Thomas Matlack was Chief Financial Officer of The Providence Journal until 1997. He was the lead investor in the Art Technology Group, which reached $5 billion in market capitalization in 2001. He founded and ran his own venture firm from 1998 to 2010, before turning to writing. He is the founder of The Good Men Project.

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I happened to meet a major vendor of Verizon’s new FiOS effort at a dinner party the other night. He let me in on a dirty little secret: Pay-Per-View is driving the resurgence in the old Ma Bell. And it isn’t Bambi that’s doing it.

Verizon charges $4.99 for its new releases but $14.99 for porn. My buddy is involved in determining the capacity needed for different parts of the day, so he has studied peak load on the system in scientific detail. Guess what consumes over 90 percent of the bandwidth—Porn. Now for the truly stupid part: guys are spending $14.99 for a two-hour story of guy meets girl where they do all kinds of sick things together, but on average, the viewer of porn turns the show off after 18 minutes. Think about how many guys have to watch 18-minute segments to drive 90 percent of Verizon’s bandwidth and you begin to see why they are making money and why we have a problem.

I had this revelatory conversation after Tiger Woods but before Jesse James had been busted for screwing around. So I got to watch yet another national scandal unfold with these facts fresh in my mind. I spoke to another friend, who runs a major organization focused on sports and society, who just laughed at the outrage over Jesse messing with the tattoo girl when he’s married to America’s Sweetheart. “All the guys pointing fingers are just trying to keep the attention off themselves, as they slink off to the nearest strip club.”

I keep asking myself: Aren’t we sick of these stories? Do I really care about the status of Charlie Sheen’s recovery? What I do care a lot about is the state of the average American guy. And for him, I am pretty darned concerned.

John Edwards, Tiger, Jesse, and our obsession with their bad behavior, are a symptom of a much deeper problem that the Groundhog Day feel of the news should shake us all to consider, even if you aren’t privy to Verizon’s pay-per-view stats. Guys in our country are at a crossroads. We are not all cheats and drunks (though I was at one point), but most guys I know are pretty confused.

I’ve spent the last two years interviewing men of all walks of life: black, white, rich, poor, gay, straight, urban, rural, famous, and the guy next door. I’ve talked to murderers locked up in Sing Sing and NFL Hall of Famers, stay-at-home dads and reporters on the ground in Baghdad, men who failed at marriage and those that succeeded, dads who lost children or struggled with them growing up, guys fighting for our country and those just trying to do the right thing.

In all those voices I heard one thing again and again: the struggle to stay true to themselves as men. Every guy I talked to who had made it through to some kind of peace of mind had hit a wall of some sort when they lost a wife, a buddy, a job, or got thrown out of the house. They woke to look in the mirror, knowing their world had changed forever. The way they had been limping along in life would no longer do. They had to dig deep to find themselves for real. They had to tell the truth about themselves and hold onto it.

The issue is, in part, cultural. Men in 2010—with more men unemployed than at any time in recent history—are supposed to be present fathers, intimate husbands, and still bring home the bacon. It’s like women 50 years ago. There is no way we can do it all. And yet we don’t like to talk about it. Most guys stay silent and compartmentalize. Men, especially when in pain, don’t like to talk about it. The last thing we want to do is end up on Oprah’s couch crying our eyes out.

So this is where that 18 minutes comes into play. It’s a way of coping, instead of actually talking about it. It takes little shame, and only accelerates the trap that too many guys fall into, thinking we are alone. All these guys doing the same idiotic things, thinking they are the only one.

At least in my case, success and public attention soon meant my public and my private personas would become widely divergent. I failed miserably as a father and a husband. I lied to myself and ultimately everyone I cared about. But you don’t have to be the CFO of a big company, as I was, or be Tiger Woods to compartmentalize as a guy. All of the men I have interviewed talked about it as the fundamental challenge—being the same person in every aspect of life.

As with Tiger, there is no excuse for Jesse’s behavior. The victims are the wives involved. But at the same time, I am rooting that they get better. Being a cheat isn’t a good time. It’s actually quite miserable.

Fourteen years later, I am sober and happily remarried. I hope that these guys get a clue. I also hope that as a country of men, we start talking more openly about the source of these problems rather than having to watch the train wreck happen again and again and again while the media feasts on yet another tragedy.

So guys, stop pointing the finger at the latest celebrity caught with his pants down. Stop suffering in silence and start talking about what is really going on, even if it isn’t pretty. Tell another guy. You might be surprised at how much he can relate to your pain. The 18 minutes isn’t going to solve a damn thing.

First, question everything, beginning with the political ideas you inherited from your parents, family, community, church, and school.

Create an inventory, in your mind or on paper, of these ideas: what are your strong, visceral, “gut” feelings about the political parties, religion in schools, the legalization versus criminalization of abortion, taxation, drug laws, and so on? What about your ideas about other races and social classes, and about race and class relations in general? Interrogate your emotional, pre-rational political ideology: why do you think it is the case that some people are poor, others wealthy, and others starving? Do you admire military power, or are you suspicious of it? How do you react to talk of America’s present and past wars – World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan?

The first step to becoming a serious political thinker is to distance yourself, at least temporarily, from what might be called your “political inheritance” – the political ideas and values that you were infused with as a child and young adult.

Many of these ideas may be worth keeping, of course, and it is perfectly acceptable to venture into the wilderness of new ideas and then return, older and wiser, to where you began – but it is unacceptable to never waver, even in thought, from the political ideas you grew up with. You must rediscover these ideas to make them truly your own.

The second step is to understand your own interests and distance yourself from them for the purposes of political thinking.

Your self-interest, whatever it may be, can probably be translated into a political and economic ideology: you are in a union, so you support unions and vote for pro-union politicians. You are an investment banker or venture capitalist, so you oppose anything – including unions – that could interfere with economic “efficiency,” that is, with your ability to “restructure” businesses and shift resources around to make a profit. You own a home in an almost entirely white, middle-class suburb where your kids attend a top-tier public school, so you oppose policies such as intradistrict school choice and property taxes that could, you feel, threaten your lifestyle.

But mature political thinking requires that you think about politics in terms of the public good and what is best for society (or humanity, even) as a whole. That does not imply that mature political thinking requires a “liberal” political ideology: it is quite acceptable to believe, conservatively, that radical or revolutionary changes to the status quo would do more harm than good, or that the way things are should be tweaked and adjusted rather than significantly changed, or that the public welfare is best served through deregulation, lowered taxes, and the privatization of public institutions. But whatever political ideology you adopt, you must, if you want to begin thinking seriously about politics, adopt it for some reason other than the health of your pocketbook.

Of course, it often happens that people consciously or unconsciously wrap their self-interests in a veil of ideology – they disguise the fact that their political views are a function of their self-interest by speaking in terms of the public good, and often they even believe their own disguise. But serious thinkers must honestly examine their own views and biases, look at their own ideas with critical eyes, and constantly work to create distance between their self-interest and their political views. If these overlap, it must be by accident and coincidence.

Question yourself, your ideology, your vocabulary, and the beliefs behind your beliefs. And also question every overt and covert political statement, every candidate’s speech, every newspaper opinion column, every dinner-table rant, every historical narrative, and even every piece of art or literature. Politics touches everything and everything touches politics. Cultivate your awareness of the political dimension of the world, a dimension that is often hidden beneath the surface of things. A map, for example, seems straightforward and self-evident – but what part of the world did the mapmaker select as central? Which continents’ sizes are distorted?

And speaking of looking beneath the surface of things: advanced political thinking requires a partial distancing from the rancorous spats and celebrity politics that are all-too-often the central focus of 24-hour cable news stations, political talk shows, and the most popular political blogs. Thinking politically does not mean choosing a side, stepping into the echo chamber, and becoming one more unimaginative partisan foot-soldier – it is better to keep one foot in the fray and one foot in the slightly-removed world of philosophy, theory, scholarship, history, and literature.

For me, this means reading both conservative and liberal blogs and websites, but favoring those that are more thoughtful and less reactive. More importantly, it means monitoring the amount of online, print, and cable news I consume, and giving primacy of place in my reading to good books – which are intrinsically more thought-out, edited, careful, and less bound to a specific historical moment, than even the best newspapers and websites.

The third step toward mature political thinking involves understanding that we look at political issues through certain lenses – lenses of theory, of history, and of our biases and ideologies.

The best political thinkers do not get trapped in one lens. Rather, like an ophthalmologist conducting an eye examination, they shift from lens to lens and look at a problem through as many lenses as possible in order to identify which lens best clarifies the problem and points the way to a possible solution.

Let’s take the contemporary debate about school reform and vouchers as an example. Conservatives use the analogy of market economics to argue that if we privatize schools and school services and create a more competitive school system, the outcome will be better and more educationally efficient; liberals argue that it is a profound mistake to think about schooling in economic terms, and that we should focus on improving the public schools, which reflect our moral commitment to providing equal educational opportunity to every American child. But why not look at education through both lenses – the lens of economics and the lens of ethics? And also the lenses of history and law?

Take practically any political or economic problem and gather a room full of academic specialists: one each in political philosophy, political psychology, law, evolutionary biology, theology or religious studies, women’s studies, history, economics, sociology, and anthropology. Each of these experts will speak intelligently about the issue, looking at it through the lens of their discipline. And each will have something valuable to contribute to the debate.

And so we arrive at a final guideline for engaging in serious political thought: become a lifelong self-educator, and never stop critically examining your own political ideas and those you find in contemporary debates.

Political issues are infinitely complex, and the political loudmouths of our world who claim to have it all figured out are cashing in on a lie. You, their target consumer, have the power to reject the narrow wares they peddle and turn to better, more thoughtful sources.

If there is one slogan and sound-bite that is worth adopting, it is this: “Well, it isn’t really that simple.”

