The issue has faded off the front pages and slogged into the courtrooms now--the Obama administration's attempt to force religious employers to pay for medical insurance for their employees that includes contraception and abortion coverage. The only "religious exemption" to be allowed was for actual houses of worship themselves; if a religious group has hospitals, schools, universities or other charitable activities, they were to be outside the exemption. There was a lot of uproar, and the spectacle of the Southern Baptist Convention siding with the Roman Catholic Church against the Federal Government. The uproar has quieted down, but the lawsuits have been filed. One small business even persuaded a judge to grant an injunction against the rule being applied to their operation--something that usually only happens if the judge thinks the plaintiff has a chance of winning his case.
But over time, this to-do reminded me of something I wrote almost exactly five years ago. It started as a comment on my online friend Steve Sensenig's "Theological Musings" blog. Steve thought enough of my comment to re-post it as a guest post. I re-copied it to my own blog as well: http://postmodernredneck.blogspot.com/2007/09/basic-question.html For those who might want to see the original extensive discussion, it's here: http://www.theologicalmusingsblog.com/2007/08/27/how-not-to-judge-someones-orthodoxy/
For those who would prefer the quick version, I was pointing out a dichotomy that has existed in Christianity for most of its history. Is Christianity (a) a set of activities engaged in on Sunday morning, led by official staff with a set of tenets enforced by the staff, or it is (b) a way of living, 24/7/365, in relationship with God and with each other. Some might say it is both, but I pointed out five years ago that it is not a stable symbiosis--over time, (a) crowds out (b). In fact, thinking about it now, I would add that in times when (a) dominates, the church is dull, boring, and what we might call "dead"--as well as having problems with internal corruption (pastoral adultery scandals among the Pentacostals and charismatics, a la Bakker, Swaggert, et al., pedophilia scandals in the Roman Catholic church, financial scandals among the Eastern Orthodox--and that's just the modern stuff, history is full of it!). And in times of renewal and revival, (b) comes to the fore: people begin to focus on applying Christianity to their daily lives and to the society they live in. The abolition of slavery in Great Britain and its possessions was one result of this; the growth of abolitionist sentiment in the United States was likewise a result of the early 19th century revivals, and the failure of those revivals to penetrate as far in the Deep South as they did in the North and Midwest was a major cause of the Civil War. (At Red River Meeting House, the beginning of the Second Great Awakening and the Camp Meeting movement in 1800, attendees saw the Holy Spirit falling on blacks as well as whites and concluded that black people did have souls--contrary to what some southern preachers were teaching--and that slavery was wrong. That area, on the Kentucky-Tennessee border, became an anti-slavery stronghold, and may well have been a factor in Kentucky not joining the Confederacy. If that revival had spread farther south as well as to the north, the Civil War might have been avoidable.)
Back to the present day: It came to me that the administration's mandate does make some sense if religion is limited to what you do inside a building on Sunday morning or some other specified time, and is not expected to have any real influence on what you do the rest of the week. So it is a result of, a "fruit" to use a Biblical term, of the (a) view of Christianity. But the mandate is a total rejection of (b), claiming to override any place for Christian principles in the workplace or the health insurance market. So this mandate controversy is a debate over the real nature of Christianity, not just what some in the government think it is, but what it ought to be, and to some extent, who gets to decide? The fate of real religious freedom in this country hangs in the balance.
Sunday, August 19, 2012
Sunday, April 8, 2012
A Matter of Evidence: Thoughts for Easter
No, the last post was not an April Fool's joke. I did not like writing it, but it is a part of how I got to where I am today. But I do have a post for Easter Sunday. In the past week Andrew Sullivan, a much more known blogger than I am, wrote about the need to get back to Jesus--the real Jesus, not what the church has made of him. He cited Thomas Jefferson's attempt to cut out all the parts of the New Testament that he thought did not belong there. But in fact, this actually impedes finding out the truth about Jesus.
I studied under a professor who had done a master's degree thesis on the comparison of the evidence for Jesus of Nazareth and Alexander the Great. He gave a lecture on that topic every year in his class on New Testament Introduction. I do not have a copy of his thesis, nor his footnotes, but I am going to give a brief overview of the matter here.
Alexander lived in the fourth century B.C. and Jesus was on earth in the first century A.D. Nobody now living on the earth was present in either period, and there are no scientific "experiments" that can be performed to determine what happened back then, so all we can go by is the historical evidence. And this primarily means the written evidence; archeology is limited to study of artifacts that survive to modern times, and is mostly about general conditions, not specific individuals. So let's look at some of the written evidence.
For Jesus, the primary sources on His life are the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The traditions of the early church say that Mark wrote first and John wrote last. Of the four, Matthew and John were part of the inner group of Jesus' disciples, "the Twelve." They were eyewitnesses of what happened. Mark was apparently younger; he may have witnessed some of the events he recorded, but he is also named as an associate of Peter, another of the Twelve, and could have learned from him as an eyewitness like Matthew and John. Luke was a Gentile rather than a Jew, and became a Christian later than the others, but his travels with Paul (including to Jerusalem) would have made it possible for him to access the eyewitnesses also.
For Alexander, there were first-hand accounts written after his death, including one by Ptolemy, one of his generals who ended up ruling Egypt. But none of those eyewitness accounts have survived to the present time. Even the second-hand accounts that relied on those eyewitnesses have not survived. All that we have about Alexander the Great is third- and fourth-hand accounts based on the earlier reports. One that some scholars consider the best is Arrian, a Greco-Roman historian from the second century A.D. (almost 500 years after Alexander's death!)
What about the quality of the work in passing on these accounts? There was no printing press, so all copies had to be handwritten by scribes. How accurate were those scribes, and how much did survive? On Alexander, it is pretty bleak: what we have is a small number of manuscripts; the earliest date from the Middle Ages, hundreds of years later than Arrian's writing and even farther from Alexander's day.
For the Gospels, we do not have the originals, the "autographs" as scholars call them. But we do have literally thousands of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament accumulated over the centuries before printing started. There are complete or nearly complete New Testaments from the 300s, and portions and fragments that are even older. It has been fashionable in some circles for the last couple of hundred years to claim that the Gospels were not eyewitness accounts, but were composed a couple of hundred years later, and incorporated myths and legends that had grown up by then. This is one area where the archeologists have dug the ground out from under their feet: years ago a papyrus fragment containing part of John's Gospel was found in Egypt. It was dated to about 125 A.D., within fifty years of the traditional date of its writing, and on the opposite side of the Mediterranean Sea from where John wrote. And in the last couple of months news leaked out that a fragment of Mark's Gospel has been found that dates to the first century! The "hundreds of years later" claim does not hold water.
But how good were those scribes at copying accurately? Actually, very good. There is a science called Textual Criticism that looks at these manuscripts, comparing them to each other, looking for the scribal errors and variations. They can often tell which later manuscript was copied as part of a chain going back to a specific one of the oldest ones, because the variations got passed on down the chain. But these variations do not add up to much. Out of the entire New Testament, all the disputed and questionable passages put together add up to about half a page--that's all! And no major doctrine of the New Testament is affected by those questionable passages.
