Cactus Juice

A Nation and a Culture Without Shame.

America doesn't do shame.  Our continual desire to hammer the Germans over Nazi atrocities juxtaposes badly with our inability to face the slave-holding roots of our own nation.  Presently, national righteousness over Burma stands in embarrassing juxtaposition to our recent bout with Hurricane Katrina.  American sheriffs refused to allow people to leave New Orleans, thereby violating the American constitution.  And yet they have neither been hanged for treason or (more realistically) jailed for civil rights violations.  The failures in Burma are not any different from what is expected out of that government.  America failed to be America, and therefore the shame should be that much greater.  I find Laura Bush's interest in Burma embarrassing in its shamelessness.  A First Lady should have political hobbies, but one of the core hobbies of First Lady is meant to be compassion upon the people of her own nation, and nothing much interesting has happened there.

What do I mean by "shame"?  Dictionary definitions tend to start with "dishonor."  And our repulsion with shame starts there as well.  In our culture, we see ourselves as ethical free agents.  You may have done something dishonorable, but you will never be a dishonorable person.  Brownie failed to manage the response to Katrina and caused untold suffering and death, but he's off managing horses again or something like that and he's whatever he is today.  His actions are things that happened at a point in time, but his essence is not made of those actions.  It's all about "what have you done lately."  Today there is more of a psychologized definition of shame which then creates it's own particular Christian response.  An in depth review of these pscyhologized definitions can be found here.  Since we don't believe that a person can have any action stick with them, "shame" becomes some rootless negativity in the emotionality.  Christians turn it into a psychologicalization of Original Sin and make Jesus the Christ the answer.

I tend to think of shame as a gap between guilt and reaction.  As the gap, it is somewhere between useless and destructive and almost always should be destroyed.  I have learned that shame feeds addiction.  One thing that was absolutely required in bring my eating problem under control was ending my shame about overeating.  There are doctors and various foolish people who think that can belittle or shame a person into losing weight, and it is an absolutely false concept.  Obesity is a painful and horrible condition.  It is medieval in the experience of punishment that it inflicts.  A person who deserves punishment could find little better than the discomforts of obesity.  I like to say, "No one ever hated themselves to health."

And yet, at the same time that I am rooting shame out of my own life, I do see a place for it.  Consider the following story:  a woman loans a digital camera to a friend.  The camera is about five years old and only takes 2 mega-pixel pictures.  You can't even get a 2 mega-pixel camera anymore, but she's happy with it and hasn't seen a need to buy one of the new 6 or higher mega-pixel cameras.  The friend falls in a lake while carrying the camera.  At first it seems that the camera is fine, and she returns it.  But as the camera dries out it ends up being ruined.  The memory card, which had never been backed up, is also ruined.  The friend is horrified and offers to replace the camera.  The owner of the camera looks up the price on a midrange camera and emails the price to the friend.

The friend is living off savings while she puts herself through college and still puts food on the plate for her two children.  She calls the owner of the camera and says that she'll make payments to make it right, but she should only pay for the replacement value of the camera.  What about half the price of the cheapest camera available?  At this point the owner of the camera is really starting to morn the pictures she lost on the memory card, and she feels insulted that her loss is being undervalued.  She insists that her friend isn't making things right, that she should pay for a midrange camera, since that was what she had bought to start with all those years ago.

I've heard various versions of this story many a time.  Just turn on Judge Judy and you can see it over and over again.  One person insisting on "ma rights," no matter what the hardship imposed upon the other person and no matter how reasonable an accident may have occurred.  I find this recourse to a legalistic form of morality brutish.  The fact is that if you have a camera for a long time, something is going to happen to it.  You might fall in a lake, you might leave it in a restaurant.  It is inevitable.  When you bought the camera, you knew that would happen.  It was probably part of the reason you didn't buy a more expensive camera.  It was also probably part of the reason you didn't trade up earlier: you were waiting for the inevitable day when you would be forced to buy a new one.  When you chose to let someone else use your toy, you passed along the possible risks to the other person.  Perhaps the person was more careless than you would have been, except your level of care included the risk of selecting that particular person.  So you are exactly equal in your level of care.  To think otherwise is absurdly self-righteous.

On that last point, you may decide that what I am actually talking about is humility.  In 12-step, humility is defined as placing yourself equally with others, neither above nor below them.  Laura Bush could possibly, with humility, comment on Burma.  Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles could have, with humility, chosen their re-marriage to each other.  With shame, Laura Bush must be silent on Burma.  The marriage of Charles and Camilla was accepted partly because of their shame in publicly stating their humility.  And the owner of the camera could use a little shame to step back from what in all legality she perhaps deserves.

When I make this argument, I am at this point told, "Well, what about personal responsibility?"  The point is that the hapless friend should take responsibility for her accident.  And yet, look at the responsibility of this camera owner that I have already outlined, including her economic choices in when and what to buy.  And, let's get real for a moment, do you really want to live in a world where you are going to be held "responsible" for everything you do?  Personal responsibility is a very popular concept... just so long as it's someone else's responsibility.

The addict has to renounce shame because it is about hopelessness.  Shame for the addict is moving into the gap between guilt and reaction permanently.  "Just for today" (a 12-step mantra) pulls him out of the gap and firmly onto the reaction of right here, right now.  And yet, conversely, shame can be a particular holder of hope.  The wisdom of millenia that grappled with Original Sin isn't something to lightly push aside.  The fact of shame and the fact of redemption says that we expect that we will get more than we deserve.  And with that hope, perhaps we can give more than others deserve.

Earlier this week, the CNN headline "Woman opens heart to man who slaughtered her family" captured my attention.  Through a process that involved public confession, a Rwandian Tutsi accepted the confession of a Hutu man who participated in the slaughter of her family.  She does business with his wife.  She told the CNN reporter that despite this man's confession and the importance of the confession process that "reconciliation would not have happened unless she had decided to open her heart and accept his pleas.  She said, "I am a Christian, and I pray a lot."  I cannot even begin to imagine how much prayer such a choice takes.  Because of her choice and the choices of others who have as much hope as she does, Rwanda is becoming an African success story.

It was her choice.  Forgiveness was entirely hers to give.  No human being had the right to demand it of her, only her Christ who shares in her suffering could ask such a thing.  A person, often a misguided Christian, who requires the forgiveness of others is making an evil and self-centered statement and is in danger of putting his own self as idol in the place of God.  I am completely in agreement with commentators such as Ayn Rand on this point: ethically, you do not have to give anything.  The only reason to demand someone give what they do not have to give is to be self-serving, and anyone who makes such demands is to be considered as a serpent.

