FUTURE PERFECT AT THE END OF WESTERN DOMINANCE

FUTURE PERFECT AT THE END OF
WESTERN DOMINANCE


James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2006


NOTE: This is a segment from Dr. Fisher’s new book TECHNOLOGY THE NEW RELIGION OF NOWHERE MAN! It is copyrighted and is not to be photocopied or electronically transmitted or used in any way without permission of the author.


Every living thing shall be meat for you. The fear of you
and dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth.
Into your hands they are delivered. Have dominion over
the earth and subdue it.

Genesis (The Bible)

Every important aspect of the life, organization, and the culture of Western society is in the extraordinary crisis. Its body and mind are sick and there is hardly a spot on its body which is not sore, nor any nervous fiber which functions soundly. We are seemingly between two epochs: the dying Sensate culture of our magnificent yesterday and the coming Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow. We are living, thinking, and acting at the end of a brilliant six-hundred-year-long Sensate day. The oblique rays of the sun still illumine the glory of the passing epoch. But the light is fading, and in the deepening shadows it becomes more and more difficult to see clearly and to orient ourselves safely in the confusions of the twilight. The night of the transitory period begins to loom before us, with its nightmares, frightening shadows, and heartrending horrors. Beyond it, however, the dawn of a new Ideational culture is probably waiting to greet the men of the future.

Pitrim Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynamics (1937)

Man is imperfect but perfectible.
This is a common adage that has become a meaningless cliché.

CONSTANT GARDNER THROUGH TIME

The West has cast the die for the world in the past six hundred years. It was the West that moved out of the sanctuary of Europe to explore, conquer and then colonize the world. It was European culture that attempted to proselytize that world in the Christian faith. It was European science that sought connection with the universe, and for it came to have a different interpretation of God and the destiny of man. It was Europe that invented capitalism and communism, using the conflict between to give rise to a creative contentious tomorrow. And it was European colonization that gave birth to, seeded, cultivated, energized and then came to be humbled by its own creation in the West, the United States of America.

The United States rose fractionally, uncertainly until early in the nineteenth century a general from humble beginnings rose out of the Carolina-Tennessee valley with muscular leadership heretofore not seen in America. His name was Andrew Jackson.

It was no accident. The climate, the culture, the primitive reality of a land rich in possibilities with a people no stranger to violence, and with deep roots on both sides of the Atlantic, was right to produce a leader native to its own. Jackson had little in common with European forebears. He was the genuine article of the Western frontier, an authentic American leader without coterie or apology.

Strains of his primitive raw character would reappear in Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Richard Nixon. This flawed but authentic archetype of temperament, contradictory in so many ways, was distinctly American, and would drive the nation to world dominance. Compared to the Founding Fathers of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Jay, Franklin, Madison, and Monroe, who all had elitist monarchist qualities, he was totally a commoner with a passionate antipathy for the monarchy.

One hundred years after his death in 1845, the United States reached its apogee with the victorious conclusion of World War II. Europe was in total recovery having lost nearly 20 million souls. Russia lost 24 million, more than half of whom were civilian, and was in total ruin. The United States, in comparison, suffered far less military casualties, and practically no civilian casualties.

As the lone possessor of the atomic bomb, no nation so dominated the world since the days of the Roman Empire.

The Union of the Soviet Socialistic Republic (USSR), or Russia would challenge this power dominance, but would ultimately collapse in 1989, break up, regroup, and become a quasi-democracy where it is today.

The complexion of the world is changing so rapidity it is difficult to imagine what it will resemble a generation away. The economic global village is a reality. India, with more than one and one-half billion people, has a middle class of 300 million, which is roughly the equivalent to the population of the United States. China is booming, a communist country practicing the economic religion of capitalism better than anywhere else on the globe. Japan has boomed and busted several times since the end of World War II, as has South Korea, and Indonesia in this frenetic climate of change, illustrating the uncertainty of the future.

Meanwhile, democracies are breaking out all over shedding their colonial shrouds and European cultures to seek and reestablish the roots of their historic and cultural traditions.