The first week in July marked the second annual ROTHBURY Music Festival. For five days (July 2nd-July 6th) a huge plot of farmland in rural Western Michigan played host to over 40,000 people and 100 bands, all of whom seemed to be quite happy dancing about in the Midwestern amber. Whereas many people came all the way from Oregon, Maine, South Carolina and Louisiana for the celebration, I was fortunate enough to live 35 minutes away. I could say that my close proximity to the festival allowed me to take a more business-like, objective approach in covering the event, but I will not tell a lie. Six of my best friends flew in from all across the country and we drank the experience like our 10am gimlets.

Photographer, web-designer, visual arts editor and friend Ryan Daly is the man behind all of the ROTHBURY photos enclosed. Head over to his Flickr page to see more photos from the weekend.

While some complained that 2009’s lineup of performers paled in comparison to last years (Dave Matthews’ Band, Steel Pulse, The Black Keys, 311, Of Montreal, Modest Mouse), Bob Dylan, The Dead, Damien Marley are nothing to sniff at. However, as is often the case, the more arcane performers provided most of the excitement.

Toubab Krewe – a dynamic group that blends contemporary American music with the percussive tones of West Africa – kicked off the festival Thursday night by deftly swimming through a flavorful 90 minute set. There’s a free download of the set on archive.org if you’d like to take a listen for yourself. The Krewe’s distinction comes, in part from a gentleman named Justin Perkins. Mr. Perkins has studied drums extensively in Mali, and plays them like a native. I was so entranced by his prowess on both the kora and the kamelengoni, that I felt compelled to sit him down for a brief interview.

After speaking to Justin I overheard a man talking openly about his recent cancer diagnosis. That man turned out to be Ralston Bowles, a well-known Midwestern songwriter in town for the weekend to open up for Willie Nelson. Because I am, perhaps unhealthily, pre-occupied with death I decided to see if I could get Ralston to sit down and share the story of his illness. He obliged.

On Friday afternoon I stumbled upon Martin Sexton coaxing blue silk ribbons out of his throat like a magician. The soul and earnest with which the Syracuse native played lured me in and I stuck around to listen to the rest of his set. Later I sat down to speak with Martin, and even though most of his music and philosophy is a bit too Utopian for my taste, he is a class act.

As a long time fan of the Toronto indie scene, Broken Social Scene was probably the performance I most enjoyed over the course of the weekend. They played an early evening set in caramel sunlight, and the Magic Hat was hitting my grey matter just right as they ran through some of their classics.

It was also incredible watching Bob Marley’s progeny emote onstage alongside Nas.

A festival like ROTHBURY can be anything you want it to. Some folks come in search of liberation, some inebriation, some music, and some company. As for me, I opted for a melodic combination of all these elements and breathed it deep…like the sweet summer air amidst.

“Eliot’s reputation as a critic of society has been worse than his record”—so wrote Roger Kojecký at the beginning of his 1971 book, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism.¹ Thirty-five years later, the situation has not changed, for T. S. Eliot’s cultural criticism continues to be more maligned than studied. It is not uncommon to hear Eliot accused of having “flirted with fascism” and of having proposed the establishment of a theocratic state. When scholars make such insinuations, they inevitably identify Eliot’s views with those of the anti-Semitic French reactionary Charles Maurras. Though Maurras was an important influence on Eliot in his early years, in the late 1920’s Eliot came to know the work of Christopher Dawson, who increasingly became his primary mentor on cultural issues. Dawson, in stark contrast to Maurras, argued that religion is integral to culture. Following Dawson, Eliot maintained that religious consciousness should ideally permeate all the elements of cultural life. However, again following Dawson, he makes it clear that his ideal state would not be a theocracy but would involve a creative tension between church and state. Under Dawson’s influence—or perhaps we could say in collaboration with Dawson—Eliot developed a balanced, coherent, and remarkably flexible cultural theory that consistently put forward their contention concerning the necessary integration (but not identification) of civil and spiritual authorities.

The central thrust of Eliot’s cultural criticism is to envision the possibility of bringing the religious and civil spheres into dynamic complementarity with each other. As he slowly worked out his cultural theory, Eliot found support for his developing ideas in the writings of Dawson. Only one critic has previously pointed out the importance of Dawson as an influence on Eliot. Russell Kirk, in his 1971 book on Eliot, declares that “Of social thinkers in his own time, none influenced Eliot more than Dawson.”² Kirk does not develop this important assertion at any length, however, and later Eliot scholars have neglected to follow Kirk’s lead and explore Dawson’s work in relation to Eliot. This essay is an attempt to begin that exploration.

Christopher Dawson was born in 1889, just a year after the birth of T. S. Eliot. His father was an Anglo-Catholic, and Dawson later converted to Roman Catholicism. He wrote some twenty books, and, as his daughter Christina Scott shows in her biography of Dawson, he came to be regarded as one of the leading historians of his time.³ In a new book that gives an excellent overview of Dawson’s life and work, Bradley Birzer notes that Henry Luce devoted his editorial column in one issue of Life (March 16, 1959) to praising Dawson’s ideas. Luce went so far as to order copies of Dawson’s latest book for all the editors at Time.⁴ This small incident gives some idea of how prominent—and even popular—the British historian had become by that time. Nevertheless, he never held an academic appointment at one of the leading universities (until, near the end of his life, he became the first Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at Harvard). And after his death in 1970, Dawson’s work sank into obscurity. By the end of the century, many of his books were out of print and difficult to find. Perhaps his neglect among academic historians accounts in part for the fact that literary scholars have not taken account of his influence on Eliot.

In the late 1920s, Dawson’s first two books were reviewed in Eliot’s journal, The Criterion.⁵ In August of 1929 Eliot wrote to Dawson asking him to contribute an essay. Dawson’s response was an article entitled “The End of an Age,” which Eliot published in 1930, and in this piece Dawson sums up many of the interpretations of history, philosophy, and culture that he shared with the editor of the journal.⁶ The age that was ending, according to Dawson’s article, began with Renaissance humanism and developed through Enlightenment rationalism and the French Revolution to the scientific materialism of the late nineteenth century, when “The goal of the Liberal Enlightenment and Revolution had been reached and Europe at last possessed a completely secularized culture.” The churches were still given a privileged position, “But they held this position only on the condition that they did not interfere with the reign of Mammon” (387). Not only religion but the very humanism that had inspired the beginning of this age was being pushed aside. Humanism had increasingly cut itself off from the supernatural and now found itself subject to rationalism, empiricism, and skepticism. Its glorification of the individual had paradoxically called forth “the new bureaucratic state” (390). Thus, “humanism by its own inner development is eventually brought to deny itself and to pass away into its opposite” (391). Humanism without religion has come to deny the human, along with the old moral truths based on religious beliefs. Lacking an ability to make any metaphysical claims, European culture has given itself to a mechanistic worldview in which the only choice seems to be between two types of materialism: “The greatest danger here is not that we should actively adopt the Bolshevik cult of Marxian materialism, but rather that we should yield ourselves passively to a practical materialization of culture after the American pattern” (393). The only genuine alternative to a culture founded on mechanistic assumptions is one founded on religious belief. The “reign of the machine . . . can only be conquered by the spiritual power which is the creative element in every culture” (396). Here Dawson introduces one of the keynotes of his historical theory, the claim that it is not only material but spiritual forces that spur cultural life.

At the end of his essay, Dawson points to the failure of humanistic individualism but maintains that Marxist collectivism is not (as many intellectuals of the time believed) the only way to prevent a complete atomization of society: “The choice that is actually before us is not between an individualistic humanism and some form of collectivism, but between a collectivism that is purely mechanistic and one which is spiritual” (400). The communal spirit of Christianity may be recovered in “a return to spiritual solidarity” (a phrase prophetic of the Catholic Solidarity movement in Poland that helped end the domination of Communism in Eastern Europe 60 years later). Dawson hastens to add that his call for a Christian renewal is not merely nostalgia and “does not necessarily involve a retrogression of culture” but may in fact lead to a genuinely new age of creative activity (400). As in all his writings, he makes it clear that an attempt to return to a medieval order would be foolish; he is calling for a renewal, not a return. This essay is a fine synopsis of Dawson’s work, though my summary of the synopsis does not do it justice because much of the value of his writing is in the vast range of his historical references and in his eloquent and metaphorically rich expression. The major points of this essay are also the touchstones of Eliot’s cultural criticism, where we find the same history of ideas, the same emphasis on the effects of secularism, and a similar proposal of a renewed integration of Christianity and culture.

During the 1930s, Dawson’s subsequent books were reviewed in The Criterion, and he contributed several reviews and articles.⁷ Eliot eventually wrote two books of cultural criticism, and in both of these books he explicitly acknowledged the importance of Dawson’s work to his own ideas. In his Preface to The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), Eliot acknowledges, “I owe a great deal to a number of recent books,” and the first one he names is “Mr. Christopher Dawson’s Beyond Politics”–followed by books by Middleton Murry and V. A. Demant.⁸ In the Preface to Notes towards the Definition of Culture nearly a decade later (1948), Eliot writes, “Throughout this study, I recognise a particular debt to the writings of Canon V. A. Demant, Mr. Christopher Dawson, and the late Professor Karl Mannheim.”⁹ Not surprisingly, given these acknowledgments, Eliot’s thinking in these major works of cultural criticism is indeed very close to Dawson’s. The historian has worked the ideas out more carefully and consistently than the poet, so re-examining Eliot’s pronouncements along with Dawson’s tends to clarify what the former was aiming at.

