reorientation

I am rarely hopeful about politics and culture — in the Milne Typology I am an Eeyore, which is the kind of thing that happens to people who reflect often upon original sin — but even so, much of what’s happening now surprises me. I always expect bad things, but I didn’t expect these bad things.

For the record, and with regard to the current matters of great contention: My sympathies are wholly with the suffering people of Minneapolis and all who recognize that the current administration is defying and mocking the Constitution of the United States in a hundred different ways; I agree completely with Mark Carney and the political leaders of other non-hegemonic countries that the United States is now an unreliable and untrustworthy neighbor; and while I believe that European-American relations are in need of revision, I also believe that the current administration’s inclination to take a chainsaw to them is woefully shortsighted and will bring great trouble for decades to come.

But if you disagree with any or all of that, it’s okay in one sense at least: That’s not what this post is about.

Instead, I’m making yet another argument for breaking bread with the dead. In times of social and political crisis, especially when new and often contradictory bulletins are arriving on our ICDs (Internet-Connected Devices) at a second-by-second rate, you and I need to step back. We need the relief. But at the same time, it is impossible, for me anyway, not to think about what’s happening. Just saying “I’m not going to read any more about this” is an inadequate response; it has a tendency to leave me fretful and at loose ends.

What helps is to read works from the past that deal with questions and challenges that are structurally similar to the ones we’re facing but that emerged in a wholly different context. Right now I am reading the Psalms, especially those that deal with questions of justice and injustice, and the Hebrew prophets. Though comparisons of the current moment to the rise of Nazism often strike me as overblown, they seem increasingly apt these days, so I am returning to Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison. I am also reading, perhaps surprisingly but quite appropriately and illuminatingly, Machiavelli’s Discourses. Machiavelli himself was breaking bread with the dead: reading Roman history as a way of understanding the challenges of 16th-century Florentine politics.

It’s noteworthy, I think, that Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan thinks that reading books about the history of Rome is dangerous: “One of the most frequent causes of [rebellion against monarchy] is the reading of the books of policy and histories of the ancient Greeks and Romans…. I cannot imagine how anything can be more prejudicial to a monarchy than the allowing of such books to be publicly read, without present applying such correctives of discreet masters, as are fit to take away their venom.” Fortunately, we today in the West may freely read such books. For now.

This practice of breaking bread with the dead in times of crisis offers a threefold reorientation:

Emotional, because it gives you a break from people who are continually trying to stoke your feelings of anger and hatred;

Intellectual, because in comparing past situations with ours you get an increasingly clear sense of what about our current situation is familiar (and therefore subject to familiar remedies) and what unusual or even unique (and therefore in need of new strategies);

Moral, because, as Aragorn says to Éomer, “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

So now back to Machiavelli. What a fascinating guy.