Israeli Racism

Israel's Arab problem hits home | Salon.com

Here's something, just fastfood for thought while to stall on writing the intro to my book. An Arab Israeli, with the best possible qualifications, was turned down from Israeli pilot training because he was an Arab.

Please tell me, someone out there, if you are out there, why Israel is able to get away with this blatent racism. I'm not even talking about any right of return for Palestineans who were displaced and are now living in refugee camps outside of Israeli territory. I'm talking about a million Arabs who are Israeli citizens.

Yes I know it isn't, as it were, racial racism because, yes I know the many Israelis are now Jews from the middle east who are brown, and that some are Jews from Ethiopia who are black. But racism in the relevant sense doesn't necessarily track skin color: it's a matter of discriminating against people on the basis of ancestry or assignment to some kinship group--not necessarily a "visible minority." You would think these Israelis would know about that--the Holocaust was, after all, strictly white on white genocide. "Aryans" had to do geneology to prove who they were and Jews had to wear yellow stars so that they could be identified. And, I'm sorry to be cynical here, but Americans and others were especially upset about this particular genocide because it was white people who were getting killed. In fact, it was in many cases white middle class people who were getting killed.

Maybe it bothers me because I'm just a crude Consequentialist. I don't care about backward-looking considerations or about compensation for past injustices. The Jews may have had a lousy deal since 70 AD culminating in the Holocaust but that doesn't buy a free pass for this kind of racism. BAD, BAD, BAD--as I tell my lab when he gets up on the couch. Not that he listens. He gets down as soon as he hears me coming down the stairs in the morning, rolls his eyes upward so you can see the whites at the bottom and puts back his floppy ears. I still know what he's up to.

One of the few passages I remember from the OT is Moses giving the Israelites a pep talk just after they get out of Egypt. Moses says, "Remember you were sojourners in the land of Egypt, and the Egyptians treated you harshly so..." So? There are two ways to go with this: (1) Turnabout is fair play--this is a fraternity ititiation. You got trashed so now you can trash them! or (2) You know what it felt like so don't do it to other people.

Moses went with (2).

The Multicultural Mystique

Well, I've just finished my book The Multicultural Mystique: The Liberal Case Against Diversity. I would be most grateful for comments.

I've beat my May 1 deadline by 3 months, so that's probably good. I just hope that I can use that time to get comments so that I can respond and revise given all that time I've bought for myself. So if anyone out there is still reading my blog, please help me out!

I suppose I'm blowing my cover here because you can easily track back to find out who I am from the page I've linked. But I think most people know who I am anyway. I do want to note that the views I've expressed in my blog and in the book don't represent the views of my university and also that this blog resides at a remote location, not my university server.

There's been all sorts of crap coming down these days suggesting that we academics are running a racket--overpaid, underworked, secure in our jobs so that we aren't "accountable" and given to promoting politically correct nonsense. Let me tell you it ain't so. The book I have up at this link is inflamatory and very politically incorrect: if I didn't have tenure, there is no way I could have put this up without risking my job and probably losing it. If I didn't have an academic job I wouldn't have had the time or resources to write it. What I've written is, I believe, important--not only for me to say but for people to read. Without the academic system that gives me resources, time, and safety to do this I couldn't have done it, and neither could my brother and sister academics who write stuff like this have done what they do.

Views of America

BBC NEWS | Have Your Say | What do you think of US policy?: "US policy affects the rest of the world. Therefore the US should allow the rest of the world to vote for the US President."

What a good idea! The rest of the comments at this site, are good too--and not surprising.

More on our India simulation game

I've just gotten back from the second day of our historical simulation of India on the Eve of Independence.

At this point it's 1945. Hardline Muslims have walked out of our talks at Simla. We, Gandhi and Congress, demanded that the Brits quit India immediately and called a referendum. We won but Muslims and our two representatives from the princely states, from Hyderabad and Kasmir voted against us, and there is rioting in the streets. My aim is to avoid partition, but it doesn't look like we can achieve that unless we provide written assurances that Muslims will get, at the very least, proportional representation in the form of seats in the national assembly guaranteed to Muslims. Dr. Ambedkar, respresenting the majority of Untouchables also demands representation. We, Gandhi, can't give in on that one (but I H. E. think it would be a good idea).

For me, out of character, this has been a frustrating and enlightening experience, and one that's very important for me given both my current project on multiculturalism and my ongoing discussion with my best friend, who's been in Kenya for the past 14 years, about colonialism.

Off the cuff, it seems to me that it's a mistake to regard "colonialism" as single kind of phenomenon that can be forced into the same template wherever it occurs. In subsaharan Africa, nation states that were part of a technologically advanced, literate culture took over territories that were, for the most part, backward, tribal and illiterate. This was like the Roman conquest of Gaul and other barbarian kingdoms and chiefdoms in norther Europe. In India, two of the world's high civilizations duked it out. This was like the Moorish conquest of Spain. So in some respects it's harder to see what should have happened in India.

It's easy to see, for me at least, what should happen in Africa. The barbarians in Gaul were Romanized and became French. They didn't become Romans, or Italians, but like the barbarians in other parts of northern Europe they were grafted into the high civilization of the Mediterranean--first into the Roman Empire, then into Christendom--and eventually became equal partners, each nation playing variations on a common theme. It's not so clear what should have happened in Spain. This is all terribly big picture and naive, but why not have some fun?

It's almost disconcerting to get out of character after playing the Game for two days. But if I, H.E. were myself in India, I wouldn't have wanted the British out. I would have wanted further evolution toward dominion status. By the time of independence, India was already largely independent at the local and provincial level. I would simply have wanted more representation at every level of the Indian Civil Service, the obliteration of all color lines, and special rights and accommodations for religious minorities and Untouchables, guaranteed and enforced by the British. I would also have wanted the power to determine economic policies, tariffs and the like, to promote industrialization and see to it that the British couldn't keep India underdeveloped, as a source of raw materials. I would certainly have been utterly opposed to Gandhi's idiotic vision of an India of 10,000 self-sufficient rural villages maintained by agriculture and cottage industries.

I suppose I react violently and adversely to that vision because I grew up in the Counterculture and am reacting to the unimaginative, romantic take on 10,000 villages supported by organic farming and crafts. Unimaginative because very few people who enthused about this program could imagine what daily life in the long term was like in such villages or comparable communal arrangements. It's lots of fun to rough it for a week or two, camp out with your nice REI gear--with your cell phone, access to showers on the camp grounds and your camper for quick trips to town if you get the munchies or if you need tampax. It's fun to grow a garden and make salad from your own fresh veg, to do some basket-weaving, throw a pot or two and even get into spinning. That's as far as Romantics can see--they can't imagine what it would be like week after week, year after year, for your entire life to grow your own food, spin your own yarn, make your own baskets, without any means of communication with the world outside, without transportation, without doctors, dentists or Western medicine and without any chance of getting out.

Romantics are unimaginative: they effuse over the natural beauty of rural settings, the crafts, the coming of age ceremonies and potlatches, but can't imagine what it would be like to live your entire life without traveling more than 20 miles from your native village--if that--without having access to a virtually unlimited supply of books and paper, without meeting people you haven't known all your life, walking through a city, eating fruit out of season or listening to Bach

What me, Gandhi?

USD History News: Conference at USD: "Reacting to the Past: History as Hypothesis"

I'm just home from the first day of a history role playing game, India on the Eve of Independence. It's been terrific, but exhausting, experience and terrific pedagogy. I'd love to take a class like this--but I wouldn't have the guts to teach it!

When I got my assigned role a couple of weeks ago, half of Gandhi (2 of us are playing him) my heart sank, until I realized that by playing a role I found unsympathetic I might actually learn something. So I immersed myself in the literature and the more I read the more unsympathetic I became. His vision for India, the policies he promoted and, most deeply of all, his whole "philosophy of life" are utterly and diametrically opposed to everything I believe--and feel. It's been a very tough part, though I'm giving it everything I've got.

