The Spiritual Shape of Political Ideas
January 16, 2017 9:42 PM   Subscribe

 
This is one of those times where I get to see an idea I've vaguely had fleshed out and grounded in the literature by someone who can fairly claim expertise.

Thanks for the link.
posted by PMdixon at 9:56 PM on January 16, 2017 [6 favorites]


He's not wrong.
Neither is Kim Radersma.
The cultural inheritance I carry as a Bible Belter is indeed a dark one, but there are still some good fruits from that soil, and an evangelical zeal for progressive causes is one of them. It buoyed the civil rights organizing and activism of the '60s.
In a much diluted form, I feel it, too. I am an atheist and a dabbler in Buddhism, yet how often have I looked at a Trumpist and thought: whited sepulchre! Be sure your sin will find you out. Many will call to Him, "Lord, Lord," who will not get in . . .
Conservatives seem to think that the religiously orthodox have a natural monopoly on morality and ethics, and that it's silly and hypocritical for anyone to the left of Franklin Graham to wax indignant about anything. I ain't got the time for it anymore. I have all the hellfire I need.
posted by Countess Elena at 10:09 PM on January 16, 2017 [21 favorites]


It's not that I haven't seen these tendencies some times, among some people. But it genuinely doesn't line up with the majority of sensible progressives I know who can talk about structural racism without the self-flagellation of white guilt, and who are engaged in genuinely earnest and difficult conversations about what views you engage with and what views aren't worth that consideration.

(And is there some point where we've lost so much sea ice that apocalyptic language feels appropriate? Do we keep up the neutral non-alarmist science talk until we're under water?)

I don't know - I think probably every convert to every ideology goes through something like what the author describes, like new vegetarians who can't stop thinking about how awful factory farming is. (One thing that happened in science fiction circles felt very much like some kind of snake-handling tent revival where one could only expiate one's sins through the meanness of the preacher's rhetoric.) But it feels like the author uses it as a way to dismiss the idea that structural racism exists, global warming is probably a pretty serious problem, and it's okay to want your student fees to be spent on a speaker whose views are not terrible (even as we disagree on what not-terrible views look like.)
posted by Jeanne at 10:17 PM on January 16, 2017 [14 favorites]


Speaking from the other side of the Pacific, it seemed the author quickly conflated white privilege with one particular, culturally embedded expression of that privilege. Not to dismiss any of the concepts touched on in the article, but the texture of what he describes is quite alien to me – and appropriate to the framing, it feels like the difference between a matter of fact, and an article of faith.
posted by not the fingers, not the fingers at 10:43 PM on January 16, 2017 [2 favorites]


Sure are a lot of motes in liberals' eyes.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 10:44 PM on January 16, 2017 [15 favorites]


The author has this mistaken idea that the goal is to be entirely unaware of race. My perspective as a secular American progressive from a Protestant background is, rather, that the goal is to be tolerant and accepting of traits that people have that they have no control over. And the fact is that it's just not possible to completely ignore many of these traits, so rather than try to do so, let's sort out how to be respectful and considerate to others, and attempt to provide them with equal opportunity, while acknowledging their differences. When facing the world with that perspective and with eyes open, the existence of privilege becomes clear.
posted by sanedragon at 10:53 PM on January 16, 2017 [24 favorites]


"The autodafé—the self-abnegation with which activists confess their own interior guilt"

auto-da-fé, Weekly Standard. It's almost like your copy editors aren't familiar with theological terms.

"And as the post-Protestant generations gradually rose up to claim the high places formerly occupied by their mainline grandparents, what they carried with them was the mood and structure of once-coherent ideas of Christian theology, rather than the personal behaviors of Christian morality. "

Yeah, dude, I feel like that's been more clearly a conservative problem than a liberal one in our public political life.

"To shun these days is to take away from sinners any access to the forums of public life."

Oh, yeah, George Will is really suffering from lack of any access to the forums of public life. As is Lawrence Summers.

"But how shall they atone? And how shall they return from the symbolic place of sinfulness in which they have been set?"

I do actually agree with this bit. Without the love of the redemption narrative that infuses the evangelical right, the left really does have no accepted, ritualized way to atone for a sin and be accepted back in the fold. All the time you see lefties saying, "Well, sure, he apologized, but it wasn't enough, and just the fact that he said that one thing that one time ... I can never trust him again." Part of my aggravation with lefty circular firing squads. People make mistakes! Let them atone and return! (I dub this paragraph "even a stopped clock.")

