Editorializing and editing

The first, and until today only, piece I wrote that was ever published in a newspaper was a letter to the editor.  It was 1988 and I was 16 (maybe 17) years old.  In those days I was in somewhat of a militant atheist phase, desperately seeking ways of stripping any and all references to God from the public square and to correct historical misconceptions about religious freedom and the Framers.

So I remember reading with dismay a letter reminding us that when we said the Pledge of Allegiance, we said "under God" to remember our forefathers, who came, the letter claimed, seeking religious freedom.  I lived in Virginia. I was something of a student of history. I was a militant atheist.  I knew these claims were wrong, at least regarding Virginia.

My letter was, needless to say, a masterpiece.  It briefly described the original Pledge and noted that the phrase "under God" was added in the 1950s, about 60 years after it was written.  Further, I noted, the people who settled where we lived, southeastern Virginia, were more looking for gold than for religious freedom.  Finally, I noted the deism that many of the Founders followed.  Game.  Set.  Match.

When the letter was printed about a week after I sent it (yes, we had to use snail mail), I was ecstatic.  My ecstasy was, however, soon tempered by the realization that they had edited my letter.  The effrontery!  They had removed some radical claims about Abraham Lincoln's religiosity and had cut some confrontational language.  And they had added a grammatical error in the last sentence when transcribing it.  This was my first introduction to the world, the horror, of being edited.

I mention this because, as I have said, this letter was the only piece I have had published in a newspaper.  Not that I've tried a great deal--four times this year and once, if I recall correctly, in 1998, I have submitted op-ed pieces to my local newspaper and the Washington Post.  But today, a piece I wrote made it onto the op-ed page of the Raleigh News & Observer.  Huzzah!  Then, of course, the heartbreak of having been edited.  D'oh!

But then a funny thing happened.  I read the column in the paper, and then I read my original.  The paragraph breaks had shifted in some cases, and the final paragraph and a sentence following it had simply been removed.  Here is the paragraph:

Unless I am missing the point.  It may be that what atheists want is to proclaim their (our) truth loudly and proudly.  In some atheist quarters, there is a stridency about this which makes suggesting accommodation akin to treason.  One’s bona fides are questioned; one is criticized for not being a “true atheist.”  Which is really strange, since that’s exactly what our true enemies, the fundamentalists, do.

This was followed by a recapitulation of the point earlier in the piece about we atheists, at least in this case, being our own worst enemies.   When I wrote it, it seemed important.  It seemed like I needed to make an explicit connection between the need among some atheists for "doctrinal" purity and the actions of fundamentalists who seek the same.  I hoped that this might prompt some consideration of ways to behave better.

Upon reflection, though, I can see that the cut was probably well-made.  In the preceding paragraphs I had said what I needed to say, and this last paragraph might have limited, in some sense, my audience.  Or it might simply have been too confrontational, a violation of the warning issued earlier in the piece about grabbing people by the shoulders and saying, "You're an idiot."  Perhaps since it deals with atheists alienating each other, instead of the larger issue, it is simply out of place.  Would another line, such as "Which is really strange, since that's exactly what religious fundamentalists do," or even "...religious fundamentalists, those who tore down the wall in the first place, do" function similarly?

At any rate, I think it was a good editorial decision, even though in some ways that last paragraph was my favorite (after, it should be said, the oblique reference to Pogo the Possum).  Perhaps it is sometimes best to heed the advice of Arthur Quiller-Couch who famously counseled students to "murder your darlings."  Still, my thanks to the editor(s), who made my piece better.  That bit about the fundamentalists I'll hold on to.
  
In fact, truth be told, it's best placed in another piece.

Hmmm....

On Rights, Part Five: Moral Universes

Embracing a wider ethos, as we have noted before, requires the abandonment of tribal mores, mores that admittedly once served members of various in-groups well. The evolution of tribal values into cosmopolitan values has been happening since the beginning of civilization(s) though, like biological evolution, this happens in fits and starts and never ends. It is the very nature of civilization, literally the act of living in a city. Civilization does not permit us the luxury of narrow-mindedness, not if there is to be harmony. Unless the city is utterly homogenous, a situation that obtains precisely nowhere, there will be a multiplicity of views. The keys to navigating these straits are trust and empathy, the very sources of morality. The paradox is that our morality often precludes the extension of trust and empathy.

