Contemplating the Big Picture

It frustrates many to do that. When done right it produces understanding and knowledge of what must be done. But what must be done is puny, over against that picture, unlikely to have any effect. What must be done turns out to be the usual daily grind done right with a cheerful attitude, whereas the “Big Picture,” to be changed in any way, appears to require gigantic deeds of transformation. But understanding of that picture teaches that that can’t actually be done. “Yes, yes, yes!” cries the impatient activist, “but if we could just get people to back us…” But that, in turn, suggests that we should see “people” in the aggregate, and, once more, the Big Picture is sobering. That reminds me of The Little Duck.

That was a poem published by Donald Babcock in The New Yorker on October 4, 1947. Babcock died in 1986, hence his poem, part of which hangs in a frame on one of our walls, is still under copyright until 2056, thus I can’t quote it. But it deals with a little duck “riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf, and he cuddles in the swells.” A great heaving moves the Atlantic, but it does not bother the little duck. “He can rest while the Atlantic heaves, because he rests in the Atlantic,” Babcock tells us, ignorant of the ocean’s vastness but aware of it. “He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity—which it is.” Babcock then ends by saying:

I like the little duck.

He doesn’t know much.

But he has religion.

So that’s what contemplating the Big Picture really is. To have religion. It’s humbling, is what it is. Most people don’t want to be a little duck. They dream, instead, of being Conan the Barbarian.

Pilgrimages in our Future?

Notions like “dilution of culture” need parsing. We’re awed by massive powers in our time and march around with anxious eyes glancing at such ephemera as The Economy or The Culture. Sometimes useful insights just roll out of the fingers and I don’t realize their utility until I’ve read what has just “happened.” A phrase like that came the other day. “Experience is sovereign, of course,” I typed, “whereas the objective is just statistics.” That translates into the obvious, but the obvious is sometimes novel.

The Economy is getting, holding a decent job. One job. I am a carrier of culture. Whatever values of the past I actually embody, have at my fingertips, and permit to guide my behavior, that is culture. “Dilution of culture” therefore means loss of values in individuals by generational change. By whatever mechanism. Culture is lost when parents or education fail individuals, when distractions overcome them. It matters—at the individual level. When we extend it and speak of phenomena in general, we mean “on average,” and that’s just statistics. That is why vast up-swells of activism deceive both those who participate in them as well as to those who merely  watch and think that they’re beholding change. The activists intend to change others. Meanwhile those actions that actually improve the lot of individuals—say creating one or two jobs in efforts to implement a good product useful to others or grasping something by effort and thus illuminating a single person’s understanding—they remain invisible.

Not all collective movements have this useless character. I’m now thinking of great pilgrimages—going on these we intend to change us. 

Action and Faction

The word faction originally stood for party (the political kind). The term was used in that sense in Roman times and also early in American history. Factions, parties, formed as soon as a democratic style of government came to be established. Factions formalized into parties around about 1787 and thereafter as the Constitution was ratified. The word rapidly took on negative connotations, obvious from the way George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and others used the word. These fathers of the country discovered the pleasures of political opposition—and didn’t like it. Washington thought that governance should rise above faction. Perhaps the negative connotations that stuck to the word eventually led to the use of another, party, a word that in the eighteenth century still attached to smaller groups like hunting or dinner parties.

In our time party has itself become encrusted with negatives. “Just party politics” means, although in a milder sense, much the same thing that our founders meant when speaking of “factional disputes”; they meant the contention of limited interests rather than action for the common good. Today—certainly in the media—a positive connotation attaches to activism. Yes. On the Right that word has strongly negative connotations instead, but in the ordinary discourse of the media an activist is someone good, a reactionary someone bad.

Amusingly, both faction and action come from roots meaning “to do,” the first from the Latin facere, the last from the Latin agere. This “doing,” however, in our context, seems always to include a qualifier: against or in opposition to. The activist acts against the System. The faction opposes another faction. The Founding Fathers believed in limiting power by institutional, legal, and procedural methods. Activists and factionalists are ultimately seeking power—but outside established institutional, legal, and procedural boundaries.

Agitation also derives from agere in its sense of moving, driving, and impelling. Factionalists and activists seek to rouse passive masses who, in turn, will either force changes in the System by those who control it or give the faction power so that, in turn, it can rule.

We need not seek far to find the root of party. Removing the tailing y will do. The parts contending to rule the whole. Were Washington and Hamilton ultimately naïve in thinking that an idealized projection of the whole actually existed, that there really was something out there that could act as a party of one? as the American People or the Athenian Demos? Or did they, perhaps, express a kind of nostalgia for a time when more people actually shared a common belief that transcended personal interest?

There is that tongue in cheek saying: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” People reject that because, echoing that sage of modernity, Gertrude Stein, they think that “there is no there there.”