In a comment to NLinStPaul’s excellent diary “Something Elections Can’t Change” I said
A people are their myths. America’s predominant myth was best defined by Richard Slotkin some thirty years ago as Regeneration Through Violence. It’s our oldest and most enduring self-definition. We redeem our society through killing the “bad guy.” Bush and Fox Television’s “24” have added torture to the mix. Every movie from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s that ends in a shootout or other orgy of violence and then cuts to the heroes standing arm in arm looking at the sunrise is an expression of this myth. Every cop show from some cheezy episode of Miami Vice to “art” like L.A. Confidential is an expression of the same redemptive quality of violence. So is Star Wars. It is the violent act that is regenerative and it doesn’t matter who gets whacked. It is who Americans are, and that’s why it was so easy for Bush to get to the beast after 9/11. The myth says we can regenerate ourselves through violence. The myth is a Big Lie. The Narragansetts were not redeemed, nor the Lakota, nor all the other native people who were exterminated; nor the Mandinka, or Masai who were kidnapped and brought here. But the majority myth is one of regeneration. We may feel superior to the Aztec who sacrificed 80,000 human beings in one continuous orgy of religious fervor. We too have our own pyramids of sacrifice.
To which NLinStPaul replied. And no, I can’t be manipulated through blatant flattery.
I’d love to see a whole diary on this topic – and I think we know just the person who could do that (hint…hint).
Well, I guess I can. So here goes. A meditation on why Americans define themselves through violence: in several parts, in deference to my readers, in order to limit the “my god, when is he going to end this stuff” thoughts.
Myths are how societies identify themselves to themselves. The myth of American self-identification that Richard Slotkin identified as Regeneration Through Violence is the primordial American myth. This is how the Europeans who came to North America first came to define themselves as residents of America rather than Europe. It remains how Americans self-define themselves at the deepest level.
Why is this so? This first diary is about how human beings create the universe of the mind in which we live together.
Aristotle said that human beings are “by nature” political animals. This was a commonplace to Greek political philosophers who thought that human beings could not fully actualize their humanity outside of the polis, outside of a shared community. We are so because we possess logos, language or the ability to create meaning not just make noise. We can create through logos the just and unjust, useful and useless, beautiful and ugly, the enhancing and the limiting, the good and the evil. Logos is the capacity or power to create symbols. It is the creation of meaning or of what sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman have called a symbolic universe.
The origins of a symbolic universe have their roots in the constitution (the nature) of man. If man in soceity is a world-constructor, this is made possible by his constitutionally given world-openess, which already implies the conflict between order and chaos. Human existence is ab initio an ongoing externalization. As man externalizes, he constructs the world into which he externalizes himself. In the process of externalization, he projects his own meanings into reality. Symbolic universes, which proclaim that all reality is humanly meaningful and call upon the entire cosmos to signify the validity of human existence, constitute the farthest reaches of this projection.
Even though Berger and Luckman wrote at a less gender bias aware time and use the term “man” for human being, their insight is still profound. They assert that human beings “in society” not simply as human beings are “world constructors.” The world constructed is a symbolic world, a universe of meaning. It must be public, shareable among others. It must give itself to the possiblity of re-enactment by future generations. A symbolic universe is not a privatized world defined by gender, race, class or any of those private things that also define humans. It is not a hiding place, a place of refuge from the vissicitudes of existence.
Eric Voegelin, a 20th century political philosopher, reaches the same point, beginning empirically with simply the fact of human existence on the planet, what he calls “participation in being.” Participation in being is simply life itself. It is not a “partial involvment,” it is “existence itself.” For human beings there is no “vantage point,” no “blessed island” outside of our existence that we can retire to to contemplate our navel, to get away from ourselves in order to find ourselves, or from which to view existence as a whole from the outside. There is no nunc stans for us. Human existence can be symbolized as a play in which the actor, the role, the director, and the play’s meaning are all uncertain and unknown and in which we are all forced to play a part. Nevertheless, Voegelin asserts that “man’s participation in being is not blind but is illuminated by consciousness.” We experience ourselves participating in something we call existence. Voegelin urges caution, because as he puts it “there is no such thing” as a human being who participates in existence. Our language can obscure as well as illuminate reality, and if we assume that “human being” and “existence” are objects in time and space which we relate to one another in language and if we assume that “existence” is an undertaking similar to writing a diary (an activity we can choose to do or not do) then our language is obscuring the point. Existence is not “an enterprise (we) could as well leave alone.” As Voegelin puts it
there is, rather, a “something,” a part of being, capable of experiencing itself as such, and futhermore capable of using language and calling this experiencing consciousness by the name of “man.”
This act of evocation is a creation of a symbolic universe of meaning which becomes home. By this act of evocation human beings articulate an experience of consubstantiality with, but no longer an exact identity with, the larger community of being. The act of self-expression identifies the human as an autonomous part of being but it does not separate human being out of being iself. Rather “it calls upon the entire cosmos to signify the validity of human existence.”
The symbol “human being” represents a universe of meaning that is existentially open, it is shareable by all human beings. It symbolizes a community of all human beings based upon a common experiential identity as an autonomous part of the All. Its openness proclaims that “all reality is humanly meaningful.”
