Defining U.S. Conservatism Down

[zerostao]

 

Mass slave wages U.S. corporate genocide culture.

pocahontas was maybe 9 years old when contact was made. disney has made her into what every young american girl should aspire to be (at least thru the disney lens)

[voidisyinyang]

We have a government who were doing not a referendum; they were doing just a survey, a simple survey, to ask people whether they want to have a constitutional reform. But we have an alliance between the very powerful class in this country with the military.

 

 

TV channel 8 was shut down, radio stations closed, CNN and Telesur not allowed to air news on cable.

 

 

We have also a curfew, because after 9:00 you can be shot if you are on the streets. So we have a curfew from 9:00 to 6:00 a.m.

 

 

 

Well, a number of the leaders of the Honduran military were trained in the School of the Americas, both during the Cold War and after, at the end of the Cold War.

AMY GOODMAN: Like who?

GREG GRANDIN: Well, Romeo Vasquez, the head of the armed forces, who Zelaya removed from office just a few days ago, because he refused to support the referendum, non-binding referendum. He’s obviously behind it, as well as the head of the navy and other high-ranking officials.

The Honduran military is effectively a subsidiary of the United States government. Honduras, as a whole, if any Latin American country is fully owned by the United States, it’s Honduras. Its economy is wholly based on trade, foreign aid and remittances.

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/6/29/coup_in_honduras_military_ousts_president

 

 

 

We have proof that John Dimitri Negroponte had meetings three weeks before the coup with —-

AMY GOODMAN: The former ambassador to Honduras, John Negroponte.

GERARDO TORRES: The former ambassador, yeah. And Negroponte had meetings three weeks before the coup with Hugo Llorens, that is the actual US ambassador, with the principal leaders of the military and the businessmen, the rich elite, and also the elite of the religious sectors of the Evangelic and the Catholic Church.

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/28/one_year_after_coup_honduras_repression

 

 

On September 21st, a few months later, Zelaya attempted to get into the country and succeeded. No one knew until now how exactly he did it, and he just told us about the body doubles. He made it into the capital, Tegucigalpa, and holed up in the Brazilian embassy for more than four months.

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/1/the_two_top_generals_the_key

Edited April 8, 2013 by pythagoreanfulllotus

[zerostao]

my definition of a conservative is a cross between john muir/ ralph waldo emerson/henry david thoreau/thomas jefferson/thomas paine/patrick henry/wendell berry

[voidisyinyang]

But the problem with the American ambassador in Honduras is that he has within his embassy people working for the DEA and people working for the CIA, and he’s not really in direct control of what these people are doing. And they are also sending cables which WikiLeaks has still not published, giving their own version of what is happening, as the people in South Command are also informing their superiors.

AMY GOODMAN:

And how does SOUTHCOM fit into this, Southern Command, military?

>

RODOLFO PASTOR FASQUELLE:

Well, remember, there had been a conflict about Palmerola. President Zelaya had expressed his intention of making the Palmerola airfield into a civilian airport.

AMY GOODMAN:

Because?

RODOLFO PASTOR FASQUELLE: Because we needed it, because the country needs it, because it is —- the airport here is dangerous. Beware now that you’re going to get on a plane, there have been so many accidents in this airport here. And the country needed this kind of airport.

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/6/1/former_honduran_minister_us_undoubtedly_played

 

 

Since the 2009 coup, funding from the US has jumped 3 times in size than what it was 10 years ago. This has resulted in 5 US military bases being renovated, whilst extra funding has been directed to the Honduran police and military. Furthermore, according to the Associated press, Washington authorised $1300 million for military electronics in 2011 alone.

There are claims that drugs are easily moving through Honduras, but US History Professor Dana Frank (Professor where?)says, the US is using the War against drugs as pretext to deepen its military alliance with Honduras. In fact, the Honduran government has been widely implicated in drug trafficking in the country. US antidrug operations, with the help of Honduran police, were recently involved in the massacre of indigenous Miskitias in Ahuas.

 

http://indymedia.org.au/2013/03/13/february-2013-honduras-coup-summary

[ralis]

my definition of a conservative is a cross between john muir/ ralph waldo emerson/henry david thoreau/thomas jefferson/thomas paine/patrick henry/wendell berry

 

 

Will you further elaborate on that one? Thanks!

[zerostao]

my definition of ideal conservative is likely not in line with gop thinktank.

muir had the wisdom to know that we needed national parks. isnt the national park system one of the things a govt should be doing?

emerson> self reliance and self responsibilty.

thoreau> mistrust of an out of control centralized govt

jefferson, paine, henry > bill of rights, free speech, champions of liberty

wendell berry. a grass roots local approach.

 

when we gave money the right of free speech it was one of the most blatant obscene attacks against persoanl liberty.

when money is speech, there can be no free speech. that is obviously the point of that fascist elitist law.

 

from my view and understanding a 'conservative" would never spend up our or any other's natural resources for the sole purpose of fast profits. gautemala is an example of this.

also i would say that a true 'conservative' would lead a frugal simple lifestyle.

our gop so called (false) conservatives (like rush limbaugh) who live decadent lavish lifestyles at the expense of others are not friends of liberty, they are in fact the enemies of.

