It was a sad day for me when Andrew Sullivan decided to shut down his blog, The Dish, about a year ago and retire. I was a regular reader and I have missed it. So I’m delighted to find he’s back at it with at least an occasional commentary. His latest, which appeared the other day in New York magazine, has a short review of Martin Scorsese’s latest movie, Silence, and some thoughts on the tragedy that is Trump.
I have been a fan of Sullivan since reading “A Conservative
Case,” a conservative’s argument in favor of same-sex marriage, which he made
in 1995. He was still a Thatcher/Reagan
supporter in those years, and he continues to take a conservative perspective
on some issues, although he joined the democrats in disillusionment with George
W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq and the torture at Abu Ghraib to vote for John Kerry.
As you might expect from someone with an Oxford, then Harvard, education, he is
a superb independent and critical thinker, and he has acquired great skill in
putting his thoughts into both speech and writing. Even when I am not persuaded
by what he has to say, I find myself thinking I am unlikely to find a better
take on any given topic he chooses to address, even when I don’t share his
views at all. His recent comments on Silence, Martin Scorsese’s latest film, are
a case in point.
Silence is based
on a 1966 novel by Shusaku Endo about two 17th Century Jesuit
priests from Portugal who travel to Japan in search of their missing mentor,
whose faith, it turns out, has not withstood the Japanese authorities’ use of death
and torture to keep this “foreign” thing called Christianity at bay. The film
addresses Scorsese’s belief that the road to faith must necessarily involve
doubt (Why is God silent?) at some point.
Sullivan is both gay and a traditionalist Roman
Catholic. Whether that’s kind of like being
an African-American member of the Ku Klux Klan, or whether that’s a sign of his
cognitive flexibility I’ll leave for another time. I understand he’s not alone
in finding a way to lay claim to its non-authoritarian authority and the power
of its traditions. How he does that is
not the point here. The point here is
that he clearly resonates at some level with Martin Scorsese’s notion of
faith.
Here’s what he has to say about Silence, the movie, and about Scorsese.
(I)ts genius lies in
the complexity of its understanding of what faith really is. For some secular
liberals, faith is some kind of easy, simple abdication of reason — a
liberation from reality. For Scorsese, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery, and
often inseparable from crippling, perpetual doubt. You see this in the main
protagonist’s evolution: from a certain, absolutist arrogance to a long
sacrifice of pride toward a deeper spiritual truth. Faith is a result, in the
end, of living, of seeing your previous certainties crumble and be rebuilt,
shakily, on new grounds. God is almost always silent, hidden, and sometimes
most painfully so in the face of hideous injustice or suffering. A life of
faith is therefore not real unless it is riddled with despair.
Moreover, I think Sullivan correctly anticipates the public
response to Silence:
Those without faith
have no patience for a long meditation on it; those with faith in our time are
filled too often with a passionate certainty to appreciate it.
I part ways with Scorsese (and thus, I assume, with Andrew
Sullivan as well) precisely because of Scorsese’s argument that faith is
"not real unless it is riddled with despair." It strikes me that this
take on faith doesn’t so much define faith as it reveals Scorsese's own
personal belief system - Sullivan, like many believers, appears to be equally drawn
to the mystery of belief, the power it has over so many people who can't or
won't accept the loneliness of unbelief.
I have always objected to the way religious people lay claim
to faith. I see it as analogous to the way so many on the political right,
including, not surprisingly, those on the religious right, who maintain they
have an exclusive right to define patriotism.
For those in the faith business, those who claim the right
to speak in the name of God, or at least in the name of their particular form
of organized religion, faith is synonymous with acceptance of one of the
doctrines associated with our civilization - Jewish, Christian or Muslim.
It involves acceptance of the claim that God gave the land of Israel to
the Jews, or that Christ was born of a virgin to redeem inheritors of the sin
of Adam, or that Mohammad was the seal of the prophets and there would never be
another.
