Matt Yglesias points to another right-wing ad attempting to scare people away from health care. The ad shows people standing in line to see a movie and says that if we had government-run health care, we’d have to stand in line to see a doctor.
The first comment: “So, with a true free market system, we’ll no longer have to wait to see a movie?”
Matt writes, Continue reading
While the psycho-pathologies of our President have become frighteningly evident over the last few years, those of the man “who decides what the Decider decides” are still very much cloaked from public view, presumably in an undisclosed location. Susan Douglas explains in Is Cheney Evil or Just a Weasel?, that when we liken Dick Cheney to evil itself (or dress him up in a black robe with a light sabre), we affirm his power as a bully, instead of undermining it.
I was going to save commentary for this Jeff Jacoby column for the next Wisdom of Doubt post — which I anticipate will be on scriptural literalness — but it’s gotten some buzz today so I will do a short take on it and elaborate later.
Jacoby speaks of a “religious fundamentalist” who wanted to teach at Cambridge University. The would-be teacher believed the world began about six thousand years ago. Yet Cambridge named the guy to the prestigious Lucasian Chair of Mathematics. WTF, you say? Relax; this happened in 1688. The teacher was Sir Isaac Newton.
I don’t have much to add to James Kirchick’s comment.
Not for nothing did John Maynard Keynes remark, upon examining Newton’s large collection of papers relating to alchemy, that “Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians…” Indeed, the logical conclusion of Jacoby’s argument is that university physics departments should teach students how to convert lead into gold.
The scientific revolution began in the 16th century, but even in Newton’s time science was not exactly science yet. Newton lived in a time suspended between pre-modern and modern thought, between mythos and logos. Human consciousness was moving away from a world of mystical revelation, but hadn’t yet fully entered the Age of Reason. Nor was Newton a true fundamentalist as we understand the word today. Fundamentalism wouldn’t be “invented” for a couple more centuries.
What I found most annoying about Jacoby’s column is his implication that if fundamentalists and creationists are shut out of teaching science, this is only because people are prejudiced against religion.
… the National Science Education Standards issued by the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 classified religion with “myths,” “mystical inspiration,” and “superstition” — all of them quite incompatible with scientific study. Michael Dini, a biologist at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, made headlines in 2003 over his policy of denying letters of recommendation for any graduate student who could not “truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer” to the question of mankind’s origin. Science and religion, he said in an interview at the time, “shouldn’t overlap.”
But such considerations didn’t keep Cambridge from hiring the theology- and Bible-drenched individual described above.
As far as education is concerned, science and religion shouldn’t overlap. Science classes are for teaching science. Math classes are for teaching math. History classes are for teaching history. If I signed up for a language class, and found that most of the class time would be spent teaching me to dance, or draw, or some other thing beside language, I would be highly annoyed. Some disciplines do overlap — science and math do, at many points. But I say this as a person with a deep regard for both science and religion: it does neither any good to mix them up. I wouldn’t ask Richard Dawkins to teach theology, for example.
If a biology graduate student cannot “truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer” to the question of mankind’s origin, then he should not be awarded with a degree. Biology is what it is; it is not whatever Jeff Jacoby wants it to be. If a language major cannot conjugate verbs, he or she shouldn’t get a degree. If a math major can’t do algebra, he should not get a degree. If an English major doesn’t know Shakespeare from spinach, he should not get a degree. Exactly what’s so outrageous about that is beyond me.
In fact, I intend to argue in the next WOD that biblical literalism of the sort Jacoby approves is killing religion. This argument will lean heavily on Joseph Campbell. Stay tuned.
