William Irwin Thompson World Wide Website

On Government Working with Faith-Based Charities: Obama's Bad Idea. (7/2/2008)

Einstein taught us that when a star's light comes to us from outer space, it is bent by the gravitational mass of the sun. Similarly, when the light of a new Democratic candidate comes to us from a new space, it is bent by staffers as it passes near the gravitational mass of voters in the American Center. So it is in the nature of things that some staffer has convinced Obama to defeat Karl Rove by becoming him in order to take the religious Right away from the Republicans and form a new American coalition--as Reagan did a generation ago. In a speech yesterday in Zainesville, Ohio, Obama seemed to be leaning hard to the Right in order to win the white evangelicals away from Bush and Hillary. (Jennifer Lowen, Associated Press)

This alchemical process of development has a nice big word already coined for it: it is called an enantiodromia—a process that starts as one thing and ends up as its opposite. You start with Jesus, a prophet with one seamless robe and no fixed address and you end up with a Pope in a palace. You start with a republic fighting a Superpower Empire and you end up with the republic becoming a Superpower Empire. You start out with a good guy fighting bad guys and you end up with a guy just as bad as his opponents as he suspends civil liberties and organizes teams of torturers, murderers, and assassins he calls Special Ops.

So it is in the nature of things that Obama should abandon everything that made him attractive and seek to co-opt the Religious Right who have really only just begun to co-opt him. That a Professor of Constitutional Law would seek to abandon the separation of Church and State is, however, truly depressing. One expects this sort of stupidity from Huckabee or Hagee, but not Obama.

But let us consider with level voice and even temper just why Bush and Obama's seeking to wed faith-based charities and social assistance programs with government funding is not a good idea. 1. Muslim terrorists have been rather good at using faith-based charities to support their own Special Ops. Do we really wish to enter into the expense of the FBI investigating every Islamic charity and mosque to make sure that it is Islamic and not Islamist? 2. Right wing Israeli groups have assassinated their own Prime Minister and built settlements in the occupied territories in order to turn the Palestinians into Indians on the reservation so that the two state solution can never become a viable option for Israel. Do we really wish to stick our hand into this hornets' nest to decide which Jewish groups are good and which are Israeli lobbies adversely affecting America's foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Asia? 3. Extremist groups with rigid beliefs are often attractive to people whose lives have disintegrated through the use of heavy drugs. It doesn't matter whether the new ideology is Hari Krishna, Scientologist, or Black Muslim; it just needs to be rigid to prop up the person who has bottomed out. Do we really wish to try to figure out if Scientology is as valid a religion as Roman Catholicism; or, inversely, if Roman Catholicism is just a bigger cult than Scientology? Do we really want the Government to decide if the Hari Krishnas in the airports are a legitimate expression of Hinduism, or if Mormonism is as equally unacceptable as polygamous, child-molesting neo-Mormonism? And, in the interests of our Democratic Feminist colleagues, do we really want faith-based religious charities deciding what is good for women in faith-based clinics for unwed mothers and genital mutilation for female children? Certainly, it will be in the self-interest of every cult to validate itself by securing funding for its own government program. And the stronger and more involved with government religions become, the more they will want to dictate to the majority concerning marriage, straight or gay, and reproduction. Making teenage sex into a crime would certainly be a move the religious Right would like to make. If we have filled our jails by criminalizing marijuana use, just think how they will swell into detention Bible camps for reprogramming teenagers in today's hook-up culture. In order to decide who gets funding and who does not, government will be forced into making decisions about what constitutes a legitimate religion. And this will bring us back into the heresy deliberations so forcefully described by Gibbon in his chronicle of the decline of another empire. This decision to involve faith-based charities with government in the administration of social programs is a Goyan nightmare masquerading as a dream of reason.