What Europe attempted to do three hundred years ago: spread the Christian-capitalistic culture as the true religion of civilized man is now being repeated by the United States. It endeavors to democratize the world by first ridding it of its totalitarian rule as we see in such places as Afghanistan and Iraq. The rationale for this policy is to take the war on terror to the sites of its alleged origins.

Where democracy is breaking out, however, it is not in accordance necessarily with the Western formula.

We have seem the terrorist group Hamas crush the Fatah Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the Middle East in democratic elections in 2006, while the democratic elections in South America in 2005 and 2006 brought socialists to power in Bolivia, Venezuela and Chile. Most stunning was the victory for the indigenous people of Venezuela.

South American societies are transitioning from agrarian reform to belated industrial revolutions in the climate of the Information Age.

We have seen South Africa, too, shed apartheid and Afrikaner rule to establish majority rule of the Bantu peoples. But we have also seen many African nations struggle desperately to find their way to peace and prosperity in the clash of native cultures with warlords or with neighboring nations.

More than four centuries after European explorers established their cultural presence in the New World, there is notable evidence that native cultures are reemerging and reconnecting with their vanquished pasts.

We are in a new day from uncertain beginnings forging into the future in a world that is mainly non-white, non-European, and non-Western.

Leadership matters. We easily forget our struggles and take comfort in our triumphs as if utopian. We do this now at our risk and peril.

“NOWHERE MAN” IN A NEW DAY

FUTURE PERFECT attempts to bridge this void by connecting two themes that are currently changing the United States, and by extension the world, two themes that flow into each other. Leadership is one, while the influence of amateurs is the other. Amateurs in the new context are not dilettantes, not dabblers without focus, but strenuous pursuers of specific interests outside the infrastructure of institutional authority.

Amateurs display a multiplicity of standards, dimensions, declensions, and variations. They emerge from the deep or the fringe to take hold in the center, and have been doing so from primitive to advanced societies across time and the world. The incipient rumble of the new amateur is chthonic but that should give “Nowhere Man” little comfort.

Long before Europeans came to the American continent, these two themes were in evidence. Now, they drive the future. The answers to these seismic shifts are seldom found in the Ivy halls of academia, in the scientific laboratories of cutting-edge research, or in the dominance of mega corporations with appetites for raw resources and virgin markets, but in the rising voices of abandoned peoples about the globe that speak and act under the radar of technocratic power.

There are two clashing frontiers prominently in evidence:

· Agrarian societies still dominate the globe. They are being forced through nineteenth and twentieth century industrialization and into the twenty-first century, painfully unshackling themselves from the remnants of feudalism, colonialism, and totalitarianism to find their definition of freedom and well being.

· The exploding Information Age is prominent in a handful of Western and Eastern societies. These societies show a rapacious hunger for economic dominance against the reality of delimiting natural resources, while showing a cavalier disregard for the other eighty percent living in poverty. Such people on the fringe have little to eat, even less likelihood of indoor plumbing, potable drinking water, electricity, access to health care, or any hope of relief from the drudgery of daily survival. Unfortunately, emerging third world industrial societies display the same cruel apathy toward environmental ecology or the needs of their less fortunate neighbors. They want economic parity at any cost, and they want it now.

World peace is never possible when twenty percent control eighty percent of all the amenities of life.

This invites unintended consequences with the “haves” and “have nots” displaying the same utopian hubris. Many third world societies have been under Western dominance for centuries, and want their chance at wealth, prosperity and power. Now, when they see it is their turn, they aren’t buying into an ecological morality of temperance. Instead, they personify Western narcissistic greed.

“Nowhere Man” has evolved unsuspectingly from college-trained professionals from New York City to Trinidad, from Johannesburg to Bangkok, from Berlin to Delhi. These players are actors on a stage with couth and cunning, where presence counts more than purpose, where one is judged more on the basis of polish and credentials than merit, and where symbolic interaction is more the focus than sober results.

