Fundamentalism

In Santorum, Death or Vindication for Democracy?

Especially given Rick Santorum’s two recent wins, and headlines practically blaring Romney’s concomitant weaknesses, I tend to see the Republican primaries as proof of a problem without a solution: members of a democracy don’t always vote for the superior candidate.

To be perfectly clear, I’m no fan of Mitt Romney. But I think it’s reasonable to conclude that he’s a better experienced and substantially less extreme (fleeting appearances to the contrary) nominee than Rick Santorum, and therefore objectively better equipped to run a twenty-first century democracy, where decisions must be made on the basis of reality rather than wishful ideology. Polls and mounting unfavorables to the contrary, Romney’s also better equipped to beat Obama in the general election, as Santorum’s ability to energize for the base simply cannot make up for the mass exodus of moderates Republicans will witness following a Santorum convention.

This is to say, if Republican primary voters are attempting to rationally select (1) the best President (2) who is also best-equipped to defeat the sitting President, they’re doing a bad job of it, or the democratic process is failing to translate their preferences into useful results. My conclusion holds even if Republicans are trying to select, instead, (1) the most conservative (read: extreme) candidate (2) who is also electable.

Given this bleak outlook, there’s one way to save democracy: if we imagine that, despite the voters’ stated goals, the Republican electorate is actually engaged in a longer game of which they’re not even consciously aware: crafting the party over the long term. Here we see two possible narratives emerge:

First, Republicans are happy to take a dive this term, so long as by nominating a conservative candidate, they build a philosophy that can win given enough time, and set the stage for a better message man to win with it. Call this the Goldwater option (per Toobin’s analysis), under which Republicans nominate an evangelical to signal (and cue up) an evangelical revolution, knowing it’ll take about four years to incubate. Even so, this seems like objectively bad strategy, because the current facts don’t fit the Goldwater pattern. Santorum’s evangelical revolution is not so much a true revolution as a counterrevolution against an infant post-culture wars finance-centered Republican Party, happily smothered in its cradle by the chaotic influence of the Tea Party. And, more importantly, the electorate isn’t just “not ready” for Santorum-style theocracy; they’ve affirmatively rejected it in poll after poll showing support for gay marriage rising by the day, and shock at Santorum’s anachronistic opposition to contraception (I mean, really). Truly, Santorum is one of the finest minds of the 13th century… and (maybe) a good alternative to George W. Bush. In the 2000 primaries.

Second, Republicans are engaged in the eschatalogical reinvention of their party, a process that can only be begun by the ritualistic sacrifice of a fundamentalist scapegoat. In Santorum, they’ve found their man. By this theory, Republicans really believe that they lost in 2008 because they weren’t conservative enough, and aim to test the theory by setting a paleoconservative against a week incumbent. If they win, they’ve proved a theory, and the Party can continue to radicalize apace. But when they lose, Santorum absorbs the blame, as a proxy for the religious right, and moderates may begin the arduous task of extirpating the fundamentalist influence on their party.

I want to believe the second narrative is true, but it’s one that entirely deprives the voters of agency. The justification for why democracy “works” in this case is that the electorate is either smarter than its component parts, like a hyper-efficient market, or force standing “behind the veil, unseen yet present”; or that we expect to spin gold from whatever electoral straw the electorate hands us.

Maybe the answer is that democracy can’t be judged by the short-term, or by individual elections, but only in retrospect. The arc of the Republican primary is long, but it bends towards… something?

Stay Useless, by the Cloud Nothings

Defining a Place for the New Atheism

I’m moving to Brooklyn! With no internet. Hence delays. 

Andrew Sullivan, with Bryan Appleyard, together question the value of the “new atheism,” which they define as a belief system devoted to the absolute eradication of both religion, and its influence on mankind. Appleyard:

By “neo-atheism”, I mean a tripartite belief system founded on the conviction that science provides the only road to truth and that all religions are deluded, irrational and destructive.

