218 Ideals in the Modern World
Soul. They spend as much money as would feed small hungry na-
tions to create movies and video entertainments that celebrate her-
oism. They attend churches that profess allegiance to the poor but
love only their own glory and their own gain. They replace the com-
passionate doctrine of Jesus with fundamentalist obsession with
the law of the Father. They patronize so- called artists who are en-
tirely devoid of imaginative power— which is to say, the power to
conceive the world that we human beings might live in, if we tried.
They attend universities where Truth is held in contempt and think
themselves to be educated. They acquire the skills of the market-
place and call it learning.
In the current world, Self sometimes delights in its own desires;
it celebrates its love for consumption and for plea sure. Self can wor-
ship its image. When this grows tiresome and the bad faith of it all
becomes too clearly manifest, then Self often fabricates for itself a
culture of Soul and inhabits it. The current version of Self is nar-
cissistic, slight, aggressive, piping, and crude, and this is the case
in part because it has no real competition. There is little thriving
culture of Soul. There is no new Romantic movement. There is no
revival of the Gospels or the Pali Scriptures. Self is victor, and there-
fore it does not need to explain itself; it requires no manifestoes, no
refl ections, no brilliant defenders. Pragmatism and deconstruction,
the last two philosophies to justify Self, are no longer necessary.
No one needs the complex undoing of ideals that deconstruction
enacted— everyone knows that there are virtually no ideals left. No
one needs to be told that pragmatism— the conviction that truth is
the belief that gets you what you want— off ers a better theory of truth
than Plato or Kant or Schopenhauer. Almost everyone now is a prag-
matist: ever yone believes that the mind is an instr ument to advance
his own ends. What else could it be? Those who do not agree, as
Nietz sche said, go voluntarily into a mad house.