2/24/10

One might assume from the title of its article on the conclusions drawn by the Chicago brainiacs who think the U.S. foreign policy is tone-deaf to religions around the world that the Post thinks this is funny ... or absurd ... or something to drown with sarcasm as fast as possible. If so, I (for once) agree with the editors of that paper that our secular-but-respectful "hands off" policy regarding other nations' religions is not only reasonable and proper, it is absolutely necessary. The folks in Chicago (and elsewhere) have their heads buried in the sand and forget that Presidents visit the Vatican, attend religious rituals across the face of the planet, entertain Dalai Lamas knowing that the incident will rile China, etc., etc.

What the "God gap" people want is for the U.S. to take a religious position, of course, and that is, if not impossible, highly dangerous, because what position are they going to suggest the diplomats take? Southern Baptist? Orthodox Jewish? Buddhist? Episcopalian (which group ... the tolerant or the gay-bashers)? There is no end of trouble in this, and the Post is absolutely correct in equating our respectful posture to the fabricated missile gap of 50 years ago.

There is a point to be made beyond the obvious unAmerican-ness of a foreign policy predicated on sectarian metaphysics, however. The point that the zealots want to make is that America is a Judeo-Christian society and culture. The point that should be made is that the American culture is distinctly pluralist and that we respect (in theory and practice ... most of us) the religious rights of everyone. You see, then, that pluralism becomes and intolerable act of faithlessness to the zealots, who will have the whole cake, frosting, and candles or no one will have it.

I frankly trust the U.S. State Department to continue its low level and respectful acknowledgement of other's religious ideas, but I do not trust any part of the federal government to keep the zealots out. The U.S. Air Force (and parts of the U.S. Navy) have been captured by zealous Christian fundamentalists in the past. It is clearly wrong for anyone to use a federal government agency to promote its own religious doctrines ... but it happened and continues. This movement "towards closing the God gap" has to be thwarted, because it is a trojan horse.

JB

1/6/10

Every once in a while Mark Morford, who (btw) is clinging to his job at the San Francisco Chronicle by a thread as paper media flash into dust everywhere, ... every once in a while Mark puts a spin on things that is truly brilliant. This is one of them, one of the best. If you are not a smorgasbord devotee of your religion, i.e., if you are hunkered down in the "literal truth," then you might not like this, but you should probably read it anyway.

JB

12/21/09

James Carroll, who writes a column in the Boston Globe each Monday morning, writes of the winter solstice, which occurs on this special day.

James tries with all his intellect and might to resolve the Enlightenment, to mend the rift between our evolution and our inheritance. He ends with the notion that "knowledge is holy," but is it really? Knowledge is what we agree upon as fact. It peels back the mysteries of life and the universe, their history, their songs and literature, the atomic structure, the quantum behavior. But knowledge is provisional, growing, replacing. It is in this way profane.

What is holy then is our leap across the boundaries of individuality to a self-conscious realization of the force animating the quest for knowledge, the realization that we are not alone in our curiosity, that life is not only dependent upon that light that wanes to its angular and orbital minimum this day, but is a new light in and of itself, a concept—the human spirit!

JB

7/1/09

Sometimes events conspire to reveal an essential truth. If you are a Liberal or Progressive, your world view is dynamic and unlikely to be anchored to just one point of reference, one point of view, one set of cherished beliefs. If you are a conservative of most any stripe you are more likely to be anchored, as it were, tethered, and in fact bound to a set of axioms about life and how to live it. Not all Liberals and Progressives are eager thinkers, and not all conservatives are mired in outdated dogmas, but even those of either camp who can chew gum and walk, tend to flinch one way or the other about the idea of modern life being better. Liberals instinctively lean into a new idea or point of view; conservatives lean away, more or less shielding themselves ... and their long held belief systems ... from the hard radiation of change.

I had a subscription to Popular Science at age ten or twelve. Back in the 'fifties this was a magazine dedicated to modern life and particularly technology. The editors had no idea how completely technology would change American and ultimately everyone's lives, but they were optimistic. The transistor is a good example, an invention which when first devised was a thing about the size of a Chiclet. It quickly replaced vacuum tubes in a variety of applications, radios and telephones particularly. Now the size of one transistor is almost a laughing matter. They are hardly visible they are so small, with hundreds and thousands fitting in the space that the first ones occupied, produced en masse and so inexpensively that they are deliberately disposable. Transistors were at the beginnings of one of the current accelerations of the magic of progress that has divided our culture and the cultures of half the countries of the world. Transistors represent a form of invisible electronics about which few people have a minds eye understanding. In this sense the technology in a modern home is for all practical purposes indistinguishable from magic. This is not a new thought, but I wish to put it into a slightly different, perhaps new, perspective.

