A few weeks ago, briefly commenting on the Castro Kerfuffle, I quoted some old timers - Orwell and DeVoto - because the subject seemed so old and stale that it had all already been said. Easy for me to say, but I am aware that there are a great many people still struggling for some sort of clarity on these issues. Even the most cursory examination of Orwell and DeVoto shows that they lacked clarity too, and I freely admit that eveything I know is wrong, and have no idea what is right. I suspect that the best we can do is to gain some clarity about which things are more wrong than others.

This David Mamet article, Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal', illuminates some of the same issues and fault lines as the Castro discussions, and has prompted many commentators to have a go.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. . .

I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama. . .

I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered. . .

Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out. . .

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

What took him so long? All of the evidence was available to him 40 years ago when he began writing. Even I saw that and I was raised in a barn, by wolves. I suspect that as with the American communists Devoto wrote about, Mamet's views were not "a system of thought but . . . an eschatology, a millennial faith."

I suspect that his apostasy is not thought based either. He makes much of the repellent unctuousness of NPR, and though that is an anecdote intended to demonstrate the conflict between his true views and those he reflexively mouthed as a cultural BDL (brain-dead liberal), I think it may be all there is to his views. It's a matter of aesthetics. BDLs seem to be ridiculous, provincial bumpkins who have no knowledge or understanding of the broad world, like an insular, inbred clan that needs an infusion of external world genetics to reduce the influence of recessive genes that afflict many. They are fashion victims. But had he not been clubable, not been willing and able to play to that insular aesthetic, his career would have been stillborn.

His rabbi was right, "it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out", but that bit of antique wisdom has always been unpopular and will always be so. It's a buzz killing sort of thought that deflates the giddy certainties of any eschatology. I suspect that such wisdom will forever be mainly available to the hormonaly challenged and aged members of society. It's a juiceless insight that deflates excitement. (call the metaphor police!!)

What is worth further consideration is his belated admiration for the structure of our government which assumes that humans will be humans, and so seeks to blunt excesses with competition. The would be kings are thwarted by the would be controlling congress scheming to loot the treasury, and the self regarding judiciary. Each reduces the predations of the other. But it isn't enough. Political parties subvert the intent. This has been recognized since the very beginning and we have many examples of the harms caused by them over the years. They categorically reject the rabbi's advice to hear the other fellow out, and subject us to Presidents and Congresses colluding rather than competing. If Mamet didn't see this with JFK he certainly should have by the time of LBJ.

As Timothy noted:

Everything that works about institutional life rests on the habitus of professionals, bureaucrats, experts, on whether they are stewards or parasites, whether they recognize the fragile possibility of a better world or are just looting the till, whether they are humble in the face of wider and more distributed experience and knowledge or whether they are contemptuous of anything besides their own immediate power. We all know it: this is Arendt’s banality of evil.

The structures of our government institutions were designed to enable the spirit of self rule. The objective wasn't to form a republican democracy. That was just a means to allow self rule. But it doesn't work so well when that spirit wanes, when we ignore the rabbi and stop listening to one another. I see no institutional solution to this very human tendency. The institutions are too powerful, too tempting to opportunists intent on hijacking them for personal advancement and pursuit of various eschatologies. Perhaps the see-saw conflicts we have had in recent times - periods when significant portions of the polity are enraged by first one, then the other hearing impaired political machine - are sufficient demonstrations of these old truths? Perhaps there will be other Mamets who gain some measure of wisdom in their dotage and speak out against insularity and arrogance?

Nah, wishful thinking. Again. Too many want their word to be law, even - perhaps especially - if it is the last word.