Delusions

In the September HARPER'S, Garret Keizer commented, in an interesting essay, on the delusion of our society, "not so much its materialism as its faux spiritualism . . . in which the elect live everlastingly and communicate telepathically while flying in disembodied splendor above the heads of the Mexicans mowing the lawn." This idea, unsurprisingly, has a long pedigree. We should focus on making this material world a better place.

Some disagree about our main delusion. I recall a French officer sent to help in the American Revolution, who reported back that "these people worship money." That sums up a lot of our recent history.

I doubt if the spiritualist delusion is our worst. About 20% of Americans believe that the Sun travels around the Earth. A third of all Americans, including members of congress, believe that the Constitution protects freedom of religion only for religions that are well liked by the majority.

Among the most deluded are the members of the Tea Party who worship, more or less, our Constitution. In fact, the Founding Fathers wrote a Constitution deliberately designed to frustrate Tea Party types (and most of the rest of us, for that matter). The Founding Fathers had a distrust of direct democracy that was based, I suppose, on their knowledge of the conflicts in ancient Athens, their sense of the people around them, and their studies of philosophers like Plato and Socrates, who were totalitarians.

The Constitution the Fathers adopted divided sovereignty into many parts (states vs. federal government, President vs. House, House vs. Senate, voters vs. the Supreme Court, etc.) The effect of this was to slow the pace of possible change to a crawl. That is our frustrating system.

There is much that the Founders did not see coming. They did not expect multinational corporations to take on the funding of our major political parties, assuming control over our financial lives. They granted ordinary citizens the right to bear one-shot rifles that took a minute to reload, not expecting the rise of machine guns. But they did get the Tea Party right. The Tea Party will be stopped by the muddling devices for slowing things down in Constitution they think they support.

We are faced now with an election in which the Republicans of all sorts are going to make gains. It is up to us to get out and limit those short term gains if we can.

Gary Goss