Progressivism as Religion

8/13/2015

Being born Jewish, and spending time in a "chader" for five years, being taught by a Rabbi whose training and teaching was close to the synagogues during the time of Christ, Religion has always been important to me.  It was only a couple hours a few days a week after school, but it certainly gave me a flavor of the what it meant to be a Jew.  Not that I could have forgotten about it from the fights walking home from school when we carefully avoided the Catholic School, where they could certainly tell my ethnic identity.

Most Jews in the U.S. whose parents came to this country around the turn of the 20th century have had a variation of this upbringing, some from intellectual families, others less so as mine.  In our family a Rabbi was an authority, as were the public school teachers.  So reconciling the one who had me sing praises to Jesus as "the King of Israel" and the other who described him as a "meshugina" a maniac, was left to me to reconcile on my own.

Early on it became clear to me that I would have nothing to do with Religion, certainly not that of my Christian classmates and not that of my Rabbi, who never even tried to teach us the meanings of the prayers we learned to recite in Hebrew.  I guess I became a liberal by osmosis, from the simplistic explanation to this budding political junkie who as my Mother said, "stayed up later than President Truman" to get the results of the 1948 election to being told that "Democrats are for the poor and Republican for the rich"--  my Mother having a skill for brevity that wasn't inherited by this son, unfortunately.


Progressives, or liberals are often are non-relgious, many being atheists or agnostics, which can often result in an arrogance in our rejecting the super-natural; our principles of political life being based on rationality.  The word that is central to this essay is "Eschatology,"  the part of theology and philosophy that is concerned with what are believed to be the last events in history along with the destiny of humanity as a whole.

It was just announced that President Jimmy Carter, after a long post presidential career of harnessing his Christianity to help others, has advanced cancer with a dire prognosis.  He happened to be asked this question that used a metaphor that I've recently come to believe is the essential element of the liberal religion.  

Last month, in an interview with The L.A. Times, Carter responded bluntly and with characteristic honesty when asked whether he thought the arc of the universe bent toward justice. 

“I’m not sure about that,” Carter replied, suggesting that “violence and destruction and hatred and animosity and discrimination seem to me to be becoming more acceptable in some parts of the world.”

Here's my conclusion:  There is a conceptual commonality-- one that defines the difference-- of the certainty of the direction of the "arc of the universe toward justice" and the belief in a Christian afterlife in heaven.  Just like Christianity has many denominations, so does liberalism, from the extremes of Marxism to the center left Democratic party in America.  While President Obama is formally a Christian, his actions are those of an atheist liberal who believes in the perfectibility of our world by political change, therefor the array of "sacraments,"--- "marriage equality," "elimination of prejudice," and finally "denial of any reality that impedes this ideal of reaching perfect justice."   This religious-like fervor, ignoring the above observation of President Carter, are immune to any rational arguments just as much as fundamentalist Christians are not touched by any against their biblical based tenets.

While a Christian fundamentalism is a large part of American society and of electoral government; among the secular power centers the conviction that their atheism is true to science may be most damaging.  In the rejection of Christian-Muslim myths of an idealized afterlife, secularists have, without acknowledging it, incorporated an idealism of perfectibility of the world as a gradual "bending of the arc of history towards justice."  The bending metaphor is instructive when compared with Marxism, which also foresees a future heaven on earth, but acknowledges that far from a painless bending of an arc, it would require a violent shattering world revolution followed by a transformational dictatorship.  

The liberal religion described here is pernicious, as it has become absorbed into secular universities, which had been over the last centuries sanctuaries for the scientific method that went beyond physics and chemistry, to disciplines that used the same rigorous principles to study all of human existence, immune from the constraints of the accepted values of an era, called the "Zeitgeist."  Racism, for instance, is now seen as the goal of social science departments to abolish, where as previously the mandate was to understand it in all of its complexity. As such, the very object of study, "race," is seen as having no scientific reality, a myth to be dismissed, which also justifies vilification of any who do not share this view. 

Now back to what I call the Progressive religion.  For me personally, just as I would never attempt to argue against an individual's belief in the Holy Bible of Christianity being other then the true revealed word of God, I would be just as reluctant to make the case described here to Progressive true believers.  I have my own personal solution.  It is that the human brain, the substrate for our propensity to think big thoughts, is best seen in the context of deep evolution.  This organ of cognition, in combination with our irrational emotions, worked well during a given epoch when it produced speech, writing, levels of authority, organization of societies, mastery of our environment, and then in a wink of the eye, explosions of technology that made us all connected and now the verge of creating implements that make the makers, human beings, obsolete compared to the products of our technology. 

In times like this we all need faith in a higher being, or of this essay's subject, a higher process, that arc of the universe that bends -- in spite of all evidence -- toward justice. Many who ascribe to this revere the patriarchs of this message, whether the chairs of prestigious social science departments or leaders of progressive parties.  Like those in the other camp who believe in the absolute good versus evil of a God and Devil, progressives can muster the same rancor towards their political enemies.  This goes beyond a hypothetical discussion of mythologies,  as on the extremes, in the event of rare conditions of pregnancy, one side says the Mother must die, and the other the unborn child.  Actual policy choices such as this are not that rare, such as dealing with the long tail of chattel slavery of the forebears of current African Americans, that now unconscionable reality of humans treated as beasts of burden
 
What is unfortunate is that rather than acknowledgment that we are all stuck in this moment of history and in the same big boat together, we are fighting over arraigning the deck chairs.  We welcome diversion, whether it is a Super Bowl game ignoring the effects of the damage to those millions of kids who emulate the pros, or watching a political debate, with the same problem of emulating those with the most radical unrealistic solutions to everything- always accompanied by commensurate excoriation of the other party leader.

It could be that the arc of history bends to justice, or equality, or universal happiness but one thing is sure, it's not pre-ordained.  It could be different, that just as the dinosaurs had its day, and the great whales theirs, that homo sapiens have reached a point of no return, that our time is limited and that all that can be done is diffuse the cataclysm of the last days.  Now that's not a banner that too many are going to form a line behind, as everything about us has looked for solutions to the most dire problems in service of .........well, it's worked out for some of us lucky ones.

Jimmy Carter's last thoughts will be anticipation of being reunited with his loved ones in an eternal life of happiness with his God.  One who fought the good fight for Progressive causes will have the satisfaction of having nudged the world somewhat closer to the pre-ordained path towards justice. One who believes in neither can either fall into despair, or maybe choose to attempt to find a bridge between the two faiths; first by dispelling the illusion that being un-religious means not having irrational beliefs.  And then appreciating the need for such irrationality, whether from an ancient bible or a current article in an academic journal.

For this too is part of our particular species of Great Ape who have managed to create artifacts that allow us to feel we are no longer part of the evolution that both giveth and taketh away.  Our current world, from Fox sponsored candidate debates to the atavistic blood lust of the aberration know as the Muslim caliphate, all show the shallowness of civility, the hallmark of our species.

(to be continued)