+++ The modern world has problems. No longer ancient and starting sort of from scratch, no longer medieval with short lifespans and a simple church-state duopoly, and certainly no longer indigenous in direct mutual dialogue with nature like a woven fabric, our problems are unique enough to have their own name: "modernity."
An idea, rather facetious, cropped up over fifty – yes, fifty – years ago to call European culture "post-modern" instead of modern. This idea suggested that although modernity may have had many serious problems they no longer mattered because their "time" had passed. The time of constitutions, including democratic ones, a public sphere of communication (with greater or lesser freedom of speech), the idea of rights codified by laws which were often upheld even when some official or strongperson didn't like it, and the reality of biological nature and scientific method, well those things were all passé. Not only did they no longer require any effort or attention, they had never warranted it, being nothing more than rewritings of the tooth fairy tale. There is no quarter under your pillow, they said, only lies. We shouldn't be surprised now that in 2024 the USA is fairly likely to vote an autocrat into the presidency and democracy is being routed like yesterday's news the world over. Autocrats from Tallahassee to Budapest crow about being post-truth, their PR consultants throwing terms like post-Enlightenment around like confetti, and the general mass of ordinary people – the only force that has ever allowed democracy to function – has nothing to go by except tired populism and hyper-specific outrage. Susan Neiman explains how Foucault carried this "who cares" attitude forward from Schmitt, who did so for Nietzsche, who is from – well, who? Neiman's book explains why the millions of factions within the left and center can only blame each other for being not left enough, too left, or left in the wrong way, and cannot reliably organize political coalitions capable of defeating autocracy in elections. Paul de Man is dancing under a giant disco ball in his grave. The boring view of Habermas that democracy is still real and matters, as do rights, constitutions, laws, and the public sphere of communication that articulates them all, that he pointed out very early on with Foucault – who he called way back in the 80's "a young conservative" and basically a hypocritical con artist like Freud or Bernays – well this practical reality-based view is now defined mainly by its incredible confusion and hopelessness. How could democracy deteriorate so badly, everywhere, when we thought we were way past it? I guess the European mind thought by ignoring democracy and pretending it didn't exist it would be protected forever, like a bee in amber. +++ Paul de Man, who championed postmodernism so effectively out of Yale early on, was, we now know, a terrible fascist sympathizer and anti-Semite. He knew very well, just as every bully on every playground knows, that if you confuse the people who are supposedly guarding ethical norms, the grown-ups and goody-goodies, you can get away with a lot more terrible shit. A super-confusing, pretentious, hyper-abstract rhetoric on which to base the thousands of PhD's being handed out in the post-civil-rights era that could out-compete Marxism for clever ambitious scholars' affection was badly needed and postmodernism was it. It has, moreover, worked like a charm. One can argue it was so crucially necessary, and therefore worthwhile, to nullify Marxism (also riddled with flaws, delusions, and outright lies) during the Cold War of 1948-1991 that any amount of duplicity or even violence was justified. Even if you grant that, by a stretch of utter contortion, there is no escaping the brutal fact that a spited face still needs a nose both to smell and not frighten the neighbors' kids or everyone at the dinner party much less watching TV. Autocracy, not the Marxist with a PhD, was the real adversary; and that lovely principle has not gone anywhere despite the wall falling and big business celebrating its myriad perfections in Beijing. We poisoned our own democracy thinking we had to in order to defeat the autocrats of 20th century and now we have very little left with which to oppose our greatest adversary as reconstituted in the 21st. Even if the autocratic party of the USA, led by a predictably effective postmodern demagogue who by the power of lying and graft has leapt straight off the TV screen into the corridors of power, loses this November democracy will still have to preserve and maintain itself under terribly adverse conditions. If the autocrats win, they will still have to be opposed and hopefully weakened by democratic means; and if by some chance the demagogue manages to cancel the constitution and put everyone who voted against autocracy to death in a giant bonfire those who survive will still have to think about democracy, what its problems are, and what to do about it. Even if the word democracy was struck from every paper book and internet web page the idea of it would have to be dealt with. So how should one do that? +++ The modern world, trying to birth itself Athena-like after medievalism, has always had two basic versions: autocracy and democracy. This battle is present from the earliest times, even the ancient ones. In ancient conversations, they talked about whether there was such a thing as right and wrong, or justice, outside of simply what the strongest person forced other people to say was right. Entire civilizations in Greece and Rome, not to mention Egypt and Mesopotamia, rose and fell on the fundamental ground of this question. Religions discussed it for literally thousands of uninterrupted years in antiquity and even in prehistory, and the discussion of what divinity was and which humans it