War of Ideas against Islam Chapter # 8 Leftism as a Religion As religions go, the religion of the contemporary Left is an unholy mess. But it is a necessary mess because it is a religion and no-one can live without one. To cite Robert Wright again, "religions, and certainly "primitive" religions, are like newspapers. In every hunter-gatherer society, religion is devoted largely to explaining why bad things happen and why good things happen—illness, recovery; famine, abundance; and so on." Through selective reporting religions tell people how to raise the probabilities of getting more good things out of life and less bad things.
All of which has worked reasonably well ever since the dawn of religion, certainly since the origins of civilization with its religions of 5000 years ago. All of which is now under relentless attack by the "enlightened" Left which seeks to destroy all traditional faiths except the most authoritarian and repressive religion ever conceived, Islam. Not that voters aligned with the working class, long the backbone of the Democratic Party, necessarily are aware of these developments. This is to speak of people for whom a college campus is the equivalent of a foreign country, of no special interest because it does not concern them nor concern the people they know as friends or co-workers, who also have no relationships to universities of any description. And, so, the leadership class of the party marches on, people who definitely are familiar with the world of higher education and which they identify with. That world is also the source of most of their ideas and values. This is true whether or not working class Democrats have knowledge of any such thing. What have they been missing? Todd Gitlin's book remains relevant today despite the passage of time. A few examples- * Professors who are liberals themselves discovering that they are not liberal enough and because they do not follow the latest party line 'truths, find themselves branded racists even if their record is unambiguous to the effect that they have consistently stood up for Civil Rights over many years. It isn't just racism that a teacher may be accused of, there are all kinds of "unbalanced, ungenerous, sometimes downright bizarre accusations." Faculty who are subject matter specialists not all that interested in the latest political dialectics may try to stand their ground using rational and fact based arguments but all that shows, so say modern students who have internalized Foucault's "power determines accepted truth" axioms, is that the professor is a slave to concepts that serve the interests of white elites. (page 16) * Its the many against the few even if this is only to speak about a large number of minority groups vs. just one white majority. "There are no impediments to the demonization of white Left-liberals, males in particular." Any allegations will do if it has the support of the Black Students Union, La Raza, Native Americans on the warpath, Muslims from Asia, and so forth. Indeed, amidst all the rhetoric there is "flagrant disregard for truth." There is opposition to any and all traditions said not to represent the interests of people of color.(page 34) * Rejection of any sense of "common dreams" which all Americans can agree upon. What this is all about is vacuous universalism in which every marginal group has equal status with even the largest and most powerful groups, in which majorities are repudiated on principle. The only "truth" is secular and cosmopolitan, not in a classy sense but along the lines of the lowest common denominator in which there can be no arguments about which cultures are best, not good at all, or some kind of mix, instead they all are equal. A screed by a peasant in Guatemala that has little or no relevance to anyone outside of Central America except dedicated Leftists is every bit as good as Shakespeare or Ernest Hemingway (page 86). * Marxism is dead, long live Cultural Marxism. For the uninitiated, original Marxism was all about socio-economic classes and the struggle for economic justice. All of that went by the boards in the late 1960s, well into the 1980s, when the erstwhile proletariat rejected the political Left en bloc and voted for Nixon and then, after a brief hiatus, Ronald Reagan. Instead, the Left turned to identity politics and the creation of a coalition of population groups that had little in common except the desire to indulge in special pleading on behalf of themselves. The economics based politics of the past -even though there are holdouts like Bernie Sanders- is pretty much obsolete. In its place the new political normal is all about race, gender, and sexuality. Including, now, something new, grown men who have their pee-pee pots chopped off because they want to pretend to be women and wear dresses. Objective discussion of any of this is impossible on many college campuses, especially elite schools. In its place there is a new standard of 'excellence.' the valorization of subjectivity.'