Pragmatic Patriotism III: On Context.
The core lesson of the information age is that as the use of technology expands, the capacity of its users to understand it decreases rapidly. The old internet, before my time, was a cutting-edge service that taught a whole curious generation the basics of coding to use it properly. Today, the internet is little more than a data extraction service, perhaps an inevitability to sustain it. Another inevitability is an increasing reliance on complex algorithms to steer the services toward coherent order.
Contemporary psychology has proven woefully incapable of adapting to these rapid technological shifts as an institution. Individually, some remain quite talented. Others simply seek to maintain self-limiting paradigms, less out of malice and more out of an incapacity to envision novel means of treatment.
Or fear of ridicule…
Psychology remains a potent tool of treatment for some, but for others, it has merely replaced confession.
At an ideological level, Americans are divided between two core ideologies: Puritanism and Classical Liberalism.
Puritanism is, ironically, the ideology of the outcast who refuses to bend the knee. The pilgrims were persecuted, but found refuge in the Dutch Republic. Unable to compromise with the licentious Dutch, they instead took the audacious Mayflower voyage. Such is the founding of the Northern United States.
Classical liberalism is the ideology of the trader who seeks growth through venturing into the unknown. Liberals and progressives tend to express the history in its darkest contours, since it was largely achieved through coercive violence. Yet, the Founding Fathers, as Enlightened thinkers, truly believed that slavery would naturally end, as its economic utility became untenable. Such is the founding of the Southern United States.
This proved false, not by any lapse in reason, but through technological change advancing beyond ‘nature’, specifically with the cotton gin. The Founding Fathers laid an ideological foundation for free labor, which proved untenable within the political structures they designed due to technological change they could not foresee.
Such is the core origin of the Civil War, still the deadliest conflict in our history. For all the talk of trauma recently, it seems rare to hear anyone suggest that trauma was the root cause of the subsequent violence in the aftermath of that conflict. The Wild West, the southern race riots, and the ‘Indian-Wars’ are all rooted in the aftermath of the Civil War.
After 2020, revisionist history on this period became the trend, with a core consensus emerging that Reconstruction was a failure, not because its leaders were overly Puritan politicians who refused to compromise, but that the whole thing itself was tainted by not radicalizing far enough.
Existentialist rhetoric became the norm, with normalized ressentiment-driven struggle sessions wishing that only more southerners had been removed. Unfortunately, the pendulum theory, cliché as it is, remains the rule.
So, we now face two parties expressing increasingly existentialist rhetoric against each other. Two Puritans whose bloodlust can only be satiated by endless bickering online.
Such is the current state of our politics, and the core inspiration of the first demo album I made, “Joker Ark.” The title itself is a reference to the 2021 trend of “Joker arcs,” which was a popular meme in college. It is also an allusion to the biblical ark. I considered titling it “Joan or Ark,” which would have been a better reflection of the album’s themes. Joan, being a reference to Joan of Arc, a visionary burned in war, who was redeemed by the Church after it became clear that her “crimes” were a conspiracy led by Pierre Cauchon, a partisan dressed as a bishop, who burned her to save England.
Such is the ideological root of French Republicanism.
The Ark metaphor refers to Noah’s Ark: a biblical story imploring foresight and planning to save oneself in a corrupted world. In essence, the album suggested two directions for Gen Z: the fanaticism of the French or the foresight of Noah.
However, I compromised. To start, I did not release the album when I recorded it in early July, out of a pathetic fear of rejection. Worse, I changed the title out of fear that viewers would miss the context. How artists hate to explain themselves!
Both fears were rooted in my personal rejection of my last large writing project, “they say.” The less I say about that, the better. In short, it was the most ressentiment-driven art conceivable, largely inspired by my gut reaction to The People’s History of the United States, by Howard Zinn, and reading the abstract stream-of-consciousness poem Howl by Alan Ginsberg. Alongside overcoming health issues I was plagued with at the time, I developed an insatiable creative desire, which I put into that poem in a tour-de-force one-night session.
I then proceeded to edit it ad neausum. Its core theme is that extreme ideologies lead to death cults that end with the leader as the sole survivor. It overtly mocked the incest of the Habsburgs. An odd theory I developed at the time was that the monarchy itself fell due to this, as the commoners remained devout followers of Catholic prohibitions, while Monarchs indulged in maintaining blue-blood purity, to the long-term cost of their capacity to rule.
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The second work in the series was to be called “The Revolution,” which was overtly inspired by the Joan of Arc legend. In a way, it is a pointless work to write, as we are living through a myriad of turmoil globally.
Such turmoil has created an anxious generation, which has increasingly embraced absurdism as the only sensible lens to navigate through it.
A new Lost Generation. A new Gen X.
Nietzsche was right about one thing: what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
But without a just and loving God centering our passions, horrific consequences can emerge.
America itself was founded on this spirit centuries prior, as a Nation of pioneers seeking to build something beautiful in the unknown. Despite the flaws of that Epoch, it still accomplished unprecedented growth, peace, and prosperity by being centered on a tangible vision of human advancement.
That is the connection between the Puritans and the Classical Liberals. As much as they detest one another, they do so because their visions of progress conflict. The Founding Fathers understood this after experiencing the worst of war, and pragmatically worked together to build the most durable political foundation of any heterogeneous Republic thus known.
Thus answers the riddle of the roots of Americanism.
Further Reading:
- A Conflict of Visions (Thomas Sowell)
- Common Sense (Thomas Paine)
- The Federalist Papers
- Anything by Benjamin Franklin
- Anything by Thomas Jefferson
- Anything by Abraham Lincoln
- Reflections on the French Revolution (Edmund Burke)
- Slaughterhouse-5 (Kurt Vonnegut)
- Watchmen
- The Gospel of Mark
