Baron Wormser: The Fury

I want to begin with a quote from The Party of Humanity: Essays in the French Enlightenment by Peter Gay: “Politics is a late acquisition, a mature fruit of civilization, requiring renunciation of instinctual gratification. It runs counter to man’s deepest need to strike out against identifiable enemies. Politics, indeed, is a demanding activity. It requires suppleness, the ability to compromise, to fit means to ends (that is, to propound ends for which means are available), to temper principles for the sake of reaching agreement, to turn burning moral issues into administrative questions, to convert moral enemies into amiable opponents, the duel into a debate. But such behavior, being the last hired, is also the first to be fired.” Clearly the United States at this point in time does not possess the “mature fruit of civilization.” Indeed, when Elon Musk, the sidekick par excellence of Mr. You’re Fired, derides empathy as the Achilles heel of Western civilization, one is tempted to ask him what civilization he is talking about. Then again, if one were to tell him that unrestrained invention is the real Achilles heel, he would not be listening. 

   Gay goes on after that paragraph (he is writing about France from 1789 on when France was in “permanent crisis”) to say: “To make things worse, politics labors under a built-in irrationality. It feeds on issues and opponents, on unsolved questions. If they do not exist, they are manufactured.” To call his words “prescient” seems a mild commendation. The nation is now under the aegis of someone who is eager to manufacture all the issues and opponents, he can lay his willful hands on, who lives to provoke his opponents and who scorns any signs of tempering as weakness. “My way or the highway,” as they say in the United States, a nation full of highways but also a nation that has carried a split personality throughout its history: part Enlightenment according to how the founders partook of that worldview, one that stressed tolerance, separation of church and state, reason, rule of law, and a theism that stressed benevolence, and part Puritanism, a worldview that partook of conscious separation from others (“Separatists,” as the Pilgrims were denominated), an individualism that rejected both hierarchy and commonality, a haunted sense of sin, a longing for theocracy (“the rule of the saints”), and a primitivist desire to strike out on one’s own in what was a strange, forbidding land. Both outlooks honored commerce, an American linchpin if there ever was one, the spokesmen for the Enlightenment, most famously Adam Smith and David Hume, seeing commerce as a civilizing force as it brought different cultures in touch, and the Puritans seeing commerce as a necessary way to start making the money that was necessary to sustain life in the so-called New World. Neither side had much to say about greed. The prospect of how much business there might be, how much money might be made, was, in its grasping, calculating way, intoxicating.  And remains so. 

   The ghost in the machine in the United States is the exclusionist nature of Puritan religion, one that has coincided with property rights, as in “mine not yours,” a workaday intolerance masked by American heartiness, fulsome myths of self-help, and a talent for seeing heaven as so much spiritual capital, a guarantor of moral complacency. That Donald Trump, a lying huckster among other things, is very far removed from the people who set foot on Cape Cod only adds to one’s wonder about how deep rooted the Puritan outlook is, how it has presented Americans with a subtext that explains how commerce can rule life to the exclusion of literature and the arts and how wealth (to say nothing of the nation) is God-blessed, even if the wealthy are too busy raking it in to take much notice of a providential God. The fear and loathing that from the start typified by those who came to be called “settlers” is alive and well, however much the blandishments of Enlightenment values seem to be in place. The Puritans could not have envisioned how much the individual ego would be liberated in this society, nor for that matter could those in the 18^th century who spoke for the values of the Enlightenment. In their very different ways both outlooks posited the importance of socialized groups. One wonders what socialized groups are created amid a notion of techno-progress that has become for many the reason to live. Many people looking at a phone is not a socialized group. Many people listening to Donald Trump rail against his opponents is not a socialized group. Electronic alienation would seem at this juncture to have won. 

   Work drives the machine forward and both camps endorsed the importance of work, though Voltaire paired its importance with love. Again, what neither outlook could have foreseen was the sheer fury that came to attend work in the modern world, a fury that has been exaggerated by machines a thousand-fold, that has blessed speed and power in ways that were unimaginable and that have influenced the human psyche profoundly. I mean to the point where someone like Trump makes vicious sense as he shames, bullies, denounces, and scorns. The fury that drives him – and one thinks of the Greek furies and the sense of someone being possessed however much the person pretends to have free will – is part and parcel of an outlook that believes the ability to tinker with and control human affairs and the natural world is not only unlimited but a right. In that regard the Puritan outlook again seems regnant because it rejected worldliness and a live-and-let-live attitude. And, indeed, if you believe you have the very short answers to the mystery of existence, why tolerate people who don’t have the answers, who live as heathen or atheists or socialists or diversity proponents or empaths or whatever judgment-obsessed categories one fancies? The fury wants them to not be there. 

   A sad irony of all this is that Trump personifies the absolute anthropomorphism that resides in the values of both outlooks. In considering the environmental degradation that modern times have visited upon the planet (“ecocide” to use a current word), this humanism to the point of excluding all other forms of life looks like a curse that is considered – look at me take a picture of myself! –  a blessing. Humans have overcome many obstacles in their push to make this world a comfortable one (which was hardly a goal of the Enlightenment or the Puritans) but our conceit seems to be preponderant. That someone who oozes conceit is in power in the United States is more than cautionary. But then, as Gay observed, politics, which has become the destination of so much of the society’s energy and a sort of sewer that catches so much of the societal unease, is, with its “built-in irrationality,” a victim, as it were, of its own careering, do-something momentum. Ideology, which is to say mania posing as reason, has shown itself over the past hundred years to be a poor answer to the irrational. Meanwhile, many Americans pride themselves along with their Leader in indulging whatever animus is at hand. The deep animus, however, would seem to be directed at Earth itself. Earth isn’t heaven. Earth isn’t messianic. Earth isn’t a pot of gold. Earth is indifferent to all the national boundaries. Earth has its own rhythms and laws. One imagines the furious likes of Trump saying, “What good is it beyond something to dig up or drill?” Or one doesn’t imagine. One feels those words in each humanly crazed pronouncement. 

Copyright 2025 Baron Wormser

Baron Wormser’s many books include The History Hotel (CavanKerry 2023). Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching and also the Frost Place Seminar. He currently resides in Montpelier, Vermont, with his wife.