David Gelernter,a professor of computer science at Yale, has noted the snarling hatred that seems to dominate the left in this country and believes he understands its source:
Where does the asymmetry come from? American conservatives tend to be Christians or Jews. Liberals tend to be atheists or agnostics. (Yes, there are exceptions—to nearly everything, always; but that doesn’t mean we can stop thinking.) Almost all human beings need religion, as subway-riders need overhead grab bars. The religious impulse strikes conservatives and liberals alike. But conservatives usually practice the religion of their parents and ancestors; liberals have mostly shed their Judaism or Christianity, and politics fills the obvious spiritual gap. You might make football, rock music, or hard science your chosen faith. Some people do. But politics, with its underlying principles and striking public ceremonies, is the obvious religion substitute.
Hence the gross asymmetry of modern politics. For most conservatives, politics is just politics. For most liberals, politics is their faith, in default of any other; it is the basis of their moral life.
Go here to read the rest. His analysis is correct. Human beings are hard wired to worship, and if they do not worship God they will worship other things, and politics tends to be a popular God substitute. This explains much about the left in this country. For example, the punishment of bakers who do not wish to bake cakes for homosexual marriages. Looked at objectively this does not make sense. There are a huge amount of bakers and most would look at this as just another job. So why punish the handful of bakers who do not want to do so? Because in leftist minds they are heretics and must by definition be punished. This also explains why leftists, while continually mounting law suits to eradicate any acknowledgement of God in public schools, are ceaseless in their efforts to have students politically indoctrinated.
We are increasingly confronting political adversaries in this country who, when it comes to political matters, are intolerant bigots. Whenever they have political power they will use the State to harass their adversaries and will continually seek to criminalize the beliefs of their adversaries. They have a very expansive view of politics which ranges from who can enter bathrooms to whether sex is a societal construct rather than a biological reality. Unless things change, eventually culture wars will end in all too real wars.
The left succeeds in part by convincing Christians there is such a thing as a naked public square. There isn’t. Nature abhors a vacuum. The result is that Christians are too often cowed into not “imposing” their morality on society, while the left is free to impose its own “religious” values with near impunity. In the absence of Christians showing courage, I only wished the left actually believed in a wall of separation.
Caesar is God for many.
Joseph Bottum and David P. Goldman have seperately argued the case that progressivism/(illiberal)liberalism is what you get when you strip the gospel out of the social gospel movement.
I think Gelerenter’s point is jejune and also mistaken. The thing is, politics and religion are components or manifestations of a person’s self-concept – at least up to a point. Paul Hollander and Thomas Sowell have explored this – Sowell more deftly than Hollander. A ‘conservative’ is generally a person whose self-undertanding is not very sensitive to his disposition toward the world outside his mundane life.
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If you hang around comboxes populated by people who are committed Republicans or soi-disant ‘conservatives’, you do find some people who have an understanding of themselves as ruggedly independent in a world of freeloaders and losers (the distaff transposition of which is the person in a slow burn that someone somewhere is getting something they do not deserve); the thing is, combox denizens tend to be eccentric compared to ordinary Republican voters, much less Joe Blow off the sidewalks of Omaha.
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I think if you look at committed Democrats, you find three basic types: blacks whose thinking about the world outside of everyday life is dominated by affirmations and assertions of identity; working-class women with a seedy personal history who are irritated that other people might be ‘judging’ them; and bourgeois types who work in word-merchant occupations and / or are very taken with their formal schooling. All three trade in different species of intolerance. The last of these are the most consequential and, I’ll submit to you think of the opposition much the way school administrators think of high school students (except when they think of them as stupid and insubordinate employees).
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A great many of the ‘hot-button’ issues are seldom argued; they incorporate attitudes rather than viewpoints and those attitudes are class-delimited and define in-groups and out-groups. Our household Facebook account counts as a ‘friend’ a retired academic librarian. The man is not stupid – he’s a graduate of Bowdoin College, among other things, and he was almost certainly a scholarship student there. He’s the most capable workshop lecturer in his trade you’re ever likely to find. He’s not intemperate, either and seldom says anything trenchant face-to-face (one of his signatures and shortcomings). He makes political posts several times a week on Facebook, but none of them ever rise above trash talk of the sort you used to get from Molly Ivins or Barney Frank.
It won’t surprise anyone that the USCCB is leftist, but you have no idea. Bear will get around to posting an article in the next couple of days, but George Soros is in it up to his elbows.
The EEOC gets the nod from obullma to rep. two Muslims from delivering beer because it’s offensive to their religion, yet the bakers get smacked $130,000 plus, for refusing to bake the gay cake. Where is the justice? For the delivery men it’s ludicrous. Did they think they would ever have to deliver beer in their new American job? If they did they should of passed up the position. Who MADE them take the job? In the case of the baker its plain brut bullying from the slimy left.
