all, and revel in it. To be sure, culture occasionally throws forth a
displaced version of the compassionate ideal. Rather than the mir-
acle of the loaves and fi shes binding the crowd together into one,
we have the miracle of the soft drink, drawing every race, creed, and
color into collective consumer bliss. Nothing, it seems, is more con-
ducive to the love of one’s neighbor than the sharing of identically
branded products.
But by and large, the compassionate ideal is so dangerous to the
Self that is it not even safe to put it into displaced or sublimated form.
Pressed to the wall, we affi rm the faith in individualism, and that is
that. Jesus the preacher of universal brotherhood— “Who is my
neighbor?” the lawyer asks, and the Savior tells him so that no one
is likely to forget— that Jesus is all but gone, and it is best for our
comfort and our entertainment that this be so. In Africa and Latin
Ame rica, one fi nds bold priests and nuns and bro th ers who stand
up for the poor and who defy Rome. All honor to them. They have
bro th ers and sisters in Ame rica and Eu rope, a few, but by and large
the rich Western churches have gone over to relative quietism. Let
us take the Buddha and Confucius and the Hindu Sages off with
this Jesus, too, and have done with it.
One could pursue the critique of the current culture of Self
through many pages—it has as many turns and twists as Satan’s tail.
But this is not time well spent. The culture of Self is the god Pro-
teus; it is a shape- shifter. Today it percolates through the Internet
and shines and fl ashes on the fl at screen. Tomorrow it will have an-
other form. Self and its works are legion and infi nitely variable, but
we humans have created them all and will continue to do so until
our race on earth has been run.
But the ideals have their strength too: Plato, Homer, Jesus,
Buddha, Blake. These fi gures will not readily die, and we will not
let them. We simulate (or suppress) their visions now in ways that
are almost laughable, but those simulations testify to our need for
256 Polemical Conclusion