Watch Lists and Gun Control- A Letter to My Fellow Liberals

Hi fellow liberals.  It’s me, Mike.  Can we talk for a minute?  Now you know I love each and every one of you—although  the “nominate #Bernie or I’m gonna take my bat and ball and go home” crowd really tests me—and I think I’ve been a staunch advocate for gun control, but we’re going just a little bit crazy.  There’s a lot of complaining about the defeat of a bill that would have prevented people on the terrorism watch list from buying guns.  What’s not to love, right?  They’re on a TERRORISM WATCH LIST for crying out loud! 

Here’s the problem.  Those people have not been convicted, or even charged, with any crime.  At all.  That’s a real problem.  Our Constitution, for good or ill, prevents the government from stripping away rights without due process.  And, yes, buying a gun is a right.  Sure, we could have a big argument about the militia clause in the Second amendment.  Sources on the ratification debate sure look like the framers of the amendment envisioned militia service in conjunction with the right to keep and bear arms (hunting also comes up…protection against one’s own government does not).  This dovetails nicely with the general fear of standing armies, which citizen militias were supposed to make redundant.

But let me clue you in on a dirty little secret, one the right has known for years: the Constitution means precisely what five justices say it means.  No more, no less.  There is no Platonic form of the Constitution, no absolute meaning waiting to be discovered.  Since the justices have determined that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, it is.  Even stranger, their decision means it’s been there all along.  Until another set of justices decides differently.

Which is the long way around saying that any action to control access to firearms has to contend with the civil right in the Constitution.  As long as gun buying is a right, then, it cannot be arbitrarily taken away.  For instance, by some bureaucrat adding your name to a watch list.  And passing a law?  I would guess that any such law would run afoul on the prohibition on bills of attainder right there in the Constitution (Article One, Section Nine, Paragraph 3).

Now I don’t for a moment think that the GOP voted against the bill for any reason other than that it’s in the pocket of the NRA.  Or perhaps as a simple negative reaction to Democratic proposals. But it’s possible to cast the right vote for the wrong reasons.  The watch list is notoriously faulty, with thousands of names on it that shouldn’t be—remember Ted Kennedy? 

And, of course, passing a law that blocks people on the watch list from purchasing guns is an opportunity for abuse.  We’re positively giddy that we might stop suspected Islamist terrorists from purchasing guns.  But, and this may be a bit of a slippery slope argument, would it be hard to imagine a future Richard Nixon having political opponents placed on such a list?  What other liberties might we permit to be curtailed by administrative fiat?  Best to avoid the temptation altogether, and that means stopping here, by protecting the due process and equal protection rights of an admittedly unpopular group.

So, really, stop your squawking unless you’re just trying to score cheap political points.  Focus your efforts on real reforms: universal background checks, waiting periods, licensing and insurance requirements…and not on “fixes” that accomplish nothing.  Every time we take our eyes off the prize, and try for a quick feel-good score, we lose a valuable opportunity to engage the public on actual reform.  And that’s a tragedy. 

The Medieval Mind of Donald Trump

In the wake of the Paris attacks, the “Western” world has been thrown into something of a panic.  Horrified by televised images of the carnage, we are tripping over ourselves to do something, anything, even if it’s the wrong thing, to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen again.  Every Muslim, every Syrian, is now seen in some quarters as guilty until proven innocent even though no Syrians appear to be involved in the attack, and the vast majority of Muslims condemn it.  

Reacting to public fears, Congress is rushing to enact legislation to make the already difficult and exhaustive process for bringing a trickle of Syrian refugees to the United States even more onerous.  Exaggerated claims are thrown willy-nilly, including one claim that as many as 270 million Muslims “have killed in the name of Allah (emphasis added).”  Voices of moderation are increasingly crowded out by sensationalistic journalism, the speeches of demagogues, and the steady drumbeat for war.

Among the observations being made is a particularly trenchant one—the comparison of the plight of Syrian refugees to those of Jews attempting to flee Europe in the run-up to World War II.  Both groups were attempting to escape potential slaughter at home and seeking a better life for their families.  And both met resistance, especially from the United States.  Like the Syrians of today, Jews were seen as a potential threat to security, as a vector to introduce communism and anarchism to America, the same threats the Third Reich trumpeted as it sought to strip Jews first of their rights and then of their lives.  Americans, broadly, supported keeping Jews out, with the result that thousands were sent away or denied visas, thousands who eventually perished in the Holocaust.

Such a comparison seems even more apt in light of the recent hubbub surrounding Donald Trump, who seemed first to approve, then positively support, the idea of a database for Muslims, and some sort of special ID that displays their religion.  Though this has raised the specter of the yellow Star of David forced on Jews in Hitler’s Germany, and perhaps of the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, the roots in this case are deeper, and in a way ironic.

Eight hundred years ago this month, 1400 of the most important leaders of the Roman Catholic Church gathered in Rome for the Fourth Lateran Council.  Beset by challenges from within, especially by the heretical teachings of the Waldensians and the Cathars, the assembly composed the definitive medieval statement of Christian belief and practice.  Old debates were settled, for instance the long-running dispute over the substantial change in the Eucharist.  Confession was enjoined on all believers once a year.  Religious and secular authorities were instructed in how to deal with religious deviance.

Part of the process of self-definition, in determining who is “us” is the definition of “not us,” the exclusion of the Other.  Fourth Lateran made an attempt to settle this, too, not just for heretics, who could be exiled and reconciled to the Church, but for Jews and Muslims as well.  Like today’s Syrian refugees and the pre-World War II Jews, they were seen as a possible source of treachery.  Jews and Muslims lived among Christians, occasionally converting even though these conversions were often suspect. 

Among the canons dealing with Jews and Muslims is Canon 68.  It describes the problem as being that in some places it was difficult to distinguish Jews and Muslims by sight.  The main concern seems to be that Christians might, unknowingly, enter into sexual relations or even start a family with one of these enemies of the Church.  As a solution, the assembled council decreed “that Jews and Saracens [Muslims] of both sexes in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public through the character of their dress.”  This decree was enforced only sporadically, and in many places took the form of an oval patch, suggestive of the Eucharist wafer, a connection to anxieties then current about Jews and the Eucharist, anxieties that manifested themselves in the libel of Host desecration.

Not much imagination is required to see this wafer-shaped patch as the ancestor of Hitler’s yellow star and a special ID for Muslims as its descendant.  Such a connection was part and parcel of the medievalism of the Third Reich.  And it remains a medieval impulse today, as erstwhile medievalist Carly Fiorina should be able to notice, were she not so busy claiming her medieval education will help her deal with Daesh. 

