In my reading of so many secular Liberal pundits and blogs I continue to find remarkable how patronizing and tone deaf they are to the concerns and sensibilities of religious believers. If nothing else, it's just politically stupid. I don't have a problem with anybody condemning hatred, intolerance, and the plain nuttiness of the Robertson, Fallwell, Coulter, Limbaugh variety, but most people with traditional religious values are not hate-filled nutcases, and it's with those that secular liberals of the DailyKos stamp need to develop a rapprochement. I believe that in this country an appeal to the religious idealism of the American people has to be central for any hope for a substantive progressive politics.
But let's face it, secular Liberals really have at best a patronizing attitude toward believers. They are so insulated by their smug sense of having moved beyond the need for religion that they seem often to be genuinely surprised when they meet a believer who is not allied with the forces of reaction. They have come to see themselves as the only hope for a progressive future, and quite frankly, from my point of view, their pretensions are ludicrously delusional. These people think their world is the only world worth living in, and really have very little understanding about how we're at the beginnings of a struggle for the soul of the country that will have to draw upon deeper resources than they have to offer. And in my view they are one of the biggest obstacles for the development of a robust progressivism that would be true to America's highest ideals.
Progressive politics has a branding problem in this regard, because it has become too closely associated with the kind of secular European style socialism to which most Americans are allergic. A secular progressive politics may or may not continue to work work in Europe, but it hasn't a prayer here. Europe has its own problematic history with its religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church, a history which is quite different in the U.S. European progressives saw the Church as the enemy, and for good reason.
But in the U.S., the situation has always been quite different. Until the seventies and eighties, religious minded people were more at the vanguard of social change more than playing the reactionary role more typical in Europe. Progressive politics,whether we're talking about the abolitionist in the ante-bellum era, the social gospel movement in the Progressive era, or the black church-based early civil rights movement, has mainly been driven by religious idealists.
This changed in the 1970s when the Democrats were mainly taken over by a hodgepodge of secular feminists, multiculturalist, and the soft Marxism of the Frankfurt School New Left. And was aggravated in the 1980s when in reaction to seventies, a rather bizarre form of right-wing, cargo-cult Christian religiosity emerged as a political force to take back America from the seventies-style, anything-goes Democrats who were destroying it.
But here's the thing that the folks over at DailyKos have to understand: for better or worse, no change has been widely accepted by Americans unless it was framed in terms that were consonant with the religiosity that is hardwired into the American psyche. And this is in my view the root of the Democrats problem in having lost touch with its base.
A little history as to why: (Skip this indented section if you're sick of my repetitious history lessons regarding the so-called cultural shift we're in the middle of. I think it's important, though, to understand if you'r serious about engaging in the long-term argument I've been advancing on this blog.)
Secularism is the spirit of the Modern period, and the modern period ended about a hundred years ago in Europe, and in 1963 in the U.S. You can quibble about dates, but for me Gutenberg's first printing of his bible in 1455 marked the transition from the medieval period to the modern. And Nietzsche's death in Europe in 1900, and JFK's in the U.S. in '63 marked the transition from the modern to the postmodern. The Modern era itself reached its high-water mark between 1650 and 1789, the period of the great epistemologists–Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant–and the enlightenment philosophes–Voltaire and Rousseau. The beginning of the end was the massive irrationality of the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 and the end of the end was the French Revolution and the Terror. Enlightenment gave way to Romanticism and its heady notions of Spirit in history, and Romanticism gave way to Marx's dialectical materialism and Darwin's idea that history was just a meaningless groping in the void.
WWI swept away what was left of enlightenment or romantic optimism in Europe, and WWII, framed by its Nazi perpetrators in a Nietzschean vocabulary, was the first postmodern war. It ended with the detonation of one of the most horrific products of the technological mind. And for the first time humans began to understand that they had it within their capability to destroy the earth. It became clear that human rationality was a fragile coracle being tossied about on a roiling sea of irrationality. Americans were a little slow on the uptake. It took the turmoil of the sixties to drive the point home that we were no longer moderns. And I would argue that the secular rationalist mentality is as relevant to understanding our world now as medieval Catholicism was for understanding the scientific technological impulses that drove the culture for the last five hundred years.
And while secular rationalism will persist just as Catholic medievalism persisted, it's simply no longer the cutting edge. But why did secular rationalism develop in the first place? It was mainly a response to the bloody post-Reformation relgious wars in Europe. It began to take hold in the wake of the Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics that ended in 1648 and the English Civil War between Puritans and Anglicans in 1649. Intelligent people understandably started thinking that this religion thing was a problem. And they began to question whether it was really needed at all. Could it be possible to live without it, and would everyone be better off if they did? And at the same time the prodigious Newton was establishing for all the world to see what the power of reason could achieve, and it became interesting for people to think of the world as a great machine and of God as an engineer who made it. And like a wind-up clock he coiled the spring and then left it to run on its own.
Such a god has essentially abandoned his creation, and does not interfere with its workings once it had been set it into motion. In a world with such a god there is no grace, no miracles, no enchantment. Such a world might delight the engineer in us, but not the poet. If the world is nothing but a great machine, it has power, but it lacks soul. Such a god for such a world is useless when it comes to solving problems, and his new status as a cosmic irrelevancy made it easier to ditch him altogether in the nineteenth century. That's when the Industrial Revolution kicked in and the machine became more than a metaphor; it became in a very real sense the new god.