The truth is, the church scribes were very accurate, all things considered. What they were doing was an important part of their faith, and they took pains to do it right. The Jewish scribes were just as good: one of the results from study of the Dead Sea Scrolls was how little difference there was between the Scrolls and the later Hebrew copies of the Old Testament.
As for the claim that "myths and legends" grew up and were incorporated into the Gospels, the archeological evidence now has cut the available time too short; the evidence is too strong that all four Gospels were written within the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses (In I Corinthians Paul wrote that there were 500 hundred people who saw the Risen Christ at one incident, and most of them were still alive when he wrote that).
The other evidence is in the writing style of the Gospels themselves: They do not read like "myths and legends," but like matter-of-fact reportage. In a paper delivered at Cambridge University in 1959, C. S. Lewis (his academic field was medieval literature) wrote about John chapter 8:
"I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage--though it no doubt may contain errors--pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell [companion and biographer of Samuel Johnson in the 1700s]. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read."
From "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" published in "The Seeing Eye" (1967) and later in "Christian Reflections" in 1994.
We have better evidence for the life and actions of Jesus of Nazareth than we do for Alexander the Great, or nearly any other figure of ancient history. Some people may not like the evidence, or the conclusions it leads to. But that is another issue. But we live in the real world, not anyone's fantasy world, and sooner or later we must face up to The God Who Is There rather than the god we wish was there.
I studied under a professor who had done a master's degree thesis on the comparison of the evidence for Jesus of Nazareth and Alexander the Great. He gave a lecture on that topic every year in his class on New Testament Introduction. I do not have a copy of his thesis, nor his footnotes, but I am going to give a brief overview of the matter here.
Alexander lived in the fourth century B.C. and Jesus was on earth in the first century A.D. Nobody now living on the earth was present in either period, and there are no scientific "experiments" that can be performed to determine what happened back then, so all we can go by is the historical evidence. And this primarily means the written evidence; archeology is limited to study of artifacts that survive to modern times, and is mostly about general conditions, not specific individuals. So let's look at some of the written evidence.
For Jesus, the primary sources on His life are the four Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The traditions of the early church say that Mark wrote first and John wrote last. Of the four, Matthew and John were part of the inner group of Jesus' disciples, "the Twelve." They were eyewitnesses of what happened. Mark was apparently younger; he may have witnessed some of the events he recorded, but he is also named as an associate of Peter, another of the Twelve, and could have learned from him as an eyewitness like Matthew and John. Luke was a Gentile rather than a Jew, and became a Christian later than the others, but his travels with Paul (including to Jerusalem) would have made it possible for him to access the eyewitnesses also.
For Alexander, there were first-hand accounts written after his death, including one by Ptolemy, one of his generals who ended up ruling Egypt. But none of those eyewitness accounts have survived to the present time. Even the second-hand accounts that relied on those eyewitnesses have not survived. All that we have about Alexander the Great is third- and fourth-hand accounts based on the earlier reports. One that some scholars consider the best is Arrian, a Greco-Roman historian from the second century A.D. (almost 500 years after Alexander's death!)
What about the quality of the work in passing on these accounts? There was no printing press, so all copies had to be handwritten by scribes. How accurate were those scribes, and how much did survive? On Alexander, it is pretty bleak: what we have is a small number of manuscripts; the earliest date from the Middle Ages, hundreds of years later than Arrian's writing and even farther from Alexander's day.
For the Gospels, we do not have the originals, the "autographs" as scholars call them. But we do have literally thousands of manuscripts of the Greek New Testament accumulated over the centuries before printing started. There are complete or nearly complete New Testaments from the 300s, and portions and fragments that are even older. It has been fashionable in some circles for the last couple of hundred years to claim that the Gospels were not eyewitness accounts, but were composed a couple of hundred years later, and incorporated myths and legends that had grown up by then. This is one area where the archeologists have dug the ground out from under their feet: years ago a papyrus fragment containing part of John's Gospel was found in Egypt. It was dated to about 125 A.D., within fifty years of the traditional date of its writing, and on the opposite side of the Mediterranean Sea from where John wrote. And in the last couple of months news leaked out that a fragment of Mark's Gospel has been found that dates to the first century! The "hundreds of years later" claim does not hold water.
But how good were those scribes at copying accurately? Actually, very good. There is a science called Textual Criticism that looks at these manuscripts, comparing them to each other, looking for the scribal errors and variations. They can often tell which later manuscript was copied as part of a chain going back to a specific one of the oldest ones, because the variations got passed on down the chain. But these variations do not add up to much. Out of the entire New Testament, all the disputed and questionable passages put together add up to about half a page--that's all! And no major doctrine of the New Testament is affected by those questionable passages.
The truth is, the church scribes were very accurate, all things considered. What they were doing was an important part of their faith, and they took pains to do it right. The Jewish scribes were just as good: one of the results from study of the Dead Sea Scrolls was how little difference there was between the Scrolls and the later Hebrew copies of the Old Testament.
As for the claim that "myths and legends" grew up and were incorporated into the Gospels, the archeological evidence now has cut the available time too short; the evidence is too strong that all four Gospels were written within the lifetimes of the eyewitnesses (In I Corinthians Paul wrote that there were 500 hundred people who saw the Risen Christ at one incident, and most of them were still alive when he wrote that).
The other evidence is in the writing style of the Gospels themselves: They do not read like "myths and legends," but like matter-of-fact reportage. In a paper delivered at Cambridge University in 1959, C. S. Lewis (his academic field was medieval literature) wrote about John chapter 8:
"I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage--though it no doubt may contain errors--pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell [companion and biographer of Samuel Johnson in the 1700s]. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read."
From "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism" published in "The Seeing Eye" (1967) and later in "Christian Reflections" in 1994.
We have better evidence for the life and actions of Jesus of Nazareth than we do for Alexander the Great, or nearly any other figure of ancient history. Some people may not like the evidence, or the conclusions it leads to. But that is another issue. But we live in the real world, not anyone's fantasy world, and sooner or later we must face up to The God Who Is There rather than the god we wish was there.
Sunday, April 1, 2012
One Redneck's Politics, Part 4: Liberal Theology
I referred to the idea of this post earlier, and finally found some time to get it out of my system. It is definitely part of the reason I am no longer the liberal I was brought up to be. My college degree is in theology, along with Christian Education. And yes, I studied both conservative and liberal theological ideas. (A lot of the liberal seminaries only teach the liberal views, mentioning conservative views only to mock them.)
At first glance, it might look like there is a sort of spectrum, with Liberal at one end and Conservative at the other, and individual people scattered out all along the line. And it often appears that way. But the real problem is, that "spectrum" is not all Christianity.
