that almost no one who is actually experienced in presidential campaigns thinks her team actually failed to make the best of a bad situation) without a strong positive message that fit the mood of the electorate she actually needed to win.

All of these are obviously true to one degree or another, and there are different ways in which we can see them amplifying one another. For example, the one might argue—as both Chris Hedges and David Brooks have argued, though in very different ways—that the lack of any kind of genuinely radical, Sanders-esque, and therefore “disruptive” economic proposals to addresses the immense costs of housing, medical, tuition, etc., coming from the Harris campaign, made it easier for Trump to claim the mantle of the person with the true “challenge the status quo” economic plan, thus covering both arguments #1 and #2. (Yes, President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act were both truly impressive progressive accomplishments, but their very lack of visibility strengthened the ease to which voters, if they even knew about these laws, would have considered them—not unreasonably—as just more of the usual tweaks to an economic system whose fundamental unfairness cannot be denied.) And that’s just one example of the ways all these diagnoses, as well as others that, as the election analysis continues on, are bound to emerge. other ways of processing this massive (though, actually, in terms of the number of people who actually voted in the election, maybe not actually quite “massive”) failure will emerge.

Will it turn out to have been a realignment election? I am instinctively doubtful, partly because I’m not sure the comparatively smaller number of people who actually voted in the election justifies such a broad conclusion, and also because last time I thought so I turned out to be quite wrong. So I hold to that possibility—the hope that Trump is something which, for all the harms I believe his administration will cause, both at home and abroad, to our economy and our foreign policy but maybe most of all to our once-actually-striving-to-be democratic political culture, we will live through, and find some new, probably much diminished, but still worthwhile ordinary politics on the other side. That is what gives my frustrated, still-processing brain a little bit of peace, at least; maybe it will to others as well.

Not a Mea Culpa, But Like Unto It

When Trump won in 2016, I was genuinely flummoxed—disappointed and angry and frustrated as well, of course, but mostly just confused. It signaled the breakdown of practically every electoral pattern that I'd spent the previous 25 years schooling myself in. One of the results was that, while I'm not sure I ever fully believed all the screams about Trump as a Russian agent and all the other "resistance" stuff (what if Clinton called upon the Electoral College to reject Trump as unfit and just pick some other Republican as president? what if the deep state simply refused to acknowledge him as Commander-in-Chief and created a shadow government behind closed doors?), I gave it all far more credence and sympathetic attention than any subsequent, actually reasonable assessment of the situation showed it deserved.

This time, I'm not confused; I can see how it is both politically and electorally possible for a stupid, corrupt, wanna-be authoritarian to craft a message that works, relative to the other option on the table, for what will be, in the end, probably over 75 million Americans—almost certainly only a tiny fraction of whom are themselves inclined to fascism, and probably only a moderately larger fraction of whom rejected the other option on the table for what might be considered fascist-adjacent reasons. I didn't want to believe that, to randomly guess, some 60 million American voters would actually either disbelieve Trump's criminality and authoritarianism or consider it forgivable in light of various issues (like my mother's belief that Trump will keep America out of wars). But the evidence is there, and it's eminently believable.

For 20 years, since Bush's re-election in 2004, I've heard Democrats, liberals, leftists, progressives, Christian socialists, and whatever else the people on what is mostly my side of our endless political divides call themselves, look at Republican candidates and look at election results and say: "too bad for America; it was nice while it lasted." As much as I sympathized with the sentiment behind that phrase, and as much as was—and probably always will be—open to taking seriously the presumptions behind it, I really don't think I ever fully believed it. As Dr. Manhattan made very clear, nothing ever ends, so I don't believe it now either. But good grief, my fellow 66 million Americans who made the what I believe to be the right choice, if we don't (and I truly do include myself in that "we") see this as the conclusion of one more iteration of the story of the boy who called wolf, then where the hell are we?

How Informational Overload Destroyed American Democracy (Maybe)

[A slightly different version of this essay appears in Current.]

James Davison Hunter's new book, Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Politics Crisis, is a wonderful, provocative, and also I think ultimately depressing synthesis of America’s cultural history. “Wonderful” because, while Hunter–as he says at the outset of the book–provides no new historical research, the “selective and interpretive history of American public and political life” (p. xv) which it provides is filled with insights and comparisons worth pondering. “Provocative” because those insights and comparisons point out connections that reveal deep-seated problems that sit directly alongside the very assumptions which most of those who value the liberal democracy Americans have attempted to build over the past two and a half centuries hold dear. And ultimately somewhat “depressing” because, despite the book’s Coda explicitly invoking the idea of hope and providing descriptions of the conditions for such regarding America’s future, it is hard to take in the cultural scope of those aforementioned deep-seated problems and not think, whatever his protestations, Hunter may well be convinced that American-style liberal democracy will not emerge from its present crisis–and as someone who explicitly describes our country’s particular political experiment as “among the greatest achievements of human history” (p. xvi), that can’t help but come off as a little sad.

