Religion, Dictatorship and American Ambivalence

Americans have, in my judgment, a somewhat unique, naïve and increasingly dangerous view of religion. It is founded on the distinction between church and state as reflected in our Constitution. Because that distinction is so imbedded in our consciousness we assume that religion is politically innocent. Unlike our European forbears, we have little experience with religion as a major property owner, of prelates as major business operators and masters of serfs or religion as highly integrated into the politics and law of our country. As a result we are at best ambivalent about any attack on religion viewing religion as a private matter. Get over it. Religious fundamentalism has been a profound enemy of democracy and in this country has become the single largest threat to our democracy; larger in point of power than any terrorist group. One of the functions of the “war on terror” has been to distract Americans from the insidious efforts of fundamentalist Christian religions to carry out this destructive enterprise.

Chris Hedges is a war reporter, one time head of the New York Times’ Middle East bureau and author of a seminal book on the attractiveness of war for humans titled War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He has a new book out titled American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. Hedges, a divinity student at Yale, where he had a professor who observed the rise of Nazism in the German church, documents a similar rise in political power of the Religious Right. He details with direct quotes their ongoing strategy to use our Constitutional freedom of religion to establish an American theocracy not unlike John Calvin’s rule of Geneva. Democracy will be destroyed in the interest of Christian dogma and the military and economic power of the United States will be used to make Christianity the dominant religion world wide. As Hedges documents, the Nazi attack on the Weimar Republic was “values” based. Their initial scapegoats included homosexuals as does the Religious Right in this country. If this were a political movement a majority of Americans would be in vigorous opposition to the Religious Right, but this movement, using the gloss of religion, confuses people as to how to deal with it. This, as in Germany, is the purpose of using religion to gain political ends.

In the matter of tolerance, which religious differences raise in a democracy, Hedges quotes the philosopher Karl Popper “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them… We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

We are, in my judgment, faced with a serious threat of fascism in this country. We see it in the usurpation of authority by the Bush administration. We see it in the USA Patriot Act. We see it in the loss of habeus corpus. We see it in the way that an act of terrorism was converted into an act of war so that our democratic freedoms could be more easily abridged. We see it in the unconstitutional gifts of millions of dollars to religious groups in the name of service to the needy. We see it when the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest military officer, publicly expresses his disdain for gays in the military. We see it in the incorporation of private armies into the American military. This was done by edict of Donald Rumsfeld thus making armies such as Blackwater and its Right Wing Christian owner immune from civilian courts for their crimes and yet as private companies they are not subject to military law. An armed camp of government subsidized freebooters was thus created. We see it locally when a religious group takes over the flagpole at our local high schools for daily prayer meetings thereby declaring ownership of that national symbol. We see it when the family is made the center of political and cultural concern, not the individual as the Constitution declares. We see it in the gross distortions of American history promulgated by the religious Right. We see it in their gross distortions of ordinary language in which, for example, the word freedom means freedom in Christ and from secular humanism. We see it in their exceptionally egregious claim to be a moral majority. In short we see it in every dimension of our cultural and political life. It is high time we recognize it for what it is and, lest this country follow the path exemplified by Nazi Germany, Pinochet’s Chile and Spain’s Francisco Franco, we need to energetically defend our democracy against it. A fascist military superpower on this planet would be disastrous for humanity.

Bob Newhard

Reality as a Moral Arbiter

As of February 2, 2007 we have been informed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that we have passed the tipping point in global warming. The planet will continue to get warmer for centuries and at an accelerating pace. This means rising sea level, massive desertification, water shortage, more frequent violent storms, etc. For western man, especially Americans, who have predicated the meaning of their lives on the prospect of the world getting better, especially for their children, we now have to face the prospect of an increasingly hostile environment. This will, I believe, give occasion for more people than usual to query what it means to be human in a world without hope.

Progressivism is especially vulnerable in such a world. It has had a “better future” at its core. Will it be able to translate its values into a world of less-and-less? If so, what will it look like at that point? There are already progressive strategies being offered to reduce the impact of global warming on the poor of the planet. Could for example, the poor areas of the world, which pollute less than the developed areas be paid for a “right to pollute” by the developed countries with a diminishing cap on total planetary pollution? This could see a long sought significant transfer of wealth to the poor of the planet. However, this whole process is shot through with profound uncertainty.

