PERHAPS I SHOULD explain how I came to go from resolutely avoiding the topic of religion in my political blogging to coming to see it as, perhaps, the most important issue there is in understanding politics.
It was in the early months of my political blogging, when I had been invited to be the weekend blogger on a far more popular blog. It was 2006 as the obnoxious, ballot box poison of the "new atheism" was everywhere on the online comment threads of us lefties. I knew that it was ballot box poison so I posted a piece that said it was and that it was counter-productive and the religious left and the atheist left had to work in common. My post was attacked and misrepresented by some of those who were riding the "new atheist" fad hard, it was, probably, the most attention that one of my posts had gotten at that time. I pointed out the misrepresentations and asked, then demanded that they retract the lies they had told about it to uniform refusal. Even by those who were representing themselves as "journalists."
The theme I'd chosen for my blog was to investigate why the side which had many more of the facts on their side could so consistently, over the previous fifty or so years, fail politically in the United States and elsewhere. I knew a few, though not most of the answers to that, the not infrequent snobbishness of so many of the college-credentialed lefty crowd being among the most friggin' obvious of those. Their obsessions with stupid issues, some of them more in the area of lifestyle than of anything important, high among those. Among the other things I'd already annoyed some on comment threads with was saying that while I didn't especially care for prayers in the public schools (though, I've come to understand, not for the reasons the ACLU opposed it) and totally unimportant things like the erection of manger scenes and crosses on public property as something worth costing the left among voters. Disestablishment on such issues as prayer in schools or manger scence may be a mildly good thing in itself but it was hardly a life or death issue or likely to become one. It was no hill worth enough for the left do die politically on. So I was already pointed in the direction I've taken. I hadn't noted that their presence before the Warren Court banned them had been a major contributing factor in preventing what is, in fact, the highest point of the American left, the period in 1964 and 1965 when the Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid and a whole host of other legislation had been passed, things that did more for more People than the entire program of the secular left had managed to achieve in their entire existence.
In the brawls I got in over such things I started to sense that the middle class and affluent college-credentialed lefties who had little to nothing to lose if Republicans won elections were quite willing to see all of the progress made die so their mere preferences could be asserted and, at times, win in courts from the leftover judges and "justices" who were willing to give them wins. In the meantime, the perpetual American underclass, especially People of Color, didn't really count as much to them. It was more a lifestyle and club membership than a matter of real importance to them.
I was still naive enough to think such people were more reasonable than the, then, Bush II cultists. But that naivety didn't last long. I try not to hold on to illusions for any longer than there's evidence to support them. I started looking more into the "new atheism" and quickly found out that it was hardly new, they were merely reiterating the tired, old, threadbare slogans and claims that the old atheists had always made. I'd read much of that from the likes of, from the somewhat higher end, Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, down through the mid-brows such as Clarence Darrow and Mark Twain, to the decidedly low-brow crap such as made its way into articles in the lefty media and organized atheism.
But I'd also read much of the religious left's literature, Dorothy Day, liberation theologians, . . . and, increasingly in those days, Protestant liberals and radicals. And I have to say that in virtually every case, I had a lot more faith in their practicality and devotion to the basic program of the left than that of those whose primary devotion wasn't doing better for the least among us but to the promotion of atheism. That is, I think, the real primary goal of the alleged atheist left, that and the promotion of their materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology. Something which, as I investigated that, convinced me that it was not only ballot box poison but, in fact, is inevitably destructive of the very basis of any real left which has an aim of equality and democracy and the preservation of life and the biosphere on which we all depend.
