Category: Religion

culture

The Other Side

Let’s imagine the conflict known as the Civil War.  It had been brewing since before the Constitution was ratified.  The issues were marrow deep in American society, so much so that any attempt to address the issue of slavery was, in effect, a deal breaker for the new nation.  The South made it abundantly clear that any action on the part of the North to write into the new guiding document the idea that black slaves were somehow deserving of the liberty being claimed for their white owners—and thereby signaling the end of slavery among the Thirteen Colonies—would be met with absolute refusal to play.  Had the reformers, exemplified by the likes of Benjamin Franklin, tried to assert any kind of racial equality at the time, the United States would have been stillborn.

Instead, they put a time limit into the document—20 years—which forbade the topic from even being discussed in Congress until that later year, at which time, presumably, the issue would come to the floor for some kind of resolution.  History shows that every such attempt was met with denunciations by southern members of Congress and often with threats of secession—which by then were illegal.

Make no mistake, as some revisionists might have you believe, secession was not an option and everyone who voted to ratify the Constitution knew it.  Contrary to popular mythology, the original 13 states locked themselves together permanently.  A couple of later territories parlayed an “escape clause”—Texas was a big one, but the Texas “right to secede” had a limiting condition: Texas could only leave as long as it never took up arms against the Union, which, much to Sam Houston’s consternation, it did during the Civil War and forever lost that right, despite what Governor Perry might wish people to believe—but by and large, joining the Union was a binding act that could not be reversed other than by armed rebellion.  The South was in the wrong, legally speaking.

Another bit of modern revisionism that has become popular is that the South did not secede over slavery but over “states rights.”  This is patent nonsense and any cursory perusal of the declarations of secession shows that issue number one for all of them was slavery.  They were not going to let Abraham Lincoln and his Republicans take away their property.

It’s difficult to imagine how it must have felt to be caught between the two sides.  Philosophically, I mean.  And where you lived didn’t make much difference.  There were riots in New York and other places in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation.  Many Northerners who had supported Lincoln in the war effort turned on him when the issue changed from preserving the Union to freeing the slaves.  Poor whites were no more enamored of the idea of free blacks than were Southern plantation owners.  As far as they were concerned, it was more competition for already depressed wages.

And the fact is many on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line, even among those who didn’t support slavery as such, did not regard Africans as fully human—at least not the equal of white people.

Try as we might to spin it otherwise, the many-faceted nature of the War Between The States turned on questions of what it meant to be human.

We still have not settled that question.  It may be that for many people it is simply not settleable.

I want to be very careful here.  My purpose in laying out the nature of the conflict during the Civil War is to establish a base for what may end up being another civil war if we’re not very careful.  The conduct—philosophically, politically, legally, morally—on both sides of the slave/emancipation divide illuminates aspects of our culture and our nature that are difficult.

There may have been many white people at the time who truly believe blacks were fully human and fully equal by nature to whites.  Most of them did not hold much authority and given subsequent history they did not win the public debate.  African Americans remained second or third class citizens for well over a century after the end of the war and in some ways today still face an uphill struggle for equity.  The bases of the discrimination mutated over time and it might be fair to say problems shifted from nature to nurture and took on sociological contours rather than biological, but the fact remains people do not treat each other as fully human in all circumstances.

It is a salient fact of our history that during the heated debates of the Emancipation and Reconstruction Eras over equal rights, equal status, and equal abilities, one group was not even considered as relevant.  Women.

Certainly the Women’s Suffrage Movement put forth arguments for equality, but the country was not likely to go to war over what people like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony asserted—that one half the population lived in conditions of chattel bondage and servitude based on gender.

The list of inarguable facts speaks for itself.  Women did not have the right to vote (federally, that is—some states granted it, here and there, from time to time, in limited fashion) until 1920.

Throughout the 19th Century, a divorced woman lost everything.  As a married woman, all her property belonged to her husband, including the children, and in the instance of a divorce the law said her ex-husband owed her nothing.  She left with the clothes on her back, which was all she was legally entitled to.  Variations existed here and there, but generally this was the case.

A woman was denied entree into the professions whenever possible.  The first woman to graduate with a medical degree in the United States was Elizabeth Blackwell in 1849.  She was barred residency in a hospital due to her sex.  The struggle continued, but by 1920 women represented only 5% of the entire medical profession as doctors.   Elizabeth Bragg graduated from Berkely in 1876 as a civil engineer, but it was not until 1965 that a woman was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.  In 1869, Arabella Mansfield graduated law school and applied to the bar in Iowa.  Iowa law forbade any but white males from taking the bar, but an exception was made.  She passed.  (A year later the law was repealed, suggesting that she was allowed to take the bar examination with an expectation that she would fail.)

