Progressives place a high priority on public education, but is that priority extended to the content of public education? Notoriously the Far Right has paid close and demanding attention to the content of public education because it sees it as an ideal venue for foisting its agenda upon the young. I suggest progressives, perhaps out of a desire to distance themselves from the tactics of the Far Right, express little concern for the content of public education. I think this is a fundamental and grievous mistake.
These thoughts occurred to me as I was recently reading a textbook on English literature my mother used when, I believe, she was about 12 years old. It was written in 1897 and is worn and frayed and has penciled comments by her. It is, of course, all in black and white. The illustrations are small black and white etchings or photos. The authors treated range from Cotton Mather to Tom Paine, Emerson, Thoreau, William Dean Howells and Samuel Clemens. I noticed a list of words, apparently to be understood, such as hyperbole, which my mother had written on a blank page.
It seemed to me that the use of language was of a more disciplined, indeed appreciative, vein than one would now find being offered to children of a similar age.
I was reminded of a study done in 1990 by a writing professor at the University of Delaware, Marcia Peoples Halio, comparing the quality of student writing produced on a Macintosh to that written using a PC. As you may recall the Macintosh was the first popular computer to use the graphical user interface (GUI). The professor found that the papers written on a PC were uniformly superior to those written on the Macintosh. Aside from the observing that the language was less precise, often verging on slang and the sentences were shorter and lass descriptive, she also noticed that the Macintosh users placed a good deal of emphasis on the appearance of their papers, using a variety of fonts and illustrations. She surmised that the Macintosh users became so involved in the formatting and appearance of their papers that they did less thinking about the subject of the paper than they did about its appearance.
The above instances, I believe, are indicative of a passage from a print-oriented to an image-oriented society. So far as I have been able to observe, progressives have not asked what happens to their values as this shift takes place. In particular, is the public education they so avidly support producing the kinds of citizens that can or will continue to vigorously support the values of free speech, social equality and intellectual honesty? What does free speech mean in a world of images? The last time Western civilization, or a part thereof, was so concerned with the appearance of its writing was in the illustrated manuscripts produced by monks concerned with praising their deity or impressing the aristocracy, but certainly not to express the values of a democratic society. What can intellectual honesty mean in such an environment? If, as Marshall McLuhan proclaimed, the medium is the message, we appear to be tending to the trivial and the irrelevant.
Robert Newhard
Sunday, December 31, 2006
Thursday, December 14, 2006
On Technology and a Progressive Vision
For the modern world there was no more seminal event than the Italian Renaissance. With the recovery of Greek and Roman thought, humans in their natural world became the focus of thought. Perhaps the most important element in the spread of the Renaissance was the invention and implementation of printing. Had the Renaissance occurred in an era of manuscripts its spread, if any, would have been most probably limited to the scholars of the period. With printing the discoveries of antiquity, the latest thoughts concerning those discoveries and their application to existing institutions and practices were accomplished much faster than ever before and for a much wider audience. While Charlemagne, living in a feudal world, could not read. The princes and public of the Renaissance read a continual and voluminous flow of thought and discovery. I suggest that one reason for the cultural explosion of the Renaissance was that printing released a thousand years of pent up human thirst for understanding in a very brief period of time. Additionally, it was found that this knowledge could be built upon thus eventuating in science thereby enabling the volume of learning and discovery to continue increasing.
Another seminal invention that represents as paradigmatic a breakthrough as printing has been the use of the computer and the voluminous capacity to communicate it has provided. However, when we look at the impact of this technology we do not see a burst of culture and understanding. To the contrary almost every one of these associated inventions has eventuated in the trivial, the mundane and the entertaining. In short, cultural banality. Nor is this outcome trivial in itself. Hannah Arendt famously declared the “banality of evil” in her report on the Eichmann trial. I suggest that this is a two way street, i.e. the evil of banality. Banality is evidence that the human mind has not come to grips with the complexity of the real world and, in consequence, we get the results that the religious right, corporate greed and G. W. Bush are having on the people of this planet. “Blinded by banality” might function as a description of our time.
I suggest that this failure to realize the potential of computer-based technology is due in part to there being no long term socially repressed knowledge to be released. Print had done its job well. Thus while we can communicate at lightening speed and while we can elaborately simulate human activities we have, in effect, nothing to say of culture-shaking importance. Progressives, if they would meaningfully lead in the future, must find, if it exists, what it is in human nature that will foster growth in human potential and seek ways to release it. In this regard I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s belief that education is the foundation of democracy and that those who refused to avail themselves of a free education should be disenfranchised. The question is, of course, whether every human being wants to expend the effort to realize her/his potential. Human history would indicate they do not. Do we have the genius to find ways to make this self realization a social function of fundamental importance to people, and to their democracy, which can be no better than they are?
Bob Newhard
Another seminal invention that represents as paradigmatic a breakthrough as printing has been the use of the computer and the voluminous capacity to communicate it has provided. However, when we look at the impact of this technology we do not see a burst of culture and understanding. To the contrary almost every one of these associated inventions has eventuated in the trivial, the mundane and the entertaining. In short, cultural banality. Nor is this outcome trivial in itself. Hannah Arendt famously declared the “banality of evil” in her report on the Eichmann trial. I suggest that this is a two way street, i.e. the evil of banality. Banality is evidence that the human mind has not come to grips with the complexity of the real world and, in consequence, we get the results that the religious right, corporate greed and G. W. Bush are having on the people of this planet. “Blinded by banality” might function as a description of our time.
