Earlier this week, I was planning on writing an article about Max Weber’s
tripartite classification of authority, a topic that I’ve been thinking
about a lot over the last few months. But as it turned out, yesterday and today
have brought enough interesting news in and of themselves to justify me in
taking a break from higher-order political philosophy. So here, without further
ado, are my comments on some of the more colorful goings-on in present-day
American life.
This
Sunday, a black man named Jacob Blake was shot in the back by police in
Kenosha, Wisconsin. The police were trying to arrest him when he bolted towards
his car, opened the door, and reached for something, and the officers,
suspecting quite reasonably that he might draw a weapon, opened fire.
In a reasonable
world, what happened to Blake would be recognized as a very different animal from
what happened to George Floyd – after all, Blake appeared to be reaching for
his gun; he wasn’t just laying on the ground for seven minutes with an officer
on his neck. Besides, he didn’t even die. But we don’t live in a reasonable
world, the Jacob Blake riots started up that very night, and when the sun rose
the next morning, several of Kenosha’s businesses lay in ashes.
The Democratic
Governor’s response to the shooting was to tweet: “Tonight, Jacob Blake was
shot in the back multiple times, in broad daylight, in Kenosha, Wisconsin….
while we do not have all of the details yet, what we know for certain is that
he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or
mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state
or our country.”
Insisting
that the shooting must have been motivated by racism, and using phrases like “mercilessly
killed” right after admitting that you don’t know the details, isn’t what
you do if you’re trying to inspire confidence in law and justice. But Governor
Tony Evers isn’t trying to inspire confidence in anything; he’s egging the
rioters on because he is a skilled politician and, as far as he’s concerned,
the rioters are on his team.
Also,
Governor Evers has exactly zero chance of having his own home or business
burned or looted.
As I’ve said before, in the present crisis, the forces of law and order are pushovers.
People like Evers are acting all nonchalant about the violence because they,
personally, have nothing to lose by acting all nonchalant about the violence.
The same is true for Republican politicians. While Republicans are on the opposite
team and must therefore tweet support for the police instead of the rioters,
they have been equally useless when it comes to actually enforcing the law.
A lot of
people on the Republican side of things are talking about how this is a preview
of what we’ll see more of in Joe Biden’s America, and then drawing the
conclusion that the riots will drive more voters over to Trump, just like the
riots of 1968 helped turnout for Nixon. Me? I don’t buy it. This time around,
the law-and-order candidate is the incumbent, not the challenger, so the
events in Kenosha or Chicago or Washington or wherever are an indictment of his
own pusillanimity, not that of the other party.
Well, it
isn’t exactly news anymore to say that constant race riots are becoming the new
normal for the poor and working classes on the ground in America’s cities. If,
on the other hand, you want to take a look at the goings-on among liberalism’s intellectual
elite – i.e. the people who live full-time in cloud cuckoo land – then a recent
Huffington Post headline provides a pretty good source of amusement.
The
headline reads: “I Have A White Boyfriend. Does That Make Me Any Less
Black?” The irony is that right next to the headline is a picture of
the author, and it’s pretty obvious that she herself is at least three-quarters
white. If her present misgivings about race-mixing strike you as something very
akin to closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, well then, you’re not
alone.
Then
there is the fiasco at Liberty University, whose president, Jerry Falwell Jr.,
just got the boot after the details came out on a bizarre sex scandal which
began clear back in 2012, when the then-49-year-old Falwell realized that he
really liked watching a youth of 20, whom he had first met as a swimming pool attendant at a hotel, have sex with his wife. The
relationship continued, supported by lavish gifts from Falwell to Pool Boy,
for six or seven years.
Then,
sometime earlier this month, Pool Boy decided to blab about the affair to
Reuters. While the journalists had to take him at his word about the physical
portion of the relationship, he was able to show screenshots of nude FaceTime
meetings to prove that something out of the ordinary was going on with
the trio. And thus ended Falwell’s career.
Within
the conservative movement, this is a big, big deal, as Falwell’s university has
long been a consistent hotbed of Republican activism. It’s where Ted Cruz
announced his presidential campaign way back in March of 2015 (does anybody
remember March of 2015?) and Falwell’s surprise endorsement of Trump instead of
Cruz early the next year was one of the big moments of the primaries. (Michael
Cohen – basically, Trump’s Better-Call-Saul type lawyer – has hinted that Falwell’s
flip-flop was the result of blackmail).
After the
election, Liberty University’s biggest Trump fans followed up on their victory by
making a movie about how President Trump was fulfilling biblical prophecy,
and the university later won notoriety for being the only campus in America
that didn’t shut down this spring, when the (then newer and deadlier) Coronavirus
arrived from China. (When I said that the variations in how different people and
institutions deal with covid are mostly a political shibboleth, I wasn’t
condemning just one side).