You get my meaning.  The numbers were low, the exceptions more or less famous.  Most women in the professions generally had to give them up when they married and there was no social space for a career woman to live her life with the same expectations of free conduct as her male counterparts.  The professions for women were very much like taking vows.

The Civil War seemed to settle the question as to the humanity of slaves, but did nothing for women.

Of course, had you phrased it that way at the time, many people, including many women, would have looked at you like you had just stepped off a spaceship speaking High Arcturan.  Of course women are human, they might answer.  But, good heavens, they’re women.

As if that explained anything.

At the time, it sort of did, though.  Women had a clearly-defined function as far as society—and most people—were concerned.  They were to be wives and mothers.  Anything else was vanity at best, offensive at worst.  Women should be what they were “made to be” and aspire to nothing more.

It didn’t seem to occur to most people that the prohibition on aspiring to be more implied that women did aspire and aspiration was a wholly human trait.

But I digress.  The fact is, any attempt to question this basic assumption was met with disdain and often the full force of the law.  The Suffrage Movement itself split over the nature of female aspiration—most thought it enough to simply get the vote, while others intended that women be granted the full rank and privilege of being human as expressed by the lives of their male counterparts, with all that entailed.  It might be that this was more a tactical issue, but I don’t doubt that for many it was philosophical as well.  In an instance of political expedience, the Suffrage Movement repudiated the ambition to make women wholly their own agents and decided to stick to the more “sanitary” program of achieving the vote.  They didn’t want to frighten potential male supporters by arguing for their right to be anything other than what they had always been—wives and mothers—only with the right to vote.

Of course, even after gaining suffrage in 1920, women remained second-class citizens because society treated them that way.  Educational opportunities were harder to gain, access to jobs and careers more difficult (and when gained, advancement and recognition delayed or denied), and economic shackles remained.  Up till the 1990s, a woman’s credit history belonged to her husband, and often, even after a divorce, she would find it very difficult to establish any credit on her own without her (former) husband’s history making it awkward.  As the 20th Century progressed, it became clear that the vote simply wasn’t enough, that equality was made up of much more than the franchise—it entails respect, agency, and an assumption of individual worth and merit, none of which can be gained by casting a ballot but only by being allowed to live as one chooses.

I think it came to a real head after the Second World War, when all those women, who had been working in industry, building the machinery with which we waged that war, were told to go home and forget all about self-sufficiency, because the men were coming home and they needed not only jobs but pliant females who wouldn’t compete with them.  It wasn’t just the jobs, but a massive change in the educational system—classes that had opened up to women in the 20s and 30s were suddenly closing down again, women who wanted to pursue careers were castigated as unnatural, the whole weight of cultural expectation that characterized women as essential sex toys and brood mares fell on them in the 1950s and turned that decade into one of the strangest periods of American history and set the stage for all the emancipatory movements of the Sixties and Seventies.  June Cleaver was the cultural icon women were supposed to aspire to.  This to women who had been  and whose mothers had been building tanks, airplanes, and ships in the 1940s, running assembly lines, driving trucks, farming, and so much more.  They were expected to just forget all that and return to a condition of simple-minded obeisance all for the boys coming home.

As patriotic as this sounded, this was an instance where sacrifice becomes a form of slavery.

Yes, there were many women who were probably perfectly happy with this state of affairs.  But their happiness was built on the shattered dreams of women for whom this was simply unacceptable.  The one cannot be justified by the desire for the other.

By now, it may be obvious where I’m going with this.  We are facing the possibility of another civil war, one I’m not sure where the lines will be drawn, but one that could be brutally destructive.  We joked about the War Between the Sexes back in the day, but that’s not what this is.  This is going to be a war over the exact nature of agency.  The flags have now gone up the poles on the one side and I think it has taken a lot of people by surprise.  The blowback is coming.

Here is how I feel about this.  One side in this conflict wishes to privilege potential life in such a way as to deny self-determination and agency to half the population, the half that still has a solid argument that it has not yet been granted full equality with the other half.  That for the sake of what may be they will have to surrender themselves to conditions of servitude that the other side simply does not have to suffer, purely by dint of biology.

It is not sufficient to argue that all the one side wants is for things to go back to the way they used to be.  The way things used to be was not acceptable—that’s why we changed it.  The way things used to be was built on hypocrisies and legal fictions that privileged a status quo which, as long as certain people exhibited no aspirations at odds with the publicly accepted norms, everyone pretended was equal and fair and just.

Well, we all know how often that is actually the case.

What disturbs me—appalls me, really—is how little the Other Side really knows, not only about our history, but about any history, and how they are so easily manipulated by the agents of regress.  There are certain arguments we should have been done with that we’re having to have all over again because people—many people—don’t have a clue what has gone before.

They’re the sorts who believe the revisionists who tell us that the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery but states rights or that the South really did have the right to secede.