Mahad Abass Mohamed and Abdkiarim Hassan Bulshale are the above mentioned pair.
Obama appointee allowed this case to go to trial. Jury awards $240,000 of our tax dollars to the two delivery men. Unbelievable!
“ So why punish the handful of bakers who do not want to do so? Because in leftist minds they are heretics and must by definition be punished. “
While many of us conservatives might see the left posture as offensive, I am afraid that they see it originating as a defense. Though we think of the bakers as innocent of any attack on homosexuals, the Wounded Group definitely sees the negative reaction to them as an attack. They see their litigation as a civilized and now civilly sanctioned strike back in self-defense.
They claim innocence: that they are born this way, even created by God this way, and worthy of the same respected status as any other consumer.
They perceive their litigation or public pressure (as against Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich) as “long-run” defensive.
So much do hey think the locus of hatred in this country is in the conservative camp, that they think it best to take the education/formation of innocent children away from hateful parents, and they are succeeding in doing just that. The resolution is a looong ways away.
Good point about the selective smackdowns Philip
“The thing is, politics and religion are components or manifestations of a person’s self-concept – at least up to a point.”
For some people their political and religious beliefs are simply family heirlooms, how they react to their family will determine to a large extent how they react to the family religion and politics, assuming their parents had the same politics and religion. Others will view both religion and politics through intellectual prisms to determine if the religion is true and if the political beliefs are just. Yet others will gain their politics and their religion based on who and what they love and hate. Others give as much thought to religion and politics as I do to professional sports: almost none. Finally, we have those who have a burning passion for a religion, and those who sublimate this passion to ends other than religion, most notably politics. The last category usually falls along a right left divide.
These people are not only worse than a pack of thieves, they are worse than inquisitors of the Spanish Inquisition
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Politics, the state, or the temptation for totalitarianism are tenets of their “religion.” And, “religious”: zealots cannot tolerate disbelief. So much so that they have allied themselves with other enemies of God and western culture/their natural allies: radical Islamists. We see it in their advancing Muslim culture and their persecuting Christians; and they’re blaming for Islamic terror massacres on the NRA, angry white men, and bitter clingers.
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In short, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy. The people have not yet realized that they do not consent to any of it. The progressives need to disarm the people before the people become aware of the elites’ sabotages and treasons.
Anzlyne.
Could this type of lopsided treatment of Christians fuel the Trump popularity?
My guess is that it isn’t hurting Trumps chances.
After ALL; “America is not a Christian Nation..”
Chia Obama said so. 🙂
In short, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy. The people have not yet realized that they do not consent to any of it.
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No, we live in a spectacularly corrupt oligarchy at the linchpin of which would be the legal profession. The Democratic Party is the electoral vehicle of the Bourbon classes of the Regime, for the most part (though some boardroom looters are Republicans). A general reformation would require breaking the legal profession on the wheel (and I mean the Bar Association, the professoriate, the appellate judiciary, the har-de-har public interest bar, the U.S. Attorney’s office, Big Law, and counsel for certain regulatory agencies – not the guy who handles your real estate closing or defends you on that drunk driving charge). Read Hernando de Soto on how doing business in Switzerland differed from doing business in Peru and then ask yourself why so many people with ready cash are willing to sluice it to characters like the Clintons and Rahm Emmanuel.
I never thought of it that way: former Christians and Jews shed their religion to embrace politics instead. And politics serves as their religion. Makes perfect sense. That explains the near ferocity with which many politicians do battle. Some think they are controlling history.
Sal.
The former Christians and Jews that have adopted their new God still call themselves Christian and Jews. That’s the fun part!
Call yourself as you see yourself…. the conscience of the narcissist. Who needs humility? That’s just a weakness for the new mercy workers.
Ernst Schreiber wrote, “progressivism/(illiberal)liberalism is what you get when you strip the gospel out of the social gospel movement.”
In France, Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier have made the same point: “In most respects, it represents a secularization of ideas and perspectives borrowed from Christian metaphysics, which spread into secular life following a rejection of any transcendent dimension. Actually, one finds in Christianity the seeds of the great mutations that gave birth to the secular ideologies of the first post-revolutionary era. Individualism was already present in the notion of individual salvation and of an intimate and privileged relation between an individual and God that surpasses any relation on earth. Egalitarianism is rooted in the idea that redemption is equally available to all mankind, since all are endowed with an individual soul whose absolute value is shared by all humanity. Progressivism is born of the idea that history has an absolute beginning and a necessary end, and that it unfolds globally according to a divine plan. Finally, universalism is the natural expression of a religion that claims to manifest a revealed truth which, valid for all men, summons them to conversion. Modern political life itself is founded on secularized theological concepts.”