In these works, Eliot argues that culture must be grounded in religion, but he also claims that culture must be grounded in nature, and that nature and religion are intimately related. “We may say,” Eliot writes, “that religion, as distinguished from modern paganism, implies a life in conformity with nature. It may be observed that the natural life and the supernatural life have a conformity with each other which neither has with the mechanistic life . . .” (Idea, 60). By “modern paganism” he seems to mean secularism. The claim that the natural and supernatural are in conformity may seem surprising but is based on the connection of religion to physical objects and their symbolic meaning. This is the point at which Eliot’s theory of meaning and his cultural theory intersect. The “mechanistic life” of the modern world is seen by Eliot as a result of the Cartesian split and the scientific revolution, which have stripped nature of its sanctity and significance, allowing us to manipulate it without limit for our purposes. Eliot goes on to say that “ . . . a wrong attitude towards nature implies, somewhere, a wrong attitude towards God,” and adds, “ . . . it would be well for us to face the permanent conditions upon which God allows us to live upon this planet” (62). Dawson similarly points out (in his 1949 book Religion and Culture) that “During the last century or two the world of culture has grown until it has subjugated the world of nature and pushed back the frontiers of the superhuman spiritual world beyond the boundaries of consciousness.”¹⁰ He goes on to speak of “the attitude of the primitive farmer to the earth and the fruits of the earth. However low is the level of his culture, man cannot but recognize the existence of laws and rhythms and cycles of change in the life of nature in which his own life is involved.” These are not merely mechanical phenomena but “divine mysteries to be adored with trembling” (R&C, 41). Dawson is speaking partly from his own childhood experience in Yorkshire, where “. . . religion was not simply concerned with the pious moralities which held such a prominent place in Victorian books for children, but stood close to that wonderful non-human world of the river and the mountain which I found around me.”¹¹ He is also influenced, as was Eliot, by his profound interest in the new field of anthropology, and he maintains that “primitive man in his weakness and ignorance is nearer to the basic realities of human existence than the self-satisfied rationalist who is confident that he has mastered the secrets of the universe” (R&C, 28).

The technological age had created a mass culture that both authors found troubling. People in England in this period were congratulating themselves on not being subject to totalitarian regimes such as those in Germany and Russia, but Eliot and Dawson were not so sure that English democracy offered sufficient protection. In Beyond Politics (the book Eliot singles out for mention) Dawson insists that

The “greatest danger that threatens modern civilization,” he claims, “is its degeneration into a hedonistic mass civilization of the cinema, the picture paper and the dance hall, where the individual, the family and the nation dissolve into a human herd without personality, or traditions or beliefs” (BP, 78-79). Eliot might have disagreed with the crack at the dance halls, which he much enjoyed, but he agreed that mass modern culture, for all its claims of individual freedom, tends to reduce humanity to a herd: “. . . the tendency of unlimited industrialism is to create bodies of men and women—of all classes—detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined” (Idea, 21). The mob Eliot speaks of is precisely what Dawson has in mind when he worries about the possibility of a “democratic totalitarianism.” For instance, at the beginning of Beyond Politics Dawson writes, “The forces that make for social uniformity and the mechanization of culture are no less strong in England and the United States than in Germany and Italy, so that we might expect to see the rise of a democratic totalitarianism which would make the same universal claims on the life of the individual as the totalitarian dictatorships of the Continent” (BP, 3). In an essay published in The Criterion (in 1934) entitled “Religion and the Totalitarian State,” Dawson speaks at length about the hostility toward religion in both the Communist and Fascist totalitarian regimes, but he also warns of the possibility of a seemingly benign version that might develop in democratic nations: “the same forces that make for governmental control and social uniformity are at work here also and in the U.S.A. . . .” Unlike the Fascist and Communist regimes, “Its ideals would probably be humanitarian, democratic and pacific. Nevertheless it will make the same universal claims as the Totalitarian State in Russia and Germany and it will be equally unwilling to tolerate any division of spiritual allegiance. . . . The new state will be universal and omnicompetent. It will mould the mind and guide the life of its citizens from the cradle to the grave.”¹³ In his 1935 book Religion and the Modern State, Dawson puts this view even more strongly:

He adds that there are of course differences and good reasons to prefer Liberal Democracy to the other systems but insists that it cannot be regarded as a “final solution.” Britain’s strongest hope, Dawson says in Beyond Politics, is in its tradition of limited government (BP, 13).

The central idea of all Dawson’s writing was the integral relationship between culture and religion. He repeatedly expressed his doubt that a completely secular culture could survive. In a chapter of Religion and Culture on the priestly class in various cultures, he concludes,

Noting that the intellectual class has replaced the priesthood, he maintains that this substitution has been a failure, giving much the same analysis that he had earlier stated in his essay in The Criterion:

The relation between religion and culture is the central idea in both of Eliot’s books on the subject, too. At the beginning of Notes towards the Definition of Culture, for instance, he says, “The first important assertion is that no culture has appeared or developed except together with a religion . . .” (13). He goes so far as to say that a culture is “essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people” (Notes, 27). Eliot thus views culture as an incarnation of religion, much as he sees symbolism as an “incarnation of meaning in fact.” He states explicitly that he means to combat the erroneous idea “that culture can be preserved, extended and developed in the absence of religion” (Notes, 28). At the end of the book he declares, “I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made” (Notes, 126).

Dawson argues for the primacy and irreducibility of religion in cultural formation, taking issue with the modern assumption that religion is a by-product of material culture. The Making of Europe (1932), his ground-breaking study of the formation of European culture in the Middle Ages (one of the first books, by the way, to acknowledge the importance of Islamic civilization to European culture), begins by declaring that the process of cultural formation in Europe was “not the product of blind material and economic forces.” History is often moved, he frequently maintains, by spiritual revelations rather than economic interests. For instance, near the end of Progress and Religion (1931), Dawson writes, “Europe is not . . . a group of peoples held together by a common type of material culture, it is a spiritual society which owes its very existence to the religious tradition which for a thousand years moulded the beliefs, the ideals, and the institutions of the European peoples.”¹⁶ Here he implicitly contradicts the Marxist claim that all cultural phenomena (including literature, art, and religion) are merely epiphenomena, entirely reducible to the material forces that are their foundation (Grundlage). Marx writes in The German Ideology, for example, “The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises.”¹⁷ All Dawson’s works assert the opposite, that the spiritual life of human culture creates its material manifestations:

Cultures are formed, he shows, not only by material circumstances but by sudden spiritual insights.¹⁸ For instance, “The experience of Mohammed in the cave of Mount Hira, when he saw human life as transitory as the beat of a gnat’s wing in comparison with the splendour and power of the Divine Unity, has shaped the existence of a great part of the human race ever since” (P&R, 77).

Dawson, with his vast knowledge of all cultures and periods, gives at one point a striking example of secularized government not from his own time but from ancient China. He describes a society dominated by “a new school of Legal Positivists—the Fa Hia—which inspired the brilliant and ruthless statesmen who created the Empire of Ts’in in the third century B.C. They taught that Virtue is Power and that states acquire Power not by correct ritual and traditional morality but by the political instruments of war and law” (R&C, 169). Dawson notes that “this doctrine of the Chinese positivists was as completely irreligious as that of any school of thought in any age or country.” What was the result of this experiment? He concludes chillingly, “The application of the principles of the legal positivists to practical politics produced a predatory imperialism which deluged China in blood,” leaving it to his readers to draw the analogy with the Nietzschean legal positivists of the modern era (170).

Another problem both Eliot and Dawson saw with the increasingly secularized culture of Europe was the tendency to cut itself off from the past. The progressivist dogma that arose in the Enlightenment regards all early thought as mere superstition and nonsense. The religious mentality, on the other hand, regards the traditions of the past as a prime source of wisdom. Dawson quotes Edumund Burke as saying that society is not an artificial construct but a spiritual community, “a partnership in all science, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are yet to be born” (qtd. in BP, 25). Eliot uses very similar words when speaking of the central role of the family in society: “But when I speak of the family, I have in mind a bond which embraces a longer period of time than this: a piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a solicitude for the unborn, however remote” (Notes, 42). Thus, the historical sense itself tends to be lost in the shift from a traditional to a progressive idea of culture. Eliot had been at pains to promote the importance of the historical sense and of tradition from the earliest period of his career, and these concepts feature, of course, in his famous essay of 1917, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” In Dawson’s work he found verification of his own thinking, along with an array of historical examples from all cultures and times.

Both writers argued that every culture will have either a traditional religion or some ideology acting as a religious substitute. Dawson maintained that when a society attempts to become secularized, as the Russian society was doing, the religious impulse will still be powerfully expressed, though in a perverted and destructive manner: “When the prophets are silent and society no longer possesses any channel of communication with the divine world, the way to the lower depths is still open and man’s frustrated spiritual powers will find their outlet in the unlimited will to power and destruction” (R&C, 83). He saw virtually the same thing happening in the Fascist states, asserting that the militaristic brutality of the Nazi state in Germany was secondary to its attempt to replace religion at the core of the culture:

Eliot makes the point dramatically in The Idea of a Christian Society soon after: “If you will not have God (and he is a jealous God) you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin” (Idea, 63).

Now, it begins to sound as if Eliot and Dawson favored some sort of medieval theocratic government, but both reject unequivocally such a simplification. In Beyond Politics, Dawson declares, “ . . . it is to-day impossible to return to the undifferentiated unity of mediaeval culture” (BP, 20). In almost identical words, Eliot acknowledges that the Christian Society he envisions “can neither be mediaeval in form, nor be modelled on the seventeenth century or any previous age” (Idea, 25). Dawson insists that religion must be at the heart of a healthy culture, but he warns against a total identification of religion and culture:

Eliot states this truth similarly: “We know from our reading of history, that a certain tension between Church and State is desirable. When Church and State fall out completely, it is ill with the commonwealth; and when Church and State get on too well together, there is something wrong with the Church” (Idea, 91). In another passage, Eliot remarks, “. . . it must be kept in mind that even in a Christian society as well organised as we can conceive possible in this world, the limit would be that our temporal and spiritual life should be harmonised: the temporal and spiritual would never be identified” (Idea, 54-55). Thus Dawson and Eliot opposed simplistic solutions to the Church-State tension, regardless of which side proposed them: they would accept neither the radical secularization of the political sphere advocated by secular liberalism nor the theocratic state proposed by some over-zealous religious leaders.¹⁹

Dawson’s emphasis on the Church’s role in “corporate” (i.e. communal) activities as well as individual ones contradicts a secularist notion that was already frequently asserted in his time—that religion is a purely private matter and should not intrude in the public sphere. This simple-minded solution to the tension between Church and State is firmly rejected by both Dawson and Eliot. The former states (in his typically lively style), “ . . . to treat religion as a purely individual and personal matter is to deprive it of actuality and to degrade it to a lower level of value and potency. To keep religion out of public life is to shut it up in a stuffy Victorian back drawing-room with the aspidistras and the antimacassars, when the streets are full of life and youth” (BP, 104). A few pages later Dawson asserts, “It is no longer possible for religion to confine itself to the inner world of the individual conscience and private religious experience, any more than it is possible for the State to confine itself to its functions as the guardian of public order” (BP, 114). Eliot expresses himself on the subject in nearly identical terms:

The healthy Christian society must not be a theocratic state, but it must express its Christian principles publicly and legally. Eliot goes so far as to say this: “We must abandon the notion that the Christian should be content with freedom of cultus, and with suffering no worldly disabilities on account of his faith. However bigoted the announcement may sound, the Christian can be satisfied with nothing less than a Christian organisation of society—which is not the same thing as a society consisting exclusively of devout Christians” (Idea, 33-34). Such a statement is indeed taken today as merely an expression of bigotry and intolerance, but it must be read in the context of Eliot’s repeated insistence that he does not advocate a complete dominance of the civil authority by the religious. He is not imagining a pure, monolithic Christian utopia.

