And while I’m sure that’s the way it was intended, it also reveals the relative limitations of our ability to imagine the ideal to begin with: our notions of the perfect tend to simply be the opposite of what worries us from day to day. So if you’re a slave in a sweatshop, your concept of heaven will be freedom and wealth. If you’re an overworked accountant, your picture of the afterlife will overflow with leisure.
The problem, of course, is that if we actually had our perfect worlds, it wouldn’t be very long before we’d all be perfectly bored.
Twain and Shaw both wrote much better about this issue than I’d ever be able to, but the problem says a lot about the human psyche: that psyche is bounded by its environment, penned in by its laundry folding and dish sudsing and Master Card payments and dead Diehards in the Mercury Montego.
Confronted with constant anxiety-producing crap, the imagination, in its boundlessness, heads in the opposite direction. La-La Lands have no zits and no creditors and no dropped cell phone calls.
Which is all fine and good as far as it goes. Pretty soon, however, we start to actually believe in it, especially when our lives get really frustrating or genuinely bad: bankruptcy, joblessness, Hurricane Katrina. Millennialist cults all seem to derive from distressed personal and political situations, from the eschatology of Jesus growing from the dissolution of Jewish culture under Greece and Rome, to the cargo cults of the South Pacific reacting to the dissolution of their cultures by the modern world, to the Ghost Shirt Dance of the Native Americans appearing from the dissolution of their cultures and bodies by the white man’s bullets and broken treaties.
We look to our ideals, our myths, for deliverance from our practical circumstances which frequently suck.
Even though it has been our own corporate class that has sold us out instead of a foreign invader, America is currently in a state of decline. In the 1950s and 1960s, even a relatively poorly educated factory worker could make a decent, middle-class living. This lead to a decades-long period of religious and cultural moderation, if not downright liberality. Women began to expand their social rights and minorities to gain their civil rights, and just at its apogee, the government started to genuinely (if inefficiently) act to relieve the plight of the poor.
But as corporate America realized the incredible profits to be made in cutting wages and offshoring work, and as conservatives gained power under Reagan/Bush and during the Republican Revolution of the ‘90s, the assumptions that had once undergirded social advancement in America began to seem less and less realistic. Middle class wages stagnated during this period, where they continue to languish, and working class wages actually declined. With the laws favoring the corporate and investor classes and with little other recourse against the vagaries of layoffs and outsourcing, Americans began to cling to their ideals as all they had left.
Traditional American ideals—even those of immigrants and minorities—tend to exclude immigrants and minorities. Our ideals, steeped in conservative Christianity, militate against homosexuals, heathens and the poor. Just as they were screwing us the most, we clung the strongest to the conservatives, who continue to hold sway in our day-to-day lives, no matter a change in Congress. The mid-term elections of ‘06 might indicate that we are finally waking up to how self-deluded we have been, but it remains to be seen whether or not those we actually elected will be willing to get down to the business of making this nation better for the real people who live here. So far, the Democratic Congress has provided little cause for optimism; they’re still fighting the last battle with the Republicans and actually think that they got elected because of values. Nothing could be further from the truth: America is still fettered by its conservative ideals. We’re simply now more willing to collectively compromise because those ideals are getting in the way of putting food on the table.
Striving for the perfect in an unperfect world, whether or not that striving comes from a fundamentalist reading of the Bible or the Koran or even the U.S. Constitution, tends to kill people, who are themselves imperfect and therefore obstacles to the ultimate goal. There are no single mothers or infidels or atheists or adulterers or secular humanists in anybody’s view of heaven, so those who bomb them off the face of the Earth with a fighter plane or the belt of C-4 strapped to their chests feel comfortable in knowing that they won’t meet the angry souls of those they’ve killed when they make that journey to the Other Shore themselves.
And that’s the real problem: peace, for as much as the warmongers would argue otherwise, is a very practical sort of thing. Disagreement and struggle, suffering and strife are inevitable parts of being alive, of course, but war is the purposeful and (usually) planned disruption of the otherwise normative human suffering taking place on the basis of individual and community. Peace is actually good for business in the long term. It’s good for study and farming and making love. It’s good for pondering over one’s pipe and tumbler of brandy. Peace is conducive to fixing one’s Volvo. There is no such thing, at least in this world, as a perfect peace. We wouldn’t want that anyway, and we waste our time and cause trouble when we strive for one. But the sort of practical peace that we can achieve accepts that this world and the people in it, its owls and moose old-growth pines, are imperfect—and that such is the point of the good.