While watching the second part of the PBS special God in America last night, I was struck by how blindly drawn to certainty a large segment of the country has always been. Better to be dead right than maybe wrong. Both sides of the Civil War believed God was on their side, but as Lincoln concluded, both could not be right and possibly neither was. Then Lincoln went from being Deist (God set in motion this mechanism called life) to Evangelical (God told me what to do) in a sudden revelation which resulted in the Emancipation Proclamation, the just cause the North needed to win the war.
America pretends to have one God but in practice has many. There are personal gods, sectarian gods, and secular gods. What the people who believe in them all have in common is a faith that their god will deliver “the good” and sometimes the goods.
For many the belief starts with absolute trust in a text. The trust is so absolute that every word in the text is sacred. Even though the text has been translated and modernized over time, every word somehow remains sacred to those who buy into fundamentalist teaching. This tendency to see certain texts as sacred (Bible, Torah, Koran) helps explain how some also view The Constitution as a static document to be preserved at any cost as opposed to a living document that is subject to adjustment according to the needs of the people and the times. Literal interpretation of texts, it is assumed, requires no interpretation. It is simply ingesting. You swallow whole, never chew.
This tendency or proclivity to absorb wholly and directly is carried into our economic lives as well. There are those believe in the Market as if it were a god. Just trust in the Market to take care of business. We need not any tinkerers or adjusters or certainly not any government bureaucrats messing with our god. In God We Trust to these purists means In Market We Trust.
America has had an element that wants to purify or sanctify something ever since the Puritans landed in 1620. It also has had an element that has always felt uncomfortable in the stiff clothes of doctrinaire thinking and texts. Printed words and human institutions are not chiseled in stone. They are created by man, not dictated by God to man. God has never exclusively endorsed a specific text as his word and has never left a note to say he had.
Belief is a “time out” from thinking. It is the product of the anti-intellectual’s unwillingness to venture into the arduous world of reason. It is the surrender to assumption and blind belief, not the victory of truth.
True believers are inevitably skeptical of science because science is so skeptical. Science has hypotheses and theories, probability and statistics, not absolute truths. It is the very uncertainty of science that horrifies the true believer. We can’t trust science to give us truth on a platter, only carcasses of old ideas left on the dissecting table and new theories tentatively offered in their place. How messy and unsatisfying it all is.
On the other hand, moderately religious people who focus on service and helping the needy are good to have around. They keep their religion to themselves and simply do good deeds. There are no strings attached to their efforts.
However, our nation suffers from an inordinate lack of faith in the power of reason to sort out our difficulties. Instead, we have our centers of power polluted by a preoccupation with preponderant principle over pragmatic progress. Some true believers are paralyzed with fear because they consume the fast food of facile belief containing empty spiritual calories rather than exercise their mental capacities toward solutions. Thinking is hard work, but a certain portion of America has always shunned it because it might disturb the literal narrative it has always blindly trusted.
However, the chief reason Americans hang onto their beliefs is the ever broadening heterogeneity of the country. We have always been a nation of immigrants and continue to be so. We are also the most religiously diverse nation in the world, but unlike the foods we bring to the American table, we do not embrace each other’s religions the way we enjoy each other’s ethnic dishes. New foods are a lot more digestible; new beliefs are not.
True believers see other beliefs as a threat to their own, not a complement. It leaves them “thinking” that they must reinforce their own beliefs rather than question them. The notion of turning to reason simply does not occur. It’s in a different realm of being.
Meanwhile, absolutist belief will continue to be the sacred cow that wanders through and disrupts American progress such as stem cell research while engineers of growth elsewhere in the world (China, India, for example) will pass us on their freshly constructed by-passes and freeways. Their de facto separation of church and state will trump our de jure separation any day now.
Showing posts with label belief. Show all posts
Showing posts with label belief. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Monday, May 24, 2010
Myth Rules America
America is a nation of believers. Americans may not always be right, but they are seldom in doubt. The current mood of the country is that experience is nothing; change is everything. If at first you don’t succeed, try something else. We are now like men on Christmas Eve, which today means pushing the various buttons on electronic toys until we get them to work. It is all trial and error. It is a wilderness to conquer, not a manual to study. The first time politicians displease us because they have had to make a tough decision, off with their heads.