A Daily Kos diarist named teacherken discusses a new book by Linda Perlstein, Tested
… in a discussion about how companies are profiting from No Child Left Behind, Perlstein recounts [elementary school principal Ernestine] McKnight’s experience at attending a presentation at a principals’ conference of a vendor who had been brought into her school during the 2005-2006 year using the success of Tyler Heights in its promotion. She was furious because they were implying they were responsible for the success in 2004-2005:
Like these guys had anything to do with third-grade math proficiency jumping 24 points? Fourth-grade reading jumping 49? p. 195
She was too polite to make a public scene, even when the vendors pointed her out to the audience. This anecdote is presented at the end of a section where Perlstein has explored the costs of NCLB in transfers of funds to the private sector, starting with the gross costs in the billions, tracing through the connections of individuals like Neil Bush and people who had helped promote in implement NCLB in the government like Sandy Kress and Gene Hickok to the individual consultants and firms McKnight had had to hire under pressure from the school system. Thus the elements of distortion and possible corruption are placed in a context beyond that of the mere numbers of dollars.
This reminded me of the article about NCLB in the current issue of Harper’s. I checked to see if it is online yet. Sorta; in PDF form. There’s always interesting stuff in Harper’s but they do make it hard to share it online. The article, “The Big Enchilada,” is by Jonathan Kozol. Here’s a chunk of it, at least (emphasis added).
The next and more ambitious stage in the introduction of the private market and its values into public schools did not become possible until the voucher advocates made the well-timed marketing decision to renounce the terminology of “vouchers” and to forgo temporarily their efforts to assume the outright ownership of schools. They settled instead for the management of schools that technically remained within the public sector. Newly created corporations, which characteristically adopted such academically impressive names as “Nobel Learning” or “Edison Schools,” began convincing officials in minority districts– first Miami, later Chicago, then Baltimore, Philadelphia, and many other cities–to contract with them to operate at first a few, then larger numbers, of their schools. At present, forty-one Philadelphia public schools are being run by Edison and another profit-making firm, along with a handful of nonprofit private groups. Almost simultaneously, as states were pressured to test and measure children more relentlessly, to institute the same “goal-setting” mechanisms that are used in private industry, the testing affiliates of some of our largest textbook publishers, as well as the major test-prep companies (The Princeton Review and Kaplan, for example), began to move into our public schools, primarily in urban areas. By 2005, the schools were generating $2.8 billion a year for the testing industry.
In both these areas–testing services and the management of schools–the encroachment of the private sector on public education has been mightily assisted by provisions that the Bush Administration managed to insert into the No Child Left Behind Act. Among the various “sanctions” that this highly controversial law imposes upon low performing schools are two provisions that have opened up these schools to interventions by private corporations on a scale that we have never before seen in the United States. The first of these provisions stipulates that if a school receiving federal funds under what is known as “Title I,” the nation’s largest program of assistance for low-income students, fails to raise its test scores by a fixed percentage within three years, it must then use a portion of its funds to purchase what the government describes as “supplemental services.” These services must be provided outside of the normal school day and, among other options, by a so called third-party provider.
Although such “services” are defined somewhat ambiguously, most low-income districts have interpreted the term to mean that they must force these schools to institute test-preparation regimens geared explicitly toward raising scores on state exams. Increasingly, too, schools have been pressured into contracts with private corporations that provide these services. Meanwhile, the test-prep companies are actively promoting their success in raising scores to principals who live in terror of the more alarming second stage of federal sanctions they will otherwise incur.
If, despite their expensive test-prep programs, low-performing schools fail to pump up test scores fast enough to meet specific goals within five years, school boards are obliged to shut them down and dismiss their faculties and principals. Such schools will then be either operated directly by the state or reconstituted under an “alternative governance arrangement.”
Although the provider of such “governance” might be a nonprofit corporation (one that operates a chain of semi-private charter schools, for instance), it is the profit-making firms, with their superb promotional machinery, that are best positioned to obtain these valuable contracts. It is this prospect–and the even more appealing notion that companies that start by managing these schools might at some future point achieve the right, through changes in state laws, to own the schools as well–that helps explain why EMOs like Edison, which has yet to tum a profit, nonetheless attract vast sums of venture capital. The “big enchilada” represented by the corporate invasion of public schools, even if it takes place only in progressive stages, is sufficiently enticing to investors to keep the money flowing in anticipation of a time when private corporations will not merely nibble at the edges of the public system but will devour it altogether.
