Idiocrasy

Have we become too dull to understand?

America, built on the best-est of thoughts—human freedom, tolerance, affection—seems of late constantly in search of ways to reduce those ideas to a cartoon of itself. Take the word idiocrasy, coined by Walt Whitman to represent the personal character of democracy, meaning a group of citizens who tolerate one another’s idiosyncracies. Who can doubt that, from top to bottom, we are an odd collection of individuals. But mostly today, the word conjures in popular mind the satirical 2006 film Idiocracy showing a society that’s lost its ability to focus and understand even simple concepts, a people so conditioned by ignorance, lies, and attention deficit that they are easily manipulated to the stunted ends of the powerful. Even the ends of power are stunted by ignorance. This describes us collectively today in ways that seemed shocking only a decade ago. But instead of focusing on the hole, let’s look at the donut. That is, what is or what could be an idiocrasy?

In two main works, Democratic Vistas (surpasses de Tocqueville) and the poem Song of Myself, Whitman’s idiocrasy reins. He champions American society & government as built around respect, decency, and affection for what is divine in individual persons, in every person, independent of their station in life. People are by nature unique, unusual, diverse. The idiocrasy embraces that character as a strength united by tolerance and human affection. To understand both our own shortcomings and the divinity inherent in us each is the source that aligns us with the Unity of the universe, of things, of being. These ideas of the Transcendentalists of the 1830s and 1840s are, for me, the most direct inheritors of the radical political and deist basis of the Founders, the Revolution, and the Constitution. While failing to live up to their lofty declarations, the hopes they engendered for humanity—slithering out of the feudal millenia of miracle, mystery, and authority—lit the mind of mankind for the modern era. Science takes the place of miracle. Inquiry takes the place of mystery. Belief takes the place of authority. The American revolution makes these possible. The Transcendentalist belief in the profound divinity of individual persons expresses the best hopes of humanity to become self-supporting, self-actualized, self-governing.

Take note how many of these ideas are under assault from the political regime of America today. I see urgent efforts to undermine and overthrow all these ideas: respect for others who think differently, basic human decencies, affection for other citizens—all these are under assault. Science is under assault. Inquiry, education, and research are under assault. And Belief, the very basis of collective action, is aggresively undermined with lies, conspiracy theories, consipiracies, mis- and dis-information. It is one gestalt, one program, to change the basis of society from that which literally made America great. It is profoundly disloyal to the Constitution and what is conceived in the quote enemies, foreign and domestic.

Some think of this in racial, ethnic, or partisan terms as an attempt by a new minority to impose an authoritarian Christian state. But where it comes from is truly beyond understanding, unless we can count greed and ignorance and fear as understanding. The solution is not so remote to see— an America based on the ideals of its founding. All the racial, ethnic, sex-based allegiances can wither before the devotion to humanity’s effort to self-govern, our desire for peace, our affection for one another. That doesn’t mean we individually have to like everyone. It means we agree to practice tolerance for others as we tolerate ourselves, and as others tolerate us. It means we honor the divinity in each person, as argued by seers from the Upanishads to Christ. To live in a society with that goal is the meaning of idiocrasy, of democracy, and the best human hope for our times.