GOD’S UNLISTED PHONE NUMBER

Jerry Harkins

There is no God.  Maybe there once was.  I have this vision of a two-year-old boy named God Almighty playing with matches in the kitchen.  Just possibly there was an accident and the Big Bang got ignited.  There are other scenarios.  For example, maybe it wasn’t an accident.  In any case, there was a perfect explosion.  It wiped out everything that preceded it so poor little G.A. did not survive.  Whatever may have been or not been on the other side of Point Alpha, the truth is that right now there is no uncaused first cause acting in history.  While I’m at it, there is no Santa Claus, no tooth fairy and, while there was a Saint Patrick, he did not expel the snakes from Ireland.   If any of this comes to you as depressing news, I apologize.

Thomas Aquinas disagrees with me and devotes the first 43 questions of the Summa Theologica to the existence and nature of God.  He begins by telling us that the statement “God is” is not self-evident but that it can be demonstrated by unaided reason or logic.  He then proceeds to attempt such a demonstration at excruciating length.  Now this is the elaborately defined God of the Christians he is dealing with, so his job is not an easy one and it is not surprising that he fails.  What is surprising is that his failure involves a logical train wreck.  Logic, after all, was his forte.  But he commits a basic fallacy when he sets out to prove something that he already believes is beyond dispute and to do so by proving a negative—that is by inferring God from what cannot be.  He says that, given the world as he sees it, God cannot not exist.  Where some see chaos, Thomas sees order and he thinks order can only come about through design.  This is known as begging the question.  If you already believe that the earth is flat or that it is 6,000 years old or that the moon is made of green cheese, you can easily prove it to your own satisfaction and that of your fellow believers by saying it cannot be otherwise.  Your logic, unlike that of Thomas, may be elegant and even valid but it still won’t hold water.[i]

The angelic doctor makes another error which is even more interesting.  If the existence of God is, as he says, not self-evident, no amount of logical pettifoggery can prove that God does exist.  When Thomas Jefferson wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” in effect he was saying that he would not debate them.  Of course he wouldn’t.  The entire history of the human race up to and including his own little piece of it at Monticello argues persuasively that those “truths” were anything but true, never mind self-evident.  All men may have been created equal but throughout history, some men owned other men known as slaves.  Tom himself owned slaves, 130 of whom were auctioned off by his estate to pay his debts.  What he had meant to say in 1776 was these truths should be self-evident.  Why?  Because I say so.  That, my dear King George, is the way I define the universe.  It is an appeal to authority, to do-as-I-say, not to logic, evidence or reasoning.

But, you say, practically everyone who has ever lived has believed in God so it must be true even if it is not self-evident.  Indeed Aquinas himself uses “universal acclamation” as one of his arguments for the existence of God.  But belief, however widespread, is not evidence of truth and believing something does not make it so.  Sophie Tucker to the contrary notwithstanding, fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong and frequently are.

Then there are all those miracles.  Didn’t Jesus feed the multitudes with five loaves of bread and two fishes?  All four evangelists claim he did.  Didn’t he raise Lazarus from the dead?  Well, so says John.  We have actual testimony.  The problem is that eyewitness testimony is evidence of the least reliable kind and the authors of the gospels were not eyewitnesses.  They were reporting hearsay decades after the event.

Or to take a more recent example, over a period of months in 1917, the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to three shepherds, ages 7, 8 and 10 years old, six times near the town of Fatima, Portugal.[ii]  The testimony of these uneducated youngsters about the lady’s prophecies, threats and demands was extensive, detailed, consistent and persuasive.  It caused a media frenzy and a firestorm of public piety.  On the last occasion, the sun “whirled around” and gave colorful emanations.  A crowd of 70,000 persons witnessed this and some number of them swore to it.  Pope John Paul II was convinced that this same “Lady of Fatima” intervened to save him from an assassin’s bullet in 1981.  He recovered the bullet and had it placed in the crown on the head of the Fatima statue.  Can 70,000 Portuguese possibly be wrong?

Yes.  Easily.  Bear in mind that only three of them actually saw the Virgin.  Bear in mind also that some of the other 69,997 apparently saw a large coronal mass ejection during a solar storm.  Of course, it is hard to look directly at the sun and, for most of the audience, the event was only a rumor.  The audience wanted to believe and it comes as no surprise that their desire was accommodated by their imagination.  There was no Lady of Fatima no matter what three impressionable children said they saw and heard.  Indeed, there has never been a virgin who gave birth to a child, barring such mortal sins as in vitro fertilization.  I regret this because the Virgin Mary is an elegant, brilliant metaphor speaking to the unity of the human and the divine.  But virgins do not produce offspring.