This seems an interesting irony, that we see the modern as medieval simply because it’s brutal because that's what "medieval" means to us, ignoring the actual medieval as it rears its, in this case ugly, head.  Like most colloquial uses of the term medieval, it is a gross misrepresentation when applied to Daesh.  All fundamentalisms are modern inventions.  They are the reaction of the aggrieved to a modernity that in many cases has left their status diminished, an attempt to restore the special place they once held in the cosmos.  Medieval Muslim theologians, though, would have found Daesh as unintelligible as the sublime scholastics would find Christian fundamentalism in America.

It is, rather, the Trumps (and, since I started writing this the Carsons and the Rubios) who are being medieval, in the worst possible sense.  Even beyond the slander to Syrians, in statements trump has made tarring undocumented Mexican immigrants as criminals, it is not hard to see and echo of the charges of ritual murder and host desecration that brought so much grief to medieval—and indeed modern—Jewry.  We’ve also seen the consequences of this sort of essentializing, which reduces human beings to a set of imputed characteristics, is given full run in the genocides of the 20^th century.  We can see it in the veritable lynching of an innocent immigrant, beaten by Trump supporters in Boston earlier this year.

Like those churchmen, like Germans in the 1930s, we feel besieged, rightly or wrongly, by forces beyond our control.  We felt this way after the September 11, 2001 attacks, and our response was to lash out in our anger, helping create the situation that led both to the refugee crisis and to the Paris attacks. In none of these situations did the solution make the problem better.  Modern challenges require modern thinking, not a return to the medieval mindset that has repeatedly failed us. 

Doing good and Meeting Each Other

In a greeting early in his papacy to delegates representing faiths and sects other than Roman Catholicism, Pope Francis made a wonderful gesture when he stated:

We also feel close to all men and women who, although not claiming to belong to any religious tradition, still feel themselves to be in search of truth, goodness, and beauty, God's Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, and who are our precious allies in the effort to defend human dignity, in building a peaceful coexistence between peoples, and in carefully protecting creation.

Though clearly directed at the so-called "nones," the growing mass of people who consider themselves "spiritual but not religious," the comments have also been taken by some to be an offer to atheists and agnostics as well.

If the pontiff is extending his hand to atheists among other nonreligious, I accept.

All of us should accept this offer, even if we might take exceptions to Francis' equation of truth, goodness, and beauty with God's capitalized version of these worthy pursuits.  We should accept because  we can all agree that defending human dignity, working for a more peaceful world and protecting the biosphere that supports us all are goals that atheists and humanists are concerned with.  And inasmuch as the Roman Catholic Church works towards these goals, we ought to consider Catholics our allies.

We won't agree on every aspect of the Church's agenda, and whenever it it conflicts with secularism in our own countries we should stand ready to oppose it.  But where they Church agrees with us, where its aims dovetail with ours, we should unite in common cause.

It will be argued by many, on both sides, that this is an unacceptable compromise.  I will leave it to the religious to deal with fallout on their side.  Some atheists, though, may accuse me of offering aid and comfort to the enemy.  They will claim that by working with the religious I give tacit support to holders of, as some would call it, an irrational belief in the supernatural.

I can say only this: Up to the point where Catholics (or members of any religion or sect) attempt to impose their religious strictures on me, I hold their beliefs to be harmless.  The rationality or irrationality of their beliefs is immaterial.

More to the point, of all Christian sects, Catholicism is the one atheists should find most congenial.  For one thing, the Church is friendlier to science than most Protestant sects.  In response, one might bring up Galileo, and his persecution is certainly a black mark against the Church, but against this must be weighed the invaluable contributions of Catholic religious to the sciences.  Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian friar, discovered the basic principles of heredity; Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest, extrapolated the idea that would be known as the Big Bang, as well as the expansion of the universe, from Einstein's math.

The pope's own order, the Jesuits, has long been known as an incubator of scientists and scholars (Francis himself holds a graduate degree in chemistry).  Scientific achievement occurred not in spite of an inchoate anti-science position, but because of a pro-knowledge attitude that has generally prevailed in the Church.

This does not mean our ally is immune from criticism.  When Catholic position of human dignity conflict with our own, we should stand fast in our beliefs.  When the Church is a bad actor, as it has been in many places with its protections of pedophile priests, we should stand with the victims.  Our cooperation does not imply our consent to everything our ally does, and when our ally does wrong, we should say so.  We should also expect similar consideration.  That's what friends do.

The potential gains far outweigh the risks.  If we, as atheists, can abandon the need for the rough sort of doctrinal purity that suggest we can only deal with people who believe as we do, we can achieve much. How can we not, when we can potentially join 1.2 billion people to our causes?  Why should we not, with all this potential?  Because the goals Francis outlined in this wonderful address- defending the dignity of our fellows, working toward a peaceful world, protecting the environment for future generations- are humanist goals.  They focus on the betterment of peoples' lives in the here and now.

They are compatible to a great extent with secularism.  And isn't that what we really want?

Help me out with this survey

Regular readers of this blog (which is probably about six of you) are well-aware that I have been in the teaching business for the last several years.  I am currently in the midst of a transition within that realm.  Though I have been teaching at the college level for the last four years, my run is at an end.  My lack of a PhD has limited my opportunities, and I feel fortunate to have had the two years of full-time employment that I had.

Since part-time work doesn't pay the bills, I have embarked on a Master of Arts in Teaching with an emphasis on Secondary Social Studies.  This is an intensive course, which is compressing the work of the degree and teacher certification into just over a calendar year.  As part of a course on Inquiry and Professional Development, I have been required to conduct a survey about professionalization in teaching.

The ten questions of this survey are below.  I welcome responses from anyone and everyone.  If you'd like to start by telling me about yourself (that is, if I don't know you already), that would be great.  You don't have to be in education.  I'm on a short schedule here, but I only need fifteen responses for this particular project. Be as brief or as thorough as you like, responding with a comment, or by email at mgbazemo@ncsu.edu  I'll post my write-up in a follow-up post.

The survey is here.

Below you can get some sense of the thinking.  I altered some of these questions when I realized my "essay" format wasn't going to work out.

Thanks!

1.  The very first of the standards articulated in the North Carolina Teaching Standards is that teachers “take responsibility for the progress of students to ensure that they graduate from high school, are globally competitive for work and secondary education, and are prepared for life in the 21^st century.”  Do find this vision adequate?  Or is it lacking something?  Is there any place in it that you think too much is being asked of teachers?

