A Minor Musing On Politics, Literature, And Unquiet Minds

As an English teacher I spent a lot of time thinking about the "usefulness" of literature especially novels and myths. Too many Americans seemingly equate use with  "being able to make a profit." Unless one is saying "'Myths and Novels' for $1000, Alex" literature may not have a financial use. 

Others may be more high minded and look to novels to somehow fill a faith void created as America's religious institutions fail to provide spiritual insight. The idea that novels can replace the god that Nietzsche claims we have all killed, however, seems specious.

While literature may not provide "the truth that shall set you free," it may provide a frame that allows readers to understand a confusing world. Elizabeth Bruenig illustrates that point with this Washington Post column that uses Conrad's Heart of Darkness to explain the damage being done to America's civic institutions.

Marlow’s is a civic kind of going mad, where the veil is lifted from politics and what lies beneath makes participation in ordinary political life with a quiet mind impossible. By the time he returns, what once seemed placid and unremarkable seems sinister and false — and it is. 

We’re about there, I think — perhaps not every single one of us, perhaps not just yet, but the conditions are right and the summer is long. The entire 2016 episode has been, in some sense, an introspective journey into America’s own innermost parts, with Donald Trump’s victory prompting a nervous self-inventory of what we value, whether our institutions work and to what degree we ought to trust one another. The full contents of that inward odyssey have yet to unfold. But on the question of institutional functioning, the news is unequivocally grim. Like Marlow, even after this particular chapter has ended, we are likely to find ourselves changed by what we’ve seen.

Bruenig concludes that the change we undergo will be long lasting,

. . . It has gone this way before. It took several incidents, from Vietnam to Watergate to scattered episodes of civil unrest, to permanently damage American trust in government; but as distinct as each event was, they all fractured the same essential faith. We haven’t returned to consistent levels of pre-’70s levels of trust in 40 years, and I doubt this current civic unease will fade much sooner. 

This particular horror — Trump and his failures, whatever ridiculous thing he has said or done today, whatever international incident he causes on Twitter tomorrow, however authentic the next panic is — will pass. What will last is the frank revelation of a point that, while ugly and dark, is at least true: You really don’t have the choices you ought to in American democracy, because of decisions made without your consent by people of wealth and power behind closed doors. It’s possible to continue to participate in a democracy after that. But not with a quiet mind.

Many have rightfully referenced Orwell's fable Animal Farm as an analogy for the current political situation.  In Animal Farm, the men and pigs become indistinguishable. Likewise, as Bruenig points out, Heart of Darkness shows both the demagogue and the a dictator, can achieve similar ends: the destruction of faith in civil institutions.

I have long maintained that Trump and his enablers use Orwell's 1984 as a road map. Yesterday, Trump became a walking caricature of Orwell's Big Brother when he asserted, “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening, . . . Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.” This post is far from the first to point out that Orwell's dystopian state rested on an "essential command": "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears."

I also wonder if America is approaching the tribalism illustrated in Lord of the Flies where one group rejected the evidence of their eyes and accepts that a pig's head on stick is somehow a talisman able to keep evil at bay. The boys were eventually rescued and novel leaves unanswered what happens when they return to "civilization." Like the questions that arise from the applying the Heart of Darkness to today's politics, this question should also cause disquiet because it implies there may be no true return from a descent into tribalism.

Because novels like Shakespeare's greatest works or ancient Greek tragedies offer questions without pat answers, we should encourage more reading and be more skeptical when a politician tells us "I alone can fix it." That we were not skeptical does not indicate that literature lacks value. Rather, it demonstrates that too few understand the value of the questions literature asks.