This means accepting a set of values that, for lack of a better word, could be called "liberal." Liberal here ought not be construed in the political sense, though there is necessarily some overlap between those whose values are liberal and those whose politics are as well. Liberal here identifies a set of values constructed to embrace the widest group of people, a set of values de-coupled from the bases of tribal morality.

What are those bases? There are a couple of routes we can use to approach them. Anthropology is among the most powerful; by viewing tribal societies, we can chart how their mores differ from ours. We can also do the work of history, studying the laws of tribal societies as they were written, such as the laws in Exodus and Leviticus, or the codes of Germanic groups written following the fall of Rome in the West.

We can also use a psychological approach such as that employed by Jonathan Haidt, whose investigation into the perceptions and preconceptions of political conservatives and liberals has recently gained wide notice. Haidt, indeed, provides interesting insights into our discussion because I have earlier contended that the values of tribes are conservative and the values of civilizations are liberal. If his conclusions are correct, we should see the same emphasis in, say, tribal laws as we see in the thought-worlds of political conservatives.

Haidt suggests that there are five foundations of our moral worlds and that conservatives and liberals place different value on these. These foundations predispose us to react in certain ways towards questions of right and wrong according to the weight we place on each relative to the others. The foundations Hiadt proposes are our reactions to issues concerning harm and care, fairness and reciprocity, in-group and loyalty, authority and respect, and purity and sanctity.

Conservatives, he suggests, value all five more or less equally where as liberals emphasize the first two. The core of his argument is that conservative opposition to the aims of those pursuing social justice is born not of conservative immorality, but out of the wider—some might say more diffuse—basis of conservative mores. Issues of harm and care, of fairness and reciprocity, represent perhaps 40 percent of the moral world of conservatives while they represent a much larger portion, perhaps even excluding issues of in-group, authority and respect.

If we think of the Torah, the Old Testament laws, laws putatively established as part of a covenant between YHWH and the Hebrews and so intimately entwined with the questions of in-group, we see concerns for all of these areas. The Decalogue, for instance, known to Christians as the Ten Commandments, starts with an assertion of authority, and then touches on the other four arenas:

1. I am the Lord and your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage, you shall have no other gods besides Me. (authority)
2.  You shall not make for yourself a sculptured image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or in the earth below, or in the waters of the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I the lord am an impassioned God, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children, upon the third and upon the fourth generations of those who reject me, but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments. (authority, sanctity, loyalty)
3.  You shall not swear falsely by the name of the Lord your God; for the lord will not clear one who swears falsely by his name. (authority, sanctity) 
4.  Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall do labor do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Lord your God: you shall not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it. (sanctity, authority) 
5.  Honor your father and mother, that you may long endure on the land that the Lord your God is assigning to you. (sanctity, authority, in-group) 
6.  You shall not murder. (harm, fairness) 
7.  You shall not commit adultery. (harm, fairness)
8.  You shall not steal. (harm, fairness) 
9.  You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. (harm, fairness) 
10.  You shall not covet your neighbor's house: you shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male or female slaves, or his ox or his ass, or anything that is your neighbor's. (in-group, harm, fairness)

 I use the Decalogue for this example for a couple of reasons. First, it is, as we have already noted, essentially a set of tribal rules, established between YHWH and the Hebrews. Second, it is an important moral touchstone for political conservatives in the United States, to judge by disputes over its display in public places and its place in the history of American law, and so begins to at least hint at the overlap between tribal values on the one hand, and those of political conservatives on the other.

None of this, of course, ought to suggest that no political liberal values the words of the Decalogue, or of the other areas of the Laws, which show the same basic concerns. It is part of the larger point about the different moral universes inhabited by conservatives and liberals, and how this ties in to tribal and cosmopolitan ethics. My contention, which I will develop in a further post, is that as the perception of who belongs in the in-group widens, preoccupations with in-group, authority and purity will be downplayed.

The "War on Religion"- Some Thoughts

There is a war on religion, or so some strident voices on the political right tell us.  This war is characterized by a bias against people of faith, by a government determined to push the symbols of religion out of the public square, to be replaced by the approved icons of secularist atheism. What is needed, they claim, is an embrace of the spirituality of the Founding Fathers, of the faith that informed the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  A return to the fundamentals is all that stands athwart the breakup of American society into an orgy of immorality, lawlessness, and rampant socialism.

Pretty much no one, least of all most of the talking heads selling the idea of this "War," takes the idea seriously.  Only blinkered partisans who feel themselves constantly under siege really press the matter...loudly.  Most seem simply embarrassed by the idea.