An awful lot of people will disagree with the foregoing which is okay with me but probably not so okay with them.  These people would rather believe the latter day prophets who claim to have God’s unlisted phone number, people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Osama bin Laden and the Roman Popes.  One of these clowns (it happened to be Robertson but it could have been any or all of them) recently challenged an audience with the notion that, since the existence of God cannot be disproved, the non-believer has an obligation to be humble in the face of faith, that is, to hedge one’s bets.  I agree.  The belief in the sacred shared by billions of people throughout history is indeed an awesome force if for no other reason than when people believe something it doesn’t make any difference whether or not it happens to be true.  Reverend Robertson is right.  I cannot prove that God does not exist.  What’s more, I don’t want to.  In fact, I’m ready to admit that the idea of God is God, and that human society as we know it could not exist without that idea.  This is not so far from John’s claim, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and God was the Word.”  The Greek logos means the word but can also be read as the idea.  Words and ideas are powerful but they have no independent existence.  Santa Claus and the tooth fairy are ideas that influence our culture and our values but, as Jean Paul Sartre might say, they have no thingness.    And there’s where we get into trouble.  If you base public policy on the existence of the Tooth Fairy, your policies will be embraced by many six year old children because it is in their pecuniary interest to do so.  The policies may be good and wise and productive on their own merits but if they are derived solely from the will of God, they cannot be right legally, technically or morally and you have no business making such a claim or forcing me to accept it.  “What would Jesus do?” is no way to run a railroad.

Or a nation.  Which brings me to the point of this essay.  We are told by many devout believers that freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion.  In America, we hear this from Christian fundamentalists in the context of their understanding of the First Amendment.  They are often joined by Roman Catholic bishops and other traditionalists who still oppose the landmark 1965 declaration of Vatican II known as Dignitatis Humanae.  In Israel, we hear a similar argument from the Haredim and, in the Muslim world, from Islamists and other conservative Muslims.  The agitation is always passionate because advocates are promoting what they claim to be attitudes and  rules of conduct dictated directly by God.

In America, the Constitution says in part, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”  The second part is clear enough:  I can worship however I want and follow whatever religious precepts I deem appropriate as long as they do not impinge seriously on the rights of others.  If I believe what I wrote in the first paragraph of this essay, these same words also mean freedom from religion.  Free exercise means freedom not to exercise;  no other construction is possible.

Suppose for a moment that there was a verse in 1 Corinthians that said “You must never abort a fetus because it is a human being from the moment of conception and sacred in the eyes of God.”  There isn’t, of course, but only because Paul didn’t know a lot about reproductive biology.  If, however, on the basis of such a command the United States Congress passed a law against abortion, it could not survive a first amendment challenge.  Might it do so on some other basis?  Perhaps.  There is no telling how the Supreme Court might view the issues but it has been receptive to a variety of state laws limiting access to abortion.  In virtually all such cases, it seems obvious that the state legislatures were applying a thin veneer of legal respectability over their basic religious motivations.  Well, perhaps not so obvious to the majority of the current Supreme Court.

On one thing, everyone can agree:  all over the world, religion is losing ground.  Ironically, it is this slippage that is largely responsible for the rise of religious extremism.  The extremists will ultimately lose the battle, perhaps at great cost.  It is difficult and a little frightening to imagine a world without the divine or to speculate as to how humanity might replace it.  It will surely seem like the end times to some who will no doubt refer to it as The Apocalypse.  To others it will seem like the Birthday of Freedom.

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Notes

[i] Valid means formally correct, but not necessarily true.  For example:  All pine trees speak French.  This is a pine tree.  Therefore this tree speaks French.  A perfectly valid syllogism but don’t try it on your botany final.

[ii] 1917 was the mid-point of 16 years of severe political instability in Portugal, an era in which it had a Provisional Government, a Republic and a constitutional Junta, 8 Presidents and 38 Prime Ministers.  At the time of the apparitions, there was the civil war that substituted one right wing dictatorship for another, that of Sidónio Pais a traditionalist who came to power with the support of the church two months after the final appearance of the Virgin.