2nd edit> i add teddy roosevelt to my list

 

edit. the grass roots approach of from the bottom up is always more successful than a mandated from the top down approach

Edited April 8, 2013 by zerostao

[ralis]

Right winger gets schooled over his incessant obsession over debt while disregarding government spending in science as a return on investment. This obsession with money and debt from the right wing will be the downfall of this nation.

 

 

[joeblast]

Dude -- you really are mind-controlled! You are supporting fascism!

 

 

 

 

First of all you're referring to Honduras. Secondly - you have swallowed the corporate lies -- as the ... hold on...

 

 

 

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/1/whats_behind_the_honduras_coup_tracing

 

easy there with the mind control bs - that I didnt even recall the correct country is reflective of the level of information I vaguely recalled on it. we're all aware we're in the midst of an information war - dont conflate misinformation with mind control, you think that is really affecting my logic circuits for chrissakes?? contrary to what ralis asserts, if I find that I dont know the whole story on something, I have no problem admitting it. but c'mon, I can go back and forth with you and not him because you're at least respectful. if we keep the banter lighthearted, it stays fun. otherwise...

[zerostao]

i add eisenhower to my list. he warned of the"military industrial complex"

and look where we are becoz we ignored ike on that.

if some havnt(i have already, but i digress) called out the "medical industrial complex'

it needs to be looked at.

[Vmarco]

my definition of a conservative is a cross between john muir/ ralph waldo emerson/henry david thoreau/thomas jefferson/thomas paine/patrick henry/wendell berry

 

Jefferson, Paine, and other Founding Father loathed Conservatives,...who at the time, called themselves Federalists.

 

Considering that Conservativism has been psychologically shown to be a mental illness, it is not surprising that Conservatives, like Tea Party fanatics, reconstruct history to make their talking points more palatable for their ignorant base.

 

Some Conservatives have realized that however,...like the Texas Tea Party, who controls the Texas State Board of Education, and wants Thomas Jefferson out of text books.

 

Freethinkers such as Thomas Paine, the father of the North American Revolution with the British, and the person who coined the term United States of America, often spoke of the insidiousness of Christian scripture. Thomas Jefferson, another U.S. founding father, said, "The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus will be classed with other fables." The American Revolution guerrilla leader Ethan Allen was even said to have stopped his own wedding until the presiding judge affirmed that "God" referred to Nature and not to the god of the Bible.

[zerostao]

vmarco, i said it was my definition. notice that i did not include jerry falwell on my list.

"Considering that Conservativism has been psychologically shown to be a mental illness"

when you make statements like that one , do you feel you maintain any level of credibility?

conservative is widely recognized as one who supports historical norms and is cautious towards change.

margaret thatcher was ate up with mental illness?

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

vmarco, i said it was my definition. notice that i did not include jerry falwell on my list.

"Considering that Conservativism has been psychologically shown to be a mental illness"

when you make statements like that one , do you feel you maintain any level of credibility?

conservative is widely recognized as one who supports historical norms and is cautious towards change.

margaret thatcher was ate up with mental illness?

 

 

It's perfectly credible. An observation made by an individual is no less credible than the identical conclusion made by billions of dollars worth of education and research, done by certified individuals you like to call scientists.

 

 

So maybe you're just not willing to believe an observation that money wasnt spent on?

 

Maybe you'd like to provide your counter-observations?

 

 

 

Can't help but see conservation as being a little bit fear-based. the fear of limited resources leads to conserving them? no? What is it if not irrationality?

[voidisyinyang]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTwqkl8BqSc

 

Conservatism:

 

Koch Brothers Exposed documentary -- from building up Stalin's empire to buying out the government for creating their own Stalinism in the U.S.

[ralis]

An excerpt of a review regarding Russell Kirk's 'The Conservative Mind'.

 

http://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2522&context=ilj

 

 

 

 

 

 

Professor Kirk's canons of conservative thought' are as follows:

(1) political problems are, at heart, religious and moral problems, for

"divine intent rules society as well as conscience;" (2) an affection for

the "proliferating variety and mystery of traditional life;" (3) a conviction that a "civilized society requires order and classes," combined

with the belief that a destruction of "natural" distinctions between men

leads to the rise of tyrants in consequence of the masses' need of leadership; (4) a recognition of the dependence of freedom upon property,

which enables the conservative to perceive that economic leveling leads

inevitably to the destruction of liberty; (5) a deep faith in tradition ana

prejudice as guarantors of social order, combined with a distrust of mere

reason; and (6) "[r] ecognition that change and reform are not identical,

and that innovation is a devouring conflagration more often than it is a

torch of progress. Society must alter, for slow change is the means of

its conservation ... but Providence is the proper instrument for change,

and the test of a statesman is his cognizance of the real tendency of

Providential social forces.

 

Professor Kirk appeals to a 'divine intent' or higher cause as a justification for traditional conservative values. Absolute property rights, opposition to egalitarianism and citing 'Providence' or 'divine activity' as just cause. The problem with this view is that the strongest determine what is 'divine will' or not and proceed accordingly to human whim which is based on fear and a quest for power. Social Darwinism.

