We were warned. No less than James Baldwin, the brilliant black writer, observed the heinous conduct of white America towards people of color, was horrified, and said as much: “moral monsters.” This was in 1979, and if anything, things have gotten worse.
Yes, America elected a Black President, and the resulting vitriol aimed at him and his family was constant and ugly. In it’s own way, the election of Barack Obama reopened the floodgates of American bigotry and the waters of hatred have swamped the land. Efforts to mitigate the effects of centuries of racism have been undermined by reactionary right-wing politicians, a politically-aligned Supreme Court, and the dismantling of DEI programs. A similar effort is now being directed at immigrant communities.
It’s as if America took two steps forward and five steps back. Whatever progress we thought we’d made has been revealed as a delusion. Multiculturalism is an anathema to bigots; a serious effort is being made to rebrand America as a white nationalist country intent upon preserving white cultural heritage. And what is white cultural heritage? Dominance over others, period.
The world has seen all this before. The rise of fascism in Europe marked the rise of moral monsters, and many millions of innocent people lost their lives as a result. When people are reduced to mere objects, their humanity denied, terrible suffering results. All it takes is the hardening of the heart, a combination of pseudoscientific or sociopathic rationales combined with a willingness to look away. It’s that simple. And it’s happening all over again right now, right here.
For many, this is hard to accept as possible or true. Human powers of denial are strong, and the opportunities for distraction more plentiful than ever. Tellingly, the distraction of entertainment often contains nearly apocalyptic depictions of human depravity. Sometimes it’s the depravity of moral monsters, and sometimes the depravity of alien or supernatural monsters. It adds up to the same thing, however. Rather than facing the monstrous conduct of our own citizens, we create imaginary monsters to scare us. It’s easier to dismiss the moral monsters of Hollywood than to confront the moral monsters of Washington, D.C.
What’s being described as the rising popularity of Democratic Socialists is an indication of the deep well of dissatisfaction felt by many people in America. They know something about our country is rotten. The same mechanism, ironically, operates on the right and left. America has lost its way, and people are either pining for an imaginary better past or desperately trying to navigate to an imagined future that they hope will be better. We are a nation where most of us live uncomfortably between the extremes of right and left. Hopelessness is a raging pandemic.
Where are we to turn to find a way out of this Labrinth? Must we succumb to the terror of the Minotaur and have our hearts ripped to shreds? In the classical Greek myth, Prince Theseus finds his way out of the Labrinth by using a magical thread. What is our magical thread, if any?
The Lutheran Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned and hanged by the German Nazis, but his letters from prison survived; moral devotion was his magical thread. “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil,” he wrote.
