Revbledsoe’s Weblog

It actually does seem to me that some of our earlier defenders of Inspiration were a bit “wooden headed” in their own literalism (not just Lindsell, but Allis and Young, and even Warfield) and did partake a bit in the quest for “photographic accuracy.” They had themselves not quite gotten over the Kantian barrenness and desert.

But, there were some remarkable people in the decades of the 20s, 30s, and 40s of the 20th Century who leaped the chasm quite deftly.

The early Wittgenstein in THE TRACTATUS was just an update and application of Russell and Whitehead’s PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA, and its quest for an “ideal language.” But both Wittgenstein and Whitehead later made the escape and realized that such ventures could never succeed, and both tried to escape a “picture theory of language.” How successfully is another question. (It strikes me that all of Wittgenstein’s “puzzling” and finding everyday language “odd,” is really a quest to recover transcendence, which everyday language gives witness to everywhere.) C.S. Lewis and company (headed I suppose by Owen Barfield) really did escape and realized that language was both literal and symbolic at the same time. One cannot make that leap really, unless one re-escapes to orthodoxy. So of course the other person who escaped most supremely was Cornelius Van Til.

On a purely Kantian basis, symbolism is surely an impossibility; at least symbolism that matters. Pray tell what could be symbolized? The noumenal is completely unknowable, so all that anything in the phenomenal realm could symbolize would be other phenomena, and what fun would that be? Hence, the attempt to escape THIS dilemma (which is no small thing to anyone who cares about a high culture–like all the great Germans did) must be the great project of all the great neo-Kantians of the 19th and 20th centuries (PHILOSOPHY OF THE SYMBOLIC FORMS–Ernst Cassirier, for example–but how successful could they be without Christian revelation?) Polanyi of course was doing the same thing in showing how unreal the descriptions of people from Beacon to Russell were in describing the real human endeavor of doing science. No one can function in the barren wilderness of the Enlightenment.

But in truth, it is only Christians with a full blown doctrine of inspiration who can make this escape.

Two more short things. One, it seems to me to be true that earlier commentators and theologians (even popular figures like Matthew Henry) are far more interesting than the great 19th century figures like Joseph Addison Alexander on Isaiah, precisely because the earlier ones are entirely unencumbered by the Kantian literal barrenness and function very naturally with symbolism. And this is what makes a figure like Vos so important, and James Jordan so interesting (and important). We are close to getting over it.

And secondly, in two or three thousand years, it will be entirely obvious that “proto-Wittgenstein and Whitehead” and “Deutero-Wittgenstein and Whitehead” are entirely different figures separated by at least several centuries. Look at the differences in style!  And the vast differences in mental outlook make clear they are from entirely different places and cultures and eras, if not different planets. Such a vast change in mental outlook would require a great many years, even centuries. Some things do get more and more clear with the passage of time.

Rich

The redoubtable Rosenstock-Huessy says somewhere in his corpus (people like ERH are really hard to footnote–they have said too much in too many places, and they are very hard to find) that real science never happens apart from despair, or rather, the overcoming of despair. This never happens, at least initially, apart from God.

Nothing becomes history until it is forgotten and then re-remembered. This is the pattern all over again of death and resurrection. Let me give two simple examples off of the top of my head.

It is hard for us to fathom how popular GK Chesterton was as a commentator in Britain for many years in the early 20th century. One might be tempted to compare what he did to talk radio today. On the level of popular influence, I suppose one could compare him to Rush Limbaugh today. But then he was forgotten. His hundred books were relegated to dust filled corners of public libraries and no one remembered (except as a dim distant nostalgia) who he was or what he said or did. His death commenced his death. And then in the last twenty years, it is as though he was resurrected from the dead. Now he is everywhere, and as one of the most quotable and clever of commentators, his quips can be seen and referenced either as sayings in themselves, or as allusions to the essay and book length meditations or stories that he concocted.

The other example is Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas in his lifetime and for a few years beyond was remarkable. But then, he either became a museum piece or was not remembered at all, except as one of those petrified “scholastics.” Then in the early 20th century, he was awakened from his long slumber (partly through Chesterton) and there has now been a century long renaissance and renewal. Aquinas has joined the living, the very living, and every renewal of memory makes him more interesting and deeper than before.

Both of these gentlemen have now “made history,” but their memory had to die first.

The most notable place this is true is with what the Bible itself has wrought in the world. The Christian revelation, and its instantiation in the world through the church, has so completely transformed human understanding and existence that after that transformation it is regarded as simply “natural” and the way things have always been. It is unthinkable that they could be otherwise.

This is similar to what has been said about great leadership. The nemesis of all great leadership is that it succeeds so “successfully” that the previous terrible reality and circumstance that has been overcome is forgotten, and the great leader is never thanked (until much later when he makes “history”).

To return to ERH and science. He says (somewhere) that the pagans never rise to science. They create interesting toys, they create very clever and very workable simple technologies, but never science. Science required the faith of Abraham to come into existence. Science only happens after the fires of despair have been overcome in a deeper faith. The early scientists were all Abrahams who leaped over impossible chasms.

Remember, Abraham was placed in an impossible situation by God. He married a barren woman. Then, beyond that, God was sure to wait long enough that she passed through menopause. Menopause came later at that time than now. Now it comes between 40 and 50. Then, people’s life spans were still declining from pre-flood lengths (Methuselah, 969 years) to the now average 70-80.  Abraham live to be 175, and Sarah lived a mere 127 years. She probably had to reach or exceed 70 or 75 to pass menopause. At any rate, she lived a long time beyond menopause before her pregnancy. And the final barrier was in the Apostle Paul’s words’ that Abraham was “as good as dead” a euphemism for being impotent. So, we have a triple impossibility for having a son. Sarah is barren, past menopause, and her husband is impotent in his approaching old age. And yet, he is to believe God for a son. And God did it in His own time. The child was appropriately named “Isaac,” a double entendre meaning both laughter of delight for having a child in old age when impossible, and the laughter at how ridiculous this entire situation is!

Now we have forgotten what barriers had to be gotten through to achieve real science. Paganism always gave up before the great breakthroughs were made, because they took seriously what appeared to be true. What appeared to be true was that indeed, the universe IS irrational. It certainly appears so. Laws can only be established to point, to a degree, and beyond that is surrender to the obvious impossibilities of imposing or seeing any order upon the primordial chaos that underlay everything. It is not easy to make a breakthrough to a new perspective that sees a deeper order in all that appears irrational. It is no easier to keep believing this is a possibility than it is to believe God can give you a son when you are 100. It took extraordinary faith and belief to persevere to such places. The early scientists were in fact Abrahams.

Now, we have made so many breakthroughs for so many centuries that we assume this to be the possibility and the reality. We have forgotten. It now must be re-remembered and can now enter the blood stream of humanity as “history.”

Leslie Newbigin has said somewhere (also “somewhere” in his vast corpus) that one of the primary tasks of the church in the 21st century and beyond, will be to be the defender and keeper of “reason.” Modernity was always a Christian heresy. The polytheism of the ancient world meant that the gods were always at war with one another against a background of ultimate chaos. There were many stories just as there were many gods. It was an irrational cosmos that was of necessity at war with itself. The Christian revelation (following the Hebrew) taught for the first time that this was a single UNIVERSE, and not a multiverse, created by, and presided over by the One Triune God, who was the implication of all perfections, complete harmony, and final love. Modernity learned that this was a harmonious universe with one final story and not a multiverse, but wanted to abstract it from the Bible, the story of the Bible, and the God of the Bible. But by the 19th century it began to become apparent that one harmonious story in one universe, was only a myth after it was abstracted from the Book. Nietzsche was the great pioneer, and he fathomed that reason is violent and at war. In Nietzsche’s world, once again slavery and war are ultimate and we must surrender harmony and reason to naked power.

Modernity always was a Christian heresy, and post modernism is academic tribalism.

We are now in a position to remember again. We are ready for “taken for granted” assumptions to remember where they came from. We are ready for “history” and for this renewed memory to once again, now self-consciously, to remake the world–again.

Rich

The Uniformity of Nature and Biblical Authority

“So oddly, Biblical miracles (as opposed to pagan magic) and science are twin brothers with the same patrimony, and they came from the same household. Originally they were not enemies or rivals of one another, but actually implied each other.”

I.

I recently listened to three lectures by the great philosopher of science, Michael Polanyi (“Science, Faith and Society”). A point stuck out at me that was NOT a point he had set out to make, but that struck me as most interesting and compelling.