But her choice certainly has brought me to reconsider the choices I have been making.  How many resentments do I cling to?  One is over a matter of about $200 that a close relative backed me into a corner on when I was destitute.  A "bait and switch" kind of a situation.  As I was forced to spend the money, with various family members peering over my shoulder, I didn't even know if the credit card would go through.  There was no cash, and I was on the last of my credit.  This incident is a decade old.  What makes the resent even more absurd is that the relative has matured in the meantime and would certainly never do such a thing today.  I have even received an apology of sorts.  I don't have to forgive, but a little more shame in realizing that I know I get more than I deserve might help me realize that about now is time to give more than someone else deserves.  I definitely know I don't want to get exactly what I deserve.

Perversion of Truth: The FLDS Crisis in Texas

While I'm aware that there is no one block of mainstream Americans (or Canadians, since they're a part of this too), there are a set of elements in the media and in law enforcement / judiciary who are meant to speak with one voice for all of "us" as a block to "them", the FLDS.  At this point, these Representatives of us have created so many manipulations and perversions of the truth that they far better exemplify The People of the Lie (a concept created by The Road Less Traveled author M. Scott Peck) than do the FLDS people that they are trying to bring into line.  The FLDS prophet Warren Jeffs may have magnified the distrust that the FLDS reasonably feel after being persecuted for more than 100 years, but it took our legal representatives to make his prophecies come true.

(Image: girls being removed from their home on the first day of the raid.  Underage girls were taken and only their mothers were allowed to accompany them, so it is possible that the white haired lady in the background was being separated from her entire family.  Image from the FLDS website.)

I have recently seen and heard news articles criticizing a lifestyle which would result in women with such drawn and haggard faces.  To get up every morning, face a crowd of people who have taken your children, and do it with precisely placed hair and not a tear shed before the enemy takes a level of courage I cannot imagine.  There are photos available from happier times.  There are also photos available of young mothers in tears and supported on the arms of their elders.  CNN published an fashion article criticizing the hairstyles of the women, which it claimed were identical.  This text ran with a  photo of a group of drawn and haggard women, each with unique and complicated up-do.  The minutia of the lies is absurd.

The telephone call supposedly prompting the raid did not come from within the FLDS property (CNN reports, and has been reporting since last week), something investigators surely knew before the raid occurred.  The stated purpose of the raid was to follow up on the topic of the phone call, statutory rape of girls given in marriage.  The actual purpose of the raid appears to be the dismantling of the FLDS community, as evidenced by the fact that all children down to infants-in-arms have been removed from their parents.  In a move of relief, the judge has allowed nursing mothers to return to their children twice a day so long as they are supervised by a religious authority (she's suggesting the LDS oversee this in order to pull the women from the FLDS, something that baffles the LDS leaders who have made it clear they want no part in this).  In other words, the mandate the mainstream public was willing to give to the Texas authorities to protect pubescent girls has been expanded all the way from infants to the re-training of grown women. 

In a recent CNN online article about Carolyn Jessop, author of Escape, her tale of leaving the FLDS with her eight children, readers turned on her in their comments postings.  When a woman on the one hand talks about the supportive underground network of women within the FLDS community that she was privy to, and on the other hand claims that no one helped her with her children, not even on the days of their births, until the day she left the community and was provided a moment of rest by the first non-FLDS woman she housed with, you know she's playing tricks with her story.  Carolyn Jessop, by the way, is in Texas providing "cultural competency" to authorities for the sake of the people she has supported herself by vilifying.

One thing Carolyn Jessop claims is that the community used children as a threat to women: if you fail to follow the dictates of Jeffs, your children will be taken from you.  It took a woman not even of the community, a woman playing a hoax of unimaginably cruel proportions, and the willing accomplices in authority down there in Texas, to turn Jeff's prophecy into reality.  The compliance of the women over the last three weeks, starting with their willingness to leave their homes, has been called "voluntary," but what can voluntary possibly mean when their nursing infants are being held captive?

Another FLDS community has existed in the Canadian province of British Columbia since the days when polygamy was banned from the main LDS church (dismantling families obedient to that prophet and leaving their children illegitimate).  Yesterday the Attorney General of British Columbia was interviewed on the news show As It Happens.  He stated that the only difference between his response to that community and the response in Texas was that there had been no under-aged complainant in British Columbia.  At the time he said this, he had to have known that there is no underage complainant in Texas either.  He also stated that the American Consulate in British Columbia has been in contact with them over the years wishing for American citizens of the FLDS to participate in the American Census.  This the FLDS has been unwilling to do, fearing that the information would be used against them.  Probably fearing that the American and Canadian authorities were in cahoots to dismantle their community, which in fact they are.  The AG, by the way, is primarily concerned with the legality of polygamy.  His concern with statutory rape, like that of the Americans, is only in that it provides a legal hook for dismantling a polygamous community.

In Texas, failure to census has resulted in DNA testing of the entire community, the first legally enforced DNA testing of any community in the world.  While some of the actions in Texas mirror human rights violations in other countries --such as communities in South America where all children were removed from their parents and adopted out to more politically compliant families or aboriginal women in Australia who were removed from their tribes to be re-educated by white Protestants-- the DNA testing puts America on the cutting edge.  No one could call the fears of the FLDS irrational any more.  And as far as the AG of British Columbia is concerned, the Canadians have every wish to out-do America in this respect.

Groups who can see themselves ending up in this group are expressing concern.  The LDS church has refused to have anything to do with it.  Perhaps that Baptist church that allowed their sign to fly over the buses dismantling this community on the first day of the raid will someday regret their decision.  Rick Fisk is anti-charity in his evaluation of the FLDS, but he's outrage at the current events equals mine.  LDS blogger Russell Arben tried to be even-handed on Day 1, but eventually he had to agree that the details weren't making the Texas authorities "look very good" (and he links to other LDS bloggers on this topic).

(Image: Some of the firepower that was brought in to remove the girls from their homes.  Also from the FLDS website.)

The homeschoolers are worried that the attack on the FLDS can be turned into an attack on home and private schooling in general.  And the breastfeeders are pissed.  This has become an attack against women as decision makers in their own lives and against the power of women as mothers as much as it has become an attack against a polygamous society.  It is peculiar that the men and teenage boys have been left out of re-education.  Is it that men are considered uneducatable?  Or is it that women are still chattle, only to be controlled by the Texas authorities rather than by the conscience of their own religious sentiment?

At the FLDS website Captive FLDS Children you can donate directly to the FLDS organization.  Quite frankly, the finances of the FLDS leadership are curious and I'm not sure that is the best way to respond to the specific outrages of this event.  I have heard reports that the ACLU is providing legal support, but there is no information about this matter on their website.  For now, all a citizen can do is read the news with a critical eye, provide outrage when we are lied to by our own representatives, and demand that human rights abuses like this not be perpetrated in our name.  What's going on down there in Texas is being done to "them"; it must not be done in the name of "us."