No Child Left Behind, with its draconian emphasis on high-stakes testing as the sole determinant of failure or success within a given school, was signed into law in 2002. The warning period for the first wave of low performing schools is now coming to an end. Thousands of schools that exclusively serve black and Hispanic children have failed to meet their federally mandated goals.
All of these schools, under the stipulations of No Child Left Behind, will soon be ripe for picking by private corporations. Progressive citizens who say they believe in public education, as well as the erstwhile liberal Democratic leadership in the U.S. House and Senate, have failed to recognize and confront this looming crisis. Meanwhile, the richly funded and well-oiled juggernaut of privatization continues to move forward, carving out increasingly large pieces of the public system. If those of us who profess to value public schools and the principle of democratic access they uphold cannot find the courage or the motivation to fight in their defense, we may soon wake up to find that they have been replaced by wholly owned subsidiaries of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wal-Mart. Some $490 billion (4 percent of GNP) is spent on education yearly in the United States. It will be an act of social suicide if liberals blithely continue to dismiss the opportunities this vast amount of money represents for corporate predation.
At Daily Kos, Teacherken writes,
Schools in which students arrive at school with strong language skills, from upper middle class backgrounds, do not have to worry so much about their scores. In fact, unless they are designated as a Title I school (with a significant number of economically poor students) they have little to fear from the sanctions of failing to make AYP.
This isn’t just about allowing Neil Bush and others in the private sector education industry to make tons of money. It could lead to outright corporate takeover of schools teaching mostly minority and immigrant children. No doubt those children will be well-prepared for “careers” in the food service, custodial and retail sectors.
This op ed by James Carroll in today’s Boston Globe makes a nice follow up to moonbat’s post below.
Leonard Jacobson, Journey Into Now:
Most humans are living in a state of unconsciousness. Even though our eyes are open and we appear to be awake as we walk and talk and live our lives, in truth we are not awake.
We are lost in the mind, which is a world of the remembered past and the imagined future. It is a world of thought, memory and imagination. It is a world of opinion, idea, concept, and belief. It gives us a sense of a life outside of the present moment. It gives us a sense of ourselves outside of the present moment. And that is the great illusion.
In truth, there is no life outside the present moment. In truth you do not and cannot exist outside the present moment. The world of the human thinking mind is an illusory world and yet everyone believes that it is real. It is as if we have fallen asleep and the life we are living is a kind of dream, from which we must awaken.
To awaken spiritually or to become enlightened is to awaken out of the past and future world of the mind into the truth and reality of the present moment.
Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now:
Until my thirtieth year, I lived in a state of almost continuous anxiety interspersed with periods of suicidal depression…
One night, not long after my twenty-ninth birthday, I woke in the early hours with a feeling of absolute dread. I had woken up with such a feeling many times before, but this time it was more intense than it had ever been. The silence of the night, the vague outlines of the furniture in the dark room, the distant noise of a passing train – everything felt so alien, so hostile, and so utterly meaningless that it created in me a deep loathing of the world. The most loathsome thing of all, however, was my own existence. What was the point of continuing to live wit this burden of misery? Why carry on with this continuous struggle? I could feel that a deep longing for annihilation, for nonexistence, was now becoming much stronger than the instinctive desire to continue to live.
“I cannot live with myself any longer.†This was the thought that kept repeating in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. “Am I one or two?†If I cannot live with myself, there must be two of me: the ‘I’ and the ‘self’ that ‘I’ cannot live with.†“Maybe†I thought, “only one of them is real.â€
I was so stunned by this strange realization that my mind stopped. I was fully conscious, but there were no more thoughts. Then I felt drawn into what seemed like a vortex of energy. It was a slow movement at first and then accelerated. I was gripped by intense fear, and my body started to shake. I heard the words “resist nothing†as if spoken inside my chest. I could feel myself being sucked into a void. It felt as if the void was inside myself rather than outside. Suddenly there was no more fear, and I let myself fall into that void. I have no recollection what happened after that.