Let’s begin with the wonderful and provocative parts first. In writing a history of the cultural underpinnings of America’s liberal democracy, Hunter begins by refusing to specifically define what it is he’s talking about. The closest he comes is when he writes that the “ideational center-piece” of democracy in America includes “the premises and principles of individual and collective freedom and representative self-government,” along with the recognition that “society is inherently diverse in its interests, ideas, values, and commitments,” necessitating the creation of governmental “mechanisms for addressing...differences in ways that can lead to common goods” (p. 13) Any of those premises, values, or mechanisms could, of course, be subject endless philosophical and practical debate–and it becomes clear from the start of his history that being purposefully indeterminate about those endless philosophical and practical debates is exactly the point. Repeatedly, Hunter insists that the genius of America’s expansive and always changing demos is that it has, until lately, remained capable of doing the “working through” (he prefers the German term durcharbeiten) which solidarity requires primarily because America’s self-understandings were and are not definitive, nor clear. The context in which these self-understandings arose Hunter calls America’s “hybrid-Enlightenment,” and that context involved, in his view, certain necessary conditions. But so long as those conditions obtained, the self-understandings which followed were regularly opaque, implicit, vague, inarticulable, and that is what made them so valuable, because it made America’s liberal democratic identity adaptable, yet still plausibly continuous with what came before. In his words, “a very specifically American adaptation of the Enlightenment project provided the cultural conditions for the emergence of liberal democracy in America...[and] because of its unique adaptation, flexibility, and opacity, it could in principle...evolve and adapt to historical circumstances over two centuries (p. 49).

He follows this praise of America’s liberal democratic order, however, with the sad observation that “for all that we can see, those conditions are no longer present.” Why is that?

Hunter is far too learned a scholar to propose any single overriding explanation; over the nearly 300 pages which make up the heart of his historical analysis (basically from chapter 4, “America’s Hybrid-Enlightenment” to chapter 11, “A Great Unraveling”) Hunter touches upon an enormous range of intellectual, political, and economic developments, and the responses, involving both inclusion and “boundary work,” which he presents them as having given rise to. Hunter does not present any of the cultural conditions upon which this range of ideas and arguments played out as singularly foundational, but if any comes close to that title, it’s probably what he describes as America’s “epistemology of transcendence,” a “synthesis between the Reformed Christian and secular Enlightenment traditions over the eighteenth century.” As he elaborated: “Even though it was understood in radically different and somewhat competing ways, the notion of transcendence at play was sufficiently capacious as a concept and sufficiently opaque as a sensibility that it could absorb a plurality of views, opinions, and traditions” (p. 60). Accepted by nearly all as the default presumption of nearly all argument and contestation in American life–up to and including the fight over slavery, since in President Lincoln’s famous words, both the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War “read the same Bible and pray to the same God”–this sense of transcendence endured in American life well into the 20^th century, continually allowing those in positions of authority, however constructed or challenged, to speak “a common language and a common grammar,” thereby sowing “the seeds of social solidarity” even in our deepest disputes. 

Hunter, to be sure, is not inattentive to the changes and costs involved in these disputes which what he presents as a long-enduring condition enabled. On the contrary, he lays out, with wonderfully incisive details, many stages in the articulation of, defense of, and overturning of understandings of America’s common culture. There is the rise of the America’s self-understanding as a Protestant Christian republic; its contested collapse in the wake of the Civil War and high levels of immigration; the emergence of religiously inspired (or at least informed) reform movements throughout the late 19^th and into the 20^th centuries; and then the hollowing out of such movements by the economically and technologically enabled power of neoliberal individualism in the decades immediately following World War II; and much more. While there is in all these details multiple points that could be challenged, it is, in many ways, a deeply persuasive and even wise reading of American intellectual history, climaxing in a frustrating half-century of cultural dissolution that began in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to heal America: “King’s rhetoric....generate[d] greater solidarity than ever before on matters of race in large part because his appeal drew upon underlying assumptions...embedded within America’s hybrid-Enlightenment’s surface and deep structures....It was not to last” (p. 199).

Why didn’t last? Again, Hunter provides a wide range of interrelated explanations, delving into political theories, globalizing economies, and education paradigms. But where I believe his analysis turns most provocative is in his discussion of “the nearly infinite multiplication of sources of information–the so-called ‘marketplace of ideas’–and the bewildering number of choices it forces upon all of us,” adding that “the entire informational ecosystem spawned by the new communications technologies and the market dynamics by which they proliferate...render truth and reality beside the point” (pp. 306-307). Hunter never makes this connection explicit, but it seems to me an obvious reading of his cultural analysis. If liberal democratic solidarity is invariably tied up in some kind inchoate trust in the transcendent validity of that which is employed as a common language or invoked as a common authority, and if the very concept of certain principles and practices possessing some kind of transcendent validity depends upon the endurance of cultural conditions whose public meanings are, by definition, undefinable and opaque and adaptable and implicit...then is it not reasonable that the swamp of information–always highly detailed, highly personalized, and highly contentious information, to be sure!--which surrounds us all could be exactly that which is undermining those conditions? To invoke an essay on a related topic I wrote in the wake of the 2000 elections, might it be that the anger and anxiety which characterized that terrible year was at least partly due to “an omnipresent social media ecosystem which rips context from every story,” leading us to believe that “the norms held to by one, or some, or all of the different sub-communities of this country...have been, or are being, challenged, upended, revealed to be otherwise than what we believe, or maybe just simply betrayed?”

