After the Future

Taking Exception

That's what a lot of readers over at Ambivablog are doing with regard to my posts about Al Gore and Normal USA.   I would describe the readers there as open-minded, Andrew-Sullivan Libertarians or maybe postmodern, conservative idealists, for want of any other easy way to describe so diverse a crowd.  They are interested in religious questions and they were generally supportive of the Iraq War.  They are sincerely interested in finding middle ground in the midst of all the oveheated rhetoric that is coming from the ideological extremists who seem to be getting the most airtime. They are also interested in ideas and good writing, or they wouldn't read Amba's elegant, eloquent, far-ranging posts.  They are precisely the kind of people I would like most to enter into a conversation with regarding the issues about which we disagree.

In any event, my posts, from which Amba quoted, touched a nerve in many of her readers, and she has invited me to respond, and I will do so later this week in a guest post on her site that I will cross post here.  I'd be interested in what any of the regulars here think about the responses over there as I prepare what I want to say.  If you have a moment, read her post here and the comments that follow--maybe they were saying there what you were thinking here.

Mythos and Logos 1

An interesting interview in Salon this morning with Karen Armstrong, author of A History of God.  An excerpt:

Salon: I think these questions are tremendously important now because more and more people, especially those with a scientific bent, say we don't need religion anymore. Science has replaced religion. You know, religion used to explain all kinds of things about the world. But science for the most part does that now. And people who are not religious say they can be just as morally upright.

Armstrong: They can. I fully endorse that. I don't think you need to believe in an external god to obey the Golden Rule. In the Axial Age, when people started to concentrate too much on what they're transcending to -- that is, God -- and neglected what they're transcending from -- their greed, pompous egotism, cruelty -- then they lost the plot, religiously. That's why God is a difficult religious concept. I think God is often used by religious people to give egotism a sacred seal of divine approval, rather than to take you beyond the ego.

As for scientists, they can explain a tremendous amount. But they can't talk about meaning so much. If your child dies, or you witness a terrible natural catastrophe such as Hurricane Katrina, you want to have a scientific explanation of it. But that's not all human beings need. We are beings who fall very easily into despair because we're meaning-seeking creatures. And if things don't add up in some way, we can become crippled by our despondency.

Salon: So would you say religion addresses those questions through the stories and myths?

Armstrong: Yes. In the pre-modern world, there were two ways of arriving at truth. Plato, for example, called them mythos and logos. Myth and reason or science. We've always needed both of them. It was very important in the pre-modern world to realize these two things, myth and science, were complementary. One didn't cancel the other out.

Salon: Well, what do you say to the scientists, especially the Darwinists -- Richard Dawkins would be the obvious case -- who are quite angry about religion? They say religion is the root of much evil in the world. Wars are fought and fueled by religion. And now that we're in the 21st century, they say it's time that science replace religion.

Armstrong: I don't think it will. In the scientific age, we've seen a massive religious revival everywhere but Europe. And some of these people -- not all, by any means -- seem to be secular fundamentalists. They have as bigoted a view of religion as some religious fundamentalists have of secularism. We have too much dogmatism at the moment. Take Richard Dawkins, for example. He did a couple of religious programs that I was fortunate enough to miss. It was a very, very one-sided view.

Salon: Well, he hates religion.

Armstrong: Yeah, this is not what the Buddha would call skillful. If you're consumed by hatred -- Freud was rather the same -- then this is souring your personality and clouding your vision. What you need to do is to look appraisingly and calmly on other traditions. Because when you hate religion, it's also very easy to hate the people who practice it.

I would go farther to say that mythos is the more important of the two because it is the defining narrative context in which all of our reasoning--our logos--takes place.  The peculiar anomie of postmodernity is its loss of that defining context, and so with the loss of the mythos that provides a meaning trellis upon which our compassion can grow, we have little motivation or knowledge how to be other than greedy, egotistical, and cruel. That's what happens when you lose the plot.

We are living with the sherds of that trellis, and we make do. The golden rule is one of those sherds, and it would be enough, perhaps. But without a larger meaning context the profound depths of compassion are hard to plumb, and instead we find ourselves being satisfied with being "nice."  In most churches throughout the land a smiley face should be hanging behind the altar rather than a crucifix.

Or else we develop other plots--myths that justify our greed and egoism, which is essentially what I've been saying Ayn Rand's brand of Libertarianism is. And when that's the plot, all our reasoning capacity is nothing but a tool in the service of our greed and egotism.  That's what it means to be rational these days.

We haven't "outgrown" myth; we just call it by a different name: ideology. It's in this sense that Dawkins lives as much in myth as Jerry Fallwell. But as I have argued elsewhere, there are good myths and there are bad myths--by their fruits you will know which is which.

I am very sympathetic to Armstrong's defense of religion, but there's also something about her that I find a little too Joseph Campbell. It's as if she speaks about religion as a perceptive, appreciative tourist in a foreign land rather than as a native. She speaks the language in a formally correct way, but not idiomatically. Perhaps that's just the scholarly persona. Not sure. 

Whom the Gods Would Destroy . . .

. . .they first make mad.  Well the media gods don't have the power to drive Al Gore mad, but they can make everyone think he is.  Check this exchange (with commentary from The Daily Howler) from Chris Matthew's show:

MATTHEWS (5/21/06): Kathleen [Parker], you wrote a column recently—I like the phraseology—you said Al Gore is “one slice short of a loaf.” (Group laughter) I mean, that’s like they say up in Massachusetts, they say things like, “He’s got a few shingles missing from the roof.” What’s your point? Is he a little nutty, are you saying?

Did he really have to ask? They’ve been calling Gore “nutty” for the past seven years! Purring sweetly, Parker carried out her role in this idiot play—in the play Beinart still won’t discuss:

PARKER: There are those who say he’s lost it. I’m not going to go that far. I think he’s actually feeling quite liberated from himself, I think he’s having a great time. He’s now the alpha wonk. And suddenly he has all these admirers and Hollywood types loving him with this movie.

Parker down-loaded “alpha male”—ha ha ha ha ha! And of course, we also heard from Joe Klein, who also thought that Gore might be a bit—well, a bit of a nut:

KLEIN: You know, there’s a big question here. If you read Al Gore’s speech just before the war in Iraq where he came out against it, it’s a brilliant speech. If you saw Al Gore delivering it, he looked like a madman.

They began with “delusional” in 3/99. By the time Gore opposed Iraq in 9/02, they had moved to “unhinged.” By last weekend, though, it was “nutty” and “madman”

Beautifully played, don't you think?  Note how Parker can deny saying that she thinks Gore has "lost it"  by saying she "wouldn't go that far", but then suggests that the people who really take him seriously are the flakes in the Hollywood crowd.   In other words, Gore isn't to be taken seriously, and by extension neither is global warming.

The Daily Howler has for years now been on a crusade to show how the media unfairly crucified Al Gore in the runup to the 2000 election, and while his posts can be a bit rambling and repetitive, he has marshaled some pretty convincing evidence. I wasn't paying as much attention six years ago as I am now, and I'm not promoting Gore as flawless, but I have to admit I was taken in then by the way the MSM made fun of him, and  I couldn't bring myself to vote for him and voted Green instead. Gore took Washington State, so it didn't matter, but in retrospect it was a mistake.  People like me in swing states probably threw the election to Bush.

Anyway, like the Howler, I've since become convinced that the Beltway Courtiers have a consistent policy to discredit progressive-leaning candidates. What's their motivation?  They're upwardly mobile careerists.  They learn quickly that if they want to advance their careers and be one of the cool kids, they have to join in with the groupthink that makes fun of those whom the power clique deems as uncool.  And for the power clique, any discussion of promoted by progressives that focuses on issues regarding power and money is not cool.  Whenever the discussion turns to questions of power and money, the media realize all they have to do is change the subject to sex--it works every time.

I bring this subject up now to build on yesterday's post about how the GOP and the corporate media play the normal/weird card when they want to promote or destroy somebody's public credibility.  They understand their power to legitimize and delegitimize, and they use it.  They have an agenda, and they make sure that issues they don't want discussed are either ignored or ridiculed, and the same goes for personalities.  What do you think was really behind the frontpage story in the NYT this week about Bill and Hillary's sex life?  It plays implicitly on the frigidity/lesbian theme:  "Gee," people think to themselves, "maybe that explains poor Bill's behavior."

