“Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?” -Honoré de Balzac
Virtually all US politicians, irrespective of party, are fond of celebrating “The American People.” As the ultimate fallback script for any candidate – whether challenger or incumbent – no other phrase can seem so appealingly quaint. Noteworthy, too, is the ubiquitous mantra’s changed meaning over time.
In essence, there has taken place a significant transformation from the mantra’s original eighteenth-century or Age of Enlightenment significations.
This transformation, once it has been more fairly recognized and acknowledged, is ironic, bitterly ironic.
There is more to discuss. Pertinent history can always be further clarifying. Though counter to various present-day misunderstandings, America’s founders had displayed a far-reaching disdain for any “voice of the people.”To Edmund Randolph, the core evils from which the new country was suffering could be discovered in the “turbulence and follies of democracy.” Elbridge Gerry actually spoke of democracy as “the worst of all political evils.” For his part, Roger Sherman had hoped, and without evident embarrassment, that “the people…have as little to do as may be about the government.”
Oddly, perhaps, these earlier sentiments are not generally apparent in present-day United States. Not at all. The reason is plausibly straightforward. It is because, at least for most Americans, disciplined learning of any kind is too palpably unpleasant to be “cost effective.”
It’s not easy to do.
Prima facie, therefore, it is anathema.
What about Alexander Hamilton? This quintessentially American darling of today’s favorite Broadway musical once exclaimed: “The turbulent and changing masses seldom judge or determine right.” Accordingly, Hamilton had sought a reliable institutional “remedy” for popular rule. More precisely, he wanted a “permanent authority” to “check the imprudence of democracy.”
“The people,” Hamilton had summarized caustically, “are a great beast.”
And the “imprudence of democracy.” How many Americans could possibly imagine such a phrase as one originally acceptable or even foundational? The answer is obvious, especially when the present-day American president is enthusiastically cheered precisely because of his indisputable illiteracy.
To a verifiable extent, George Washington found himself in the same philosophic camp as Hamilton. Soon to become the nation’s first president, he urged convention delegates not to produce a document merely “to please the people.” Washington had argued, inter alia, that any self-serving search for public approval would quickly prove contrary to any reasonable calculations of national interest.
To wit, Washington was an early American leader who could still value real learning.
There is more. Any misconceived searches for public approval would have been contrary to the American-celebrated Age of Enlightenment. The new nation, after all, was built expressly upon the philosophic and legal writings of Grotius, Pufendorf, Voltaire, Diderot, Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu and Rousseau.[1]
Is there a single person in today’s White House who could even recognize (let alone actually read) a single one of these names?
It’s a silly question.
Today, largely because there is so little reading of history by “the people” (especially at the White House and in the Senate), Americans neglect that the country’s founders displayed a conspicuous distrust of all democratic governance. Warned the young Governeur Morris, in a typically harsh metaphor: “The mob begin to think and reason, poor reptiles . . . They bask in the sun, and ere noon they will bite, depend on it.”
Much as Americans might not now care to admit, the nation’s founding fathers were largely correct in their anti-populist reservations, but nonetheless for the wrong reasons. In the United States, We the people have displayed a more-or-less consistent deference to “lawful authority.” Still, this same people has demonstrated a persisting unwillingness to care for itself as a coherent body of authentic individuals. Should there be any doubt about this potentially lethal unwillingness, we need look back no further than the latest presidential “rally.”
Now, finally, it is high time for candor, especially in the rabidly anti-historic and anti-intellectual Trump Era. A “mob” does effectively defile any reborn American eruptions of “greatness,” but it is not the same mob feared by Hamilton, Sherman and Morris. What more do we really need to know about this mob?
And who actually belongs to such an increasingly rancorous American society?
In brief, the constituent “members” are rich and poor, black and white, easterner and westerner, southerner and mid-westerner, educated and uneducated, young and old, male and female, Jew and Christian and Muslim and Hindu and Buddhist and atheist. It is, at least in some tangible respects, exactly as the founding fathers had originally feared. Inter alia, it is a populist mob, markedly so; still, it is not by any means exclusively or excessively “blue collar.” Its most distinguishing features are not poverty or lack of manners or any absence of formal education.
They concern the witting absence of any decent regard for wisdom or serious learning. This absence includes many with very respectable university degrees and professions.
During the past several years, at least in these particular matters, America has gone from bad to worse. The overriding goal for literally millions has become painfully and irremediably obvious. This objective is a presumptively comforting presidential dispensation to scream nonsense, pure nonsense, endlessly, preferably rote, and in chorus.
