Walt Whitman (1891) | Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution / CC0
I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ’d in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ’d in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appalling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable.
—Walt Whitman, ca. 1870
Here, Whitman is in his most prophetic key, stripped of the hymnic exaltation often associated with Leaves of Grass, and instead offering an unsparing moral X-ray of the American soul. What strikes immediately is the tonal shift: no longer the bard singing the body electric, but a seer disillusioned, naming the sickness in the very marrow of democracy.
The passage anticipates many of our contemporary discontents: performative outrage, institutional decay, the erosion of sincerity, and the commodification of both literature and religion. His phrase “deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds” has the weight of scripture. It prefigures a spiritual rot that metastasizes into political and cultural crisis.
That crisis is no longer latent. I have lived in the United States for nearly 20 years, long enough to witness the transformation of disquiet into a kind of surreal nightmare. Today’s headlines—Trump considering US-led Iraq-style occupation of Gaza—read like parodies of empire, yet they are alarmingly real. The assault on the arts, the muzzling of dissent, the replacement of culture with content: All contribute to the sense that the air itself is not safe to breathe, poisoned by the very deceit Whitman diagnosed. One feels the slow erosion not just of institutions but of belief itself.
Whitman had not abandoned belief when he wrote those words. He mourned its absence with the intensity of one who had once touched it who had sung it, wide-eyed and full-throated, into the American canon. That is what gives his lament such gravity: the grief of a father for a wayward child, not the bitterness of a cynic. In this way, he stands less as a moralizer than as a cultural diagnostician, holding up the spirit to the light and naming what he sees.
That light has dimmed. Not extinguished, but veiled. The culture has turned away from its ideals and become embittered. In literature, mockery too often replaces meaning; detachment masquerades as depth. The literary voice that dares to believe in something—beauty, justice, the soul—is treated as naive, or worse, unfashionable. The cost of earnestness is ridicule.
Religion fares no better. Whitman saw the churches of his day as “the most dismal phantasms I know,” and that phantasmagoria persists: where ritual is emptied of mystery, and belief is wielded as a cudgel rather than a compass. What masquerades as religion is often ideology in hypocritical costume, a performance of faith without the tremor of the sacred.
For those of us caught in this cultural twilight, the alienation runs deep. There is no longer a common language of spirit. One becomes, over time, a stranger in a strange land, not because of accent or passport, but because of ethos. Because one still seeks something unattainable. Because one still believes that art and faith are not luxuries, but necessities of the soul.
That belief is difficult to sustain, and yet it becomes more vital in moments like this, when truth is under siege, violence is repackaged as salvation, and the human spirit is asked to kneel before vicious, cruel spectacle. It is precisely now that we must remember what Whitman remembered: that poetry can still name the real, and that belief, however fragile, is the seed of all resistance.
In dark times, the sacred work is not to flee but to testify. To speak what the age refuses to hear. To hold space for sincerity, for beauty, for what refuses to be commodified. This, too, is political. This, too, is an act of faith.
Touchingly urgent and authentic. Hope springs eternal with such aware writing.