I suggest that this failure to realize the potential of computer-based technology is due in part to there being no long term socially repressed knowledge to be released. Print had done its job well. Thus while we can communicate at lightening speed and while we can elaborately simulate human activities we have, in effect, nothing to say of culture-shaking importance. Progressives, if they would meaningfully lead in the future, must find, if it exists, what it is in human nature that will foster growth in human potential and seek ways to release it. In this regard I am reminded of Thomas Jefferson’s belief that education is the foundation of democracy and that those who refused to avail themselves of a free education should be disenfranchised. The question is, of course, whether every human being wants to expend the effort to realize her/his potential. Human history would indicate they do not. Do we have the genius to find ways to make this self realization a social function of fundamental importance to people, and to their democracy, which can be no better than they are?
Bob Newhard
Saturday, December 2, 2006
Democracy, Truth and Reality
Sometimes progressives and other well-motivated people would have us think that democracy is the end-all and be-all of human organization. At root democracy is an agreement arrived at by the majority with due concern not to infringe the rights of the minority. There is however, a third element in this decision-making process, and one becoming of profound importance. It is reality. No matter what a group of humans agree upon, it is of no consequence for reality. For instance the Kyoto Protocol agreed to by the majority of the planet’s nations, is not a solution to global warming. It is, as the saying goes, a first step, but unless the remaining steps are taken within the time that reality requires, global warming, regardless of any human agreement, will produce the terrible consequences scientists have predicted.
In every group decision we reach there are at least two opposing sides plus reality. Notoriously, humans can reach agreements totally disregardful of reality. The agreement achieved may simply reflect an emotion-driven compromise in which cultural or other concerns are the focus of negotiations not reality. This is why democracy, while probably better than an ego-driven dictatorship, cannot be trusted to arrive at truth. With the power of humans to destroy themselves and much of the planet’s other life forms as great as it is and growing rapidly, the damage we can inflict requires an increasing focus on and concern for reality. Mistakes, often caused by focusing on the other party rather than reality can have momentous consequences. Every negotiation should begin with and retain reality as its focus.
But, it is said, reality is in the eye of the beholder. This is much less so than the cliché would have us believe. Depending upon the degree of precision required, testable or rigorously confirmed evidence is frequently available that constitute good indicators of reality. Even in the gross, complex, and deception-ridden world of foreign policy the experience of the Vietnam war was very telling evidence that the invasion of Iraq was not only immoral, but doomed to failure. The leadership of this country and the majority of Americans chose to disregard it. Reality was replaced by hubris in reaching the decision to invade Iraq. In any negotiation what reality may be replaced by, e.g. religious, moral or cultural beliefs, varies greatly depending upon the concerns of the negotiators.
At bottom reality cannot be negotiated. This is why scientific endeavors cannot be democratic. Those endeavors are focused on reality and must accept the evidence adduced. This is why we must be ever vigilant that our democracy does not pretend to deal with reality. The failure to do so lets groups like Christian conservatives promote creationism and indeed get laws passed requiring its teaching in public schools. They convince legislators that more people believe in creationism or intelligent design than believe in evolution and thereby these spurious beliefs, not only lacking, but incapable of any evidence, are permitted to be taught.
Progressivism, if it is to be effective in the 21st century, must have a fundamental motivating concern to discover the truth and to do that well before it begins developing proposals and pushing agendas. The truth is not to be found in one’s opponents nor in oneself nor in an amalgam of the two. It is to be found in a rigorous examination of facts and the evidence that intellectual honesty can adduce from them.
A note to readers:
I am simultaneously posting my blogs to the following address - http://thetemeculavalleyreflectiveliberal.blogspot.com/
I am in the process of copying all my posts to this blog to the new blog address. They are readable, but contain some formatting from the DFA web site. I hope you will visit the new blog and I look forward to your comments.
Bob Newhard
In every group decision we reach there are at least two opposing sides plus reality. Notoriously, humans can reach agreements totally disregardful of reality. The agreement achieved may simply reflect an emotion-driven compromise in which cultural or other concerns are the focus of negotiations not reality. This is why democracy, while probably better than an ego-driven dictatorship, cannot be trusted to arrive at truth. With the power of humans to destroy themselves and much of the planet’s other life forms as great as it is and growing rapidly, the damage we can inflict requires an increasing focus on and concern for reality. Mistakes, often caused by focusing on the other party rather than reality can have momentous consequences. Every negotiation should begin with and retain reality as its focus.
But, it is said, reality is in the eye of the beholder. This is much less so than the cliché would have us believe. Depending upon the degree of precision required, testable or rigorously confirmed evidence is frequently available that constitute good indicators of reality. Even in the gross, complex, and deception-ridden world of foreign policy the experience of the Vietnam war was very telling evidence that the invasion of Iraq was not only immoral, but doomed to failure. The leadership of this country and the majority of Americans chose to disregard it. Reality was replaced by hubris in reaching the decision to invade Iraq. In any negotiation what reality may be replaced by, e.g. religious, moral or cultural beliefs, varies greatly depending upon the concerns of the negotiators.
At bottom reality cannot be negotiated. This is why scientific endeavors cannot be democratic. Those endeavors are focused on reality and must accept the evidence adduced. This is why we must be ever vigilant that our democracy does not pretend to deal with reality. The failure to do so lets groups like Christian conservatives promote creationism and indeed get laws passed requiring its teaching in public schools. They convince legislators that more people believe in creationism or intelligent design than believe in evolution and thereby these spurious beliefs, not only lacking, but incapable of any evidence, are permitted to be taught.
Progressivism, if it is to be effective in the 21st century, must have a fundamental motivating concern to discover the truth and to do that well before it begins developing proposals and pushing agendas. The truth is not to be found in one’s opponents nor in oneself nor in an amalgam of the two. It is to be found in a rigorous examination of facts and the evidence that intellectual honesty can adduce from them.