As a non-theist, I am said to be a man without faith. But I’m not without faith. I’m simply without religion, and I think
we’ve done ourselves a disservice in conflating the two. “Faith-based” has come
to be understood as “religion-based,” when it is more precisely defined as
“belief-based.” Not all beliefs are religious beliefs. I believe there is such a thing as good and
evil, for example, and that there is truth and there is falsehood and that
there is beauty and there is the absence of beauty. These are philosophical
principles, of course, which many people, both religious and non-religious,
often distinguish from religion. My life
experience (I believe – at least I credit it to experience) has taught me that
one has a moral duty to one’s fellow creatures as well as to one’s own well
being. I believe that at the heart of a life well lived is a commitment to
avoid violence and deceit. And that to
the degree one surrenders to violence and deceit happiness becomes increasingly
unattainable.
That faith system – my belief system – requires no descent
into misery for it to mature. It requires no periods of doubt to grow, although
I find doubt and the debate that derives from questioning things to be extremely
useful. And I am naturally suspicious of
affirmations of certainty. I am much
more comfortable with the definition of truth used by modern science – that it
is the sum total of all knowledge to date, subject to change with the addition
of new and contradictory information. It
is my belief that an openness to the possibility of error in one’s convictions
is superior to the claim that certain things must not be questioned. I don’t believe that it is God “working in
mysterious ways” when millions are tortured and killed in war, or die in
natural disasters. The claim of a loving
God strikes me as not consistent with children born blind or paralyzed or
ridden with diseases which will cause them to live out their lives in pain and
agony and then die at a very young age.
I don’t wonder at God’s silence.
I do wonder how people find such a god worthy of worship and praise. How
is following such a god not simply following some law of perversity?
Silence may have
many things going for it – I don’t know and I’m not attempting to review it
here because I have yet to see it – but I will not seek it out for what it has
to say about testing one’s faith in God.
And I trust that will not deter others from doing so if they wish.
What Sullivan has to say about the Trump phenomenon is a
different story. This time, he and I
seem to be on the same wave length exactly.
Sullivan begins with the truism that “All politicians lie.” What is different about Trump is that normal
liars “pay some deference to the truth.”
They “acknowledge… the need for a common set of facts in order for a
liberal democracy to function at all.”
Trump’s lies, he maintains, are goal-directed. They have a purpose, to enforce his power and
to test the loyalty of those he is able to force into submission. It is a
characteristic strategy of authoritarians.
Sullivan’s solution to the problem of living with Trump’s deceit
is not original, but it is intuitive.
“Rebut every single lie,” he insists.
Insist, if you are in a position to, that every lie be retracted. Work cooperatively (he’s speaking specifically
to journalists here) to back each other with follow up questions. Never leave a lie alone. “Press and press and press until (a) lie is
conceded.” Don’t be afraid to call him a
liar to his face.
Sullivan is also not the first to suggest that there may be
something wrong with Trump’s mental and psychological health. It’s this, he says, and not his agenda, that is
“a fundamental reason why so many of us have been so unsettled, anxious, and near
panic these past few months.”
There is no anchor any more, Sullivan says. “At the core of
the administration of the most powerful country on earth, there is, instead,
madness.”
Most of us, I think, never imagined we’d be using language
like this when speaking about American democracy. But then none of us imagined we’d have to
watch the systematic dismantling of efforts to control banking so as to avoid a
repeat of the crash of 2008. Or the
removal of efforts to further enrich corporations and the hyperrich at the
expense of the less fortunate. Or to save
the environment. Who among us imagined
an administration openly committed to increasing the risk of nuclear disaster, to
fostering the education of the few at the expense of education of all? Who
thought we’d ever see a complete takeover by the racist, sexist, homophobic
right and an open attack on the voting rights and other civil rights of
America’s black population? We have
always had politicians who know how to manipulate our fears and our greed. We just have not had one in our lifetimes who
did so openly and so brazenly.
We have listened to those who claimed this liar’s promises
were nothing more than some raw meat to a pack of hungry wolves, a strategy for
building up a power base, and that once in power he would rise to the dignity
of his office. We have considered claims
that he is not a true conservative, that his self-interest would keep the
radical right from attempting to break down the wall between church and state,
to roll back Roe v. Wade and the rights of LGBT citizens to marry. And now we are presented with evidence that
the opposite is true, and that chaos and uncertainty are the only
certainties. We are in a condition of
exteme distress and disease.
I said earlier that I believe in good and evil. But I don’t believe that good always
prevails. I think if it is to prevail
under present-day circumstances, it will take extraordinary efforts.
