Immanuel Kant probably saved my life. In my mid-twenties, trying to fight the panting hedonism of the 1970’s with every shred of wit and will that I could muster—looking, above all, for dignity at a time when people of my age were emulating the primate house—I briefly flirted with charismatic faith: “enthusiasm”, as it was called in previous centuries (i.e., “being in the god”). The experiment was not a happy one. I embraced anguish and martyrdom with gratitude (or tried to) on the grounds that I deserved all the punishment this world could dish out, and much more—and also, contradictorily, on the grounds that I was drawing nearer to Christ’s ordeal through innocent suffering. The amount of self-deceit that went into this adventure was exceeded only by the amount of willful blindness I applied to the behavior of others. They were hardly little lost lambs, those sybarites who raced by me in the fast lane, any more than I was a wicked sinner being seared in deserved ostracism. I was a decent, rather nerdy kid burdened with taste and humility in a slimy wash of degeneracy and narcissism. The swamp around me, to be sure, had its victims—countless victims, who submitted to a Manson-like programming of multiple couple-mates and a panoply of hallucinatory drugs because they were afraid of the ostracism I myself knew so well. Yet the truly malign spirits who traduced them knew exactly what they were doing, and did it with gusto: among the lambs were plenty of slavering wolves. A pale martyr blessing his persecutors from the cross would have to renounce any righteous indignation at the true persecutors: he would have to bless lambs and wolves together. He would be complicit, not only in his own torture, but in that of many who lacked his strength—who preferred vulpine company to being left all alone.

 

I finally spat this madness out of my system. Kant taught me how to recover my objectivity. His acidly dry style was just the antidote that my pathologically emotional sores and tumors needed. Reality exists, even in moral matters. There is X, and there is Not-X. Blunt carnal pleasure, for instance, is pernicious on two counts. It is a) focused entirely on the whimsy of the subject, reducing all other people to objects servicing its satisfaction; and b) it is indeed not will but whimsy—a pre-rational drive which we share with the dullest creatures on four legs, without any redeeming trace of deliberation. The province of morality extends to the limits of freedom. At the very least, therefore, a higher being capable of goodness must acknowledge an obligation to impose choice over biological determinism insofar as is healthily possible. He must subjugate his natural drives. The decisions which he proceeds to make within the realm thereby demarcated may then be analyzed for their degree of recognizing the subject in other human beings, as well. Many of my generation were, by this definition, not really bad people, since they had not ascended high enough to be capable of good or bad. Their will ruled such a paltry domain—perhaps little more than what to have for breakfast—that they had virtually relegated themselves to the level of a pitiable house pet.

 

I learned that one can endure the most barren deserts by abandoning fanciful sentiment for objective principle. And the trained mind imports other “consolations of philosophy”, as Boethius called them: it takes pleasure, for instance, simply in the study of the material world. Kant wrote short essays on such subjects as the craters of the Moon, the origins of meteors, the formation of the solar system (I discovered that his theory was the basis of what I had learned as a schoolboy), and the curious one-way adaptive mechanism that has caused humanity to branch into different races (a paper more observant than Darwin’s yet-unborn ideas in some regards). I developed an amateur’s delight in astronomy. When I turned my attention back to people, I found that I could view their orgies and bacchanals far more dispassionately—as something like the response, perhaps, of caged laboratory mammals to a sensory stimulus. The contempt implicit in that view did not extend to the group’s individuals, for I believed with equal conviction that any member of the mass can will himself to freedom. (Kant even wrote an essay about that: Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltburgerlicher Absicht.) My clinical indifference to that dehumanizing beast, the Mob, took very deep root, however.