"And who, at some level, doesn’t want that?"

Whoa, dude. Hella projection.

This is very cherry-picky. A lot of his points are what I would call "very Protestant" -- ideas about original sin, the sinfulness of the body, shunning, repentance, etc. -- and don't have the same strength or currency in American Catholic communities/descendants, and he just leaves that to the side. Which, fair enough, he's talking about American Protestant Christianity. Right up until he wants to make a point about banning books and ideas and suddenly he jumps to the Catholic tradition and Popes with Indices of banned books, when the Anglo-American Protestant tradition (of Milton, and Locke) has a very different, and richer, attitude, that "Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?" (Areopagitica) I don't know, I'd have to spend more time with it and read the longer form to frame a really coherent objection, but that seems like a rhetorical trick. "Here's all the ways the left is just like its American Protestant heritage and is enacting its prior rituals of faith in politics" -- and they are many! it's a fair point! -- and then there's a slight of hand where he suddenly flips to a Catholic intellectual tradition of banned book lists and "error having no rights" that basically never had any traction in American political thought (or really even among American Catholics) because he wants to show how extra-censorship-oriented and shunning-oriented the progressive left is, but that's not a part of that Protestant faith inheritance and it's not a part of American political heritage; the opposite is indeed the case when it comes to American Protestant free speech ideas.

And, yeah, no, I don't buy the comparison of environmentalism and global warming science to millennarianism or Apocalyptic literature at all. That's -- a failure of understanding of how Apocalyptic literature functions in the Bible, and a failure of understanding of how it's handled in mainline Protestant theology, and, again, he wants to slip away from his point about mainline Protestant American heritage and choose an outsider fringe group as the "real" progenitors of leftist thought, but I don't think this one works at all.

("We had the cardinals in the Kremlin and the return of the Inquisition in the secret police and Moscow show trials." -- see, NOW we're back to Catholicism being so foreign to America that it's the same as communist Russia, there's a lot of slight-of-hand in these arguments with the hope that his not-well-educated-on-theology-or-religious-history audience won't notice the rhetorical slippage.)

"for much of radical environmentalism has, in fact, the shape of a Christian worldview."

It's gonna blow his fuckin' mind when he finds out that there's a whole theological school of Christian radical environmentalism that is embraced by the leadership of most mainline American Protestant denominations, and by the Catholic Church, and even by an increasing number of Evangelical leaders, and that it IS IN FACT a Christian worldview deeply rooted in the narrative of Creation and Redemption. Blow. His. Fuckin'. Mind.

"And who, at some level, doesn’t want that?"

DUDE SERIOUSLY JUST YOU.

But at least we get to his point ... environmentalists bad, global warming probably fake because it sounds like Armageddon.

Also, to jump back to the beginning before we began the slippage from white guilt to college students being delicate flowers to global warming being probably fake because people sound hysterical about it, people talk about racism in terms of original sin because since the beginning of the Civil Rights movement (really, since the beginning of the abolitionist movement!), Christian abolitionists, Civil Rights advocates, etc., have explicitly used that metaphor to frame their discussion of racism. Not because they've inherited orphaned Protestant ideas of original sin without the theology, but because people like the Rev. Martin Luther King, whose sometimes-subtle, sometimes-overt Protestant Christian theology in his public speeches is a thing of beauty and awe, SAID THAT ON PURPOSE.

That said, I do think there are a lot of way in which we re-enact parts of our American Protestant heritage in the American public sphere that are quite obvious if you study theology or religious history but maybe don't jump out at other people. Americans freakin' love a redemption narrative, and not only did (for example) George W. Bush build his campaign on a straight-up evangelical redemption narrative, but if you watch old episodes of "Behind the Music" from VH1, those were utterly straightforward copies of a very typical evangelical Protestant revival meeting redemption narrative. Americans just love that story form, it's profoundly ingrained in the culture.

(On preview: "Sure are a lot of motes in liberals' eyes." Dammit, that could have been my whole long comment, nutshelled beautifully and cleverly, and now I am full of the jealousy.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:04 PM on January 16, 2017 [73 favorites]


Wow, this is a heaping wad of sophistry.