At the most fundamental level it's his picture of the world and our place in it that I find most alien. First, a moral universe in which the fundamental category is duty and wellbeing, insofar as it figures at all, is a byproduct of doing one's duty. To me, duty is just a means for distributing individual wellbeing. Secondly, the notion of individuals as parts of a grand scheme of things which which they are fundamentally in harmony if they play the game properly and do the duties that come with their particular place in the cosmos and social order.

To me, the grand scheme of things imposes constraints on individuals, who achieve wellbeing by fighting it, mastering it, subduing it. If I have a picture it's of individual agents as atoms, or maybe better, the nuclei of atoms, surrounded by a sphere of freedom, the little bit of the world within our power to dominate. These spheres press against one another, like bubbles in a foam. We each try to expand our sphere of freedom pressing against the spheres of others, and we all press against the constraints imposed by Nature, red in tooth an claw.

Now, there is no way of adjudicating between two pictures that are so fundamental level. My picture is indefensible, but so is Gandhi's. All we can do is work out the ramifications of these fundamental commitments and aim at consistency. That, in any case, is what I'm trying to do with Gandhi.

Given Gandhi's fundamental picture, his program is a consistent consequence--his repudiation of Western ways and opposition to industrialization, his vision of an India of 10,000 self-sufficient villages where people farm and do crafts, his education program for training children to play their roles within this scheme. Yet still it seems appalling, the narrow, constrained, dull lives he envisions for most of India's 400 million citizens--weaving the 1000th basket, and the 10,000th basket, and the 100,000th basket until they die--and, presumably, are reincarnated to weave even more baskets. Somehow "spirituality" is supposed to fill the void in these otherwise dull, empty lives, but I can't see how. I suppose it's consistent with the Hindu idea that our aim is to escape this treadmill--but why would anyone want to make life a treadmill, to relegate people to this emptiness and tedium, pain and drudgery, when other options are feasible?

The answer I suppose is that it's all tedium, pain and drudgery: we can decrease the pain but it's still there; we can decrease the reps, but we're still repeating the same tasks--it's just that the cycles are longer. The village craftsman throws 2 pots an hour--I teach two logic courses a year. Big difference. But it is a big difference because if the cycles are long enough we don't get bored, and if the tasks are complex enough we can change them and improve them--there's the possibility of achievement. In the grand scheme of things neither the pots nor the logic courses matter: the sun will explode into a red giant and all this will be wiped out and, beyond that, the material universe will expand, then contract and collapse. But who cares about the grand scheme of things. I will get personal gratification, I will feel a sense of achievement, I will enjoy myself.

What me, Gandhi?
USD History News: Conference at USD: "Reacting to the Past: History as Hypothesis"

I'm just home from the first day of a history role playing game, India on the Eve of Independence. It's been terrific, but exhausting, experience and terrific pedagogy. I'd love to take a class like this--but I wouldn't have the guts to teach it!

When I got my assigned role a couple of weeks ago, half of Gandhi (2 of us are playing him) my heart sank, until I realized that by playing a role I found unsympathetic I might actually learn something. So I immersed myself in the literature and the more I read the more unsympathetic I became. His vision for India, the policies he promoted and, most deeply of all, his whole "philosophy of life" are utterly and diametrically opposed to everything I believe--and feel. It's been a very tough part, though I'm giving it everything I've got.

At the most fundamental level it's his picture of the world and our place in it that I find most alien. First, a moral universe in which the fundamental category is duty and wellbeing, insofar as it figures at all, is a byproduct of doing one's duty. To me, duty is just a means for distributing individual wellbeing. Secondly, the notion of individuals as parts of a grand scheme of things which which they are fundamentally in harmony if they play the game properly and do the duties that come with their particular place in the cosmos and social order.

To me, the grand scheme of things imposes constraints on individuals, who achieve wellbeing by fighting it, mastering it, subduing it. If I have a picture it's of individual agents as atoms, or maybe better, the nuclei of atoms, surrounded by a sphere of freedom, the little bit of the world within our power to dominate. These spheres press against one another, like bubbles in a foam. We each try to expand our sphere of freedom pressing against the spheres of others, and we all press against the constraints imposed by Nature, red in tooth an claw.

Now, there is no way of adjudicating between two pictures that are so fundamental level. My picture is indefensible, but so is Gandhi's. All we can do is work out the ramifications of these fundamental commitments and aim at consistency. That, in any case, is what I'm trying to do with Gandhi.

Given Gandhi's fundamental picture, his program is a consistent consequence--his repudiation of Western ways and opposition to industrialization, his vision of an India of 10,000 self-sufficient villages where people farm and do crafts, his education program for training children to play their roles within this scheme. Yet still it seems appalling, the narrow, constrained, dull lives he envisions for most of India's 400 million citizens--weaving the 1000th basket, and the 10,000th basket, and the 100,000th basket until they die--and, presumably, are reincarnated to weave even more baskets. Somehow "spirituality" is supposed to fill the void in these otherwise dull, empty lives, but I can't see how. I suppose it's consistent with the Hindu idea that our aim is to escape this treadmill--but why would anyone want to make life a treadmill, to relegate people to this emptiness and tedium, pain and drudgery, when other options are feasible?

The answer I suppose is that it's all tedium, pain and drudgery: we can decrease the pain but it's still there; we can decrease the reps, but we're still repeating the same tasks--it's just that the cycles are longer. The village craftsman throws 2 pots an hour--I teach two logic courses a year. Big difference. But it is a big difference because if the cycles are long enough we don't get bored, and if the tasks are complex enough we can change them and improve them--there's the possibility of achievement. In the grand scheme of things neither the pots nor the logic courses matter: the sun will explode into a red giant and all this will be wiped out and, beyond that, the material universe will expand, then contract and collapse. But who cares about the grand scheme of things. I will get personal gratification, I will feel a sense of achievement, I will enjoy myself.

The Angels Weep

Online NewsHour: Report | Young People Speak Out on Faith | January 3, 2007 | PBS

Among young people in this most recent survey that we've done, we do see -- I'm hesitant to use the term "polarization," but clearly we see an over-representation of evangelicals among the young and a significant over-representation of the young in the unaffiliated category.

ADORA MORA: ...I believe in personal relationships with God; I don't really believe in church. My mom doesn't like me to say that, but it's the truth. I believe my church is sitting in my house, writing a letter to God about what he's done for me, or about good and bad things that have happened with my life and how we'll overcome them together.

JUDY WOODRUFF: As we traveled across the country, we often heard young people talk about their "personal relationship" with God, which was more important to them than congregational loyalty or the structure that it provides.

DAISY COOPER: I'm not into religion. I have a relationship. Religion is -- that's what's like -- that's what sparks confusion, and God is not the author of confusion. So a religion is what blocks people from getting the real.


Here's a Newshour segment that I didn't manage to catch...so, so, to me, depressing. Judy Woodruff, being upbeat, notes that these young evangelicals aren't necessary either politically or socially conservative. That's good. But what's depressing to me is that they're evangelicals, that they see religion personally rather than institutionally, without any connection to history, culture or art, and psychologically, as part of life experience hooked up with their various life problems and concerns.

I'm still skeptical as to whether the kids interviewed are really representative: the pitch is that this style of religiousity is the going thing so, as a journalist, you look for representatives.

Yet still, not a one, neither the evangelicals or the dropouts is anything remotely like was--their whole take just doesn't connect with anything I can understand. Those who claim that religion is very important in their lives don't seem to me in any way religious: they're absolutely remote from the impulse in myself that I understand as religious. I don't even understand the "relationship" business--I quite literally don't understand what they're talking about. No wonder there's "an over-representation of the young in the unaffiliated category." If this is religion, who wants it?

