One more time, because it’s worth getting it right.
April 13, 2010
Two things: 1) the Internet is absolutely amazing. Anyone with a rudimentary interest in American history and an avid interest in the Internet has received over the past week an incredible education in the history of the Confederacy, the Civil War, and slavery. McDonnell may be a dick – no, there’s no need to qualify, McDonnell is a complete dick – but his assholery has brought together in response a fascinating exchange of historical understanding and supporting documents on the Civil War. 2) at this point, we need to start moving beyond the notion that it’s a myth that the Civil War was primarily a war over states rights to the notion that it’s a deliberate lie. There’s simply far too much evidence in the historical record to excuse “Lost Cause” historians because of the complexity or the remoteness of the war and its surrounding events for mistaking the overt and blatant cause of the war.
The best summation of the evidence, and by far the best reflection on its implication, is Ta-Nehisis Coates’s discussion of it. Part of what’s so savory about Coates’s take is that, reading him slowly respond to it over the course of the past week, one would get the impression that he was very reluctant to engage the issue – the level of denial about the Civil War being so huge and leaden and the centrality of slavery to the War being so glaringly obvious to even the dimmest of schoolchildren. And then it becomes so insistent a question that he can’t not respond more fully, and he does, not with anger or indignation, but an enormity and graciousness of spirit. It’s worth reading for that, and then thinking of Mississippi governor Haley Barbour’s response to the controversy, claiming that not mentioning the issue of slavery in connection to the history of the Confederacy “doesn’t amount to diddly.”
Coates’s post starts off with Robert E. Lee and the enduring myth (repeated in Ken Burns’s docupic) that Lee was personally opposed to slavery, the implication being that only Lee’s bond to Virginia and the South and their honorable cause was what drew him into leading the army of the Confederacy. Not at all true: Lee owned slaves, felt that Africans could not and should not be free, that slavery was natural and God-given, and presided over an unruly population of slaves that resented his control over them and his brutal enforcement of discipline. There’s a profound need on the part of the South to redeem its heroes from the twenty-first-century view of their monstrosity, and Lee as its greatest hero is perhaps the individual that is most desperately needed to seem free from slavery’s taint. But it’s not possible to glorify them without violating the truth. We’re left with a complex, flawed individual rather than symbol of gentlemanly perfection.
The historical truth may invalidate the myth, but it does not invalidate the need to redeem history and through that its inheritors. Nor does it invalidate the complexity of the situation. One of the more interesting things to emerge from Coates’s post is the notion of the institution of slavery as a cumulative wealth, and so, in light of the exchange with tbudd, I thought it worth revisiting:
By 1860 there were approximately 4,000,000 slaves in the United States, the second largest slave society–slave population–in the world. The only one larger was Russian serfdom. Brazil was close. But in 1860 American slaves, as a financial asset, were worth approximately three and a half billion dollars–that’s just as property. Three and a half billion dollars was the net worth, roughly, of slaves in 1860. In today’s dollars that would be approximately seventy-five billion dollars. In 1860 slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together. Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy. The only thing worth more than the slaves in the American economy of the 1850s was the land itself, and no one can really put a dollar value on all of the land of North America.
That’s from David Blight, a major historian of slavery, but I don’t know the source – it’s quoted as such in Coates’s post. The Republican administration in the White House and the increasing anti-slavery sentiment in Congress was threatening enough to the South for it to join in secession from the Union. Apparently the South had something worth protecting, despite its declining ability to produce wealth, its declining population, and its loss of political influence.
