An Age of Iconoclasm
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
-Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
We need a new mythology.
For every new insight our History enlightens, we find another aspect obscured, a shadow cast across all the wisdom that failed to survive us. We guess at the meaning of icon-etched artefact, of spit and charcoal spread along the cave walls. But flesh withers and dies, papyrus crumbles to dust, and what remains of the Great Library of Alexandria? A half-remembered tale of the fire that reduced all its knowledge to ash.
We crane our necks, lungs strained with bated breath, listening. For the cry of Prometheus in the hiss of the flames; for the footfalls of Gilgamesh, forever seeking immortality, as he haunts the floodplain of our ancestry like a mirage.
For the Old Gods. For the voices that echoed through so many epochs, only to die away. For the hope that we might better understand those that remain.
In religion we’ll find some of the greatest lies and most profound truths codified. And as we listen, the most constant reverberation is a blurring of the two, a mirror image of an actuality:
That the gods make us in their image.
But those who continue to seek, who continue to listen, will discover the deeper truth:
We make them in ours.
It is no accident that the gods of the desert were harsh, and vengeful. That lands besieged by drought and famine found themselves beholden to gods demanding sacrifices to appease their every callous whim, while people in the lands of plenty developed a pantheism that imbued every stream and meadow and rock with the sacred. Dig through the layers of the Torah, and you’ll find the fragments of a god remade across the ages. The early Hebrews called him Yahweh, a close, personal god who walked alongside his creations in the garden. A century later, they called him Elohim. And as they migrated, and suffered through exile, the faith changed: from the monolatry of one local god among many, to the monotheism that would see him remade as God, the One, the Only, a distant and omnipotent creator of the universe who might compete with the great gods of Babylon.
As they remade their god, so they remade themselves- from a people of flesh, destined to die and sink into Sheol, to dualistic vessels housing a Platonic soul capable of transcending the corporeal into an afterlife newly ornamented by Hellenism.
For the slaves in America, backs broken and split by whip, God was merciful. Not the petty, vengeful deity demanding the genocide of Ammonites and Moabites, but the benevolent force that brought the Israelites out of Egypt, that delivered the covenant of love in Christ. But the slave masters had the same religion, and when God spoke to them, he spoke through Leviticus, through the laws that delineated a system of human enslavement. That same Christ, who flipped the tables of the moneychangers, can be found every Sunday morning in soup kitchens feeding the casualties of capitalism, and in the prosperity gospels of televangelists begging but a few dollars more to fund their private jets.
There are plenty of explanations proffered for how the god of the Hebrews endured the ages. The believers will claim it as proof of the divine at work; the skeptics will cling to historical happenstance.
Through the lens of natural selection, it appears another example of how the fittest have always survived: they adapt. They morph and change, a sort of Rorschach ink blot that allows continual reinterpretation for each generation seeking divine justification for their self-worship.
Human history is a history of continual change, and the gods we’ve created in our image must remain in our image. They must change with us. And those that cannot be remade are consigned to history, to dine in the halls of Valhalla, alongside Ra and the Jade Emperor, tracking Apollo’s celestial arc and admiring Aphrodite’s beauty from afar.
Those changes have carried us here, to this moment, where we gaze wide-eyed at the immensity of our collective nuclear arsenals, lament the vastness of our collective ineptitude, and wonder whether we’ll survive ourselves.
Millennia from now, the next great galactic Caesar may sweep through our solar system, on his way to pacify the denizens of some far-flung corner of his empire. Perhaps, as he passes the charred embers of a dead celestial body, drifting third from the star, he’ll slow his retinue, and turn to address his attendant.
“What of that dead world?”
In an echo of the Alexandrian library, the attendant will shake his head and reply, “It was once called Earth. Now, nothing remains. A shame; I heard there was great knowledge there.”
And if they are to approach the dead planet, and the ring of debris caught in its slow, silent orbit, they may find a final few surviving relics, and among them the records that tell of our own age.
Without the hindsight of the historian, I cannot say what we’ll be remembered for. But if I stop once again to listen, for those Old Gods, I’ll find them more distant than ever, drowned out by the cacophony of New Zealotry. Perhaps that’s how the historians would define this age.
For while we’ve always made our gods in our image, never before have we so feverishly worked to remake the world in the image of our gods.