It's not overt, of course.  But it's there. And it does a good job, too, of laying the foundation for destroying her candidacy. Remember what happened to Ann Richards in 94? I'm no Hillary fan, but puhlease. Again, this is  not the Enquirer we're talking  about--it 's the  NY Times. It's become a rag that I for one cannot take seriously anymore.

I also bring it up because Krugman (whom I'm sure Keller would love to dump if he could) focuses on the taking Gore seriously issue in his 5/26 column:

“An Inconvenient Truth” isn't just about global warming, of course. It's also about Mr. Gore. And it is, implicitly, a cautionary tale about what's been wrong with our politics.

Why, after all, was Mr. Gore's popular-vote margin in the 2000 election narrow enough that he could be denied the White House? Any account that neglects the determination of some journalists to make him a figure of ridicule misses a key part of the story. Why were those journalists so determined to jeer Mr. Gore? Because of the very qualities that allowed him to realize the importance of global warming, many years before any other major political figure: his earnestness, and his genuine interest in facts, numbers and serious analysis.

And so the 2000 campaign ended up being about the candidates' clothing, their mannerisms, anything but the issues, on which Mr. Gore had a clear advantage (and about which his opponent was clearly both ill informed and dishonest). . .

Since 2000, we've seen what happens when people who aren't interested in the facts, who believe what they want to believe, sit in the White House. Osama bin Laden is still at large, Iraq is a mess, New Orleans is a wreck. And, of course, we've done nothing about global warming.

But can the sort of person who would act on global warming get elected? Are we—by which I mean both the public and the press—ready for political leaders who don't pander, who are willing to talk about complicated issues and call for responsible policies? That's a test of national character. I wonder whether we'll pass.

But the point I was trying to make yesterday is that the GOP and its media and energy constituencies will do everything they can to discredit attempts to deal with global warming or other issues that undermine their respective agendas.  And  they do it by playing the normal/weird card.  The Democrats have a very fundamental branding problem in that they have allowed the GOP to establish a narrative in which lots of people are predisposed to think of the Democrats as "not normal", so it's easy to make Al Gore look like he's a tree-hugging flake.  In the Democratic world it's ok to be that, right?  Sure, but Americans don't elect that kind of person to national office.  And that's all that matters.

It doesn't matter if it's true or not. That's the genius of the GOP strategy.  They realize that facts don't matter; it's all about the underlying narrative. And all the media have to do is play the story ambiguously enough to raise a doubt.  Isn't that what the media's collusion with the Swiftboaters did to Kerry?  Why was that story given legitimacy and the Bush AWOL story not?  Because Democrats aren't war heroes--that's not their narrative, so there's something wrong with this Kerry war hero picture.  It was important instead that the GOP succeed in substituting the liberal long-haired war protestor narrative for the war hero narrative, and for the most part they succeeded.

It wasn't that hard to plant doubts. It doesn't matter that there was no substance to the Swiftboaters' allegations--there was just enough truthiness in them for people who are not sure what to believe to at least have doubts.  As with Gore in 2000, "Where there's smoke there's fire," people think to themsleves.  Well the GOP has learned how easy it is to blow smoke--they just have to play the weirdo-phony-liberal card.   

And so we wind up voting instead for real, authentic men--strong, steady leaders like George Bush. Oy.  The AWOL charges don't stick because it doesn't fit the GOP narrative developed for Bush that the Beltway media have bought into.  Remember how they (particularly Chris Matthews) gushed over his appearance on the aircraft carrier in the flight suit.  That's what fits into the narrative that the media believe, and they are allergic to any facts that would suggest the narrative has no basis in reality.   

It's an amazingly effective con. But it's so easy to pull off because the basic liberal/conservative narrative is in place.  If people weren't predisposed to think of liberals as, for instance, wishy-washy flip-floppers, the accusation wouldn't have stuck on Kerry.  That's why it didn't work when liberals tried to point out that Bush had flip-flopped on several issues. Flip-flopping is not part of the conservative narrative--everybody knows conservatives are flinty and stubborn.  They don't flip flop. It's not about the facts; it's about the narrative. 

That's why progressives, if they are to have any chance at all, have to figure out a way to change the basic narrative, and that's why I think that the Dems might be beyond repair. Any attempts to change the narrative will be easily branded as inauthentic pandering.  Whether fairly or not, they are too easy to discredit.

Normal USA

There is no normal anymore. But it doesn't matter because people want what they can't have, anyway.  People long for normal as unrequited lovers long for what they cannot have.  And so they vote in the hopes that those who say they can deliver normal will do so.  They won't.

Is what passes for normal these days really normal? One of the peculiar characteristics of the time in which we live is that on one level everything seems to be normal. Life goes on pretty much the way it always has for the last fifty years—adults go to work, children go to school, we get around in cars and watch a lot of TV—there are continuities, for sure. But something is different. Things don’t feel quite right. There's relative calm on the outside, but there's barely controlled panic on the inside. People are scared, and they don't quite know about what. It’s not just the heightened level of anxiety that the nation feels following 9/11. It’s been going on longer than that—at least since the sixties, because that’s when we Americans began to have a palpable sense that we were no longer who we thought we were.

I think it comes from a feeling of the country having lost its anchor. There's a directionless drift that makes people very anxious, and it comes from a sense that there's no "normal" anymore. This sense of the country losing its norms has accelerated in the last forty years, and much has been written about just getting used to a world where normal means constant change. All kinds of self-help books have come on to the scene instructing their readers how to thrive in chaos or how to ride the rapids of change. And that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t really cut to the heart of the matter, which is that living with constant change is stressful. People need stability. They need to have a feeling of some control over their lives, and when they don’t, they cannot help but feel that they are lost and that their lives are spinning out of control.

So they vote Republican. The Democrats have become identified with the forces of normless chaos, the Republicans with the forces of what used to be thought of as "normal." For many people it's that simple and that primitive. It has hardly anything to do with the specific issues. It's all a matter of who they believe at an unconscious level will be more effective at maintaining and promoting the feeling of order and security that comes if only the world were normal again.

But as I've been arguing for some time now, voting Republican doesn't slow down the change--the laisser faire capitalism that is at the center of their agenda is the one of the greatest promoters of social destabilization in human history. So voting Republican just gives people the illusion of control. It gives people a feeling that their vote is all about trying to bring back the old, normal America. This is a politics of nostalgia and it's just shot through with delusion. It's a politics that refuses to deal with the world as it is. But the GOP understands this dynamic and exploits it to spectacular effect. 

The fact is that change and social chaos will continue to be the norm no matter whom we elect. But at least the Democrats have been the party which has historically tried to mitigate the harsher consequences of modernity. And so the kind of people we need in political leadership positions are not those who promise to make the anxiety and discomfort go away, but those who will help us to develop the skills that will enable us to adapt. A lot of people I know would say: Well that's what the GOP stands for. The Dems are for giving everybody a fish, to use the old cliche, and the GOP is for teaching every body how to catch his own fish. What's wrong with that?  Well that's what they say, but that's not what they do.  Unfunded mandates are not policy.

As I have said before, and I will no doubt say again, a vote for the GOP appears to be a conservative vote, but it is anything but that.  Conservative means to conserve what exists, and what exists is the social democratic system we associate with the New Deal.  But insofar as the Democrats have been the custodians for this system, and insofar as they have allowed themselves to be branded as the party of chaos and normlessness, they have given the GOP the means to advance not a conservative agenda, but an agenda which is bent on destroying the system.  I think that this has been catastrophic for the party and for the country because is has provided an opening for the most predatory elements in American society--these wolves in traditional-values sheep's clothing--to get into the Beltway henhouse and make the mess of things that they have.

That's the irony.  It's the Democrats that in fact represent a basic belief in the common good and which has provided us with some modicum of stability and security; it the GOP which seeks to destabilize the system by unfettering the forces that will return us to brutal conditions more typical of the laisser faire late 19th century. Believe me, that's not a "normal" we want to go back to.  The Democrats are the real conservatives. Voting for Democrats is in fact the more conservative vote because its a vote to protect and conserve what's left of the the much eroded New Deal system without which there is very little protection from the predators.