There's nothing wrong with ascertaining a similar shape between social justice activism and the doctrine of Original Sin as an intellectual exercise, sure: an argument from genealogy has some merit in tracing the expressions of a deeper cultural tendency in American thought. But then, the argument here implies that the basic conceits of both traditions are the same, that, like Original Sin, the notion of systemic bias derives from an assertion of faith with no corresponding basis in the actual. Then we have the question-begging assertion that the components of the Christian worldview identified here, themselves subject to debate as a matter of ontology, are incoherent when separated, but that's nearly irrelevant in the face of the breakdown of the analogy at this point: the nature of redemption has a teleological shape entirely different from the fight against prejudice, since Christianity assumes the existence of the perfect, whose realization, importantly, lies in another plane; social justice activism has no such sense of a perfect world, and is comparatively contingent: humanity inherits a legacy of injustice, but any act of improvement is in itself a good. Compare this to the thrust of much of American evangelical thought, which holds that faith in Christ is both necessary and sufficient for salvation, while good works are neither. They have value, to be sure, but cannot overcome a lack of faith, nor will a history of sin permanently tarnish a soul that has truly accepted Christ.

Then there are the simpler errors of thought, like the framing of the Summers incident, deriving from the inability of all parties involved to recognize that, in the face of the magnitude of the effects of systemic bias, to even entertain the notion of some basic difference in capacity between populations like Summers does between men and women doesn't stand up to an application of Occam's Razor. The mere willingness to grant credence to the notion while those injustices still exist signals, yes, bias.

Another error of thought follows: a failure to acknowledge that, as a society, we all already exclude views that are universally deigned as reprehensible. The speaker's stage at a university in the author's perfect world is ideologically selective too, he just fails to acknowledge it. That certain groups in this society admit the public expression of ideas considered unspeakable by other groups is a function of those former groups' insulation from the horrors experienced by the others, not leftist intellectual intolerance. Compare this program to expand the notion of which beliefs we consider inadmissible as a society to what the fundamentalist Christian right practices, which is the legal reification of gender, race and economic inequality: just kidding, they're incomparable. My partner, who was raised in that environment and had to have every bit of media she consumed screened beforehand for anti-Christian themes (incidentally including notions such as the idea that women should have social standing independent of their value to men) before she was allowed to watch them, finds that notion pretty fucking funny.

Finally, oh my God I'm tired, the extension of the analogy beyond its original application to suggest that social justice activists need to apply the teachings of Christ and not "shun" their enemies is fucking garbage. Not granting pride of place to devils by giving them a pulpit is quite different from shunning. Please go ahead and lecture the cowardly fundy fucks who consider a non-white image of Jesus blasphemous (they're out there!) for their fragility and distance from Jesus if you're committed to real ideological consistency here, but otherwise please shut the fuck up.

I'm open to being corrected on any arguments I've made based on a misunderstanding of Christian theology here, I'm no expert, but this is garbage uttered by a quicksilver tongue for many other reasons than those.
posted by invitapriore at 11:17 PM on January 16, 2017 [19 favorites]


While I find many of the specifics he gives to not be very strong, I, too, don't think he's all that wrong.

On more than a few occasions, I've found some liberal communities to feel an awful lot like some kind of bizarro secular/quasi-religious, highly moralistic communities, And I have to admit, in these more extreme cases, it's bothered me. Of course, the blanket assertion that liberals are like this would be a serious misreading of the truth. Not that it ever stopped anyone.
posted by 2N2222 at 11:19 PM on January 16, 2017 [5 favorites]


The breast-beating many white progressive heterosexual males do about how awful and fallen they are certainly can mirror the asceticism of many of the more hellfire and brimstone sects of Christianity. Likewise the redemption narrative. "Friend, I once was like you, but then I joined Twitter and became Woke!"
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 11:39 PM on January 16, 2017 [15 favorites]


How it is that we once again find ourselves rooting out sin, shunning heretics, and heralding the end times

His essay pretends to be neutral in the way some pretend both major parties are the same. Early on the author tipped his hand by pointing out that sinners need a way back into the fold, implying a false religion on the left. His major points appear as fallacies of accident. For example, he describes an "utter nutball" (his words) as someone he met on the highway in Wyoming, a handy genius who plans for civilization to fail. This is the author's cue to identify everyone who sees failure as the same nutball: As the extreme survivalists are out on the edges of the right, so the extreme environmentalists are out on the edges of the left.... Environmentalism often comes to us these days as a political idea with a particular spiritual shape. It comes to us as Christianity without Christ. Of course, everything without Christ could be something else entirely, unless leaving Christ out was the mistake the author is identifying.
posted by Brian B. at 12:07 AM on January 17, 2017 [7 favorites]


i think there's a bit of insight here, well-explained, about some people's quasi-religious relationship with certain progressive/radical ideas. perhaps the most performative self-flagellating aspects are magnified by social media and by academic culture.

but this tendency isn't the defining motivation behind environmentalism or anti-racism, as is obvious to anyone who knows these movements from real life and not from the editorial pages of conservative newspapers.
posted by vogon_poet at 1:29 AM on January 17, 2017 [10 favorites]


Good article, worth reading to the end and deciding if, and how, you disagree. This 2015 newspost from Tycho is germane.