Polanyi, a chemist himself, while making the point about the necessary hallmark of “tradition” and remaining within the tradition, in science itself (showing that science itself is as dependent upon a “tradition,” just as much as say, Talmudic studies), was discussing what experimental evidence ought to be accepted and what ought not be accepted. It is simply not the case that all experimental evidence is found to be “acceptable.” A good deal of it is too far outside of the parameters of “the tradition” and is therefore simply ignored, or “put on hold” or re-interpreted, or regarded as being the result of faulty experimental technique and therefore, simply mistaken. Occasionally and very significantly, data that is apparently contradictory leads to a new, larger way of interpreting data that brings a reconciliation from larger parameters. But, it is impossible to accept all experimental data at face value. If all the data were accepted, science would end. (1)

Some of the data (and he gives fascinating examples) demonstrate startling things, and if simply believed and taken into the corpus, would lead us to no longer believe in the uniformity of nature, or that it is possible to give a rational account of how the universe functions. Face acceptance would lead us back to a pagan belief that “magic” and irrationality are supreme. It would lead us to believe that in fact as Ovid believed and wrote about in his METAMORPHOSIS: anything can turn into anything else.

But these conclusions are banished from the outset, because the uniformity of nature and the idea that the universe is rationally penetrable are axioms that are a-priorily believed and whatever violates those axioms is automatically thrown out. Nature’s uniformity and universal rationality are not provable dogmas, but are assumptions that all of science depends upon.

Where did these axioms come from?

Polanyi is himself Hungarian, and to understand where these axioms came from, one can turn to one of the other great Hungarian minds of the 20th century, Stanley Jaki. (The three great Hungarian thinkers of the 20th century were Polanyi, Jaki, and Aurthur Koestler. All three knew and influenced each other, and all three dealt extensively with the philosophy and history of science.) Jaki is the great historian of science in our time. Jaki demonstrates that science is the step child of Christian Church and the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.

In something I had written elsewhere, I offer a very short synopsis of what I have learned from the great Jaki (and also notably, from Cornelius Van Til, the great Reformed thinker). Here it is:

“Greek metaphysics by themselves, could not support the modern scientific enterprise. The Greeks did not believe in the pervasive rationality of the universe. Ultimately form could not encapsulate matter, and there was always an excrescence of the irrational.

“Modernity would never have happened had it not been for Christianity and the church in the western world. The old ancient world was ruled by various forms of pantheism (the idea that the cosmos itself is in some sense divine) and the many gods that emerged out of the forms and chaos of the cosmos. It was a world of polytheism, and a world in which anything could in some mysterious sense become a concentration point for the demonic powers that the world was filled with. So rocks, trees, animals, men, could rise up and become divine powers themselves. Then, Christianity declared that the world and the cosmos were the creation of the One Triune God who was exhaustively in control of all that there was, even in spite of the Fall into sin and the consequent rebellion that now characterized all things. Christ, through whom all things were created, came to redeem all things from the rebellion that now marked us, and his church was the center point of his presence and of his work in the world in the new era inaugurated by his death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven where He sat down at the right hand of the Father. One of the names of Christ is the Logos, which has many shades of meaning, which include both word or speech, and logic (logos is the root of our English word logic). If the world was created through the one who was both the reality of language and logic, it meant that the cosmos itself was reasonable , and could be spoken of. It was not ineffable. In other words, the world could be studied and understood. This great theological reality was what swept away the old pagan cosmos that was irrational, unpredictable, and controlled by demonic and magical powers. The one true God was Himself a God of both reason and speech, and His creation mirrored that. Hence, while the existence of God is what makes miracles possible, it is also the foundation of what came to be termed the uniformity of nature which means that the world is a place of constant causality and stable and rational construction. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity and of creation were in fact, the foundation of modern science. So oddly, Biblical miracles (as opposed to pagan magic) and science are twin brothers with the same patrimony, and they came from the same household. Originally they were not enemies or rivals of one another, but actually implied each other.”

Now, just as the world is the “book” of the scientist, so the Bible is the “world” of the Christian. The uniformity of nature, and the rationality of cosmos are axioms (ultimately derived from the Bible) that cannot be ultimately empirically established, or contradicted. Rather, they are assumptions that make science possible in the first place.

Likewise, inerrancy and infallibility are axioms that are also derived from the Bible (I can only refer the reader to B. B. Warfield’s INSPIRATION AND AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE for the biblical data demonstrating this) and it is also the case that inerrancy can neither be empirically demonstrated or contradicted. It is an axiom, a doctrine, that makes the very doing of theology possible in the first place. (2)

Scientific progress is almost always a result of dealing with “evidence” that appears to undo science, evidence that if taken at face value, would in fact undo the rationality of the universe, or the uniformity of nature. Science, in other words, progresses, as a result of finding a coherent and consistent explanation of a “problem.”

Likewise, theology is only possible if revelation is a coherent and consistent whole. I.e. the inerrancy and infallibility of the whole of the Bible is the basis of knowing what we know about God and His dealing with His world. Problems, or elements or facts that appear to contradict the coherence and consistency of the Bible are, if taken in the proper spirit, the very foundation of progress and the forward movement of theology and of our knowledge of God and His action in His world. But oddly, theologians over the last two hundred years, often in the name of science, have surrendered the integrity of the Bible because of “problems.” In fact, especially with “higher textual critics,” the default position is almost always to claim a contradiction. Multiple editors, conflation of texts and anachronistic “reading back into” earlier texts by later editors are almost automatically assumed at the first hint of any apparent difficulty. This is the practice, even when the results are obviously silly and very easy and less contorted explanations are immediately obvious. There is almost a compulsive addiction to declaring contradiction.

This is the end of theology, just as a similar loss of courage in the face of strange and difficult data for the scientist would be the end of science. The scientists would immediately release us back to a world of myth, superstition and magic. The theologians have certainly done so.

“Fun” is a strange reality and perhaps difficult to define. But, whatever it is, it is wonderful. The “fun” of science is when a “contradiction” is given larger and better coherent explanation. It is the outcome when that which contradicts Newtonian mechanics, and the contradictory results of Michelson-Morley experiments lead to the Theory of Relativity. The sense of crystalline beauty, aesthetic pleasure felt in the coherence of Relativity has been expressed by many as the theory gave a new and deeper coherence to what appeared previously to be a tatters. At the very least, Einstein’s insight was immense fun.

Theologians have often been kill-joys. They need to learn something new about “fun,” and have the courage to experience it.

II.

My interest here is less apologetical, in the sense of trying to make the Bible and its doctrines somehow palatable to modern rationality, and is more along the lines of giving a check on our unbounded, and stifling egotism, which also destroys all creativity.

The scientist is able to be truly “creative” in large measure because he is disciplined by the cosmos that is really “out there.” He might have all kinds of opinions that he would like to be true, that he would even like to impose on the world and the cosmos. If he were a magician, he could do exactly that. He could say the magic words, and the cosmos would obey him and do his bidding. But reality is intransigent, and will not just bend to our wishes. It is also true that reality, since it is the creation of the Real and Living God, is far more interesting than anything we could make up. So, reality opposes my petty little wishes with real experimental data that opposes my petty little wishes. It is frustrating at first, but if I allow myself to be disciplined, what is discovered in the end is far more interesting than my small and petty imagination could have possibly invented. So, Newtonian mechanics appear to be violated again and again with Michelson-Morley so I become increasingly sure that I am not dealing with flawed data, and the final outcome in a great new coherence is The General Theory of Relativity. Relativity is far more interesting than what my petty, magic desiring imagination could have conceived of in the first place. I have been disciplined by reality.

So it is with the Bible as my infallable guide. I am naturally as a fallen creature, overwhelmingly egotistical, and I want to be a magician who “invents” all realities. But, in fact what my fallen and petty imagination constantly “invents” is boring, oppressive, stupid, and “uncreative.” I believe I will create a utopia. Instead, I create a “dystopia” like Orwell saw (1984) or like Huxley foresaw (Brave New World). The real Kingdom of God disciplines me. But apart from a text that I am subject to, I just constantly cave in on myself, and I am back to my own oppressive boredom.

So, as examples, both big and small.

Big: After the NT was completed, what we were left with were a mass of strange and seemingly contradictory texts about who God is. The real adventurers are the ones who submit themselves to the text and find the really big coherence (Athanasius, Augustine). Nicene Orthodoxy by the 4th or 5th century has hammered out the doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation. Really big, really interesting–like Relativity. The small and petty making myself the boundaries are Arianism and Tri-Theism or Modalism, all of which leave us with all of the unresolved dilemmas of the paganism that has gone before,

Here is a small example. Deuteronomy 21:18-21, the law of the rebellious son. The modern progressive or liberal looks at it and says: “See what a barbaric book the Bible is? And how wonderful that we now have the freedom and liberty to say that this ancient book , which in our own way, we of course revere– is WRONG and MISTAKEN. It is filled with culture bound patriarcal privilege, along with some interesting mythologies and some helpful things. But, the Old Testament is in favor of killing your own children. How evil. How terrible. How wonderful that we have arrived and are now superior to so much that went before us. How wonderful that we have risen above our forbearers and and have arrived!”

But what if there is a deeper coherence that is far more interesting than declaring our own superior progressive insight?