(page 95). * Truth is all about liberating the unfortunate from their oppressors. It is also all about redefining social deviance as an alternative form of normality. The task is to work for the advancement of the oppressed and scorn every vestige of white advantage in favor of uplifting everyone else. Gitln calls this a pathological "rivalry for the crown of thorns." (page 124). * Black is beautiful, African-Americans are never guilty of any crime, the system is rigged against them, they have "soul" and no-one else has any such thing, etc. The goal is elevating negritude above all other kinds of values, all of this expedited by junking all previous moral values (page 131). * The conventional family of mother, father, and biological offspring who live at home until early adulthood is evil. Make way for the matriarchy led by female homosexuals -butches who look like sewer dwellers and who often are grossly fat, along with fems who look like they stepped out of a fashion magazine from the 1950s. Sexuality is whatever you choose for yourself on any grounds that appeal to you for any reason, except, that is, normal heterosexuality (page 142) Obviously Gitlin over dramatized things. But he did so out of anguish for the lost Left of his experience as a youthful adult. That Left, the sane Left, is a memory in retreat everywhere. Worse, college values have been seeping into Popular Culture all over the map. Which was to be expected; this is to discuss university graduates who become teachers, political figures, journalists, TV producers, NGO executives, book authors, environmentalists, lawyers, founders of computer start-up companies, social workers, film writers, and still more occupations. To bring Gitlin up to date we can cite a Brandon Showalter article in the May 31, 2017 edition of the Christian Post. Showalter has written extensively on related issues and this one is also quite trenchant: "Fareed Zakaria says intolerant liberals are silencing conservatives." This is in reference to the CNN program, Fareed Zakaria GPS, during which Zakaria, a registered Left-winger, "highlighted several episodes in the past few months where liberal campus "thought police" have shown themselves the intolerant people they purport to loathe." To quote Fareed: "American universities seem committed to every kind of diversity except intellectual diversity. Conservative voices and views are being silenced entirely." Indeed, although anti-intellectualism has long been associated with the political Right it now is also a Left-wing phenomenon -to the dismay of many liberals themselves; this is not what they signed up for. Who needs "an attitude of self-righteousness that says we are so pure, so morally superior, we cannot bear to hear an idea with which we disagree"? Yet this has become, certainly at many elite universities, the new normal. Hence examples of 'liberal' intolerance as when Vice President Pence spoke at Notre Dame University, when Education secretary Betsy De Vos spoke at Bethune-Cookman University, when Ann Coulter tried to speak at UC Berkeley, and most notoriously at Middleburry College in Vermont when a guest speaker, scholar Charles Murray, was verbally abused and threatened and a faculty member escorting Murray around campus was physically attacked and injured. Some 67 students either were sanctioned or put on probation over the incident. Probably a dozen or so deserved to be arrested and jailed but things never got that far. As Jody Bottum, a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard had said, the Left claims to possess "the moral authority once held by the mainline liberal consensus" but what we get are "banned speakers," "censored heresies," and such tactics as use of "shunning" (a commonplace punishment among Jehovah's Witnesses for those on the outs with the group) to ostracize anyone who dissents from Leftist orthodoxy, and ceaseless smears against anybody who has a semblance of traditional morality as someone who espouses "toxic masculinity," or other such grievous sins. Another Showalter article in the Christian Post, this for April 3, 2017, took the theme further. "Is Leftism now a religion?" observed that Jonathan Haidt has pointed out that Left wing behaviors have the marks of a religious faith. This was explained in some detail in an essay by Bari Weis, associate book review editor for the Wall Street Journal, who said that: "Universities have undergone a transformation" from 'citadel of learning.' to a situation "where white privilege has replaced original sin, the transgressions of class and race and gender are confessed not to priests but to 'the community,' victim groups [especially blacks] are worshipped like gods and the sinned-against are supplicated with 'safe spaces' and 'trigger warnings...' " Please don't get me wrong. None of this says that extremes of the Religious Right are in any way justifiable. Ross Douthat has made the comment that we can live without the "paranoia, crankishness, and all the other pathologies of the religious ghetto" -if only this was possible. And the problem can be all-too-real. For example, for all the good that Evangelicals can do, which is considerable and in the form of rescue missions that provide food and shelter for the homeless, foreign aid programs that make health resources available in remote parts of Africa, and much else, there is a peculiar mentality that exists in many places which penalizes people for seeking to learn the lessons of basic science, like a movement in Texas that seeks to abolish use of geological science to locate new oil fields. Not that oilmen are buying into this particular form of irrationality; geology, based on the view that understanding millions of years of environmental evolution can pinpoint likely locations of petroleum fields. Which happens to work very well, indeed. But this denies, prima facie, any thought of literal Genesis-style creation, hence a small number of religious believers want oil companies to jettison scientific geology. This ties in with a self-evident fact, to wit, that "young earth creationism" demands ignorance of geology, paleontology, and