Civil Commotion

It does us no good to ignore what is going on in this obscure little corner of the Pacific Northwest. It does us no good to refuse to hold to account the politics that led to this, and the politicians who sought to profit from it. It does us no good to deny that there is a substantial constituency for armed sedition in this country, and to deny the necessity of delegitimizing that constituency in our politics, and the first step in that process is to face it and to call it what it is.

Charles Pierce

As someone who has been talking for a long time about the near- and outright-sedition preached in Southern Baptist churches all across the country, I’m grateful that somebody with as large a megaphone as Pierce is finally drawing attention to it. I have not been kidding, or indulging in hyperbole, when I’ve said that the evangelical right is going to get worse, and probably violent, as the continued evolution of society forces them to the margins.

Michael Hamar points this morning toward a Washington Post column that reprises an old theme around here: The anger driving American politics has a lot to do with technological and religious change that has rendered a lot of people incompetent to live in the modern world.

For decades, people in rich countries have lived longer. But in a well-known paper, economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case found that over the past 15 years, one group — middle-age whites in the United States — constitutes an alarming trend. They are dying in increasing numbers. And things look much worse for those with just a high school diploma or less. There are concerns about the calculations, but even a leading critic of the paper has acknowledged that, however measured, “the change compared to other countries and groups is huge.”

The main causes of death are as striking as the fact itself: suicide, alcoholism, and overdoses of prescription and illegal drugs. “People seem to be killing themselves, slowly or quickly,” Deaton told me. These circumstances are usually caused by stress, depression and despair. The only comparable spike in deaths in an industrialized country took place among Russian males after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when rates of alcoholism skyrocketed.

[ … ]

Donald Trump has promised that he will change this and make them win again. But he can’t. No one can. And deep down, they know it.

Here in the south, the locus of the GOPs descent into the political arm of a crude, backward-looking religious movement, what is going on is blinking-neon obvious; just listen to the chatter in the YMCA locker room, or the barber shop.

A miscellany of related thoughts, in no particular order.

• Christianity will continue to decline in the United States. The decline is inevitable, will accelerate — and good riddance; the storyline is incontestably false, and an ethical system inspired by Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son is cult-like sewage and deserves to die.

  That does not mean that the desire for community will disappear; people will merely stop debasing themselves with regular public beratings and assemble around different ideals and interests.

• Broader acceptance of differences — ethnic, sexual orientation/identity, race — should conduce toward an end of identity ghettoes. It will happen slowly, over generations, but wouldn’t it be a good thing if people stopped talking about avoiding, or seeking, ‘black neighborhoods’ and ‘gay bars’ because nobody even knows what those expressions mean?

• The middle-class, especially that portion which counted on working at the mill until retirement, is going to be hoeing a tough row for a long time. The day when a high school education was sufficient is over.

• The frustrated middle class is poisoning its own well with its support of the very laissez faire policies that are screwing them into the ground. The day is not far off when 50- or 100-million educated workers is all we will need to feed ourselves; build, program, and maintain the machines; sort and file the paperwork.

• We are entering what is bound to be one of the most tumultuous periods in human history. The old religions are dying, work is changing, and support for the power structures which enabled them is dwindling. If mankind is to survive and avoid disappearing into Stone Age conflicts, we will have to adopt some flavor of collectivism for organizing ourselves. America is never going to elect a self-described Democratic Socialist like Bernie Sanders, but it is a rock-solid fact that Americans never had it so good as when the unions imposed a sort of industrial socialism; it is they who built the middle class — not people like Donald Trump or the Koch brothers.

I doubt very much that Donald Trump will survive the primaries. Though a substantial number of Americans are clearly ready for a fascist demagogue, a ‘man on horseback’ who simply sweeps aside pettifogging nuisances who care about facts, I don’t believe he can achieve anything more than the destruction of those few GOP candidates who might have been plausible candidates.

Update:   Commenter Bernie points toward an Atlantic piece which takes-up the looming prospect of a world without work. Well worth your time.

Contemplating the problem of integrating the religious into the modern world, philosopher of science Maarten Boudry make an observation that will be familiar to long-time Civil Commotion readers.

The religions that were too malleable, too easily accommodating to changing circumstances, too prone to compromise, have disappeared in the folds of history. Numerous gods have failed, precisely because their supporters too easily blended in with other cultures. The religions that have endured long enough to still be around, are the religions that managed to forge close-knit groups that actively resisted assimilation, and didn’t tolerate any questioning or doubt. Religious doctrines, at least culturally successful ones, are not open to critical scrutiny, but must be accepted on blind faith. By its very nature, religion creates a dichotomy between those who live in the ‘Truth’, and the outsiders who are deprived of it. In other words, religion is the mother lode of Us-vs-Them thinking. Blind faith is divisive, whereas doubt and critical thinking unites and bridges our differences.

The falsity of the Abrahamic narratives is simply not susceptible of any educated dispute. They persist because they exploit insecure people who are willing to humiliate and debase themselves in order to win acceptance by a group; they feed on the weak.