Nothing is Written

The culture-war in America is real but it isn't a war within a semi-unified entity to redefine the terms of its existence, given prescribed and accepted standards because changing circumstances require it, but a war between cultures, one within the bounds of legitimate authority and one not.

Democrats and progressives are the loyal citizens, ideologically descended from the thinkers of the Enlightenment, to whom the country is indebted for its founding principles. The nation's creators drew on those ideals. But the right-wingers are like the Arab fighters in Lawrence of Arabia. 

Everything is "written" in their world, predestined and ordained, and so people are not free but only implements of a higher causality, actors in a script written by God and so the thing has meaning at that scale but in earthly, fatalistic form it is normal for it to be violent, arbitrary and unintelligible.

To me it is to say that we are nothing but animals and not endowed individually with autonomous souls but enslaved to other forces. We are agents of a destiny entirely out of our hands and accountable only as players in a primal drama--to be judged by our allegiances, not independently. 

There are problems with dignity and self-determination in this human version of the Call of the Wild, a desire for the loss of individuality and submergence in a sea of unreason and conformity and the comfort of the clan or tribe. Okay, but that is not our tradition and calling. And nothing is written.