The Elevation, Supremacy And Decay Of "Rights" And The Destruction Of The Meaning Of Words And The Defeat Of Truth

Continuing on with Stanely Hauerwas on rights:

Not that long ago one of the fundamental issues that characterized that strange activity called "meta-ethics" was rather right or good was the primary ethical notion on which all other ethical judgements could be justified. That fruitless debate was, of course, an attempt to choose between Mill and Kant on strictly logical grounds. The challenge to that way of understanding ethics was represented by philosophers such as Bernard Williams, Iris Murdoch, Phillipa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre  and Ray (Gaeteah. sorry, not familiar with that one) who directed attention to words such as "kindness," "honesty," "gentleness" as descriptions at least as important as the big words "right" and "good."

I'm trying to make a similar point about rights.  

Not unrelated to the over-determination of rights language in our current moral vocabulary is my worry that once the language of inalienable rights is introduced there is no way to control their multiplication. Once rights are divorced from the practices they depend upon for their intelligibility they multiply faster than rabbits.

I may well think I have a right to my body but it is not clear how that claim can be commensurate with people who think suicide is wrong. If I have a right to my body does that mean as some seem to think that I have a right to end my life when I so desire?  Not only does the unlimited scope of rights language seem uncontrollable once the cat of inalienable rights is let out of the bag, there is no way it seems to adjudicate mutually exclusive rights claims. The assumption that I have a right to my body is not that different from someone who thinks they have an unlimited right to their money.

The moral life conceived primarily in terms of rights turns out to produce people who end up shouting at one another by claiming their rights have been violated. John Millbank observes for example if rights for women only means women are to receive their respective shares of use in relationship to men and children the notion of women's rights in terms of self-possession can rebound to a further oppression of women. For example, if only women have rights over the fetus, Millbanks suggests, men as men will naturally  exercise their equivalent right to have nothing to do with childbearing or the nurture of children.

Here I disagree with Stanley Hauerwas, or those he makes reference to.  There are some real differences between ownership of one's body and ownership of money, the source and transferability of what is owned is different and the meanings of owning money and ones own body are quite different.

You can own money through earning it by your own labor (the use you put your own body to). The ownership of a boss or investor or slave-owner (I'd usually say slave-holder, but will use the common term in this discussion) of the money or wealth produced by those they hold power over, whether "free" workers of enslaved people by the use to which they put those workers of slaves bodies and not their own is a quite different kind of ownership.  What is morally indisputable when, as Lincoln pointed out, a Black Woman rightly eats the bread that her own labor has produced is far more disputable when a person who enslaves or holds her in wage-slavery exerts ownership over the very same thing, especially when leaving her starving or destitute.  

I will insert that in a very practical and real way, ownership of your money is dependent on ownership of your body but ownership of your body is first and primary whereas ownership of money is incidental to that. Our use of one word for the two kinds of ownership shouldn't lead us to believe that the two things are equivalent.  Lawyers and judges often use that confusion to do what they wanted, in the end.

The transfer of money to the ownership of someone else by the one who produced the wealth behind it is not only possible but it is common. You can own money through a gift from someone whose labor earned the money.  You you can receive it in a free exchange from the one who earned the money by selling them something or doing them a service (choosing to use their own body to do that).

Or someone can own money through theft, including through legalized enslavement or wage-slavery, which are not that much different from ownership of money through illegal methods such as the various forms of theft and cheating.  What is different between the legal and illegal forms of such transfer of money is not much when looked at plainly as a matter of justice or morality where those often are close or  equivalent.  

But if a practice of slavery is legal or wage-slavery or the various forms of coerced or dishonest swindling, cheating, deceiving and taking advantage of are legal, our legal systems and even those who are robbed themselves are led to pretend that there is something moral about it, that their enslaver or oppressor is "within their rights," which is little different from other sorts of conning of people to cheat them.  

Very often under the laws of the United States, under the Constitution, especially as it has been amended by Supreme Court fiat, the rights to the product of your own labor are transferred to those who didn't produce it and under any honest analysis stole it from the ones who did.  And when, especially, the investor class of unillegalized crooks and cheats are told they have to pay taxes on their ill-gotten billions to pay their share of maintaining infrastructure and a decent life which they benefit from more than almost anyone else, the whining and weeping and crying over that violation of their conventionalized, Constitutionalized "rights" is pathetic to hear. At least pathetic to the affluent and the media, to most working people and the destitute of any awareness, it's more than a little annoying.  At least unless they've been gulled into sympathizing with the rich and famous by TV shows like Celebrity Apprentice.

Money changes hands, its "ownership" is not intrinsic to any one owner.  There are certainly other aspects of the ownership of money that could be brought into this discussion that show it is really not much like the "ownership" of one's own body.  There is no limit on how much money someone can "own" there is exactly a limit of one body that the possessor of it can own and no one else can ever really own it in the same way.  There was a Civil War to establish that principle in U.S. law, the founders certainly didn't hold it and neither did the Supreme Court up to and during the Civil War.

That is in no way like the ownership of one person to their own body.  In the case of straight, white men I doubt such issues much come up except in the extreme of a question of suicide no matter how irresponsibly he uses his body, men being the origin of the very issue of abortion that Hauerwas used as an example. Before the overturning of "sodomy" laws, there were such restrictions placed on gay male use of their bodies, though, since the law was largely a product of straight, white, male creation, I doubt there was ever much enforcment of those when it was a straight male doing exactly the same things to women or girls.

I would also disagree with what is said about women's relationship with a fetus which she is carrying in her own body.  I don't think the issue of who owns the fetus is the primary fact of an abortion, it is the fact that a particular fetus is contained, inevitably, within a particular woman's body which body she has the primary interest in, unique to her.  Which is certainly superior to the interest of any other person, even a man who may have fathered the fetus she is carrying.  Even the fetus, if it has rights.  That interest does not transfer to any other person, it can't be transferred or said to be transferable except, perhaps, the right of a parent, guardian or other person who can act in the best interest of an incompetent minor Girl or mentally incompetent adult Woman to act in their best interest, health and even preservation of life.  Though I would more think that that decision falls more in the area of responsibilities than rights.

That said, I would never put it past men as a gender to try to get out of facing their responsibilities in the fathering of a fetus or child that they don't want to take responsibility for, using any excuse they can to do that.  The use of their body in having sex, regardless of the very knowable consequences, despite the consequences for the Woman they might well impregnate unwillingly, give an STD, or cause other harms generates responsibility for the consequences of that use.  But the fact is whatever interest OR RESPONSIBILITY that gives him in the bearing of the child, he can't have the same relationship to a fetus he fathered as the woman who is carrying it in her own body for nine months. Men get out of the responsibility for even children they claimed to have wanted and the law has, at times, let them get off.  The horrors of Victorian institutionalized infanticide, the "baby farming" referenced humorously in Gilbert and Sullivan was horrific and a direct result of all-male adopted Victorian laws that put all of the responsibility for children born out of wedlock on the woman which led to a long period of increased infanticide and a business in baby selling or, often, killing that was known enough to feature in the newspapers and enter into musical comedy.  

After birth, it is quite a different matter and the child has an entirely independent existence that the law can consider apart from the right of either the mother or father and their own bodily ownership but not apart from their use of their bodies in generating the child.  They have a responsibility to the child they made. Any attempt to greatly enforce the responsibilities of fathering a child on the male was relatively recent and, if what I've noticed is accurate, not that effective.

I do agree that viewing the morality of suicide solely in terms of the right of bodily autonomy of the one who is trying to end their life leaves out those who care about them, those who may depend on their support (a father or mother of young children) those whose own safety might be endangered by them killing themselves in their chosen manner, those who will be devastated emotionally for perhaps the rest of their lives.  Suicide is not an act understood exclusively as the self-determination of the person who chooses it.  

And, as I mentioned, the regularizing of assisted, medically administered suicide cannot but have consequences in questions well outside of self-determination, valuations of the worth of lives, the economic or other utility of their death to others, the coercion of that nagging fear of becoming a "burden" on their families, friends or, perhaps most perniciously, "on society."   I have no doubt that when "assisted suicide" or even self-administered suicide becomes normal and regular and is sold as a good the results will not be unrelated to those other 20th century "goods" of "the good birth," eugenics, or "the good death," euthanasia which was quite involuntary in almost every case where the state was involved.  When your conception of "good" jibes so closely with that of eugenicists and the early stages of the Nazi industrialization of murder, someone should at the very least bring those issues up for serious discussion.   

But even given that, I don't know how I feel about the legalization of suicide.  Not everything that is morally ambiguous or even a wrong should be the focus of legal prohibition. There are moral issues that the law is incompetent to address and which either should or cannot be legislated. The civil law is a very cumbersome and inaccurate set of tools with which to find, measure or use morality, the clunky manner in which it deals with "rights" is an active front where that not infrequent  incompetence becomes obvious fairly quickly.  Criminal law, even more so.

There is no interest of the state that is superior to the right of a Woman to decide what happens inside her own skin.  The power of the state should end there. Similarly, I think drinking alcohol is at best morally ambiguous and I think it is a bad enough problem that it probably rises to the status of being immoral - you don't have to be an alcoholic to do yourself or others harm by casual drinking - but the experience of prohibition showed that it was not possible to ban its use without a level of control on other behavior that no one should or will tolerate.*  In that case the actual drinking is not something that can effectively be regulated by law, though I think public drunkenness should never have been decriminalized.  The consequences of being drunk at home are bad enough, being drunk in public only makes that worse.  what someone who is drinking does because they are drinking is very much the business of the state and everyone who can be impacted by it. Bringing the question of money into it, the effects of drinking alcohol on other people is sufficient to regulate that and the behavior of those who sell and distribute the alcohol that has those effects, the use of money and who owns it very much a part of that.

I do agree with him about the problem of the multiplication of things designated as "rights" even when they are not called that.  I have mentioned the right to lie  that the Warren Court gave to the New York Times in the Sullivan decision, the effect of which has been most impactful and totally predictably even in 1964 in the permission to lie about liberals and Democrats in politics.  Building on that "right" the right of the rich to enormously fund and multiply and amplify that "right" to lie through the politically effective mass media in the Buckley v. Valeo case in which money was either turned into a "right" itself by the Court turning money into "speech" (named a "right" by the Bill of Rights)  ignoring that thereby the Court actually gifted the rich with probably the greatest bounty of such instantly created "right" ever bestowed on anyone, that right not available to those without huge fortunes, created it in such abundance it had to be measured by quantity instead of individually.  Put together those "rights" had the power to destroy equality and, with other Court rulings of the kind, democratic government through attacks on elections governed by truth. In later cases, the Roberts Court even extended that right to meddle in U. S. elections to foreign billionaires and even adversarial governments.  What the Supreme Court gave with rights such as those, it destroyed as those were applied politically and the Republican-fascists, first in the Congress, then with those put on the court through the results of that court-permitted atmosphere of anti-Democratic lying,  took what equality  had been won with the blood and lives of Civil Rights workers and others in the hard struggle to rest even the numerated rights listed in the Constitution for those who had not had them.  

