BETTER ANGELS
It always had an ironic, almost mocking quality, despite its prettiness: “our better angels.” Charles Dickens used the phrase in a novel in 1841, and President Lincoln immortalized it as the slightly altered “better angels of our nature” twenty years later. It’s an odd phrase, somewhat like “most unique.” That’s a frankly incorrect construction, because unique means one of a kind, so no comparing word like “most” makes it more or less one of a kind.
“Our better angels” is less awkward than “most unique,” then. There can be grades of angels, all the way down to Lucifer and his lot. But “angels” conveys purity and niceness, and we commonly think of angels as benevolent beings. That’s what gives the phrase its ironic tint—it implies that humans are across-the-board okay, and that we can be distinctly okay if we follow our better impulses.
That’s a hard proposition to support. It always has been, and there are times when it seems harder yet, times when the center cannot hold, things fall apart, and we wait in quiet terror for whatever rough beast will show up next. W. B. Yeats wrote about those things soon after the world spasmed through the First World War, when events appeared even more cataclysmic than now. But events now are “worse enough yet,” as my grandmother put it, to produce a new rough beast, or herd of them, any day now.
What prompts this piece is my growing sense of reversal of the normative, of the default, human situation. We tend to adhere to the image that things normally cohere, don’t fall apart, that a center holds. We need to adhere to that notion. But the notion mocks reality like “our better angels,” suggesting our default position as humans lies somewhere along a spectrum of more and less angelic inclinations.
This “growing sense of reversal of the normative” has been accelerating since 2015, when he descended the moving stairway and brought us collectively many levels lower. He, of course, was just the runny nose and wracking cough and chills and fever of an already-incubated illness. He just manifested the full symptomatic flowering of the thing.
The illness itself harks back to the notion of our better angels. We’re collectively shell-shocked by the seemingly rapid erosion of any center these last seven years. One recent expression of this in found in Sarah Kendzior’s disturbing and engaging book, They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent. She makes a strong case that our current spasm isn’t the product of the Descender or the ones who so readily assisted him in carrying us down. She captures the longevity of the illness. She contends the country is and long has been run by a cabal, a cohesive one despite the appearance of bitterly opposed camps of conservatives and progressives, Republicans and Democrats, autocrats and democrats, norm-subverters and norm-maintainers. The cabal is united by the implacable, single-minded obsession with the preservation and further aggrandizement of the powerful, no matter what their politics. She warns that they are far more invested in protecting each other as fellow powerfuls than in furthering any civic good.
Ms. Kendzior sees little difference between Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy, or between Robert Mueller and William Barr, or between Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Clinton, or between Lawrence O’Donnell and Tucker Carlson. All are complicit in preserving, above all else, their own privileges of power, mainly impunity for constant, egregious betrayal of public trust and interest. That seems hyperbolic. There are degrees of evil and self-interest just as there are degrees of angelicism. Routinely exploiting grown women belongs to a different ring of hell than running a child sex traffic operation for decades. But she’s right in principle that the cabal members will turn blind eyes to whatever rings of hell each pursue.
She’s evenhanded, ecumenically so, in her scorn for power, irrespective of party or political affinities. She sees the cabal as a seamless one, superficially at odds in terms of which faction grabs a little more power than the other but utterly agreed that they stick together to maintain the unassailability and unaccountability of the edifice of power they both occupy. She’s right. But her indignation suggests she sees the situation as an aberration. She’s offended by the impunity of power and the collusive maintenance of impunity by the powerful, as though such wrongs are our special affliction.
History, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and religion suggest our time is not an aberration. It’s distinctly mainstream, normative, normal. We always wish to imagine such spasms as anomalies, deviations from our usual better-angel selves. But some rough beast either presides or slouches toward Bethlehem to preside always. An uninterrupted parade of rough beasts is the story of human history.
This point of view will appear cynical, and even despairing and hopeless, to many. It has seemed that way to me, even though I’m a proponent of it. I referred above to “my growing sense of reversal of the normative.” It’s been growing not just since the descent of the Descender in 2015, although it certainly accelerated then. It’s been present and growing since reason first took root, or soon after.
