THE OSTERHOUT/VOEGELIN ENIGMA

 "In an hour of crisis, when the order of society flounders and disintegrates, the fundamental problems of political existence in history are more apt to come into view than in periods of comparative stability."- Eric Voegelin

       Along with his own children my grandfather also provided a safe refuge for my father’s best friend George Victor “Vic” Voegelin, who considered my grandfather Wray Osterhout a father figure and mentor. Even the odd spelling of (w)Ray has been passed down in both families. Two of my lifelong friends and deer hunting companions are Vic’s sons Bill and Wray Voegelin (Savage Lynch and Milawyer). Vic’s father, the rich and spoiled George Voegelin was said to have been a hopeless alcoholic losing millions multiple times and like my great grandfather Andrew Osterhout his name was rarely mentioned by either family. Turns out the Voegelins have as odd a bunch of intellectuals and hardcore alcoholics as the Osterhouts.  

      The reason I include the Voegelins here is twofold. One, the Voegelin family are as close to kin as it comes and secondly while researching (F)ancestor I came across the famous Indigenous linguist and anthropologist Prof. Charles F. “Carl” Voegelin. Carl led me to a German cousin, one of the twentieth century’s great minds, political philosopher Eric Voegelin. Voegelin is an even more uncommon surname than Osterhout. We are fam-il-ee.

     Eric Voegelin coined the arcane phrase “Don’t immanentize the eschaton.” that was popularized by conservative pundit William F. Buckley in the 1960’s. In Buckley’s skewed usage it was a battle cry against the radical left activism and utopian visions of the Sixties Revolutionaries that Conservatives feared were leading the world into “Godless totalitarianism.” In my understanding I took Voegelin’s 1952 statement to mean in both political and theological terms a call against the blind religious enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening of a century before and even the Native American Revitalization Movement, a warning to the modern evangelical Right that increasingly infected American politics after World War II and continues in today’s "apocalyptic Republican insurgency." Heaven will not materialize on earth, so don’t seek it out, try to create it or hasten the arrival of the nihilistic “end of times,” with your stupidity of faith and politics.

     Not a rigid political ideologue like Buckley, Voegelin drew dangerous parallels between Christian post-millennial ideology (eschatology) and the Third Reich Nazism he fled in Germany. Writing to George H. Nash after the historian labeled Eric Voegelin a “conservative,” the philosopher stated in typical Voegelin fashion, “Just because I’m not stupid enough to be a liberal does not mean I am stupid enough to be a conservative.” 

    I've read some of Charles Voegelin's work on the Shawnee female deity "Our Grandmother" and just scratched the surface with Eric Voegelin. The shit is dense. Both these Voegelins were giant intellects. I've spent a lifetime drinking and conversing with Wray and Bill Voegelin. Neither is an intellectual, but both are smart, clever and funny as hell. I'd trust either with my life. Eric Voegelin left Austria in the 1930's with the Gestapo at his door. Rather than collaborate with the Nazis he fled to America. In this "hour of crisis" in American politics the Osterhouts and Voegelins are not going anywhere. We may not be intellectuals, or have all the answers, but we are very well armed and know how to shoot. Not everyone on the left is unprepared for what may come. Just because we aren't smart enough to be labeled as intellectuals doesn't mean we aren't smart enough to recognize the warnings.