Similar things can be said about rights created around guns made as previous Courts as well as the Roberts Court rulings have turned the United States into a shooting gallery and rendered policing impotent to do anything to stop it before dozens, scores and even hundreds are shot and killed.

Clearly, though there are problematic areas in this discussion.  the discussion itself cannot be avoided because in how they are actually adjudicated and created by courts and as they are commonly thought of and discussed by all of us "rights are divorced from the practices they depend upon for their intelligibility," and that severing has left them unintelligible and when that happens anyone can claim they have a right to do the most terrible things as well as those which are, by comparison, innocuous.  

There is no intelligible "right to lie" just as there is no "right to be stupid" or "right to make a fool of yourself," "get smash drunk," be excused from getting suckered by Trump or Alex Jones or anyone else into breaking the law, . . . or any of a myriad of other things I've heard declared to be rights in that multiplication not unrelated to Trump's telepathic rescission of document classification and other loads of bull shit which issues from the Trumpians and the Republican-fascists and the mendacious media that, even when they are officially opposed to Trump, cannot but echo their latest lines of fascist sloganeering.  

When lies are granted the status of rights, all meaning is bound to follow that nonsense into the abyss and democracy cannot possibly last or recover while that situation has the status of law.  

I think one of the biggest problems uncovered in this is that the very notion of "rights" inalienable or not, and their creation by courts and legislatures and, in the United States in the post-WWII period, anyone who wanted to invent one for themselves, dissolves them by making them an abstraction and then into a mere notion then a whim.

If legislatures or courts can create "rights" then they can uncreate them.  If the state of the law, whether legitimately made legislation or through dodgy Supreme Court fiat, determines what is a right and what isn't, then there is nothing durable about "rights".  The right to self-determination about what we do with our own body is no more secure than the rights of Jews to theirs in 1940s Germany.  I have mentioned the legalistic, moral atrocity of Robert Taft lauded by John F. Kennedy in his truly weird book, Profiles in Courage, when he condemned the Nuremberg Trials because what the Nazis did was legal in Nazi Germany. You would have to be a Harvard level trained lawyer to not see the problem with that kind of "courage."  

That's certainly something worth considering when you make the law of the land the arbiter of what is and what isn't a right.  Considering the ability of even elected legislatures and, especially, an out of control Supreme Court to do terrible things in that regard, the sloppy, ill defined notion of "rights" that seems to have gotten steadily worse as "rights talk" has abounded, we really need to come to some better notion of what rights are and where they come from.  And I don't think there is any better than sloppiness and ill definition to be had from secularism.  If that is an intrinsic part of secular governance as we understand it, we had better face the fact of it.  I am virtually certain that it is what happens under materialism, especially from seeing the state of "rights" in countries that have either explicitly or implicitly been governed under the ideology of materialism and scientism and societies without any concept that there is something higher than that.  

Where I completely agree with Hauerwas is that rights can be a shoddy make-shift for things that are far higher, far more durable and far more inclusive.  When "rights" are held to be as far as we can go in determining what is left of moral requirements and behavior, even as a matter of law, things will go to the kind of hell that lawyers and judges and "justices" can administer, give orders to execute, leaving the devastation and injustice thus created to stand as they go home to their affluent lives and the wealthy talking-heads of the media go home to theirs after selling it to a duped, confused public who sense something isn't right about things but who have been deprived of the language to say just what.  I never could begin to understand how Ruth Bader Ginsberg could be Antonin Scalia's best buddy on the Supreme Court, considering his depravity.  Collegiality is one of the most effective solvents for such a faintly written morality as is common at that level of power.  Especially in the Ivy League class.

* Exactly the kind of things that "fugitive pregnant woman" laws in Republican-fascist controlled states and with the blessing of the Roberts Court, putting a bounty on Women who leave abortion prohibitions states to get medical care have become a reality for many Women in 2022. We will, I am sure, see something like what happened in Prohibition reproduced as the post-Roe United States develops and the Roberts-Alito Court reenacts so much of the antebellum court style for us now.

that the only alternative to nihilism that is a real concern when "rights language" is questionable has already become manifest in the very Supreme Court First Amendment "rights" language and its results

THE SPEECH WHAT'S WRONG WITH RIGHTS a Christian perspective, by Stanley Hauerwas has some important questions, demonstrations and conclusions in it and I've decided to risk transcribing it to comment on it.  You should, of course, listen to it yourself because I'm sure Hauerwas is a far better resource than I am for inciting thinking and discussion on some little remarked on but extremely important problems we have with our laws and politics and, more so, our culture and society.  Being a political blogger, I'm most concentrated on the political and legal.  Though I think part of the problem is that the law and political thinking ignores that unless The People start out from an intention of good will, what Hauwerwas will eventually remark on as kindness, what Pope Francis has championed as mercy, no legal or political system will produce good ends.  Any politics, law, legal theorizing, government action that doesn't promote such good will contains the seeds of its own destruction.  Ours not only doesn't promote it, it actively inhibits such promotion.  Our media promotes cynicism, envy and distrust as well as selfishness and consumerism, which, even as its terrible and clearly predictable results come in mount and get even hundreds of thousands of us killed,  is A-OK with our ideological framing because "free speech-press."

Our ideological framing excludes questions of good intentions and seeking such necessary ends in a pose of enlightenment scientific inquiry that pretends to leave those questions open because the structuring of science cannot deal with them by the intentions of of its method and its narrow focus.  But life, politics, the law, never leaves such questions open, they end up answering them, or forcing what in effect is an answer and without the prerequisite good intentions, the results are, on balance, not good. What happens as a consequence serves bad intentions and the ends that those bring.  When a democratic republic ends up in the same places as despotic monarchies, something hasn't worked, as it clearly has not in so many a modern would-be republic.  

In the American context, the character and means of making money among the Founders is an intrinsic element in making that choice for a pose of scientific indifference.  

Given the role the imagination of 1776 has in our make-believe history, whether the mendacious cross-race-dressing pieties of "Hamilton" or the idiot fascists waving Gadsden flags as they try to overturn elections, and the real role that the Constitution has in our official politics and law (the insurrectionary voter suppression of the Roberts Court*) we cannot get away without going into the character defects of those rich, white men and the later rich, white men and women who share in their flaws and, so, rise in power.  Not until we replace the Constitution they wrote and the Bill of Rights with something that does not pretend such basic moral distinctions are not needed, something which takes the lessons of our terrible subsequent history as seriously as the Constitutional blue-print, the 18th century product of their amateur imaginations, many of which ideas changed in their imaginations even long before the framers died.  

Here's where his lecture starts.

I assume I'm here as a representative of that most modern of "atheists," namely those who do not believe in inalienable rights.  I take it to be a mark of our times that a theologian may have worries about whether God exists but we cannot call into question the status of rights.

The language of rights bloomed after World War Two in what seemed to be an absence of any unifying ideologies or religious belief systems necessary to bind individuals together. Rights are, therefore, regarded as a source of ethical and political values that was and is capable of binding people together short of violence.

The language of rights became and remains the language of high humanism many think necessary to maintain peace in a fragmented world.

Therefore, to be a critic of rights is close to  putting oneself on the side of terrorism. For example, some suggest the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel and Inhuman, Degrading Treatment,  a Convention of 1987, is a crucial example of the importance of the development of rights language.  

It seems if we did not have the language of rights we might, it seems, lack the moral presumptions for a condemnation of torture. Governmental and non-governmental agencies make frequent appeals to this Convention in support of political prisoners and their families around the globe. Accordingly rights as ideals and principles form the basis for liberal democracy that have assumed a value and authority without precedence in the history of the world.

It's hard to imagine why anyone, particularly someone like myself committed to non-violence would have any hesitation as to appeals to rights.  Yet I do have reservations which interesting enough involves how one thinks about torture. I will develop my worries as a broadside but let me put it succinctly this way.  

If you need a theory of rights to know that torture is wrong, or if you think you need rights to ground your judgements that torture  is morally wrong, then something has clearly gone wrong with your moral sensibilities. What follows is my attempt to defend that remark by giving you a list of what I regard as some of the disabilities associated with rights language.

Far from Stanley Hauerwas demoting the consequences that are whatever is virtuous about "rights talk" by noting the inadequacies of "rights,"  he is worried that thinking of things solely in such terms demotes the consideration of them and damages the outcomes from that thinking.  I have come to conclude, the dangerous inspecificity of "rights language" as to the moral consequences or immoral uses of it leaves even the cleverest people incapable of discerning the difference, or, rather, thinking or talking about the consequences of that.  

Perhaps even more so, the social and educational coercion to not admit to those problems or the inevitable moral nature of them or that we must find legal solutions to them or all that is good is lost, is an even more potent consequence of this situation. 

And their disassociation of rights from perusal of the moral consequences of such denatured "rights" which have and can support immoral consequences, the criticism of Hauerwas which I am supporting sees "rights" as an inadequate substitute for the kinds of better "moral sensibilities" that he mentions above.  

My criticism of "rights" in American democracy yesterday, of the rights enumerated in the Constitution, especially those foolishly granted to human created entities "the press" "religion." states and offices, those which can be used and are for the worst as well as the best of purposes "speech," and one even more ambiguous as even an heavily mitigated good "bear arms," is based in the actual history of such "rights" as performed under law.  That history proves that such talk is essential, not only to the humanist imagined liberal democracy mentioned above but to the Roberts-Alito court, the Republican-fascist, corporate media driven retreat into white supremacist American apartheid, 1950s era subjugation of Women, the Supreme Court taking away in LGBTQ+ rights which the Supreme Court  so recently "gave", etc.  

"Rights" in 2022 is as much the language of Trump, Trump's rent-a-lawyers, Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, Republican-fascists, other lawyers and on TV liars of corporations and Neo-fascist-libertarian* billionaires and the ACLU that can be counted on to support their "rights" to lie themselves into power.   With their financial backing and head start in the culture of our indigenous criminal class, white supremacists, on the side of the current, perhaps permanent Supreme Court majority, there is no doubt where, in most cases, such "justice" will come down. 

