Civil Commotion

Kim Davis, Pious Yahoo and, unfortunately, still the clerk of Rowan County, Kentucky, continues to refuse to issue marriage licenses, though she lost her appeal to the Supreme Court yesterday.

Invoking “God’s authority” in a testy exchange with same-sex partners, a county clerk has again refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples – this time in defiance of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling against her.

On Tuesday morning, Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis’ office denied the licenses to several couples. At first, Davis was in her office with the door closed and blinds drawn, and her staff said she wouldn’t be available. But Davis emerged a few minutes later, telling the couples and the activists gathered there that her office is continuing to deny the licenses “under God’s authority.”

Well.

Ignorant characters like Davis enjoy justifying their ill behavior with brave declarations like, “I don’t leave my faith at home when I go to work,” et cetera, et cetera. The fact is that the state has no religion — and neither may Davis during the hours that she toils as its agent. She is wrong, and wildly and embarrassingly so.

There is a bright side to this unseemly debacle: Nobody with two eyeballs connected to a functioning mind can fail to see how vicious and inherently incompatible with democratic self-government Christianity actually is when people are so foolish that they take it seriously.

This is interesting: They’re asking over at Daily Nous what one statement/question/passage from Western philosophy would you preserve if all of the rest of philosophical thought were to be removed from the earth?

Resetting, or jump-starting, Western thought is an idea that has been around for a while; the need for that is the aim of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, and John Dewey’s Reconstruction in Philosophy. Rightly so, too. Western thought is derived chiefly from Plato who, taking his cue from mathematics, taught that our world is a poor copy of a perfect, ideal world somewhere else. Layer-on Original Sin to explain why that other world is inaccessible to us, and you’ve got Christianity. The West has reached the dead-end of Plato’s thought.

I need to think about it, but my first thought is the challenge posed by Socrates in Euthyphro:

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

Book Two: A Criticism of the Highest Values That Have Prevailed Hitherto
Concluding remarks concerning the criticism of morality

§401   Which values have been most valued hitherto. Morality as the leading value in all phases of philosophy (even with the Sceptics). Result: this world is no good, a “true world” must exist somewhere.

What is it that here determines the highest value? What, in sooth, is morality? The instinct of decadence; it is the exhausted and the disinherited who take their revenge in this way and play the masters —

Historical proof: philosophers have always been decadents and always in the pay of Nihilistic religions. The instinct of decadence appears as the will to power. The introduction of its system of means: its means arc absolutely immoral.

General aspect: the values that have been highest hitherto have been a special instance of the will to power; morality itself is a particular instance of immorality.

* * *

Why the Antagonistic Values always succumbed.

1. How was this actually possible? Question: why did life and physiological well-constitution succumb everywhere? Why was there no affirmative philosophy, no affirmative religion?

   The historical signs of such movements: the pagan religion. Dionysos versus the Christ. The Renaissance. Art.

2. The strong and the weak: the healthy and the sick; the exception and the rule. There is no doubt as to who is the stronger —

   General view of history; Is man an exception in the history of life on this account? An objection to Darwinism. The means wherewith the weak succeed in ruling have become: instincts, “humanity”, “institutions”—.

3. The proof of this rule on the part of the weak is to be found in our political instincts, in our social values, in our arts and in our science.

* * *

The instincts of decadence have become master of the instincts of ascending life –. The will to nonentity has prevailed over the will to life.

— Is this true? Is there not perhaps a stronger guarantee of life and of the species in this victory of the weak and the mediocre? Is it not perhaps only a means in the collective movement of life, a mere slackening of the pace, a protective measure against something even more dangerous?

— Suppose the strong were masters in all respects, even in valuing: let us try and think what their attitude would be towards illness, suffering and sacrifice! Self-contempt on the part of the weak would be the result: they would do their utmost to disappear and to extinguish their kind. And would this be desirable? Should we really like a world in which the subtlety, the consideration, the intellectuality, the plasticity in fact, the whole influence of the weak was lacking?

* * *

We have seen two “wills to power” at war (in this special case we had a principle: that of agreeing with the one that has hitherto succumbed and of disagreeing with the one that has hitherto triumphed): we have recognised the “real world” as a “world of lies” and morality as a form of immorality. We do not say “the stronger is wrong”.

We have understood what it is that has determined the highest values hitherto and why the latter should have prevailed over the opposite value: it was numerically the stronger.

If we now purify the opposite value of the infection, the half-heartedness and the degeneration with which we identify it.

We restore Nature to the throne, free from moralic acid.

I was sad. I still am sad. I studied for six years to fulfill all the requirements for ordination. I wore my dog collar proudly and worked tirelessly to help people and to help God’s kingdom come. Being a minister was the lion’s share of my identity. That’s gone now.

For closeted clergy, ministers who are still active but no longer believe, the risks of candor are huge. Family and finances are jeopardized.

Rev. Robert Ripley

By the time he gets out of seminary, every bright kid knows three things:

1. Biblical scholarship has dispositively established that the familiar, orthodox Christian narrative is false.

2. If he ever says so aloud he will be unemployable as a pastor.

3. His expensive seminary education leaves him wholly unfitted for any other kind of work.

I suspect, but can’t prove, that this is what lies behind the Southern Baptist insistence upon young marriage and childbirth; it moves the escape hatch out of reach.

So there you are: Just graduated, married to a woman who was herself raised to be a preacher’s wife and who is wildly impatient to get out of married student housing, and with a nest full of hungry and clamoring little birds. You accept the glib assurances that everybody has occasional episodes of doubt, but faith will overcome that, and get that first job and perhaps even take out a mortgage.

Walking that back and living as an honest man is very nearly impossible.

I’ve said for a long time that if George Wallace were alive today he’d campaign as a Republican so, naturally, I’m pleased to see the same observation in Salon.

He’s [Donald Trump] a demagogic ethno-nationalist of the kind that’s succeeded before in American history, especially during times of great upheaval and dislocation. Think of him as our Huey Long¹, our George Wallace.

Besides a genius for self-promotion, what Trump has in common with those three men is this: He appeals to a large swathe of Americans who have not only lived through massive social disruption — the Great Depression and the Civil Rights Movement, respectfully — but who have had their fundamental assumptions about Americanness, and therefore themselves, challenged in the process. When his fans speak of “taking” their country back, they are not being tongue-in-cheek. They are deathly serious.

It is the whole of modernity that the loony Right is upset about, especially the Teavangelicals. Their ethic of unthinking submission has been rejected, they’re not special, they are laughed at when they’re accustomed to deference — the world has become a place that they can’t understand and for which nothing in their experience has prepared them. Our transient political brawls are merely proxies for a deeper fight over an epochal philosophical shift away from Platonism — our world is a poor copy of a perfect world somewhere else — toward some flavor of pragmatic realism. This is, withal, a good thing, though we’re not going to get there easily or without a lot of grief along the way.

– – – – –
¹   The novel All the Kings Men, by Robert Penn Warren, is based upon Huey Long.