Thou Vain Toy

 

From the beginning Ahab was, and to the end remained, a master of his science of whaling. But rapidly he narrows the very concept of science down to what serves his purpose simply and directly. Any other kind of science he will destroy.

One day he has just taken the daily reckoning from the sun with the quadrant when in a sudden rage he dashes it to the deck. ""Science! I curse thee, thou vain toy," he yells and stamps upon the instrument.

His reason is one of Melville's profoundest penetrations into the nature of totalitarianism. The quadrant, Ahab says, can tell where the sun is. But it cannot tell man what he wants to know, and that is where he will be tomorrow. It lifts man's eyes up to the great and glorious sun. But man by doing so only ruins himself. Man was made to live with his eyes limited to the earth's horizons.

"Aye, thus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!" Here is the ruthless limitation of social aspirations which totalitarianism imposes on the masses of its followers. Their eyes must be kept level with the horizon until after the purpose is achieved. It is on the same evening that the storm breaks, the fires burn on the masts, and Ahab defies the fires of industry. Thus, within one day, Industry and Science, the twin gods of the nineteenth century, have been deposed.

C.L.R. James - Mariners, Renegades & Castaways

Our newly reelected Ahab is a master of no science and what purpose he sees on the horizon is obscured by his lies and subject to digestive disorders. What we can make out is the dubloon that he has nailed to the mast to motivate his crew. It is the chimera of post-war American life, not the life of those who engaged in rebellion, but those who clung to the old causes. The rallying point for this new economics is the factory, the factory that used to be here but now has been stolen. In its place they now see themselves hosting, against their will, alien workers of malevolent and subversive intent.

Trump is dating himself with this story. It’s been a very long time since the old factories left and America lifted up its eyes to the worship of finance. Not that any of this process was part of his education. He began practicing this resentment when he saw the rich crop of votes and offerings to be had from it. 

But the story plays. Theft and invasion are the work of foreigners. Globalist ideology, even as he denounces it in his domestic political opponents, comes from outside the nationalist spirit. Within the movement which carried him to power there is no distinction of classes. The only struggle is between inside and outside. 

Although the story is founded in layers of American myth and has served Trump well in his campaigns it is only because it has avoided, so far, being tested in reality. Its failure, now that it has actually been put in practice, has been immediate. Treasury Secretary Bessert assures us that his boss is all about creating leverage. But it's plain to all that Trump has no leverage.

If American business, as he claims, had been taken advantage of out of its own stupidity that might be corrected. That the guile required to do so has arisen from the playing fields of big city real estate is hard to imagine. American business, instead, stands where it does as a result of what are usually called market forces. Its position is more or less what the invisible hand has assigned it. 

While Trump may be able to sell his tears to his own followers, he has no chance of selling them abroad. I can't be the only one to suspect that he had a higher estimate of the economic situation bequeathed him than he professed for political purposes. But the ace up his sleeve, the American market, is already overextended. It exists only as long as the rest of the world is willing to extend to it the credit that it craves.

And what of the quadrant? What of the science that we need to determine our location? For Ahab it was useless, for Trump it's a threat. His political support is a validation of the will to blindness. What is being torn out of the federal project is any attempt to see where we are. To know that is to open the question of where we want to go. If all we want to do is go back to where we were, to where we felt safe, then all we have to do is get rid of those who ask questions.

By calling for a fearful retreat Trump is not just mollifying and corralling his audience. He is also bargaining with those who own everything to advance their interests. In our world the quadrant is not politically neutral. When we know our location we know our connection to the rest of the world. We know our exposure to climate, to contagion, and to exploitation. We know that these dangers and the warfare that pursues them are never more than temporarily remote. And therefore we know that those who describe the world as lacking only sufficient barriers and prisons are no longer just leading us in a mad pursuit of the white whale. Before our eyes they are enacting an auto-da-fe shipwreck by pillaging the timbers of our masts and hull.