So I thought I’d address another complexity that’s important for me, that of one of the most notable literary figures from the era who defends the humanity of slaves, Walt Whitman. As we move away from Whitman’s poetry to view him as a person, that sense that Whitman represents a strong condemnation of slavery’s degradation seems to evaporate. As a journalist deeply committed to the radical wing of the Democratic party in the 1840s, the so-called “barnburners,” Whitman was a vocal opponent of slavery and a free-soiler. He was not an abolitionist (or “ultra”), a position he viewed as extremist and as threatening to national unity, and the opposition of free-soilers to slavery was not based on humanitarian grounds but on rather more working-class considerations: free white men in the trades could not compete economically with slave labor, and the free-soil movement opposed allowing new territories to permit slavery because they believed a slave economy would discourage the free movement and economic opportunity of white workers. Whitman’s writing at the time even supported the institution of slavery as necessary and beneficial when confined to southern states: in his pro-temperance novel Franklin Evans, the protagonist visits Virginia, and Whitman has a planter lecture Evans on how slavery is beloved by the slaves as well as their owners, and demonstrates how childlike and governed by passion the slaves are – familiar stereotypical justifications for slavery and white supremacy.
As late as his Brooklyn Daily Times editorials in 1857 and 1858, Whitman was declaiming the impossibility of blacks and whites being able to work and live together, and that slavery might not be all bad. This was already a few years after he’d published Leaves of Grass. In that volume appears the persona of Whitman as the poet of sympathy, embracing all equally, black as well as white. He imagines himself in his central early poem, “Song of Myself,” as helping slaves to their freedom without fear or regret:
The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,
And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting piasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,
I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner. (section 10)
As the poem moves toward its climax of sympathetic identification with all American types, rejecting none, Whitman imagines himself setting a dinner and inviting even the lowliest to sit down with him, the adultress, the thief, the “veneralee,” and the slave (section 19). At its final point, Whitman imagines himself as capable of being the slaves racing for freedom:
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am.
I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks. (section 33)
And, of course, the rightly famous passage in “I Sing the Body Electric,” where he assumes the role of slave auctioneer to rework the slave’s economic value into a spiritual value:
A man’s body at auction,
(For before the war I often go to the slave-mart and watch the sale,)
I help the auctioneer, the sloven does not half know his business.
Gentlemen look on this wonder,
Whatever the bids of the bidders they cannot be high enough for it,
For it the globe lay preparing quintillions of years without one animal or plant,
For it the revolving cycles truly and steadily roll’d.
In this head the all-baffling brain,
In it and below it the makings of heroes.
Examine these limbs, red, black, or white, they are cunning in tendon and nerve,
They shall be stript that you may see them.
Exquisite senses, life-lit eyes, pluck, volition,
Flakes of breast-muscle, pliant backbone and neck, flesh not flabby,good-sized arms and legs,
And wonders within there yet.
Within there runs blood,
The same old blood! the same red-running blood!
There swells and jets a heart, there all passions, desires, reachings, aspirations,
(Do you think they are not there because they are not express’d in parlors and lecture-rooms?)
This is not only one man, this the father of those who shall be fathers in their turns,
In him the start of populous states and rich republics,
Of him countless immortal lives with countless embodiments and enjoyments.
How do you know who shall come from the offspring of his offspring through the centuries?
(Who might you find you have come from yourself, if you could trace back through the centuries?) (section 7)
I quote the entire section because there’s not one part I would remove: it retains all the power it had when it was first published (the text quoted here is from the last version of the poem as amended in the 1870s – Whitman added the historical marker as well as a few other modifications, especially that significant final line). It is also stunningly prescient, given the debates on race and rights in the century that will follow.
How do we reconcile the journalist whose opposition to slavery held no sympathy for the enslaved, and who it seems could not envision slavery’s end, only its containment, with the poet whose sympathy for all persons insisted on equal rights, equal consideration, and equal freedoms for the enslaved he would invite to work and eat side-by-side with his fellow citizens? If the journalist is to be condemned, then how do we read his poetry?