On the one hand, I'm happy that I've got so much more, that I can get so much more, and so much more intense pleasure (I'm listening to the new CD of the Bach B Minor Mass my son and daughter-in-law got me for Christmas--good, good performance!) But it's disconcerting that I'm so far out and maybe even more so that while I've always thought I was religious I can't even get what they're talking about, can't make any connection. (Ah, the Gloria...turn up the volume). Meanwhile Dawkins and Dennett are high on the charts and the militant atheists on the net are crusading and predicting the end of religion in 25 years.

It isn't even the end of religion as such but what seems to be the end of a whole grand cultural package and an attitude (very good Laudamus--creamy, not operatic, and very technically proficient on the ornaments). I've been soaking in books on my favorite time and place--Hellenistic through Late Antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean. I'm not sure whether the nomenclature is right--I mean Alexander to Julian the Apostate. Near the end, the men of letters watch the whole of high culture end--ossify, erode and then crumble--the gods, the art, the literature, the ethos, everything that matters, everything that touches the soul not, as it did in the West, with a bang but with a whimper and write things like, "even in these days Alexandria is still a center of learning." They knew it was happening, knew their world was dying. Why did it happen, and why is it happening now?

I suppose this sounds both pretentious and melodramatic. So be it. Technology at least is doing fine this time around. I can listen to Bach whenever I want and as often as I want, read reviews of books online and order them instantly from Amazon and worship my own gods.

Big Business

A Year to Suspend Disbelief - New York Times

AS 2006 recedes and investors ponder another round of amazing events in the business world, one theme keeps recurring. It was a year when truth was more audacious than fiction. A hedge fund loses $6 billion in a week. A chief executive receives an $82 million pension after his company loses billions in shareholder value. A board chairwoman snoops on her fellow directors and journalists. Authorities discover that a throng of executives have spent years shifting stock option dates to fatten already-bulging paychecks.

Not one of these scenes would have been credible had it appeared in a novel. Real life, however, is another matter. And in 2006, investors had to suspend their disbelief almost daily.

What's the matter with Kansas, again. Here are wasteful, incompetent, crooked CEOs with multimillion dollar compensation packages, bonuses, stock options and perks, trashing stockholders, spying on employees and looting their firms. But no one's down on Business as such in the way that they're down on Government as such. And no one takes Jeffrey Skilling, the Enron CEO who wiped out employees' retirement funds by his shenanigans as representative of business people in the way that they take Ward Churchill who, by comparison, got chicken-feed in salary and lecture fees for pretending to be an American Indian as representative of academics.

So why do Americans regard the corporate execs who raid the cookie jar as a few bad apples who don't reflect adversely on Business but jump on crooked politicians and academics as typical of the institutions they represent?

My conjecture is that it comes from a bias against institutions and expertise, and a fantasy picture of business. For all that Enron was in the news, and in spite of the fact that most Americans work for big businesses, when you say "business" to Americans they still imagine Jim Anderson's insurance agency and the little druggist on Main Street. That why W could persuade millions of working class Americans who had no chance of inheriting taxable estates, that the "Death Tax" was a plot against America. Jim wouldn't be able to pass his insurance agency down to Bud and Dobie would never inherit the Gillis grocery store.

Americans aren't pro-business--they're anti-big, anti-institutional and anti-bureaucratic. Even if they buy insurance online and shop at Walmart, "business" still immediately conjures up the the Anderson insurance agency, Gillis grocery and a live voice at the other end of the phone. Government immediately suggests legions of remote, faceless bureaucrats, red-tape, phone-trees, arbitrary regulations and impersonal treatment--the DMV. And politicians who are virtually logical constructions by groomers and trainers out of the data extracted from focus groups--photo-shopped and lip-synching.

Democrats gotta fix this.

Toward Freedom - Behind European Governments%u2019 Veil of Deceit

This poses a very serious question. Why are a marginal number of Muslim women wearing the burqa, being targeted for possible legal precedents?...This is racism in its simplest form. Such a ruling will undoubtedly have a domino effect across Europe, with Italy eagerly waiting in the wings. Although France and Turkey are infamous for curtailing religious freedoms, other European nations have not gone unnoticed...Buzz terms such as ‘assimilation’, ‘integration’ and the barrier to social ’cohesion’ are constantly being flouted to mask the media’s true motives of injecting the fabricated war of ‘us against them’ to the public, reminiscent of the George Bush school of thought.

Right now I'm writing a section of my book on veiling.

Here's a conundrum: do proposed policies banning or discouraging some of the more spectacular forms of Islamic dress promote segregation or undermine it? Do they curtail individual freedom or expand it?

The core issue as I see it is the conflict of interests between individuals who want to assimilate and those who want to remain separate, between cultural preservationists and integrationists. And there is no free ride. Women wearing veils make ethnicity more salient, they make it harder for individuals who are ethnically tagged by the color of their skin or other markers to be perceived as plain, generic citizens rather than members of a special cultural group. So veiling, and other practices that display cultural identity, set back the interests of individuals who do not want to be identified with ancestral cultures.

The bottom line is that veiling is voluntary but ethnic identification isn't: you can take of the veil but you can't take off the color of your skin. So veiled women and other cultural preservationists, by their voluntary actions, lock others who happen to look like them, into cultural identities that they can't avoid.

For comparison consider this: suppose women demand extended maternity leave. That's a choice on their part. But it's a choice that sets back my interests because it leads employers to believe that they will have to make expensive accommodations for women who are likely to demand maternity leave. I can't dissociate myself from these women--being female isn't voluntary--and their behavior reflects on me. Their freedom impinges on my freedom and restricts my opportunities.

It would be nice if everyone treated everyone "as an individual" but that isn't the way it works. The religious freedom issue is pure bs. There is no fabricated war of "us against them." The war is between those of us who want to join the mainstream, and those with whom we're inextricably linked by unchosen characteristics--by sex or race--who don't and selfishly pursue their interests at our expense.

Episcopalians Are Reaching Point of Revolt - New York Times
It’s a huge amount of mess,” said the Rev. Dr. Kendall Harmon, canon theologian of the Diocese of South Carolina, who is aligned with the conservatives. “As these two sides fight, a lot of people in the middle of the Episcopal Church are exhausted and trying to hide, and you can’t. When you’re in a family and the two sides are fighting, it affects everybody.

”It's more of the usual--now 8 churches occupying prima real estate in the Diocese of Virginia are pulling out because of the current dispute over the ordination of active homosexuals. And there will be mega-litigation. And women will be the big losers in this one. Most Americans by the end of the 20th century had no objections to women's ordination. But the Episcopal Church insisted on packaging women's ordination together with together with gay ordination, the blessing of same-sex unions and a whole host of other revisionary doctrines and practices that were part of what, for convenience and in the spirit of bitter irony, might be called The Liberation Agenda, in which there is something for everyone to hate.

Now that the sexuality issue has become a cause to rally the troops, and various ultra-conservative third world bishops have taken up the cause, people who had no objection to women's ordination are getting on board with the opposition. People who had no objection to women's ordination will join this consortium. Most gays in the Episcopal Church will also lose out because of the split too. When it happens, neither of the churches that survive the fission will be viable.

On the one side there will be a church that's been religiously gutted, a generic liberal Protestant denomination led by politically correct atheists catering to a religiously indifferent clientele for whom the church is no more than a community center or civic organization. Like all such churches, it will continue its genteel decline--in this case pushed onto the fast track by legal expenses, loss of revenue and bad publicity. On the other side the malcontents' rainbow coalition will form a church too conservative for most of its members' tastes which, like all rainbow coalitions unified only by opposition, will fall apart once it is no longer in opposition.