A note to readers:
I am simultaneously posting my blogs to the following address - http://thetemeculavalleyreflectiveliberal.blogspot.com/
I am in the process of copying all my posts to this blog to the new blog address. They are readable, but contain some formatting from the DFA web site. I hope you will visit the new blog and I look forward to your comments.
Bob Newhard
Friday, November 24, 2006
Living Under Fascism
By: robert 3/15/2005 7:54:25 PM (Comment On This Article)
Living Under Fascism
Davidson Loehr7 November 2004First UU Church of Austin
March 7, 2005: This sermon by Rev. Dr. Davidson Loehr, originally delivered on November 7, 2004, has recently been the subject of discussion on Air America's "Morning Sedition" as well as in other media outlets.
SERMON: Living Under Fascism
You may wonder why anyone would try to use the word “fascism” in a serious discussion of where America is today. It sounds like cheap name-calling, or melodramatic allusion to a slew of old war movies. But I am serious. I don’t mean it as name-calling at all. I mean to persuade you that the style of governing into which America has slid is most accurately described as fascism, and that the necessary implications of this fact are rightly regarded as terrifying. That’s what I am about here. And even if I don’t persuade you, I hope to raise the level of your thinking about who and where we are now, to add some nuance and perhaps some useful insights.
The word comes from the Latin word “Fasces,” denoting a bundle of sticks tied together. The individual sticks represented citizens, and the bundle represented the state. The message of this metaphor was that it was the bundle that was significant, not the individual sticks. If it sounds un-American, it’s worth knowing that the Roman Fasces appear on the wall behind the Speaker’s podium in the chamber of the US House of Representatives.
Still, it’s an unlikely word. When most people hear the word "fascism" they may think of the racism and anti-Semitism of Mussolini and Hitler. It is true that the use of force and the scapegoating of fringe groups are part of every fascism. But there was also an economic dimension of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and '30s as "corporatism," which was an essential ingredient of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s tyrannies. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a model by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago (in “The Corporation Will Eat Your Soul”), Fortune magazine ran a cover story on Mussolini in 1934, praising his fascism for its ability to break worker unions, disempower workers and transfer huge sums of money to those who controlled the money rather than those who earned it.
Few Americans are aware of or can recall how so many Americans and Europeans viewed economic fascism as the wave of the future during the 1930s. Yet reviewing our past may help shed light on our present, and point the way to a better future. So I want to begin by looking back to the last time fascism posed a serious threat to America.
In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy — those concerned with individual rights and freedoms — as anti-American. That was 69 years ago.
One of the most outspoken American fascists from the 1930s was economist Lawrence Dennis. In his 1936 book, The Coming American Fascism — a coming which he anticipated and cheered — Dennis declared that defenders of “18th-century Americanism” were sure to become "the laughing stock of their own countrymen." The big stumbling block to the development of economic fascism, Dennis bemoaned, was "liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights."
So it is important for us to recognize that, as an economic system, fascism was widely accepted in the 1920s and '30s, and nearly worshiped by some powerful American industrialists. And fascism has always, and explicitly, been opposed to liberalism of all kinds.
Mussolini, who helped create modern fascism, viewed liberal ideas as the enemy. "The Fascist conception of life," he wrote, "stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual." (In 1932 Mussolini wrote, with the help of Giovanni Gentile, an entry for the Italian Encyclopedia on the definition of fascism. You can read the whole entry at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/mussolini-fascism.html )
Mussolini thought it was unnatural for a government to protect individual rights: The essence of fascism, he believed, is that government should be the master, not the servant, of the people.
Still, fascism is a word that is completely foreign to most of us. We need to know what it is, and how we can know it when we see it.
In an essay coyly titled “Fascism Anyone?,” Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, identifies social and political agendas common to fascist regimes. His comparisons of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet yielded this list of 14 “identifying characteristics of fascism.” (The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2. Read it at http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/britt_23_2.htm ) See how familiar they sound.
Powerful and Continuing NationalismFascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying CauseThe people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
Supremacy of the MilitaryEven when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
Rampant SexismThe governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.
Controlled Mass MediaSometimes the media are directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media are indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
Obsession with National SecurityFear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
Religion and Government are IntertwinedGovernments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
Corporate Power is ProtectedThe industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
Labor Power is SuppressedBecause the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
Disdain for Intellectuals and the ArtsFascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.
Obsession with Crime and PunishmentUnder fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations
Rampant Cronyism and CorruptionFascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
Fraudulent ElectionsSometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
This list will be familiar to students of political science. But it should be familiar to students of religion as well, for much of it mirrors the social and political agenda of religious fundamentalisms worldwide. It is both accurate and helpful for us to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. They both come from very primitive parts of us that have always been the default setting of our species: amity toward our in-group, enmity toward out-groups, hierarchical deference to alpha male figures, a powerful identification with our territory, and so forth. It is that brutal default setting that all civilizations have tried to raise us above, but it is always a fragile thing, civilization, and has to be achieved over and over and over again.
But, again, this is not America’s first encounter with fascism.
In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan. See how much you think his statements apply to our society today.
“The really dangerous American fascist,” Wallace wrote, “… is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism he saw rising in America, Wallace added, “They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.” By these standards, a few of today’s weapons for keeping the common people in eternal subjection include NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, union-busting, cutting worker benefits while increasing CEO pay, elimination of worker benefits, security and pensions, rapacious credit card interest, and outsourcing of jobs — not to mention the largest prison system in the world.