Tolerance is a product of good times; impatience is a product of bad. Belief strengthens in the face of uncertainty; doubt subsides. We are a decisive people who take action, often before we have thought very hard. Intellectuals think hard, and that leads to nowhere otherwise known as complexity, like that bridge Sarah Palin referenced throughout her VP campaign. We don’t trust complexity, because it smacks of obfuscation. It is a brier patch that no lawn mower can make into a green carpet. We want our lawns spotless; we want our universe well-ordered.
Americans know what is right, and nothing Washington does is ever quite right. Instead, it is mostly or completely wrong. Everything congress puts out looks like a Trojan horse or Mark Twain’s definition of a camel: a horse put together by a committee. A congressional “horse,” no matter what, is never a winner. It is mostly a construct that is disdained by the minority members and passed with held noses by the majority. The recent health care bill was a Trojan horse to both extremes: one group would not even look the gift horse in the mouth and the others were focused on how much the other end produced.
All of this is the product of mutually opposing myths: government can and should steer the American people; government can and should get out of the way of the American people. The libertarians think they have the answer by calling for as little government as possible. Liberals believe that government can serve the people well if only the lobbyists would go away.
As David Brooks pointed out on the News Hour Friday night (May 21, 2010), the centrists have no discernible platform; the moderates have no place. Compromise is corruption. Purity is all. If you’re in the middle, you are merely indecisive. Both sets of extremists insist you are part of the solution, or you are part of the problem. A pragmatist, by definition, prostitutes principles.
America seems to default to principles, even if the principle of by the people, for the people turns out to be by the rich, for the rich. And our principles are faith based, not rooted in actual fact. Libertarians trust self-interest as the governing principle; liberals trust community. We’re either all batters at the plate, or we’re all rowers in a boat. Either the parts are greater than the whole, or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
No one is right on this, except the folks somewhere in the middle, who see life as a balancing act between individual needs and the greater good. We would surely perish as a people if we all became Gandhi or the guy whose operating principle is: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Just as a good marriage depends on compromise, not do or die, so does a good society.
Let’s get back to the middle ground where the meeting of minds takes place, rather than trying to live on the wilderness edge of extremism where self-destruction lurks and people shout of freedom out of fear of losing what they have rather than striving for a greater goodness. That means electing and supporting people as our representatives who will do the next right thing, disdain personal gain, and serve the people, not the lobbyists and the corporate giants.
Tolerance is a product of good times; impatience is a product of bad. Belief strengthens in the face of uncertainty; doubt subsides. We are a decisive people who take action, often before we have thought very hard. Intellectuals think hard, and that leads to nowhere otherwise known as complexity, like that bridge Sarah Palin referenced throughout her VP campaign. We don’t trust complexity, because it smacks of obfuscation. It is a brier patch that no lawn mower can make into a green carpet. We want our lawns spotless; we want our universe well-ordered.
Americans know what is right, and nothing Washington does is ever quite right. Instead, it is mostly or completely wrong. Everything congress puts out looks like a Trojan horse or Mark Twain’s definition of a camel: a horse put together by a committee. A congressional “horse,” no matter what, is never a winner. It is mostly a construct that is disdained by the minority members and passed with held noses by the majority. The recent health care bill was a Trojan horse to both extremes: one group would not even look the gift horse in the mouth and the others were focused on how much the other end produced.
All of this is the product of mutually opposing myths: government can and should steer the American people; government can and should get out of the way of the American people. The libertarians think they have the answer by calling for as little government as possible. Liberals believe that government can serve the people well if only the lobbyists would go away.
As David Brooks pointed out on the News Hour Friday night (May 21, 2010), the centrists have no discernible platform; the moderates have no place. Compromise is corruption. Purity is all. If you’re in the middle, you are merely indecisive. Both sets of extremists insist you are part of the solution, or you are part of the problem. A pragmatist, by definition, prostitutes principles.