The capacity to engender symbols is the only means with which human beings are possessed enabling them to share experiences, to make what is invisible–our own epxeriences–public and visible and open to others. It is this capacity which Aristotle described as our communal nature as human beings. What makes us communal beings (what Aristotle called “political” or “of the polis) by nature is the ability to create symbolic realities–communities engendered by symbolic expressions of common experiences–within which meaning is given to both indivudal and communal existence.
That the creation of symbolic universes is a societal as well as individual phenomenon does not imply that societies create them. Only individual human beings are capable of experiencing reality and expressing that through language. Consciousness enables us to re-enact the symbolic expressions of others as well as generate our own. By compellingly symbolzing common experience, one’s personal expression of experience becomes representatively meaningful for one’s society and illuminates that soceity with meaning from within. It becomes a symbolic reality within which others live and gain meaning. Richard Slotkin has described mythology as
a complex of naratives that dramatizes the world-vision and historical sense of a people or culture, reducing centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors.
Slotkin’s definition of myth implies that it is representative of a culture or society because it gives a shareable meaning to the private experiences (the expectations, memories, anxieties and hopes) of its individual members. A society is therefore not an “objective fact” nor is it an entity that can only be described using social scientific quantifications. A society is not only an external event in history that exists in space and time, it is fundamentally an event in consciousness.
Certainly societies are material things. Buildings, institutions, people who are born and die and leave hints of themselves, are all the material stuff of society. But these things did not create the society. In terms of existential meaning, society is a datum of experience, not materiality. It is a unverse of meaning generated by the symbolic expressions of experience by the human beings living within it. Society cannot be grasped or expressed from without: “it is” as Voegelin puts it “a whole little world, a cosmion, illuminated with meaning from within by human beings who continuously create and bear it as the mode and condition of their self-actualization.”
The self-illumination of society through symbols is an integral part of social reality, and one may even say its essential part, for through such symbolization the members of society experience it as more than an accident or a convenience; they experience it as of their human essence.
Existential representation is therefore an ephemeral thing. Human experience in soceity must continually be re-interpreted through the lens of the existing symbolic universe of meaning. When that symbolic unvierse becomes old and creaky, when as Socrates or Plato put it “when the gods themselves become unseemly,” then existential meaning has to re-defined. The formulation and re-formulation of the exisential meaing of society is politics. We are living at a time in need of such a re-definition. In order to redefine how Americans represent themselves to themselves and others we need to understand the current manifestation.
Whether we define society as an “event of consciousness” or as Voegelin’s “mode and condition” of actualizing our humanity or as Berger and Luckman’s world into which humans externalize themselves, we can see that all of these definitions share one common feature. Human beings are world creators in that we create symbolic realities within which to find a shareable meaning for our private experiences. But there are a multitude of symbolic realities, each claiming to make all of reality humanly meaningful, each truthfully claiming that their own “mode and condition” makes the actualization of their American-nes, Lakota-ness, Christian-ness, Muslim-ness, equivalent to the actualization of their humanity.
This multiplicty should not lead us to attempt to rank them on some kind of vertical, hierarchical scale (with our own on the top or the bottom depending on how we’re feeling about it). This will result in the kind of ideological deformation of reality that we see in the variety of fundamentatlisms currently infecting the world whether Christian, Jewish, Islamic or atheisitc that compels one to exclusively claim the ownerhsip of what is human. However, we don’t have to become relativists either and say that all symbolic realities are equal. They’re not.
The existential openness of the symbol “human being” is paradigmatic, it is the model by which to compare and judge and the openness and existential authenticity of particular symbolic representations of the world into which humans beings in society externalize themselves. For example, in God Is Red Vine Deloria, Jr. lists the names of twenty-seven tribes of American Indians, twenty-three of which represent themselves by the name of “people” in one form or another. The experience of membership in tribal soceity is seen as equivalent to being human. The humanity of indivudal human beings can only be actualized with the tribe-polis. Even given the intensity of the experience of coincidence of ones’s tribal membership with one’s humanity for the Lakota, for example, the “people” was not an exclusive community defined by race. The symbolic universe of meaning embraced by the Lakota was existentially open. A sign of this openness is the absence of proselytization. The Lakota did not seek to convert the rest of humanity to their view of reality. They did, howevever, accept into their society anyone who desired inclusion. The Lakota believe that one is most human when living within their tribal symbolic universe of meaning, but not solely so. The Puritans who emigrated to America and to whom we owe one of the first expressions of the symbolic universe defined as regeneration through violence, believed that one is only human when living within their symbolic reality.
When a symbolic reality and its languages of expression and legitimation is based upon the denial of the humanity of those not included within it, it ceases to be a symbolic reality and becomes a crusading ideology, a substitute reality not capable of being shared beyond that described by a Spanish Conquistador who claimed to be spreading Christianity by putting his faith onto his sword and his sword into the “Indian.”
I’ve made you suffer enough. More to come that is specifically related to our inauthentic yet incredibly resilient myth of Regeneration Through Violence.
