Filed under: Author - ACG,History,Politics | Tags: Human Events, Conservatism, Culture wars, Fundamentalism, Civil War, Historical revisionism
Among other stellar exhibitions of conservative values, this year’s CPAC featured, hilariously, a presentation that dared to ask the important question: “Abraham Lincoln: Friend or Foe?” Now, it’s altogether too easy to make fun of isolated presentations at a conservative fringe event. And it’s probably unfair to generalize on that basis alone.
But Human Events, a fairly mainstream conservative outlet (how sad is that?), sent around this e-mail to subscribers yesterday:
No, I do not know who signed me up for Human Events updates. And that’s not the point. The point is that the motivations for and the outcome of the Civil War are somehow now controversial, in a mainstream conservative paper. It gets worse, too. The e-mail goes on to offer a few revelations. DID YOU KNOW:
- That secession was legal
- That the Emancipation Proclamation did not free a single slave
- That leading Northern generals — like McLellan and Sherman — hated abolitionists
- That bombing people “back to the Stone Age” got its start with the Federal siege of Vicksburg
- That Stonewall Jackson founded a Sunday school for slaves where he taught them how to read
- That General James Longstreet fought the Battle of Sharpsburg in his carpet slippers
- That if the South had won, we might be able to enjoy holidays in the sunny Southern state of Cuba
These are all pretty bad, and pretty wrong. There’s a good reason you didn’t know about #1: because it’s not true. Although we can query whether Justice Chase had a conflict of interest, he was right to conclude, after the fact in Texas v. White, that secession was an illegal act utterly hostile to the values and the theory of the Constitution. And whether the Emancipation Proclamation was conceived as a military or a moral act is an interesting debate, but doesn’t alter, as this author seems to think, the conclusion that it was the Right Thing To Do. But unequivocally the worst has to be number four, which deserves its own highlight. The author finds it significant that:
Stonewall Jackson founded a Sunday school for slaves where he taught them how to read
Why would this fact be significant? Why does the author think I should care? Why does he care? Presumably, because it rehabilitates Stonewall Jackson as a partially moral man. But it really doesn’t. It shows that General Jackson was, at best, a benevolent slaver who believed in the “White Man’s Burden.” Partially benevolent slavery is still slavery. It’s still premised on the idea of black inferiority, and it still holds out human beings as property. Accordingly, it’s still grievously immoral, and the absence of physical cruelty doesn’t change that, or make it better. The cruelty we so often see in slavery is wrong, to be sure, but it’s a wrong that’s separate from and not necessary for the sin of slavery. By trying to argue otherwise, our author, a valued contributor to Human Events, seems to suggest that we should see where Stonewall Jackson was coming from. And that’s truly terrifying.
Bottom line: Human Events doesn’t understand the Civil War, a turning point in American history, a “constitutional moment” that improved the daily lives of every American, black or white, in a thousand different ways. They don’t care. Not about that, and not about the fact that half a million American soldiers died to secure those benefits. For them, it’s more worthwhile to tell your readers that, if the South had won the Civil War, maybe we wouldn’t have a country anymore, but hey. We’d always have Cuba.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics,Religion,Science | Tags: Avatar, Christianity, Culture wars, Fundamentalism, Jonah Goldberg, Neo-Platonism, Philosophy, Platonism, Religious politics, Ross Douthat, Science fiction, War on Christmas
James Cameron’s Avatar is a good movie — but as a paean to a path we forsook long ago, it’s anything but subtle, and its approach to race may even be a little troubling, for the simplistic sort of apology it contains. Should we, as a race, feel personally guilty for the sins of our fathers, and if so, how if at all should we express it? And is allegory so blatant any allegory at all?
These issues, raised by the film, might be worth debate. What’s not worth debate is the question of whether the film somehow marginalizes Christianity. And yet no less than two “mainstream” conservative commentators have attempted to roll Avatar in to the “war on Christmas,” for its failure to further the clear superiority of monotheism. Apparently, Eywa is not the reason for the season.