A vote for the Democrats is simply a vote to apply the brakes. It's a vote to return to the social democracy mainstream. There's nothing particularly exciting about that or about Democrats. They should be the party most Americans feel comfortable with in a time of disorienting change, but they don't.   The Dems have allowed themselves to become branded in such a way that many Americans who should be the natural constituency for the Dems no longer are.  Why? Because these Americans have a mostly traditional sense about what is right or wrong, what is normal and what is weird, and they no longer feel comfortable with what the Democrats have come to represent.   Even if they agree with specific Democratic policy proposals, their support is tepid because they no longer identify with the team which has proposed them. 

Having good ideas is not enough. The Socialist Party a hundred years ago proposed  labor laws that most Americans thought were a good idea.  Does that mean that Americans voted Socialists into office?  Locally in a few places, but not nationally--a party does not get voted into office unless people can identify with it. Most Americans need to be able to look at the party and say, "The people in that party are 'normal' folk like me."  The Democrats are no longer perceived that way by what had been their white, working-class base. In the longer run, they are very much in danger of becoming a political irrelevancy unless they shore up their support among that constituency. It might be too late for them to do that. Team loyalties have gelled, and people don't change their fundamental political identities easily. 

The GOP realizes that this is an image game, that the game is being played in the cultural values arena where people form their team loyalties, and it will do everything it can to keep the game there, because as long as they do, they win.  The substance or reality doesn't matter; only the image does, for except for the relatively few truly independent minded, most people form their allegiances superficially on the basis of who's saying what they want to hear.  The GOP understands this in a way the Dems have not been able yet to grasp.  And so the Dems lose the image game in the cultural values arena time and time again.   I don't see how that's going to change, at least any time soon.  Their only hope is to change the game. 

Because even if the Democrats are successful in November (and I'm not convinced yet they will be), it will not be because these 'normal' Americans identify with them; it will have more to do with their rejecting the corruption, incompetence, and facetious overreaching of the GOP.  It will be at best a temporary respite while the predators regroup.

Lost Season Two Finale

Thomas Merton somewhere said that the only reason that the world continues to exist is because of the monks in their cells praying, which keeps the world's roof from caving in.  I know, it sounds a bit grandiose, but this is a gloss on the "righteous man" tradition that goes back at least as far as Abraham's bargaining with God in Genesis 18 to save Sodom and Gomorrah from divine destruction.  Bottom line: if ten righteous men can be found in the cities God spares everyone. God relents, and the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah go about their business blissfully ignorant that their lives had hung in the balance depending on the advocacy of good Father Abraham.

Valentin Tomberg frequently describes prayer as vertical breathing.  It's not something everybody does, but because enough people do those prayers function like columns of grace that prevent the sky from falling, which in turn allows room for everyone to continue with their horizontal breathing, which is the metaphor for our biological existence.  Evolution is the combined effect of the horizontal breathing of everyone (the Darwinian dimension), and the vertical breathing of the few (the salvation history dimension).

So these are the first thoughts that gelled for me after watching last night's "Lost".  It was in its own way a gloss on the righteous-man tradition.  It was the story of Desmond, Locke and Eko, and their role as righteous men charged with keeping the sky from falling  It was the story off Locke's original belief and his loss of it, and of how that almost caused the end of the world.   It was the story of Eko and Desmond, who had enough faith to counter him. 

At first I thought that Locke was crazy to keep pushing the buttons, and I didn't understand his original fervor to do so.  And certainly his first encounter with Desmond in which he tells Locke that the reason he's pushing the buttons is to save the world sounded nuts and grandiose.  And as convinced as I was that Eko is the key personality in the whole drama of this island, I was wondering why he was so convinced more than ever after watching the video in the second hatch that pushing the button was an essential task.  But as I suggested in my post about the episode two weeks ago, punching in those number might be like a mantra or the repetitive tedious prayers of the rosary.  It might be that it's what's holding the sky up.

That being said, this episode raises more questions than it answers.  Is life on the island life lived within a glass ball as Desmond is convinced it is.  Is there no physical escape except through death?  That's what I thought, and it was the basis of my "Sixth Sense" hypothesis--that the survivors were really already dead, the island was Purgatory, and that the Others were 'angelic' testers.  The back story narratives of each of the principal survivors was information for us to better understand the nature of the tests they had to pass before it was time for them to "go home." 

Then in my post two weeks ago, it occurred to me the writers were playing with the alien abduction theme out of Whitley Strieber.  And last night suggests the same thing when he says he thinks the Others are aliens.  Maybe, but I think that's a red herring. But the one new piece of evidence from last night that undermines the Sixth Sense hypothesis is the quick scene at the end in which the electromagnetic anomaly is detected by the Portuguese (why Portuguese?) speaking guys in the observation station which looks to be in Antarctica. And then their call to Desmond's love Penny who is still looking for him.  It's the first bit of evidence that there some physical connection to the world the survivors left behind exists. But is electromagnetism in its essence really physical?   Or is it the physical manifestation of something not physical?  Whatever?  It seems to have had a physical, chartable location that the Portuguese-speaking guys found.

Random questions:    What does "home" mean when Henry says that he's going to take Kate, Sawyer, and Jack there?  What about the number 922 which Eko carves into his prayer stick and which was the date of the plane crash and Desmond's system failure (echoes of 9/11?)  The promos for the show suggested that we would finally learn who the Others were.  And Michael asks Henry point blank, "Who are you people?  And Henry's answer is "We're the good guys, Michael."  That supports what I've been saying about them, but who really knows? Do you believe him? Did it surprise you that he let Michael and Walt go? That he will keep his promise not to hurt the three?  Do you think that Michael and Walt will really get back to the "real" world following compass bearing 325? Or does "find rescue" mean something else?  Why do the others bother at all with the charade requiring the beards and disguises and hiding their real names?  Did you notice that Kelvin, Desmond's predecessor at punching in the numbers,  was the American intelligence officer that paid  Sayyid off to become a traitor during the first Iraq war?   

Whatever the answers to these questions, "Lost" continues to be must-see TV.  If you haven't seen it, get the DVDs and start from the beginning.  There is nothing like it that even remotely attempts to do what it is doing.  At least not that I'm aware of.

The Politics of Zealotry

In 1928, Justice Louis Brandeis wrote that the real threat to American freedom was not from an outside assault, but from the devious manipulations of our own misguided leaders. "The greatest dangers to liberty," he observed, "lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding."

Nearly 80 years after Brandeis's warning, the zealots have been brought in from the far-right fringe on the golden chariot of George W, and they've shown that they have no understanding of the essence of America, which includes our hard-won liberties, our rule of law and our system of checked-and-balanced governmental power.   --Jim Hightower.

***

I would emphasize that it's not because Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz are diabolical creatures intent on doing evil. They genuinely believe it's in the interests of the United States, and the world, that unconstrained American power should determine the shape of the international order. I think they vastly overstate our capabilities. For all of their supposed worldliness and sophistication, I don't think they understand the world. I am persuaded that their efforts will only lead to greater mischief while undermining our democracy. Yet I don't question that, at some gut level, they think they are acting on your behalf and mine. They are all the more dangerous as a result.--Andrew Bacevich

Staying away from the question about how cynical or sincere administration policy in the Middle East has been--let's give them the benefit of the doubt for now--nevertheless the one clear picture that has emerged about the engineers of this policy is that they do not understand the world as it is.  They have a brutish imagination of the way the world works, and they only understand what happens within worlds which they can control through their brutish methods.

Isn't that the psychology of all zealots.  Because zealots are so impoverished in their imaginations and so incapable of understanding any thinking but their own, they insist that the world think and behave as they do.  It's the only way they can feel safe. And because the world is complex and confusing and does not willingly comply with the zealots' demand to think and behave as they want it to, they seek in whatever way they can to violently impose their will on it.  Ideology is just a cover story to justify their need to control. God is always on their side.

