"Standing at the edge of a winter field among rough men. . . . Watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number. Collected there for a common warmth. The dull tubes of them beginning to move sluggishly in the cold hard light. Like the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they were mute there were no screams of pain and the men watched them burn and writhe and blacken in just such silence themselves and they disbanded in silence in the winter dusk each with his own thoughts to go home to their suppers."
From The Road by Cormac McCarthy
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"...having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be." How often in history have the masses set light to conceptions of evil rather than evil as it truly was? This image of serpents set alight is an apt parable for a common pathology of democracy on display whenever the masses flail at popular conceptions of evil rather than the sources of it. Typically, mythology, prejudice or some other handmaiden of ignorance directs the popular focus in such instances. It is a condition that can only exist for long if leadership is unwilling or unable to point out evil in its then true and present form or as sometimes is the case promotes the misdirection.
"Change", to day we want change because we know we need change. We remain confused by what change though. The change required will be obvious when the evil is seen for what it is. However, when truth is unpleasant it becomes hard to see and few willing to point it out, not because it is not known but because it is not believe that people are willing to see it.
So lets point it out. Dogma, dogma in any form is a principal evil in America public sphere today. America entered an era of Dogma after the Vietnam War. The error of the war was so great, the costs so high and pride so hurt that the nation fled reality and in the process fled from its dreams and its long standing native course, a course toward empowering the middle class economically, politically and educationally, a course against privilege, prejudice, injustice and ignorance, a course toward full filling the visions of its birth documents, all through the application of reason. A fountain of knowledge, the world’s university, America was about knowledge, reality and reason and about delivering the fruits of its discipline in those areas to the middle class and not an upper class.
Religious dogma, economic dogma, ecological dogma, dogma of the right and the left, reason has progressively been relegated to a secondary roll in public discussion. Beliefs have rained instead. America is in an Enlightenment recession and is burning serpents in consequence instead of solving real problems.
There has always been mythology but America was born of reason, raised by reason and reached its zenith with reason. It now subsides in a quicksand of belief and dogma even as other nations are discovering reason and are building prosperity on it. In consequence America finds itself competing for a world of resources we once had to ourselves. Dogma will buy little; reason will buy much, peoples around the world are being empowered by the later even as the former is consuming America.
People have a right to say and believe what they like but the rest of us are not obligated to treat it with respect. People should check their mythologies at the door of public discourse or be called out for it when they don’t. Argue with reason or speak not at all. As long as we tolerate the distractions that arise from dogma in our public discourse we will find ourselves lighting fire to conceptions of evil rather than evil itself.
We can be a nation of snake handlers and speak in the tongues of dogma and mythology or we can return to reason as our principle arbiter for public policy and begin again to progress as a nation. It is possible that yet another military blunder and embarrassment is providing the shock that the country needs to return to its senses, to find its role again as a nation of reason and not of mythology.
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