Can we still call the hand of the free market invisible, when worn like an armband on every devoted capitalist’s sleeve? When entire sections of society must mobilize and intervene to keep it solvent? The very idea was that our own individual interests would serve to regulate this system of capital. But instead of accepting that system’s failure and seeking reform, so many adherents contort their own minds, hammering away at the edges of our world in a desperate attempt to break it down into their chosen compartment. There need be no conspiracy of elites to engineer an oligarchy; when enough of us believe in the God of the Market, we’ll hold our own wages down, we’ll erode our own tax base, we’ll allow our own public goods privatized to serve the few over the many, because those are the sacrifices our god requires. We’ll decide to incentivize our financial system speculating its way into catastrophe by bailing it out afterwards, falling behind our representatives with the devotion of Isaac following Abraham to his own sacrifice. We’ll allow talking heads to perpetuate their talking points until their narratives are so familiar that their propaganda becomes cliché. “Burdensome regulations on small business…” and say no more! If my wages failed to appease, I’ll lay my health insurance upon the altar. Poison my drinking water, dismantle my watchdog groups, defund my schools until they fail so completely that there’s no choice left but to sell them off to a board of private donors. In Market We Trust.
What of the God of War? The Greeks called him Ares; in certain circles, we may know him as Boeing or Lockheed Martin, though his power transcends as something greater: Public Opinion, growing continually, exponentially, with every flight of F-16s over the football stadium, every blockbuster film chronicling the heroism and moral rectitude of military might. Even the torturer may be reformed in the public eye, when recast as the will of freedom and democracy at work.
One can easily point to this god’s failings. Our instigated coups and outright invasions that destabilize other societies for generations, leaving the vulnerable to suffer through the monsters who rise to fill the power vacuum. “Should we open our doors to these tired, these poor, these huddled masses yearning to breathe free?” some ask. “Madness!” The god cries in response. “There are wolves among the sheep at the door. Bolt it tight.”
“But what of the role we’ve played in this villainy?”
And with that the questioner makes the fatal error, unintentionally stepping into the line of fire of a people well-conditioned to police those weak in the faith:
“I find it inappropriate and, frankly, disrespectful to criticize our revered military leadership, our brave men and women in uniform.” “It sounds to me like you just hate America and don’t appreciate the sacrifices of our troops.” “Love it or leave it!”
We need not contend with the audacity of those who question our militarism, not when their criticisms can be obfuscated by blind deference to The Troops, that demigod suffused with all the pride and grief our people can muster. It is a time of war, and in times of war the avenues of our Shining City on the Hill must reverberate with every voice. Our radios and televisions forever tuned in, we nod and sing the refrain, believing we’ve filtered the truth sufficiently to find the Truth. All the while, the God of War watches, pleased by the devotion of these acolytes, these proxies for party propaganda. In a world at war, the voices never stop; and in a war on emotions, on tactics, on Terror, the war never ends.
Some gods rule us best when they have a devil to destroy.
One would think that, among these forces, the one stalking the rows of church pews, the halls of elementary schools, the cubicles of workplaces and the streets of every city, indiscriminately ripping apart the bodies of anyone it finds there, would be a devil.
But not in this land. In this land, it is a god. For this is the Land of the Gun.
The Land of the Gun is well-suited for this religion. It is a land steeped in the ego of individual exceptionalism, where the collective good is so easily shouted down with the cries of “Liberty!” Its creation myths are a fertile soil, where the armed revolution against tyranny, the armed taming of the frontier, and the armed maintenance of a vast, hegemonic empire sow their respective values in each successive generation. What we reap is an internal arms race, where the only thing that stops the bad guy with the knife is the good guy with the handgun, where the only thing that stops the bad gun with the handgun is the good guy with the assault rifle, and where following the philosophy’s own precepts to their logical ends finds me locked into a system of mutually-assured destruction with my neighbors, our respective arsenals ensuring that no one instigates conflict.
I eagerly await the lifting of burdensome regulations on the enriched uranium-show loophole to allow for my constitutionally-guaranteed personal security.
The Gun is the ultimate inkblot, evading argument by forever morphing. “Why are we manufacturing these deadly weapons in the first place?” we ask. The ink shows us an image of a sportsman, and responds, “They are not weapons, they are TOOLS. Do you want to outlaw hammers?”
“Well should we better regulate the distribution of these tools, to make sure they only end up in the hands of trained… er… tradespeople?”
The inkblot blurs into the indistinct image of an accidental anarchist. “Criminals don’t follow laws and will get them anyway. What’s the point?” (In other words: why have laws at all? They apparently have no impact on human behavior.)