BIBLICAL MYTH AND PRIESTLY POWER

Jerry Harkins

The Bible is an anthology of ancient writings believed to have been “inspired” by God. It consists of 66 “books” produced over a period of about a thousand years and divided into two “Testaments,” the “Old” which antedates the birth of Jesus Christ and the “New” which follows it.  It is, without doubt, the most important book ever produced. However else its contents may be described—history, prophecy, wisdom, etc.—the 66 books were selected or “canonized” first and foremost to be absolutely authoritative.[i] Many modern readers accept them as “inerrant,” a term defined by the 1978 International Congress on Biblical Inerrancy as follows:

 Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives.

Most denominations do not go quite so far.  The official Catholic position has varied slightly over the centuries.  The 1994 Catechism states:

"The inspired books teach the truth. Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confined to the Sacred Scriptures."

Some claim to see a bit of wiggle room in phrasing that seems to limit inerrancy to matters “affirmed” by the inspired authors whatever that means.  In any event, the church now believes that Galileo was right and that even Darwin might have been right.  Galileo’s Inquisitor, Cardinal Bellarmine, realized that it might turn out that the earth revolves around the sun contrary to what is implied in the Bible.  If that were so, he wrote, “…one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary, and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false.”  In other words, scripture can and must be interpreted in ways that may differ from its literal meaning.  Another step back from inerrancy is a common mainstream Protestant position holding that only those truths which are important to our salvation are inerrant.  Occasionally, Jesus gives an explicit indication.  “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again” (John 3:3).  By “born again” he was referring to baptism by “water and the spirit” (John 3:5) which is not at all the same thing modern fundamentalists mean by the same phrase.  So, again, it’s a question of interpretation and the power to interpret.

The Bible, of course, is full of metaphors, explicit and implicit, obvious and opaque. “Original sin,” a term that does not actually appear in the Bible, is a metaphor meant to remind us that, though we are made in the image and likeness of God, we are yet incomplete and imperfect, works in progress until we re-join the Creator in heaven.  The virgin birth is a metaphor.  The divinity of Jesus, however ambiguously claimed in the gospels, is another metaphor.   It alludes to the ineffable sense of the transcendent that all of us are born with.  The most difficult biblical metaphors, technically similes, are the 31 parables of Jesus.  They are not easy to interpret.  He says, “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.” (Matthew 13:35).  Thus, we can expect his stories to teach the most esoteric parts of the new philosophy.  They were never meant to be crystal clear.  We are told, “When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, ‘The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you.  But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, they may be ever seeing but never perceiving,  and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!’”[ii]

This bewildering sentiment is an echo of a conversation between God and Isaiah in the eighth century BCE (Is. 6:8-10):  “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?”  And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’  He said, ‘Go and tell this people [of Judah]:  Be ever hearing, but never understanding;
 be ever seeing, but never perceiving.  Make the heart of this people calloused;
  make their ears dull
and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.’”  From the time the church emerged from the catacombs, this has been its official philosophy.  The idea has been to reserve understanding to the priests who must be obeyed in all things.

At first, the tactics were relatively benign:  maintain the text only in Latin to keep the ambiguities, contradictions and outright errors out of the reach of the simple laity.  That became less successful as literacy spread so the church adopted the position that only the anointed can truly understand and interpret the Bible.[iii]  When the plain language contradicts something the church wants people to believe, the hierarchs invent a convenient interpretation.  A good example is John Paul II’s sophomoric attempt to explain the inferiority of women implied in Genesis 3:16.  Because of her sin, God says to Eve “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
 with painful labor you will give birth to children.
 Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”  The Pope agrees this is something modern women might resent but warns them not to let resentment threaten their “essential richness.”  He does not want a mob of crazed feminists picketing St. Peter’s so he tells them how wonderful they really are and what they stand to lose.  Yours, he says, “…is an enormous richness. In the biblical description, the words of the first man at the sight of the woman who had been created are words of admiration and enchantment, words which fill the whole history of man on earth.”  There is no easy way to say this:  the Pope is lying.  Blatantly.   The Bible says or implies no such thing.[iv]  He is making one of his “definitive” moral statements and feels the need for biblical support so he makes it up.  Whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth! 

One of the principal functions of myth is to establish a moral foundation on which a community can flourish.  At the same time, one of the dangers is that the myth becomes obsolete and counterproductive.  An example is divorce which is interesting because the Bible addresses it directly and reasonably clearly.  The Old Testament allows divorce but Jesus said, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.  So they are no longer two, but one flesh.  Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” [v]

These sentences are a perfect example of two phenomena that recur often in biblical criticism.  First, it is clear that Jesus and those who claimed to be quoting him would have profited from a careful copy editor who might have cleaned up the logic.  Everything he says about divorce hinges on the assertion, derived from Genesis 2:24, that in a marriage the two become “one flesh.”   That is the reason they cannot be separated.  That is why Moses was wrong to allow divorce.  And that, ultimately is why remarriage following divorce is adulterous.  Indeed, that is why men who are seriously interested in going to heaven are better off not marrying in the first place.  But the that is also perfectly nonsensical.  The man and the woman do not become one flesh. God does not wave a magic wand.  They may unite as a spiritual couple but their flesh remains plural.  The two are and forever remain fully independent biological entities and no metaphor can change that reality.