This passage is in fact, to my knowledge (I owe this to Dennis Prager, by the way) the first and only place in the ancient world that contradicts the doctrine of pater familias, the doctrine that the father “owns” his family and can carry out discipline all the way up to putting his family members to death with no legal consequence. In this law, the rebellious son is taken outside the family to the elders. Clan and family power is limited. This is to be done by the father AND THE MOTHER, and this is absolutely unique as well. She is as empowered as the father to take him to state courts. And finally, there is not a single known instance of a son being so put to death in all of Jewish history (Except oddly and interestingly, in the case of Jesus. The charge against him was that he was “a glutton and a wine bibber” and he WAS put to death as a rebellious son, Matthew 11:19. A most fascinating fulfillment.)
It is radically different from ancient law all the way up through Roman law, which  upheld pater familias.

And here is the other irony, which I see happening again and again. The liberal, who assumes his / her moral superiority in assuming the superior moral insight of their own autonomous moral conscience (which “heroically” defies the Bible) is itself wholly dependent on what the Bible created in the first place. We live in a world where parents and fathers do not kill their own offspring. This did not pop into place the moment we declared our own Cartesian independence, but was created by the Old Testament Law in the first place.

Hence, so often what strikes us as odd, strange, incoherent, in the text of the Bible, is really, when more deeply understood, the very foundation of wonderful, new insight.

(1) “The process of explaining away deviations is in fact quite indispensable to the daily routine of research. In my laboratory I find the laws of nature formally contradicted at every hour, but I explain this away by the assumption of experimental error. I know that this may cause me one day to explain away a fundamentally new phenomenon and to miss a great discovery. Such things have often happened in the history of science, Yet I shall continue to explain away my odd results, for if every anomaly observed in my laboratory were taken at its face value, research would instantly degenerate into a wild-goose chase after imaginary fundamental novelties.” (lecture III of Science Faith and Society)

(2) What one observes in both science and theology is a non-vicious circle of demonstration. In science, uniformity of nature and the rationality of the cosmos, and in theology, inerrancy and infallibility are not empirically demonstrable. However, “subordinate” demonstration is possible. With every fresh triumph of science in giving a new rational explanation to what appears to be contradictory, greater confidence is gained in believing the a-priori axioms. The same is true with the Bible. The more one finds the Bible giving coherent explanation to what previously had appeared an irrational world, or as deeper coherence is demonstrated in what previously appeared odd and contradictory, the more ones confidence in the truth of the doctrines of inerrancy and infallibility is strengthened. Some reconciliations are so wonderful and remarkable that they constitute veritable “ah haaa” moments. They are the very foundation of “fun.”

“Fun” is given up when one surrenders and loses ones courage. One is then thrown back to myth, superstition and magic.

Rich

How odd the world is. Pharisees gave the pretence of caring about the justice and righteousness given witness to in the Torah. But instead, God’s righteousness was subverted by giving priority to the “traditions of the elders,” and the Word of God was buried under a mass of habits, traditions, and precepts inherited from past fathers. In doing so, they actually “became like the nations around them,” because such traditions were the whole fabric of all of the ancient world outside of Israel. The Word of God is startling, suprising, and its reception, application, and result, could never be foreseen or predicted.

Revelation created something unheard of and impossible outside of Revelation. It created a future. There could be no future for ancient pagans, because all of life was a repetition of the traditions of the elders. Such repetition simply meant nothing new could ever happen. But, the Prophets, in particular, gave new promises of new life, of redemption, of renewal of all things in ways never dreamt of, never thought of before. God promised over and over, to “do a new thing.”

Jesus was the future. He was the startling New Man who would renew all things. He therefore opposed the Pharisees adherence to “the traditions of the elders” which buried the Torah under a mass of dead human precepts. He did so over and over, and in every instance of opposing “the traditions of the elders,” he does so by quoting the Hebrew revelation, what we now term The Old Testament.

As the Gospel has taken hold through history, we see a gradual overcoming of the habits of the ancient world. The Reformation was a re-affirmation of the text of Scripture (Old and New Testament) over against a whole lot of new “traditions of the elders” that had come to cling to the church over the centuries. The very heart of Martin Chemnitz’s EXAMINATION OF THE COUNCIL OF TRENT (published a generation after Luther) was the greatest of all defenses of Reformation Doctrine by showing that the very structure of Roman Catholic and Trentine theology, was that its structure was a virtual repetition of Rabbinical Theology. The Rabbis had a secret oral tradition that supposedly came down from Sinai, and Trent claimed an oral tradition that came down from the time of the Apostles. In both cases, the secret oral tradition (known only to the highest clergy in both cases) took practical precident over the written text. But, Jesus who was the future, always forced the priority of the written text to all secret oral traditions. The Reformation forced the same issue. And, it must be said that Rome has been extensively forced back to the written text as it has tried to do war with the children of the French Revolution. The traditions of the elders were substantially what gave fuel to the Revolution in the first place.

Phariseeism has been disappearing. So is the world now, in an untramaled way, becoming righteous?

I am skeptical.There may be forward movement, but in hardly an untramaled way.There is a great new set-back. The devil is clever. If you can’t beat them, join them…

If the traditions of the elders have been the way of blocking the new future that will be created by the New Man in concert with His Word, then let us (says the Evil One) do the opposite.

What we care about now, what we will make the new public opinion (say the Principalities and the Powers) is youth and the future. All things (including the Word of God) can now be subordinated to Youth and a Utopian Future. But this utopian future created by the Planners of the Omnipotent State, is a world of perfect stagnation. It is remarkably like the static cyclical world of the traditions of the elders.

It is the novelists who have seen this. The “dystopias,” the brilliant satirazations of the coming leftist utopias, those great novels of Orwell (1984), Huxley (BRAVE NEW WORLD) and most insightfully, CS Lewis (THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH)

The new Phariseeism is established by lifting up youth and the future. And, the engine that propels it is the very concept of Righteousness and Justice that is derived from the Bible, from Christianity. In this way, a new hypocrisy is ensconsed. The text of the Word of God is effectively subordinated to The Up To Date Opinion, the New York Times Editorial Page.

If you are interested in being young, thinking young, and having progressive, up-to-date opinions on all subjects, and if you are particularly interested in establishing “social justice,” beware. You might be in the neighborhood of the new Pharisees. You might be party to creating a stagnant, unchanging world of perfect oppression. And it is all in the name of superior righteousness.

Rich

Last night we watched an episode of WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, the fascinating show that explores with some celebrity, their own ancestory and geneology. Last night, the actress, Helen Hunt was the subject of the program.

Helen Hunt had Jewish ancestory on one side, and gentile Christian on the other. On her mother’s side, she descended from Bavarian Jews who made their way from New York City to San Francisco during the gold rush of 1849, and they established a dry goods business and became exceedingly wealthy. Only a few years later they invested, along with other luminous and influential Jews (like Levi Strauss) in the Nevada Bank, which later became Wells Fargo.

As interesting as all of that is, for my purposes, her father’s side is even more interesting. Her great, great (at least some combination of greats) grandfather was a sugar farmer in Maine who raised sugar beets. Now that would be innocent enough, except that one begins here to uncover something of the hidden and secret Evangelical history of the 19th century.

It is tempting to think that somehow before our time, America was all innocence and light. But not so. The fallen flesh breaks out and expresses itself in every era, and is either overcome or destroys wherever it can. 19th century America was in many ways, in many places, a cesspool of depravity rivaling our own time. For example, abortion was nearly as common after the Civil War in America as it is today. There is already a history of it being overcome once by Evangelicals in this country then (it is an amazing story and a great triumph). It is also the case that it was a time of rampant alcoholism, wife beating, and sexual abuse of children. Alcohol consumption in America “topped out” in the 1850s and the contribution in Maine (Helen Hunt’s great grandfather’s home) was in the production of rum. He sold his sugar to the rum industry.

Now here is where the story becomes interesting. Helen Hunt’s great grandmother became the leading luminary in the WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Union). Hunt visited the headquarters of the Union (which now mainly preserves the history of the association) and did an interview with the historian and chronicler of the Union. She immeadiately expressed embarrassment and some dismay at this history. The Union lady fathomed this and drew her out about it, and then proceeded to educate her as to the real meaning of this history as opposed to the embarrassing reputation that Hunt was reacting to. The historian asked Hunt if she did not associate the Union with a failed and prudish association that was somehow against having a good time. Of course that was exactly Hunt’s impression. The truth is quite different. The then current rampant alcoholism was responcible for also rampant child sexual abuse and wife beating everywhere. Hunt discovered to her amazement, that her great grandmother was a pioneer not only against alcoholism, but also a pioneer for the suffragettes, and only days before her death in 1932, was the first woman in Maine to cast a ballot. It dawned on Hunt that this woman was a great heroine, and not an embarrassment at all.