Marriage is a sacrament and its definition should be left up to whatever religion the individual chooses to adhere to. For property rights or medical visitation rights, the state should only be concerned with civil unions. Marriage, Gay or straight, like baptism is no business of the State. The State needs to be simply the guarantor of the civil liberties of the individual. If we try to base the State on ethnic identity or religious beliefs, we undo the American Revolution and take us all back to the ugly violence and genocide of the Thirty Years War—the horror of which was uppermost in the minds of the Founding Fathers when they worked on the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In his fear to be seen as Black, educated, and to the Left, Senator Obama, in the dilemma of a chameleon on a Scotch plaid, has adopted every color in order to fit in, but now the eyes blur and the overall visual effect is that of yellow as he hugs the stripe down the middle of the road too closely to his chest.

On Religion and the State 4/26/2008

For as long as it takes a Tyrannosaurus Rex to devolve into a chicken, just so long will we have to wait for religion to scale down into a harmless nourishment for the soul. Then again, considering cock fights in Latin America, maybe the chicken isn't so chicken after all. It is just smaller than we are. So how long do we have to wait before religion becomes spiritually smaller than we are? Judging by the recent exposures of the geriatric fundamentalist Mormon sect in Texas and the Pope's recent damage control on priests' child molestation, we have a long wait ahead of us.

In spite of the TV appearances of Richard Dawkins--with his wonderfully cultured BBC accent--and the popularity of his useful God-bashing book, religion seems good—or should I say bad?—for a geological era. As was the case with T Rex, it will take a catastrophe to dislodge it, or force it to devolve, or morph into some higher form of spirituality, but the problem with catastrophes is that they generally so scare people that they end up by making them even more religious. The French Revolution may have used force to install rationality, but even in France today, July is no longer called Thermidor. La France may be secular—with the exception of the Muslim quarters around le périphérique of Paris—but the United States is mired in religion, from Puritan Cotton Mather through the nineteenth century Millerites and up to our latter day Scientologists. So even when rationalists shuffle off the mortal coil of the python of religion, they often turn rationalism into another form of religion, try to construct temples to Newton, or now ask folks to worship the inherent creativity of the evolutionary universe: which is like asking poets to write their poems in Esperanto.

Reason not withstanding, there is good reason why religion has such staying power. Primates evolved large brains by living in groups and using their brains to read faces and body language and become sensitive to systems of dominance. The evolutionary surplus that came along with this new ability also bestowed a capacity for explaining the meaning of things: the glance of the Big Guy or what the Thunder said. Religion explained the cause of things long before science came up with a theory of causality. From the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny to the personified parental God in sandals and long robe, religion explains what happens. It does no good to say, "Shit happens," if you can say "The ways of God are mysterious and not for man to question." It doesn't count to prove that what religion says is false; it is the system of explaining things that counts and locks it into place. It is the structure that matters and not the content, and that is why scientism often adopts religion's structure while attempting to erase its content.

So although religion-bashing Bill Maher is on HBO and God-bashing Richard Dawkins is at Oxford—and God bless them both for their public-spirited good works!--Joe Six Pack is still going to park his pickup in the humungous parking lot of his new drive-in Dallas-style super church. So mystics who don't need religion and atheists who hate it, will both just have to accept the anthropological fact that religion is not going to go away anytime soon.

That said, since religion is part of our living together in groups, it has to be regulated like everything else: like air travel, traffic, drunk-drivers, poisons in our food, pollution in the air, or banking, stock-trading, and junk-bonding. If a religion infringes on human rights and civil liberties by razoring out a young girl's clitoris, or forcing a thirteen year old to become the bride of a church elder, or replacing scientific textbooks with the Bible and comic books about Intelligent Design, then the State has to step in to protect the intellectual commons from overgrazing by religions, sects, and cults. If an Abraham were to think today that God told him to murder his son, then the State, like the Angel of Mercy itself, would have to intervene and stay his hand.

