Postscript to Larger than Life

For the past sixteen months, I have been posting, sequentially, the transcripts to the episodes of a radio documentary that I prepared for airing back in 2004, which I had titled Larger than Life.  It was a series that attempted to show how our collective beliefs about ourselves and our places in the universe actually shape the evolution and major events of our society.

The precipitating cause of this project was actually my visit to an Irish Pub in Chesterton, Indiana called Wingfield’s on its weekly “all-you-can-eat ribs” night.  That was back in 1995.  A friend and coworker had invited me to join him there, and it just so happened that this was also “poetry slam” night at the same establishment, where patrons were invited to step up to a microphone and share their inspired verbal compositions with everyone else.  After a suitable indulgence in ribs and beer, I was sufficiently inspired (and inebriated) to go to the stage myself, and recite a poem that my friend and I had scrawled on the back of my menu.  To the surprise of my friend, and probably myself as well, the poem got a large round of applause from the audience.  The manager was also suitably impressed, and after the event ended, she stopped by our table and invited me to return on some future poetry slam night with more compositions.  I protested, however, that I wasn’t really a poet, and that I was actually more of a history buff, and offered instead to step up to the microphone some night and give a talk on some historical subject.  Surprisingly, she agreed to this, and offered to devote an entire evening to my presentation.

The talk that I gave was called “Homer’s Greece”, and I spent most of it retelling Homer’s tales of the Trojan War and Odysseus’s voyage back to Ithaca.  The presentation was well received by the patrons, and the manager invited me back for an “encore” on a future night.  I intended to continue along the same vein, by talking about the history of ancient Greece in its Classical era, covering its battle with the Persians, and the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.  On the scheduled night of my return, I was overjoyed to find that the pub area was packed with hundreds of patrons.  Extra tables had even been brought in to accommodate them.  “I’m a hit!” I thought to myself, exuberantly, and couldn’t understand why the manager looked so nervous upon my arrival.  And then one of her associates explained to me that the large crowd was actually a retirement party for a steelworker at a local mill.  The manager offered to reschedule me to another night.

But I was undaunted.  I got onto the stage and started my presentation, confident that the audience would soon be enthralled by my recounting of ancient Greek history.  As I began, the patrons actually did fall silent, and I could see the manager and her associates looking at each other with hopeful smiles.  But as I continued, a din began to arise, as conversations resumed among the patrons, and it finally became so loud that I couldn’t even hear myself speak.  I left the stage, and as I walked away from it, I saw that one of the retiree’s companions had leapt onto it and taken the microphone.  I heard him make a joke about my failed presentation, and heard him say that now it was time for some genuine entertainment. 

Fortunately, the manager was able to salvage the evening for me by moving my presentation into a side room and, much to my relief, I discovered that some people – about two dozen – had actually come that evening to hear it.  I was of course a little shaken by the whole experience, but managed to get through my entire talk, and sensed once again that it was well-received.

Thus began what would turn out to be a recurring speaking engagement, and for all of my future presentations, the manager made sure that there were no competing parties or events that would put me at risk of enduring the same humiliating spectacle as on that second night.  Those first two talks comprised a good part of what would eventually become Episode 4 (“Troy”) of the Larger than Life series.  Over the course of the next two years or so, I gave “live” performances which included material that would also find its way into that series, including “Arthurian Legends” (Episode 7), “Mass Hysteria” (“The Secret Doctrine”, Episode 8), “Machiavelli” (Episode 10),  “Washington and Napoleon” (Episode 11), and “Great Discoveries” (“The Lost World”, Episode 12).

That final presentation at Wingfield’s, “Great Discoveries”, was a very special one for me, because it was actually videotaped by a local cable channel, and was then showed several times on that station.  This had become an emerging ambition of mine, to somehow turn these talks into an actual series: a documentary not unlike those that are shown on public television stations or, these days, on the History Channel.  Sadly for me, however, this would not come to pass.  For a while, it seemed that whenever a new manager or producer got a job at that local station, and came across the single presentation of mine that had been recorded, they would contact me, and enthusiastically raise the prospect of doing just that.  But inevitably, they found that their limited resources meant that they had promised more than they could deliver.  My hopes were raised and then dashed more than once, until finally, mercifully, the enthusiastic calls stopped coming, and I resigned myself to the fact that nothing more would come of this avenue.

Just when I was about to abandon hope of doing anything more with this project, a new opportunity came from an unexpected quarter.  A friend and former boss of mine, Cathy Hodges, got involved with a group of people who were planning to start a new public radio station in Valparaiso, Indiana.  She had taken on the task of searching for programming ideas, and, having attended one of my presentations at Wingfield’s, solicited me for some proposals of my own.  Naturally, the idea of doing a documentary based on my presentations again came to mind.

But I needed a central theme to organize these around.  Had there been a common thread of ideas running through the various topics that I had chosen to speak on – something that had motivated me to choose them?  I sensed that there was.  As a very young man, I had developed an interest in philosophy, and in particular became fascinated with the ideas of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.  In his day, back in the eighteenth century, a debate had been raging between the schools of idealism and materialism: whether the ultimate basis of reality lay in the mind, with the apparent universe around us being merely a mental construct; or in matter, with consciousness being only a sort of accidental result of the chain of causes and effects between material things.  Kant’s insight was that both of these schools were right: there really is something “out there”, independent of the mind, but we can never know exactly what that is, because our minds play an active role in shaping what we perceive and conceive.  In that sense, we create our own reality.

As a simple analogy, consider your computer.  In the room surrounding it, there is a multitude of sights, sounds, and smells.  And yet, all that your computer is capable of “perceiving” is what is transmitted to it through your keyboard.  And then, all that can be done with the electrical impulses passed through to it this way is what the computer is programmed or “hard-wired” to do with them: it can only “comprehend” them in pre-determined ways, structured by the computer’s design and programming.  Similarly, even our own multi-faceted perceptions – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – can only take in a fraction of our surroundings, and what we do with these perceptions, including how we organize them and take them in to begin with, is governed by our own “programming” and “hard-wiring”.  Now it is true that, as living, organic beings, we are more than simple machines: we have found ways to expand the capabilities of our perception, with such things as microscopes and telescopes, and we have at least some ability to “modify” our internal programming, but in spite of this, our reality is still profoundly limited and arbitrarily structured by us.  It is, predominantly, a product of our own creation.

Around the same time that I had discovered Kant, I had also come across a book entitled The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, written in the 1960s, and which had clearly been inspired by Kant’s ideas.  In fact, it took these ideas to another level, arguing that not just individual beings but human societies create their own realities, by collectively developing ways of looking at the world and making sense of it.  People living in a certain society are conditioned to viewing and interpreting their surroundings in particular ways, and this conditioning is so fundamental that their entire reality is essentially a social construct.  It affects not just their way of looking at the world around them, but also the way that they perceive members within their community, people who are not part of their community, and even the way that they perceive themselves and their role in the universe.

This idea affected me profoundly, and as I thought about the subject matter of my history presentations, I realized that this book, along with Kant’s earlier ideas, had been a fundamental inspiration for them.  The topics of interest to me had been the lives of great persons – both real and legendary – and the momentous events of civilizations, but also how these interacted.  Because as a part of creating their own realities, people also create their own personal legends, and in the case of some people, these personal legends eventually affect, in profound ways, the lives of others in their society.  In the most extreme cases, they actually remold that entire society’s view of itself and its place in the universe.  And the process works both ways, because in the collective development of their myths and legends, societies create historical figures of great importance who are either entirely fictional, or, if they actually existed, have lives that are now remembered in embellished and exaggerated terms: that have become “larger than life”. 

Of course, generally the personal legend that each of us manufactures is “larger than life” as well, in that they include beliefs about oneself and about one’s destiny that are not entirely grounded in reality (and many if not most of which were molded in turn by the beliefs about reality that our society has imposed on us).  But it is precisely those people who have had a profound sense of personal destiny, and who have acted upon this, who have often made the most significant impacts on history, either in positive ways (George Washington), negative ways (Adolf Hitler), or with both positive and negative consequences (Christopher Columbus and Napoleon Bonaparte).  Even those who have merely contributed world-changing ideas or inventions, such as Darwin, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Marx, Freud, and Edison, were generally motivated by a personal sense of mission, and a faith in their own capacity to discover new truths and ideas.  Individually and collectively, then, we are authors of our own reality, and even if this reality is merely an illusion, it is an illusion that sustains us and impels us forward.

The first half of what became a sixteen-part series dealt with the role that mythology, religion, and occultism played in our early civilization.  The second half, which began with historical events surrounding the discovery of America, shifted to an analysis of the impacts of more contemporary beliefs – the “isms” that have arisen in modern times: Scientism, Darwinism, Capitalism, Marxism, Freudianism, and Nationalism, among others. 