The Perfect Storm
Our current descent into fascism came about through a kind of “Perfect Storm,” a confluence of three unrelated but mutually supportive schools of thought.
The first stream of thought was the imperialistic dream of the Project for the New American Century. I don’t believe anyone can understand the past four years without reading the Project for the New American Century, published in September 2000 and authored by many who have been prominent players in the Bush administrations, including Cheney, Rumsfleid, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Kagan to name only a few. This report saw the fall of Communism as a call for America to become the military rulers of the world, to establish a new worldwide empire. They spelled out the military enhancements we would need, then noted, sadly, that these wonderful plans would take a long time, unless there could be a catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor that would let the leaders turn America into a military and militarist country. There was no clear interest in religion in this report, and no clear concern with local economic policies.
A second powerful stream must be credited to Pat Robertson and his Christian Reconstructionists, or Dominionists. Long dismissed by most of us as a screwball, the Dominionist style of Christianity which he has been preaching since the early 1980s is now the most powerful religious voice in the Bush administration. Katherine Yurica, who transcribed over 1300 pages of interviews from Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” shows in the 1980s, has shown how Robertson and his chosen guests consistently, openly and passionately argued that America must become a theocracy under the control of Christian Dominionists. Robertson is on record saying democracy is a terrible form of government unless it is run by his kind of Christians. He also rails constantly against taxing the rich, against public education, social programs and welfare — and prefers Deuteronomy 28 over the teachings of Jesus. He is clear that women must remain homebound as obedient servants of men, and that abortions, like homosexuals, should not be allowed. Robertson has also been clear that other kinds of Christians, including Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are enemies of Christ. (The Yurica Report. Search under this name, or for “Despoiling America” by Katherine Yurica on the internet.)
The third major component of this Perfect Storm has been the desire of very wealthy Americans and corporate CEOs for a plutocracy that will favor profits by the very rich and disempowerment of the vast majority of American workers, the destruction of workers’ unions, and the alliance of government to help achieve these greedy goals. It is a condition some have called socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor, and which others recognize as a reincarnation of Social Darwinism. This strain of thought has been present throughout American history. Seventy years ago, they tried to finance a military coup to replace Franlkin Delano Roosevelt and establish General Smedley Butler as a fascist dictator in 1934. Fortunately, the picked a general who really was a patriot; he refused, reported the scheme, and spoke and wrote about it. As Canadian law professor Joel Bakan wrote in the book and movie “The Corporation,” they have now achieved their coup without firing a shot.
Our plutocrats have had no particular interest in religion. Their global interests are with an imperialist empire, and their domestic goals are in undoing all the New Deal reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that enabled the rise of America’s middle class after WWII.
Another ill wind in this Perfect Storm is more important than its crudity might suggest: it was President Clinton’s sleazy sex with a young but eager intern in the White House. This incident, and Clinton’s equally sleazy lying about it, focused the certainties of conservatives on the fact that “liberals” had neither moral compass nor moral concern, and therefore represented a dangerous threat to the moral fiber of America. While the effects of this may be hard to quantify, I think they were profound.
These “storm” components have no necessary connection, and come from different groups of thinkers, many of whom wouldn’t even like one another. But together, they form a nearly complete web of command and control, which has finally gained control of America and, they hope, of the world.
What’s coming
When all fascisms exhibit the same social and political agendas (the 14 points listed by Britt), then it is not hard to predict where a new fascist uprising will lead. And it is not hard. The actions of fascists and the social and political effects of fascism and fundamentalism are clear and sobering. Here is some of what’s coming, what will be happening in our country in the next few years:
The theft of all social security funds, to be transferred to those who control money, and the increasing destitution of all those dependent on social security and social welfare programs.
Rising numbers of uninsured people in this country that already has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance in the developed world.
Increased loss of funding for public education combined with increased support for vouchers, urging Americans to entrust their children’s education to Christian schools.
More restrictions on civil liberties as America is turned into the police state necessary for fascism to work
Withdrawal of virtually all funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. At their best, these media sometimes encourage critical questioning, so they are correctly seen as enemies of the state’s official stories.
The reinstatement of a draft, from which the children of privileged parents will again be mostly exempt, leaving our poorest children to fight and die in wars of imperialism and greed that could never benefit them anyway. (That was my one-sentence Veterans’ Day sermon for this year.)
More imperialistic invasions: of Iran and others, and the construction of a huge permanent embassy in Iraq.
More restrictions on speech, under the flag of national security.
Control of the internet to remove or cripple it as an instrument of free communication that is exempt from government control. This will be presented as a necessary anti-terrorist measure.
Efforts to remove the tax-exempt status of churches like this one, and to characterize them as anti-American.
Tighter control of the editorial bias of almost all media, and demonization of the few media they are unable to control – the New York Times, for instance.
Continued outsourcing of jobs, including more white-collar jobs, to produce greater profits for those who control the money and direct the society, while simultaneously reducing America’s workers to a more desperate and powerless status.
Moves in the banking industry to make it impossible for an increasing number of Americans to own their homes. As they did in the 1930s, those who control the money know that it is to their advantage and profit to keep others renting rather than owning.
Criminalization of those who protest, as un-American, with arrests, detentions and harassment increasing. We already have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than any other country in the world. That percentage will increase.
In the near future, it will be illegal or at least dangerous to say the things I have said here this morning. In the fascist story, these things are un-American. In the real history of a democratic America, they were seen as profoundly patriotic, as the kind of critical questions that kept the American spirit alive — the kind of questions, incidentally, that our media were supposed to be pressing.