Liberal theology began in Europe in the 1700s in the universities and clergy of the state-supported "established" churches (the kind of thing the framers of our Bill of Rights intended to avoid). It was made possible by the institution of the professional clergy--men who made their living from the church and often had no clue how to make a living any other way. And from the very beginning there was an inherent dishonesty at its very core. There have always been people who cease to believe in Christianity; it even happens to pastors and other church leaders. Often such people walk away from the church and find other ways to make a living. I am saddened on behalf of such people, but I do not blame them for what they do; at least they have some integrity left. But those who started and maintained liberal theology left the beliefs of Christianity, and yet stayed in the professional ministry, stayed in the seminary faculties, stayed in the denominational organization--and lived a lie the whole time. In the local church, they used the same vocabulary as true believers but with their own definitions, different from those of historic Christianity. Among themselves, they developed new ideas about the origin of the Bible--all theories spun out of thin air, with no historical evidence to back anything up--and about everything based on the Bible. But they learned to be careful to hide their real beliefs, or lack of them, in public until they gained control. And overall, their beliefs were not the historic doctrines of Christianity.
And gradually, they did gain control of denominations, colleges and seminaries. Francis A. Schaeffer wrote about what had happened in the Northern Presbyterian denomination: In the 1890s, a professor at Union Theological Seminary was "defrocked" (officially put out of the ministry, his ordination revoked) for teaching liberal theology. But by the 1930s, J. Gresham Machen, one of the leading conservative theologians, was defrocked for being a conservative. The liberals had gained control of the denominational organization, and tightened that control after many conservatives left and formed a new Presbyterian body.
By the 1930s, all of what were called the "mainline" Protestant denominations were controlled by those who held to liberal theology. These included the Northern Presbyterians (now called the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. since merging with the Southern Presbyterians), the Episcopal Church, the American Baptists, the United Methodists, the Congregational-Christian Church (result of a merger between the Congregationalists, descended from the New England Puritans, and another group and now part of the United Church of Christ), the Evangelical Lutheran Church (the largest Lutheran body at that time). By the 1950s, a new denomination joined them--the Disciples of Christ, split off from the independent Christian Churches, a loose group with no denominational structure (the liberals proceeded to set one up).
Now, the control is not absolute and complete, especially at the local level. Even in the 1950s, often the members of the congregation were more conservative than their pastors. And individual congregations often were quite conservative and taught historic Christian doctrine locally. And not all pastors were completely liberal. I can remember when Don Wildmon, a Methodist minister, began to speak out on moral issues, he was upset that the press labeled him a "fundamentalist," a term from the '30s. He very likely held some liberal views on the Bible and theology, but was still morally conservative. But such people are now in the minority in these denominations and have little clout beyond the local level.
But what does all this have to do with politics? Well, liberal churchmen and liberal politicians have worked together for the past century in this country. There was a Religious Left long before anyone ever heard of a Religious Right in the '80s. The clergy of the liberal churches pushed for the welfare state from the beginning, and for every liberal cause since. And especially in the early years of the twentieth century, the backing of the pastors and denominations gave credibility to the plans of the liberal politicians.
The question boils down to, if a liberal pastor can stand up and lead his congregation in the Apostles' Creed or other historic statement of faith and not mean it--what does that imply about a liberal politician who is elected to office and takes an oath to uphold the Constitution? Can we trust him, if we can't trust his pastor?
At first glance, it might look like there is a sort of spectrum, with Liberal at one end and Conservative at the other, and individual people scattered out all along the line. And it often appears that way. But the real problem is, that "spectrum" is not all Christianity.
Liberal theology began in Europe in the 1700s in the universities and clergy of the state-supported "established" churches (the kind of thing the framers of our Bill of Rights intended to avoid). It was made possible by the institution of the professional clergy--men who made their living from the church and often had no clue how to make a living any other way. And from the very beginning there was an inherent dishonesty at its very core. There have always been people who cease to believe in Christianity; it even happens to pastors and other church leaders. Often such people walk away from the church and find other ways to make a living. I am saddened on behalf of such people, but I do not blame them for what they do; at least they have some integrity left. But those who started and maintained liberal theology left the beliefs of Christianity, and yet stayed in the professional ministry, stayed in the seminary faculties, stayed in the denominational organization--and lived a lie the whole time. In the local church, they used the same vocabulary as true believers but with their own definitions, different from those of historic Christianity. Among themselves, they developed new ideas about the origin of the Bible--all theories spun out of thin air, with no historical evidence to back anything up--and about everything based on the Bible. But they learned to be careful to hide their real beliefs, or lack of them, in public until they gained control. And overall, their beliefs were not the historic doctrines of Christianity.
And gradually, they did gain control of denominations, colleges and seminaries. Francis A. Schaeffer wrote about what had happened in the Northern Presbyterian denomination: In the 1890s, a professor at Union Theological Seminary was "defrocked" (officially put out of the ministry, his ordination revoked) for teaching liberal theology. But by the 1930s, J. Gresham Machen, one of the leading conservative theologians, was defrocked for being a conservative. The liberals had gained control of the denominational organization, and tightened that control after many conservatives left and formed a new Presbyterian body.
By the 1930s, all of what were called the "mainline" Protestant denominations were controlled by those who held to liberal theology. These included the Northern Presbyterians (now called the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. since merging with the Southern Presbyterians), the Episcopal Church, the American Baptists, the United Methodists, the Congregational-Christian Church (result of a merger between the Congregationalists, descended from the New England Puritans, and another group and now part of the United Church of Christ), the Evangelical Lutheran Church (the largest Lutheran body at that time). By the 1950s, a new denomination joined them--the Disciples of Christ, split off from the independent Christian Churches, a loose group with no denominational structure (the liberals proceeded to set one up).
Now, the control is not absolute and complete, especially at the local level. Even in the 1950s, often the members of the congregation were more conservative than their pastors. And individual congregations often were quite conservative and taught historic Christian doctrine locally. And not all pastors were completely liberal. I can remember when Don Wildmon, a Methodist minister, began to speak out on moral issues, he was upset that the press labeled him a "fundamentalist," a term from the '30s. He very likely held some liberal views on the Bible and theology, but was still morally conservative. But such people are now in the minority in these denominations and have little clout beyond the local level.
But what does all this have to do with politics? Well, liberal churchmen and liberal politicians have worked together for the past century in this country. There was a Religious Left long before anyone ever heard of a Religious Right in the '80s. The clergy of the liberal churches pushed for the welfare state from the beginning, and for every liberal cause since. And especially in the early years of the twentieth century, the backing of the pastors and denominations gave credibility to the plans of the liberal politicians.
The question boils down to, if a liberal pastor can stand up and lead his congregation in the Apostles' Creed or other historic statement of faith and not mean it--what does that imply about a liberal politician who is elected to office and takes an oath to uphold the Constitution? Can we trust him, if we can't trust his pastor?