The second and more important problem is one of interpretation.  What exactly was Jesus trying to say?  Who gets the last word on this and on what authority?  These are  important questions because the church has long insisted that divorced and remarried Catholics are living in sin and commit an additional serious sin each time they receive the eucharist.  Jesus claimed that adulterers would wind up in hell (Matt. 5:30) which is understandable in that adultery is a direct violation of what Catholics number as the sixth commandment.  So if Jesus is right that remarriage is tantamount to adultery, maybe the church is being reasonable in concluding that remarried Catholics should be excluded from communion.  The key word is maybe.  Certainly there is no biblical support for such exclusion.  Jesus never said or even implied it.  Quite the contrary, he forgave the woman taken in adultery even though she did not ask for forgiveness (John 8:11).  The moral of that story is simple: “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.”  The church, however, invoking its power to bind upon earth, is unforgiving.  It immediately excludes the adulterer from communion and community, from God’s love and from the hope of salvation.  All on the basis of its interpretation of a seriously flawed metaphor.

What literalists fail to understand is that while all metaphors limp, metaphor constitutes much of the glory and greatness of the Bible.  The theologian Ronald Modras has written, “…the biblical authors realized that their images were metaphors—limp, stuttering attempts to express in analogies the mystery that they called holy and beyond all telling.”[vi]   Jesus’ favorite metaphor may have been that of the mustard seed which he used often in several different contexts.  Most famously, he taught, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and planted in his field.  Though it is the smallest of all your seeds, yet when it grows, it is the largest of garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and perch in its branches” (Matthew 13:31-32). Presumably he is saying that heaven will flourish from what may seem to be insignificant beginnings—he himself and his band of disciples.  Had he lived in a more northerly climate, he might have phrased it in terms of the old English proverb, mighty oaks grow from little acorns.  But heaven does not literally grow.  Nor will the mustard seed ever become a tree capable of sheltering birds in its shade.  Mustard plants are generally inconspicuous weeds two to three feet tall.  But this is only a metaphor.  It cannot carry the burden of philosophy, theology or even botany.  Metaphors are necessarily simple.  Their whole purpose is to simplify the complex.  Everyone in Jesus’ audience had experienced mustard seeds as tiny and mustard plants as much larger. For his modest purpose, it was sufficient.

The hierarchs pretend that the Bible is a single, perfectly consistent narrative which sets forth a divine plan for achieving eternal bliss in heaven.  As evidence for this, they cite the seamless robe of Jesus (John 19:23) as a metaphor for the “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” allocution of the bull Unam Sanctam of 1302.  Writing of the church, the Pope, Boniface VIII, declared, “…outside of her there is neither salvation nor the remission of sins, as the Spouse in the Canticles proclaims: 'One is my dove, my perfect one. She is the only one, the chosen of her who bore her,' and she represents one sole mystical body whose Head is Christ and the head of Christ is God.”[vii]   Not surprisingly, that plan, divinely perfect though it may be, requires extensive amplification and even amendment by priests who share God’s power and are called on to exercise it over the lives of everyone else.

Sadly, this is all nonsense.  The Bible contains a smidgen of history.  David, Solomon, the Maccabees, Jesus and his disciples and Paul (Saul of Tarsus) were real people who probably said and did at least some of what is attributed to them.  Adam and Eve, Abraham and Noah, Job and Ruth, Lazarus and the Three Magi are not historical personages.   Others are probably half and half.  Job is a fictional morality tale based on some kernel of truth.  Jesus was a wise man and a teacher but he was not the son of God.  Mary was probably the name of his mother but she was not a virgin when she gave birth.  The Book of Revelation is pure fantasy.

No self-respecting reader can believe that any part of the Bible is inerrant.  In fact, no one really believes that.  Some members of the professional religious class insist only that their particular interpretation of their favorite translation is inerrant which is the same thing as saying they are inerrant.  They put themselves forward as the keepers of the myth, a vital role in any society but one susceptible to the seductions of power.  When challenged, they respond with fury although they no longer burn heretics at the stake.[viii]  Still, it is well to bear in mind the observation of Friedrich Nietzsche that, “All things are subject to interpretation.  Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power, not truth.”