The scientistic adoption of the merely secretarial practice of science shunting aside questions of morality, that artificial exclusion to do science adopted by government and the law is to guarantee that the courts will adopt that pose and to come out with exactly the legal conclusion as matters of "rights" that you would expect from any corrupt court anywhere under any form of government.  As Walter Brueggemann noted, Scalia never found an "original intent" that didn't agree with him.   

Obviously equal justice is not an essential and unavoidable logical consummation of "rights language."  That shouldn't surprise us as such phrases as "the divine right of kings" was the kind of language that the United States was formed to oppose. Even though nothing is clearer than that the aristocrats who formed the Constitution intended to exercise such rights over slaves and others.   What we may have missed in the adoption of the framings of rights as opposed to specific and necessary guarantees of moral life in the right kind of moral sensibilities was that rights divorced from those are as useful to those wanting to achieve other sensibilities that are quite immoral.

He certainly raises some thorny and not typically raised questions that I think are worth thinking about as the Supreme Court "rights" us into despotism and grotesque inequality.  But the problems he points out are far deeper than that.

I can illustrate what I mean by suggesting that rights language has become too powerful by calling attention to a remark by someone who I believe was in the Department of Justice during the Civil Rights campaign in Mississippi. Several Civil Rights Workers had been killed, the spokesman for the Department of Justice was appropriately outraged. In order to express his outrage he resorted to the moral vocabulary in which he most felt at home.  He said those who had been killed had had their rights violated.  When "rights" become a more basic moral description than murder you have an indication that your language has gone on a holiday.

Of course, one cannot help but have sympathy for the Department of Justice representative.  He was using the most significant language he knew to indicate what a horrible moral crime had been committed.  Yet the very appeal to the violation of rights as fundamental moral description may indicate a profound worry about such a morality.  For if confidence in the language of rights is lost it is not clear what the alternative to nihilism will be. I worry, therefore, that for many reasons some are trying to make the language of rights do more work than it is capable of doing.

This is an intensification of a point I've made in the past that the use of "rights" growing out of the Bill of Rights but not only due to that to support truly terrible things, now including a Supreme Court blessed "right to lie" which cannot but be destructive of a right for People to know the truth, one of the absolute prerequisites for having a real egalitarian or even a merely working electoral democracy.  Of course it's not called a "right to lie" but that is exactly what it is.  When Alex Jones had a leg to stand on citing "rights" as defined in the Constitution in court for what he broadcast to his large audience about the parents of the children murdered in a mass shooting, ATTACKING THE VICTIMS, OF THAT CRIME,  while there is some ground for appeal of the judgement against him within our Constitutional system as the judiciary has commanded it is, the worry of Hauerwas that the only alternative to nihilism that is a real concern when "rights language" is questionable has already become manifest in the very Supreme Court First Amendment "rights" language and its results.  

And what can be said about a Supreme Court, lower court created "right" to lie that swamps truth, as we found out in the experience of Trump and should have already known from the Gingrich era in the House and Republican-fascism in the Senate, can be repeated over and over again, not as a result of a loss of confidence in "rights" language but the language of rights being over-worked well past the point where it failed and broke long ago.  Yet the shoddy impoverished thinking of enlightenment secularism, stuck in the pose that the secular descriptions and categories and definitions are all you are allowed to make recourse to leaves the would-be explainer and definer without any language to even admit there is a problem.  There's a "level playing field" the "justices" only "call balls and strikes" the rules are in place, they're the only ones allowed no matter what the results are.  The Supreme Court rigged depravity we are experiencing proves that their adoption of "rights language" is as useful to those intent on committing murder as it is to those shocked by it, their recent gun ruling is an obvious example of that, as is their gutting of the Clean Air Act.  

The opinions of those like Scalia and O'Connor that say it's permissible for the state to execute innocent people on the basis of a failure to file papers on time should certainly have been called what they were.  Rights cannot even overcome the calendar of lower courts to save possibly innocent People from being executed, yet we depend on them even with the Court we have.  The Democrats in the House and Senate who believe that a legal codification of Roe would stand up against the Roberts Court, that People should depend on the Bill of Rights and the Constitution - in short, the courts - to protect them when it has not yet done so, are like a more intense example of how dangerously far we've gotten in depending on "rights language" against all evidence that it is not adequate in even many of the most exigent circumstances.
 
The old guard at the ACLU, largely white and from a background of affluence, is having to deal with younger lawyers, many of them lawyers of color whose personal experience will not permit them to do what the old guard did so well, ignore the consequences of their advocacy on behalf of morally corrupt People, groups and corporations, including our indigenous fascists, the white supremacists and Neo-Nazis.  I would add the tobacco, liquor, addictive and harmful pharmaceutical and gun companies to that list because they are all in the same business.  

I would not be surprised if the religious identity of the two groups of lawyers might possibly have some interesting information in it, though I don't have that information to see if that's true.  But even without that I agree with Hauerwas that secularism is part of the problem, I think I may go farther than he does in saying I think that secularism is one of the diseases at the heart of the problem which prevents any real change which will save us.  Secularism is incapable of resisting evil in even some of the most obvious and basic of moral distinctions.  The failure of rights language in the United States starts with those inadequacies of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, many of them placed there by slave-holders, financiers and genocidal land barons, many of those inserted problems exacerbated by the same on the Supreme Court from at least the time of John Marshall, certainly from the time of Roger Taney and today with the era of William Rehnquist and John Roberts and his stacked Republican-fascist majority.  

* Under the inadequacies of our thinking, our language, our legal system and our Constitution, the Roberts Court and Republican-fascist state legislatures will do more to destroy electoral democracy than those idiots who stormed the Capitol on January 6th, and the inadequacies of all of that list just given will facilitate them doing it under the Constitution.  When the Constitution didn't protect the voting rights OR LIVES of freed Black People as the Constitutionally, Electoral College installed Rutherford Hayes ended Reconstruction, that was certainly the decisive proof that the Constitution doesn't produce the good things it promised. Not even with a decisive win for the Union in the terrible Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation.  The Roberts Court and Republican-fascists are reenacting the erection of the Jim Crow era under the Constitution.  American apartheid.  The Constitution cannot stand as it is forever, it will have to be replaced with something that does intend to produce equal justice because it hasn't and doesn't, even as amended. The Court and the Constitutional structure of governance will hand victory to the insurrectionists by more genteel means.

Update:  It is remarkable how, given the pose of scientific moral indifference that is part of the basic framing of U. S. Law, how the Courts have so institutionalized a legal indifference to even the most clearly valid and experienced findings of legitimate science such as in its recent billionaire enriching climate denying rulings.  Clearly rights language isn't the only problem with our out-of-control Supreme Court under the Constitution.

The Missing Of The People As They Live In The Dark Forest of "Rights" Talk - Hate Mail

 

WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT harder than we are encouraged to, the talk about "rights" that pervades our political, legal and social discussion is extremely bizarre and disconnected from the reality that we live in.  The present day reality of inequality in which People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, those with disabilities and chronic illness, those who live in families of long-term poverty, etc. live and always have lived should make that talk about things such as "equal justice under law" sound surreal but it doesn't because we consider that as an abstraction and not in terms of reality.  

In terms of Constitutional babble, both learned and the pervasive common nonsense about it, we talk as if the huge fact of the Constitutional order was that "the founding fathers" "gave" "us rights" and that all we need to do is to follow their ideas when the overwhelming fact of "rights" in terms of those mere mortals was that they had no intention of there being equal rights, certainly not for those they were murdering to steal their land, certainly not for Black People they were holding in slavery of a form forbidden by even the slavery provisions in the Mosaic Law,*  not for Women who, we are finding out right now, are no closer to equal rights in their daily reality unless they are quite independently rich, a condition which, in itself, defines inequality and nothing like equality even under the laws of the state.  As I pointed out in the post objected to, they certainly never denominated the most obvious of necessities of maintaining even the meanest of lives as "rights" concentrating on those of most interest to those who were not at a loss for food or clothing or housing because they already had more than sufficient for themselves and those they cared about.  And that is the state of the Constitution in what likes to think of itself as the premier example of "liberal democracy."  

Clearly our history AND OUR PRESENT in a period after the most promiscuous talk and insistence on and struggle for and reactionary push-back against equal "rights" proves that there are deeply problematic issues with the entire framing and notion of them.

It is exactly Stanley Hauerwas's skepticism about all of this "rights" language that has led me to read and consider more of what he said and to listen to his lectures.  And his skepticism is not only about the mandated secular framing of "rights" but even that which Jefferson gave in the Declaration of Independence, inherent rights endowed on us by our "Creator," something which Marilynne Robinson astutely asked what a secular framing of that idea would sound like.  I will point out that that brief mention of God, in denatured "enlightenment" terms,  in that document, some of the most morally potent language in our founding documents was certainly negated in the one that mattered in action and fact, the Constitution.  

I am certain that those slave-holders and Indian murdering, land accumulating financiers and wage-slave-holders. those most minutely and astutely considerers of the implications and consequences of what they were setting down on paper wanted to, by ensuring secularism as a requirement in it, remove any such notions of divinely mandated equal rights which, in fact, those subject to subjugation would notice and use to argue for their equality.  That struggle was already present and, in some of the States, pervasive at the time of the writing of the Constitution, it was certainly known to many of those who met in the Constitutional Convention, including those who held slaves. In every colonial and early American articulation of emancipation of slaves I'm aware of, that was made in explicitly religious terms.   While agreeing that equality in a pluralistic population required the government to be "secular" in its administration, its consequences when that is read as it also requiring it to be amoral in its goals is quite another matter.

Far from it being a grantee of equality, I think the effect, intended or not, has been for the secular framing and administration of our "supreme law" the Constitution, something that has impeded equal justice, not helped it in almost all cases.  I have repeatedly pointed out to atheists and those who insist that all of our political life be conducted under strict "separation of church and state" that when those held in slavery began to struggle against slavery, it wasn't the secular language of the Constitution they began their arguments with, if it was the founding documents appealed to it was exactly that statement about what God had given them in the Declaration BUT THAT THEY WERE MOST LIKELY TO APPEAL TO THE DOCUMENTS OF RELIGION claimed by those slave-holders and the large majority of other Americans, the Book of Exodus, most of all.  When The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. made his argument that there was an unpaid promissory note due in the Civil Rights struggle, he went to Jefferson's claim about rights endowed by God, not to the Bill of Rights, but he really turned to the Prophets of Scripture.