But we should take them seriously, not because there is a war on religion, by which the claimants almost always mean a war on Christianity, but because there has always been a war on religion.  From the beginning.  Sort of.  To understand the paradigm, and the paradox, we need to step back in time.

In the early years of Christianity, until its legalization by Constantine in 313, Christian communities lived under the threat of persecution.  Never mind that most real persecutions were sporadic and localized affairs (if they even happened).  Those that were empire-wide, including the ten-year persecution that Galerius ended two years before Constantine's edict, were traumatic enough that persecution came to be perceived as part of the Christian experience, a process by which the true believers were separated from those whose faith was lacking, with martyrs representing the highest rank of the former and the traditores, who handed over their writings and religious paraphernalia, the lowest of the latter.

Once Christianity was made legal following the last major persecution, and later still when it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, the perception of persecution as an integral part of the Christian experience remained, though the actual threat of it practically nil.  Since there was no outside force truly capable of persecuting Christians, the focus turned on persecution from within the newly "Christian society."  The persecutors took two forms: wrong believers, heretics, or the members of other, minority, faiths such as Judaism.

A heretic is, literally, someone who has chosen a belief different from the official, orthodox version of a given faith.  In first Corinthians, Paul writes “there must be also heresies among you, that they also who are approved may be made manifest among you.”  The heretics, then, though a minority of the faithful at all times, took the place of the persecuting Roman authorities.  That those labeled heretics also saw themselves as persecuted followers of the true Christian faith adds only the slightest wrinkle to this perception.  Heterodox or orthodox, each saw their persecution as an act of definition, as proving their worthiness in their faith.

The early heresies tended to center around the nature of Christ.  Was Jesus was essentially the same as God the Father, or was he a later creation?  Was he fully human, fully divine, or both?  Never mind that an outsider would have a hard time differentiating between the "heretics" and the "orthodox."  Never mind that on the vast majority of doctrine and history both sides would tend to agree.  The minute differences seemed as vast to them as the differences between "pagan" and "Christian" and "Jew."

Later heresies tended to focus on matters of practice, cropping up occasionally as resistance to innovation, or the entanglement of religious and secular authorities.  Again, in most cases (with the exception, for instance, of the Cathars) an outsider would be challenged to spot the difference.  Each side in these matters, though, claimed to be the inheritor of the true version of Christianity, an embodiment of the primitive Church.

Jews also played a role in this through the absurd accusations of ritual murder and of tormenting the consecrated Eucharistic wafer that began circulating in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.  It is no coincidence that the tortures, of both Christian bodies and the body of Christ itself, described in these stories echo those inflicted on Jesus in his passion.   These were merely lurid reflections, in the Christian mind, of the ongoing persecution of the righteous and probably reflect a newfound concern, and perhaps discomfort, with the embodied Jesus.

During the Reformation, as new denominations began spinning off from the Catholic church in the West, part of their patrimony was the sense of being true believers persecuted for adherence to the true faith.  Catholics and Protestants both saw each other as the persecuting heretic, whose condemnation was proof of one's worthiness.

Today, the story is the same, only the villains have changed.  Now that we live in a supposedly secular society, supporters of the secular arrangement, regardless of personal faith or lack of faith, are cast as the heretics, as the persecutors.  Secularism requires, at the very least, the equal treatment of all religious groups by agents of government, if not their complete sequestration.  It requires neutrality on religious questions, and this makes some people of faith very uncomfortable.  That some religious groups in the mix are non-Christian must be particularly grating.

This situation is further complicated in American society by the fact that, like the orthodox and heterodox of bygone generations, secularists and their opponents also make a historical claim.  In our times, they both claim to be re-capturing the pristine spirit of the Constitution, much as combatants in religious disputes claimed to be re-capturing the spirit of the primitive Church.  Secularists note the deist leanings of a great number of the Framers, and language supporting the segregation of religion from politics, while those favoring a greater place for religion in the public square point to the Framers' many overt expressions of religiosity and, of course, to the reference to "Nature and Nature's God" in the Declaration of Independence. 

Let us not, however, succumb to a false equivalency. Secularists, for the most part, point to the tradition of separation that began in the early years of the Republic, and to the complete absence of religious language in the Constitution.  And, while there are some shrill voices in the secularist camp, the perception of a wholesale assault on religion is just that, a perception.  For the most part, the struggle centers on the issues that arise from the need for government neutrality in religious questions, especially as American society become more religiously pluralistic.  On the other side, those who were once in power and able to assert their religious identities over and against others' see the loss of cultural hegemony and the old instincts kick in.   