2. As a follow-up to question one, regardless of where you were educated or when (feel free to say a word or two about that), does this gibe with your own educational experiences?  If not, what was the most significant difference?

3. The second standard states that “Teachers Establish a Respectful Environment for a Diverse Population of Students.”  What are the responsibilities of teachers and schools in accommodating cultural diversity?  Please say something about the diversity experiences in your own educational process.

4.  Diversity is about more than culture, ethnicity, and language, it covers different styles of learning and learning disabilities as well.  What is your perception of the diversity challenges faced by teachers in this realm?

5.  North Carolina states that teachers should “recognize that educating children is a shared responsibility involving the school, parents or guardians, and the community.”  How do you feel this responsibility ought to be apportioned?

6.  Thinking about question five, how does this gibe with your own experiences?

7.  North Carolina makes explicit that teachers should be experts in their content areas, teaching along the lines of the North Carolina Standard Course of Study.  What is your sense of the knowledge teachers bring to the classroom?  Do you expect that they will be content experts?

8.  In regards to expertise, how do you feel the teaching profession today stacks up against when you were en elementary or secondary school student?

9.  The primary aim of teachers is, of course, to educate.  In order to do this, they must find ways to approach different kinds of learners.  What is your assessment of the way that you learn?  Did you find primary and secondary education was able to reach you?  What succeeded and what failed?

10. We measure teacher success in many ways—through observation, through graduation rates, and through testing, of which standardized testing has become increasingly important.  What is your sense of the importance of standardized testing?  Based on what you know, are schools (and government) relying too much, not enough, or just about the right amount on the results of standardized tests.

Kim Davis is not a martyr

Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who rose to prominence for her refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of court orders, has apparently been jailed until she is willing to do so.  Her appeals essentially exhausted, she was taken into custody on contempt of court charges.  To her opponents, she is a hypocritical public servant who simply will not do her job out of irrational prejudice, and who ought to be removed from office.  To her supporters, she is a shining symbol of the refusal to yield her religious liberties in the face of rampant secularism, one who is suffering for her beliefs--in other words, a martyr.

Already from the usual suspects like Mike Huckabee (among other GOP presidential hopefuls) and Bryan Fischer have come the accolades for Davis, standing strong in her belief that marriage is a sacred covenant between a man and a woman.  Christian media have repeated the meme, casting her willingness to suffer imprisonment for her beliefs as the kind of courage shown by those who, when offered the choice of renouncing their religion or suffering death at the hands of Roman authorities, chose the latter.

Of course, this narrative of martyrdom is a powerful one and underlies the meme that there is a war on religion in the United States.  Its proponents wouldn't use it if they didn't realize this power.  The whole idea of martyrdom is that the willingness to face persecution at the hands of the authorities for one's religious beliefs is good for the religious community.  It galvanizes the faithful and it elicits sympathy from the wider culture, which can see itself in the persecuted.

This is precisely why Kim Davis falls short as a martyr. She does not come across as a sympathetic figure; she comes across as a bully, using the twin cudgels of her faith and her elective office to beat down those she sees as sinners.

Think about this: early Christians were occasionally persecuted  (or perhaps simply prosecuted) because the dictates of their faith prevented them from participating in state-mandated rituals.  But the key distinction between those early Christians and Kim Davis (not to mention other clerks asking to be excused from doing their jobs) is that the one crying persecution is the state.  She cannot be persecuted if she refuses to do her job because in not doing her job she is the persecutor.

In the martyrdoms of the Roman era, we can see people denied their rights by an oppressive state.  Davis does exactly the same thing when she, as an agent of the state, refuses to respect the civil rights of all citizens.  She dehumanizes her fellow citizens in the name of her personal belief under color of legal authority.

So those defending her have it entirely wrong. In this little drama, Kim Davis is no martyr; she's the Roman authorities feeding the lions.

The (Seemingly) Eternal War on Christmas

Is it really "War on Christmas" again?  It seems to come earlier every year.  I am forced to ask because of Donald trump's recent comments* on the struggle for Christmas present, which is stoking the flames of the renewed "War on Christmas."

You know, Christmas, that time of year when we see Christmas trees everywhere, Santas in the malls and ever-deepening price cuts at retail stores?  The problem is apparently that the word "Christmas" is anathema to schools, in town squares, and to those same retailers.  Christmas pageants are now "winter" celebrations.  Christmas trees are now "holiday" trees.  The baby Jesus, the wise men, and the manger have been relegated to the Island of Misfit Holiday Symbols.

For Americans, though, this is nothing new.  We inherit a long history of subverting the celebration of Christmas.  Shaping the holiday to a particular end is nothing new.

Think about it.  Those most Christian of America's settlers, the Puritans, actually outlawed Christmas celebrations between 1659 and 1681.  Revelers caught celebrating the holiday were hit with a fine of 5 shillings.  In many places, December 25 was business as usual.

Of course there were Christmas services.  This was Puritan New England; there were always services.  It's simply that Christmas was viewed with extreme suspicion by religious and civic authorities.  As the historian Stephen Nissenbaum put it in his wonderful 1996 book, The Battle for Christmas, authorities in New England saw the holiday season as one of "rowdy public display, of excessive eating and drinking, the mockery of established authority, aggressive begging...and even the invasion of wealthy homes."

Not to mention the occasional public sex, apparently a real thing in England.

Yuletide was a time of upending the social order, which served as a sort of safety valve for the frustrations of those at the lower end of that order.  Wassailing, in terms of heavy drinking and drunken brawls and light vandalism, allowed the lower classes to let off steam and, presumably, helped keep them in line for the rest of the year.

The original war on Christmas, then, was a war against public rowdiness.  It changed course in the early nineteenth century when upper-class merchants, realizing Christmas wasn't going away, tried a new tactic.  Writers such as Washington Irving and Clement C. Moore (presumably) began reshaping the holiday by transforming the character of Saint Nicholas from an austere fourth-century bishop known for miracles and secret gift-giving into a jolly old elf with a belly laugh and a white beard.

He came to bring presents to the children and, implicitly, to deliver the message of a Christmas celebrated, quietly, with lots and lots of store-bought gifts, among the family in the confines of the home.

It's probably not a coincidence that this came about as industrialization was beginning to make consumer goods more readily available to more people.  Advertising, catalogs, and department stores would emerge in the decades to follow, and the now-familiar image of Santa Claus would be used to entice shoppers.  By the 1870s, it seems fair to say that Christmas had been transformed into an orgy, not of drinking and feasting, but of consumption.  The second American "War on Christmas" succeeded in changing Christmas for good.