Star Wars is pretty good, I’ve seen it a couple times so far; it’s got problems but you can’t talk about them without someone calling you names. And not like the regular names people call each other, names which impute nefarious action on the part of your opponent, like whether or not they fuck moms or their nuanced position on cocks.

The way it works now, what you might call the New Old Fashioned Way, is that there is no position of any kind that isn’t laced up with a position on some Question Of The Age. There are character arcs in Star Wars that are truncated and inexplicable, but like a total dork I have come up with reasons for why it’s fine. This is a pretty common nerd pastime, and I’m good at it. But even expressing moments of doubt about that which has been considered sanctified - doubt, you’ll recall, being a distinctly human emotion; dogs do not doubt - creates the preconditions for exile.

If this is what it means to have your culture integrated into the mainstream, I don’t care for it. It’s… Church, everything has been transformed into Church, and I hate Church. Every action must be slathered with a kind of pious frosting, a greater moral dimension, even if you’re talking about laser swords. It’s vital not necessarily to do good, but to be seen as good, which isn’t really the same thing. If this weren’t my job, I would stop doing it.

posted by Sebmojo at 1:56 AM on January 17, 2017 [6 favorites]


This seems... backwards. Like, the notion of Original Sin sounds very theological and high-minded, but the idea that human beings are basically pretty terrible absent better influences is, if not universal, at least something that I'm quite sure has had plenty of adherents dating back to the days of Those Assholes Stole Our Goats level tribal conflicts, and continuing to this day with Why Can't My Neighbors Control Their Children. We've built up layers and layers of rituals around the same human inclinations. Sure, these patterns look like Christianity, but you know, how does this fit in with stuff like the Japanese pop star who shaved her head and made a public apology because she got caught violating the cardinal sin of dating? I don't think that had Christian roots, however much it looks like our patterns for that kind of thing. If we're just like this, as humans, then it stands to reason that most human endeavors are going to wind up having the same sorts of issues.

And at that point, if you focus on that instead of the actual intent and goals of two different groups and start equating them as being basically equal, then why should any of us bother having goals at all, if the manners and rituals attendant to them matter more? If you don't think there's any point to any of it, I guess that's the point where you start thinking the end of days sounds pretty good. The rest of us, though, maybe think the end results matter more than simplicity.
posted by Sequence at 2:11 AM on January 17, 2017 [8 favorites]


Yeah, that's exactly what it's like. Having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.

Nevertheless, I was pretty fed up about a third of the way along, and it came as no surprise when he made a faux-neutral defense of Summers, who was factually incorrect. Academics really should get their facts straight, especially when they're going to impugn the abilities of many of their coworkers en bloc. That shouldn't really require explanation.

I kept reading for a while, then realized I was halfway down the second page with no end in sight, and for all I knew there were more and more pages after that.

Enough already.
posted by tel3path at 4:01 AM on January 17, 2017 [5 favorites]


dogs do not doubt

What about that look in their eyes after you go to throw the tennis ball but only pretend to throw it?
posted by thelonius at 4:23 AM on January 17, 2017 [14 favorites]


There's a good critique to be made that certain inherited notions of salvation or purity are undermining anti-racist or environmentalist activism, but this article is a rationalization of the contempt the author already had for these activists, not an insight that could improve them.
posted by idiopath at 4:24 AM on January 17, 2017 [15 favorites]


i've interacted with some crunchy-granola type Western Buddhists who interpret "karma" not as something that determines how an individual will be reincarnated, but as something much more abstract. i've heard it translated as "law of cause and effect" -- however much we try to fool ourselves, actions have consequences, and doing wrong will cause harm.

in this view, structural racism is the result of choices made in the past. People chose to condone slavery and imperialism, to look the other way as Black Americans were marginalized and murdered, those choices had consequences, and we've inherited that karma. It puts both internal and external constraints on the choices we can hope to make, but within those constraints we're free to act in a way that preserves racism, or in a way that opens up the possibility of being free from it.