America's Decline 4/18/2008

It's not because of Wal-Mart. It's not because so many factories have moved out to Mexico, China, and Indonesia. And it's not "the economy, Stupid!" It's because we're stupid, Stupid! Americans insist on voting for their President as if they were voting for student body president in high school. So politicians have to be popular and not smart. Smart is elitist. So they have to kiss babies, eat junk food, bowl, lie through their false smiles, and invoke the plastic malled banalities about God and the Flag that will not please the former or improve the global symbolic value of the latter. In high school, Americans insist on popularity as the most important value. The smartest kid in class is hated; nerds are beaten up, and dickheads are idolized, especially if they have a cool set of wheels. So in 2000, Al Gore was hated as the smartest kid in class, and when he ran for President, he had to kick off his campaign by kissing his wife on stage as if he were still making out with his high school steady. He had to promise never to talk about global warming or any idea as big as a challenge to industrial civilization. Bush, a spoiled preppy brat from the Eastern Establishment who got into Yale and Harvard because of Daddy, had to pretend he was a hick from Texas, speak with a fake accent, walk as if he were bow-legged from riding on the range all day, and hold his hands curved out to his sides as if he were getting ready to have a gunslinger's shoot out in Dodge City.

Both McCain and Hillary are, like Bush, running for high school student body president. Hillary, a made-over nerdy girl with glasses from Wellesley and Yale, adopts a phony accent when she is Down South, talks about Guns and God as if she were the reddest neck in the duck blind, and McCain, God bless him, recites patriotic clichés about Victory in Iraq as if it will always be 1945 in America. And poor Obama goes down in flames as he bowls 37 and tries to analyze why Americans vote for issues of identity over ideas.

Since the days of primate evolution, politics has always been about dominance, hierarchy, and emotional identification with an alpha male and female bonding with an ancillary alpha female: in other words, high school. The Enlightenment's eighteenth-century experiment with shifting away from the systems of dominance in religion and politics required intellectual excellence at the top with the new philosophers and a new culture of public education for the middle and bottom of the entire populace. Since the invention of television, the United States, however, has worked hard to dumb itself down. It has succeeded. We are now so dumbed down that we cannot stop the slide into our own decline. Like a mastodon stuck in a La Brea tar pit, all we can do is to make a lot of noise as we go under.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:La_Brea_Tar_Pits_Mastadons.jpg

Why I Am Not for McCain, 4/10/2008

In 2000, the United States was taken over by a putsch organized by the neocon wing of the Republican party. Through their policy think tank, Project for a New American Century, the neocons had been planning this take-over for some time. Bush the Lesser was chosen to be the compliant poster-boy for the group, one who would have to do all the tedious work of campaigning because he was deeply in debt to the Old Boys Club of Dad et alia for bailing him out, failure after failure, from drunk driving to trying to run businesses and baseball clubs. He owed them all big time. So with the connivance of the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, the counting of votes was negated (with a little local help from the Party in Florida) and James Baker himself rode into town to block the impending threat of a plurality of 600,000 votes for Gore. (Baker was a major player in the Carlyle Group which managed defense industries and global investments for the Bush family and the Saudis.) With the help of Cheney and Rumsfeld, an invisible Directorate decided to execute a hostile take-over of our nation-state with the goal of reconstituting itself as a new global board of directors of the world. It was to be business after the playbook of Enron.

So just as Enron had plundered the State of California, the new corporate raiders were determined to plunder the United States. In a hostile take-over, the parts of a company are recognized to be more valuable than the whole, so the raiders take over the whole, break it up, and then sell off the parts for more than the whole is worth. The whole of the United States, with all its citizens, labor unions, and obstructing environmental groups is not worth much to the global corporate managers in the U.S., Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, China, and Europe, so a new policy was needed that was not based upon politics as usual--or capitalism as usual, for that matter, as this new development was more like a return to the fur trade Mercantilism of the Hudson Bay Company. Iraq was to be taken over in the interest of creating a Crown Colony for the oil industry in the very middle of the Middle East. The war on terror could be used to justify deflecting resources from Afghanistan and the pursuit of bin Laden and al Qaeda to Saddam's Bath Socialist Iraq, as well as suspending the civil liberties that got in the way of Management. Here Cheney and Rumsfeld were on familiar turf as they had connived with Saddam during the Iraq-Iran war. With the help of the Defense Policy Board of Perle, Woolsey, and Wolfowitz, the neocons went to work.