Edited April 9, 2013 by ralis

[ralis]

To continue

 

 

 

 

Society must alter, for slow change is the means of

its conservation ... but Providence is the proper instrument for change,

and the test of a statesman is his cognizance of the real tendency of

Providential social forces."'2

At the heart of this list lie the Providential theory of history, a

deep rooted distrust of human reason and human goodness, and a nearly

mystic belief in the intrinsic value of tradition and prejudice as the basis

of social order.

 

Does anyone believe that conservatives are for the greater common good of our society and not just their own selfish agenda?

[voidisyinyang]

To continue

 

 

 

 

Does anyone believe that conservatives are for the greater common good of our society and not just their own selfish agenda?

 

Well.... I mean.... democracy itself needs to be spread through subversion and coups and assassinations, etc.

 

http://williamblum.org/aer/read/115

 

Nice -- U.S. government funded 22 NGOs in Venezuela to take out Chavez.

 

yeah conservative..... liberal.... as long as it goes along with U.S. imperialism all is well.

 

Oh yeah we don't live in a "democracy" -- I keep forgetting. haha. I love how conservatives really emphasize this -- like so they're against democracy?

 

Oh because the rights of the "minority" (read wealthy elite) will be threatened.

 

This is exactly what John Jay and the other conservative elites like Alexander Hamilton, etc. thought.....

 

It's all Western b.s. based on logarithmic mathematics as technology.

[JustARandomPanda]

Wow. Had no idea my C&P of assorted articles would generate such posts.

 

 

I question the equation of Conservative = Mental Illness if for no other reason than I think it's quite possible for people of other ideologies to become mentally ill as well. Illness doesn't check first to see what one's ideology is. I guess I equate mental illness with a more biological imbalance than with a categorizing of positions one is for or against or indifferent to. To start merging them begins to lose the usefulness of the term mental illness. I actually recall getting into a dispute with Aaron and Marblehead over this very thing in the Nietzsche thread. Both of them preferring to use the term Mental Illness with positions they deem irrational. And while Mental Illness may be irrational not all irrationality is mental illness. I found neither Marblehead's, Aaron's nor anyone else's arguments in this thread for oozing the term's boundaries (equivocation) convincing.

 

 

 

****

 

I think what got lost from my Opening Post is that what is called 'conservative' today is not what was historically considered conservative. "Old Time" conservatives were actually against standing armies and constant military interventions around the globe and behaving like an Imperial power and seeing that such comes at great cost not only to the invaded countries but also to the people back home.

 

Paul Gottfried doesn't agree with the Russel Kirk definition of what is conservative but he and others like him (ie Paul Gottfried) are definitely conservative. Libertarians don't count as conservatives according to Paul Gottfried either. They're 'hopelessly demented Leftists' in his opinion. That they don't see that themselves (it's leftist historical roots) is a testament to the poor state of education of even recent history among the average citizen in the West. Libertarianism would actually open the door to increased control of society by Mercantile powers - something many old time Conservatives would oppose (unless they themselves were one of those Mercantile powers-that-be).

 

 

2. I disagree that an appeal to the Transcendent always equates to appealing to an (inevitably somebody's culturally-defined) Supreme Deity. Dharmakaya in Buddhism is taught as the highest truth. It is certainly transcendent if I understand it correctly but it's not appealing to a Diety of any kind. Yet if it is re-ified then those opposed to Deities should equally apply that opposition to Buddhism. Thus it is not God as such that is a possible source of contention but the re-ification of (inevitably somebody's culturally-and-ethnically defined) Transcendence that is the contention. As if other cultures can't get a clue that there may be a transcendent so they gotta be 'shown the correct way'. That's why I believe it's possible a Hindu's use of the word "god" can be correct if 'god' is a non-reified term for highest transcendence. And Buddhists often can and do exactly the reverse - else why would the Buddha have continually taught dependent origination instead. I also think it's quite possible for atheists to be virtuous yet don't need a 'god' to justify virtuousness.

 

Anyway...that gets a bit Off-Topic but it's to show why I'm surprised so many continue to stick with the current media-ted (as VMarco puts it) version of conservatism that's currently sold. It's not the only 'kind' around. And it's not even the oldest kind around.

 

And most of all...I find it surprising that I'm the only one who doesn't see JB as an authoritarian. If anything he's as fierce a critic of the Money Power Leviathan that spans the globe as much as anyone else in this thread so far. As such you'd think others who oppose the same would see him as a natural ally - not an opponent.

[JustARandomPanda]

Here is JMG's very latest post.

 

Guess what it's about. The Reification of Civil Religions. Interestingly it touches on the themes in this very thread.

 

Enjoy!

 

 

The Fate of Civil Religion

 

 

 

To describe faith in progress as a religion, as I’ve done in these essays numerous times, courts a good many misunderstandings. The most basic of those comes out of the way that the word “religion” itself has been tossed around like a football in any number of modern society’s rhetorical scrimmages. Thus it’s going to be necessary to begin by taking a closer look at the usage of that much-vexed term.