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Notes

[i] These 66 books are but a small fraction of those that might have been included.   There are also about 15 books of Old Testament Apocrypha which are accepted as canonical by some denominations, including Catholic and Orthodox Christians, by others as less than the inspired word of God.  All biblical quotations in the body of the text are from The Holy Bible, New International Version (NIV), © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.

[ii] The scholars of the Jesus Seminar concluded that these are not the words of Jesus but of Mark who was attempting to explain the opaqueness of many of Jesus’s parables.  See:  Funk, Robert W. and Roy W. Hoover, The Five Gospels,  Macmillan, 1993, pp.55-56.  It should also be noted that on another occasion Jesus said,  “There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs” (Luke 12:2-3).  The Jesus Seminar doubts this passage also.

[iii] See the encyclicals Providentissimus Deus of Leo XIII (1893) and Divino Allfante Spiritu of Pius XII (1943).

[iv] All Adam says is, “Now this at last: bone from my bones, flesh from my flesh! This shall be called woman for from man was this taken.” (Genesis 2:23).  He does not sound either admiring or enchanted. There is no record in the Bible that Adam ever said a single word to Eve.  There is no hint he found her attractive or even useful.  The Pope here is perverting the truth.  (It should be noted that there are two non-canonical Books of Adam and Eve but even in these Adam has little to say to Eve that is not an admonishment of one sort or another.)

[v] This passage occurs twice.  Here are both versions in context as given by the translators of the NIV:

Mark 10:  5 “It was because your hearts were hard that Moses wrote you this law,” Jesus replied. 6 “But at the beginning of creation God ‘made them male and female.’ 7 ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, 8 and the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. 9 Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

Matthew 19:  3 Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?” 4 “Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ 5 and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? 6 So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” 7 “Why then,” they asked, “did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?” 8 Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. 9 I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.” 10 The disciples said to him, “If this is the situation between a husband and wife, it is better not to marry.”  11 Jesus replied, “Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. 12 For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.”

[vi] Ignatian Humanism, Loyola Press, 2010, p. 288.  The “limping metaphor” is a principle of ancient Greek rhetoric that recognizes the centrality of metaphor to human knowledge and also the limitation inherent in all comparisons.

[vii] “Canticles” refers to the Song of Songs otherwise known as the Canticle of Canticles, Chapter 6 Verse 8.  Again we encounter papal distortion of the Bible.  The passage refers to one woman (“my dove”) among the “sixty queens and eighty concubines and virgins beyond number” the King keeps in his harem.  The Pope uses this dove or pigeon as a metaphor for the church.  He probably does not want you to think of the church as a concubine.  “Chosen of her who bore her” seems to be an example of pontificating under the influence of a controlled substance.

[viii] The last auto-da-fé took place in Madrid, Spain on May 18, 1721.  Two men and three women were burned alive together with effigies of two deceased heretics.  All were accused of being relapsed Jews.  One, Maria Barbara Carillo, was 95 years old.

EYES LEFT

Jerry Harkins

For several decades, the American government has been driven by ideological conflicts that have grown more extreme and vituperative with each iteration.  Public policy is increasingly derived from abstract belief systems rather than empirical experience.  These ideologies, like religion, have no basis in the operational world but are held with a desperate tenacity.  Occasionally they work as anti-communism worked for Ronald Reagan.  Generally, however, they are irrelevant because they are immune to complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity.  The current prominence of the Tea Party is eloquent testimony to our modish taste for the politics of the absurd.  Under its aegis, a growing majority of Republicans have come to reject science, especially climate science and that historical bug-a-boo of the right, evolution.  In a red state near you, there are probably well financed battles now in their second and third generations against fluoridation of the water, the vaccination of children, the use of contraceptives to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and the horrors of even the most benign indulgences in recreational drugs.  Eighty years after the repeal of Prohibition, there are 271 counties in the United States that ban the sale and/or consumption of alcoholic beverages.  Admittedly most of them are in the South where they are likely to remain dry as long as the voters manage to stay sober enough to stagger to the polls.