The mind's eye seeks a lens through which to observe the world and its people. The lens of "progress" has its blind spots and distortions, to be sure, but the lens of tradition, although it appears to be clear, undistorted, and reassuring is that way only because the experience is always very much the same. The curious thing is that Liberals will inevitably settle for a while on ideas and points of view, just like conservatives, but they are restless and do not reify them and take them to be final. Conservatives, having conducted periodic inventories of what they like and what frightens them or makes them uncomfortable, have trouble projecting an idea of themselves into new situations. Yes, they are often comfortable in complex situations, but the more uncertain outcomes become the more stressed become the conservatives. If they cannot see themselves living in New York City for more than a couple of days, they simply write off New York City and reify Middletown, which is much less complicated and much less likely to present them with difficult choices and contingencies. The conservative jet fighter pilot masters his machine, but has no time to understand his town and its people, so he establishes "dogmatic" benchmarks that reassure him that his ideas are "reasonable."

So, the countries of the world are amalgams of people who are futurists or traditionalists to one degree or another. Iran, for instance, is a country where the gulf between "liberals" and "conservatives" is wider than in the Netherlands, for one example, and the traditions of the conservative groups in Iran are respected through a process of religious kinship. In fact, the kinship is something of contrivance, a public illusion, growing out of the necessities of a waxing and waning material progress. Put more straightforwardly, cultures like the Iranian one are deeply riven, with robust "progressive" values supported and enunciated by a vigorous and dynamic minority, while traditional values are given credible lip-service to avoid civil unrest. The actions of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the current circumstances is understandable, given that as a cleric his world view is essentially based on traditional values, that his understanding of modern technology and the life it creates is minimal ... (but envious). Democratic voting is an anomalous activity to clerics. One does not vote on Allah's creation or ideas. The idea of democracy has a long way to go in Iran.

In fact democratic voting is and always has been a problem in western cultures as well. In the U.S. the question of whether we have a democracy is answered by conservatives with the retort: "we have a republic, not a democracy." Liberals and Progressives quickly answer "democracy," even though they know that our form of government is a representative rather than a direct or "pure" democracy. They answer "democracy" without the trepidation that Ayatollahs and American conservatives have, because they easily understand the essential principle that belief systems are directly and inherently related to the material bases of culture. A sharecropper may vote for a policy to provide irrigation in fallow lands. As soon as his material condition changes because of that irrigation, the sharecropper's view of the world changes. It evolves. The conservatives want this to happen slowly, if at all; the "progressives" are there already, chafing at the present, leaning into the next future.

There was a book reviewed in the Sunday New York Times this past weekend entitled "No Smiting", Paul Bloom's feisty review article on Robert Wright's new book, The Evolution of God. "No Smiting" draws out the essential point that the Abrahamic religions' deities have evolved right along with the cultures that gave rise to them. Yahweh smote, Jesus (whether trinitarian or not) does not smite, in the course of 1200 years the followers of the Prophet Muhammed have evolved from bloody scimitars to ... what more genteel form? This is the essential question for Islam. The middle class citizens of Teheran and hundreds of other modern Muslim cities across the planet have evolved to a more abstract and less tribal view of civilization and their religion has evolved accordingly. But even if they understood it perfectly, most Muslim clerics do not have the courage to express themselves in the same vernacular. The very same thing obtains for the current and many past Popes of the Roman Catholic Church. In the U.S. and elsewhere, religious conservatism aligns with political conservatism in search of the answer about what will become of us in a culture of Change. The answer already evolved by the urban progressives and liberals ... a more abstract view of God and importantly, of the evolution of culture and world views correspondingly. In other words, a more tolerant and optimistic view of the course of history.

Sigmund Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents and Frank J. Sulloway's "Born To Rebel" are clear markers along the path to understanding the contest between modernity and tradition. From these two accounts it becomes obvious that these contrasting impulses are part of the human condition. They are not political planks or perspectives. They are not religious tenets or dogmas. They are, nevertheless, present and kicking within the expression of religion and politics. The kicking is the working out on small scales the evolving of a culture.

There is no guarantee that evolution can proceed without periods of revolution. The American Revolution was the culmination of a very long process begun in the Renaissance and given strong vocabulary in the Enlightenment. The continuation of the American Revolution, the strong discord and divisiveness we see today, has many backed up against their principles ... both sides ... with tantrums flying and demagogues making little fortunes stoking the prejudices and fears of the minority. In Iran, though, the minority is the progressive side, invidiously more successful, but self-aware of the discrepancy. The evolution in both countries must be accomplished from within, yet there is a commonality that should not be overlooked. Progress will come when the conservatives no longer fear the emergent future and its unfamiliar things! Does this not suggest that progressives and liberals in both countries need to learn how to persuasively communicate fearlessness and confidence in the future!

JB