Often enough control freaks are successful in imposing their will.  The smaller and less complex the environment the control freak seeks to dominate, the more likely the success.  The GOP syndicate, for instance, is capable of dominating the Beltway in this way, but it is not able to dominate a social reality as complex and foreign to their sensibility as the societies of the Middle East.  They thought their brutish methods would carry the day, and instead they just made things worse.  The zealot has little trouble imposing his will on the sane and reasonable people who stand in his way, but has a harder time when he encounters those who are as zealous as he.

But the worst thing about a control freak is that he only knows one way to deal with what he doesn't understand or what frightens him, and that's to strive to dominate it.   Fear is at the heart of all zealots.  And the more chaotic things get, the less they understand,  and the more it frightened they become.  And so like cornered animals, they attack.  That's all they know.  So now in the Middle East instead of hearing some sane plan of adjusting to failure, we hear talk about attacking Iran.  Iran is a problem, but the last thing the world needs is these zealots anywhere near the table where solutions to the problem are being worked out. 

We Americans have the opportunity to put these sick people in a straitjacket in November.  For the world's sake, we had better.

More on The DaVinci Code

I saw the film last night, and it was more tolerable than the book. At least it didn't take as long.  But I have to say, I still don't get it.  I do believe that there is a hunger for what is really at the heart of the Mary Magdalene story, which is the sacred feminine.  All the Marys in the Gospels point to this much diminished dimension of Western religious experience, and I suspect that we are well on our way to redressing the balance. But this movie is hardly blazing any trails toward that place of genuine spiritual renewal that would come with a true breaking in of the sacred feminine.

Maybe if David Lynch made the movie rather than Opie--or even the writers of TV's  "Lost".  Or maybe anybody who understood religion from the inside. The movie and the book instead have the kind of gee-whiz,flat-footed sensibility of that show with Robert Stack exploring unexplained mysteries. It's an adolescent sensibility that doesn't understand mystery or understands it the way we were first introduced to it around campfires as kids trying to one-up one another with weird believe-it-or-not type stories.  It's tedious.

At the end, does it really matter if Mary Magdalene's sarcaphagous would be found.  What difference would it make, even withing the fictional context of the book/movie?  It's just goofy. The story of the Magdalene, whom I believe to be a great, great woman needs to be tackled by someone who could get at the strangeness that is associated with the alternative reality that is associated with the "sacred" wherever it breaks through into our ordinary experience.  Would it make a difference to me if it were proven that Jesus married her or anyone else?  I don't see why it would.  I think it unlikely, but it's the kind of thing that only appeals to those who think that the only thing that works in the Church is power politics and that, as the movie explains, the Council of Nicaea was just power politics as usual.  I, for one, think the good guys won at Nicaea.  And the Nicene creed, which came out of it, is a perfect expression of my faith. Documents like that don't come out of mere political maneuvering.

That being said, I think that the Cathars and the Albigensians and the Templars were probably onto something and that they were brutally suppressed for all the wrong reasons.  But does that mean that crude power dynamics are the only force shapes how things work in the church?  Well, the bad guys often do win.  But sometimes they lose.  Sometimes truth and grace and human courage play a role in shaping ecclesiastical outcomes. 

It's not all bad. The Second Vatican Council was a truly  grace-filled moment in church history.  The Brazilian bishops in the 80s were the good guys who beat back the power of the Vatican when then Cardinal Ratzinger tried to suppress Liberation Theology movement causing so much trouble to the oligarchy in Brazil.  Organizations like Opus Dei do exist, and they are in fact creepy and cult-like, even if not fulfilling its stereotype in the film.  That's the human condition.  Unfortunately religious organizations are not immune from it.  And as much that is dark and just plain evil in the historical experience of the Church, there is also much that been good, especially in the grassroots level, where people actually live out the spiritual dramas that are their lives.

I would have to say that right now that Christianity, particularly in its Catholic manifestation is at one of its historical lows.  There is not much going on that is visible that is cause for celebration.  It's easy to feel alienated and discouraged, even if you are, as I am, inclined to want to think positively about it as a force for good in the world. 

Daniel Berrigan once said of the Church, She's a whore, but  she's our Mother.  It aptly captures the ambivalence that anybody with faith and any historical knowledge feels about her.  She's a corrupt old girl, but she's not all bad--she's given us something we would not have had if she did not exist, and she's always capable of changing her ways.  She often pulls herself together, only to fall back into bad habits.  But what a boon for the world it would be if she could just get it together and keep it together.

DaVinci Decoding

I expect the movie will be better than the book.  I read it when it first came out intrigued to see what the fuss was all about, and I could understand its appeal on the level of curiosity to know what the big secret was. But the delivery of the secret was so hamfisted and goofy,  I'm amazed anyone could take the book seriously--either as fiction literature or as Brown claims, a story that is based on fact.

The bottom line is that both Dan Brown and the feminist theologian Margaret Starbird base their whole story on a flakey piece of pseudo-scholarship, the 1985 Holy Blood, Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, et al.  I read it back then, and had a good laugh.  I didn't know it then, but the basis for that book was phony documents created by Pierre Plantard.  I won't go into the details, you can read about them in this Wikipedia article.  The whole thing is a hoax from the get go. 

I haven't heard what either Brown, Starbird, or Baigent have said about the Plantard hoax, and I'm not interested enough to spend time finding out.  The more important question is why this book and its premise about the marriage of Mary Magdalene and Jesus and their bloodline is so intriguing to so many people. I've said before that in the postsecular era into which we are entering, anything goes.  Whoever comes up with the most compelling narrative wins.  But please, you've got to come up with something better than this to be taken seriously.  Is it just the inclination to believe that the Catholic Church is so obsessed with power that it will do anything to keep people from knowing the truth?  Any other theories?

Safety in Complexity?

As has been seen, any group we choose to call the "middle class" is so large as to be of little analytical help. Nor do the huge majority who are not rich qualify as a class. Moreover, there remains a very well-paid tier of corporate executives between them and the truly rich. Yet, along with the increased concentration of wealth, we are seeing millions of Americans being laid off, settling for lower paying jobs, losing health coverage, and watching pensions evaporate. Economic inequality is increasing, just as the millions who are born and stay poor are not getting anything like a fair chance to improve their situation. Victims of outsourcing don't fit into a single class, nor do the people who suffer most from living in a society that is increasingly unequal and unjust. To see these trends as matters of class does not explain them. What is clear is that we have yet to see any convincing ways of reversing them.

This excerpt is taken from a NYRB article by Andrew Hacker.  The article itself talks about the difficulties of working with the word "class" in trying to understand our situation in the U.S., to wit:  it's complicated. In a way I find it reassuring that the situation is complex enough that it doesn't fall into some easy analysis.  The more complex things are, the more difficult to control, and so whatever my concerns about the aggregation of power into the hands of fewer and fewer people, the one thing that works in favor of the common good is the complexity and dynamism of the larger society. And clearly the America of 2006 is far more complex than the America of 1906, when a discussion of class would have been a more manageable topic. 

But for my purposes, whether class is the right word for it, the issue is power, not manners or even wealth.  I think it is possible to talk about a power elite in this country.  It's an elite that is created by a system, and so the personalities don't matter so much as the system.  The personalities serve the system and the system demands more control and more power, and the personalities do what they can to feed the system, and they in turn are rewarded with great wealth. 

In the end, it's the system that's the enemy, not the personalities.In the end, the system runs the people, even those in its highest positions.  No one is really in control.  For me a progressive politics is about getting human beings in control of the system rather than continuing to allow the system to dictate the rules.  Libertarianism is the ideology of those who think it's better to let the system do its thing with as little human interference as possible.  Libertarianism, therefore, is the ideology of accommodation.

Wealth matters, but power matters more.  And lots of wealthy people don't care about power.  They just use their wealth for their own high-priced bread and circuses. They don't concern me. They vote for their own interests, but their numbers are not significant enough to effect electoral outcomes.What bothers me is how those who serve the system have got hold of the primary information channels and have convinced people that their interests lie with accommodating themselves to the existing power sytem.   And so the fact of having money is itself insignificant.  The more important question is not who has money, but who controls certain essential fulcrums of power.  And I would like to suggest that in our society the two main fulcrums in the power system are energy and information. What else is it more important to consolidate control over?  Are there any other sectors in our political economy that are more important than these?  Maybe, but these two are what worry me the most right now. 