I was awakened by the chirping of a bird outside the window. I had never heard such a sound before…The first light of dawn was filtering through the curtains. Without any thought, I felt, I knew, that there is infinitely more to light than we realize. That soft luminosity filtering through the curtains was love itself. Tears came into my eyes. I got up and walked around the room. I recognized the room, and yet I knew that I had never truly seen it before. Everything was fresh and pristine, as if it had just come into existence. I picked up things, a pencil, and empty bottle, marveling at the beauty and aliveness of it all.
That day I walked around the city in utter amazement at the miracle of life on the earth, as if I had just been born into this world.
For the next five months, I lived in a state of uninterrupted deep peace and bliss. After that, it diminished somewhat in intensity, or perhaps it just seemed to because it became my natural state. I could still function in the world, although I realized that nothing I ever did could possibly add anything to what I already had.
I knew…that something profoundly significant had happened to me, but I didn’t understand it at all. It wasn’t until several years later, after I had read spiritual texts and spent time with spiritual teachers, that I realized that what everybody was looking for had already happened to me. I understood that the intense pressure of suffering that night must have forced my consciousness to withdraw from its identification with the unhappy and deeply fearful self [or ego], which is ultimately a fiction of the mind….
What on earth do these two passages have to do with the typical subjects found on this blog? Everything, as I’ll try to show.
As Jacobson wrote, most people spend most of their time living in their minds, or more specifically in their ego-mind. The thoughts running through our minds are always taking us somewhere away from the present moment – either to the past, or the future, or to some imaginary geography. When the mind is thinking its thoughts, the mental worlds they construct seem very real, and we easily get lost in them and feel separation from everything physically around us.
By contrast, when the mind is quiet, we can be fully here in the present, right here, right now. Not only that, but we feel a connection, a unity with everything around us. Our ego diminishes and we feel a part of the universe, one that is alive and all around us. There is no separation between us and the universe.
When we are present to the now, when the mind is quiet, the mind’s contents and structures are experienced as not having all that much substance or reality. We have our viewpoints and our beliefs and our agendas, but they no longer dominate us, and we are capable of setting them aside because they’re only mental creations. We can detach from them fairly easily. This lets us be skeptical or even dismissive of our mental creations, the healthy need for which, Maha has been writing about in the Wisdom of Doubt series.
With practice, this quiet deepens and we relax into it, and it becomes our normal way of being. The mind then becomes a servant, a tool to be used as needed, and put aside when it’s not, instead of something we get lost in, dominating us with its concepts, ideas, its rush of thoughts, and its bouncing between the remembered past and imaginary futures.
When our ego mind disengages, when we are still and fully aware in the present moment, we feel a unity with everything around us. We experience other people still attached to their egos and their viewpoints and their beliefs, with compassion, as people who have yet to awaken to this larger reality, that is nonetheless innate to all of us.
This is what Jesus meant when he said to turn the other cheek when your enemy strikes you. Don’t answer your enemy from the same level of consciousness as they inhabit. Go to a higher, more inclusive level of consciousness and respond to your enemy from there. This doesn’t mean be a masochist, it means don’t answer their provocation on the same level as it is given.
This most definitely relates to the political battles we face with the right. It’s very easy to be provoked and hooked emotionally by the attacks of the right, and this is part of their intention. It’s important to learn to stay centered in the present moment, while evaluating how to respond. Many times, no response is required at all, but on other occasions it is important to interact with what they’re saying, to set these people straight, to deflect or cancel their attack. To correct them.
