I'm still not satisfied with this essay. I have spent a month thinking and reading; trying to find some new angle to enlighten people. I feel like its all been said before, and none of it has accomplished anything. Its preaching to the choir. Basically, my advice is to read "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity" and be very afraid.
arendt
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Religions of Mass Destruction by arendt
"Faith is what credulity becomes when it finally achieves escape velocity from the constraints of terrestrial discourse - constraints like reasonableness, internal coherence, civility, and candor... Ignorance is the true coinage of this realm - "Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed" (John 20:29) - and every child is instructed that it is, at the very least, an option, if not a sacred duty, to disregard the facts of this world out of deference to the God who lurks in his mother's and father's imaginations.
"But faith is an impostor. This can be readily seen in the way that all extraordinary phenomena of the religious life - a statue of the Virgin weeps, a child casts his crutches to the ground - are seized upon by the faithful as confirmation of their faith. At these moments, religious believers appear like men and women in the desert of uncertainty given a cool drink of data."-Sam Harris, "The End of Faith"
It is the most irrational of times; it is the most hyper-rational of times. It is the age of wisdom, it is the age of foolishness. It is the epoch of belief, it is the epoch of incredulity. (Apologies to Mr. Dickens.)
Today, as every day for the past few years, the media brings me news reports from the fourteenth century. Religious fervor grips the world. Christians fight Moslems, with both sides convinced that eternal glory awaits those who die for their god. Christians torture other Christians in the name of Jesus. Wherever this war-like Christianity reigns, women are second-class citizens, whose duty is to provide babies and be submissive to the "pater familias". One might ask why internecine religious slaughter and misogyny is news, since it has been with us as long as old men worshipped other old men. The news is that it is happening in 21st century America, a Republic founded upon Separation of Church and State and made pre-eminent by its strong support for science and technology.
But the media also brings me glowing reports of globalization - the great Race to the Bottom, the Big Sellout of the American middle class by the American elites. I can watch factories, both high-tech and low-tech, close in America, only to reopen in China or India (high-tech) or some third world sweatshop(low-tech). The Bahamas-domiciled "American" oligarchs running this process have no loyalty to America, no respect for the global environment that unrestrained, laissez faire capitalism and a fossil fuel economy are wrecking, and no compassion for the societies that are imploding from the draining of their assets for the benefit of a tiny minority. All those concepts - loyalty, respect, and compassion - have no place in a global balance sheet. They are not quantifiable. They do not add to shareholder value, so there is no fiduciary duty to these quaint concepts.
It seems that the current U.S. leadership failed to learn from the misery caused in the mid-20th century by the secular religions of Colonialism (a.k.a. white man's burden), Communism, and Naziism. Our leadership has turned our economy over to the latest incarnation of corporatism, known as globablism, and turned our social policy over to the medieval, irrational lunacy of fundamentalist clerics.
It is the utter intellectual incompatibility of corporatism and fundamentalism that arms the right wing so well politically. The cynical apparatchiks of the right can beat you up one minute for being "irrational" in your opposition to the free market, then turn around and whack you for being "un-Christian" in your demands for separation of church and state. Because no one is allowed to point out the total inconsistency of the right wing's policies, they can make any doublespeak argument they want. The corporate media will instantly send any offending factual leakage "down the memory hole" until it is needed for some later bashing of the ever-mistaken opposition to "free markets" or "family values" or whatever slogan can be trotted out to cover up the latest abomination.
----
Therefore, the resistance to corporate theocracy must find a commonality among right- wing thought patterns that cannot be deflected by shifting the context from laissez fair economics to theology without stopping in between at reality.
Fortunately, the commonality is an elephant in the living room: hyper-macho, alpha-male primitivism. The only coin of this dark realm is power. Law is whatever the powerful say it is; Constitutions be damned. And, only straight males have the right to power because they are more easily socialized into regimented, hyper-competitive, homosocial hierarchies.
At the apex of all mythologies of power is "the will". It seems that while the scientists were creating the Industrial Revolution, the politicians were creating paeans to will, often with metaphors of metallic hardness: Nietzsche's "Will to Power"; Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will"; Stalin, the man of Steel; and a thousand corporate pamphlets about success through will power and toughness. Fundamentalism, which really got started as reactionary resistance to industrialism, is also all about using your will (not your brains) to overcome the world (a.k.a. the snares of the devil).