There is much to condemn in the Confederacy – it was an organized act of desperate treason, devised to defend what many found to be morally indefensible. Many soldiers in the Confederacy fought for other reasons – home, honor, pay, etc. Their officers and politicians seemed often to feel uncomfortable with what they were called upon to defend, and, particularly as the war was drawing to a close, spun a number of reasons and justifications for the war that many still cling to today, but those officers and politicians cannot be wholly and universally condemned. History gives us a range of possibilities to inhabit, but it’s mistaken to assume that we can freely and easily move among them: it’s often slow, painful, and difficult to do so. Even if it’s difficult to look back to the Confederacy and find heroes, there’s no need to look back and find nothing but monsters. It was a necessary passage, and likely necessarily violent, so while we can and all should take pleasure and pride in the defeat and loss of the Confederacy, it was not without purpose or meaning.
We should remember that even so, Virginia was not without her heroes. And Whitman remains a hero to me: somehow in his poetry he made things possible that could not be in his prose.
The Civil War was fought over slavery.
White historians thought up the idea to make the “states rights” cause central to the war as a myth for Southern whites to save face. But it’s still a myth. I’ll repeat: the idea that the Civil War was fought over the principle of states rights is a myth designed to disguise the fact that the Civil War was fought over slavery.
Northern soldiers going into battle wrote in their diaries that they were going to end the vile practice of slavery for the honor of the union. Abraham Lincoln on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is alleged by Stowe’s 1911 biographer to have said, “So you’re the little lady who started this great war,” a testament to the moral presence of Stowe and her work’s brutal portrayal of the degradation of slavery in the public perception of Lincoln – a presence that during Lincoln’s life was customarily described as his conscience.
Southern politicians and military leaders uniformly described the reason for secession as the need to preserve the Southern institution of chattel slavery against the efforts of the anti-slavery Republicans who had won the White House and desired to end the practice. Southern orators regularly declaimed the difference between Northern and Southern climates as the reason why white people shouldn’t be responsible for heavy labor in the South, and for the innate suitability of black people from Africa to enforced servitude and heavy labor on their behalf, and for the both as being the primary rational behind secession and the war.
When the Civil War commenced, the majority population of the state of Virginia was opposed to secession and the Confederacy. Unfortunately many of them did not have a political voice because they were slaves, the de facto majority population of the state. The white population of Virginia wasn’t particularly enthused about it either, many perceiving the war as being conducted on the behalf of the wealthy minority slave-holding population at the expense of everyone else. That controversy literal split the state into Virginia and West Virginia, as the Scotch-Irish population of the Appalachian mountains were themselves too familiar with the conditions of servitude and oppression at the hands of the wealthy Anglo-Saxon elite to support the Confederate States. At the war’s end, the majority of Virginians – yes, black, but many whites as well – greeted the Union troops as liberators.
That’s history, but only some of it. Not the type that McDonnell and the fat-ass losers that make up the various Confederate nostalgia groups of Virginia are willing to learn and acknowledge, but that’s because some of the most important history of the past hundred and fifty years hasn’t even fully happened yet. Victors write the history? No. Victors assume a history. To write one necessitates dissent. And through that dissent is how history sometimes happens.
UPDATE: O.K., so there are some definite errors in my own sense of history. Slaves were not a clear majority population in Virginia; they were a majority population in some states deeper South where, of course, cotton plantations were more central to the economy. At the time of the civil war, Virginia’s slave population was a bit less than half the population of the state. It may not have been a majority of Virginians that celebrated the collapse of the Confederacy, but if not, it was likely close to that. I apologize for letting my indignation at McDonnell’s presumption rush me past the fact-checking.
Holy Thursday
April 2, 2010
This is William Blake’s “Holy Thursday” from Songs of Innocence:
’Twas on a Holy Thursday their innocent faces clean
The children walking two & two in red & blue & green
Grey headed beadles walk’d before with wands as white as snow
Till into the high dome of Pauls they like Thames waters flow
O what a multitude they seem’d these flowers of London town
Seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs
Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands
Now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song
Or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among
Beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor
Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door
The poem refers to the annual London ritual of bringing the children of the charity schools to St. Paul on Holy Thursday. The charity schools housed and trained – educated not being exactly the right word here – orphans and children whose parents were too poor or entrapped in debt, which at the time involved lengthy prison stays, to care for them. The ritual was to display on the behalf of the London citizenry their civic virtue of Christian charity, and as well I’d imagine the ritual would serve as a living metaphor for each citizen’s fragile metaphysical state and dependence upon the grace and charity of the Church and Savior.
