Rewind your mental tape to December. Replay the howls of Balkan imprecation that rose from the land. Recall the rage-red faces of blue America — "I will drink your blood!" Remember the purity of that indignation, untainted by the slightest doubt that George W. Bush had stolen the election of 2000.
We have by now proceeded at warp speed to the next installment (China crisis, market crisis, etc.) George W. Bush is firmly installed at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; he is even ratified in office by a new weekly Comedy Central television sitcom, "That's My Bush!", aimed at persuading us that we have a president who is as moronic as the authors of the show.
I bring up the howls of yesterday (actually, most good Democrats are still howling, or else preserve the election of 2000 in their hearts in the way a Croatian grandmother may cherish the bloody shirt in which her husband was stabbed by a Serb, in order to show it to her grandchildren and swear them to revenge) — I bring up these howls not to disturb the dead horse of that election, but to make a different point.
You will think this odd, or prissy, but trust me. Get hold of Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Representative Men" — I'm serious — and read his essay entitled "Montaigne; Or, The Skeptic."
Why? Because Americans need to learn to stop howling, with such passionate and infantile conviction, from either side of any given controversy.
Yo: What you are so sure is true right now, with a conviction you are ready to die for, may not — how to put this? — be true.
That is Emerson's point in his tribute to Montaigne, the magnificently sane 16th-century Frenchman who invented the modern essay and who managed to live an intelligent, humane life in the midst of a France tearing itself limb from limb in half a century of religious civil war.
Between the partisan extremes, Emerson writes, "there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground... the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong... He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance... You are both in extremes, he says... you are spinning like bubbles in a river... you are bottomed and capped and wrapped in illusions."
Emerson says, "I am weary of these dogmatizers. I tire of these hacks of routine... why pretend life is so simple a game, when we know how subtle and elusive the Proteus is?.. Why fancy that you have all the truth in your keeping? There is much to say on all sides."
There Emerson hits precisely upon an essential imbecility of our own time. Rabid partisanship, an overboil of conviction, damages sight, impairs understanding, and may even ruin the joy of life. You see the world with one eye, peering straight ahead through one stupid, dogmatic lens, and walk through the day, as if it were a tunnel, in a state of smug, inflamed, combative rage.
There's no substitute for brains and an autonomous mind. The idea, as Emerson says, is to avail yourself "of the checks and balances in nature, as a natural weapon against the exaggeration... of bigots and blockheads."
But much of America got addicted a long time ago to sensation and controversy, in the way that people get hooked on sex or drugs. Zealots bizarrely think of balance as a point of weakness.<
Turn off the media and read Emerson or Montaigne for an hour a day. In six months, you may have your mind back.