 

I would not claim that my misanthropy is particularly Kantian. The Prussian philosopher was naïve enough to hold Rousseau in an almost reverent esteem (until he actually met the bounder), and his confidence that democracies do not go to war against each other (expressed in the essay, Zum ewigen Frieden) provided the academic underpinning of the Bush Administration’s disastrously simplistic Iraq experiment. Yet the Enlightenment was generally misanthropic in this regard: that is, its thinkers overwhelmingly subscribed to the classical notion (enunciated, for instance, in Cicero’s De Re Publica) that pure democracy is the worst form of governments because of the mob’s irrational impulses. Our Founding Fathers indeed took the greatest precaution to contain surges of mass hysteria within checks and balances. Their high valuation of the individual—his soul, his creativity, his genius, his mystical road to fulfillment—lies at the very heart of our nation’s essential documents; and to the extent that the individual is exalted, the collective must be suppressed. The Mob kills the Man every time.

 

This concatenation of reminiscence and classical ethics leads me, at last, to my main point: that our society no longer understands the kind of progress for which it was modeled, and which the modelers believed to be the only true kind. Individuals can progress, as I did myself. The lessons of my youth were painful, but invaluable. The collective, however, does not and cannot progress in a moral or spiritual sense; for not only does it lack a unifying moral will (as opposed to an irrational common impetus), but its influence actually undermines the operation of individual conscience that characterizes all properly moral behavior. We may say, perhaps, that a society progresses insofar as it frees individuals from the mass’s oppression: its progress is intricately related, that is, to its success at consigning bully-like social tendencies to chains. True progress, to a Kant or a Jefferson or Madison, would be to maximize the individual’s opportunities for defining and pursuing his or her own variety of progress.

 

The enunciation of such progress has today been entrusted to the libertarians among us; and the libertarians themselves are in far too much moral disarray to carry forth the battle. Some are sincerely zealous to find God in their own way rather than to be subjugated in an efficient hive of storm-trooping do-gooders; others are infinitely more interested in the free sex and legal drugs whose prospect made the wolves of my youth salivate. Among those who consider themselves more mainstream-conservative, where do we find a spokesman for progress of the individual spirit? Rush Limbaugh asserts that the American Dream is to grow wealthy: I heard him use just those terms this past week. While I find El Rushbo utterly amiable and believe he deserves a favorable spin in whatever wiggle-room his terms allow, the bluntest interpretation of those terms is that individual freedom consists of enjoying the maximal number of angles from which to choose a “get rich” scheme. What I find odious in this vision (which is essentially Ayn Rand’s equation of individual liberty with a Nietzschean ecstasy of machine-wrought profits) is its servitude to the Mass; for most market-ready cash sits in the hands of innumerable consumers, and the largest volume of these will pay the highest amount for any product that hits the bull’s eye of mediocrity or trend. How, I ask, can anyone excel at such marketplace sharpshooting who has not himself internalized the tastes and values of the masses? Rand’s romantic industrial titans notwithstanding, this sounds more like a life sentence of mind-numbing, soul-killing labor to me than a liberation: perpetual reproduction of whatever draws the loudest applause.

 

Other “conservatives” devote more print or airtime to the creation of a world without war. Since the only certain way to keep vast numbers of human beings peaceful is to kill, terrorize, or imprison most of them, one is hard put to see how this agenda promotes individual freedom, either. Neo-cons compete with each other to gild it: one day, they say, we will not need to hold the Iraqis at gunpoint for them to elect governments we like. Yet what is this New Dawn but the propagandist’s dream of creating cultural revolution with re-education camps—a kind of genetic engineering for entire societies?

 

Those “conservatives” who verbally fondle the phrase, “American exceptionalism”, also perplex me. If the United States is unique in the history of the world, then it can only be so as a refuge of individual liberty whose founders foresaw and impeded the wicked tendencies of human nature. But if America as a nation rather than a citizenry of individuals goes forth “herself” to transform the world, then we must most clearly be designing another progress of the collective. Whether “she” does this by making each generation richer than the last or by posting ever more U.N. peacekeepers around the globe, a golden staircase is still envisioned whose final destination seems to escape utopian lunacy only by virtue of being shrouded in mists of distance.