Blake’s ironic take is to show the powerless children from the lowest economic and social status in full possession of a strong spiritual import and power, though he tempers those “harmonious thunderings” at the end when he turns from bends the “mighty wind” of the children’s song into a tepid sentimentality about children as angels and beggars at one’s door.
The consideration of those efforts to turn innocent spiritual power into cheap profit produces the companion poem, same title, in Songs of Experience:
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!
And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are filled with thorns:
It is eternal winter there.
For where’er the sun does shine,
And where’er the rain does fall,
Babes should never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.
The children, the poem insists, are victims of a usurious scheme to cheaply cloth and house them while they’re trained to feed industrial London’s insatiable appetite for child labor. Blake wants us to see the ill treatment of the children as an affront to the holiness of the ritual’s occasion. Charity schools were parish concerns, though maintained largely not for spiritual reasons so much as for the benefit of a public sentiment that would prefer to see the children used to generate some profit, and not, as Blake would have it, simply bask and grow while sheltered in the relative security of England’s wealth. Or at the least not be traumatized by poverty and enslavement, because children occupy a special place of holiness in Christianity: they are powerless and becoming. In Blake that lack of power and the blessing on it becomes a particular kind of power — a harmony and a wind or a river — when viewed as a representative ideal.
Just that. I was moved to look back at Blake’s poems because of the day and because of the horrifying response of defenders of the Catholic Church, and now the Vatican itself, to the growing scandal surrounding Pope Benedict. I’m not going to get into it, except to say that I find efforts to blame the systemic and widespread sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests on gays or hippies to be the most craven, low, and amoral kind of response. But if want to read about the depth to which the Church has sunk and its defenders are willing to, you can go here and keep reading. I think if we keep the day at all, we should think about the moral obligation of those whose dependency places them in our trust and the particular power they have to sanctify or condemn. And now look, it’s Good Friday.
Awesome on so many levels.
March 19, 2010
“If reform fails …”
March 7, 2010
This is not my topic, but I thought I’d throw the NYT editorial up in case people haven’t seen it. And if you have, maybe this would be a chance to reread it.
The House needs to pass the Senate bill, and pass the Senate bill now. Fixes may be possible, and fixes are certainly desirable, and there’s still a long way to go. For instance, if anyone’s interested in competing philosophies of regulation of health care to promote health and increase cost effectiveness, this article from the New York Review of Books discussing Cass Sunstein’s libertarian approach as an alternate to the “best practices” approach currently enshrined in the the Senate bill is thought-provoking. Despite the sincere insistence on the part of the congressional Democrats that the bill is not a “government takeover” of health care – and make no mistake, they are right in that – there are some legitimate concerns about strong-arming medical decision-making in order to direct patients to effective treatment.
But the Senate bill is actually a very good bill, as the NYT editorial outlines. The key innovation here is the creation of an actual insurance market. We’ve not had a genuine market for health insurance, and the opportunity is quite intoxicating. Insurers would compete for those seeking small business and private individual coverage. Insurers would be required to offer coverage to anyone who wishes to purchase it, hence the individual mandate that all citizens either purchase coverage or opt out, thus ensuring that risk is distributed market-wide and not driving up coverage costs.
Surprisingly it’s the business mandate that’s the more controversial provision – the requirement that businesses (larger than the traditional small business cutoff of 50 employees, as I recall, in the Senate version) either purchase insurance protection for their employees or pay a fee into a pool to support market administration. Is this an undue burden on businesses? No. The undue burden is out-of-control health plan costs which in the U.S. has become a huge economic drain on business activity and threaten to loom dangerously out of control unless immediate action is taken.