Before I
go on about the role of sex scandals among the religious right, I think it is worth
noting that Liberty University offers courses in which some of its undergrads
are taught a version of science tailored for compatibility with the idea that
the Earth is six thousand years old. Needless to say, the administration’s
embrace of the young-earther meme hasn’t exactly earned their institution a
respected place within the scientific community at large.
(Sidebar:
I am not going to follow the media norm of referring to this belief system as “Creationism,”
with no additional adjectives applied. The word “creationist” does not deserve the
baggage that has been loaded onto it; as far as I’m concerned, if you believe
that, once upon a time, God or the angels or whoever created one
cell, then you are a creationist. Since the spontaneous generation of life from
inert matter is something which, according to all known science, never happens,
this view of things deserves more respect than it's presently getting).
Now I happen to be one of those people who think that conflict between
science and religion is not inevitable. Religion in general – even a religion which
claims that mankind is God’s special creation and has a unique place in the cosmos – doesn't really need to depend on a disbelief in the idea that all life forms developed gradually from a common ancestor. After all, it has been a staple of religious thought for
thousands of years to view seemingly-random natural processes as steps in the unfolding of some sort of divine plan.
Rather, the theory of evolution is only a bugbear to a specific kind of religion: the kind in which a worshiper's relationship to his or her God is mediated through the authority of a collection of infallible sacred texts. Since people have been worshiping the Gods for much longer than they’ve known how to write, this is by no means a universal element of human religion.
But because infallible
authorities of one form or another have featured strongly in the dominant religions
of the Middle East and Europe for the last two millennia, it is easy for
westerners to think that all religions are like this. And it is easy for
scientifically-minded westerners to dismiss all religion as a relic
of a mankind's benighted and irrational past.
Now, the infallible-authority worldview happens to be fairly workable in a society where detailed knowledge of the world is more limited - that is, one in which people of all sects aren't constantly being bombarded with reasons to distrust their respective religious authorities. Indeed, during the halcyon days of Christian civilization, the greatest minds were all able to work productively within this intellectual framework.
These included theologians like Martin Luther and
Desiderius Erasmus, poets like Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, and John Milton,
and great artists like Michelangelo and Johann Sebastian Bach. There were also scientists
like Sir Isaac Newton, who made the foundational discoveries of physics while devoting
just as much time to unraveling the mysteries of biblical chronology. Newton
eventually came to believe that the Earth had been created in 3998 BC, and that
the end of the world would come no earlier than AD 2060.
But the intellectual revolution which began with men like Newton would eventually lead to vast improvements in the quality and scope of human knowledge. The discoveries of geologists
and paleontologists made it clear that the Earth was much older than the
Israelite elders who wrote Genesis had thought. Archaeologists and linguists
developed reliable methods of tracking the origins and migrations of ancient peoples,
and their results weren’t compatible with the idea that all the world’s inhabitants were descended from a single family who survived a global flood in
the third or fourth millennium BC.
And new
methods of textual criticism eventually led most scholars to agree that the Hebrew Bible was compiled from multiple original sources, whose authors often
disagreed with one another on questions of serious historical and theological importance.
Nowadays,
there are still plenty of religious groups which insist that all of this
information can’t possibly matter, and that all that's really going on is that God's people are enduring a test of their faith: will they accept the authority of holy writ in preference to all
human wisdom? But the religions that do this pay a price: the loss of their
brightest and most inquisitive young minds.
Now a
cynic might just say that it's obvious that when this happens, only the stupid people will remain, and that that’s who Jerry Falwell & Co. drew on to fill their university. This conclusion is wrong. Stupidity
in itself is almost never common enough to be an adequate explanation for a social
phenomenon. After all, the average person is not stupid, the average person is
of average intelligence.
What you’re
left with, after the best minds have been driven away, is a very few people who are genuinely dumber then a box of rocks, and a much larger number who are simply
willing to overlook any information that makes them uncomfortable.
And when
your movement is filled with people who approach life with that attitude, then it’s
no wonder that you are going to suffer from all sorts of messy scandals. There were
probably lots of people at Liberty University who were aware of the signs that
Jerry Falwell was a pervert, but because this knowledge made them uncomfortable, they found ways to overlook it.
The same
goes for the Baylor rape scandal a few years ago. If the notion that one of
your football players raped somebody and might deserve to be in jail rather
than on the playing field makes you feel queasy, then your first response will likely be to just look the other way. It is, after all, what you’re already doing
with all those carbon-dated artifacts and genetic clade diagrams.