Ms. Kendzior’s book suggests a single, most-important distinction between humans: the powerful and the non-powerful. The subjugators and the subjugated. The dominant and the dominated. This dichotomy trumps all others dividing humans and always will. All human behavior can be seen as shaped by power, either offensively or defensively. All actions are aimed at acquiring and maintaining power on the one hand, or defending against the excesses of power on the other. Many are engaged in both activities at the same time, because there is always someone threatening the power of even the most powerful. Power governs everything.
All of “our better angels” are the product of our sense and fear of power. So are all our worst angels. We love and crave power, but at the same time we’re terrified of it. Terrified of it not just as a weapon wielded against us, but equally terrified of its turning against us when we possess it. And not just of someone else turning their power against us, but of what our own power does and may do to us. It’s our ultimate, our universal, love/hate relationship. We know power is likely to consume us, whether we’re possessor or victim. Everyone is its victim, all the time. No one survives power unharmed.
Philosophy can be viewed as the systematic study of power. Ethics is the human effort to harness power, offensively and defensively. The Hobbesian idea of human movement from a state of nature to a social contract is a story of power management. The power to kill and take in a state of nature was both opportunity and threat, and everyone was in constant anxiety as a result of it. So people agreed to give up such power, surrender it to the state. That, of course, produced the state that outrages Ms. Kendzior now.
Power is seductive because we all fear its absence in ourselves. We seek it for protection, and we end up wielding it for both protection and advancement. We’re born powerless, helplessly dependent, and all-too-aware of our powerlessness and dependency. So the imperative of having power asserts itself from the beginning of life. It initially seems an unalloyed good, the source of independence and esteem. What we don’t see until later in life, if we are so fortunate as to come to see it at all, is that it’s far closer to an unalloyed bad than good. We can’t possess it without abusing it. Its utility to protect always becomes secondary to its utility to advance.
Power is a 600-horsepower car, sleek, beautiful, status-enhancing, and deadly, because few if any have the talent or training to control the thing. There are few teachers in controlling it anyway, because almost all who come to power do so unprepared to manage it, do so by means other than the prudent use of power. And they routinely are seduced by its advancement features, not its protective ones. The few who don’t outright crash and burn the sleek thing still menace themselves and many others trying to learn to control it, if they even perceive the need to control it.
The problem is appetite. Power could be a just a check, an equalizer, a means of protection. Theoretically could be, but not under human management. Such is the human conception of equality. Human trust is such that equality seems fragile, vulnerable. Any balanced scale requires just the slightest addition of weight to tip it. Our sense of “equality” of power, then, always includes a bit of reserve to draw upon in case the other person cheats. A spiral starts that can’t be stopped. Everyone wants more power, first as a protective hedge against overreach by others, then as a result of the perks and privileges, the advancement features, of power. Addiction is almost inevitable. Power brings both envy and enmity, and the only reasonable response is to gain more power. The irony is that massive power grows increasingly like powerlessness, as larger and larger coalitions form to thwart it or redistribute it.
The Trump phenomenon has been an allegory of power and the lack of human capacity to control it. But it’s not an aberration. It’s just such an exuberant flowering of the peril of power that the usual mechanisms to hide its happening have been exposed. The Trump debacle has made us more aware that power has its own Peter Principle. That was a business idea that people ascend in position until they reach their own level of incompetence, and stay there. As a result, most organizations are incompetently managed. Power’s variant is that people rise in power until it exceeds their character. Its illusory appeals overcome any ethic but its own. So we see an Elise Stefanik overwhelmed by it, emptied of content by it.
Ms. Kendzior is right about the cabal. All powerful people have far more in common with each other than with anyone in the not-powerful class. They instinctually protect one another, become impervious to other concerns or claims on conscience. But this isn’t the result of a nation borne of slavery, or a nation plagued with exceptional moral and political missteps. It’s our norm as humans. Our only angel is power, and it’s a devil.
Written December 19, 2022
Revised January 4, 2023
©2022-2023 Lawrence Helms