In his contribution, Jonah Goldberg, the cutting mind who brought us “Liberal Fascism,” starts with — and slowly rejects — the premise that specific religiosity matters. It’s a dishonest and deeply flawed way to deepen, and then purport to abandon culture war tropes.
What would have been controversial is if — somehow — Cameron had made a movie in which the good guys accepted Jesus Christ into their hearts.
Of course, that sounds outlandish and absurd, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We live in an age in which it’s the norm to speak glowingly of spirituality but derisively of traditional religion. If the Na’Vi were Roman Catholics, there would be boycotts and protests. Make the oversized Smurfs Rousseauian noble savages and everyone nods along, save for a few cranky right-wingers.
Awww, poor persecuted Christians. It’s tough to be an overwhelming majority and have to feign interest in other viewpoints. Now, watch the hands as Goldberg ditches this losing argument for another one. Apparently the absence of Christ in a science fiction film isn’t so surprising — what’s surprising is that religion is present at all.
What I find fascinating, and infuriating, is how the culture war debate is routinely described by antagonists on both sides as a conflict between the religious and the un-religious. The faith instinct manifests itself across the ideological spectrum, even if it masquerades as something else [as in Avatar].
Goldberg takes this as proof of God’s existence. The language is somewhat less elegant than Cicero’s (“nature herself has imprinted on the minds of all the idea of god”), but the notion is the same, and it suffers from the same flaws. That we think of God does not prove his existence. Indeed, the presence of the “faith instinct” could just as easily point to a shared human need to find (or, failing that, create) certainty in an uncertain world. God’s commonality could be his downfall, not proof of his existence.
Surprisingly, our second commentator is much, much worse. It’s seriously hard to be worse than Jonah Goldberg, but there but for the grace of God goes Ross Douthat, whose problem isn’t with Avatar‘s ignorance of Christianity, but with its apparent support for pantheism, a religion he judges as “empty” because it fails to offer a Christian form of salvation.
Religion exists, in part, precisely because humans aren’t at home amid these cruel rhythms. We stand half inside the natural world and half outside it. We’re beasts with self-consciousness, predators with ethics, mortal creatures who yearn for immortality.
This is an agonized position, and if there’s no escape upward — or no God to take on flesh and come among us, as the Christmas story has it — a deeply tragic one.
Pantheism offers a different sort of solution: a downward exit, an abandonment of our tragic self-consciousness, a re-merger with the natural world our ancestors half-escaped millennia ago.
But except as dust and ashes, Nature cannot take us back.
This really isn’t worth commentary, except to note how narrow Douthat’s field of vision is (salvation means a lot of things to a lot of people), and how far religion has fallen. He all but concedes that religion only has value to him if it can offer an “escape upward” — a comfort in the form of an afterlife, or close proximity to a physical, knowable God. That’s just sad. Wasn’t knowledge once its own reward, and its pursuit an integral part of religion? Don’t we want Marx to be wrong? Isn’t the pursuit of wisdom its own escape upwards? Douthat could have benefited from reading — among other things — at least a single page of Platonist philosophy.
Besides, Douthat fails at the threshold. The theology of Avatar begins as a type of pantheism, but slowly becomes a verifiable scientific construct. When your planet is a huge neural net that preserves memories in accessible form, ancestor- and nature-worship aren’t forms of religious reverence — they’re forms of racial memory. Eywa is less a nature-god than a naturally occurring Library of Alexandria. This is not a minor plot point: it’s the film’s writers explicitly avoiding deeper questions of religion. Goldberg yearns to alter, and Douthat tilts against, an allegory that ultimately isn’t there.
Further, the movie is better for it. Explicit religious allegory is a painful thing, because it almost always degenerates into a missionary tract. Science fiction and fantasy work because they let us see ourselves from a distance, and through other eyes: explicit allegory, of the type that our two Christian pundits crave, kills that distance, and strangles the genre of all but escapist value. Goldberg and Douthat would depopulate creative fiction of all works but Narnia knock-offs. And who wants that?
