Republican lunacy
Mar. 4th, 2009 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbTo simplify matters somewhat: Louisiana has signed the teaching of creationism in schools into law. Florida, Mississippi and a swathe of Southern states have had bills to that purpose introduced by Republicans. But this is not only a southern disease: New Mexico just joined the club, and Michigan governor Tim Pawlenty is a well-known creationist.
If any of you weren't here the first time, here is what I said when Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee came out as a creationist:
....[there is no] contradiction between being being "descendants of a primate" and being "the unique creations of a God who knows us and loves us and who created us for his own purpose."... It does not take a Pope (but two Popes have pointed it out anyway) to point out that such a contradiction still does not exist. Provided we accept a creator God, it matters very little indeed by what means or stages He created us. Indeed, it is a useful exercise in humility - that most Christian of all virtues - to get it clear in our minds that the clumsy gorilla and the ridiculous chimpanzee are our close relatives. And it is good for the intellect to review, for instance, all the theories that Thomas Aquinas proved to be compatible with the idea of a Creator. (Even, he argued, that of a universe with no beginning or end!) Even my own self can grip such an obvious idea: as I put it elsewhere, God made the toymaker, the toy, and the child who holds the toy...
...Huckabee believes all propositions that claim to be scientific to be equally valid and defensible. "...if anybody wants to believe..." He is speaking as if it was the choice - and, one rather surmises, the wilful and selfish choice - of a scientist, indeed of any person, to choose this theory over another. That is not only bullshit, it is potentially appallingly dangerous. Ask any doctor how many cases he knows of "alternative" quacks who have killed people by denying them the proper medicine in favour of crank remedies or "mental" disciplines. Even to sceptics, the proof of the truth of science is in its immense, unmatched record of achievement. It has multiplied the powers and faculties of the ordinary human being a hundredfold (every time Mr.Smith drives his car out of his garage, he is literally controlling more power than many ancient sovereigns did), and access to knowledge and communication beyond comparison. But behind this lies a rigorous intellectual discipline. Whether we understand the heart of scientific method in falsifiability (Popper) or in the improvement of puzzle-solving capacities (Kuhn) or both (and to me, this is one of those contradictions that are not contradictions), it is clear that science progressively enlarges the area of what we know to be wrong. More than one discipline - genetics, paleontology, etc. - has drawn the range of acceptable theories so tight around the human descent from primates, that any other account is simply out of court. In this context, to speak of it as one of many possible beliefs, which a man accepts not because of the authority of science, but out of a mere personal taste, is disgraceful. It is a genuine validation of quackery and arbitrariness - finally, of that very relativism which the Pope has singled out as the evil of our age, and that all thinking Christians since C.S.Lewis if not G.K.Chesterton have been fighting.
Finally... it does not make no difference what view of science the leadership of a country takes. Ever since Prussian Germany discovered that scientific research in its vast universities was a tremendous booster of industrial competitivity and military power, science has been a direct concern of the State. All great powers finance and encourage scientific research and engineering innovation. And it makes an enormous amount of difference whether they pursue the proper kind of science.... A modern country cannot afford a leadership that ignores science (Italy has suffered severely for this) or that treats it as a matter of opinion. George W.Bush has been unfairly charged with being anti-scientific because of his doubts about the theories of global warming - doubts which legitimate and distinguished scientists across the world share. But that is one thing, and treating the descent of man as a matter of opinion - and doing so, at that, on theologically untenable ground - is quite another.
Bad theology, bad philosophy, bad politics: this is what Creationism is. It is not even an electoral asset: since William J.Bryant, no evangelical opponent of science has ever been elected to any office higher than a governorship. What garners one vote in the Bible Belt - and not all evangelicals are creationists, by any means - loses two in the rest of the Union. And given that the Republican party is in an inherently weak and vulnerable position, visibly in danger of being reduced to a sectional, regional, minority grouping - what kind of madness has it seized, to so obviously throw itself away from the mainstream of commonsense and knowledge?
I suspect I know the answer.
My answer begins with the crisis of the European, and especially British, left. This is a phenomenon that was already evident in its days of glory in the nineteen-sixties, but came to a serious head in the years of Ronald Thatcher. In Britain, and I think I can say elsewhere in Europe, the left became convinced that it could no longer win an election unless it threw overboard a good deal of its heritage and effectively accepted some variety of Thatcherite economics. But as the very identity of the left is campaigning and oppositional, it was not possible for them to simply withdraw on a position of good government and fiscal restraint. Such a position would win election, but would condemn party activists to boredom and irrelevancy.
