Musings on Soil With a Little Blood Thrown In For Good Measure...

Like a lot of people I have lived in a lot of places or locales over the course of my life. I accept reality, the reality that I have lived in them all. I may have some emotional attachments to some, for a variety of reasons, more than others, but that does not mean that I didn't live in those other places. Not all of the places I have lived, by the way, were by choice. Sometimes you got to go where you got to go, sometimes someone or something drags you somewhere, and sometimes you are somewhere because of an accident of birth.

Here is the bit about blood... Humans are "hybrids", of course. Sadly, a lot of people create a fantasy and prefer to live in those fantasy worlds rather than in the real world. I would tell those who live with fantasies to get over them but it wouldn't have any effect because they prefer their little myths and delusions to reality and have preferred such fantasies for a long time.

Musings on Utopianism and Social Engineering

For philosopher, social critic, and critic of Marxism Leszek Kolakowski, the utopian idea of human fraternity was disastrous as a political programme even though it and the optimism and hope associated with it was indispensable to human life. I would have to agree with Kolakowski (and Lev Tolstoy before him) on one level, so much utopianism in the modern West is potentially if not inherently dangerous to human health. This social engineering of human life utopianism goes far beyond the Marxist tradition Kolakowski was critical of, however.

Yes, Bolshevism mixed an alchemical brew of utopianism, paternalism, and Comteanism (the academic mentality?). But you can also find the same alchemical mix in the neo-liberalism of those who seem to believe that capitalism will bring us to the promised land of endless wealth and consumption.

So, social engineers who believe they know the direction of history or the science of society share visions of utopias dancing in their heads. Ironically another movement shares much with these "secular" social engineers. But that movement is not so secular.

Fundamentalisms of all varieties of religious stripes and colours share a utopianism and a paternalism with the Enlightenment movements mentioned above. Where "secular" utopians and "religious" utopians differ is in their epistemology (a postmodernist might argue that there is, semiologically, no difference at all). Secular utopians find their authority in science, social science, or the humanities. Religious utopians find it in divine revelation. Both, to me, are equally paternalistic. Both, to me, are equally utopian. And both, to me, are equally dangerous.

As for human hope, I am reminded of the relevant verses of Reinhold Niebuhr's "Serenity Prayer" of 1932 and 1933. I have to wonder whether hope is possible in a world where globalism has strengthened the hegemonic control of oligarchs in the core nation world and where digital communications have taken misinformation, disinformation, anti-intellectualism, and demagoguery to new heights...

The New York State and Local Retirement System Kiada

 

Oh the bureaucracy...

As I mentioned in a previous blog, I am retiring from my job working for New York state. I was basically given no other option by my employer.

I had my retirement interview with my state employer this morning and was informed that not only do I have to retire with my department but also with the New York State Local Retirement System (NYSLRS). So, I go to the website, put in information like my name and my social security number and click next. What I get next is a series of esoteric questions like who did you live next to and what is your old phone number. Well, I don't know old phone numbers, they aren't important to me, and I don't have a list of the dozen if not more phone numbers I have had during my sixty-six years of life. Why an automated system is asking me such an occult question is beyond me. After all, I have a hell of a lot of other things to remember and recollect other than previous phone numbers and addresses, such as how to find my way to Christ's Pieces and how to deal, as a sickly 66 year old with asthma and arthritis, with the "joys" of global climate change.

So, I call the phone number of the NYSLRS. I, of course, get the requisite automated questions that are de rigeuer these days such as press one if you need to talk to someone in such and such. Press two if you are calling about this or that. I am, of course, told that the queue is long and we can, if you want, call you back. I ask for a call back. When I get the call back, I am, of course, almost immediately disconnected so I have to start the sisyphean task all over again. Oh joy. And so it goes and I wait and wait spending a half hour if not more trying to do something that I could have completed some time ago if the automated system of the NYSLRS asked me sensible questions.

Anyway, to wrap this up, I finally got a second call and now have a NY state retirement account...almost. I filled out the form. However, the state retirement system requires proof of birth--which I would have thought they would have already had since I work for them and have done so for fifteen years--and something related to electronic funds transfer although I gave them that information when I applied online. Oh well, part 4,982,543. We must follow "proper procedure" and have the proper paperwork even if we have done it and submitted it many times before. What is life, after all, without having to jump through bureaucratic hoops you have already jumped through many times before?

The Books of My Life: One Nation Under God

Religion, as American voting data from the 19th century to today shows, has long played an important and significant role in American politics and in American history. Many American academics and intellectuals, particularly since World War II, thanks to the notion that religion was declining in importance in the modern and postmodern world, however, have sometimes seem to have forgotten this fact. Occasionally, as in the elections of Carter, Reagan, Trump and the increasing prominence and importance of the White Christian right since the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the role it played in the elections of Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and Trump, they recognise, if only perhaps fleetingly, the important role religion has played and continues to play in modern and postmodern American politics. Recently, even labour historians like Elizabeth and Ken Fones-Wolf, have realised the important role culture, in the form of religion, has played in American cultural history, for instance.