 

Having polished off Virgil’s Aeneid for the umpteenth time in a survey class this month, I remain struck by how critical the issue of individualism versus progressivism is within Rome’s great epic. Most scholars (like my mentor Karl Galinsky) continue to insist that the Aeneid has no dark subtext: that Aeneas and those around him personally suffer so intensely because dedication to the commonwealth demands self-sacrifice, and that such uplifting propaganda was precisely what consul-for-life Augustus desired of his literary lackey. To be sure, this is surely how the poem must have been understood by the majority of Romans: as a praise, that is, of individual sacrifice for a higher good. Yet Virgil had excelled at pastoral poetry before accepting the epic challenge; and in pastoral, the world of Eden and the Fall (the Greco-Roman shorthand for which is Arcadia) magnetizes the moral atmosphere. The Arcadian world diametrically opposes the progressive world. In the former, individuals have little, but enough, and they find blissful happiness in “sufficiency” as long as they are not beguiled by the snake’s whispers of “something better”. In contrast, the progressive world (which was not Homer’s, by the way, but what Augustus wanted Virgil to make of Homer) destabilizes everything. Per aspera ad astra—“through hard times to the stars!” Work, ambition, vision… yes, and monomania, envy, delusion. There was work to be done in Eden, too: the pastoral landscape does not allow one to lie about all day. Yet as Milton’s Adam reminds Eve (vainly), none of the labor is so pressing that it should be permitted to disrupt the broader cadences of a peaceful, disciplined existence. Virgil’s Aeneas is hoodwinked into obsession by the pricking and prodding of a feckless, fantastical Jupiter. (Scholars never bother to remark that Jupiter at last concedes to Juno a complete fusion of Trojan and Italian cultures—not at all the original deal embraced by Aeneas.) In the epic’s final moment—its apparent halfway point, beyond which a writer’s block obstructed Virgil so invincibly that he wanted the whole text burned upon his death—Aeneas finishes off his fallen adversary Turnus under a furious outburst’s compulsion. Virgil’s own words (pace Professor Galinsky) describe the execution repugnantly as a human sacrifice. The Cause has upset Aeneas’s inner poise, devoured his individual sense of decency. Like some Washington ideologue whose sword is a pen, his conscience can no longer shout above the Movement’s voice, and a passionate surge is now a blow for a Better Tomorrow.

 

I would never suggest that Rush Limbaugh would condone Eric Holder’s assassin-style “justice” in the private sector. Yet might not someone whose basic bonhomie is less than Rush’s tell himself a lot of pious rot about “creating jobs” as he plows under an old neighborhood to build a casino? The hubristic sense of higher authority doesn’t afflict only those whose salary comes from the taxpayer. Anyone who convinces himself that he makes the world a better place as he feeds gluttonously on his meat of choice, whether it be power or fame or money, is not progressing as a human being; and his “beneficiaries”, to the extent that “opportunity” has been forced upon them rather than creatively chosen, have also been given little spiritual scope to blossom individually. A man who takes a job flipping burgers that he may one day manage Burger Bucket that he may one day have the money to buy the franchise that he may one day be able to sell it for a profit that he may one day finally open a garden shop knows considerably less happiness in his life than a young man who builds the dreamed-of nursery, unmolested by big government or big business, in a Norman Rockwell small town. The way to reach Eden sooner and stay there longer is to harness appetite—one’s own and society’s—well and early.

 

Now, however—and for the foreseeable future—our conservatives are stuck with having to preach sermons about moving the country forward, forward, forward. More jobs created by others—more private-sector rather than public-sector patronage: never a full release to work with our own resources. More effective and secure world dominion: never the “isolationism” of tending our own garden. More protection from big government while mending the safety net’s occasional holes: never a unilateral declaration that our private lives and property are off limits, leaving the needy to seek the unfailing charity of kind people.

 

Do we not really believe in Heaven, we conservatives whose mouths are always filled with Heaven’s name? Or are we simply bored by the wait, such that we must forever be fashioning our own terrestrial heavens? If we must have new horizons to explore, why can we not find them within ourselves? Why can we not mind our own business, and broadcast a political doctrine of allowing everyone to live his own life? Why can we not adhere to the Constitution’s spirit as well as rhetorically mastering its letter?

 

With conservatives like us, who needs progressives?