They’re the sort that believes that any woman who has the temerity to talk publicly about her right to have sex is a slut.

A word to the wise—it’s not temerity; it’s self confidence.

See you on the barricades.

culture

Narratives and the American Landscape

I watched the Bill Moyers interview of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt with great interest. Haidt tried to describe what has essentially become what might be called the Two Nations Problem—that is, that America, the United States, has become in many ways two very distinct countries.

At its simplest, what this means to me is that people, using the same documents, the same laws, and the same presumptions of national character, have created two very different narratives about what it means to be an American.  Quite often these beliefs overlap, but at the extremes such instances are ignored or treated as anomalies or expressions of hypocrisy.

It might be reassuring to keep in mind that it is at the rhetorical and ideological extremes where this happens, that the larger portion of the population is between the extremes, and by inference less rigid in their misapprehensions of both sides, but in reality this may not matter since it is those who establish the most coherent narratives who dictate the battle lines.  And we have come to a point where a willingness to hear the opposite viewpoint gets characterized as a kind of treason.

As an example, try this: for the Left, any suggestion that corporations are important, vital, and often do beneficial things for society is relegated at best to a “So what?” category, at worse as an attempt to excuse a variety of evils committed in the name of profit.  For the Right, any criticism of the shortcomings of corporations and attempts to regulate activities which can be demonstrated as undesirable is seen as a direct attack on fundamental American freedoms.

We can go down the list.  Attempts to regulate the distribution and availability of firearms is seen by the Right as a threat to basic liberties while for the Left the defense of an absolutist Second Amendment posture is seen as irresponsible at best, the promotion and propagation of a culture of violence at worst.  Environmental issues divide along similar lines—for the Left, this is, using Jonathan Haidt’s term, sacred, but for the Right is again an assault on the freedoms of Americans to use their property as they see fit.  And taxes? For the Right, taxes have become a penalty, for the Left a kind of grail for equitable redistribution of wealth.

Tragically, none of these hardened positions—none—addresses the reality of most Americans’ lives.

Oh, there’s some truth in all the positions, otherwise it would be simpler to dismiss them.  But the hardest truth to get at is the one being used to advance a false position.

What Haidt suggests—and I’ve heard political strategists talk about this—is that the difficulty lies in the particular narrative embraced. The story we use to describe who we are.  In the past, that story has been less rigid, porous in some ways, and flexible enough to include a variety of viewpoints from both Left and Right, but in recent years both narratives have taken on the stolidity of religion.

But the related problem is that really there’s only one narrative, at least one that’s cogent and accessible, and that happens to be the one best described as conservative.

Recently, I’ve been giving thought to this dichotomy of Left-Right, Liberal-Conservative.  I’ve been uncomfortable with it for a long time, but have found myself shoved into the Left-Liberal camp as a reaction to policy proposals I find unacceptable which always seem to come from the Right-Conservative side.  In the hurly-burly of political competition, sometimes there isn’t room for the kind of nuance which, say, historians can indulge.  You find yourself defending or attacking in an attempt to preserve or change and the finer points of all positions are reduced to sound-bites and slogans.  I’ve never been particularly pleased with the welfare system, but faced with conservative assaults that seem determined to simply tear it down and leave a great many people without recourse  has found me defending it against any criticism that seems aimed at finding a reason to end it.  It has always seemed to me that people opposed to it are not interested in offering a viable alternative (“They should all get a job!”) and dismantling welfare would do nothing but leave many millions of people with nothing.

But nuance, as I say, gets lost.  I don’t care for the way in which welfare is administered, but that’s not the same as saying we should not have a system for those who simply cannot gain employment.  And in the economic environments of the last forty years, it is simply facile posturing to suggest there are plenty of jobs.  If you want to see a real-life consequence of the kind of budget cutting being discussed, look at the upsurge of homelessness after Reagan gutted the HHS budgets and people who had been in mental hospitals were suddenly on the streets.

But I don’t want to continue the excuse making.  The problems Haidt elucidates have to do with an avoidance of reality on both sides and a subsequent process of demonizing each other.

And with a political mischaracterization that has resulted in the alienation of a great many people from both camps.  Often such people are given the broad and thoroughly undescriptive label Independent.  I consider myself that, though I have voted consistently Liberal-Democrat since 1984.  (Admission time.  I voted for Nixon in 1972 and I voted for Reagan in 1980.  In hindsight, it would seem I had always been looking for the Other Designation—Progressive—for which to cast my ballot, but that’s a very slippery term.  Reagan was the last Republican I voted for in a national election.  I have felt consistently alienated by GOP strategies and policies, but the reality has been that my votes for Democrats have usually been “lesser-of-two-evils” votes, not wholehearted endorsements.  Until Obama.  He was the first presidential candidate since John Anderson in 1984 who I felt actually had something worthwhile to offer rather than merely a less odious choice to the Republican.)