When my proposal for the new series was accepted, I imagined that I would merely have to write the scripts, and narrate them, and all of the other things that needed to happen in order to make them “ready for prime time”, such as putting in background music and doing sound editing, would be taken care of by experts who had been enlisted by the radio station.  And in fact, this is what I was led to believe.  But as idea shifted to execution, I soon discovered, once again, that the promises made by others had exceeded their capability to deliver on them.  I came to the sobering realization that if this series was ever going to air, then I would have to somehow take charge of every aspect of production, from start to finish.  It seemed like an overwhelming prospect, and I nearly despaired of even attempting it.  After all, never, in my wildest imaginings, did I think that I might be capable of sound editing, let alone musical scoring.  This was what I have called, in a previous blog (March 2015), a “cold, dark well” experience.

But rescue came in the person of a consultant hired by Cathy Hodges to assist her in doing the initial programming for the radio station.  His name was Joel Cohen, and he was a former teacher at the Columbia College in Chicago, which specializes in arts and media.  Joel took a personal interest in my project, and he not only encouraged me to rise to the task of taking on the entire project from start to finish, but also gave me practical suggestions on how to do such things as providing background music scores for the narration.  Still, my initial steps into the project were faltering ones.  It took me more than a year to compose, record, and sound edit the first episode, and several months to complete each of the next three.  But by the fifth episode, I had systematized the process, and become adept at carrying out all of its phases – from writing, to narration, to recording, to sound editing, to musical scoring – so that I was able to complete each episode within one month’s time.  Episode 5 was completed in January of 2004, and all of the remaining ones, through Episode 16, were completed by the end of that year.  It was in 2004 and early 2005 that the series had its first and perhaps only run at the local public radio station.  Over the next year or so, I made some further attempts to find avenues for getting a video production made, but with no success.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share the series through yet another entirely different avenue.  Ironically, I only did so because I had come into a “dry spell” in my blog entries, having run out of original ideas to write about.  I think that the average size of the readership of the series worked out to about the same as that of the attendance to my live presentations.  On the blog, two of the episodes, “The Secret Doctrine” and “Machiavelli: The Prince of Darkness” were conspicuously more popular than all of the others, but I suspect that the titles for these played a role in the interest that they received.  (I do, however, think that these were two of the best episodes.)

I actually made very few changes to the original transcripts that were written a decade ago: generally only correcting factual errors that I had discovered after the series aired.  (At the end of “The American Dream”, for example, I recount the story of the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese, which was witnessed by her neighbors, who did nothing to help her.  In the original version, I stated that there were thirty-eight witnesses to the attack, as this was what was generally believed about the crime after it occurred.  It has since been determined that this was actually something of an urban legend in its own right, and that the real figure is probably closer to a dozen.  Still, this was high enough in my opinion to merit retaining the story, as an example of personal non-engagement.)  And I must say that it was eerie how some of these episodes, as I posted them, seemed to provide timely commentary on current events, shortly after I published each of them on the blog.

Were I to rewrite the series today, however, I can think of a number of significant additions and changes that I would make.  It is embarrassing, when reading through them again, to see how culture-centric they are: telling a history of the world where most of the major events of consequence happen in Europe, and with America presented as a sort of final culmination of the story.  In the years since the series originally aired, I have had the opportunity to listen to two series of lectures on China: the first covering its ancient history, and the second covering its history in modern times.  A “Larger than Life” story, just as compelling as the one I told, could easily be written about China, and about other cultures and countries as well, no doubt.  I must say, too, that when reading through these again I was more than a little embarrassed to see the proliferation of male gender nouns and pronouns (“man”, “mankind”, “his”) when talking about general trends or phenomena, and here, too, a personal bias was apparent, as nearly all of the biographies presented are about male historical figures.  I tried to correct some of the more egregious examples of bias in my general nouns and pronouns, but barely scratched the surface, I’m afraid.  And in a future writing I would endeavor to be more inclusive in describing the people – male and female – who have contributed to the story of civilization.

Even the critique of the behaviors of modern human beings – and of Americans in particular – which was done in the final two episodes of the series, was probably colored by an egocentric bias: what psychologists call “projection”.  This is a tendency for a person to more often see one’s own faults reflected in others than in oneself.  In other words, there is a real possibility that many of the shortcomings that I ascribed to our contemporaries might actually have been unconscious reflections of my own.  For example, a lack of neighborly behavior, affinity for fast food, fleeting attention span, and tendency towards spiritual dilettantism are all charges that could be laid at my own doorstep.  I can only hope that my failings are sufficiently representative of those of my peers so that these and the other criticisms are genuinely relevant . . . and enlightening.

I can think of at least a couple of episodes that could have been added to the series.  For example, I had not been aware of the role that occultism played in some of the significant trends and events of the past century or so, such as the rise of Nazism.  (I had discovered this recently when watching a show on the History Channel, which is not surprising, since Hitler and occultism seem to be two of the more popular subjects on that channel, along with extraterrestrials.)  A recurring theme in my series was how religious and magical thinking has persisted into modern times in an awkward side-by-side relationship with science and rationalism, and this undercurrent of occultism would have been a very tangible illustration of the phenomenon.

One of the biggest single gaps in the series is the absence of any discussion of modern mythology: science fiction.  This genre, which has grown, over the past one hundred years, beyond magazines and books to movies and television series that are popular on a global scale, has had a significant impact on both the ideals and actual scientific advances of our society.  Some scholars of ancient mythology such as the late Joseph Campbell have recognized this, and noted that science fiction has indeed taken over the role that ancient mythology once played.  (I must comment, however, that I disagree with Joseph Campbell’s choice of Star Wars as an iconic example of modern mythology expressed through science fiction.  I think that the original Star Wars series was merely successful escapist entertainment, and that the second trilogy of movies that were made several years after the first lacked even this quality because their producer, George Lucas, had felt overwhelmed by the great cultural importance attached to his movies by Campbell.)  At least one entire episode of my series could have been devoted to the evolution of this genre, its messages, and the tangible impact that these messages have had.  Clearly, much science fiction has tried to address the question of what our destiny should be, or should not be.  In this respect, it has even competed with religion in illustrating for us an end goal for our collective existence.

In the final episode, I tried to summarize the ideas that had inspired this retelling of human history and the additional insights that emerged from it after I had done so.  Probably the most significant such insight that came to me, by the time I had finished, was that science, while succeeding in better describing for us the “how” of the universe, and in doing so replacing many of the obvious distortions and misconceptions which had been provided by superstition and mythology, has singularly failed in providing a satisfactory “why” for our existence.  And an answer to that “why” is one thing that human beings continue to desperately need, both in their personal and collective lives.  It is a psychological source of sustenance every bit as important as the more material ones of food and shelter.  Science has not only failed in providing an answer to this question, but when attempts have been made to use it to do so, disastrous and tragic consequences have often resulted, either directly through the application of misguided philosophies, or indirectly when unscientific fanatics or demagogues have used the modern tools of science to destructive ends on a much larger scale than would have been possible before the modern age.  It is for this reason, I think, that religion continues to hold a great sway over our civilization, even when many of its practitioners doubt or even disbelieve some of its central tenets, because it provides a meaningful role for them.  I doubt that science, in spite of its impressive advances, will ever reach a stage where it can do so.  My hope is that religion will evolve (as the philosopher Henri Bergson thought it has, and it will) so that it can answer the “why” of existence without resorting to irrationalism or historical fictions.

And so I can return Larger than Life back to the shelf again, perhaps for the final time, after having found this new venue to share it.  As I find myself approaching the threshold to becoming (and I hate this term) a “senior citizen”, I doubt that even if an opportunity did arise to turn it into a television documentary now, I would present it myself (as, in my younger and vainer days, I imagined myself doing).  That chore would better be passed on to a younger and more photogenic presence.  My more practical, remaining hope is that some past or future reader of the series will be sufficiently inspired to attempt a similar project of their own, perhaps based upon the same underlying insights as this one, and do so in a much more eloquent, comprehensive, unbiased, and researched manner than I did.  If it becomes a success, then I will have been grateful to have played at least some small part in contributing to it, or, at the very least, in providing motivation for the accomplishment..

