98 Ancient Ideals
know what to do with the temptation of the other Soul ideals—
fabricate them and sell them. Culture now largely is the counter-
feiting and sale of courage, contemplation, and imagination. The
denizen of the contemporary consumer utopia can buy himself a vi-
olent video game or howl with warrior joy when his football team
wins. He can believe that information is wisdom. He can believe that
true insights about the human condition infuse the news reports of
the day. He can imagine that the racket of a garage band or the me-
anderings of a fulminating rapper are art. But compassion is more
diffi cult to counterfeit.
Churches preach compassion. But many, if not most, are outright
in their worship of Mammon. The fund drive never ceases; the
minister is hot with the belief that the lord shows favor by the dis-
pensing of goods. (“Chris tian ity has completely conquered,” says
Kierkegaard, “that is, it is abolished.”) The church that still claims
to care for the poor— and sometimes actually does—is ridden into
horrible absurdity by scandal. Jesus may have achieved a great deal
by maintaining the conjunction of the Old Testament and the
New— but he left potentially intact the worship of wealth and power
that the older book sometimes endorses. He did not pull Mammon
all the way down.
But our main defense against the collective is simply to insist on
the individual and nothing but the individual. Greed in our world
is good. Nothing succeeds like success. If you make it, you will be
undyingly happy. Succeed, succeed. Our worship of the individual
who seeks and fi nds triumph is unending—we have time for little
else. That success attained against others is sterile and lonely— that
fact we contemplate less. The ideal of a brotherhood and sisterhood
among all is now commonly understood to be an absurdity. We are
all in it for ourselves and for no one else. The notion that we can
only be happy when we love— rather than resenting and competing