Why did this happen? Every liberal, mainline denomination as been dealing with sexuality issues for decades and isn't experiencing this meltdown. What's the difference? I think it's deep in the structure and fundamental theology of the Anglican Church--to the extent that it has a theology. The Anglican Church at its root and in its gut is Catholic in the most important sense--not in virtue of costume or liturgy, but in its hierarchal structure and in roles assigned to clergy and laity. There is no tradition of the priesthood of all believers. There is a bright line between clergy and laity, and no recognition of lay intellectual leadership or participation. Because of the historical structure of the Anglican Church, clergy are set up as intellectual leaders and moral teachers, called to instruct the laity in matters of faith and morals, and to set them straight. For the past 40 years liberal clergy in this capacity they have pushed the Liberation Agenda, pigheadedly pursuing it, in the unshakable conviction that they have got it right and are called to correct the laity. Listen to the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church:

The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, said in an e-mail response to a request for an interview [with the NYTimes] that such splits reflect a polarized society, as well as the “anxiety” and “discomfort” that many people feel when they are asked to live with diversity.“The quick fix embraced in drawing lines or in departing is not going to be an ultimate solution for our discomfort,” she said.

The bishop doesn't get it. Like other liberal clergy, she understands dissent as an expression of "anxiety" and "discomfort" rather than principled disagreement--a matter to be sorted out by sympathy, pastoral care and therapy. She, and they, do not understand that even apart from substantive disagreement this patronizing treatment by itself is enough to infuriate dissenters. And because she, and they, are convinced that their opponents are either naive or perverse, that she and they have a divine mission to correct them and that their agenda will inevitably triumph, they will pursue their iron-fist-in-velvet-glove program until the Episcopal Church is screwed into the ground.

I've been reading Barbara Tuchman on The March of Folly--an account of folly on the grand scale, from the Trojan Horse to the War in Vietnam. Everyone makes mistakes, but folly on this grand scale only occurs when smart people who are actors on the world stage, who should know better, who have all relevant information, good advice, and the power set policy, pigheadedly march to destruction, dragging the people and institutions in their charge to destruction. Right now I'm reading about how the Renaissance Popes precipitated the Reformation--by setting up as Italian princelings, bankrolling their retainers and illegitimate children, playing politics and waging war. Julius simply didn't get the idea that it was, minimally, unseemly for a priest to lead the troops into battle and his Borgia predecessor, Alexander, just didn't understand that staging orgies at the Vatican for his pleasure and the entertainment of his children Lucrezia and Cesere was, at best, offensive. None of them seemed to get the idea that religion had anything to do with what they were doing. They were magnates, and that was the way big men behaved.

The Episcopal Church, for all its endowment, is a marginal institution--hardly comparable to the Roman Catholic Church on the eve of the Reformation. It's the same story though: clergy don't get the idea that they were supposed to be doing is religion. Those who're politically active are convinced that they're prophets, charged with setting the rest of us straight. They don't believe the stuff and, when it gets down to brass tacks, they don't believe that Christianity is of any real importance. Their goal is to promote the Liberation Agenda. They believe that their position as clergy of the Episcopal Church puts them in the position to push it and that is that they are going to do. What a miserable sad, bad business.

Christmas Wars II

Christianity as an Oppositional Identity

Let's not sleepwalk with the Christian soldiers | Comment | The Observer

The Italian journalist Antonio Polito defined what can happen when people with no religion worthy of the name feel their values are under threat. He invented the term 'theo-con' to describe secular and atheist Italians who nevertheless support the Pope as a defender of a Western civilisation which paradoxically protects their freedom to be irreligious...[T]hose who emphasise a Christianity so vague it doesn't extend to going to church, play into the hands of al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood. They make a 'clash of civilisations' a self-fulfilling prophecy. There are the Islamists on one side and 'the Crusaders and Zionists' on another and no middle ground in between.

"Dog bites man" isn't news so, in a strange journalist twist, Nick Cohen argues that the real bad guys in the current Clash of Civilizations aren't convinced fundamentalist Christians--or, presumably, fundamentalist Muslims—but the great mass of secular Brits who nevertheless identify themselves as "Christians" and fuss about revisionary packaging for Christmas, the suppression of Christian religious symbols in the public square, and the like.

Cohen's reasoning is an argument to the best explanation: 71% of the public in England self-identify as Christians even though church attendance is in single digits. Why then do those 60 some odd percent of the public who aren't, by Cohen's lights, religious call themselves Christians? This is his take:

[M]ilitant Islam was on the march in 2001 and anger about asylum-seekers was at its highest. The census-takers then presented the public with a form that invited them to tick boxes from a list that included Christian, Muslim, Jew, Hindu and Sikh. There must have been a temptation to tick 'Christian' simply as a way of saying 'we're white and not Muslim'.

Christianity, he suggests, is an oppositional identity for them: they call themselves "Christians" and push to maintain the public presence of Christian symbolism in order to distinguish themselves from the non-white Other and make the statement that the UK is still Christian territory--their turf.

Empirically, this explanation doesn't wash. Even before mass immigration and the march of militant Islam, it was the same: Christendom has always been full of religious slackers, agnostics who weren’t willing to repudiate religious belief outright and the great mass of the indifferent who maintained a minimal, sentimental attachment to various Christian denominations but otherwise weren’t very interested. My bet is that if the census Cohen cites had included tick boxes for CofE, Catholic, and other Christian denominations rather than "Christian" the figure for Christians overall would have been even higher, and would have included even more non-churchgoers. These days "Christian" suggests "fundamentalist" or, at the very least, "intentionally committed and observant."

The secular culture-Christianity of the unchurched that worries Cohen is, and always has been, the religious norm at all times in most places. Strong religion is a special taste. For most Christians, and I suspect most Muslims as well, religion is a matter of participation in a culture where religious symbols, ceremonies and myths figure and rites of passage are conducted under religious auspices. This is not only normal religion--it is religion as it should be: religion that enriches life and satisfies human needs without imposing burdens or serious moral obligations. It is the kind of religion that Kierkegaard despised as mere participation in "Christendom." And it is quintessentially Anglican.

I'm all for it--and I am not being ironic. To reject Christianity as a source of serious moral obligation is not to reject serious moral obligation: ethics is independent of religion. We admire Bonhoeffer and Pastor Neimöller for resisting the Nazi program on Christian grounds. On the conventional view this is a recommendation for strong religion, committed Christianity, over mere participation in Christendom: a mere culture-Christian wouldn't have had the motivation or the backbone to stand up to the Nazi regime. Is that so? I would bet that there were quite a few mere culture-Christians and even flat-out atheists who resisted the Nazi agenda out of pure human decency. There is simply no empirical evidence that religious commitment makes people braver or morally better. Decent, courageous people who are committed Christians appeal to their religious convictions as the source of their moral commitment and behavior. The Church cheers them on as martyrs and confessors, advertisements for the ethnical benefits of religious commitment. But is there any reason to believe that they wouldn't have done their good deeds if they weren't religiously committed? There are certainly secular martyrs and confessors whose good deeds and courage are equally remarkable.

I am, in any case, for culture-Christianity. What worries me is that strong religion, religion that imposes burdensome rules, tight constraints, and tough moral obligations will drive out culture-Christianity. In the US this is already almost a done deal because here Christianity is already perceived as an "oppositional" identity: Christian symbols and ceremonies have become so tainted by association with strong religion, in particular conservative, evangelical Christianity, that we can't enjoy them as cultural amenities any more.

During the last anti-crucifix crusade at my (Catholic) university I asked one of the leading crusaders why she was ok with buddha statues in Chinese restaurants and the earth-god shrine at the entrance of our local Vietnamese supermarket, but not with crucifixes in classrooms, creches in the park or crosses on mountaintops. She asked, rhetorically, whether I would be comfortable as a Christian living in a place that was full of Buddha statues or Hindu idols (comfortable? I'd be thrilled--I like all religion and the more the better!). Like Cohen, she viewed Christianity as an oppositional identity and Christian symbols in public, or semi-public places, as a way of marking territory--sticking it to religious minorities that they were on Christian turf, on sufferance, that they were at best dhimmi. She claimed that students who were not Catholic, some 40% of our undergraduates, in particular Jews and members of traditionally persecuted minorities, were upset and felt threatened.