The Final Call

[The following is Episode 16 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

Welcome to the final episode of this series, “Larger than Life”.  I’d like to begin by going back to the questions that I asked at the very beginning of the series, about your own personal life.  If you recall, I talked about how each one of us creates our own story, our own legend, that puts our whole life into context.  Although we actually remember very little – at least in our conscious memory – about the events, thoughts, and perceptions that we’ve experienced in our past, we somehow manage to weave what we’ve kept into a tapestry of meaning.  It’s a story of who we were, what we‘ve become, and what we think our destiny will be.  For some, the story is a tragedy, for others, maybe even a comedy, and for others, it’s an epic, a great momentous drama unfolding on the stage of life.  For most of us, it’s probably a mixture, with the comic, tragic, and epic moments rising in prominence at different times and in different situations.  There are probably eras, or epochs, in our past, that mark off distinct “chapters”: childhood, the college years, the first job, marriage.  And there are probably artifacts that are silent monuments and witnesses to those eras: a guitar, a picture, a textbook, a cherished piece of furniture.  These are our own pyramids and monoliths, reminding us of an age in our past that is now only dimly remembered.  Think, for a moment, about your own life “story”, or drama.  Are you a hero in the story?  A villain?  A victim?  Were there great turning points, or other dramatic events, that defined who you are and what you think you’re destined to become?  And what do you believe destiny holds in store for you?  Are you anticipating your own apocalypse, or messianic age, when you will cross some threshold in your life and find a better or more meaningful world?  Perhaps the great event will be a happy marriage, or the right career, or simply that moment of truth when all self-doubts fall away and you truly live and act like the person you believe you were meant to be.  In any case, this story, this drama, is the most important one in your personal life, and you get to be author, actor, and spectator all at the same time.

 

            In this series, I’ve argued that our civilization works in exactly the same way.  Collectively, as a group, we try to make sense of who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.  And in creating this story, we put the emphasis on meaning, on what makes what we do important, and not just trivial, accidental, or ultimately meaningless.  In one episode I talked about the parable told by the Greek philosopher Socrates about prisoners bound up inside of a dark cave, who can only see shadows flickering on a wall.  In this parable, Socrates was trying to tell us that that’s what we’re really faced with in this existence, a flawed, incomplete perception and comprehension of what’s really “out there”.  Our five senses leave out more than they take in, and even what we do take in, is not always perceived correctly.  We misjudge things, we are fooled by tricks of the light, and sometimes we see patterns in things where a pattern doesn’t really exist.  Even what we take in, let alone take in correctly, is hardly remembered, if it’s remembered at all.  And memory itself usually only adds to the distortion of reality.

            If we were only passive beings, whose sole experience consisted of perceiving and reflecting upon what is really “out there”, we’d be living a pathetic existence to be sure, because we’d be wrong more often than we were right.  Like the prisoners bound up inside the cave, our lives would be wrapped up in illusion, and faulty hints of what reality is really like.  But that’s where the analogy ends, because we’re not just passive beings, like the prisoners in the cave.  We have the ability to react to our environment, affect it, change it, and even create it.  And the true miracle of our existence is that it is exactly this weakness of ours which gives us our greatest strength as creative beings.  When we see patterns that don’t exist, when we perceive things in a different way, or remember them in a unique way, and then act upon these differences, we are giving something back to the universe that is truly novel and original, we are becoming co-creators of existence.  When we create an object, a story, a personal destiny, based upon our unique perceptions and reflections, when we create a pattern that we thought had been provided to us, but we actually invented, because before us it had never really been there, we’re imposing a new kind of order on the universe.  But if it was merely this accidental, flawed, and limited nature of our existence that resulted in creative acts, we would be nothing more than monkeys sitting at typewriters, occasionally, accidentally, typing a page of poetry or a play worthy of Shakespeare.  The difference is that we give value to our projects, and the projects of others who enter into our lives, as well as the products of nature itself.  We say “This is good,” or “This is bad,” or, more importantly, “This is good to me,” and “I like this.”  Sometimes, in the act of creativity, our mistakes and flaws are intentional – we want to imagine, visualize, remember, or contemplate images and sounds that are different from those provided to us in regular daily experience.  And then, like the God of the Hebrews, our creations are not accidental, but deliberate. 

            Creation, in fact, is the first thing we really looked at in this series – we began with the beginning, or rather, the “beginnings”, looking at the ways in which the earliest civilizations explained how their peoples, and the world, came into being.  Because our ancestors, in trying to make sense of who they were and the why of their own existence, found the most comforting answer in an explanation of where they came from.  Clearly, this was important to them – important to them that their common story have a beginning.  And in these stories, we can see that they had a sense for, and appreciation of, powers at work in the universe greater than themselves.  But they needed more than this to make sense of their world, and how it came into being.  This power, or powers, had to have intelligence, and even personality.  These gods and goddesses had to be somehow like them – stronger, yes, with talents and abilities of an almost unimaginable scale – but still with enough similarities to humanity to at least make them comprehensible, and suitable characters for creation stories.  Only then could the storytellers talk about the wills, motives, and purposes of these supernatural beings and link these to an answer to the “why” of creation.

            Man desperately wanted to find some sort of affinity with these beings, because, having acknowledged that great powers did exist in the universe, the first order of business was to find a way to relate to them, for the sake of survival, if nothing else.  The ancients appreciated, much more than we do now, that the world is both terrifying and beautiful at the same time.  Amid the beauty of meadows, and singing birds, and picturesque landscapes, there is also the ever-present threat that life can be extinguished at any moment, through lightning, drought, famine, exposure, attack by wild animals, or simply an accidental fall.  By enlisting the aid of the supernatural, one might find protection against these disasters, as well as against one’s human enemies, and perhaps even a means to gain greater power and prestige.  Here was the origin of prayer and supplication, but also the practice of chanting invocations, and wearing special amulets that conferred power and protection.  Religion was born in these rites, but magic and superstition were its elder brothers.  Religion would grow into its own with the introduction of a new feature into the story of humanity.  Some ancient societies, in addition to searching for a beginning, also sought to find a meaningful end in their sagas.  The end could simply be the vision of a personal life after death – pleasant for those who lived a life pleasing to the gods, but much less so for those who didn’t.  But in religions such as Christianity and Judaism, there was an end as momentous as creation itself.  This was apocalypse, a final climax and turning point in the drama of creation, in which God would establish a kingdom of righteousness, and cast out all that had fallen afoul of the higher aims of creation.  For believers in this great and finite plan of creation, a new type of purpose in living was available to them.  They could make it a part of their own destiny to become agents in God’s great plan, subordinating their mortal goals and desires to the perceived ends of the Creator.  Here was the expression of religion in its highest form.  No longer did man look for ways to be aided or served by the gods, but instead sought out methods to become a servant of God.

"Feed the hungry and help those in trouble.  Then your light will shine out from the darkness, and the darkness around you will be as bright as day."  Isaiah 58:10

            But there was another way that stories, myths, and religions created meaning – both for the individual and for the society as a whole – and this was through identification.  One could feel a sense of personal pride for his peoples’ ancient heroes, such as Gilgamesh or Theseus, much as we do today for our favorite baseball, football, or basketball teams and their star players.  One could even feel a sense of pride and personal identity with the local ruler, even if this ruler was arrogant, harsh, and remote.  A man might be personally powerless, but still feel powerful because he was in the service of a mighty king or nobleman.  In fact, it was probably this shared sense of glory that motivated the commoners who built the pyramids and other great monuments of antiquity, as they realized that they were participating in projects whose glory would survive for countless generations after their own lives had ended.  And in the mystery religions of Greece, Crete, and Persia, we find the process of meaning through identification reaching its greatest extreme.  Through these practices, one sought to literally merge with the gods, to be possessed by them, infused with their spirit, and linked to them through empathy by participating in their death and rebirth.  In its highest form, this process of identification is a sort of self-transcendence: a true form of mysticism that offers liberation from the finite, time- and space-bound limitations inherent in mortal existence.  But in its baser forms, identification leads to racism, elitism, sexual and national chauvinism, and religious intolerance.  It poisons, rather than purifies, the soul, and has often resulted in the oppression, victimization, and widespread murder of entire populations.