Once Iraq's oil reserves were in the Directorate's hands, Russia's gas and oil resources with its grip on Europe could be blocked and China's growth could be kept under control—their control. After "Shock and Awe" had done its work in Iraq, it was to be directed against the United States. If illegal immigration could be continued by protesting against it publicly but supporting it actually, a new working class could be constituted that would have no voting rights. Thus the power of labor unions would be checked and there would be no new working class members swelling the ranks of the Democratic Party. By borrowing from China and by running the three trillion dollar war in Iraq through deficit spending—a play the invisible Directorate took from Enron-style financing—the dollar would surely fall in value and this would enable Bush's Saudi friends and other members of the new global Board of Directors to be able to buy American properties quite cheaply. If factories were owned by foreign companies, and the ports were owned by Dubai, then sovereignty would continue its shift away from the nation-state to the global board of directors. With environmental laws negated by Cheney, and civil liberties negated by the new Patriot Act, and with the working class weakened by illegal immigration and the transfer of factories to China and Indonesia, the take-over was a shoe-in. All that was needed was to neutralize public opinion with supportive propaganda. Since some of the members of the board already owned the media, it took little effort for Clear Channel and Fox News to saturate the populace with corporate propaganda disguised as patriotism. The Press Corp could be counted on not to object, for they were no longer a Fourth Estate, but had become Muzak in the factory keeping the citizens distracted with news about sports and celebrities and happy at their work. Any reporter who dared to ask a real question and raise issues such as those I have discussed above, would instantly loose his press card and his access to power. As a reporter's job depends upon being able to hold meaningless interviews with those in power, no reporter would risk his or her job, mortgage, and the tuition for the kids in college, in an exercise of true investigative reporting.

Senator McCain is a man with a military world view and a military interpretation of reality, so he is in the great American tradition that requires an enemy to support our economy. To be fair to the Republicans, this is a bipartisan policy that goes from Washington through Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, Truman, the Bushes, and the Clintons. McCain is a Good Old Boy and can be counted on to co-operate with the invisible Directorate—the new global board of directors of Earth, Inc. The attacks on him by the Rush Limbaughs of the country are just the acts of hirelings who serve to create the myth of McCain the Maverick to attract Independents and centrist members of the Democratic Party. A vote for McCain is, therefore, to my mind, a vote of confidence in Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Baker.

After the elections of 2000 and 2004, our social democratic state is in extreme danger. President Bush's recent support of torture and water-boarding shows just how far America has departed from its ideals. McCain's grip on reality is too senescent and his lights are already growing dim; his mental acuity is not likely to improve as he ages in office. Even when corrected by Senator Lieberman and told that Sunni al Qaeda and Shiite Iran were not in the same insurgent grouping, he continued to make this mistake in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's interview of General Petraeus, and this slip shows that McCain is at one mind with the neocons to demonize Iran and prepare Americans for the attack. To think that McCain can protect our democratic civil society is like thinking Herbert Hoover could protect us from the Great Depression. We need a new paradigm of political thinking, and a new world view. If Senator Obama cannot provide it, then our situation is truly hopeless and we are doomed to continue our slide into decline.

And poetry brings me back to why I am for Obama. It isn't always what he says, because we make all our politicians say the political bullshit we hold dear. Nobody gets elected by pissing people off through telling them truths that make them uncomfortable. It's what Obama is and what I sense between and around the lines of his first book, and not what he has to say now on the stump, that has got my vote. But in his March 18 speech in Philadelphia, Obama set the common rhetoric of politicians to the side and spoke honestly and directly about the politics of race and poverty in America. He revealed his sense of a new planetary civilization, and that is what I sensed in him when he first spoke to the nation in 2004; he revealed what it means to have brothers and cousins of every race on the three continents of America, Africa, and Asia. This sense of a new planetary humanity is the true meaning of Obama's invocations of hope, for without it we are doomed to an unending war of each against all in a world that is one gigantic Iraq. Oil may fuel our Hummers and Lincoln Navigators, but no hope is the fuel of suicide bombers. There can be no "victory," Senator McCain, when the shadowed enemy we are fighting is all of us in a common space and not "them" in some distant country we can safely bomb. One would have hoped that you had learned that in Viet Nam.

