Obama, Machiavelli, Oprah-endorsed post-masculine charisma, and more “heaven on earth” inanity

The whole essay is quite an engrossing read, believe me. A few tastes:

It is a sign of growing maturity in a people when...it acknowledges that suffering is an element of life that sympathetic magic cannot eradicate, and recognizes a residue of pain in existence that even the application of technical knowledge cannot assuage. Advances in knowledge may end particular kinds of suffering, but these give way to new forms of hurt—milder, perhaps (one would rather be depressed than famished), yet not without their sting. We do not draw closer to a painless world.

One of the objects of a mature political philosophy is to reconcile people to the painful limitations of their condition. The American Founders recognized this, as did the English statesmen who presided at the Revolution of 1688: they rejected utopianism.

Listen: Phil Gramm was right. Most rational human beings would much rather have to deal with the blues than starving to death, yet here we sit, in the world's wealthiest nation, with the world's highest standard of living, with the world's greatest healthcare system...But what do we hear? Whining, kvetching, and complaining about things our grandparents and great-grandparents would be shocked at even having the opportunity to grumble about. The older I get, the less tolerant I'm becoming of whining and grumbling. STOP IT. Find something to be thankful for; chances are, an abundance of such things shall be found.

Anyhow, back to Beran: he, too, is right that a sign of maturity is recognizing that pain, frustration, and sadness are a part of life in a fallen world populated by fallen people. Rational, thoughtful, honest people will also admit that the idea of "heaven on earth", a utopian world, a communitarian society of love and happiness, is fully impossible precisely because we are all fallen and incapable of creating such a thing, much less sustaining it.

Unlike the English Whigs and the American Founders, the modern liberal regards suffering not as an unavoidable element of life but as an aberration to be corrected by up-to-date political, economic, and hygienic arrangements. Rather than acknowledge the limitations of our condition, the liberal continually contrives panaceas that will enable us to transcend it.

Barack Obama, in taking up the part of regenerative healer, is the latest panacea. ...Obama finds a scapegoat for the present discontents in politics—a politics, he argues, that breeds “division, and conflict, and cynicism” and that has become a “dead zone” in which “narrow interests vie for advantage and ideological minorities seek to impose their own versions of absolute truth.”

Something Obama has never addressed is this: if we, who tend to split into different political groups at odds with one another, are "the ones we've been waiting for"...well...How does that work, O Barack?

One of the most important parts of the essay:

Yet if Obama has made redemptive communitarianism attractive in an age of sagging sperm counts, he has done nothing to correct the underlying flaw of the collectivist ideal: its incompatibility with the older morality of limits. The politics of consensus that Obama favors is incompatible with the Founders’ adversarial system, which permits those whom he disparages as “ideological minorities” to take stands on principle that, at times, frustrate the national consensus. Obama makes it clear that there is no place, in the politics he advocates, for those “absolutists” who would defy the community. The “ideological core of today’s GOP,” he writes, is “absolutism, not conservatism,” an absolutism driven by those who prize “absolute truth” over “communal values.” This commitment to absolute truth, he argues, stands in the way of a politics that can solve our problems and change our lives.

How many Christians believe they'll be left out of that unloved crowd, those with "absolute truth"? Hmmm?

Obama goes so far as to argue that the Constitution itself is “a rejection of absolute truth.” His moral relativism is intimately bound up with his conviction that we can transcend those limitations in human nature that the Founders acknowledged when they drafted the Constitution. This rejection of older moral standards, Machiavelli observed, is a tactical necessity for the charismatic redeemer. It is not simply that adherence to the West’s traditional morality would prevent such a leader from being properly ruthless in the pursuit of his ideal; it is that the old morality, with its emphasis on the limits of man’s fallen condition, makes his communitarian paradise seem quixotic—an instance of utopian overreaching.

Machiavelli was ready with a solution. He helped prepare the way for the politics of redemptive healing by working to overturn the older morality. In particular, he undermined the West’s most potent myth of diabolic amorality and delusory hubris. Two years after he completed The Prince, Machiavelli composed a fable, Belfagor, or the Devil Who Took a Wife, in which he ridiculed the idea that the devil can take possession of a man’s mind and corrupt those around him.

In other words, Machiavelli (followed by Voltaire, Goethe, Shaw, Diderot, and countless others) began to turn the existence of the devil, and hence the source of evil, into a joke, or even into a character that arouses sympathy. As Dostoyevsky intimates in The Brothers Karmazov,

Dostoyevsky implied that it was precisely when the devil became a wit that the intellectual classes of the West succumbed to the most familiar form of diabolic temptation: the belief that men can transcend the limits of their condition and “be as gods”—demiurges with the power to heal the world’s pain and reshape it in accordance with a beautiful idea.

Well, that sounds awfully familiar, both from present-day experiences with environmentalists and politicians all the way back to the serpent in Eden. Interestingly, though, America despite its slide has one card in its advantage against Obama and those like him: we believe there is a devil (according to a 2005 poll, 61% of us do, compared to just 20.5% of the Italians, 12.5% of the Russians, and 3.6% of East Germans).

The very strength of America’s religious ideal of redemption has restrained, though it has not entirely forestalled, the development of alternative secular ideals of redemption. A religiously inspired belief in original sin has made Americans wary of succumbing to the Pelagian notion that a mere mortal, however charismatic, can build the New Jerusalem out of purely secular materials.

...We often read about differences between America and Europe with respect to belief in God, but differences with respect to belief in diabolic evil may be even more revealing. It is significant that belief in the devil is lowest in those countries (Russia and Germany) that suffered, during the twentieth century, most acutely from forms of evil that might without exaggeration be called diabolic. Europeans, it may be, have proved more susceptible to the element of diabolic temptation in charismatic leadership precisely because they are less likely to believe in the reality of diabolic evil.

Talk about food for thought.

Additionally, where there is no belief in a devil (much less God), it stands to reason that individuals and certain groups will be seen as the originators of and forces for evil; after all, who else is there to blame? Thus we see SUVs and air-conditioners blamed for (nonexistent) "climate change"; we see Christians and Catholics fighting abortion called "hatemongers" and "patriarchal"; we see the success of one person being blamed for the failure of another though both operate in vastly different and separated spheres of life.

Finally:

Meanwhile, the very images of frailty that undermine the masculine leader’s pose of strength help the practitioner of the new post-masculine charisma, whose object is to appear human—all too human. Softness has become an asset for candidates who have molded themselves on the exhibitionist model of the Oprah matriarchy.

Hence Obama’s spectacular rise. But Obama-mania is bound in the end to disappoint. Not only does it teach us to despise our political system’s wise recognition of human imperfection and the pursuit of private happiness; it encourages us to seek for perfection where we will not find it, in politics, in the hero worship of a charismatic shaman, in the speciousness of a secular millennium. Lacking the moral parables that made our ancestors wary of those delusions in which overweening pride is apt to involve us, we pursue false gods and turn away from traditions that really can help us make sense of our condition.