Perspectives

Eidos is a Greek word, a noun. It means the formal sum of a culture, its intellectual character, ideas, etc. (Pronounced: EYE-dos)

Fiction and history are the two areas where I devote most of my time reading. I’ve often thought, why be redundant? History, in many respects, is fiction. That’s a joke folks. But there is a slight element of truth to it.

Legitimate history is an attempt to reconstruct events (times) with the “unbiased” eye of accuracy. We endeavor to agree on the facts, but even that is a challenge, the nature of man being what it is. To then extrapolate what the facts actually “mean,” well, I’m reminded of the corny line from that early 1960s ABC TV series “The Naked City” that went, “There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them.” There are many interpretations of what the naked facts (stories) might mean.

The nation state is a manmade creation. Some historians trace its origins back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia; others, quite legitimately, see it as a specific 19th century European phenomenon. Regardless, we might be in a period of history when the nation state is being eclipsed by different organizing principles. But that is grist for another column.

The United States, our always-at-war nation state, is unraveling before our eyes. There is no more “united” in our states. Increasingly, the message from America’s political right is every woman and child for herself. We are being sold a bill of goods that in the name of freedom behooves us to operate on the premise of every man for himself.

The politics, the governing by division, has achieved such polarization within our population that the middle class is laughably (sadly) more concerned with literally eating its own (itself) than focusing on the biggest income transfer of national wealth since America’s Gilded Age. We are becoming an oligarchy. The goal: cheap labor, cheap environment, cheap life. When the middle class is gone, America’s uber-rich will sanctimoniously lament, “If only they had worked harder.”

What is our eidos? Or rather, history will ask, what was America’s eidos? Anatole France observed, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal their bread.” We are becoming a two-tier culture.

Either we are all in the boat together as Americans, rowing toward a shared future, or we inevitably become just another once-powerful imperial power that couldn’t overcome the historical forces of corruption, monopoly and concentrated wealth; an oligarchy of greed, shortsightedness and perverse financial elitism.

Maybe that is our world’s brave new future, no nation states per se, just international financial interests “managing” the world’s resources for maximum profit. And humanity? Well, that’s one of those managed resources, don’t-cha see. An expense to be depreciated.

Some see a future where the world’s rich have more in common with each other than with their own fellow citizens. Please, let America not end there.

How could our national debate have deteriorated to such simplistic right-wing banalities? Why? But then I am reminded of what the Great Oz said, “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”

That is what our special interest politicians would have us do.