The great obstacle here is that so many people these days insist that religion is a specific thing with a specific definition. Now of course it’s all too common for the definition in question to be crafted to privilege the definer’s own beliefs and deliver a slap across the face of rivals; that’s as true of religious people who want to define religion as something they have and other people don’t as it is of atheists who want to insist that what they have isn’t a religion no matter how much it looks like one. Still, there’s a deeper issue involved here as well.

The word “religion” is a label for a category. That may seem like an excessively obvious statement, but it has implications that get missed surprisingly often. Categories are not, by and large, things that exist out there in the world. They’re abstractions—linguistically, culturally, and contextually specific abstractions—that human minds use to sort out the disorder and diversity of experience into some kind of meaningful order. To define a category is simply to draw a mental boundary around certain things, as a way of stressing their similarities to one another and their differences from other things. To make the same point in a slightly different way, categories are tools, and a tool, as a tool, can’t be true or false; it can only be more or less useful for a given job, and slight variations in a given tool can be useful to help it do that job more effectively.

A lack of attention to this detail has caused any number of squabbles, ranging from the absurd to the profound. Thus, for example, when the International Astronomical Union announced a few years back that Pluto had been reclassified from a planet to a dwarf planet, some of the protests that were splashed across the internet made it sound as though astronomers had aimed a death ray at the solar system’s former ninth planet and blasted it out of the heavens. Now of course they did nothing of the kind; they were simply following a precedent set back in the 1850s, when the asteroid Ceres, originally classified as a planet on its discovery in 1801, was stripped of that title once other objects like it were spotted.

Pluto, as it turned out, was simply the first object in the Kuiper Belt to be sighted and named, just as Ceres was the first object in the asteroid belt to be sighted and named. The later discoveries of Eris, Haumea, Sedna, and other Pluto-like objects out in the snowball-rich suburbs of the solar system convinced the IAU that assigning Pluto to a different category made more sense than keeping it in its former place on the roster of planets. The change in category didn’t affect Pluto at all; it simply provided a slightly more useful way of sorting out the diverse family of objects circling the Sun.

A similar shift, though in the other direction, took place in the sociology of religions in 1967, with the publication of Robert Bellah’s paper “Civil Religion in America.” Before that time, most definitions of religion had presupposed that something could be assigned to that category only if it involved belief in at least one deity. Challenging this notion, Bellah pointed out the existence of a class of widely accepted belief systems that had all the hallmarks of religion except such a belief. Borrowing a turn of phrase from Rousseau, he called these “civil religions,” and the example central to his paper was the system of beliefs that had grown up around the ideas and institutions of American political life.

The civil religion of Americanism, Bellah showed, could be compared point for point with the popular theistic religions in American life, and the comparison made sense of features no previous analysis quite managed to interpret convincingly. Americanism had its own sacred scriptures, such as the Declaration of Independence; its own saints and martyrs, such as Abraham Lincoln; its own formal rites—the Pledge of Allegiance, for example, fills exactly the same role in Americanism that the Lord’s Prayer does in most forms of Christianity popular in the United States—and so on straight down the list of religious institutions. Furthermore, and most crucially, the core beliefs of Americanism were seen by most Americans as self-evidently good and true, and as standards by which other claims of goodness and truth could and should be measured: in a word, as sacred.

While Americanism was the focus of Bellah’s paper, it was and is far from the only example of the species he anatomized. When the paper in question first saw print, for example, a classic example of the type was in full flower on the other side of the Cold War’s heavily guarded frontiers. During the century and a half or so from the publication of The Communist Manifesto to the implosion of the Soviet Union, Communism was one of the modern world’s most successful civil religions, an aggressive missionary faith preaching an apocalyptic creed of secular salvation. It shared a galaxy of standard features with other contemporary Western religions, from sacred scriptures and intricate doctrinal debates on down to steet-corner evangelists spreading the gospel among the downtrodden.

Even its vaunted atheism, the one obvious barrier setting it apart from its more conventionally religious rivals, was simply an extension of a principle central to the Abrahamic religions, though by no means common outside that harsh desert-centered tradition. The unyielding words of the first commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” were as central to Communism as to Judaism, Christianity, or Islam; the sole difference in practice was that, since Communist civil religion directed its reverence toward a hypothetical set of abstract historical processes rather than a personal deity, its version of the commandment required the faithful to have no gods at all.

Not all civil religions take so hard a line toward their theist rivals. Americanism is an example of the other common strategy, which can be described with fair accuracy as cooptation: the recruitment of the deity or deities of the locally popular theist religion as part of the publicity team for the civil religion in question. In this case, a picture is indeed worth a thousand words:

 

 

 

 

I hope I don’t need to point out to any of my readers that the US constitution, that cautious tissue of half-resolved disputes and last-minute compromises, was not handed down by Jesus to the founding fathers, and that it’s even a bit insulting to suggest that a document needing so much revision and amendment down through the years could have come from an omniscient source. I also hope I don’t need to point out that most of the founding fathers shown clustered around Jesus in the painting were Deists who were deeply suspicious of organized religion—and of course then there’s Ben Franklin, skeptic, libertine, lapsed Quaker, and sometime member of the Hell-Fire Club, standing there with a beatific smile on his face, one hand over his heart, and the other doubtless hiding crossed fingers behind his back. Still, that’s the sort of distortion that happens when the emotions evoked by civil religion shape history in hindsight. The Communist Manifesto and the October Revolution came in for the same sort of hagiography, and inspired even worse art.