Among the milestones at about the same time pushing my own liberation from the mindset of the conventional American secular, college-credentialed left was noticing, by chance, one of the barroom style atheists on the conventional lefty blog I frequented making the claim that "science" had debunked the idea of free will" and that there was no opposition to the idea. I suddenly realized that believing that nonsense was fatal to any real left based on equality, on any idea of people being free to make a free and informed choice on who will hold political power and govern. It was, in fact, something that would not bring egalitarian democracy but the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche realized was an inevitable result of his materialist-atheist-scientism. That led me to read more of the thinking of such materialist-atheitst-true believes in scientism and, to a person, they were either entirely pudding headed on the matter of governance or they were devoted to some ideological position which was, in fact, opposed to egatltarian democracy, Marxism, of course, some non-Marxist though atheist articulations of what they called "socialism" but which inevitably looked more like state capitalism to me, or, perhaps stupidest of all anarchism. I found that having access online to very large if not all inclusive samples of the old-line left going back for centuries was a real eye-opener to the actual thinking of such people mistaken as heroes of the contemporary secular left. I've presented such thinking a lot on this blog and at the previous blogs I wrote on. Darwin is certainly one, Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, Emma Goldman, etc. I also had much more access to the ability to fact check the historical and biographical claims that are and have long been current in the lore of materialist-atheist-scientism and very often found that, if anything, that lore is constructed of lies. Lies which are never fact-checked by the journalists and other materialist-atheist-even scientistic scribblers who will rely on the secondary, tertiary claims and junk and even more remote from the actual primary documentation to repeat that common received lore. Many of those I respected highly on the contemporary left did that, though there were some few who were far more scrupulous scholars and writers. There are still a few of those I respect for their unusual honesty.
One of the things I have become absolutely convinced of it is that the materialist-atheist-scientistic holding the People and other living beings are mere objects, of no more transcendent character than the kinds of objects physicists and chemists study, is not and cannot be made consistent with egalitarian democracy and any such basis for any politics or legal system will, inevitably and eventually, result in everything from injustice to genocide, to the destruction of the biosphere and life on Earth. No materialistic ideology is compatible with any left which has any right to the label.
-------
Why am I bringing that up now? Because of a complaint about what I said in my critique of Katha Pollitt the other day on the matter of moral absolutes.
One of the arguments I early got into was on the whining in 2006 that opinion polls said that a majority of Americans said they would not vote for an atheist as president or, as I recall, for lower offices. It figured in that first most controversial of my posts I mention above. I pointed out that if that was something atheists didn't like the only People who could change that opinion among American People were atheists who could make themselves more appealing and trusted by voters. I pointed out that the anti-religious snark which blanketed the lefty blogs and in magazine and other articles by atheists was that ballot-box poison which it was and if they wanted voters to vote for them, and this was news to them, THEY HAD TO BE LIKABLE. No one is likely to vote for someone who they believe doesn't respect them or disrespect them. THEY SEEMED TO BELIEVE THAT THEY HAD SOME KIND OF RIGHT TO HAVE THE VOTES OF PEOPLE THEY DERIDED AND MOCKED AND WHO THEY CLEARLY NOT ONLY DIDN'T RESPECT BUT DESPISED.
I asked how many of them would vote for a Southern Baptist or what the shorthand was already calling "evangelicals." I don't recall any of them taking the point that that question made.
As you no doubt will understand, these guys who figured they were the smartest people there were, were entirely clueless about how real People think and react to that kind of thing. In the back and forth that came as a result from that post I realized that their ideology, apart from any issue they claimed to support, was inevitably worse than counter productive, it was self-destructive.
In further arguments along those lines, the claim that morality was nothing but a product of common consensus of a majority opinion of any society at any given time. I asked how they could complain if a society came to a consensus or majority opinion that you shouldn't trust atheists with political power, then. Or how anyone could hold that within a society in which Black chattel slavery or the subjugation of Women or the brutal inequality of LGBTetc. People was believed to be right doing those things was, in fact, wrong.
Of course I said that such a basis of morality or "ethics" could ever call any society in which a majority believed it was the right thing to do to kill all Jews, wrong if they did that. I may have already pointed out that such a secular-legal position was taken by Senator Robert Taft in his opposition to the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis on the basis that what they had done in the Shoah was legal under the laws the Nazis had adopted and, therefore, the legal process against them was illegitimate. A position so depraved that it took that Harvard trained lawyer, JFK, to identify Taft's moral depravity as "A Profile in Courage." As I indicated above, I'm not so warm on Constitutional secularism and, especially, as that has developed in the lore and "ethics" of the American legal profession. I'm impressed with how frequently a training in the secular law will make the most obviously morally depraved position acceptable as the "right" position and course of action, or inaction. Especially at the Ivy-League level of respectability.