The Price of Grain: Selling Morality by the Bushel

Today I took a six mile walk in a Canadian metropolis, and each bus stop that I passed had a banner advertisement for the Canadian Renewable Fuels Association.  On the grey city street, the ad was a dreamscape of flowery meadowland.  Given today's headline on CNN, "Riots, instability spread as food prices skyrocket," complete with grimy riot photographs, the advertisements seemed misplaced.  The contrast between the flowers and the riots was downright un-Canadian.  For today, the farmers behind the advertising have been stripped of their sunshine and daisies image and their bloody-handed ruthlessness had been laid bare.

"Ha," thinks the American of the slightly sappy Canadians, "That's what they get for being so gullible."  The Canadian Renewable Fuels Association would argue otherwise: they have posted some statistics showing how renewable fuels have little to do with food prices and how food prices are actually being driven up more by oil scarcity than by food scarcity.  And some other stuff that amounts to, "Those riots have nothing to do with us!  We're flowery meadowland!!"

Despite our supposed sophistication, us Americans are as gullible as our neighbors to the north.  We have a brick wall against marketing it is true, but brick walls aren't very responsive to change and the flow of capital is.  Since we can no longer be marketed to directly, pharmaceutical producers sell diseases rather than drugs and energy producers sell morality rather than megawatts.

All this comes on the heels of BwP reading The 48 Laws of Power (I hear there is going to be a follow-up post), me reading Influencer (there will be a post), and me finding myself in a snit because I didn't qualify for a government program that I thought was straightforward with no exclusions.  I felt betrayed, I felt gullible, I felt that as a citizen I had been voted off the island.  I was suddenly supremely aware that whatever ethics I had been sold (and ethics are very much about the sale, about creating a tribe that can be counted on to behave in a consistent way), that whatever sort of spiritual being having a human experience I may be, I am an animal in a world where every animal is out for their own interests.  Patriotism or any other interest in the public good suddenly seemed worse than that famous "last refuge of scoundrels;" it seemed the first pitfall of Pollyannas.

My mood has shifted by the realization that there are a lot of people, people much more powerful than me, who want a lot of the same things that I do.  Yes, there is a tug-of-war of power over every single thing that exists in the minds and/or the reality of the humans on this earth, but it is a tug-of-war which has a certain kind of stasis.  Value has been maximized.  Sell me meadows or sell me riots, the statistics suggest that actually the price of food hasn't changed that much.  Counting up the balance of power each morning, meadow-flower posters seem incongruously benign.  Counting up how little has changed from mornings past, giving quotidian ruthlessness a meadowland veneer doesn't seem so wrong.

Managing Encounter with Spiritual Genius: creating religious experience

I've just begun reading The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James for the second time in my life.  Now that I have a few years of experience as an adult, it has been a goal to re-read a few books first encountered in my teens and early twenties.  This book was not selected for that project: I cannot compare the two experiences of reading it because on the first exposure the book held no meaning for me.  I picked it up now because I'm feeling a great deal of clarity about philosophy and, after some various religious experiences of my own, not so much clarity about my relations with spirituality and religion.  This time it is proving much more engaging.  And timely:

There can be no doubt that as a matter of fact a religious life, exclusively pursued, does tend to make the person exceptional and eccentric.  I speak not now of your ordinary religious believer, who follows the conventional observances of his country, whether it be Buddhist, Christian, or Mohammadan.  His religious has been made for him by others, communicated to him by tradition, determined to fixed forms by imitation, and retained by habit.  It would profit us little study this second-hand religious life.  We must make search rather for the original experiences which were the pattern-settings to all this mass of suggested feeling and imitated conduct.  These experiences we can only find in individuals for whom religion exists not as a dull habit, but as an acute fever rather.  But such individuals are "geniuses" in the religious line... They have known no measure, been liable to obsessions and fixed ideas; and frequently they have fallen into trances, heard voices, seen visions, and presented all sorts of peculiarities which are ordinarily classed as pathological.  Often, moreover, these pathological features in their career have helped to give them their religious authority and influence. (pp. 8 - 9)

James then goes on to give as an example George Fox, founder of the Quaker religion and very odd duck.  Martin Luther King, Jr., who has been canonized in American culture and will be of special note next week on the fortieth anniversary of his murder, and Malcolm X, ignored with diligence in the same culture, are examples that I spent more time pondering in my early college days.  Today the focus is on Rev. Jeremiah Wright and whether his rhetorical fervor has tainted the politician Barack Obama.

Genius of all kind has always been suspect because of its destabilizing aspect.  The canonization of Martin Luther King, Jr. is troubling where the intent seems to be to tame his message into bland tradition.  We know that this was President Lyndon Johnson's outright goal.  Canonization is a more civilized means than whipping to turn King into a trophy in the sitting room,with the bonus that he's no longer around to open his mouth and get himself sent back outside. Christ, Mohammad and most anyone else that really matters have suffered the same civilizing indignity.

On the King holiday, when I will sometimes make it my civic duty to suggest reading Malcolm X instead, the response can be ferocious and insane- occasionally someone will suggest it is racist.  Appearing to speak against Dr. King or elevating any other leader near him is Bad.  Mentioning King's personal failings can be met with the same ferocity, although they are discussed evenhandedly in the landmark Parting the Waters, a three-book series discussing all aspects of King's life and influence and which is intellectual bedrock for the King canonization. (Malcolm X has many biographies, but no similar book of such substance and therefore I simply suggest reading his Autobiography.)

Is there such a thing as spiritual genius?  Can spiritual leaders impart a special kind of wisdom, despite their inability to live balanced, measured, lives?  In most of the world, the answer to the first question is seen as "yes."  Europeans of the modern era, with their post-totalitarian wariness of all extreme ideas, are the only culture that leans toward a "no."  When America is labeled backwards in relation to Europe, the issue almost always comes down to America's continued willingness to grapple with contrasts in ethical extremes.  In less-developed nations it isn't about willingness; the factors of limited means make it an absolute requirement.  The European slant sidesteps ethical decisions by declaring an underlying balance and unity of ethics which is still stuck on a form of the idealism that feeds totalitarianism.

