The Religion of Politics

[Demeter]

http://www.regressiveantidote.net/Articles/The_Religion_of_Politics.html


...Fundamentally, it seems to me there are two basic ways in which we can seek to comprehend our world: the empirical or the assumptive. The scientific or the faith-based. The (roughly speaking) cognitive or the emotional. I know its fashionable in our time to try to reconcile the two, to say that science has its domain and religion has its. But that’s rubbish. The truth is that they are competing modalities for engaging life and the environment in which it dwells. On any given matter, one can make a judgement based on evidence and logic, or you can take a position based on what you prefer to believe. Those two approaches apply to every question ranging from the existence of god to whether the US should invade Iraq (and those who answered the latter affirmatively should count themselves lucky that the former answer is negative).

Of course, there are rarely if ever fully ‘correct’ answers to any of these questions in any abstract sense. But there is an investigatory process that will get you as close to the ‘correct answer’ – or a best functioning approximation – as is humanly possible, and then there is an alternative approach, called ‘let’s all pretend’. The first path may not get you where you want to be, but the second one is almost sure not to. The first approach may not solve your problems, but the second is almost guaranteed to exacerbate them.

This is not exactly a new observation, of course. The Founders of the American state were profoundly men of the first category, as leading figures in the Enlightenment, a movement which practically defined itself over the principle of rejecting superstition and assumption in favor of rational analysis. For all the faults that would later be attributed (some rightly, most wrongly) to rationality, science and Enlightenment thinking, this cognitive sea change marks one of the greatest moments of the entire human story. I see it as the adolescence of humankind.

The Enlightenment approach is also, among other things, at the very foundation of the idea of democracy. First be cause it gives humans license to control their own destiny. And second because there is, after all, no point to the concept of self-rule by the people if the body politic is ill-equipped to make thoughtful decisions...It is a frightening world, precisely because it is so frightened a world. The people who inhabit it are so uncomfortable with the real world that they have created a bogus one to which they tenaciously cling. The vociferousness with which they demand Fake World’s hegemony over others is anything but an indicator of their confidence in the power of its principles. Quite to the contrary, that obstreperousness represents instead an inadvertent indication of the falsity of their beliefs, of the brittle precariousness of a world view that possesses all the solidity of cotton candy, and of the urgent requirement for total vigilance in order to keep the dogs of cognitive dissonance well at bay. To paraphrase Jefferson (who knew a thing or two about cognitive dissonance): It is error alone which needs the support of ideology. Truth can stand by itself.

Truth is a big problem for the right. A really big problem. And, regrettably, it is increasingly becoming a really big problem for America...

MIGHT I ADD THAT TRUTH ISN'T UNIVERSALLY REVERED OR ACCEPTED ON THE LEFT, EITHER?