even archaeology in some cases. Not to mention evolutionary biology, and environmental science, viz., the workings of ecology. That is, all of these sciences must be regarded as false for any kind of six day creation to be taken seriously. Which is precisely what a certain category of Christian believer is prepared to do in order to maintain that the first chapters of Genesis are something other than allegory, as many Church Fathers said it was. Which, you don't need to guess, people with scientific background regard as a bad joke by way of beliefs -with some qualification for physics and chemistry since those sciences aren't all that relevant to the issue of geohistory, aka, historical geology. Who would want to pin their "faith" on ignorance of science? The answer, besides various Evangelicals, is that all strict Orthodox Jews have this opinion. But so do true-believer Muslims, who also are creationists. Leftists aren't in the least bashful about deriding Christians who take creation mythology literally but when it is pointed out that Muslims, allies of the Left, also are creationists, well, lips are sealed, mum's the word, better to keep it quiet. Just as the Left is silent about gender feminists who disdain sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, each of which epitomize scientific evolution. But this is an aside. Not only this, but in rejecting the sciences that support historical geology the burden of proof is on Evangelicals. They need to disprove the validity of these sciences. At most, and even this much is highly debatable, Evangelicals have identified a small number of anomalies, facts with no current good explanations. But nothing -nothing at all- has called into question the principles of these sciences, which proceed as before, making more discoveries, adding to the sum of human knowledge. Meanwhile, and another unmet burden of proof that Evangelicals have failed miserably at, where are the predictions that can be made starting with the theory that the world came into existence in six days at God's command? Where is there one shred of empirical evidence that supports any such thing? There isn't any. Yet Evangelicals also carry on as before, basing everything on unsubstantiated belief, and nothing but belief. How does that make good sense? In other words, there are plenty of criticisms to make of people who follow traditional Western religious faiths. This is anything but an unqualified defense of normative Christianity or Judaism, and certainly not of Islam. But the fact remains that the Left deserves to be humiliated for its blatant disregard of the truth. Leftism, itself, is a form of non-rational religion. Traditional religious faiths have a virtue, however, not found on the Left, namely, that Christianity and Judaism, by and large, have fully functional and socially valuable systems of morality. The Left advocates a type of morality that is socially dysfunctional, socially disruptive, and psychologically damaging to everyone involved. What you won't find in any religion, for that matter in most philosophies of life, is a completely rational system of thought. That is not how religions function. Religions are systems for organizing disparate beliefs and values in a coherent manner that makes sense to people even when not everything can pass basic truth tests. Its the "package that counts," something that can hold a society together for the common good, not whether each and every proposition that is part of a religion is true and beyond argument. We need to live with a certain number of imperfections in any religion you can name. To quote Wright a final time, "it makes sense that human brains would naturally seize on strange, surprising things, since the predictable things have already been absorbed into the expectations that guide them through the world; news of the strange and surprising may signal that some amendment of our expectations is warranted. But one property of strange surprising claims is that they’re often untrue. So if they get preferred access to our brains, that gives falsehood a kind of advantage -if a fleeting advantage- over truth." After all, not only is there a biological propensity to be religious, to have some kind of religion, religion itself is partly a product of evolution. Hence the observation that each part of the human brain is the locus of particular religious attributes. According to Paul Mac Lean, the reptilian brain, the genetically oldest part of our gray matter, found toward the back of the head, not only is where our sex drives have their origin, it is also where religious feelings with sexual overtones have their source. The limbic system is where "collective religious belief" has its origin, namely the emotions of "love, fear, and gregariousness." Collective religion is group focused, it is all about what our spiritual community asks of us. This is where social sanctions and conditioning takes place. Individual religion, customized faith as it were, is a function of the neo-cortex, that last part of the brain to evolve. Not that this is a settled issue but there is general agreement that something along these lines must explain the different character of our religious sentiments. And it also seems to go a long way to explaining why religious mythologies tend to be cobbled together affairs, much that remains inconsistent no matter what efforts theologians make to create a coherent system of beliefs. It also tells us that, as Barbara King has observed, human spirituality is at least partly founded on primate