Saturday, November 12, 2011
Why Liberal Policies Don't Work
I was born five years after the end of World War II, and was in high school when Lyndon Johnson announced his "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" plans. Around that time my grandfather retired and started collecting Social Security. But over the years, it seems that many of these ambitious social programs (and economic programs as well) have fallen far short of the promises made when they began. War on Poverty? We lost! We seem to have just as many poor as we did before Johnson declared war on it; they may be the richest "poor" in the world's history, with more consumer goodies and better lifestyle than the middle class had when I was born, but they are still dependent on government handouts. Social Security? The shrinkage in the pool of workers paying the taxes compared to the number of beneficiaries is bringing the world's largest Ponzi scheme to bankruptcy.
But why? As Charley Brown kept asking during baseball season, "How can we lose when we're so sincere?" At the root of these liberal failures is a basic misconception that ruins everything they try to do: liberal policies are based on a view of human nature that is inaccurate and therefore everything they prescribe does not work well in the real world (Remember what I put in my last post--The Real World Always Wins). Liberal policies of all kinds are based on the idea that people--all people--are basically good, and that if we can just eliminate war, poverty and ignorance all will be very well and we can create a Heaven on Earth.
But are all people basically good? Is this true--does what they are saying correspond to what we see in the real world, now and throughout history? I am a lifelong student of history, American, British, European, world, and often less-commonly studied cultures, and I would have to say that this view is not true to the world we live in. In terms of "goodness" human nature has a rather broad spectrum. There are a few people who are in fact very good; a larger number who try to be as good as they can. There are a much larger number who are as good as they think they have to be, and another substantial number who are as bad as they think they can get away with. And there are some people who simply are Evil, and have no intention of changing. And I think a strong case can be made that this description fits the Real World we live in better than the liberal view.
The idea that all people are basically good has been around for a long time, but seldom widely held. Of the American "Founding Fathers" only Thomas Jefferson seemed to express any form of it. It definitely was not held by the men who wrote the Constitution in 1787 (Jefferson was serving as ambassador to France at the time, and was not part of the effort, and was not sure whether he even liked it); that is why the Constitution included all those "checks and balances." It was the "Victorian Optimism" of the 1800s that brought it into style, first in England and Europe, but much later in the U.S.--it did not take hold here until well after the Civil War. It was widely but not universally adopted by the "elites" by the 1920s, but its greatest popularity came in the growth of prosperity after WW2.
But why should this assumption about human nature matter so much? It matters because if one of your basic assumptions is wrong, every thing you try to do based on that assumption will turn out badly. It would be like trying to balance your checkbook or fill out your tax return, when you are absolutely convinced that 2+2=6 (and therefore 4+4=12, and so on--everything you add up, all the way through, is tainted and ruined by that basic misconception).
Looking at the history of the last century alone, this wrong view of human nature is why British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain could not deal effectively with Adolph Hitler in 1938, why FDR could not handle Josef Stalin, why Jimmy Carter could not handle Ayatollah Khomeini. And it is why liberal policies and enactments keep running afoul of "the Law of Unintended Consequences." No matter what they prescribe, it either does not work as they thought it would, or people find ways to game the system or get around their new rules that they did not foresee. All too often, the policy they implement makes things worse instead of better, either by failing to cure the problem or causing new problems worse than the original ones.
The final proof that the liberal view of human nature is wrong is that they do not stick to it consistently themselves. A liberal will act on it, even with enemies of his own country (as Chamberlain tried to do with Hitler). But let a liberal politician run into one of his own countrymen who dares to disagree with him, and he quickly drops the pretense--these opponents are EVIL! He treats them with contempt, tries any dirty trick available to overcome the opposition. He totally drops the "all people are basically good" "schtick" when he meets opposition in his own country, even if he still applies it to the enemies of his country.
In contrast, there is the historic Christian view of man: that man was created good, but having free will, chose to disobey his Creator and has ever since been flawed. The all-out version of this teaching is that man is now flawed in all areas: morally and spiritually, of course, but also physically (the long lives of the earliest patriarchs in Genesis express the idea that man was created to live forever and took a while to decline and die at first--the Babylonians preserved a similar tradition about their ancestors' long lifespans), and intellectually (meaning, nobody is ever as smart as he thinks he is--no matter how many degrees he has) [And yes, this does include me; and sometimes I even remember it...]. This teaching of traditional Christianity is compatible with the spectrum of human nature that does exist in the real world. It is not compatible with the liberal idea of human nature. But it does work in the Real World we actually live in, and the liberal view on human nature does not. And as I said before, no matter how attractive the theory, The Real World Always Wins.
But why? As Charley Brown kept asking during baseball season, "How can we lose when we're so sincere?" At the root of these liberal failures is a basic misconception that ruins everything they try to do: liberal policies are based on a view of human nature that is inaccurate and therefore everything they prescribe does not work well in the real world (Remember what I put in my last post--The Real World Always Wins). Liberal policies of all kinds are based on the idea that people--all people--are basically good, and that if we can just eliminate war, poverty and ignorance all will be very well and we can create a Heaven on Earth.
But are all people basically good? Is this true--does what they are saying correspond to what we see in the real world, now and throughout history? I am a lifelong student of history, American, British, European, world, and often less-commonly studied cultures, and I would have to say that this view is not true to the world we live in. In terms of "goodness" human nature has a rather broad spectrum. There are a few people who are in fact very good; a larger number who try to be as good as they can. There are a much larger number who are as good as they think they have to be, and another substantial number who are as bad as they think they can get away with. And there are some people who simply are Evil, and have no intention of changing. And I think a strong case can be made that this description fits the Real World we live in better than the liberal view.
The idea that all people are basically good has been around for a long time, but seldom widely held. Of the American "Founding Fathers" only Thomas Jefferson seemed to express any form of it. It definitely was not held by the men who wrote the Constitution in 1787 (Jefferson was serving as ambassador to France at the time, and was not part of the effort, and was not sure whether he even liked it); that is why the Constitution included all those "checks and balances." It was the "Victorian Optimism" of the 1800s that brought it into style, first in England and Europe, but much later in the U.S.--it did not take hold here until well after the Civil War. It was widely but not universally adopted by the "elites" by the 1920s, but its greatest popularity came in the growth of prosperity after WW2.
But why should this assumption about human nature matter so much? It matters because if one of your basic assumptions is wrong, every thing you try to do based on that assumption will turn out badly. It would be like trying to balance your checkbook or fill out your tax return, when you are absolutely convinced that 2+2=6 (and therefore 4+4=12, and so on--everything you add up, all the way through, is tainted and ruined by that basic misconception).
Looking at the history of the last century alone, this wrong view of human nature is why British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain could not deal effectively with Adolph Hitler in 1938, why FDR could not handle Josef Stalin, why Jimmy Carter could not handle Ayatollah Khomeini. And it is why liberal policies and enactments keep running afoul of "the Law of Unintended Consequences." No matter what they prescribe, it either does not work as they thought it would, or people find ways to game the system or get around their new rules that they did not foresee. All too often, the policy they implement makes things worse instead of better, either by failing to cure the problem or causing new problems worse than the original ones.