I think it is for this reason that most or all left-wing parties in the western world have largely made a transition from a union-led, working-class based, vaguely socialist posture, to what can be called Political Correctness - a sheaf of largely middle-class concerns of various origins and tendencies, among which sexual antinomianism tended to be the most visible. The activists had to be kept active about something, after all. And if there was no prospect of repealing, say, Thatcherite union-busting legislation, then so-called "gay rights" might make a credible replacement. After all, a streak of antinomianism had always been a part of the left's Utopian currents.
This is the left I left: a grouping that paid no more attention to the concrete problems of real domestic working class citizens, but instead pursued a number of distant and often unreasonable will'o'the wisps while tolerating and indeed encouraging a Thatcherite attitude to economics along with a desperate short-termism.
Now my guess is that the Republican party is pursuing, from its own position, a similar course. Its problem is different: starting with the fact that the Republican leadership has to rely on voters it despises. It may be said that the modern Labour Party has unconsciously come to despise the real working classes, but that is neither a conscious nor an approved attitude. To the contrary, the party is full of "professional Yorkshiremen" and other dialect-spouting, consciously working-class types. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the likes of Karl Rove really and truly despise the evangelicals and social conservatives in their base. They cannot do without them, for without Bible Belt and libertarian votes they would barely register on the electoral scale; but they look down on them, socially, intellectually, and in every other way.
The electoral disasters of 2006 and 2008 are to some considerable extent the results of a Christian-libertarian electoral strike. Contempt cannot be long hidden, and the Republican electorate had realized that the party establishment would do nothing serious either to reduce state expenditure and power, or to stem the delegitimation of the family, or to reverse Wade vs.Roe. It is true that the sleazy and corrupt image of the Republicans was a major problem, but the problem went deeper; it reached to the roots of millions of minds who contemplated the ineptitude, inaction and immorality of the party, and wondered, what on earth did we vote this for?
The Republican leadership does not want to reduce state expenditure or federal power; to the contrary - as shown in the lame-duck months of the Bush II administration. It really does not want to do anything serious about the family. It has no more fondness for sexual decency than any other oligarchy. And the last thing it wants is the aggro and unpleasantness that would go with a head-on collision over abortion. For different reasons, that is, it is in the same situation of impotence and political irrelevance that Labour faced in about 1985. It has nothing to sell that prospective voters would want to buy.
And so, just as Labour threw itself into Political Correctness and antinomianism, so the Republican Party has invented its own brummagem version of a cause to rouse the troops: creationism. You have to remember that these people despise their voters. They regard them as brainless, Bible-thumping rednecks. They do not take their sense of morality seriously, and could not respond to it if they did, because it is not their sense of morality. They cannot accept a policy that really embodied Evangelical, or indeed libertarian, notions of decency - different though these may be from each other - because both would be too demanding for them. And so, as they cannot accept their base's moral demands, they have decided to pander to its superstition. Their idea is that creationism is just as good a way to roue the troops as abortion abolition or limited government, and far less trouble. Creationism is the structural equivalent for the Republicans of Political Correctness for Labour and the Democrats: an appeal to the more irrational and minoritarian instincts of a part of their electorate, meant to disguise a profound and central failure in their core politics.
If any of you weren't here the first time, here is what I said when Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee came out as a creationist:
....[there is no] contradiction between being being "descendants of a primate" and being "the unique creations of a God who knows us and loves us and who created us for his own purpose."... It does not take a Pope (but two Popes have pointed it out anyway) to point out that such a contradiction still does not exist. Provided we accept a creator God, it matters very little indeed by what means or stages He created us. Indeed, it is a useful exercise in humility - that most Christian of all virtues - to get it clear in our minds that the clumsy gorilla and the ridiculous chimpanzee are our close relatives. And it is good for the intellect to review, for instance, all the theories that Thomas Aquinas proved to be compatible with the idea of a Creator. (Even, he argued, that of a universe with no beginning or end!) Even my own self can grip such an obvious idea: as I put it elsewhere, God made the toymaker, the toy, and the child who holds the toy...