When I first read Hauerwas on the topic I was a bit shocked about it until I really listened hard to what he was saying.  That shock was due to the fact that the entire secular framing in which I had been educated to think about such things presented that conception of "rights" as complete and adequate in itself when that history AND PRESENT I had not only thought about but witnessed and experienced should have prepared me for the reality that that conception has failed, continually and, when the greatest steps were taken to correct that, quickly and successfully driven back by those who benefit from inequality and the denial of rights and, even more so, equal justice.**  

Most noticeably it has failed in the conservative - which can safely be read, as "racist" - reaction against equal rights being mandated and made real, by the Supreme Court destroying the Voting Rights Act, attacking the Civil Rights Act, the failure of the country to adopt the Equal Rights Amendment, etc. But the fact is that even under the law there has been a continual, pervasive and abject failure of the Constitution, perhaps especially the Bill of Rights to produce anything like equality. In fact, as can be seen by Supreme Court rulings from almost the beginning, that Constitution has proven more useful for the denial of rights, the denial of equality and the promotion of privilege for exactly those who resemble the framers of it in terms of race, gender, class, moral disposition, etc. than Black People, People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, the vicissitudes of being born into and raised in the economic underclass, etc.  Far from the pious civics class myths, under the Constitutional regime of "rights" the progress has not been a steady march towards equality and equal justice, nothing like that. And we are in a period of dangerous and serious reversal of any rights so gained under the very Constitution such ill-placed faith was put in.

Hauerwases thinking about "rights" is not simple or easily completely or accurately given.  There is something subtle and elusive about it, even more so to one educated into our most common and failed notions of secular rights under liberal democracy. I worry that that elusive quality will have to be made clearer before it can have any real impact.  And I suspect it should have much more of an impact because it is important.

The fact is that his conception of it isn't a demotion of what is due us and, even more so, imposed on us as a moral obligation, it is an elevation of the entire matter to a higher level.  I'm still in a relatively early stage of understanding what he thinks on the matter.  I may try to transcribe a lecture and Q&A on the topic I've downloaded and give my thoughts on that.  He does ask some extremely important questions about rights in terms of torture and sexual enslavement as not merely an assertion of "rights" which more than imply a requirement on those wronged to pursue justice for them, themselves, but which as a human possession are certainly not complete even as an endowment by God.  He says that when you discuss the wrongness of torture or a young girl being forced into prostitution merely in terms of right, you are demoting the issues instead of raising them to a level where the wrong is identified and measured in terms of the need to make them right.  He is far ahead of where I've been in trying to anticipate problems with even the most seemingly idealistic of abstract ideas of rights.

His argument as to the wrongness of slavery in a Christian framing is superior to that of secular talk, he puts it in terms of the body of those enslaved belonging to God not to any person, including the ones enslaved.  Which, if taken seriously by Christians, would have always precluded them from enslaving others and in those not enslaved to treat their own bodies and lives with less than great care.  I am a little troubled when he puts it in terms of baptism giving that status but suspect that would have to include a Christian obligation to ensure the opportunity of baptism that would grant that status, a Christian obligation to encourage in the strongest ways, such a baptism.  I still would insist that our embodiment by birth would instill that status on us.  But I suspect that he, also, sees something beyond the specifically Christian framing he gave in that argument against Christians participation in slavery.

One thing he talks about is what such an understanding of our bodies as being God's and not our own would call into question a right to commit suicide which I think is very important to think about.  I have mentioned Barney Frank once flummoxing the rather dishonest and stupid Henry Hyde on the question of a right to commit suicide.  Hyde used the anti-abortion language of "a right to life" which Frank effectively countered as to who possessed that right, that "rights" don't float around disembodied but that they had to be held by a person whose right was specific to them.  I remember often being impressed by that agile use of logic even as I wasn't certain I exactly bought it, having known suicides and the devastating consequences of them killing themselves.  I wasn't sure it was that simple.  I am not certain that the thought-out position on "assisted suicide" that is sweeping many a liberal-democratic polity will prove to not produce some pretty bad results, coming as it is bound to with issues of economic inequality, economic utility and the other issues that surround some of our other most terrible moral failures, slavery, wage-slavery, Women's subjugation, sexual bondage and enslavement, inequality in medical care and education, etc.  

My skepticism of secular thinking seems to be centering on there always and necessarily being something missing at the center of it, something which, without, the greatest intellectual strivings for equality and democracy and the common-holding of a decent life will always fall short.  I don't think it's possible to get closer to that if you insist on keeping God out of the picture. It certainly has worked that way in American history, as evidenced by the actual history of abolition, the civil rights movement, etc.  Eventually you have to believe what your eyes see, the testimony of others and what your experience of life has shown you.   Any of the supposed Christian persons or churches who participated in or colluded with that had to ignore the teachings of Jesus and Paul, the Law of Moses in order to do that.

The framing of the struggle for equality and a decent life under a secular regime of rights has had its run and the results aren't equality.  The intention to produce decency of life reached its high point about the time that Nixon began the turn back against the progress that had been achieved, even Nixon felt its pull when he proposed that still radical notion of a guaranteed income.  The Constitutional order under the "Bill of Rights" has been one of the most potent tools of those who attacked that progress as the decisions doing that by the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts have proven, as have those which either found them inadequate to enforce equal treatment under law to, for example, Japanese citizens during WWII or in turning back demands of equality under Plessey while pretending segregationists were going to provide equality.  It is clear that that secularist legal framing has some basic and intrinsic problems with it, it certainly has never produced what it claimed to during any of its existence as the supreme law of the land.  

I'm less skeptical about some more modern Constitutions but am certain those will prove to have some basic problems, as well, some of which will turn out to be as dangerous as those contained in the U. S. Constitution.  There are court rulings under the modern Canadian framing that have produced some pretty bad results.  But I don't think the ultimate means of achieving equality and justice and a decent life rests on such documents but in the hearts and minds of a sufficient majority of People, sufficient to overcome the heritage of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and Court rulings.  

Our "rights" talk in which Neo-Nazis, Neo-fascists, Republican-fascists, etc. can adopt and use the very same language that they openly intend to never put into effect if they gain power to achieve their ends and which has been used by the ACLU to enable Neo-Nazis, etc.,  the corrupting, fascism promoting mass media, the gun industry, various other industries in their promotion of devastating addictions and other harms, etc. facilitated by judges who have no real or professional interest in justice, indeed, some of them fearing higher courts would overturn such good intentions, all of that shows that at the very least we really need to rethink hard what all of that is and has been about.  And secularism lacks the means to really do that.  Secularism is incapable of even identifying the superiority of equality and equal justice, in the end. In its most developed forms, it can't even support the reality of freedom of thought or choice.  When pushed to its logical conclusion, its most common basis in materialist determinism requires it to debunk any notions of moral truth and even the possibility of freedom. 

None of this is easy, in the lecture to linked above, Hauerwas notes, "If confidence in the language of rights it lost it is not clear what the alternative to nihilism will be."  I don't think you can find that alternative in secularism, but you can in Abrahamic religion and in many other religious traditions that insist on our equality under God.

* Certainly those are some of the Scriptural laws that existed due to the "hardness of heart" that is pervasive in the human population, with some provisions that would make that Mosaic enslavement far less absolute than that experienced by the Children of Israel described in the book of Exodus and which was practiced by the Greeks, Romans and other nations in their later experience.  Though I am sure that like all such law, its better intentions were often violated by those who professed them. The mention of slavery by Paul was, I'm sure, something similar, dealing with early Christians who came from and lived in a milieu of Greco-Roman style slavery with no escape to an equivalent to Canada or even, before Dred Scott, free territory possible.  It was Paul's attempt to deal with hardness of heart, habits and social conventions they lived in, so he gave a commandment that slave-owners were to treat those they held in slavery as brothers.  Which, if followed, would probably be better for those enslaved than the kind of rare willed manumissions issued by Madison, Jefferson, Washington, etc.  If the slave-holding "Christians" had taken Moses and Jesus and Paul seriously there would have been no fugitive slave law and other such Constitutionally permitted and Supreme Court encouraged laws under our secular order, there would have been ample provision made to those who were freed from bondage in exactly the way the Constitutional order of the United States never mandated and our government representative of the male-white majority didn't enact.  Slaves treated as equals and brothers and sisters are not slaves in any sense of it, whether chattel slaves nor wage slaves.  About the earliest abolitionist was St. Macrina the Younger who talked her mother into treating those enslaved by their family as family members and they more or less lived as members of a household, she took the teachings of Jesus seriously, about the least among you and those who were first being last, etc. Near the end of her life those who had been servants in her house tried to talk her into sleeping in a bed but she insisted on lying on the floor as she always had.  I think that kind of thing accounts for why her brilliant brother St. Gregory of Nyssa, the source of most of our knowledge about her, respected her as his teacher and, I gather from how he wrote about her, moral superior.  Given their time and place in history, their thinking is rather breathtaking in its egalitarian justice.

** I think the problems of the secular, Constitutional type of framing makes even the concept of equality problematic.  When a rich, racist, elitist hack such as John Roberts can use the language of "equality" to claim that the role of a Supreme Court "justice" like him is to apply the law equally, "calling balls and strikes" while maintaining and enforcing and reinstalling the monumental inequality in life that he and his Supreme Court, the Supreme Courts of the past have, that word has some problems to it.  

And under even the more seemingly benign style of U.S. Constitutional advocacy, the results of "equal justice under law," are hardly ideal.  When the ACLU style civil liberties law hacks can disclaim an interest in the results of their litigation that they are merely insisting on "an equal playing field" on which those with wealth, power, racism, amorality, etc. on their side will always kill the other team, the abstract concept of "equality" of "equal justice under law" such as our Constitutional system conceives things will always produce grotesque inequality in life.  I have long thought there would be an interesting tale to tell if the financing of such "civil liberties lawyering" was fully revealed as I have found the financial history of some of the great figures on the Supreme Court to be a revelation in understanding their allegedly disinterested rulings.

Abstracting such virtues out of any real context of life and morality is a guarantee that they will be perverted into the kind of virtue that "equality under the law" is in the United States under the secular framing of the Constitution.  It really doesn't seem to believe People really matter despite the frequently higher aspirations of many of the People who are led to put their faith in it.  Secularism guarantees that there will never be an adequate moral end to produce such results.  You need something more to do that, something strong enough to force you toward it.
 