The final proof that the liberal view of human nature is wrong is that they do not stick to it consistently themselves. A liberal will act on it, even with enemies of his own country (as Chamberlain tried to do with Hitler). But let a liberal politician run into one of his own countrymen who dares to disagree with him, and he quickly drops the pretense--these opponents are EVIL! He treats them with contempt, tries any dirty trick available to overcome the opposition. He totally drops the "all people are basically good" "schtick" when he meets opposition in his own country, even if he still applies it to the enemies of his country.
In contrast, there is the historic Christian view of man: that man was created good, but having free will, chose to disobey his Creator and has ever since been flawed. The all-out version of this teaching is that man is now flawed in all areas: morally and spiritually, of course, but also physically (the long lives of the earliest patriarchs in Genesis express the idea that man was created to live forever and took a while to decline and die at first--the Babylonians preserved a similar tradition about their ancestors' long lifespans), and intellectually (meaning, nobody is ever as smart as he thinks he is--no matter how many degrees he has) [And yes, this does include me; and sometimes I even remember it...]. This teaching of traditional Christianity is compatible with the spectrum of human nature that does exist in the real world. It is not compatible with the liberal idea of human nature. But it does work in the Real World we actually live in, and the liberal view on human nature does not. And as I said before, no matter how attractive the theory, The Real World Always Wins.
Saturday, October 29, 2011
An Interlude
I am going to interrupt the series I've been writing on politics to interject some things that bear on posts to follow. These are important principles that apply to all of life, including politics. One of them I have blogged about before, but I wanted to bring it up again rather than have to include it in the next post. The other is somewhat related to the first, but still important in its own right.
The one I've written about before is a working definition of truth, as given by a professor I studied under in college. "Truth...is a degree of correspondence between what is, and what is said about what is." No matter how high up you are in the ivory towers of academe, or how elevated in political stature, sooner or later what you have said is going to be compared by others to reality; and if it does not match up, you will suffer for it one way or another.
The second one is also very important to remember. It does not matter how pretty your theory is, how tidily it fits with your other opinions, or with your desires. It does not matter how much government research money is available to back you up, how many degrees you and your friends have, or what the consensus among scientists is, or how many and how elaborate computer models are made....The Real World Always Wins! Memorize that...The. Real. World. Always. Wins.!!!
The one I've written about before is a working definition of truth, as given by a professor I studied under in college. "Truth...is a degree of correspondence between what is, and what is said about what is." No matter how high up you are in the ivory towers of academe, or how elevated in political stature, sooner or later what you have said is going to be compared by others to reality; and if it does not match up, you will suffer for it one way or another.
The second one is also very important to remember. It does not matter how pretty your theory is, how tidily it fits with your other opinions, or with your desires. It does not matter how much government research money is available to back you up, how many degrees you and your friends have, or what the consensus among scientists is, or how many and how elaborate computer models are made....The Real World Always Wins! Memorize that...The. Real. World. Always. Wins.!!!
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
One Redneck's Politics, Part 2: A Historical Comparison
I've been having an occasional email discussion with a friend about the political situation lately. My friend is bothered by all the name-calling, noise and general nastiness of the political discourse lately, and would prefer not to accept any label or be too closely associated with either side. I can understand that view, but my knowledge of American history tells me that the vision she has, of people discussing things, disagreeing, but still getting along, has been rather rare in this country. There was a time that the historians call "The Era of Good Feelings" from 1816 to 1824, when partisan bickering was almost minimal; but it did not last. At the best of times, American democracy has a tendency to get messy.
But I do think that the U.S. today is more sharply divided than it has ever been in my lifetime, possibly more divided than at any time since the Civil War. And this time the division is not along any geographic regions, as with the Southern Cotton states and the manufacturing North, but is much more spread out. Even the Red State/Blue State maps of the last few presidential elections do not show the real gravity of the situation: if you look at the first map on this site http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/ , you see the electoral vote by states, and it looks like one side controls the coasts, the Great Lakes area, and a few scattered states elsewhere. But farther down the page, there is a map of the electoral results by counties, and the picture changes dramatically; many of the solidly "blue" states turn out to be dominated by a small highly populated area surrounded by a land mass less densely populated--of the opposite opinion. There are no neat geographic dividing lines between Left and Right. Even if we wanted to, we can not just split the land up and go separate ways as the South tried to in 1861. (Reminder: these maps at the link are of the 2008 election results; there is a strong possibility that a map for 2012 will not look as blue.) The South, as a contiguous defined region, had at least some chance of making it as a nation; the Blue cities have no such chance--they are too dependent on the surrounding Red counties to survive without them. The disagreements, which really are fundamental, are going to have to be worked out over time. It may be some states will be divided into two or more new units, as West Virginia, a mountainous region of small towns and small farms, separated from the Virginia of Tidewater plantations during the Civil War. Most of Illinois would likely be happier without Chicago, and much of upstate New York would not really miss New York City. There has even been a proposal voiced to break California up into five states, because of the cultural differences in that state's regions.
So far, the rhetoric, and actual violence, has not been as bad as in the years leading up to the Civil War. In 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was sitting at his desk on the Senate floor, when Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina walked up behind him and started beating Sumner with a cane. He kept it up until the cane broke. Sumner took several years to recover from the beating, and Brooks received donations to pay the fine the court assessed him--and a lot of canes from all over the South to replace his broken one. The territory of Kansas was being settled in this period, and the violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions got so bad it was called "Bleeding Kansas."
But why did these things get out of hand so badly? Overall, there is some case to be made that the South escalated the rhetoric, and later the violence, and the North responded in kind. And the South escalated the rhetoric because they saw they were beginning to lose the long-term struggle. During the early years of the nineteenth century, the Southern states and the Northern states were equal in number; while the North's greater population gave it an advantage in the House of Representatives, the South maintained an equality in the Senate that would allow it to stop any legislation it disliked. In 1820, the "Missouri Compromise" brought in two new states, Missouri (slave) and Maine (free)--the equilibrium was maintained. But as new territories were acquired by the United States in the 1840s, this equilibrium was about to end. Most of the new land would not have been suited to growing cotton, and would likely be settled primarily by anti-slavery people from the North. The South did not really have the population to fill up these new states-to-be. And as their long-term prospects dimmed, the voices in the South got louder, angrier, and more inclined to violence. I am not saying the North was blameless in the march to violence, but I do think the South led the way in starting the rhetoric and in ratcheting it up. And of course, it was the South that first resorted to arms. They did win the battle at Fort Sumter (and quite a few more) but they lost the war.