America at large, long freed from philosophical idealism, nonetheless turns ideas into cartoons ("tradition", as referenced by James above).  Literally: the canonization of King means that all good school children learn all good things about him, including in their cartoon books.  The cartoon is that King was Good (and Malcolm was Bad).  Somewhere, there is probably a cartoon that he went potty when his Mommy told him to.  No one wants their children to imitate King literally: tilting at windmills in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, selected specifically because he was young and didn't know any better, copying someone else's homework.  We Americans tend to sidestep the question of how wisdom comes from the unbalanced, attempting to isolate out wisdom while burying the questions of ethical difference and ethical failure.  This leads to the absurdities of snake-oil televangelists and their followings.  If you saw a flash of genius, the next step is to bury your head in the sand about the snake-oil.  Sometimes it means you end a racist institution.  Sometimes it means you pay for someone else's castle and vat of mascara.

My own thinking has been to view spiritual leadership with suspicion.  Prior to my encounter with James' argument that the role is different from the role of citizen or philosopher, or politician, I considered the role dangerous to the individual.  The way I saw it a good person (a good citizen, a sound philosopher, given to being a good theologian) sometimes found himself called to spiritual leadership.  Accepting the call did bad things to people; it made them bad citizens.  A person who took the role outside of an established religious institutional structure was in even more grave danger.  James suggests that the person will find themself in the role because they are already unbalanced.  My error was one of philosophical idealism- that all existential roles are fundamentally the same.

Given these common errors, Obama's speech on race was not just sane, but remarkably sane.  He starts by asserting the argument for political genius, as bland as that may be: unity, unity, unity.  The politician has a different job, and ethical challenge is not it.  Think of Roosevelt's fireside chats.  Balance.  Stability.  Obama, as a civilian in the world of spiritual genius and as a politician, is required to divide Wright's statements into good/bad and this he does.  Here he fails somewhat- he isn't clear about the existential divide between his own locus of judgment and that of Wright, but this is a political speech and not a philosophical treatise.

His sanity is that he refuse to label Wright as Good or Bad.  Wright is familiar to him, and in that familiarity Obama has been spiritually inspired.  But he also places Wright's excesses at a distance.  He judges, not as the European disdainer of religious genius judges and not as the American snake-oil viewer judges, but with honest judgment rooted in the reality of his experience.

Without intending to, Obama's speech draws focus on the absurdity of the spiritual leader gone politician.  These are two separate roles.  Obama speaks of Wright's sermon in terms of "mistake" and it would be mistake- if he were a politician.  But in terms of evangelism and a call to repentance in the tradition of the Old Testament and the words of John the Baptist in the New, Wright was spot on.  This is what Obama said:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society.  It's that he spoke as if our society were static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.  But what we know-- what we have seen-- is that America can change.  That is true genius of this nation [sic].  What we have already achieved gives us hope-- the audacity to hope-- for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

Obama is a politician.  Repentance is not his game; the future is.  Wright is part of the meaningful discourse that has influenced Obama, but Obama must make different judgments.

Back to the question of whether these odd ducks can impart any wisdom.  I think the answer is: not directly.  We make a mistake when we expect them directly feed wisdom into our minds and our hearts.  Across America this morning, legions of Christians have walked into their churches, notebooks at the ready, expecting to get direct advice on how to live.  Run-of-the-mill preachers, imparting tradition and providing solid leadership, are going to step up to the pulpit and give it.  That is a valuable continuation of social norms and stability, but it is not spiritual genius.

Spiritual geniuses do not impart wisdom by direction, but rather by inspiration.  Where they provide direction, they create tradition.  Fox with his Quakers, Wesley with his Methodists, Smith with his Mormons.  These men purposefully created institutions, but institutions pass on tradition rather than genius.  Spiritual genius is not passed on, but rather interacted with.  At best, the institutions create a environment where the spark of genius may survive from generation to generation.  Obama is not meant to model his forward-facing politics on his Rev. Wright, but rather have it informed by Wright's calls to repentance.

Human growth requires an input from outside the models that we have already nurtured and established.  I already have an idea what my ethics are and what my ideals are for most humane lifestyle.  Continuing to interact only with what I see as balanced approaches to ethics and lifestyle isn't going to change anything.  As James wrote, "It will profit us little..."  I may not go in for the instability, I certainly don't want the crowd-at-large to turn to instability (really the number one reason some would like to duct-tape Wright's mouth shut- "It isn't that I'm too stupid to be allowed to hear him, but you might be."), but institutions are going to teach us nothing.

When Obama portrays Wright as the sometimes embarrassing uncle, I think he has made the correct judgment about how you or I should interact with the spiritual genius that we encounter.  Close, but not too close.  In the interaction with instability I will shift my stability.  James would say that I continue to create my own individual interaction with divinity, an interaction which must be made and not copied.

P.S.

Where the topic is prejudice and complexity, I always have to bring up The Nature of Prejudice by Gordon Allport.  My opinion is that this book should be required-reading for every high school student.  I just learned today that both King and Malcolm X were also fans of the book.

Barry Saunders, a Raleigh News & Observer columnist who frequently comments on race and what I shall call (with absurd formality given the context of his columns) "the Black experience," had an excellent column on the flap over Wright.

To see how intellectually vacant, morally flat-footed, and in some cases utterly failing in courage the cartoon response to this question is, you can unfortunately do no worse than today's Sunday Forum (a kind of expanded letters-to-the-editor) "What to make of Obama and his pastor" in the Raleigh News & Observer.

Fear Itself

The top headline on the front page of USA Today this morning is "Police, feds OK'd to check on mail".  This is to check the outside of packages for name and address, a process that does not require any judicial approval.  Only the approval of the postal system is required, and in 2006 there were 13,411 requests to the Post Office's Chief Inspector, of which 57 were denied.  "National security requests," under gag order, are not counted.  Post office spokes person Douglas Bem declares, "Regulations are in place that serve to protect the general population from illegal and unlawful intrusions."

A story, from shortly after 9/11, that covers both national security and illegal & unlawful: One day, I went to get my mail from my PO Box in Carrboro, North Carolina.  The police were called.  I was asked to show my identification, etc.  I do not know what prompted it.  I had recently filled out the new national security form that is now required for everyone using a PO Box.  My husband at the time was a foreign national.  I had just started a subscription to a French magazine.  National security.  Routine.  Not counted.  Intrusive.

While I was there, I listened to the police officer chat with the clerk about various names he was looking for a different places they had been receiving mail.  Not approved by the Chief Inspector.  No discussion of legalities of any kind.  Just a government official giving out personal information illegally and unlawfully.

I'm just an average citizen.  I wasn't sure what to do.  I thought about writing it down and sending it to... to who?  Maybe the ACLU??  But I had just had an interaction with the police over my mail, and no one really believes these stories anyway.

I don't believe in the progress of history beyond today.  I don't believe that I can expect continuous improvement in our attachment to the American ideal.  But I do believe that when I see a story like this on the front of USA Today, when I know that the numbers and facts given have to be bogus because just in one little town in North Carolina (one little town that is actually quite opposed to cooperation with issues of a police state) I've seen otherwise, I can at least post my personal experience of the matter on the internet.