I do not mean to reduce Hunter’s wonderfully provocative reading of America’s current condition to my own pre-occupations. Still, when Hunter acknowledges the fact that the cultural conditions for liberal democracy as he understands them actually do still abound on the local level, resulting in “an abundance of goodwill among ordinary citizens who are willing to do the difficult work of coming together to find democratic solutions to the problems they face,” yet concludes that “the interconnected cultural economies of technology, media and social media, the party system, and the like...render all such grassroots efforts ineffective” (elsewhere he wrote “There is no end to good intentions among ordinary citizens, but good intentions are no match for the kind of institutional power wielded by Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and their kind”), it’s perhaps reasonable to see the heart of his fear for America dwelling in the fact that our hybrid-Enlightenment adaptation was perhaps just not designed for a world of public discourse wherein “there is not no authority by which questions of truth or reality or public ethics could be settled definitively” since “it is not clear that anything is capable of penetrating [our] echo chambers” (pp. 300-301, 306, 367-369).

Hunter’s own sober and careful conclusions boil down to a hope for slow cultural work and a “paradigm shift” that would involve a sense of realism: “that the sources of social conflict can never be eliminated,” and “that politics is an administrative apparatus and is thus severely limited in what it can accomplish.” Such realism would mitigate against associating political elections with “redemptive or salvific” causes, and encourage the depoliticization of much of public life (pp. 378-380).To give his ideas some hope of survival, I wonder if his own analysis points towards the need for a more stringent structural and technological critique of how we share ideas in the first place—and how we might address the informational overload whose hyper-politicization crowds out the adaptative discussion of once more open-ended and opaque concepts, thus allowing us to do so again.

On Fascists, Jesus, and Woody Guthrie

I’m awake early this morning, thanks to a headache, after going to bed late last night following 2 ½ hours of talking about yesterday’s terrible news at a local news station, filming comments for their late night and early morning news segments, and I’m thinking about Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and also Woody Guthrie’s guitar.

There’s certainly a truth in that statement, and those of us who think Trump was a terrible president and would (perhaps will) make an even worse one the second time around should not be so blinkered as to deny that truth. But it is not the whole truth, and unless one assumes the human beings are machines that simply respond to the inputs they receive, with no conscious thought, no reflection, no personal judgment whatsoever along the way, a larger truth must be insisted upon. And this is where, perhaps especially because this is Sunday, I get religious. (I owe this particular reflection to the late-last-night comments of my fellow Kansas writer, Joel Mathis.)

The story that has come down to us through the text known as the Book of Matthew has Jesus preaching a sermon, where among many other civilization-changing principles, He is presented as saying in chapter 5, verses 43 through 46 (most famously in the translation found in the King James Version of the Bible):

“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.  But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?”

It is notable, I think, that Jesus is not presented as having said that one’s enemies aren’t actually that—that they are actually your neighbors, actually your fellow human beings, your fellow children of our “Father which is in heaven,” and therefore lovable. No, instead the received text presents Him as saying acknowledging enemies as exactly that: enemies, opponents, those who disagree with and “despitefully use” and even “persecute” those to whom He is speaking (which, for believers like myself, means all of us). He is calling for us to turn away from hate—and thus also, I think it is reasonable to say, violence—when it comes to even those who we see as enemies to that which we hold dear.

This is, in some ways, the most difficult of all Christian teachings. So difficult, you might say, that even the greatest American leaders, even leaders as familiar with the teachings found in the Christian Bible as Abraham Lincoln, chose to lessen its sharpness when confronted with the enormities it implies. In his First Inaugural Address, he insisted as he finished “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” Every political expression must, of course, be guided by a sense of prudence, and articulated in reference to both the aspirations and the reality of the polis that one is speaking of—and, in Lincoln’s case, was trying to save—and so I’ve no criticism of what Lincoln was attempting to rhetorically accomplish at that moment in 1861, when the divisions over the evils of slavery had led to the point of secession and war. But it is nonetheless worth noting that Jesus presented a different possibility: that the affection can and should still exist, even if the bonds which tie people together, which prevent them from seeing one another as an enemy, have been broken.

What does that mean, in practice? Well, if worse comes to absolute worse, it may mean pacifism in the face of direct violence, it means showing love even when those being shown love respond with persecution and death. But less than that point, it could mean Woody Guthrie’s condemnation of fascism—with a guitar.

Of course, by the time Guthrie first started writing that message on his guitar, it was 1943, and America’s involvement in the world war against the Nazis of Germany, the fascists of Italy, and the war party which had take control of Japan, had been in full swing for over a year. Yet Guthrie himself connected that message to something much broader than even that global conflict, to a fight that extended back to the Great Depression and the struggle against “economic turmoil and social disintegration” in general. That Guthrie supported the war effort was undeniable. And yet, it remains important I think, that his machine was not a gun, not a weapon, but a musical instrument. A guitar. Which, unless you use it to bash someone over the head, and maybe not even then, can’t kill anyone. But it, and the music it makes, can kill the ideas and movements that make fascists. Who were clearly people that Guthrie regarded as an enemy. He was no pacifist, and made no criticism of soldiers fighting in World War II. Yet still, hold onto that image: the image of fighting fascism with music, not (or at least not only) violence.