I also think one of the major factors leading to the Civil War was that too many people in the South, among the leaders and the ordinary citizens, fell into the trap of believing their own propaganda. They had to learn the hard way that their slogan "One Southerner can whip any five Yankees!" was mistaken: Midwestern farm boys turned out to be as tough, man for man, as any Southerner. And that discovery itself pointed out another of their big mistakes: many in the South assumed the Midwest would side with them against the industrial Northeast; they totally underestimated the anti-slavery sentiment among the small farmers of the Midwestern states. (Another change they had not noticed: in the early 1800s, much produce from Ohio and Indiana was shipped down the Mississippi to market, but by 1860 the railroads provided an alternate route to market.) Another mistaken assumption by the South was that the British would come in on their side to keep the flow of cotton going to their factories. As it turned out, many British politicians were inclined to favor the South, but the mass of the British people was so firmly anti-slavery that it would have been political suicide to intervene.
How does this compare to our situation today? I have heard quite a bit of what comes from both sides, and I think the Left is in the position of the South in the late 1840s. The handwriting is on the wall, and they are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.
In the 1930s the Democrats backed the industrial unions and helped them gain legitimacy; now only six or seven percent of private sector workers belong to unions. Now the main strength of unions is among government employees, but their successes in the past in negotiating lavish pensions and other benefits is threatening to bankrupt cities and states across the country. There was a lot of commotion in Wisconsin earlier this year when a new Republican governor and legislature took steps to curtail union power and benefits; steps in the same direction by the Democrat governor of New York did not attract nearly as much attention.
For many years the public school systems across the country have been a bastion of liberalism. Yet as many have noted, the more tax money is spent on education, the lower the quality of the results. The causes are too many to go into here. But one result is the cracking of the monopoly on education. In the 1920s efforts to shut down the Roman Catholic school systems failed. In the 1980s a new wave of private Christian schools began to appear, followed by the phenomenon of home schooling (my own family was part of this, and our daughter is now teaching her own children). Now charter schools are cropping up all over the landscape, and voucher programs are starting to get past the legal challenges and gain ground. The educators' unions are still fighting, but it is definitely a rear-guard action.
Another albatross around the Democrats' neck is the social welfare programs; people are realizing they cannot be sustained. When Social Security began in the 1930s, there were over 150 people working for each one collecting its benefits; by last year there were three workers per retiree. In the '30s, many who retired at 65 drew benefits for a year or two. My grandfather died in 1973, nine years after retiring. My own father died last year at the age of 90, after 35 years of collecting both Social Security and his pension from Ford Motor Company.
And then there is the regulatory mess. When the Federal government started regulating businesses in the early twentieth century, there was some need for it. But they have kept adding, and adding and adding...the Federal Register shows 81,000 pages of new regulations--just for the past year! Add to that the state government regulations, county and city enactments, zoning boards, and even homeowners' associations that want to tell you what color you can paint your house....A few months ago the President of the US admitted that there hadn't been as many "shovel ready" jobs as expected when Congress passed his stimulus bill. Just this week he voiced concern that we are no longer building great things like the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, they did not have Environmental Impact Statements to file back then! As I mentioned in the last post, it took a year and a half to build the Empire State Building in the early 1930s; a few months ago in an online article, the writer was telling of his co-op association's ten-year effort to get a permit from the city to repair the building they live in.
This is just a sampling. But the point is, whether you call it Progressivism, Liberalism, or just the Democrat Party, it is failing, and a large part of the American people are getting soured on it. And the "Blue States", "liberals" or just "Democrats", whatever you choose to call them, showing signs of getting scared, just as the South did. They cannot bring themselves to admit it, any more than the South could, but they are scared, and they are reacting the same way, by making more noise and getting nastier.
Some may say there is little to choose from in rhetoric between the two sides, but I do not agree. It is one thing to call a politician a "Marxist" or "socialist"--one might argue whether the label is accurate in a particular case, but these are at least terms that indicate a political philosophy by the way, there is a socialist caucus in the US Congress, and a 2009 newsletter from the American Socialist Party claimed it had 70 members--I looked at the list, and a lot of them are still there, and many of them are quite well-known). [I tried to link to Gateway Pundit's post on this, but either the computer or Blogger would not cooperate]. But on Labor Day of this year, Jimmy Hoffa, president of the Teamsters Union, referred to Tea Partiers as "sons of bitches"; President Obama spoke after him, and did not then and has not since done anything to show disapproval of that language. That was not a description of a political philosophy, it was a coarsening and degrading of our political discourse. And, I think, it is a sign of decline and failure of liberalism in this country.
But I do think that the U.S. today is more sharply divided than it has ever been in my lifetime, possibly more divided than at any time since the Civil War. And this time the division is not along any geographic regions, as with the Southern Cotton states and the manufacturing North, but is much more spread out. Even the Red State/Blue State maps of the last few presidential elections do not show the real gravity of the situation: if you look at the first map on this site http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/election/2008/ , you see the electoral vote by states, and it looks like one side controls the coasts, the Great Lakes area, and a few scattered states elsewhere. But farther down the page, there is a map of the electoral results by counties, and the picture changes dramatically; many of the solidly "blue" states turn out to be dominated by a small highly populated area surrounded by a land mass less densely populated--of the opposite opinion. There are no neat geographic dividing lines between Left and Right. Even if we wanted to, we can not just split the land up and go separate ways as the South tried to in 1861. (Reminder: these maps at the link are of the 2008 election results; there is a strong possibility that a map for 2012 will not look as blue.) The South, as a contiguous defined region, had at least some chance of making it as a nation; the Blue cities have no such chance--they are too dependent on the surrounding Red counties to survive without them. The disagreements, which really are fundamental, are going to have to be worked out over time. It may be some states will be divided into two or more new units, as West Virginia, a mountainous region of small towns and small farms, separated from the Virginia of Tidewater plantations during the Civil War. Most of Illinois would likely be happier without Chicago, and much of upstate New York would not really miss New York City. There has even been a proposal voiced to break California up into five states, because of the cultural differences in that state's regions.
So far, the rhetoric, and actual violence, has not been as bad as in the years leading up to the Civil War. In 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts was sitting at his desk on the Senate floor, when Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina walked up behind him and started beating Sumner with a cane. He kept it up until the cane broke. Sumner took several years to recover from the beating, and Brooks received donations to pay the fine the court assessed him--and a lot of canes from all over the South to replace his broken one. The territory of Kansas was being settled in this period, and the violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery factions got so bad it was called "Bleeding Kansas."
But why did these things get out of hand so badly? Overall, there is some case to be made that the South escalated the rhetoric, and later the violence, and the North responded in kind. And the South escalated the rhetoric because they saw they were beginning to lose the long-term struggle. During the early years of the nineteenth century, the Southern states and the Northern states were equal in number; while the North's greater population gave it an advantage in the House of Representatives, the South maintained an equality in the Senate that would allow it to stop any legislation it disliked. In 1820, the "Missouri Compromise" brought in two new states, Missouri (slave) and Maine (free)--the equilibrium was maintained. But as new territories were acquired by the United States in the 1840s, this equilibrium was about to end. Most of the new land would not have been suited to growing cotton, and would likely be settled primarily by anti-slavery people from the North. The South did not really have the population to fill up these new states-to-be. And as their long-term prospects dimmed, the voices in the South got louder, angrier, and more inclined to violence. I am not saying the North was blameless in the march to violence, but I do think the South led the way in starting the rhetoric and in ratcheting it up. And of course, it was the South that first resorted to arms. They did win the battle at Fort Sumter (and quite a few more) but they lost the war.
