Arts & Opinion.com
  Arts Culture Analysis  
Vol. 18, No. 1, 2019
 
     
 
  Current Issue  
  Back Issues  
  About  
 
 
  Submissions  
  Subscribe  
  Comments  
  Letters  
  Contact  
  Jobs  
  Ads  
  Links  
 
 
  Editor
Robert J. Lewis
 
  Senior Editor
Bernard Dubé
 
  Contributing Editors
David Solway
Louis René Beres
Nick Catalano
Lynda Renée
Gary Olson
Howard Richler
Oslavi Linares
Chris Barry
Jordan Adler
Andrew Hlavacek
Daniel Charchuk
 
  Music Editors
Diane Gordon
Serge Gamache
 
  Arts Editor
Lydia Schrufer
 
  Graphics
Mady Bourdage
 
  Photographer
Chantal Levesque Denis Beaumont
 
  Webmaster
Emanuel Pordes
 
 
 
  Past Contributors
 
  Noam Chomsky
Mark Kingwell
Naomi Klein
Arundhati Roy
Evelyn Lau
Stephen Lewis
Robert Fisk
Margaret Somerville
Mona Eltahawy
Michael Moore
Julius Grey
Irshad Manji
Richard Rodriguez
Ernesto Zedillo
Pico Iyer
Edward Said
Jean Baudrillard
Bill Moyers
Barbara Ehrenreich
Leon Wieseltier
Nayan Chanda
Charles Lewis
John Lavery
Tariq Ali
Michael Albert
Rochelle Gurstein
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
 
     

donald trump
THE DESTRUCTION OF THE AMERICAN MIND


by
LOUIS RENÉ BERES

___________________________

Louis René Beres is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and International Law (Purdue University). He is author of many books and articles dealing with international politics. His columns have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, The Jerusalem Post and OUPblog (Oxford University Press). This article was originally published in yaleglobal.yale.edu.

An open loathing of intellect has become substantially de rigeur for Donald Trump and his supporters. Accordingly, the nation’s chief executive regards terms like “intellectual” or “analytic” as epithets rather than positive attributes or prospectively gainful expectations.

While Trump did not create this demeaning subordination of the “mind,” it is nonetheless an integral component of his bitter and corrosive presidency. Furthermore, there are particular concerns. Above all, one must now inquire, how can an American president so wilfully ignore the obvious foreign and domestic policy manipulations committed by his Russian counterpart and the deepening concerns shared by intelligence officials, investigators, congressional representatives of both parties, allies and other world leaders? Indeed, even in the absence of any recognizable “high thinking” in the White House, alarm builds that one superpower president has become the pawn of another power.

Trump’s curious ascent to the American presidency did not arise in a vacuum. Rather, the country’s long history of distrust for intellect and science conveniently set the stage for such debilitating and portentous national leadership. In the words of poet W.B. Yeats, “There is no longer a virtuous nation, and the best of us live by candlelight.”

We dare not speak of "tragedy.” Tragedy, unlike catastrophe and misfortune, is ennobling. It demands a victim, either individual or societal, who suffers markedly and undeservedly. It follows that a democratic and presumably virtuous nation that elected a blustering businessman and reality TV star can hardly be held blameless.

Today, not only the crass American “emperor," but also those still watching the stifling "parade” with unsuitable deference are similarly "naked." To wit, in Trump's deeply fractionated American republic, 'we the people' now inhabit a rapidly descending “hollow” land of unending submission, crude consumption, dreary profanity and immutably shallow pleasures. Bored by the suffocating banality of daily life and beaten down by the grinding struggle to stay hopeful amid ever-widening polarities of wealth and poverty, Americans grasp anxiously for almost any available lifeline of promising distraction. Small wonder that the cavernous opiate crisis is deep enough to drown whole oceans of a once-sacred poetry.

In part, at least, because of the grievously misdirected and ineffectual stewardship of the current president, both the nation and the much wider system of nation-states are increasingly imperiled. Where, then, shall people seek to dispel any still-lingering public apprehensions concerning collective survival and human improvement? Where, indeed, can they discover any usefully reinforcing visions of social cooperation and personal growth?

Misled by the self-destructive syntax of “America First,” Americans have already forgotten that world politics is inevitably a system with US prosperity inextricably linked to the calculable well-being of other societies.

In Trump's cliché-ridden America, 'we the people' are no longer shaped by common feelings of reverence or compassion, or even the tiniest hints of some clarifying analytic thought. Unsurprisingly, education failures represent a large part of the anti-intellectual problem. Even in the nation’s best colleges and universities, there is now far greater interest in studying “practical” matters than in learning history, government, literature, music or philosophy. And why not? In this country, true learning assuredly doesn’t “pay.”

In this feverishly disjointed era, the US president fervently encourages Americans to resist aggressively intellect, science, journalism and history. Often, too, even the most affluent US citizens separate themselves to inhabit the loneliest of places. Apart from their ownership of more conspicuously glittering “stuff,” there is little about greater wealth than can insulate these citizens from anomie, alienation and an utterly profound sense of meaninglessness.