“But you have to admit that your tools are a serious threat to the public good.” The inkblot blurs into a series of tragedies: of a knife attack at a Chinese train station, of a van running down pedestrians in Barcelona, of the British woman who killed her mother-in-law with a rolling pin. It sets its arms at akimbo, and defiantly counters, “GOT you, libtard. Look at these. See? Argument destroyed. Anything can be a murder weapon. If only someone had a gun for self-defense, maybe these tragedies could have been avoided!”
It takes a second to find entry into the disparate, looping threads of argument, unsure whether to begin with, “Isn’t this cherry-picking statistically unlikely anecdotes from across the world, as opposed to addressing the obvious bloodbath that is so neatly contained within our borders?” or with furrowed brow, ask, “Self defense… so, then, you DO admit that the gun is a weapon, not a tool?”
But the blot has already turned back to the range and started firing at targets. It looks back over its shoulder and hollers to hear itself through its earmuffs. “SORRY-” bang bang bang “-I CAN‘T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND-“ bang bang bang “-OF MY FREEDOM-“
Believers in the Gun don’t often have to contend with these counterpoints. They find their own devils, phantoms forever lurking in the prejudices of those ready to heap every injustice at the feet of The Other. The disillusioned youth, the right-wing radical, the foot soldier of Islamic fundamentalism, the encroachment of secular values and the issue of mental health. These ideologies are disparate, yet responsible for the same social plague. Never mind that they are variables in a despicable experiment where the only constant is the Gun. We do not question the Gun.
Gods of Market, War, and Gun. If these are our gods, it is no surprise that the righteous murder each other with such regularity; that the latest bombing campaign had our commander-in-chief looking “very presidential”; that the 43 million in poverty are easily rebranded as unfortunate side-effects of an otherwise perfect economic system. But hey, speaking of tax cuts- did you hear about some of those Wal-Mart bonuses they’re handing out? One-thousand buckeroos, holy cow, now that’s what I call a whole lotta mazuma!
And so the crowd churns into a frenzy of gratitude as Commodus slings a few loaves of bread out into the Coliseum stands, while Gracchus looks on and remarks: “He knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate, it's the sand of the Colosseum. He'll bring them death...and they will love him for it.”
We need a new mythology.
The greatest mistake we can make is to think our course is set. While much of humanity’s wisdom may have been lost through the ages, enough has endured to make for a worthy historical guide. If we look to ourselves, we learn, time and again, how dramatically we can change course.
The land of the Vikings who raped and murdered their way across land and sea is now a society with one of the highest and most progressive standards of living on Earth. Japan, once an entire nation mobilized into the service of imperial aggression, is now well known for the emphasis they place on conscientious public behavior and the greater social good (and… perhaps sex robots). That latter transformation happened in living memory, and while it came in the wake of unimaginable tragedy, it is not a requirement that a society nearly destroy itself before seeking reform.
It is not a requirement, because we are in the midst of a transformation ourselves, and we are not yet destroyed.
To think again of those later historians is to remember that while this may all end up as an age of New Zealotry, it may just as easily end another way:
An age of iconoclasm.
The symbols we’ve surrounded ourselves with are collapsing around us. Coal miners and Berkeley students are newfound brothers and sisters in arms, awakening to the knowledge that they are pawns, manipulated into position in a game in which they’ve lost their stake. Mass media narratives will supply us with the worst representatives from either side, will inundate us with the idea that all those liberal California snowflakes are actually fascists, ready to shout down every conservative commentator, punch every Nazi, and continue on until free speech is made irrelevant, due to everyone thinking like them; that every blue-collar worker in Appalachia is a Bible-thumping white supremacist, who wants every immigrant out and every border closed for good. There, on the surface, the people stay divided, forever at war over the dividing line of what’s politically correct, or who’s to blame for what slight. But coursing beneath, within the people, is a new force, and it binds more wholly than the old. They have simply to cast off their gods and see one another for what they share.
Confederate generals are crashing down from their pedestals, as the public majority asserts their well-deserved authority. “These are your gods, the gods of your fathers and grandfathers, but they are not mine, they are not ours. They do not represent who we are now, and they do not help guide us to where we want to go. They no longer belong.”
Black Lives Matter is laying bare a system of gods who have engineered oppression for generations. Gods that held the whip and hid beneath the white hood are gods who wear the badge and don the black robe. If mass incarceration and unarmed people shot to death in the streets are what happens when Lady Justice is blind, it’s about time someone tore that blindfold off and showed her what’s been happening on her watch.
#MeToo is chasing down the monsters, the rapists and abusers of power, and giving them no quarter. It is opening up every corner of society to its own failings, hypocrisies, complicity in bolstering such a long reign of injustice.