In premodern societies, land was the power fulcrum, and the more you had of it, the more powerful you were, and with that power came wealth. And politics was about acquiring more land, and in centralizing control of a given territory in a hierarchical system of land-based vassalage.  That was the system, and everyone, high and low, served it. The modern period is the story of the shift of the power fulcrum from land and territorial acquisition for their markets and resources to a system in which the fulcrum was increasingly mobile capital, and then from a state-centered mercantilist model to a private-sector- centered, laisser-faire capitalist model.  The key tensions in the modern period have been between stability and mobility on the one hand, and on the other, the central role of the state vs. the role of the market.   

This first part of this tension is represented by an inclination of mind that could be associated with Hamilton, Lincoln, and Keynes/FDR/LBJ--namely that the central government plays an important role in regulating the economy for the prosperity and well being of its citizens, and it has an interest in preserving a certain level of stability. You would think that this would be the conservative position, but it's associated with the misnomer Liberalism.

The second habit of mind that would be associated with Adam Smith, William McKinley/Mark Hanna, and Friedman/Thatcher/Reagan in which market mechanisms are allowed free rein. This is classic Liberalism, but in this country it's what we call conservatism.  This group promotes the social dynamics that more than any other destroy traditions and foster social instability.  It's the group that promotes  the forces of creative destruction, as Schumpeter called them, which is what the market left to itself unleashes for better or worse. 

It does indeed create wealth but at the same time it destroys traditional social structures and the stability associated with them.  How the second group got traditionalist conservatives to back their program is one of the great propaganda coups of modern times.  Perhaps the key to conservative support for this program is how it inevitably leads to oligarchy. Because really the terms 'conservative' and 'liberal' have become almost completely useless except as rough designations for right and left. 

What we have, really, is two groups--those inclined toward authoritarianism and oligarchy, and those inclined toward  democracy, civil rights, and the rule of law. To me that's the only distinction that matters, no matter what label we give them, and it's time for people to decide which side they're on.  And it should be clear that the whole system since 1980 is trending in the authoritarian direction: The market promotes chaos and the law of the jungle, and in that scenario private parties have the scope to accumulate enough power to dominate the system. I do not think of principled conservatives as consciously supporting the tendency toward a right-wing authoritarian or oligarchic forms of government, but that's what their support of the GOP agenda leads to. For me nothing could be clearer.

In any event, the main problem associated with the first FDR/LBJ group is a tendency for the central government to overstep its bounds and in interfering where it has no business.  I think there is a lot of valid conservative criticism of some of the social engineering projects associated with LBJ's New Society. But that's not what we have to worry about now. In the historical cycle since 1980, we've been dominated by the habit of mind of the second Reagan/Thatcher group, and we're seeing the problems associated with it come to fruition.

There are some early rumblings that the failures of the last six years have completely discredited this group. You'd think so, but I'm not so sure.  They are not going to go away, and the fundamental structural conditions remain that promote the agenda of the system.  The Democrats, insofar as they have lost the allegiance of so many working Americans, have been forced to ground themselves elsewhere, and this has driven them into the hands of Big Money.  This is what the DLC trend in the Democratic Party represents.  The DLC think they are being realistic, and the rest of us are naive idealists, but they've been coopted. They are surrendering to rather than fighting the forces that are destroying our democracy.  There are lots of practical reasons to hope the Dems take back congress in November, but their doing so hardly solves the more fundamental systemic problem, and they have no motivation to deal with it because it feeds them.

But back to the earlier theme about class.  This is the only important thing to remember about it:  it's not about the wealth; it's about the power system. The power system rewards those who feed it with wealth.   And the key fulcrums in the power system right now are communications media and energy.  There are other systems playing supporting roles, but those to areas are key.  We can discuss the fine points, but it's worrisome to see how much influence the energy sector has in shaping American policy, and it's worrisome to see the consolidation trends in the corporate media, which more and more serves the underlying agenda of of the power system.

But what do others think?  Is American society too complex to worry about the aggregation of power into the hands of a few?  Or is it possible to boil a complex situation down to a few key elements, like communications and energy?  I've state the thesis--anybody want to lay out the antithesis? The bottom line is that we all begin to get a better sense about what we're dealing with here.  If you don't understand the problem, you can't frame an effective solution.

Frodo Failed; Bush Has the Ring

That's a bumper sticker I saw yesterday, and how apt to read it as this NSA thing breaks in the MSM.  Even they can't avoid it now. If it were just this, it would be bad enough.  But it's this and everything else.  The enormity of what this administration has done is beyond our fathoming. And what we know, you can be sure is only a fraction of what there is to know. 

The frogs in boiling water metaphor also seems apt.  It's the only way to account for how we have put up with so much now for so long.  But I will still have hope so long as the the information infrastructure is still not controlled by these thugs.  Isn't that the point of the NSA going after the phone records--to set the precedent that nothing is inviolable, that there is no such thing as privacy anymore?  That the Orwellian nightmare that I and so many others have been warning about is not some paranoid rant.  Does  the whole business of net neutrality come into clearer perspective in light of this NSA scandal?

In a crony capitalist system, compliant corporate execs, like those at ATT and Verizon, work hand in hand with Big Brother in one big, happy, corrupt system. (Hats off to Qwest for resisting.) The MSM--TV and newspapers, are well on their way to being co-opted into this crony system. The next step is telecommunications, and then, finally, the Internet.  Oh, but wait, the Internet can't be controlled unless it's owned by the corporations.  So gotto find a way to remedy that. Do you see what's at stake here?

These are bad guys.  I know for some it's hard to face;  I know for some it's hard to countenance the idea that the Democrats, for all their flaws, would have been a better choice.  I know that they don't represent the cultural values of many honest, decent Americans.  I know that the Dems hove worked pretty hard to alienate you.

But at least they respect the law, and for everything you didn't like about Clinton, and I'm there with you, hardly anybody associated with that administration was convicted of any crimes, especially compared to the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations.  And God knows it wasn't for the GOP's lack of trying. The party of law and order could care less about the law--they only  care about dominating the system in such a way as to allow them to do as they please.

(Along these lines it's interesting that a new MSM meme, is that if the Dems win the house, they will begin investigations whose sole purpose will be politically motivated payback.  Notice how such a meme sets the stage to inoculate GOP malfeasants from actually having done anything wrong.   Or how about Chris Wallace uses the national security card (with its implicit accusation of treason) in this question he poses to Sen. Schumer concerning investigations into the NSA wiretapping business: "Senator Schumer, we're in the middle of a war. We have an enemy that doesn't play by any rules. Do you really want to limit the president's ability to protect Americans? "  Is there anybody out there still buying blatant propaganda?  You betcha.)

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  The GOP is dominated by wolves in grandma's clothing.  They're con men.  They say what you want to hear, and then do what they want believing they won't be caught because for them the American people are so stupid and compliant that they'll keep believing the lies, and even if the lies come to light, they dominate the power system and so nothing can be done about it.  Think about it: for all that has come to light, what so far has  been done about it?  We have some indictments, but have the policies changed?  Has the momentum been slowed?  Did it affect, for instance, the vote on extending tax breaks for the wealthy this week? 

Does it matter that Bush's approval ratings are dipping below 30%?  It might if it affects the midterm elections. I know that in some national polls the abstract Democrat beats the abstract Republican, but next fall abstract candidates won't be running--incumbents will be running against challengers.   I know there are lots of decent republicans, but they are not running the show, and if they are in congress, they haven't stood up strongly enough to the corrupt thugs. None who consistently voted party line deserve re-election.  Will the American electorate be savvy enough to understand that when they go into the voting booth?  Will they understand that the only way to control Bush is to take the Congress away from him?  I'm sorry, but I can't seem to get my hopes up about that.

Lost Observations

Here are some random, speculative thoughts about this week's episode of "Lost".  I welcome comments that you might have about your take on what's going on.  We didn't learn  much about Michael's motivations.  He let Henry escape.  It would seem that he is therefore working in collaboration with the Others, but maybe not, and if he is, it's not clear whether he's doing so willingly.  He's not somebody who is glad about his murders.  But he's got either his own plan or a mission from the Others, and he's going to see it through.

