One of the recurring ideas that Obama uses in his speeches whether he is in Berlin or Cairo is the centrality of the American character, and what is fast becoming the human character. The idea that humankind shall come together under one banner, fighting for one world, wearing one uniform, against common enemies. The image of one political identity that Obama is transmitting through his rhetoric is very dangerous because it rests on a fashionable illusion and is directed to the child in us all. We are letting our guard down, while a militant guard is being spread over us, under the cloak of superhumanity and supernationality. To believe that Obama is America's saving grace is pure illusion, and to believe in his second-hand ideas for a new global system is even a greater illusion.
Emerson advised us not to partake in these cruel illusions. "In this kingdom of illusions," he said, "we grope eagerly for stays and foundations. There is none but a strict and faithful dealing at home, and a severe barring out of all duplicity or illusion there. Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth." In this past era a large number of Americans have failed to live up to these words. They, like the couple in Tony Gilroy's film Duplicity, chose to partake in wrongful schemes, in the belief that they would succeed extravagantly. But only a very elite few did when it all came crashing down.
E Pluribus Unum - or, out of many, one, is the famous phrase that Obama loudly proclaimed on Inauguration Day. And out of many, none have yet challenged him on this claim. I, for one, do believe in this so-called new-age idea that we all share a piece of the divinity, but where I depart, is when we try to organize politically into one common state, wrongly believing that the state can put what was originally a divine idea into motion on a grand, but still earthly scale.
I believe what Emerson believed, that we deceive our past and real nature when we commit to a single narration of history. To impose a flawed, totalitarian human order on our civilization that is at a breaking point is the gravest error we can make at this time. I believe there is in life a natural order, to which we are witnesses do, and recipients of. "The order is a willed order," professor James Schall says, and to the detest of many atheists, it is "not irrational, though its rationality is not a manmade rationality." Actively stamping our own idea of order, as Obama and his backers are pursuing, will ultimately fail because we succeed only when we remain passive in our common human destiny. Projecting our own image of ourselves is an absurdity; there already exists a copy of our face and of our motions, and laws. Our job primarily is to follow the natural blueprint and dismiss all others.
There is intelligence in the universe, of which we are examples. And the same few laws that were responsible for the origins of life are observable today, under our microscopes and through our telescopes. Schall wrote that this "origin does not mean that human minds cannot know something of it, beginning from what is." Emerson was called a sage because he knew that "of the universal mind each individual man is one more incarnation." New World Order' enthusiasts try to hijack this intuitive truth and exploit it for their own corrupt purposes. But we must look past the rhetoric and see their true faces, underneath all their cosmetic designs.
II
There are no nation states, only individuals. We've established that truth after much struggle and bloodshed in the 20th century. But we still can't put the state to bed, despite all its misgivings. The detractors of history are slowly coming out of time's secret closet and want to galvanize humankind's resources and talents and channel them into one supernational state. Such hopes are the elite's biggest illusion. But we must take their words and aims seriously because they are calculated, however, not as rightly as they like to believe.
As Gore Vidal writes, "total control over all of the people all of the time is the traditional aim of almost every government. In earlier times, this was only a tyrant's dream. Now it is technically possible." And the technocrats are lining up, ever ready to be told what to do. These technocrats lack a coherent inner life, and so they are more willing to give up their sovereignty to a higher command, but certainly not the highest for they believe little in God. Through aggression and lies the moneyed and political elite are putting in place a very destructive system, but not without its charm for the lower-level participants. The technocrats will probably achieve some height of personal significance in managing this system if it ever approaches its completion, which, again, I highly doubt. The new world order is an idea whose time will never come because it is the antithesis to all that is naturally good in humanity.
The proponents of this violent design for humanity will point to the threat of chaos, and of impending doom, as they have done so savagely in this first decade of the twentieth-first century. And they will not relent until they create some form of reality out of their and what is now our illusions, such as terrorism and man-made global warming.
Casting us into the dark has already been tried, and they have failed, thanks to the information age, but it's not a far-off guess to suggest that they will soon present the ultimate trade-off for the masses, complete freedom for complete security. And millions of us will budge, but millions won't. So blood, again, as Marx said, may move history, which is a sad fact. Or, I could be wrong, and the good men may be victorious without violence, but after Iraq and Palestine, can we be so sure that humankind's determined enemies won't recede until the last drop? The trouble is, we have no sense of tragedy, much less of history. The greatest riddle is being laid before our eyes, by humankind's most inept villains, sure, but villains, nonetheless, and we continue to watch reality t.v, as if the news isn't by itself entertaining and engaging enough.
I lack the clarity of extremists of whatever stripe because I believe that we live in an age of great tragedy. "In tragedy the clarity of the world," said the great American classicist scholar, Charles Segal, "like the meaning of events, is hidden behind a foreground which none of the characters can penetrate with any degree of certainty." The characters in David Simon's The Wire were oblivious to the larger forces operating in their daily lives, even the higher-ups were not given the full detail of the social policies they were responsibly for enacting. And those who have full knowledge are tied by social and political bonds to never come forward with revealing information, for whatever program and in whatever institution. But all is not lost. Sometimes history is propelled forward by small acts, as Rosa Parks showed us.
Segal commented that in a tragedy "the total meaning of events grows to fulfillment only slowly, partially, darkly." I am only getting a glimpse of the harsh truths with my busy and narrowing eyes, but that is another proof that we are living out a tragedy, because the truth has many voices as Segal says, and is hardly revealed at once.
Because we are cut off from history, we are frightened when we first discover that some men, those who hold undeniable power, are thinking and planning on a grand scale, to direct civlizaiton so it can benefit them, and we're just along for the ride. That fact is an outstanding wake-up call, and deeply dehumanizing at first, until we realize the second truth, that they will fail if we put up a fight. So which order will we come to? The one hammered down by the judge or the law's natural order? I say the law, the natural law which entails justice, liberty, and truth.
But my liberty is not of the 'leave-me-alone' coalition, but of a more accomplished liberty, the kind that recognizes we are all one. "Liberty," Schall teaches us, "is not independence from one another, but a relatedness to one another."
