A Rambling, Disjointed Essay on the Emerging Cultural War
We are deep in the middle of a cultural war yet most of us fail to see this. There is a battle waging for the hearts and minds of the masses and it is not the battle of light vs. the dark. It is the battle between science and religion. It is a war between secularism and faith. At its most extreme this war is a battle between those on the far right and on the far left each wishing to impose their viewpoint, their philosophy (or theology) of life on everyone.
Religious conservatives wage war against women’s reproductive freedoms and the rights of gays to be treated with respect and the same regard as heterosexual couples. These same conservatives want to dictate so-called standards of decency and morality. They want to tell you what books to read, television programs to watch and what movies are fit to be made. They make up the ranks of book banners and would burn them in huge public bonfires if they could get away with it.
The extremists on the left are not much better. While they support equality and respect for gays and favor women’s reproductive choices they too want to tell us what is appropriate for mass consumption. While the Far right wants to put God and prayer back in the class room the far left wants to take it away. They might favor religious studies but they would scream if Christians demanded equal time. The fact is that both sides represent extremes that threaten our way of life, our freedom of choice and our right to self-determination. Neither side is good at compromise or listening to what their opponents have to say. Both sides have some good ideas but neither would be willing to readily admit it. Both sides have some really bad ideas which they are ever ready to point out to the public with fingers waving, tongues clucking and voices shrill.
The founders of our country wisely understood that separation of church and state was an imperative if a truly democratic society was to ever be created and thrive. The truth however is shaded with much more grey than we would like to admit. We are a nation built on a set of ideals that look and sound great on paper but have always been a challenge to implement fairly and with justice.
The line between the separation of church and state has always been easily blurred. Even though the United States doesn’t have an official state sponsored religion the influence of the protestant Christian traditions can be felt through out every generation of our young countries history. We need to understand that in comparison to many countries we are still very, very young. Our way of life is still a grand experiment in democracy and we haven’t reached a conclusion. While other democratic states exist in the world the democracy of the United States is still unique in many ways.
The extremists waging the cultural war have differing opinions. One side proudly declares this is a secular nation where God has little or no place and the other side proudly proclaim the United States is a Christian nation. Both arguments are incorrect. It is historically more accurate to state the United States is a secular republic founded by largely protestant Christians of varying degrees of belief with a few atheists thrown into the mix. The inheritors of the Calvinist theology choke when they are forced to admit (if they will even acknowledge it) that the theology of the deists and philosophy of the Freemasons played an important role in creating the ideology and government of our country.
George Washington was a very dedicated Freemason of advanced degree by the time he was elected president. John Adams, our second president, was a Unitarian and Thomas Jefferson had very strong deistic sympathies even though he maintained membership in the Anglican Church throughout his life. Other great men and women in American History were Unitarians including the great Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The philosophy of the Transcendentalists played a huge roll in the thought of our nation’s infancy. Ralph Waldo Emerson is still one of the most often quoted American thinkers in Churches across the country. I have even heard tidbits from Emerson read from the pulpit of more conservative churches.
Revolutionary pamphleteer, Thomas Paine, was an atheist who had very little regard for religion. His famous pamphlet, The Age of Reason, says it all in the title alone. The late 17th century was the Age of Reason and all across the civilized world humanity was turning its eyes to the pursuit of science, mathematics and reason. Humanity began to emancipate itself from the concepts of God left over from the medieval theologies that still gripped so much of the Christian world.
Humanism was born and we saw the possibility that humanity had within itself the capacity to create a just, fair world based on reason. We began to reason that morality was not necessarily divinely appointed. We saw the possibility that individuals could be trusted to follow their own conscience in matters of right and wrong. That is one of the great ideas of humanism. We do not have to be beholden to a supreme being in order to do what is right. There are many who believe that morality comes from God and only by being accountable to {him} can we truly create a righteous society.
Yet I don’t know if that is true. In a secular democracy such as ours we are accountable to each other in matters of choice. I have the freedom to determine my own course in life and the constitution guarantees me the basic inalienable rights first stated in the Declaration of Independence. Yet if my choices interfere with the inalienable rights of my neighbor then I face censure. My personal freedoms do not necessarily mean that I can do whatever I want. I have to conform to societal standards in regards to certain behaviors.
As a rational man I do not need the fear of hell or the promise of heaven to keep me on the so-called straight and narrow. As a religious man I believe that God has blessed this country because of its attempted secularism not despite it. This secularism that so many religious people fear is the one element that ensures freedom of choice for all people. Even then this much abused ideal has not always been lived up to. African Americans, while emancipated by Lincoln and the Civil War, did not have any real equality under the law or economic equality until the hard one battles of the civil rights movement. Even then progress was often violent and slow.