Extreme leftist ideology has been largely absent from the national stage in recent decades but those old enough to have lived through the fog of the 60’s and early 70’s will recall the mindless causes and harebrained antics of the student “revolutionaries.”  Foolish as they may have seemed even at the time, they managed to work their way into mainstream liberalism.  Thus, serious politicians like George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy and even Bobby Kennedy were forced to make common cause with Yippies, Black Panthers, Weathermen and other anarchistic minigroups masquerading behind and often contaminating important progressive movements trying to address racial discrimination, women’s rights, environmental issues and, eventually, gay rights.  But, as usual, the crazies got all the ink and all the 90-second spots on the evening news.  Moreover the whole mess was politically counterproductive.  The old leftists who voted for Dick Gregory in 1968 because they thought Hubert Horatio Humphrey was a traitor to their cause brought about the election of Richard M. Nixon and Spiro T. Agnew.  That same year, George Wallace tried to do the same thing to Nixon whom he considered insufficiently conservative.  Although he carried five states, he had less effect than the anti-Humphrey liberals.  In 1992, Ross Perot garnered nearly 19% of the popular vote but it was so evenly distributed it did not affect the outcome.  However in 2000, Ralph Nader succeeded in denying a clear victory to Al Gore in Florida which ultimately delivered the election to George Bush.  Henry Clay’s remark, “I’d rather be right than President” has become a great American theme.  Nader, for one, simply wanted to deny the election to a candidate less liberal than himself.

David Brower, Archdruid of the environmental movement, said that someone always has to stake out the extremist position so that the real debate can take place within a penumbra of sanity.  It turned out that for him the extremist arena was not the Sierra Club or the Friends of the Earth, both of which were ultimately threatened by his rigid environmentalism.  What saved the environmental movement was that its most PR-worthy issues tended to be related to saving soft furry creatures and green leafy trees.  It was difficult to take such eco-terrorism organizations as the Animal Liberation Front, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Earth First or even Greenpeace seriously but they did exercise significant influence for a time.  In its inimitable fashion, The New York Times did try to link some of the more outré forms of environmentalism to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, but its story was contrived and inconsequential.  In the public imagination, Mr. Kaczynski couldn’t compete with baby seals.

Extremism almost always metastasizes out of important social concerns as a new cadre of leaders seeks to seize the media high ground occupied by established critics.  The civil rights struggles began as a legitimate non-violent protest by serious people.  On the cusp of success, which is to say after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it turned into self-destructive hooliganism characterized by blood-curdling rhetoric and cries of “Burn, baby, burn!”  Students for a Democratic Society morphed into the Weather Underground which set out to force the creation of a Utopian, classless, communist world largely by blowing up the townhouses of their parents.  Today’s Tea Party movement is rooted in a well-founded distrust of contemporary government.  It quickly transformed itself by welcoming relatively small strains of ignorance, religious fundamentalism, nativism and racism.  Even intellectually respectable neo-conservatives and libertarians were seduced by promoters of laissez faire economics and political anarchy.

In the wake of the 2012 conservative debacle, liberalism began to show renewed signs of life.  It is still on life support.  It would be a miracle if the American people suddenly developed a taste for the higher taxes major liberal programs would inevitably require.  Moreover, the first generation of reborn liberals has no experience in governance and is likely to make a hash out of its early efforts.  In New York City, the voters have just elected Bill de Blasio as their new mayor by a landslide.  Bill is an outspoken old fashioned leftie who promises to soak (not his word) the rich to pay for universal pre-kindergarten, to weaken (not his word) the ability of the police to prevent crime and to return us to the glory days of education—the era of “community control.”  Against all odds, he may actually fulfill some of these dreams.  This is, after all, New York but he still has a lot to learn.  His carefully orchestrated inauguration was a nightmare.  Speaker after speaker (excepting a gracious and grateful Bill Clinton) denounced his predecessor Mike Bloomberg to his face.  Bloomberg was possibly the most effective mayor the city ever elected in terms of addressing the big ticket problems.  Indeed, during his tenure, New York displaced Chicago as “the city that works.”  But the inauguration speakers sounded just like the red meat Republicans delivering themselves of their considered opinions of Obama and Obamacare.  They excoriated the former mayor and his signature programs in terms that sounded like playground trash talk.  De Blasio himself seemed embarrassed as well he should have been.  But he learned nothing.  Almost immediately, he set out to alienate the Democratic Governor of New York and the state legislature without whose support he can accomplish virtually nothing.

