The Tide Is Always Turning: The Parsifal Trap

With every minor political victory, my conservative friends never fail to inform me that the tide is turning. I’ve been fed this dinning phrase so often and have seen it written so many times, that I sometimes imagine the tide finally twisting itself into a nautical pretzel. Much conservative hope seems to be awash in slack water which never quite manages to reverse direction.

For the last ten years, a good friend has seen the tide turn with every occasion of potentially good news — a perpetrator convicted for a crime rather than his victim for self-defense, a wife arrested for assaulting her husband rather than the husband for being assaulted, a refugee jailed for rape rather than the woman cited for provocation, and so on. That such events are practically a null hypothesis never occurs to her.

Another friend is, I’m sad to say, an inveterate conspiracy nut. A secret society of Rosicrucians is steering the political world toward freedom and prosperity, as witnessed in the events in Italy, El Salvador, and Argentina. The rest of the world cannot be far behind. 

Moreover, Donald Trump is in control of the American melodrama, arranging for his own legal troubles to impress the electorate with his targeted innocence before emerging from every litigation in ascendant glory, a sure sign of the victory of good over evil. The positive evidence is everywhere to be seen, apparently. One need only know where to look to assure oneself that Trump will inevitably overcome the margin of fraud.

Another old friend, a poet of noble inclinations, believes that since the Liberal Party of Canada is generous to its artists, it will eventually reconsider its autocratic ways, move along a more socially conservative track, and therefore, merit our vote. Indeed, the election of a decent Liberal backbencher of his acquaintance is a clear signal that the tide is turning. 

That Canada’s artistic and poetic communities consistently vote Liberal while earnestly denouncing the Conservatives and that the decent Liberal backbencher votes along party lines and has never introduced a private member’s bill reveal that a presumed sign of civic benefits is a symptom of its opposite and that my friend is a casualty of his own folly.

Two of my correspondents each sent me an internet facsimile of a page from Klaus Schwab’s COVID-19: The Great Reset in which Schwab inveighs against a society of “useless eaters.” Now Schwab is a problematic individual in league with a cabal of globalists and oligarchs bent on demolishing the democratic order of nations, but he never used the phrase “useless eaters.” That particular page cannot be found in his text. Neither of my correspondents had read Schwab’s book but were only too eager to believe the wind was in their sails and to credit a forgery as authentic, harming both their credibility and the validity of the conservative argument.

These are only a few examples from a lengthy catalog of tide-turners. They express a psychological tropism I believe is common to much conservative thinking, always quick to snatch promise from unlikelihood, or at any rate, fantasy from reality, proof that conservative analysis is often unreliable and is prone to underestimating the cleverness and determination of the Left.  

Thus. Donald Trump was a surefire winner in 2020 — scarcely anyone allowed for the obvious possibility under the COVID pretext of massive Democrat fraud. This was or should have been a no-brainer. The 2022 congressional elections were enthusiastically described as a red wave in the making; they turned into a mere dribble. 

Arizona governor Katie Hobbs did not bother to debate her immensely popular gubernatorial opponent Kari Lake. Conservative pundits like Dr. Steve Turley immediately jumped to the happy conclusion that Kari Lake was a shoo-in when Turley should have suspected that Hobbs, who presided over the vote tally, knew she had the election already sewed up. Why debate? 

Additionally, the belief that Kari Lake’s evidence-based lawsuit against electoral fraud would bear fruit — “Kari Lake Just Ended Katie Hobbs” is the title of one of Turley’s videos — is another indication of wishful thinking rather than sober insight. Given the state of the judiciary, there was never any chance of that happening. More recently, we are informed that a corrupt attorney general is about to be cashiered. Great news. The next day he remains in office. Such instances abound.

This is not to say that reason and right are contraindicated, only that many conservatives seem inherently liable to moon-muddle. Good things do happen. But it should be acknowledged that conservative policies supporting freedom, faith, and family can prevail only at intervals and only if one recognizes the unbending nature of the reality principle against which one must continue to struggle.

One recalls that old saw about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice. As I wrote in a previous article for PJ Media, the phrase goes back to Martin Luther King’s celebrated conviction that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” a mythologem which derives in turn from a sermon delivered in 1853 by the American transcendentalist preacher Theodore Parker, who confessed, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one… And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

I, for one, am not so sure. Evil, I am convinced, is the default condition of the human world, which John of Patmos in the Book of Revelation portrayed as a demonic force and Thomas Aquinas in the Summa defined as a lack or emptiness in the core of the self. It entails the exercise of malignity, whether motiveless or not. It is something we can surmount only intermittently and only if we understand that we live in a state of neap tide and that the arc of the moral universe is more of a wavering line. The tide never quite turns and the arc never quite bends — in any event, not this side of heaven.

Regrettably, for a certain stamp of the conservative mind, the tide is always turning and the arc is always bending — although there is no indication of the process ever being completed. This is what I call the Parsifal trap. Parsifal — the “innocent fool” of the Grail legend — initially believes that justice and reason are present to be readily grasped and that the world is a fundamentally decent place. 

In the words of mythographer and psychologist Robert A. Johnson, “It would take years of grueling, rigorous battles and quests” before Parsifal arrives at the mature realization that the real world is difficult, complex, and resistant, requiring a degree of skepticism and modesty, as well as courage if one is to come to terms with it and achieve a modicum of success. “Parsifal need only ask the right question.” In other words, one interrogates experience with scrupulous candor to find what is there rather than seek confirmation of one’s biases or snag a desired conclusion from an obscure and enigmatic world. 

Once this fact is understood and absorbed, conservatives are less likely, to quote Robert Ludlum’s The Parsifal Mosaic, a serious thriller about the isolated and always insecure triumph of grit in a theater of perpetual violence and malfeasance, “to build delusions out of images and fantasies out of abstractions.” Those conservatives who tend to interpret every dixie cup as the Holy Grail must come to understand things may improve, if only temporarily, assuming political and practical affairs are approached with some degree of self-deprecation and sincerity of purpose. 

In a moving article for PJM about the handicapped painter Michael Davenport entitled “A Lesson in Perseverance for Conservatives,” Chris Queen writes: “As conservatives, it can seem like the odds are against us. We fight the headwinds of culture and a media infrastructure that seeks to shut us up and shut us down. But we persevere because we know that we're right and that nothing worthwhile is easy.” To win through, to whatever extent, demands we do not deceive ourselves and continue resolute.

Perseverance, prudence and, let’s say, clinical rather than romantic analysis, are the antidotes to the eclipse of hope and the erosion of constructive effort. This is a lesson many conservatives need to learn. The adversary may be absurd or insane, but the adversary is formidable and relentless. Parsifal needs to grow up and transcend the handicap of untutored innocence.