deemed worthy of life or freedom was of course the basic economic function, outside farming, of the Middle Ages. Today we are still stuck in it, this conversation, you might even say up to our necks. Does might make right, with the autocrat as divine enforcer, or does right make might through a democracy of laws? Plato wrote about this topic, as did basically most other ancients, hoping that right makes might. In the real world of street violence and royal dungeons of course we know it isn't always the case and right making might is often aspired to rather than experienced. Still, even after ancient Rome and Athens were well and duly sacked once and for all the question lingered like ash nutrients in fertile soil; and the reborn religions of the medieval age centered on it too. At first the claim was made that monotheism answered the question: since the monodeity created and loved all humans, all were of value under divine law. Various failures to apply the spirit of such equality did occur, sometimes in great volume, but so did efforts to reform such corruption grow with time. Reformation was built into the DNA of medieval institutions even to the dismay of many rulers thereof. Dante is just one example of thousands of reformers, across every continent, who both imagined and created the modern age in which art and science emerged as often equal peers to reform the church-state duopoly and rescue it from the fungal logic, which tends to afflict any moribund tissue of the body politic, that might makes right. Ethical art and science, Dante wrote, were the engines of adaptive change that could turn the institutions of church-state authority away from corrupted autocracy back onto the path of democracy, rights, and the rule of law, thus restoring the ethical status of both temporal and ecclesiastical authority away from might makes right, the abyss of destruction which has always threatened every human relationship since humans began. +++ Yet without Hope there can be no Hopelessness, and modernity was as certain to forge paths to might-makes-right as the prehistoric, ancient, and medieval times were. In the Renaissance, the first modern stretch of history in Europe, some like to posit, Machiavelli, who is often called the first modern philosopher and the inventor of political modernity, set forth such a path indelibly in The Prince and Discourses on Livy. These two books in which force is the parent of all things laid the foundation for all might-making-right to follow, through Hobbes to every proto-autocrat including Marx and Nietzsche, and thence to yes Schmitt and Foucault. It's the same ugly lineage all the way back. It's the hopelessness that drinks the poison wine of violence hoping to piss perfume. It has whispered sweetly into the ears of mass-slaughter-aficionados from Mussolini to Stalin, and Mao to Putin. There is no moral code worth following, no rules, no arbiter in the sky to pass judgment, there is only you killing or being killed. Who has fought to keep democracy alive thus far? People whose names start with L, like Lincoln and Leonardo da Vinci, and others whose names do not start with L like Hamilton and Tokarczuk. Kondiaronk, the great Native American author and diplomat, arguably reminded 17th century Europe more than any European (ancient, medieval, or modern) that democracy matters. In today's world and all over the internet we have both people trying to protect democracy in 2024 and people trying to put it out of its misery. We are all in the game, invested one way or another, even in how we happen to fondle our phones on any given day. +++ For simplicity and energy, and considering the towering importance of Machiavelli in this saga of modern might vs. right, let us focus our wandering eyes on an unlikely interlocutor: Leonardo, fatherless child of the town of Vinci in Tuscany, born about two months before slavery (only of non-Christians of course) was declared legal Dum Diversas i.e. "until otherwise" by the ecclesiastical authorities of Europe. Leonardo was smarter than you and me, or at least as smart, and very perceptive too, and he knew Machiavelli personally and worked with him on both canal-digging and espionage projects as fellow public servants of the government of Florence, Italy. Leonardo favored Dante, from whom he learned to read and write the only language he could, Italian, and he knew an autocrat when he saw one. (They were all over Renaissance Italy like flies on a turd, you might say.) So Leonardo, who loved lists and recipes, as well as phrases and drawings, created his counter-mechanism. He did it so well it was not destroyed by over 500 years of autocracy and even autocrats like Napoleon have worshipped rather than burnt it. Like an early form of genetic engineering, Leonardo has provided us with the benefits of his own immuno-response in the form of ten letters spliced into the conversations of today, 10 February 2024: E-X-P-E-R-I-E-N-C-E, or in Italian, E-S-P-E-R-I-E-N-Z-A. It's the story by allegory of right making might over might making right in his portrait of the Mona Lisa, showing in perfect subtlety how art and science can serve and nourish all life and nature, including humans, in defiance of and victory (vinci) over those who would enslave and slaughter by said instruments in their hate, rage, pale ire, envy, and despair. Yet Leonardo did not end his painting life there. He painted one more after, a much darker work, indeed almost black: the Gran Giovanni. Leonardo knew the "monster" of humanity could and likely would kill all life on earth due to the simple bad habit of incontinence, or compulsive appetite, which Dante had depicted as a starving wolf which "mated with all things." There is no guarantee, as it were, and as we can all attest to we are not, most certainly not, out of the woods