The victory of the courts against the inhuman and profoundly
stupid and self-defeating travel ban is a positive sign and some of us are
celebrating that victory and hoping it signals the start of a more effective
resistance to the new Trump way of doing things.
My concern lies less with Trump, more with his
enablers. I fear that unless Republicans
of integrity find a way to get us off this path, we may find that
gerrymandering only gets worse, that even more blacks and other minority people
will lose their power to vote, that ever more judgeships, more school board
positions will go to self-serving right winger candidates.
I also differ with those who claim this is the worst thing
to happen to America since the Civil War. Even with the threat coming from an
apparent powerlessness to fight deceit in high places, I think we’ve been worse
off. The Civil War time was worse. Life under slavery and in segregated America
was worse. McCarthy and the Red Scare,
the internment of Japanese-Americans, Nixon’s shenanigans – American democracy
has been bombarded before.
Our only hope is that we still have a critical mass of
people committed to democracy and to decency, to the rule of law and to
evidence-based justification for political action. I don’t think they are
likely to let all this slip through their fingers.
“One of the great achievements of free society in a stable
democracy is that many people, for much of the time, need not think about
politics at all,” Sullivan writes. We’ve
had it easy. We’ve been able to ride the
waves. We’ve been able to turn off the news,
and “exult in that blessed space where politics doesn’t intervene.”
Not any more. We are
beginning to realize those times are over.
We now get to have a close look at just how fragile democracy really is.
We may have to live with fear and with burnout from an endless display of
outrage, day after day. Some of us will go under, especially if our health care
suffers and if white supremacists continue to come out of the woodwork.
Everybody’s looking for ways to resist. Let me suggest one that I have not heard
seriously suggested before.
I witnessed a terrible injustice the other day when a
provocateur came to speak at the UC Berkeley Campus at the invitation of the
young Republicans. Protesters assembled
and outside forces, identified as “anarchists” (they dressed in black and wore
masks), came in, set fires and smashed windows on and near the campus. The news media then did what I think was a
terrible thing. They reported that “some
of the protesters turned violent.”
But that was bad reporting.
The protesters didn’t turn violent.
This is Berkeley, the home of free speech. Protesters protest here all the time and the
tradition of peaceful protest is well established. It was a separate group of outside agitators
who took over, as they now commonly do when there are public protests, and
brought about the violence.
The Berkeley police held back because in previous riots in
the Occupy movement they had moved in too soon and only escalated the rage of
the group. The pendulum swung too far
and this time they calculated that allowing the negative energy to burn itself
out was the lesser evil. Getting that right is an art. They need community help in doing this.
Here’s my suggestion.
We need to recognize that protests are now going to be a regular part of
the resistance to the new Trumpocracy.
Because it is based on deceit and the power of a small minority to abuse
the institutions of power to which they have been given access, we have no alternative. As the recent 600 women’s marches around the
country and the world demonstrated, protest, along with other institutions like
the police and the courts dedicated to the rule of law, are going to be our way
around this corrupt regime. Let me
suggest that protesters take another look at the police and shed the outdated
view that they are the enemy. Protesters
need to work with the police against the anarchists. If you see somebody wearing a mask set a
building on fire, rip off that mask.
Take their pictures and pursue them relentlessly up until the time when
they are prosecuted. Call them out by
name if you know them. Call attention to them.
Shut down this threat to peaceful protest. It’s our new lifeline they are endangering.
I realize this isn’t easy.
Many still think of cops as “pigs.”
As racists and bullies. Some are,
as the Black Lives Matter movement makes plain.
But some is a long way from all. We need to commit to a ruthlessly
honest look at the prejudice in ourselves and at our own inclination to profile. Recognize that there are crooked cops, but also
that the majority of police are committed to law and order. Making cops the enemy is a self-destructive
strategy in this day and age. What we
need now is to join forces with the police and help them do their job to look
out for the weak and the vulnerable.
We need to know who our friends are and not make enemies of
the very people we need to fight this battle of resistence to the man who
promised to drain the swamp but now demonstrates on a daily basis that he’s all
about doing the exact opposite.
We need to get smart.
Quickly.
No comments:
Post a Comment