Advent Adventure

AN ADVENT ADVENTURE

Do universal values, such as the true, the good, the beautiful, and the just, exist?  Could we not suggest, without contradiction, that these values are the object of an agreement of the universal audience?  These values are the object of a universal agreement as long as they remain undetermined.  When one tries to make them precise, applying them to a situation or to a concrete action, disagreements and the opposition of specific groups are not long in coming.

Chaim Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric

Marilynne Robinson's nicely worded essay "What Are We Doing Here?" (New York Review of Books, November 9, 2017) is a predictable apology for the utility of the humanities in the twenty-first century. It proposes to respond to one of the grand questions that can be associated with nia and either ontological or existential reflection.  The title is a question one might ask at a social or political meeting, at a professional conference, or in the course of an oral history interview; likewise, it is a question one might ask as an American citizen whom the winter of national politics has made angry, fearful, silent, or baffled.  As is the case with Perelman's questions and comment, the pronoun "we" seems to be an innocent marker of collectivity.  When one considers the marker in the context of historical narratives, "we" is at once pivotal and problematic, a source for doubt.  Who is included and who is excluded in the collective?

Given Robinson's references to John Milton, Hamlet,  President Obama, " Spenglerian gloom," Alexis de Tocqueville, Walt Whitman, John Keats,  and "a Benthamite panopticon," it is not unreasonable to think her "we" excludes a vast number of people who are seldom accounted for in the history of the West, a vast number of people who speak of their identities in the history of the East, the North, or the South (to the extent that geopolitical location matters.  They are commonly thought of as the Other, because the artifice called the West resists acknowledging how decidedly Other it is in the contemporary eyes of the world.  Even when it isn't intentional, the presence of the cardinal sins of the West ---anger, sloth, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, and pride --attack imagined "universal values" (particularly those derived from local knowledge and presumed common sense).  These sins are distributive.  Thus, East, South, West, and North are complicit in the production of terrorism, the insanely natural  scourge of the twenty-first century.  We can't hide.  We are condemned to suffer.

Robinson's effort to persuade readers that "eloquence and depth of thought" prevail and "belong to all of us because they are the most pregnant evidence we can have of what is possible in us" falls short of the mark.  Her humanistic optimism may be beautiful, but it becomes grotesque in the moment a person recognizes that Darwinian amorality is a bit more possible (and powerful)  in us than the universal  spiritual virtues of faith, prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, hope, and charity.  On the other hand, she hits the target dead center by reminding us (whoever we may be) that in contemporary politics (and by extension, everyday life) one "is expected to have mastery of an artificial language, a language made up arbitrarily of the terms and references of a nonexistent world that is conjured out of prejudice and nostalgia and mis- and disinformation, as well as of fashion and slovenliness among the opinion makers."  Excellent.  Universal values do exist as Platonic fictions, but it is impossible to find them in the vernacular dialects we use to impose "reality" upon "actuality." Once upon a time, a poet called Christ a tiger.

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.            December 25, 2017