As an ethnologist and ethnographer and historian I am interested in apologetics, what we believe is true, and polemics, what you believe is false. However, I am not interested in either as a form of practise though I am, of course, aware of the fact that demagoguery has become a cottage industry particularly in the core nation West with its modern secondary socialisers such as media and schools.
As a student of socialisation, enculturation, and deviance, I have, of course, noticed the tendency of those engaged in apologetics and polemics to tar anyone who doesn't fall into civil religion line during times of crisis with the stench of deviance, of violating and profaning societal cultural norms and values, and sacred national myths and legends. As a student of Mormonism, of course, I can't help but be reminded by all of this of the Mormon apologetic and polemic faith historical practise of categorising some, in typical demagogic practise, as "anti-Mormon".
This tendency of some Mormon faith historical commentators and pundits, of Mormon apologists and polemicists to, distinguish, in melodramatic and manichean fashion, solely between "Mormon" and "anti-Mormon", however, elides the fact that not all criticism of Mormonism is grounded in emotions like fear, anxiety, hatred, disgust, or the binary of orthdox and heresy. There are, in fact, some criticisms of Mormonism (and of the US, Israel, Russia, the Ukraine, to chose a few other examples) that are grounded in valid empirical frames of analysis (economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic) necessitating that those of us who are dispassionate and empirical add a third category into the dualistic and generally manichean mix of demagogues: empirical approaches to Mormonism. The fact that apologists and polemicists for the Mormon faith don't really want to add that third category simply points up how political and cultural use can be made and often is made of such binaries and how useful such dualisms can be and are in culture wars. That such a binary is inherently apologietic and polemic also needs to be noted.
One thing ethnography and ethnology taught me is that to be
fully empirical one has to approach cultural groups from both an emic
or insider perspective, and an etic perspective grounded in economic,
political, cultural, demographic, and geographic theoretical and methodological frames. I understand (verstehen), for instance, that Russian and American culture have their ideologies of exceptionalism, chosenness, messianism, and
global or at least group mission (and here is where the various
economic, political, cultural, and geographic imperialism comes in). By utilising such emic approaches, by "going native" in other words, one can gain an understanding of how cultural ideologies work in practise and one can get a glimpse into the societal mind and into national and state civil religions and how these work themselves out in real life.
Once I have an emic derived cultural base, I try to go all etic on social and cultural arse. I try to analyse them, in other words, through economic, political, demographic, geographic, and particularly cultural frames. When one does this one quickly recognises that such cultural ideologies like all cultural ideologies are cultural and ideological contructions and that humans, given their tendency to fetishise the particular, universalise particular constructed cultural ideologies turning them into, as Emile Durkheim noted, in the process, their totem or their god making their particular society sacred and holy as a result.
When one understands this process of fetishisation one can also comprehend the fact that anyone who profanes the sacred civil religion is in danger of being categorised as evil, demonic, or a heretic, inquisited, ostracised, and even burned at the stake. Deviants and dissidents become, as Durkheim recognised, examples of what happens to those who deviate from the norm (shoutout to Rush) for all of society to see. Those who can be brought back into line are brought back into line for humans, after all, are a conforming species as social scientific studies have repeatedly shown. Those who can't are stigmatised as outsiders, as deviants, as heretics.
By the way, recent events in Europe have foregrounded what earlier research has shown, namely, that there really is not much new that further studies can add to the understanding of apologetics and polemics or demagoguery in the core nation world. Most of the masses in the core nations continue to get their news, if I can call such sensationalism, manicheanism, and melodrama news, from a secondary socialiser, the media. The only difference is that the brave new digital world has broadened and enlarged the media environment, made it more ever present, and dumbed it down to penny press sensationalism, manicheanism, and melodrama even more than it already had. The media continues, particularly during times of crisis, to function and serve as a propaganda arm of governments and particularly, in the West, of imperial America, its mouthpieces and clones in parts of Europe, and its ever expanding military arm in Europe, NATO. The masses continue to avoid reading books written by reputable scholars, who put things into broader context and avoid the fallacy of the great and evil man approach to history, in order to fact check the melodramatic and manichean sensationalism the media peddles and parrots. And they, in turn, by and large ditto it and parrot it back on dumbed down social media sites like Facebook. Welcome to the postmodern world.
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