While these comments, from an old friend who is probably the world's greatest student of George Santayana, are not addressed to my previous post, nonetheless they speak to it. When he speaks of Santayana's skepticism, he is digging into in the earth of our cultural fragmentation and violence — and of the spirit of empathic dialogue and mutual nurture that is its antithisis.
As I write this, memorial services are bring held around the nation for the Tucson victims. Our one nation indivisible has proved tragically, perhaps fatally, divisible. We seem now to have, as Dos Passos would say, two Americas. My mentor-in-chief, Santayana, wrote of the Zeitgeist in our country which he thought crucial for the unity, the success of the U.S. He traced it to our inheritance and practice of "English liberty"--a readiness to join together, to cooperate, to compromise. It's apparent now that any idea of a "loyal opposition" is unknown to the Republicans.
What bound our nation together, GS thought, was a dedication to "unity in work"--a shared belief in our commercial/industrial enterprises and their rewards as the guarantors of progress and U.S. ascendency in the world. He hoped that our faith in machines, in gadgets, in science would bring not only prosperity but happiness to its faithful. Yet he was deeply ambivalent here. Did the engines of capitalism reward the spirit? the life of mind? Or would the workers, off the job, sigh Thank God It's Friday, resorting then to trivial self-indulgent distractions in the off hours? (And here I think Twitter and FaceBook and text messaging as harbingers of a gathering ignorance, the loss of coherence in both language and life.)
Were GS alive now he would find his early scepticism warranted. Our economy is now crucially dependent on the military/industrial complex, which requires the indefinite continuance of our wars on the Middle East. That dependency will wreck the budget (as military costs rise to 2 trillion), thus in time, ironically, wrecking the nation's economy.
And as Santayana knew well, the wreckage ultimately has to do with the human soul, with our integrity, our intelligence, and our capacity to love one another.