Resurrecting Decency
Voices from the past as the handrails of resurrection
“Let me tell you what justice is. Justice is the law. And the law is man's feeble attempt to lay down the principles of decency. Decency! And decency isn't a deal, it's not a contract or a hustle or an angle! Decency… decency is what your grandmother taught you. It's in your bones! Now you go home. Go home and be decent people. Be decent.”— Morgan Freeman, as Judge Leonard White, in the movie adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s book, Bonfire of the Vanities
Amid all the tumult of the present it is too easily forgotten that we are in recovery after seventy years of empire which is an aberrant social order, a societal rupture, based on extortion, pillage and plunder. It is the era where piracy rules the high seas, board rooms and tainted halls of power. There are countries to be conquered fortunes to be made ad infinitum.
We might see the present situation of the declining west as being in an intensive care unit (ICU) where societal conscience is in a deep coma and will we see its recovery? Conscience has been left to flat-line, for too long and too often. Bringing back its essential amplitude as the heart and soul of any society is going to require the rigorous injection of some powerful social steroids— beginning with decency. As Judge White reminds us above….. “decency is what your grandmother taught you.”
Charlie Chaplin’s movie Modern Times(1936), was a powerful precursor of what was to come. In comic, cinematic terms he addressed the issue of what the industrial revolution was doing to us. It was turning us into the robotic automatons of the industrial state. Today that devolution is more than replete. Whole populations are abandoned, exploited and disenfranchised. The absolutism of empires and predatory capitalism have put down such very deep roots governments serve as no more than the lapdogs to the power and demagoguery as the presiding kakistocracy.
Vonnegut’s quote above is also a stunning indictment of the status quo. When he refers to cost effective, he is stating we are trapped in a vortex of decline where every thing is defined in terms of profit vs loss, extortion and bribery, secrecy and propaganda, endless wars and statutory genocides and lewd scandals.
The best defense [for a democracy, for the public good] is aggressiveness, the aggressiveness of the involved citizen. We need to reassert that slow, time-consuming, inefficient, boring process that requires our involvement; it is called 'being a citizen. The public good is not something that you can see. It is not static. It is a process. It is the process by which democratic civilizations build themselves.— John Ralston Saul
Democracy as a hollowed ritual
Sheldon Wolin’s concept of inverted totalitarianism describes a political system that retains the outward appearance of democracy while hollowing out its substance, allowing corporate and state power to dominate without overt dictatorship. It is “totalitarianism inverted” because instead of a charismatic leader mobilizing the masses, it relies on citizen apathy, corporate influence, and managed political spectacle.
Democracy has many aspects. It is about appropriation process, decorum, respect, and the quintessence of sociableness. It is about compromise, consensus, diplomacy. It is the bloom of the human spirit and the essential animation of who we are and what we stand for — the “sweetness and light” we invoke when we need to believe the future is listening.
Flirting with resurrection’s tipping point
After 5000 years of written history we are a little late in the game to be flirting with resurrection’s tipping point—the question is whether renewal can still outrun decay, or whether the machinery has slipped past the point where revival is possible? In times like these, resurrection should be at the front of the line as a first priority. History has its death bite allowing only so many return tickets, so much recidivism and so much savage barbarism. So many cultures have risen and fallen over eons it has become a major multi-billion global tourist industry visiting the ruins of the past— yet we are impervious to the message they send— it is a temporal world and our brief moments in time are minuscule on the continuum of history. It would seem we have an obligation to be on our best behaviors and worthy custodians.
There are dead empires, a dying empire and retired empires. Europe is dotted with former imperialists who plundered the world in earlier times. In too many ways the continued existence of an empire in today’s world is a humiliating anachronism of times gone by. It is a brutal historic irony that countries like Britain, Germany, and France are all colonized vassals of the the declining American empire. They have suffered the entropy of colonized countries and have huge adjustments to make to secure their futures; as the does the US republic as the seat of empire. Empire’s are a reign of tyranny and despotism where social animation is paralyzed, frozen in time and recovery-as resurrection- does not come easily. The longer the crises of decline endures and becomes more deeply embedded the more challenging the future becomes.
The existential hollowing
As the souls of cultures wain and empires die back social placebos come into play— the dementia of grief and denialism. Gold adornment is an ostentatious admission of the death of the soul and humane consciousness. Politicians lie to their hearts content— as they are in their most desperate hour… democracy has been reduced to a feeble ritual, a deception of the power elites.The cult of frivolous adornments arises when a civilization has lost its moral compass and the consciousness that once animated it. The more trivial the object, the more fervent the devotion. The grotesque and the mundane are deified. War and genocide are the curtain closers—the last desperate acts as the gods punish those who they first of all drove insane.
The resurrection of decency and democracy
The resurrection of decency and democracy waits in the wings. It takes its cue from us, the very ones who must set the cadence.
Decency re-emerges when we say NO to the spectacle, no to the degradation, no to the spinning carousel of final collapse.
Decency re-emerges only when we insist the integrity and viability of our sacred institutions be restored.
Decency re-emerges when we recognize we can only exist with in the parameters of sustainability, and true wealth resides in effective custodianship—not endless extortion and rapacious greed.
Decency re-emerges when objective truth is the mainstay of our existence.
Decency re-emerges when we realize empires are the death knell of planetary survival.
Decency re‑emerges only when we return to the cathedrals of contrition and redemption.
Decency re-emerges only where there is the credibility that agreements are kept, promises honored, and the boundaries of international law respected.
Judge Leonard White gets the last word.
Imagine, for a moment, Tom Wolfe placing Morgan Freeman — Judge Leonard White — in a Bronx courtroom to tell us all it is time to return to decency, and that the wisdom of our grandmothers insists it must be so.
