Since I began this blog there have often been periods when I’ve not posted or times when I’ve put off writing particular pieces I’ve promised in favor of paying attention to events. I’ve posted nothing for the past six months partly because I’ve been paying attention to events in a way that is new for me and has seemed more conducive to silence than to speech. (Writing is speech for me, perhaps because I am old fashioned, or just old, perhaps because I am a poet). In this essay I hope to be able to delineate what I think I have learned, or am learning, in my new round of attending.

As a way of beginning I am recalling a conversation with an old friend, the Rev. Jimmye Kimmey, a priest of The Episcopal church for whom I have lasting and deep admiration and affection. I don’t remember the context, what it was that caused me to ask my friend what I asked her, but I do remember that it was something in the news of the times towards the end of the last century, something that disturbed me with the suggestion that misogyny was far more widespread than I thought. “I’m wondering for the first time,” I said, “if most men hate women. Is that really true?” Her answer surprised me. Very quickly and quietly she said, “Yes, men hate women.” No qualifier, nothing to let me off the hook as a man, but as we continued to talk it was as though she had touched my hand when she spoke. We were in one of those communicative moments when difference falls away and humans confront one another outside the norms of prejudiced discourse.

Another friend, Rob Anderson, has studied such moments, He and his partner, Kenneth Cissna, have written extensively about what they call Moments of Meeting, in a study of conversations between Carl Rogers and Martin Buber that was published by SUNY Press in 2002. Whether such moments, or some public equivalent or set of equivalents can be constructed as part of an attempt to retain or revive mass participation in various performances of the public good among us, I don’t begin to know. But I mention Rob and Ken’s book as a way of making a generalized statement at the outset about what I think is at stake for us in this century as peoples who in the final analysis must live together on this small planet as we confront what is coming to seem more and more like a worldwide backlash against the liberal world order we have known (and taken for granted) during most of my lifetime. Could a transformational moment of meeting take place between congressional Republicans deeply invested in the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and women just as deeply invested in frustrating that confirmation? We already know the answer to that question. Here’s another. can we imagine such a moment of meeting between a group of women who oppose the Kavanaugh nomination and women who are now defending it?

And of course there’s a larger question behind these questions about a particular historical circumstance involving particular cultural commitments and instrumentalities. It’s the question we, like J. Alfred Prufrock, have had dropped on our plate by the new century which seems to be turning the world upside down. I’ve been trying to think about what’s at stake in my own confrontation with this question, as well as how to frame an interpretation of it that will suffice for the time being. At the head of this piece I am returning, as I often do, To Wallace Stevens:

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
        Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

In declaring my desire to find a poem, I ask for something I think precedes defending the public good. What factors, conventions, instrumentalities impinge on my taking the public good seriously. What commitments do I have as a human individual with my particular history and acculturation that may impinge upon my thinking; and if I find myself at fault, what can I do about it? Another old friend, the late A. C. Greene, said to me once that he thought one should have a personal reason for whatever one believed about life. At the time I thought the remark was a fairly shallow obiter dictum, but I no longer think so.

And for a while, too, I was satisfied with the recommendation I have made in a number of essays, that we as a people need to revive politics and participatory democracy. But I now think something else has to happen before I can recommend conventional politics seriously to any young person who believes that voting is a sham and that direct action, protest, union organizing, and like modes of social action are superior to established ways of what we now call bringing about change. What needs to change after all? Isaiah Berlin says at the outset of his first essay on liberty that when ends are agreed upon in a polity all politics is instrumental. We now live with the reality that questions about the ends of life and society form occasions for bitter and irreconcilable dispute among us. Some even take the view, famously associated with Margaret Thatcher, that society doesn’t exist. As I think about my country these days, I am less able to return a political answer to Chernyshevsky’s question, “What is to be done?” than I was when I wrote about it in 2016 shortly after the election.

Much has been said as the present U. S. regime has run its increasingly destructive course almost to its midpoint, about the undoubted fact that this regime has flouted most norms of decent behavior. But the conflict over the Kavanaugh appointment has exposed another set of norms that the majority of Americans who oppose the present regime find embarrassing and distressful. I am one such American. As a descendant of slave owners I have directly benefitted from the peculiar institution. My mother’s parents were shaped by post-reconstruction southern ideology. I grew up in the twilight of the Jim Crow era, internalized its values, attended segregated schools. As a descendant on my father’s side of white settlers who came to the southwest in the last days of the Oklahoma land rush I am a beneficiary of ethnic cleansing of the North American continent, of Manifest Destiny, as well. What these facts mean to me now is that my thinking for most of my life has been embedded in acceptance of a social hierarchy that assigns roles to its members on the basis of the accidents of birth and history. It’s all very well for us to tout American meritocracy, but in my case privilege came before any merit of my own

When someone like Brett Kavanaugh proclaims that he got into Yale by virtue of virtue when in fact his was a legacy admission, we understand how meritocracy works at a different scale of entitlement from mine. Leaving race and ethnicity aside for the moment, I have been struck in the past few days by how often I have heard it claimed that all of us men, if we are honest, will have to admit to attempting to rape a woman, or women, when we were young; and that therefore, if Kavanaugh is found to be guilty of moral transgression as a young man, how will the rest of us escape whipping? In the immediate aftermath of Lindsay Graham’s tirades against women and the Democrats in the U. S. Senate, it was this argument that was the subject of a number of telling critiques of masculinity written by women, of which this one might serve as an example. I think I am one of a number of men who have never raped, or attempted to rape anyone; but I have had a long and complex education in regard to my own participation in the sexist hierarchy that dominates modern culture worldwide, no less so in this presumably enlightened place than in those “shithole countries” our enlightened leader enjoys stigmatizing. But if Graham’s target was more Democrats than women, then his tirades take on a further dimension as critiques of Democrats who support Dr. Blasey Ford against Brett Kavanaugh but defended Bill Clinton in an impeachment trial in which Graham was the prosecutor. You can’t have it two ways Graham seems to tell us. If you defend the essential innocence of Dr. Blasey Ford against the youthful depravity of Brett Kavanaugh, then you should at least acknowledge your culpability when you defended Bill Clinton against defenders of Monica Lewinsky. Consent aside, the power differential between Clinton and Lewinsky should have caused you to vote for impeachment.

