Civil Commotion

Today is the Winter Solstice — the real reason for the season — so I am republishing the annual post. I have (falsely) set the time of the post to 5:02 AM, the time of the solstice this year.

In truth, the solstices hardly matter any more, and I imagine that most folk barely notice; perhaps there is an offhand mention of it during the television weather report. After all, we no longer are eager for the game to return so that we have assurance of food. Why worry — we have chicken-to-go! But the winter solstice was a genuine-article Big Deal for millennia; it signified that fields would soon freshen, game would return to the forests, the air would soon be warming. All over the world, ancient peoples built observatories spread across acres; the projects must have required years, and the cost of labor and missed opportunities must have been huge.

And, of course, this day of least sunshine figured heavily in the religious narratives relied upon to understand the world, and all religions made much of the winter solstice. Basically, Christianity simply appropriated this promising, forward-looking day and attached to it a made-up a story about a savior’s birth. We all know how that worked-out.

No Winter Solstice ever passes but that I find myself imagining what must have been the experience of that first person who recognized that there is regularity in the cosmos.

What triggered the insight? What set of circumstances caused the caveman Poogah to realize that the stars were aligned just like now when the days were last cold just like now and the game had moved south just like now? How staggering it must have been to realize that he lived in the middle of a giant clock.

How long did he wait to speak of it? Did he watch carefully for two or three years before telling the rest of his tribe what he had recognized, in order to be certain, or did he share that insight at once? And what words did he use, when the words had never before been needed to explain a thought that nobody had ever had?

Did the local Holy Man, with responsibility for teasing blessings from a random and hostile universe, condemn him for impiety?

Whatever happened, it must be counted one of the great moments of human history, for afterward the world became predictable and perhaps manageable. There are ancient observatories all over the earth, and always it can be seen that the stones were arranged to point toward the rising sun on this day of least daylight, signifying that on the morrow the day would be longer and soon the game would return and the fields would freshen. We know our ancient forebears attached great importance to the day, because the work of building the observatories was huge and construction of the observatories would have required years.

Thus were science and engineering born.

Nowadays, of course, it hardly matters. The passing of the seasons has nothing to do with whether or not there will be food to eat, and the greatest part of mankind will probably not pause to remark the solstice at all or even, if only vaguely, wonder why there are so many religious observances at just about the same time the seasons change. Indeed, some people are so ignorant that they are offended by the idea that their Holy Day has pagan origins.

Meantime, the great clock ticks on.

A couple of recent conversations have caused me to think carefully about what it means to be a ‘conservative’ and to identify the reasons I don’t believe that the modern GOP is conservative in any meaningful sense.

For starters, I think that, rightly understood, conservatism is not an agenda but an attitude, a will to solve problems and prepare for the future while protecting — or, conserving — what is most valuable. Those who are conversant in philosophy might recognize what I’m driving at as the Deweyan pragmatism to which all engineers are trained; not Dewey’s socialism, but Dewey’s approach to problem-solving. A few of the rules:

• Conservatives are reality junkies. As they used to say on Dragnet, “Just the facts” — and conservative respect that there are such things as facts.

• Education is a good thing; the more of it possessed by individuals, and society writ large, the better.

• The methods of science are the best means of determining facts about the world; mysticism, feelings, ‘just knowing’ things, is untrustworthy.

An example: We all know that, according to most GOPrs and the Evangelical Right, same-sex marriage is a very grave evil that pisses-off Our Invisible Friend and heralds the imminent collapse of Civilization.

No. A proper conservatism favors permitting same-sex marriage, because …

• It is a settled, incontestable fact that sexual orientation is innate at birth.

• The sex lives of the Gentlemen Bachelors down the street affects nobody but themselves.

• It protects marriage by affirming its importance and enlarging its compass, drawing more people into one of society’s most important building-blocks.

The hostility of the GOP and the Evangelical Right to same-sex marriage is not grounded on any principled conservatism; it is merely reaction, hostility to change.

Some other examples of the distinction I’m making here between agenda and attitude.

