“A bitter wind blows through the country
A hard rain falls on the sea
If terror comes without a warning
There must be something we don’t see
What fire begets this fire?
Like torches thrown into the straw
If no one asks, then no one answers
That’s how every empire falls” — John Prine (“That’s How Every Empire Falls”)

Maybe the scientific revolution (for all its magnificent insights and newfound capacities) re-imagined the human being as a kind of inanimate billiard ball bouncing mechanically along a chain of meaningless cause and effect.

This was the only Grand Narrative that science could offer the individual. A brief, inexplicable eruption from total non-animacy, which ends in non-animacy yet again.

This revolution freed the individual from the biting dogmas of religion, but left the individual feeling like a surplus ball bearing bouncing around in some inexplicable clockwork; which had the effect of leaving the non-scientist (the new lay person) desperate to find purchase in the open-ended abyss of an isolated “me,” which was all that remained in the absence of religion and monarchy (and NO, this is not a lament). But as a result, perhaps the 18^th and 19^th century citizen (or at least European or American citizen) colonized the world in its need to distract itself from the absence of meaningful identity that the sudden withdrawal of old certainties provoked.

I mean, the 19^th century “American” mind was optimistic, because it was experiencing the “singularity” of a logarithmic upswing in personal and national power in the rising tide of colonialism, thanks to genocide and slavery.

As the empire collapses, the urge to regress towards that “old time” faith in kings and gods and tribes grows more desperate, and less euphoric. Hence, there’s a desire to return to the familiar hellscape of genocide and enslavement so as to give those who feel this way a boost of self-esteem.

So, perhaps the “rugged individual”, and the “self-made man” of an eager 19^th century America became the resume-building, careerist, self-branding, cynical and self-obsessed tweeting global consumer of today. We’ve all been colonized.

Now there is a widespread lament that “civic unity” is no longer possible like it was in the “good old days” of the 19^th century, where everyone was provided with a prescribed (and proscribed) place in the hierarchy of Gods and Nations, whether they liked it or not.

But the civic unity of the 19^th century was a strangely fractured one. Some now lament the absence of the Ten Commandments or images of Christ’s murdered body hanging in schools and courtrooms. So, there is a renewed emphasis on one-sided, patriotic histories to con the youth into becoming 19^th century civic-minded Americans again with God always on Their Side.

But civic unity in the Great America of the 19^th century was a constantly fraying fabric of revolution, enslavement, civil war, genocidal campaigns, and suffragist and abolitionist attempts to awaken the public to the absence of any real civic unity.

Still, somehow none of this erased a 19^th century (or perhaps a sepia-tinted 21^st century) belief (among white people) in the glory days of old-time civic unity. Even poor white people back then were allowed to “know themselves” as Real Americans, at least during patriotic festivals. And other races could also emulate the same unifying hierarchies in their own small circumscribed domains, as long as they didn’t accumulate any power or wealth, or think of themselves as equal citizens.

This permission to cling to a confidence-inspiring illusion of civic unity is what many people are currently clamoring to restore. And this makes them irritable, because they know it isn’t going to work.

After all, the ease with which the 19^th century (white) American mind disregarded members of other groups while presuming to speak from a “common civic ground” (without shame) is no longer possible, even for racists.

Now even white supremacists are “woke,” because they feel compelled to hide behind any far-right black man who joins their ranks, so as to deceptively hide their real intentions.

In other words, the 21^st century (implicitly white American) mind is finally aware of the existence of other people’s perspectives, no matter how appalling this still seems to many people.

Meanwhile, in the real world, our challenge is to find a form of civic unity that doesn’t depend on one-sided patriotic narratives and other indoctrinated illusions of difference and superiority. Or, perhaps the challenge is to find a form of self-knowledge that doesn’t draw on a packing list of external attributes, which inevitably end in the fighting dichotomies of Agreement/Disagreement, which is the absence of unity.  

Even the seemingly more stable group identities of the 19^th century required a shared rage against the mirror-image of an Other. Otherwise, no membrane (or “border”) can form, which defines who we are by contrast. Agreement requires disagreement.

 Now the borders are fragmenting faster and thereby multiplying the number of competing identities; the Internet as a new Tower of Babel.

The clamor for a new imposition of civic order through authoritarianism — through the re-imposition of a nationalistic myth preserved from too much honest examination; and the pathetic attempt to build up these corrupt assholes into Great Men — is a last-ditch attempt to stave off the inevitable collapse of the first kind of self-knowledge.