KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN -- FOUR

KIERKEGAARD DEFENSE OF THE COMMON MAN – FOUR

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© May 16, 2012

THE COTERIES OF THE CULTIVATED

There is nothing that Americans attempt to do more strenuously than to escape the commonality of their roots.  The motivation is to win acceptance and inclusion in the believed to be rarefied air of the cultivated, to bathe in the reflected light of the real people who count for something, as if common man counts for little or nothing.

Money, alone, will not get them there.  Education has a better chance, but it, too, cannot do the trick.  Often, marriage provides a leg up to shed the blemishes of their roots.  Nor can academic, political or business acclaim ensure membership in this coterie.  To blend in as well as be accepted, they must be seen as belonging by the patina of manners, diction, interests, beliefs and gravitas.  This is required of even peripheral insiders who serve the coterie. 

It is a heady climb and can take generations by going to the right schools, marrying the right people, pursuing the right careers, and living in the right part of the country.

Sometimes the climb for peripheral insiders can be accomplished in a single generation by being celebrities in one's own right, as television commentators, journalists, bankers or extraordinaire entrepreneurs.  Occasionally, Presidents of the United States make the cut, but not always.

Thinking as I have of late of Kierkegaard and the common man, I was reminded of this watching PBS television, and a rather obsequious and fawning discussion of J.P. Morgan Chase’s current financial fiasco in losing $2 billion of its clients' money. 

Charlie Rose and a New York Times columnist admitted at the outset of the discussion that they “were friends” of CEO James Dimon.  This disclosure was meant apparently to diminish any bias, while broadcasting their connection to one of the wealthier men on the planet as well as one of the best connected. 

As amusing as this was, David Brooks managed to top it with his description of President Barack Obama as “the ESPN man.”  Cable television in 2012 is doing for the president what the Internet did for him in his campaign in 2008.  The coteries of the cultivated are lining up in support of him.  Brooks notes this is keeping him competitive for reelection when all the traditional indicators would suggest otherwise, given the economic mood of the country and the shift towards conservative politics.  Why so?

Brooks writes:

“Normally, presidents look weak during periods of economic stagnation, overwhelmed by events.  But Obama has displayed a kind of ESPN masculinity – postfeminist in his values, but also thoroughly traditional in style – hypercompetitive, restrained, not given to self-doubt, rarely self-indulgent.”

As a result, the president comes off aggressive, but also in touch with the middle class.  His coterie leadership style is keeping him afloat.  Brooks continues:

“He has defined a version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manner and reticence.”

In politics, as in life, it is all about identity, which brings us back to Kierkegaard.

HOW THESE COTERIES OPERATE

Most Americans of European stock have descendents in their tree of the peasant class, which formed cliques working the land of feudal lords.  Our brief three hundred years of history can find the so-called "cultivated," rising out of that stock. 

Kierkegaard was born (1813) when feudalism was being replaced by budding capitalism, but the seeds of feudalism in cliques remained.  People still cowered in fear, he suggests, as “the manner, not the message, was the reason.”  It was best to stay in your place, and not create waves.

The Danish philosopher saw that the church and humanists combined  to preserve the traditional religious-political climate he appalled. 

We have seen evidence of this mindset in the United States to our day.  The public scoffs at poor people of all races being on welfare.  At the same time, that same public does everything to keep them there, by limiting access to unions, education, craftsmanship, and emergence from such dependency. 

Kierkegaard enjoyed the form and the content of culture by dint of his social class and education, and even admired the aristocracy of the intellect while attacking it incessantly.  He did this because he understood the tenor of his times was directed against the common man. 

He was weary of the cloak of coyness that maintained the "coteries of the cultivated" that pulled everyone down to the same level. 

It was a little bit like the present.  The tenor of Kierkegaard’s time was a sociable tone of conversation that dulled the edge off of discussion of real issues and real problems, until there was no originality of thought.  Today, those in positions of power are quick to be skeptical of any originality encountered that addresses the plight of the common man.  Instead, we have collectively gravitated to a mania for sameness, for the protocol of the acceptable, leaving no room for either pathos or passion. 

To combat this mania, Kierkegaard in his refined and underhanded way, behind the disguise of indirect communication, constructed bombshells with his books meant to explode in the minds of readers once his message was digested. 

Like Shakespeare, he saw life as a stage and all of us actors on that stage.  My sense is that my words might have resonated with him:

“We are all authors of our own footprints in the sand, heroes of the novels inscribed in our hearts.  Everyone’s life, without exception, is sacred, unique, scripted high drama, played out before an audience of one, with but one actor on stage.  The sooner we realize this the more quickly we overcome the bondage to loneliness and find true friendship with ourselves.” (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend, 1996)

Kierkegaard knew that living in the moment, what an actor does, triumphing over stage fright when defending oneself against discrimination, ridicule or unfair practices, demands a composure and ease on that stage in this dramaturgic play in life. 

Often, when we are the victim of circumstances, we instead act as if the guilty in our unease.  Against this, Kierkegaard mounts a self-defense:

“Completely unselfish students of truth have never played hide-and-seek with the crowd so that they could then play the game of surprise on the rare occasion when they present themselves as objects of astonishment.  On the contrary, they have lived with the common man, have conversed in the streets and alleys, renouncing every claim to respect.”

The whole piece here is a self-examination and a self-defense disguised as a dramaturgic analysis.  It is this little work on the theatre of the mind in which he reflects on unrest, playfulness, coquetry, and especially, reliability.  Reliability is the existential touchstone that makes it possible to defend all the playfulness, secretiveness and style. 

His interest is in the power of the creative force that permeates the unconscious and is displayed as unrest.  The unrest that he is talking about is not the unrest of which one soon tires, but the unrest of infinity that stirs the timbers of our souls to rejuvenate us, refresh us, heal us, and raise us to higher understanding. 

This, he says, is the unrest of genius.  It reveals something common to us all, elemental, inexhaustible, but tapped by few of us.  It is the playfulness of a mind such as when Einstein flirted with ideas beyond the pale of convention, and pursued them like the sound of the wind. 

Such actors have the ability to be simultaneously deceptive and truthful, playing with thematic nuances of their discipline but with the agitation of unrest but the reliability of calm to see what has never been seen before.  Kierkegaard writes:

“Only in recollection is there absolute rest, and this is precisely why there is also the quick fire, the imperishable glow of the eternal . . .Like an idealizing light, this pure, reassuring, and rejuvenating recollection will illuminate the entire performance, which will become completely transparent in that illumination.”

A writer composes out of his own age and the reflections it germinates.  Kierkegaard’s age was that of revolution with the birth of mass society.  He could see the rise of common people, whereas many of his ilk would deny such a rise.  He writes:

“A man of the common people who has an essential and passionate commitment to an important decision is essentially cultivated.  A superficial and fragmentary set of manners based upon an inner emptiness, the colorful display of swaggering weeds in comparison to the humble bowing of the blessed grain is mere form and affectation.”

True as these words are, as I’ve attempted to display in these opening lines, weeds are as stubborn today as they were in his day.

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