IS THERE TIME?

    Sidney Hook was nothing if not a rationalist, an atheist, a devotee of John Dewey’s pragmatism. My devotion to Mallarmé was utterly different. Yet, we were very close. My wife and I alone were with him and Anne the night before he died. He said, with his usual earnestness, “Vision is the great thing.”
    Robert Spinrad was also close to Sidney, another giant of rational—scientific, technological—thought. But he too in a recent conversation, assumes the importance, to him and the world, of intuition, vision, imagination, agreeing with the 9/11Commission that the lack of these, the total imbalance in that regard, proved catastrophic.
    Indeed that balance of faculties, reflecting Aquinas’s faith/reason balance, Pascal’s spirit of finesse/ spirit of geometry, Jakobson’s metaphoric/ metonymic, and the cream of Western thought altogether (including Mallarmé and Einstein) is the persistent ideal we approached, to our lasting good fortune by our Founders, Lincoln, FDR, but survive them working in a skewed de-spiritualized, roboticized America, to the point of crisis now.
    Charles Krauthammer and James Q. Wilson strike me as notable exceptions of the fateful drift: both have the operative humility (not worn on their sleeves) and concomitant openness to beyond-us vision (including moral) traversed by, but not subordinate do strong intellect in a rare “higher balance” (Camus’ ideal).
    Both see the limits to the rational, flatly-civic, shallow scheme of exporting democracy à la Wilson, Fukuyama, President Bush, et. al. Krauthammer proposed in a recent Commentary article, a “democratic realism” rather than “democratic idealism.” That leaves room for gentlemanly dealing with folks who are substantively on our side in terms of decency and the war on terror even though for local reasons such as radical Islamic threats which dwarf ours, plus old habits of the heart like tribal loyalty, they are skittish about free elections which would bring the worst to power in their homeland.
    Wilson, similarly in a Commentary article proposes something more realistic and moderate, substantive, based on character rather than historically-developed (in the West) forms of civic organizations, with an emphasis on extending basic human rights such as women’s rather than hold up imported structures (welcome as any democratic manifestation would be!).
    The tremendous power of one miraculously-given tolerant heart, Sistani’s as opposed to elaborate finagling, in Iraq (like Gorbachev’s disappointed comment on Cheney’s heavy-handed lecturing to Russia) is almost buried in our lockstep sclerotic spiritually-dumb media.
    The Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Mrs. Ebadi, who will be simply ignored here by conventional wisdom when she remarks that you can’t expect democracy with bombings. And notes that democracy springs vertically from culture, not dynamically sideways and vulgarly from manipulative later-come brain.
    I’d say if you have to bomb to stop the popular fanatics who want to behead all non-Muslim “infidels”—like noble Atticus shooting the mad dog threatening his children in To Kill a Mockingbird, OK, and, in and our best Judeo-Christian spirit, be generally merciful afterward (as we were with Hitler’s Germany and Japan) but not in the same movement!
That’s as obtuse as marrying with a contract or making love with a bionic device, or for “sex.”
    As for Russia, it doesn’t matter that they bled twenty times more, suffered incomparably more wrong, in the last great world-struggle, in a common cause and gave the world more genius by far, serving as a barrier for the whole West against Asian hordes;
that we (Bush Sr. gratefully for their sacrifices) promised to not invade their sphere of influence if they supported the unification of Germany, ha! So here we are in a decadent, obese (in all ways) “…” America lecturing them as if we knew a dam thing about how to survive now.
    Ehud Olmert, the other day, said his heart sighed for biblical Israel, including the burial grounds of the patriarchs, but the concrete stability of Israel now, realistically something else.
    How about a little of that balance and wisdom here, in dealing with the immigrants, with imminent national debt and eventual bankruptcy, with oil shortages?
    You’ll not hear that plea from the parties, too far gone is sclerotic rational-civic solemnizing and selfishness, immodesty, or form the media.
    A few voices like Krauthammer and Wilson are invoking this deeper, long-range vision, but so far very hesitatingly.
    One wonders what it will take for those voices to emerge full-throat, rising above all the modern vernacular, fakeries and evasions in an order which has become practically tone-deaf to the real thing. Is there time?