So it goes.  Christmas is changed by each successive generation to serve the particular needs of that generation.  And the previous generation always rails against it.

In an America populated almost entirely by Christians, it was easy for all the terminology and symbolism used in the public square to be Christian. But the Christmas we celebrate outside of churches is not a Christian holiday; it is an American one.  As a quintessentially American holiday, it changes with the country.  To include the many non-Christians in this country, we have changed the way we speak of it, leading to the perhaps more anodyne terms used by government agencies and retailers.  Still the marketing of Christmas is so effective that this non-believer will be found wishing a "Merry Christmas" to all.

Retailers, who have been accused of caving into rampant secularism, know this.  No one is holding a gun to Target's collective head to force the company to strike the word Christmas from it's ads.  They do it because inclusiveness is profitable.  Nor is this effort part of some larger "War on Religion," an attempt to transform America into an atheistic nation.  Christmas has always been protean in nature, and this is how we adapt it to the present moment.

Perhaps this very flexibility in possible meanings is why the Puritans were so suspicious of the holiday in the first place.  Nothing in the Bible supports December 25 as the date of Jesus' birth, unlike, say, material supporting the date of Easter, a holiday which has historically been more important.  That date in December happens to coincide with other celebrations of the winter solstice and the longer days it brought.  Christmas itself was, then, in its own way an attempt to sell Christianity to the Roman people.

Today people worldwide, many not Christians, celebrate it American-style.  Some, though caught up in the consumer aspects of the holiday, almost certainly imbibe the religious message of peace on Earth and good will toward men.

Not a bad message, that.  As a vehicle for it, Christmas may be the greatest ad campaign in history.

*See comment below.

Why Leo Frank Still Matters

One hundred years ago, on the night of August 16, a group of about twenty-five men stormed the Georgia State Penitentiary at Milledgeville and carried away thirty-one year-old Leo Frank.  By the next morning, Frank dangled from a tree outside Marietta, almost 200 miles away.  Among those who carried out the killing were a former governor of Georgia and a superior court judge, as well as tradesmen selected for their ability to help in the jailbreak.

Frank, who was Jewish, had come to Atlanta in 1908 to work in his uncle’s pencil factory.  In 1913, he was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of 13 year-old Mary Phagan, an employee of his, in a trial with crude sexual and anti-Semitic overtones, a verdict most who have studied the case consider a miscarriage of justice. 

His case became a cause célèbre of sorts, with editorials nationwide, even in other Southern states, condemning the conviction.  After unsuccessful appeals to overturn the conviction that reached the Supreme Court, his sentence was commuted to life in prison a day before his scheduled execution.  It was anger over this commutation that led to his lynching.

Opinion on Frank showed the fractures emerging in Georgia, and in Atlanta, fractures between labor and management, between elites and non-elites, between urban and rural.  It showed the lengths to which some--people whom the historian Nancy MacLean calls “reactionary populists,” groups in which anti-elitist populism runs hand-in-glove with the desire to preserve racial and religious domination—were willing to go in order to protect their prerogatives.

   

These reactionary populists were people who felt left behind by changes sweeping the South.  They were factory workers who felt exploited by bosses, they were farmers whose prestige had eroded, they were men who felt they had lost control over their women working in the factories.  Since the law seemed to have failed them, they struck out through extralegal means, encouraged in their wrath by the editorials of future Senator Thomas Watson.  The lynching was the ultimate expression of their frustrations, and an attempt to show they still had power.

Their cry, and the echoes of the Frank case, still be heard.

Leo Frank had been president of Atlanta’s chapter of B’nai B’rith, the society founded in 1843 and dedicated to the protection of the Jewish people and their legacy.  Following Frank’s conviction, National B’nai B’rith formed the Anti-Defamation League, which to this day champions the cause of human rights.  Adolf Kraus, one of the founders of the ADL, specifically cited the Frank case as a reason for its formation.  That’s one of the traces.

Another could be seen in November of 1915, when a small group, likely including at least one of the Knights of Mary Phagan, joined Walter Simmons in the burning of a cross on Stone Mountain, inaugurating the second Ku Klux Klan.  They were, perhaps, emboldened by the successful lynching.  Their sentiment had almost certainly been whipped up by Watson who had suggested in the lynching’s wake that “another Ku Klux Klan may be organized to restore HOME RULE!”

The legacy of both the ADL and the Klan stretch through the twentieth century, with the former advocating the cause of human rights while the latter worked to deny them to large segments of the populace.

And now we find ourselves at a similar moment, with a new set of reactionary populists.  They find their world upended by a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, religiously pluralistic society. Many are appalled that a black man is President.  They feel the country turning into something they don’t recognize.  Further, they feel betrayed by members of the political and economic elite they feel have enabled this turn of events.

We see the same old twinned responses in the calls for the removal of Confederate symbols and in the vitriolic resistance to their removal in the wake of the Charleston church shootings, itself perhaps a Leo Frank moment for the 21^st century, an act of racist vigilantism that stirs the best and the worst in us.

What was the recent demonstration at Stone Mountain, with its brazenly armed protesters carrying the flag that for so many symbolizes oppression, to site awash in the symbolism of racial subjugation with its huge images of Confederate heroes and its KKK connection, if not an outpouring of reactionary populism? 

What else is the Tea Party?  The outpouring of support for Donald Trump?

We’ve seen this movie before.  It was Birth of a Nation, the D.W. Griffith film that in 1915 provided much of the symbolism used by the reborn Klan. 

You’d think we’d have learned something in the intervening century.  Perhaps we should consider a new script.

"Virtual" tribalism and the "real" thing

A couple of articles that popped up on my Twitter feed have me thinking about some conclusions I drew in an earlier installment of my occasional "On Rights" postings.  Mostly these pieces, concentrating on the effects of the Internet on religion, have me thinking about what I earlier argued was one of the hallmarks of civilized living in the modern era- the gradual replacement by tribal mores with more cosmopolitan ones.  Religion is, as I have suggested, and as others have argued, irrespective of any truth claims, a powerful scheme of organization that we as humans have adapted.  Its values, however, tend to be reflective of its tribal underpinnings, and advancing parochial (no pun intended) concerns.

