Reinvigorating a wasteland

Every sham may have a patina. Openly uneasy with complex ideas, this imperiled nation eagerly seeks an easy redemption in crude commerce, banal slogans and empty witticisms. Our noisy search for happiness would be less corrosive if it did not proceed at its core from a serious and underlying ailment. This debilitating national illness even has a precise and recognizable topography. Its pathogens lurk dangerously in a collective loathing of intellect, individualism and serious learning. “Alas,” the poet T.S. Eliot observed, “Our dried voices, when / We whisper together, / Are quiet and meaningless.”

As a nation, we insist loudly upon being “number one.” But it is a shrill and unpersuasive insistence. No nation can claim to be “first” that does not hold the individual sacred. Absurdities cannot be made into truth by fiat.

Earlier in our history, after Emerson and Thoreau, a spirit of accomplishment earned actual high marks. Then, young people especially strove to rise meaningfully, not as the obedient mimics of memory and desire, but as proud owners of a real American Self.

True patriotism, we have yet to learn, can never lie in ritualized ignorance, conformance and imitation. The last presidential campaign — in the fashion of all previous campaigns — spawned many such degradations, but the usual shallowness of language was merely a symptom. Upon reflection, our core American pathology still originates and lies latent in a peculiarly willful abandonment of thinking and questioning.

Mass offers each citizen a ready defense against unbearable loneliness. Yet, mass also defiles whatever is wondrous, gracious, genuine and generous in any society. Understanding this, Charles Dickens observed back in 1842, “I do fear that the heaviest blow ever dealt at liberty will be dealt by this country in the failure of its example to the earth.”

Until now, we Americans have successfully maintained our political freedom from the most visible kind of tyranny and oppression, but we have also sacrificed our corollary obligation to become true persons. Openly deploring a life of sincerity, we continue to confuse technology with success and fitting-in with joy.

Today, an individual American who would choose energetic thought over effortless conformance must feel alone. Yet, “The most radical division,” Jose Ortega y Gasset asserted in 1930, “is that which splits humanity … those who make great demands on themselves … and those who demand nothing special of themselves.”

Now it is time for camouflage in the inert American mass to yield to being challenged in the world. Individuals who would dare to reject an endlessly demeaning amusement society, and who would be willing to risk disapproval in order to stand apart from the suffocating crowd, offer America its only hope for change to believe in. These very rare souls can seldom be found in politics, in universities, in corporate boardrooms or on television. Their strength and courage never lie in advanced degrees or in cliched contrivances of language, but rather in the pure and always-complementary powers of intellectual independence and empathy.

Expressed as genre, the 2008 election campaign — even if our new president should prove himself exceptional — was once again only a parody of democracy. Following the usual trajectories, this campaign soon became a visceral rallying cry for individual submission to multitudes. Patching together assorted scraps of pseudo-wisdom, both candidates wrapped themselves securely within a breathless rhythm of ready slogans and easy sentimentality. We Americans were still able to see ourselves in a mirror, but somehow the reflections were wearing a mask.

Wisdom can be contrived. So, too, can it appear selectively among both leaders and citizens. The critical division of American society into few and mass represents a significant separation of those who are followers from those who seek authenticity. “The mass,” Ortega y Gasset said, “crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select.” Left in control of our national norms and institutions, this mass would make it impossible for President Obama to affect any sort of real change.

The fragmented world offers us all a welter of contradictions and paradoxes. In this confusing world, Obama now has a unique but also challenging opportunity to energize and rebuild our visibly wasting American democracy upon a more solid foundation of thinking, feeling and learning. Strong, dignified and intelligent, this president assuredly can succeed, but first he will have to confront directly the still-lethal dangers of individual American concealment in the mass.

The poets will understand.