Hope is sometimes contrasted with despair. I think this is a mistake. Meaning remains.

It is rather commonly agreed that the most significant difference between humans and the other animals that have evolved on this planet is the human ability to reason. By reason I mean the ability to abstract and draw relationships between those abstractions and to apply these logically related abstractions to the real world in order to produce understanding. This process obviously involves more than reason, notably honesty about the facts, but at root it is reason that is unique to the human species.

We will in the coming centuries, for that is how long global warming will last, have ample opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of what it means to be human as mankind experiences century after century of increasing global warming. There will also be ample opportunity for mankind’s other response mechanisms to calamity, e.g. increasing social fragmentation and the accompanying hostility and violence, superstition raised to a high level of mass delusion, etc. Much of human experience suggests that consequences such as these will be predominant, despite being destructive of the best in humans. In all this there will be those who persist in the exercise of hope, no matter how fantastic it has to get, as the enormity of man’s predicament becomes more evident.

I suggest for those who wish to live responsibly that this is a unique period in human experience in which our intelligence is telling us what our future is and that knowing this we can use it to vastly improve our ability to optimize the best in human nature. This is not unlike a person knowing he has a limited time to live seeking to optimize that time. This will require as much honesty as we can muster in facing the future and based on the facts that honesty uncovers seek to deepen our understanding of the real world and how humans relate to it.

Some people, especially those of an entrepreneurial bent, are already getting hyped by the potential for bringing technology to bear on these problems. Many will find refuge in these undertakings and insist that we can technologize our way out of this. The response I am suggesting would vigorously question such assumptions in the interest of honesty and the continuing preservation of what is best in humanity, namely, understanding. This is a time that will require an uncommon level of earnestness of those who seek to retain their judgment and exercise their thought. This is not to say that this is a period to look forward to, it will be fraught with calamity and violence, but as long as we have our ephemeral lives we can exercise our understanding and learn who we are as humans. Unfortunately humans have the additional problem of institutionalizing their emotions. Religion is the institutionalized form of hope and we see what its disregard for reality can lead to. Let us not trade on the vagaries and distractions of hope in which the mind is directed to, and obfuscated by, our desires rather than our understanding. Let us substitute purpose for hope as we seek to exemplify what is most uniquely human.

For those who are interested, Barbara Ehrenreich has an article, The Pathologies of Hope, in the February 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine. While she is dealing with her bout with breast cancer rather than mankind’s future under global warming, she finds that hope has perversely invaded even academia in the form of Positive Psychology. She ends her article with reference to Albert Camus and the need for honesty in living our lives.

Finally, I would point out that hope rather than understanding is already being made a political issue. Barak Obama is obviously going to make hope a centerpiece of his presidential campaign as is evidenced by the 3-20-07 publication of his book The Audacity of Hope. Here is a senator with at best modest achievements as a senator. He evidences less than a comprehensive appreciation for the global issues that reality presents to mankind. Hence, he will appeal not to understanding and thought but to mankind’s emotions and the delusion that accompanies them. To do this knowingly is, in my judgment, despicable. The spin doctors of the left and undoubtedly the media will turn the 2008 election into a contest of which will be the first minority president a black or a woman. As important as racial accommodation and women’s equality are, they do not compare with global warming and the immediate strategies and negotiations that this world-wide phenomenon demands of us. We should find our racial and gender commonalities in our common and dire predicament, not in personal charisma or an appeal to the “American Way.” The question is not do “We worship an ‘awesome God’ in the Blue States” or whether the “audacity of hope ...is God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation.” as Barak Obama would have it. This is rhetoric directed at people’s feelings which are highly manipulable. The question is do we humans have the intelligence, will and ability to rearrange our social priorities to address the future that faces our species or will we play the same old “values” game that has glossed the existential issues we have faced for the last thirty or forty years. Al Gore talks reality with respect to global warming. Barak Obama gives us yet more sentimental pabulum, which makes me very suspicious of his motives and his new found corporate moneybags. As the Daily Kos (2-26-07) says in its plea for progressives to come to Al Gore’s defense, “Note to Senator Obama: spare us the hope and bi-partisanship talk and help us fight back.”

Bob Newhard