This mindset of unreasoning loyalty to cult leadership has caused so much trouble in human history that everyone, conservative or liberal, at least pays lip service to opposing it - usually by claiming that the other side practices it. Unfortunately the worship of power, the animal male hierarchy, is hardwired into humans, the real "fallen" nature of human beings. In America today, the cult of willpower has risen Phoenix-like from the ashes of the 20th century ideologies to capture the levers of political, economic, and social power.
In its denial of political, scientific, and social reality, fundamentalism pegs the willpower meter. The manifestations of will run amuck in fundamentalist America abound: the widely quoted Ron Rosenbloom interview about the White House's disdain for the "reality-based community"; the "Intelligent Design" movement - the latest cynical pandering to fundamentalist ignorance and fear of science; the demand for willpower-based solutions to the drug problem ("Just say no.") and the teenage pregnancy problem (abstinence-only). What is left unsaid is that the only way to enforce such tried-and-failed, willpower-based solutions on a skeptical populace is with coercion and violence. The next time you hear the phrase "faith-based", just substitute "willpower-based" and it will all make sense. Willpower-based solutions always blame the victim for failure and, like 14th century doctors, call for more bleedings.
Hence we come to the first mass destruction of the religion of corporate Christian theocracy: the wholesale assault on intellectual endeavor, on historical awareness, on accurate comprehension of today's world outside of the theocracy. Education is always the first target of theocrats; witness the Islamic madrassas that the political right criticizes in order to to demonize all Moslems. (Of course, the media would never point out that the fundamentalists are busy running their very own madrassas right here in America.) Theocrats want indoctrinated, heavily-policed followers; not skeptical, self-aware citizens.
You don't need brains, you just need willpower and loyalty to whatever Nietzschean cult of will is manipulating your holy symbols.
The second mass destruction of corporate theocracy is the destruction of the political, economic, and social rights of women. Corporations and some Western governments initially had no objection to tough women rising by merit to positions of power. Not even a right-winger could argue that Margaret Thatcher should have stayed at home baking cookies. But, corporations soon found that the economic and social insecurities of fundamentalist men could give them a hand in their battle against progressive regulation. You see, all you needed was a powerful liberal WOMAN politician on which to focus the fundamentalists' fear. Is there any wonder that Hilary Clinton is the most vilified woman politician since Eleanor Roosevelt?
While women's rights are being rolled back in the U.S, they at least existed. But overseas, we now fund the Pakistani fundamentalists who have no problem with "honor killings" of women. All over South Asia, children are sold into prostitution. Russian mobsters trick teenage girls with promises of overseas jobs, and they too are enslaved and raped into prostitution. After 100 years, we still cannot manage to prosecute incest mascarading as family values among renegade Mormons in Utah. On the flip side of the whore/madonna coin, we installed and have no problem with the Salvadorian police state that surveils pregnancy with a ruthlessness that would make Nikolai Ceacescu envious. (It seems the NY times momentarily woke up on that subject.)
What goes for women, goes triple for the other usual-suspect minorities that are always the whipping boys of ignorant, male authoritarianism: gays, darkies, Jews, and intellectuals. The recently won toleration of all these groups will be smashed in a typically animalistic male berserker backlash.
With education and civil rights rolled back, the third mass destruction is the destruction of genuine democracy and peace. We have declared "permanent war" on "terrorism". We live in an Orwellian police state that has demolished the checks and balances of our government. It taps our phones, disperses political protests, sells its favors to the highest bidder behind closed doors, bankrupts our treasury, and militarizes every aspect of domestic and foreign policy. Today, the only thing America is really good at making is trouble.
Our democracy has been replaced by an unprecedented cult of personality around the simpering personality of George Bush. Here is a politician with abysmal popularity, multiple criminal investigations of his appointees and cronies (whom he purports never to have known), and a record of open public lies. Yet the media can barely manage to report all this malfeasance (and even then, it makes excuses for it), much less draw the conclusion that a 13-year old would draw: this man and his entire administration are dangerous, lying, crooks and warmongers. Instead, the corporate media crucify anyone daring to tell the truth, from Governor Dean to Senator Feingold.
The fourth mass destruction of corporate theocracy is the environment. Contrary to Jesus' injunction to "be good stewards", Rapture-addled devotees of fundamentalism don't care about leaving a viable biosphere for their children. They have been willfully blind to global warming and oblivious to unprecedented levels of pollution and species destruction. This is demonstrably un-Christian. The Eastern Orthodox Church (Christians last time I checked) has embraced environmentalism, as have a large group of Christian Evangelical denominations. The fundamentalists have no theological leg to stand on. So, we are back to willpower.