David Riesman tells us we are living in the “cathedrals of learning” without the faith that built those cathedrals, indeed, without the faith that built that society. Nor is there ample conviction and dedication to sustain it. Thomas Sowell points out that in our most esteemed universities “A’s” are given to more than ninety percent of the undergraduates with nine out of ten likely to graduate with honors. He writes: “Students can graduate from some of the most prestigious colleges in the land without a clue as to what the Second World War or the Cold War was about.” Moral curiosity has failed to be stimulated in the curriculum as graduates measure their worth in dollars to be made, not in a difference to make. This cynicism then carries into their working life.

Education has become a two-dimensional process, an interruption in “life” to secure membership in the “good life,” which is interpreted in specific economic terms. Passion and heart have given way to an obsession with gain. Earning a degree is not a commencement but a meal ticket as education is an end. There is little fondness in “Nowhere Man” for raw courage, artless determination, inflexible fidelity to interests entrusted, and self-confidence founded in unwavering personal morality, integrity, and loyalty. The game is to stay fluid and go with the flow, as confrontation is anathema to a career. Authentic man has faded to the whimsical and therefore has drifted into oblivion.

When perfection becomes obsessive, filling all the boxes to becoming a CEO or whatever, that which is perfected is more real than the perfection. You have entered “Nowhere Land,” which is the home of “Nowhere Man.” He is product of the technological age and disciple of its disingenuous church. Analytical determinism has been the problem with institutions with virtually all streams of post-modern mainly Western societies. People as flawed human beings have been lost in the equation. It is our perfections that are on display, but it is our buried imperfections that make us human and connectible.

Societies on the fringe are moving back to their roots to rediscover the lost human soul.

The role of the specialist will gradually recede into history as the knowledge base rapidly flows into every segment of society, and no one is special anymore.

The once esteemed specialist, the compartmental bureaucrat, and ubiquitous technocrat are now being displaced by the amorphous amateur, the indigenous leader, while the complexion of society continues to change from rigid institutional life into free flowing enterprise where few of the traditional rules apply, and where leaders rise out of the tall grass and make up their own rules as they go along.

The ground is shifting under leadership’s sacred touchstones of power (property, wealth, clout, influence, connections) and taking on moral equivalents that cannot be measured materially, but can be only appreciated spiritually. Moral leadership is on the rise while material leadership is on the decline.

Material authority in government was evident in the preemptive war in Iraq and its half-hearted response to Hurricane Katrina. This was again on display in industry with wacky scandals from Enron to WorldCom with no one minding the store or concerned with the people’s business. It was also obvious in Homeland Security when an amber alert was issued on data months old, costing millions across the country for no perceptible threat. And it was painfully evident in Medicare’s 2006 Medicare Prescription Drug Entitlement Program, which would make Rube Goldberg chuckle in his grave. Corporate sin has come to define our times and our way of operating in “Nowhere Land.”

When everyone is in charge, no one is; when no one is in charge, capacious energy is expended after the fact and often to devious purpose. Conversely, when poll numbers governs leadership, than the majority rules and never well. When soldiers don’t wear uniforms but strap explosives to their chests, the enemy is everywhere and the stealth of terror turns the world into “Nowhere Land” and everyone into “Nowhere Man.”

Pitrim Sorokin suggests we are now ending a six hundred-year-long Sensate day, coming into an “Ideational culture of the creative tomorrow.” He continues: “The oblique rays of the sun still illumine the glory of the passing epoch. But the light is fading, and in the deepening shadows it becomes more and more difficult to see clearly and to orient ourselves safely in the confusion of the twilight.” It has been so since the beginning of time.

The constant flow of experience from the hunter and gatherer, to the farmer, to the expansionistic warrior, to the industrialist, and now to the electronic agent has found the cost each time more inflated, the unintended consequences more deflating. The buffalo and North American Indian are gone, while the United States, still a young nation, dominates the world. This dominance is shifting as well. Americans cannot imagine much less fathom being less than the center of world attention. Greece, Rome, France, Spain, and Great Britain have had their day and have had to step off center stage. While the US continues to occupy it at the moment, its departure is likewise inevitable.