Commitment to Reality: The Drought, Lévy's book on Sartre, and Mourning Addiction

The Drought

The hysteria over the drought in North Carolina reached (I hope!) the zenith of it's absurdity when the News & Observer published the latest of their water saving tips: hair styles for non-daily washing.  This is the same paper that analyzed the water use of a normal responsible family and found that it was almost within the governor's "request" of 25 gallons per person per day.  I know someone who dutifully collects shower water to flush the toilet, and whose daily mood is partially influenced by whether or not it has rained.

Meanwhile, it has been pointed out that the water bills in most of the municipalities are impossible to read.  It doesn't matter what they say anyway, because at least one municipality has decided to put a flat surcharge on all bills (regardless of use, regardless of size of household) to cover the shortfall in revenue due to (this is so great!) people conserving.

In actuality, the State of North Carolina and it's municipalities are failing to respond to water limitation issues.  Instead, politicians are using the responsible sense of conservation and the individual social/political action of environmentalism to cover for their failure to provide leadership and, more importantly, policy.  Disorganized job and housing growth can continue one more election cycle, if only you will wear your hair in an oily ponytail for a week.  This is not stealing from the poor to give to the rich, it is stealing from the willing to give to the unwilling.  It is exactly the kind of cynical and warped appeal to altruism that so inflamed Ayn Rand.

Meanwhile, our communities go further and further down the road to unsustainability, and there will be serious pain we run into a reality that not amount of stealing from one group of the community to give to another can resolve.  This "drought" is a blip, currently of about 20% variation from the recorded mean.  If it were a serious natural anomaly, you would see changes in the environment such as the die-off of deciduous plants.  Look around- the natural world expected this kind of variability in rainfall.  We're the only ones who failed to account for it.  Look at that failure to respond map- it isn't about climate zones, it is about uncontrolled grown.  We cannot continue to cover for politicians who continue to fail to make a real response.

So live your life, wash your hair.  Heck, put an extra 10 gallons down the drain, the fish will thank you.*  Instead of carrying buckets to the toilet, put those politicians against the wall and make them face reality.

Lévy's Book

This week I started reading: Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century by Bernard-Henri Lévy (trans. Andrew Brown).  Lévy is apparently an odd sort of figure, and the Publishers' Weekly review called the book a "haze of grandiloquent verbiage" ("grandiloquent" is an amusingly self-referential word, isn't it?).  I'm enjoying the book very much, to me it reads like a road trip: you just sit and watch the scenery go by.  How much of it is Sartre and how much of it is Lévy, I have no idea.  The books is an enthusiastic response to Sartre (the review called it a "love letter"), which is really the most a philosopher could ever hope for.  As a blogger, I write responses, riffs off whatever strikes me (I am now), so that is fine with me.

Lévy's response to Sartre's essay "What is Literature?" (pp. 60-69) focuses on the the idea of "commitment."  What is a writer committing to?  Ultimately, to reality.  The writer writes out of his time and place, for his time and place and (Sartre urges) to as wide of an audience as possible.  When it comes to this commitment to humanity, the journalist is no less of a writer than the philosopher and perhaps even more of one.  Lévy calls this last commitment on the part of Sartre "a real generosity, a superabundance of being, a prodigality -- and hence a form of courage." (p. 69)

The common criticism of existentialism is that it can descend into solipsism.  The idea that you control your life and the ways in which you do actually control your environment can turn into the wishfulness which (interesting because of it's core solipsistic nature) is best expressed by the "prosperity preachers" of today's popular Christianity.  It appears that what holds solipsism back is commitment.  Commitment to reality.  Just think of that in terms of the issues with the drought and personal and societal/politic response discussed above.

Mourning Addiction

With all of that in mind, someone from my Weight Watcher's group recently hit that moment of mourning addiction.  This experience I have found best described in Existential Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom, a book I read many years ago.  There is a point in overcoming addiction when one looks back at the wreckage of previous failures with horror.  Along with the realization that you can control your life today comes the realization that you were in control of your life yesterday.  That the meaning of addiction is to have played a game with reality, a game where you made the rules and the rules said that you lose.  For some that realization is too harsh and a decision is made to simply stay in addiction, stay out of contact with reality.  For others, all you can do is hold their hand while they weep, and then turn attention toward the promise of the future.

The only thing that makes the promise of the future possible is a profound attachment to reality.  After considering the hopelessness of the entangled motivations in response to the drought, after reading this idea of the writer's commitment to reality, I'm realizing that commitment to reality has a broader meaning than I had previously considered.  It isn't just about untangling motivations- which the games of politics would prefer remain tangled. It isn't just about honest and authentic interaction with the world and the things in it- what the addiction meaning game undoes.  It is about burrowing into reality with dedication, not just accepting reality, but choosing.  Not just being there because you've found the limits of your self-definition, but committing to being in that place.

I know that my accepting phase is well; I am fairly sane and not given to the delusions of wishfulness outside of it's proper place.  Only this week did I start to understand what commitment means, and how far I have to go.

P.S.

*We use surface water here; this is not the wildly destructive act it would be in a place where pumped water is used.  If you live in one of those places and just have to do something, wash your hair and dress it nice and go protest in front of town hall instead.

H-France review of Lévy's book.

The Conservative Soul

Andrew Sullivan's The Conservative Soul is most excellent as the confrontation of fundamentalism that it was meant to be.  I myself am currently in a state of extreme rootlessness regarding my religious ideals and though I have rejected certain ideas of fundamentalism, others had vined their way into my thinking through the constant message that fundamentalism is religion, a message that is megaphoned out from those speaking both for and against it.

Actually, our current cultural climate not only megaphones that religion is fundamentalism, but that all morality is fundamentalism.  The choices presented by popular culture are either to accept your religion or your morality with fundamentalism, or to reject all of them together.  Because of the importance of teasing religion and morality both apart from fundamentalism, I recommend this book not only for someone hoping to understand the current political climate, but for anyone hoping to escape from errors of thought which have been inculcated into them by the fact of having been born in this time and place.  For me, the most extreme of those errors are brought to light in my food addiction, and indeed so many of the addicts thought patterns start at the all-or-nothing abyss (pp. 202 - 209) essential to fundamentalism.