Keven Kruse's One Nation Under God (New York: Basic, 2015) is one of the many books published by social scientists and historians recently that have recognised the important and significant role culture and religion have played in American politics during the 20th and 21st century. Kruse argues in his book that contrary to the argument that American right wing Christian nationalism--he primarily calls it Christian libertarianism--arose in the economic, political, and cultural ferment of the Cold War between the US and USSR, Kruse instead argues that Christian libertarianism was actually born out of the right wing and conservative reaction to the New Deal of American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt with its more activist state.

In One Nation Under God Kruse introduces us to a host of fascinating and sometimes colourful cast of characters including Congregationalist James Fifield, Methodist Abraham Vereide, evangelist Billy Graham, Presbyterian oilman J. Howard Pew, oilman Sid Richardson, Australian medical doctor Fred Schwarz, entertainers Cecil B. DeMille, John Wayne, English born Bob Hope, and Pat Boone, and politicians like Dwight David Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, and institutions and organisations like Spiritual Mobilization, the National Council of Christian Leadership, the International Council of Christian Leadership, the Fraternal Order of Eagles, the Freedom Foundation, the National Association of Evangelicals, and the National Association of Manufacturers, to create an important and influential right wing and conservative spiritual-economic elite, political, military, and industrial ideological complex that tied American freedom and liberty to free market capitalism and right wing Christian religiosity and had a significant impact on American political institutions at federal, state, and local levels. This complex, Kruse shows, helped establish the National Day of Prayer, the National Prayer Breakfast, change the American Pledge of Allegiance, add slogans to American paper monies, and tried to pass amendments to the American Constitution establishing state directed prayer and Bible readings in American public schools.

Kruse's book is a wonderful well researched and well documented history of the rise of a spiritual-economic-political-military-and industrial complex that has grown up and become immensely influential in American politics in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s, World War II, and the Cold War. However, I think there are a number of problems with the book that, while they don't, in most instance, undermine the argument of the book do problematise certain aspects of the book. First, there is the Terminological problem. Kruse refers to the right wing anti-New Deal largely Christian movement as Christian libertarianism. While such a descriptive phrase may accurately describe the Christian right's economic ideology it certainly doesn't describe the Christian rights tendency, on the economic, political, and cultural level, for theocracy. For right wing Christians there is only one valid economics, politics, and culture. Their own. Those who don't buy into their economic, political, and cultural ideologies are simply heretics. Finally, Kruse tends to conflate conservative and right wing, though, historically speaking, these are different cultural forms and these social movements have different historical genealogies. Laissez faire liberals are not, historically speaking, conservative.

Second, there is the historical problem. Kruse argues that right wing nationalist and theocratic Christianity is the product of an anti-New Deal impulse. However, Christian theocratism goes back at least to nineteenth century America when WASP Protestantism, with its culture of American exceptionalism, became the official unofficial religion of the United States. The right-wing Protestantism, which emerged out of the conflicts over Darwinism and scientific Biblical criticism, was certainly impacted by the anti-communism of the middle and late 19th century and anti-communism, by the New Deal, but it was not the product alone of the New Deal. Additionally, what is peculiarly missing from Kruse's analysis is an analysis of the role Southern White right-wing Protestantism played in the anti-New Deal and anti-Soviet Christian right. Kruse fails to note and explore the role race played in the culture of right-wing American Christianity. Finally, Kruse doesn't explore the role Puritanism, with its stern moralism, its theocracy, and its notion of American exceptionalism played and plays in right-wing Christianity.

Third, there is the theoretical problem. Kruse tends to use civil religion and public religion interchangeably though social scientists often use these terms, and the phrase civic religion, in somewhat different ways. Additionally, Kruse seems to only have a very limited conception of the fact that there are multiple forms of civil religion, multiple forms of priestly and prophetic civil religion, varying hegemonic forms of priestly civil religion that fight culture wars with each other, and that civil religion is dynamic and that this dynamic civil religion has impacted American right wing Christianity over time and changed it somewhat across time. Finally, Kruse doesn't engage the issue of whether religion is one meaning system among many, an institutional phenomenon, or both though he seems to imply the last.

Regardless of my concerns about Kruse's approach One Nation Under God is an important and seminal book on the intersection between religion, economics, politics, culture, geography, and demography. Everyone interested in American culture, American politics, American economics, American cultural imperialism, and American religion should read it. Anyone who wants to know how America got to now needs to read this superb book. Highly recommended.