With this in mind, FUTURE PERFECT opens with a profile of a rank amateur and untrained leader, who moved the US out of its agrarian fixation and into the industrial age. He preserved America’s national integrity when the British, French and Spanish had not yet conceded the continent was lost to them. His predecessors in the American presidency, all cultured and eastern elitists scorned his commonness and lack of couth, yet he pulled the presidency of James Monroe from the jaws of disaster with his bold military exploits. He seldom asked permission to venture beyond his military authority, but was quick to repent after succeeding as he did in Florida and the Gulf Coast, when this was contested territory of interest to Spain, France and Great Britain.

The man was Andrew Jackson. Often called “the second George Washington” for his role in saving the union, while sowing the seeds that would lead to the Civil War, he is profiled here because leadership is not clean and neat; nor is it one-dimensional. It works when it carries the DNA of the people and understands their genetic code.

You will see there is something Machiavellian in Andrew Jackson. He played outside the rules because the rules generally did not take into account the way the world had spread itself before his eyes. For him, a government of reason did not always offer satisfactory means to deal with a range of perceived injustices. Consequently, he recurred to his own highly emotionalized inner sense of right and resolve without apology. He lacked subtlety and was a clear-cut, no-nonsense man with undisguised purpose. People seldom fooled him no matter how high their station, as he was comfortable with the emotive qualities of his own constitution.

Later, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google will be profiled as the new amateurs, or amateurs with credentials. They display many qualities similar to Jackson. While Jackson had little formal education, these thirty-something youngsters hold graduate degrees from fine institutions. Even so, like Jackson, their own lights did not blind them when they left the cave of “Nowhere Land” and the mindset of “Nowhere Man.”

PAST IMPERFECT will follow to show the price now being paid for stumbling in the recent past, only to come to punishing fruition in the PRESENT RIDICULOUS. The theme of the American conscience is “Nowhere Man,” not because Americans are running away from their problems, but because Americans fail to recognize they have such problems. They remain in the firm grip of utopia, confident in the belief that surrealistic progress in the future will take care of all challenges.

REVISITING JACKSONIAN LEADERSHIP: OUT OF THE VIRGIN SOIL RISES A LEADER

The battleground between people of property and the working class has been a contentious war from the earliest days of the American republic. It wasn’t until the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829 – 1837) that the credo of workingmen had a powerful advocate, not in rhetoric but in action.

Before, men such as Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and John Marshall, among other Federalists, were convinced that common men could not govern themselves, that the common man with the vote would spell chaos and doom for the United States. Indeed, the key to stability and progress resided, according to their lights, in the landed gentry who would rule with compassion and prudence.

To a greater or lesser degree, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, James Madison, and James Monroe, who preceded Andrew Jackson in the White House, were of a similar mind. They were all Easterners. Jackson was from the West (Tennessee) and South (North Carolina). He had a grass roots mentality leavened in violence where victory was surviving for another day.

They were idealists, dreamers, whereas Jackson was a man of action, who perceived the situation and wrestled it to his will. Jefferson envisioned a republic of small farmers living in idealized tranquility. This proved a gap between aspirations and reality as he presided over a massive expansion of the slaveholding plantation system.

Nothing happens in a vacuum; nothing of consequence is nice and tidy or is likely to make perfect sense. Nor do leaders come forward with impeccable credentials, incontrovertible personas, or faultless characters. Leaders of depth are authentic with inner strength, expressively resolved, defiantly focused, and decisively committed to action. They go where they must, choose their enemies with the precision of marksmen, and are untroubled if disengaged from the clamor beyond.

With Jackson, when the moment of action came, he made up his own mind. Once he crossed the bridge between thought and action, no threats, no warnings of catastrophe, no dictates of prudence, could sway him. “I care nothing about clamors, sir, mark me! I do precisely what I think just and right.”

Jackson spoke quickly and forcibly, often emphasizing his points by raising a clenched fist in a brief and sharp gesture. When his mind was made up, he would draw down the left corner of his mouth, giving his face the pugnacious glare of the fighter he was.