Once upon a time there were Liberal Republicans.  There are still Conservative Democrats.  But I think in general we no longer know what these terms mean.  The narrative that has been driving our politics since Reagan has buried them under an avalanche of postured rhetoric designed to define an American in a particular way that no doubt was intended to transcend party politics but has instead cast us all in a bad Hollywood movie with Good Guys and Bad Guys in which a final shoot-out or fist-fight determines the outcome.

I think it is fair to say that this America is ahistorical.  On the Left, it is a country demanding atonement, built on the backs of the abused and misused, hypocritical,  concerned only with power and wealth.  On the Right is the only country ever that has offered genuine freedom for its citizens and has stood on the principles of fairness and justice (which are not always the same thing) and because it has done more good than not its sins should be absolved if not ignored.

Neither portrait is true, although many true details inform both.

What perhaps needs to happen is for new storytellers to come to the fore.  I’m not sure how they’re going to be heard through the constant din of invective-laden blaming, but I think Obama took a stab at it.  He got drowned out more often than not and didn’t finish constructing the narrative, but he seems to have a grasp of how important the story is.

Because here, almost more than anywhere else, the Story is vital.  When we broke free from England, our story up till then had been England’s story, and it was long, deep into the past.  When we stepped away from that it was into political and social terra incognito, and if there was going to be a story for us it would have to be one that looked into the future.  We had no past at that point, not one we could claim as our own.  We have been constructing that narrative ever since.

Here’s where the crux of the problem now lies, I think.  For one side, there is the sense that we finished the story quite some time ago and that it is fine as it was and should go on unmodified.  For the other side, that narrative is too filled with burdens of a past it seems no longer applies.  This ex stasis has left us in a kind of limbo.  Neither side seems willing to admit that the other might have something of value to add to the narrative and that maybe some of the narrative went off the rails here and there.  Neither side wants to admit that their version of who we are really needs the other as well.  Until that occurs, those caught in the crossfire find themselves having to pick and choose the parts of both narratives that work for them and then figure out which way to go with the hodge-podge so assembled.  By these means we lurch on into an uncertain future.

I’m likely going to revisit this from time to time.  For now I think I want to do without labels.  But I’ll leave off for now with this: My Way Or The Highway is absolutely idiotic when we’re all still building the road.

culture

Moyers & Haidt On Moral Psychology

I have a lot of things to say about what is discussed in this video, but first I’d like people to give a listen.

Jonathan Haidt Explains Our Contentious Culture from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo.

As a teaser, let me say that what Jonathan Haidt has to say needs to be heard by both sides of current political divide in this country before we completely screw ourselves out of a functioning community. More to follow.

culture

Where The Rubber Meets The Road (Womb)

Congress is holdings hearings on President Obama’s mandate that insurance companies cover contraception for employees of religious institutions. His earlier initiative, that such institutions pay for it themselves through their employee insurance plans, was met with outrage over a presumed infringement of religious liberty. He made what I, at least, consider an admirable compromise, sidestepping the primary complaint by mandating that the insurance companies pick up the costs. However, that didn’t satisfy congressional Republicans and religious conservatives.

Hearings were held.

Representative Issa of California held a panel to discuss the issue comprised entirely of men. All his witnesses were men. When challenged about why there were no women testifying, the reply was that the issue was not about contraception but about federal infringement of religion.

Women don’t have an opinion on that?

This is simple: the hullabaloo is over contraception coverage. The counterargument is that forcing religious institutions to provide for it, even by association, is a violation of their First Amendment rights, that if something violates religious conscience that religion has the right to refuse to participate.

I could concoct any number of scenarios in which that position is questionable at best. But for our Congress then to accept not only that proposition but to accept the further condition that even discussion of the fulcrum issue is out of order is absurd and not what we’re paying them for.

It is about birth control. State supercession over religious privileges happens all the time. Santeria animal sacrifice practices are regulated and in many areas prohibited because they violate secular health laws. Christian Scientists may not deny their children medical care unto death. Peyote use among certain Native American tribes is proscribed, regardless of the ceremonial claims and religious liberty arguments. And here’s the thing—outside of the group affected these are not controversial. So it must be asked, what is it about this that makes it different?

Contraception. Religious conservatives claim Obama is waging war on religion. As John Stewart has pointed out, “don’t confuse war with not getting everything you want.”

What is clear is that religious conservatives are conducting an extreme campaign to roll back contraceptive liberties, which ought to have no religious test. This is very much about women and civil liberties and health care costs and the sensitivities of groups who hold archaic views of “a woman’s place” and traditional values. For Congress to hold hearings that tacitly ignore this aspect is politically irresponsible at best, campaign year posturing at a minimum, and socially negligent at worst.