Of course, what was kept quietly in the background was the fact that her great grandmother was an evangelical, and that these were largely the result of what were originally evangelical crusades. A group of the previously powerless became transformers, and probably saved American culture from complete rot.
But how quickly the tide turns. Evil is never quiet, and it is always seeking new venues of expression.
A fascinating study, and one that needs to be undertaken is just how quickly did all of the 19th century evangelical triumphs get transformed into secular Progressivism, ultimately finding expression in Woodrow Wilson, and the two Roosevelts? I suspect very fast, and that is dismaying. (Jonah Goldberg’s fascinating study LIBERAL FASCISM, shows the dismaying connections between that era’s utopian politics and European Fascism) Mark Levin’s current beselling AMERITOPIA takes up the same questions as Goldberg, but I think leaves some things out. Levin’s study is essentially secular, and is interested in the contrast historically between utopian statism and an Enlightenment vision of a limited state. But, I doubt Levin takes into account the tensions inside of Christianity.

Christianity on the one hand, believes that all power in all places should be limited because of original sin and its intoxicating effects on humans when given power. It also believes in a limited state because all divinity has been taken from rulers and states since Jesus Christ has come and is now recognized as the ONLY God-man (kings, emperors, presidents, chiefs, can no longer make claims to being divine or semi-divine). But, on the other hand, the dramatic leavening effects of the work of the Holy Spirit (which can be very dramatic–healing culture wide alcoholism, sweeping away child sexual abuse, stopping ramant wife beating, for example), a generation later is secularized and transferred to the state. Evangelicalism, can oddly enough, become the step father or step mother, to utopian politics. And utopian politics very rapidly become tyrannical and destructive.

Hence, in the reforms of the 19th century, the evangelicalism is forgotten, it is secularized, tied to the state, and quickly becomes the advocate of other statist and anti-Christian movements like Planned Parenthood.

Evil never sleeps…

I would like to beat a very old drum here, one that I beat a lot, but only because it has proven so illuminating to me. Back to Barfield’s “original to final participation”. Along with everything else, masculinity in its original natural form is dying. I don’t know about any of you, but when one is virtually anywhere in the “third world” it is amazing to me as an American, the extent and degree of masculine control over everything. As an American, and one who lives in a particularly liberal town,this kind of unthinking, effortless, control, which is as natural as a fish in water, is almost incomprehensible. I recently read an account of a missionary kid who was American by birth, but reared in Japan for most of his youth, being especially amazed upon returning to America at the degree of rudeness and”yelling” that went on here from women to their men in public. But he said what amazed him the most, was that the men “took it like whipped puppies”. Indeed.

I think the natural power of the male is over. He can rebell against it all he wants,but it is struggling in quick sand. The more struggle there is, the faster he sinks. The patriarcal head of household church movement is completely artificial and is NOT a return to something spiritual, but something natural, and it is nature that is dying.

The only way forward for masculinity is to die. Jesus was the first man to give up his natural masculine powers. The Kenotic poem of Philippians is the essential telling of this story. It has now caught up with the world. It is only in dying to what is natural that masculine authority and headship can be raised again and come back in a new “final” form that is shorn of nature.

Now, I know everyone will want details on what this means. All I know is that every man I have ever seen who tried to revive nature ends up being an ass. I have seen cases of the most macho masculine and by nature controlling men, with what are undoubtedly very high male hormone levels, just rendered helpless by the current culture. They thrive no better than an Apache warrior in modern Arizona. And in fact, the reality is exactly the same as for the warrior. He can only die, and be raised as a Christian, which looks very different and does not exist by humiliating and degrading women and children.

I think everything in the natural world exists by rivalry. In the natural world, the man is the man is the man by overpowering rivalry over against the female and the children. In God’s world, this is undone. In reality, it may well be that large elements of all of this death have only come to pass as late as the 20th century.

Here is what occured to me this morning. Western liberalism has become western narcissism and culminates everywhere in our worship of ourselves. The “search for the historical Jesus” is part and parcel of this great selfist quest,and must mute Jesus,who is the great challenge to me-ism by commanding that we worship Him. Hence, how amazing that every quest for Jesus by German universities only turns up…me. How convenient. To mute Jesus, he must be removed from the Old Testament text,which sets the whole stage for this God who is quite other than myself or from the whole of the pantheistic ancient world. So, every sort of source possible in the whole of the ancient world is ransacked so Jesus roots are anything but Old Testament. So, now the western liberal is cut off from everything that would keep him from caving in on himself.

The result is that now on three occasions,western liberalism in its embrace of selfism has been blinded to radical evil, and is sure that terrible and evil enemies are really, once again, only images of us, and therefore at heart–nice folks. Thus, Hitler is not really so bad, and can always be negotiated with. Stalin is not really so bad, and can be negotiated with. And,Islamo-fascism is not really so bad, and can be dealt with. In each case,the faults of the enemy are always a result of their having been victimized, and thus must be understood. In each case, “fellow travelers” become de-facto allies of all of the aims of those who expicitly state that they intend to destroy them.

In each of these cases, emasculated liberal churches are at the forefront. In each of these cases, one of the concommitants is radical and virulent anti-Jewish sentiment,which is not embraced by the western liberal, but to which they become de-facto allies.

The great boogie man is now the Fundamentalists “desire to impose a ‘theocracy’ on the nation”. This is the horror of horrors, and only need be hinted to bring terror. But oddly, defacto the alternative is support for a renewed Arab Caliphate by what will not be opposed. Surely the “real Islam” is moderate, like the western liberal.

In running from the “otherness”of the Jewish Jesus who is rooted in the revelation of Moses and the Prophets, we do not escape to dreamy world of comfortable selfism, but to Hitler’s destruction of Europe, Stalin’s gulags, and a renewed world of Sharia