In my mind, there is no doubt that de Blasio is right about a lot of these issues.  I am a huge supporter of free, universal, compulsory education and I think the charter school movement siphons desperately needed money from truly public schools.  I agree that it is a well established fact that an early start in school is the best way to assure success in later life.  I have serious concerns about the fairness and decency of stop and frisk and I believe the city must address the problem of affordable housing.  But to treat the wealthy, the business leaders, the politically more conservative and the pragmatic as morally repugnant enemies of the people is amateurish, foolish and counterproductive.  To act as though the horse drawn carriages in Central Park are tantamount to crimes against humanity is  a waste of time and an exercise in adolescent self-indulgence.

There has always been a leftist fringe.  In 1786, Shay’s Rebellion was a populist uprising brought about by the economic depression that followed the Revolutionary War and the austerity program instituted to reduce state debt.  The actual issues were surprisingly similar to those raised by the Occupy Wall Street protesters some 225 years later except that two of the rebels were eventually hanged for treason.  It drove another wedge between Washington and Jefferson and gave rise to one of the latter’s more asinine observations to the effect that, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  It is its natural manure.”  A century later, the labor wars were waged against vast odds by two generations of committed, focused leaders.  Organized labor survived the Pinkertons and their machine guns, the hostility of government, the antipathy of the oligarchs and the stupidity of their own lunatic fringes.  It might have won by the simple expedient of having better songs but it ultimately lost because the unions allowed themselves to be dominated by anarchists, communists and organized crime thugs.  Corruption, violence and arrogance rendered the entire movement an easy target for its enemies.

For progressives, it’s often fun to watch the right wing crazies shoot themselves in the foot.  We enjoy watching these paragons of family values twist slowly in the winds of the latest lurid sex scandal.  It’s hard to keep a straight face when a congressperson named Bubba from a town called Dogpatch rants and raves about the evils of school lunches.  On the other hand, it’s easy to root for a candidate like Donald “Only His Hairdresser Knows For Sure” Trump as he trumpets one inane theory after another.  It’s natural to feel a bit smug when one discovers that fully 27% of the people who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 are convinced that the government is still covering up the landing of hostile space aliens in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947.

Liberals, of course, are no fun at all because they’re such serious people.  A Seventeen Year Leftist just now emerging from his chrysalis is probably running against growing income inequality.  Mayor de Blasio’s signature “tale of two cities” issue is a case in point.  Again, he’s right.  The income gap between the richest and the poorest is growing. The Mayor’s plan, such as it is, is to raise the minimum wage to $11.50 an hour including $1.50 in benefits.  It couldn’t hurt but it’s not going to solve income inequality.  For a family of four with one wage earner, $24 thousand a year is still below the official poverty level.  So school crossing guards and home health aides are not suddenly going to find themselves anywhere within reach of Jamie Dimon’s $20 million compensation package.  To do that, the Mayor would have to institute a marginal income tax rate of 100% on every dollar of income above some arbitrary line.  It wouldn’t be the first time.  Huey “The Kingfisher” Long had proposed just such a solution as part of his “Every Man A King” platform in the 1930’s.  His cutoff varied but wound up at income of $1 million a year, assets of $5 million and an estate of $5 million.  Everything above those amounts would be confiscated.  As to income inequality, the nineteenth century reformer (and New York mayoral candidate) Henry George was far more sophisticated than De Blasio and his friends but was still unable to find a workable solution.  And therein lies the problem for ideologues of every stripe:  in an essentially capitalist society, the problem of income inequality belongs to the set of problems that have no political or technical solution.  In essentially socialist systems, a rough equality can be achieved but everyone is poorer for it.  It has ever been so.  There is no example in world history of a non-capitalist economy that came close to delivering the greatest good for the greatest number for any period of time beyond the blinking of an historical eye.  Not New Harmony which lasted four years, not Brook Farm which lasted five and not Oneida which preached free love (“complex marriage”) and paid for it by making flatware.  Even Amana collapsed after 82 years in spite of its excellent large appliances.  The Shakers came closest and lasted longer than the others.  At their peak around 1860 they had several thousand members in some twenty communities.  And that may have been their secret:  they kept the communities small and self sufficient.  Larger scale socialist societies universally failed.   The Soviet Union was impoverished from start to finish (75 years) and the People’s Republic of China, equally impoverished, lasted less than 50.

Capitalism gave people the incentive to throw over the old feudal order and made possible the idea of democratic governance.  Somehow socialism always seems that it should be better:  simpler, more moral, more equitable, less contentious.  But invariably it winds up producing more poverty, more disease and more misery for more people.  Capitalism, on the other hand, seems almost ugly, like a symphony composed by a committee.  As Daniel Bell pointed out it is based on what appears to be a fundamental contradiction in that it simultaneously requires asset accumulation or saving and consumption or spending.  Perhaps more accurately, capitalism requires a delicate balance between the two, a balance that is challenged by the brass ring that drives innovation and growth.  Call it an incentive or call it greed.  Either way, the prospect of personal gain is the engine that drives capitalism.  In moderation it yields prosperity.  Carried to the extreme, it is the fault that periodically comes close to destroying the whole system.

