[The Combine] worked on (my father, the Chief) for years. He was big enough to fight it for awhile….

He said [to the government men with the checks]; What can you pay for the way a man lives? He said, What can you pay for what a man is?…The Combine… whipped him. It beats everybody. It’ll beat you too.”

–“Chief” Bromden, narrator of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey

Civilization is by its nature ‘bourgeois’ in the deepest spiritual sense of the word. ‘Bourgeois’ is synonymous precisely with the civilized kingdom of this world…The spirit of civilization is that of the middle classes; it is attached and clings to corrupt and transitory things; and it fears eternity.

– Nicolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of History

What would a politics be like that was obliged at last to be fully part…not just of capitalism, but of capitalism as form of life, capitalism as terminator of anything resembling society?

–T. J. Clark, The Job, London Review of Books, 12/4/25

Perhaps, as an aged person, I simply fear the whole idea of obsolescence. Thus, like old people everywhere, I lament the changes happening that appear to old one-foot-in-the-grave me, to be the knell of doom for civilization “as we know it.” As it happens, while I probably am becoming more predictably conservative with age, I am one of those who, while not cheering for the end of civilization, cannot lament it. This for a whole checklist of doom-burdened reasons to which my recent reading of Nicolai Berdyaev has added ontological critique! It is not loss of civilization I mourn or fear, indefensible as it is from so many perspectives; rather, I fear, in its continuation, with Mr. Clark, loss of any possibility of being anchored in recognizably human life, “in anything resembling society.”

Though I do not characterize myself as “warm and outgoing,” and, yes, I am comfortable being much in my own head, nothing terrifies me more than imagining the loss of human warmth, easily conjured for me in possibilities of either fascism or robothood. Pathetic as it may sound for me to claim this fear comes from the lack of warmth in my childhood, it is true. More than fear of something anticipated, it is a default condition in my soul. Thus all my creative effort aims at this-world restoration of something I never actually knew – that sense of safety and containment that might be, were we a society that places the utmost value on protecting its most vulnerable members. Nevertheless I believe that a trauma-free safety is real, that its rarity has to do not with bad parenting (only) but with civilization and its addiction to power. And I believe embodied safety is foundational for people who will be in their very habits and communal ways of life, resistant to fascism and robotic existence. For people who, even if they lose, and likely they will lose, win.

I’m at a disadvantage, thus, to Chief Bromden’s father, inasmuch as the fictional character represents an indigenous perspective. I grew up, as most of us do, in the “Combine.” I am fairly well adapted to its ways, needed no whipping to get me in line, but, importantly, I did not adapt happily. I venture that the entire effort to resist machinehood depends upon one’s willing admission of deep, unresolvable unhappiness, for authentic happiness remains outside the control of the Combine. In my case, the mix in my childhood of two dominant and at-odds influences left me with a particularly hard-to-resolve unhappiness. Materialist “bourgeoisity” ( i.e, the Combine) was not the sum of my environment. Added to it was the undeniable impression of my father’s delight in the invisible reality attained through his art. The fact that bourgeoisity was not the whole story left me less capable than some of accepting the pseudo-happiness of “attachment to corrupt and transitory things” – but at the same time and equally – stuck in it.

Looking around me, it’s difficult to find corroboration for thinking other people are fearful, as I am, of what is being lost. Good riddance, yes, to women being treated as inferior humans, to Jim Crow, to the divine right of kings, and by all means let’s keep the improvements going – let’s lose colonial settlerism, factory farms, stop unlawful deportations and the exploitation of the planet for the enrichment of the few. However, in this alarm I feel for what we are losing, I’m with the conservatives, not in the MAGA way, but in a what-has-happened-to-human-decency way. It’s hard not to look at what is happening socially as a gradual crumbling of social glue, and not only between skin colors and ethnicities, natives and immigrants, upper class and underclass. The erosion of habits and customs in in-place communities, that at very least gave a standard everyone knew by which to measure and judge behavior, leaves us incredibly socially crippled. Trump is not the cause of this crumbling of decency. He is merely exploiting it for his own purposes, a means for keeping all eyes upon the spectacle/himself.