The Gospel of John and Friendship

The Gospel of John, Friendship, and the Homoerotic
Many questions are answered by-the-by, elliptically, indirectly, and on the way to other more direct concerns. John tells us the purpose of his Gospel: “…these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you may have life in His name.” (John 20:30 NKJV). But John, as the great poet of the New Testament, has other secondary issues to deal with. (1)
The Gospel of John, on the way to demonstrating that Jesus is the Son of God, is also an answer to a cultural issue that had become widespread in the Hellenized late Roman Empire. It is an answer to the issue of “friendship”, itself a Hellenized category.
It is indeed the case that as history moves from tribalism toward elegant civilization in advanced empire which is centered on life in the city, the power of the clan, the tribe, of blood, of the family, declines. Politics is the replacement for clan ties. And with the breaking of the ties of blood, the erotic is also freed and made more diffuse. Bonding is necessary in the political realm of freedom, and the old bonds of family are not at the heart of this. It is very likely that the erotic will become the new bond.
For the Greek, the Good and the Beautiful are very closely allied. The Greek word, kalan, is related to both the Good and the Beautiful, and relates them. For the Greek, beauty was related to proportional and perfect form and could be most easily expressed visually in the form of statuary. But the visible merely gave tangible form to every kind of perfect form. The erotic was aroused by the beautiful form of the perfect body and more deeply by the perfect form of the beautiful soul. Hence, Plato’s “Symposium” is a rhapsodizing of lovers for the beauty of the beloved, and for Socrates, this is transformed into a series of rungs on the ladder upward to the forms of the Good and the Beautiful.
The Greek ideal of politics is an especially aesthetic expression. The Greek city state is the place where every form of human beauty and perfection can reach its own pinnacle. This is what the “philosopher king” is able to develop and direct. For this to happen, the ties of family bond must be broken and transcended. Family bonds do not seek the development of the highest forms of beautiful development, but self preservation and enhancement of family power. The purpose of the erotic in the family is the preservation and extension of its own authority through the begetting of many sons. And while this is necessary for the city, the Greek perspective cannot allow this to dominate the city. The city is about the highest development of every form of human beauty, and this is spiritual and philosophic, not biological.
The erotic by definition gives rise to tension. Allan Bloom believed that the Bible resolves this tension within the family and that the Bible is almost exclusively founded on blood and familial relationships, and that apart from very few exceptions (like the friendship of David and Jonathon) the family is the beginning and end in the Bible. In this he is both right and wrong.
The Bible is founded on marriage. The very first relationship in the Bible is Adam and Eve. Marriage carries through the entire Bible and is certainly one of the central relationships, and it gives rise to other relationships that are also familial relationship. It gives rise to the father / son, and father / daughter relationship as well. But what is notable in all of these originally biotic relationships is that they are all transcended and all become spiritual realities. Even in the Old Testament, marriage becomes the symbol of Jehovah’s relationship with Israel, and the father / son and father / daughter relationship becomes the same. But very early in the Bible, the family comes early to be seen sometimes as the enemy of relationship with God, and one must chose between them. This was very notably the reason that the tribe of Levi was rewarded with the priesthood. They were the ones who dared to take up sword against their own family in the scandal of the Golden Calf. “Thus says the Lord, ‘Let every man kill his brother…’ Then Moses said, ‘Consecrate yourselves today to the Lord, that He may bestow on you a blessing this day, for every man has opposed his son and his brother.’ ” (Exodus 32: 27-29 NKJV)
While it is true that the entire Covenant of Redemption has its origins in the family of Abraham, it is clear from the outset that family and blood are to be transcended. The son through whom the covenant of grace is to descend is the son of utterly supernatural birth (Isaac) and the son that is passed over is the son of flesh and blood (Ishmael). From that time forward, all through the Old Testament, natural family is oddly demoted as time and again the favored child through whom the covenant passes is either the child supernaturally born to a barren woman (as in the case of Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Sampson, and Samuel for example) or is the youngest, thus overturning the family preserving rite of primogeniture (Joseph, Gideon, David for example). (2)
All of this is the Old Testament. The New Testament foundation stone is the birth of Messiah. His birth immediately overturns the power of family by telling us that he is the completer of all of the Old Testament births granted to barren women. The ultimately barren woman is a virgin.
It is also the case that Jesus overturns the law of primogeniture. In the largest picture of things, Jesus is the younger brother who overturns the claims of the elder brother, Adam. Adam is the first born, but Jesus now inherits the rights of the first born by being the “first born from the dead.” (Colossians 1:17) His Kingly powers transcend those that flow from flesh and blood in every way.
Finally, before entering John’s Gospel, one of Jesus’ central and scandalous sayings was, “If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and his mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:25-26) And, “from now on, five in one house will be divided; three against two, and two against three. Father will be divided against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” (Luke 12:52-53)
In following the hypothesis of several 20th Century scholars, seeking to return to the so-called “Augustinian Order” of the composition of the Gospels, it follows that each Gospel typologically follows the order of the Old Testament.(3) The thesis that the Gospel of John was the “Hellenistic Gospel” was popular in the scholarly world for a long time. That hypothesis has been largely overturned because it is now very clear that the book is intensely Jewish and that whoever wrote it was very familiar with both Jerusalem and the Temple.(4) However, this does not obviate the possibility that while the book is intensely Jewish, much of its primary audience could well have been Hellenized Jews. The Greek mind itself was partly what John was aiming at.(5)
While not necessary to the thesis of this paper, if the old Augustinian order is the correct order, then following Old Testament scholar, James Jordan, it would also follow that each Gospel bears a correspondence to a time period and a section of the Old Testament. So, for example, Matthew seems to correspond to the establishment of Israel as a tribal people under Moses. Jesus is the new Moses delivering his new law from a new mount and referencing the Mosaic legislation far more than any other Gospel. The Gospel of Mark corresponds more to the monarchical era, with Jesus acting as the new David, the Gospel of Luke seems to correspond more to the Empire era of the captivity with more references to “the nations” than elsewhere. Finally, John would correspond to a late Empire era, an era of “man”. This would be a “Hellenistic era”.(6)
There are three configurations of the human ordering of society in the Old Testament. These three still broadly outline for us all types of societies that exist. From Judges through the time of Israel’s appointment of Saul to be king, Israel is essentially a tribal configuration. From the time of Saul and David through the time of Zedekiah, when Judah goes to captivity, Israel is a monarchy, and city and town life begin to come to a new importance… Then, from the time of the Babylonian captivity to the end of the Old Testament, through the time of the coming of Christ, the world is dominated by great multi-cultural empires, and cities assume a very central prominence.
Each one of these eras has a “typical” sin that overshadows others in seriousness. The tribal era is dominated by sins against the father on the part of the son, or of father’s against sons. The typical sin of the monarchical era is brother / brother rivalry. The typical sin of the empire era is the sin of false intermarriage. We see this repeated several times through the Old Testament in spiraling ways.(7)
The one time when Israel approached an empire during its monarchical era was under the reign of Solomon. Solomon’s reign was marred by intermarriage with foreign women who worshiped many gods. Much later in both Ezra 9-10, and Nehemiah 13:23-31, false intermarriage is again the major issue with which Israel must struggle.
Intermarriage with foreign women, while an issue in itself, points to the larger issue of pluralism and syncretism in all empires.
Tribes are ruled by chiefs. Something like national boundaries can begin to grow up when a king unites a number of tribes under his own rule. Thus a king is a chief of chiefs. Then, very large, even enormous human configurations can develop when an emperor unites a number of kingdoms under a single rule. Thus, an emperor is a king of kings.
Empires are thus multi-cultural and, usually, multi-linguistic configurations. In empires, the greater the diversity of culture and language, the less that is held in common amongst the various peoples. Empires become “thin” in terms of commonalities. It is impossible to hold so many cultural and linguistic diversities together apart from considerable tolerance. But, at a certain point, tolerance can increase to such an extent that it becomes paradoxical in effect. Tolerance ceases to enable diverse peoples to cooperate and becomes a firewall that separates peoples from one another. Peoples cease to have enough in common to meaningfully function together in a body politic. A new danger arises of each separate-people-grouping ceasing to be citizens of an empire and beginning to again function as factions and finally virtually as separate tribes. At this point, it is possible that tribalism will become the new configuration, and things will start all over again.
This is essentially what happened with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the resurgence of tribalism. The West has actually recycled this spiral one whole time since the first Advent. Now we see the resurgence of tribalism on a world wide level, while at the same time we are experiencing in an unprecedented way an expanse to a kind of world wide economic empire with the growth of “globalism”.
In this global empire environment, orientation and direction becomes a crisis. There is not enough agreed upon cultural content to give direction and common consent to the large bodies of diverse people who are forced to function together. The gods are indeed at war, and no god reigns with any supremacy. Hence, no one knows what to do.
The power of empires is very great. But, either the will or capacity to use power is lacking. Action requires certain orientation, and this is just what becomes scarce in these situations.
The sin of intermarriage is symbolic of what plagues all empires. Having “many wives” means that a plethora of directions are a given, with none being able to come to dominance. “Truth” as a concept suffers, with many “truths” claiming priority. But even pragmatism as a way of finding orientation becomes difficult. Empires become very broad and the great difficulty is orientation and direction.
In late empire eras, friendship becomes an overriding category as politics becomes central. “Politics” as a self conscious science, is a great Hellenistic contribution . Friendship trumps family in the great Platonic dialogues as the erotic is diffused and detached from the family. “Friendship” is a Greek category far more than a Hebrew one. Almost nothing, outside of David’s friendship with Jonathon and Hushai, is said about human friendship in the Old Testament.(8) Almost everything else is in the context of blood, the clan, the family, and the tribe. Friendship was clearly seen as something dangerous in the light of what friendship very broadly meant in the Greek world. At least three of Plato’s most important dialogues revolve around the issue of homoerotic friendship.(9) The new freedom brought by politics needs a new bond to hold all things together. The bond of nature given by the Hellenized to enable the politics of the city to function is the bond of Eros. Thus, the homoerotic bond becomes central.
One could contend that John answers the Greek “problem”. In the Gospel of John, there is an explosion of material around the theme of “friendship”.(10) With the coming of Jesus, and with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, friendship is now a category that can be redeemed, cleansed, and perfected. The Upper Room Discourse is virtually a new “Symposium” a “drinking party” revolving around the theme of love. Christ is the new Rhapsodizer who sings a new song of love to his friends. The Gospel of John is the new Gospel of Friendship, and the Beloved Disciple is even the new Best Friend. This is Greek life redeemed and purified. The Gospel of John is the Gospel of the restoration of the self in relationship to purified friendship.
The Gospel begins with its profound reflection on the “Logos”. The logos was clearly a Greek theme, and older commentators saw this as the beginning of their reflection that the Gospel had a Hellenistic theme about it. Immediately we see the theme of the intimacy experienced within the Godhead Himself. “The Word was with God…” The Greek preposition “pros” is translated in the English as “with”, and it is related to the Greek word, “prosopon”, which is the word for “face”. The meaning is that the Father and the Son (God and the Word) are from eternity to eternity, facing one another. Jesus thus is the one who has been awaited as the Prophet spoken of by Moses. God spoke to Moses, face to face, but to all other prophets in visions or dreams (Numbers 12:8). But God would raise up another like Moses (Deuteronomy. 18:15). This one has now become “flesh” (John 1:14) Then we are told, “No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten Son who is in the bosom of the Father, He has declared him.” (John 1:18, NKJV) Thus, we once again have a declaration of the intimacy of the Father and the Son and a declaration of the function and competency of the Son. The Son is in the bosom of the Father and thus “declares” the one who is invisible, and who has never been seen. The Greek word for “declares” is “exegete”. Hence, the Son exegetes the Father.
Friendship is a growing theme throughout the Gospel. In the 11th chapter, Lazarus is referred to as “our friend” and his entire relationship with the “Lazarus household” is the relationship of friends. Then, when we reach the “Upper Room Discourses” in chapters 13-16, we reach the epitome of the expression of friendship. In the 15th chapter, verses 11-15, Jesus clearly declares the spiritual reality of his friendship with his disciples. He contrasts friendship with servant hood.
In all of the Upper Room Discourses, we have the final outpouring of love, of friendship. In 13:23 we have the first declaration that is then repeated four more times, (19:26, 20:2, 21:7, 20), concerning “the disciple whom he loved.” Presumably this is John himself, but we are never explicitly told this. In this first great declaration concerning the disciple who Jesus loved, we are told that this disciple was “leaning on Jesus’ bosom.”
This disciple, who leaned on Jesus’ bosom, points back to the first use of “bosom” in John 1:18. Jesus is competent to exegete the Father because he is “in the bosom of the Father.” Therefore, if John reclines on Jesus’ bosom, he likewise is competent to exegete Jesus. This is his declaration as to why he is capable, and indeed has written, this Gospel.
We know from the source material of the other Gospels that Jesus had three friends from among the twelve disciples who were especially close to Him (Peter, James, and John). They witnessed some things that the others did not. The Gospel of John makes clear that, of the three, John is Jesus’ “best friend”. Even on the surface it is obvious that John’s Gospel is very different from the other three. In fact, Matthew, Mark and Luke have come to be referred to as the “synoptic Gospels”, meaning that they are “synonymous”, similar, a symphony. They are all markedly alike, covering much of the same material and even using overlapping vocabulary. But John is very different. Why? It is because John is written from the inside, from the perspective of the “best friend”. This is what accounts for its difference.(11)
Friendship is clearly dangerous for a Jew. Everyone knows what it means for the Greek. It means the homoerotic. This is clearly forbidden by the Torah. Until we have Jesus about to leave, and promising the coming of the “Paraclete”, the one who is the “friend who stands by one”, the friend who will come and live within, friendship is not developed. It is “too hot to handle”. Until that time, the spirit that in all likelihood animates friends with one another will be the spirit of sex, of the erotic.
The erotic is developed in Revelation by this same John. The final revelation is marriage, the fullness of the Bride of Christ. Here is where the erotic comes to its fullness in the final revelation of what originally was the other great Greek theme, the environment of the erotic, the city, the New Jerusalem (not the New Athens or Sparta, or Rome). This is the final crescendo of the entire Bible. What begins in the creation account of Adam and Eve, the first marriage, ends with the Marriage Supper of the Lamb. In John the exalted is friendship. It is purified from the erotic, with the new bond being the Holy Spirit. In Revelation the city, (the realm of politics for the Greek), is fulfilled by marriage. But even marriage, in which the erotic is fulfilled, is now animated by friendship. The bride also becomes the friend, a thought very foreign to the Classical world. What begins as “Daughter Jerusalem”, in the Old Testament is fulfilled in “the Bride of Christ” who is also the final great city, in The New Jerusalem.(12)
1. Nobody understands the Greek ethos of the homoerotic in relationship to politics and the life of the city better than Allan Bloom. His relationship of this to the Biblical record is fascinating, but less than satisfying. The original stimulus for this paper was Bloom’s reflection on this topic…Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1993) pp. 431-444
2. Primogeniture is the rule that the eldest son either inherits all of the family property, or that he inherits the majority of it over against all other brothers and siblings. The purpose of this was to preserve family land holdings so they would not be broken up into non-productive small plots.
3. John Wenham, Redating Matthew, Mark, and Luke (Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 1992)
Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, The Fruit of Lips (Pittsburgh : Pickwick Press, 1978)
Rosenstock-Huessy argues that each Gospel picks up where the previous one left off and that this order can be seen clearly in the so called “Augustinian order” (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John).
4. All the vogue until the discovery of the Qumran MSS, the attribution of Hellenistic thought to the writer of the fourth gospel seemed to nail the coffin shut on Johannine authorship. However, with the absolute dualism found in Qumran which parallels both Hellenism and John, scholarly opinion has swung very far in the other direction: this gospel is very Jewish! Still, full weight must be given to F. C. Grant’s warning that the relative amount of parallels with Qumran vs. “the vast array of parallels” with Hellenism cannot be used to deny a strong Hellenistic influence.18 The real issue, therefore, is simple: Would a Galilean fisherman ever be able to gain such an acquaintance with Hellenism? In response, it need only be mentioned that (a) Hellenistic thought pervaded Galilee in the first century; (b) John , as son of a fishing magnate, would probably have received a decent education, exposing him to much Hellenism;19 (c) the targeted audience, being Gentiles, might well have prompted the author to shape his material with a Hellenistic strain which they could comprehend and appreciate; and (d) John could well have employed an amanuensis (as early patristic writers seem to hint at) for the writing of this gospel—a person who could have easily packaged the material with a Hellenistic hue at John’s beckoning.20 Thus, though I am not nearly as optimistic as many today who want to pour all of John’s dualism into a first-century Jewish mold, neither would I argue that a Hellenistic coloring denies Johannine authorship. Indeed, the Hellenistic overtones, in my view, argue when coupled with date and occasion of writing.