But the most aggravating aspect is the pretense that they aren’t talking about birth control. Of course they are. The religious position is that birth control violates religious conscience. Since when do we let religious conscience that does not reflect the views of even a majority of adherents to those institutions dictate secular policy? This is a breech of the wall of separation in the other direction. If I go to work for a Catholic hospital, I do not take that job to support Catholicism but to support myself and my family. If they’re going to offer me health coverage, then they should offer it in parity with what any other comparable facility offers, because as my employer they do not represent my convictions and have no right to dictate conscience to me through essentially punitive economic policies. (I shouldn’t even have to say that in this employment environment, to tell me that if I don’t like it I should get another job would border on criminal. What other job?)

I will be tremendously disappointed if Obama backs down from this. I am tired to having my conscience violated simply because I have no religion. I do not wish to live in a country run according to theocratic principles.

Yes. It is about birth control. Also about control. Period.

culture

Writers On Religion

This a collection of excerpts from interviews with a wide range of writers, some science fiction, some fantasists, several so-called “mainstream,” on their belief—actually disbelief—in a deity.

I think the most difficult thing for many people to grasp is the idea of purposelessness, the concept that the universe simply Is and has no other purpose for its existence. Humans like to have a sense of where they’re going, what they’re supposed to do when they get there, and why. To say that these answers must come entirely from within is, to put it mildly, a bit unsettling, especially as in the first part of one’s life someone has kept stressing that there is an innate purpose, that “nothing happens without a reason,” and that this purpose comes from what we call god, a being who first made the universe entirely with us in mind that we might live according to some plan. I admit, this would be very comforting. Life is a confusing collection of event and reaction and it would be nice if there were an instruction book. Barring that, simply trusting that it all leads to something is one way to get through a day, a year, a life. To then have the idea that this is not the case dropped on us is understandably discommoding.

But is it? I found it liberating, since now I no longer had to worry about living up to a standard kept mystically hidden. And I could do my own work figuring out what “it all means.”

Anyway, I found this thoughtful and interesting, so…enjoy.

Absurdity

President Santorum

I’ve always wondered about people in Iowa.  Only a little less than those in Idaho, specifically the northern part.  Why, I wonder, should this state be our early warning system, our barometer of coming political shitstorms?

Just as a historical note, the caucus is concerned mainly with choosing state electoral delegates.  In 1972, it was altered slightly to become a bellwether process in early presidential showings. Altered by the Democrats, who sponsored the first early January caucus there.  By 1976, the Republicans opted for the same model, and it’s been rumbling along that way ever since.

Interestingly, though both parties participate, national attention is almost entirely on the Republicans.

This year’s caucus may tell us why.

I admit, before today I knew very little about Rick Santorum’s stands on issues unrelated to sex.  So I Googled him.  There’s a link to Where I Stand/Rick Santorum.  When you click it, you are taken immediately to a donation page.  Right up front, before you find out one more thing about him, his hand is out.  I suppose this is all right, since I frankly can’t imagine anyone but those who have already decided that he’s the one will go there, so why not get the business out of the way first?

Click the next link and you get to his main campaign page and then you can click on the Where I Stand button.  Here’s the page.   As you go down this list, you find almost nothing overtly related to the topic that has become the chief identifier for Santorum since he was thrown out of his Pennsylvania senate seat, namely his attitude toward sex.  Instead we find a list that could be found on almost any mainstream politician’s roster of important talking points.

At the bottom, though, is a final section, 10 Steps to Promote Our Interests Around the World.  Here it gets interesting.  The first two are typically Republican—a call for broader “free markets” and the promotion of religious liberty.  That one is worth quoting:  “… religious pluralism where people of faith have the right to pursue their beliefs and not be abused by either their government or a majority. This is the only ground upon which we can truly live in peace with our differences and also advance the moral teachings which are essential for freedom to thrive.”

This sounds almost mainstream, doesn’t it?  Nowhere on his site does he expound upon the basis of such religious egalitarianism, but he does advocate the traditional conservative backing of Israel (even though he states in another section that “housing” issues there should be on equal footing between Israel and Hammas.  Not sure what that means).  But you must also keep in mind that christian conservatives have for years been claiming that they are “under assault” by a godless government and majority, and that this is Santorum’s constituency.

You have to go to his public speeches to realize that his moral universe is driven by an almost Old Testament view of morality, which requires the rolling back of personal liberties that do not fit within such a framework.  He’s a vocal opponent not just of abortion but of birth control and on more than one occasion he has claimed that he opposes birth control because it promotes multi-partner sex, which is a guaranteed path to horrible diseases.  He is a forceful opponent of gay marriage, something that has already become a fact in this country, though not federally.  So right there he has stated his moral position, which will require him to strip rights from people.