“I belong, therefore I am” – this is not what philosopher René Descartes had in mind when he famously urged intellectual thought and purposeful doubt. It is also a sad credo, an unhesitatingly pathetic cry that social acceptance and certain related affections are roughly equivalent to physical survival and that even the sorely pretended pleasures of inclusion are desperately worth pursuing. At the same time, Americans shrug off the very real survival issue of others fleeing war in Syria or hopeless poverty in Central America. Although international law obliges the United States to oppose crimes of genocide and crimes against humanity, Trump remains silent on irremediable war crimes committed by Syria's murderous dictator and his Russian presidential patron – this despite the fact that international law represents an incorporated part of the law of the United States. In the words of Justice Horace Gray delivering the 1900 US Supreme Court judgment in Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction . . . ”

For most of our young people, learning has become a reluctantly required and inconvenient commodity, nothing more. At the same time, commodities exist for one overriding purpose. They are there, much like the newly minted college graduates themselves, to be marketed, bought and sold.

Though faced with distinctly genuine threats of war, illness, impoverishment and terror, vast millions of Americans still choose to distract and amuse themselves with assorted forms of morbid excitement, public scandal and the thoroughly inane repetitions of an authentically illiterate political discourse. Not a day goes by that we don't notice some premonitory sign of impending catastrophe. Still, this self-anaesthetized nation continues to impose upon its exhausted and manipulated people a shamelessly open devaluation of disciplined thought.

Soon, even if the United States should somehow manage to avoid nuclear war and nuclear terrorism under the relentless corrupting Trump leadership, the swaying of the American ship will become so violent that even the hardiest lamps will be overturned. Then, the phantoms of great ships of state, once laden with silver and gold, may no longer lie forgotten. Instead, citizens will finally understand that the circumstances that once sent the great compositions of Homer, Maimonides, Goethe, Milton, Shakespeare, Freud and Kafka to join the disintegrating works of forgotten poets were neither unique nor transient.

In an 1897 essay titled “On Being Human,” Woodrow Wilson, later president of Princeton and the United States, inquired coyly about the authenticity of America. “Is it even open to us to choose to be genuine?” This president answered “yes,” but only if we first refused to stoop to join the inglorious “herds” of mass society. Wilson describes the challenges: “once it was a simple enough matter to be a human being, but now it is deeply difficult; because life was once simple, but is now complex, confused, multifarious. Haste, anxiety, preoccupation, the need to specialize and make machines of ourselves, have transformed the once simple world, and we are apprised that it will not be without effort that we shall keep the broad human traits which have so far made the earth habitable.”

In all societies, the meticulous care of individual 'souls' is critically important. In principle, there can be a better 'American soul,' but not until we first affirm a prior obligation to shun the unsustainable and inter-penetrating seductions of mass culture, rank imitation, shallow thinking, organized mediocrity and as corollary a manifestly predatory presidential politics of “rallies.”

“This is the dead land . . .” intones T.S. Eliot in "The Hollow Men." Here, as the prophetic poet already understood, those still living must reluctantly plan to receive “the supplication of a dead man's hand.” For the steadily weakening United States, now in cascading moral and physical decline, there does exist a more promising and dignified orientation, but it would require more conscious acceptance of how far the nation has fallen during the first years of Trump’s convulsive presidency.

This two-year anniversary is not one for anyone to celebrate with pride – except perhaps for Vladimir Putin and Bashar al Assad.

 

 

YOUR COMMENTS

Email Address
(not required)

COMMENTS

user-submission@feedback.com
The information and opinion expressed in this essay is obviously bang on to anyone with half a brain. The comment below bespeaks the idiocy that runs rampant on comment threads all over the Internet. Probably paid republican cronies.

user-submission@feedback.com
If the professor is dismayed by Trump, I suggest he cash in his stock gains from his retirement fund and donate that money to charity. Don’t want anything beneficial from Trump — Orange Man Bad!

user-submission@feedback.com
Nothing destroys minds more than the socialism of Democrats.

by Louis René Beres:
Empathy & Intelligence
The Crowd Is Untruth
In Praise of Folly: Trump Presidency
Repairing the World at Its Source
Emptiness and Consciousness
Nuclear Deterrence Conflict
Trump's Anti-Intellectualism
Lawless Retreat
Trump - Triumph of Anti-Reason
In the Absence of Wise Councel
Futile Goal of Winning Wars
Money & Politics: A Look Behind the News
Trump's War Against the Intellect
America Becomes What Its Founding Fathers Feared
Victory as Vanishing Point in the Age of Terror
Against a Nuclear-Free World
The Politics of Pre-emption
Crowds, Belonging and Victory Over Death
The Tip of the Jihadist Iceberg
Fixing the World
When Science May Not Be Enough
Facing future Wars
America's Senseless Wars
Is There a Genocide Gene?
Slow Death of America
To Fix a Broken Planet
Our Fractured Union
Affirming Life in the Age of Atrocity
War, Truth and the Shadows of Meaning
Occupy Wall Street
What Is Important?
Social Network Anxiety
Disappearance of the Philosopher Kings


 

 
Help Haiti
Film Ratings at Arts & Opinion - Montreal
2016 Festival Nouveau Cinema de Montreal, Oct. 05-16st, (514) 844-2172
Lynda Renée: Chroniques Québécois - Blog
Montreal Guitar Show July 2-4th (Sylvain Luc etc.). border=
Photo by David Lieber: davidliebersblog.blogspot.com
SPECIAL PROMOTION: ads@artsandopinion.com
SUPPORT THE ARTS
Valid HTML 4.01!
Privacy Statement Contact Info
Copyright 2002 Robert J. Lewis