...Huckabee believes all propositions that claim to be scientific to be equally valid and defensible. "...if anybody wants to believe..." He is speaking as if it was the choice - and, one rather surmises, the wilful and selfish choice - of a scientist, indeed of any person, to choose this theory over another. That is not only bullshit, it is potentially appallingly dangerous. Ask any doctor how many cases he knows of "alternative" quacks who have killed people by denying them the proper medicine in favour of crank remedies or "mental" disciplines. Even to sceptics, the proof of the truth of science is in its immense, unmatched record of achievement. It has multiplied the powers and faculties of the ordinary human being a hundredfold (every time Mr.Smith drives his car out of his garage, he is literally controlling more power than many ancient sovereigns did), and access to knowledge and communication beyond comparison. But behind this lies a rigorous intellectual discipline. Whether we understand the heart of scientific method in falsifiability (Popper) or in the improvement of puzzle-solving capacities (Kuhn) or both (and to me, this is one of those contradictions that are not contradictions), it is clear that science progressively enlarges the area of what we know to be wrong. More than one discipline - genetics, paleontology, etc. - has drawn the range of acceptable theories so tight around the human descent from primates, that any other account is simply out of court. In this context, to speak of it as one of many possible beliefs, which a man accepts not because of the authority of science, but out of a mere personal taste, is disgraceful. It is a genuine validation of quackery and arbitrariness - finally, of that very relativism which the Pope has singled out as the evil of our age, and that all thinking Christians since C.S.Lewis if not G.K.Chesterton have been fighting.
Finally... it does not make no difference what view of science the leadership of a country takes. Ever since Prussian Germany discovered that scientific research in its vast universities was a tremendous booster of industrial competitivity and military power, science has been a direct concern of the State. All great powers finance and encourage scientific research and engineering innovation. And it makes an enormous amount of difference whether they pursue the proper kind of science.... A modern country cannot afford a leadership that ignores science (Italy has suffered severely for this) or that treats it as a matter of opinion. George W.Bush has been unfairly charged with being anti-scientific because of his doubts about the theories of global warming - doubts which legitimate and distinguished scientists across the world share. But that is one thing, and treating the descent of man as a matter of opinion - and doing so, at that, on theologically untenable ground - is quite another.
Bad theology, bad philosophy, bad politics: this is what Creationism is. It is not even an electoral asset: since William J.Bryant, no evangelical opponent of science has ever been elected to any office higher than a governorship. What garners one vote in the Bible Belt - and not all evangelicals are creationists, by any means - loses two in the rest of the Union. And given that the Republican party is in an inherently weak and vulnerable position, visibly in danger of being reduced to a sectional, regional, minority grouping - what kind of madness has it seized, to so obviously throw itself away from the mainstream of commonsense and knowledge?
I suspect I know the answer.
My answer begins with the crisis of the European, and especially British, left. This is a phenomenon that was already evident in its days of glory in the nineteen-sixties, but came to a serious head in the years of Ronald Thatcher. In Britain, and I think I can say elsewhere in Europe, the left became convinced that it could no longer win an election unless it threw overboard a good deal of its heritage and effectively accepted some variety of Thatcherite economics. But as the very identity of the left is campaigning and oppositional, it was not possible for them to simply withdraw on a position of good government and fiscal restraint. Such a position would win election, but would condemn party activists to boredom and irrelevancy.
I think it is for this reason that most or all left-wing parties in the western world have largely made a transition from a union-led, working-class based, vaguely socialist posture, to what can be called Political Correctness - a sheaf of largely middle-class concerns of various origins and tendencies, among which sexual antinomianism tended to be the most visible. The activists had to be kept active about something, after all. And if there was no prospect of repealing, say, Thatcherite union-busting legislation, then so-called "gay rights" might make a credible replacement. After all, a streak of antinomianism had always been a part of the left's Utopian currents.
This is the left I left: a grouping that paid no more attention to the concrete problems of real domestic working class citizens, but instead pursued a number of distant and often unreasonable will'o'the wisps while tolerating and indeed encouraging a Thatcherite attitude to economics along with a desperate short-termism.
Now my guess is that the Republican party is pursuing, from its own position, a similar course. Its problem is different: starting with the fact that the Republican leadership has to rely on voters it despises. It may be said that the modern Labour Party has unconsciously come to despise the real working classes, but that is neither a conscious nor an approved attitude. To the contrary, the party is full of "professional Yorkshiremen" and other dialect-spouting, consciously working-class types. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that the likes of Karl Rove really and truly despise the evangelicals and social conservatives in their base. They cannot do without them, for without Bible Belt and libertarian votes they would barely register on the electoral scale; but they look down on them, socially, intellectually, and in every other way.