In fact, even as Eliot and Dawson called for the renewal of Christian culture, they acknowledged that if such a renewal were to take place it would not create a perfect society. As Eliot says, “It is very easy for speculation on a possible Christian order in the future to tend to come to rest in a kind of apocalyptic vision of a golden age of virtue. But we have to remember that the Kingdom of Christ on earth will never be realised, and also that it is always being realised; we must remember that whatever reform or revolution we carry out, the result will always be a sordid travesty of what human society should be—though the world is never left wholly without glory” (Idea, 59). Perhaps Eliot is thinking partly of mistakes made by his own ancestors attempting to establish a reformed Christian society in New England. In any case, he remembers that his entire conservative approach (which began with the anti-Romantic ideas of Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and T. E. Hulme) is based on a belief in Original Sin and the imperfectability of mankind—a limitation which applies to religious leaders as well as to secular ones. He fully acknowledges the reality that a religious organization of society, though desirable, cannot perfect human culture and can, at best, create a “sordid travesty” of the ideal society. Dawson states the same caveat: “ . . . we have no right to expect that Christian principles will work in practice in the simple way that a political system may work. The Christian order is a supernatural order. It has its own principles and its own laws which are not those of the visible world and which may often seem to contradict them. Its victories may be found in apparent defeat and its defeats in material success” (BP, 127). His words here are quite similar to those of Eliot in his 1927 essay on F. H. Bradley: “There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause. We fight for lost causes because we know that our defeat and dismay may be the preface to our successors’ victory, though that victory itself will be temporary; we fight rather to keep something alive than in the expectation that anything will triumph.”²⁰ Eliot, like Dawson, had too much of the historical sense to fall under the spell of millenarian fantasies.

Eliot sometimes felt it more likely that the religious renewal would not happen and that a new dark age would ensue. We are, he proclaimed, “destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanised caravans” (Notes, 111). Yet he was not without hope even with that prospect: “The World is trying the experiment of attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail; but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the World from suicide.”²¹ Dawson and Eliot were not much inclined toward optimistic predictions of cultural regeneration, but neither were they much inclined to despair. Both believed that the human spirit was naturally given to religious inspiration so that continual spiritual renewal was certain, even in the most unlikely circumstances. At the conclusion of Religion and Culture, Dawson urges a re-integration of the material and spiritual forces divorced by the Cartesian dualism of the modern world: “We are faced with a spiritual conflict of the most acute kind, a sort of social schizophrenia which divides the soul of society between a non-moral will to power served by inhuman techniques and a religious faith and a moral idealism which have no power to influence human life. There must be a return to unity—a spiritual integration of culture—if mankind is to survive” (R&C, 217).

¹

Roger Kojecký, T. S. Eliot’s Social Criticism (London: Faber, 1971), 11. One work Kojecký has in mind is John R. Harrison’s The Reactionaries: W. B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence (New York: Schocken Books, 1967). This book was savaged in a review by Hugh Kenner, “The Sleep Machine,” Triumph (August, 1967): 32-34. Nevertheless, Harrison’s slipshod slanders have endured.

²

Russell Kirk, Eliot and His Age: T. S. Eliot’s Moral Imagination in the Twentieth Century (1971; reprint Peru, IL: Sherwood Sugden, 1984), 300. In his book T. S. Eliot and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), Kenneth Asher makes one passing reference to Dawson, while speaking constantly of Maurras. He cites Kojecký once and Kirk not at all.

³

See Christina Scott, A Historian and His World: A Life of Christopher Dawson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1992).

⁴

Bradley J. Birzer, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Press, 2007), xix.

⁵

H. J. Massingham, Review of The Age of the Gods by Christopher Dawson, Criterion 8, no. 30 (Sept., 1928): 149-53. H. J. Massingham, Review of Progress and Religion by Christopher Dawson, Criterion 9, no. 34 (Oct., 1929): 146-50.

⁶

Christopher Dawson, “The End of an Age,” Criterion 9, no. 36 (April, 1930), 386-401. Dawson also sent Eliot an essay which Faber published in 1930 as a booklet, Christianity and Sex. See Birzer, xxiii. See also Scott, 93-94.

⁷

C. Dawson, Rev. of Mediaeval Culture by Carl Vossler and New Light on the youth of Dante by Gertrude Leigh, Criterion 9, no. 37 (July, 1930): 718-22. Christopher Dawson, Rev. of Woman and Society by Meyrick Booth, Criterion 10, no. 38 (Oct., 1930):176-77. F. McEachran, Rev. of Christianity and the New Age by Christopher Dawson, Criterion 10, no. 41 (July, 1931): 750-55. Christopher Dawson, “The Origins of the Romantic Tradition,” Criterion 11, no. 43 (Jan., 1932): 222-48. C. Dawson, Rev. of The Great Amphibian by Joseph Needham, Criterion 11, no. 44 (April, 1932): 545-48. Christopher Dawson, “H. G. Wells and History,” Criterion 12, no. 46 (Oct, 1932): 9-16. F. McEachran, Rev. of The Making of Europe by Christopher Dawson, Criterion 12, no. 47 (Jan., 1933): 290-92. F. McEachren, Rev. of The Modern Dilemma by Christopher Dawson, Criterion 12, no. 48 (April, 1933):494-96. Montgomery Belgion, Rev. of Enquiries into Religion and Culture by Christopher Dawson, Criterion, 13, no. 50 (Oct. 1933): 143-46. Christopher Dawson, “Religion and the Totalitarian State,” Criterion 14, no. 54 (Oct, 1934): 1-16. C. Dawson, Rev. of Reflections on the End of an Era by Reinhold Niebuhr, Criterion 14, no. 54 (Oct., 1934). E. W. F. Tomlin, Rev. of Religion and the Modern State by Christopher Dawson, Criterion 15, no. 58 (Oct., 1935): 130-37.

⁸

Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber, 1939), 6.

⁹

Eliot, Notes towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, 1949), 9. The book combines a series of articles published in 1943 in the New English Weekly.

¹⁰

Christopher Dawson, Religion and Culture (London: Sheed and Ward, 1949), 27. Cited hereafter in the text as R&C.

¹¹

Dawson, “Memories of a Victorian Childhood,” Appendix to Scott, A Historian and His World, 230-31.

¹²

Dawson, Beyond Politics (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1939), 49. Cited hereafter in the text as BP.

¹³

Dawson, “Religion and the Totalitarian State,” Criterion 14, no. 54 (Oct., 1934): 10.

¹⁴

Dawson, Religion and the Modern State (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1935), xv. Reviewing this book in The Criterion (vol. 15, no. 58), E. W. F. Tomlin names Dawson “a historian of the first rank” (133) and says the book must not only be recommended but prescribed (134).

¹⁵

Dawson, The Making of Europe (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1932; reprint Cleveland: Meridian, 1956), 22.

¹⁶

Dawson, Progress and Religion: An Historical Inquiry (London: Sheed and Ward, 1931), 217. Cited hereafter in the text as P&R.

¹⁷

Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, ed. David H. Richter, 2nd ed. (Boston: St. Martin’s, 1998), 391.

¹⁸

In his last—and still unpublished—book, Dawson wrote, “The creative force of a culture always comes from . . . the spiritual side . . . the material environment or the material circumstances of life only condition the form of its expression.” Quoted by Birzer, 113.

¹⁹

Another thinker whose influence on Eliot’s social theory has not been considered adequately is Jacques Maritain, and he also warns against a theocratic solution. E. W. F. Tomlin reviews Maritain’s Freedom and the Modern World along with Dawson’s Religion and the Modern State in The Criterion (vol. 15, no. 58). Tomlin quotes Maritain as saying that it would be fatal “to substitute for the error of Liberalism an opposite error and to erect . . . a Theocratic Church in opposition to or alongside the theocracies of the Collectivist Man” (132).

²⁰

Eliot, “Francis Herbert Bradley,” in Selected Essays (New York: Harcourt, 1950), 399.

²¹

Eliot, “Thoughts after Lambeth,” Selected Essays, 342.

The title of the following observations might better be offered as, “…from wanton destruction by the present heirs and/or occupiers of the lands of their original creators.” As we were sadly aware, immediately upon the lightning-swift liberation of Baghdad after a campaign of less than four weeks it was discovered, even as guns were still rattling outside, that the Iraq National Museum had been despoiled by gangs of vandals, some of whom appeared to have had keys to the vaults and knowledge of where the most valuable items were, people who paused to make sure computers were removed and the old, yellowing card catalogues destroyed. Some days after the arrival of the general appointed to oversee the country while United States forces began to restore water and power and police districts were yet to be pacified, a “specialist in prehistoric ages,” 33 year old Mohammed Sabri (so young, he was most likely employed as a trained shovel-wielder) “bemoaned the losses to the museum and blamed the Americans, at least partially, for failing to protect the building,” according to a Los Angeles Times correspondent. “They were late. They should have been here the first day. The Ministry of Oil was protected from the first day. Why not the Museum? Ask the Americans.” The “Americans” did not need to be asked. The media outcry was shrilling outrage from the day after soldiers entered Baghdad. The keening arose from the “archaeological community,” which includes museums, philanthropists, collectors, scholars, numismatists and most prominently the Archaeological Institute of America. Even though it seems not more than 30-50 “important” objects had gone missing, the abuse of the White House by the media was virulent.