I find this hard to believe. I've never met a member of any religious minority who had this reaction to crucifixes or Christmas cribs--and it seems unlikely that anyone who felt this way would sign on at a Catholic college. During the Crucifix Wars at Georgetown, non-Catholics, including Jews and other non-Christians, were active on the pro-crucifix side. They argued that these religious symbols were part of the identity of the university, part of what they were attached to as students and faculty. It is, however, a preoccupation of secularists with axes to grind, which hardly endears them to the general public while supplying ammunition to the religious right.

Maybe I don't get it because I was brought up as a pagan. It used to surprise me, until I got used to it, that students who were generally credulous and sympathetic to various flavors of "spirituality" dismissed Christianity out of hand. When I asked them why they wouldn’t give Christianity a fair shake their answer was always the same monosyllable: "rules." They did not merely find the Christian "rules" inconvenient--to their credit, they objected to the rules they imagined were constituitive of Christianity because they regarded them as arbitrary and unmotivated. It took me a while to realize that we were not on the same page, and that the disagreement wasn't about what the Christian rules were or whether they were reasonable, but about the importance of rules of any kind in religious traditions, particularly Christianity. They saw the rules, primarily moral rules but also rules regarding religious observance, as the essence of Christianity—with all the symbols and ceremonies as a little bit of sugar to make the medicine go down. I saw the essential business of religion as myth and metaphysics, symbolism, art and cult--ethics optional.

This is the way I believe most people, most of the time, have viewed religion and it is why advocates of strong religion have almost always been isolated malcontents and prophets. This is the religion of Christendom that got Kierkegaard's knickers in a twist, the religion that the Reformation and all religious reformations were supposed to clean up, the religion of the masses--the religion of happy slackers. This is my religion though, it seems, only as a romantic fantasy--the fantasy of syncretic Hellenistic paganism: the libations and sacrifices, the mystery cults and the treasure-laden Ship of Isis (as described by Pater) floating out to sea. This is not mere aestheticism and does not trivialize religion: the core of religion is ineffable, or at the very least, highly controversial, like all metaphysics. The cultural packaging is all we can get a hold of. Apart from a very few orthodox theologians and philosophers of religion who spin out the doctrines, most educated practicing Christians are, effectively agnostics who believe that “there may be something there” and regard their cultural religious package as a way, however inadequate, of representing it and enjoying it.

Fundamentalist Christians and crusading secularists between them have all but destroyed the remnants of Christendom—a casualty of Culture Wars, in which ideologues with competing sets of rules fight for power and turf. We are not going to have the shrines and cults of 1000 gods happily coexisting, with people sampling their wares as it takes their fancy. We are not going to have those innocuous and lovely displays of public religiousity that everyone can enjoy as they please. New holidays and myths, symbols, ceremonies and shrines have replaced the old ones. They are genuine—Superbowl Sunday, Halloween and the Fourth of July, parades, block festivals and shopping malls—as rooted in the culture as religious processions carrying statues of local patron saints in Catholic Europe before it became rich and secular. I like Fourth of July fireworks and shopping malls too, but I like religious displays more—and they are doomed. That seems a pity.

It may be that even if Christian symbols and ceremonies hadn’t been tainted, and weren’t doomed to be casualties of cultural turf wars, the kind of religiousity that I enjoy might still be unsustainable. There are very few high church romantics like me who enjoy religious symbols and practices for their own sake. Most clients who keep the shrines in business, who engage in ceremonies which are appealing to me largely because they are gratuitous expect to get something out if their efforts—a normal pregnancy and easy birth or seasonable rains to make the corn grow, health, prosperity and a better shake in this world or the next. Most religious people who aren’t in the game for the rules are in for the magic: for them religious practices are no more interesting than balancing their checkbooks or going to the dentist. Religion is just more of that stuff you have to do to keep your life in order, stay healthy and get various material benefits. Without them, pilgrimages and icon-kissing would be nothing more than a vulgar, sentimental display—the childish game of self-conscious Anglo-Catholics like me—and churches would become museums or mini-themeparks. We high church junkies piggyback on the superstition of the naïve who give these rituals authenticity.

What a foul trichotomy if that’s true. Who is religious? Conservatives who want restrictive social rules promulgated and enforced; peasants who want the corn to grow; and a few silly asses, like me, who just plain like religion—cult, symbol, myth and custom.

In any case, I seriously doubt that Christianity is as yet an oppositional identity, much as both militant fundamentalists and equally militant secularists want to make it one. Laodician Christians are not interested in capturing territory or defending turf: they are simply sentimental, like those non-Catholics at Georgetown who campaigned to get the crucifixes back up. We want crosses on the hilltops and crèches in the park, along with chestnuts roasting on the open fire, Frosty, Rudolph and all the secular symbols of Christmas. We like cathedral evensong and the San Gennaro Festa. Thousands of happy tourists go to cathedral evensong to hear, and see, the boy choirs in ruffs without even realizing that they’re participating in a religious service. Thousands celebrate the San Gennaro festival, in honor of the annual (alleged) magical liquification of St. Janarius’ blood, at which a statue of the saint is trotted out and paraded around New York City’s Little Italy. You don’t have to be Catholic to enjoy that event any more than you need to be Italian to eat spaghetti or Jewish to love Levi’s Real Jewish Rye, as an old TV commercial had it.

So where is the beef? I suppose the problem is that lots of people simply can’t imagine liking religion as such either because they’ve been brought up in a strong religion that killed any pleasure they might have gotten out of it, or because they’re so remote from religion that can’t fathom what there could be to like. More’s the pity. The altars have been stripped, the churches are closing, the ceremonies and processions that remain are becoming mere tourist attractions, and the religious symbols, ceremonies and sentimentalities surrounding Christmas—the Star of Bethlehem, the ox and ass in the stable, the angels singing Gloria, the carols, candles, and hymns, the midnight mass—are slipping away and the world will be poorer, colder and duller for it.

Are we rational self-interested choosers?

Essays: 'The world after Bush' by Michael Lind | Prospect Magazine November 2006 issue 128

The fact is that most of the people engaged in political violence today—from the Basque country to the Philippines—are not fighting for individual rights, nor for that matter are they fighting to establish an Islamist caliphate. Most are fighting for a national homeland for the ethnic nation to which they belong. For most human beings other than deracinated north Atlantic elites, the question of the unit of government is more important than the form of government, which can be settled later, after a stateless nation has obtained its own state. And as the hostility towards Israel of democratically elected governments in Palestine, Iraq and Lebanon shows, democracy can express, even inflame, pre-existing national hatreds and rivalries; it is not a cure for them.

Well, I've gotten the book on multiculturalism, for which this blog has been a sketch, accepted for publication by Prometheus, my first choice! Check out their list and buy their books!!! I'm now working on the next draft so I'll be reflecting more on material for the book. I am always grateful for discussion and comments.

I've linked a nice article from the current issue of The Prospect on the end of, what the author calls, the neo-conservative and neo-liberal dreams of the 1990s. Most of his analyses and predictions seem plausible and much of what he predicts seems ok. The unipolar world envisaged by neo-cons, with the US running the show, he predicts is not going to happen. I'm ok with that. Laissez-faire capitalism will not take over. I'm definitely ok with that.

It's the suggestion that the ethnic-based nation-state will remain the aspiration for most human beings "other than deracinated north Atlantic elites" that sticks in my craw. Clearly this is currently the case. But one hopes that eventually it will not be so. At least the line I'm running is that deracination is the ideal for which we should strive so that, ideally, everyone will approximate the idea of this north Atlantic elite.

Now the question becomes: given that most of the world's population has very different aspirations from us, the deracinated, cosmopolitan elite, on what grounds can we argue that they ought to become more like us? Why not de gustibus: they like ethnicity--we like deracination; we're individualists--they're communitarians; they say "tom-ay-to"--we say "tom-ah-to"? Here is an argument though.