I believe it is up to individuals to stop the hemorrhage of the lifeblood of relatedness.

How much failure to hold a line for behaviors, how much loosening of the once-reasonable expectation everyone will do his/her part for the good of the whole (not merely for one’s private good or for appearances) has already become normalized? I know I’m just being annoying bringing up such antediluvian concepts as fidelity, stability, constancy, loyalty, but what happens to maturity and adulthood when these standards for behavior are all relativized? But it’s not the behaviors for which I plead, actually. It is the knowledge of a unifying transcendent reality within which constancy and loyalty become the positive choice, affirmed in the eye of Eternity – the perspective alive in the human soul – that’s needed. I plead for the souls of men and women, that which we have in common with indigenous and all people.

+++

At the last meeting of the book club that has grown from a seed germinated at our Cafe several yeas ago, we touched upon this subject of the collective human future. At first much of the conversation focused – given the setting of Cuckoo’s Nest, not surprisingly – on the treatment of mental patients, almost more sociologically than personally. (I did not bring up my view of mental illness, that – at least in some cases – mine for example – psychosis is a stage in the natural process of soul recovery). Still, the fact that Kesey’s narrator, the schizophrenic Chief Bromden, with his personal memory of indigenous life ways existing outside the soulless bourgeois system, his imagining of the Combinethat reduces human beings to complete docile uniformity, points in the direction of the real, existing soul.

That night in the book group, no one spoke personally of his/her own experience in “the Combine;” i.e., no one confessed personal unhappiness. Then one young man asked if people thought “doomscrolling” is a sign of mental illness. This led to talk that made me aware how these particular young people, who were attracted to our Cafe and its commitment to local culture, are alarmed at the normalized phenomena of “screens-as-refuge.” They fear the loss of any notion of the more effortful world of communication face-to-face, of negotiating relationships, of finding actual activities and involvements with which to occupy oneself, with gaining strength from joining with the alienated others here, in shared life outside the screen.

Listening to them I easily imagine these young people as managing to stay just slightly ahead of the “Combine” that pursues them relentlessly, Terminator-like. This Combine destroys people not by paying them off with cash like the Indians (for white people that’s “pre-history”). This Combine’s the “closer. “ By means of the phones everyone must have, the Combine now has the advantage of people’s 24-7 access to that corporate-owned reliable facsimile of democratic relatedness. No matter the degree of social phobia, no matter one’s distance from fully functioning – in the sense of looking out for the welfare of the larger community – adulthood, one can “function” fine in the faux connectivity of the online world, at one remove from personal unhappiness and from one’s soul.

+++

The Netflix mini-series Death By Lightning, about the assassination in 1881 of President Garfield has caused much excitement locally because of the large role in it for Roscoe Conkling, Senator from Utica, and also for its depiction of the Oneida Community, the ambitious Utopian social experiment in nearby Sherrill, where the assassin Charles Guiteau had sojourned briefly.

After finally getting a chance to watch the series, over four consecutive nights, my dominant thought about it was this: whatever its shortcomings, misrepresentations and exaggerations, the film effectively makes a contrast between people who still understood and abided by rules of decency (represented in the person of President Garfield), and those who flagrantly did not (i.e., Utica’s own Roscoe Conkling.). The distinction comes to a climax in the “redemption” scene with Chester Arthur, in which, overcome by shame for his betrayal of the now dead President, he breaks with his longtime crony Conkling and returns from “the dark side” to “the good.”