Sullivan's definition and description of conservatism proper is also an excellent little refresher and primer.  He at first launches into a rather grand idea of conservatism:

This is where conservatism starts [a "definition of humanness that is marked by imperfection and uncertainty", as found in the same gospels called upon by Christian fundamentalists].  If we are all humans, then we each have a beginning and an end; and each of us has a different beginning and end.  We see the world from where we are, and our understanding of the universe is intrinsically rooted in a time and place.  We can do all we can to increase our knowledge and gain deeper and deeper insight.  We can read history and philosophy; we can travel; we can ask questions of young and old; we can debate; we can pray; we can grow through pain and amusement of daily life.  But we will never fully or completely transcend where we are.  And even if we could, such transcendence would render us unintelligible to those still earthbound. (p. 174)

While this is a beautifully written call to the conscience-based theological alternative to fundamentalism that Sullivan has explained in his book, it is more abstract that political conservatism requires.  However Sullivan is not only presenting a political conservatism, but also presenting a world-view to take on fundamentalism.  He then advances from this philosophy into something a little more solid, that in my thinking is the philosophical beginning to political conservatism:

...we live in twilight, and we are unsure whether it is a prelude to morning or night. (p. 175)

This is direct contradiction to the Marxist idea of history as progress, and the subset of Christianity known as dispensationalism.  Conservatism expects nothing about truth to come out of history. (p. 211)  In fact, politics isn't about truth with a capital "T".  Sullivan writes:

As a politics, its [conservatism's] essence is an acceptance of the unknowability of ultimate truth, an acknowledgment of the distinction between what is true forever and what is true for here and now, and an embrace of the discrepancy between theoretical and practical knowledge.  It is an anti-ideology, a nonprogram, a way of looking at the world whose most perfect expression might be called inactivism. (p. 230)

That which passes for national political dialog is actually about ideology in the broadest sense.  Sullivan refers to calling this politics a "battle of ideas" as vulgarity. (p. 199)   The opportunity to run for President is seen as an opportunity to leave statecraft behind and enter into the realm of pure philosophy.  No one currently running for President, with the exception of Hillary Clinton and her crass proposals for repackaging the economic successes of some into goods for others, are talking about statecraft.

As someone who has always been politically conservative, I find it odd to have to make the argument that politics is only about statecraft, and that politicians should stick to the business at hand.  Defining the meaning of the universe is not the job of my elected representatives; having my trash picked up on time is.  That seems painfully obvious.

With no one in the presidential race talking about statecraft, certainly none of them are talking about political conservatism.  In contrast, Sullivan returns several times to the great statement of Ronald Reagan, patron saint of conservatism, in his 1981 inaugural address:

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.  From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by and of the people.  Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who amongst us has the capacity to govern someone else?

This is conservatism, and it is important that we know it.  I have already suggested that hope starts with care, responsibility, respect and knowledge; the same four items named by Fromm as requirements for love.  When things are called by the wrong name, knowledge is perverted.  When knowledge is off the rails, there is no basis for hope.  Whatever one may think of the view currently being offered by President Bush and his team that we must allow someone else to make value judgments between liberty and security on our behalf, how it plays out in history must be judged by what it is.

The alternative, the confusion of mislabeling and misnaming, means that conservatism will head into the same morass that American liberalism has been in for perhaps fifty years.  It is actually probably too late (and Sullivan explains the problems in thought and in on-the-ground political action that have already happened because fundamentalism has been mislabeled as conservatism).  It was Sullivan's article on Obama, discussed previously in this blog, that helped me finally understand how this happened to American liberalism, crushed by it's own mislabeled fundamentalism of ideology (rather than religion) as played out in the various catastrophes of the last century.

Perhaps Sullivan is right.  Perhaps Obama, the only likely escapee from fundamentalism, is the only one who, like Bill Clinton before him, in turning the conversation to statecraft can ultimately turn the conversation to political conservatism.  But that is hoping for a history with direction, and that just isn't conservative enough for me.

P.S.

Sullivan makes important reference to Michael Oakeshott.  An Introduction, at Amazon.com.  Wikipedia article.
Sullivan also discusses Montaigne at length.  Wikipedia.
And Hobbes.  Wikipedia again.

Podcast of an author interview.  (I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet myself.)

Follow-up reading on the book:

Glen Greenwald's review of Sullivan's book and the issues discussed.

The Washington Post review of Sullivan's book by Bryan Burrough claimed that if you've ever read anything by Ann Coulter, then this book is not for you.  Actually, I so thoroughly enjoy this part of the review that I've got to quote the entire thing:

The Conservative Soul, unfortunately, is not only too polite but too high-minded to galvanize anyone without a graduate degree in philosophy.  This is not a bad thing, just a warning.  If you belong to the Elks Club, apply catsup to your scrambled eggs or have ever read anything by Ann Coulter, this is not a book for you.

You got that America?  You must be stupid, stupid, stupid. <Loafingcactus here cackles and cackles with amusement.>

For good measure, David Brooks in his review also brings up Ann Coulter, this time as not more stupid than Sullivan and his readers but as more dangerous than the Christian fundamentalists Sullivan is writing about.  While both are worth reading (as is Ann Coulter), I find the need to keep bringing up Ann Coulter as a contrast... um, curious.  It is Ann Coulter who is a force of nature in defining reality according to her own centered consistency.  True, she cannot be reasoned with in any way, but the one quality she has is truly amazing.

The Brooks article I found compelling on first reading, although I was hungry at the time.  After a snack and a re-read, no.  It's criticisms of the book are hollow, wrong.  But in criticizing the book he does present an interesting alternative viewpoint.

Sullivan on Obama, History and Hope for the Future

I would blog about the entire December issue of the Atlantic Monthly if I could, but circling around that for the last few days has kept me away from the topic of this most excellent article "Good bye to All That" by Andrew Sullivan (with an online only interview with Sullivan), and the companion article "Teacher and Apprentice" by Marc Ambinder.

A couple of weeks before reading this article I had come across an enthusiastic young Obama supporter.  Unfortunately enthusiasm and youth equated to ignorance and he wasn't able to tell me anything about his candidate.  His enthusiasm did have me picking up one of Obama's books, but then I put it down, deciding that my alloted time for reading candidates' books was if and when that particular candidate reached my decision point as a voter.  Until then, I decided, Obama was just so much noise.  Sullivan points out that I'm not the only one with a ho-hum attitude toward this election:

We are fighting over something, to be sure.  But it is more a fight over how we define ourselves and over long-term goals than over what is practically to be done on the ground.... Even on issues that are seen as integral to the polarization, the practical stakes in this election are minor.

Americans are closer than ever on a huge list of topics.  Even the two sides of the abortion debate are, in a practical sense, closer together than they ever have been.  So why is there still so much strife, and why can a candidate as uninteresting as Obama stir up so much excitement?