While I personally am aggrieved at how the right is destroying this country and this planet, and while I have had scores of negative personal encounters with members of the right, culminating in a very painful firing from a job, I also understand the importance of not getting dragged into their drama. They are, after all, only playing out the programs in their minds, often as unconsciously as a player piano. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.†It’s important instead to be centered and to get busy creating the world to come. The one that is superseding their tiny, disintegrating world, which is an extension of the little self, the ego-mind. As Jacobson writes:
Because of our technological advances, we have become too destructive to continue living unconsciously upon this earth.
It’s my belief that out of the ashes of the destruction of the current order, a new human race is being born, one whose level of consciousness will be quite different from what created the current order based on fear, which is the basis for the ego. In another hundred or two hundred years, there are going to be a lot of enlightened people on this planet.
I personally believe George W Bush is unconscious and seriously deluded. He thinks he is doing the will of his Father in Heaven (truly a frightening thought given W’s narcissistic, sociopathic personality). However, consider that perhaps God / the universe / life itself really is using W, by forcing us, in a manner similar to Eckhart Tolle’s pressured awakening, to wake up. Childhood is ending, whether we want it to or not.
—
Both Tolle’s and Jacobson’s books cover similar terrain, but Tolle writes with a stark clarity befitting the kind of dramatic awakening he went through. I heard Ekhart Tolle speak, a few years ago. He walked into a hall filled to capacity with about 2000 people, and spoke, extemporaneously for close to three hours. Every single person in that hall was spellbound, hanging onto each word during the whole time. Tolle is an intense human being.
Jacobson, a relaxed Australian, by contrast offers a lot of practical guidance anyone can do to become more fully present, and to make this a permanent state. His book is much more recent than Tolle’s, and his work to some extent builds on Tolle’s foundation and yet makes it very practical. Jacobson offers workshops and retreats. Tolle, being an international star, is a bit harder to catch in person.
“Nader’s Dead End” by Todd Gitlin in the Los Angeles Times
Three good editorials at the New York Times: “Vetoing Children’s Health,” “Power Without Limits,” and “FEMA Runs for Cover.”
At Think Progress — Bill Kristol quakes in fear of the Great Orange Satan.
If you don’t feel like reading — Crooks & Liars has an exclusive Michael Moore video.
Consider this an update to the previous post, The Wisdom of Doubt IX. Karen Armstrong wrote an op ed for yesterday’s Guardian in which she argued that “An inability to tolerate Islam contradicts western values.” Here’s just a snip:
On both sides, however, there are double standards and the kind of contradiction evident in Khomeini’s violation of the essential principles of his mentor, Mulla Sadra. For Muslims to protest against the Danish cartoonists’ depiction of the prophet as a terrorist, while carrying placards that threatened another 7/7 atrocity on London, represented a nihilistic failure of integrity.
But equally the cartoonists and their publishers, who seemed impervious to Muslim sensibilities, failed to live up to their own liberal values, since the principle of free speech implies respect for the opinions of others. Islamophobia should be as unacceptable as any other form of prejudice. When 255,000 members of the so-called “Christian community” signed a petition to prevent the building of a large mosque in Abbey Mills, east London, they sent a grim message to the Muslim world: western freedom of worship did not, apparently, apply to Islam. There were similar protests by some in the Jewish community, who, as Seth Freedman pointed out in his Commentisfree piece, should be the first to protest against discrimination.
Naturally, the usual knee-jerk reactions commenced. Short version: Because there is Muslim terrorism, and because there are Muslims who commit unspeakable atrocities, we are justified in hating all Muslims and denying them the same degree of tolerance and respect we want them to give us.
From Marc at U.S.S. Neverdock:
Tell that to the Christians persecuted and murdered in Muslim countries. Tell that to the gays who are hung in Muslim lands. Tell that to Muslim women who are raped and killed in so called “honour” attacks. In their attempts to portray Muslims as victims, the left completely ignore Islam’s intolerance to Western values.