Of course the Clinton impeachment trial was not about whether the president “had sex” with Monica Lewinsky. It was about obstruction of justice. Clinton lied, as was argued, to protect both his privacy and that of the young woman. But the legal issue of a trial, even an impeachment trial, is sometimes a mask for more profound issues, as countless episodes of Law and Order have now taught us. The Clinton trial was about the relative importance to the republic of Clinton and Lewinsky. Recent Republican strategy has sought to make the Kavanaugh hearings about the same issue. The participants have not cooperated to the fullest extent, but there remains tremendous cultural pressure to protect the norm which decrees that the life and the reputation of an entitled white male transcend in importance the life and reputation of any woman, however accomplished she may be or however wronged by said entitled white male. Many who defend Kavanaugh are resorting to claims that Dr. Blasey Ford’s memory is faulty, or that she was paid to lie as part of Democrat conspiracy. May they continue to be comforted by these rationalizations as events unfold; for if the present FBI investigation turns out to be the whitewash many of us expect, the facts of Kavanaugh’s young life will continue to emerge as enterprising reporters dig for them. The bottom line is that Kavanaugh’s privilege is the privilege of his historical moment and also both deeply and tragically human and deeply and tragically American, as Clarence Thomas’s privilege was in 1991, as Bill Clinton’s was in 1998.

Which leaves me where?

The culture of violence against young women and the drinking cultures of many American prep schools and the colleges and universities to which their graduates regularly gain admission are widely known and widely tolerated in the liberal establishment. This toleration crosses political boundaries and is as prevalent among voters for liberal political candidates as among those who voted for the present regime. I say these things on the basis of long experience. They constitute an open scandal. One cannot with integrity deny or defend it, no matter one’s political persuasion. Graham’s attack on women and the Democrats is wrong, not so much wrong headed as wrong hearted, expressive of an almost sociopathic absence of empathy, but it points to a discomfort that all of us, male and female, who gave Bill Clinton a pass must feel. And beyond the Clinton experience, such discomfort is the condition of our time. It is exacerbated on every hand by the inhumanity of the present regime, but it is a discomfort in which we all know, or ought to know, ourselves implicated—all of us who are part of the privileged liberal political class, who vote, or contribute, or organize, or protest. We may seek innocence in driving hybrid automobiles, in working to overturn discriminatory laws and policies, in opposing rape culture, in striving to redeem our public schools, in helping to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. But there is no innocence to be had in these pursuits. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t follow them, only that we should understand that our hearts are not pure.

It seems more than a month since the funeral of John McCain, for that remarkable social event is now a world away. But for me what was most remarkable about the McCain funeral and what keeps the memory of it fresh in my mind was not only that it illustrated the vitality of American civil religion and its clear opposition to the anti-religion of right-wing piety, but also that it was seen to do so. It was heartening for a while as I thought about it, but the cultural fissure it revealed began to trouble me almost immediately. Marilynne Robinson persuades me in her new book, What Are We Doing Here (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018) that American liberalism, whether religious or not, has its roots in English puritanism, which gave rise to the abolitionist movement as well. But there were also those Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, and members of smaller groups who embraced the southern cause during the civil war, some of whom remained outside the national consensus even if they participated in postbellum reunifications. I was baptized in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, that is the historically pro-slavery southern Methodist church. I was a member of a Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina in the 1960s that nearly split apart over whether it would admit African Americans to attend Sunday services.

We live now—I live now, with the deep conviction that the political and legal fixes we installed in the last century hoping to create a more equitable and just society than the one we had inherited have in some crucial way failed. They have changed some behavior, but they have not changed our hearts. As a thinking citizen, I can adjust my behavior to reflect a decent respect for demands for equality from those marginalized and oppressed by the social system in which we all live. I have been doing so all my life as I have come to understand those demands and desire to be allied with those who make them rather than with those who oppose them. But at eighty something I understand that my managed behavior is on the social surface. My heart is not the heart of a man who hates women or persons of color or practitioners of religions other than my own, but it remains tainted by the bigotry that is built into the social milieu within which I act and whose assumptions I internalized as a child. My education as a social being over the past forty to fifty years has been an embarrassment of occasions upon which I have been forced to recognize the casual homophobia, the casual sexism, or the casual racism, of my behavior and to know what these casual misbehaviors reflect. I think sometimes that I remain a religious person, in spite of a broad area of apostasy in my makeup, because I remain profoundly aware of sin, mostly in myself, trapped somewhere in the wisdom of Solomon—“As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” I can no more shed this awareness than I can shed the privilege that sometimes masks it.

So if I were to find the poem I seek, it would be a poem of the heart, a poem that would evoke some moment of meaning in which a speaker and an invisible polyglot audience fold themselves into one another like lovers, heeding neither the craft nor sullen art of any language, certainly not mine. A poem that would evoke a moment of love we fail to find as citizens. Prayer aspires to it.