Some critics of the plan are saying that many employers will chose to pay the fine and just not offer benefits if they believe it will be more cost effective to ask employees to seek out healthcare on their own once it’s available. I say great. That’s in fact the beauty of the plan. The American peculiarity whereby workers are dependent upon their employers for health and related benefits is not only a bizarre way of doing things, it’s also increasingly a problem for the employee, given the seeming unstoppable trend toward less traditional employment, in the form of full-time, lifetime positions with benefits, in favor of fluid and shifting contractor, freelance, or multiple part-time arrangements that change frequently over time. The Senate bill offers us a possible mechanism whereby we can begin prying healthcare out of the human resources department and into the hands of the citizen, consumer, and patient.
Workers would now have the freedom to change jobs or careers without worrying how they’ll manage the COBRA payments or future medical needs. That’s the beauty of the whole thing: it will return power and freedom to the individual citizen. And I believe it’s quite possible that this will be the wedge that finally lets us lift benefit costs into the market economy, freeing up for businesses considerable capital for very much needed innovation and development. It’s by no means certain that this will be the road to sensible, market-based healthcare, but it is the best thing to get there we’ve seen by far.
Although many favor the public option, and are upset that the Senate bill has no provision for it, the insurance exchange without it should prove quite effective nonetheless. Many of the public option supporters, let’s be honest, want the public option as a first step toward a British NHS-style single provider plan. And I think most people familiar with healthcare issues would say that the NHS is much better than what we have currently in the U.S., though I find it doubtful that the public option would actually bring us there, or if at this point anything could. But the public option’s actual role in the current debate is not a stalking horse for socialism, but a mechanism to ensure market competition in the face of possible collusion or price-gouging on the part of insurers. We may still need it. But we won’t need it to develop conditions for the market and put it into play.
(And regarding public option as a market corrective? If anyone wants to bray about government inefficiency, remind them about the post office. Ask them to consider how much it costs to send something through the mail, and then how much FedEx or UPS will charge you for the same thing to be delivered in the same timeframe. Now think about how much package shipping might cost if the post office wasn’t there to offer a competitive disincentive to higher prices. Unfair competition? I thought not.)
Look, like I said, this isn’t my issue. I’m no expert – just someone who’s felt it necessary to stay informed. And if you feel you could be more informed, it’s not to late to start reading up. This is no time to be complacent and disgruntled because the current bill doesn’t include everything people have been clamoring for on the issue. Get behind it and get excited about it, because there’s a very real possibility that without continued pressure on Congress to complete the deal, it’ll stumble and fail. And if reform fails now, it might not ever happen.
Miscellany and hobby horses
March 3, 2010
I’m lazy, and I’ve been busy. I do have to start scheduling more time to contribute, and I do need to finish some of the essays I’ve been noodling around with, plus write a couple that’ve been banging around in my head. For starters, there’s the whole headscarf thing, on which I found I have a lot to say and therefore no time to finish. In the meantime, if anyone really wants to look into it themselves, much of what I have to say comes from Talal Asad, particularly his essay on French secularism collected here, Saba Mahmood’s work, particularly her seminal work on female subjectivity in the revival of Islamic culture here, and those beautiful and brave Rutgers women who wear this with their headscarf or their hijab.
As for my thoughts on why it’s not much of a problem for science if a significant minority of the population still can’t accept evolution but it is a problem for the religious, well, that will have to wait. There’s another brief piece on life on the farm inspired by that triple snow whammy also. That will help break up the monotony with some personal writing – it does seem as if much of my writing interest has turned largely to my professional interest in secularism and religious thought, and not as much the poetry and composition stuff – what tatters of my academic life I’m still clinging to. But that may not hold.
Or it may. Things that have caught my attention, lately:
The schoolchildren of Texas caught a lucky break in the recent primaries. Deranged state school board member Don McLeroy lost his bid to continue representing the Republican party for his district in favor of a candidate who pledged to offer support to a more moderate voice. The vote was pretty close, so that means there are still lots of people out there who feel driven to politicize education rather than allow children to know and experience the real world, and McLeroy still has like-minded supporters on the board, but a victory is still a victory.
