Politics involves a subtle balance of optimism and pessimism. Hence the two faces of Donald Trump: the grim-faced mug shot from the courtroom, with the frown of an elderly gorilla being taunted by his keepers, and the smiley-faced demagogue whose every third word is “beautiful”. If you’re in opposition, you need to portray the state of the nation as pretty dire, but not to the point where you create widespread disillusion, which might weaken the will to do anything about it. If the nation is in terminal decline, where would it find the resources to climb back up again? If political society isn’t in much of a mess, there’s no call for your reformist agenda, but if it’s in too much of a mess there’s not much chance that it will do any good.

Disillusion gives birth to demoralisation, and a demoralised public is a potentially disaffected one. This is one reason why almost every English novel before Thomas Hardy ends on an affirmative note, even if this runs counter to what it has actually shown about the world. Art must edify as well as entertain. It must raise our spirits as well as feed our curiosity about our fellow humans, show things as they are but also as they might be in some more just, compassionate parallel universe. Fiction makes up for the deficiencies of reality.

Even so, it’s important that optimism isn’t overdone. This is partly because people are quick enough to see through hollow promises and bogus superlatives. But it’s also because, while our rulers may be idealistic, prating of a new Golden Age of peace and prosperity, the populace is spontaneously materialist, more interested in the price of eggs than the advent of Utopia. The bankers and CEOs are materialists as well, though they’re aware that one needs the odd burst of piety and patriotic rhetoric to mask the naked self-interest of their actual activities. Ruling classes are not always fooled by their own ideology. This is why it’s a futile pursuit to speak truth to power, since power usually knows the truth anyway. Power understands that one occasionally needs to invoke God, the greatness of the nation and the spirit of selflessness without allowing it to interrupt the daily business of screwing one’s competitors. As the wit remarked, it’s when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it’s time to give it up.

The orgy of collective self-congratulation and sham religiosity which was Trump’s inauguration showed all this well enough. The man himself was in Messianic mode, sent by God to save the nation: as though the Almighty’s first attempt at this task, by sending a close family member, hadn’t quite come off. Looking around the world, one feels bound to agree. Trump was in a performative mood as well, which may require some explaining. For philosophers of language, performative statements are the kind of utterance that gets something done. Promising, cursing, blessing, welcoming, instructing, forgiving, forbidding: these are examples of language as action, doing something by saying something, not describing the world but bringing some new state of affairs into existence through the power of the word.

It was in this spirit that Trump decreed on being elected that there were now only two genders in the United States. It was as though all other genders vanished into thin air as the words were spoken, which is to say that performative language is a kind of magic. You can transform the world with a movement of the lips. You can even conjure new geographical features into existence, such as Mount McKinley or the Gulf of America. The same goes for Trump’s declaration that “The Golden Age of America begins right now”, which is less an observation like “What a fine library!” than a creative act like “I declare this library open”. Idealism in the sense of a positive vision of the world begins to merge into idealism in its more philosophical sense, meaning the power of the mind to create reality in its own image. If the truth is inconvenient, you can replace it by legislating an alternative truth into being.

This is all the more acceptable if you live in a world in which everything is in flux. Change and fluidity are hallmarks of postmodern culture, which means that no statement about reality can be definitive. It all depends on who says it, for what reason, at what place and time. There is no single truth about anything. The world exists in a whole spectrum of different ways at any given time, so that almost any description of it is likely to be true from some standpoint or other. Being true to the way things are means acknowledging that things are in no way particular. Hence the emergence of post-truth civilisation, in which Trump is a wronged innocent. Since you can’t make an objective judgement between this and the belief that he is a crook and a liar, reason becomes pointless and the two opinions simply have to fight it out. Post-truth leads to violence.

The mental power that transforms the world is traditionally known as the will, and in American culture the will is infinite. Madonna attributed her recovery from a serious illness to the fact that she “didn’t believe in limitations”. She may be in for a nasty surprise in 20 or 30 years time. What obstructs the will is the flesh, with all of its flaws and constraints, so that the only true freedom would be to de-materialise yourself, escaping from the body altogether. It’s this, not just a prudishness about sexuality, which lies at the root of the Puritan hatred of the body. To be a body is to be finite, and to be finite is to be plunged into permanent conflict with one’s true self, which is the infinite power of God within you. If you were to shuck off the body entirely, however, you would be nothing, so that the ultimate freedom is pure negativity. To act is to shape the world according to your wishes; but it is also to be a prisoner of what you create, since whatever you create is fated to be finite, and finitude is a scandal to the infinity which is the life of God in his creatures.

This is why there can never be an American utopia. The nation is doomed to remain divided — not just between George Clooney and the Proud Boys, but between the flesh and the spirit, which is to say between its actual achievements and the eternally unappeased desire which will always find them lacking. There is always more wilderness to tame, more territories to be colonised, more attempts to plant the Stars and Stripes on Alpha Centuari as well as Mars. All one’s ideals succeed in doing is showing how far reality has fallen short of them. You can call this state of affairs permanent progress or chronic unhappiness. Jean-Jacques Rousseau thought that it was both. The only future it can’t deal with is the one we are all forced to confront: death.

Because of their different history, the British are nothing like as idealist as the Americans. A prime minister who claimed that God saved his life, so that he could save the country, would probably be ridiculed rather than applauded. A long heritage of empiricism means that the contemporary British believe in what they can touch and taste, whatever the imperial fantasises of their ancestors and the chauvinism of the far-Right. Rather than stamping your identity on the world, you allow the world to shape your identity. The past is to be broken with in some respects, but conformed to in others. Gratitude for God’s special interest in the nation is largely confined to the last night of the Proms. Pessimism rather than bright-eyed enterprise sets the cultural tone. Alexis de Tocqueville remarks in his Democracy in America that Americans discourage negative comments about the weather. In Britain, they are well-nigh compulsory.

“There is always more wilderness to tame, more territories to be colonised, more attempts to plant the Stars and Stripes on Alpha Centuari as well as Mars.”

Optimism and pessimism, however, are for the most part mere temperamental affairs, without much moral substance. It’s no credit to smile at adversity if this comes to you as naturally as sneezing. This is where optimism differs from hope. Trump’s vision of a prosperous United States, supreme among the nations, may sound like hope but is actually just small-boy bragging. Much of what he says about America is really about himself. Genuine hope has to be based on realism rather than fantasy. The frail, tentative hope that sometimes emerges as the final note of a tragic drama is worth attending to because it has been dearly bought. Optimism, by contrast, is for the most part hope bought on the cheap. In the end, the only positive vision that counts is one that has faced the worst: yet still manages to affirm. Donald Trump gives the impression of a man who has never faced anything worse than an overdone cheeseburger.

Performative declarations don’t really work when it comes to culture. You can pardon a convict with a stroke of the pen, but most cultural change moves more like a glacier than a mountain stream. Culture in the sense of everyday customs and allegiances has its roots in a whole complex history. It represents what one might call the collective unconscious, and tends to resist being engineered into or out of existence. It is the stuff of which identities are made, which means that it’s a lot harder to change than your shoes or even your accent. Dismissing certain genders as null and void is like trying to will your hair to change colour. The narcissist insists that the world must be pliant to his touch, raging like an infant when it resists his desires. He would rather destroy material reality than allow it to frustrate his schemes. And Trump has his finger on the nuclear button.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/