Civil Commotion

I think evangelicals have found their dream president.

Jerry Falwell, Jr.

A thoughtful piece by Andrew Sullivan at New York Magazine takes a look at the global rise of backward-looking reactionaries.

Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It’s far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were. It is not simply a conservative preference for things as they are, with a few nudges back, but a passionate loathing of the status quo and a desire to return to the past in one emotionally cathartic revolt.

It will be well worth your time to go read the entire thing.

I think Sullivan’s piece is far more right than wrong, but that he underestimates a couple of things. First, automation has transformed the workplace in ways that make it unrecognizable to many people and leaves them behind and, second, the Abrahamic faiths are dying because their narratives are incontestably false and their ethics are very bad. The simultaneous transformation of work, and slow-motion death of religion — the anchors of most lives — has left many people unmoored and ready to listen to cheap demagogues and nihilistic vandals like Donald Trump. Worse, both transformations have their locus in a single demographic — the best educated, the so-called ‘elites.’

We are reprising today the turmoil of the first century and, as then, there will not be a swift resolution; a serviceable philosophy must emerge and be widely accepted. Let us hope that, unlike Christianity, it can be maintained without bloodshed.

It was 100-years ago that the United States entered World War I — the first mechanized war, with the appearance of tanks, air power, great guns. John Dewey, then and still one of the most penetrating minds America has ever produced, delivered in the early ’20s a series of lectures subsequently published as Reconstruction in Philosophy, and a few years later a second set of lectures published as A Common Faith.

At the heart of both books is anticipation of our present turmoils (rather like Nietzsche) and the rejection of absolutes, recognition that abstractions such as ‘justice’ and ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are provisional, that they emerge out of a social contexts as spurs to action. This is an explicit rejection of the metaphysical claims of the Abrahamic religions, all of which hold that there are absolute rights and wrongs, and that which is which is forever settled. To take the most pressing example, LGBTQ people were persecuted and killed for millennia because of the condemnation of them by Bronze Age anonymities; now, a steadily-growing number of people attach more merit to John Stuart Mill’s Enlightenment-era ‘harm principle.’ Basically, a once universally-accepted convention — kill gays — has been displaced by another — they harm nobody, so leave them alone.

Domestically, and internationally, the primary engine of conflict is the failure of worldviews that don’t explain reality or provide adequate guidance for living peacefully with reality. What is more, embedded in those worldviews is the teaching that living any other way comes with grave metaphysical consequences — in the case of Christianity, bobbing on the lake of fire like a cork for eternity. The people raised on this gunk are psychologically incapable of accommodating an evolved world or absorbing its contrary information.

The global growth of reaction is a failure of philosophy.

Uhhh … right.

I’ve been working my way through On Tyranny, recommended by Bruce Gerencser here, and discussed a bit here.

It’s a brief enumeration by a Yale historian of 20-rules which, if we all observe them, undermine authoritarians — a timely subject. Rule number 5 is …

Remember professional ethics

Good advice. There are no Flint water-supply disasters without engineers who have set-aside their professional ethics. There are no show trials without lawyers who have set-aside their professional ethics. There are no obscene medical experiments without doctors who have set-aside their professional ethics. There are no cover-ups of pastoral sex abuse without preachers who have set-aside their professional ethics. There are no Enron collapses without accountants who have set-aside their professional ethics.

Now, I understand that most people don’t earn their living by practicing an occupation that is considered a ‘profession’ — but it is true of all trades and occupations that there is an enveloping set of expectations that constitute what is considered proper, acceptable behavior. Even the kid who hands burgers through the drive-through window is expected to return the proper change.

Ethics are not a burden; they are the first line of defense against dog-eat-dog chaos.

What do you know? Earlier this week, with health care, tax reform, financing for the border wall and a possible government shutdown on this week’s agenda, I made a modest prediction:

I bravely predict that the only bit of it that might actually happen is the shutdown, and Trump might order something blown-up in order to change the subject.

The tax plan is a bullet-list on a half-sheet of paper, health care reform/repair/whatever has been shelved again, the wall has been put off till next year’s budget, Congress is debating a resolution to continue funding right now, and The Orange One is ominously warning of a “major, major conflict” with Pyongyang.

I am a very smart guy, but I can’t see into the future. All it takes is to see this bunch as they actually are: A pack of empty bumblers whose lives are cheap theater, lives all about seeming rather than know-how and doing.

I still marvel that Trump fooled so many people.