As you continue down his list of proposals, his focus is clearly on the Middle East and a little bit on China.  There’s a strong whiff of the Cold War in his specifics—missile bases, increased intelligence operations, and a pronounced suspicion of Iran.

In short, most of this is mainstream Republican.  He’s opposed to Obamacare, but that’s no distinction, they all are—even though as the law works its way into practice it is becoming increasingly clear that much of it will be popular, and possibly even radical enough to work to the nation’s benefit.

There is something that bothers me, but it bothers me about all of them, not just Santorum.  One of his proposals states:  “…we need to change our information operations abroad to promote our core values of freedom, equality, and democracy — just as we did with the Soviet Empire in the 1980s.”

That in itself doesn’t trouble me so much—it’s a debatable bit of propaganda, since we always maintained as part of our efforts against communism an information component—but when combined with this:

  1. Finally, we need to have a national effort to restore the teaching of American history in our nation’s schools. It is our children’s worst subject — they simply do not know their own story and thus when they are told ours is a history of aggression and immorality, they have no counter-narrative to refute it. It is worth remembering that Ronald Reagan’s final wish in his farewell address was to ask America to instill in our youth a renewed “informed patriotism.” Unfortunately, we ignored this lesson, and we are reaping the consequences.

If you are going to advocate a deeper understanding of our history as a core principle, then you should also present that history accurately throughout your platform.  The implication of the information quote is that it was our strong advocacy of core ideas that brought the Soviet Union down, and this is simply not true.  Reagan did not crush them by showing them the error of their ideas.  The United States spent the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and it collapsed under its own unsustainability.

Of course, that’s not sexy.  But it’s true and consistent with historical accuracy.

But this is a charge that can be leveled equally at all presidential candidates of either party.

On the face of it, Rick Santorum’s proposed policies are not that different from any other candidate currently making a viable bid for the Republican nomination.  Ron Paul is distinct on his foreign policy positions and his economic ideas, but not so much on anything else.  It appears that Rick Perry is about to go back to Texas to lick his wounds and Michele Bachman has finally become the mediocrity she has always been.  (She’s been one of the worst offenders of historical accuracy in this campaign.)  John Huntsman is about to become a footnote.  (Which is a shame, as he seemed to have been the only one of the bunch who had the most traditional conservative viewpoint.)

What is there to say about Newt Gingrich?  He will still run, but he will talk his way out of more and more victories.

So we have Romney, Santorum, and Paul going into New Hampshire.  You could probably mix and match among them and come up with one pretty good candidate, but—

Santorum has made his reputation as an advocate for marriage, absolute monogamy, and a repudiation of homosexuality as a legitimate state of being.  He has made a political fetish out of sex and abortion.  And his pronouncement upon the results of the Iowa Caucus that the cohesion of the family is the source of economic progress is a pompous oversimplification and distraction about the nature of economies and the variety of human experience and potential.  He makes a big deal about supporting religious pluralism, but has been clear about his aversion to human pluralism.

Why am I harping on this?  Is it just about the sex?

Well, no.  But the sex is a marker for the problem.  It’s about freedom of association.

The personal liberty movements of the 20th Century—civil rights, racial equality, gender equality, gay rights—all share one common feature: they are all concerned with the freedom of association.  With whom may we associate…and how?

To say to people that their choices concerning with whom and in what way they will spend their lives must be limited by a particular social convention is perhaps an underappreciated cost of this conservative war on gays and women.  It is in a very real sense telling people that they may have only certain kinds of conversations with only certain kinds of people.

Santorum might be very surprised by this notion.  In his view, and the view of the GOP lo these last few decades, barring gays from marriage and women from full equality is supposed to free people from being forced to make choices they don’t wish to make.  I’ve never understood how that works—by expanding rights, how is it that we therefore limit them?—but it really was never about controlling one’s own life, but about controlling the choices of others.  If people are kept in neat, distinct boxes—husband, wife, toddler, preteen, teen, and young adult, christian, working-middle-upper middle class—business can operate more confidently, predict trends, guarantee profits.  If everyone is running around messing with the categories, who knows what the future will bring?

(You think I jest?  Expanded freedoms bring expanded expectations, which takes control from one group and gives it to another.  Why do you think business is so keen on busting unions and shipping jobs overseas?)

I didn’t see anything on Santorum’s site about energy policy or, beyond his pledge to end Obamacare, anything about public health—except a safe commitment to the AIDS epidemic in Africa and a concern for fraud in MediCare.  I didn’t see anything there about his commitment to science, but given the distortions he has indulged in his war on abortion I doubt he has much use for it—that and his vocal advocacy of a religious temperament.

