David Mamet is, the cover to his new book – The
Disenlightenment: Politics, Horror and Entertainment – announces,
“one of the foremost American playwrights.” The description is a bit too modest
for Ben Shapiro, who tells us “David
Mamet is America’s greatest living playwright and screenwriter.”
He is also a Goddamned joy to read.
In this slender book, the entire world-stage of the sad and
despairing post-modern age – ours – forms the warp and woof of Mamet’s always
entertaining romp through philosophy, philology and culture in an analysis
bordering on trenchant political satire and cultural horror.
One chapter of the book – “A Dream Is A Wish Your Heart
Makes” – is, among other things, an examination of a political and cultural
con-game and the dangers of luxury, the lavish backyard pool in which many of
America’s loftier critics swim.
“A con game functions through exciting greed, the
political-social con though assuaging fear.” This political writer will lay his
head on his pillow tonight wishing he had written that line.
Mamet continues, “The frightened individual, reduced by
knowledge of his own powerlessness, can be offered the upgrade to rage only as
a member of the group. This is the introductory gift of his membership in the
party: he is no longer powerless, as he has what he has misidentified as
anxiety, or apprehension, as indignation.”
The post-modern world, taught to shiver in its boots by
carnival-barker politicians, is highly susceptible to distraction and political
suggestion. There is a method to the madness of misidentifying causes. The
falsely assigned causes of anxiety, “whether [President Donald] Trump, or
global warming, racism, capitalism, or trans rights, functions here like the
psychiatrist’s inverse-oracular withholding of cause: it allows the politician,
having hit the right note, an endless exploitation, since the cause being imaginary,
there is no danger of a cure.”
In a delicious piece of political ribaldry, the word “cure”
in the passage above is footnoted: “Ultraliberal wealthy Californians voted for
environmental protections (for the Deltas, for the untrimmed parklands, etc.)
for fiscal policies leaching money for fire department operations, and spending
it on DEI [Diversity, Equity and Inclusion], for hiring practices for first
responders, prioritizing race and gender over merit and competence, and in January 2025, the reservoirs were empty, the
combustible parkland blazed, the fire departments were water-starved, and the
17 million stripped from the L.A.P.D. for operations was spent on DEI…”
Mamet’s cultural analysis reaches into the bowels of our
lonely and messy confusion. Consider: “The computer age, that Pandora’s box,
has separated us from communion with our fellows. For sitting in a playhouse or
movie theatre laughing or weeping with unknown others is an exercise in
humanity – that is, the experience
(rather than the understanding) that, gender, race and politics aside, we tend
to laugh and cry at the same things. The new woke totalitarianism is an
outgrowth of our separation, ensuring only that those stories that separate us
can be told, and can be appreciated not in communion, but in isolation with a machine.”
We know that the age of Enlightenment was followed in due
courses by the Romantic Period, a direct application of Isaac Newton’s Third
Law of Motion: “For every action, there
is an equal and opposite reaction.” To a certain extent warps in our cultus (rather
than culture) may be self-correcting. This is not a vagrant hope. In fairy
tales, the way out of the dark forest is the way in – in reverse. In the
postmodern period, C. S. Lewis’s “friendship” or Philia (Greek: φιλία) -- the love existing between people who share
common values, interests, or activities – has been replaced by plasticine Facebook
friendships, synthetic and unsatisfying. And, Mamet supposes, we may be
drifting into a resurgence of pre-Christian paganism, as the Judeo-Christian experience
becomes a dimly recalled rather than a lived experience.
How would anyone know, Dwight McDonald used to ask, if the
world were slipping into a pagan reversion?
There would be signs, Mamet tells us: “The bookworms, the
media, the schools, and the politicians are screeching that there is evil in
the world, and that we may be the superhero we see in the movies if we
continually hate (our neighbors) which proclamation we may make good if we buy
their product: vote for them, teach diversity, read only the books on their
side, abandon our children to the teachers union, tear down the other sides
political signs and so on…”
And Mamet adds in another footnote: “I do not mention the
contemporary rediscovery of racism, and its perpetual use, ostensibly as a
means of control of the hated Other, but actually for manipulation of the
incited. Screaming “Palestine Must Be Free” is the delight of immunity from the
oppression of the Sixth Commandment.”
The Disenlightenment
ends on a biographical note: “I am a child of the American midcentury and have
prospered under the American right to freedom of expression. Throughout my life
I’ve been writing my obituary. Or perhaps my autobiography. God bless America.”
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