Sleepycatz

Quod di omen avertant

In the recent weeks, I have often been haunted by something Henry Louis Mencken said some years ago. In his notebooks, Mencken wrote: “The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.”

Mencken was fond of playing the cynic, and often pened quick, acerbic, and sagacious commentaries on the issues that irked him most. Today, Mencken is forgotten or dismissed (usually because of his strident anti-religious feelings — something not tolerated in today’’s America); yet, he remains one of the great men of American letters.

This quote preoccupies me because I see it as a foretelling of the near future. A time when we move from a moral government and ethos to fanatical ones. Today, government and society are imbued with moral superiority. In America, the moral high ground often lies with the victims of injustice, and no greater injustice occured in recent memory then the events of September 11th. This tragedy has galvanized the morality of America. And like Augustus in Rome, our morality and superiority must be enforced at home and spread thoughout the world. Yet, America lacks a consistant moral voice. We are a nation founded by deists and open to numerous religious and ethical voices. We have no centralized religion or omnipotent voice of authority. Even those ideologies we praise as being American we temper. Very few of us believe unbridled captialism is a force for good, and our support for democracy wains when it doesn”t support our interests of the moment. We have no singular moral voice, but we currently have moral superiority. Our leaders believe they have the moral voice that America should follow, and in order to raise this voice they have resorted to fanaticism.

One of the hallmarks of fanaticism is its unwavering zeal to its own point of view. Defing logic and moderation, fanaticism dismisses questions and probing with name calling and threats. Fanatics have always been part of America. They have have existed throughout our history in political and religious institutions. Americans tend to grow tired of fanatics quickly, and our history tends to judge them harshly — one need only consider our collective views of Sen. Joesph McCarthy as evidence of this. Yet today we have a new fanaticism, one thriving on collective moralsuperiority. This new fanaticism uses the tools of it’s aged parent, but invokes the methods and means of our sophisticated society. Although the current fanaticism still responds to probing with name calling, its greater focus is to ensure the questions never get asked. Instead, like Goebbels, it insists

“The task of the press cannot be merely to inform. rather the press has\r\n above and beyond that the the much greater task of instructing. It naturally has the task of making clear to the people what the government is doing and but it must also explain why the government is doing it, why the government is forced to act a certain way and no other.”

The new fanaticism achieves this by exploiting the moral empowerment of America. It suggests that to probe or question is to undermine the greater morality. Instead we are to accept the actions of our government and simply try to understand them. This is perhaps the greatest tool of the new fanaticism, and what Ted J. Smith III in his study of Soviet propaganda termed, the fallacy of limited alternatives. Smith defined this as “reasoning to a false conclusion by artificially restricting the number of alternatives considered possible.” Although the new fanaticism makes use of both older and newer more sohpisticated tools for manipulation, the fallacy of limited alternatives is its bread and butter. The new fanatics use it to limit question or debate on almost every policy decision. By utilizing the moral high ground they define the potential options and alternatives available. To suggest other options is to question the morality of the fanatics, and disturb the moral outrage they covet. Such disagreement is often met with name calling, or more typically role assigning. Roll assigning is the marginalization of an argument by assigning its proponent to a specific, usually culturally derrogeotry, role. For instance, referring to anti-war protesters as “hippy-wanna-be’s”, or “the usual crowd” somehow marginalizes them in our eyes. In essence roll assigning is simply a more sophistcated name calling, and is frequently used to remove critics from the public eye. For the new fanatics the most insidious and recent tool of manipulation is the fallacy of impossible certainty, which consists of drawing a positive conclusion on an issue on which certainty is impossible. By utilizing this tool with a moral superiority the the new fanatics have been able to push forward their agenda with little opposition. In fact this this tool has lead to some of the most fallacious reasoning America has ever seen. Present polling shows over 60% of all Americans are certain that Iraq was involved in the September 11th tragedies. This assertion has not been made by even the most vocal critics of Iraq, and there is no evidence of any connection. So how did we arrive at this certainty? Quite simply. The limited alternatives presented by the new fanatics have left America with military intervention as the predominant option in regards to Iraq. As the new fanatics speak from a high moral ground, this option is assumed to be both moral and necessary. Without a competing moral voice, Americans draw an inferrence between their coalessing moral event and the policies of those ascribing themselves with moral certainty. We are left with a certainty of connection, albeit a false one.

Unfortunately this dialectic seems to portend an ominus future. The new fanatics by justifying themselves with a collective moral superioity have been able to silence or dismiss probing and dissent. They have coopted any dialogue or logic by utilizing various well known tools of manipulation. Where, eventually, they will probably fall from grace — as all fanatics seem to — their success has shown the way for future endevors. We must always be wary of those who are certain, even if they share our pain and outrage. We must watch for the signs of fanticism in all forms in order to protect those ephemeral ideals we wish to pass down to future. For the moment, I, like Cicero, plea “May the gods avert this omen

This entry was posted by steve on Sunday, March 16th, 2003 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Misc. Ramblings, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.