We are losing our religions, our gods, and in response, so many lament: “Where does it stop? How long until they come for me? Until they outlaw hugs as sexual harassment, until they smash the Jefferson Memorial and rip Lincoln down from his throne?”
Well, that depends. Where do these symbols and myths cease to serve us? To constrain instead of guide us? At what point do we fall into that recurring trap of attempting to mold a world to fit the religion, instead of constructing a religion that suits the world?
If we have one true opportunity in this moment, it’s the opportunity to decide, as a species, that we are infinitely capable and intelligent. That we only fail ourselves when we anchor ourselves to burdensome regulations of our thought. That nothing should be beyond the bounds of debate, accepted as a given simply because it’s always been that way. Nothing’s always been any way. As the Dire Straits sang, “once there was a river, now there’s a stone.” The canyon was once an ocean. The nation, a tribe. The god, an idea.
In the midst of these upheavals, we have a clear choice: to continue on as is, or make a break from tradition. To continue with our zealotry, or commit to this iconoclasm.
There’s always a new god waiting to be born out of the blood of a deicide. We could trade one zealotry for another, and replace Robert E. Lee’s statue with yet another icon. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo could outlast their own movement to become self-serving ends in themselves, forever lobbying the halls of Congress alongside the pharmaceutical reps and union leaders and other captains of industry. The movements could cease to move; and we know from experience that, as soon as they stop, they ossify into yet another power structure; they stagnate into a swamp.
Listen to the story of the small band of plucky colonists who cast off the shackles of a tyrannical British monarchy; hear it echo through the years. In its refrain, we find similar battles unfolding- in towns torn apart by drone strikes and streaked with the dead children we’ve classified as collateral damage, in export processing zones where contractor loopholes allow the legal enslavement of workers- though, this time, the revolt is against the shackles of American imperialism.
It is our duty to forever reexamine who we are, what we stand for, and what we’re becoming. When we don’t, we punch protestors in the name of free speech; we torture prisoners in service of the rule of law; we invade and murder in the spirit of liberation.
Not fulfilling this duty is our greatest danger as a people. Lately, the gods seem like the hydra, ready to replace each severed head with two more. Capitalism has failed us, so let us tear down the church of Capital, and from its rubble construct the Holy Church of Marx, with an adjacent monument to our patron St. Sanders, and we all shall feel the Bern, Amen. Donald Trump has allowed the swamp to proliferate, and dredged even worse monsters from its depths. He must be taken down, so let us stand and link arms with war criminals, and herald our saviors the FBI, the CIA, and George W. Bush. The enemies of my enemies are my friends! And Bush wasn’t so bad anyway, right? Mostly just a sweet old man who likes to paint.
What failing memories we seem to have.
There are always new gods, new zealotries, ready to received the disillusioned into their open arms. As Rage Against the Machine and its lyricist Zack de la Rocha once brilliantly noted, “Hungry people don’t stay hungry for long.”
We can succumb to inertia and head for the stage to play out the tragedy once more. Or, we can climb atop the shoulders of these felled giants, to see a little farther: to a new paradigm.
A new mythology, built not on the power of icons or systems, but on the more fundamental pillars of our humanity: reason and compassion.
Our course is not set. We are not destined to serve the Old Gods, or the New; we can cast them off altogether, and enter a new age. An age where we no longer twist our brains into doublethink to cover for the failings and inconsistencies of our systems and leaders. Where every idea is supported only so long as it offers the best solution to a specific situation, is abandoned when it falters, and is never prescribed as a cure-all for problems beyond its scope.
Where the statues are torn down from the pedestals, and the pedestals are left bare.
An age of iconoclasm.
*Note: Ideas are a lot like ivy. If you find a strand and start to pull, you unearth an infinitely complex system of intertwining roots, and can quickly lose track of where you started. While I couldn’t even begin to do a full accounting of all the giants on whose shoulders I attempt to stand, I’d be remiss if I didn’t credit a few major influences on my thoughts here: the philosophy of Ken Vallario and his ideas about systems and gods; the model agnosticism of Robert Anton Wilson; Susan Sontag’s masterful essays; the journalism of Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, and loads of other great reporters at The Intercept; and Dr. Cornel West, yet another great thinker in a long line of civil rights leaders like Dr. King and Malcolm X, who never stopped speaking truth to power. I cite them not to inflate my own work or ego, but to simply encourage you to seek them out, and to keep thinking.
charming & delightful!