It’s always heartening when right-wingers embrace liberal values and express outrage at injustices perpetrated against religious minorities, gays, and women. However, I would like to point out that Jesus set a higher standard:
You have heard that it was said, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. [Matthew 5:43-48, New International Version]
I looked around in Matthew for a qualifier — that it’s OK to hate and discriminate against all members of a group if some among them are really bad — but couldn’t find it. Maybe it’s in some other Gospel. Or else they’re confusing the Bible with the script of The Godfather, and they think the Golden Rule is what Sonny Corleone said: “They hit us so — we hit ’em back.”
I don’t think Jesus’ “turn the other cheek” (Matthew 5:39) necessarily means that a righteous person may not defend himself or others from physical assault. I think the “cheek” business is about not allowing hate to escalate. Just because someone hates you doesn’t mean you have to hate them back. You don’t even have to hate them if you must use force to defend yourself from them. Just defend yourself. Hate is superfluous and may even be a hindrance to self-defense. Any martial arts master will tell you the same thing.
What Jesus — and Karen Armstrong — are saying is that tit-for-tat hatred takes the haters down a very dark road. The righteous person, Jesus said, is the one who refuses to feed the hate cycle.
The Buddha said:
“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,” in those who harbour such thoughts hatred is not appeased.
“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me,” in those who do not harbour such thoughts hatred is appeased.
Hate is not overcome by hate; by Love (Metta) alone is hate appeased. This is an eternal law. [Dhammapada 1:3-5)
I’m just sayin’ that when a couple of heavy hitters like Jesus and the Buddha agree on something, we would do well to pay attention.
In the last episode I provided a skip through history from the Reformation to the birth of fundamentalism in the early 20th century. Let’s pick up the story in the 1920s.
I dug the passage below out of one of my antique college textbooks. It’s long, but (I think) relevant to our current political situation. The author (eminent historian John Garraty) is discussing post-World War I America.
The war-born tensions and hostilities of the twenties also found expression in other ways, most of them related to an older rift in American society — the conflict between the city and the farm. By 1920 the United States had become predominantly urban. To the scattered millions who still tilled the soil, the new city-oriented culture seemed sinful, overly materialistic, and unhealthy, but there was no denying its power and compelling fascination. Made even more aware of the appeal of the city by such modern improvements as radio and the automobile, farmers coveted the comfort and excitement of city life at the same time that they condemned them. They fulminated against the metropolis, yet watched enviously as their sons and neighbors drifted off to taste its pleasures.
Out of this ambivalence developed some strange social phenomena, all exacerbated by the backlash of wartime emotions. The unifying element in all was intolerance; rural society, at once attracted and repelled by the city, responded by rigidly proclaiming the superiority of its own ways, as much to protect itself against temptation as to denounce urban life. Change, omnipresent in the postwar world, must be desperately resisted, even at the cost of the individualism and freedom that farmers had cherished since the time of Jefferson.
One expression of this intolerance of modern urban values was the resurgence of religious fundamentalism in certain Protestant sects, especially the Baptists and Presbyterians. Fundamentalists insisted on taking every word of the Bible literally. They rejected the theory of evolution, indeed the whole mass of scientific knowledge about the origins of man and the universe that had been discovered during the 19th century. As we have seen, educated persons had been able to resolve the apparent contradictions between Darwin’s theory and religious teachings easily enough, but in rural backwaters, especially in the southern and border states, this was never the case. Partly, fundamentalism resulted from simple ignorance; where educational standards were low and culture relatively static, old ideas remained unchallenged. Urban sophisticates tended to dismiss the fundamentalists as crude boors and hayseed fanatics, but, in such surroundings, the persistence of old-fashioned ideas was understandable enough. The power of reason, so obvious to men living in a technologically advanced society, seemed much less obvious to a backward agricultural population. Even prosperous farmers, in close contact with the capricious, elemental power of nature, tended to have more respect for the force of divine providence than cityfolk.