For them, neo-atheism rests on equal parts atheism, cultural secularism, and Darwinism, with the latter serving as  ”the final conclusive proof not only that God does not exist but also that religion as a whole is a uniquely dangerous threat to scientific rationality.” The definition is hardly elegant, and relies on context for its meaning: by characterizing neo-atheism at least partially as a reaction against creationism, he denies the concept an independent existence, and so risks stopping short of identifying any error in neo-atheism except in its relation to competing ideologies. But even if Appleyard’s neo-atheism is an antithesis, rather than a free-standing concept, we can take his argument as a case for synthesis — that reactionary, militant atheism shares the flaw of exclusion with the very ideologies it opposes.

[A]bsence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn’t. . . . The history of attempts to destroy religion is littered with the corpses of believers and unbelievers alike. There are many roads to truth, but cultish intolerance is not one of them.

Indeed, the fault runs deeper. The problem isn’t that militant atheism excludes, though it does; nor is it that it’s an incomplete explanation of the world, though it is (for now); nor even that humanist morality, the companion of atheism, fails to resonate with some individuals as strongly as religious morality. It’s that in a pluralistic society, which we declare ourselves to be, there can be no one answer. Christopher Hitchens once argued, correctly, that “the taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization.” That’s a battle we continue to fight against fundamentalist versions of Islam and Christianity alike. Similarly, we should recognize that atheism will have to civilize and accept difference before it can play an exclusively positive role in American society.

Thankfully, that task should not be terribly difficult. Many of the assumptions that underlie secularism and atheism are uniquely suited to American democracy, and easily adaptable to strengthen the integrity of our shared state. By proscribing the notion of a single religious Truth, atheism strongly justifies a constitutional structure that enables each citizen to discover their own personal truth. It maximizes freedom, by eschewing the kind of subjective norms that some would deploy to circumscribe the inoffensive, private moral choices of others. And it fits handily with the American Constitution’s formal declaration of its own religious neutrality, and its creation of what is (in the view of some scholars) a public, pan-American secular morality (a “constitutional faith”). As religion serves society by creating (for some) a necessary moral compass, atheism can serve the state by justifying each citizen’s decision to create that moral compass for themselves, and reminding them not to inflict it on others.

Consequentially, the only claim that atheism must renounce to complete its “taming and domestication” is the claim that other religions are, objectively and publicly, wrong and dangerous. To see itself integrated into civil society, atheism must find validation not just in an individual’s decision to abjure all faiths, but in the more common, private, and individual choice to follow one faith, and renounce others. Such decisions are, after all, declarations of atheism as to all but one (set of) god(s), made with the blessing and legal protection of our secular constitution. And there can be no greater victory over fundamentalism — atheism’s only true enemy — than to separate religiosity from orthodoxy.

But because atheism is a reactionary movement, query whether its “domestication” should precede or follow the end of religious fundamentalism in America. Until that time, militant atheists will have a point: religious fundamentalism actually is dangerous. It erodes our scientific competitiveness, justifies injustice, promotes bullying and therefore suicide, and provides moral support for domestic terrorism. We can look forward to the day when virulent atheism and fundamentalism produce, together, a stable synthesis, but in a world where Rick Santorum actually stands to win a Republican primary, we’re still a ways away.

The Dangers of Constitutional Theology

Rick Santorum’s surprising return to relevance should justify a second look at some of his… crazier beliefs. This The New York Times ably provides, per Molly Worthen, who questions whether his prolonged discussions of “natural law” are anything other than a way to sell Catholic-style theocracy to Tea Party-infused Republicans. I’m more troubled by his recent attempt to characterize the President (through “ObamaCare”) as trading the foundational notion of God-given rights for government-created rights, and his corresponding argument that only the former are permanent, and immune from government interference. The larger thesis, that rights cannot exist without God, shares a thesis with some other conservative schools of thought, all of which ought to in fact be viewed as dangerous to the rights of men.

First, Mr. Santorum appears alone in his belief that God can confer rights on men without mediation through some secular power structure. The Magna Carta itself — from which the rights of Englishmen so cherished by the Founders derive — was drafted to secure to the people, through the crown, rights recognized by God. And Catholic theology plainly holds that Christ’s law can only be discharged through human intermediaries. Even if God creates rights, man administers them.