Nicholas Kristof asked an insightful question on Sunday: What’s the largest U.S.-based international relief organization? It’s World Vision, an evangelical Christian organization based in Seattle that assists children caught up in humanitarian crises – Uganda, Congo, Haiti, etc. Over the past decade, their budget has tripled, and their sense of mission has grown in urgency and scope as well.
This is part of what I’m talking about when I insist that a more robust secularism means a greater voice in the public sphere for religious belief (- and by robust I don’t mean necessarily stronger, in the sense of stricter, but richer, less insecure, and therefore stabler, even if perpetually contested). Although I stand by my assessment that those who hold prominent leadership positions in the American evangelical movement are guilty of exporting violence and murder to other countries as part of a deepening campaign of intimidation against segments of our own society, much of the larger movement that is not so focused on a pointless struggle with secularity has found its sense of Christian mission urging them to respond to real and crucial issues like AIDs, the environment, and human trafficking.
That said, one should guard against the (secular) tendency to castigate organized or institutional religion in favor of the individual believer. Oh, it’s the priests and the preachers that are bad, right? For them it’s all about power and control, or preserving their traditional privilege, etc., etc. It’s what’s in people’s hearts that matter, right? Yeah, it’s not so simple.
It’s true that the religious leadership of much of the American religious community is probably more of a social evil than a social good. After all, there’s very little good that one can say about the Catholic priesthood at this point. And yet the experience of Catholicism without the presence of the Church itself is inconceivable – Protestants perhaps have a little more leeway to imagine religious faith absent the presence of a community, but it’s only a brief and largely illusory margin.
One of the key characteristics, and one of the key values, I think, of religious experience is that moral insistence of the religious community that informs and sustains the existence of individual believer. And as ethical instruction, this experience is immensely valuable in its efforts to not merely call us beyond or outside ourselves, but recognize that our own existence is dependent upon these prior commitments to what makes our being possible. It should go without question that I understand these moral commitments atheistically, but I also recognize that the language and mental architecture remain largely religious, so there we go.
A valuable instruction in this comes out of the torture debate. The Pew Research Center last year came out with polling results showing that support for torture of suspected terrorists was higher among the religiously faithful than those expressing no specific religious affiliation, and the more strongly one affiliated with religious practice and belief, the more likely one was to support torture. And yet nearly every major religious body has made strong and explicit statements condemning the use of torture, demonstrating a marked disjuncture between the attitudes of the religious and their institutions.
Religious affiliation and political identification are, of course, strongly linked, and as the faithful tend conservative, and as conservatives tend to view human dignity and rights more from a tribal perspective as opposed to the more liberal universal perspective, the results of the pole not entirely surprising. Religious institutions, of course, are driven to moral instruction that takes a longer view – one less susceptible to the passions of the moment and political division, and one that takes the dignity of human life as its authorizing position, so their insistence on the moral error of torture is not surprising either.
Unfortunately the religious leadership can articulate the position, but as a whole is too far engaged in their own divisive and politically motivated struggle against modernity to lead effectively, and so the necessary ministry just doesn’t get done. And abominations like Mark Thiessen’s largely self-serving attempt to justify torture along the lines of Catholic just war theology bubble up.
O.K. and one last thing: this recent study suggesting that high IQ correlates with liberalism, atheism, and monogamy in males. Of course it does, you expect me to say? Balderdash, I say. It’s a crock – maybe even a complete crock. The scientist that lead the study interpreted the significance of the correlation between atheism and intelligence thus: “Religion, the current theory goes, did not help people survive or reproduce necessarily, but goes along the lines of helping people to be paranoid, Kanazawa said. Assuming that, for example, a noise in the distance is a signal of a threat helped early humans to prepare in case of danger. ‘It helps life to be paranoid, and because humans are paranoid, they become more religious, and they see the hands of God everywhere,’ Kanazawa said.” The man knows nothing about current theories of religion, nor religion itself – it’s once of those not-infrequent embarrassments when social scientists, or other scientists for that matter, attempt to utter authoritative statements on the humanities. They don’t respect the disciplines enough to inform themselves.