The real story this week concerns Locke and Eko, who with Rose (and maybe Sun) compose the Faith Faction, the minority that is most in tune with the idea that no matter how things appear, the Island is a good place and that it is good that they are there.

The Rational Faction, led by Jack, still thinks that theirs is a normal story of wreckage and survival.  This island has monsters, apparitions, preposterous coincidences, inhabitants who leave no footprints on the beach.  Survivors who before the crash were sick, impotent, and crippled are cured. But there's a rational explanation for all of that (if only they had more facts), so they choose not to think about these anomalies too much.  They continue in their horizontal thinking to behave as if everything is normal, and most of the life on the island is normal,  at least normal enough so that one doesn't always have to be thinking about what doesn't make any sense. 

Because clearly they are in a place that operates according to the laws different from the Newtonian world from which they came--there is another level of lawfulness in operation there.  And from the viewer's perspective, it's clear (or should be) that the Rational Faction is in a weaker position to understand what's really going on--they don't have the mental or spiritual tools for it. And it's also clear that they are most at risk of being manipulated because their behavior and reactions are so predictable.  You ring the bell, and the dogs come running.

Now the main question is whether the rules of the Island are set up by a benevolent or malevolent intelligence.  That's Locke's crisis.  At first he believed it was benevolent, but  since the Henry incident he's lost faith in that idea.  If there is a higher intelligence operating on the island, he's become convinced that it's either malevolent or is just playing games with the survivors.  He's become convinced that their situation is like that of those who report having been abducted by aliens who conduct experiments on them for their own research. 

So this is Locke's karmic bind. He's the guy who wants to believe in the "good father" and finds out that believing such things just leads to losing a kidney.  And so the pattern repeats now on the island.  He wanted to believe in the goodness of the island, but now it looks to him as if the Dharma project is a cruel experiment designed by an intelligence as malevolent as his father. They are no more than rats in a maze, and if it's true, then Jack is right--they should fight the island; they should defy it, refuse to cooperate. 

Jack may not understand what he's up against--he's playing in a chess game that he thinks is checkers, but it doesn't matter. Winning isn't the issue; refusing to submit is.  Shaking your fist at God is the archetypal act here. The defiance about which Camus wrote so eloquently is the only option in which the survivors can maintain their freedom and dignity in a game that is rigged from the beginning.  But then again, maybe defiance is the pathetically predictable behavior the Intelligence expects from his rats, and was hoping for something more interesting.

And that's what was so poignant about the discovery of the new hatch in this week's episode.  For a moment Locke (and the viewers, too) had his hope renewed that the island was about something  more than this cruel experiment, but he (and we) was disappointed.  In the new hatch he just found more evidence to confirm his loss of faith.  And if it weren't for Eko, the viewing audience would have to concur. 

Eko's storyline keeps open other possibilities.  We know that his dead brother, Yemi, is a noble character, a priest who represents the vertical dimension of grace, which is the dimension of spiritual freedom about which I've been writing recently.  The vertical dimension opens up possiblities for people to act in ways that are not predictable in a Pavlovian sense. 

And so the shaman/priest Eko gests this message in dreamtime from his brother  in the vertical dimension that says Locke has lost his way.  Ana Lucia, now dead and as such another messenger from the vertical dimension, comes to Eko in a dream, and tells him that Locke needs his help.  So Eko as the unshakable principal in the Faith Faction has the job to shore up Locke's weakening Faith in the goodness of the island.  He tells Locke that his punching in the numbers is important work. 

And the viewers, including me, are left asking, "Punching numbers? Are you sure about that?"  Well maybe it's not about the numbers, it's about keeping the Faith no matter what.  Punching those numbers is like the repetition of a mantra, an act of prayer, like the repetition of Ave Marias in the rosary--seems tedious and stupid, but it might just be what's keeping the world from self-destructing.  I don't know--just a thought.

More on Christian Liberty

If there is one thing I have become sick of hearing is the now-tired argument that people who are religious our spiritually inclined are weak and needy, that they are afraid to be free.

Now I'm a Catholic, and it's not easy being one these days. I'll be the first to acknowledge that much of the criticism directed toward Catholics over the last five hundred years by Protestants and secularists is valid. The Church has taken its role as shepherd of souls a little too seriously in its insistence that its members act like sheep. And there are an awful lot of Catholics both now and in the past who have been happy to conform to those expectations. Nevertheless, there is something there at the heart of the tradition that nourishes profoundly the longing for genuine freedom alongside or underneath all the other stuff that works against it. 

And if Americans can take solace that their identity as Americans should not be confused with their government (whatever right wingers might think about who is or is not a real American), Catholics can also take solace in that their identity is not essentially linked to the Church hierarchy (whatever the hierarchy might think to the contrary).  Critics of Catholicism might take that into consideration. If there's a lot to be absolutely horrified about in being American, the same is true of being a Catholic. Doesn't mean you stop being one. You stay because you know there's another dimension, a beauty and a goodness, even if it isn't all that visible to outsiders.

Now from what I've written, it should be clear that I am by no means a theological liberal and that I acknowledge that in order to develop a high level of spiritual maturity, it is necessary to restrain one's open ended freedom in order to submit to one kind or another of spiritual discipline, just as it is necessary for a musician to submit to the discipline of his or her instrument.  You can noodle away on your fiddle, or you can find a teacher and really work at it.  It's the same with any kind of spiritual development; most people are noodlers, and it comes down to a fundamental resistance to submit to a basic discipline.  But the goal of restricting one's freedom in the short run has the longer term goal to be trained to become more free.  The highly trained, disciplined musician is freer because he can play things that are impossible for the noodler. The goal is higher level of freedom--not endless submission.

Now the problem facing any spiritual aspirant in our western consumer culture is that most of the religion that seems to be flourishing today has very little to do with developing spiritual freedom. There are people everywhere who are spiritually starving and all they can find is spiritual junk food, which has an unwholesome, addictive effect. And when the junk food offered identifies itself as Christian, it gives Christianity a bad name.

I don't know for sure what the pope, Joseph Ratzinger, would say about the goal of Christian practice being a deeper level of freedom. I suspect he would agree in theory--his early writings show he understands and has embraced the concept, but his persistent attempts to suppress Liberation Theology in Brazil in the 80s shows he was never very sympathetic to the idea people putting the theory into practice. He would probably argue that the goal of true spiritual freedom is rarely realized, and that too many people who think they are exercising real freedom are in fact deluded and more than likely really in the grip of compulsion, aka, sin. The road is narrow and the path steep toward the attainment of genuine freedom, he might say, and, if he did, I would agree with him on that.

And maybe the reason that it so rarely realized is because it's feared and so it's not promoted for fear of what it might lead to.  It's the old Grand Inquisitor scenario envisioned by Dotooyevski's Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov.  This idea that the clergy has to keep those in its care in a childlike dependent state to keep them safe from harsh truths that they could not bear to know or cope with.

So the question I would put to him then would be this: Is it really desirable that people should just be well-behaved children? Or is that as much a form of unfreedom as the compulsiveness of, say, the sexual libertine? Is it significantly better to be a prig than it is to be a debauchee. Is it better to be a Pharisee than a tax collector? Is it better to be the older son or the prodigal, younger son? It's not good to be either, but if you had to be one or the other, which would it be?

I'm pretty sure he'd say it's better to be the former in these pairs--the prig. It's safer, less messy. And as a parent I understand where he's coming from. Much less to worry about if your kid (or your priests and nuns) is well-behaved and repressed, if he's a member of the party of the Superego rather than of the party of the Id.

This kind of moral conformism is the bias of the cultural right and leads to spiritual passivity and a defensive, fortress mentality. The Jesus of the Gospels was completely the opposite; if any thing he came to subvert such fortresses of the mind.   But the strength of the fortress correlates with the intensity of the fear, and the intensity of the fear correlates with the intensity of violence needed to suppress the threat. And the threat they fear is true, genuine freedom.

I think there are times in everyone's life when he or she must make a sacrifice of his or her freedom, but such a sacrifice should be always freely chosen and should be for a clearly understood higher purpose--not just to be well behaved. And while certainly we have a duty in the parenting of our children to challenge their natural narcissism--they must learn self-restraint and to master their compulsivity--our more important duty to them is to nourish their freedom, and the development of their conscience. Because in the long run having a well-developed conscience is the only thing that matters. It is the cognitive capacity they must  develop if they are to discern the movement of grace in their lives or distinguish truth from illusion.