            Another popular belief that held great appeal for many was that of a lost, golden age, in which the peoples were happier, more advanced, or more enlightened than those of contemporary times.  Atlantis is probably the best example of this – its enduring legend continues to offer a vision of a powerful, advanced, and even utopian civilization that once dominated the world.  Often in our history, the hope has been entertained that there were survivors of Atlantis who passed on its legacy in secret doctrines to fortunate individuals who were able to comprehend them and preserve them.  The existence of Atlantis is still just a matter of speculation, but in Rome we find a great civilization whose existence is beyond doubt.  And for the peoples of the Renaissance, a return to the greatness that had been Rome – a recovering of lost glory - was one of the greatest incentives to achievement.  For the Jewish people, hope and inspiration could be found in the tales of King David and King Solomon, and the nation of Israel.  In the centuries of persecution that they faced after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans, as they lived scattered among the emerging nations who came into being in the aftermath of Rome’s fall, Israel was a focal point of hope, with its promise that a happier place and time once existed for them, and could someday exist again.  Closer to our own time, the legend of Arthur provided an inspiring picture of a kingdom held together by a great leader, and bound by a code of conduct that encouraged both bravery and gracious behavior among its strongest toward those less powerful.  But why do these stories of lost ages, or civilizations, have such a hold over persons of later ages?  Their power probably lies in the belief, and the promise, that something has already been attained, and therefore may someday be attained again.  For it is hard to convince someone that something can be achieved, if there is no evidence that the achievement is possible.  On the other hand, if we see that somebody else has done it, or if we believe this to be the case, it gives us a greater faith, and a greater incentive to strive for that lofty goal.  Probably the best example of this in recent history is the achievement of Roger Bannister.  From the days of the ancient Greeks, the quest to run the mile in less than four minutes was one that seemed unattainable, and a general belief evolved that it was a natural barrier that could never be exceeded.  And then on May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister ran the mile in less than four minutes, shattering this so-called barrier.  But what is even more remarkable is that within a year of Roger Bannister’s breaking this record, thirty-seven other runners also ran the mile in less than four minutes.  And three hundred others broke the record within a year after that.  So this simple belief, that something had been done, provided sufficient power and inspiration to others to make what had once seemed impossible, possible.  Even if Atlantis, and King Arthur’s court, had been fictions, illusions, the belief in their existence, in a similar way, has impelled civilization forward, in an effort to recover the lost glory of a bygone age.  Individuals who today are remembered as great pioneers in scientific discovery, like Kepler and Newton, derived much of their inspiration from a fascination with esoteric doctrines, such as astrology and mysticism.  Perhaps their work began as part of a youthful quest to rediscover lost wisdom of the past.

            In the Age of the Renaissance, the dream of recovering the glory of a lost age found its fullest expression, and most tangible success.  For a Europe that had been plagued for centuries with war, disease, famine, barbarism, and superstition, a new hope was restored that mankind was fulfilling a special destiny, and was moving closer toward a richer and more inspired existence.  But with the scientific advances that began to reshape our civilization’s views of the universe in the sixteenth century, many of the most cherished beliefs and assumptions that gave humanity a special place in that universe were shaken to the core.  For although the twin legacies of Greek philosophy and Jewish monotheism clashed in many respects, both had passed on to us a common belief that humanity had a special place in the cosmos.  Earth was the center of the universe, and human beings were its most important occupants, fulfilling a unique role in the process of creation.  Christian tradition had assigned some guilt to that role, emphasizing humanity’s responsibility for introducing sin into the world, but this only served to reinforce the belief in man’s ultimate importance to God’s plan, rather than undermine it.  The new worldview that came out of science changed all that, in very profound and ultimately unsettling ways.  The work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo made a convincing case that the earth was not a stationary object, with everything in the celestial heavens revolving around it.  The Earth was but one of the many planets revolving around the sun.  Three hundred years later, Charles Darwin would make popular an alternative theory about the origins of the human race, which would explain the emergence of man in terms of biological processes – adaptation, competition, heredity – processes that all species on the planet share in common with humanity.  While these new worldviews comprised a more rational way of looking at the world and man’s place in it, they undermined those beliefs that had most supported man’s faith in his ultimate personal value and special destiny.  No longer a central actor in the drama of creation, he was now an insignificant entity in an immense, and ultimately indifferent, universe.  And the new science had not only taken away man’s sense of uniqueness, it had taken away what had always been the most tangible evidence of God.  That evidence had been the remarkable order, complexity, and apparent design that existed on the earth and in the movements of the celestial bodies, but now science asserted that all of this was the product of impersonal, mechanical forces.

            Faced with a new, mechanistic model of the universe, many of civilization’s most eminent thinkers tried to find a way to restore a special place for humanity.  Philosophers such as Hegel and Bergson tried to develop new worldviews that combined evolution with spirituality, envisioning an ongoing plan of creation that spurred development in both the world of nature and in the souls of man and society.  But for other philosophers, such as Karl Marx, souls, either world souls or personal souls, were no longer a necessary part in the mechanism of the evolving universe.  He argued that the same lifeless, mechanical processes that produced order in nature were also responsible for the evolution of social order, and of civilization.  Nevertheless, Marx and the materialist philosophers tried to retain one of the most compelling elements of the Judeo-Christian model, that of apocalypse, and a future utopia.  All of the features of the Jewish and Christian worldviews that gave man a sense of meaning and purpose were preserved, except the belief in God and the human soul.  But for many, this new, secular humanism did not provide a satisfying substitute for the traditional means to find a sense of personal destiny.  If there was no hope of reward in an afterlife, and no means of self-transcendence and merging with the divine, the rewards of participation – even active participation – in an impersonal process of evolution seemed hollow, and not worth any meaningful sacrifice.  For those who did not see the attraction in being anonymous supporters of a possible future secular utopia, another, more personally satisfying alternative offered itself.  This was the lure of power, the temptation to become – as far as possible – godlike, in a world in which it was demonstrated that no real gods existed.  This was not a new or novel idea.  From the days of the earliest civilizations, one avenue along which men might move closer to gods was through the acquiring of power, either real, physical power, or secret knowledge that would confer god-like abilities upon the adept.  If self-transcendence were not possible, then perhaps self-transformation was.  If man could not become a god, then perhaps he could at least become a superman, and enjoy a larger measure of the fruits of existence. 

            A more benevolent form of this doctrine expressed itself in the creative aspirations of artists, composers, and architects.  And with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, another by-product of the new age of science, men could be inventors, creators and architects of new industries, and also masters of men, wielding power through their commercial organizations.  A new philosophy of personal success arose from the feats of these individuals, offering promise to those smart enough, brave enough, and strong enough to practice it, which would allow them, at least in some measure, to rise above the impersonal forces that controlled the lives of their fellows.  This new philosophy of success, however, with its premise that the opportunity to rise to a higher station in life was open to anyone willing to practice it, had a darker side:  It removed a measure of guilt over the conditions of those who were not successful in society.  It suggested that those who labored on farms, worked menial jobs, or spent long hours toiling in factories had, at least implicitly, chosen their fates.  Because of laziness, timidity, or lack of ambition, those who appeared to be less fortunate in society had actually settled for a less challenging, if admittedly less pleasant, existence.  It was probably a belief such as this that accounted for the apparent disparity in behavior of many of these “captains of industry”, such as Andrew Carnegie, toward their fellow human beings.  On the one hand, Carnegie had been a generous philanthropist, making abundant charitable contributions, building libraries, and supporting other selfless causes.  On the other hand, he had been an uncompromising employer, allowing his executives to resort to the most extreme measures, even violence, to keep his laborers in the steel mills in check.

            But if the lure of the superman presented a dark side in business, its manifestation in the realm of politics was far more sinister.  The twentieth century, in particular, saw the rise of leaders who had no scruples about sacrificing countless human lives as means to an end, whether this end be some utopian vision of a worker’s paradise, or the securing of world domination under the control of a master race.  Like the industrialists, these leaders saw themselves as architects who legitimized the subordination of large numbers of human beings in the service of a great enterprise.  But unlike the industrialists, they created little, and, through the mechanism of war and political repression, destroyed much, much more.

            If Darwin took the soul out of nature, and God out of the cosmos, he still preserved one of the most endearing myths that provided consolation to humanity.  This was the idea that the world was evolving, improving, and perhaps moving toward some ideal state of order and harmony.  But for our civilization, this idea received a shattering blow early in the twentieth century, when the most powerful, and apparently most enlightened, nations of Europe engaged in a devastating, horrendous, and ultimately pointless war.  The horrors of that century that followed in its wake only served to confirm what the Great War had demonstrated – that the advance of science, and the waning influence of religion, had not moved humanity onto a higher, more rational, plane.  On the contrary, it made possible the commitment of atrocities on an unprecedented level.

            The astronomer Carl Sagan once referred to our present age as one of technological adolescence.  What he meant was that, like a human adolescent, we as a civilization are now confronted with great powers and abilities that we have not learned how to harness and control.  Because with these new powers have also come powerful passions, and a confused sense of identity and purpose.  It is an optimistic analogy, because for the normal individual, adulthood brings the maturity needed to channel the passions and drives of youth in the service of a rational, personal goal, and divert energies that could be potentially very destructive – to oneself or others – into the service of this objective.  Even this series, with its episodes organized to suggest a forward, progressive movement in time, has succumbed to that optimistic model of history as a record of progress and development.  In spite of the increasing level of destruction and human violence that we have seen over the past century, we still doggedly want to believe that somehow, in some way, civilization is evolving, maturing, improving.