And he has this to say about how they determined liberal tendencies: “The study takes the American view of liberal vs. conservative. It defines ‘liberal’ in terms of concern for genetically nonrelated people and support for private resources that help those people. It does not look at other factors that play into American political beliefs, such as abortion, gun control and gay rights. ‘Liberals are more likely to be concerned about total strangers; conservatives are likely to be concerned with people they associate with,’ he said.”
Well, O.K., sure, but given what I’ve gone over above, doesn’t that make these people more religious, too? What about other ways to articulate the liberal/conservative divide: anti-authoritarian (liberal) vs. authoritarian (conservative), for instance? Although there’s been some interesting work done recently on psychological disposition and the tendency to identify with one pole or the other of the American political spectrum, such as conservatives having a low threshold of bodily disgust and liberals tending to be more comfortable with ambiguity and complexity, whether one is willing help out a stranger is a surprisingly crude way to determine political sensibility.
And if this isn’t bad enough, in the CNN story that’s making the blog rounds, they bring in another academic whose field is described as “leadership” to comment (“leadership” WTF? that sounds even dumber than “communications” as an academic field), and he says that intelligent people are drawn to the novel and unusual as part of the self-display of their intelligence. And that’s not too far off-base from responsible sociology.
But then they quote this self-important blowhard saying that “unconventional” philosophies such as liberalism or atheism may be “ways to communicate to everyone that you’re pretty smart.” Unconventional? Liberalism? Until the Reagan years it was the dominant American political paradigm. And even before it became a political identification, the motivating philosophy behind the founding of the republic. Atheism may be unconventional, but for many of us the ability to think beyond our narrow self-interest and value the sovereign dignity of another is a core ethical aspiration. And it does that aspiration a disservice to label it, whether its the religious or the liberal label you want to put to it, which is why the conversation ought to continue.
The Texas education standards controversy
February 13, 2010
I had meant to write at length on this myself, but this article from the New York Times Magazine covers much of what I wanted to say quite brilliantly. It should be mandatory reading for anyone concerned with the state of education in the U.S.
For those of you unacquainted with the controversy, you’re probably aware of the strong influence Texas has on what gets taught in public schools nationally – well, public and quite a few private as well. Texas was an innovator and early leader in setting statewide educational standards, and as the second largest textbook market in the nation, what Texas decides is important and necessary to be taught is likely to shape the textbooks educational publishers will offer to the rest of the nation.
Over the past few years, the Texas State Board of Education has increasingly come under the control of conservative activists who are bent on politicizing education. As the article points out, one of the core focuses, and what seems to be the major force driving the agenda of this group, is to rewrite American history to highlight what Christian fundamentalists insist on is the Christian origin of the nation. Although the group has made only a little headway in rewriting American religious history precisely, preferring at this point to focus on promoting explicitly conservative interpretations of isolated historical incidents and shifting the history’s personnel around (removing Ted Kennedy from the history curriculum, and adding Phyllis Shafly, e.g..), the re-imagining of America as a Christian nation remain a rhetorical incitement to their project as well as the intended effect of their changes.
As the article points out, the group has some valid points. The strong interpretation of the separation of church and state over the twentieth century has introduced what the current Supreme Court might very well term a “chilling effect” on the instruction of the role of religion in American history. What should be viewed as a central, organic, and integral component of the lives of the European settlers in North America and the consequences of that settlement emerges instead as piecemeal and often incoherent. Are any schoolchildren taught about the First and Second Great Awakening? The first is important to an understanding of the American Revolution; the second to the broad experience of American Protestantism but democracy, capitalism, and secularism as well (one of the beautiful, untold ironies of American history is how the Second Great Awakening generously produced not only evangelical Christianity but also the contemporary forms of liberal secularism, and not as a reaction either).