To me everything is politics. Politics has to do with the relationship between people and how these people view themselves and the world. If you believe in God you will believe that we should all follow God’s rules. If you don’t, you will be a secularist who believes an elite (replacement for God) should determine the rules. One of the major differences between those that believe in God and those who don’t is that is that God believers base their judgements on long established moral criteria while secularists constantly review their moral criteria to fit some new theory emerging from academia.
Nowadays I think must folks lean secularist especially the clergy of the Catholic church and most particularly Pope Francis. The overall trend is the erosion of individual freedom and control by the state. The reason for this is that most people have become distanced from God and dependent on the nanny state which is a substitute for God. God is irrelevant in this situation.
The main hope is that perhaps enough folks have become fed up with this (Obamaism?) loss of freedom and economic progress that they will elect someone like Trump or Cruz who is capable of fomenting a revolution.
This debate is sure to continue. I am looking forward to what the Bear has to say.
“Michael Dowd
To me everything is politics. ”
I understand your point, religion and politics overlap, but that’s sort of like saying that the entirety of a human is chemistry. We can’t confuse the cake with the ingredients. There is a difference.
“To me everything is politics.”
Only beause we live in an age of
m(cr)ass (over)communication, increasing democracy (in the Aristotelean sebse) and commingling of the public & private spheres.Michael Dowd, I disagree. Politics fundamentally deals with government. Yes, you can argue that even parish councils are government and therefore political, but most of the time they really aren’t (witness the lack of campaigning for them).
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When government is limited people spend little time with politics, and yet feel satisfied with that limited involvement – most of life being nonpolitical. When government becomes dominant people either avoid politics entirely (success requires too much of an investment) or become immersed in it. When government becomes oppressive politics is either abhorred or becomes literally everything. “The private life in Russia is dead ” – Pasha Antipov “Strelnikov”, Doctor Zhivago – aptly describes the Communist version of political oppression.
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No, in a healthy society most human interactions are outside politics.
TomD wrote, “Politics fundamentally deals with government.”
Does no one read Carl Schmitt anymore?
The political comes into being when groups are placed in a relation of enmity, where each comes to perceive the other as an irreconcilable adversary to be fought and, if possible, defeated. “Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis,” insists Schmitt, “ transforms itself into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively, according to friends and enemy.”
“The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism,” Schmitt wrote. War is its most violent form and Schmitt, in effect, inverts Clausewitz’s famous dictum that “War is merely the continuation of policy by other means.” For Schmitt, politics is the continuation of war by other means.
Scathing in his rejection of Liberal Democracy, he denies the possibility of neutral rules that can mediate between conflicting positions; for Schmitt there is no such neutrality, since any rule – even an ostensibly fair one –represents the victory of one political faction over another and is merely the temporarily stabilised result of past conflicts.
Internal order can only be imposed as the necessary means of pursuing external conflicts. For Schmitt, a world state is impossible, for” humanity has no enemy.” – It could not unite people, for there would be nothing to unite them against.
I don’t know anything about Scmitt. Is he a total secularist? It would seem his eternal cycles of war would eventually be subsumed into religion.
We do of course have a meaning and purpose- Love. And see more than the secular cause and effect.
Anzlyne wrote, “I don’t know anything about Schmitt. Is he a total secularist?”
Quite the reverse. He was a Catholic and a Throne and Altar Conservative, who hated the French Revolution, the Rights of Man and parliamentary democracy.
He quoted with approval the English writer Bagehot, who declared that “The nature of a constitution, the action of an assembly, the play of parties, the unseen formation of a guiding opinion, are complex facts, difficult to know and easy to mistake. But the action of a single will, the fiat of a single mind, are easy ideas: anybody can make them out, and no one can ever forget them. When you put before the mass of mankind the question, ‘Will you be governed by a king, or will you be governed by a constitution?’ the inquiry comes out thus—’Will you be governed in a way you understand, or will you be governed in a way you do not understand?’”
Hence his famous dictum, “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” The sovereign is a definite agency capable of making a decision, not a legitimating category (the “people”) or a purely formal definition (plenitude off power, etc.). Sovereignty is outside the law, since the actions of the sovereign in the state of exception cannot be bound by laws since laws presuppose a normal situation. To claim that this is anti-legal is to ignore the fact that all laws have an outside, that they exist because of a substantiated claim (endorsed by the facts) on the part of some agency to be the dominant source of binding rules within a territory. The sovereign determines the possibility of the ‘rule of law’ by deciding on the exception: ‘For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.’”
It will be interesting to see how the good professor is treated by his increasingly rabid colleagues – and more importantly – the feral students of Yale.
Academics and their charges are the most intolerant and aggressive zealots since the Cromwell used Puritanism to purge their intellectual opponents.
I just meant that
He doesn’t seem to allow for an intervention of Grace… only speaking in tactical dialectical human terms – which points out how difficult it is even for him to be a “sovereign” individual. free of cultural influence