The problem arises when religious groups come into contact with each other, especially as they become components of larger political structures.  Each, thinking it has a monopoly on ultimate truth, seeks to set the moral compass for a society.  Inasmuch as any one group succeeds, others will be alienated, so government, at its best, should foster an ethos that embraces the widest possible segment of its constituents.  As one of the primary functions of any social structure is to foster group cohesion through suppressing threats to the group, threats we might loosely refer to as deviancy, it follows that as the components of the social system become more heterogeneous, the scope of what is defined as deviancy is narrowed.

One can see this, for instance, in the evolution of what constitutes acceptable sexual behavior in the United States. The topic is too large to be adequately detailed here, so I hope a thumbnail sketch will suffice:  from a puritanical (in the literal and figurative senses) beginning where the only socially acceptable sexual behavior was between and man and his wife, with everything else considered deviance.  Over the intervening years, sexual mores gradually relaxed until, three hundred years later, homosexual behavior, which in the puritan ethos was a great crime worthy of capital punishment, passes for the most part with barely a shrug.  Generally, it should go without saying, men and women gradually and unevenly became more freely able to engage openly in sexual behavior that in previous generations would have received censure.

That this coincides with the creation of the United States from separate colonies, the new nation's territorial expansion, the great waves of urbanization and immigration, and the tightening web of globalization is no coincidence.  This is not a new phenomenon.  Urbanization is the common thread, and urbanization has been the great cultural driver in human history since the first cities were founded.  In cities, disparate peoples come together and begin exchanging ideas as readily as they exchange genes.  Cities also, however, provided a haven for dissidents and the adventuresome, those who in village life might have run up against social strictures, to find one another and begin forming communities of their own.  Heretics and reformers alike could find an audience and though passions might be stirred, the requirements of city life meant that a basic detente usually held, and when a group was sufficiently radical to shatter that, it was dealt with.

But we have seen, beginning in earnest in the late 1970s with the rise of the Religious Right and its political alliance with the Republican party, the beginning of a counter-liberalization, a rejection of detente.  Reasserting older, more restrictive values, conservative evangelicals have enjoyed a four-decade run where, in various places, they have imposed their social vision.  This coincides with perhaps the two greatest forces of social transformation we have seen yet--the rise of cable television and the Internet.

At first glance, cable television and the Internet seem to offer a number of places for a plurality of voices to be heard.  The possibility that they might, to borrow a phrase from Mao, "let a hundred flowers bloom; let a hundred schools of thought contend" seemed very real.  Yet there was another possibility, one that voices of the new conservative movement appear to have noticed before anyone else.  The proliferation of channels and chatrooms offered a separate space where like-minded people could come together and reinforce their own sense of America's decline and of religious persecution.  In these echo chambers, they were able to attain a sense of pristine purpose without the obligation to entertain counter-narratives.

Modern communications, especially cable and the Internet, allow those who might have been marginalized before, potential heretics and reformers each, to gather and join forces.  They can work towards expanding the promise of America, implicit in the founding documents, in the hopes, perhaps, of forming a "more perfect Union."  But they can also work towards restricting the promise, towards restoring the older order that represents a golden age.

This is what I refer to as the new tribalism.  Virtual relationships offer, it would seem, a greater possibility for people to come together with people who only agree with them.  This holds for people on any side of a given issue, but seems more prevalent on the political right.  Such gathering will serve only to reinforce one's opinions and to help foster an "us against them" mentality.  When you no longer have to interact with real people who might disagree with you, the concord that holds a society together weakens.  Our interactions with real people, who might put the lie to the caricatures we create, force us to confront that real humans believe differently from us, suffer.  With nothing to leaven radical opinions, we become increasingly radicalized, and increasingly unable to talk to each other.  Our new tribe becomes our social universe, the locus of our most meaningful relationships.

The good news is that most of us don't inhabit this world.  The bad news is that the loudest forces of reaction either inhabit this world, or are able to harness its resentments, and the harm they can do is incalculable.  The cure is the same as it's always been--engagement with those who will be engaged, an open ear and a closed mouth and, above all, the realization that those who disagree with us are not our enemies, but rather our fellow citizens and that their concern for the future is as real as ours.  We may not come to agreement, but the real sin is not failure, but not to try.

Note:  I originally posted this a few years ago.  Somehow this was linked by something, to the effect that it was being accessed constantly.  Views of this piece constitute something like 25 percent of my total views, for no apparent reason.  I reverted it to draft and am re-posing it due to interactions online.

The past isn't even past

If there are any words that sum up the tragedy of Southern history it is those of the South’s most famous literary son, William Faulkner, who wrote” The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”  Growing up in southern Virginia, I was aware history wasn’t locked away, that it was not an object on the shelf; history hangs oppressive in the air, like humidity in August. 

It is this omnipresent past that has been brought to the fore following the murder of nine parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston and in the effort to remove emblems like the Confederate battle flag that flew in front of the South Carolina Statehouse. 

I do not aim to re-litigate the removal of these emblems, except to say that it is long overdue. 

Nor do I wish to address the ongoing (how is it even ongoing...the men who broke the union were quite clear about their reasons?) resistance to their removal, under the argument that they somehow represent “heritage, not hate,” as though hatred of African Americans were somehow not the heritage, as though the desire of whites to keep blacks as chattel were not the primary motivation for the war that spawned the symbols.

But underlying the argument that symbols ought to be left in place is a more pernicious idea—that the past is past, and ought to be left undisturbed.  There is a sense in some quarters that the injustices of the past have been completely redressed in the last 150 years, and that America needs to move on, even as these same people remained mired in their imagined history.  Until we face this, we’re stuck.

Because the past is not even past.

*     *     *

On Route 5 in Virginia, traveling from Richmond down towards Jamestown, sit the remnants of a series of what were once vast forced labor camps.  Oh, the literature will call them plantations, a name that calls to mind mint juleps on the veranda overlooking the James on a summer evening.  But they were forced labor camps—credit for the term goes to the historian Ed Baptist, whose “The Half Has Never BeenTold” lays bare the roots of American capitalism in slavery—where those of African descent were held in bondage for their lifetimes, as were their children and, for a dozen or more generations, their children’s children.

Their names are evocative: Berkeley (where the first thanksgiving was held), Evelynton, Shirley, Westover and then, farthest east, Sherwood Forest.  Sherwood Forest was not always called by this name; it was called Smith’s Hundred when it was granted in 1616.  For almost four hundred years, then, it has been a part of the Virginia landscape, and for most of that time all of the hard work was done by enslaved people.