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The people most likely to substitute willpower for thought are those for whom thought comes with difficulty. This difficulty could be due to nature or to nurture, but it is pretty well set in life by the time one reaches adulthood. Unfortunately for the United States, anti-intellectualism has been a prominent part of our culture for our entire brief existence as a nation. With the rise of electronic communication, the small corpus of thoughtful writing that had been produced was inundated by a flood of pointedly low-brow consumerist tripe. Literacy rates have been going down for decades.
It is this artificially engineered dis-education and de-politicization that has allowed fundamentalist operatives - wolves in clerics clothing, like Charles Colson - an entrance to political and social power. We have the classic totalitarian mixture of gullliblilty and cynicism: the gullible led by the cynical. But, "gullible" is too polite a word. Gullible is a rube buying a counterfeit Rolex on his first visit to the Big Apple. What we have is a whole segment of the population that has undergone a religious lobotomy. They behave pre-rationally, to the point of self-destruction. But it is more than self-destruction. These people are destroying not only our country, but any chance for a peaceful and sustainable world for centuries to come. This behavior, sad to say, fits the classic description of "stupid":
....
"A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of
....persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses."And our country exhibits the inevitable result of such behavior:
....
“In a country which is moving downhill, the fraction of stupid people (has not
....changed); however in the remaining (non-stupid) population one notices among those
....in power an alarming proliferation of bandits with overtones of stupidity, and among
....those not in power an equally alarming growth in the number of helpless individuals.
....Such change in the composition of the non-stupid population inevitably strengthens the
....destructive power of the (stupid) fraction and makes decline a certainty. And the
....country goes to hell......... Carlo Cipolla, “The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity”
........
http://cantrip.org/stupidity.htmlOver the last ten years, American society has been on a trajectory similar to an Alzheimer's victim. At first, it forgets the little things; it becomes cranky to its dearest friends. Then it becomes helpless; and finally, it is reduced to infantile behavior before it finally dies. And the sociopaths who infected us with this wasting disease will laugh all the way to the bank. History will write that:
....Never have so few stolen so much from so many, who remained so clueless.
At this point, the situation of the United States is beyond repair - even if FDR and Abraham Lincoln were put in charge of a government of geniuses. We have been systematically looted. Our infrastructure sent overseas, our public education system deliberately sabotaged, our military used as a blunt instrument, our national reputation reduced to that of ignorant thugs, and our public debt run off the charts. All this at the exact moment when peak oil, global warming, and massive overpopulation are about to push most of the world's systems into collapse. Stupidity in the form of religious fundamentalism has triumphed.
I offer no solution. Perhaps we will see the fragmentation of America, with the old Northern industrial core surviving as the "Eastern American Republic", akin to the Eastern Roman Empire that outlasted the Western Empire by nearly 1,000 years. I give the South of the U.S. no more than fifty years before it degenerates into barbarism and anti-scientific superstition while trying to fight back a tide of Spanish-speakers that it exploited and abused for 150 years.
While I offer no solution, I do offer a political program:
In the face of this fate, I will not go quietly. If these lunatics are going to drag us into the pit with them, they are going to get an earful. We can start by saying that:
....Fundamentalism is a form of intellectual terrorism against the scientific method and the
....Enlightenment.
....The fundamentalist program is one of calculated cruelty. Suffering in place of
....assistance. Punishment in place of compassion. Suspicion in place of natural curiosity.
....The inculcation of a dread of life into children. The kind of other-worldly insanity that
....leaves mountains of dead and sends the bill to "god".
We must loudly and repeatedly denounce the religious and economic fundamentalists' programs in the clearest terms with the clearest of consciences. When you ain't got nothin', you got nothin' to lose. In closing, I leave you with more words from Sam Harris:
"This world is simply ablaze with bad ideas. There are still places where people are put to death for imaginary crimes - like blasphemy - and where the totality of a child's education consists of his learning to recite from an ancient book of religious fiction. There are countries where women are denied almost every human liberty, except the liberty to breed. And yet, these same societies are quickly acquiring terrifying arsenals of advanced weaponry.
"It is time we realized that to presume knowledge where one has only pious hope is a species of evil. Wherever conviction grows in inverse proportion to its justification, we have lost the very basis of human cooperation. Where we have reasons for what we believe, we have no need of faith; where we have no reasons, we have lost both our connection to the world and to one another. People who harbor strong convictions without evidence belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of power. The only thing we should respect in a person's faith is his desire for a better life in this world; we need never have respected his certainty that one awaits him in the next.
Nothing is more sacred than the facts. No one, therefore, should win any points in our discourse for deluding himself."- Sam Harris, “The End of Faith”
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