For superb self-sufficiency to be effective, it must be matched by an equally superb self-control. His towering rages, then, despite the Jacksonian myth, were a way of avoiding futile arguments. Jackson’s intelligence expressed itself in judgment rather than in analysis. One hundred and fifty years later, Edward de Bono would call such a man a “lateral thinker,” or a thinker outside the box.

Jackson had vigorous thoughts, intimates would say, but not the faculty of arranging them in a regular composition. Possessed of a mind that was ever dealing with the substances of things, he was not very careful in regard to the precise terms. John Quincy Adams dismissed this artless act as that of an “uncultured man.” Adams was cultured to the toes but a very ineffective leader.

The character of Jackson’s mind was that of judgment with a rapid almost intuitive perception followed by an instant and decisive action. To him, knowledge, per se, seemed entirely unnecessary. He saw intuitively into everything, and reached a conclusion by a shortcut while others were beating the bush for the game. His native strength, as well as intellect as character, compelled every man to be his tool that came within reach. The more cunning the individual served only to make him the sharper tool to Jackson's purposes.

Leadership is not only seeing the problem clearly but also husbanding resources effectively to meet the challenge. The highest administrative ability is intuitive, and precedes argument, and rises above it. It is the perception of the thing to be done, its propriety, and necessity that is so strongly felt that it cannot be disclosed or discussed, but must be acted upon posthaste that is the mantle of the leader. Jackson had this. He was not a man of reflection, not a dreamer, but a man of action. He created an age, and led the way from American agrarianism to working class industrialism. In the last analysis, his strength lay in his deep natural understanding of the common people.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. writes in The Age of Jackson (1945):

The America of Jefferson had begun to disappear before Jefferson himself had retired from the presidential chair. That paradise of small farms, each man secure on his own freehold, resting under his own vine and fig trees, was already darkened by the shadow of impending change. For Jefferson, Utopia had cast itself in the form a nation of husbandmen. “Those who labor in the earth,” he had said, “are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people”; and the American dream required that the land be kept free from the corruptions of industrialism. “While we have land to labor then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff.” Far better to send our materials to Europe for manufacture, than to bring workingmen to these virgin shores, “and with them their manners and principles.” “The mobs of great cities,” he concluded ominously, “add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.”

An age is never ready for change, and even the most capable of leaders can be so committed to an age that they are unwilling to adapt to a new one. Often it takes a maverick to unshackle the “Nowhere Man” from his prison in “Nowhere Land.”

Jefferson and his Eastern colleagues were the former; Jackson was the latter. None of Jackson’s predecessors completely escaped the monarchist caste system of Great Britain, save Jefferson who saw gentleman plantation owners running the country. Even Jackson was called “King Jackson” for his authoritarian ways, especially his attack on the Bank of the United States, and disregard of the Supreme Court. He set the precedence and created the power of the presidency.

Jackson saw his role clearly as advocate of the people. He neither had the rhetoric nor oratorical style of Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Clay, tall, brilliant, reckless, fascinating, indolent, was irresistibly attractive. He had broad and exciting vision, which took the place of ideas. He carried all, not by logic, not by knowledge, but by storm, by charm and courage and fire. Schlesinger claims his rhetoric was often tasteless and inflated, his matter often inconsequential, and the country may not have trusted him, but they loved him.

Daniel Webster, on the other hand, lacked precisely that talent for stirring the popular imagination as Clay could. That being said he was an awe-inspiring figure, but loved his comforts too much. He was considered “the great canon loaded to the lips,” who when inspiration lagged was merely pompous. The people, who trusted Jackson and loved Clay, could neither trust nor love Webster. He never won the people because he never gave himself to them. He had no instinct for the massive movement. Indeed, only Jackson of these giants did.


JACKSON AND THE PEOPLE

One of the early policies of President Jackson was to take on the Bank of the United States. It was not actually a national bank but a banking corporation located in Philadelphia privately controlled, but possessing unique and profitable relations with the government. Jackson was determined to kill it. His adversary was Nicholas Biddle a most astute banker at its head. It would be a war without conclusion during his administration.

