An Assault Upon Conscience

The righteous will rejoice when he sees the vengeance;
he will bathe his feet in the blood of the wicked.
Men will say, "Surely there is a reward for the righteous;
surely there is a God who judges on earth."
—Psalm 58

It has lately come to pass that America has entered upon a dark age. This is, I discern, also the reality for other post-industrial technocratic societies. It is, I believe, an authentic dark age; that is, a time in which the power of death is pervasive and militant and in which people exist without hope or else in pursuit of transient, fraudulent, or delusive hopes.

It is not merely an episode of passing malaise, nor only an interlude of economic or cultural or political depression, though it has some such aspects. It is an era of chaotic activity, disoriented priorities, banal redundancy. Creativity is suppressed; imagination has been lost; nostalgia is superficial and indulgent. Society suffers massive tedium. There is very quick resort to violence, usually of overkill dimensions. People become frantic about their personal safety and concentrate solemnly on their own survival. The infrastructures of great institutions crumble.

For those who consider that there is a God, there is widespread suspicion of abandonment. It is a period marked by intense animosity toward human life and, indeed, intransigent hostility toward all of created life. It is a time within itself persuasive of the truth of the biblical description of the Fall. It is a prosperous period for death. It is, in short, a dark age.

A Dark Age

That the contemporary phase of American experience may be characterized as verifying the Fall does not mean that this dark age is severed from history. On the contrary, it was incipient in the Second World War and foreshadowed in the supposed ending of that war in the resort to obliteration bombing and, next, the deployment of first-strike nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was then that the primal features of the present darkness began to emerge and became capable of being identified.

A rudimentary element in this time is violence, and as a last resort but as the first reliance of the nation and society, and then not only externally in confronting other nations as enemies but also internally in the paramilitarization of police power and its entanglement with the entrenchment of racism. Moreover, it is not only visible violence—as in nuclear arms or paramilitary police operations—which is involved, but, as much, invisible violence, like that practiced in the discarding of the elderly, or that which is often routinely administered in the medical and hospital systems.

America is a violent society not because there are not viable alternatives to violence but because, in the Second World War and in the so-called cold war, violence has been the first, quick, and often pre-emptive recourse in substitution for the policy or the practice of non-violence. The nation learned the techniks of violence and handled the varieties of violence in these war encounters and fantasies and also became entrapped into supposing that violence is good. Thus a literally fatal idolatry of violence has been initiated.

Another hallmark of this dark age is, manifestly, technology and the political implementation of technology as technocracy. This was foreseeable, the Second World War and the cold war aside, but it is a syndrome which has been enormously influenced by the war events. This is the realm in which America has most self-consciously imitated and emulated the Nazis and indeed, vested former Nazis with employment, with great power, with handsome compensation and similar rewards, and with limitless facilities to abet the momentum of the technological process.

The central issue in technology has been and still is the proposition that any technological capability which develops should be implemented without restraint of human discretion as to whether a particular capability has a potential adverse to human life or to the life of creation. This is the unbridled amoral technology that has yielded proliferation of harmful, stupid, unneeded consumer products as well as nuclear weapons and, for that matter, nuclear utilities.

At the same time, as an additional feature of the American darkness, forms of technology have enabled the articulation of conditioning, marketing, and merchandising techniks capable of utterly overpowering human faculties of reason or conscience, of neutralizing human critical responses, and of programming more or less everyone to purchase and consume whatever technology produces. Applied politically as well as commercially, similar techniks have had a devastating impact upon the fiber of democratic institutions by minimizing intelligent citizen participation and in substituting image for substance, polling or voting, and credibility for truth. What is at issue in politics, as in the marketplace … is not truth or falsehood in a factual sense (much less metaphysically) but that which human beings can be induced, in one way or another, to believe, whether or not it is connected to the truth …

An Idolatry of Science

The present darkness in America has complicated origins in diverse aspects if the American experience as a culture and society—compounded, as has already been mentioned in setting forth some features of the age, by certain historic events. Perhaps the most conspicuous cultural factor has been a profligate idolatry of science, fostering gross over-estimations of the capabilities of science and technology, together with an uncritical—indeed, wanton—imposition of the scientific method, so-called, throughout society. These circumstance have, in turn, issued in the literally fantastic attitude that technical capability ought to be implemented just because it exists, without regard to the moral character of any particular venture.