I also think one of the major factors leading to the Civil War was that too many people in the South, among the leaders and the ordinary citizens, fell into the trap of believing their own propaganda. They had to learn the hard way that their slogan "One Southerner can whip any five Yankees!" was mistaken: Midwestern farm boys turned out to be as tough, man for man, as any Southerner. And that discovery itself pointed out another of their big mistakes: many in the South assumed the Midwest would side with them against the industrial Northeast; they totally underestimated the anti-slavery sentiment among the small farmers of the Midwestern states. (Another change they had not noticed: in the early 1800s, much produce from Ohio and Indiana was shipped down the Mississippi to market, but by 1860 the railroads provided an alternate route to market.) Another mistaken assumption by the South was that the British would come in on their side to keep the flow of cotton going to their factories. As it turned out, many British politicians were inclined to favor the South, but the mass of the British people was so firmly anti-slavery that it would have been political suicide to intervene.
How does this compare to our situation today? I have heard quite a bit of what comes from both sides, and I think the Left is in the position of the South in the late 1840s. The handwriting is on the wall, and they are losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people.
In the 1930s the Democrats backed the industrial unions and helped them gain legitimacy; now only six or seven percent of private sector workers belong to unions. Now the main strength of unions is among government employees, but their successes in the past in negotiating lavish pensions and other benefits is threatening to bankrupt cities and states across the country. There was a lot of commotion in Wisconsin earlier this year when a new Republican governor and legislature took steps to curtail union power and benefits; steps in the same direction by the Democrat governor of New York did not attract nearly as much attention.
For many years the public school systems across the country have been a bastion of liberalism. Yet as many have noted, the more tax money is spent on education, the lower the quality of the results. The causes are too many to go into here. But one result is the cracking of the monopoly on education. In the 1920s efforts to shut down the Roman Catholic school systems failed. In the 1980s a new wave of private Christian schools began to appear, followed by the phenomenon of home schooling (my own family was part of this, and our daughter is now teaching her own children). Now charter schools are cropping up all over the landscape, and voucher programs are starting to get past the legal challenges and gain ground. The educators' unions are still fighting, but it is definitely a rear-guard action.
Another albatross around the Democrats' neck is the social welfare programs; people are realizing they cannot be sustained. When Social Security began in the 1930s, there were over 150 people working for each one collecting its benefits; by last year there were three workers per retiree. In the '30s, many who retired at 65 drew benefits for a year or two. My grandfather died in 1973, nine years after retiring. My own father died last year at the age of 90, after 35 years of collecting both Social Security and his pension from Ford Motor Company.
And then there is the regulatory mess. When the Federal government started regulating businesses in the early twentieth century, there was some need for it. But they have kept adding, and adding and adding...the Federal Register shows 81,000 pages of new regulations--just for the past year! Add to that the state government regulations, county and city enactments, zoning boards, and even homeowners' associations that want to tell you what color you can paint your house....A few months ago the President of the US admitted that there hadn't been as many "shovel ready" jobs as expected when Congress passed his stimulus bill. Just this week he voiced concern that we are no longer building great things like the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, they did not have Environmental Impact Statements to file back then! As I mentioned in the last post, it took a year and a half to build the Empire State Building in the early 1930s; a few months ago in an online article, the writer was telling of his co-op association's ten-year effort to get a permit from the city to repair the building they live in.
This is just a sampling. But the point is, whether you call it Progressivism, Liberalism, or just the Democrat Party, it is failing, and a large part of the American people are getting soured on it. And the "Blue States", "liberals" or just "Democrats", whatever you choose to call them, showing signs of getting scared, just as the South did. They cannot bring themselves to admit it, any more than the South could, but they are scared, and they are reacting the same way, by making more noise and getting nastier.
Some may say there is little to choose from in rhetoric between the two sides, but I do not agree. It is one thing to call a politician a "Marxist" or "socialist"--one might argue whether the label is accurate in a particular case, but these are at least terms that indicate a political philosophy by the way, there is a socialist caucus in the US Congress, and a 2009 newsletter from the American Socialist Party claimed it had 70 members--I looked at the list, and a lot of them are still there, and many of them are quite well-known). [I tried to link to Gateway Pundit's post on this, but either the computer or Blogger would not cooperate]. But on Labor Day of this year, Jimmy Hoffa, president of the Teamsters Union, referred to Tea Partiers as "sons of bitches"; President Obama spoke after him, and did not then and has not since done anything to show disapproval of that language. That was not a description of a political philosophy, it was a coarsening and degrading of our political discourse. And, I think, it is a sign of decline and failure of liberalism in this country.
Monday, October 24, 2011
One Redneck's Politics
I said when I began blogging that there were other blogs on politics and I did not plan to write on that topic. But lately the things rattling around my head are more in that direction, and I have a few posts taking shape that bear on current politics. I am not going to endorse any particular candidates, but I do have some things I have been thinking concerning the intersection of politics, faith, and general culture. If it goes on too long and gets too specific I may have to set it up as a separate blog, but for now I'll keep it under the Postmodern Redneck schtick.
Before I start in, I should say a bit about my own journey up to now. I've called myself Postmodern Redneck because, as I said at the start, I Are One! On one side of my family I had (until the Depression) small farmers and some small businessmen, primarily of English ancestry, at the western edge of Ohio's part of Appalachia. On the other, mountain folk from eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, of Scotch-Irish extraction (my grandfather was a Burns, my grandmother a Webb--both good Scottish names, but the family tradition is that they came to America from Ireland. There were major settlements of Protestant Scots in Ireland in the 1600s, and a quarter of a million of them moved on to America during the 1700s). My grandfather and his sons spent some time working in the coal mines; otherwise, it was likely, as the old saying goes, "Whatever it takes to get the coon."
I was born in 1950, brought up in a UAW household. My parents revered FDR, and between them and my schoolteachers, I was brought up to be a good little liberal. (There was one incident, though: sometime when I was two they got too close to an Eisenhower rally, and I picked up the catchy slogan "I like Ike!" It apparently took a few spankings after I got home to get me to shut up....) Of course, back in the '50s and early '60s, even the Republicans were liberal, primarily from the Northeast like Nelson Rockefeller.
There were a number of things that moved me away from my liberal upbringing. One is my love of history--all periods, most places, but American history especially. Another was when I started studying theology in Bible college and learned something about "liberal" theology, which has always been hand-in-glove with liberal politics (there will be a post on that in this series, I suspect). Then, after college, as I drifted away from pulpit ministry I found myself making a living for my family in small business (my great-grandfather Hawkins, who died before I was born, had owned a bus company in his small town and an electrical contracting firm).