There are no communitarians--at least not on the ground (as distinct from the Ivory Tower). Everyone is after individual rights. It is just that in most circumstances the only way people can secure individual rights is by getting a national homeland for the ethnic nation to which they belong. Most people are tribal: they live under a social contract according to which everyone takes care of their own and no one is expected to take care of anyone else. They expect their tribes-mates to provide hospitality, hire them, provide patronage when in power and charity if need be and recognize an obligation to do the same for tribes-mates. They don't recognize any obligation to look after "strangers" in this way or expect "strangers" to look after them. Indeed, treating outsiders like family or putting the interests of others ahead of the interests of your own breaks the social contract. Once an individual breaks his contract he's no longer trustworthy: his tribes-mates can no longer assume that he'll meet his obligations to them and so no longer have any compelling reason to take care of him.

Among the north Atlantic elite, it doesn't matter very much whether the nation to which we belong has its own state because we recognize an obligation to take care of everyone and expect others to take care of us through impersonal social mechanisms. The state will provide benefits to us, regardless of race, creed or color; employers will hire on the basis of merit--or at least this is the official view--and those who discriminate will be dealt with by the state. When it comes to patronage, politicians will take care of their constituents, whether or not they're members of the same tribe so these days ethnic bloc voting has largely disappeared: we don't have to vote for tribes-mates to insure that our interests will be promoted.

It is very different in tribal societies like Iraq, Kenya, or Northern New Jersey--at least when I was growing up. There, it is essential for your well-being that your tribe have turf or, failing that, power. If you are a member of a minority tribe on someone else's turf you will not be taken care of by members of the dominant tribe who control government, business, unions, the Mob and other amenities. If your tribe is sufficiently powerful there will be log-rolling and deals will be cut--political positions will be reserved for your tribes-mates who will dispense patronage to their own. If members of your tribe own businesses you may be hired; if they control unions you may be apprenticed. If however your tribe has no power or if such deals aren't cut on behalf of your tribe then you, as an individual, will not be taken care of because everyone takes care of his own unless deals are cut. Of course this means that you have to vote in and otherwise support your tribes-mates to see to it that they have the power to pull for you. However it's best for you as an individual if your tribe has its own turf since, in the tribal system, only tribal power and turf can guarantee individual rights. Therefore as a rational self-interested chooser, in the interest of securing individual rights, you support your tribe.

The problem is that the tribal mechanism for supporting individual rights is inefficient. Unless we want to revert to a world of isolated hunter-gather bands, or at best, isolated self-sufficient villages, it isn't practical for every tribe to have its own turf, the wheeling-dealing involved in tribal log-rolling is very expensive and lots of people fall through the cracks. Moreover, tribal warfare is always a real and present danger and demagogues can exploit it to gain power--like Southern segregationists in the bad old days turning working class whites against working class blacks, Kenyan politicians conjuring up "tribal clashes," or nativists pumping up anti-immigrant sentiment to promote their own interests. Tribalism is self-perpetuating--people get caught in an evil net--but when people have the choice most prefer deracinated, cosmopolitan societies.

That last is an empirical claim and a claim about what MOST people prefer. There will always be Romantics, nostalgic for tribalism, especially for idealized versions of tribalism that never existed and the progress from tribalism to universalism is uneven--ratcheting up, and falling back--but overall, the trend is from tribalism to universalism, from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, from smaller to larger social units. Very few people want to go back and and people who've had it both ways almost always prefer modernity to tribalism. I grew up in a tribal society and I can vouch for that. I can also vouch for the fact that of the many Romantics I know who fantisize about the joys of tribalism, not one of them has experienced it first hand from the inside as I did. It's all very well to sentimentalize about "My Big, Fat Greek Wedding," Samoa as misdescribed by Margaret Mead, the Middle Ages, the hunter-gatherers of the Amazon or any of the other tribal societies, real or imagined, that are part of the public mythos. Those of us who've known tribal societies from the inside and gotten out know just how completely awful they are and would never, never want to go back.

That is why, I argue, it would be better if tribalism were obliterated: if it's feasible for people to live like the deracinated north Atlantic elite, ceteris paribus, that's what they prefer. Modern societies, non-tribal arrangements, are just a lot better at getting people what they want.

Oh, happy day!

Fall of the house of kitsch | Salon.com
The cultural style of the Bush warriors is the latest wrinkle in one of the most enduring modes of antimodern aesthetic expression. "Kitsch is mechanical and operates by formulas," wrote art critic Clement Greenberg in his seminal essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in 1939. "Kitsch is vicarious experience and faked sensations. Kitsch changes according to style, but remains always the same. Kitsch is the epitome of all that is spurious in the life of our times."

Kitsch is imitative, cheap, sentimental, mawkish and incoherent, and derives its appeal by demeaning and degrading genuine standards and values, especially those of modernity. While the proponents of the faux retro style claim to uphold tradition, they are inherently reactive and parasitic, their words and products a tawdry patchwork, hastily assembled as declarations against authentic complexity and ambiguity, which they stigmatize as threats to the sanctity of an imaginary harmonious order of the past that they insist they and their works represent. Kitsch presumes to be based on old rules, but constantly traduces them.

The Bush kitsch warriors have created a cultural iconography that attempts to inspire deference to the radical making of an authoritarian presidency. These warriors pose as populists, fighting a condescending liberal elite. Wealthy, celebrated and influential, their faux populism demands that they be seen however as victims. Having risen solely by association with sheer political power and economic force (News Corp., etc.), the cultural charlatans become the arbiters of social standing.

Yes, Jesus, yes! Alleluia!!! What a good election day! Here we have the tumblers falling into place, the cadence resolved, the other shoe dropped, the end of a good proof: these stinking shit bags have been given a kick up the ass.

Fair and square: after bawling about gridlock and complaining that their policies were failing because they didn't have free hand to pursue them whole hog, they got what they wanted--and failed. These Republicans had 9/11, goodwill and a consensus that should have carried for a decade, and squandered it. After 9/11 the Great Ayatolla or Grand Poo-Bah of Iran sent his condolances. Within two years we were in there slugging away at the Axis of Evil.

Maybe Americans have finally got it. You got the whole thing. You got the retrogressive, superstitious pseudo-redneck jackass of your dreams. You got a $300 check in the mail as "tax relief." You got a jolly war to show the world just how tough we were. Are we having fun yet?

Maybe this is the tipping point. Also, today I beat a major rap at traffic court: no fine, no fee, no traffic school--case dismissed! A good day!

Cat meat

Australian Muslim leader compares uncovered women to exposed meat | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited: "Sheik Hilali was quoted as saying: 'If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside ... without cover, and the cats come to eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat's? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab [the headdress worn by some Muslim women], no problem would have occurred.'"

Demeaning to women, offensive to cats...but also insulting to men. The idea is that men have no real intentionality, that they will of course pounce reflexively at the first piece of red meat they see and that they are so far from being rational, autonomous agents that they cannot be blamed. Without external constraints men will of course run amok.

Where does this come from? It's at the heart of traditional "shame cultures where there are no internal forces governing behavior, where people merely respond to external constraints and social approbation. This works fine in the village where most people play by the rules most of the time and see to it that their neighbors do likewise, where everyone is caught in a net of kinship and mutual obligation, shame and honor. In the anonymous city, without the village watching you at every turn, in a world of strangers, there is no reason why you shouldn't run amok. Of course if a tempting piece of meat comes your way you will pounce. The only way to stop you is either to restrain you physically or to hide the meat.

The gears grind whenever villagers move to the city and wherever the Third World meets the first. When people who are bound and constrained break free there's crime, corruption and social chaos. It happens to colleges too, when students away from their families and childhood rules, drink themselves sick because they can and don't show up for class because no one is taking the roll. Most figure out how to behave in a year or two, sometimes longer if they don't wash out first.

Lakoff is wrong: the cut isn't between the Strict Father and Nurturing Parent--code for the stereotypical masculine and feminine. It's between those who believe that men are cats and women are meat or, more generally, that people will run amok if not embedded in family and village, bound by custom, constrained by shame, honor and the fear of God, and those of us who believe that left to their own devices people can, and will--even if after harsh experience--grow up. I guess really that's why I got into philosophy--beyond the taste for fighting and puzzle solving, I do believe in reason, sweet reason, splendidly powerful and always benign.

