Rendezvous with Oblivion: Reports from a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Praying Our Way to the Apocalypse

Having most likely entered my final decade of life, I have been drawn into reflecting on my experience with the various institutions in which I have been directly involved - the family, the church, the military, academia, and financial and commercial business. Ticking them off as a has-been in each, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that I have been a consistent failure in them all. But reading Rendevous with Oblivion gives a glimmer of hope that perhaps this failure has not been all mine.

The collection of essays is a catalogue of institutional corruption, not just in politics where it has always thrived, but also in every significant class of human cooperative endeavour. Persistent sexual abuse by the clergy of children and vulnerable adults; the selling of university places on a large scale; the involvement of senior military people and politicians in patently treasonous activities; the systematic protection of the architects of worldwide financial collapse; the exposure of routine fraud and other reprehensible behaviour among leading cultural lights, all suggest that something systematically is undermining what we vaguely refer to as civilisation.

The issue which Frank raises is not that these institutions have corrupt members. Such has always been the case. It is rather that the institutions themselves now serve corruption, that they initiate, tolerate, and promote bad behaviour among their members. What was formerly considered as aberrant is now perceived as normal, even admirable. What were at one time institutional inhibitors to the excesses of human desire are now conduits through which those desires can be achieved. What in fact were refuges from the worst effects of free market competition are now places of the greatest intensity of self-aggrandisement.

To the extent that these institutions are the substance of civilised society, we are retreating into a sort of barbarism. This may not be noticed because the substitution of social virtue with expedient self-interest is subtle. Justice gives way step by step and with progressively strident argument to security. Social responsibility is privatised through ideological rationale as a matter of personal choice. Personal financial success or celebrity come to define social contribution. Integrity gives way to the necessities of ambition which is understood as admirable. And value is what other people say it is. This is the world which Frank documents. It is a world that even Thomas Ligotti might find shocking in its unrelieved exploitative evil (Chris Hedges, not so much).

It is difficult to maintain the institutional perspective when exhibitionist clowns like Trump, AM radio hosts and cable-news pundits, internet bloggers and social media inciters are what’s most visible and the most obvious symptoms of widespread deterioration in the social fabric. But the problem and its solution is institutional. That is to say, institutional corruption cannot be reversed by changing the leading players, nor through a change in the ruling political party, nor even by legislative or political reform, which would have to be carried out by the very people who would be its target. Paradoxically institutional reform is a purely personal and entirely local act. It starts and it ends in recognising the extent to which corruption has been internalised in each of us by the redefinitions of social virtue promulgated by these institutions.

Theologians call this kind of profound transformation metanoia, a spiritual conversion to an alternative way of acting. Such a transformation does not have a rational basis since the institutional rational of every aspect of current society argues against it. This is especially problematic for the religiously-minded who believe that they have already been subject to the required change in attitude. They are, on the contrary, the most resistant to anything which might dim their light of faith, their possession of the absolute truth; yet it is precisely this light, this obsession with formulas of truth, that blinds them to the reality of the situation. Quite literally it is their God who is the architect of our impending social doom.

Of course believers are generally not a majority of the population. But they don’t need to be. The really powerful source of institutional decay is the secularised legacy of religion. Two central principles of Christianity seem to be particularly relevant. The first is the idea of personal salvation, that is, an ethical responsibility solely for conduct and fate of one’s own life. The second idea is the way in which this fate can be assured, namely through total confidence, obdurate faith, in the correctness of one’s beliefs, rather than in the relationship with one’s fellows. These principles have been assimilated into Western culture and form the core of its ideology.

Historically, the development of modern institutions of government, politics, education, and law, has been at the expense of the institutional Church. The decline of the institutional Church, however, has perversely released the germ of anti-social, intransigent, militant faith more widely into these non-religious areas of civil life. The result is an ethos of selfish self-confidence which destroys democratic politics, promotes tribal loyalties, and prevents both learning and reasoned argument. It seems to me likely that this is the epicentre of the cultural malaise that Frank describes. We have learned the habits of religion so well that they have survived its institutional decline; and now they are destroying us.

My own failure within these institutions isn’t mitigated by their deterioration. But perhaps others, particularly the young, might see the implications of Frank’s analysis in their own lives. One can only hope. The track record of success of the old communicating with the young is abysmal. So I’m not holding my breath.

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