The wreckage was truly appalling; what was left in Baghdad were the odds and ends of collections that had not yet been earlier taken from the Museum’s vaults by insiders with keys, or shipped out during the last decade by the regime’s personal diggers and traders of antiquities — Saddam’s relatives, favorite high officers, and his mistress’ servants — who had long busied themselves retrieving antiquities, trenching, plundering, and transferring works abroad to salesrooms and dealers’ vaults. Journalists and soldiers apparently stuffed their backpacks, augmenting the loss by carrying off stuff from bazaar vendors and as yet unpoliced sites. As the situation stands, what lies hidden in strata dating to ancient Western civilization will simply have to wait for future investigators. The AIA has over the past quarter century conducted a stubborn campaign of lobbying to make the trade in antiquities from anywhere illegal, aiming to suppress dealers who receive and collectors who buy artifacts lifted from tombs, sanctuaries and the like; it declares whatever emerges into the light from the past off-limits, by right the property of governments, meaning favored scholars — a minute portion of the scientific community, to be sure — and by default museum curators, people appointed to minister to the care and display of objects. Never mind that 99% of things warehoused around the world, stacked and sealed in packing cases or gathering dust in drawers in museum cellars are actually examined only once in a century; moreover, almost none of them add more than an iota to our knowledge. It might be better said of such sequestered objects, that they have been entombed yet again, more or less safe from harm.

Well and good. No one questions the premises upon which the strictures of the archæologists stand, shakily enough in the United States, where little attention or respect, and rather scarce financial support have ever been invested from its belated beginnings. So far as the public knows, archæology means picture stories in travel magazines or the NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC and its TV videos, at best a comic book hero named Indiana Jones wandering armed through movies descended from the genre of the Frankenstein monster via the “curse” of the mummy Nesferatu after the plundering of the sepulcher of an ill-fated youth named King Tut hit the headlines in the 1920s, and who has been toured about again in the new millenium’s first decade. Has the “archæological community” any grounds high or low to have justified the vehemence of its attack upon the soldiers who liberated Iraq, as if they were responsible for the losses of the Baghdad museum? It is not even known in point of fact who those looters were, apart from the anonymous rabble in streets who seem to have been drawn rather to furniture, office machines, government and bank records, vehicles, TV sets, washing machines, sofas, chandeliers, and such. Given the 48 hours during which the lightning thrust into Baghdad took place, there would seem little basis to support this “archæological community’s” arrogation of the right to demand, ex post facto, that a force charged to protect the national museum should have been sent with the first soldiers. Indeed, a harder question might be asked: Is there any reason why securing the museum should even have been considered a war aim? Hindsight is the feeblest argument. Yet for the sake of argument, if it should absolutely have been considered, what solutions might have lain ready and to hand? It is worth some discussion.

Several centuries have fallen away into time’s dim oubliette since an Italian nobleman strolled through his garden in Florence after the Spring rains and was struck by a ray of sunlight glancing from a muddy, marble limb. Although Italians had always lived amongst great still-standing ruins of walls, temples, palaces and city gates, it seems odd to us today that the idea itself of a buried past from which they scavenged marbles, and built upon and lived over had not suggested to them the notion of a science we now call archæology. Perhaps they had always been too distracted by a millennium and more of invading barbarians, too busy farming and working and fighting to protect the cities that remained after the Empire of Rome had faded from living memory, or been transmuted into a peninsula of cathedrals and churches. In the 18th Century, even Edward Gibbon seated overlooking the vast wreckage of the Roman Forum, its columns and strewn stone fragments spread before his eyes, and musing upon its builders’ all-too ephemeral shadows, had not conceived the possibility of restoring a more ample knowledge of that vast empire’s decline and fall through the unearthing and reconstruction of its ruins by means of a new sort of discipline. That means was still to be developed by the technology of a far-off future. He had to construct his story from whatever written records had survived the fire and flood of time’s constant wars; the treasures of the art and architecture of that bygone Classical civilization had proved easy to smash, cart off or melt down, for indeed that proved the fate of most all the Ancient world’s great creations. Gibbon knew, as Ecclesiastes knew even while the Parthenon was being built, that only the present lives: the past is no more; its records are friable, subject to revision and re-evaluation (In contrast, the civilization of China, dynasty upon dynasty, was threaded by a persistent veneration of the past, and connoisseurs and antiquarians preserved the most fragile things, including its annals, notwithstanding periodic barbarian invasion from the northwest; it also kept crafts and arts alive and new because it was always trading to the west, south and east. In the Christian West nothing much remained known, let alone understood.) That Renaissance discovery in a garden was to evolve into a passion for excavation and recovery, until archæology and its ancillary, paleography, blossomed in the 20th Century. Old things, broken fibulas, votive figurines, mirrors and tiled floors, sarcophagi, mummies, tomb furnishings, statues and walls incited the beginning of an understanding that there was indeed far more to Greece and Rome, Jerusalem, Egypt and Ur of the Chaldees than could have been guessed from the relatively few writings left after the library at Alexandria was burned.

As a corollary concomitant with the growing curiosity about the relics of a lost Classical civilization, as well the great Middle Eastern empires that long preceded it, the 18th Century began to make a market for them: from the antiquarian collector’s cabinet and the rooms set aside by princes for their works of art came the notion of a museum, the repository of objects to be viewed by a middle class that emerged during the 19th Century. When industrial magnates entered the auction rooms, vying with aristocrats, the houses of dealers arose to satisfy their desire for such things. Soon enough, curios and bibelots acquired a cash value, one that rose in proportion to scarcity; furthermore, during the creation of the 19th Century colonial empires, a taste for the exotic and esoteric was cultivated.

None of that however, even the estimation of objects that eventually flowed into the possession of the public, tells us much about their intrinsic value, if any, even when and perhaps because, they may come to be designated as “priceless.” Since most exploration and digging, when it is not treasure hunting on the sea’s floor, has but recently graduated from its status as a hobby for amateur adventurers, remains a minor area of ill-funded research directed by professors in a few institutions of higher learning — how many autonomous departments of archæology exist in the United States? even as many as a half-dozen? — it might be concluded that the remote past of dead civilizations is regarded as something not really worth investment. Whatever glory halos the few scientific excavators and gives some summer employment to a their graduate students, it is a dim glow against the bright background of a commercial-technological culture that nets the globe. As the Viennese wag once categorized the scale of things in society: It may be serious, but it’s not important. (The converse holds true as well.) . Life in short goes on, as it must, and the present alone determines what matters; ancient wisdom reminds us that it is better to be a living dog than a dead lion The past is a foreign land, its richest human remains reduced to swaddled bones at best; their creations are things that served for practical and ritual use: tools for raising animals and crops, for housekeeping chores, weapons for hunting and warfare, clothing and music for leisure; all the things suggestive of daily life — and death — their ways of laying aside their dead together with their doings. If not for what is left in writing and pictures, what they may or may not have believed about whatever there is to be believed is almost as unknowable (and if known, intrinsically incomprehensible) as the world itself and our universe. Certainly most of its self-expression is obscure and mysterious, when not impenetrable; what we imagine the dead meant by what they wrote and drew is merest conjecture . Which is only natural, since it is hard enough to comprehend what we who are alive believe, or think we do. From a financial point of view furthermore, the amount of support of study of the human past is scarcely a trowel’s worth of sand in comparison to what is allotted to our exploration of space, whether our own solar system, or our one galaxy, one among billions of unimaginably vast systems, let alone the remotest past of the universe glimpsed by the puzzled cosmologists — all of which is driven perhaps by hubris, in any case certainly close to inexplicable.

Still, we continue to build museums; we do pursue and gather objects brought up from out of the buried past to be displayed in these our contemporary mausoleums. We convince ourselves that in visiting them we are entertained, and now and again may even learn something when reading the signage describing what is placed on exhibition. Learning about a thing is simply the acquiring some information, these days not necessarily factually accurate nor much different from political propaganda . It is difficult to believe we can be enlightened by the occasional visit to one of these public tombs through whose halls we stroll, glancing idly at the crafts and arts of the ancients, those objects once devised to support and augment their well-being, and those images by which they expressed to themselves their now forever-vanished life — such as it was for the rich, such as it was for the poor. And if we are for a fleeting hour consoled by the pathos of the past, the very pastness of the past, it serves to remind us, at least at such moments, that, yes, we ourselves are alive. No negligible reminder. And yet not very instructive, let alone useful to most of us, it seems.

If there is however a lesson taught as we gaze through the glass of museum cases or walk round statues or look up contemplating paintings, it is that in truth we are infinitely remote from what we see. We try to imagine what they say to us, or if they tell us anything at all. They are relics, things upon which the energy of the living was once expended; in today’s jargon, “surplus energy”; nevertheless they are au fond things that as such are impenetrable, impervious to our wished-for communication. Silent, they resist our questioning; it even may be said they reject it. Reflection tells us, if we’re honest with ourselves, that whatever they may be, they are subsist but virtually, only as long as we look at them or hold them up to memory in the mind’s eye. What is a costume on a dummy in a glass case? For that matter, what is the suit of clothes left behind when a parent dies? Or even the suit or dress we ourselves wore once upon a time at our own wedding ? They are as nothing. They have passed in the way that a day in Heraclitus’ flows by, in the evening leaving us different from what and who we were that morning. Philosophy murmurs, This is how it is. The past is momentarily returned in the song of the elegist, that poetry voiced long before philosophy, in the keening of Gilgamesh, by the ecstasy of The Psalmist, through the joyous lamentations of Sappho. Perhaps such places stuffed full as they are with untouchable, unusable relics of life are no more than our extravagantly expensive collections of memento mori. They serve well in that way — so long as we can afford to protect and care for them.

