Americans have been an anxious people for longer than you might think, and there are many reasons for this, but one big one, as Alexis de Tocqueville masterfully documented, is our experience of what he called “democratic life.”
The important thing is that Tocqueville do not have Blaming our misery on democratic politics, which it really isn’t, he insisted, the only earthly cure for what ails us is to dive into the messy, difficult details of local community governance, the epitome of the political democracy Americans have known for years.
If we want to do more than that, we must take matters into our own hands, recognizing that all such matters are ultimately deeply dependent on God.
But he warned that democratic life, a life in which equality of conditions prevails for the majority, leads to certain psychological and mental pressures that can often become overwhelming. For those not born into wealth and privilege, he believed that a brief period of sixty or so productive years of maturity was not enough to safely provide a period of comfort, self-confidence and independent activity.
Instead, struggling to gain an advantage in a social scrum characterized by competition and submission, Americans were constantly worrying about tomorrow, wondering when they might lose ground or face new upheavals, and wondering whether, even if they managed to climb the slippery pole, they might wake up one day to find that they had wasted their lives competing for the fleeting pleasures and opportunities of this world.
Tocqueville stressed the need for “habits of the mind” to assuage (but by no means cure) the anxieties of democratic life, which, for him, ultimately came from religion: even what we might today call “minimal” Christianity, he felt, was far better than nothing.
But today we may be forced to reconsider the feasibility of that approach in light of the evidence. People, and not just anxious Americans, are stubbornly hesitant to make the hard spiritual effort of confronting God in his innermost recesses, in his own weaknesses and folly. It’s hard even when there’s nothing else to do. Add to that the noise and uncertainty of democratic life and all the distractions we create in our desperate search for new quick fixes, and it may seem impossible, no matter how willing the Lord is to allow it.
So Americans have long sought to extricate themselves from their mental and social predicaments by redirecting their social and personal attention away from the present, and some have preferred to do this by focusing on the past.
American optimism
But the past isn’t entirely the past in America, especially not compared to the Old World. There is no distant golden age to which America can return or restore. In a vague, imaginary world, some may indulge in nostalgia that is not their own.
But for most people, the future is actually the best refuge from the present, the responsibility and repentance that living before God demands of us, and, at least until very recently, more and more Americans have been looking to the future for vicarious salvation.
This is despite the constant disappointment with the ostensible futures produced in shiny, disembodied form by hordes of self-proclaimed (and sometimes even credentialed) “futurists.” Today’s futurists are staunchly resistant to the future’s sadly inevitable PR problems.
They contain a kernel of truth: it is wicked to hope that tomorrow will be worse than today, it is sinful to despair of tomorrow; if we fail to fulfill our responsibilities today, we are sure to be hit with the consequences as early as next week; the sins of the fathers haunt the sons for generations to come.
The “Great Stagnation” that many futurists lament is not entirely a figment of the imagination. On the other hand, the blame for it is almost always misplaced. Futurists point to jealousy, guilt, laziness, stupidity, and a host of other shortcomings, but the real culprit is an understanding that is deeply rooted in the human psyche. more More things, more distractions, more idols, more machines, more tools, more drugs, more speed, more noise – these are in fact the things that most trouble us in a spiritual sense. fewIn reality, it makes the hole we’re in even deeper.
Of course, this is not to say that we shouldn’t build better airplanes (instead of them falling from the sky) or more robust digital infrastructure (instead of letting the internet degenerate into spam). It’s just that futurism’s biggest problem — the problem it cannot overcome — is the future itself. We can never find an escape from the present in the future, because we cannot live in the future. As a result, futurism is characterized by its attempt to distort the present to make the future real. Seem Like the future.
This lie, this illusion, while superficially numbing the anxiety, only makes it worse. Caught in this vicious circle, Macbeth feels the urge to keep going because it’s easier than backing down (i.e., changing his mind and repenting), and this becomes the urge of society as a whole. “I want to outrun the speed of pain for just one more day,” Marilyn Manson sang in the late ’90s, a warning from someone playing the role of an alien monster from the future. Few take the shock rocker’s raspy voice at face value, but we can look to where we are today and see an entire society grappling with doing just that.
This is the bitter fruit of Futurism, an idol of imagined earthly perfection from which no one can reach and from which no one can derive mercy. It is all too poetic justice for those who were led so far astray in the mid-20th century by the well-intentioned but misleading cult of “live for today” and “be here and now.” These hippie mantras, rather than leading people towards the necessities of communal living that Tocqueville urged, merely adorned a culture of individual irresponsibility.
But without a shared spiritual life, the daily toil of maintaining the ephemeral things of this world (which ultimately includes all that is merely mortal) would still be intolerable to us.Tocqueville believed that governments in democratic times could only draw people back to faith by demanding that they attend to their own affairs as much as possible, rather than making them childlike slaves.
If we want to do more than that, we must take matters into our own hands, recognizing that all such matters are ultimately deeply dependent on God.
That’s a presentism we can believe in.