A house was built in 1720, and in 1842 the property was purchased by John Tyler, president of the United States from 1841 when William Henry Harrison—scion of the Virginia family that lived up the road at the forced labor camp called Berkeley—died a month after taking office.  “His Accidency,” as Tyler was sometimes known, served only the one term, the sixth Virginian to hold the office among the first ten presidents.  He is best known today as the back half of the famous campaign slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”

It was Tyler who renamed the place Sherwood Forest, and he stayed out of politics until the eve of the Civil War.  An avid supporter of states’ rights, he was also the owner of seventy human beings and, though he is reported to have been a kind master, he was still the owner of seventy human beings.  He argued against secession, then embraced it when he saw it as the only path forward for Virginia and the other Southern states.  Tyler was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives in 1861, but died before it opened.

In 1853, at age 63, Tyler fathered a son.  That son fathered late children, too, in 1924 and 1928.  Those children, John Tyler’s grandsons, are still alive and one still lives in the house at Sherwood Forest.  

Think about this.  John Tyler was born the year after the Constitution went into effect, the year after George Washington assumed the presidency and his grandsons are alive, three generations encompassing the life of the Republic, one  grandson living on the land that was worked by enslaved people. I don’t wish to cast aspersions on him; he is not responsible for his grandfather’s misdeeds.  But he is a living beneficiary of the slave system that his grandfather participated in. 

Because the past is not even past.

*     *     *

What is the point of all this?  Simply that to say something happened a long time ago does not free us from the consequences of the past.  To say that accounts have been settled does not make it so.  All white Americans, to some extent, benefit from the same system that bestowed a fine old house on John Tyler’s grandsons.  All black Americans, to some extent, continue to suffer from the disabilities engendered by that same system.

In 1955, a living witness to Abraham Lincoln’s assassination appeared on television, a year before the last Civil War veteran died.  As recently as last year a North Carolina woman received her late father’s pension for serving in the Confederate army.  How many hundreds, or thousands of people, black and white, are the children and grandchildren of that era?  How can it be over when it is still so close?   And how can Jim Crow be completely a thing of the past when there are so many living today who suffered under it? When so many of the lingering aftereffects are still visible to anyone who bothers to look.

That is the point.  The past is still alive in all of us.  All of the triumph and all of the tragedy of it lingers in the air around us, weighing us down, threatening to drown us if we don't struggle against it.  And the only way to shed that weight is to acknowledge it, truthfully, and to make good on old debts.  Then, though it will never be dead, we can at least learn to live with it.

Because the past is not even past.

That doesn't make it our destiny.

Abortion and the Perils of Abstraction

Two years ago, when North Carolina governor Pat McCrory broke his campaign promises and signed new abortion restrictions into law, I wrote about the spectacular lack of trust this showed for women and the health care decisions they make.  I did so as a soon-to-be dad, awaiting the birth of my baby girl.  I did so because I thought the implicit message of distrust was poisonous and would undermine everything my wife and I would teach her about her value and potential as a human being, and everything society would tell her about those same things.  I was angry then.  I still am.

Now McCrory has done it again, signing into law a 72-hour waiting period for women seeking abortions.  He does this in full knowledge of the hardships it will present to lower-income women and women who have to travel far to receive abortion services.  That he announced the decision via email rather than on his website or in some other public manner shows, perhaps, some sense of shame at yet another betrayal of the public trust.

My argument remains the same now as it did two years ago concerning the lack of trust he and the radical Republicans in the state legislature have for women.  It is not my intent to re-litigate that point.

Nor is it my intent to make a general pro-choice argument.  My stand for choice is based in pragmatism and a deep respect for the bodily autonomy of women.  Arguments that “life” begins at conception are, at base, philosophical rather than scientific.  We use the law as a blunt instrument to answer the fine questions of when a fetus stops being a fetus and starts being a person.  Allowing abortion preserves a woman’s autonomy; preventing it after “viability” acknowledges that at a certain point the fetus can live without its mother and society can rightly take an interest in it.  The entire argument is a balancing act of interests.

But this balancing act is illustrative of a larger issue, and one that shapes our politics in ways that we need to understand.  On the one hand, we have conservatives who say that a person due all the protections of law is the product of the union of sperm and egg.  On the other we have progressives (I prefer “liberal” but there is still a negative valence to the word in our discourse) who claim that the fetus is a person when it can live, albeit with technological assistance, outside of the womb.  Conservatives say the separate life has an equal status to the mother, reducing her to an incubator; liberals that until viability the mother’s rights predominate.

What is interesting about this is the value that conservatives place on the pre-viable fetus. They give it the attribute of “life” and furthermore of “personhood.”  Both of these are not scientific facts; they are philosophical opinions.  For conservatives, the zygote and fetus that form have a right to live, and a mother may not abrogate that right except, perhaps, in cases of rape, incest, or danger to life.  In reality, then, the rights assigned to the fetus supersede those of the mother.  The fetus, remember, whose personhood is entirely a matter of philosophical opinion.*

The abstract person is equal to or more important than the concrete flesh-and-blood mother.

I think this is a key to understanding the way some conservatives think. 

In the Citizens United case, the Supreme Court ruled that non-profit corporations could not be limited in their political spending, a decision which has seen these rights extended to other entities as well.  In Hobby Lobby, closely-held corporations were held to have free exercise rights under the Constitution.  In case after case rights that have been traditionally applied to people have been extended to artificial “persons,” corporations created by law.  That the actions of these persons have negatively impacted the lives of real people does not seem to bother supporters.  Again, we have a prejudice against the concrete.

Support for the death penalty is high among conservatives, who see it as enacting an ultimate form of justice, even in the face of the real harm done innocents convicted to death row erroneously, and the possibility of people being executed for crimes they didn’t commit; in a 1993 case the Supreme Court essentially ruled that as long as procedures were followed, states could execute an innocent man.  Like fetal personhood and like corporate personhood, there is a preference in these matters for the abstract over the concrete—process over people; the law over life.

We might also consider the following:

• A preference for as…liberal…an interpretation of the Second Amendment over common-sense gun regulations;
• Favoring religious interpretations of marriage over the due process rights of gay men and women who wish to marry;
• Allowing religious exemptions from serving people when doing so would violate “closely-held” religious beliefs under the guise of “restoring” religious freedom;
• Willingness to effectively disenfranchise thousands to remedy the almost non-existent scourge of vote fraud with the claim of seeking “clean elections;”
•  Using the existence of a minuscule number of cheaters to make access to public assistance programs harder.