Separately, Santorum’s conclusion that the creation of separate, government rights somehow dilutes rights of a more permanent basis lacks foundation in American law. The Constitution creates certain rights which the people may not abridge — including, per the Supreme Court and contrary to Santorum’s particularly deranged philosophy, the right to accessible contraception — but these are inherent in the document, based on the theory that the Founders pre-committed us to certain non-derogable rights. As legally permanent, these rights exist on the highest plane of American law. On a lower plane are those created or destroyed with regularity by the Congress: the superstructure built steadily above the “floor” provided by the Constitution. These include, for example, welfare rights, and other “new property” concerns, but go so far as to include various remedial vehicles that exist to discharge other fundamental rights, or to fulfill promises made by the Founders but not brought by them to completion. Among others, the right to discharge debts by bankruptcy is contemplated by the Constitution, but not accomplished by the document itself. If the legislative creation of similar rights consistent with the structure and intent of the Constitution somehow dilutes the whole, the compact cannot be administered without accomplishing its own destruction. Dividing constitutional concepts between the sacred rights created by the Constitution, and profane rights created by constitutional process but somehow inimical to it, simply does not make sense.

This is especially so if the Constitution is itself divinely inspired — as believed by Mormons, and specifically, by devotees of the mad Skousen — since all legislative creations of the constitutional process should share in that grace. But this notion of some latter-day divinity of government is separately problematic. If constitutional rights are made and handed down by God, disputes over government automatically become disputes over religion, investing average political debates with eschatological and doctrinal baggage detrimental to the larger society. (Such magnifying rhetoric explains, for example, how quickly the debate over healthcare reform became a debate over “tyranny.”) The Constitution is emphatically a document for us all, written “to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.” If constitutional debates can be resolved by reference to private, factional, or sectarian morality, rather than catholic concepts belonging to all Americans, we have abandoned the notion of a Constitution and a country for all citizens. Though this is, probably, exactly what Rick Santorum has in mind.

Remembering Mr. Hitchens

It’s an insecure, easily-threatened worldview which feels the need to frame every tragedy its opponents face within its own narrative. But that’s the outpouring we’ve seen from some on the Christian right over the passing of the prominent, relentlessly thoughtful atheist advocate Christopher Hitchens. Most of the acknowledgments take this simple form — “now he knows” — as if, somewhere, Mr. Hitchens is finally receiving his cosmological come-uppance. The sentiment is as arrogant as it is mean-spirited, even if delivered lovingly (as by Mr. Warren). And it’s also wrong.

Personally, I don’t stake a position on the theism v. atheism debate. It feels like a hard thing to be certain about, and (personally) I would hope there is some cosmic force that watches over mankind, for we sorely need it. Against such doubt, the only thing one can say about Mr. Hitchens is that either he does know, or he doesn’t. And either way, Mr. Hitchens faced the event which would finally resolve the question of divinity for him, personally, with bravery and a confidence that he used his time here well. As all should.

He has passed beyond a barrier where the scoring of the petty points so prized by his opponents no longer matters. I will remember him as someone who made us think, and for that, deserves our gratitude.

Note that if you want an excellent, touchingly human view of Mr. Hitchens, consider his correspondence and relationship with his (very religious) friend Andrew Sullivan.

Cultural Leadership

Rick Warren, the halfway-liberal evangelist briefly involved in the President’s inauguration, offers two tweets on cultural leadership, for those who believe the task can (and should) be undertaken:

Politics is always downstream from the source of culture. By the time a law is proposed, the water’s already contaminated.

If you’re serious about changing culture, start with music. Its power is unequalled. That’s why I mentor musicians.

I read these together, as a syllogism, which I think is probably correct:

(1) If your goal is to influence national politics, (2) remember that culture is prior to, and more powerful than, politics. (3) Therefore, to change politics, one must change culture.

The law rarely leads. In most cases — like in desegregation — it lags far behind, waiting for the ascendancy of a newer and more progressive generation to write their lifestyle and beliefs into law. And when the law leads, even if it effects cultural change, it rarely prompts the kind of consensus that results from organic development. To that extent, the preacher is on to something, but for one serious problem: I don’t think it’s possible to affirmatively lead the culture in the top-down manner he assumes. Put another way, I don’t think one can countermand organic cultural change through the counseling of individual players, or even through aggressive activism.

