
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss: An Interview with Eugene McCarraher
Part 1
"...The Other Journal (TOJ): We’ve reached the end of the decade, and Time magazine has already hyperbolically pronounced it the “worst decade ever.”2 In 2001 you said that in the ’90s “the trajectories of abundance and power had never seemed so righteous and unalterable.”3 What is your take on this decade? What cultural themes have emerged in the last ten years?
Eugene McCarraher (EM): The 2000s were most definitely
not “the worse decade ever.” That pronouncement demonstrates how
addicted to hyperbole our historically illiterate media have become.
There’s any number of decades that far exceeded the last one in
awfulness: the 1940s, when almost the entire globe was engulfed in war;
the 1930s, when a quarter or more of the workforce was unemployed, and
fascism was on the march; the 1860s, when the nation was torn apart by
civil war. People have endured horrors and upheavals of far greater
magnitude than our own.
That said, the 2000s did really suck, and the key word in that sentence
of mine you quoted was “seemed.” Some of us knew back in the ’90s that
the American Empire was heading toward a reckoning with Nemesis, and
the only question was when, not if. The trajectories of economic and
military supremacy were unsustainable, and at some point, the Empire
would meet resistance to its courses of military and financial
overextension. The tech-stock bust of 2000—no one seems to remember it
these days—was the first sign that the imperial finances were out of
whack. But it was swiftly patched up—to a considerable extent, we now
realize, by creating new bubbles in the housing and “financial product”
markets. Similarly—albeit much more tragically and horrifically—the
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were the first acts in a
tragedy of retribution for imperial sway in the Middle East. The
distemper of that episode was composed by the invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq—rather than confront the real issues and reasons for the
attacks, Americans acquiesced in or enthusiastically supported the most
arrogant and brutal assertions of imperial might. In both cases, we
heard a lot about how We’re All Going to Get Serious Now and how the
Decade of Frivolity (that would be the ’90s) would be followed by a
Decade of Seriousness. (We’re hearing the same thing now, about how the
economic crisis is going to Change Our Values, etc.) It didn’t happen.
Most Americans are just as deluded and mortgaged in Fantasyland as they
were on September 10, 2001, or on September 15, 2008, the date often
affixed to the current crisis. Even as the trajectories of power and
abundance have turned out to have real and jarring limits—our follies
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the exposure of our economy as a vast and
meretricious shell game—most people reside either in Palinland or in
YesWeCanistan.
Where does one begin the retrospective on this “low, dishonest decade,” as W. H. Auden described the ’30s?4
For me, one of the more revealing episodes was the public reaction to
the Abu Ghraib revelations—the callous indifference or approval a lot
of people exhibited to the cruelty recorded in those photos. As soon as
they first appeared, our Wise Statesmen and Pundits roared in a chorus
of outrage, “This is not who we are.” Who the hell do they think took
the photographs? Who do they think was telling interviewers that they
thought the prisoners deserved what they got? Who do they think had
been told by people such as Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter that torture was an acceptable practice?5
The aesthetic of the photos was just as revealing as the reaction. Much
was made at the time of the resemblance between the composition of the
photos and the aesthetic of Internet porn, one of the leading uses of
the Internet. No, Abu Ghraib was a snapshot of the American character.
Those photographs and the reaction to them told us how harsh we’ve
become as a people.
Bound up with the cruelty was credulity. The 2000s was a jubilee season
of credulity, when masses of Americans exiled reason and evidence to
some nether region of the mind. And what was especially striking and
dispiriting was how willful so much of it was—and remains, because I
don’t see much of a let-up. So many, many people, almost on principle,
decided to accept on faith a lot of falsehood or bullshit. (I use that
latter term not as an indelicate provocation, but in the technical
sense defined by Harry Frankfurt in his treatise On Bullshit,
published, in exemplary fashion, in the middle of the decade: not
simple lies, whose speakers actually pay a kind of homage to truth, but
assertions made without regard for their truth or falsehood.)6
Not quite as a side note, credulity should be a serious matter for
Christians, because we are people who take certain things on faith, and
so we are open to the serious charge that we’re gullible folk who’ve
taken leave of sense and reason. This isn’t the place to hash all that
out, but one reason I’ve grown fonder of the Thomist tradition over the
last decade is that it’s a rigorous lineage of rationality. (Speaking
of Thomists, whenever I can, I advertise for the late Fr. Herbert
McCabe, O.P., so let me recommend his entire oeuvre.) Christians have
an obligation to affirm reason, evidence, and science; they shouldn’t
be the first to jump on board “faith-based” anything.
The 2000s was, sadly, the heyday of faith-based everything: faith-based
wars (Iraq), faith-based science (“intelligent design” and
global-warming denial), faith-based economics (the financial and
housing bubbles, the extraordinary trust placed in a gnomic mediocrity
like Alan Greenspan). And let’s be honest here: conservative
Christianity, Protestant and Catholic, remains one of the leading
service providers of credulity. You just can’t escape the fact that
conservative religious culture leavened almost every instance of
faith-based bunkum that characterized the last decade. Anyone who
studies the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq knows that one of
the reasons George W. Bush went to war was his belief—encouraged by
neoconservatives who don’t give a damn about Christian or any other
faith—that God wanted him to be some righteous warrior. Churches and
synagogues around the nation sounded their tocsins for war, but the
invasion received the most enthusiastic benedictions from conservative
churches, all resounding with hosannahs and praise for God’s President.