The list surely goes on.  In each case a principle, an abstraction, is used as a justification to ignore the suffering of real people and, in some cases, as an excuse for “accidental” suffering inflicted.  Time after time we see certain conservatives siding with impersonal forces rather than with real people.  Yes, principles are important to have, and liberals have them, too.  But if your principles require you to inflict harm on fellow human beings, then I suggest your principles are faulty.  They are a good starting point, but must bend to reality.

Indeed, blind obedience to abstract principles has led to the worst atrocities we have visited on one another.  We cannot allow them to let us lose sight of the humanity of those around us, to deny our fellow citizens the equal standing they are due, a result that leaves us all impoverished.

*So is anyone’s personhood when you get down to it.  But it’s hard to deny personhood to people right in front of you.  It can be done.  Sadly, it has been all too often.

Same-sex Marriage and the Incredible Shrinking Worldview

This week in arguments before the Supreme Court, advocates and opponents of same-sex marriage presented their cases in what could be the defining moment in the struggle that has emerged over the last two decades on this issue.  At issue was whether there would be a uniform federal right to same-sex marriage, and whether (though if the answer to the first question is “yes,” it’s hard to see how this one is still operable) states that do not have same-sex marriage will be required to respect lawful same-sex marriages concluded in other states, as the federal government was required to do in the Windsor decision two years ago.  Two issues, equal protection of the laws and full faith and credit, are at issue.

To say that both sides are passionate about this issue is something of an understatement.  For supporters of same-sex marriage, nothing less than the full panoply of rights available to every heterosexual citizen is at stake.  For opponents, the possibility of a legal right to same-sex marriage is viewed in apocalyptic terms, as the rough equivalent of destroying the pillars of Western Civilization itself. 

It is not my intent to make either argument here; I am foursquare behind the movement for same-sex marriage and think the religious arguments of opponents are silly.  Believe what you will, this is a nation of laws—a secular nation of laws—meaning that there needs to be a compelling social interest in discriminating against one group or another.  Adhering to antiquated notions of purity and following the dictates of sketchy authority don’t quite fit the bill.

I am still stuck, though, wondering why it is that conservative Christians are so adamantly opposed.  They cite Biblical passages decrying homosexuality, though unless they plan to adopt the entire Levitical corpus of laws, they are left only with passages of ambiguous meaning in the New Testament.  Given this, it seems to boil down to personal taste.  Biblical literalists, like Constitutional literalists, seem always to find support for their own prejudices in the “plain meaning” of whatever text they’re using.

But there’s more.  No Christian (or anyone else, for that matter) can claim he or she will be harmed by same-sex marriage.  No clergy will be forced to perform a same-sex wedding.  Christianity will not, as perpetual GOP also-ran Mike Huckabee has tried to claim, be outlawed.  This seems part and parcel of the on-going “War on Religion” meme that, while it is absurd as described, is buried in the genome of conservative Christianity.

What we’re witnessing here is an extension of the same hissy fit that leads some to argue that their religion is being devalued whenever society chooses secularism over dogma.  And though the battle over same-sex marriage is pretty bad, if opponents lose the next one will be worse because, bit by bit, their world is shrinking, and their sense of specialness is becoming more and more untenable. 

It’s not been an easy half-millennium, after all.  Beginning with Copernicus moving the Earth from the center of the cosmos and ending…well, it’s hard to say where it will end…so many certainties about the place of humanity, and of Christians, have been eroded away. 

We do not live at the center of the universe; Copernicus told us that, and subsequent scientists refined his faulty heliocentrism which was ultimately proved true.  Kepler and Galileo taught us that there was no divide between the heavens and the Earth, that all operated on the same principles.  Generations of scholars showed the construction of the Bible from multiple sources and, indeed, the construction of Christianity from pagan and Jewish roots.  Darwin and those who followed abolished the artificial distinction between humans and other animals.  We have swept away attempts to prove this or that “race” inherently superior.  Cosmology and physics have removed the need of a creator.  Secularism has removed Christianity from its privileged position in Western societies.

If one was convinced of one’s special place in a created order, it’s easy to see why one might feel under siege.

At every step, there were conservatives who fought to keep things the way they were, even when what they believed flew in the face of the evidence provided by our senses and reason.  And every time they have lost.  After each loss, rather than accepting it and attempting to assimilate new thinking to their faith—as the Catholic church, mainline Protestants, and liberal Christians have to varying degrees managed to do all along—they have retrenched and sought a new battleground for the struggle against the world.  Instead of adapting to a changing world, they childishly demand the world adapt to them.

Prejudice against homosexuals is surely one of the last redoubts in which conservative Christians, desperate to feel special, can barricade themselves.  They will add to the imprimatur of the Bible junk science “proving” the perils of same-sex marriage to children and society in an attempt to rationalize their prejudices.  And, when they are ultimately defeated (even if it’s not this time around) they will flee to another, more distant, spot for a last stand, and fight even harder for that vanishingly small sense of being important in a universe that just doesn't give a damn.

Until they grow up.

Baltimore and the Limits of Non-violence

When I think about Baltimore last night, and I see the usual pious calls for non-violence, I increasingly feel confused.  I know we're supposed to embrace the paradigm of Martin Luther King, Jr., and preach non-violence, but any such call sounds hypocritical in view of the violence visited upon marginalized communities.  King said that a riot is "the language of the unheard."  The riots that have occurred in the wake of known or supposed police brutality against African Americans are the voice of people who have been speaking politely to the powerful for decades, but who have systematically been ignored. The only time their voices are heard is when they threaten property and public order. In other words, when they inconvenience those in power.

If you were an attentive student of history, what sort of lesson would you take from this?

Non-violence is wonderful, but it only works when both sides agree there's a problem and on the general parameters of that problem. Otherwise, the threat to violence and public order is the only weapon in the arsenal of the powerless. Once violence erupts, those in power seek to quell the violence and then do the bare minimum, in their estimation, to prevent further outbreaks. Efforts are made at addressing symptoms, but never at getting to the root problem which in this case is, sorry conservatives, systemic racial bias.  Until this is addressed, events like Baltimore will play as though on repeat.

Those of us in white America, who shake our heads and conflate the actions of rioters with those of a few malefactors among the multitudes are the problem. Yes, there are those taking advantage of the situation for their own benefit and, yes, rioters are destroying property and engaging violently with police.  But, again, we must put ourselves in the position of those protesting.  Their voices have not been heard.  The police deployed in quasi-military gear which does not signal peacekeeping, but preparation for war.  And there is a long history of violence visited on African Americans by those in power, violence which the powerful claim is the result of a “few bad cops” and which many African Americans see as the result of a system tilted against them.