Can these schemes work? I don’t think so. I think they are murderous, rapacious and insane. But I don’t know. Maybe they can. Similar schemes have worked in countries like Chile, where a democracy in which over 90% voted has been reduced to one in which only about 20% vote because they say, as Americans are learning to say, that it no longer matters who you vote for.
Hope
In the meantime, is there any hope, or do we just band together like lemmings and dive off a cliff? Yes, there is always hope, though at times it is more hidden, as it is now.
As some critics are now saying, and as I have been preaching and writing for almost twenty years, America’s liberals need to grow beyond political liberalism, with its often self-absorbed focus on individual rights to the exclusion of individual responsibilities to the larger society. Liberals will have to construct a more complete vision with moral and religious grounding. That does not mean confessional Christianity. It means the legitimate heir to Christianity. Such a legitimate heir need not be a religion, though it must have clear moral power, and be able to attract the minds and hearts of a voting majority of Americans.
And the new liberal vision must be larger than that of the conservative religious vision that will be appointing judges, writing laws and bending the cultural norms toward hatred and exclusion for the foreseeable future. The conservatives deserve a lot of admiration. They have spent the last thirty years studying American politics, forming their vision and learning how to gain control in the political system. And it worked; they have won. Even if liberals can develop a bigger vision, they still have all that time-consuming work to do. It won’t be fast. It isn’t even clear that liberals will be willing to do it; they may instead prefer to go down with the ship they’re used to.
One man who has been tireless in his investigations and critiques of America’s slide into fascism is Michael C. Ruppert, whose postings usually read as though he is wound way too tight. But he offers four pieces of advice about what we can do now, and they seem reality-based enough to pass on to you. This is America; they’re all about money:
First, he says you should get out of debt.
Second is to spend your money and time on things that give you energy and provide you with useful information.
Third is to stop spending a penny with major banks, news media and corporations that feed you lies and leave you angry and exhausted.
And fourth is to learn how money works and use it like a (political) weapon — as he predicts the rest of the world will be doing against us. (from http://fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110504_snap_out.shtml )
That’s advice written this week. Another bit of advice comes from sixty years ago, from Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry Wallace. Wallace said, “Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.”
Still another way to understand fascism is as a kind of colonization. A simple definition of “colonization” is that it takes people’s stories away, and assigns them supportive roles in stories that empower others at their expense. When you are taxed to support a government that uses you as a means to serve the ends of others, you are — ironically — in a state of taxation without representation. That’s where this country started, and it’s where we are now.
I don’t know the next step. I’m not a political activist; I’m only a preacher. But whatever you do, whatever we do, I hope that we can remember some very basic things that I think of as eternally true. One is that the vast majority of people are good decent people who mean and do as well as they know how. Very few people are evil, though some are. But we all live in families where some of our blood relatives support things we hate. I believe they mean well, and the way to rebuild broken bridges is through greater understanding, compassion, and a reality-based story that is more inclusive and empowering for the vast majority of us.
Those who want to live in a reality-based story rather than as serfs in an ideology designed to transfer power, possibility and hope to a small ruling elite have much long and hard work to do, individually and collectively. It will not be either easy or quick.
But we will do it. We will go forward in hope and in courage. Let us seek that better path, and find the courage to take it — step, by step, by step. Comments On This Article (Comment On This Article)
By: webmaster 3/16/2005 8:47:05 PM This is a great article. I hope everybody reads this and takes it to heart.By: webmaster 3/16/2005 8:58:28 PM I don't think that most people realize that Facism was orginally meant to describe a state controlled by corporations and run for their benefit. By: Unknown 10/4/2006 1:10:09 PM Thanks to the virtual properties of an electronic archive, you can also do a computer search of all the obituary notices to look for specific words, and so check for specific patterns and features in the way his times valued MT. africansupermarket com It's interesting, for example, to see whether "Tom" or "Huck" is mentioned the most - and what other characters and novels are singled out. submiturlexpress [URL=http://submiturlexpress.com/dir/directory/Business/index.html] submiturlexpress[/URL] http://submiturlexpress.com/dir/directory/Business/index.html Improvement Homeowners Warranty Deficiency Judgment
Living Under Fascism
Davidson Loehr7 November 2004First UU Church of Austin
March 7, 2005: This sermon by Rev. Dr. Davidson Loehr, originally delivered on November 7, 2004, has recently been the subject of discussion on Air America's "Morning Sedition" as well as in other media outlets.
SERMON: Living Under Fascism
You may wonder why anyone would try to use the word “fascism” in a serious discussion of where America is today. It sounds like cheap name-calling, or melodramatic allusion to a slew of old war movies. But I am serious. I don’t mean it as name-calling at all. I mean to persuade you that the style of governing into which America has slid is most accurately described as fascism, and that the necessary implications of this fact are rightly regarded as terrifying. That’s what I am about here. And even if I don’t persuade you, I hope to raise the level of your thinking about who and where we are now, to add some nuance and perhaps some useful insights.
The word comes from the Latin word “Fasces,” denoting a bundle of sticks tied together. The individual sticks represented citizens, and the bundle represented the state. The message of this metaphor was that it was the bundle that was significant, not the individual sticks. If it sounds un-American, it’s worth knowing that the Roman Fasces appear on the wall behind the Speaker’s podium in the chamber of the US House of Representatives.
Still, it’s an unlikely word. When most people hear the word "fascism" they may think of the racism and anti-Semitism of Mussolini and Hitler. It is true that the use of force and the scapegoating of fringe groups are part of every fascism. But there was also an economic dimension of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and '30s as "corporatism," which was an essential ingredient of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s tyrannies. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a model by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe.