Yup. We Lost

The Observer | World | How Iraq came home to haunt America: "For months doubts over Iraq have risen along with the death toll. Last week a tipping point was reached as political leaders in Washington and London began openly to think the unthinkable: that the war was lost"

It was tough to admit during the war in Vietnam and it's tough to admit now: we lost. We took out the local tin pot dictator and prised the lid off a cauldron of cultural diversity. Now, predictably, the tribes are beating up on one another and warlords who can muster street gangs of lower class youths from the urban slums, dignified as "militias," are having the time of their lives.

However all is not lost: I have a plan.

(1) Declare an independent state of Kurdistan and promise Turkey admission to the EU if they'll recognize it.

(2) Require the independent state of Kurdistan to recognize a right of return for Kurds outside its borders comparable to the right of return Israel recognizes for Jews. If Turkish Kurds, affirming their ethnicity, prefer living in a Kurdish state to living in an EU country jolly good--I doubt that the Turks will miss them.

(3) Give educated, middle class, non-tribal Iraqis green cards and airlift them out to the US. We trashed their country and destroyed their lives--we take responsibility.

(4) Leave the tribal, lower class Shiites and Sunnis to fight it out amongst themselves over oil, land, women, goats or whatever it is they traditionally fight about until they manage to kill one another off.

How's that? Remember, you heard it here first.

David Kuo's Tempting Faith

It's hard to believe, but Bush does disdain evangelicals: Kuo's book creates cognitive dissonance for liberals. Conspiracy theories about theocracy have haunted liberals for the last few years, and, if you believe that religious conservatives lead Bush around by the nose, evidence to the contrary is impossible to absorb. Everyone on the left 'knows' that the faith-based initiative is a slush-fund, a jackpot for religious conservatives. If it turns out instead to be a political sham that produced only 1 percent of the new funds it promised for faith-based organizations, liberals need rethink their theocracy-phobia...Evangelicals have become increasingly disillusioned with the Bush administration and the Republican Party in general over the last two years. While 78 percent of white evangelicals voted for Bush in 2004, only 57 percent approve of the job he's doing now, and only 52 percent say they are likely to support Republicans in the November elections...evangelical support has plummeted in large part because they, along with other religious conservatives, have begun to suspect they've been played by Republicans--used for their votes and then ignored.

Hard to believe??? Of course elite conservatives are as contemptuous of conservative Christians as elite liberals are. The American elite, whether conservative or liberal, is secular and most members have little sympathy with the socially conservative agenda that the current administration has pretended to promote. No surprise here.

The difference between liberal and conservative members of the elite is that conservatives have lied to lower class conservative Christians, played them for fools, taken their money and used their support to promote policies that are contrary to their interests. Somehow Dubya managed to persuade hoi polloi that he was just a regular dumbass, inarticulate guy with a bad accent who cut brush on his "ranch," and to persuade everyone that he really thought that "the jury was out" on evolution. Really? After Andover and Yale--even though his daddy had to buy him into both?

Nothing new. Renaissance Popes frolicked and made their "nephews" cardinal archbishops in their teens, while the pious Catholic peasantry worshipped holy bones. Henry opined that Paris was "worth a mass," while Protestant peasants were convinced that the Pope was the Anti-Christ. Everything changes, everything remains the same. The Republican elite giggled about Mark Foley's silly little flirtations with youths and covered it up lest their redneck supporters on the ground find out.

I don't know how the Democrats could play this one. What should they say to these lower class people who keep the Republicans in power--"look these guys despise you just as much as we do, and are exploiting you to boot"? What should these people do? Pull out of the Republican party and support genuine populists from amongst them--splitting the conservative alliance and guaranteeing a liberal win? Somehow the message has got to be put across: everyone with any money, education or power thinks you guys are stinking shit; anyone you could vote for--Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or Green--anyone sufficiently educated and articulate to get on any ticket--detests you. So you may as well vote your economic interests--so that if not you, at least your children can become upper middle class latte-drinking liberals.

Fundamentalism Lite

I debated a fundamentalist minister from a local branch of The Vineyard last Wednesday.
I was supposed to be debating a professional "youth evangelist," one Alex McFarland, on the topic of his talk, Truth Exists--Absolutely!. I'm not altogether clear on the story but apparently, when McFarland found out, the day before the event, that a real, live professor would debate him, he backed out.

So I was left to debate the local guru, the very model of a modern neo-fundamentalist as described in a remarkable NYTimes Magazine story about the Radiant Church of Surprise, AZ some time back.

The guru, big and genial, wouldn't fight and wouldn't bite. He began by asserting that if there was one thing we knew it was that Truth was "relational" and also that Truth was "dynamic." I couldn't fathom what he was talking about but the audience seemed to be following--and approving. The questions from the audience were equally incomprehensible. Somehow, however, he and they had an understanding, though I couldn't grasp what it was about, beyond some vague idea that Truth=Jesus=Love and that loving Truth/Love/Jesus made people happy and morally good.

I was disheartening, not only or primarily because so many of these decent kids were hooked on fundamentalism but because of why they and others were hooked--and not only on fundamentalism. It was the appetite for empty sentimentalities and uplift without content, the boosterism, the unshakable faith in slogans, "training" to teach leaders recipes, pep rallies to "energize" the base, and the vacuous blandness of the whole thing. That I think is characteristically American, and that is why American-style neo-fundamentalism takes hold. It isn't puritanism--long dead. It isn't Elmer Gantry, the promise of heaven or threat of hell--it's the glad-handing, boosterism and sloganeering of Main Street, the slicked up sales pitch, the inflated pseudo-technology of group dynamics, pedagogy, and management. It's the hegemony of Business: salesmanship, marketing and management--professionalized, refined and applied to everything, including education, religion and politics.

What bothers me is the intolerance for anything gritty, unconventional, combatative or simply difficult, the obsession with slick, smooth, and bland, the utter tedium of the whole thing and the waste--the energy people could spend on learning real technical skills wasted on these elaborate techniques of social interaction: management, marketing, "leadership," cultivating the art of likablity so that in the end neither technical skills nor intellectual content matter. That, it seemed, was the draw of this neo-fundamentalism--religion without ritual, symbolism or intellectual content beyond a few theological nuggets swallowed painlessly because to adherents they didn't matter: what mattered were "relationships"--to Jesus, to the affable pastor, and to the "community" of fellow-adherents.

Guardian Unlimited Film | News | Mel Gibson apologises for anti-semitic outburst

Last July, the Braveheart director was arrested on a Los Angeles motorway on suspicion of drunk driving, after being caught speeding. A three-quarters-full bottle of tequila wrapped in a brown paper bag was found on the floor. According to portions of the arrest report that became public, Gibson launched into an anti-semitic tirade, accusing Jews of starting all wars and demanding to know if his arresting officer was Jewish. The incident sparked international headlines, drew condemnation from Jewish leaders and led to speculation that Gibson's Hollywood career had been irreparably damaged. Within days of the incident, Gibson had entered a rehabilitation clinic and undergone treatment for alcoholism.

Oh, and he also had some choice remarks for the officer's female partner whom he called "sugar tits." Not to mention the fact that he was speeding down the freeway dead drunk, endangering the public. But who's counting? In the words of my favorite quote from Ghostbusters, when the Central Park horse-cab driver is accosted by a demonically possessed tax accountant in full flow: "what an asshole."

These days alcohol rehab is the respectable way out. So, when Mark Foley got caught flirting with youths, it was only natural that he sign on for alcohol rehab and, for good measure, claim that he was a victim of priest abuse. Clearly priest abuse will become de rigeur in all subsequent cases of this nature. Then there was Ellen Cook, the treasurer of the Episcopal Church who embezzled 2.6 million dollars and made the case that it was a consequence of the intolerable stress of male chauvinism that she faced in her position as the Church's highest ranked layperson. Is it possible that anyone actually takes these excuses seriously?