As I wrote above, every political action and expression should be guided by prudential judgment: we really should think, as much and as often as we can, about where and when to apply whatever tools and talents we have to promote that which we believe. That’s the churn of participatory democracy, and it’s something I believe in, as both good and wise. It is possible—it’s always possible—that some moment will be revealed as a Rubicon, the crossing of which leaves all conversation and argument and democratic contestation behind and suggests that guitars must be turned into guns. All I can say in the face of that logical point is: resist it, the way Jesus called us to resist it, the way that image of a defiant, guitar-wielding, fascist-“killing” Guthrie resists it. That resistance may, ultimately, be the most prudent, most purely (if naively) democratic action of all.

I’ve been pretty clear that I consider Trump a danger to the flawed but nonetheless real virtues of the flawed but nonetheless still functioning liberal democracy called the United States of America. “Fascist-adjacent” is the term I’ve used, and until and unless Trump himself shares evidence otherwise, I’m going to consider him an authoritarian, or at the very best a quasi-authoritarian threat, to whatever political goods America’s dysfunctional system can still provide. But I’ve also recognized that something similar can be said about practically every American president in my lifetime. That doesn’t wipe away the concern; that doesn’t make me think “oh well, if Johnson and Reagan and Obama were in some ways similar, then clearly our 45^th president can’t be all that different, or all that bad.” I can still, and should still, recognize and respond to dangers when I see them. But I won’t respond with violence, and I denounce anyone who does, or who apologizes for such. Violence can’t save us from a political danger—in fact, it can only result in the closing down of the politics that we are trying to save. That’s the message I take this morning from Jesus, and Woody Guthrie (who were probably more similar, in the end, then latter would have ever expected). I pray it’s a message others will take too.

A Comic (But Not Comical) Take on Mormon History

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

As an intellectually-inclined, book-obsessed, life-long member of the Mormon Church, I have read many histories of my religion. I’ve read so many, in fact, that unfortunately I sometimes forget that such histories aren’t necessarily being written for knowledgeable believers like myself, and I end up criticizing them for getting some small detail wrong or for skipping over some academic controversy, forgetting that the purpose of good histories is to tell a story, one that draws you in. And when it comes to telling a story about a religious movement, presenting something compelling is essential, because if the story-teller can’t convey the circumstances or the feeling that drew people into the faith in the first place, the history can’t succeed at all.

All of that is to say that I wish I had been able to get over my intellectual pre-occupations and more fully enjoy the amazing accomplishment of Noah Van Sciver’s JosephSmith and the Mormons–a wonderfully researched and captivatingly (and sometimes quite beautifully) drawn graphic novel when I first read it. Across more than 400 pages, Sciver presents an unconventional telling of the 19^th-century, frontier American beginnings of the faith he was raised in, departed long ago, but has maintained a curiosity about and a confused sympathy for ever since. The tale it tells is mostly straightforward; it emphasizes some characters who rarely get much attention in typical Mormon histories, mostly bypasses some of the most intriguing beats in the story of Mormonism, and some might even argue that it is overly apologetic in its treatment of Joseph Smith. But as a literary whole, it needs to be acknowledged as a history as solid as many more scholarly ones, something I didn’t appreciate at first.

But given that most readers won’t be engaging this book in scholarly terms, let’s focus on its artwork and its comic method. As a work of visual story-telling, the novel–which Sciver worked on for years–is stunning in its craft, even if you’re not a fan of the purposefully rough, earthy, stylized naturalism of his drawings. Most impressively, Sciver chose to never insert himself in the panels as an omniscient narrator. Instead, whether he was introducing the historical actors of his story (beginning with Smith himself, whom he depicts as a hard-working, religiously sensitive young man with a weirdly magnetic personality, busy contributing to his family through difficult labor and occasional treasure hunting) or providing transitions as the locations change (the books follows the community formed around Smith’s revelations, particularly the Book of Mormon, as it moved–sometimes due to persecution, sometimes due to self-induced financial calamities–from New York to Ohio to Missouri to, ultimately, Nauvoo), every panel is either a stand-alone visual or includes dialogue between characters, most of which are well attested within existing historical records. (In a concluding section, Sciver lists the works of history and biography that most guided his research into the conversations and conflicts that he builds his story around.) Thus, as an artistic and historical story-telling project alone, especially in capturing the crude sectarian violence and near-Pentecostal religious passion which characterized the early years of Smith’s religion-building, as well as the sense of holiness and deliverance it promised, Sciver’s work deserves great praise.

Consider these examples, taken from Sciver’s own website. First, a depiction of the moment, soon after the founding of the church, when Smith was tarred and feathered, in the attempt to get him to abandon his visions and get out of town:

 

Next, a series of panels dramatizing Smith’s preaching, as he uses the story later related in the Book of Moses to provide an inspiring history of, and prophesied future for, the world:

 

Finally, Sciver’s haunting artistic recreation of the notorious reading of Smith’s revelation on plural marriage to Emma Smith (whom Sciver depicts as a long-suffering, tragic believer in her husband’s promises and revelations):

Those looking for panels exposing Joseph Smith as con-artist will be disappointed, as will those looking to see him discoursing faithfully with angels. Sciver’s style is to bring to life that which his contemporaries, both believers and enemies, said about Smith and his words, and his choices are intriguing. The inner life he is able to visually grant to Emma is touching, and his treatment of Bennett led me to feel like I could partly understand his motivations, and that's no small accomplishment.