Other examples of civil religion would be easy enough to cite—or, for that matter, to illustrate with equally tasteless imagery—but the two I’ve just named are good examples of the type, and will be wholly adequate to illustrate the points I want to make here. First, it takes only the briefest glance at history to realize that civil religions can call forth passions and loyalties every bit as powerful as those evoked by theist religions. Plenty of American patriots and committed Communists alike have readily laid down their lives for the sake of the civil religions in which they put their faith. Both civil religions have inspired art, architecture, music and poetry along the whole spectrum from greatness to utter kitsch; both provided the force that drove immense social and cultural changes for good or ill; both are comparable in their impact on the world in modern times with even the most popular theist religions.

Second, the relations between civil religions and theist religions tend to be just as problematic as the relations between one theist religion and another. The sort of bland tolerance with which most of today’s democracies regard religion is the least intrusive option, and even so it often involves compromises that many theist religions find difficult to accept. From there, the spectrum extends through more or less blatant efforts to coopt theist religions into the service of the civil religion, all the way to accusations of disloyalty and the most violent forms of persecution. The long history of troubled relations between theist religions and officially nonreligious political creeds is among other things a useful confirmation of Bellah’s thesis: it’s precisely because civil religions and theist religions appeal to so many of the same social and individual needs, and call forth so many of the same passions and loyalties, that they so often come into conflict with one another.

Third, civil religions share with theist religions a curious and insufficiently studied phenomenon that may as well be called the antireligion. An antireligion is a movement within a religious community that claims to oppose that community’s faith, in a distinctive way: it embraces essentially all of its parent religion’s beliefs, but inverts the values, embracing as good what the parent religion defines as evil, and rejecting as evil what the parent religion defines as good.

The classic example of the type is Satanism, the antireligion of Christianity. In its traditional forms—the conservative Christians among my readers may be interested to know that Satanism also suffers from modernist heresies—Satanism accepts essentially all of the presuppositions of Christianity, but says with Milton’s Satan, “Evil, be thou my good.” Thus you’ll have to look long and hard among even the most devout Catholics to find anyone more convinced of the spiritual power of the Catholic Mass than an old-fashioned Satanist; it’s from that conviction that the Black Mass, the parody of the Catholic rite that provides traditional Satanism with its central ceremony, gains whatever power it has.

Antireligions are at least as common among civil religions as they are among theist faiths. The civil religion of Americanism, for example, has as its antireligion the devout and richly detailed claim, common among American radicals of all stripes, that the United States is uniquely evil among the world’s nations. This creed, or anticreed, simply inverts the standard notions of American exceptionalism without changing them in any other way. In the same way, Communism has its antireligion, which was founded by the Russian expatriate Ayn Rand and has become the central faith of much of America’s current pseudoconservative movement. There is of course nothing actually conservative about Rand’s Objectivism; it’s simply what you get when you accept the presuppositions of Marxism—atheism, materialism, class warfare, and the rest of it—but say “Evil, be thou my good” to all its value judgments. If you’ve ever wondered why so many American pseudoconservatives sound as though they’re trying to imitate the cackling capitalist villains of traditional Communist demonology, now you know.

Emotional power, difficult relations with other faiths, and the presence of an antireligion: these are far from the only features civil religions have in common with the theist competition. Still, just as it makes sense to talk of civil religions and theist religions as two subcategories within the broader category of religion as a whole, it’s worthwhile to point out at least one crucial difference between civil and theist religions: civil religions tend to be brittle. They are far more vulnerable than theist faiths to sudden loss of faith on the grand scale.

The collapse of Communism in the late twentieth century is a classic example. By the 1980s, despite heroic efforts at deception and self-deception, nobody anywhere on the globe could pretend any longer that the Communist regimes spread across the globe had anything in common with the worker’s paradise of Communist myth, or were likely to do so on less than geological time scales. The grand prophetic vision central to the Communist faith—the worldwide spread of proletarian revolution, driven by the unstoppable force of the historical dialectic; the dictatorship of the proletariat that would follow, in nation after nation, bringing the blessings of socialism to the wretched of the earth; sooner or later thereafter, the withering away of the state and the coming of true communism—all turned, in the space of a single generation, from the devout hope of countless millions to a subject for bitter jokes among the children of those same millions. The implosion of the Soviet empire and its inner circle of client states, and the rapid abandonment of Communism elsewhere, followed in short order.

The Communist civil religion was vulnerable to so dramatic a collapse because its kingdom was entirely of this world. Theist religions that teach the doctrines of divine providence and the immortality of the soul can always appeal to another world for the fulfillment of hopes disappointed in this one, but a civil religion such as Communism cannot. As the Soviet system stumbled toward its final collapse, faithful believers in the Communist gospel could not console themselves with the hope that they would be welcomed into the worker’s paradise after they died, or even pray that the angels of dialectical materialism might smite the local commissar for his sins. There was no refuge from the realization that their hopes had been betrayed and the promises central to their faith would not be kept.

