Captain Ahab and the White Whale of Democracy

From The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (1839) by Thomas Beale (1807–1849). The New York Public Library.

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was published in 1851. Akin to the tragic figures of ancient Greek drama, Captain Ahab is a figure who seems at first larger than life, a man who has been struck by lightning and lived, yet who is brought down by his own hubris. For he is “an ungodly, god-like” man who does not worship, or even recognize the superiority of forces beyond himself. His grandiosity is such that Ahab himself tells us he “would strike the sun if it insulted me.” Yet he has the power to move people with charismatic persuasion. And through rousing speech — and the promise of gold — he solicits the support of his crew for his obsessed mission: to hunt down a white whale. For he believes there is a force within the whale that wants to injure or oppose him, to limit his role in the world. And so, he strikes out against the elemental powers of nature, and the universe — which he cannot possibly defeat — and which finally bring him down.

Yet we can track Captain Ahab farther back still… For without overlooking their “clear-running” high mindedness, nor the noble documents they left to guide us, we might also remember that even many of our founding fathers had a bit of Ahab, a bit of Trump inside them too, a part that was “muddy and foul.” For Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe — to pick just four — were slave-holders all.

John Barrymore as Ahab Ceeley in The Sea Beast (1926)

And who but a version of Ahab was at the helm, as the U.S. government plowed its sea-like prairies, stole the land from its native peoples at our beginnings as a nation, and forced them onto reservations? (George Washington himself later came to regard this as the greatest failure of his presidency). And who but a sub-culture of Ahabs were responsible for sailing ships with Africans in chains in their holds; bringing them to swelter as slaves in a nation whose Declaration of Independence proclaimed in 1776 that all men were “created equal” and entitled to the rights of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The opening of the original printing of the Declaration, printed on July 4, 1776.

But that high-minded Declaration was to have no legal effect. And when the status of slaves — are they people or property? — became debated during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the compromise that was reached was that each slave was to be counted as three-fifths of a person. And the southern delegation had only granted slaves that fraction of person-hood once it became clear that the number of representatives that each state would be granted in the new Congress would be based upon population.

And so, gerrymandering and attempts to suppress and restrict voting rights of dark-skinned people is nothing new. A selfish, grandiose, and calculating meme has been with us forever. It comprises one of America’s “twin tributaries.” And this contrary pull of opposing currents has created the ongoing condition that sea captains term “confused waters.” And they’ve made it hard to steer the ship of state on a clear, and coherent democratic course.

We might then jump to the 20th century, while repeating the current refrain: Who but an Ahab following an obsessive, and ultimately self-destructive mission, would ever think to start a bloody, long-running war based on fake naval data in the Gulf of Tonkin, and then rain Agent Orange down upon the brown-skinned people and their families in Southeast Asia, as if they were threats limiting America’s role in the world? And who or what was the archetypal source that sentenced hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths based on charges cooked up by the neo-cons in George W’s White House — as if it had become a death-spewing Meth House — and prosecuting yet another war for charges against a nation in which neither its people, nor its leader, were ever culpable?

From Ahab’s whale boat, through these examples, it’s not a far jump to Trump’s White House. Trump’s just the latest of our Ahabs, an American son. (And we’ll need to own him, as the Germans did Hitler).

For our problem is deeper than Trump. And whether we call it Ahab-ism or narcissism, a militantly obsessed hubris that lacks empathy has been a near continuous stream running through American politics, and unfortunately, at times at its helm.

And long before Trump, people from outside the U.S. have viewed America as a crazy, gun-toting, dangerous place. And in other countries — long before Trump — the “Ugly American” had been a familiar and shadowy figure. And not only ugly, but (also like Trump) a dangerous bully, due to our outsized military that spends more on armaments than the other 8 or 10 most heavily armed countries combined.

All these unsavory traits need to be made more conscious — individually and collectively — for a people to become truly “great.” That is the true opportunity Trump offers America. And you can’t elect that kind of greatness — or even recognize it, if it remains largely obscured in yourself. And so, it’s going to take a lot of collective effort, and not only politically. It’s going to take a lot of soul searching, an increase of discernment, and a lessening of our psychological, spiritual, and political naiveté. We have to own our own shadow.

For Trump is an exaggerated mirror of what’s false, polarized, obsessed, and corruptible in a human soul; and the dire consequences that can result when that polarizing corruption is not adequately recognized, let alone opposed.

Opposing that is the true American jihad. Yet without adequately confronting these features in ourselves, as well as externally, we could just swing to someone “more liberal” in the next election cycle, while leaving the nation as gullible, and as vulnerable to a toxic divisiveness as ever.

There are thus enormously important lessons to learn from this presidency — an evolutionary challenge, really. And if we don’t learn them and evolve now, we may remain subject to the next Ahab, the next Trump in waiting, the next Joe McCarthy, the next Nixon, and be no wiser than before.