this strikes me as maybe a better spiritual frame for thinking about these things than structural racism as Original Sin, because, as the author points out (and I really hate giving him credit for it) there's no redeemer to wash away our racism.
posted by vogon_poet at 4:28 AM on January 17, 2017 [9 favorites]


the idea that human beings are basically pretty terrible absent better influences is, if not universal, at least something that I'm quite sure has had plenty of adherents dating back to the days of Those Assholes Stole Our Goats level tribal conflicts,

My favorite elucidator of this idea is Xunzi, circa 250 BCE. He's often translated as saying "human nature is detestable" but the word he actually uses is "stinks." I felt so validated in my instincts when I first read Xunzi.
posted by soren_lorensen at 4:38 AM on January 17, 2017 [5 favorites]


Like, the notion of Original Sin sounds very theological and high-minded, but the idea that human beings are basically pretty terrible absent better influences is, if not universal,

The doctrine of Original Sin has a little bit more to it than "lol ppl r the WORST!"

(hint: what does Original Sin say about newborns?)
posted by PMdixon at 5:27 AM on January 17, 2017 [3 favorites]


don't mistake weak for good - if newborns had hand-eye coordination and muscle tone they would be terrifying
posted by idiopath at 5:41 AM on January 17, 2017 [11 favorites]


The English writer John Gray has been saying this for years. The enlightenment inherited a lot of things from Christianity.
posted by KaizenSoze at 6:35 AM on January 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


Eyebrow McGee said everything I was thinking and more. I'd add that, not surprisingly, the author's description of trigger warnings indicates that his only exposure to them are sensationalist editorials that highlight the handful of edge cases not descriptive of the practice as a whole.
posted by codacorolla at 6:37 AM on January 17, 2017 [5 favorites]


Put another way, these supposed defenders of academic rigor make some of the laziest and weakest arguments I've ever seen put to print.
posted by codacorolla at 6:39 AM on January 17, 2017 [6 favorites]



The English writer John Gray has been saying this for years.


Also Nietzsche.
posted by thelonius at 6:40 AM on January 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is simply the concept of "secular religion" as applied (sloppily, perhaps) to the present. The American historian of ideas Jonathan Rose talks about late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artistic and social movements in these terms in the first chapter of The Edwardian Temperament, 1895-1919 (1986), and I have to admit that I've found this an incredibly useful framework for understanding the moral logic and vocabulary of, e.g., Edwardian socialism and social-liberal discourse in Britain in the period leading up to the First World War:
The Edwardian age was [an] epoch of expansion. It was a period in which artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and sociologists responded to the decline of religion by reconciling faith and reason, merging the two into a higher and broader synthesis. Different individuals work out this reconciliation in different ways, but they generally approached the problem simply by abolishing the distinction between the spiritual and the mundane. They invented substitute religions, or substitutes for religion, that were firmly grounded on secular fact, and they infused spirituality into worldly things. If they no longer attended church, they remained intensely religious, for they had taken religion out of the churches and dispersed it into areas heretofore considered profane ...
There's plenty of other recent work out there using the "secular religion" idea to analyze contemporary cultural attitudes and beliefs, e.g. Jonathan Benthall's Returning to Religion: Why a Secular Age is Haunted by Faith (2008) or (and this one's for Sebmojo) in the field of cultural studies, Jennifer Otter Bickerdike's The Secular Religion of Fandom: Pop Culture Pilgrim (2016).
posted by Sonny Jim at 7:00 AM on January 17, 2017 [5 favorites]


that the goal is to be tolerant and accepting of traits that people have that they have no control over

Some people actually like their traits and would prefer to be appreciated for what they are rather than simply churned into a grey slurry with everyone else.
posted by klanawa at 8:10 AM on January 17, 2017 [3 favorites]


But I always find myself doubtful, always suspect the disingenuous, when people who clearly desire a particular outcome insist that a contemporary situation somehow uniquely mandates the changes they would have wanted anyway. It’s a species of what statisticians call confirmation bias. If you despise the busy industry and messy artificiality of modern times the busy activisim and messy rhetoric of modern times—if you hunger for a return to a Rousseauian state of benign nature and the innocence before the Fall a continuation of the status quo—then you’re probably deceiving even yourself when you claim that somehow, this time, people who think the way you do must be put in charge of everything. disagree with you must be catastrophizing, acting out fragments of a religion they no longer adhere to.