The electoral disasters of 2006 and 2008 are to some considerable extent the results of a Christian-libertarian electoral strike. Contempt cannot be long hidden, and the Republican electorate had realized that the party establishment would do nothing serious either to reduce state expenditure and power, or to stem the delegitimation of the family, or to reverse Wade vs.Roe. It is true that the sleazy and corrupt image of the Republicans was a major problem, but the problem went deeper; it reached to the roots of millions of minds who contemplated the ineptitude, inaction and immorality of the party, and wondered, what on earth did we vote this for?
The Republican leadership does not want to reduce state expenditure or federal power; to the contrary - as shown in the lame-duck months of the Bush II administration. It really does not want to do anything serious about the family. It has no more fondness for sexual decency than any other oligarchy. And the last thing it wants is the aggro and unpleasantness that would go with a head-on collision over abortion. For different reasons, that is, it is in the same situation of impotence and political irrelevance that Labour faced in about 1985. It has nothing to sell that prospective voters would want to buy.
And so, just as Labour threw itself into Political Correctness and antinomianism, so the Republican Party has invented its own brummagem version of a cause to rouse the troops: creationism. You have to remember that these people despise their voters. They regard them as brainless, Bible-thumping rednecks. They do not take their sense of morality seriously, and could not respond to it if they did, because it is not their sense of morality. They cannot accept a policy that really embodied Evangelical, or indeed libertarian, notions of decency - different though these may be from each other - because both would be too demanding for them. And so, as they cannot accept their base's moral demands, they have decided to pander to its superstition. Their idea is that creationism is just as good a way to roue the troops as abortion abolition or limited government, and far less trouble. Creationism is the structural equivalent for the Republicans of Political Correctness for Labour and the Democrats: an appeal to the more irrational and minoritarian instincts of a part of their electorate, meant to disguise a profound and central failure in their core politics.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-04 09:00 pm (UTC)This is essentially a symbolic gesture, though it will no doubt be used as a pretext for introducing teaching materials promulgated by the Discovery Institute, and creationist material generally (which is of course intended). But in that sense, in the legislation's careful avoidance of anything explicitly creationist, it opens the door far wider than that.
Speaking of which, in some respects paralleling the developments you have outlined in the Republican party, it is interesting to note that the Discovery Institute itself has been engaged in a careful retreat from anything explicitly Christian, though it still aggressively seeks endorsement by and association with Christians. I imagine that Christian creationists support it because they imagine it will open the door for Christian creationism, but in reality there is no reason to assume that that is necessarily what will fill the vacuum.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 08:01 am (UTC)So you may be right in saying that Louisinia has not signed the teaching of creationism in schools, but they have most certainly opened the door for exactly that and I can think of no other reason for their
Strangely enough, since this is one of the things that most irritates me, I really have no issue with creationism being taught in schools. So long as it is not a part of Biology or Science classes. RE or civics, even psychology or sociology may be able to cover it, but not Biology or science.
I would also suspect that the Discovery Institute's retreat from anything overtly Christian is a tactic, rather than a real change in thinking. They try to promote Intelligent Design as a non-religious scientific theory in order to work their way arround the (totally justified in my opinion) accusation that they are promoting a religious view rather than a scientific theory.
I think if anything other than Christian creationism were to 'fill the vacuum' as you put it, the Discovery Institute would change tack double quick.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 09:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-05 10:35 pm (UTC)I wonder about that. They might if that happened today, but they have been touting/encouraging non-Christian membership in the Institute, and their spokesmen are fond of saying things like, "Although I find it congenial to think that [the designer is] God, others might prefer to think it's an alien -- or who knows? An angel, or some satanic force, some new age power." (Behe) If pursued for long enough, that fiction may well become the reality of the organization.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-07 08:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-04 09:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-04 11:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-08 08:43 pm (UTC)(Kicks himself mentally)
Date: 2009-03-08 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-10 08:42 pm (UTC)Am I venturing into conspiracy nut territory if I wonder whether this might have an additional intention of marginalizing Christian influence in the long term by making Christians look dumb?
no subject
Date: 2009-03-10 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-10 09:52 pm (UTC)