William Irwin Thompson, Copyright 2008

BEYOND THE ENTRANCED AND THE INTRANSIGENT

To be equal to our age, it is not sufficient for philosophy to retreat from spiritual vision to economics or become simply an apologist for technological innovation and investment in artificial intelligence. We need a human intelligence to express a culture equal to our present condition. In previous moments of cultural change, philosophy has expressed a visionary imagination and come forward to articulate the transformation of tribe into polis (Plato and Aristotle), or kingdom into republic (Locke and Jefferson). Now as we shift from a world of conflicting nation-states to a biospheric and globally noetic polity, we need to have an understanding of world civilization that is not based on the war between Osama bin Laden's eighth-century vision of Islamist jihad and Bush's eighteenth-century neocon ideology of market economics and American military expansion. A reimagination of world civilization is called for, one that is not captured by the single academic discipline of economics but is expressive of a new culture in which consciousness matters simply because consciousness is the material condition of the universe in which humanity is seeking adult membership.

The congressional election of 2006 showed the resilience of the social democratic state, as well as a wide-spread public realization that the Republican party had been captured by a neocon cult. Their continual denials of the obvious showed that Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Bush were out of touch with reality and were living in some delusional world. Whether a solid middle ground between perception and deception can be found will now depend upon the Democratic party's intellectual ability to revision our true historical condition. For some time now, both the Democratic and Republican parties have been brain-dead and have been on TV life-support; neither party has had a new idea for ages--the one not since FDR, the other not since Adam Smith. Obama waffles more on health care and nuclear power than Edwards does, but it is clear that Edwards' angry reprise of FDR and the thirties, and Hillary's boomer reprise of her husband's dot.com nineties won't replay in a new millennium. In this election of 2008, the subtext is perhaps even more important than the text. And in this cultural milieu of a hope for a new planetary civilization, Senator Obama is indeed the face America needs to put forth if we are to face the future and not turn our backs on science. If we are to avoid the Dark Age that the war between the ideologically entranced and the religiously intransigent could bring about, then we will need to shift from a global economy of industrial nation-states to a planetary ecumené of noetic polities in which ecology, and not economics, is the governing science.

As American school children, we were all raised to believe the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson's " That government is best that governs least." Americans of a Republican and Libertarian persuasion feel that interference of the state in the life of the individual is evil, and the excesses of fascism and communism in the nineteen-thirties and forties confirmed their Superman comic book sense of the superiority of the American way. Even to this day in a new century with new problems, the Republicans and Libertarians in their think-tanks like the Cato Institute continue to rant on about the evils of Big Government.

And it is not only our theories of knowledge that have changed, but also our perception of the environment in which our polity is situated. In an age of global warming and sudden catastrophes from pandemics, earthquakes, coastal inundation, tsunamis and volcanoes, a scientific council will be needed for a tricameral legislature in which government is provided with sound and objective scientific information and informed guidance. The Bush Administration sought to constrain and edit science so that it would tell it what it wanted to hear for ideological reasons; in other words, it sought to treat science in the same way it treated Intelligence and the CIA in particular. Since the CIA has only the single client of the presidency, both the CIA and the Supreme Court have been corrupted by the growth of the "Imperial Presidency."

A third chamber will be needed to be composed of truly intelligent and independent scientists, artists, scholars, and professors of constitutional law. These outstanding citizens will need to be men and women of "intellectual property," and not simply popular celebrities chosen through elections funded by the wealthy and the few owners of the media. They will need to be elected to this third chamber of an Academy of Arts and Sciences (the present Academy can be renamed the Symposium of Arts and Sciences since it is not a legislative body) by an ad hoc electoral college composed of the faculties of the state universities and the outstanding private universities of the nation, from Harvard in the East to Stanford in the West. And at the same time that this twenty-first century ad hoc Electoral College is created, our present anti-democratic eighteenth-century Electoral College should be abolished. The President should be elected by a simple popular majority so that Florida, 2000 can never happen again. And it is this third chamber that should nominate members to the Supreme Court based upon their knowledge of constituional law and not their party politics. In the election of 2000 we saw what happens when the Supreme Court intrudes and applies party politics to negate a plurality in the popular vote.