In sum, there are many fine scholarly histories of Mormonism out there, but not nearly as many books which effectively tell the story of the beginning of Mormonism in a way which respects the appeal which enabled it to emerge from those early years and become the major religious institution it is today, an institution that, for all its many flaws, is still adhered to by people like me. Sciver’s comic shows a compassionate curiosity about those people, and for that he has my thanks.

Michael Austin, Vardis Fisher, and the Death of the Mormo-American

[Cross-posted to By Common Consent]

Michael Austin, a fellow blogger and old friend, wrote an essay nearly 30 years ago that accomplished what most of us intellectual scribblers can only aspire towards: putting into a words a framework for understanding a problem or question which endures, even if the problem or question does not. This is definitely the case for Michael's "The Function of Mormon Literary Criticism at the Present Time." Most of the specific examples and engagements in that essay are probably inextricable from the intellectual debates of American Mormonism during the 1980s and 1990s, but his general observations--that "embedded in the assertion that there is such a thing as 'Mormon literature' is the claim that we, as Mormons, and particularly as American Mormons, represent a cultural entity whose traditions, heritage, and experience deserve to be considered a vital part of the American mosaic," and "we are [not just] Mormons, but...are "Mormo-Americans"--remain provocative and vital. In fact, the deepest importance of his latest book cannot, I think, be fully appreciated without them.

Michael obviously wasn't the first to look at the American citizens and others who had built a distinct social world along the Mormon Corridor of Idaho-Utah-Arizona and more from the late 19th-century into the middle of the 20th; sociologists, historians, and political scientists have long done the same, and continue to do so. But Michael was, to my knowledge anyway, the first to connect the language of ethnography to that of literary (self-)presentation. In other words, if we want to understand how we talk about and write about ourselves, whether for internal audiences or external ones, we have to keep in mind the fact that American Mormonism, by the first part of the 20th century, had essentially become an ethnicity, a people with a situated particularity, and that whatever one did with or against the cultural or religious or political implications or associations of that particularity, its positioning was paramount. (Keep in mind that "was.") As Michael put it, "since Mormonism--like Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, or existentialism--contains its own philosophical assumptions and values, it does not matter what we ultimately write about but who we write as."

The aim of Michael's wonderful short book Vardis Fisher: A Mormon Novelist is to reveal that "as" in Fisher. He shows how this a talented, hard-working, arrogant, and obsessive writer--an intelligent, opinionated, selfish, sometimes cruel but also guilt-wracked man, a hard-bitten survivor of a desperately poor Mormon settlement in southeastern Idaho at the turn of the 20th-century--expressed himself through his inherited ethnic particularity, despite his own insistence of having rejected it entirely. In the book, Michael (drawing upon earlier work he's done) succinctly weaves together Fisher's biography, a literary analysis of many of Fisher's published works, a portrait of American publishing in the first half of the 20th century, and--in my opinion, most importantly--a vivid, however partial, picture of what it meant to be a marginal hanger-on in the Mormon ethnic world during arguably its most flourishing and tightest phase (say the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s), as Fisher most definitely was. It makes for informative, insightful reading, something that I'd encourage anyone at all curious about American Mormonism to check out, even if their interest in mid-century American literature is zero. I say this because, ultimately, I see this as at least as much a work of cultural and religious exploration as a work of literary critique. Michael's concluding observation--"Vardis Fisher was a religious unbeliever...but Mormonism was the religion that he didn't believe in"--may not be an entirely original formulation, but I couldn't help but feel it indirectly putting its finger on something essential.

That essential thing is the assumption about Mormonness which enabled Michael to formulate a way to cut through and re-frame arguments about Mormon literature ("faithful" vs. "faithless," etc.) decades ago. It is the assumption that one can--and that someone like Fisher did--express a Mormon identity without actually believing or advocating for any of it, meaning that it has, surrounding and accompanying and attending to its truth claims about the universe and sin and God and salvation, an embodied, communal, historically and spatially particular worldview. Again, there are many ways in which many who read this blog post would consider that an old and banal observation: in our lives, or in the lives of those we know or work with or love, the labels "cultural Mormon" or "DNA Mormon" or "raised Mormon," etc., get employed all the time. But Michael's patient work with Fisher presents the argument that, for at least Fisher and those of the social worlds he lived in and moved through, his claim about "who we write as" was (again, a "was") stronger than merely talking about the assorted quotidian practices and preferences inherited by those who were raised in a Mormon family or attended a Mormon university or whatever. Fisher's "Mormo-Americanness," his gestalt, was an active, morally shaping constant in his literary expressions. Through Vridar Hunter, the fictional protagonist of Fisher's "Antelope" novels and stories, he articulates what could be labeled a fiercely individualistic, Mormo-American way of being an Idahoan; more broadly and abstractly, through the shifting protagonists of his sprawling Testament of Man series that Fisher obsessively worked on through the final two decades of his life, he articulates a defiantly self-aggrandizing, Mormo-American vision of the whole human race, complete with secular prophets (always male), constantly searching for an ever-evolving truth.