There's a reason why Jesus got a much warmer reception among those in the party of the Id who had morally scandalous reputations than the morally righteous who were the party of the Superego--the former were less smugly sure of themselves, more vulnerable, more open to the surprising and the new possibility. They were, for sure, in a state of unfreedom, but they were not locked up tight the way the Pharisees were in their whited sepulchers. The unrighteous were disposed toward freedom and recognized true liberation when it came to them. They had a capacity for discernment that the Pharisees did not. The Pharisees had highly developed superegos, but profoundly underdeveloped consciences. Conscience is one of those use-it-or-lose it kind of things. Better to use it and be occasionally wrong than not to use it at all.

We are all of us in our different ways in states of unfreedom. It's a given. It's what Christians mean when they talk about original sin. But in the final analysis it doesn't matter what the particular form our unfreedom takes. The more important issue is how well disposed we are to be free. Will we greet the Liberator if he should come to us, or shall we turn away from him in fear? Pharisees and Inquisitors want nothing to do with him.

Reality's Liberal Bias

Reality is what it is, but obviously our interpretations of it are shaped by our biases. Most of us  operate within a web of biases more or less supported by experience and factual information, and we make adjustements as we learn more.  For extreme ideologues of the left or the right nothing comes into view except through a lens shaped by their ideologies--everything else is filtered out as politically motivated by their opponents. (It can't be true if that "extreme leftist" [fill in the blank] said it.) Or some one becomes branded for being an extreme leftist or rightist if he articulates an opinion that is associated with the extreme right or left.  My opinions about abortion align with the right; my opinions about the war in Iraq and the threat from corporate power align with the left.  What does that make me?   

I'd like to think it doesn't make me anything if being something requires being either on the left or the right.  I realize that politics is about coalition building and about creating group alignments to get policies enacted, but ultimately one's identity and thought process is not determined by one's political  allignment.  You figure out what you think first, then you support whatever polticial alignment you most agree with.  That should be obvious, but you have to wonder if this is a habit of mind in very wide usage these days.

So who do I align with?  In the case of abortion, I believe that the human fetus is a human being and has rights.  I can't get around that.  In the case of the economy, it's clear to me that it's natural for the big to eat the small, and as a Christian I have a bias to oppose the strong when they seek to implement an agenda designed to exploit the weak. So it follows that I support the relatively weak doing whatever they can to organize against the predictable predatory behavior of the strong. It therefore follows that I have a bias against predators like Wal-Mart.  I think anyone who understands how the world works should have such a bias.  Wal-Mart isn't evil; it just does what the strong do in the state of nature.  Their business practices are as predictable as coyotes eating rabbits.

It's just common sense.  It's not a matter of being left or right, Libertarian or Socialist.  I'm not into the ideology so much as I'm into the practical consequences.  If we lived in a society that was more collectivist in its mentality, I'd probably be worried more about the tyranny of the majority or the dictatorship of the proletariat or whatever the crazy tendencies or imbalances might be in collectivist societies. But the idea that in our radically individualist society we are vulnerable to any threat from collectivist ideologies is ridiculous.  All the imbalances and social illnesses we suffer from derive from our loss as a society of any sense of the "common good," the sense that we're all in this together, that it's not every man for himself.

So  if you disagree with me, there are two grounds upon which we can debate, and I wish more people would challenge me than do.  But the first ground would have to do with fundamental principle or belief, for instance, if I am a Christian and you are a materialist, it has consequences for our opinions about abortion.  My belief that the fetus is a spiritual being seeking incarnation makes no sense to you.  Your belief that it isn't really a human being until it enters into society seems to me arbitrary.

We could argue on that level and  you could try to convince me otherwise, or I you otherwise, but those discussions usually end up with both parties agreeing to disagree because the real debate is not about abortion but about first principles.  I would at least respect you for having an opinion that was consistent within your materialist framework.  The pro-abortion arguments I hear from Christians are the ones that I find baffling.  But that's a topic for another day. 

The second argument could be a challenge to the accuracy of my information or observations.  I might be working with inaccurate or mistaken data, and if that was pointed out to me, I would have to correct myself.  Or I could have an opinion about a complex matter where the data is incomplete and my attempt to connect the dots is provisional at best because the most important dots might not yet be available. Ideological thinking is impervioius to the facts.  That was the point that Colbert was making and that Tom Tomorrow makes repeatedly in his cartoons. It's not the opinions that are contemptible--we are all often wrong; it's the kind of mind that refuses to adjust when the facts don't support their opinions, and such a mindset is, indeed, ridiculous and worthy or of our contempt.

On February 15, 2003, I marched against the invasion of Iraq.  In my guts I thought the war was wrong; I was convinced that we were being conned at the time, and subsequent revelations have proved what was at the time educated guesswork correct. My bias about Republican foreign policy from observations since Vietnam, Iran/Contra, and now Iraq is not groundless.  The same personalities have been working the GOP agenda for the last three decades.  My experience and understanding during the last three decades is what led me to assume that what did in fact happen would happen.  I was amazed that so many people afforded this administration the trust that they did and accepted the its casus belli at face value.  I never believed it. It would have required my disbelieving everything I have learned about the way our government works. 

So that was biased thinking, admittedly.  And it could have turned out that my biased guesses were wrong.  Some things that I was unaware of could have eventually come into view, but It came down to trusting my experience or trusting the administration, and that was a no brainer.  Because the point is this: In a society whose power structure is dominated by the right, reality has a leftward bias.  And in a society whose power structure is dominated by the left, as is in socialist countries, reality has a rightward bias. It's not that hard to predict the behavior that follows from this rule. And the extremists on the right project their own thinking onto the extremists of the left, and both understand one another well because in the final analysis they are pretty much mirror images of one another in reflecting the basic mindset, which is imperviousness to whatever does not fit into their ideological template.

It's a pretty simple rule, and you don't have to be that smart to understand it or see it in operation.  The American power elite in this country have been dominated by a right wing ideology, and so it follows that, as Stephen Colbert said last week, reality has a liberal bias.  It's not that Liberalism is superior to conservatism; it's just that it's closer to reality when the power structure is dominated by the distortions of rigid right-wing ideological thinking.  It takes an extraordinary human being to swim against the current in the centers where money and power are the riptide that drive all policies.  It's not impossible, but if you're betting the odds, you know where to put your money. 

Lost Thoughts

I haven't commented on developments in the show "Lost" recently because there didn't seem much to say, but this week's episode  increases the intensity level of the plot with the return of Michael, who now appears to be an agent working undercover for the Others.  Is he a kind of brainwashed Manchurian Candidate, or has he been told that he must  accomplish his "mission" successfully if he was ever to see his son, Walt, again? Or has he just been convinced that the Others are OK, and he has willingly enlisted in their cause?  Not enough information to know yet.

It's quite possible that Michael passed the test, for his issue was his earlier willingness to give up his son to his stronger-willed ex-wife.  His willingness on the Island to do anything to get him back could very well have been the path of his redemption.  But he doesn't seem like someone who has been lost and then found.  He's still got issues to be resolved.

The episode also intensifies  one's sense of ambiguity regarding the Others--Are they evil or are they good?  Is Henry the lying sneak the Survivors  believe him to be?  Is he a figure who evokes what's worst in each person he meets so that it comes out front and center for them either to confront and subdue or do they remain rather controlled by their own inner demons?  Is he a Tester, in this case testing Locke (whom he tells was one of the good ones he was coming to take back to the Others (Remember the scene in the First Season when Locke is being dragged away by the monster only to be pulled back by Jack.  Locke was OK with being taken away before, but he's not all that sure now.) And is he testing Ana Lucia, whom he tells was earlier perceived as redeemable by the Peace Corp Other (forget his name) she killed.  Was she given one last chance, and did she take it by choosing not to shoot Henry?  Did she lose it again by giving the gun to Michael thinking his intention was to kill Henry even though she could not?