As I mentioned a few weeks ago (in “The Corporation Will Eat Your Soul”), Fortune magazine ran a cover story on Mussolini in 1934, praising his fascism for its ability to break worker unions, disempower workers and transfer huge sums of money to those who controlled the money rather than those who earned it.
Few Americans are aware of or can recall how so many Americans and Europeans viewed economic fascism as the wave of the future during the 1930s. Yet reviewing our past may help shed light on our present, and point the way to a better future. So I want to begin by looking back to the last time fascism posed a serious threat to America.
In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy — those concerned with individual rights and freedoms — as anti-American. That was 69 years ago.
One of the most outspoken American fascists from the 1930s was economist Lawrence Dennis. In his 1936 book, The Coming American Fascism — a coming which he anticipated and cheered — Dennis declared that defenders of “18th-century Americanism” were sure to become "the laughing stock of their own countrymen." The big stumbling block to the development of economic fascism, Dennis bemoaned, was "liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights."
So it is important for us to recognize that, as an economic system, fascism was widely accepted in the 1920s and '30s, and nearly worshiped by some powerful American industrialists. And fascism has always, and explicitly, been opposed to liberalism of all kinds.
Mussolini, who helped create modern fascism, viewed liberal ideas as the enemy. "The Fascist conception of life," he wrote, "stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual." (In 1932 Mussolini wrote, with the help of Giovanni Gentile, an entry for the Italian Encyclopedia on the definition of fascism. You can read the whole entry at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/mussolini-fascism.html )
Mussolini thought it was unnatural for a government to protect individual rights: The essence of fascism, he believed, is that government should be the master, not the servant, of the people.
Still, fascism is a word that is completely foreign to most of us. We need to know what it is, and how we can know it when we see it.
In an essay coyly titled “Fascism Anyone?,” Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, identifies social and political agendas common to fascist regimes. His comparisons of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet yielded this list of 14 “identifying characteristics of fascism.” (The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2. Read it at http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/britt_23_2.htm ) See how familiar they sound.
Powerful and Continuing NationalismFascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.
Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of “need.” The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.
Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying CauseThe people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.
Supremacy of the MilitaryEven when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.
Rampant SexismThe governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.
Controlled Mass MediaSometimes the media are directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media are indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common.
Obsession with National SecurityFear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.
Religion and Government are IntertwinedGovernments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
Corporate Power is ProtectedThe industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
Labor Power is SuppressedBecause the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.
Disdain for Intellectuals and the ArtsFascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.
Obsession with Crime and PunishmentUnder fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations
Rampant Cronyism and CorruptionFascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.
Fraudulent ElectionsSometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.
This list will be familiar to students of political science. But it should be familiar to students of religion as well, for much of it mirrors the social and political agenda of religious fundamentalisms worldwide. It is both accurate and helpful for us to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. They both come from very primitive parts of us that have always been the default setting of our species: amity toward our in-group, enmity toward out-groups, hierarchical deference to alpha male figures, a powerful identification with our territory, and so forth. It is that brutal default setting that all civilizations have tried to raise us above, but it is always a fragile thing, civilization, and has to be achieved over and over and over again.
But, again, this is not America’s first encounter with fascism.
In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan. See how much you think his statements apply to our society today.
“The really dangerous American fascist,” Wallace wrote, “… is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism he saw rising in America, Wallace added, “They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.” By these standards, a few of today’s weapons for keeping the common people in eternal subjection include NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, union-busting, cutting worker benefits while increasing CEO pay, elimination of worker benefits, security and pensions, rapacious credit card interest, and outsourcing of jobs — not to mention the largest prison system in the world.
The Perfect Storm
Our current descent into fascism came about through a kind of “Perfect Storm,” a confluence of three unrelated but mutually supportive schools of thought.
The first stream of thought was the imperialistic dream of the Project for the New American Century. I don’t believe anyone can understand the past four years without reading the Project for the New American Century, published in September 2000 and authored by many who have been prominent players in the Bush administrations, including Cheney, Rumsfleid, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Kagan to name only a few. This report saw the fall of Communism as a call for America to become the military rulers of the world, to establish a new worldwide empire. They spelled out the military enhancements we would need, then noted, sadly, that these wonderful plans would take a long time, unless there could be a catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor that would let the leaders turn America into a military and militarist country. There was no clear interest in religion in this report, and no clear concern with local economic policies.
A second powerful stream must be credited to Pat Robertson and his Christian Reconstructionists, or Dominionists. Long dismissed by most of us as a screwball, the Dominionist style of Christianity which he has been preaching since the early 1980s is now the most powerful religious voice in the Bush administration. Katherine Yurica, who transcribed over 1300 pages of interviews from Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” shows in the 1980s, has shown how Robertson and his chosen guests consistently, openly and passionately argued that America must become a theocracy under the control of Christian Dominionists. Robertson is on record saying democracy is a terrible form of government unless it is run by his kind of Christians. He also rails constantly against taxing the rich, against public education, social programs and welfare — and prefers Deuteronomy 28 over the teachings of Jesus. He is clear that women must remain homebound as obedient servants of men, and that abortions, like homosexuals, should not be allowed. Robertson has also been clear that other kinds of Christians, including Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are enemies of Christ. (The Yurica Report. Search under this name, or for “Despoiling America” by Katherine Yurica on the internet.)