(Though I, too, agree with the "stopped clock" paragraph Eyebrows mentioned above - we in the radical/activist world might benefit from establishing clear paths to "redemption" for people we "shun." Fortunately, in the circles I run in, concepts like mediation and conflict resolution procedures seem to be gaining ground.)
posted by sibilatorix at 8:32 AM on January 17, 2017 [4 favorites]


Though I, too, agree with the "stopped clock" paragraph Eyebrows mentioned above - we in the radical/activist world might benefit from establishing clear paths to "redemption" for people we "shun."

I completely agree with this. It seems like a soluble problem for small communities, but the techniques that work there don't scale up very well, which is a huge issue. If there's no clear way for a public figure to successfully redeem themselves, then there's no incentive for them to do so...

I'd love to see a different FPP on this narrower topic, but I'm not personally aware of any writing on it that would make a good jumping-off point.
posted by tobascodagama at 8:54 AM on January 17, 2017 [2 favorites]


I agree. This article raises a singular good point, but masks that behind many layers of bile and a seriously strained metaphorical conceit.
posted by codacorolla at 9:13 AM on January 17, 2017 [3 favorites]


there's a lot of slight-of-hand in these arguments

From the Weekly Standard -- the former home of David Brooks? You don't say.
posted by Gelatin at 9:31 AM on January 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


Wow. This article really illustrates in great detail exactly my frustration with my friends who are conservatives and their understanding of liberalism.

They, and Bottom, look at a liberal white person who expresses concern about racism (they're typically not paying much attention to people of color), and they see someone who is self-righteously trying to be pure, whose goal is to be not-racist. But the people I respect who express concern about racist ideas and language and microaggressions are either themselves people of color or are listening to people of color and have come to recognize and be concerned about the actual harms done to people by racism. Their goal is not to be righteous, they're just trying not to hurt people. They're not on a crusade to eradicate the sin of racism, they're trying to prevent harm to people they care about.

George Will looks at Nancy Hopkins, a woman who is a biology professor at MIT, and imagines that she could possibly be some kind of frail violet, swooning at the mention of a sexist idea. My certainty that Hopkins is made of much sterner stuff does not come from thinking I'm a more virtuous person than Will. It's just that I've listened to enough women in academia to know that Hopkins has gotten to her position in the face of enormous amounts of sexist bullshit. She's probably exasperated that the president of her college is wasting time with speculation about bell curves (which, even if true, nothing could be done about) instead of focusing on the torrent of sexist bullshit that he should be doing something about (rather than granting legitimacy to the kind of nonsense that strengthens the torrent).

Coincidentally, the Christians I admire -- the kind of Christian I want to be -- are the ones who are dismayed more about the actual harm their sin has done than about the stains of sin on their own souls, who value forgiveness more because they care about the relationships that are restored than because they crave the feeling of freedom from guilt.
posted by straight at 10:00 AM on January 17, 2017 [19 favorites]


The principal culprit, in Bottum's An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, is Walter Rauschenbusch and his Christianity And The Social Crisis. Rauschenbusch emphatically argued for the union of Christianity and radical politics. He wrote:
If any one holds that religion is essentially ritual and sacramental; or that it is purely personal; or that God is on the side of the rich; or that social interest is likely to lead preachers astray; he must prove his case with his eye on the Hebrew prophets, and the burden of proof is with him.--p. 43
Rauschenbusch would, however, probably fall afoul of militant atheists. He states, for example:
Unless the economic and intellectual factors are strongly reenforced by religious enthusiasm, the whole social movement may prove abortive, and the New Era may die before it comes to birth.-p.xii
Bottum is correct to say that radicalism is based on Christianity. What he doesn't say, though, is that the best hope for anti-radicals is that the radicals themselves forget and/or disavow their own origin and foundation in Christianity. This would be a true withering on the vine.
posted by No Robots at 10:37 AM on January 17, 2017 [4 favorites]


The words with which, for example, Alec Baldwin savaged his pursuer, like the scatological attack on Sarah Palin for which the leftist MSNBC commentator Martin Bashir lost his job in 2013 under pressure from conservatives, were so vile that these men may well deserve their public censure. But how shall they atone? And how shall they return from the symbolic place of sinfulness in which they have been set?