            And where does America fit into this picture?  What is our role in this story - we, who currently consume one-fourth of the world’s energy supply and an equally significant share of its other natural resources?  Are we truly the living heirs to, and the crowning achievement of, the progress of history?  Or are we merely a nation of self-involved, ignorant, overweight, and gluttonous individuals, squandering the world’s resources while whiling away much of our time in escapist entertainment or wrapped up in the mundane daily dramas of our own exaggerated self-importance?  Should we consider it fortunate that we live in a country that, as the result of some happy accidents, great men and women who shaped it in its early days, and abundant natural resources, has produced for us wealth unimagined since the dawn of civilization?  Perhaps we feel it is presumptuous for anyone to suggest that our better circumstances give us an obligation to others outside of our borders.  We might even be tempted to say to the rest of the world, “Too bad for you, but you can at least take consolation in knowing that somebody on this planet had the ability to truly enjoy life, and live it to the fullest, with great food, great entertainments, relative comfort and security.”  Perhaps we are content if our politicians and leaders are merely good at keeping the rest of the world at bay, allowing us to continue to enjoy our happy existence without letting any evil or envious people elsewhere in the world jeopardize that existence.  After all, doesn’t that mean that it really wasn’t all for nothing, since if it isn’t possible for every human being to live a good, happy life, it was at least possible for a few?  But the fact is that few people in America – even the wealthiest – are very happy, if they are happy at all.  They are obsessed with personal anxieties, daily conflicts, and a strange mix of stress and boredom.  Their lives are empty and unfulfilled because, after all, they have no ultimate purpose, and with no ultimate purpose they have no sense of significant personal value.  Do we, as Americans, have a national legend, a common destiny or myth that provides a context for our privileged existence?  Or is it just a glorious accident?  Will some future age look back with wonder at this strange, short episode in world history when a country once existed, powerful, affluent, with all of the races of the world living together peacefully in freedom and relative security?  Where the world believed – at least for a time – that humanity really was progressing toward a state of greater perfection, peace, and civility, and that America was leading the way?  Or will our country look like an Atlantis, or an Israel under the glorious reign of King David, or the great city of Troy, lands in whose greatness lie the seeds of their own downfall?  Will idealistic persons in that unknowable future - perhaps descendents of the real Americans - secretly harbor a hope that that idealistic, golden age that once existed in the distant mists of the past might someday return?  These latter day devotees to a lost civilization might commit their lives to studying the events, beliefs, and knowledge of the Americans, trying to understand what made the land great, and what led to its demise.  In this future world, which might be in the grip of a bleak, dark age, more grim and chaotic than the centuries following the fall of Rome, the legend or lost secrets of America might provide a blueprint for the hopeful on how to recover some purpose, or at least some means of comfort, to suffering humanity.

            But to determine our place in this story of civilization, it is probably best to take one final, cursory look at how our past has influenced, and is influencing, our present – how the legacies of Sumer, Egypt, Troy and Israel, Greece and Rome, Christ and Darwin, Washington and Napoleon, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan define our lifestyles, and shape our worldview.  From Sumer, we have the sixty-second minute, and the sixty-minute hour, and from Egypt, the belief that there were ancient civilizations as great as, or greater than, our own.  The refugees of Troy, and the Hebrew slaves who defied an Egyptian pharaoh, set history on a course that would lead to Caesar, Christ, and King Arthur.  The Greeks bequeathed a philosophical outlook that remains unrivalled to this day.  Machiavelli was the prophet of a new order of national politics, and Washington and Napoleon, in their own unique ways, shaped the forms that America and Europe would take in the modern age.  Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Darwin demonstrated that the majesty of the universe, with all of its order and complexity, could be explained in terms of impersonal forces that did not require a god, or a central role for humanity.  And the great inventors and industrialists of the past two centuries, along with the great dictators, demonstrated the awesome power now available to ambitious human beings to both create and destroy, and in either case to affect millions of human lives, for better or for worse.  Myths, legends, and core beliefs, both personal and national, can have distinctly different consequences.  They can provide the hope, inspiration, and driving force to attaining some higher end.  They can offer a kind of harmless lie, giving one a sense of importance, or belief in a future, that is entirely fictional.  Or they can be pernicious and destructive, to oneself, and to others.  Our civilization has fallen under the sway of all three of these types, and we may never develop the capacity to fully recognize and distinguish them.  Perhaps we shouldn’t, because without the capacity to dream, and to succumb to dreams, we would also lack the capacity to create, and to find higher truths.

            But as the result of all of this, we live in a society with a plurality of ideas, where God and science exist side by side in an awkward coexistence.  Most of us believe in evolution, and science, and yet doggedly retain religious beliefs that we vocally profess, at least one day a week.  Somehow, in our universe, God exists, and affects destiny, and cares about how we live our lives, at the same time that vast, impersonal forces move the earth, the planets, and the stars, and leave human civilization as an insignificant event in the cosmos.  Like the ancient Romans, we are exposed to a veritable marketplace of alternative beliefs and spiritual disciplines, and thanks to our highly evolved commercial economy, these can be presented to us in books with catchy titles, and affordable video and audiotape series that we can listen to for enjoyment as well as inspiration.  Many of these are little more than modern renditions of the lure of practical magic – answering the ancient desire to control one’s destiny through soothsaying, or by learning simple tricks and formulas that will make one more powerful, or change one’s fate.  If one visits the philosophy and mysticism sections of most modern bookstores, one will probably be just as likely to encounter books on Tarot cards and astrology as on Plato and Immanuel Kant.  And not only higher truths, but the more banal entertainments of sex and violence are packaged and promoted in movies and television programs that vie for our attention.  We enjoy the spectacle of the coliseum, without having to endure the guilt of knowing that human beings are actually being brutalized.  Our jobs are routinized and standardized, and a rigid work schedule is imposed upon us.  Wealth and power is still controlled by a select, elite group, but the rest of us are no longer peasants.  Most of us are employees who earn our keep by doing something we feel is beneath us, but at least is not intolerable, and allows us to afford our entertainments.  And in spite of all this, we still try to find meaning in our lives.  We want to believe that life has a purpose.  We try to find it in those philosophies of personal success and self-improvement, or in the spiritual doctrines that are sold in marketed tape series and best-selling books, or offered in seminars.  We have sufficient free time to at least harbor the hope that we might do something, someday, that is generally creative and meaningful, after retirement, if not sooner.  We want to believe that America really is a beacon on a hill, in spite of the fact that our leaders often treat it as a fortress instead, to be defended against a myriad of pernicious threats, that originate from both the inside and the outside, like drugs, and terrorism.  What is the story that you believe in?  Do you believe that God will intervene, that the Christian apocalypse will still happen?  Or do you believe that the impersonal forces of evolution are driving us forward to some as yet unimaginable final destination?  Or is it some combination of these – is it a world soul evolving, and raising the spiritual consciousness of humanity?  What is your role in this drama, if any?  Do you choose to ignore this, and focus on your personal destiny, and whatever success that you can attain in this life, perhaps with the hope that other rewards lie in the afterlife?

            In any work of history, the weakest chapter is always the final one, in which the author attempts to extrapolate from the important trends they've identified, to some future innovation, resolution, or continuation of what has taken place in the past.  Without exception, these forward looks are always wrong, and as the future audience ponders over these faulty predictions, they often question whether the author’s view of the past was flawed in the first place.  It is no consolation to accept that any view of a pattern in history might be an illusion, and that progress might be a myth.  It goes against the grain of our belief to consider such a thing.  Somehow, the faith in an encompassing story seems to be a source of sustaining energy and power for us, as important as the light of the sun – that celestial body that was revered by so many of the ancients who gave us our earliest such stories.  And so we strive to believe that history moves forward, and that in some way we are a part of that process.  But for those who insist on this view, the belief presents a special obligation.  It means that each of us bears the burden of stepping outside of ourselves, and making some contribution to that destiny.  We can turn to our own heroes, and see in their examples a demonstration of how the greatest among us have done exactly that.  Or we can search for a link to some greater power that will guide us, and inspire us.  There is, of course, always the temptation to shrink from the task, and to limit our concerns to our own personal problems, or worse, to lash out at a universe that we feel has not given us a sufficiently prominent place.  But if we want to believe that each of us truly has the capacity to write the story of our collective destiny, then that is a luxury that none of us can afford.  Like Moses, we must accept that the call to freedom can be terrifying, but that only by answering that call can we find a meaningful answer to who we are, and what we are meant to be. 

            I thank you for following this series, “Larger Than Life”.  May your own journey be an interesting one, and your story a happy one.

