"Little Eichmanns" - Part II

I see, in one of the comments on the first part of this essay, that "it is unreasonable to expect anyone to provide a comprehensive answer to the question of what our system does.' No one currently is in possession of enough knowledge to answer, nor does anyone have sufficient time to acquire it. Only someone with the hubris to claim he understands the system (like, say, an Ethnic Studies professor) would try to explain it. And by explaining, he has undermined our confidence in his ability to understand it."



I'm not sure I fully understand that comment. I think it means that an outline of "our [political economic] system" must needs be imperfect. So imperfect that there's no point in trying.



From an "objective" historical or social scientific perspective, that may be the case. For we know in part and we prophesy in part. But it doesn't mean that that the question--what is the nature of the world and what is our place within it?--is meaningless. On the contrary, it is a question of ultimate meaning. The quest for an answer may be informed by history, social science, philosophy, the rest of the humanities, even ethnic studies, but it is ultimately a spiritual quest.



When I was a child, I talked like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.



The answers are never complete or final, but there are glimpses; what William James, an early psychologist of religious experience, termed "cosmic consciousness," a sense of the interconnectedness of all things. Any number of novelists, poets, and songwriters have tried to describe this phenomenon. I will only instance Paula Cole in the title track to her fourth album, Amen:



I'm siphoning gas from the high school bus

Into the tank of my beat-up bug

So I can drive away from the shouting and misery

I drive into the night, to the hill, to the water tower

To lie on my back and drink in the meteor shower

Knowing that many men have lain as i do now

Ptolemy, Copernicus, Carl Jung

Pondering his existence,pondering,

Is God with me now?



And I look to the sky

And I ask these questions

Yes, I feel something I don't understand

Can somebody say Amen?



My life is but a short and precious seed

Like three seasons of life in a leaf on a tree

And when I cascade to the ground I will not be done

I will mingle with the earth and give life

To the roots again

Can somebody say Amen?



And I look to the sky

And I ask these questions

Yes, I feel something I don't understand

Can somebody say Amen?

Amen for the drivers in their garbage trucks

Amen for our mothers, for the lust to fuck

Amen for the child with innocent eyes

Amen for Kevorkian and the right to die

Amen for NASA, the NSA

It's all a front anyway

Amen for Marilyn Manson, Saddam Hussein

Amen for America and the Milky Way.

Amen for Elvis, for Betty Page

Amen for Gloria Steinham and Ronald Reagan

Amen for O.J., Clinton too

Amen for the Republican witch hunt coup

Amen for Gandhi, for Malcolm X

Amen for the uprising of the weaker sex

Amen for Babylon, the third world's call,

Amen for the unity of us all

Amen, Amen, Amen



And I am not unique.

We are all leave on this great big tree.

this tree that is life, that is God, that is you, that is me

And I lie under my tree like the Buddhas before and after me

And I ask the stars, "What for?"

Yes, I feel something I can't explain

A light that flickers off and on again

And I look to the sky

And I ask these questions

Yes, I feel something I don't understand

Oh, can somebody say Amen?



Most of us experience this sense of cosmic consciousness, this subjective experience of interconnectedness, intermittently at best. Once in a while we'll have one of those epiphanies--in the scrubbed look of the sky when the sun comes out after a heavy rain, in the easy laughter among old friends, in the way a song you've heard dozens as times as background can suddenly pierce you with an understanding of life you carry with you forever after. Mostly, though, we turn away, particularly in a society that, despite much conventional piety, actively encourages us to turn away. The social critic Christopher Lasch--who in most respects would be tearing Ward Churchill a new one were he still alive--called this societal style "the culture of narcissism."



We are immersed in a consumer culture that constantly beguiles us to find meaning not in authentic spirituality but in clothes, CDs, DVDs, cars, and the endless gew gaws and doo dads on which the health of our economy rests. There is a word for this.



Evil.



Not in the Psycho, Exorcist, Friday the Thirteenth, I Know What You Did Last Summer sense of evil, nor even the Schindler's List sense of evil, though that comes closer. I'm talking about evil as the term is defined and used in People of the Lie (1983), psychiatrist M. Scott Peck's follow-up to his famous best-seller The Road Less Traveled.



Continue to Part III.