As one member of Jackson’s administration put it regarding its relationship to the bank, “We know absolutely nothing. There is no consultation, no exchanges of sentiment, no production of correspondence, but merely a rapid, superficial, general statement. We are perfect ciphers.”

Biddle not only suppressed all communications but also insisted flatly that the Bank was not accountable to the government or the people. His chief supporters in government were Henry Clay and Daniel Webster. Jackson told his vice president, “The bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me, but I will kill it!” It would be killed, but not in his administration, but in that of President Van Buren’s, who would create the Federal Reserve System, which we still enjoy today.

Jackson had the heart of the people and believed in the essential rights of the common man. He expressed this plainly:

“It is to be regretted, that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Human institutions cannot produce equality of talents, of education, or of wealth. In industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions . . . to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society – the farmers, mechanics, and laborers – who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government."

Such generalities did not suffice to win the day. He had to create a wedge between the hard-money arguments – the economic argument that the paper system caused periodic depressions and the social argument that it built up a financial aristocracy -- by submitting the Bank was unconstitutional, and then on the political argument that the Bank represented too great a centralization of power under private control.

Jackson led the people to see the Bank as a distinction between their humble status and the rich and powerful. He assumed the posture of taking on institutional authority and the eastern establishment. People saw this as expressing their will and forgave him his demagogic language.

The great media for the dissemination of information and the molding of public opinion fought him. Haughty and sterile intellectuals fought him. Musty reactionaries fought him. Hollow and outworn traditionalists shook a trembling finger at him. It seemed sometimes as if everyone was against him save the people of the United States.

Americans love to champion the underdog, and Jackson played the role with consummate skill. Over the years, this war with the Bank would go on, withdrawal of federal deposits would cripple the Bank, a depression would follow, and the bank war would continue into President Van Buren’s administration until the Federal Reserve was finally created.

Somewhere along the way, Nicholas Biddle, who represented not only the Bank, but symbolized the moneyed class, adopted a self-crippling dismissal attitude by inferring the “cracker president and his motley crew” couldn’t touch him. With this imperious stance, he lost his grip on reality. Ambition, vanity, and love of power had crossed the thin line to megalomania.

So little had he understood the will of the American people that he ordered the circulation of thirty thousand copies of the president’s Bank veto as a campaign document for Henry Clay. He completely misconceived the ground of the Jackson attack, which was to maintain the supremacy of the union and to serve the interests of the people. To the end, Biddle believed Jackson’s secret purpose was to found a new national bank of his own. Jackson won the election of 1832 in a landslide over Clay. Above all, the Bank War triumphantly established Jackson in the confidence of the people.

Jackson summed up his broad aims in this manner:

“The planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer, all know that their success depends upon their industry and economy, and that they must not expect to become suddenly rich by the fruits of their toil. These classes form the great body of the people of the United States; they are the bone and sinew of the country. Yet they are in constant danger of losing their fair influence in the Government. Why? The mischief springs from the power, which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency, which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges, which they have succeeded in obtaining in the different States. Unless you become more watchful you will in the end find that the most important powers of Government have been given or bartered away, and the control over your dearest interests has passed into the hands of these corporations."

The credo for workingmen became equal universal education, abolition of imprisonment for debt, abolition of all licensed monopolies, a less expensive law system, equal taxation of property, effective lien laws for laborers, all officers of the workplace to be elected by the people, and no legislation on religion.

The Jacksonian policy moved the Western frontier from the fringe to the center changing the process from political liberty to economic liberty. Politicians and middle-class intellectuals, enlightened by Jeffersonian insights into the economic basis of democracy, now found Jackson bringing the working classes nearer the actual causes of their discontent. Again, Jefferson’s aspirations required the drive and cunning of Jackson to bring them to fruition.

Jackson understood American society was in transition; that the laws that governed the economic interests of men contributed more than government, more than morals, more than religion to make society what it ultimately becomes. The distinction was not between farmers and city dwellers, but between the productive and unproductive classes, between those whose labor increased the national wealth and those whose labor did not.