On The Necessity Of Being Socially Unacceptable, Uncomfortable And Icky

HAVING GONE OVER the transcriptions I made of Walter Brueggemann's lecture "Slow Wisdom As A Sub-Version of Reality" I mentioned the other day, almost every sentence in it could generate an entire post about some aspect of current politics and current life.  I'm going to give into that temptation to go back over some of it.

Day 7 of my previous posts contained this passage which I'll comment on inside of the text:

The force of Torah aims to resist autonomy wherein one imagines unfettered freedom without responsibility.  Freedom to seize what belongs to another because of more power or freedom to exploit the vulnerable neighbor.

In abbreviated form,  this lays out in total what is wrong with the ersatz virtues of liberal democracy, especially as those in my generation, educated far more in movie theaters and by TV entertainment than the university, learned things.  The theme of most of the movies I've ever seen imagine their male leading characters as autonomous, standing outside of or against a community or tradition, insistent on having their own way, pursuing their own unfettered freedom without responsibility to much of anyone except, perhaps, a few people who they have some interest in, as even the minimal limits of the production code gave way to the heady libertarianism of the 1950s, 60s and onward, even the cinematically presented consequences of even the most depraved of those movie heroes, the gangsters, were made to not impinge on them, they gave us Trumpian figures as heroes and we wonder why so many entertainment addled Americans still fall for him even now.  

In many cases, the hero was presented as standing against some obvious wrong of the greater society but what may have been presented as a bold, brave, sexy, manly stand against some moral wrong didn't require that societal wrong as a plot outline, as in the answer to what are you rebelling against, "what'd'ya got?"  And when writers, directors and producers found out that nothing more than the emotional outline of that plot worked, it worked for gangsters and outlaws just as much as it worked for Atticus Finch.  A related outline of boldness, autonomy, etc. worked for the most degenerate of figures of the establishment worked perfectly for Donald Trump in Celebrity Apprentice.   Apparently it even managed to sell the fat, short-fingered degenerate as a sex symbol on TV in his fat, phony haired, orange tinged obvious phony.   The thing he rode into the presidency.

The extent to which this is true of what the "news division" presents as Christianity, the TV hallelujah peddlers, billionaire-millionaire astro-turf "traditional Catholics" are no less a product of Hollywood-TV style entertainment production values than Trump is, than the Republican-fascist biggest mouths like Gaetz and Green, Cruz or Hawley or the particularly odious form of Republican-fascist politician who got their start in hate-talk radio and TV. Suckers for the phony history of the Revolutionary period or "the way-est" or "the South".  All of that started in what generally college-credentialed TV and radio and movie bosses and script scribblers figured would turn them the greatest profits and enhance their wealth.  

And the American People, no less trained in their thinking by TV and the movies than my generation of Boomers were, are largely suckers for it, especially when it was sold in the language of secular civic virtue, "bold," "independent " "liberty," "freedom," and, yes, "rights." The Easy-Rider style of counter-culture was just the same with long hair.  The use by Trumpian and related American fascists in 2020 of the same language as the "counter-culture" of the 1960s should lead at least some people to wonder if those basic concepts removed from the kind of moral responsibility Brueggemann is talking about might not be problematic. The language of liberal-democracy in the mouths of CPAC fascism, the miscalculation of George Soros who was one of Viktor Orban's early supporters, all of that is evidence that there are foundational and fatal problems with liberal democracy.  

Of course, while there was the media-presented "counter-culture" of secular indulgence, there was a real counter-culture which tended to be religious which was, in many cases, genuinely counter-cultural in the way that Brueggemann points out that Jeremiah was.  I often think of Jeremiah and Bob Dylan at the same time, after reading Brueggemann.  Or The Staple Singers.

In the end Torah is Israel's testimony to the covenantal shape of social existence. That the world is organized according to steadfast love, that the economy is to be engaged according to neighborly justice, that the political culture is to be shaped by righteousness that is the work of the common good. The entire purpose of liberal arts, I suggest, is to help students situate themselves in a summoning tradition that refuses the autonomy of enlightenment reason with its concomitant of consumer seduction.

That is true IF and only if the liberal arts start out with that orientation and that intention.  Under secularism, with its inevitable rejection of the language of the actual truth of that kind of morality, its reality, its consequential truth when made consequential in actions, under the sciency amorality of secularism, that itself is not only rejected but made to feel uncomfortable and socially unacceptable and icky.

The main stream of imaginative literature since the so-called "enlightenment" has been in the diminution of the validity and reality and consequential nature of the morality of the Torah.  Not a little of the commentary on Scripture has the same flavor if not intention as the secular culture of the "enlightenment" and the ideological depravities that flow from it, including those which grew up upon finding the 18th century enlightenment was not an adequate or satisfying framing of life and reality.  

Romanticism, especially as it declined into late 19th and 20th century decadence, wasn't much better. Some really great writing was produced during that entire time but there isn't really much to find that will produce the kinds of results that Brueggemann is talking about in it.  It's more of a distraction to those who find themselves depressed and distraught about the life that is produced by the kinds of "freedom" that has become the reality of most people.  The voyeurism of so much of the legitimately artistic literature of the period is only different in quality and range of imagination and not in kind from Hallmark made for TV movies.  I would propose that the oppressiveness of secularism and its byproducts are even worse than the imagined oppressiveness of 17th century established churches aligned to the political powers and the law, which were seldom any more governed by the kind of things Brueggemann finds in Jeremiah and the Prophetic tradition.  Our science-tech conducted wars are certainly more destructive and far more indiscriminate in who gets killed than the often anti-religiously cited 30-years-war was.  The modern genocides of the scientific regimes kill far more people, whether the most efficient of those genocides as conducted by the Nazis or the non-industrial, free-press driven one in Rwanda.

If you think I'm calling for any part of our history to be reproduced as our future, you are entirely wrong.  It is stunning how our free-press, entertainment glutted minds can't imagine more than the most inaccurate and base either-this-or-that alternatives.  I can't imagine what that better future will be with any great detail but I know if you try to reproduce the past you will a. fail because the past cannot be reproduced now, time doesn't work like that, b. likely reproduce some of the worst aspects of the past (look at the racist 1776 romantic bull shit of the Trumpians if you want a good example of where that would lead us), c. you will only turn that into the kinds of oppressive ideologies that the Jewish prophetic tradition is full to the top with warnings against.

I do know that with the power of human numbers, human technology, the pollution of the planet and atmosphere, nuclear and other powers, if we don't drastically turn around the world in the direction that Jeremiah and Brueggemann points to - which is not about any humanly made past epoch -  there will very likely not be a future, barring some more dramatic divine intervention of a kind which enlightenment ideology and social strictures forbid polite people from expecting and which the Republican-fascist use of The Book of Revelation most certainly is not anything like.

The triad of fidelity excuses the seduction of the reasoning of autonomy, it fends off the counter temptation of absolutism.

Autonomy, "every man thinks for himself," as opposed to the "counter temptation" of absolutism, no one thinks for themselves but are given what they are to think.  

The cheap limits of cinematic and dramatic and, ironically, "enlightenment" imagination doesn't allow for the imagination of other alternatives to those "opposites."  It is amazing, when you think of it, how many false dichotomies are the only habit of thought permitted or achieved in the modern world.

It refuses absolutism through the ongoing disputatious practice of interpretation. So that the old Torah cannot just be read.  

This reminds me of the advice of the atheist-materialist who didn't think like one, Richard Lewontin, to the conventional hero of popular atheist-materialism, Carl Sagan that if he wanted to hear lively disputation about the nature of the universe he should leave the elite university he taught science at and to to an Orthodox study hall in Brooklyn.  

And there can be no recourse to the original intention or what we call originalism, which is to misconstrue the tradition.

I believe that what Brueggeman means by "the old Torah cannot just be read" is that it has to be made real in the real lives of real People who live in history and the history of now can never be a mere reproduction of what was in even the period of the Prophets.  It will always be as new as good jazz is always new and never a reproduction of the past.  But you can go through the motions through habit and the results won't be good.  Creation, time, goes from the past to the future through the present.  That is the reason for it. Deny that as we might, it is how time which we all live in works. The prophetic tradition accounts for that.

Because it is the great work of the university to nurture competent hermeneutists who refuse the easy relativism of popular culture and who refuse the temptation to absolutism whether of God or sect or country. The tradition requires interpretive agility that knows that the memory is the beginning point but never the conclusion. The tradition is always being reformulated in radical contemporaneity with deep rootage that is not deleted by interpretation.

This passage is, of course, tied to the friction between the would be "originalists" the "fundamentalists" of religion but, especially useful to us right now, the Constitutional fundamentalists of the Supreme Court,  and those who by "interpretation" delete the moral center or meaning of Scripture, most certainly by the discrediting-debunking of the historical-critical methods that have gotten us a bit in the way of loosening some of the priestly purity codes in sexual behavior and gender roles but which, in the process, have diminished so much of what is true and of vital importance in every area of moral urgency in the material and mental well-being of the least among us and the vulnerable.  

I am very tempted to go into that and might this week if I have the time in terms of what it gave and what the results, good and catastrophic,  were for gay men, something I know and have witnessed first-hand as a gay man in the time I've lived.  Believe me, I've got some experience in the reformulations of radical contemporaneity and deep rootage in tradition, between the heady language of and life of libertarian freedom, the reaction of traditional LGBTQ hatred as "Christianity" and discrimination, the practice of unfettered freedom and the radical consequences of ignoring the most basic of moral considerations for the well-being of others in the context of sexual freedom on that basis.  Much of it personal experience, even more in intimate observation of the lives and consequences for other gay men and LGBTQ people. I have a feeling the experience was like a long, slow, rabbinical disputation, lived out over years, while looking backwards.  I think I'll give into temptation to talk about that later this week.  Though this piece from years back did some of it.

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Bernard Farrell - Greta At The Gresham

 Greta at The Gresham

Boy meets girl in a brief encounter on an ancient island in an Irish lake, and they talk through the moonlit night of this and that and their two bespoken lives. They will meet again, they promise, at some future point. They will meet again, and by appointment, too. They will meet in the lobby of a Dublin hotel in six straightforward years, no more, no less, where they will compare their dealings and their disappointments in the unforeseen meantime.

With Dawn Bradfield as Greta and Bryan Murray as Jerry with a J, Bernard Farrell’s radio-play establishes the most poignant traditions of melodrama and romantic comedy – only to subvert their moonshine in the overcast conditions of ordinary life.