• Richard Nixon oversaw the founding of the EPA, and OSHA. Further, he masterminded the opening to China.

  The contemporary GOP was hostile to those acts then, and the Trump administration has worked fervidly to undermine the work of the EPA and OSHA. By my lights, Nixon was a conservative in the real meaning on the word, striving to protect the environment and safe workplaces, and Trump’s GOP is merely reactionary.

• Dwight Eisenhower oversaw the inauguration of the Interstate Highway System, the founding of NASA under civilian control, funded America’s early research in computing, and presciently warned against the military-industrial complex. This distinguished military man relied on science and engineering to prepare for an onrushing future while protecting, preserving, conserving, civilian control of each of these major initiatives.

• Teddy Roosevelt and Gerald Ford, each a Republican president, favored a system of public health care.

Granted, there is room for arguing about all these things as public policy initiatives, and I don’t want to disparage that. What I am concerned to point out is the attitude, the spirit with which problems are addressed. The contemporary — not modern — GOP responds to all change with hostility and sentimental, half-baked mysticism; they are not conservatives.

Albert the Pious is having a difficult time dealing with the nomination of Pete Buttigieg as Transportation Secretary.

Well, how long will the LGBTQ movement celebrate the fact that an openly gay middle-class white man has become the first LGBTQ openly such member of a president’s cabinet because after all, he’s not a lesbian and because after all, he’s not bisexual and he is not African-American and he is not Hispanic and he is not, well, you can go down the list. He is not transgender. And so, as you’re looking at this, you recognize that LGBTQ and then of course the plus sign that follow means that, next there will be the demand that there needs to be the first openly lesbian member of a president’s cabinet.

And then, they will just go down the list, LGBTQ and of course, as you’re looking at the plus sign, this is never going to end. As we’re looking at this, we recognize that we have now reached a certain point in the revolution in American morality and culture where yes, Pete Buttigieg has now been nominated by the president-elect to be the next Secretary of Transportation. But the nomination is not really so much about the Department of Transportation or any particular expertise when it comes to transportation. It has instead to do with identity politics but there is another angle to the Buttigieg nomination and it shows up very interestingly in the main article about the announcement that appeared in the New York Times. This article by Reid Epstein and Coral Davenport has the headline, “Former Rival as Partner for Agenda on Climate.”

There is merit in the observation that Buttigieg has no special expertise, or even experience, in transportation, and if Mohler had let his criticism rest with that I’d probably agree with him. But the gratuitous acknowledgement that Buttigieg is not a lesbian? Or transgender?

Mohler has turned a humdrum political appointment into a rant about moral upheaval.

It’s a system of lies. To assert that magical spirits watch people and burn them in fiery hell after death is an obvious falsehood to any thinking, educated person. Ditto for the rest of biblical supernaturalism.

Young Americans are abandoning religion by millions — just as young Europeans, Canadians, Japanese, Australians and others have already done. Those who say their faith is “none” are rising with amazing rapidity, heading toward a possible majority. Hopefully, it will be acceptable before too long for the news media to openly say that religion is a fraud.

James Haught

When the harm that religion does is added to the patent ridiculousness of its claims, I honestly marvel that it persists; this is especially true of Christianity, which is so degrading. It’s a good thing that Christianity is in decline, and I look forward to the day when Southern Baptists are as rare as Zoroastrians.

CNN is reporting that Trump is telling aides he plans to remain in the White House.

President Donald Trump is convinced he won the 2020 election and is now telling aides that he is considering not leaving the White House on January 20th, which is mandated by the Constitution since Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the next president that day.

On Erin Burnett Out Front, the CNN host reported that Trump appears to have flip-flopped on accepting the reality of his defeat and now adamantly believes a number of conspiracy theories that falsely claim he won the 2020 election.

I suppose it was statistically inevitable that a president would crack-up and go veering-off into La La Land one day but, really, with impeachments (Clinton, Trump), a resignation (Nixon), an assassination (Kennedy), a legitimately contested election (Bush/Gore), I feel some days as if I’ve lived the whole of American history. I’m looking forward to a boring presidency.