If one saw Conkling as in some ways the most interesting character in the series, this may have been due not so much or only to acting ability – I thought all the actors were superb – but to liberal society’s nearly complete nullification of the notion of goodness. For by now goodness is insipid and boring and frankly must have its antagonist to be at all interesting – the Anti-Christ rather than the Christ. In real life, goodness, virtue, can at best now incarnate as “codependence,” acts of service and caring based in deep unworthiness. I wondered if the film makers share my alarm at the loss of “virtue for its own sake,” and so sought to present Garfield as “that guy,” rooted in home place and family, reluctant to accept the Presidency, making a stand for values fast becoming obsolete not only in the corridors of power, but in the hearts and minds of the people being ground up in the Combine.

By now standards of decency have not merely been erased; their erasure is the Spectacle. The entire political spectrum resembles the corrupt Roscoe Conkling, without even his excuse, his possibly sincere belief in the spoils system, with all of its casual brutality and coarseness (the movie Conkling uses the f-word liberally; he sounds like an Italian gangster, very modern). But still I persist in longing for that decency.

+++

It may be the fact I read Dickens every night before going to sleep that keeps me acutely attuned to this distinction between normal decency and the brave new heartless world of “whatever.” The decency in, say, Scrooge’s nephew, or little Nell, or Little Dorrit, is nearly impossible for a modern person to see as anything besides impossibly old-fashioned sentimentality. But still, wouldn’t it be nice? I believe virtue is so hard for us to recognize because it comes from positive self-regard – not naivete, but it depends upon an active religious function which, in Dickens’ time, could still be commonly referred to. Without spiritual enlargement, the personal “self” is reduced to neurotic narcissism and self-loathing, authentic, non co-dependent kindness from a simple good heart hard to come by.

Not coincidentally, Dickens’ characters live in places – some desolate – as we for the most part no longer do. Our places, like ourselves in capitalism, lack intrinsic worth, and are redeemable solely by commercial worth. To relearn the habits of decency it matters if we live within circumstances that allow people – or force us – to put into practice the “old” social/relational virtues. This, I suggest, is the paramount reason why the return to the local makes sense. All the other good reasons aside, the return to restriction in local living provides the relational “heating up” that reveals to the person her soul’s unhappiness. It forces one in the direction of that ultimate, real, spiritual dependency that is also the direction of one’s creativity. The unifying mandate given in the soul of each unique and interdependent human being awaits its expression in creative acts. Society is starved for human wisdom, which does not come secondhand. For that there must be those who will take up the “hero’s journey,” the creative life, undertaken like a religious practice.

+++

I began this piece under the most appalling feeling of alienation from the “holiday spirit.” It was wrung out of me with every non-negotiable demand communicated through the very family relationships I’m committed to. For several weeks I felt much more aligned with Scrooge “before” than “after” his ghostly visitations.

Turns out I needed my own visitation, from the spirit of our Cafe. It was due to the talismanic power of the little urban Cafe we served for 22 years that this extended family are gathered here in one location The Cafe was the sign – in the sense of “signs and wonders” – that made this family closeness about living in accord with our need as human beings to feel safe in our souls, to know we are part of an interconnected, ancestrally connected whole. Not abstractly, in our heads, but among real flesh-and-blood people, people we know and can depend upon being connected with, for better and for worse, in sickness and health, all our lives.

Only recently in history has the human need for stability of place and community become optional. The fact that, absent patriarchy and authoritarianism, we no longer know how to be limited this way, does not detract from its meaning, which, though absolute is not dogmatic. I am surrounded here by my family members who, imbibing in their own way the Cafe’s message of godly creativity, have valued other things than “success” on materialist terms. To be this kind of person, to be good positively, one needs the confidence accessed by means of creativity. That is why, like Allen Ginsberg, I advocate that each person become “mindful of… your own art, your own beauty,” that you “go out and make it for your own eternity.” I’m at a loss for whatever else might work. I think we must open ourselves to the unhappiness that’s in our personal hearts, let it speak its deep truth; this is where decency starts.

The post But Wouldn’t It Be Nice? A Paean to Decency appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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