This sort of sudden collapse happens tolerably often to civil religions, and explains some of the more dramatic shifts in religious history. The implosion of Roman paganism in the late Empire, for example, had a good many factors driving it, but one of the most important was the way that the worship of the old gods had been coopted by the civil religion of the Roman state. By the time the Roman Empire reached its zenith, Jove and the other gods of the old Roman pantheon had been turned into political functionaries, filling much the same role as Jesus in the painting above. The old concept of the pax deorum—the maintenance of peace and good relations between the Roman people and their gods—had been drafted into the service of the Pax Romana, and generations of Roman panegyrists insisted that Rome’s piety guaranteed her the perpetual rulership of the world.

When the empire started to come unglued, therefore, and those panegyrics stopped being polite exaggerations and turned into bad jokes, Roman civil religion came unglued with it, and dragged down much of Roman paganism in its turn. The collapse of belief in the old gods was nothing like as sudden or as total as the collapse of faith in Communism—all along, there were those who found spiritual sustenance in the traditional faith, and many of them clung to it until the rising spiral of Christian persecution intervened—but the failure of the promises Roman civil religion had loaded onto the old gods, at the very least, made things much easier for Christian evangelists.

It’s entirely possible, as I’ve suggested more than once in these essays, that some similar fate awaits the civil religion of Americanism. That faith has already shifted in ways that suggest the imminence of serious trouble. Not that many decades ago, all things considered, a vast number of Americans were simply and unselfconsciously convinced that the American way was the best way, that America would inevitably overcome whatever troubles its enemies and the vagaries of nature threw at it, and that the world’s best hope lay in the possibility that people in other lands would finally get around to noticing how much better things were over here, and be inspired to imitate us. It’s easy to make fun of such opinions, especially in the light of what happened in the decades that followed, but it’s one of the peculiarities of religious belief—any religious belief, civil, theist, or otherwise—that it always looks at least faintly absurd to those who don’t hold it.

Still, the point I want to make is more specific. You won’t find many Americans holding such beliefs nowadays, and those who still make such claims in public generally do it in the sort of angry and defensive tones that suggest that they’re repeating a creed in which neither they nor their listeners quite believe any longer. American patriotism, like Roman patriotism during the last couple of centuries of the Empire, increasingly focuses on the past: it’s not America as it is today that inspires religious devotion, but the hovering ghost of an earlier era, taking on more and more of the colors of utopia as it fades from sight. Meanwhile politicians mouth the old slogans and go their merry ways. I wonder how many of them have stopped to think about the consequences if the last of the old faith that once gave those slogans their meaning finally goes away for good.

Such things happen to civil religions, far more often than they happen to theist faiths. I’d encourage my readers to keep that in mind next week, as we focus on another civil religion, one that’s played even a larger role in modern history than the two discussed in this post. That faith is, of course, the religion of progress.

 

[ralis]

Wow. Had no idea my C&P of assorted articles would generate such posts.

 

 

I question the equation of Conservative = Mental Illness if for no other reason than I think it's quite possible for people of other ideologies to become mentally ill as well. Illness doesn't check first to see what one's ideology is. I guess I equate mental illness with a more biological imbalance than with a categorizing of positions one is for or against or indifferent to. To start merging them begins to lose the usefulness of the term mental illness. I actually recall getting into a dispute with Aaron and Marblehead over this very thing in the Nietzsche thread. Both of them preferring to use the term Mental Illness with positions they deem irrational. And while Mental Illness may be irrational not all irrationality is mental illness. I found neither Marblehead's, Aaron's nor anyone else's arguments in this thread for oozing the term's boundaries (equivocation) convincing.

 

 

 

****

 

I think what got lost from my Opening Post is that what is called 'conservative' today is not what was historically considered conservative. "Old Time" conservatives were actually against standing armies and constant military interventions around the globe and behaving like an Imperial power and seeing that such comes at great cost not only to the invaded countries but also to the people back home.

 

Paul Gottfried doesn't agree with the Russel Kirk definition of what is conservative but he and others like him (ie Paul Gottfried) are definitely conservative. Libertarians don't count as conservatives according to Paul Gottfried either. They're 'hopelessly demented Leftists' in his opinion. That they don't see that themselves (it's leftist historical roots) is a testament to the poor state of education of even recent history among the average citizen in the West. Libertarianism would actually open the door to increased control of society by Mercantile powers - something many old time Conservatives would oppose (unless they themselves were one of those Mercantile powers-that-be).