To the living at this hour, how little matter those inventories of thousands upon thousands of objects, pieces of sculpture, jewelry, pottery, baked cuneiform clay tablets disemboweled from the sands, as in Baghdad, and in what was Babylon long before the Prophet lived in Arabia — and long before the nomad Arabs — arrived to occupy the lands between the two great rivers? Serious they may seem to be; still, hardly important. Is it surprising that they had so very little value that enraged gangs of brutal men suddenly unshackled from the grip of a peasant tyrant like Saddam armed with the latest weapons made elsewhere and refined techniques of social control developed elsewhere should have burst in to pillage the museum? Perhaps its holdings have cash value to some, given the world market for antiquities; but obviously nothing as useful as sofas or TV sets? Instantly such a howl went up in the West at their despoliation you would have supposed the Great god Pan had died yet again, when in fact it was the usual havoc of barbarism, newly-hatched in the demotic populace of a city built on sand, and paid for, supported by what lies far below — not antiquities but something immensely more useful to the West: oil. What waste, what a shame to have smashed all that stuff to smithereens, lamented our pundits. The truth, they overlooked: those objects have value only to those with money; their value is determined by a dealer who sets the rate according to cost and profit, and what the traffic will bear. Any cultural or intellectual value in them exists only insofar as it may be useful to curators who put up captions and placards presumed to convey their history, perhaps enhanced by invented anecdotage about what the dead did when they lived, stories varying according to the political vicissitudes and ideological deformities of each generation. An amusing and absurd example of this inherent fantastification was to be seen recently in Xian at the entrance to the hall exhibiting the famous terra cotta army of the tyrant who first unified China. A huge mural representing the people of the Ice Age, probably dating from Chairman Mao’s decades, presumably representative of the new Western (Soviet?) science of archæology, depicts a family of forebears in skins: blonde-haired women and children and ax-wielding Nordic-featured hunters! The painters seem to have modeled their drawing style on the 1940s comic strip, Terry and the Pirates. To the looters of today’s Iraq, those things signify nothing: they are neither work nor food, knowledge nor skills. Looters have no inclination to luxuriate in the nostalgias archæology offers in the Smithsonian.

If we are honest with ourselves, we must recognize not only that dead men tell no tales, but that their dead things, in and of themselves, whether ten or ten thousand, are silent; they simply do not, cannot speak to us. A library of clay tablets recording the transactions of their day — trading in sheep, goats, oil, wine, slaves, and so on — is not much more enlightening than grandfather’s tax return, even though the economist may deduce the scale of commerce and its organization millennia ago. And the craft that made little votive idols, or jewelry, manifests the level of their skill, all such remains being but adjuncts to a diurnal round that exists no more. Daily life is gone with each revolution of the turning globe. Temples unearthed and restored are temples for tourists, not worshipers of whatever gods may have been; they are museums. Is there anyone who can know what the great statue of a god meant to its beholders at the time that god was honored, when rituals were performed by priests and votaries? All the commentary in the world, even if accurately explained, is essentially imagined, a confabulated, rickety sort of rope and plank bridge swaying between the viewer today and the living then, who knew what they knew about their gods, just as today we know what a red light, a yellow light, and green light mean to us as we stand at a street corner. Between the consciousness of those who are no more and ours there is the unfathomable abyss of many-too-many yesterdays. What they were may be hinted at by what they left behind, or buried to sequester from us; who they were can no more be guessed than what we, standing with a watering can and a bouquet of fresh flowers before the headstones of our own parents, can suppose we know of them. Furthermore, what is the underlying significance of treasure buried with its owner, from Egypt to China, and everywhere in South America? The Norse heroes were put into deep barrows with their gold and silver and amber, or like Beowulf in his epic poem set adrift on a burning pyre, laid out with his hard-won riches on that bark, its sails iced-up in winter, like Scyld Sefing, and set to drift with the tide out to sea, to a place no one knows. Surely there was no practical reason compelling mourners to keep treasure and owner together when death was celebrated? There was a market value to things even when a pyramid covered its maker, which looted tombs tell us, not to mention their marble sheathing. Practically speaking, the dead have no need for any thing of material or cultural value. Rather, there is some profound wisdom at work, wherein it was felt or known or believed that material riches were meaningful things of interest solely to those who had enjoyed them when they lived. Those who lived on would of necessity create new things of their own, for they had their present hour in which to do so. What was buried with the dead was the dead’s. Somehow, the modern market place, its wealth and connoisseurship, has shown that it prizes inanimate objects before all else. Modern society rationalizes its emptiness by pretending to admire beautiful objects, even if they were painted and burnt clay cooking vessels. Perhaps the simple greed of ancient looters and recent conquistadors was morally less suspect: beauty was melted down for its gold and silver; gems were gouged out to be set in bangles and coronets for new royalty. What is served by the display of pots and feathers and idols of clay but vanity? The descendants now living off those who made them have other gods, and their votive objects are not made of scarce and costly metals in order to be buried with their owner. In our world, graves hold urns of ashes or bones. All relations to spirit or soul have altered forever, and the old magnificence of the after-life has been abandoned.

Nevertheless, since the enormity of the wanton and deliberate destruction wreaked upon the Iraq National Museum of recovered things was declared an immeasurable cultural disaster for that nation by those who declare what culture is, perhaps we must turn and consider what is to be done to prevent such a calamity tomorrow. And tomorrow is already present, since the conflict we see now is likely to spread throughout that region of desert and mountain, to Egypt and Syria, Iran and Pakistan and India, if not beyond. Surely the lesson of Baghdad ought not to be lost upon us? If we are serious, it is an important lesson. Undoubtedly scholars and the American Institute of Archæology, pundits and critics who shouted, Shame upon you, President Bush! are serious, if not important, persons. Since there are agencies trying to track and retrieve and restore whatever can be salvaged, our first concern ought to see to securing beforehand precious ancient objects from such ravage. Our category must include as yet undiscovered treasures buried with their former owners, who took them with them into the airless dark. In other words, let the demand for preservation be respected: viz., antiquities, per se priceless, beyond any and all valuation, must be protected and guarded no matter the cost; whether unearthed or retrieved from their millennial slumber, they must repose in safety, conserved and locked up for study by those who devote a lifetime to it. Failure to do so is a crime against all humanity, for they are the heritage and legacy of generations yet unborn. Let it also be recognized that war and its attendant chaos is not merely foreseeable, but inevitable during the rest of the 21st Century. Therefore the fundamental question that looms before us is: Do we preserve people, or relics? Before the answer comes, it should be understood that a trade-off is entailed. Consider what will be done in either case.

The premise of archæologists, diggers, historians, curators and, of course the market, assumes a priori that the answer lies to hand: antiquities matter in the long run since they are irreplaceable. People, on the other hand, crowd the earth in our epoch, polluting it and exhausting its resources. That people are disposable by the tens of millions was demonstrated in the 20th Century in its world wars and by the rise of totalist regimes for which genocide is a basic principle. Insofar far as this issue asserts precious objects must be spared, people need not be. Their removal during warfare would consist merely of those unfortunates residing near museums and libraries, or on places built beside or upon the lost cities of archaic societies and their burial sites — only the minimum necessary, of course, since a population displaced wholesale would revive the enormities committed by Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. There are always empty regions to which they, after proper warning, and with financial and logistical assistance, might transfer themselves, or be transferred. In the event of resistance to forced exodus from a homeland, the next step would be stronger action following upon the proclamation of imminent mortality.

By what means? Our Third Millennium opened with a dark prospect exhibiting ingenious developments in death-dealing: the distant delivery of fatal chemical agents and biological vectors, perhaps even more fearsome than the familiar detonation of giant explosives dropped from the sky. Weapons of Mass Destruction, we term them. It seems, however, that at present they are not sufficiently accurate or reliable, being subject to wind and rain, and to an extent able to be defended against by armored clothing, masks and the like. In any case, gas and germ warfare is likely to be employed by the weaker combatant — and by the terrorist — since major powers regard themselves constrained by treaty and law, if not by morality. Nuclear bombs great and small, the nec plus ultra of physical annihilation, destroy not merely people and structures, but incinerate the very ground itself, and deposit far and wide a bitter glow of radioactive debris that lasts for decades or can be designed to endure for centuries, inciting genetic horror, as was recently shown by the Chernobyl nuclear power-plant meltdown in the former Soviet Union. Furthermore, the dirty mini-bombs now threatening population centers everywhere will leave the legacy of plutonium’s fatal decay products, radiating with terrible half-life for the next 26,000 years. What then can safeguard the antiquities they insist are mankind’s link to its civilized origins — originally and by right the property archæology has ravished from the helpless dead?

Having in theory ruled those weapons out, what’s left? Given the great probability of attacks from hidden sources of terror, may defense accept the necessity of pre-emptive strikes? The instrument of choice required to extinguish a city’s structures and/or its population must neither blast, burn, nor stir up lethal clouds of dust and sand. Only some clean device, one that leaves little chemical or biological residue, will serve. Some four or so decades ago such a weapon was announced ready for use in artillery, designed to stop the expected “unstoppable” waves of Soviet tanks poised to ram through the Fulda Gap into Western Germany and Europe. Some objection there was; after a while, however, news reports ceased to appear. That tool was a neutron bomb. Today precision carriers, drones and missiles could deliver it from a great distance.

The purpose of that instrument was the release upon detonation of gamma rays. Buildings and all other structures would remain intact. Protection, there is none. In 36-48 hours, those exposed perish. A silence of quarantine will remain for some days, followed by the burial of the dead. A gloomy-enough task, yet necessary for public safety.