The present Senate would obviously resist the formation of a Third House of scientists, scholars, and artists, for fear of losing its power. Therefore, in a tricameral legislative process it would make sense if both the popular House and the Academy could initiate legislation and then refer it to the Senate, which would then pass on it and refer it to the Executive Council for signing into law. In this way, the Academy could do the research on matters of science having to do with things such as environmental pollution and global warming, and the House could initiate legislation having to do with popularly arising issues such as a minimum wage or voting rights. Since each of the three Houses would elect one its members to serve as its president on the Executive Council, the newly increased power of the Senate would be checked and held in balance. I am a poet and cultural historian and not a constitutional lawyer, so obviously, any constitutional convention--no matter under what emergency scenario it convened--would argue out these matters fiercely. And humans, being only recently evolved primates, would work to find all sorts of clever ways in which to subvert the purposes of honest government and the public good in the interests of private greed or religious fanaticism.

The electronic media have created a new superstitious technopeasantry whose enflamed attacks on the imaginary castle of science's Dr. Frankenstein now threaten to eliminate scientific textbooks from our schools to replace them with the Bible. As popular ministers like Huckabee thrust themselves to the head of the impassioned multitude, waving their Bibles in the air, we will be brought back to the ugly Thirty Years War of religions that preceded the Age of Revolution from 1689 to 1789. It was precisely because these horrors of religious wars were still evident to our Founding Fathers that they instituted the separation of church and state that is so basic to our civil liberties. If we slide back into this religious abyss and seek to affirm, as Mitt Romney has called for, a new non-secular civil religion--some American version of theocratic Iran that Christian radio programs call "the Kingdom"--then we will have indeed fallen off the edge of history into a new Dark Age.

© William Irwin Thompson, 2005

This Time, Let's Build a New Venice and Not Another New Orleans

A new and architecturally more beautiful London rose on the ashes of the Great Fire of 1666, and this allowed the genius of Wren and Hawksmoor to shine forth in stone, brighter in its human spirit than the flames of destruction that consumed the old Tudor wooden edifices. So let us imagine a truly "New" Orleans in which Cajun gondolas and Creole vaporettos, aloud with Dixieland and Zydeco, glide past buildings on high concrete foundations and decorated with balconies of iron with lace filigree. John Todd, of the University of Vermont's Institute of Natural Resources, has designed canals for Chinese cities which were formally filled with garbage and redolent of the stench of human waste, but now are filled with plants that cleanse the waters so that fish may safely swim. So there is a Green Architecture in America up to the challenge.

The Army Corps of Engineers with its national system of dams and levees has shown us what happens when the military-industrial approach in which Man dominates nature is put to work in eliminating wet lands where wild birds gather and sedimentary islands build up to break ocean surges. This form of engineering is the same kind of military-industrial thinking that salinates the soil with center-pivot agriculture and drains the Ogalala aquifer to replace biodiversity with monocrops held in place with the chemical warfare of pesticides. And the animal prisoners taken in this war are held in place in the concentration camps of feedlots and drugged with antibiotics and growth hormones to prepare them for mass slaughter. Their carcasses are then processed in fast food fuel stations along highway strips that are the same ugly clutter of signs and stops from Anchorage to Miami. Our President is comfortable with this mentality because for him nature is basically a golf course or a ranch--or a national park turned into a country club where folks can burn off stress by speeding over the snow while polluting the air of Yellowstone with gas-guzzling skidoos.

We have more than New Orleans to rebuild. We have to rebuild our whole idea of America. And while everyone is too afraid to mention it, it is now only too clear that we are not prepared for the earthquakes of California or the volcanoes of the Northwest. Only poets like Gary Snyder talk about living "more lightly on the Earth," but it is beginning to be time for the rest of us, if not to be hobbits in their ecologically embedded dwellings in the Shire, at least to be humans who can learn from their mistakes.