An exclusive Religion Dispatches interview with renowned historian of religions Mircea Eliade, conducted by Ira Chernus:
RD: Thank you for agreeing to discuss the recent American elections with us, Professor Eliade. It’s not often that we get to talk with a world-famous scholar of religion who has been dead for nearly a quarter-century.
ME: In my view, truly religious people never see death as final. Their sacred symbols assure them that beyond this time-bound earthly plane there is a transcendent realm, where being is eternal. But the two planes of existence are always interconnected, so the religious person assumes that it’s possible to travel between them.
If we understand your work correctly, the contact between those planes comes at a sacred center, which also links our sense of earthly order with some symbolic experience of chaos.
Yes, archaic religious people did not fear chaos, because their sacred symbols convinced them that order and chaos are not ultimately enemies. At the sacred center there is a coincidence of opposites that harmonizes the two. But modern people no longer have convincing symbols of a coincidence of opposites that affords an opening to transcendence. They divide the world into two realms—order and chaos—and they see life as an endless contest between the two. Without access to transcendence, they rely on the economic and political system to impose order and stave off chaos.
But the mundane level of economic and political life is always changing. To pursue perfect order by political and economic change is a hopeless dream. Since modern people can never have perfect order they are always dissatisfied, always afraid of chaos.
This abstract theory is all very fine. But what does it have to do with the Republican gains in this year’s election?
Everything! Although most American voters will say they are religious, they are essentially modern people, practicing crypto-religion at best. They rely more on the political system than on their religious systems to get the order they’re looking for. But apparently they aren’t finding it. At least that’s what I read in the New York Times. They’ve got a political analyst named Matt Bai who really understands these deeper motives. Listen to what he’s written lately:
“Voters in a lot of the country trusted in an established order that seemed to be working pretty well for them, but then people saw their cities and their industries collapse… With global interdependence comes a certain lack of control.”
And their fears go far beyond economic worries to “the larger breakdown of civil society” and “the sense that the establishment has lost its credibility.” In other words, a lot of voters see chaos all around them.
So they vote for candidates who seem most able to stem the growing tide of chaos?
“Seem” is the key word. As Matt Bai wrote about newly-elected politicians: “They find themselves sucked into the capital’s partisan culture, caught up in familiar debates while the people who supported them struggle with a growing sense of chaos. And so the voters rebel again.” That’s why the electorate seems to shift every two years. They’re always looking for leaders who can protect them against chaos, but never finding them.
Did voters in 2008 really think Obama could protect them from chaos better than McCain?
As long as McCain kept the focus on the threat of foreign “terrorists,” he remained even with Obama, and in early September 2008 he was pulling ahead in the polls. (I pay a lot more attention to politics than most of my readers suspected.) But as soon as the economic collapse struck, the economy replaced “terrorism” as the greatest source of threatening chaos. McCain’s response struck voters as rather chaotic, while Obama gave off an image of solid stability. That’s when he started pulling ahead, and that’s the main reason he won the presidency.
So what happened since Obama took office?
Not enough, in terms of economic recovery. He no longer looks like the man who can protect the U.S. from economic chaos. But the economic factors all your pundits focus on are superficial.
Again, Matt Bai is the one who sees that deeper cultural level. He says that conservatives created
“a general portrayal of [Obama’s] otherness based on his age and ideology, his upbringing and, inescapably, his race… The president represents an America where racial and regional distinctions are often harder to discern than they used to be. All this makes a lot of Americans, and especially older Americans, profoundly uncomfortable.”
Of course they are uncomfortable, and even afraid. Order is always based on boundaries that seem to be immutable. Anyone who makes boundaries look flexible and porous becomes a symbol of chaos.
Didn’t you write essays back in the 1960s about the “hippies” as a symbol of social chaos?
I wrote about their feeble effort to restore the archaic religious consciousness, which does involve a positive reassessment of chaos. And if Matt Bai is right, that image has long been used by conservatives to attack the Democrats by associating them with “60s” culture: “This cultural critique of Mr. Obama… is reminiscent of similar attacks on Bill Clinton, whom 1990s-era conservatives reveled in depicting as a symbol of the socially permissive, self-indulgent hippie left.”
They’ve made Obama, too, a symbol of the supposedly chaotic left.
So the Republicans won big this year because the Democrats, led by Obama, appear unable to fend off chaos and restore order?
That pretty well sums it up. Obama identified himself and his party with the word “change.” Since change is always unpredictable, it always portends the threat of chaos. This year, unlike 1994, the Republicans did not even call themselves “the party of change.” They no longer see any advantage in using that word. They want to make themselves the party of resistance to change, which is what most voters seemed to want this year.
But let’s remember that most Americans did not vote. The Democrats suffered especially because their strategy of bringing out young voters, many who voted for the first time in ’08, did not work very well.
It is possible that the U.S. is going through a huge cultural transformation. The youth may be creating—for the first time ever—a society that sees order and chaos as opposites but is not deeply afraid of chaos; a society that does not feel threatened by blurred boundaries and constant change. Obama’s problem is that he is stuck between these cultural phases and trying to appeal to both, trying to be a symbol of both resistance and openness to chaos. In that sense he is trying to be what the sacred center was to archaic religious people. He managed it pretty well in the ’08 campaign, but not very well since he entered the White House.
Perhaps he’ll succeed again when he returns to the campaign trail in 2012. We hope you will return in two years, Professor Eliade, to tell us how well you think he did.