The main thing to keep in mind was that during the modern period, there were two basic camps that formed with all kinds of variations on two basic themes. The new one comprised those who were open to new ideas and put their faith in reason and technology, and the other was the old traditionalist camp that comprised those who resisted the "new thinking" and continued to put their faith in traditional practice and religious authority. Instead of religious authority, the progressive new thinkers had science. It gradually became a substitute religion for many progressives who wanted to assert values of freedom and independence over against the constrictions of the traditional past. It was completely understandable that these progressives would want to divorce themselves from traditional religion and work to undermine the kind of society that was dominated by oppressive religious ideologies.
The "new thinking" types were optimistic about progressive social change and thought that rationality and new technological advancements were the tools to achieve it. The traditionalists steeped in religious ideas about original sin were skeptical that any kind of truly significant progress was possible. But the new thinkers pointed to the material improvements and the prosperity generated by the new technologies. The most thoughtful of the conservatives Blake, Coleridge, Dostoyevski wondered if humans weren't being seduced by the promise of material progress into a rationalist/technological nightmare world. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, the first significant science fiction novel in 1817, gave expression to the foreboding.
It's not a foreboding that we have left behind. Now we worry about the coming Singularity. The problem does not lie with science, but with what we do with the new knowledge that science has made available. Science has given us the aiblity to reverse engineer the natural world, and with that knowledge comes enormous power. Pure science is a discipline very restricted in its scope–it seeks only to understand in naturalistic terms the natural world. The technological applications of this new knowledge go far beyond just trying to understand the natural world.
The motive driving technological development is very similar to the motive that drove alchemists and magicians in the late medieval and early modern period. Both sought to understand the laws that governed how the world worked in order to obtain greater levels of power. In the 1600s science and alchemy existed side by side– Newton was as much interested in the latter as he was the former.
But in the end science and its materialistic logic proved to be the more potent tool for controlling and transforming the material world. And the principle of Ockham's Razor excluded any reference to a reality beyond the material world of the senses, even if scientists believed there was such a world. So a habit of mind developed that was committed to the radical separation of the material world from a spiritual world, and it is understandable that insofar as the supersensibile world becomes irrelevant to what one does on a daily basis, it would only be a matter of time before a kind of culture of rationalist skepticism developed whose members found it hard to believe that there was any other world except the material one they sought so diligently to understand.
Secularism is for the most part the product of the modern habit of mind that developed a culture of skepticism among its intellectuals. As science and philosophy became activities divorced from any consideration of the ways in which the spiritual and material world interacted, so was politics similarly divorced. I think the divorce was for the most part a good thing, and I wouldn't have it any other way, but I understand why the Christian right, the Pope, and Muslim ayatollahs have a problem with it. They think the divorce is a false division that gives people who live in a society split that way a distorted picture of reality with profoundly alienating social effects. They have good reason to think so, but in a globalizing world they have no choice but to adapt.
Nevertheless their alienation is real and their confusion painful. Their God is not a watchmaker god. He is intimately involved with his creation, and they believe this to be true with every fiber of their being. To acquire the ability to live in a world where one's private beliefs are not reflected in the social structures that support them is not easy for a people with a traditionalist mindset. They view the secularists arguments about separation of church and state that require the removal of prayer from schools and the ten commandments from the courthouse lobby to be like the clever lawyer who makes a case in court that gets the obviously guilty criminal off. Their sense of the rightness of the world is profoundly offended, and it's understandable why they would have a hard time with a political system that operates from assumptions that makes such travesties possible. Liberals, for whom nothing is sacred because everything is profane, have no clue how viscerally wrong this feels to traditionalists.
It's not something most traditionalists think about; it's something that they deeply feel, and I have to say that I think there is an element of healthfulness in it. It has made them feel strangers in their own country, and that's hard to bear. And one of the biggest drivers in the conservative backlash since the eighties has been the longing these traditionalists have to get their country back. It's a futile, nostalgic longing, but I understand it and I sympathize with their distress and confusion. And I understand why they feel so offended by the force that they believe is the cause of it all–secular liberalism and its cosmopolitian tolerance of just about any kind of weirdness. Is nothing sacred? Is there no shame? These are legitimate questions.
Nevertheless, in a globalizing world we're all Cosmopolitans, whether we like it or not. We have to learn to deal respectfully with those whose who come from different worlds while at the same time holding fast to what is for us sacred. And secularese is the neutral language we must speak in the political sphere. Otherwise we will revert to the kind of insanity that engulfed Europe in the first half of the 1600s and that we see now in Iraq as it devolves into a three-way civil war.
What bothers me about the smug cosmopolitanism of the left is that they have little sense of the price that has been paid and of the superficiality of their glib worldview. Cosmopolitanism is a survival strategy in a globalizing pluralistic world. It does not, however, comprise beliefs that most people would die for, and for people who have any real hope of fighting for a just society in the now intensifying confrontation that is coming between ordinary people and the ruthless predators in the corporate overclass, they will have to draw on resources than those found in the glib cosmopolitanism you find at DailyKos or the mainstream of the Democratic Party. In the end this is truly a spiriitual struggle for the soul of the country.
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