Every ethnic group that came to the “Land of the Free” experienced bigotry, intolerance and injustice when first arriving upon our shores. The Irish-Catholics, The Chinese and the Japanese all the way up to today where we are treating people of Mexican, Latin American descent or Middle Eastern origins with suspicion and downright hostility experienced or are experiencing intolerance. We haven’t even touched on the issues of women’s rights. It wasn’t until the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century that women were given “the right” to vote. That is only one of the many issues that women faced.
The United States, a nation that espouses religious freedom as an Ideal, is often suspicious of people who profess something other than the Protestant Christian faith. Catholics are not considered Christian by many of these groups and if you are a Muslim then you must be linked to a terrorist group.
The war in Iraq and the so-called War on Terror are another element of our current cultural war that is turning us on the hopeful idealism of our countries founders. While the threat of violence against our country is great I am not certain that it is any more profound than in previous generations. We have always had enemies…we always will as long as our idealism differs from other extremists.
But if we continue to be suspicious of every dark face or everyone that reveres the message of the Koran then we have lost ourselves. During World War II suspicion of Japanese Americans lead to one of the greatest modern atrocities in our countries history. Scores of Japanese Americans were rounded up and placed in concentration camps. Their freedom curtailed and their civil rights non-existent they became one of the casualties of the war. When we forcibly rob the dignity of others because of dark, paranoid suspicions we rob ourselves of dignity as well.
President Harry Truman is perhaps one of the greatest mass murders of all time. The act of dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a needless, senseless act ending in many deaths. It is on par with the maliciousness of the Nazi concentration camps and the later atrocities of Stalin and Khrushchev. That we were fighting a war, that Japan attacked us first is no excuse. The war for Japan was all but over. History tells us that Japan was done in and had been trying to surrender all summer but it fell on deaf ears. Truman wanted to drop the bomb. He wanted to announce to the world that the United States had emerged from a period of isolation and was now a superpower to be contended with and respected. He wanted to put the “fear of God” into Stalin and other future dictators of the world.
Under Eisenhower the era of the military-industrial complex was created and soon, much to his dismay grew to the point where it was beyond his control. In his farewell address to the nation Eisenhower warned us of the new era of militarism but by then we had begun to establish a solid presence across the world.
Now war has become big business. The practice of outsourcing has transformed war into a very profitable enterprise and private companies now vie for government contracts to supply our soldiers with all the necessities needed. Even KP duty has fallen to private contractors. Even more terrifying is that intelligence and security services are being doled out on government contract. We have a difficult challenge as it is policing our intelligence and law enforcement agencies who is going to police the private contractors? Who is going to keep an eye out on the situation as these companies compete against each other? The ramifications are chilling.
With so much money to be made by the private sector in war who can guarantee us that this will not create a demand for more wars? That is part and parcel of a free enterprise economy.
Under the Bush Administration our civil rights have taken a beating. Habeas has been suspended a person suspected of terrorism can be rounded up by the jack booted thugs of the Homeland Security Department and held indefinitely. Even if there is no evidence or clear case against them and many foreign nationals have experienced this simply because they look like what a terrorist is supposed to look like or they have a name that sounds Arabic or come from a part of the world where known terrorist groups operate.
The NSA has been spying on us internally. They are listening in and watching. We can’t escape their eyes. The Bush Administration forced Yahoo and Google (although Google fought hard against it) for its search engine records because they wanted to see what people were surfing the net for. This is the tip of a large iceberg. If may seem innocuous, after all if you are doing nothing wrong what do you have to hide…right? But, that is all it takes to make a situation get worse. Once privacy is breached no one is safe. This is how extremes of fascism and communism get started.
Privacy and the possibility that some one or some group somewhere may do something harmful is the price we pay for a free and open society. But the present administration and conservative supporters have whipped up a frenzy of fear so that their actions can be justified. It isn’t just the extremists on the left that want to control society; the extremists on the right do as well.
Not all extreme conservatives hold the Libertarian ideal of small government that stays out of the lives of its citizens. Fascism is an extreme conservative idealism. Its idealism starts with a strong ultra nationalism that fuels a patriotic fervor of “my country, right or wrong.” It’s a political philosophy that creates discrimination based on whether or not you meet a set of overly idealized criteria for citizenship. Fascism supports a very narrow band of morality that is fueled often by a theology.
This essay has flipped back between religion, war and conservative idealism. While it is myopic in the sense that I didn’t give equal time to the liberal idealism that is every bit a part of the problem the elements discussed above are the recipe that has created the present situation we are now facing in this country. At some other point I will discuss the elements of the left that worry me. Meanwhile, let me be so bold as to suggest that a democratic controlled congress as we have now will not necessarily provide the solutions that we need nor is the electing of a democratic president. Yet most people I know will be voting this way simply because it is “not” what we have currently. I hope that people will put more thought into their choices.
As Joe Moore, a newscaster for KHON-TV Honolulu put it, “Death and taxes may be the only certain things in life, but at least death doesn’t get worse every time congress meets.”