Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of America by Terry Eagleton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Dangerous People

An outrageous book. Eagleton at his wittiest and most sardonic.

Only in comparison can we perceive our own insanities. British insanities do tend to be less malign and even less fundamental than the American sort, largely because the British laugh at themselves more readily. Put another way: Americans on the whole are more profound than their superficial silliness suggest. And that may not be a good thing.

Eagleton appreciates what Harold Bloom noted as the underlying Gnosticism of American metaphysical/materialist culture, its true religion (see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). For Americans, Eagleton writes,

"The will lies at the core of the self, which means that the self is what bestows meaning and value on things. But the self is also orthodox of material reality. So we too are part of what must be hammered into shape. We are clay in our own hands, awaiting the moment when we will transform ourselves into an artefact of great splendour. The self is always a work in progress. It is a kind of wilderness which must be cultivated, mixed with one's labour, before it can become meaningful. It is part of Puritan doctrine that human labour is what makes things real. Before we happened along, there was just chaos. Ceaseless activity is what keeps the world in existence. American optimism thus conceals a darker vision. It springs as much from a scepticism about material reality as from an affirmation of it. In themselves, Nature and the flesh are chaotic stuff. They are worthless until the spirit invests them with significance. It is labour that transforms Nature into meaning. And this always involves a degree of violence. Body and soul are both subject to belligerent onslaughts, along with the rain forests and terrorist strongholds."

Thus the American fantasy of omnipotence as well as immortality which Donald Trump has so successfully exploited. What his Evangelical supporters haven't twigged onto yet is that this fantasy isn't Christian but Gnostic just as Bloom argues and Eagleton describes. The myth of the self-made man is a also a Christian heresy (Pelagianism), recognised since the 4th century.

And, irony of ironies, the origin of Gnosticism is ultimately pagan and Persian, that is to say, Iranian. Its essential doctrine is the idea of human deification, the gradual transformation of mankind into a divine species. This doctrine is most clearly expressed in Mormonism but, as Bloom points out, it has been transmitted to every Christian sect in America. It even affects America’s atheism with a triumphant optimism of a liberal Utopia.

When everyone believes they are heading for deification, the currency of the divine seems doomed to drastic depreciation, dragging the rest of us into a maelstrom of metaphysical and material hyper-inflation. Trump is a visible manifestation of the phenomenon, a leader whose only talent is of unlimited confidence in his own divinity, the ultimate debasement of the spiritual dollar. As Eagleton notes: "People who are both powerful and dissatisfied are peculiarly dangerous." Their particular faith, held firmly but largely without awareness, is the source of American power and danger to the world.

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