This is the flawed background assumption of the “culture wars”: that leaders, or groups largely disconnected from the dominant popular culture, can arrest the pace of its change. To my knowledge, it’s simply never happened in human history — and certainly not in a free society — but for whatever reason, it’s still an act played out in every generation, the culture going in one direction, and some remnant of the old guard attempting to “stand[] athwart history” yelling “Stop!” Maybe the background culture comes from a more genuine place; maybe, as an amalgamation of multiple influences, it’s less susceptible to voices narrowly focused on a single theme.

Whatever the reason, I don’t believe that cultural conservatism, as an ideology, has ever won a battle, despite hewing to Warren’s playbook. Rome hellenized despite the Catos, and was later Christianized despite Julian & his elites; the Catholic church lost its temporal influence despite the Papacy; the Beatles drowned out Cole Porter; the South desegregated despite Thurmond & Helms; and America will come to accept gay marriage despite her Santorums. Who’s to say whether it’s good or bad, but it is the course of history. “Politics is always downstream from the source of culture,” and the current’s too swift to paddle backwards.

Two Fundamentalisms

How is this distinguishable from Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson’s brand of Christianity?

Allah has struck New York and the capital city Washington by an earthquake as a punishment for their disbelief.

Falwell and Robertson on the 9/11 attacks, remember:

I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians, who’re actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle… all of them, who tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their faces and say, “you helped this happen.”

Why We Care About Scientific Understanding in Electeds

Kevin Williamson at NRO punts on a fairly interesting question about why we should care that politicians understand science. His basis: because science is hard, and a specialist field, electeds can’t really know the answer to a scientific question in any meaningful way, making it impossible to judge them for their knowledge, or lack thereof.

But it is a rare politician indeed who is remotely qualified to accept or dispute any scientific question of any real significance. Politicians are here to consider political questions.

I have not argued that scientific knowledge does not matter. I have argued that the scientific opinions of people who do not know the first thing about science do not matter.

Scientific disputes are highly specialized, and meaningful participation in them requires a great deal of non-generalist knowledge.

This is a cop out of a very specific kind. Much like the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica, Williamson’s response is basically a surrender to modernity. Simply put, the epistemological uncertainty of being “correct” about everything new in the world is no excuse for incompetence. Granting that members of the general public can’t really know science as well as professional scientists, we, as members of a technological society, should understand it at least well enough to remain proficient in our chosen professions. And it is the function of democratic representatives to make decisions for the rest of us.

Necessarily, no one politician can know everything necessary to the faithful discharge of that duty. But he must know when (and where) to turn to for expert advice, and be able to rely on it. When politicians tolerate or embrace scientific ignorance — by rejecting fundamental knowledge, on the basis of faith — they’re telling us that adherence to a personal creed matters more to them than the ability to make informed decisions based on both reality, and a healthy, necessary trust of those who know better than him. This is fine for some professions: admirable, even, in others. But for a politician, it represents a dereliction of the elected official’s first duty: to make informed decisions based on objective reality that are binding on the rest of us.

As such, the question, “are you a creationist?” is not just a helpful question when evaluating a politician. It’s a central one, because a “yes” answer proves the respondent is either (1) deliberately ignorant, (2) a shill for an offensively narrow view of Christianity, or (3) a shameless panderer. None of those is a quality I would like to see in my representative.

Ah. For the sake of staying positive: it is a good thing for politicians to engage with difficult facts on an objective basis. We should expect as much from all politicians.

Our Republican Endorsement

Today, let’s take a break from negativity. In the Republican Primary, this site endorses Jon Huntsman.

Mr. Huntsman will never win the nomination. He rejects creationism and climate denialism. He has the diplomat’s ability to speak to other cultures in their own terms, instead of the cultural hegemon’s insistence that they speak to him in his. In short, he rejects everything it means to be a Republican in the modern era. And by taking on the Republicans’ fringe, and its increasing pretensions to dominance, he shows no sign of stopping.