In primitive society, every man had enjoyed the fruits of his own industry. The advances of technology and the increasing division of labor had brought a great accession to the power of production, and this seemed, for a time, the remedy for the existing evils of society.

But the economic gain in productive power had on the whole injured the lot of the worker. Massive unemployment had occurred in Europe with production exceeding demand, pushing workers to the sidelines. This condition did not yet exist in the United States because of the expansion into the unsettled lands of the West with a constant demand for greater production, but Jackson could see it was only a matter of time before it would occur.

Already, the condition of poverty and plenty was evident, which was an artificial thing created not from a lack of productive capacity but from limits placed on production to enhance the price of goods.

A new class had been created in industrial society, a class that amassed wealth without creating it. Trade gave rise to a currency, and credit, and interest of money, and these, though they produced none of the objects of wealth, of themselves became the instruments of wealth accumulation. Stocks and bonds and mortgages became the paper currency with the risk falling on the productive classes of workers to suffer for the folly, and not the capitalists. This artificial state of society was a new reality, which could not conceal the new truth: he who does not raise his own bread, eats the fruits of another man’s labor.

Jackson designated this class the “financial aristocracy,” a race of men who are non-producers, and who render no equivalent to society for what they consume. Their power is founded on capital, not on land, without permanence, nationality, or sense of moral obligation. He saw this as a more uncompromising character than the feudal system or the landed aristocracy. The capitalist class had captured the state. Workingmen languished in oppression under its sway. The lament of the time: “All wealth is the product of labor and belongs by right to him who produces it, and yet how small a part of the products of its labor falls to the laboring class!”

The Workingmen Movement became a contest between two new classes in industrial society: the powerful moneyed class encroachment upon the weak working class, or the rich upon the poor.

The capitalistic trend, in Jackson’s view, was to ultimately reduce producers to a state of slavery. What was already apparent in the 1830s was that the stimulus to business enterprise by technological improvement, even more than from unrestricted competition, was driving small capitalism into ruin. It was oppressing the whole laboring class.

The banking system and paper money was proving a source of industrial oppression. The emerging what Jackson called the “professional aristocracy” of priests, lawyers, and politicians was seen to be using their power to cheat the people. Most fundamentally, Jackson believed a false system of education more germane to aristocratic Europe than to working class America was engulfing society. There was no attempt to make working people self-sufficient. Instead, there was a sense that the upper classes distinguished socially by exclusiveness, economically by wealth, and politically by mistrust of the people had grasped all the power of the state. It was in this climate of change that Jacksonian democracy took hold, forming the Democratic Party, and declaring the right of government came from the people, resided with the people, and with the people, alone.

It was a time when the powerful moved to increase its power by first charging the people who resisted with revolutionary designs. Unions attempted to form as a measure of self-defense only to be opposed by Congress. This placed employees at the mercy of their employers: that is, to have those whose interests it was to reduce wages set wage rates.

Critics claimed a public largely uninformed by ideas held the impression that the General was a friend of the American free enterprise, while they claimed he was not. They attributed Jackson’s popular support simply to people’s enthusiasm for his heroics at New Orleans. In this climate, radicals rose and fell on the frontier of an unstable society with extremes of poverty and wealth, but with easy access to riches, and quick turnover in the composition of the moneyed class, not unlike the frenetic opportunism that rules the new frontier of the twenty-first century.

It was Jackson’s constant agitation that changed society into a program, then a party, and then into a process that remains with us to this day. But as his second term was coming to an end, there were premonitions of catastrophe. The government was so corrupt, Henry Clay insisted, “the time had arrived when reformation or revolution must go on.” Many agreed, and for a time feelings ran so high that Van Buren took to wearing a brace of pistols when he presided over the Senate.

Hezekiah Niles noting the upsurge in popular violence was moved to report, “Society seems everywhere unhinged.” The character of his countrymen seemed suddenly to change. Foreign visitors noted the disorder. An admirer of the democratic experiment was moved to say, “farewell to Utopia.” The American experience was never taken seriously abroad as a sustainable idea, but only as a utopian ideal.