yet. Leonardo explained clearly how in their cruelty, unbounded, humans would soon dig up and despoil every natural life-form, throughout the land and under the land and in the sea, for consumption, and then bring war and hate and violence and labor and fury to every living thing, all from appetite escalated by cruelty. We are not out of the woods. +++ Some have written of what is likely autocracy's worst, most violent, and most pathological modern example, German Fascism, by ascribing to it "the banality of evil." Just people doing their work, following orders, filling out paperwork, calculating formulas, and so forth, thereby making possible a descent into horror, destruction, and atrocity previously unimaginable. There is some truth to this, to the smallness and meekness of bureaucratic slaughter. However, on the flip side, all that fiery German rhetoric (Feurigeworter) and those rallies and banners and ritualized pogroms egged on by radio and film were quite dramatic, volatile, spectacular, and boisterous. It was these most vehement "exhortations to evil" driven by lust, blood, and hyper-erotic sadism as well as insipid clerical duties which changed Germany from a relatively normal group of people into a nation of mechanized psychopathy overnight. It wasn't just banality: much of the motive force was theatrical, exaggerated, amplified brutality of the most public, transgressive, and fevered character possible. What it was, however, this attempt to subject the whole planet to some Germano-Roman fantasy of might making right, above all else was mediocre. All of its leaders were crass, second-rate, and in a word, loser slobs. Their sadism and luxuriation in bloodletting was not banal by any definition, but it was the height of mediocrity in ethical, cultural, political, and psychological terms. They were like middle-school bullies with tank divisions and gas chambers, who hadn't outgrown their own humiliation (by parents, the newspapers, other bullies, or morbid and stunted self-talk) nor had they been sickened by their own early taste of cruelty the way most decent people are. Their own standards for human right and wrong were incredibly mediocre – like Schmitt, a laughable idiot, and Heidegger, little if any better – and so was the conscience of both the general populace and the wealthy. Their society's institutions and laws for the protection of rights and legality itself were worse than middling in quality and effectiveness, and their culture was often little more than bigotry, kitsch, tuxedos and brandy, or cheap maudlin taverns. Such mediocrity run amok was all the human appetite for cruelty needed to seize power and destroy peace in the twentieth century and perhaps forever given the toxic human and chemical waste left by the Fascists' war and its aftermath. All this is Machiavelli, walking in the blood-soaked trenches as if an officer in a greatcoat, surveying his handiwork and glorying in the success of his prophecy, all throughout he is there. +++ Yet Leonardo: he is still the stronger, yes by excellence but not of an autocratic sort to indulge his own love of power to kill. Leonardo is a servant-warrior, who loved all life and took his own power to live from this love of nature. He had and was conscience free of the allure of cruel appetite, a freedom he had to fight hard from a young age to gain and keep. So, in keeping with his own nature, which was part created by him and part the gift of circumstance, he built for us the means of destroying Machiavelli's new Prince and in so doing sustain the planet as a living one. Just a simple portrait, it hangs (if spattered with pumpkin soup) in the grand museum of the pyramids at the heart of Paris, France, home of this year's Olympic games in which despite the doping and souvenirs and crass bluster the world aspires to something better than its worst – a flame of hope, you could say, for excellence of effort to help right make might. The portrait will be there, in the heart of all this hope, not far from the once-charred skeleton of Notre Dame cathedral rebuilt as another gesture toward the second most-divine virtue. Can the portrait speak, over the din of the new Prince marching everywhere, and will it? The portrait has never stopped speaking, and likely never will even if autocracy defeats democracy forever in nine months (because even autocrats need excuses). All we have to do is listen, and repeat; hear a word, then speak a word; hear a word, then speak that word in our own little voice. It's as achievable, you could say, as breathing, and just as powerful. Nothing can stop it if you choose to let it happen, nothing on earth or above the earth, before, during, or after. And who teaches this simple fact? Saint Genevieve, who has a bridge I painted once in 2006, in the city of Paris, while I floated on a boat (a barge) that had a little table and patio on top and a funny apartment in the hold, all moored along the left bank close to Pont de Sully. Genevieve is the saint who saves France, and is the patron saint of Paris. She saves it in different ways for different times, eras, and contexts, but she saves it almost always by hoping and speaking hopefully, as one of many in a large group. She is definitely a defender not a crusader; she appears at the time of greatest need and danger like that which constitutional democracy faces this very year, on the very streets of Paris France. Someone will even cross her bridge to see the Olympic games this summer or visit the rebuilt cathedral, or just have coffee with a friend or a stranger or even alone. Someone might even whisper that little word, that one word, to a visual image of a portrait of an idea, hoping. +++ Max Herman February, 2024 ExperienceDemocracy2024.org/experience-democracy-is/ +++
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