But alongside the efforts of the conservative contingent of the board to reintroduce the history of American Christianity into the history of America, there are also examples of selective focus, like putting new emphasis on the Mayflower Compact as setting out a specific Christian agenda for the Puritan settlers, neglecting that the initial colonies arose out of a variety of competing and often exclusive agendas, notably the mercantile proto-capitalism of the Virginia Company. And then, of course, there is the absolute ahistorical hogwash, that seems to come from that unique blindness that first obliterates inconvenient facts and then manufactures new ones to fill the resulting vacuum.
This the familiar historical bullshit that proclaims the Founding Fathers to be Christians who designed the new American nation to be from start to second coming a Christian nation. Do I need even need to rehearse this? The Founding Fathers were Christian in the sense that they were white descendants of Northern Europeans who were not Jews – that is how they understood and used the word. Their own religious beliefs and practices were various to a man, and few bear much resemblance to the beliefs and practices we currently use the term Christian to mean. Few of them believed in the divinity of Christ; few of them believed in the exclusive claim of Christian revelation to the truth. Most of them were deeply suspect of revelation and its claims entirely.
(That these men were educated elites whose own experiences and attitudes could be quite different from the masses whose passions helped fuel the Revolution and the ensuing emergence of the first modern republic should be evident. But let’s not forget the importance of Enlightenment secular thought to American intellectual culture throughout class strata. Washington read his soldiers in Valley Forge from The American Crisis by Thomas Paine, the Christopher Hitchens of the eighteenth century, to inspire them for the Christmas Day engagement with the British soldiers in Trenton that was to change the course of the war to the Americans’ favor.)
The Constitution is a wholly secular document, written to help shape the development of a strong federal government that in part would protect and assure that persons could follow the dictates of individual conscience, no matter what that might be (and the framers were aware and quite explicitly state in their correspondence – especially Jefferson – that the Constitution was to favor no religion over any other, including Judaism, Hinduism, and Islam). Those aspects of the First Amendment that specifically treat religion, the disestablishment clause and the freedom clause, developed out of joint efforts by secularists like Madison and Jefferson and religious dissenters like Quakers and Baptists to protect believers, dissenters, non-believers, and religion itself from what they viewed as potential tyranny of allowing the state to claim any authority from or involvement in religious practice.
And any anyone who believes that American jurisprudence has any relationship to the Ten Commandments is a fool who has either no knowledge of the law or of the commandments, or, mostly likely, both.
The debate is important: 1) the historical record is quite clear that America was founded as the world’s first secular nation, and we need to adhere to the truth where we have it, painful and inconvenient as it may be; and 2) our democracy and our freedoms cannot be ever fully extricated from our secularity: the three are mutually interdependent concepts, and are the consequence and the dream of a fully realized modernity.
I have much more to say on efforts to politicize education and on the hard-line conservative war on truth and reality, and I’m sure I’ll have the opportunity. This issue is important in and of itself, and as the article suggests, the controversy has brought about sufficient national scrutiny to mean that the political futures of the thugs attempting to divert education toward their partisan political agendas is less certain than before. Please, don’t lose sight of this.
Sarkozy endorses headscarf ban.
January 26, 2010
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7002294.ece
Bad. Bad. Bad. Fuller discussion to come, but all-in-all, this is bad news and poor policy on several fronts. It’s no surprise, given the increasing paranoia in Europe over the presence of Muslims and France’s rightward drift, but it’s still a disappointment that the country that produced the “Rights of Man” is now just another one bent on chipping away at them.
Well this is good news.
January 21, 2010
The Obama administration has just reversed a Bush administration Patriot Act decision preventing Tariq Ramadan from entering the country. Ramadan being perhaps the most prominent intellectual in interfaith dialogues between the West and Islamic traditions, this is excellent news. Ramadan was first denied entry in 2004 when he arrived to take a job at Notre Dame. He was again denied a visa in 2006, an again in 2007 he was denied a visa that would allow him to participate in a academic seminar at which I was attending in California. The seminar attempted to comlink him into a video conferencing center, but it was a dismal technological failure.