The third major component of this Perfect Storm has been the desire of very wealthy Americans and corporate CEOs for a plutocracy that will favor profits by the very rich and disempowerment of the vast majority of American workers, the destruction of workers’ unions, and the alliance of government to help achieve these greedy goals. It is a condition some have called socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor, and which others recognize as a reincarnation of Social Darwinism. This strain of thought has been present throughout American history. Seventy years ago, they tried to finance a military coup to replace Franlkin Delano Roosevelt and establish General Smedley Butler as a fascist dictator in 1934. Fortunately, the picked a general who really was a patriot; he refused, reported the scheme, and spoke and wrote about it. As Canadian law professor Joel Bakan wrote in the book and movie “The Corporation,” they have now achieved their coup without firing a shot.
Our plutocrats have had no particular interest in religion. Their global interests are with an imperialist empire, and their domestic goals are in undoing all the New Deal reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that enabled the rise of America’s middle class after WWII.
Another ill wind in this Perfect Storm is more important than its crudity might suggest: it was President Clinton’s sleazy sex with a young but eager intern in the White House. This incident, and Clinton’s equally sleazy lying about it, focused the certainties of conservatives on the fact that “liberals” had neither moral compass nor moral concern, and therefore represented a dangerous threat to the moral fiber of America. While the effects of this may be hard to quantify, I think they were profound.
These “storm” components have no necessary connection, and come from different groups of thinkers, many of whom wouldn’t even like one another. But together, they form a nearly complete web of command and control, which has finally gained control of America and, they hope, of the world.
What’s coming
When all fascisms exhibit the same social and political agendas (the 14 points listed by Britt), then it is not hard to predict where a new fascist uprising will lead. And it is not hard. The actions of fascists and the social and political effects of fascism and fundamentalism are clear and sobering. Here is some of what’s coming, what will be happening in our country in the next few years:
The theft of all social security funds, to be transferred to those who control money, and the increasing destitution of all those dependent on social security and social welfare programs.
Rising numbers of uninsured people in this country that already has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance in the developed world.
Increased loss of funding for public education combined with increased support for vouchers, urging Americans to entrust their children’s education to Christian schools.
More restrictions on civil liberties as America is turned into the police state necessary for fascism to work
Withdrawal of virtually all funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. At their best, these media sometimes encourage critical questioning, so they are correctly seen as enemies of the state’s official stories.
The reinstatement of a draft, from which the children of privileged parents will again be mostly exempt, leaving our poorest children to fight and die in wars of imperialism and greed that could never benefit them anyway. (That was my one-sentence Veterans’ Day sermon for this year.)
More imperialistic invasions: of Iran and others, and the construction of a huge permanent embassy in Iraq.
More restrictions on speech, under the flag of national security.
Control of the internet to remove or cripple it as an instrument of free communication that is exempt from government control. This will be presented as a necessary anti-terrorist measure.
Efforts to remove the tax-exempt status of churches like this one, and to characterize them as anti-American.
Tighter control of the editorial bias of almost all media, and demonization of the few media they are unable to control – the New York Times, for instance.
Continued outsourcing of jobs, including more white-collar jobs, to produce greater profits for those who control the money and direct the society, while simultaneously reducing America’s workers to a more desperate and powerless status.
Moves in the banking industry to make it impossible for an increasing number of Americans to own their homes. As they did in the 1930s, those who control the money know that it is to their advantage and profit to keep others renting rather than owning.
Criminalization of those who protest, as un-American, with arrests, detentions and harassment increasing. We already have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than any other country in the world. That percentage will increase.
In the near future, it will be illegal or at least dangerous to say the things I have said here this morning. In the fascist story, these things are un-American. In the real history of a democratic America, they were seen as profoundly patriotic, as the kind of critical questions that kept the American spirit alive — the kind of questions, incidentally, that our media were supposed to be pressing.
Can these schemes work? I don’t think so. I think they are murderous, rapacious and insane. But I don’t know. Maybe they can. Similar schemes have worked in countries like Chile, where a democracy in which over 90% voted has been reduced to one in which only about 20% vote because they say, as Americans are learning to say, that it no longer matters who you vote for.
Hope
In the meantime, is there any hope, or do we just band together like lemmings and dive off a cliff? Yes, there is always hope, though at times it is more hidden, as it is now.
As some critics are now saying, and as I have been preaching and writing for almost twenty years, America’s liberals need to grow beyond political liberalism, with its often self-absorbed focus on individual rights to the exclusion of individual responsibilities to the larger society. Liberals will have to construct a more complete vision with moral and religious grounding. That does not mean confessional Christianity. It means the legitimate heir to Christianity. Such a legitimate heir need not be a religion, though it must have clear moral power, and be able to attract the minds and hearts of a voting majority of Americans.
And the new liberal vision must be larger than that of the conservative religious vision that will be appointing judges, writing laws and bending the cultural norms toward hatred and exclusion for the foreseeable future. The conservatives deserve a lot of admiration. They have spent the last thirty years studying American politics, forming their vision and learning how to gain control in the political system. And it worked; they have won. Even if liberals can develop a bigger vision, they still have all that time-consuming work to do. It won’t be fast. It isn’t even clear that liberals will be willing to do it; they may instead prefer to go down with the ship they’re used to.
One man who has been tireless in his investigations and critiques of America’s slide into fascism is Michael C. Ruppert, whose postings usually read as though he is wound way too tight. But he offers four pieces of advice about what we can do now, and they seem reality-based enough to pass on to you. This is America; they’re all about money:
First, he says you should get out of debt.
Second is to spend your money and time on things that give you energy and provide you with useful information.
Third is to stop spending a penny with major banks, news media and corporations that feed you lies and leave you angry and exhausted.
And fourth is to learn how money works and use it like a (political) weapon — as he predicts the rest of the world will be doing against us. (from http://fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110504_snap_out.shtml )
That’s advice written this week. Another bit of advice comes from sixty years ago, from Roosevelt’s Vice President, Henry Wallace. Wallace said, “Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels.”
