Why the Center A PUNCTUM BOOK Can’t Hold A Diagnosis of Puritanized America by Tom O’Neill A Diagnosis of our American State of Puritanism by Tom O’Neill why the center can’t hold Why the Center Can’t Hold A Diagnosis of Puritanized America by Tom O’Neill punctum books america & earth WHY THE CENTER CAN’T HOLD: A DIAGNOSIS OF PURATINIZED AMERICA © 2016 Tom O’Neill http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transforma- tion, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. First published in 2016 by punctum books America & Earth http://punctumbooks.com punctum books is an independent, open-access pub- lisher dedicated to radically creative modes of intel- lectual inquiry and writing across a whimsical para- humantities assemblage. We solicit and pimp quixotic, sagely mad engagements with textual thought-bodies. We provide shelters for intellectual vagabonds. ISBN-13: 978-0692725474 ISBN-10: 0692725474 Facing-page drawing: Heather Masciandaro. Book and cover design: Chris Piuma. Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ http://punctumbooks.com/about/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible without your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490–1500) Table of Contents Preface xv section one SIGNS OF ACCELERATING INCOHERENCE 1 1. Our Accelerating Disinvestment in Education 3 2. The Growing Ascendance of the Rich 31 2.1 Puritans 31 2.2 Adam Smith 45 2.3 Milton Friedman 58 3. Our Tenaciously Expanding Belief in Force 73 3.1 Cherokee Removal 82 3.2 Mexican Removal 85 3.3 War on the Plains 91 3.4 War against Spaniards (and Cubans?) and Filipinos 103 4. The Sense Nature Can Take Whatever We Dish Out 141 5. How the Signs of Incoherence Cohere in Pointing Toward Disintegration 167 SECTION TWO CONVENIENT SKEPTICISMS AS FACILITATORS OF INCOHERENCE 187 6. Skepticism about History 191 7. Skepticism about Beauty 209 8. Skepticism about Morality 217 9. Skepticism about Anything Being Known Absolutely (Absolute Skepticism) 227 SECTION THREE FALSE HOPES REGARDING AN ESCAPE FROM INCOHERENCE 237 10. “Fundamentalism Will Save Us!” 239 11. “God Will Save Us from Ourselves!” 271 12. “The Next Election (or the one after that) Will Save Us!” 281 13. “I’ve Decided to Be a Survivor!” 297 Conclusion 303 Bibliography 335 About the author 339 Index 341 This book is dedicated in gratitude to some of its generous sources: to Barton Bernstein of Stanford, for eye-opening lectures and for deft guidance to graduate-students like me; to Joseph P. Sottile of NewsVandal, for relentless reproach when I slacken my attention to current events; and to my daughter Natasha, for listening thoughtfully to my interminable monologs. Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world . —William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming” Preface This essay is an exercise in reflection— worse yet, the reflection involves theology. There’s not much of new data in it. It revisits themes some may think have been worked to exhaustion. And even in taking up these themes, the writer will be disclosed as sometimes an amateur. That is, there are others whose mastery of individual facts clearly exceeds his. My interest however is not mainly in adding to our information about America, but in tak- ing the weight of quite familiar information. My concern is that we have not done this. While we have admitted to bumps along the road to progress and to some incon- sistencies in our practice of principles, I believe we as a people have never acknowledged some underlying contradictions in the way we conceive our task and ourselves. So I crave indulgence of the reader. I attempt a revisiting of the American story, and I can imagine time and again the individ- ual reader will say, “Wait— he’s got it all wrong; this isn’t what I’ve learned at all!” At such points I ask the reader to hesitate and consider that it may not be sheer ignorance of the familiar story that guides me; rather I’m attempting to tell the story in a way that may shed light on why so many aspects of our current American experience are disappointing to us and seem to have lost their efficacy as guides to the future. xv SECTION ONE Signs of Accelerating Incoherence We confront with wholesome skepticism those who say the sky is falling. People have been saying it since the invention of speech— and the sky is still there. Sound enough. Yet the danger of this skepticism can be that even when something is going awry systematically, we may tend to greet each indication as a mere oddity. True, one should not treat the first sneeze as a predictor of pneumonia. But when sneeze follows sneeze, and the throat clogs, and the lungs register congestion, one must at some point acknowledge the onset of illness. That moment of doing so is a positive one; without it one isn’t likely to take corrective action. Today evidence of something going wrong shows up in many places. Consider education for instance. Granted, education is always problematic. Knowledge maketh a bloody entrance. And the effort to set aside immediate concerns for the sake of cultivating more general understandings has always been sub- ject to thoughtful objection. A decision to postpone immediate improvements (say, re-tiling the kitchen floor) to seek a broader understanding of life is open to the charge of impracticality. Add to that that our nation, from the time of its first settlement by Europeans, has been always the site of urgency at some fron- tier. Our sense of the urgency of things has contributed toward a specifically American form of anti-intellectualism. “He who hesitates is lost.” Let’s get this show on the road.” There probably aren’t many cultures in the world where “egghead” and “intellec- tual elite” are such effective put-downs as they are here. All that notwithstanding, something new and worse has been happening lately to education in America. I will speak of “accel- erating disinvestment,” and this disinvestment I argue is both a 2 tom o’neill matter of morale and a matter of money (often in fact beginning as a matter of morale and becoming a matter of money). I speak of this as a sign of incoherence; the disinvestment runs contrary both to what we’ve said traditionally and what we say currently in our common discourse about education. So I begin by attending to education as a place that calls for reflection. After that, I address the profit motive as it currently establishes itself to be the arbiter in America of all other valuation and enter- prise. I suggest that here too we have matter for reflection, argu- ing that our exclusive focus on profit is incompatible with many things we claim to believe in and care about. Thirdly, I examine our reliance on force as our guarantee of national security. I suggest our quest for a form of absolute secu- rity, sought through intimidation, cannot co-exist with our ambi- tion to become a beacon of light to the human race. At the end of this section I argue there’s a kind of coherence amid the incoherencies being identified. Just before that though, I turn to Nature, and suggest there’s an ominous contrast between our sense of America as the Promised Land and our actual treat- ment of the land we inhabit. Our Accelerating 1 Disinvestment in Education Our galloping disinvestment in education doesn’t need to be proved. By reason of family members and friends— if not from personal experience — everyone’s aware of it. On the surface of things it’s so obviously counterproductive it seems inexplicable. It’s as if a hungry farmer were to say in desperate times: “We’ll eat all the seed-corn this year, but as soon as we are again blest with bountiful harvests, we’ll start again to put seed aside for planting.” Regarding education, Franklin, Madison, and— in his way— Jefferson were clear that, for government-by-the-people to work, the public would have to be well informed and able to think real- istically about needs and prospects. Jefferson tells us “a people who would be both free and ignorant longs for something that can never be.” This is why free speech and a free press, along with freedom of religion, were singled out for protection in our first amendment to our Constitution. Candidates for government office understand this so well that each of them campaigns to become the Education Mayor or the Education Governor or the Education President.