Listening to my young friend, I recalled my own days of excitement over politics.  As a college student and first-time voter, I was attracted to Ross Perot.  Not because I knew anything about him, but because he was different.  Ultimately he showed himself to be different and, as a politician, psycho, and I was left disappointed in the prospect of anyone being different at all.  As I've come to appreciate the stability of our political system, being different is no longer in itself appealing.

Sullivan explains why the national politicians I've been exposed to thus far in my life (here in my early 30s) are all basically the same and why as a member of Generation X I would have been seeking something different.  He shows how American politics is a house that was set up before I was born, with oddly placed furniture that I tripped over in my youthful ignorance.  In revealing the set up, he creates best kind of perspective- perspective that isn't just the other side of the same way of seeing things, but is a whole new way of seeing things.  Ultimately, I have a different view of Obama (Sullivan has become a supporter), but the historical perspective Sullivan offers is nonetheless important.

Sullivan's central argument is not that interesting:

Given this quiet, evolving consensus on policy, how do we account for the bitter, brutal tone of American politics?  The answer lies mainly with the biggest and most influential generation in America: the Baby boomers.  The divide is still--amazingly--between those who fought in Vietnam and those who didn't, and between those who fought and dissented and those who fought and never dissented at all.  By defining the contours of the Boomer generation, it lasted decades.  And with time came a strange intensity.

Sullivan's nuanced explanation of exactly what this means is where the brilliance comes in.  In Sullivan's view, this election is important because is either the place to move on, or the place where the Boomer generation, through the divisions of the occupation of Iraq, will cement their divisions into the next generation.

I'm not certain the direct link to the Iraq war would do that; it would take a draft to build that kind of cement.  In our current climate, the cement seems to be more about those issues of self-definition, and in that way the more disconnected youth culture is, the more likely it is to break free of the past.  The hope would be that those youth will reform themselves into a new adult culture.  However, I didn't have that much hope in youth when I was one and I certainly don't now.  I'm curious to see what Generation Y and beyond turn into, and I expect that they will create an adult culture that is more free of history than X and prior, but I don't expect them to create any significant new virtue out of that freedom.  Placing hope in what is ultimately a form of ignorance seems a dubious bet.

The hope being placed in Obama is more about his cleanness than about ignorance; he has received a top-rate education and he knows his potential place in history.  But his experience of history is about education rather than personal experience.  Ultimately, for Sullivan and for many others, it is Obama's new face is most important.  Physically, his face is a sign of an American that is something aside from those divisions that the entire world has watched play out.  Sullivan writes, "It [Obama's face] proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."  (I would add that it proves us wrong as well.)  However, it is not just his physical face that is important, but his fresh face.  Sullivan explains that for those whose feet is caught in the previous generation, there is no escape.  Much of what so many hate about Hillary is inherent in the division that can never be removed from her mind.  But Obama's mother is only a few years younger than Hillary.  Obama himself, therefore, is something new:

He is among the first Democrats in a generation not be afraid or ashamed of what they actually believe, which also gives them more freedom to move pragmatically to the right, if necessary.  He does not smell, as [Hillary] Clinton does, of political fear.

Sullivan then goes on with a few pages of specific discussion of Obama, which are informative and I recommend reading them, but not of any interest here.  He closes with an evaluation of what an Obama race would mean, versus some of the other options, explaining his opinion that choosing Obama is choosing to take seriously the need to break through the cement of the Boomer generation into something different, something that more closely reflects what America and the world are about right now.  In the companion interview, he reiterates a point made in the article:

...if you believe the world's okay, then the case for Obama is actually rather weak.  Why would we listen to this rather young, untested figure?  Let's go to security mom, Hillary, or big daddy Rudy.  If you believe, as I do, that the world seems to be hurtling toward something quite catastrophic, then the requirement of the United States to actually evolve itself to resist that trend--as opposed to accelerating it-- is quite high.  And Obama in fact puts the brakes on what I think is our accelerating path towards global warfare and possible constitutional crisis.

Sullivan's argument hinges on the need for something different, and the expectation of an unhinging crisis, while I actually have some faith in the cement of our institutions compared to the ephemeral nature of crisis.  Yes, the impetuous of 9/11 allowed Bush to move quickly and perhaps calamitously into the Middle East, and the cement will made the withdrawal move that much more slowly, which is costly in lives, in world opinion, in "the war on terror."  But it also now in our cement that we wouldn't move so quickly in response to another attack.  Yes, there have been some dramatic institutional failures during the Bush years, most disturbingly the disastrous and inhumane response to hurricane Katrina, which was in so many different ways a failure of the values our national institutions are meant to uphold.  Painfully and inelegantly, our institutions are responding to those failures as well.

I'm not certain that there would be anything wrong with Obama for President, but I'm not sold that there would be anything particularly correct about him either.  Presidential politics are seductive because they offer up the idea that some great change, some very moral change, could be just around the corner.  There is no reason to believe that great change is likely, or that it would be good. Different is not enough to make Obama the right choice, and even if his individual psychology has escaped certain aspects of history he would nonetheless take his place a chain of history that no one can escape from.

Hope for Truth: The Failures of Romney

To lie is vile. To demonstrate the varieties of half-truths, and non-sense that can vortex out and send friends and enemies alike off kilter in their relationship with the truth is to be Mitt Romney as reported in the media. This week, CNN published a puzzling interaction between presidential hopefuls Romney and Huckabee. Almost nothing in the article made sense.

This is going to run a bit long, so a roadmap: first, a Discussion of the CNN Article, then a Review of Other Failures, finally a Discussion of Hope for the Truth.

Discussion of the CNN Article

Huckabee, who has a degree in theology, on the one hand states that Mormonism is a religion rather than a cult, but on the other hand states that he "doesn't know much about it."  Uh huh.  But next is where the Romney-level weirdness begins: "Don't Mormon's believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers?"  Huckabee surely knows the answer to that one already.  Romney too.  The spokespeople of the LDS (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the actual name of the largest of the religions commonly known as "Mormon") also.  (By the way, the answer is "yes."  If Huckabee really wanted to open a can of worms he should have just gone for the Mormon version of the problem of the Trinity.)

But Huckabee asks his question.  And then makes a non-sense apology which Romney furthers the non-sense by accepting.  And then the LDS spokespeople stamp on some further nonsense.  Here is the LDS media-release nonsense (the comments of another spokesperson are similar):

Like other Christians, we believe Jesus is the divine Son of God.  Satan is a fallen angel.  As the Apostle Paul wrote, God is the Father of all.  That means that all beings were created by God and are his spirit children.  Christ, however, was the only begotten in the flesh, and we worship Him as the Son of God and the Savior of mankind.

Here the LDS definition of Satan:

Satan, also called the adversary or the devil, is the enemy of all righteousness of those who seek to follow God.  He is a spirit son of God who was once an angel "in authority in the presence of God".  But in the premortal Council in Heaven, Lucifer, as Satan was then called, rebelled against God...