Still another way to understand fascism is as a kind of colonization. A simple definition of “colonization” is that it takes people’s stories away, and assigns them supportive roles in stories that empower others at their expense. When you are taxed to support a government that uses you as a means to serve the ends of others, you are — ironically — in a state of taxation without representation. That’s where this country started, and it’s where we are now.
I don’t know the next step. I’m not a political activist; I’m only a preacher. But whatever you do, whatever we do, I hope that we can remember some very basic things that I think of as eternally true. One is that the vast majority of people are good decent people who mean and do as well as they know how. Very few people are evil, though some are. But we all live in families where some of our blood relatives support things we hate. I believe they mean well, and the way to rebuild broken bridges is through greater understanding, compassion, and a reality-based story that is more inclusive and empowering for the vast majority of us.
Those who want to live in a reality-based story rather than as serfs in an ideology designed to transfer power, possibility and hope to a small ruling elite have much long and hard work to do, individually and collectively. It will not be either easy or quick.
But we will do it. We will go forward in hope and in courage. Let us seek that better path, and find the courage to take it — step, by step, by step. Comments On This Article (Comment On This Article)
By: webmaster 3/16/2005 8:47:05 PM This is a great article. I hope everybody reads this and takes it to heart.By: webmaster 3/16/2005 8:58:28 PM I don't think that most people realize that Facism was orginally meant to describe a state controlled by corporations and run for their benefit. By: Unknown 10/4/2006 1:10:09 PM Thanks to the virtual properties of an electronic archive, you can also do a computer search of all the obituary notices to look for specific words, and so check for specific patterns and features in the way his times valued MT. africansupermarket com It's interesting, for example, to see whether "Tom" or "Huck" is mentioned the most - and what other characters and novels are singled out. submiturlexpress [URL=http://submiturlexpress.com/dir/directory/Business/index.html] submiturlexpress[/URL] http://submiturlexpress.com/dir/directory/Business/index.html Improvement Homeowners Warranty Deficiency Judgment
Talking values
By: robert 3/15/2005 4:14:16 PM (Comment On This Article)
A lot of post election punditry says that the election was "values" driven and that for that reason Bush won. One even suggested that the Democrats would have to return to Sunday school. So, what is it with values? How is it that a president that has lied, supported unscrupulous profiteering, shred the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, arbitrarily broken treaties and has set this country, which was born in a fight against imperialistic tyranny, on the road to being an empire itself, can be elected on the basis of values. I suggest it is due to a massive disconnect between religion and moral values. It is always precarious to base a value system on myth, no matter how strongly believed in. The risk is that the myth will come onto conflict with reality and drive a society to destruction in the face of reality. With this in mind let us examine just one of the values of the Christian Right and fundamentalist Catholic religions. Other examples may follow in subsequent posts.
Anti-abortion.
At root the opposition to abortion lies in the belief in a soul whose existence is totally unverifiable. This leads to the belief that the minute a sperm enters an egg a human being is created. In fact this is absolute nonsense. It is, at best, to mistake the potential for the real. Yet as we have seen, some ideologies possessed of this belief are willing to kill real human beings in promotion of their belief, and the president they support has led a massive killing spree against innocents in Iraq. So much for the right to life.
Reality-based values, following the natural progression of fetal development might require a scaled system of legal decision making in which it is acknowledged that the fetus is not a human being, but the mother is and that her well being is paramount. Furthermore, it is clear that population growth cannot go on unchecked without profound detriment to the meaning of life and the planet that supports us all. How does the value of birthing every fetus stack up against preventing a world in which violence is a rampant quest for diminishing resources and in which no one would want to or could live? These are the real choices and it is clear that the Christian ideologues insistence on birth at any social cost is nothing more than a religious belief and not a human value. It is imperative that we focus on real human beings in the context of the real world if we are to have values germane to human welfare.
A lot of post election punditry says that the election was "values" driven and that for that reason Bush won. One even suggested that the Democrats would have to return to Sunday school. So, what is it with values? How is it that a president that has lied, supported unscrupulous profiteering, shred the Bill of Rights and the Constitution, arbitrarily broken treaties and has set this country, which was born in a fight against imperialistic tyranny, on the road to being an empire itself, can be elected on the basis of values. I suggest it is due to a massive disconnect between religion and moral values. It is always precarious to base a value system on myth, no matter how strongly believed in. The risk is that the myth will come onto conflict with reality and drive a society to destruction in the face of reality. With this in mind let us examine just one of the values of the Christian Right and fundamentalist Catholic religions. Other examples may follow in subsequent posts.
Anti-abortion.
At root the opposition to abortion lies in the belief in a soul whose existence is totally unverifiable. This leads to the belief that the minute a sperm enters an egg a human being is created. In fact this is absolute nonsense. It is, at best, to mistake the potential for the real. Yet as we have seen, some ideologies possessed of this belief are willing to kill real human beings in promotion of their belief, and the president they support has led a massive killing spree against innocents in Iraq. So much for the right to life.
Reality-based values, following the natural progression of fetal development might require a scaled system of legal decision making in which it is acknowledged that the fetus is not a human being, but the mother is and that her well being is paramount. Furthermore, it is clear that population growth cannot go on unchecked without profound detriment to the meaning of life and the planet that supports us all. How does the value of birthing every fetus stack up against preventing a world in which violence is a rampant quest for diminishing resources and in which no one would want to or could live? These are the real choices and it is clear that the Christian ideologues insistence on birth at any social cost is nothing more than a religious belief and not a human value. It is imperative that we focus on real human beings in the context of the real world if we are to have values germane to human welfare.
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