I haven't had much time to listen to new radio drama, this is another one I'm posting unheard - well, I'm listening as I post it.  Hope it's good. 

Cultured Despisers Got No Kulcha - Hate Mail

IT'S KIND OF FUNNY that I'm accused of holding up Stanley Hauerwas as an idol when he certainly would never want anyone to do that.  

I could have written that in the book I quoted from, not far into it, he made a huge whopper of a mistake, one typical of his and my generation of educationally credentialed people and which is probably most typical of the materialist-atheist devotees of scientism, such as yourself.

Christians, our theologians told us, are in the rather embarrassing position of having a faith rooted in ancient parochial, Near Eastern writings, which present life of an ancient, parochial, Near Eastern Jew named Jesus.  Modern Christians stare at the life, death and resurrection of Jesus across what the German philosopher Lessing called the "ugly wide ditch" of history.  Copernicus, despite the church's efforts to silence him, finally convinced us that the sun did not go around the earth, and everything changed.  The Copernican Revolution was the first, we were led to believe, seismic shift for the church.  Everyone's world view had shifted to something called "the modern world view."  The poor old church, however, was stuck with the legacy of a "pre-scientific (i.e., pre-modern) world view."

This explains why, at least for a century, the church's theology has been predominantly apologetic.  The church did not want to duplicate the mistake we made with Copernicus.  

First, since Hauerwas is a Methodist who is a communicant at an Episcopal Church,  he's taking on a big mistake of the Catholic hierarchy and SOME continental Protestants taking on that embarrassment for English Protestantism.  Some of the Protestant opposition was biblical though Luther thought that Copernican cosmology was horse-feathers because it overturned the science establishment of his day.   Science is no more of a progressive force than anything else that relies on the old guard dying off, eventually.   It's ruthlessness just makes it seem that way. 

He mentioned Copernicus one more time in the book at the start of the passage I posted (with my own typos), I was tempted to point out that what he said, though it fits in rather exactly with the common-received-wisdom on the Copernican cosmology got it pretty much wrong as none other than the man he probably meant when he talked about "the church's effort to silence him," would have known.  Galileo, certainly among the most important scientific figures in the early modern era noted that not only had Copernicus been a cleric, himself, the patrons and supporters of his scientific work on the calendar and, as a result, the conclusion that the Earth revolved around the sun  were none other than bishops, cardinals and even popes, who Copernicus thanked in the preface to his work, in fact, noting that it was they who had encouraged him to publish when he seems to have been reluctant to do that and one of whom he dedicated his major work to.  Copernicus and his followers lectured on his sun-centered universe in Rome and at the Vatican, itself and was championed and encouraged by bishops and Popes.*  Galileo certainly had read the book in the original and, so, he did what virtually no modern, self-asserted champion of Copernicus or Galileo has ever done with Copernicus or Galileo or, for that matter, Darwin READ WHAT THEY WROTE!

If there is an actual modern habit of thought it is to read the secondary, tertiary and even more remote junk and to totally ignore the primary documents, something certainly as true of Scripture as it is modern science.  Most typically, they don't even read those, they watch a movie that lies about history or just pick up the lore that pervades popular media.

Actually, "the church" didn't oppose Copernicus, even the Catholic hierarchy didn't until Galileo insulted a particularly touchy and scientifically ignorant Pope (the last of the humanist Popes) in one of his books.  Galileo had been teaching Copernican cosmology for a while before that and had previously been friendly with the rich guy who became pope.  The foremost opponents of his cosmology were the university men, the scientific establishment of his time, some of whom were clerics but many weren't.  They were the ones who Galileo bitterly complained to the very religious Johannes Kepler wouldn't even look in his telescope, the ones who in modern a-historical fiction and several often reproduced paintings (never trust a later artist to get it right, trust 20th century dramatists even less) are replaced with cardinals and bishops, a number of whom even championed Galileo within the Vatican while his long trial was being conducted.  

Also, it should be mentioned that not a single cosmologist or astronomer today is a Copernican.  Anyone who championed his model of the universe, or that of Galileo, for that fact, would be considered a wacky nut-ball because, of course, our sun isn't the center of much of anything, isn't static and revolves and moves through the universe as much as any of the things that can be said to move around it,  and the physics of today could as happily say that the sun revolves around the Earth as to say the Earth revolves around the sun as Arthur Stanley Eddington amusingly noted in one of his more popular lectures  more than ninety years ago**.   Odd how many of those who love to think they're up and with it haven't caught up to that.

While I get what Hauerwas was getting at, what he said was not only not true, it was very inaccurate in the typical modern manner which holds no falsehood is to go unsaid when you can use it to slam religion.  I still am finding enormous amounts of what he has said to be extremely useful and extremely interesting.  No one gets it all right but I find that theologians are usually better at getting more of it right than their "cultured despisers." They're more careful and, sometimes, seem to really believe it is a sin to bear false witness.  

I am not, by the way, a humanist because I reject that human beings are the measure of all things.  It is the limits of our mere humanity we are stuck with, humanism misidentifies that misfortune with the definition of reality which surpasses it.  It seems to me it exacerbates every parochialism attributed to ancient Near-Eastern religion with an even more radically presumptuous position deifying an often very particularly defined human point of view.    Modernism like scholasticism and all other previously dominant isms are things we should get over, not something we should rest on as so many lazy modern academics and those they credential insist on.  

* Twenty-five years after his university career, he had finished his great work, at least in his own mind, but hesitated a long time, whether to publish it or to imitate the Pythagoreans, who transmitted the mysteries of their philosophy only orally to their own disciples for fear of exposing them to the contempt of the multitude. His friends who had become interested in the new theory prevailed on him to write at least an abstract for them, manuscript copies of which have been discovered in Vienna (1873) and Stockholm (1878). In this commentary Copernicus stated his theory in the form of seven axioms, reserving the mathematical part for the Principal work. This was in 1531, or twelve years before his death. From this on the doctrine of the heliocentric system began to spread. In 1533 Albert Widmanstadt lectured before Pope Clement VII on the Copernican solar system. His reward consisted in a Greek codex which is preserved in the State library of Munich. Three years later Copernicus was urged by Cardinal Schonberg, then Archbishop of Capua, in a letter, dated at Rome, 1 November, 1536, to publish his discovery, or at least to have a copy made at the cardinal's expense. But all the urging of friends was in vain, until a younger man was providentially sent to his side.

It was George Joachim Rheticus who quitted his chair of mathematics in Wittenberg in order to spend two years at the feet of the new master (1539-41). Hardly ten weeks after his arrival in Frauenburg he sent a "First Narration" of the new solar system to his scientific friend Schöner in Nuremberg, in the form of a letter of sixty-six pages, which was soon after printed in Danzig (1540) and Basle (1541). Rheticus next obtained for publication the manuscript of a preliminary chapter of the great work on plane and spherical trigonometry. Finally Copernicus, feeling the weight of his sixty-eight years, yielded, as he writes to Paul III, to the entreaties of Cardinal Schonberg, of Bishop Giese of Culm, and of other learned men to surrender his manuscripts for publication. Bishop Giese charged Rheticus, as the ablest disciple of the great master, with the task of editing the work. The intention of the latter was to take the manuscript to Wittenberg and have it published at the university but owing to the hostility prevailing there against the Copernican system, only the chapter on trigonometry was printed (1542). The two copies of the "First Narration" and of the treatise on trigonometry, which Rheticus presented to his friend Dr. Gasser, then practising medicine in Feldkirch, may be seen in the Vatican Library (Palat. IV, 585) Rheticus then turned to Schöner in Nuremberg, who, together with Osiander, accepted the charge and engaged the printing-house of Petreius in the same city. In the meanwhile Rheticus tried to resume his chair in Wittenberg, but on account of his Copernican views had to resign (1542) and turned to Leipzig (1543). He was thus prevented from giving his personal attention to the edition, nor was the author himself able to superintend it. Copernicus became paralyzed on the right side and weakened in memory and mind many days before his death. The first copy of the "Six Books on the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbits" was handed to him the very day he died. Fortunately for him, he could not see what Osiander had done. This reformer, knowing the attitude of Luther and Melanchthon against the heliocentric system, introduced the word "Hypothesis" on the title page, and without adding his own name, replaced the preface of Copernicus by another strongly contrasting in spirit with that of Copernicus. The preface of Osiander warns the reader not to expect anything certain from astronomy, nor to accept its hypothesis as true, ne stultior ab hac disciplinâ discedat, quam accesserit. The dedication to Pope Paul III was, however, retained, and the text of the work remained intact, as was ascertained later when access was had to the original manuscript, now in the family library of the Counts Nostitz in Prague.

**  If the kind of controversy which so often springs up between modernism and traditionalism in religion were applied to more commonplace affairs of life we might see some strange results. Would it be altogether unfair to imagine something liked the following series of letters in our correspondence columns? It arises, let us say, from a passage in an obituary notice which mentions that the deceased had loved to watch the sunsets from his peaceful country home. A. writes deploring that in this progressive age few of the younger generation ever notice a sunset; perhaps this is due to the pernicious influence of the teaching of Copernicus who maintains that the sun is really stationary. This rouses B* to reply that nowadays every reasonable person accepts Copernicus’s doctrine. C is positive that he has many times seen the sun set, and Copernicus must be wrong. D calls for a restatement of belief, so that we may know just how much modern science has left of the sunset, and appreciated the remnant without disloyalty to truth. E (perhaps significantly my own initial) in a misguided effort for peace points out that on the most modern scientific theory there is no absolute distinction between the heavens revolving around the earth and the earth revolving under the heavens; both parties are (relatively) right. F regards this as a most dangerous sophistry, which insinuates that there is no essential difference between truth and untruth. G thinks that we ought now to admit frankly that the revolution of the heavens is a myth; nevertheless such myths have still a practical teaching for us in the present day. H produces an obscure passage in the Almagest, which he interprets as showing that the philosophy of the ancients was not really opposed to the Copernican view. And so it goes on. And the simple reader feels himself in an age of disquiet, insecurity and dissension, all because it is forgotten that what the deceased man looked out for each evening was an experience and not a creed.

Of course, what those who endlessly go over the imagined wrongs they believe the Church did to Copernicus or the grotesquely exaggerated ones claimed as having been done to the, admittedly, wronged Galileo really looked out for wasn't the truth, it was just another experience of hatin' on religion and reaffirming their inness with the in-crowd who does such stuff more reliably than they can recite the 7's times table. 