America seems to default to principles, even if the principle of by the people, for the people turns out to be by the rich, for the rich. And our principles are faith based, not rooted in actual fact. Libertarians trust self-interest as the governing principle; liberals trust community. We’re either all batters at the plate, or we’re all rowers in a boat. Either the parts are greater than the whole, or the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
No one is right on this, except the folks somewhere in the middle, who see life as a balancing act between individual needs and the greater good. We would surely perish as a people if we all became Gandhi or the guy whose operating principle is: “He who dies with the most toys wins.” Just as a good marriage depends on compromise, not do or die, so does a good society.
Let’s get back to the middle ground where the meeting of minds takes place, rather than trying to live on the wilderness edge of extremism where self-destruction lurks and people shout of freedom out of fear of losing what they have rather than striving for a greater goodness. That means electing and supporting people as our representatives who will do the next right thing, disdain personal gain, and serve the people, not the lobbyists and the corporate giants.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Manifest Destiny 2009
The shooting at Fort Hood is beginning to look like another story in the long history of manifest destiny narratives. What they all have in common is that some kind of god told a person (or a people) that he should listen to the voice in his head (presumably the voice of God) and do what it says. Whether it is a voice telling Israelis to keep building their houses on occupied Palestinian lands, or Christian settlers usurping Indian lands in the settling of the American West, or Islamic Jihadists detonating suicide bombs, or right-wing Christians killing abortion doctors, they all have the voice of God as their navigator or inspiration.
Most of the time throughout history the voice of God has been benign. Most believers in God have used that voice to tell them to be good or to do good works. The problem is, as soon as a person decides that voice in his head is the voice of God, all bets are off as to what head voice messages are assigned to God and what are not. God’s voice is hard to distinguish from whatever other voices exist in the head. You can assign God to the deep voices or to the little bird-type voices. The problem remains: how can you tell for certain which messages are God’s and which are not?
The safer course is to assume that all voices in your head are of your own making, not anyone else’s, especially a god’s, and to question every voice you hear no matter what. Relinquishing authority to someone else, especially an invisible voice, is kind of dangerous. It leaves you open to the possibility of believing a message to kill someone is a good thing.
That’s why we would be a whole lot better off if we question authority, especially if that authority comes to us in the form of a voice or in the form of an authority who is telling us to do something our reason or the law tells us is quite wrong.
Therefore, it is probably better to listen to the narratives that are life-affirming and respectful of others rather than those that are not. That way, we won’t end up thinking God told us to do something or start believing homicide is better than suicide because at least we are thinking of others when we kill them.
As soon as we turn our lives over to the care of God, we have relinquished some responsibility for governing our own lives. That is why I have a hard time understanding why conservatives advocate taking more responsibility for ourselves and yet also stand behind the notion of a God whose voice can surely be mistaken or invented as an excuse to take the law into ones’ own hands.
I would rather leave out trying to tell which voices in my head are God’s or someone else’s and assume they are all just voices in my head. That way, I will not empower some voices more than others and will remain skeptical of them all.
However, in American culture we have the triple-edged sword of freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech. In other words, we are free to believe anything we think and free to purchase a gun to act on those beliefs without regard to consequences until after the action has occurred, unless we have previously sent enough verbal signals in advance to call attention to our intentions. Unless those verbal signals are confronted, it is often too late to prevent the consequences. Such is the dilemma of freedom of speech, of religion, of the right to bear arms.
In the case of the Fort Hood shooter, the verbal signals were there. Apparently the supply of Army counselors was so small in relation to the demand that the screening process was made loose enough to keep the supply of counselors greater than was safely advisable. Sending a devout Muslim with extremist sympathies to Afghanistan was the straw that broke the back of what was left of the shooter’s sanity because it put him in a psychological double bind: he was going to have to hear the confessions of American soldiers who would be apparently killing his own religious brethren. He could not imagine withstanding that personal torture. Belief in absolutes trumps mundane duty to one’s profession when the two conflict.