It's telling that Bottom is far more interested in the question of "How can these white dudes be forgiven?" than he is in the question "How do work toward a society where gays and women aren't subjected to these kinds of comments?"
posted by straight at 3:33 PM on January 17, 2017 [5 favorites]


The only silver lining of this bilge is as a reminder of what conservatism used to be: smug, elaborate, wrong in complex, self-serving and destructive ways, infuriating and tiring to debunk yet dangerous enough to require counter-argument. Ah, for the good old days.
posted by chortly at 4:29 PM on January 17, 2017 [7 favorites]


The breast-beating many white progressive heterosexual males do about how awful and fallen they are certainly can mirror the asceticism of many of the more hellfire and brimstone sects of Christianity. Likewise the redemption narrative. "Friend, I once was like you, but then I joined Twitter and became Woke!"

Sure, there are plenty of guys who are mostly interested in feminism out of a desire to get some kind of seal-of-approval from women and feel good about themselves. But I think Bottom would be pretty upset at someone arguing that such self-righteous Pharisee-ism was essentially the main thing going on in Christianity.
posted by straight at 4:52 PM on January 17, 2017


> the idea that human beings are basically pretty terrible absent better influences is, if not universal, at least something that I'm quite sure has had plenty of adherents dating back to the days of Those Assholes Stole Our Goats level tribal conflicts,

My favorite elucidator of this idea is Xunzi, circa 250 BCE.

A couple of disagreeing counterpoints from contemporary Chinese philosophers are concisely presented in the passage quoted in this Wikipedia article. Not universal enough to be conclusive, fortunately or unfortunately.
posted by XMLicious at 7:13 PM on January 17, 2017


Thanks for the link. It's a level of insight that seemed to be missing; the first comment sums it up for me. (At the very least, even if you don't agree—and I see much more anger than argument here, sorry—you have to at least admit striking parallels.)
posted by blue shadows at 11:21 PM on January 17, 2017 [1 favorite]


(At the very least, even if you don't agree—and I see much more anger than argument here, sorry—you have to at least admit striking parallels.)

I assume you are referring to the likeness between the politically correct left, and the religious right generally. That's pretty much been an open secret for decades to those once exposed to a cult, or any thought reform. Some people are both, perhaps steeped in Catholicism or a Protestant fundamentalism and never leaving mentally. The toolkit is the same: condemnation, self-righteousness, orthodoxy, and strongly emphasizing abstinence and gifting as relating to supply shortages. But there are problems with drawing straight lines to connect the dots. For example, Nazi dogma was not all from their brand of Christianity. It was their cultural response to a policy that demanded purity of allegiance: as a personally accountable and competitive extremism. This form of indoctrination has surfaced all over the globe, and it only needs a dash of mythology to blend with absurd reasons; but exploits a frustrated mass of people, a desperate leadership, and uses a scapegoating policy to get started. Mass media facilitates. The older religious dogma is not the main influence, but is an outdated expression from previous achievements on the same score. One day we may find that human genetics are involved, which would explain an odd fascination with forced breeding and no birth control, and why Christianity and its original strains relate directly to agriculture. We're ultimately talking about brainwashing and this is a blatant case for moderation. Dogmas are just words to agree with, but we need peer pressure and the need for personal validation to a higher authority in order to surrender control over our emotional intensity.
posted by Brian B. at 10:57 AM on January 18, 2017 [1 favorite]


You're right, extremes resembling each other is not new. I think more generally the point is the irony of rejecting one system as being irrational and extreme and then replacing it with systems that have a similar form but different content, at least at the far ends.
posted by blue shadows at 12:57 PM on January 18, 2017


Funny how everyone fancies themselves immune to this kind of thing. Take our approach to science, for example. All too often, it is rife with the same kind of thinking as one finds in religion.
Why is evolutionary biology so rife with the terms and emotions of organized Western religion? Numerous factors have played a role. Evolutionary biology’s emergence from traditions of religious reasoning and writing, into contexts where religious thinking remained prominent; the propensity of evolutionists themselves to paint themselves, ironically or seriously, as dissenters or believers; their tendency to draw, unconsciously or consciously, their scientific frameworks from preexisting religious ones; and their impulse to take it on themselves to pronounce on issues formerly the domain of religion – all of these have prompted biologists to armor themselves in the language of religious combat.--Darwinian heresies / edited by Abigail Lustig, Robert J. Richards, Michael Ruse.
It's motes and beams all the way down.
posted by No Robots at 1:36 PM on January 18, 2017


You're right, extremes resembling each other is not new. I think more generally the point is the irony of rejecting one system as being irrational and extreme and then replacing it with systems that have a similar form but different content, at least at the far ends.