What made crusaders of the fundamentalists, however, was their resentment of modern urban culture which had passed them by, and the emotional currents of the age. Although in some cases they did harass liberal ministers, their religious attitudes had little public significance; their efforts to impose their views on public education were another matter. The teaching of evolution must be prohibited, they insisted. Throughout the early twenties they campaigned vigorously for laws banning all mention of Darwin’s theory in textbooks and classrooms.
Their greatest asset in this unfortunate crusade was William Jennings Bryan. Age had not improved the “Peerless Leader.” Never a profound thinker, after leaving Wilson’s cabinet in 1915 he devoted much time to religious and moral issues without applying himself conscientiously to the study of these difficult questions. He went about charging that “they” — meaning the mass of educated Americans — had “taken the Lord away from the schools” and denouncing the expenditure of public money to undermine Christian principles. Bryan toured the country offering $100 to anyone who would admit that he was descended from an ape; his immense popularity in rural areas assured him a wide audience, and no one came forward to take his money. [John A. Garraty, The American Nation: A History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1966), pp. 702-703]
You’ve probably guessed that What Happened Next was the Scopes trial of 1925. There are detailed accounts of the trial all over the web, so I’m not going to provide one here. The significance of the Scopes trial is that fundies were nationally humiliated, and modernists thought they had won. The modernists, it turns out, were wrong. Historian Gary Wills documents that the teaching of evolution “quietly crept out” of biology textbooks throughout the remainder of the 1920s, and the creeping continued through the 1930s and after, and there was no real attempt to put it back until the 1960s.
It was not Scopes that put evolution in the schools, but Sputnik. The Soviet space satellite caused a widespread fear that Russians taught science more efficiently than Americans. American experts, who thought they had “settled” Bryan, finally took a look at what Americans were actually being taught; and what they were being taught about the origin of mankind more often assumed the Genesis account than Darwin’s. [Gary Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 113]
However, when I took high school biology ca. 1966, my teacher was too intimidated to say the word evolution in class. Instead, she quietly slipped some of us (if she knew our parents and knew they wouldn’t flip out about it) copies of a book about evolution by Isaac Asimov. So much for Sputnik.
There was something else about the passage from the old textbook that struck me. John Garraty wrote about “an older rift in American society — the conflict between the city and the farm.” This rang alarm bells. I was reminded of “Soldiers of Christ: Inside America’s Most Powerful Megachurch” by Jeff Sharlit in the May 2005 issue of Harper’s.
It is not so much the large populations, with their uneasy mix of sinner and saved, that make Christian conservatives leery of urban areas. Even downtown Colorado Springs, presumably as godly as any big town in America, struck the New Lifers I met as unclean. Whenever I asked where to eat, they would warn me away from downtown’s neat little grid of cafes and ethnic joints. Stick to Academy, they’d tell me, referring to the vein of superstores and prepackaged eateries–P.F. Chang’s, California PizzaKitchen, et al.–that bypasses the city. Downtown, they said, is “confusing.” Part of their antipathy is literally biblical: the Hebrew Bible is the scripture of a provincial desert people, suspicious of the cosmopolitan powers that threatened to destroy them, and fundamentalists read the New Testament as a catalogue of urban ills–sophistication, cynicism, lust–so deadly that one would be better off putting out one’s own eye than partaking in their alleged pleasures. …
…As contemporary fundamentalism has become an exurban movement, it has reframed the question of theodicy–if God is good, then why does He allow suffering?–as a matter of geography. Some places are simply more blessed than others. Cities equal more fallen souls equal more demons equal more temptation, which, of course, leads to more fallen souls. The threats that suffuse urban centers have forced Christian conservatives to flee–to Cobb County, Georgia, to Colorado Springs. Hounded by the sins they see as rampant in the cities (homosexuality, atheistic schoolteaching, ungodly imagery), they imagine themselves to be outcasts in their own land. They are the “persecuted church”–just as Jesus promised, and just as their cell-group leaders teach them. This exurban exile is not an escape to easy living, to barbecue and lawn care. “We [Christians] have lost every major city in North America,” Pastor Ted writes in his 1995 book Primary Purpose, but he believes they can be reclaimed through prayer–“violent, confrontive prayer.” He encourages believers to obtain maps of cities and to identify “power points” that “strengthen the demonic activities.” He suggests especially popular bars, as well as “cult-type” churches. “Sometimes,” he writes, “particular government buildings … are power points.” The exurban position is one of strategic retreat, where believers are to “plant” their churches as strategic outposts encircling the enemy.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Remember the Karen Armstrong quote from the last Wisdom of Doubt post —
Typically, fundamentalists have proceeded on a fairly common program. Very often they begin by retreating from mainstream society and creating, as it were, enclaves of pure faith where they try to keep the godless world at bay and where they try to live a pure religious life. Examples would include the ultra-orthodox Jewish communities in New York City or [Christians at] Bob Jones University or Osama bin Laden’s camps.