Do I find these implicit ways and visions of how to be in the world appealing? No; actually they mostly strike me as somewhat monomaniacal and stupid (though I trust Michael's judgment that the specific plots which advance them often make for good reading). So why did I finish Vardis Fisher and feel both fulfilled and kind of sad? Because I realized that that worldview, that particularity, which became arguably monomaniacal and stupid in Fisher's hands, was nonetheless one that I knew in my bones. And it's also one that, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, began to die. It has had many killers: the consequences of post-WWII missionary work, which slowly but surely loosened the Americanness of Mormonism; the rise of church correlation and centralization, which slowly but surely eliminated the spaces within our institutionalized faith for diverse cultural expressions; the technological and economic developments which gave rise to broad cultural conflicts, ones that American Mormonism, being centered in the politically conservative American west, slowly but surely positioned itself alongside evangelical Christianity regarding; and many more. But all together they bring us to point where, for all sorts of reasons--many of them eminently defensible!--the Americanness, even the literal "Mormon"-ness, of this ethnicity, this identity, that at one time structured the cultural and social world(s) of so many of our families and communities, is officially discouraged, sometimes even formally condemned.

It's not total, of course; it's just about impossible to truly, finally, kill off a cultural or ethnic identity. Perhaps as long as Steven Peck is writing novels, or Jerusha and Jared Hess are making movies, some kind of Mormo-American perspective will remain. Or maybe the ecclesiastical and socio-economic squelching of the institutional supports for Mormo-Americanness will just in turn allow for some social space for other Mormon ethnicities to express themselves in writing or music or art (keep on the look-out for Mormo-Mexican or Mormo-Maori literature, perhaps). But for all that, as a white male 1960s-born American Mormon, even one who fervently agrees with no less an authority than Orson Scott Card that Mormon church basketball was a horror that has been justly nuked from orbit (or from the Church Office Building), and even as one who recognizes that dumping Boy Scouts of America was a move the church probably should have made decades ago, I finished Michael's fine book, and felt the loss. Vardis Fisher was clearly a bit of a jerk. But that talented jerk was our jerk, and we can know it, even if he denied it. And that sense of belonging, limited or perverse or ridiculously out-of-date as it may be, nonetheless, I think, ennobled both Fisher and the Mormo-American world he was part of. Thank you, Michael, for helping me see that.

Localism, Intentionality, and Utopia (Socialist or Otherwise)

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

There is an accusation which has been flung over the decades (if not centuries) at practically every sort of intentional community-building effort, thus oddly discovering something which apparently entirely disparate elements of the right and left have in common. Sometimes that accusation takes the form of condemnations of a supposedly unrealistic idealism, sometimes in terms of contempt for what is labeled a nostalgic myopia. But either way, the heart of all these attacks is the same: attempting to build communities of cooperation, equality, and justice, in contrast to the socio-economic self-interestedness which has been the rule for 300 years or more, is "utopian," and thus nonsensical and wrong. The ease of that accusation, and the fact that it has been and still is unthinkingly lobbed at intentional communities of every sort, makes it worthy of push-back, I think.

The caveat which those who fling the accusation will insist upon, of course, is that it is not all community-building activities which they think deserves their condemnation and contempt; only "comprehensive" community-building. And for most critics, that's probably correct--it would require an insanely individualist outlook to describe every effort to strengthen neighborhood ties (organizing a block party!), to secure social justice (expanding handicap accessibility!), or to serve the public through the provision of common goods (health insurance, public schools, environmental protection, the Veterans Administration, and more!) as instances of "utopianism." (That some people do in fact affirm such a nihilistic libertarianism is worth noting but not much more. There are also people who make life-size nude sculptures of Richard Nixon out of butter, and more power to them.) The great majority of those who look askance upon community-building would insist that they do not mean to reject every communitarian project; rather, what they reject is community-building visions and efforts that aspire to comprehensiveness--or, on my reading, the ones that aspire to topography.

My point in invoking topography is to bring up that element which everyone with the slightest interest in or affection for localism must take seriously: the topos, the place or location or referent upon on which one stands or acts. Such language is, of course, what gave birth to the accusation in the first place: Thomas More's 16th-century Utopia, the rationally organized "no-place" of agrarian communism, communal eating, universal health care, and chamber pots made of gold (so as to subliminally communicate a contempt for wealth). More's neologism, it should be noted, was perhaps not his intended one; Utopia concludes with an addendum in which More remarks upon the pun in his book's title, suggesting that the city is should be understood less as a dreamy "no-place" and more as a "good-place" that inspires: "not Utopia, but rather rightly my name is 'Eutopia,' a place of felicity." Whatever his intent, though, the history of the term is grasped easily enough: throughout history, there have been 1) those captivated by comprehensive visions of how to cooperate rather than compete, to encourage virtue and inclusion, to establish peace and justice, and to witness to the truth as they understand it, with the material articulations central to those visions involving the establishment of a distinct community, and 2) those who find any and all such visions dangerous and simply flawed. (And, of course, one can find plenty of capitalists in group 2) who will insist the "placeness" inherent to most populist challenges, distributist arguments, and mutualist alternatives means they're all in the same camp as the socialists and radicals in group 1), but let's stick with the clear communalist examples for now.)