It’s this very commitment to centrism, and reasonable solutions, that together entitle him to the very position he’ll never occupy. Lesser men start from the center, and swerve right when it gets tough: McCain, for example. Huntsman shows every indication of sticking to his guns, even though it’ll cost him the nomination, to make a point about the way politics should be. For that, we applaud him.

To be clear, I at least could not support the Ambassador in a general election. The “flat tax,” and the notion that the poor should start paying taxes before the rich should pay more, remain wrongheaded and at odds with the facts (pdf). But a look at today’s political atmosphere makes clear that extremism begets extremism: when we first determine to forsake compromise, and set out to destroy one another rather than govern, we unlock Pandora’s box. It’s what happened in Wisconsin, and we can only fix the national problem by agreeing to govern together from the center again. Huntsman appears to understand as much, in a way that no other Republican does.

For that, he’s condemned to be an afterthought in a primary that’ll be defined by the Palins, Perrys, and Bachmanns, not by the Lugars and Huntsmans. That’s the Republicans’ loss — none of the former set have even a shadow of a shot in the general — but it’s the country’s loss, too. We deserve an election about ideas, not one where the Republican (wrongly) considers his opponent a foreign-born socialist, and the Democrat (probably correctly) considers his an intellectually bereft ideologue.

The Wages of Extremism

We can argue about whether the right’s continued practice of fanning the flames of Islamophobia actually leads to death. But here’s something that’s substantially more definite:

Because Republicans either incite — or fail to discredit, at leadership levels — the persistent “Birther” rumors, at least two members of our armed forces have concluded that the President is a traitor, and decided not to follow his orders. That’s not a thing you can do in the armed forces, and both soldiers’ careers are now over.

So much, then, for honor and duty.  We use them as the backbone of a life spent defending something. (YouTube) They use them as pawns in a political game of chess, to be sacrificed as necessary.

Theocratic Constitutionalism & the Hollowness of Republican “Freedom”

How disconcerting to have one’s Christian name used as a Twitter tag to describe the aspirations of seven men and one woman, none of whom will ever be President.

Still, yesterday’s debate gave a fairly good idea of what each candidate means when they use words like “liberty” or “freedom,” and expressions like “states’ rights.” Rick Perry comes closest to a coherent, limited-government synthesis, when arguing that the Tenth Amendment should protect each state’s right to make mistakes about the definition of marriage, subject only to the peoples’ right to amend the Constitution to say otherwise. As we’ve explained before, that’s actually not at all contradictory.

Compare this with Rick Santorum.

Sullivan explains: according to Pennsylvania’s favorite son, “freedom does not mean the freedom to violate the eternal, unchanging ‘laws of nature,’ as defined by the Catholic church.” Put another way, the laws of God perforce supersede the laws of man, and should be enforced by both man and by God.

Now, Santorum is obviously wrong on the law. The Constitution leaves no room for implied theocracy. If religious mores may be used in molding the law — something that’s perhaps improper in a pluralist society, but certainly not illegal – they do not become the law absent affirmative enactment, subject to constitutional limitations. But isn’t he also wrong on his theology? Believers should hope to see God’s will done, but Santorum posits an interference with temporal affairs rejected by Christ himself, and by early church fathers (St. Augustine of Hippo, in his City of God: “Two cities have been formed by two loves. The earthly, by the love of Self; the heavenly, by the love of God.”) Santorum’s view seems definitional of today’s more militant Christian fundamentalism, where a takeover of all secular institutions approximates a religious commandment, a Christian jihad, albeit one which precludes violence in most iterations. But it’s also plainly at odds with what Christianity was originally supposed to be.

It’s also in conflict with the larger fundamentalist community. The Skousenite view — formerly an aberration confined to the far-far-right of the Mormon church, now more mainline fundamentalism, post-Beck (cf.) — holds that the Constitution is a “divinely inspired” document. Per Skousen, because the Constitution was formed by God’s will, the limits of the document are the limits of God’s will for human government. Per Santorum, the Constitution incorporates God’s law into the background, as a sort of external limitation preventing the constitutional recognition of certain rights and liberties.

Both views should terrify, and both are clearly wrong. But both are finding increasing incorporation into the Republican party line. God help us all.