And thus, a great work shall have been accomplished: the buried hoards of our lost and forgotten progenitors may rest intact until tomorrow’s archæologists return to find and restore them to light, to be catalogued for future study. Museums will not be razed; on the contrary, their holdings will constantly be augmented, that our children’s children may learn about their ancestors, by whom the past that is always only the past was created. To today’s materialists of our technological civilization, which aspires to leap into space, that matters least as the species grows older, foreseeing already the death of our sun. People today cannot conceive of an ancient humanity for whom the end of each person was from the first consciously prepared. It cannot retrieve the notion of a life accepted as the fulfillment of a search, not for buried treasure, but for the rule of the good life, the true and beautiful and proper relations between ourselves. Life was for most, as Hobbes remarked, brutal and short. Daily, life was lived out under the Sword of Damocles, so to say; and death hung over us by a thread. This was the teaching of Socrates, of Gautama, both of whom chose to depart quietly, having held nothing and owned nothing but the present, which they filled with conversation, with seeking and teaching the best way to make a path through the few hours of our days. Neither wished to possess more.

On the other hand, what characterizes fanatics who seek to liquidate people like us, including our archæologists, is the promised reward of ease in some supermundane Garden of Eden, a Paradise exempt from time. Today’s soldiers of a warring Islam care nothing for their own lives, let alone the obliteration of the records of the past. The reply we must make is to prevent them from their goal, the destruction of themselves and ourselves as well. That is moreover the task implicitly assigned by our demanding archæologists. We can agree with them; it is our choice to make; and it must be done. If such means as the gamma rays of neutron devices as has been suggested above are employed when and as the strategic situation requires, there will no reason for critics and pundits to carp and accuse our leaders of dereliction in their duty to save what is left of Ur of the Chaldees, or Damascus or Cairo or Persepolis, and other points east.

Human beings have strong emotional immune systems, and human societies have a remarkable capacity for collective forgetfulness. Milan Kundera, writing of the effect of the news cycle on historical memory, once said: “The bloody massacre in Bangladesh quickly covered the memory of the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, the war in the Sinai desert made people forget Allende, the Cambodian massacre made people forget Sinai, and so on and so forth until ultimately everyone lets everything be forgotten.”

Likewise, the histories of our time might say: there was an American invasion and occupation of Iraq, a war that amounts to a crime, but it was quickly followed by other wars, a financial crisis, and an economic depression – and we found that we had enough problems on our plate without worrying too much about the past.

Americans are leaving the Iraq War behind; it is seen as an embarrassing episode, best unmentioned in polite company. The Obama administration is stacked with liberal hawks who supported the Iraq War, and figures from the former Bush administration are signing book deals and making the rounds of press conferences and interviews, propagating meae culpae of the “mistakes were made” sort. A war of choice is being quietly transformed into an unfortunate but ultimately unavoidable mistake, one caused not by politicians and public intellectuals cocooned in their hubris and their reckless ideologies, but by an “intelligence failure.”

It is possible that Americans feel that, having elected a president who had the courage and foresight to oppose the Iraq War from the beginning, we have done our penance and can now move on with our national political life. There is no talk of holding any of the national leaders who dreamed of and executed the war accountable; the idea of war-crimes trials for the leaders of a rampaging superpower is a pipe-dream, far removed from political reality. And so while the Iraqi and American families who lost everything in the war struggle to find stability and rebuild their lives, the great majority of Americans are far too concerned with the sudden evaporation of their wealth, savings, and jobs to spare a moment to reflect on Iraq.

While there is no denying the severity of the problems Americans face in the present, our ability to navigate future crises depends upon our ability to learn from the mistakes of the past. Most Americans have come to acknowledge that the Iraq war was a mistake – and that’s a significant start. However, the challenge peace advocates face is to demonstrate that the war would have been a mistake even if it had been “successful” for the United States.

Back when the easy credit was flowing, stock prices were ballooning, and the reality of the American failure in Iraq had not yet set in, President Bush remained popular enough to easily win reelection. The “antiwar” sentiment that followed the 2004 election and led the Democrats to sweeps in the national elections of 2006 and 2008 must be seen for what it is: a mood, and not a lasting realignment in American politics. Not a wholesale turn away from war, but a realization that we have lost one particular war – the war in Iraq. (Some will object that America is “winning” in Iraq, but I argue that no reasonable observer, looking at the totality of the American military adventure in Iraq, could conclude that America’s conduct should be called a victory.)

American peace advocates have convinced the vast majority of Americans that withdrawal from Iraq should be a priority; we have made the case that neoconservatism and its idea of spreading democracy at gunpoint is a ludicrous theory whose proponents should be held accountable for their failures in Iraq and elsewhere; and we have worked hard to elect many vocal, unashamedly anti-Iraq War politicians to office. But our work is far from complete.

Peace advocates must play two very important roles in society. First, we must remain fully aware of the movements and machinations of states, vigilant and ready to stand up against those who would engage in unjust wars (and they are nearly all unjust). Second, we must act as educators: we must constantly work to eliminate the psychological distance that estranges people from those who are or may become their “enemies.”

We must work to humanize the “other,” emphasizing the individual human lives obscured by the veils of labels, prejudice, and racism. In contemporary America, that might mean promoting the study of Arabic and Farsi and Chinese, reading Islamic literature, and increasing the number of student-exchange programs. Every small step matters. A popular recent cookbook featuring the “cuisines of the Axis of Evil” struck another blow against ideologies that would assign a lesser value to the lives of citizens in states considered “enemies.” Movies such as Slumdog Millionaire and best-selling fiction by writers such as Khaled Hosseini and Jhumpa Lahiri have introduced thousands of Westerners to alternative – and more human and realistic – ways of looking at the Middle East. Such works help to free us from the prejudiced, conflict-centered narratives we learn by watching the evening news.

Empathy is inversely proportional to emotional distance; we empathize most with our closest family and friends, and least with people on the other side of the globe. Political education must aim to combat apathy and stand between people and their prejudices.

One critically important way to accomplish this is to keep the memory of war – and, crucially, its effects on the individuals caught up in its maelstroms – alive. As Iraq recedes from the headlines and slips from the public’s mind to make room for the next “crisis,” we have a responsibility to give some thought to the two million Iraqi refugees displaced by the war and the tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis killed or maimed as a consequence of the war. And what we should remember is not statistics or grand narratives, but individual stories and the weight they lend to the principles of prudence, humanism, and nonviolence.

And yet as the Iraq War itself demonstrated, the memory of war’s horrors never seems quite strong enough to prevent the next war and provide for a lasting peace. Can individual citizens and educators change that? Can a nation’s conscience overcome its lust for political power and international primacy? There is hope – in the contemporary world we find a wide range of nation-states and polities, each more or less violent, more or less war-prone, and more or less democratic than the next. By remaining politically awake, working to improve our understanding of the world, and struggling to live our values personally and politically, we can use our small strength to work toward a better world.

At the dawn of what many hope will turn out to be a 2009 version of “Morning in America,” we are confronted with a litany of challenges that are making even our strongest of willed nation buckle at the knees. While discussions of credit default swaps, subprime mortgage foreclosures, and economic stimulus dominate both the airwaves and the front pages of our republic’s ever-dwindling newspaper circulation, it is the possibility of another foreign entanglement that weighs most heavily on those of us with an enduring aversion to international conflict. The new Commander in Chief certainly brings renewed hope in this particular policy arena, but will his brand of change be accompanied by the desperately needed paradigm shift that is required to avoid another debacle in the Middle East? This fundamental question must be answered in order to properly assess any foreign policy successes or failures that this administration or its critics may claim.

President Obama rode into office on a wave of promises and expectations regarding the United State’s policies of war and peace. The criticism that he drew from the opposition regarding his vision of engaging the much dreaded and loathed Persian government was fierce and unending. The ideologues screamed that sitting down with the Iranian leadership and allowing both sides to effectively air their grievances over issues of nuclear proliferation, the Iraq War, and regional stability would equate to nothing less than Neville Chamberlain appeasing Adolph Hitler in 1938. Those on the other side of the spectrum recognized that embarking on a journey towards meaningful dialogue with our bitter enemy of thirty years could possibly bear fruit and cool the simmering tension. Considering the uneven results, someone less kind might call them failures, of the previous administration’s “Do as I say” approach in this area, engagement appears to be the proper path towards reconciliation. The new president should be applauded for having the courage to bring such pragmatism to the forefront of this exceedingly important situation, but will it be enough to bring some form of stability to a region where ever-changing power dynamics are the norm?

Perhaps a new approach must be tried alongside President Obama’s logical step of negotiation. Realist theorists from Hans Morgenthau to George F. Kennan have long described the international order as one that places interests over ideals. In other words, even the most stringent true believers will abandon ideology in order to serve the interests at hand. In the realm of governance, this often means sacrificing quintessential beliefs in the interest of political expediency. So why would a nuclear armed Iran be so unacceptable? Are the Iranian authorities so wedded to their disdain of a Jewish state in their neighborhood that they would risk the total annihilation of their own civilization? Would they be so bold as to send a nuclear weapon in the direction of these United States? While these scenarios surely leave many a neoconservative lying in a pool of cold sweat night after night, they are simply not realistic.

Short of a nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of an Al-Qaeda like extremist organization, the chances of the Iranians launching a nuclear-armed missile in the direction of Jerusalem or setting off a suitcase nuke in Washington D.C. are just about nil. Still, this is a threat that merits observation and cooperation, so a hands-off approach by the Obama camp is clearly not the way forward. Instead, the risk must be managed and contained through practical means.

Nuclear weaponry is a simple fact of modern day life that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon. With this harsh reality staring us directly in the face, we had better learn how to deal with the issue pragmatically, as more and more nations cast an eye towards developing nuclear energy with every passing year. The best solution to this situation may have been illustrated in the writings of John Mearsheimer. A structural realist or neorealist, such as Mearsheimer, takes the focus of the classical realist’s belief that human nature and personal interest lie at the heart of every decision, and expands it to encompass the international system structure. This approach dovetails nicely with the current global reality of an increasingly shrinking and interconnected world.

Mearsheimer analyzes the international community and hypothesizes nuclear armaments may not be the doomsday weapons that many critics counter. In fact, nukes may be the ultimate peacemaking tool, if proliferation is well managed. Mearsheimer points to what he labels as the pacifying effects of nuclear weaponry when imagining the prospect of a nuclear free Europe. Without atomic weapons, “the caution they generate, the security they provide, the rough equality they impose, and the clarity of the relative power they create–would be lost.”* Although he was writing specifically about the post-Cold War order in Europe, his ideas can be used to examine other areas of the world, i.e. the Middle East and its problematic history of dealing with proliferation issues.