I think a case could be made for Henry being a Satanic figure--in the root meaning of the word, which means "accuser" or "adversary" in the court of what-goes-around-comes-around cosmic or karmic justice.  Isn't this the stance he takes toward Ana Lucia when he accuses her of killing two of the Others, including one who was her advocate?  His job is to test the worthiness of those who would pass to the next level.  It's the role the Satan figure plays in the Book of Job, where he's one of the angels who has the ear of God and who convinces God that Job is obedient only because his life is easy.  What if we made it more difficult.  Would his faith remain as strong.  As it turns out, his faith was that strong.  Job passed the test.  I think it's in this sense that the Survivors are being tested by the Others like Henry.  They seem malevolent, but deep down they are hoping that you prove worthy and pass the test.  We'll see if that's right.

In any event, Michael's return at first appears to be a call to arms for the Survivors to attack the camp of the Others which he describes as austere, unarmed,  and peopled mainly by older women. Jack and Locke run off to get the guns from Sawyer.  This leaves Michael alone to accomplish the first part of his mission, which is to give the final test to Ana Lucia and to free Henry.  He's shaking and distraught as he does it (he's seems hardly a willing agent in all of this), and he is startled by Libby's unexpected appearance. 

But apparently whether it was his intention or not, "It is written," and it's time for Libby to go as well. And what about Libby? Was her test to love somebody who was physically repulsive?  Or was it about something she did to Hurley while they were both at the mental hospital for which she had to make amends?  Is her death going to turn the good-natured, but morally ambiguous, Hurley into a vengeful monster?

So nothing so far has developed to undermine my Purgatorio hypothesis, and several things have developed to support it. From the next week episode's preview, it appears that the shamanic Eko is going to come back into the plot as a key actor to counter the assault faction.  I see two factions developing.  It will be interesting to see who sides with Eko, or if anyone does. (Will Locke?)  The show, so far, has failed to disapppoint.  (I've pretty much lost interest in "Desperate Housewives"--once the Dana mystery was cleared up, nothing really to drive the plot.  Every episode seems forced, and I don't find myself caring about these cartoon people at all.)

Coffee and Sugar

Why do some societies stagnate and others develop?  It has a lot to do with the level to which elites dominate the system. And elites dominate the system because the basic economic infrastructure allows them to.  Let me draw an analogy from what has been traditionally described as the difference between progressive crops like coffee and rice and reactionary crops like sugar and cotton.  I came across this passage about Brazil in the period before World War I that makes my point.  It's from Harvard scholar Jeffry Friedan's Global Capitalism:

Brazil demonstrated the impact of different crops, for it contained both failed and successful regions.  Its northeastern agriculture was based on a large plantations growing cotton and sugar.  Landowners relied on formerly slave and informally tied labor to keep its estates running. Plantation owners worked hard to keep farm workers in their place, for without captive labor the plantations would collapse.  At the other extreme, in the southeast around Sao Paulo, a vibrant agricultural economy based on coffee was developing.  The constant demand was for more farmers, more labor, to open up new lands.  Many farms were small and many farmers worked for themselves; if they worked for others, they were paid decent wages and moved freely from employer to employer.  Here the wealthy repositioned themselves in the export sector, finance, and commerce. This Paulista elite, no less self-interested than the northeasterners, encouraged the opening of new farmland and the development of ever more profitable farms.  The northeast stagnated while the southeast boomed. p. 101.

Remind you of anything? The point is that where the system is dominated by elites, stagnation usually follows, where there is a dynamic, diverse groupd of economically independent actors, societies flourish.  Friedan goes on:

Th Brazilian experience recalls analogous regional differences in the United States. America's reactionary crops were the cotton, tobacco, and cane sugar of the South, while the progressive crops were the grain a cattle of the North and West.  As in Brazil, the former plantation areas remained backward and stagnant for decades, while the small family farm and ranch regions grew dramatically.  In fact the system of legal apartheid that reigned in the American South--with its social and political exclusion of the descendants of slaves, miserable educational system, hostility to labor recruiters, and underinvestment in transport and an impoverished, captive labor force in a region whose oligarchs were dependent upon a ready supply of cheap unskilled labor.  pp. 101-02.

What's interesting about reading Friedan's book is the perspective it gives you that helps you understand what was going on in the U.S, in this instance in the period between 1870 and 1914, as a part of a huge explosion in global trade.  And how the American South at that time had more in common with South American oligarchies than it did with the rest of the United States. 

This is a point I've made before in reference to Michael Lind's book Made in Texas, but the point bears making again. All societies tend toward oligarchy when the economic infrastructure allows for the dominance of the many by the few. The big swallow the small unless the small have means to organize and fight back with their power in numbers. And societies resistant to oligarchy usually comprise alert, knowledgeable, economically independent actors--small business people, family farms, professionals--who are self reliant and not dependent for their livelihoods on the Boss. That was the original vision the founders had for the American Republic, and it was a vision that came into violent conflict with the vision of the southern oligarchs, who if it were up to them would have run the country much as it was run in Northeastern Brazil, an area today still afflicted with wretched levels of poverty.

So the north won the war, but it wasn't long before the founders' vision was threatened from another quarter. This time from a new power developing in the industrial north. Apologists for the South rightly saw the irony: The Robber Barons were in many ways more brutal and avaricious than the southern planters, and the power that they amassed in the late 19th early 20th Century could have forced the country into the kind of crony capitalism typical of Indonesia and other parts of Asia where crony capitalism reigns. This natural tendency was checked by the trust busting of Teddy Roosevelt and later by the New Deal initiatives of his cousin Franklin Roosevelt. But now the Libertarian right has been doing all it can to dismantle the protections the Roosevelts gave us, and we really have no idea yet how naked and vulnerable we are becoming. We take for granted to the normalcy that the New Deal brought.  People could quibble about this or that program, and of course there were abuses. But for the most part it worked well in the interests of the majority of Americans, and it kept corporations in check to some degree. 

Now this is the challenge that I put to readers of this blog who tend to be small government Libertarians and who think I'm overstating the threat:  Prove that I'm wrong when I say that the structural changes our economy is currently undergoing are making us more like a "sugar" economy and less like  a "coffee" economy.  I realize that the American economy is complex, but prove this thesis wrong:  If there are not enough economically independent, self-reliant citizens to counterbalance the power of corporate giants, each of which operates as if it was a quasi-autonomous feudal duchy, how can we citizens stop the inevitable slide into neo-feudal form of peonage? Isn't that essentially the lot now of the employees at Wal-Mart?  Are we just expecting the corporations to be nice, and continue giving us our health care and maternity leave? Maybe some will, but see how long that kind of thing lasts when their competitors start cutting those kinds of benefits, and they argue they have to cut them to stay competitive. So here's the question: If things are going in one direction or the other, which one is it--the neo-plantation economy typified by Wal-Mart or a movement toward small, diverse, independent, self-reliant businesses? To me the answer is obvious.

You Libertarians who say you're against crony capitalism and corporate welfare, what power do your opinions have to stop the ineluctable movement toward on the one hand the Wal-Martization of the economy, and on the other greater degrees of cronyism and the corporate corruption of government?  You say that's not the Libertarianism you stand for, but who cares about your principled Libertarianism--it's toothless. The other guys who use Libertarian arguments as a cover to aggregate more wealth and influence are the ones with the power.

This is not some parlor debate; it's about who has the power and who doesn't. How can the government that governs best when it governs least fight back when it doesn't govern at all, when it has simply become the tool of corporate overclass?  This is the thing I want some Libertarian to explain to me:  Why do you believe the primary threat comes from government?  Isn't it obvious that the real threat comes from the corporate private sector and its domination of government?  And isn't the only solution for the People to take back the government and use it to protect their interests?  What other alternatives are there?  What other tool is there to protect our interests? 

Tell me, give me some reason to be optimistic--give me a Libertarian scenario in which there is a counterbalance this trend?  I want to know, really.  Prove me wrong. Maybe  I am. But if I'm not, then we have to talk about what needs to be done to create the counterbalance.  And for me, electing a Democratic congress later this year and Hillary in '08 are hardly the answer.

Update:  See this Atlantic Monthly article about how Wal-Mart might be a key player in the larger strategy to get a sane national health-care program.