That the LDS definition doesn't directly address the question is forgivable, since it was not meant to.  That the LDS media-release is wishy-washy and unclear is surely an embarrassment to those Mormons who stand by their faith.  The anti-LDS group Mormonism Research Ministry charitably calls this explanation "less than lucid."  There is no reason for officials of the LDS church to purposefully stride onto ground where then may be called deceivers from the truth.

For anyone interested in a clear overview of the LDS concept of Satan, Mormon Wiki does very well.  An intellectual deconstruction of the LDS base texts on Satan can be found here.  In contrast to the official non-sense, All About Mormons clearly addresses the question in an essay titled Is Satan the Brother of Jesus?, which closes:

So it can be said that Jesus and Lucifer were brothers, in the sense of both being spiritually begotten by the Father, but it is a misrepresentation to say so without giving the contextual background [which the article provides].  Whatever similarities in background exist between Jesus and Satan pale compared to the differences.  Jesus is the Beloved and Chosen, who is the Only Begotten Son of God in the flesh.

Going back to the CNN, article, it is Romney spokesman Kevin Madden who continues with the non-sense:

The governor accepted the apology... it is out of bounds for one candidate to question another's personal faith.

This right on the heels of Romney giving an entire speech about the importance of his faith.  It is only Huckabee, in the closing paragraph of the CNN article, who finally demonstrates any courage:

I get all of the God questions at the debates, so you know when people say, "Oh, he [Romney] had to make a speech," I'm thinking, "Hey, you know what?  If you'll give me national television time, I'll make you a God speech, and I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll throw in an offering and an altar call to throw in with it."

And this draws the attention back to the creators of the intrigue- the media.  A set of journalists who have enlarged the original question, accepted Romney's speech and his acceptance of the meaningless apology without question, and published the media-release LDS nonsense.  Courage and hope for the truth are not found there.

Review of Other Failures

Romney didn't start with these problems this week.  In mid-October, speaking to a Jewish group, he was"startled" by a question about baptisms for the dead and then stated the meaningless, "I have in my life, but I haven't recently."  He has also distanced himself from his own polygamous ancestry and been evasive on a fundamental belief about where Christ will return to the earth, as explained in an article in The New Republic.  Author Josh Patashnik writes, "It is one thing to flip-flop on your politics, and quite another to flip-flop on your faith."

It may be that politics is all about lies, it may be that the public can be expected to ask questions of a Mormon candidate, but Romney's lack of integrity goes beyond politics to how he expresses his personal faith.  Perhaps this was inevitable whenever it was that he first decided to mingle the two.  His address on faith shows that at some point he forgot they were separate.  Rather than faith corrupting politics (a popular worry, probably rooted in dishonesty, that Romney was addressing), politics have corrupted faith.

The feminist blogger Hugo Schwyzer very effectively takes on the bizarre missteps of the speech, contrasting the "symphony of faith" with his own response "In Praise of Cacophony."  Schwyzer writes, "Real diversity is not harmonious."  This is a truth about religious diversity that is fundamentally at odds with Romney's desire to idealize the presidency as a seat of harmony, and to sell himself as the proper person to place in that seat.  Dick Ostling (who knows, some writer that CNN quotes someone else quoting):

Better to candidly admit there are differences [between Mormons and other Christians] but these should not affect voting decisions. The more effective plea is tolerance, asking voters to follow the spirit of the Constitution's ban on any "religious test" to hold public office.

This requires the faith in America and fundamental courage for truth that made Kennedy one of the most respected presidents in history.  Romney lacks that courage.  (I'd say "Where is Lloyd Bentson when you need him, but the blogosphere is already all over that.") As posted on the liberal-leaning political blog Avenging Angel:

A Kennedy biographer said of JFK's 1960 address to the Southern Baptists, "he knocked religion out of the campaign as an intellectually respectable issue."  By making religion a centerpiece of his campaign, Mitt Romney simply doesn't have that option.  And for that, he has no one to blame but himself.

To which I can only say, indeed.

Discussion of Hope for the Truth

There is breadth and depth to the truth.  Lies and departures from the truth, which seem so complicated, are perhaps fundamentally simpler.  At best, they can only form a thin veneer over the truth.  Most everyday lies can only lightly shade the truth slightly.  All the things that hold up the lie are actually the same truths that hold up integrity.   Many Mormons, including certain LDS spokespeople and Mitt Romney, are uncomfortable explaining their religion.  That is true and remains true.

Interestingly, The Oxford Companion to Philosophy does not have an entry for "lie" or "honest."  It does have an entry for "truth" written by E.J. Lowe which covers the more recent history of evaluation of the truth, which concludes with a statement again pragmatists and sophists saying,

fortunately! --it seems unlikely that philosophers will ever entirely give up asking "What is truth?" and assuming that the answer is something of importance.

"Fortunately," indeed!  Wikipedia has a very nice entry on lying, which suggests that the two main reasons for lying are avoidance of punishment and predation.  Seeking political office is a form of predation.  Everyone knows how hard it is to maintain an ethical and truthful center while selling a part of yourself in employment or selling a product; it is difficult to imagine how one sells one's entire being as required in politics while maintaining any ethics at all.

Conflating avoidance of punishment with avoidance of the truth is pretending at innocence.  Romney isn't a child; he knows perfectly well that his Mormonism may cost him the presidency.  It is a punishment, a denial of a goal, that he wishes to avoid.  Unfortunately, in pretending that he doesn't know the truth, he makes himself ineligible for the trust of the nation on the more fundamental issue of integrity.  As the pretending plays out amongst the actors on the national stage (friends, foes, competitors, media) the non-sense it generates will continue to grow and probably sink him (he is likely already sunk).  Only hope for the truth, and the strength and courage required to withstand the vortex of non-sense, could have limited, boundaried, and ultimately subdued the other kinds of questions about his religion.

P.S.: Elsewhere on the Web

There was more good stuff on the internet than I could fit into my many links.  The NPR news blog has a little fun with an election debating Jesus and Satan.  Aside from the fun, the article is also a well written overview of the issue with a little more emphasis on taking a second look at Huckabee and his religious statements lately.

Breakfast With Pandora took a kinder, gentler approach as compared to my schoolmarm finger-wagging, evaluating the differences between Mormonism as explained by moi (yup, I'm quoted) and his own Protestant-based beliefs, ended with:

As for Mitt Romney, I think he should be proud of the story that his faith puts forth.  None of us know for sure what the absolute truth of the universe is.  It would be nice if we could be both proud of what we believe, and yet not arrogant about it, either.

It would be nice indeed.