But probably the biggest factor was the drift of the Democrat Party itself. There's a saying around, "Not your grandfather's Democrat Party." It's true; the Democrats have traveled a long way from the time when I was born. Franklin D. Roosevelt was totally opposed to the unionization of Federal employees; now government employee unions are a mainstay of the Democrat Party. I grew up during the Cold War; there would be no room among today's Democrats for men like Harry Truman, John Kennedy, or "Scoop" Jackson. It was JFK who said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Today's Democrats are all about what they are going to do for us (and to us!).
The change in me had already taken place when I read "Modern Times," an account of the years from the end of World War I to the Reagan/Thatcher years by the English historian Paul Johnson. One thing he wrote in that book has always stayed with me. He said the real divide, in Britain and America, was not between liberal and conservative, Tory and Labour, or Republican and Democrat; it was between those who see the state and its power as the answer to every problem, and those who believe in individual freedom. You can have liberal or conservative statists; they may want to use the power of the state for different problems, but they both see the state as the ultimate answer.
This resonated with me because of something C.S. Lewis had written, I think in "Mere Christianity"--that if an individual man is a creature who lives for seventy years or so and dies and is ended, then a state that can last for hundreds of years is more important; but if man is a spiritual being who can live for eternity, then a state is a transient, passing thing, and the individual is much more important than the State.
At this point, I could probably be described as a "libertarian" (small "L"--my older son has considered being a precinct officer for the Libertarian Party, but I'm not into that). I think we as a nation have reached the point where we have too much government regulation, at all levels: not just the EPA and OSHA, but state regulations, county licenses and boards, zoning rules that go beyond sense, and even homeowners' associations. (At least I finally got free of those where I live now.) The busybodies have been allowed too much control and are strangling us! As a remodeling contractor, I have had experience with the building codes and electrical codes. The basics of these are sensible and necessary; but the revisions every few years have gone far beyond the basics. I would say that most of the revisions are trivial, made to justify the bureaucrats who write them staying on the payroll; a few are important; and once in a while they make a change that I look at and think, "They had the technology to do this forty years ago! Why did it take them this long to figure it out?" This regulatory mindset is a large part of why there were no "shovel ready" jobs a couple of years ago. It took less than a year and a half to build the Empire State Building in New York City in the 1930s; it took ten years to build the 911 memorial on the World Trade Center site, and one of the neighboring churches destroyed at the time still has not been rebuilt, because of bureaucratic dithering!
So this is where I've come from, and a bit of what has shaped my thinking over the years. In my next few posts, I hope to discuss how some of these things apply to what is going on today.
Before I start in, I should say a bit about my own journey up to now. I've called myself Postmodern Redneck because, as I said at the start, I Are One! On one side of my family I had (until the Depression) small farmers and some small businessmen, primarily of English ancestry, at the western edge of Ohio's part of Appalachia. On the other, mountain folk from eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, of Scotch-Irish extraction (my grandfather was a Burns, my grandmother a Webb--both good Scottish names, but the family tradition is that they came to America from Ireland. There were major settlements of Protestant Scots in Ireland in the 1600s, and a quarter of a million of them moved on to America during the 1700s). My grandfather and his sons spent some time working in the coal mines; otherwise, it was likely, as the old saying goes, "Whatever it takes to get the coon."
I was born in 1950, brought up in a UAW household. My parents revered FDR, and between them and my schoolteachers, I was brought up to be a good little liberal. (There was one incident, though: sometime when I was two they got too close to an Eisenhower rally, and I picked up the catchy slogan "I like Ike!" It apparently took a few spankings after I got home to get me to shut up....) Of course, back in the '50s and early '60s, even the Republicans were liberal, primarily from the Northeast like Nelson Rockefeller.
There were a number of things that moved me away from my liberal upbringing. One is my love of history--all periods, most places, but American history especially. Another was when I started studying theology in Bible college and learned something about "liberal" theology, which has always been hand-in-glove with liberal politics (there will be a post on that in this series, I suspect). Then, after college, as I drifted away from pulpit ministry I found myself making a living for my family in small business (my great-grandfather Hawkins, who died before I was born, had owned a bus company in his small town and an electrical contracting firm).
But probably the biggest factor was the drift of the Democrat Party itself. There's a saying around, "Not your grandfather's Democrat Party." It's true; the Democrats have traveled a long way from the time when I was born. Franklin D. Roosevelt was totally opposed to the unionization of Federal employees; now government employee unions are a mainstay of the Democrat Party. I grew up during the Cold War; there would be no room among today's Democrats for men like Harry Truman, John Kennedy, or "Scoop" Jackson. It was JFK who said, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." Today's Democrats are all about what they are going to do for us (and to us!).
The change in me had already taken place when I read "Modern Times," an account of the years from the end of World War I to the Reagan/Thatcher years by the English historian Paul Johnson. One thing he wrote in that book has always stayed with me. He said the real divide, in Britain and America, was not between liberal and conservative, Tory and Labour, or Republican and Democrat; it was between those who see the state and its power as the answer to every problem, and those who believe in individual freedom. You can have liberal or conservative statists; they may want to use the power of the state for different problems, but they both see the state as the ultimate answer.
This resonated with me because of something C.S. Lewis had written, I think in "Mere Christianity"--that if an individual man is a creature who lives for seventy years or so and dies and is ended, then a state that can last for hundreds of years is more important; but if man is a spiritual being who can live for eternity, then a state is a transient, passing thing, and the individual is much more important than the State.
At this point, I could probably be described as a "libertarian" (small "L"--my older son has considered being a precinct officer for the Libertarian Party, but I'm not into that). I think we as a nation have reached the point where we have too much government regulation, at all levels: not just the EPA and OSHA, but state regulations, county licenses and boards, zoning rules that go beyond sense, and even homeowners' associations. (At least I finally got free of those where I live now.) The busybodies have been allowed too much control and are strangling us! As a remodeling contractor, I have had experience with the building codes and electrical codes. The basics of these are sensible and necessary; but the revisions every few years have gone far beyond the basics. I would say that most of the revisions are trivial, made to justify the bureaucrats who write them staying on the payroll; a few are important; and once in a while they make a change that I look at and think, "They had the technology to do this forty years ago! Why did it take them this long to figure it out?" This regulatory mindset is a large part of why there were no "shovel ready" jobs a couple of years ago. It took less than a year and a half to build the Empire State Building in New York City in the 1930s; it took ten years to build the 911 memorial on the World Trade Center site, and one of the neighboring churches destroyed at the time still has not been rebuilt, because of bureaucratic dithering!
So this is where I've come from, and a bit of what has shaped my thinking over the years. In my next few posts, I hope to discuss how some of these things apply to what is going on today.
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