The presidency of Jackson accomplished a revolution in political values. It destroyed neo-Federalism as a public social philosophy where a ruling class dictated to the masses. It restated fundamentally the presuppositions of American political life. The Jacksonian revolution rested on the premise of a deep-rooted conflict in society between the “producing” and “non-producing” classes with farmers and laborers on the one hand, and the business community on the other. It was a system designed to strip the working classes of the fruits of their labor, or those who produced the wealth being themselves left poor. Jackson saw the role of government to redress this injustice.

Jackson made every effort to resist the concentration of wealth and power further into the hands of the few, pointing out that from the start of the century, first in banking, and insurance, then in transportation, canals, bridges, turnpikes, then in manufacturing, the corporation was gradually becoming the dominant form of economic organization.

The Jacksonian generation was the first to face and make a large-scale adjustment to this new economic mechanism. For owners and large investors, the adjustment presented no particular problem. But for those outside of the wealth creators there existed a feeling of deep misgiving and betrayal. What Jackson succeeded in doing, which caught his opponents by surprise, was to declare that economic and political adjustment was not the primary issue, but moral betrayal of the average citizen’s sense of security, trust, identity, well being, and satisfaction in work and life under the US constitution.

The new industrial order of the early nineteenth century stirred up deep currents of discontent through the laboring classes. The tensions of adjustment to new modes of employment and production, as agriculture gave way to manufacturing and industrialization, created pervasive anxieties with people suffering under the new system. This led working people to fear for their self-respect and status in society.

Andrew Jackson broke the strangle hold of the presidency with the eastern aristocratic establishment (George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams) with a ringing statement of his belief in the essential rights of the common man, which has been echoed in these rising democracies across the globe:

“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes. Distinctions in society will always exist under every just government. Equality of talents, of education, or of wealth cannot be produced by human institutions. In the full enjoyment of the gifts of Heaven and the fruits of superior industry, economy, and virtue, every man is equally entitled to protection by law; but when the laws undertake to add to these natural and just advantages artificial distinctions to make the rich richer and the potent more powerful, the humble members of society – farmers, mechanics, and laborers – who have neither the time nor the means of securing like favors to themselves, have a right to complain of the injustice of their Government.”

Now, in the twenty-first century, an inexorable destiny seems to be pressing working people to unshackle themselves from a system that exaggerates these distinctions. The common man is rising from his world of “Nowhere Land” to unchartered territory in FUTURE PERFECT.

Our concepts of a free and democratic society place the emphasis on progress and perfection, which may differ with the non-Anglo-Saxon world. Unique cultural propensities are likely to dictate their version of a democratic society, which may or may not be especially free. Clearly, other cultures are not accepting the imposition of the technological West. God anoints no nation or society with the quintessential formula for meaning and cultural harmony of a society. Nor has any crusade successfully driven a people from their hereditary base. Between 1095 and 1291, there were Nine Christian Crusades against the Islam infidels of the East, ending in Western defeat and disgrace with Tripoli falling to the Moslems on the latter year. Now, nearly a thousand years later “Nowhere Man” still resides in the utopian Western intellect apparently learning little during the intervening millennium.

The focus of FUTURE PERFECT is on Western society’s mistaken belief that through “cut and control” progress on the wings of technology man would sore over his human deficiencies to the Promised Land. Instead, it has taken him to “Nowhere Land” where technology’s golden achievements may ultimately contribute to his planetary ruin. Man has used his mind, not to liberate him from his fears, but instead to drive him into its prison. Man’s story reads like a novel, and in a sense “Nowhere Land” is the fiction of an ideal state. But reality still haunts “Nowhere Man’s” as he attempts to bend Mother Nature to his will failing to realize he exists or dies at her pleasure.


________________________________________________________________________
This is a segment of Dr. Fisher’s new book yet to be published titled TECHNOLOGY THE NEW RELIGION OF NOWHERE MAN. Check out his website: www.peripateticphilosopher.com where his books and some articles are listed.