Comforted by rhythmic and repetitive primal chants (one should think here of the marooned and eventually murderous English schoolboys in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies), millions of Americans have freely abandoned any meaningful responsibilities to understand what is being cheered. At Trump presidential rallies, just as in the United States Senate during a State of the Union address, serious books or ideas are mentioned only sotto voce, and multi-layered intellectual content remains very intentionally ostracized . What matters most amid the carefully-orchestrated presidential rancor in the United States is the warmly comforting embrace of a sympathetic “crowd.”
Nothing more.
“Intellect rots the brain,” roared Third Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels back in 1935.
“I love the poorly educated,” proclaimed candidate Donald Trump back in 2016.
“We’ll build a beautiful wall, with a beautiful door….”
“Intellect rots the brain.”
In large measure, the American People now exhibit an intellectually unambitious conglomeration of souls,[2] one eager to learn only what is presumptively “practical.” To be sure, legible university affiliations are still valued on sweatshirts and automobile bumper stickers, but not for anything having to do with genuine education. Rather, these affiliations are valued along with their respective sports teams for another overriding reason.
This reason is to be able to say to the world, succinctly and convincingly, “I belong.”
For Americans today, there can be no greater accomplishment.
Accordingly, what has emerged in Trump’s polarizing America is a commoditized mass, one roughly equivalent to the ancient Greek hoi polloi or the Roman plebs. From such a proudly docile coming-together, nothing analytic or excellent should ever be expected.[3]
Now, Americans cheer only “USA.” “USA.” “USA.” This is the primal chant of belonging that one must expect to hear, even on the floor of the US Congress. This is nothing less that the culminating rhythm of a major nation’s historical and intellectual devolution.
There is a long-recognizable history to all this. Prophetic expectations of such a mob were widely-circulated among America’s founding fathers, primarily by way of Livy: “Nothing is so valueless,” said Livy, “as the minds of the multitude.” Recalling this ancient Latin author, America’s core enemy today is less an adversarial nation than an insistent analytic docility, a grimly uninquiring national spirit that not only knows nothing of truth, but determinedly wants to know nothing of truth.
In his Notes on Virginia, Thomas Jefferson once proposed an improved plan of elementary schooling in which “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.” Today, of course, it is inconceivable that any American president or presidential aspirant could ever refer to his fellow citizens as “rubbish.” Yet, this openly crude analogy accurately expressed the unvarnished sentiment of America’s most famous early “populist.” Jefferson, lest we forget, was the cerebral founder and future president who (having already read such key Enlightenment thinkers as John Locke and Thomas Hobbes) drafted the American Declaration of Independence.
Going forward, the “American People” have one manifestly overriding obligation. This is the responsibility to disprove Alexander Hamilton and Donald Trump by embracing a virtually new political ethos. This expectedly more promising Vox Populi would be inspired not by any perpetual fears of severance from the warmly-submissive American mass, but by more devotedly intentional cultivations of personal intellect and civic courage.[4]
All this will take time, of course, but there is simply no alternative posture for “The American People” to assume.
What shall be concluded? This mandatory eleventh-hour embrace may represent America’s last graspable chance for both personal growth and collective survival; that is, a final and indispensable opportunity to avoid Balzac’s “withered hearts” and his “empty skulls.” In our world’s rapidly “advancing” nuclear age, it could even represent America’s utterly last chance, period.[5]
[1] A common theme in these classical writings is the unequivocal “oneness” of world legal imperatives, and, correspondingly, the inherent intersections of national (municipal) and international law. Regarding the United States in particular, Mr. Justice Gray, in delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900), declared: “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction….” (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)). The specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called “Supremacy Clause.”
[2] Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung thought of “soul” (in German, Seele) as the very essence of a human being. Neither Freud nor Jung ever provides a precise definition of the term, but clearly it was not intended by either in any ordinary religious sense. For both, it was a still-recognizable and critical seat of both mind and passions in this life. Interesting, too, in the present context, is that Freud explained his already-predicted decline of America by various express references to “soul.” Freud was plainly disgusted by any civilization so apparently unmoved by considerations of true “consciousness” (e.g., awareness of intellect and literature), and even thought that the crude American commitment to perpetually shallow optimism and to material accomplishment at any cost would occasion sweeping psychological misery.
[3] “The mass-man,” we learn from Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’ Gasset (The Revolt of the Masses, 1930), “has no attention to spare for reasoning; he learns only in his own flesh.”
[4] One should be reminded of Bertrand Russell’s trenchant observation in Principles of Social Reconstruction (1916): “Men fear thought more than they fear anything else on earth – more than ruin, more even than death.”
[5] See, for example, by this writer: https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making/