http://www.bible.org/page.php?page_id=1328#P78_16400

5. Because of John’s familiarity with the Temple, it has been surmised that either he is a priest, or comes from a priestly family. If this is so, it fits very well with the Hellenized tinge of John’s Gospel, because the priestly group were all Sadducees, which was the Hellenized party or sect of the Jews.
6. In the Gospel of Matthew, for example, Jesus sends out the twelve on an evangelistic and healing mission (Matthew 10:5-15). In Luke, he does initially send out twelve, but later sends out seventy (Luke 9:1-6, 10:1-12). Twelve is the number of Israel, following the number of tribes, but seventy is the number of the nations, taken from the table of nations in Genesis 10 following the Flood, in which 70 peoples are named. It is in the Empire era, when the four giant empires enumerated in Daniel 2 that the spreading of the truth of the true God to all nations begins to take precedent.
7. The first cycle of sin against the Father, sin of brother / brother rivalry, sin of false intermarriage is seen in the opening chapters of Genesis. Adam sins against God as his Father, Cain murders his brother Abel, and “the sons of God” married the “daughters of men.” We see it again in the second half of Genesis when all of these sins are corrected. Abraham obeys and believes and obeys God as the Father for many years in believing him for a son. Then, in the case of Isaac and Ishmael, and Jacob and Esau, we see brother / brother rivalry, as well as the rivalry of all of Jacob’s sons against Joseph. None of these cases finally issue in fratricide, and in the case of Joseph, the godly brother is given complete triumph. Finally, Joseph marries the daughter of the priest of On of Egypt. There is no condemnation of Joseph in his deportment in any of his relationships, and one ought to assume that along with Pharaoh, one sees true conversion to the true God in the case of his wife.
This pattern is again repeated in the era of the initiation of the monarchy. Israel rebels against God as the King and Father of Israel, and rebels against Samuel as a father of Israel in the request for a king. Saul falls into murderous rivalry against David, but is taken to death himself. Then Solomon corrupts himself and Israel with false intermarriage to hundreds of foreign women who all worship false gods.
In the larger scheme, we see Israel in the tribal era during the Judges, the monarchial era through the times of the kings, and in an empire era after the captivity. In each of these eras in a general sense, the primary sin fits with the time, with smaller cycles fitting into the larger scheme.
I owe this insight to my friend and Old Testament scholar, James Jordan.
8. There is a considerable amount about friendship with God in the Old Testament, beginning with Enoch, who “walked with God” (Gen. 5:22). Abraham is explicitly termed “the friend of God” (2 Chron. 20:7, Isa. 41:8, James 2:23). But human friendship is rare.
9. The Greek attitude toward the homoerotic is ambiguous. The Laws clearly condemn homosexuality as “against nature”, but The Symposium, The Phaedrus, and Lysis are all structured around homoerotic friendship. Some interpretations do not see the homosexual as being ideal, but see the ideal in contraposition to the homosexual. The love of wisdom is what the erotic is meant to lead to, and in some sense may be its fulfillment.
10. Allan Bloom, Love and Friendship, pp 436-444 Simon and Schuster, New York, 1993
11. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, The Fruit of Lips:or Why Four Gospels (Pittsburg: Pickwick Press, 1978)
12. “The Daughter of Zion” or “Daughter of Jerusalem” can sometimes be translated simply, “Daughter Zion” or “Daughter Jerusalem”.
2 Kings 19:21, Isa. 37:22, Lam. 2:13, 15, Mic 4:8, Zeph. 3:14, Zech. 9:9

No Laughing Matter

A good friend sent two articles to me yesterday, and upon reading them, I thought, these are very important, and transcend the immediacy of the moment. The first is what follows, and is a good human interest story that points to the second article (the following Blog entry) that is a very serious piece. Wonderful and insightful stuff…

