The Right Wing Rationale: V

Now this brings us to the nub of what is at work in the neo-conservative (or the accompanying Orwellian term, neo-liberal) ideology. In order to deconstruct this phenomenon one has to look at a political and quasi-religious tradition that goes far back in history. Augustine, a founder of the Christian faith and a neo-Pauline master of the Christian realpolitik, who wrote down his ideas as his beloved Roman Empire was about to fall to the invading barbarians, might be a good place to start. It is no accident that Martin Luther, another Master Builder whose influence would ultimately extend to the creation of the Protestant Ethic and the Gospel of Wealth, was an Augustinian monk. But one needs to go back further, to the roots of Augustine’s philosophical writings. Although his City of God would find echoes fifteen hundred years later in Ronald Reagan’s “City on the Hill,” the secret of Augustine’s utopia is that he did not believe it was realizable here on Earth, only in the hereafter. It is from Augustine that we get the concept of the elect, of salvation by grace alone, of a terrestrial life which drives humans to the brink of madness because of (and this was a favorite word) “concupiscence,” that is, human appetites and desires. If we look a bit more deeply into who Augustine was, we find a converted Manichaean, a follower of the philosophy that sees the Evil Empire and the Axis of Evil as ubiquitous. Augustine was also a careful reader of Plotinus, a Platonic idealist. (The late Carl Sagan, in his closing remarks on the televised rendition of Cosmos, stated that all Western philosophy, down to the present day, has been a battle between Plato and Aristotle.) Some may recall R.W. Apple’s surprising first page comments in the New York Times on the event of the destruction of the Berlin Wall, “the most significant event since the revolutions of 1848,” and then, a short time later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s characterization, again placed on the first page of the Times, of the fall of the Soviet Union as the end of a tradition that went back not merely to 1848, but to the French Revolution and its roots in the Romantic tradition. The all-American Apple and the brooding Russian Solzhenitsyn expressed a shared sense that what was at work in these events was an ongoing political and philosophical battle with a long history. If we look at the other side of this political coin, it also explains how Putin can characterize the fall of the Soviet Union as “the greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century,” and a short time later, in an interview with Charlie Rose, find Gorbachev agreeing with Putin’s sentiments. What is at war here, and I would argue what those who see in the present neo-liberal/neo-conservative agenda real dangers need to understand, is an ancient battle of ideas at the center of which is our fundamental definition of human nature. This may seem rather esoteric, but fractals of this ancient debate are with us every day. And I would argue that unless one can see the present conflicts resolved through the sharper focus afforded by an understanding of these longer historical currents, a viable response to the millennial types now running the U.S. hegemon will be long forestalled.