I would like to know how any of these people think they can enlarge and advance the cause of freedom by taking it away from groups they don’t like.

It’s no secret that I won’t be voting for any of these people next November.  I rather doubt that, in the unlikely event that he somehow snags the nomination, I’d vote for John Huntsman.  The problem is not so much them as candidates as the fact that they are tied to a political party that has gone completely off the rails in my view.  Since 2010 the GOP in congress has managed to be on the wrong side of almost every issue, simply in their blind hatred of Obama.  They have repudiated programs that originated with them simply because Obama advocated support for them.  I haven’t respected their social agenda for decades and now their unwavering and idiotic support of tax cuts and regulation rollbacks in the face of one of the worst failures of laissez-faire policy since 1929 doesn’t show so much their love of the rich as it does their complete lack of common sense.

But I had to go look, since the good Republicans of Iowa have elevated Mr. Santorum up to the status of a real contender, because I really didn’t know.  His reputation has been so colored by his pathological obsession with other people’s sex lives that I knew nothing about his other positions.  Now I do.

I think I can confidently predict that Obama will be reelected.  I don’t say that’s a good thing.  But the thought of Rick Santorum in the White House is a very sobering thought.

 

culture

Tilting At Icons: Christopher Hitchens 1949 – 2011

Unless you’ve been living on Mars or under a layer of primordial loam these past few decades, you know who Christopher Hitchens is. He has died. He was an unapologetic pragmatist, atheist, and iconoclast to the end. For an extended obit, go here.

I only knew Hitchens through his work, of which I’ve become quite impressed and even fond in the last few years. He did not tilt pointlessly at windmills. Rather, he spoke truth in the face of sham, questioned revered assumptions, and generally made us all twitch over some specious bit of received wisdom we thought reliable. And he did it in ways and under conditions that often ran counter to public courtesy. “Speaking ill of the dead” was never something he avoided, especially when death seemed about to bestow what in his opinion was an unearned and poorly-considered status on someone. For instance, Jerry Falwell. When most other commentators were suspending whatever critical commentary they might have indulged simply because the man had died, Hitch continued to go after him, unwilling to allow his death to gloss over what Hitch considered monstrosities of ego and policy. Here he is jousting with Sean Hannity:

He had a talent for giving as good if not better than he got from some of the most practiced mouthpieces in the media, rarely ever being shut down or bested in highly-charged, barbed exchanges with pundits attempting to just shut him up. His language skills matched a razor-sharp intellect and he had no qualms about speaking his mind, usually in a way that allowed little purchase for facile counterpolemic.

Here he is at length, discussing his book God Is Not Great, which brought him into line with Richard Dawkins as one of the most hated of the so-called “New Atheists.”

Before all this he had the temerity to attack one of the most unexamined and misunderstood of our modern icons, Mother Theresa. He got a lot of flack for his unflinching analysis of her cult and her hypocrisies. Even non-Catholics balk at saying much of anything negative about her, which is a curious effect of the kind of image-making Theresa used and was used on her. The rush to beatification had all the earmarks of desperation—the need for a popular public figure of piety to bolster the flagging reputation of Mother Church—and it seems to have worked even for those who would otherwise have nothing to do with Catholicism. Mother Theresa has become the byword for a kind of innocent generosity, a pure aching love for humanity that ignores specifics and embraces the general as if the most simpleminded of approaches to problems has a special sanctity. Hitch was one of the few who dared to actually look at the practice of her organization and present the contradictions and, indeed, the grotesqueness at the heart of her philosophy.

He also baffled many of his supporters by doing something I admire above all else. He held views that he deemed right regardless of the political spectrum along which they fell. So he could be a socialist and a hawk. He could be a severe critic of the military-intelligence combine and a patriot. His politics was all over the map in terms of Left-Right and to me it showed the silliness of doctrinaire positioning. He had no patience with idiocy, no matter the side to which it was attached.

Through all this, he was also a generous and polite debater. In a lengthy exchange with Al Sharpton he was never less than cordial, even if unyielding on his principles. He showed us how to do it and not be a bully.

Unless he felt he was being played.

Even when I disagreed with him I admired him. I would say Rest In Peace, but he would not have accepted the implications underlying the sentiment.

I’ll miss him.

Absurdity

National Pathos

This will be a short post.  Just a comment or two on the recent national scandal concerning college athletics.  The Penn State incident, resulting in a firing, death threats, a riot, and another investigation has many people scampering about wondering “how could this happen?” and “what do we do now?”

Among the questions being asked, the most relevant is “Why did no one report this?”  There were witnesses, at least one has stated sorrow at not having “done more” and a famous and otherwise well-loved coach has been dismissed as a result of inaction.