The danger which can--and, tragically, often does--accompany any effort to establish a complete community in accordance with specific intentions, whether religious or ideological or both, is well established, both historically and theoretically. The genocidal historical record of many comprehensive society-shaping visions is incontestable (though whether the kill-count of all such revolutionary movements is greater or fewer than the kill-count of non-comprehensive, profit-motivated world historical slaughters like the African slave trade or the European colonization of the Americas is something I leave to the terminally morbid to calculate). Theoretically as well, the problems with this conceptualization of humanity's fundamentally social and political nature are large, though not insurmountable. Humankind's embodiment as distinct individuals means an organic, evolving pluralism will always be present in all our social and political orders, and the rationalist temptation which is entailed by many communitarian visions directly contradicts that, with frequently destructive results. 

But the emphasis there must be placed on "frequently," as opposed to "always." Human beings, despite (or perhaps as part of) our pluralism, regularly tend towards the dialogical and aspirational and spiritual, which means that what we truly are always reasoning about and reaching for--thanks to God or nature or both--is how to make our lives fit with that we consider to just and right and good: to achieve eudaimonia in our places, our topoi, and then make those places available to others. So while dangers and flaws of comprehensiveness must always be attended to, the topographical aspect of our spiritual and ideological longings is too central to the human character to dismiss it entirely. Indeed, if Wendell Berry is any guide, much of contemporary thinking reflects an overlearning (or an encouragement towards overlearning by those who benefit from our individualistic status quo) of the lessons of comprehensiveness. To automatically reject communitarian efforts and imaginings which involve the making of actual cooperative places as obviously pointless from the start is to succumb to a false sense of "inevitability...an economic and technological determinism, as heartless as it is ignorant" (Berry, The Art of Loading Brush, p. 51; more here).

So perhaps we can allow that the accusation of "utopianism" is not necessarily, or at least should not be accepted as necessarily, fatal to the communitarian imagination. But does that allowance have anything to do with localist projects, which, while obviously centrally concerned with places, rarely approach those topoi with any comprehensive vision in mind? While it is true that the watch-word for most genuinely localist politics today is "incremental," eschewing comprehensive reforms for the humble and the partial, there is, I think, a utopian element usually present nonetheless, hidden in the idea of "intentionality."

Every localist concern involves looking at a neighborhood, an association, or a community, and tending to it. That tending, however, unless wholly and unthinkingly reactionary (and if it were, then no communitarian tending would take place over the long haul at all, because to think outside of one's own immediate interest and one's own temporal moment is invariably aspirational), cannot help but involve an ideal, a vision--something that is intended. That intentionality, like comprehensiveness, can be dangerous is a simple sociological fact, but it is also that which grants community the transformative promise--whether personal or collective or both--which it has always held, separating us, as Aristotle observed, from otherwise equally "gregarious animals" like bees.

The difficult-to-dispute point that we form communities for the sake of collective ideals and not just individual interests--something every Bible-reader, at the very least, should have realized as soon as they came to the second chapter of Acts--has, perhaps, been made harder to swallow for many by the legacy of 19th and 20th-century socialisms, particularly the statist, scientific socialisms of the Marxist variety. But even there, a fuller appreciation of the history such surprising diversity. The Oxford political theorist David Leopold has made a career out of exploring and undermining (or at least seriously complicating) the rationalist, universalist, non-utopian reading of Marx's legacy, arguing that even within the first century of the modern European socialist movement, when the materialist assumption of universal revolution were strongest, you nonetheless can find robust expressions of and arguments about the age-old understanding of socialism as a cooperative, communitarian ideal, as something that must necessarily be rooted in the organically constructed architecture of a locality and place. The intermingling of these became even more pronounced as the revolutionary determinism of Marx's early interpreters was replaced with a recognition of the inevitability, even sometimes the value, of party politics in democratic countries. Ultimately, Leopold suggests, the differences between place-obsessed reformers like Robert Owen, the founder of New Harmony who constantly experimented with forming small, cooperative, egalitarian communities (what Leopold calls the "communal" or "horizontal" strategy), and detail-oriented policy wonks like Sidney Webb and Beatrice Potter, early members of the Fabian Society who worked within the Labor party to introduce specific egalitarian and collective policies to the whole of the United Kingdom (what Leopold calls the "political" or "vertical" strategy), are not nearly as great as their similarities.

You don't need to work out the historical implications of such political theories to recognize the truth of that judgment, though--you could, instead, simply look at the real world example of dozens of intentional communities and communes and collective projects throughout history, and the mixed perspectives they embodied. You could look at the Bruderhof, an Amish-inspired movement of deeply traditional Christians, organized into communities of cooperation and equality around the world, whose communal devotion have led them to a political position of uncompromising pacifism. Or you could look at Koinonia Farm, an intentional community of believers in Georgia who humbly practice sustainable agriculture, but were also central to shaping, in the face of enormous racial hostility, the non-violent resistance which politically defined much of the civil rights movement in America.

