Fundamentalism

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.

Allocating Blame Between a Willing President, and an Unwilling Law

Consider it a metonym for larger questions on the economy, the war on terror, and beyond: if we have a President who’s made his policy position clear, do we blame him, or others, when the law prevents him from making good on a promise?

Here’s the story. Two men married in Massachusetts, one an American, the other an Australian. They’ve lived together as a couple for almost a decade and their marriage, remember, is legal under both state and Australian law. On that basis, the American sought permanent residence for his husband. Earlier this week, the Obama administration denied permanent resident status, citing the Defense of Marriage Act, which establishes that a valid “marriage,” for the purposes of federal law, requires one man and one woman. Functionally, for the purposes of federal benefits (like immigration status, Social Security, etc.), the bigoted federal definition supersedes more enlightened state law.

Oh, to make matters just a billion times worse, the now-deportable Australian is dying of AIDS, and dependent on his husband’s care.

Now here’s the question. Whose “fault” is this undeniable tragedy? It’s true that USCIS may in some cases, as an act of discretion, override the law and grant resident status to this couple, but in so doing they would violate clearly applicable law.

I would hold that blame rests with the jailer, who’s tied the prisoner’s hands, rather than the prisoner, who’s either not creative or not brave enough to slip his bonds. Remember, federal power over domestic matters is an illusion absent a compliant or filibuster-proof Congress. For all intents and purposes, President Obama has never had either.

Disappointment

Saddled with an opposition that relentlessly avoids the appearance or actuality of substance, and which tries at every turn to push the country farther right than their thin mandate should support, even at the expense of the country’s fiscal integrity, this President has somehow continued to speak in substantive, positive, centrist terms.

After the hard-right tilt of the Bush years, and corresponding translation of all debates into culture war terms, that even-temperedness is at least a little of what I signed up for: a President for the country, not for an outspoken and increasingly violent political faction. Even where the price is, essentially, the loss of political effectiveness, it’s a little nice to occupy the high ground. So the following comes as a surprise:

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee. [. . .]

A senior Obama adviser was even more cutting, suggesting that the Republican’s personal awkwardness will turn off voters.

“There’s a weirdness factor with Romney and it remains to be seen how he wears with the public,” said the adviser, noting that the contrasts they’d drive between the president and the former Massachusetts governor would be “based on character to a great extent.”

And a serious disappointment. If the Republican succeed at bringing Obama down to their level — where personal attacks and clever catchphrases substitute for leadership — they will have finally, and actually won. Centrism and statesmanship will be dead and buried, by both sides. And we’ll have nothing to show for that great loss, while the Republicans will have engineered a country convinced that “liberty” means nothing more than tax cuts and “freedom” from the social safety net.

If nothing else, though, this strategy leak signals a tone change, an awareness that the President’s current messaging strategy isn’t working. That’s good. But instead of embracing the lowest common denominator, the Administration should consider what’s actually working, what isn’t, and most importantly, what they actually have to lose. For example, the most frustrating element of the past three years has been the GOP’s remarkable ability to pin positions on the White House more extreme than those it actually advocates. By playing the centrist game in response, we get the worst of all worlds, suffering undeserved blows from the right, deserved blows from the left, and bewildered indifference from the center.

Well, “if we’re going to be walking into walls, I want us running into them.”

It’s long-past time the President attempted even-tempered and intellectual solutions to the world’s problems, and delivered them in a strident, confident tone, backed by the courage of our convictions. This IS the “tea party downgrade,” and it threatens to be the tea party double-recession — not because of Boehner’s caucus and its reckless disregard for the consequences of fiscal zealotry. But because we’ve allowed the right to define the terms of the debate for the better part of a half-century, on the mistaken premise that modern tax policy is some liberal lie at odds with a history of “freedom.” This while simultaneously giving a pass to the real enemy — supply-side economics — a disproven aberration that’s left the rich less taxed than ever in American history, shifted the burden to the middle, and left us too poor to fix the current crisis, itself a product of runaway deregulation. The last time so many Americans were out of a job, we put them to work reinventing the country. We electrified the Tennessee River Valley, rebuilt the interstate, and poured manpower into science and industry, to the point that we could fight (and win) the greatest war in human history. Instead, today, we view investing in ourselves as some sort of sin — and let Republicans use a deficit they built to somehow excuse themselves from their responsibility to fix the damn thing. Why?

President Obama should ask that question, rather than indulging in the kind of namecalling expected of our honorable friends opposite. The Republicans have left us to play the part of the prodigal son, coasting off our fathers’ victories. We need a paradigm shift: life will be hard again, but we can win through it if we give up the myths that’ve allowed the rich to get richer on the nation’s dime, and the preoccupations that’ve convinced some that it’s more important to worry about their God than our country.

If Obama won’t even try to accomplish that shift — but instead buys into the type of politics that have abetted this decline all along — then he truly does not deserve his second term. Although I suppose the Republicans will deserve it even less.

Let it never be said that I am unequal in criticism.

A Short Reading List…

…for a busy day. Don’t miss these two articles from The New Yorker. The first represents (yet another) alarming profile of Michele Bachmann; the second, a remarkable inside look at the operation that brought down Osama Bin Laden, and a fitting elegy for those members of the team who may (or may not) have been lost during the weekend’s tragic downing of a SEAL transport.

From the Bachmann article, note where Francis Schaeffer, apparently a strong influence on Bachmann’s life, explains that:

[t]he early church believed that only the Bible was the final authority. What these people really believed and what gave them their whole strength was in the truth of the Bible as the absolute infallible word of God.

Well, yes but no. Early Christians may’ve viewed the Bible as the “absolute infallible word of God,” but this misses the more interesting question of what reading of the Bible, exactly, they imbued with this infallibility. Not the literal, plain-text reading relied on by today’s Christians to substantiate the more absurd claims of modern fundamentalisms.