Filed under: Author - ACG,Politics,Religion | Tags: Culture wars, First Amendment, Fundamentalism, Immigration, Islam, Law
Minarets. Not so scary.
Underscoring yesterday’s post about the dangers of religious conflict, per the BBC, we learn that Switzerland voted, by referendum, to ban the construction of minarets, an iconic feature of Islamic architecture used in daily calls to prayer. The notion that this will “solve” the “problem” of “Islamization” in Switzerland is ridiculous, in its whole, and at every subsidiary part. The majority shouldn’t delude itself into thinking this is anything but what it is: oppression of a resurgent minority, sure to inflame an avoidable conflict about the nature, and adaptability, of European democracy.
Say what you will about America’s many, frequently serious problems: this could not happen here, no matter how desperately some of our countrymen may wish for it. Immigration and an influx of different cultures rarely become the existential threats to society that they’re so often billed as. But, should it come to that, there’s a middle road between accommodation and all-out conflict, which this ban does seem to forbode. Our Constitution commands us to find that middle road; that Switzerland declined to rise to the same challenge is a stain on their history.
Filed under: Author - ACG,Culture,History,Politics,Religion | Tags: Creationism, Culture wars, Don McLeroy, Fundamentalism, Patriotism, Religious history, Religious politics
And it never was, for the simple fact that, with the religious right, when push comes to shove, their narrow conception of God trumps country, character, and Constitution. How else do you explain the most recent conflagration to come out of Texas’ warped, disgraceful board of education?
The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state’s social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.
Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. [. . .]
But the emphasis on Christianity as a driving force is disputed by some historians, who focus on the economic motivation of many colonists and the fractured views of religion among the Founding Fathers.
Because prosleytizing should always take a backseat to science and, indeed, history.
Never let the far-right go unchallenged when they purport to put “country first.” There’s a reason the slogan goes, “God and country.” One has to wonder about an ideology that brands government subsidies “socialism,” but expects the government to subsidize their missionary activity.
More on this subject, from a letter I recently wrote explaining my view of why the Founders did not intend to ground American culture exclusively within Christian morality:
[. . .] The question, of course, is what is morality, and what is religion. The Founders were hardly of one mind on the subject (like most subjects — most differed on the meaning of “the Freedom of Speech,” even, as was clear by 1812!). It’s hard to disagree with the proposition that some absolute moral code must govern, but whose, and how? Historical originalism — the idea that what the Founders practiced, they intended for us — is attractive for its objectivity but discounts the notion, adopted by much of the same generation, that the Constitution was not intended to freeze the social mores of 1789 America. The document was intended to admit of interpretation rather than static meaning: “[W]e must never forget that it is a Constitution we are expounding.” McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819). Similarly, it discounts the problem that history rarely if ever speaks with one voice. Franklin’s God was very different than Patrick Henry’s God, was very different from Jefferson’s God (Jefferson edited his own Bible, by deleting all mentions of miracles). Whose God (morality) controls, if any?
Despite this void, the rules of constitutional decisionmaking provide some guidance. Due process & equal protection function to insulate small groups from the caprice of majoritarian government, insofar as restrictions placed on the few derive only from subjective notions of the morality of the many, and lack an objective basis in physical reality: “Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.” Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833 (1992); Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). This doesn’t deprive the state of the power to regulate morals, although it does limit it to only “rational” regulations, at the maximum. You can call this “constitutional faith” (though I’m misappropriating a term from someone far smarter than me!): that, rather than incorporating any single faith or moral structure as a guiding light, the Constitution sets out rules of decision that require a searching inquiry into any law, or action, that functions to proscribe conduct merely for the twinge of discomfort it creates in others. This rule “plays well” with the other constitutional freedoms of religion, association, and speech, too, to create a freer and more pluralistic society than the Founders knew, but perhaps not more so than they intended.