The American Dream

[The following is Episode 15 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

            She is the envy of the world.  The story of her birth, as a nation, and the establishment of its code of laws rivals the legendary beginnings of Athens as a democracy, under the guidance of the great lawgiver Solon.  And while her government is more democratic than the ones of classical Greece ever were, her august institutions recall the glory of ancient republican Rome.  During her brief history, slavery has been abolished, the rights of women have been advanced, the cause of racial equality has been espoused, and religious tolerance has become an accepted way of life.  New industries, never before seen in the world, have been created between her shores, and scientific advances undreamed of in earlier generations have heralded a new epoch.  The diverse peoples that populate her lands are wealthier, better educated, and healthier than those of other places and times.  And she is more powerful than any other nation on earth.  Here, for the first time in recorded human history, is a state that has rivaled and surpassed the legendary kingdom of Atlantis, a nation that is more admired, respected, envied, despised, and feared than any in human history.  For a weary civilization that is desperately looking for inspiration, she is the one remaining hope that humanity’s best times lie in its future, rather than in its past.  “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,” says the great statue welcoming newcomers from abroad, “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”  But by the twentieth century, it was not merely exiles and emigrants who were looking to her for a new path, and a new promise.  Entire nations, shattered by wars and upheavals of unprecedented destruction, turned to the United States of America to light a lamp leading out of the darkness of the twentieth century, into a new age.

            By any standard, the story of the United States of America is a remarkable one, and it is a nation unlike any other that has existed in recorded history.  But before its story can be told, and its role in civilization assessed, we must once again acknowledge that it will be difficult, if not impossible, to look at it with an unbiased eye.  Like Judaism and Christianity, the institutions and cultural underpinnings of the United States surround us, and we, as Americans, can never step outside of them entirely and give them an impartial assessment.  But in this day and age, as we shall see very shortly, it would probably even be impossible for a foreigner to fairly assess the role of the United States in the world, since just about every nation of the world is materially affected by its role.  So the best we can do is hope that our view is not much more biased than that of any outsider’s, as we take a hard, searching look at our country and its historical foundations.

            What is it that is so special about the United States?  We pride ourselves in the fact that we live in a free country, but there are many countries in the world today that enjoy representative democracy, and democratic institutions were evolving in the most civilized countries of Europe even before the time of the American Revolution.  Ancient Athens was a democracy, and the Roman republic had a representative government.  Our land has been called a melting pot, but again there have been great nations and empires with diverse populations, thriving from the mixture of distinct cultural influences within their borders, like the Spanish peninsula during and immediately after the reign of the Moors, in the 13^th and 14^th centuries.  And finally, we say with pride that we live in the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world, with a well-educated population and a dominant cultural influence over the rest of civilization.  Yet in any historical age, there has always been a wealthiest, a most powerful, and a most culturally endowed nation, and often a single state or empire could boast of all three at the same time.  There is something more about our country, something that both includes and transcends all of these attributes: it’s the idea that we’re part of some great experiment or project, something never tried before, the results of which will have a lasting benefit for mankind. 

            Nevertheless, there have been two competing strains in our history, a light one and a dark one, which have shaped its major events.  The light one embraces the idea of the melting pot, of a society in which all races, ethnic groups, and religions can mix freely together in a spirit of peace and harmony, under democratic institutions, which promote tolerance, diversity, justice, and the general welfare.  This is the vision expressed in the message of the Statue of Liberty, and in the more inspired writings of our nation.  But there is also a darker strain, which has played a role in our history more significant than most would care to openly admit.  It is the idea that this great experiment in democracy, and the society in which it manifests itself, is the product of a special people, culturally and perhaps even biologically endowed with a greater capacity to fashion and maintain a truly great civilization.  In this view, America’s great society is one that has been under siege for the past two hundred years, as alien peoples and cultures invaded our shores, or, in the case of blacks and native Americans, emerged from within, who either lacked the capacity or the motivation to maintain the exemplary institutions which have supported its greatness.  While part of this fear has a basis in real concern about fractionating a unified society of shared customs into a chaos of discordant cultures, it also has its roots in the racial, religious, and class prejudices of the Old World.  Between these two opposing visions, the one of inclusion and the one of exclusion, the evolution of our culture can be seen as a sort of expanding circle, beginning with the core of Anglo Saxon Protestant colonists who threw off the yoke of English rule, but who in turn reacted with consternation and ill-disguised hostility toward the Catholic immigrants who came to America’s shores in the decades that followed.  These fears were intensified during the massive waves of Irish immigration in the 19^th century, as well as during the influx of Italians, East Europeans, and Jews who immigrated at the turn of the century, before World War I.  Foreign religions, languages, customs, and possibly even allegiances were seen as a threat to the grand experiment begun after the Revolutionary War.  But as each wave of immigrants eventually assimilated to their host culture, at least to some degree, they in turn became ardent co-defenders of the “American Way” against the next wave of perceived invaders.  The struggle continues to this day, and plays itself out even on the college campus, as the debate rages on between the relative merits and threats of “multiculturalism”.  Is it more beneficial to have a unified, common culture, which serves as a basis of general harmony and shared common goals among the American population, or is it better, on the other hand, to honor and respect the unique cultural heritage of each ethnic group that comprises our society?  Of course, it is actually the ongoing tension between these two poles, of unity and diversity, which has brought about some of America’s greatest cultural achievements.  Still, the struggle continues, and in matters of race, it is hardly less pernicious today than it was before the Civil War.

Views and opinions such as these have sadly not been uncommon during America's history.

            Perhaps the most remarkable thing is that in the face of this struggle, and among a collection of peoples so radically diverse in ethnic, religious, educational, and occupational backgrounds, a distinctly American character has appeared, that is readily recognizable to any foreigner.  Ask a European how he would describe an American, and he would probably say something like the following: superficially friendly, gregarious, and approachable, at least on the surface, but if one tries to get too close, to get to the real person at the core, he will encounter a barrier that is all but insurmountable, as if there is something that must be shielded, hid, and protected from the casual friend or acquaintance.  “Isolationist” is a phrase commonly applied to Americans by foreigners, and it is used to convey a meaning on many levels.  Certainly there is the well-known phenomenon of national isolationism, the recurring tendency of our people to want to remove themselves from the affairs and concerns of the rest of the world, and even to create a self-imposed state of ignorance.  But the term also applies to that more personal side of our character, just alluded to.  Aside from a carefully selected network of family and close friends, we strive to maintain a distance between ourselves and those with whom we come in contact.  It has become all too common in this country for residents to remain strangers to many of their closest neighbors, if not all of them.  Consequently, we are a society of strangers, linked together by electronic media and a set of far flung connections forged mainly by occupational pursuits and loose family ties, capable of leading an active social life while remaining almost entirely anonymous to the community at large.

            Europeans and Americans mark time differently.  Europe records the epochs of its history by centuries, while we record ours by decades.  Great nations and empires in their history have survived for more than a thousand years, while our own country seems very old at just over 200.  The great era of classical music in Europe, which began with Bach and Handel, came into full bloom with Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, and then moved into maturity with Ravel and Stravinsky, spanned nearly two hundred and fifty years.  Rock and Roll, on the other hand, which began with Chuck Berry and Bill Haley, seems to be well past its mature phase now, some fifty years later.  And again, this difference is apparent not just in great matters, but also in small.  It is not unusual, for example, for a European meal to last well over an hour in length, and possibly several, from the serving of the first course, to the final after-dinner drink.  The United States, by contrast, has given the world “fast food”, and an American driving to work can order his breakfast and have it served to him without ever having to leave his automobile, and then finish consuming it before he arrives at his place of employment.  The marvels of television, with its rapid succession of images and sound bites, to which youth are exposed at a very early age, have created a new psychological condition which, while disturbing, seems strangely endemic to the American way of life: “attention deficit disorder”.  And for the intellectually curious and spiritually starved of our day, seeking to find enlightenment or profound truths, many years of committed practice and study at a temple, monastery, or university are no longer required: videotapes, CD’s, and cassettes can convey all of the essential steps or lessons during just a few hours of listening, and for a very affordable price.  Sadly, some surveys have indicated that even in the pursuit of their most private pleasures, Americans, unlike Europeans, have preferred efficiency over leisurely enjoyment.  We are keenly conscious of time, and organizing it effectively has become a pastime for many, an obsession for some, a mania for others.  Granted, many of these traits and practices have spread far beyond our borders, and whether this is because the world is becoming more “Americanized”, or because what appeared to be American behavior was actually just a phenomenon of the modern age, rather than our culture, is not always clear.  In some ways it is irrelevant, because to much of the world, we represent both the blessing and the curse of modernity.