Views such as these are embraced in a belief, inculcated profusely in the culture, that science is morally neutral or, to put it in some traditional theological terms, that science as a principality somehow enjoys exemption from the Fall. This naivete, incredible though it be, commonly associated with the rank superstition that science can eventually supply a remedy for any peril or problem wrought from the untimely, stupid, or inappropriate implementation of any specific technical capability.

The practical consequences of these foolish verities have been multifarious, nefarious, and, often enough, grotesque. Thus, to mention but a single item, hundreds of thousands of hapless Americans today await tardy rescue from hazards unpredicted or, anyway, unforewarned by commercialized science fomented by reckless, premature, or otherwise improvident disposal of toxic wastes.

In Hiroshima (which is simultaneously the primeval and the penultimate event of nuclear history), such ideas sponsored within the pantheon of science converged with the shibboleths spawned initially during the Second World War, which were readily enough extended and embellished to suit the cold war and which survive still, in substantially this latter form, in the Pentagon, in the so-called intelligence apparatus, and among the self-styled national security authorities. The upshot has been the much-boasted connection between zeal for American nuclear pre-eminence and that fancied holy destiny for the nation in postwar America, along with the asserted efficacy of superpower in determining history and in dominating the life of creation, not to mention the extraordinary, if nonetheless self-evident, contradiction of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence.

Events have, by now, intervened and surpassed the heavy myths originating in Hiroshima: American nuclear pre-eminence has been dissipated and, perchance, was all along illusory. The inherent impotence of superpower to feign sovereignty in history and domination over the existence of creation has been verified in one calamity after another befalling the professed superpowers (such has been the repeated lesson in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Poland, and Central America). At the same time, the doctrine of deterrence seems discredited by the common sense of the ordinary citizen.

Meanwhile, the fundamental proposition which rendered the making and use of nuclear weapons thinkable in the first place—the curious hypothesis that science is morally innocuous or morally neutral—continues to be categorically refuted, day after day, not only because of the close probabilities of nuclear apocalypse but also because of the plethora of other perils and contaminations, plagues and pestilences, and jeopardies both known and surprise, produced and promoted in the name of science as safe and beneficial to life.

In short, in the present time in America—and, indeed, on this planet—history itself confirms the radical and persistent moral ambiguity of science and of all that science does and claims: history verifies and betells the truth that science is a fallen principality.

An Assault Upon Sanity and Conscience

The extraordinary changes being wrought in American society by the politicalization of technology are not only literally counterrevolutionary in scope in their impact upon the inherited constitutional tradition but, further, represent a massive and sustained aggression against human beings and the faculties most definitive of human life. What is going on is a brutal assault upon sanity and conscience. The reality is that technology and its political formulation as technocracy cannot prevail and, most especially, cannot secure its totalitarian captivation of the nation unless—somehow—human beings are dissuaded from functioning humanly.

Technocracy requires the displacement of human creativity and the neutralization of human reason by intimidation, the inducement of ignorance, passivity, indifference, indolence, diversion, coercion, or some other form of dysfunction. The process is, as often as not, abetted simply by neglect or default or acquiescence on the part of persons.

Technocracy requires this abdication or equivalent loss of human originality and reflection in order to achieve a maximum efficiency, as gauged by its own terms. The human involvement must therefore, so far as possible, be reduced to that which is quantifiable, predictable, reliable, uniform, and, in a word, conformed to the survival interests of the technocracy rather than concerned with human potential, human rights, or human needs.

The requirement that technocracy has to neutralize human discretion, particularly where that openly identifies moral problems, explains for the most part why the last two decades have been marked with such emphatic, at times virtually pathological, anxiety about so-called security, surveillance, the tracking of credit histories and political involvements, and the great inflation of the police presence in society, while at the same time civilian control of the police has been practically set aside.

Meanwhile, the capability of technology to displace human activities by substituting ersatz technical procedures steadily increases and encroaches upon human responsibility. "Knowledge engineering," whereby a computer classifies and applies prefabricated "solutions" to societal problems, is ominous in its potential for eliminating human reason and conscience from social crisis.

