America: Four Hundred Years of Bread and Water

The Canadian Comparison: Part 3.

Special thanks to Oleg Radvan for "Bread and Water". Courtesy: americanplainsartists.com. Also special thanks to animatedgif.net and the University of Virginia for the René Descartes drawings.

(CALGARY, Alberta) - “The United States is broken,” said Bob Herbert in his December 1, column A Tragic Mistake, going on to say: “school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding—yet we’re nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each”.

There is always a bigger picture. This is the elemental fact of the world we live in. It doesn’t matter if you’re a checkout clerk in a grocery store, or one of the physicists working on the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, it’s the same thing. No matter what we see, our worldview is enclosed in something larger.

In my piece titled Descartes’ Disaster I argued that until the beginning of the 17th century, humanity felt connected to the larger cosmos. Even though they didn’t understand it, a medieval man or woman outside on a clear night felt connected to the stars and the sky above. During the day, they felt connected to nature and the world around them. Death, while felt as tragic and painful, was accepted as a part of life.

Man cannot live by bread alone

Then along came René Descartes in the early 17th century with a philosophy that disconnected man from nature. Science grew apace, but the spiritual side of man was desiccated. As far as science is concerned, there is no spiritual side to man. We are evolutionary machines rooted in the material world.

America has been spiritually starved since its founding. And by that I don’t mean religion because, outside the Islamic nations, the U.S. is the most religiously dominated country in the world—for all the good it has done.

The argument is simple:

From René Descartes' L’homme

Man’s spirit has been eviscerated by a material orientation where all that mattered was material gain—the dollar. This is why America became a culture of never ending consumption and greed. When your spirit is hungry and all you can offer it is materialism then, of course, there can never be enough.

This is the source of America’s obesity problem. When all you can feed the spirit is physical food, you will always be hungry and can never eat enough.

Man cannot live by bread alone but Western society—America is the biggest victim—has been trying to live on the equivalent of a bread only diet for four hundred years.

The result, today, is that Americans are spending more time and energy fighting each other over comparatively inconsequential issues like gun control, abortion, who should get health care and who shouldn’t and on and on. I say comparatively because these and similar issues are irrelevant if, in the course of the internecine battles, you lose the country itself.

When I first learned to drive an older, wiser person explained to me the perspective of being in the right. If, at an intersection, I am in the right, but the other driver, for whatever reason doesn’t recognize it (they may be intoxicated, or simply not paying attention) then I could stay in the right and be dead.

So it is with America today. There are political factions, primarily on the political right, whose intransigence is so pronounced that they appear to be willing to let the country itself collapse rather than let go of even an iota of their self-righteousness.

It may already be too late, but if Americans are able to band together in a meaningful way and reclaim a real CAN-DO attitude, who knows how much progress can be made. I say “real” because too much of the can-do of the past was at the expense of other nations, who will no longer roll over and play dead.

As one example: Most of America’s great industrial expansion of the fifties and sixties was only possible because of $1 and $2 barrel oil. American profligacy bordered on the criminal. OPEC stopped that in 1973 and things have never been the same since.

René Descartes, L’homme…. These drawings show the influence of Descartes’ knowledge of mathematics and geometry on his perception of how the body works.

The understanding

It’s another truism that the first step towards solving a problem is understanding it. The idea that the Western world, not just the U. S. is spiritually starved, is not a new one.

The U. S. is only an extreme example of this material syndrome. What to do to remedy this deficiency has been the source of endless discussion for decades. It is only when we see how we arrived at our materially dominated world that we can perhaps frame an approach to ameliorate the situation.

The fact that we are dominated by material wants, is also not news. It’s when we can meaningfully connect the two dysfunctions, that an epiphany moment appears.

There is no question that we are a society dominated by science. We know how, through the elevation of Descartes’ philosophy how this happened. The next step is to evaluate the dynamics so we can look at areas where we can change our attitudes and approaches to life itself.

Some of you may breathe a sigh of relief at this conclusion. I’ve moved past any critiques of the U.S. because this is a cultural phenomenon that applies to all Western countries.

“God” died in the 1960s. Now it’s time to kill materialism. That’s the subject of my next installment.

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Daniel Johnson was born near the midpoint of the twentieth century in Calgary, Alberta. In his teens he knew he was going to be a writer, which is why he was one of only a handful of boys in his high school typing class—a skill he knew was going to be necessary. He defines himself as a social reformer, not a left winger, the latter being an ideological label which, he says, is why he is not an ideologue. From 1975 to 1981 he was reporter, photographer, then editor of the weekly Airdrie Echo. For more than ten years after that he worked with Peter C. Newman, Canada’s top business writer (notably a series of books, The Canadian Establishment). Through this period Daniel also did some national radio and TV broadcasting. He gave up journalism in the early 1980s because he had no interest in being a hack writer for the mainstream media and became a software developer and programmer. He retired from computers last year and is now back to doing what he loves—writing and trying to make the world a better place