Allowing Iran to develop these advanced weapons would provide a counterbalance to the Israeli nuclear arsenal that, although unstated, everyone knows exists in the region. It is a fundamental return to the idea of deterrence that pervaded throughout the Cold War…and worked.

Prior to the United States decision to invade Iraq and reshape the structure of the state based on the incorrect premise that Iraq was actively seeking a nuclear arsenal along with other weapons of mass destruction, the Middle East showed more signs of stability then at current. Despite the horrendous crimes of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Iraq provided a check on the power of the Iranian Mullahs. With this counterbalance now missing, Iran is exerting greater influence throughout Iraq and the entire Middle Eastern world. The effect of this somehow unforeseen consequence has been an increasing fear of Iranian aggression and influence by the Israelis who sit within striking distance of Iran’s Shahab missiles, and their American benefactors. This anxiety and uncertainty is increasing the likelihood that Israel will launch a pre-emptive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities and plunge the region into all-out war. This outcome is far less desirable than the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran.

The many failures of the United States and the IAEA should serve as ample evidence of how ineffectively the current international atomic regime operates. One need look no further than what transpired in North Korea to better understand this point. The message that the United States sent to Kim Jong Il and the rest of the world after invading Iraq was simple: if you are trying to acquire nuclear capabilities we may invade you, but if you hurry up and develop them before we get the chance to invade, we will negotiate instead. While no one can be positive of this point, it is a safe bet to assume that Iran ratcheted up its nuclear ambitions after witnessing this bungled policy and realizing that the United States Armed Forces stood at full attention with numerous brigades stationed on its western border in Iraq and its eastern border in Afghanistan. Add to this the fleet of American warships patrolling the Persian Gulf waters off the southern coast of the country and one begins to see why the Iranians might have been spooked. Whatever the intention of the United States, we are now witnessing the blowback of a failed non-proliferation policy.

Allowing Iran the ability to develop nuclear capabilities under the watchful eye of the international community would help guard against a great number of devastating scenarios that much of the world fears. By taking an active role in an Iranian nuclear program, the United States and other vital players would be able to monitor and assess Iranian progress; this essential information currently lies outside of our grasp and accounts for the numerous conflicting reports of exactly how close the country is to actually assembling a usable weapon. A new approach of managed proliferation could give us an insider’s view of exactly what is going on and why. This kind of information would prove invaluable in spotting and stopping the less than desirable outcomes which provoke angst in so many worldwide. The example of the nuclear weapon falling into the hands of the evil, terrorist mastermind provides a fitting example. With proper oversight and cooperation, it is much less likely that this scenario would ever come to fruition. This particular sequence of events gains more plausibility when one considers the specter of the Iranians conducting their work in secrecy away from the prying eyes of the West.

The argument presented here does beg one essential question: where does it end? With Iran entering the realm of nuclear powers, it is quite possible other countries in the region will want to go forward with their own nuclear programs. The Saudis, Egyptians, or both may wish to enter this highly exclusive club in order to counteract any perceived Iranian threat. With this in mind, it is important to note that this is not a blanket approval of all proliferation scenarios. It is important to judge each instance individually and assess the potential costs and benefits accordingly. If the United States and the international community deem it too risky to allow Saudi Arabia or Egypt to follow the same path as Iran, they are in a much stronger position to convince the countries to abandon their programs by virtue of the relationships the United States has with both states. United States ties to Saudi kingdom are well chronicled and would provide leverage in dealing with the issue through political or economic means. The same can be said for an Egyptian state that receives billions in military and economic aid from the United States every year. These relationships provide a negotiating tool that is virtually nonexistent in the Iranian case due to the tenuous relationship that has existed between the United States and the Islamic republic over the past three decades.

Ultimately, the idea laid out here is utterly unlikely to unfold. Regardless of whether a person lies on the left or right of the political spectrum, there seems to be a bipartisan consensus that a nuclear-armed Iran equals disaster for all parties. This dogmatic approach to international relations is no longer useful in realistically dealing with the problems presented in today’s global village. If anything, the current approach breeds more bitterness towards the United States by virtue of the implied inferiority we assign to nations such as Iran. It is time to relegate our current policies to the dustbin of history and embark on a new, forward-thinking path towards peaceful coexistence. Delusions of American hegemony or empire are misguided at best and malevolent at worst. With the population of this planet ticking upwards towards seven billion souls, it is foolish to believe we can impose a system of authority that is to our liking. Instead, we must learn to accept that our world is changing and much will be out of our control. We can either adapt to this evolutionary reality or perish amongst the long list of great civilizations past.

Notes

The U.S. is currently engaged in a landmark debate over what role government should play in confronting our economic crisis and in shaping the future. Too much of the discourse by politicians and pundits seem woefully ill-informed about the historical record and is tragically misguided about Democratic and Republican policies. The charts below contrast the economic policies of Republican and Democratic Presidents since World War II. These tables yield a clear consistent and graphic picture of the effects party leaders have had on many of the most important indicators of economic well-being.

I hope the charts and brief commentaries can be valuable to citizens and political elites. Taken together the graphics tell a surprising story about the relationship between equity and economic well-being. The evidence and conclusions presented presuppose a democratic government, a market economy, and the continuation of both. Hopefully this information will provide new insights into those policies which best address current challenges, and can promote discussions that can undo the price we pay when leaders and citizens rely on time-worn slogans that have little relation to actual facts.

As a scholar, my primary interests concern the philosophy, psychology and politics as they relate to morality and justice. I am not an economist, but for 30 years have tracked government data on how well we as a nation are doing, both materially and (by extension) morally. The data here does not employ complicated economic models. It is a straightforward historical presentation organized around the Presidential election cycle and the party identity of the President. Surprisingly clear patterns emerge and manifest with surprising consistency.

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(A supplement to her poem I Want To Make You Safe)

“The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.”

-Jim Holt, “It’s the Oil” [http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/holt01_.html]

“I think it’s bullshit how these fucking civilians are dying!” rages Jeffrey Carazales, a lance corporal from Texas, after he shoots at a building that clearly has civilians in it: They’re worse off than the guys that are shooting at us. They don’t even have a chance. Do you think people at home are going to see this-all these women and children we’re killing? Fuck no. Back home they’re glorifying this motherfucker, I guarantee you. Saying our president is a fucking hero for getting us into this bitch. He ain’t even a real Texan.

-Michael Massing, “Iraq: The Hidden Human Costs” [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20906]

What facts haunt me on a daily basis inform the direction of the words my poem stitch: the world’s population more than doubled in the last half century, our consumption of diminishing natural resources continues a detrimental route for ourselves and other species, and American democracy is imperialistically spreading around the globe. We, as a people, have not been careful in our “liberations,” fearfully following the lead of a government that repeatedly hides its true, selfish purposes in dishonest newspeak.

Here at home, the young soldiers executing the orders to secure these new democracies have been casually referred to as the “disposable generation.” This casualness towards life, its disposability, colors much of my daily outlook; I see disdain everywhere in the most minute ways and am becoming paranoid that empathy is one of those notions falling from the window’s ledge with other old fashioned, hollowed-out values like respect and virtue. But my faith is in an empathy that holds everything together.

If one doesn’t exercise the imagination regularly and practice putting herself in the position of others, one begins to cut people off in traffic, one gives into the fear in a store that there are not enough products, or lines become a competition rather than a place to pass the time with others. The struggle, strife, and fight of uninformed hate become the habitual modes of operation. In turn, one even more easily stands complicit and silent while a government, in her name, attacks the civilians of a distant country, burning their flesh with bullets and bombs as they go about their shopping, work days, watching their children play in the streets, by sheltering us from the images and atrocities with back page statistics.

Even now, politics will not save us, especially from ourselves. We will never know the enemy borne by speeches and muted news updates, we will never shirk our competitive behaviors if we look only through the capitalist lens, and we will never see the humanity in others if the vertiginous gaps of our shared media reality are not exposed and explored. Poetry serves no government, and by its historical nature, occupies the privileged, bastardized position of calling public concepts into question, making us uncomfortable by pointing out smoke screens, false bottoms, and unstable meanings, as well as revealing the similarities between enemies and allies.

Even as the political brain is guided by motors beyond the dictatorial one of logic, poetry provides a place for things we dub philosophical, political, emotional, and spiritual to meet, spar, collide, and dance, until we arrive at an odd perspective on identity that discomforts our insular “I” or sounds a desirable chord in the “other”- and the public and intimate can finally confer in unsanctioned ways. With this faith in the empathetic potential and subsequent responses, such poetic investigations may eventually throw a wrench in the traditional action-consequence routine we continue to quietly support and abide by in the name of states united. We are now a worldwide franchise, and from this condition, through the daily poetic, I want to make you safe.

Ben Evans

Creative individuals overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama in his bid for the presidency, and I say this with no hint of pretension. Many of the most dynamic musicians, writers, and actors vocalized their support for the Illinois Senator, and I believe this trend warrants analysis.

I suspect that the artist’s conviction in progress is cause for their affinity to liberalism. By and large the focus of any artist is to break from the norms of human perception, while the focus of the Democratic Party, by and large is to break from blind allegiance to societal traditions that time has rendered obsolete.

Because the conservative ideology continues to be rooted in puritan custom, it leaves little room for expression. Individuals who find safety in the comfort of routine thereby tend to gravitate towards the political right. Many republicans fear that progressive ideas will compromise the principles under which America was founded 220 years ago. Yet, 220 years ago Democracy itself was a progressive idea.

I presume that most artists and democrats believe that 220 years ago we were given a framework, a framework whose beauty lie in its allowance for change within its boundaries. The writer is given the page, the painter the canvas, the actor the camera; all must operate within the confines of their medium, yet beyond that they have no limit. Our medium is democracy and through it we can either burgeon or remain stagnant.