American Apokalyptein and the Discursive Rituals of its Judge/Priests--Between Heaven and Pandemonium inside the Republic

 

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July 4 is celebrated in the United Sates as Independence Day--the day when the Continental Congress is said to have ratified the Declaration of Independence. In past years I have posted U.S. Independence Day day reflections to this site (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here) as a way to commemorate the event and celebrate the holiday.

For this year I again offer a reflection in the form of a haiku, with brief a brief reflection.

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Enemies within
All is apokalyptein
The screeching annoys

 Americans, like other political collectives, sometimes develop a taste for apokalyptein--the Greek root of what over the last several thousand years has been variously received as both a noun and a verb. On the one hand it speaks to the act of "revelation," or less spectacularly on the act of disclosing, or uncovering. Before the Enlightenment in the West apokalyptein also suggested the coming to insight, the experience of a vision, or an episode of hallucination. On the other hand apokalyptein speaks to the object--the thing revealed, experienced, envisioned, hallucinated, or the insight received. The root of the word itself is centered on the act of removing what is covered or concealed, but also on the thing revealed. Apokalyptein does not speak t the nature of the revelation or its source. It does speak to the consequences to those revealing (the apocalypst) or those witnessing the revelation or experiencing the hallucination. "The general meaning "a cataclysmic event" is modern (not in OED 2nd ed., 1989); apocalypticism "belief in an imminent end of the present world" is from 1858." (HERE).

Modernity, then, ushers in the hysterical element to acts and experiences of disclosure--as if something momentous and final--something that puts those to whom it is revealed on some sort of course toward apotheosis or ecstasy--lends to revelation an aura of finality or the weight of unavoidable consequence that is progressive and irremediable. That consequence--that revelation also reveals those who embrace and those who reject. Revelation reveals to just itself (as act and content) but it also reveals those in the community who embrace the revelation and reaffirm the authority of the process of revealing, against those who reject both. Revelation, then, does not just reveal its own content, as well as its own manner of being; it also exposes  revelatory patriots and those who would rebel. For the patriot, there is communion; for the heretic, there is discipline or rebellion. Thus a finite dialectic producing eternity:

Courts engage in authoritatively cultural production using one of three voices: one of two Greek voices, the Homeric or the Delphic, or the Hebrew voice of the Biblical Job's companions. The two Greek voices speak with measured tones and single-minded linear confidence. The Homeric voice articulates tradition: it is the voice of repetition and reminder, the voice of our oral tradition. The Delphic voice speaks with the authority of the seeress touched by the divine. This voice articulates "that which is becoming," thus iliuminating value-movement within culture. The Biblical voice adds a layer of messiness and conflict to the authority of judicial pronouncements. The voices of Job's companions are always incomplete, flawed, or misdirected. We might listen to these voices with half an ear, and we
might successfully rebel against it under the right circumstances. Stripping the divine from the voice that articulates, these Biblical voices provide a societal exit from the duty to obey and submit. (Chroniclers in the Field of Cultural Production: Courts, Law and the Interpretive Process, p. 293).

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This year has seen turmoil among our oracular bodies on which an army of lawyer-priests and their clients rely. Two decisions, in particular, have appeared to upset what had been a tumultuous and deeply contested but more or less stable set or oracular premises.  One touched on the allocation of authority for discretionary decision making by and through law-- Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (No. 22-451; 28 June 2024). The other touched on the allocation of risk bearing for official actions, in this case that of the President--Trump v. U.S.(No. 23-939; 1 July 2024).  In both cases  the decisions were oracular against accusations of both heresy and transformation by the dissenting voices. In both cases, what had been a plausible determination of the ruling position was displaced by another (in Loper the so-called Chevron doctrine was overruled; in Trump, presidential immunity was extended and reconstituted). Reaction to both have been excited--especially by those with interests at stake and advantage to lose. That was to be expected.  

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Taking the longer view, it may be reasonable to consider the possibility that none of these decisions will eternally end, though it may alter, the path of the trajectories of the governance of the Republic.  It may also be possible to take the position that both sides in these decisions revealed the extent of the scope of plausible interpretation--and the stakes in play respecting each point in the resulting spectrum of possible choices among them. The administrative state will survive shifts in the locus of final interpretive power--or that locus will be statutorily redeveloped. Likewise the Republic will survive an ego that is presumably dictatorial--if it continues to serve the interest of its elites to denature dictatorship, something that applies to "good" dictators as well as the other kind. But this is the stuff of the political branches--and the masses, individually and collectively.  Here at last a faith in the individuals for whose welfare and protection the great organs of the Republic were constituted. The rest is faith and responsibility--and politics. The rest is hallucination.

It is also possible to remind oneself that the structuring of the Republic is not a Platonic exercise in which one institution is vested with the most authoritative voice in its construction--that the attainment of an inevitable perfection-- is not necessarily written in as an ordering premise of the Republic's constitutional order. Argument is more plausibly written into its framework, a structural dialectics that maintains the Republic's elites at low boil most of the time. A more perfect union, perhaps; a perfect one less possible, more likely implausible, if only because perfection is a moving target and tradition; the basis of the original ordering, may be understood as a presumption, the baseline, for moving national census from one point in the plausible interpretive spectrum to another. Americans seem to enjoy the discursive pyrotechnics of apokalyptein--its elites in resorting to those tropes and the rest as a willing audience. As a diversion it provides relief from the mundane; as a historical mimesis it falls nicely within cycles of apocalyptic hysteria; as politics both apolcalyptein and hysteria can be weaponized--the act and the message remain potent tools of political action. Too much, and the screeching from the indulgence in engineered revelatory trajectories annoys; a little more than too much and the screeching either ends or is ended.

Happy birthday U.S.