Similar schemes are already in wide use in medicine and, increasingly, in law, as well as in the media with, so far as I can discern, appalling consequences for human life in society. One of the perils in this kind of substitution and displacement, as is happening so rapidly with respect to language, for an example, is that the substitute is readily confused with the authentic, and after a while the genuine disappears because of neglect or disuse and all that is left is the ersatz and some further diminished human beings…

One very important accompaniment of the displacement process and I the human dysfunction that it prompts, in one way or another, is the manifold increase in the theatrical and ritual aspects of the governing institutions, both nominal and actual. The most poignant instance of this affects the Presidency.

In the urgency of the Second World War, the Presidency lost much of its effectiveness as a ruling authority to other and extra-constitutional agencies and institutions, notably the Pentagon. Instead of the control and direction of the Pentagon lodging in the Presidency, the Presidency became subject to the initiative, briefing, indoctrination, and dominance of the Pentagon.

After the war had ostensibly ended, this reversal of roles continued and became more complex, more institutionalized or routine, as compared to the relatively extemporaneous status that it had had during wartime. For one thing, the budget-making procedure, which is always also basic policy making, became extended, for the sake of longer-range contingency planning, so that the Pentagon was projecting budget (and policy) years ahead of the fiscal constructions of the president or the Congress. To a substantial extent, those projections became presumptions or otherwise gained priority in the budgets adopted.

In this change, however, the scope of the president was diminished. The president, together with the Congress, was much more in the position of ratifying the Pentagon's budget (and policy) than of originating budget and policy. That represents a stereotypical problem in relation to any bureaucracy, but it is an acute issue, and one adversely affecting the whole constitutional system and its values wherein they are weighted on the side of human life, in the technocratic regime.

Other factors aggravate the situation, including the tradition of presidential accountability in elections every four years. The Pentagon technocracy cannot tolerate these disruptions, and so it is deemed best to relocate the Presidency as far as possible outside the mainstream of policy deliberation and decision and to take on the chore of indoctrinating each incumbent president now and then in what is going on or what is contemplated and what he can appropriately say and do.

In other words, the Presidency is cast more and more in a ritual or theatrical aspect, in which the pretense is upheld that the president governs, while the president, if well behaved, is in fact engaged in diverting attention from the real-politik of the nation. When citizens ask rhetorically, what difference does it make who is elected president? the answer is not that all the candidates are the same in qualification or lack of it, because they vary significantly in these respects, as well as ethically and aesthetically. Rather, the response is, it doesn't make much difference, because the Presidency is no longer the primary governing institution in America. So it is not ironical or absurd, in a day when the Presidency has been reduced to ceremonial and public relations and other theatrical assignments, to elect a professional actor to the office.

Notice, please, that I do not allege that this erosion of constitutional authority in favor of Pentagon technocracy has been happening because of wicked persons in high places in that technocracy. There are, no doubt, truly wicked persons there, as one would expect in any such vast enterprise, but that is not the problem I am raising here. On the contrary, the Pentagon institutional apparatus is basically organized for the mere sake of the survival of the institution regardless of the character or disposition of any human beings within the precincts of the technocracy ...

The Pentagon is archetypical of the principalities and powers of the technocratic state and is representative in its operation of how any of the great public or private corporate powers act and of how they victimize human beings, not only ordinary folk but presidents or others in high office too. I am aware, let it be mentioned, that these comments about how the principalities function for their own survival in the technocratic regime are very simplified, and I recognize that the reality of their scene is more complex than human language can explicate briefly; indeed, the scene is literally chaos, the chaos of death's own reign.

For all that, let it be acknowledged that the principalities of technocracy cannot calculate failure. They must succeed or be able, on some basis, to declare that they succeed. That is why, in part, the disastrous defeat of American superpower in Southeast Asia could not be tolerated by the Pentagon. And when a whole battery of public relations campaigns still did not dispose of the truth, something else had to be attempted.

A rehearsal was staged, macabre as it was, when the Iranian hostages were released (after the air rescue operation, which was macabre too, was stopped). That tried to construe the release as some sort of victory, and it was dutifully celebrated as such when the hostages arrived home.

We had, however, to await a different president to witness a real war in which American aggression in an unlawful invasion became victorious to supply vicariously what had not been won in Vietnam. Grenada thus was the Pentagon's way of bringing Vietnam to a glorious and patriotic finish. I suppose many, many Americans in addition to the Pentagon cadre and the president have been so stifled and conformed that they are fooled by this grotesque trick, which assumes that Americans are, by now, bereft of either sanity or conscience.