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Judith Warner NY Times Blog

September 11, 2008, 10:29 pm
No Laughing Matter

Tags: liberals, media, sarah palin
“You can stand on my wagon, if you want.”
I tend, when I’m not in big crowds, to forget that I’m short. In Republican crowds, I find, I feel particularly small.
And dark. And unsmiling. And uncoiffed, unmade-up and inappropriately dressed.
For the McCain/Palin rally in Fairfax, Va., on Wednesday, the organizers had asked people to wear red. I – unthinkingly – had dressed in blue, which was somewhat isolating.
I was isolated, too, because, unable to find the press area in the crowd of about 15,000, I was out with the “real” people. Which meant that I could hear everything from the podium and from the onlookers around me, but could see nothing, not, at least, until the mom beside me stopped struggling to balance atop her Little Tikes wagon with two toddlers in her arms and another screaming at her feet, and offered me a go at the view.
(“It’s Sarah. Sarah’s going to be the vice president,” she had told the little girls, clad in their matching polka dot dresses. “Sarah Palin.”)
She was a nice woman. She told me history was in the making. She told me where to get lunch. She handed me back my reporter’s notebook when one of her almost-two-year-old twins, fixing me with a dark look of mistrust, took it away. “Liberal media, eh?” her solemn eyes glared. “Well, watch what you say about my mommy and Our Sarah.”
Do not think for a moment that I was being paranoid.
Fred Thompson had warmed up the crowd, his familiar old district attorney’s voice restored to full bombast, and he’d been in fine form, denouncing – to loud boos from the crowd — the “lawyers and scandal mongers and representatives of cable networks” (boos from the crowd) who were at that very moment descending upon Alaska looking for dirt on their Sarah.
“I hope they brought their own Brie and Chablis with them,” he’d said, to raucous laughter, as I willed myself to disappear, remembering, with a shudder, that my children had demanded Brie for breakfast only that morning.
I should have been finding this funny. My whole plan, after all, had been to write something funny this week about the whole Sarah Palin phenomenon. I’d arrived at an if-you-can’t-beat-’em-laugh-at-’em kind of a juncture, I suppose.
I’d planned to make attending the McCain/Palin event a silly sort of adventure. I’d invited a friend who has six kids to come with me. I figured funny things were bound to befall us in Palin-Land, where, collectively, we’d have eight children between us (a funny thought in and of itself.) A Harold and Kumar Escape from the Barracuda sort of storyline was the idea – until my friend, done in by one too many sleepless nights, declined to accompany me, and I had to venture off alone.
And, forced to make new friends on the spot, discovered that the Palin Phenomenon is no laughing matter.
Those who think that it is — well, as Thompson warned on Wednesday, “they’ve got another thing coming.”
I made my first friend on the shuttle bus that took us from a nearby mall, where we’d been instructed to park, to the field where the rally was held. She was from Leesburg, Va., an ardent McCain supporter, conservative and self-described “soccer mom,” who grew up in Pennsylvania among girls who went hunting with their Dads.
Sarah Palin, she told me, “just seems like a regular person.”
I did not argue with her. One does not argue when making new friends. And besides, we had so many other things to bond over. We talked about kids with issues. She had a son with A.D.H.D., cousins with Asperger’s and dysgraphia, and a nephew with autism. (“They’re lucky they live in New Jersey. New Jersey’s pretty progressive,” she said.)
We talked about the moral vacuity of modern parenting. “I see extreme spoiling, self-absorption,” she said. “Constant bringing the kids up to love themselves without reflecting on how they affect others.” We talked about the disastrous lack of respect that children now show adults and institutions, and about the ways this lack of respect translates into a very ugly sort of lack of decorum and a lack of basic manners: “This 10-year-old, my daughter’s friend, she comes over and throws down a magazine with John McCain on the cover. ‘Here’s friggin John McCain,’ she says. ‘Let’s see what lies he’s going to tell now.’” She continued: “These 10-year-olds think they’re better than me. That they don’t have to say hello. That they think I’m beneath them.”
You go girl, I was thinking, in so many words, until the talk turned back to politics: “So often these kids that are so incredibly full of themselves, I find their parents are Democrats. The Democrats, they hate ‘us,’ the United States, but they love ‘me,’ that is, themselves,” she said.
I heard a lot more talk that day about the need for respect – and about arrogance and selfishness and about Democrats and liberals who think way too highly of themselves.
Fred Thompson on the liberal media: “This woman is undergoing the most vicious assault … all because she is a threat to the power they expected to inherit and think they’re entitled to.”
Businessman Scott Maclean on the Democratic Party: “Their attitude is: you don’t get it and they don’t expect you to get it because they’re smarter than you – and I hate that.”
I heard, repeatedly, a complaint about sterile individualism, about selfishness and the desire for a revalidated “us” – from John McCain’s boilerplate attack on “me-first Washington” to this curious reflection, from a mother of nine, on the field with eight of her children, on the question of whether she, like Palin, could ever imagine balancing the demands of her large family against a high-profile political career like Sarah’s.
“My daughter asked me, ‘Mom, would you do that if you had the opportunity?,’” she recalled, as the six-year-old in question looked on. “I said ‘I don’t know. Maybe she was born to do that. Maybe that’s the sacrifice she has to make to serve her country.’”
The daughter lifted high her hand-painted, flower-adorned Palin sign.
“She’ll really be a big step forward for women,” the mother said.
No, it wasn’t funny, my morning with the hockey and the soccer moms, the homeschooling moms and the book club moms, the joyful moms who brought their children to see history in the making and spun them on the lawn, dancing, when music played. It was sobering. It was serious. It was an education.
“Palin Power” isn’t just about making hockey moms feel important. It’s not just about giving abortion rights opponents their due. It’s also, in obscure ways, about making yearnings come true — deep, inchoate desires about respect and service, hierarchy and family that have somehow been successfully projected onto the figure of this unlikely woman and have stuck.
For those of us who can’t tap into those yearnings, it seems the Palin faithful are blind – to the contradictions between her stated positions and the truth of the policies she espouses, to the contradictions between her ideology and their interests. But Jonathan Haidt, an associate professor of moral psychology at the University of Virginia, argues in an essay this month, “What Makes People Vote Republican?”, that it’s liberals, in fact, who are dangerously blind.
Haidt has conducted research in which liberals and conservatives were asked to project themselves into the minds of their opponents and answer questions about their moral reasoning. Conservatives, he said, prove quite adept at thinking like liberals, but liberals are consistently incapable of understanding the conservative point of view. “Liberals feel contempt for the conservative moral view, and that is very, very angering. Republicans are good at exploiting that anger,” he told me in a phone interview.
Perhaps that’s why the conservatives can so successfully get under liberals’ skin. And why liberals need to start working harder at breaking through the empathy barrier.

Why People Vote Republican

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Why People Vote Republican

…the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer.

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? [9.9.08]
By Jonathan Haidt
JONATHAN HAIDT is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, where he does research on morality and emotion and how they vary across cultures. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.

Jonathan Haidt’s Edge Bio Page

Further reading on Edge: Moral Psychology and the Misunderstanding of Religion By Jonathan Haidt [9.22.07]

THE REALITY CLUB: Daniel Everett, Howard Gardner, Michael Shermer, Scott Atran, James Fowler, Alison Gopnik, Sam Harris, James O’Donnell