You can group a lot of materially different things together by abstracting away the salient bits as "content" and likening them by their "form" (often with some trickery regarding how you sort aspects of different worldviews into those two buckets à la the OP, since the boundary between those two is more porous than the agenda-driven ever want to admit), but you then have to supply an argument as to why the abstract form in question is inherently pernicious. Usually it's too abstract to do so, and it becomes pretty clear that the arguer's only purpose is tarnishing the reputation of the one system by comparison to the other. That they resort to this tactic speaks to the fact that they don't have the means to argue against that system by appealing to its actual consequences.
posted by invitapriore at 9:17 PM on January 18, 2017 [2 favorites]


(often with some trickery regarding how you sort aspects of different worldviews into those two buckets à la the OP, since the boundary between those two is more porous than the agenda-driven ever want to admit)

I agree, but choosing content over the formal system to directly compare would be a cultural bias in taking their propaganda at face value. In most cases we wisely or politically identify with those having similar problems, forgiving dissimilar content as foreign, which means two democratic regimes become strategic allies, or two fascist regimes, because they recognize each others ambitions, although their style is very different. In the case of the left versus right, any observer is faced with the dilemma that both systems have produced atrocities in the name of expedient leadership methods, where their consequences are equally disastrous to human rights. Moderation means avoiding the idealistic, as extremes, and to place our distrust in power and its appeals to sudden reversals of fortune to save us. I note that the author in the essay is cleverly comparing the left as poorly imitating the right.
posted by Brian B. at 7:51 AM on January 20, 2017


In the case of the left versus right, any observer is faced with the dilemma that both systems have produced atrocities in the name of expedient leadership methods, where their consequences are equally disastrous to human rights.

Where is this coming from? The article isn't talking about the shape of the historical left vs. the historical right, it's talking about contemporary social justice movements vs. traditional American Protestantism. The suggestion that the former is "extreme" in any sense is question begging, and it's not even a point that the author here makes directly, though it's obvious that he perceives a level of self-flagellation in it that he considers immoderate. That's a failure of imagination typical of the American right: having little experience with actions that are earnestly and primarily concerned with the well-being of other people not part of their immediate networks, they fabricate a subtext to, e.g., anti-sexism that makes it a self-directed activity again. That's not to say that something like white knighting doesn't happen, but to someone like Bottum, it never doesn't happen.
posted by invitapriore at 5:10 PM on January 20, 2017 [2 favorites]


In most cases we wisely or politically identify with those having similar problems, forgiving dissimilar content as foreign, which means two democratic regimes become strategic allies, or two fascist regimes, because they recognize each others ambitions, although their style is very different.

Have you, uh, heard of the Cold War? Or World War II? Or World War I? Or most of the 18th and 19th centuries? Or contemporary US relations with countries in the middle east?
posted by PMdixon at 6:04 PM on January 20, 2017


invitapriore, not quite sure what you're saying, but it rather sounds like a way of ignoring/dismissing what you don't agree with and/or making complicated explanations/excuses for the rest. There is such a thing as form and there is such a thing as content, and forgive me, this sounds like word games unless you can express it more clearly.
posted by blue shadows at 1:30 AM on January 21, 2017


Where is this coming from?

It followed from my first sentence, which is that comparing content is full of pitfalls and not something wisely done when the stakes are high. My other point is that the author is under a religious influence and sees that the PC left is a rather faux Catholicism (his denomination, apparently). He suggests they lack an effective social technique called repentance, which is tried and true for believers, but is also a tool of so-called thought reform which leads to states of denial. It appears that besides piquing curiosity, the author is also making a case for converting from left to right. I would counter-propose that the author has it mostly backwards; that religion is a faux civilization that feeds on chaos. But he makes an interesting point about those who seem to act in a way he recognizes as deficient. Why would they be doing that? I would suggest they are being identified by their emotional methods, perhaps described as a guilt-inducing approach. But these methods aren't necessary to maintain civilization, which works better when we aren't required to care about someone prior to letting them be, but rather see our rights as derived from a system that precludes an emotional response. So what? Well, then the author above will always be smugly superior in their particular cultural idealism.
posted by Brian B. at 12:00 PM on January 21, 2017 [1 favorite]


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