 

 

2. I disagree that an appeal to the Transcendent always equates to appealing to an (inevitably somebody's culturally-defined) Supreme Deity. Dharmakaya in Buddhism is taught as the highest truth. It is certainly transcendent if I understand it correctly but it's not appealing to a Diety of any kind. Yet if it is re-ified then those opposed to Deities should equally apply that opposition to Buddhism. Thus it is not God as such that is a possible source of contention but the re-ification of (inevitably somebody's culturally-and-ethnically defined) Transcendence that is the contention. As if other cultures can't get a clue that there may be a transcendent so they gotta be 'shown the correct way'. That's why I believe it's possible a Hindu's use of the word "god" can be correct if 'god' is a non-reified term for highest transcendence. And Buddhists often can and do exactly the reverse - else why would the Buddha have continually taught dependent origination instead. I also think it's quite possible for atheists to be virtuous yet don't need a 'god' to justify virtuousness.

 

Anyway...that gets a bit Off-Topic but it's to show why I'm surprised so many continue to stick with the current media-ted (as VMarco puts it) version of conservatism that's currently sold. It's not the only 'kind' around. And it's not even the oldest kind around.

 

And most of all...I find it surprising that I'm the only one who doesn't see JB as an authoritarian. If anything he's as fierce a critic of the Money Power Leviathan that spans the globe as much as anyone else in this thread so far. As such you'd think others who oppose the same would see him as a natural ally - not an opponent.

 

If you don't see JB as an authoritarian, then you have not read his posts over the years. In particular around global warming and his insistence that he is absolutely right and all climate scientists are wrong. That is an authoritarian mindset and violates open scientific peer review and discourse. His mindset is not from well researched evidence or working with a research group but of personal opinion only. Joe is not a scientist and has on several occasions stated that any evidence that I put forward, he will immediately knock it down. I would suggest reading his posts before making that statement.

 

 

What I was referring to in terms of Russell Kirk is his view of the 'divine will' and the workings of Providence. Which in historical context can be seen as the 'Divine Right of Kings' submitting to a higher cause etc. Who decides or interprets what the higher cause or 'divine will is'? That can't be dismissed whatsoever. To equate Buddhism in this context is missing the point. Theistic religious beliefs such as Christianity that many conservatives believe in and will use against others is apparent in the right wing movement. It is time to stop philosophical discourse and see this dangerous right wing movement for what it is.

 

I grew up in the midwest during the height of the cold war and have first hand experience of what right wing conservatives are capable of.

[ralis]

 

Christian belief is not the only source of ethical principle behind law, but it is the most powerful and popular source.

If all connection between the Christian religion and the verdicts of courts of law is severed in this country, the law

will become erratic and unpredictable at best.

—Russell Kirk (147)

 

http://allenmendenhall.com/wp-content/uploads/A-Word-for-Christian-Lawyers.pdf

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

Not even scientific authorities of any researched topic are presenting anything other than opinions based on the objects of evidence used in their equations.


To say one group has more authority solely on their funding and environment (money and labs = authority on facts) is to say that anyone who does NOT have the prerequisites of presenting facts is blind, deaf, mute, numb, and... ugh whatever affliction of the olfactory renders odor null.


If Joe's observations are invalidated by the presence of evidence, then he is wrong and no one needs concern themselves with him, only present evidence.


But you two are more interested in une opping each other. its not about facts or what is true, but about the popularity contest to see which one of the two of you can gather a larger following of "yesmen" who agree with your side of the argument.

And while this might not have anything to do with the topic of argument, it's a consistent theme between ralis and joeblast. it's relevant only by association.

Welcome to The History of the World: According to Joeblast and Ralis hour!

[ralis]

Not even scientific authorities of any researched topic are presenting anything other than opinions based on the objects of evidence used in their equations.

 

 

To say one group has more authority solely on their funding and environment (money and labs = authority on facts) is to say that anyone who does NOT have the prerequisites of presenting facts is blind, deaf, mute, numb, and... ugh whatever affliction of the olfactory renders odor null.

 

 

If Joe's observations are invalidated by the presence of evidence, then he is wrong and no one needs concern themselves with him, only present evidence.

 

 

But you two are more interested in une opping each other. its not about facts or what is true, but about the popularity contest to see which one of the two of you can gather a larger following of "yesmen" who agree with your side of the argument.

 

And while this might not have anything to do with the topic of argument, it's a consistent theme between ralis and joeblast. it's relevant only by association.

 

Welcome to The History of the World: According to Joeblast and Ralis hour!

 

If that is your opinion, then you fail to understand the scientific method!

[Vanir Thunder Dojo Tan]

the scientific method has not produced a better world for which people can live, but a world in which no one can agree with each other!

Too worried about dissecting the universe to experience it, too scared of the unknown to simply leave well enough alone.


Tell me, what good is the scientific method?

I have seen many things derived from using science, but of them, i have yet to see any resolution. I have yet to see an end of poverty, of hunger, of suffering. if anything, science has only brought the quantum of these examples up to a higher digit!

So again, i demand: What good is the scientific method?

[JustARandomPanda]

 

If you don't see JB as an authoritarian, then you have not read his posts over the years. In particular around global warming and his insistence that he is absolutely right and all climate scientists are wrong. That is an authoritarian mindset and violates open scientific peer review and discourse. His mindset is not from well researched evidence or working with a research group but of personal opinion only. Joe is not a scientist and has on several occasions stated that any evidence that I put forward, he will immediately knock it down. I would suggest reading his posts before making that statement.