BLOGWATCH
WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN?
What makes people vote Republican? Why in particular do working class and rural Americans usually vote for pro-business Republicans when their economic interests would seem better served by Democratic policies? We psychologists have been examining the origins of ideology ever since Hitler sent us Germany’s best psychologists, and we long ago reported that strict parenting and a variety of personal insecurities work together to turn people against liberalism, diversity, and progress. But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer “moral clarity”—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.
Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the “war on terror” and repeal of the “death tax”) that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.
But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats. To see what Democrats have been missing, it helps to take off the halo, step back for a moment, and think about what morality really is.
I began to study morality and culture at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987. A then-prevalent definition of the moral domain, from the Berkeley psychologist Elliot Turiel, said that morality refers to “prescriptive judgments of justice, rights, and welfare pertaining to how people ought to relate to each other.” But if morality is about how we treat each other, then why did so many ancient texts devote so much space to rules about menstruation, who can eat what, and who can have sex with whom? There is no rational or health-related way to explain these laws. (Why are grasshoppers kosher but most locusts are not?) The emotion of disgust seemed to me like a more promising explanatory principle. The book of Leviticus makes a lot more sense when you think of ancient lawgivers first sorting everything into two categories: “disgusts me” (gay male sex, menstruation, pigs, swarming insects) and “disgusts me less” (gay female sex, urination, cows, grasshoppers ).
For my dissertation research, I made up stories about people who did things that were disgusting or disrespectful yet perfectly harmless. For example, what do you think about a woman who can’t find any rags in her house so she cuts up an old American flag and uses the pieces to clean her toilet, in private? Or how about a family whose dog is killed by a car, so they dismember the body and cook it for dinner? I read these stories to 180 young adults and 180 eleven-year-old children, half from higher social classes and half from lower, in the USA and in Brazil. I found that most of the people I interviewed said that the actions in these stories were morally wrong, even when nobody was harmed. Only one group—college students at Penn—consistently exemplified Turiel’s definition of morality and overrode their own feelings of disgust to say that harmless acts were not wrong. (A few even praised the efficiency of recycling the flag and the dog).
This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like “it’s wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick” or “it’s wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet.” These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume’s dictum that reason is “the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them.” This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.
The second conclusion was that the moral domain varies across cultures. Turiel’s description of morality as being about justice, rights, and human welfare worked perfectly for the college students I interviewed at Penn, but it simply did not capture the moral concerns of the less elite groups—the working-class people in both countries who were more likely to justify their judgments with talk about respect, duty, and family roles. (“Your dog is family, and you just don’t eat family.”) From this study I concluded that the anthropologist Richard Shweder was probably right in a 1987 critique of Turiel in which he claimed that the moral domain (not just specific rules) varies by culture. Drawing on Shweder’s ideas, I would say that the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way.
When Republicans say that Democrats “just don’t get it,” this is the “it” to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label “elitist.” But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?
After graduate school I moved to the University of Chicago to work with Shweder, and while there I got a fellowship to do research in India. In September 1993 I traveled to Bhubaneswar, an ancient temple town 200 miles southwest of Calcutta. I brought with me two incompatible identities. On the one hand, I was a 29 year old liberal atheist who had spent his politically conscious life despising Republican presidents, and I was charged up by the culture wars that intensified in the 1990s. On the other hand, I wanted to be like those tolerant anthropologists I had read so much about.
My first few weeks in Bhubaneswar were therefore filled with feelings of shock and confusion. I dined with men whose wives silently served us and then retreated to the kitchen. My hosts gave me a servant of my own and told me to stop thanking him when he served me. I watched people bathe in and cook with visibly polluted water that was held to be sacred. In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine.
It only took a few weeks for my shock to disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. And once I liked them (remember that first principle of moral psychology) it was easy to take their perspective and to consider with an open mind the virtues they thought they were enacting. Rather than automatically rejecting the men as sexist oppressors and pitying the women, children, and servants as helpless victims, I was able to see a moral world in which families, not individuals, are the basic unit of society, and the members of each extended family (including its servants) are intensely interdependent. In this world, equality and personal autonomy were not sacred values. Honoring elders, gods, and guests, and fulfilling one’s role-based duties, were more important. Looking at America from this vantage point, what I saw now seemed overly individualistic and self-focused. For example, when I boarded the plane to fly back to Chicago I heard a loud voice saying “Look, you tell him that this is the compartment over MY seat, and I have a RIGHT to use it.”
Back in the United States the culture war was going strong, but I had lost my righteous passion. I could never have empathized with the Christian Right directly, but once I had stood outside of my home morality, once I had tried on the moral lenses of my Indian friends and interview subjects, I was able to think about conservative ideas with a newfound clinical detachment. They want more prayer and spanking in schools, and less sex education and access to abortion? I didn’t think those steps would reduce AIDS and teen pregnancy, but I could see why the religious right wanted to “thicken up” the moral climate of schools and discourage the view that children should be as free as possible to act on their desires. Conservatives think that welfare programs and feminism increase rates of single motherhood and weaken the traditional social structures that compel men to support their own children? Hmm, that may be true, even if there are also many good effects of liberating women from dependence on men. I had escaped from my prior partisan mindset (reject first, ask rhetorical questions later), and began to think about liberal and conservative policies as manifestations of deeply conflicting but equally heartfelt visions of the good society.
On Turiel’s definition of morality (“justice, rights, and welfare”), Christian and Hindu communities don’t look good. They restrict people’s rights (especially sexual rights), encourage hierarchy and conformity to gender roles, and make people spend extraordinary amounts of time in prayer and ritual practices that seem to have nothing to do with “real” morality. But isn’t it unfair to impose on all cultures a definition of morality drawn from the European Enlightenment tradition? Might we do better with an approach that defines moral systems by what they do rather than by what they value?
Here’s my alternative definition: morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible. It turns out that human societies have found several radically different approaches to suppressing selfishness, two of which are most relevant for understanding what Democrats don’t understand about morality.
First, imagine society as a social contract invented for our mutual benefit. All individuals are equal, and all should be left as free as possible to move, develop talents, and form relationships as they please. The patron saint of a contractual society is John Stuart Mill, who wrote (in On Liberty) that “the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.” Mill’s vision appeals to many liberals and libertarians; a Millian society at its best would be a peaceful, open, and creative place where diverse individuals respect each other’s rights and band together voluntarily (as in Obama’s calls for “unity”) to help those in need or to change the laws for the common good.
Psychologists have done extensive research on the moral mechanisms that are presupposed in a Millian society, and there are two that appear to be partly innate. First, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to suffering and harm, particularly violent harm, and so nearly all cultures have norms or laws to protect individuals and to encourage care for the most vulnerable. Second, people in all cultures are emotionally responsive to issues of fairness and reciprocity, which often expand into notions of rights and justice. Philosophical efforts to justify liberal democracies and egalitarian social contracts invariably rely heavily on intuitions about fairness and reciprocity.
But now imagine society not as an agreement among individuals but as something that emerged organically over time as people found ways of living together, binding themselves to each other, suppressing each other’s selfishness, and punishing the deviants and free-riders who eternally threaten to undermine cooperative groups. The basic social unit is not the individual, it is the hierarchically structured family, which serves as a model for other institutions. Individuals in such societies are born into strong and constraining relationships that profoundly limit their autonomy. The patron saint of this more binding moral system is the sociologist Emile Durkheim, who warned of the dangers of anomie (normlessness), and wrote, in 1897, that “Man cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free himself from all social pressure is to abandon himself and demoralize him.” A Durkheimian society at its best would be a stable network composed of many nested and overlapping groups that socialize, reshape, and care for individuals who, if left to their own devices, would pursue shallow, carnal, and selfish pleasures. A Durkheimian society would value self-control over self-expression, duty over rights, and loyalty to one’s groups over concerns for outgroups.
A Durkheimian ethos can’t be supported by the two moral foundations that hold up a Millian society (harm/care and fairness/reciprocity). My recent research shows that social conservatives do indeed rely upon those two foundations, but they also value virtues related to three additional psychological systems: ingroup/loyalty (involving mechanisms that evolved during the long human history of tribalism), authority/respect (involving ancient primate mechanisms for managing social rank, tempered by the obligation of superiors to protect and provide for subordinates), and purity/sanctity (a relatively new part of the moral mind, related to the evolution of disgust, that makes us see carnality as degrading and renunciation as noble). These three systems support moralities that bind people into intensely interdependent groups that work together to reach common goals. Such moralities make it easier for individuals to forget themselves and coalesce temporarily into hives, a process that is thrilling, as anyone who has ever “lost” him or herself in a choir, protest march, or religious ritual can attest.
In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.
In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don’t understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.
Religion and political leadership are so intertwined across eras and cultures because they are about the same thing: performing the miracle of converting unrelated individuals into a group. Durkheim long ago said that God is really society projected up into the heavens, a collective delusion that enables collectives to exist, suppress selfishness, and endure. The three Durkheimian foundations (ingroup, authority, and purity) play a crucial role in most religions. When they are banished entirely from political life, what remains is a nation of individuals striving to maximize utility while respecting the rules. What remains is a cold but fair social contract, which can easily degenerate into a nation of shoppers.
The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words “God” and “faith.” But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights–but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum (“from many, one”). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap.
A useful heuristic would be to think about each issue, and about the Party itself, from the perspective of the three Durkheimian foundations. Might the Democrats expand their moral range without betraying their principles? Might they even find ways to improve their policies by incorporating and publicly praising some conservative insights?
The ingroup/loyalty foundation supports virtues of patriotism and self-sacrifice that can lead to dangerous nationalism, but in moderate doses a sense that “we are all one” is a recipe for high social capital and civic well-being. A recent study by Robert Putnam (titled E Pluribus Unum) found that ethnic diversity increases anomie and social isolation by decreasing people’s sense of belonging to a shared community. Democrats should think carefully, therefore, about why they celebrate diversity. If the purpose of diversity programs is to fight racism and discrimination (worthy goals based on fairness concerns), then these goals might be better served by encouraging assimilation and a sense of shared identity.
The purity/sanctity foundation is used heavily by the Christian right to condemn hedonism and sexual “deviance,” but it can also be harnessed for progressive causes. Sanctity does not have to come from God; the psychology of this system is about overcoming our lower, grasping, carnal selves in order to live in a way that is higher, nobler, and more spiritual. Many liberals criticize the crassness and ugliness that our unrestrained free-market society has created. There is a long tradition of liberal anti-materialism often linked to a reverence for nature. Environmental and animal welfare issues are easily promoted using the language of harm/care, but such appeals might be more effective when supplemented with hints of purity/sanctity.
The authority/respect foundation will be the hardest for Democrats to use. But even as liberal bumper stickers urge us to “question authority” and assert that “dissent is patriotic,” Democrats can ask what needs this foundation serves, and then look for other ways to meet them. The authority foundation is all about maintaining social order, so any candidate seen to be “soft on crime” has disqualified himself, for many Americans, from being entrusted with the ultimate authority. Democrats would do well to read Durkheim and think about the quasi-religious importance of the criminal justice system. The miracle of turning individuals into groups can only be performed by groups that impose costs on cheaters and slackers. You can do this the authoritarian way (with strict rules and harsh penalties) or you can do it using the fairness/reciprocity foundation by stressing personal responsibility and the beneficence of the nation towards those who “work hard and play by the rules.” But if you don’t do it at all—if you seem to tolerate or enable cheaters and slackers — then you are committing a kind of sacrilege.
If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom.
Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.