Now, I
know that it isn’t fair to act like these sorts of scandals are mainly found among Evangelical
Christians. They aren’t, though the element of hypocrisy does make them more noticeable
there. The Catholics, for that matter, have a similar situation; Catholics are generally
more realistic about evolution than Evangelicals, but they compensate for their
limited view of biblical authority by placing way too much trust in church tradition and hierarchy, a strategy which opens up its own can of worms.
And, of
course, sex scandals happen all the time throughout secular society. They
are run-of-the-mill in Hollywood, and they find fertile ground in enclaves of extreme leftism
where sex between men and boys is ignored or celebrated because membership in the
LGBT community puts the men involved above criticism.
Each of
these subcultures is acting in accordance with slightly different motivating
forces when it decides to stage a cover-up rather than coming clean. But when dealing with Evangelicals, I think it would be naïve to
overlook the role of the anti-empiricist, believe-whatever’s-comfortable ethos which
a man or woman must cultivate in order to be a young-earther.
I think
that the same thing is going on with the anti-abortion movement’s willingness
to be duped by both Republican politicians and its own leaders into thinking
that it’s winning when it isn’t. President Reagan and the two Bushes appointed,
between them, four pro-abortion Supreme Court justices, beginning with Sandra
Day O’Connor in 1981. Despite private doubts about these judges’ ideology, neither
the National Right-to-Life Committee, nor any similar organization, has ever
gone forward and publicly opposed a Republican Supreme Court nomination.
After
all, admitting that the Republican party was deprioritizing the abortion issue
would have meant admitting that pro-life activists were further from victory
than they wanted to believe. The upshot of this excessive optimism is that, to this day, the majority
of said activists keep on deploying the same failed methods: polite protests
that don’t put political pressure on anybody, and unqualified support for the
Republican Party no matter how many times that party betrays them.
I have found
it interesting to note that the two Christian bloggers whom I read most often,
Matt Walsh and Rod Dreher, are pessimists about abortion and make no secret of
their belief that the pro-life movement is being used and discarded by
the Republican establishment. They are also very outspoken about the child sex abuse
scandals that bubble up from time to time in the Catholic church. I don’t think
it is a coincidence that both Walsh and Dreher believe in evolution.
But
within the broader religious right, such level-headed realism is hard to come
by. The sorts of people who looked the other way during the Baylor and Falwell
scandals comprise the bulk of the movement. This is almost inevitable when so many conservative
Christians are raised to think that loyalty to God is a matter of giving the
right answer when the Big Guy asks: “Who are you gonna believe, me or your
lyin’ eyes?” And when you think that way about your relationship with Deity,
it’s kind of inevitable that the same attitude will spill over into your
relationships with other human beings, too.
Well,
that is about all that I have to say today about the riots in Wisconsin, the
Jerry Falwell scandal, and the problems with belonging to a religion that asks you
to hide under a rug whenever science enters the room. I will get to Max Weber
some other time.
Yes, it's very depressing if you are both on the Right, and possess a brain that actually has some cerebral cortex, to see, over and over, proofs that the base of the Right seems to consist of a large number of deeply stupid, gullible, ignorant people. (The Left has the same problem with the followers of Al Sharpton, but of course this cannot be referred to publically.) Never mind. We are where we are.
ReplyDeleteThe blog's author and other readers might like to look at Larry Arnhart's blog, 'Darwinian Conservatism' (and he wrote a good book with the same title): https://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/
One consolation: there are, in the middle-ish reasonable part of the Left, some very good people who are really committed to Reason, Popperian verification, etc. They mostly spend their time firing at the dumbo Right. But recently, they have begun to realize that the monster of irrationality has taken hold on their own side. They have begun to assemble here: Quillette.com -- and we should give the all encouragement, even if some on the Mad-as-a-Hatter Left will see it as the Kiss of Death.
In fact, some of these people did a very good job, three decades ago, of exposing the 'Afro-centric' craze ... for instance, when the Portland School Board (the madness in that city has deep roots) changed the curriculum, an put Black education in charge of an uneducated Black crank who taught that not only were the ancient Egpytians Black but that they had psionic powers.
You can download a critique of this nuttiness, authored by the leftwing American Federation of Teachers, here:
https://www.aft.org/ae/spring1994/martel
and a fuller description of their nuttiness here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Baseline_Essays
Our side needs to be alert to this sort of division in the Left and where the division occurs along the lines of reason, toleration, civility -- values still held by some people on the Left -- vs the current rush towards a totalitarian vision of the world .. then we need to extend the hand of friendship to the defenders of reason, even if we disagree about other important things.