Violence may not be the ideal response to violence, but it is a perfectly rational one. And, let's be honest, African Americans are justified in feeling themselves under threat.

In another time, or another country, we would be more apt to praise an oppressed people who stood up to a regime that valued them little and denied them basic rights and opportunities available to others.   We applauded when Arab countries rose up in the Arab Spring and did not attempt to discredit the entire movement when violence occurred as happened against Coptic Christians in Egypt.  We recognized these as the result of bad actors, a courtesy we are loath to extend in our own back yard.

Which is odd, because that story is OUR story, or at least the one we like to tell: of a people denied their basic liberties who, after reason failed resorted to force. When we learn in school about the words "Give me liberty or give me death," we are presumably filled with admiration for the clarity of Patrick Henry's vision and the force with which he articulated it—and perhaps with a cringe at the hypocrisy of a slaveowner complaining about being enslaved.

There is, then, a certain cynicism at play in the calls for non-violence.  Once violence stops, there is no longer any urgency, and we can safely go back to ignoring the underlying reasons for it, writing it off as due to the local circumstances.  This is the gentleman wish of, especially, conservatives, that we can marginalize the arguments of the rioters by de-legitimizing their violence, and by conflating all protestors with the bad actors among them.

Henry’s cry is the cry issuing from the streets of Baltimore and of Ferguson and of countless other places, a call no less (and perhaps, all things considered, more) worthy than when it was issued by white men bitching about "unjust" taxation. Those men secured their rights by force, not by non-violence. 

This is a truth of history.  It wasn’t reason that secured American independence, westward expansion, the liberation of enslaved African Americans, the rights of workers, and the civil rights of minorities.  It wasn’t satyagraha that secured Indian independence. It was force…violence…or the fear of it.

Can we be at all surprised when others do the same? Will we have any moral standing to tell them not to?  These are big questions, and questions those in power should ask themselves. And then, perhaps, a third: What is to be done?

I don't have the answer to that one either, but I know it has something to do with paying attention when people are talking not just when they are shouting. Riots, remember, are the language of the unheard.  If those in power only act when this language is spoken, they may find it the only one in which they are addressed.

 

 

A Question for Presidential Candidates

In a blog entry on the Huffington Post Daniel Darling, the Vice President of Communications, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention shares with readers the question he hopes every presidential candidate is asked.  From the outset, he clearly has an agenda, complaining about the “unfair” treatment conservatives seem to receive from the media, mentioning Scott Walker of Wisconsin by name and referring, one assumes, to his being question about his stance on evolution. Darling’s question for candidates is as tendentious as the rest of the piece, and question-begging to boot:  Do you recognize the intrinsic value of every human life, from conception to natural death?

Darling then proceeds to talk about the Christian tradition of respect for life, never once pausing to consider that the premise that a fertilized egg is “human life” is one for philosophers, not scientists, and so cannot be treated as proven.  Towards the end he proposes a series of questions, arising from the first, many of them showing laudable concern for outsiders and the poor.  I will take him at his word that his concern for such people is genuine.

Still, he is far too dismissive of the evolution question, and this leads to the question I’d like candidates to answer:

Do you accept the conclusion of the world community of scientists that life on Earth, including humans, evolved from earlier forms of life over a period of billions of years?

It will be easy now to throw the charge of tendentiousness back in my face, so I am going to pre-empt that and plead guilty; I do have an axe to grind here.  And it’s not just because I am on the record as a accepting the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution by natural selection that explains the fact.  It’s because acceptance of evolution is the acceptance of a way of thinking that has proven the best method of determining truth about the physical world…and it means following the facts wherever they lead and no matter how uncomfortable they might make us.  It means following reason and not magical thinking. 

Why does it matter?  It matters because the epistemology embraced by the leaders of our nation, of any nation, has to be one that is equipped to deal with the challenges we face.  Most often when rejecting evolution, religious belief is cited as the prime motivation—the Bible says that God created the world in six days and created Man as a creature apart in the divine image. 

But it is a peculiarly modern innovation that this has to be taken literally, a reaction to the rise of modern science as a competitive explanation for existence.  That some continue to use a literal account of creation, whatever the source, as a substitute for what the sciences have revealed to us, ought to be troubling.  It tells us that, when faced with uncertainty, such people will react with belief rather than with knowledge.  If all of the problems that needed dealing with were philosophical, this might be tenable.

But the problems we face are, in large part, not philosophical.  They can be addressed only through evaluation of the evidence.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the challenge of climate change, a truly existential threat.  In scientific circles there is no debate that rising temperatures are the result of human activity.  There are numerous reasons some, especially here in the United States, deny this reality.  Most of them hinge on denial of the science.  A leader who accepts the reality of evolution is more likely to see climate change for what it really is and to make smart policy based on facts.

Beyond the scientific challenges, there are the great moral and international challenges we face, and these, too, will be better addressed by a leader steeped in empiricism.  Such a view of the world tells us that, as humans, we are fundamentally the same, therefore discrimination based on gender, race, or sexual orientation can be based only on prejudice, not on fact.  It tells us that medical decisions should be made on sound science, not on philosophical considerations, and to err in the favor of what is known rather than what is believed.  It tells us that policies ought to be evidence-based, rather than hewing to closely-held and cherished ideas about how the world ought to work that fly in the face of the way it actually does.

We are called to revise the exalted sense of ourselves that has come from the idea of American exceptionalism, that this nation is, as John Winthrop put it and Ronald Reagan loved to repeat, “a shining city on a hill,” somehow blessed by Providence with a unique mission to spread freedom and democracy, has to fall by the wayside.  This belief has allowed us to avoid self-criticism, to ignore the progress of other nations against problems that bedevil us, to assume that things will simply work out right.  This sense of exemption from the grip of history is a tenet of our civil religion…an article of faith with no basis in fact, and so a poor basis for action.

Some will suggest that the very brief course I have outlined above will require candidates who reject religion.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Believers the world over have found ways to accommodate empirical facts within their religious frameworks.  They tend to place religion and science in separate spheres, following the examples of Galileo and Newton who argued that religious opinions had no place in the sciences, just as science has no bearing on religious truths. 

By accepting the fact of evolution and the methods used to explain it, the candidate affirms the importance of humility in the face of uncertainty, rather than the hubris of pseudo-certainty.  He or she reminds us that facts—even, or perhaps especially, uncomfortable facts—matter.  And the ability to face such facts, accept them for what they are, and proceed based on knowledge and reason, is a faculty worthy of a leader.

We can afford no less.