A Monastic Witness

Vietnam manifestly still haunts the nation; the Pentagon has no power (indeed no authority) to exorcise that ghastly, searing, deadly recollection. That was pathetically attested lately in the misadventure of the dispatch of Marines to Lebanon. Fantasy and war have—I suppose—always had close associations, but if that be so, the two have seldom become so jumbled each with the other as in that incomprehensible assignment in Lebanon.

One gathers that, in fantasy, it was supposed to be a heroic episode that would serve the purpose of repressing further the still vivid recall of the humiliation of American superpower in Vietnam. And, even though Lebanon was, on its own scale, an equivalent calamity for American superpower, the temptations for other exploits riddle the situations in the Middle East and also in Central America. Those temptations are likely to insinuate themselves against America for a long time to come—if, that is, the world is spared nuclear war and there is a long time to come.

If the assessment of the ruling powers in the American technocratic state expressed here is accurate to any substantial degree, then resistance is warranted: a patient, resilient, versatile, tough-minded resistance to the powers that be, urgently needed among all persons who still remember the constitutional inheritance and, especially, the Bill of Rights, and all those who would prefer representative government over a secret, unaccountable, anonymous, self-perpetuating technocratic totalitarianism. Or, on a broader basis, such resistance is called for as both an exemplification and a defense of human life in society as such.

For Christians, of course, participation in such resistance to the ruling authorities because the purported ruling authorities operate on an arbitrary basis, without means of accountability to human beings and to human life, is, theologically speaking, normative. It has been, since the days of the apostles, an articulation of the characteristic and indispensable confession of the political efficacy of the resurrection from death ...

Technocracy must be resisted, and human beings must reclaim discretion over every facet of technology and every possible implementation of technical capacity. For biblical people, the claim goes further: technology and technical capability must be rendered accountable to human life and to the sovereignty of the Word of God, in whom all things, including science and technology, and all of life, including that of the principalities and nations, have been created. In other words, the authority which Christians assert when they engage in resistance to the incumbent technocratic regime is their confession that Jesus Christ is Lord or that the sovereignty of the Word of God in history is active now.

Whatever other forms that witness of resistance may take, I believe it must incorporate two aspects of venerable monastic tactics, which also have origins in biblical spirituality. The first of these is intercession—the work of intercession and, if you will, the politics of intercession—the solemn offering to Almighty God of all the cares and needs of this world whatsoever represented in the offertory of certain particular necessities and issues implicating persons and communities known to those who intercede.

In the tradition of intercession, as I understand it, the one who intercedes for another is confessing that his or her trust in the vitality of the Word of God is so serious that he or she risks sharing the burden of the one for whom intercession is offered even to the extremity of taking the place of the other person who is the subject of the prayer. Intercession takes its meaning from the politics of redemption; intercession is a most audacious witness to the world.

Another aspect of the monastic style I consider especially suited to political resistance is sustained eucharistic praise of life Word of God. In the Bible, in such images or stories as we have received concerning the Kingdom of God, the only activity which seems pertinent in the Kingdom (including those scenes of the Judgment that are integral to the coming of the Kingdom) is praise of the Word of God. It is as if the vocations of the whole assembly of created life, the angelic powers as well as human beings and the entire remainder and range of creation, are being fulfilled and perfected in celebration of the Word of God, in the glorification of the Word of God, in thanksgiving for the Word of God. For human beings, in these scenes, is not God who is fulfilled or made whole by the praise but we ourselves.

This effort of the chorus of creation in the Kingdom is the consummation of the restoration of creation wrought by the Word of God. That restoration has begun in the midst of the Fall; it has been exemplified in Jesus Christ (and so we name him Lord); our witness now expects, eagerly, and anticipates, patiently, the Kingdom vouchsafed at the finale of the present history and at the end of time.

Hence, the occasion for praising the Word of God, in every way, in all things, is already with us. There is actually nothing else that needs to be done, and so whatever we do is transfigured into a sacrament of that praise.

William Stringfellow was a theologian, lawyer, and Sojourners contributing editor when this article appeared.