In these enclaves, fundamentalist communities often plan, as it were, a counteroffensive, where they seek to convert the mainstream society back to a more godly way of life. Some of them may resort to violence. Why? Because every fundamentalist movement that I’ve studied–in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–is rooted in a profound fear. They are convinced, even here in the United States, that modern liberal secular society wants to wipe out religion in some way or is destructive to faith.
Fundamentalism isn’t religion. It’s social pathology expressing itself as religion. In Part V I touched on the fact that right-wing Christianity has become remarkably disconnected from anything resembling standard Christian doctrine. The movement is being manipulated by money and by political power, and its followers seem to be getting most of their “theology” from popular culture — the Left Behind books come to mind. Certainly the Presbyterians who published The Fundamentals back in 1910 had serious theological intentions, but the fundamentalist movement has morphed into something much sicker and much uglier since. As John Garraty wrote, the unifying element is intolerance. As Karen Armstrong says, it is rooted in a profound fear.
After Scopes, fundamentalists seethed with humiliation and resentment. Back in Part VII I quoted Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Vintage Books, 1962)
Their heightened sense of isolation and impotence helped to bring many of the dwindling but still numerically significant fundamentalists into the ranks of a fanatical right-wing opposition to the New Deal. The fundamentalism of the cross was now supplemented by a fundamentalism of the flag. Since the 1930’s, fundamentalism has been a significant component in the extreme right in American politics, whose cast of thought often shows strong fundamentalist filiations. …
… The fundamentalist mind … is essentially Manichean; it looks upon the world as an arena for conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, and accordingly it scorns compromises (who would compromise with Satan?) and can tolerate no ambiguities. It cannot find serious importance in what it believes trifling degrees of difference: liberals support measures that are for all practical purposes socialistic, and socialism is nothing more than a variant of Communism, which, as everyone knows, is atheism. … [T]he secularized fundamentalist mind begins with a definition of that which is absolutely right, and looks upon politics as an arena in which that right must be realized. … It is not concerned with the realities of power — with the fact, say, that the Soviets have the bomb — but with the spiritual battle with the Communist, preferably the domestic Communist, whose reality does not consist in what he does, or even in the fact that he exists, but who represents, rather, an archetypal opponent in a spiritual wrestling match.
We who are Not Them — religious and non-religious alike — are the enemy. We are the “archetypal opponent in a spiritual wrestling match.” They will never tolerate us. This conflict is not about discrete issues like abortion, but so much more.
The point I hope to get across is that the fundies — not religion — are a threat to liberalism, to democracy, to science, to education, to modernity, and even to religion. It’s not clear to me what’s to be done about them, other than keep an eye on them and counter their nonsense with education. And we need to educate the talking heads on mass media that these whackjobs shouldn’t be allowed to speak for Christianity.
Also: Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, 1942-2007.