Thus the narrative of persecution, buried deep in the cultural genes of Christian denominations, finds its expression in claims of a so-called “War on Religion.”  We must take it seriously because it is a serious thing, but not so seriously that we allow the shrill cries of wounded faith to drown out rational discourse.  We must, instead, seek to engage people of faith, to show them how secularism protects the realm of faith from governmental interference, how establishment of religion threatens religion and how neutrality has created a vibrant and pluralistic religious life in America.  

We will not reach everyone, but there are potentially enough people whose worries about interference in and marginalization of their faiths are not characterized by simple paranoia and concocted grievance, that we can make inroads.  People of faith and non-faith can come together to make this possible.

Otherwise the "War on Religion," a war that never was yet always has been, cannot be drawn to a peaceful conclusion.

On Rights, Part Four: Towards a Wider Ethos

In a previous post, I suggested that it is up to us to determine the relationship of ourselves to government. It is also up to us, having untethered the concept of rights from “Nature and Nature’s God” to also untether it from the nihilism that can follow. When rights were perceived as coming as though through divine writ, this imprimatur was sufficient justification for their existence. Recognizing that we, as humans, are the authors of our rights seems to open the door to all sorts of abuses. My call above that we accept responsibility for the exercise and limitation of rights becomes seemingly pointless.

If, the argument might go, rights do not come built in to the cosmos, why bother with them at all? At first pass, this is a logical response. Absent divine sanction, it would seem, we are left to visit all manner of horror on our fellow man. Free speech? Freedom of religion? No longer! In the absence of this moral component, we are left to return to a more “natural” state, what Hobbes called the “war of all against all,” where the strongest can impose their will on the weak without consideration of any “rights.” Those ruling over us have no obligation to consider our welfare and, if they are kind, will give us our rights only to the extent that their exercise does not threaten their prerogatives.

This only follows, though, so far as we have forgotten what has come before. We are individuals, but individuals integrated into society; society is our natural mode of living, selected for over the millennia; groups of individuals who cooperate tend to out-compete those groups that do not; morality, religion and government are all ways of extending the recognition and protection of kin to those not related to us. Government, the largest of these, is still us.

Rights, then, are the courtesy we extend to each other as fellow human beings, or at least as fellow citizens, in order to secure civic harmony. Just as we agree that a paper dollar or a coin made of gold has value, we agree that we have rights to speak freely or to worship as we please. Together, a group of us might have the power to repress the speech of others. We do not do this, ultimately, because we would not wish it done to us. This you will perhaps recognize as the so-called Golden Rule, close to its original Judaic formulation, “What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow.”

When we do curtail these rights, these courtesies, it is in the public good. So, child pornography is made illegal, the shouting of “Fire” in the crowded theater is not protected. There is no sense in which these activities can be construed to be in the public good. On the other hand, we do not prevent the members of the Westboro Baptist Church from picketing military funerals, provided no other laws are being broken, because their message, no matter how odious, does not harm the public good. Most messages, good and ill, fall into this category. We can argue their moral worth, but they will not cause physical harm, they will not lead the republic to fall.

Trouble comes, however, when allowing others the due exercise of their rights conflicts with our moral values. The problem with morality is that it is largely tribal, and tribal values tend to be conservative (writ small). Emphasis in the tribe is on stability, and since individual deviance tends to be disruptive of that stability, the tribe’s bias is to quash innovation. This pressure to conform can be seen among members of closed organization such as clubs or cults, and in open organizations like churches, companies or unions, where members profess an allegiance that stands beyond mere acquaintance and hold to a common set of core values. Deviants who resist pressure to conform often find themselves expelled.

Nation-states, on the other hand, have to take the longer view, so deviance is harder to define. Tribal values—or, if you will, “community standards”—vary from place to place; thus, what is required is a wider range of acceptable behaviors, so that the ethos of the nation-state can encompass the maximum number of its citizens (it will never embrace them all without dissolution). This range cannot be identical with any one set of tribal values, since no set of tribal values has the inclusivity needed though, obviously, tribal values can provide building blocks in the development of a larger ethos. Eventually, though, tribal mores that find their way into the larger scheme must shed their tribal underpinnings or risk turning into atavism at best and sources of division at worst.