Even churches like the one I attend, which isn’t especially
conservative, started draping the Stars and Stripes from their choir
balconies. When I objected strongly to this, I was told that
parishioners were demanding it. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson drooled
with anticipation at the prospect of vengeance and assassination; John
Hagee, Rod Parsley, and others reveled in blood-soaked eschatological
visions; the Left Behind
books sold millions of copies, filling the minds of readers with
hateful, sanguinary orgasms of violence; theo-con journals like First Things, the religion supplement for the Wall Street Journal,
ran articles about America’s providential mission in the world. Add to
that the cavalier hostility to science that now makes a cretin like
James Inhofe into a major player on climate policy. Very large swaths
of American Christianity now compose a potent culture of resentment,
bigotry, and militarism. Where, oh where, is H. L. Mencken when you
need him? You can’t even begin to understand someone like Bush—or Sarah
Palin, the true heir to this maelstrom of nuttery—without attending to
this stew.
..."
Part 2
"...I discussed Christian realism at some length in my book "Christian Critics", so I’ll restate and perhaps embellish my objections to it here.
In my view, the fundamental problem with Christian realism isn’t the
Christian part, but the realism part. Whoever defines reality holds the
most crucial power one can have. If that reality is one of love and
abundance—that is, reality as it’s defined, or should be defined, by
the community called to Christ—then your politics will follow from that
ontological foundation. If that reality is one of scarcity and
strife—that is, reality as it’s always defined by nation-states and
corporations—then your politics will follow from that ontological
foundation. So because Christians reside in nation-states, they have
dual citizenships, one in a global, cosmopolitan community, the other
in a limited, national community. The mythology of the nation-state is
that those two citizenships are completely compatible, if not
identical, and that if one seems to conflict with the other, the
national identity must prevail. The gospel has no such illusions:
Christians can and must obey laws that do not harm faith and morals,
but if those laws do such harm, they must not be obeyed. The problem
then becomes, what practices of the nation-state harm faith and morals?
That can be an extremely difficult question to answer, to say the
least, and it dovetails with another question: is warfare a practice
that harms faith and morals? Not the first, but the historically most
determinative answer, was Augustine’s: yes, Christians can fight “just”
wars. But I’ve never been satisfied with Augustine’s answer, in part
because I don’t think he argues so much as he asserts it in the
City of God,
and in part because he defines the problem of war precisely in the
terms of imperial self-protection and expansion that he should have
been challenging.
4
In short, by defining the problem of war in terms he borrowed from
Roman imperial culture, Augustine was the model for what Niebuhr and
later Christian realists would do: accept the terms of the nation-state
for what counts as realistic. Once you let the nation-state, whose
government is the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, define the
terms of political and economic reality, you’ve ceded the cognitive
terrain to its corporate, bureaucratic, and military elites. The
problem with Christian “realism,” then, is that it offers just too
beguiling a deference to the nightmares and fantasies of politicians,
bankers, generals, and pundits. Christian realism has served, on the
whole, as one of the more sad-sack imperial ideologies, the kind of
thing imperial Christians feel they have to say to the world when the
“necessities” of power “compel” them to bankroll tyrants, assassinate
insurgents, or kill innocent people. At its best, it can and has
mitigated violence; as its worst, it corrupts the good news of
redemption into the very bad news of death.
Not that it would help him at all—he’d probably have to resign if he
took it seriously—but I’d recommend that Obama read, not Niebuhr or
Augustine, but Origen, whose Contra Celsum is a magnificent piece of polemic and exposition.5
Celsus was one of the Roman Empire’s embedded intellectuals, shaking
his head and furrowing his brow over antiquity’s version of the Culture
Wars. These Christians, the old fogey complained, they blaspheme the
traditional deities, they dishonor our imperial past, they refuse to
fight in the legions that protect them.6
Origen dissected Celsus’s arguments with exquisite forensic skill. But
the upshot was simple: we won’t fight in your wars or sacrifice to your
gods because we don’t accept your account of reality. The same defiance
animated critics of Niebuhr such as A. J. Muste, Dorothy Day, Thomas
Merton, and Daniel Berrigan; they, too, should be on Obama’s reading
list. Like I said, Obama would have to hand in his resignation if he
took Origen to heart, but he’d save his soul, and perhaps those of at
least a few other people. Stranger things have happened.
..."
Part 3"...
This goes a long way in explaining the theocon obsession with sex to
the exclusion of economics, health care, et cetera. As I’ve suggested,
the theocons, like other kinds of conservatives, are in the impossible
position of wanting capitalism without its inevitable social and
cultural turbulence, a large part of which has been the sex and gender
trouble provoked by capitalism’s demolition of traditional patriarchy.
The greater sexual freedom of women in particular reminds theocons that
the self-possession and autonomy they celebrate in the marketplace can
be exercised in the bedroom and elsewhere. I mean “sexual freedom of
women” here to include, not only what they do in bed and with whom they
do it, but a broader range of freedoms in areas of traditional male
control and supervision: access to education, employment, housing, et
cetera. It’s quite revealing of the level of fear and angst involved
here that Leon Kass, another B-lister who gets exalted in some quarters
into a sage, once lamented that college-educated women don’t live with
their parents until they get married. Rather than ponder the
significance of the fact that choice and autonomy
are keywords in both economic and sexual libertarianism, and thus
rethink their entire conception of the relationship between the sexual
and political economies, theocons displace their anxieties about market
autonomy onto sex. They make feeble attempts to argue that sexual
activity and market activity are in separate spheres, evaluated by
different standards, but this ideological obfuscation is becoming more
and more apparent. If you really want patriarchy and traditional,
“natural” gender roles back, you’ve got to destroy capitalism in the
name of some reactionary proprietary vision. Unless they’re absolute
loons like the dominionists, the theocons can’t and won’t do that.
..."
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