LONERGAN OFF AGAIN

Lonergan Off Again

OK, I admit to just wanting to write that. I am addicted to puns. But the purpose of this piece is somewhat to the point. To wit: I long ago posted Lonergan’s definition of Oversight, which is the opposite of Insight. Insight is a process of progressively deeper understanding of truth. It has no end but God himself, who knows all. It is a breathtaking epistemology that has the radiance of Hegel, the analytical precision of Kant and the beguiling simplicity of Darwin. But that is not my point.

Last Sunday my wife and I watched the next installment of Downton Abbey. It is mind boggling how stupid this program is but something makes us watch. I am a student of decline, or oversight. How could I not be? So are you, and anyone else who has retained mental function in the befuddled, befogging atmosphere of methane and carbon monoxide, of pestilence we breathe. Oversight is the downward trend of prejudice and bias and falsehood, each oversight reinforcing the old and leading to new oversight. It is the downward spiral of error compounding error. Downton Abbey chronicles the collapse of the British empire and the class that rose to power with it. But it doesn’t really tell that story. What it tells is a soap opera with that story for decoration. It is insultingly stupid but compelling, like a smore. No one likes to eat a smore, or a rice crispy  treat, but isn’t it a bit dogmatic not to, when it comes dripping and puffing and charred from the fire in the dirty hands of an 8 year old? So we watch and groan and wonder if Lady Mary will ever rediscover her pussy. Matthew certainly seems not to have discovered it.

Sunday nights are different from all other nights in our home. On other nights we are watching The Wire, which many believe to be the greatest TV show ever. There’s a lot of competition for that title these days, but I agree that it is up there. The Wire swims in a sea of decline. The Wire is explicitly about the failure of reform, the failure of the American polis, of its politics, education, media, culture, of the American soul. Each hour long episode is a meditation of Oversight. It shows another step in the downward spiral of decline. In America we have only had two acceptable narratives of decline. One is of the fall of the Ante Bellum south and the other is the death of the frontier, symbolized by the arrival of the car in Westerns. Both events are fraught with moral peril and both vividly demonstrate the folly of a golden age, considering the Native American and African American perspectives on both events. But largely the collapse of the south and the frontier are contextualized in the comic triumph of the industrial age and the American century.

European narratives of decline are apocalyptic. They are contextualized by the inferno of World War 2. Books likeThe Good Soldier Svejk, Buddenbrooks and The Radetsky March are about the death of civilizations without rebirth. They are pessimistic. The Magic Mountain ends with a hail of machine gun bullets and an anonymous death on an industrialized battle field. What follows, we know, is a great depression, the fragmentation of Austro-Hungary, and the rise of Fascist and Nazi parties.

David Simon, the creator of The Wire, said either in an interview or a special feature (I forget which) that The Wire is about the failure of reform. Reform is a kind of Insight. Identify something that is wrong or doesn’t work, improve it, implement the improvement, use the knowledge gained to identify other related areas of error or dysfunction, explore alternatives, experiment, select successful solutions, implement and so on. Science works this way. Politics doesn’t. It’s like Plunkitt of Tammany Hall says. Reforms administrations don’t last. He asks if any reader can even name a reform administration.

In the series, time and again reformers attempt to implement changes that are both practical and effective, only to be thwarted by the system. The failure of reform breeds corruption. Honest people lie and cheat to achieve noble ends. A retiring police officer decriminalizes drugs in a defined area of the city and improves the quality of life for everyone in the neighborhood. When his plan is revealed he’s attacked but is ultimately allowed to retire because the truth that decriminalization worked was so unpalatable. In retirement he teams up with an academic  who believes intervention with young people in the schools will break the cycle of corner drug dealing, addiction  and murder. Another ex-cop becomes a teacher hoping to make a difference in children’s lives. Both meet limited success until test time rolls around and all of their efforts have to be redirected towards passing No Child Left Behind tests. Education ceases because of a national failure to reform education. It does not matter what you do locally when the federal government mandates oversight. Money used for the academic study vanishes when the reform mayor discovers that the Board of Ed has lost 53 million dollars through corruption and incompetence. The reform mayor has promised the police money too, to investigate 25 murders. But the failure of the Board of Ed ripples out. He could go to the governor for the 53 million dollars but the governor is a political enemy and the mayor wants his seat. Corruption spreads. The cops investigating the 25 murders decide to invent a serial killer, thinking the media attention will force the governor to assign detectives to the case whom they can then redirect towards the other investigation. They falsify evidence and feed the story to a reporter, who turns out to be a liar who invents news stories. His editor is suspicious, but the publisher knows good copy when he sees it and overlooks the obvious. Oversight. Corruption. The failure of reform. 

Watching Downton Abbey with The Wire is kind of exciting. An inconsequential bon bon melting in a pot of boiling pitch. England may be napping, but somewhere in America a few people are paying attention and somehow there is money to be made. Never say good things don’t happen. Even in an atmosphere choked with oversight, insight exists.

I Repost Mr. Lonergan:

Insight/Oversight

From the Preface to Bernard Lonergan’s Insight

Thus, insight into insight brings to light the cumulative process of progress. For concrete situations give rise to insights which issue into policies and courses of action. Action transforms the existing situation to give rise to further insights, better policies, more effective courses of action. It follows that if insight occurs, it keeps recurring; and at each recurrence knowledge develops, action increases its scope, and situations improve.

Similarly, insight into oversight reveals the cumulative process of decline. For the flight from understanding blocks the insights that concrete situations demand. There follow unintelligent policies and inept courses of action. The situation deteriorates to demand still further insights and, as they are blocked, policies become more unintelligent and action more inept. What is worse, the deteriorating situation seems to provide the uncritical, biased mind with factual evidence in which the bias is claimed to be verified. So in ever increasing measure intelligence comes to be regarded as irrelevant to practical living. Human activity settles down to a decadent routine, and initiative becomes the privilege of violence.