characteristics. No, apes and monkeys do not have religions, but they do have a set of traits that are a necessary precondition for religion: Elevated intelligence, a capacity for _communication_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_communication) through use of symbols, acceptance of the value of social norms, awareness of a 'self,' and a "concept of continuity" -viz, memory expanded to include something like a sense of history. Of course Leftism is a religion. Leftists don't have a formal religion, or most do not, like the 20% of the population that are identified as "nones." At most they have some kind of membership in a 'liberal' church. But Ross Douthat's view is that the mainstream denominations by and large are less religions than they are political associations with mystical interests. As Douthat put it in his 2012 book, Bad Religion, the liberal churches were terribly compromised by the widespread perception, often based on experience, that what these churches had become were fronts for political causes that are all associated with the Democratic Party. Not that there was a stampede into the liberal churches; the opposite happened and is still happening: A rush to the exits. Every mainstream denomination has been in steep membership decline since about 1970 and the pace of defections has been increasing. The only exception to this rule concerns the American Baptist Church (formerly "Convention"), but of all the mainstream organizations the northern Baptists are the least liberal and the most traditional. Yes, there are exceptions in a few places, but generally the attitude on the Left is: Why bother joining a church, especially since Leftist doctrine has it that religion is an evil? Or why bother maintaining one's membership? All of which is made more appealing by virtue of the fact that Leftism itself fulfills the functions of religion. It is "where the action is," the liberal churches are merely leftovers from a previous time in history. Of course, religion continues to thrive, or at least survive well enough, because of another fact, which page 145 of Douthat's book explains: "Culture abhors a metaphysical vacuum, and there was no materialist ideology capable of supplying the kind of holistic account of human life that the great "isms" of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had attempted to provide." This leaves traditional faith as the default position for most people who regard religious faith per se as vital for a good life. Even some Atheists agree, hence a new phenomenon -outside of California, anyway- Atheist churches. I know of at least one "Atheist Church" in Los Angeles that flourished in the 1980s but not until the early 2000s did the idea catch on anywhere else. Still, the total numbers of 'communicants' is quite small by most standards and this can be set aside at least for now. For maybe 50 years Freud and Freudianism assumed some functions of religion but that era has pretty much run its course as far as the public is concerned even if there are thousands of professional psychoanalysts who continue to practice, continue to take part in the mental health realm, and still have influence among a segment of the psychology profession. The core problem with Leftist religion is the fact that its philosophical foundation is nihilism. Hence we get absurdities like author James Frey, cited by Douthat on page 236, who expressed the view that "God doesn't care about the petty dramas that mean so much to us. God doesn't care what we say or who we f*ck or what we do with our bodies or who we love or who we marry." This is pure baloney. To regard sex as a neutral commodity with little or no emotional significance is a view that is contrary to the experience of maybe 90% of the population at large. Or as Douthat put it: "Sex may be "safer" with pills and condoms, but its never anything remotely close to safe." Or as movie, The Godfather, Part 1, had it, in a close paraphrase, "Sicilian women are more dangerous than a loaded shotgun." James Frey's opinion is Leftist, specifically Cultural Marxist, but you don't have to look very long to find much the same thing on the Right -in the form of libertarian philosophy with its valorization of self-centeredness, selfishness, and social irresponsibility. The Right, speaking of the great majority of Right-wingers, is powerless to combat much at all of these things. Rightists customarily are preoccupied with making money, and many are quite good at it. But this often means gross incompetence in the realm of ideas. And, as Douthat added, Evangelicals in early 2000s "sealed themselves off from bad news" Now, in 2017, we find a certain popularity for one of the most stupid ideas ever to arise among Christian believers, the so-called "Benedict Option," a concept popularized by Rod Dreher -based on how monastic orders do things, specifically how St. Benedict did things in the early Mediaeval era in Europe. As if isolating oneself from the vicissitudes of life and never ending human tragedies is the solution for anything at all and is something other than a confession of incompetence to actually take meaningful action in the world. Hence we get Christianity in retreat and Christian separatism and what could be the start of the death throes of an entire mass religion. For which there is no excuse. -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <RadicalCentrism@googlegroups.com> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to radicalcentrism+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