 

I looked up authoritarianism on Wikipedia. I'm not sure how disputing scientific research equates to authoritarianism. Has he actually posted in the past that his position is the right one and all climate scientists are wrong?

 

I've only seen him question the assumptions that feed into the methodologies so far - perhaps you can give an exact quote wherein he states his scientific evaluation is the absolutely correct one? And the main reason I've seen him question them is his (legitimate imo) fear that such research will be used as an excuse by the Money Power Leviathan to further it's grip of control on the populace - which makes him *surprise surprise* AGAINST totalitarianism (assuming Wikipedia's entry is correct).

 

This is where he and PFL sound alike in some respects imo because such centralizing power only comes about with the aid of the technological/creative classes of society's use of technology (the much ballyhood Knowledge Workers with High Paying Jobs politicians love to trot out to their constituents). Without this strata of workers to grease the daily work-wheels of power (power whose financial costs of maintaining and sustaining such are plummeting decade by decade). The populace doesn't even see how they inadvertently grease the wheels of that which they dislike or even in some cases hate.

 

To put it in Nassim Taleb's terms - there's very little anti-fragility built into the world-system now. Even a 4% cut by any developed world government will bring the system crashing to the ground. The Money Power employs - directly and indirectly - the people who control technology whether that control be via STEM or via "Creative-Class" aid. Because there is now almost no anti-fragility in society (that's one of the consequences of technocratic-enabled centralization imo and I think JMG agrees) the Money Power has us all by the throat. One move - if we don't do as they say - and the system comes crashing down to the suffering of nearly all.

 

He's not wrong to point out that this is a definite possibility. A carbon tax market just creates another avenue for the tertiary paper economy to blow a 'gaming the system' bubble (in JMG's 3-tiered outline) to make the world's societies even more vulnerable if financial shenanigans go bellyup. It's as if the guys at the top are saying - "fine...just know that if you bring us down to ruin..you'll bring yourself down to ruin too". And most people are too scared to move. They fight each other instead of seeing they could potentially be natural allies. But it would mean giving up a lot of the stuff in their lives they love and think they can't do without. JMG teaches his blog readers they actually can do without and live a damn fine life at it to boot. He teaches them to be anti-fragile in an increasingly systemically fragile world economy.

 

 

I don't know if JB would ever concede if there's a possibility that climate science might be right. I think they are but that's just me. And I admit I'm no scientist. All I've seen at the moment is him just questioning some undesirable and rather totalitarian-esq outcomes of the proposals floated about Congress and International Governing bodies (like the EU). Such constant focus on what government can do makes people forget

 

1. the Money Power has vastly disproportionate influence there and

 

2. they actually can act without pre-authorization from any elites - governmental, corporate or financial.

 

We don't act because energy goes where there's least resistance typically (habits are like this too). Some people are very early adopters..most like me are rather late to the table. I'm actually with Aaron (and JMG) in that one of the better ways to start changing things is to take back our power. Don't wait for government to save us (on any level - not even local - you do that and you'll be waiting a loooong time).

 

Anyway...all of the above is off-topic.

 

To get back to the point - how does equating authoritarianism with global weirding address what I was posting about - That there's more than one type of conservative out there. The level of education of what conservatism is - from my admittedly recent but ongoing investigations - doesn't convince me that everyone who thinks he/she is a conservative actually is or knows the history of that term. Which kind of conservative? The Jacobite Mercantilist Neocons? The Technocrats? The Theocrats? Those are the ones that dominate much of the Republican party. Surprisingly a huge bunch of the same mentality has an inordinate amount of power within the Democratic Party too. Why else does Obama's Democratic Administration refuse to prosecute TBTF bank execs and the shadow bank execs that nearly brought the world to it's knees in 2008?

 

 

 

What I was referring to in terms of Russell Kirk is his view of the 'divine will' and the workings of Providence. Which in historical context can be seen as the 'Divine Right of Kings' submitting to a higher cause etc. Who decides or interprets what the higher cause or 'divine will is'? That can't be dismissed whatsoever.

 

That's what I was talking about earlier. You can't get away from the inevitably cultural-ethnic history of what divine will even is (assuming there is such). Divine will as Russell Kirk saw it presumes a Supreme Diety...something no Buddhist would agree to for example. Yet Buddhists do acknowledge there is an Absolute (that's what the dharmakaya is as I understand it). They just don't reify it as a Supreme Diety the way most Abrahamaic theists do.

 

It's possible imo to become aware of transcendence - part of what this whole website is about imo. Just break through the skandas and you'll start to find out how little you really know.

 

But again...so I can bring it back around to my Opening Topic. People like Paul Gottfried would argue someone like Russell Kirk's definition of conservative overlooks a lot of other history loaded into that term. A lot of history which can end up contradicting many of Kirk's conclusions.

 

I don't know if Gottfried is correct. But he's made me curious about the actual history as opposed to what the Media has been telling me for most of my life. I surely don't hold up Rupert Murdoch owned Media outlets as vaunted sources of historical accuracy.

[ralis]

edit