            To sketch out the history of the United States, in any meaningful way, in just a few paragraphs, is a distinctly American undertaking – in keeping with a tradition where we try to get to the core of something – no matter how profound - as quickly and efficiently as possible.  It is the challenge of putting together “Cliff’s Notes” to summarize the essentials and nuances of our own collective drama.  It began, of course, with revolution, and the idealistic experiment of creating a new government, based upon the highest traditions and ideals of Western civilization, while grounded in practical principles that recognized the more immediate interests of those who would have a significant stake in the project’s outcome.  Nevertheless, the constitution and federal government that came out of this project has rightly been called a miracle, and not necessarily because of the ingenuity of its design.  An enlightened European would argue that the parliamentary system which evolved in his land is a much more practical and effective form of representative government, and that the Founding Fathers’ emphasis on the executive, legislative, and judicial branches as three distinct and essential bases of power that needed to be properly balanced was an arbitrary and even artificial construction.  Nevertheless, for all of its declared shortcomings, it has served its purpose, converting a weak confederation of colonies into a cohesive union of states, whose populations enjoy a voice in government and the explicit guarantee of civil liberties and equal protection under the law.  It emerged from its birthplace in Philadelphia with only one serious and ultimately catastrophic flaw: the treatment of slavery.  The status of the slave, and of the African living on American soil, would fester as an issue of contention until erupting, seventy years later, into the greatest domestic calamity in our nation’s history, the Civil War.  And while the war itself would result in the loss of millions of lives, wreak devastation in the South, and leave in its aftermath a sense of resentment there which has persisted into modern times, it also demonstrated, both to the United States and to the world, the immense power and unrealized potential that could someday make it a formidable presence on the world stage.  Theodore Roosevelt was probably the first president that truly understood this potential and tried to apply it to world affairs, flexing military muscle at times to promote domestic interests abroad, but also winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for his contributions to ending a war between Russia and Japan.  Woodrow Wilson, in the aftermath of World War I in 1918, promoted the creation of a League of Nations, an international organization devoted to the cause of perpetual peace, but suffered abject humiliation at home when his own country, falling back into its traditional posture of isolationism, refused to join the organization.  When the civilized world again succumbed to the conflagration of general warfare, twenty years later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt skillfully confronted and overcame these domestic isolationist tendencies, leading America into a war from which it would emerge, not only victorious, but as the dominant power in the modern international community.  The United States, as a prosperous, victorious, and culturally vibrant nation, faced, for the first time in its history, a unique new challenge – to define a role and a destiny that reached beyond its own shores and embraced the entire world.

            The story of our history since World War II is best understood as a story of how we attempted to live up to, and occasionally shrank from, that task.  The specter of international Communism provided a convenient enemy by which we could continue in our role as champion of freedom and justice against the darker forces of totalitarianism and flawed ideology, and thereby continue framing foreign policy as a simple doctrine of good versus evil.  But this holy war became just another dubious crusade as we found ourselves having to rely on allies of questionable character, simply because they aligned themselves against communism, and as we found ourselves fighting battles in remote arenas, where this country’s stake in the outcome was far from apparent to its own people.  And as the new weapons of mass destruction which had emerged since World War II now made global annihilation a real possibility, many questioned whether the stakes were too high to carry out any sort of conflict whatsoever.  Meanwhile, the crusade took its toll domestically as well, in a misguided search for domestic enemies, suspected sympathizers to the evil empire.  Many began to question whether the “American way” was really all that superior to Communism.  After all, there were tangible evidences of repression in this “free” country, from the general emphasis on social conformity, to the outright bigotry and racism that existed everywhere, but was particularly conspicuous in the American south.  And while the citizens of the United States did enjoy relative affluence in the aftermath of the last great war, one of the side effects of this affluence was boredom.  Cynicism, social injustice, boredom, and a sense that modernity, with its cookie cutter houses and bland occupations, was creating a sterile society, paved the way for a general reaction.  In the 1950’s that reaction found its voice in the Beat generation, led by writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg.  In his book, The Dharma Bums, Kerouac painted a cynical picture of the American life, as “. . . rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody watching the same thing at the same time. . . .”  In the 1960’s, this growing cynicism toward the “American Dream” would erupt into open protest, in the Vietnam anti-war movement, the marches for Civil Rights, and the emergence of the counter-culture.  For the first time in our history, a sustained, wide-scale social reaction against the forces of repression, conformity, and unquestioning patriotism carried the day, and brought with it the promise of a permanent, revolutionary societal upheaval.  But by the 1970’s this movement had turned inward, having spent its fury against declared enemies, such as the “establishment”, which at times seemed illusory, spectral, and even contrived.  The new declared aim was to maximize human potential, and “self-help” became the order of the day.  A cottage industry arose which promised life-transformation with the aid of Eastern philosophy, pop-psychology, self-hypnosis, nutrition, exercise, drugs, occult science, or some combination thereof.  While in many respects the human potential movement seemed a logical offshoot of the social reform movements of the 1960’s, it also represented a retreat of sorts, away from social action to a more personal, self-directed approach to find meaning and satisfaction in life.  The logical outcome of this turning inward was the emergence of a cult of personal success, the age of the “Yuppie”.  After all, in order to “find oneself”, it was only practical that one needed sufficient personal resources to do so.  And in the 1980’s, as America’s economy recovered from the high inflation and high unemployment of the preceding decade, success through rising in a corporate career offered a tangible means of obtaining these resources.

            But if America’s struggle to find identity has been a challenge internally, it has been a much, much greater one externally, as it has tried to find its proper role in the world.  George Washington, in his “Farewell Address” of 1796, wrote, “The great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible,” and warned specifically against becoming involved in the political controversies of Europe.  Washington’s admonitions set the tone for a tendency toward isolationism that has lasted for over two hundred years, but there has always been a countervailing tendency, an urge to export what is perceived to be the best elements of our culture and our institutions to other countries.  While there was a desire to take advantage of the great ocean separating us from Europe, and affect a clean break from its centuries of war, repression, and upheaval, there also emerged a growing ambition to find our own place in the world, which rivaled that of the other great powers.  Some of our leaders have even been tempted to follow Napoleon’s example, and extend the revolution in our nation beyond its borders to distant lands.  This has often been attempted through diplomacy or subtle incentives, but it has, at times, also been attempted through political subterfuge, or outright military force, particularly in the last one hundred years, as we have begun to equate national security at home with political stability and liberal institutions abroad.  And in our conflict with Communism, an ideology which also aspired to recast the world in its own image, we have witnessed our foreign policy become much more pragmatic, and even cynical, a tendency which has even outlasted Communism’s fall.  Some of our national leaders have not shrunk from supporting political despots and oppressive regimes, if it was perceived that these could be relied upon as allies, or henchmen, in the struggle against a more powerful enemy or ideology that threatened our national interests.  In recent decades, we have seen this policy come back to haunt us, as former pawns became troublesome and even formidable foes in their own right, men such as Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden.  Washington could have never foreseen that the new weapons of war, which emerged in the twentieth century, would make it impossible for America to avoid foreign entanglements.  We now live in a world where any tyrant, warlord, or misguided ideologue can threaten our national security, not to mention the welfare of our entire civilization.  And in a country which consumes one-fourth of the world’s energy supply, and a comparable proportion of its other natural resources, just about any major upheaval, economic or political, in just about any region of the globe, now has a potential impact to our national interest.  But this fact, above all, has contributed to the more cynical direction that our foreign policy has taken in recent generations, a fact that has not escaped notice by both our allies and enemies abroad, and our own citizens at home.

            As America has taken a prominent role on the world stage, it has been forced to contend with an understanding of what really drives a national purpose, particularly as it faces rivals and enemies that seem driven by incomprehensible, and yet unrelenting, motivations.  There is of course the desire for revenge: to redress some perceived grievance, insult, or injustice.  And there is the basic desire for power, for respect, and for acknowledgment.  America’s isolationist tendencies, and apparent unconcern for, or even ignorance of, the needs and aspirations of its neighbors has often grated upon the sensibilities of allies and enemies alike.  We have seen, in recent history, how a people will go to great, and seemingly irrational, lengths to acquire something that they feel they have been unjustly deprived of, whether this be wealth, territory, or individual rights.  And we have seen how ideology, whether religious or secular, can put us squarely at odds with other world powers.  Entire peoples can be motivated by simple competition: the desire to make a name for themselves and their country by excelling in some field, whether artistic, athletic, or scientific.  The “space race” of the 1960’s was a notable example of this, culminating in a successful moon landing in 1969.  Arms races are a more pernicious, and much more dangerous, example of international competition.  And finally, fear, paranoia, and the collective belief that a dangerous enemy exists, can drive an entire nation into desperate acts.  As we saw in the last episode, some of the worst demagogues of the twentieth century cultivated and exploited such fears, and by doing so perpetrated some of the worst crimes in human history.  America’s own foreign policy has been, and probably will continue to be, motivated by three distinct aims.  First, there is a genuine and well-intentioned desire to promote higher ideals abroad: democracy, tolerance, human rights, and peace.  And then there is the more pragmatic, but ultimately more urgent goal to protect our own citizens and interests from external threats and adversaries.  Often, these first two goals are complimentary, and can be pursued as part of foreign policy that is both enlightened and pragmatic at the same time.  But there is a third goal, much more pragmatic, and one that often makes our own actions hardly distinguishable from those of other nations that we have criticized.  This is the desire to preserve the so-called “American way of life”, which at times is just a high-minded way of saying that we wish to remain affluent and comfortable, even if this requires doing things that are of questionable morality, such as not supporting a global environmental policy, or trading with countries that do not support human rights, in order to get the abundant natural resources that our lifestyle requires. If these natural resources, such as oil, become scarcer, we might live to see American policy dictated entirely by pragmatic interests, at the expense of idealistic ones.  And if that unhappy day should come, our country will no longer be seen, either at home or abroad, as a “beacon on a hill”, but as just the latest in a chain of self aggrandizing world empires that rose, flourished, and fell into decline.