Yet the riot that occurred was not about the rapes of minors,  but over the firing of that coach.  As if that is the tragedy.  As if a beloved head of an institution that has behaved abominably in this and many other instances matters more than the pain and suffering caused by an adult with authority and the trust of the young who couldn’t keep his hands off little boys.  My question is, “what’s wrong with you people?  Where are your priorities?  So a coach lost his job?  So what?  He can get another job.  Can those boys ever get their lives back as they were?”

I’ve commented on this before, often in sarcastic tones, but this is not to be taken lightly.  We treat sports in this country as if it were a religion.  In fact, to my view, sports is  our national religion.  We spend money we don’t have on it, build the biggest cathedrals to it, and worship it mindlessly as if our souls depended on the outcome of a given game.  The only question was which denomination might sports be most like.

Well, now we know the answer.  What other institution covers for child abusers?  Just so the game can go on.

Art

A Few Thoughts Concerning Margaret Atwood

Actually, just one.  I’d like her to stop trying to be an authority on science fiction.  I haven’t read her new book of essays on the topic, but I’ve heard her in interviews and read some of her thoughts in the past, and based on that she’s pretty much a tourist.  Back when her publisher thought claiming her work was science fiction would hurt her sales, she misunderstood the genre magnificently (“Oh, sci-fi has rockets in it.  I don’t do that.”)  A lot of it reminded me of Susan Sontag’s egregiously off-base attempt to define it.

Of course, being in the same company as Sontag isn’t a bad thing, especially not if you want to remain within the fold of the folks who persistently fail to “get” any kind of genre work.  But it has become obvious that Atwood likes some of the aesthetic possibilities in SF and can’t help using them, and it has become likewise obvious that claiming common cause with SF isn’t hurting her sales, so now she’s a very Out There advocate.

But she still doesn’t get it. In a recent interview she characterized SF as basically religious, since it speaks to the desire to embrace something vast and elemental and be awed—the way one is supposed to be awed by religious epiphany and ritual evocation of spiritual connection.

There are two things wrong with this.  One, it suggests that the only way humans can experience awe and wonder is within a framework that can only be defined as religious.  Two, it ignores the decades-long assault on paradigms that is the core impulse in written SF.  Religion is nothing without the continuity of its paradigms, preserved as they are by the acceptance of their unassailability.  But, like science, science fiction has no reverence for paradigms that fail to explain anything and the tendency is to go at them tooth and claw in order to rip away the caul that muffles genuine transcendence.  This is not religious in the least—it is, if anything, the aesthetic of the newest gadget, a consumer culture variant that says anything done last year is, you know, Last Year.

That said, science fiction is also like an overcrowded antique shop whose proprietors just can’t bring themselves to throw anything out.  Everything that was ever done in the genre since 1926 is still there, used and reused, and that, too, is very much like science.

Because being “wrong” in the overall sense doesn’t mean all the bits by themselves are in error or are useless.  Alchemy and Chemistry are separated by an insurmountable barrier of fact, but some of the laboratory methodology devised in alchemy is still useful in modern chemistry, at least conceptually.  Einstein superseded Newton in ability to explain the universe at large, but we haven’t tossed Newton in the dustbin when it comes to working out simple cause-and-effect relations on the macro scale.  No one takes Doc Smith’s Lensmen series seriously anymore, but we’re still writing about starships, elite cadres of supercompetent heroes, and interstellar warfare with inscrutable aliens.  We just don’t do it with the kind of naivete E.E. Smith used.

But more than that, the points we’re making are different.  We’ve moved on to more sophisticated themes, or even themes that were not considered at all half a century ago.  John W. Campbell Jr. declared in the pages of Astounding that no aliens could be morally superior to humans.  That’s a laughable, pathetic idea today, but we do still wrestle with the potential relationships.

Ms. Atwood should read more fantasy if she wants to find religious fiction.  Science Fiction is all about how the universe is not dependable, reliable, or amenable to petition.  Religion is about finding a way to stability through the assertion of belief over circumstance.  Science is about figuring out how things work.  Science Fiction is about how to live in the universe science shows us, which offers only the most conditional stability.

To be fair, I understand where she might get that idea, that SF is religious.  It’s the awe, the “sense of wonder”, that is difficult to separate from one of the “varieties of religious experience.”  And it may well be that people turn to religion for exactly that thrill of awe.  But that’s not the point of religion.  And the source of the awe is very different.

I’m glad she likes SF now. But I’m less sanguine about the expectations she will provide those just coming to SF after having read her ideas.  I suspect many of them will be disappointed and give up on it.  In this regard, I see her as very much like Harold Bloom, who dumped all over Harry Potter  because he thought it was inferior to what he regards as worthwhile YA, all the while missing the good part of the whole Harry Potter phenomenon.

On the the other hand, maybe it won’t make any difference.  Maybe no one will really pay any attention.  That, too, will be a shame.