The fact is Katha Pollitt AND VIRTUALLY EVERY OTHER MATERILAIST-ATHEIST-SECULAR lefty scribbler does what the great musician Eduard Stuerrmann called "Vienese double-counterpoint"* on "ethics" or what is really morality. They hold all kinds of "ethical" positions that are impeached by their underlying materialist-atheist-scientistic ideology. And their instance on their "secularist" (really M-A-S) ideology creates all kinds of intellectual problems but, in reality and far more importantly, undermines real morality. I have come to see that as one of the most important reasons that the American left and so many other secular would-be lefts have failed so catastrophically. I think it is one of the reasons that liberal democracy was doomed by coming out of that same ideological stream and why any liberalism that has a chance has to be based on the kind of moral absolutes that are found in Scripture. I believe those can come from other traditions than the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, any religious holding that holds that People are equally endowed by their Creator with rights that are absolute an inalienable, and that there are absolute moral obligations of the right kind could provide a support for egalitarian democracy and real equal justice but the fact is, in the United States, other aspiring democracies, for the most part it is, as the atheist-materialist philosopher Jurgen Habermass DID ACTUALLY SAY, that has no other source or source of nourishment than than the Jewish "ethic" of justice or the Christian one of universal love. Something which, when the Christian apologist John Lennox (unlike his critics, a fluent German speaker) quoted Habermass as saying, atheists online blatantly lied about what he said. When I pointed that out, repeatedly and exhaustively using the exact words of Habermass in the original, they still claimed Lennox was lying.
I think the current failure of liberal democracies is a strong indication that the very bases on which those are founded, especially such things as the failure of the acknolegement that there is a right to tell the truth but no right to lie, a right to promote equality but no right to promote privilege and discrimation against groups, THE MEAT-HEADED IDEA THAT MEDIA COMPANIES OR CORPORATIONS HAVE A RIGHT TO LIE AND SPREAD HATE WHEN CORPORATIONS ARE NOT PEOPLE AND HAVE NO RIGHTS, is fatal to them, And I think those were all adopted out of that self-destorying scientistic ideology taken from the frequently dangerous exemption that science was given from the consideration of morality in the thinking of the 17th and 18th century "enlightenment." I'm not sure that was ever a wise decision to make in the scientific pursuit of the knowledge of and manipulation of the physical universe, I KNOW IT IS A DISASTER WHEN IT IS APPLIED TO THE REAL LIFE POLITICAL AND LEGAL REALMS REGULATING THE BEHAVIOR OF PEOPLE. I don't see that there is any difference between the death lists of the Nazis or those that current "ethicists" are always drawing up on the basis of the economic valuation of human beings. I think you really have to be educated and acculturated into true depravity to do such things with the human population's experience of the scientific genocides of the 20th century. And such a depravity is promoted and made mandatory by our secularized Constitution and legal rulings and legal lore and in the most insane, brain and soul-dead culture which is the norm in our journalism, academic writing and popular culture. A lot of that is imprecise and inexact adoption of the original ideas but even watered down and alterered slightly, they have become quite poisionous to egalitarian democracy.
I've come a long way since 2006. A long way much farther to a real left to egalitarian democracy and the presevation and improvement of life. I don't think I hold much of anything else strongly enough for it to be called an ideology. As FDR said, I'm a democrat and a Christian, nothing else. I'm not stupid enough to think any of this is discernible with the methods of science, not as asserted by the ideology of those I'm criticizing. I think rigorous and honest consideration of history is a superior method of finding out about that. Their scientism certainly hasn't worked out as prediction after prediction fails in the test of time, which is what is supposed to be the source of the credibility of science. The failure of the secular left is what got me going on this to start with.
* As I recall, he mentioned someone who was a member of the Nazi party but who, nevertheless, asked someone for an introduction to Alban Berg because he wanted composition lessons with him.
No comments:
Post a Comment