Why can't ordinary slobs like me (and you, dear reader) get away with this? So sorry I haven't shown up to teach my logic classes for the past week--I was flat on the floor in a drunken stupor--I need a paid vacation in rehab. Holy cow, two years ago a screwy part-timer reported me and my next door colleague for smoking in our offices. I managed to get rid of the evidence, but the dean caught my colleague with an ashtray on his desk and there was hell to pay. Why don't we think of these things--alcoholism, priest abuse, male chauvinism? I suppose that's why we aren't celebrities.

Veiling: Thanks, Jack

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Dangerous attack or fair point? Straw veil row deepens:

Muslim opinion on the streets was not unsympathetic to Mr Straw, but hardly anyone put other communities' feelings before the religious right - duty in the eyes of a sizeable minority - to wear the full veil. A self-employed electrician waiting for the end of lessons at St Nicholas and St John infant and junior school - which is overwhelmingly Asian - said that the roots of social division were much older than veil-wearing.'It's all to do with the way we were treated in the Seventies - I was regularly chased along here when I was a kid by white lads. Other communities just didn't want to know about us - funny that they're all so interested now in things like veils. I was a soldier in the British Army for 11 years and I can tell you very clearly how I couldn't get anywhere because I wasn't white but brown.'

The electrician knows best.

In all the stuff I've been reading for my current project on multiculturalism, with every conceivable theory and speculative fantasy concocted by journalists, pundits, politicians and academics on the table, the remarks of people on the ground--when they manage to be heard above the noise--point in the same direction. Immigrants and people of color face discrimination and exclusion. They can't get into the mainstream so they cluster together. Their children, who expect more than second-class citizenship, take up cultural affirmation and identity politics with the blessing of multiculturalists: better to be Other than under; if you lock us out pooh on you--we've got our own club.

Then along comes Jack--fretting because he can't read the emotion on his constituents' veiled faces. Of course this isn't the issue, any more than Islam, female modesty or female subordination is. The issue is people publicly asserting ethnicity, cultural identity and otherness. That assertion of otherness makes group identity more salient, promotes further discrimination, and sets back the interests of most Others who just want to assimilate, be regular plain vanilla citizens and, most importantly, to be treated as such.

Fat lot of good it does to get women to take off their face veils or otherwise encourage those Others to dress and behave like regular guys if the color of their skin still marks them as Other and they're treated as such. It's not the bus--it's us.

The response to discrimination helps perpetuate it. Bigots who wouldn't dare to say they didn't want brown people around can point triumphantly to veiling and other forms of Otherness to make the case that the problem is the refusal of those people to integrate, their commitment to radical Islamicism or their rejection of mainstream cultural values. There are, of course, Those Counterfactuals: if all those Muslims dropped their veils and converted to industry-standard CofE agnosticism, the bigots still wouldn't want them around. It's reminiscent of anti-semitism in Christian Europe from the get-go to the Holocaust. "We don't want you Jews around because you dress funny, talk funny, reject our culture and reject Christ. Oh, you've assimilated and converted, and don't dress funny or talk funny? Well, we still don't want you around."

Still, it's the state that hasn't kept it's part of the bargain--or at least what I believe the bargain should be: "we'll see to it that you're treated in the same way as other citizens if you behave like other citizens." Shifting the burden to minorities accomplishes nothing. Immigrants and their children can't avoid discrimination and exclusion by assimilating any more than the Jews in Nazi Germany could. Only the state can break the vicious circle by aggressively promoting integration and equal treatment, by affirmative action, by every available means.

But such policies are expensive and unpopular. It's cheaper and easier lob the ball into the Others' court, and then complain that they won't play the game.

Freedom, Security and Good Red Herring

American Prospect Online - Centered Right: Something odd is happening in Scandinavian politics. Or rather, something normal has stopped happening. Everybody knows that for the better part of a century, social democrats have been building Keynesian welfare states in Scandinavia. The news is that economic liberals ('liberals' in the classical, continental sense of the term) have basically ceased to attack them. In fact, Scandinavia%u2019s center-right parties now actively embrace the welfare state. And suddenly -- and not coincidentally -- voters like them

I'm not sure I understand how a center right party can embrace the welfare state, much less an improved an expanded one, since I thought that the criterion for being "left" or "right" was precisely acceptance or rejection of the welfare state. What on earth else is there?

However that's a semantic issue. The substantive point is the realization by Rasmussen, the leader of Sweden's center "right" party, that "the welfare model is a necessary condition for the goal of liberalism, defined as a maximization of individual freedom and self-reliance....concerned with freedom to as freedom from."

From this perspective, government is not a categorical infringement on individual rights; on the contrary, government can and should expand individual freedoms by providing opportunities for citizens. Thus the accessibility of a quality education is a freedom issue, as is the availability of affordable health care, day care, paid maternity and paternity leave, etc.

It's surprising that this should be news in Sweden--or anywhere else. We're constrained, thwarted and hemmed in in innumerable ways--by the brute facts of nature and by the refusal of others to cooperate in supporting our most important interests. Without that cooperation, we can't get what matters most: interesting work, leisure and the avoidance of drudgery, opportunities for travel, the use of technology, novelty and variety. It's hard to imagine any life more meager or constrained, or less free than the life of a self-sufficient survivalist scratching out a living in some remote outback if freedom in the sense that matters means having a wide range of options.

In affluent Western countries, particularly in the US where libertarian sentiment is most entrenched, the government is the least of our worries. It's hard for me to think of how the government restricts my freedom in any serious way or prevents me from getting anything I want--apart from imposing speed limits with which I find it hard to comply. The government of course taxes me and to that extent restricts my options--since money is nothing other than the permanent possibility of preference satisfaction. But if I had that money in hand it wouldn't expand my options for all practical purposes because, in order to see to it that I wasn't backed into a corner--old, poor, with few options and at the mercy of others--I would have to save that money or use it to buy into private insurance schemes of various sorts.

So why, one wonders, are most Americans convinced even now that government is the problem rather than the solution and, more fundamentally, that there's a trade off between freedom and security? Security, safety nets and the knowledge that we will never be backed into a corner with few opportunities or choices, is precisely what liberates us from scrounging, skimping and perennially saving to preserve our freedom. Why in particular is it that people who are less secure and so less free than we are, those rural and exurban working class voters who could benefit from the welfare state, are most adamantly opposed to it: the old question again--what's the matter with Kansas?

At bottom I think it's a lack of imagination: they cannot imagine what it would be like to have a wider range of more desirable options--better access to education and training, a wider range of job options, shorter hours at work and longer vacations, affordable child care and good schools for their kids. They're constrained and financially insecure, stuck with mega-commutes from remote semi-rural areas because cities are unlivable and inner suburbs are unaffordable, stuck working 8 hours a day and overtime, 50 weeks a year and quite reasonably afraid that the few options they have will be taken away. Conservatives, whose policies have backed them into that corner, exploit that fear.

This is standard Third World practice, the policy of tin pot dictators whose policies keep the peasantry impoverished and then, at election time, win their votes by dispensing little bits of money. And they vote for the guy because the only alternative to a crumby life with patronage from the Big Man is a crumby life without patronage. This is Walmart giving Thanksgiving turkeys for the poor and promising employees from its New Orleans stores flooded out by Katrina equally lousy jobs in other parts of the country. This is Roger Hedgecock, the local conservative radio call in talk show pundit telling low-wage non-union workers that they could of course see that unions were out to do them wrong to benefit rich, greedy politicians: unionized labor jacked up the price of food. And these low-wage workers, judging from those that got on the air, they bought it--after all it was they who most needed cheap food given their low, non-union wages. The logic is the same as the logic of arguing that we shouldn't oppose the war in Iraq because if we if we weren't fighting there we would be in danger of terror caused by anger over the war in Iraq.