Or, much less celebratedly but with no less admiration, you could look to the Solidarity Collective, a cooperative association of activists, artists, and democratic socialists, deeply committed to the vision of living sustainably and defending justice in Laramie, Wyoming. Close to four years ago, the collective was founded by several passionate workers and dreamers, one of whom is an old and dear friend; its charter (read it here!) is frankly revolutionary in its vision of a fully democratic and inclusive socialism, while its actual operations reflect the difficult, patient, humbling work of living in accordance with "utopian" ideals of cooperation and consensus. It was at the invitation of my old friend that I began to seriously reflect on the particularity--including the topographic particularity, or simply the "locality"--incumbent to the physically and emotionally demanding labor and negotiations involved in building a home, a refuge, and a community that seeks to exemplify its ideals, and has only the material and psychological resources which its own members can bring to it. As no doubt everyone who has ever been part of an attempt to comprehend and bring to life a community (or a church, a labor union, a co-op, or any other such idealistic effort), sometimes it seems that community "always fails." With typical honesty, the members of the collective turned their own impasses into a podcast episode, talking about how impossible it sometimes seems to bring everyone laborious work into "union" with one another...and why they keep trying anyway. (Hint: it's because, in part, they genuinely believe in the place--the house, the farm, the community, and the human resources through which they are enabling to flourish--which they're building.)

Listening to that podcast, as members of the collective honestly and searchingly challenge one another regarding the roots of their manifold struggles, I was struck at how intentionally and comprehensively pushing against the norms of capitalist modernity in the 21st-century requires practices that have not changed much since the 19th century, or earlier. In Chris Jennings wonderful history, Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism (though his focus is really just the story of the early utopian movements which emerged in the context of Protestant revivals in Europe and America and the Great Awakenings they were part of), he lays out one of the secrets of the success of the Oneida Community, whose radical communism--which included the sharing of not just all property and work, but of sexual partners as well--endured in the face intense opposition and deep internal divisions for more than a generation:

"[T]he biggest reason the Perfectionists were able to maintain communal harmony despite such fraught circumstances was institutional: a form of weekly group therapy that they called 'mutual criticism'....[B]y the time the community relocated to Oneida, regular sessions of mutual criticism had become a central pillar of [what the followers of John Humphrey Noyce, the found of the community, called] Bible Communism....As the Perfectionists got better at mutual criticism, most of them came to regard it as a vital catharsis and an essential means of maintaining the colony's delicate social harmony. It functioned like a cross between confession, performance review, and psychoanalysis, but crowdsourced. The fact that everyone had a turn in the hot seat took some of the sting our of the ordeal....One man was cautioned that he had 'masculinity carried to excess. There is not enough woman in him'....Perhaps most important, the regular sessions of mutual criticism allowed the colonists to air the countless minor aggravations that will erode a cooperative colony from within if left to fester" (pp. 346-348).

It is probable that Jennings would not entirely agree with my likening of the practices of the comprehensive community-builders of the 19th century with those of today. In his view, while the revival of intentional efforts to create alternative forms of life over the past half-century is admirable--"[l]ike the nineteenth-century utopians, the long-haired communards of the sixties and seventies rejected the prevailing values of their day as morally corrupt and expressed that rejection through the total reconfiguration of their own daily lives"--their intentionality is of a lesser category entirely: "[a]lthough the communalists of the sixties and seventies tried (and often succeeded) to build strongholds of cooperation, pleasure, and consciousness amid the mercantile bustle of American life, they...expressed a secessionist impulse--a leave-taking from the World...[and thus their] revolution was more personal and, ultimately, far less utopian" (pp. 379-380). But I find this unfair, because it wrongly assumes that any envisioning of a place that isn't millenniarian--that is, that doesn't proclaim it to be a model for a world which teeters on the edge of total destruction and/or transformation--has no radicalism, no true utopianism, to it at all.

In a world where the pluralism of the human condition has been, for centuries, from the age of imperialism to that of industrialization and beyond, both subject to and expected to express itself through an ever-evolving, ever-varying, but nonetheless also ever-expanding, technologically-enabled socio-economic universalization, privatization, and individuation, it seems to me that any attempt to build into one's topos principles and practices that aspire to, or at least are in dialogue with, ideals of social justice and civic strength and equality, cannot help but involve at least a degree of comprehensiveness, a degree to utopian hope. To quote the striving local socialists of the Solidarity Collective, "there are many potential models of anti-capitalist activism and politics," and the search for "cooperative, sustainable systems" will always be a matter of "good-faith deliberation."

Such deliberation--or "mutual criticism," for that matter--isn't a rejection of the possibility of building a locality of such comprehensive, communitarian "felicity" that others will be inspired and transformed by it, and thus go forward to build other such "eu-topian" communities in other places. (That is, in fact, exactly the primary aim of the Solidarity Collective: as they write, "We hope that by creating a thriving, fun, and engaged non-capitalist ecosystem we can demonstrate the viability of a more cooperative and less oppressive way of life and hence attract more people to our cause.") What it is, is a recognition that such places shouldn't be conceived as environments that will just rationally unfold, without particular work done by particular people in particular topoi. Thus, maybe, does incrementalism and utopianism meet. If you're looking intentionally at your locality, wanting to make it more just and more civil and more communal--with, say, cooperative food practices, responsible energy usage, democratic decision-making, and social arrangements premised upon love and respect rather than financial and racial advantage--well, that doesn't automatically make you into a communard, fully engaged in the struggle to build a comprehensively new world. But it does mean, I think, that you probably share more with those inspired folk than you may think.