 

There Are Rights and Then There Are "Rights" - Hate Mail

ONE OF THE MOST helpful things I've ever done here was to transcribe and go through a speech which Walter Brueggemann gave in which he contrasted the values of the Jewish prophetic tradition with the values of modern liberal democracy, though he didn't call it that, he identified it as a triad of might, wisdom, and wealth, which can certainly serve things other than republics or even liberal democracies and which he explicitly identifies with the ideology of modernism based in science which is in service to those things.  We are urged in the snobbish abstractions of modern academics to forget that science was wisdom founded in and has never been separable from the enhancement of might and wealth even when those serve the powerful, the elite and the wealthy as they did when figures such as Bacon and Descartes invented modernism through inventing modern science.  And other forms of academic erudition have, as well.

Brueggemann contrasts that with a Jewish prophetic triad of steadfast love, justice, and righteousness which he remarkably demonstrated in eight ways was in opposition to and in contrast to the "triad of control."  Since his starting point was the Prophet Jeremiah condemning the royal-religious establishment of his day and since the same triad has served many kings, despots, dictators, aristocratic and oligarchic regimes since then, the "triad of control" is not specific to modern liberal democracies but that it can so comfortably find support from it is a significant indication that its endpoint is not going to be egalitarian or long remain genuinely democratic.

The fifth day of that series I transcribed this passage from his lecture which gets to the heart of why I reject liberal democracy as being in any way adequate, I don't know how Brueggemann would transcribe it or how he originally wrote it but it's the ideas in it I want to go into.  I also don't know how he would feel about my use of his points.

The triad of fidelity first focuses on the body whereas the triad of control focuses characteristically on abstractions of power and possession. The couplet of justice and righteousness are concerned with the ways in which the resources of the community are mobilized for the bodily reality of persons and the healthy reality of the body politic. The materiality of the biblical tradition has to do with the quotidian dimension of the vulnerable, the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor and the wherewithal for their dignity and well-being. Thus the indictment in the ancient city, they have grown fat and sleek, they know no limit in deeds of wickedness, they do not judge with justice the cause of the poor, they do not defend the right of the needy. And the same poet says if you truly amend your ways, if you truly act with justice, if you do not oppress the immigrant, the orphan and the widow or shed innocent blood and if you do not go after other gods, then . . . (W.B.'s hand gesture indicating continuation)

What aroused objections in what I posted the other day was my supposed diminution of the importance of "rights," as those are idolatrously propitiated today.  That as included in my rejection of unfettered "liberty," rejecting both the "liberalism" (really libertarianism) which either demands or permits a definition of rights which will allow their unequal distribution and, so, unequal exercise.  I really don't think you can anymore separate the reality of rights from how they are exercised BY PEOPLE  anymore than you can from the natural beings, People, animals, etc. which hold those rights as an inherent aspect of their being.  I think the creation of "rights" that courts and even legislatures assign to man-made entities that don't possess rights, corporations, "institutions" even political and judicial offices is to be expected when courts separate rights from natural beings and make them into abstractions.

Notice the right that is the only mention of "rights" in this passage "they do not defend the right of the needy."  In the context of the passage which focuses on "the materiality of the biblical tradition" "the quotidian dimensions of the vulnerable,"  certainly those include most of all a right to clean and sufficient air, water, food, shelter, clothing, dignity for the most vulnerable and forgotten - not least of which because they are the least economically profitable - People.  

In all of the "rights" enumerated in the Constitution, even those listed in the Declaration of Independence, it should be mind-boggling that NONE OF THESE MOST IMPORTANT RIGHTS a human being can have are mentioned, a right to clean water and food in a decent sufficiency, a right to clothing and shelter adequate for the maintenance of a decent standard of living, the right to healthcare.  We are even noticing, at least for half of the population, that there isn't even the most basic right of bodily ownership and autonomy as the "justices" of the Supreme Court negate the right of Women to determine the state of their own bodies, even allowing states under Republican-fascist control to give rapists and other men more control over the bodies of Women than they allow Women to exercise over their own bodies.

I would bet that to just about anyone who reads this, proposing the rights to those material needs on the same level of abstract "rights" to "free press-speech" "freedom of religious belief" even the most dangerous of all those popularly expounded "right to bear arms" will seem very strange and even incomprehensible.  Pointing out that that gap in our Constitution is an enormous chasm between important rights of all of us on an equal basis and those as imagined by the rich and powerful based on their own interests, and so are the ones they addressed and which later rich and powerful people maintained as of supreme importance will seem rather dangerous.  I am regularly told when I say things like that that I really shouldn't say them. Freedom of speech is a very sometimes thing.

It should astound us that the framers of the United States Constitution, living in their society with such an abundance of poverty, of  hard-scrabble farms, frequent failures of crops, frequent illness due to bad water, bad healthcare (though some of that may be due to the science of medicine at the time being quite likely to kill a patient who may have recovered on their own) and other absolute necessities of life just had those kinds of rights slip their lofty minds.   That the framers were all aristocrats from the higher and highest economic class of the time certainly accounts for their priorities and what they entirely ignored in listing of "rights" and those "liberties" they put in their documents instead.  Jefferson's one word mention of a right to "life" is the closest thing to that in the founding documents of what likes to think of itself as the premier "new order of the ages" the start of modern liberal democracy but what is required to maintain even a miserable life, water, food, housing, clothing, as a right to these citizens of their "new order" goes unmentioned .

And in the succeeding periods, those lacks in the specific wording of our supreme law, the Constitution, has hardly mattered much and when it was made to matter was attacked on the very basis of that framing of liberal democracy.  As the right of mega-corporate media to lie with impunity is defended exhaustively, food assistance, clean water and air, healthcare, etc. are successfully thwarted and, when a few steps forward are taken, successfully driven back, not least of which with lies in the freest press in our history.  

That they also neglected the right to the truth, instead of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" is something that could be expanded on at length.  Which I have.  The Federalist Papers and other documents prove the founders, themselves, were quite experienced and manipulative managers of speech and press to mold public opinion to their own ends, not least of which with appeals made to the worst in us as well as some of our more abstractly idealistic aspirations, in that they often had very little desire for the truth to interfere with that.  They were, after all, mostly lawyers and politicians.  Compared to that Walter Brueggemann and Jeremiah are better than gold and sweeter than honey from the honeycomb. They are like a breath of fresh air and clear, cold water in a parching drought such as the one the world is suffering through, which the Supreme Court through its reading of the Constitution is furthering.

Jeremiah sees the bodily needs of the vulnerable that require a different ordering of the body politic. Righteousness is weighing in for the well-being of the community.  The poetic tradition always cares about food, clothing and housing. The materiality of this triad refuses the requirements of ideas, concepts, theories and ideologies that draw energy away from reality of those who stand in front of us. The flight to abstraction is an endless seduction for those in control so that social reality can be reduced to a program or a budget that depends always on a euphemism to hide the bodily reality next door.  

The items in the Bill of Rights that gets the most attention, the "rights" to "speech" of "religion" of "press" are all focused on abstractions that have certainly not gotten us to anything like a common wealth or close to equality.  They have been used, more often than not, to oppose, hinder and delay of the real rights to clean water and even clean air (you will never be able to separate the depravity of the Roberts-Alito Court from these issues), food (as a right for those who need it, not a marketing opportunity for corporations who sell it with government subsidies) housing, clothing, medical care - my friend whose biopsy is being put off under a very expensive insurance plan under the ACA was told he might have to wait another six months to find out if he has cancer - . . . I could go on.

That we don't even begin to notice the most vital of rights for the destitute, the poor, the working poor, the middle class etc. in the framing of liberal democracy is, itself, an indictment of liberal democracy for whatever virtues are claimed for it.  I think those absolute failures of liberal democracy are both intentional and, since we've become accustomed to the habits of speech and thought about it, endemic to our thought, fixed in our habits.  And they are powerful no matter how dangerous the results are.  

Anyone who believes the United States Constitution and, really, much of any of the framing of liberal democracy as it is is sustainable is deluded.  We have to come down out of the clouds of idealistic abstraction to face the everyday material needs of life in order to have areal and important considerations of rights under a democratic government, we aren't anywhere near having that because the abstractions are what counts to those who count money.  We are distracted and deluded and conventional education is a part of that as much as anything, the dainty, scrupulously maintained habits of thought and speech surrounding these issues are the flying buttresses that hold up otherwise unsupportable walls.

The seduction of the university not unlike the government and the church and the corporation is to traffic in abstraction.  And the challenge of the university is to bring the energy back to that quotidian reality so that resources and passion may be mobilized differently .

Why I Dumped On Deism - Hate Mail

 "DEISM" WAS added to that list with agnosticism and atheism because I recently found a 2000 lecture about engineering given by Neil Armstrong I remembered hearing on the radio and admiring at the time.  I still like a lot of what he said in it but it led me to read more about him online and, of course, the topic of his religion figured into that.  He is one of the few people I could name who has professed his religious orientation was "deism."   I've always been skeptical about "deism" as anything from the new-atheist fad of the 00's when I regularly asked the atheists to point out to any actual deists who they claimed existed.   Deism in relation to  egalitarian democracy or morality may not be as actively undermining as materialistic, atheistic scientism which inevitably ends up hostile to it and denying their existence,  but it contains absolutely nothing more than MAS to positively motivate towards those.   I think Armstrong got too impressed with the achievements of science, mathematics and technology and he mistook them for the ultimate oracle of everything, as so many do.  Even those who may profess a belief in God.  

I'm sure there are dozens, hundreds and thousands of more than just worthwhile Protestant theologians who I should read and listen to,  Stanley Hauerwas is one whose subtle and radically challenging intersection of religion and politics is one I'm looking more at right now.   Though I said intersection, really, as I indicated, I am beginning to think that there can be no separation because every political issue is fraught with and saturated with moral considerations and problems.  I'm sure there will be many others I wish I had time for, as well. 

You Can Never Say Enough When You Start To Talk About The Jewish Monotheistic Tradition

THE EVER EXCELLENT RMJ has posted the excerpt that I used yesterday with many essential expansions, some of which, I confess, were included in the book I cribbed from but which I left out because I'm antsy about violating fair use.  Whatever "fair use" is. 

Here is a link to it. 

Instead of the often mocked intellectual inadequacies of theology, I find that there is never enough time or space to include all of what could and has been said about it.  Theology isn't an inadequate relic of the past, it is too hard for the facile, media stupefied and stupefying modern habits of thought I live in to deal with.  Always leaving to others to include more than you can.   It's an invitation, as the excerpt noted, one which is hard to accept.