The respect America gives to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech will continue to be ingredients readily available to produce a “bomb” ready to go off almost anywhere in America, even at a military installation. That’s the price we pay for those freedoms, and this Fort Hood narrative is just one more in the pantheon of sad narratives that are a part of the on-going American story. And we hear them in one form or another when the body count is large or valued enough or the perpetrators initially seem unlikely (an American soldier shooting other soldiers on an Army base).
Maybe we need more counselors for all of us, especially those of us who are prone to view the world in terms of absolutes and those of us who have trouble identifying the voices in our heads. But that would mean universal mental health care coverage, and we can’t even get to universal physical health care without diluting compromise. You’re still on your own there, but you can have all the guns you want without a prescription.
Most of the time throughout history the voice of God has been benign. Most believers in God have used that voice to tell them to be good or to do good works. The problem is, as soon as a person decides that voice in his head is the voice of God, all bets are off as to what head voice messages are assigned to God and what are not. God’s voice is hard to distinguish from whatever other voices exist in the head. You can assign God to the deep voices or to the little bird-type voices. The problem remains: how can you tell for certain which messages are God’s and which are not?
The safer course is to assume that all voices in your head are of your own making, not anyone else’s, especially a god’s, and to question every voice you hear no matter what. Relinquishing authority to someone else, especially an invisible voice, is kind of dangerous. It leaves you open to the possibility of believing a message to kill someone is a good thing.
That’s why we would be a whole lot better off if we question authority, especially if that authority comes to us in the form of a voice or in the form of an authority who is telling us to do something our reason or the law tells us is quite wrong.
Therefore, it is probably better to listen to the narratives that are life-affirming and respectful of others rather than those that are not. That way, we won’t end up thinking God told us to do something or start believing homicide is better than suicide because at least we are thinking of others when we kill them.
As soon as we turn our lives over to the care of God, we have relinquished some responsibility for governing our own lives. That is why I have a hard time understanding why conservatives advocate taking more responsibility for ourselves and yet also stand behind the notion of a God whose voice can surely be mistaken or invented as an excuse to take the law into ones’ own hands.
I would rather leave out trying to tell which voices in my head are God’s or someone else’s and assume they are all just voices in my head. That way, I will not empower some voices more than others and will remain skeptical of them all.
However, in American culture we have the triple-edged sword of freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech. In other words, we are free to believe anything we think and free to purchase a gun to act on those beliefs without regard to consequences until after the action has occurred, unless we have previously sent enough verbal signals in advance to call attention to our intentions. Unless those verbal signals are confronted, it is often too late to prevent the consequences. Such is the dilemma of freedom of speech, of religion, of the right to bear arms.
In the case of the Fort Hood shooter, the verbal signals were there. Apparently the supply of Army counselors was so small in relation to the demand that the screening process was made loose enough to keep the supply of counselors greater than was safely advisable. Sending a devout Muslim with extremist sympathies to Afghanistan was the straw that broke the back of what was left of the shooter’s sanity because it put him in a psychological double bind: he was going to have to hear the confessions of American soldiers who would be apparently killing his own religious brethren. He could not imagine withstanding that personal torture. Belief in absolutes trumps mundane duty to one’s profession when the two conflict.
The respect America gives to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech will continue to be ingredients readily available to produce a “bomb” ready to go off almost anywhere in America, even at a military installation. That’s the price we pay for those freedoms, and this Fort Hood narrative is just one more in the pantheon of sad narratives that are a part of the on-going American story. And we hear them in one form or another when the body count is large or valued enough or the perpetrators initially seem unlikely (an American soldier shooting other soldiers on an Army base).
Maybe we need more counselors for all of us, especially those of us who are prone to view the world in terms of absolutes and those of us who have trouble identifying the voices in our heads. But that would mean universal mental health care coverage, and we can’t even get to universal physical health care without diluting compromise. You’re still on your own there, but you can have all the guns you want without a prescription.
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