            If there is one way that America has influenced and reshaped civilization more than any other nation that has come before it, it is through the media, through cinema, television, music, and the printed page.  Every people, every culture, and every great power has been guided by their own unique myths, legends, and beliefs, and these in turn have shaped their legacies, and colored their most enduring contributions.  Our country is no exception, and while many of our most cherished beliefs, about religion, about our past and its heroes, and about the nature of the universe, have been inherited from the civilization within which our country was born, we have also seen new legends, new ideas, and new visions of the future emerge during our brief history.  And because our history has been so brief, our heroes become legends just decades after they have lived, if not actually during their lifetimes.  There is no distant past, buried in the mists of time, some idyllic age that we look back to with nostalgic yearnings - there is only the present, the future, and a yesterday that has just passed.  When we look at our national legends, our heroes and heroines, we see real faces, in portraits, photographs, or moving pictures, and often even hear their actual voices.  And although we live in what is generally called a “modern age”, we have not lost the capacity to dream, to create new myths, and to compose great epics populated with demigods and heroes larger than life.

            In fact, in our nation, we have succeeded in bringing these dreams and myths to life in ways unimagined in earlier ages.  In the nineteenth century, dime novels glorified the exploits of gunfighters in the Wild West.  Comic strips, which had emerged in American newspapers in the 1890’s with “Down in Hogan’s Alley” and the Katzenjammer Kids, expanded from humor to escapist adventure yarns during the 1930’s, when this country fell into the grips of the Great Depression.  A whole new crop of heroes were introduced, including Dick Tracy, Batman, Superman, Flash Gordon, and the Phantom, men and women who often had powers rivaling or even overshadowing those of the great mythical heroes of our earliest civilizations.  And many of these heroes would gain even wider fame through the new mediums of radio and the cinema, as would the gun slinging legends of the Wild West from the previous century.    But the cinema would also add its own contributions to this gallery of the great, like the attorney Atticus Finch of “To Kill a Mockingbird”, Indiana Jones, Gary Cooper’s abandoned but resolute sheriff Will Cane in “High Noon”, Humphrey Bogart’s courageous, jaded, innkeeper Rick Blaine of “Casablanca”, and Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  Of course, great legends need great anti-heroes as well, and our country has produced more than it’s share of these, from outlaws like Billy the Kid and Jesse James, to comic book villains such as Lex Luthor, the Joker, and Ming the Merciless, and then cinematic evildoers like Bonnie and Clyde, Hannibal Lector, Darth Vader, and the Wicked Witch of the West.  The American gangster, that criminal byproduct of the Great Depression and Prohibition, became a national icon of sorts, despised and venerated at the same time in films about real ones, such as Al Capone and John Dillinger, and fictional ones, such as Don Corleone and James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett.  And the cinema has even provided a modern counterpart to the darkest denizens of mythology, offering monsters such as King Kong, Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy.  In the 1950’s, this great landscape of mythology and legend was brought to a new outlet, television, and in the decades that followed, new sagas would be viewed in the living rooms of millions of homes across the country, and eventually throughout the world.

            We tend to underestimate just what the influence of our media has been on the rest of the world, believing that it holds our personal histories, fables, and fantasies, with no relevance or consequence to those living in other lands.  But these productions have transcended national boundaries, and contributed to that strange mixture of feelings with which we are regarded by our neighbors: admiration, awe, and fascination on the one hand; envy, resentment, contempt, and disdain on the other.  To the rest of the world we have become the symbol of both the best and the worst of modernity, exhibiting its technological marvels, unbridled dreams, and continuing sense of wonder with a world of expanding possibilities, but also its shallowness, cynicism, and growing sense of boredom in the face of escapist entertainment that must promise greater and more immediate rewards of less and less enduring consequence. 

            Our music, too, from bluegrass and country western to jazz and rock and roll, has defined who we are, and has provided a backdrop to the saga of our national history, while also entertaining and moving listeners of many lands.  It has been the anthem for the downtrodden and oppressed, for racial equality, and for freedom of expression.  The world watched with fascination, as Elvis Presley, like a modern Dionysus, caused young girls to scream and swoon in an ecstatic frenzy.  Those that followed in his wake would take a central role in the great drama unfolding in the 1960’s, when it seemed, for a brief moment, that America was erupting in a cataclysmic but perhaps ultimately liberating transformation.  It was as if the ancient, feminine, religion of self-transcendence, and of merging with the natural forces of creation, if not with the Creator itself, was finally re-emerging, to strike a crippling blow against the new mechanistic world view which had subjugated the forces of nature, and appeared to be stifling the spirit of humanity.  But just at the moment where this upheaval seemed to be reaching the point of no return, when art would subjugate science, and the vast powers of commerce and government would be subdued by a new, enlightened human being, it faded and disappeared as quickly as it had arisen.  In the place of music as the poetry of rebellion emerged the “entertainment industry”, which packaged and stifled artistic expression, and debased it to its most commercially appealing elements.  “Modernity” triumphed, and the protest which had first found a booming voice in the Beat generation, faded and became an interesting oddity in the history of our nation.

1984

            The English writer George Orwell wrote a famous book entitled “1984”, which chronicled a future age in which the forces of totalitarianism would crush the spirit of individualism.  When the year came and passed, in our country, the book was treated with a slight air of condescension, as a dire prediction that never came to pass.  And within the next decade, the perceived great enemy of democracy, Communism, had crumbled, as evidenced by the fall of the Soviet empire.  There was a feeling of renewed optimism and faith in the promise of democracy and capitalism.  But in the years since 1984, the dark, Orwellian vision of a totalitarian state has found jarring parallels in our own nation.  In that book, oppression was justified by perpetual, unrelenting wars against faceless enemies, as reported in daily dispatches to the citizens of the totalitarian state.  In our own time, we have seen the emergence of wars that require similar sacrifices in civil liberties, wars against nebulous enemies, and without a clearly defined objective or end.  The war against drugs has enabled our government to confiscate personal property without due process of law.  And the recent war against terrorism has resulted in the passage of laws that permit the government to encroach upon our privacy, allowing it to engage in acts of domestic spying and surveillance that would have been unthinkable in the past.   And neither of these wars offers any promise of resolution or victory in the near future.

            What does it mean to be an American today?  The search for personal meaning is carried out in an almost casual fashion, with no sense of urgency – only the nagging sense of angst that life is passing one by.  The only collective concern is to maintain a reasonable level of security, stability, and material comfort so that one can continue this search unperturbed.  We have the paradoxical desire to do good, and answer a higher call, while maintaining an undisturbed personal sphere that is shielded from the intrusions of others.  Two historical examples provide telling evidence of both the glory and the shortcomings of the American character.  In the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which claimed hundreds of lives, eyewitnesses recounted the heroism and selflessness of persons on the scene.  Although many had lost everything in the disaster, they nevertheless set about doing everything they possibly could to relieve the sufferings of their neighbors.  Eyewitnesses said that they had never experienced a more noble display of the highest elements of the human spirit.  At the opposite extreme, the dark side of the American character was exhibited on March 14, 1964, when a young woman named Kitty Genovese returned home from work late that night to her apartment.  As she approached her home, an assailant mugged her and stabbed her, repeatedly.  At least a dozen witnesses, neighbors, saw or heard the crime, but none ever bothered to contact the police until after the killer had returned to her a third time, raped her, and mortally wounded her.  For them, getting involved, even in a trivial way, was a price that was too high, too threatening to their personal security.  While we might reel in horror at their actions today, if we our honest with ourselves. we are forced to admit that they reflect the weaknesses of our own character.  After all, as Americans, we want to find truth and meaning in our lives, but we want to do it in a personal way, without having to become engaged in the affairs of the world, and perhaps even in the affairs of our own neighbors.  To be American means to be an example to the world, without being a participant in it.  But in a world that looks to America as the last hope to provide a happy ending to the story of civilization, such a stance may be a luxury that we can no longer afford.