And Now For Something Likely To Infuriate - Hate Mail

I AM NOT A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT, I am an egalitarian democrat.  The key differences in the two positions, as I define them, are in the modifying adjectives.  Liberal democracy may well stress "liberty" which is sloppily identified as "rights" but it has no real interest in what those rights result in as a common possession except as a legalistic abstraction. In its most dangerous form, the form that holds dominance in the United States in 2022, "rights" as defined by Republican-fascism are seen as limitless for those who have the resources to not be limited - the Supreme Court making money = speech, is a perfect example of that.

Egalitarian democracy holds that all People have equal rights and the right to exercise those but within a network of equally held rights which must, necessarily, define the limits of the rights held and the exercise of those rights.  Rights cannot be seen as abstract disembodied entities that can be dealt with on a theoretical basis but have to always be considered in the context of the People who have equal rights, really there is no such a thing as a "right" that is separable from the living being who possesses them as an inherent endowment.  The rights of any one person or group of People in reality instead of the irreality of abstraction are necessarily held in tension with and bounded by the rights of others and the necessity of the common good and the sustainable viability of their environment.  

Liberal democracy denies that reality or, really, ignores it and the consequences are that "rights" become a parody of something that is supposed to be a good in the world into something which is not infrequently extremely dangerous.  "Rights" to pollute, to use guns and possess them irresponsibly, "rights" to cheat and swindle People on the basis of conman tricks legalized by courts and corrupted legislatures on the pretense that those swindled have exercised a "right of contract" or some such other gangster-lawyer-judge-"justice" created meta-con job. "Rights" of husbands to tyrannize over wives, "rights" of white supremacists to oppress, terrorize and murder People of Color, "rights" of slavers to their "property" things which have loomed large over and still basically deform and distort America's liberal democracy are all examples of "rights" in the definition of liberal democracy but which could never stand under the holdings of egalitarian democracy. There is no such a thing as a right which is not sustained on a reciprocal basis, if you do unto others as you would have them do unto you, inequality, destitution, poverty, racial, ethnic, gender and sexual inequality would not be practiced.  

Abstracting "rights" from their only real manifestation as equal endowments as our law and Constitution and legal profession does is extremely dangerous.  It is only one of a number of such sloppy and dangerous word games that are the basis of modernism as it has been other similarly inadequate and, as they ripen and rot, dangerous ideological framings.  

To confuse things, as things are often confused by using labels and words, I am a liberal if you are talking about the traditional, American use of the word which is grounded in the moral obligation to liberally provide material, spiritual and cultural sustenance for the least among us and even the just not as well off or unfortunate.  And if you also include mutual respect and, yes, the "l" word, love. I am in no way a "liberal" as the word is commonly used in post-enlightenment, scientistic European and academic use which stresses "rights" as I've defined them having often malignant legal, political and cultural potency under "liberal democracy."  The habit of the physical sciences of abstracting particles and chemicals in order to come up with some general facts about them being extended far outside of science to apply them to far more complex entities is not only supremely nonsensical, it is extremely dangerous.

Those who are more comfortable with the formulation of liberal democracy because it seems more comfortably secular in an anti-religious or merely culturally "post-religious" cultural setting are fooling themselves if they believe it can result in a reliably good world because it is almost certainly guaranteed to devolve into the most wretched of inequality and, in time, despotism of the kind our liberal democracy is devolving into under the United States Constitution, a long and long failed experiment in 18th century conceptions of liberal democracy.  I think the choice we face is either to ride that into fascism or we will basically alter it and give it up for egalitarian democracy.

-------------------------

I was thinking about a passage from a book by Stanley Hauerwas and William Williomon, Resident Aliens which is worth thinking about both in context with the above and in the context of this week in August.

Christianity is more than a matter of a new understanding.  Christianity is an invitation to be part of an alien people who make a difference because they see something that cannot otherwise be seen without Christ.  Right living is more the challenge than right thinking.  The challenge is of a new people who have aligned themselves with the seismic shift that has occurred in the world since Christ.

Although our assertion is based, as was [Karl] Barth's, on a theological assessment of the world,  it is also based, as was Barth's on a particular experience.  For Barth, and for us, Nazi Germany was the supreme test for modern theology.  There we experienced the "modern world,"  which we had so labored to understand and to become credible to, as the world, not only of the Copernican world view, computers, and the dynamo, but also of the Nazis.  

I will break in here to note that despite the popular distortion of Nazism into some kind of entity alien to the ideological framing of modernism, it, like 20th century fascism was not only self-consciously modern ("National Socialism is nothing but applied biology") it was seen as progressive by many a modernist and many liberals, in the 18th century, modern usage of the word.

Barth was horrified that his church lacked the theological resources to stand against Hitler.  It was the theological liberals, those who had spent their theological careers translating the faith into terms that could be understood by modern people and used in the creation of modern civilization, who were unable to say no.  Some, like Emanuel Hirsh, even said yes to Hitler. (For a troubling account of Hirsh, see Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians under Hitler [New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1985]. What was so troubling about Ericksen's account is his demonstration that Tillich and Hirsh were not only close friends, but also that their theology was essentially the same.  They differed only on what political implications came from their theology.)

Liberal theology had spent decades reassuring us that we did not have to take the Jewishness of Jesus seriously.  The particulars of this faith, the limiting, historically contingent, narrative specifics of the faith, such as the Jewishness of Jesus or his messianic eschatology, were impediments for the credibility of modern people and could therefore be removed so that we could get down to the real substance of Christianity.  Jesus was not really a Jew, he was the pinnacle of the brightest and best in humanity, the teacher of noble ideals, civilization's very best.  It was a short step from the liberal Christ-the-highest-in-humanity to the Nazi Superman.

It's not only liberal Christianity(which must be pointed out is often to be distinguished from the Christianity of traditional liberals) that demands that denial of the radical egalitarianism at the center of the Mosaic Law, 18th century modernism and secularism also demand it. If Nazism had not defined itself biologically under the doctrine of natural selection, it may have not been genocidal* but it would have joined in secular modernism in demanding of Jews and Christians the same rejection of the heart of the Jewish religion as so many modern Jews have accommodated themselves to in order to fit in.  Christians have, of course, gone far farther than that, to the extent that Marjorie Taylor Greene can spout "Christianity" which is a thoroughly racist, inegalitarian, consumerist-modern- cargo-cult - paganism without the radical expression of the Mosaic law of Jesus.  Modern American "Christianity" is, by and large, a modernistic, materialistic paganism which is certainly not confined to Protestantism but which, with billionaire and millionaire loot, is a Catholic heresy waging war against Pope Francis and the Gospel.   The terms "conservative" and "liberal" can no more be used without extensive modification than "Christian" can.

I would be dishonest if I said that I think any viable, sustainable egalitarian-democratic liberalism that could withstand something like Nazism is possible without a real belief in The real God.  I have become convinced that agnosticism, atheism and "deism" are bound to decay into what will corrode, erode and eventually collapse egalitarian democracy.  There is a reason that the First Commandment is the one it is and that the Second and Third ones follow on from it.  I am endlessly amazed at how well thought out much of the Scripture is as a logical presentation of things.  I believe many religious traditions believe in The real God and their moral holdings will TEND TO confirm that.  Of course no one is more responsible for carrying it out than the Abrahamic religions have often failed to do.

Barth's commentary on Romans countered with the insistence that passages like Romans 9-11 must set the tone for Christian thought.  There he noted how the liberals had asserted certain humanistic assumptions about human nature and the world that did not need a living god to make them credible.  "God is not 'man' said in a loud voice," was Barth's caustic remark to liberals.  

It might have all been explained away by asserting that Hitler as a maniac and the German people were infected with some sort of mass hysteria.  Then we North American Christians could say that, although the compromised German church failed, at least ours did not.  Unfortunately, the ethical results of our inadequate theology had global implications.

On August 6, 1945, the fist atomic bomb was dropped on a Japanese city.  Turning to a group of sailors with him on the battle cruiser Augusta,  President Truman said, "This is the greatest thing in history." Truman, once described as "an outstanding Baptist layman,"  was supported by the majority of American Christians, who expressed few misgivings about the bomb.  The bomb, however, was the sign of our moral incapacitation, an open admission that we had lost the will and the resources to resist vast evil.

The American church had come a long way to stand beside Harry Truman in 1945.  Just a few years earlier, in 1937, when Franco's forces bombed the Spanish town of Guernica, killing many civilians, the civilized world was shocked.  That same year, when the Japanese bombed the city of Nanking, the world felt it was now dealing with particularly insidious forces which had little intention of obeying historical prohibitions against killing civilians.  President Roosevelt issued an urgent appeal to all governments, at the beginning of World War II, saying "The bombing of helpless and unprotected civilians is a strategy which has aroused the horror of all mankind.  I recall with pride that the United States consistently has taken the lead in urging that this inhuman practice be prohibited."

Yet only several years later, in 1942, Churchill spoke of "beating the life out of Germany" through routine bombing of German cities (after the bombing of London by the Germans).  What had begun as the acts of ruthless Fascist dictators had become the accepted practice of democratic nations.  Few Christians probably even remember that there was a time when the church was the voice of condemnation for such wantonly immoral acts (George Hunsinger, "Where the Battle Rages:  Confessing Christ in America Today,"  Dialog, vol 26, no 4, pp. 264-74).  

The fact is that science and technology (as if those are separable) has a way of creating things that change everything, leaving moral considerations on a leaking life-raft, though we're all on that life-raft as a result.  I think the perhaps necessary clerical detail of leaving out questions of morality when doing science and technology, as well as financial accounting of money, etc. has real consequences when those practices of instrumental reasoning have real power and potency, creating a very real monster that can get us all killed.  The law does the same thing when it turns things such as "rights under (human made) law" into things divorced from the People whose lives are the only real embodiment of any rights and considers them in a pantomime of scientific reasoning.  As the present day Supreme Court of the United States proves, that legalistic pantomime has the ability to even break away from its scientific model and to deny the reality of even very good and desperately important science such as the science of human caused climate change.  The bomb, that "greatest thing in history" was only ever at the service of humans exercising political and legal power, the bomb of secularism is probably the stronger and more destructive force it will serve. 

*  I will insert this update because it occurred to me that a good model of that might be Stalinism before Stalin became paranoid in the typical way and turned against and started murdering even Marxist Jews.  Though, perhaps, what that shows is that eventually every gangster government will turn to the typical forms of murder of the expected groups.  You don't need a biological excuse for that.