Striking the proper balance requires two policies that capitalists do not like:  government regulation and some level of wealth redistribution to provide a “safety net” and an incentive for the poor and otherwise disadvantaged.  Regulation seeks to deter or punish excessive greed.  A safety net promotes both fairness and a sense of fairness by fostering opportunity.  A proper balance also requires policies that liberals dislike including assent to a certain level of income inequality and the social advantages that wealth offers.  Without these, the incentive system near the heart of capitalism is and is seen as fraudulent. 

And so the economy staggers between Scylla and Charybdis depending on a multitude of forces some of which are quite mysterious.  It does, however, seem to have a direction at least over the long term.  In the lifespan of the United States, we have witnessed at least four very different kinds of capitalism:  the mercantile capitalism of Adam Smith, the laissez faire era of the Industrial Revolution, the regulated capitalism that prevailed roughly between 1910 and 1980 and the post-industrial capitalism now unfolding.  Over time, the American standard of living as measured by economic criteria has improved almost consistently for almost everyone.  Interestingly, this has not always resulted in increasing social and psychic satisfaction.  For example, as working conditions have improved, job satisfaction has declined.  Similarly, the social upheavals of the 1960’s produced steady, undeniable gains for women and African-Americans in every sphere of life.  But the dominant truth is that progress for both has been too little, too slow, too incomplete.

The poisonous tenor of our current political discourse is due almost entirely to the inability of our institutions to respond to challenges that require compromise.   Consider, for example, New York’s need for affordable housing.  It is not a new problem.  The city has experimented with rent control since the 1920’s and the current system was developed in the aftermath of World War II.  It was promoted as a temporary solution to a shortage created by the depression and the demand of returning veterans.  It consisted of legalized price controls which had also been a feature of the wartime economy.  It never worked.  It turned marginal landlords into slumlords by eradicating any incentive to maintain or improve property and destroying the market for anything but luxury development.  It turned tenants into a politically powerful bloc of advantaged stakeholders with a fierce sense of entitlement.  In essence, New York was saddled with an insoluble problem.  It tried everything including socialism.  It built thousands upon thousands of public housing units—depressing, crime-ridden, poorly maintained apartment complexes that worked no better than those of the old Soviet Union. The city quickly became its own worst slumlord.  For two decades, it looked the other way as desperate private owners turned to arson as a means of getting losing properties off their backs and books.  What this accomplished was to prepare whole neighborhoods for gentrification which rarely includes more than a soupçon of affordable housing.

Our problems are not due to the stupidity or corruption of our politicians or our bureaucrats although there is a great deal of both in City Hall and Albany and Washington.  Rather there has been a breakdown in the social contract and a consequent unwillingness to compromise.  We are alienated from the institutions that define us as a community including government, business, the press and the religious establishment and we have turned instead to harebrained, simplistic ideologies of the left and right.  The two most important pragmatists of our era, Barack Obama and Michael Bloomberg, have lost our favor.  In the face of complexity, we have become impatient and we demand magic.

This too shall pass.  We have survived worse and anarchy has never prevailed.  We are living through a period of wrenching, rapid dislocation.  Regaining our footing must begin at the grassroots.  Citizens have to vote and vote intelligently.  To do so, we have to become fed up with mindless gridlock and eschew the specious comforts of ideology.  It will certainly happen and it won’t take much to get it started.  “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

WHOSE WORDS THESE ARE I THINK I KNOW

Jerry Harkins

"It turns out that Senator John Walsh, Democrat of Montana, may have plagiarized a paper he wrote while a student at the Army War College in 2007.  If so, this would call his judgment and possibly his integrity into question, something the voters in Montana might want to take into consideration."

For this exposé, the voters of Montana and we are indebted to The New York Times which went to a lot of trouble and expense to produce a lengthy front page story.  We and the good people of Montana will, I expect, make up our minds without losing much sleep over it.

We are not told how The Times glommed onto this heinous crime.  They no doubt had an tipster who wished to remain anonymous because he or she did not want to jeopardize a longstanding friendship with the Senator.  Not that it makes much difference.  The Times has been struggling manfully to reduce its dependence on anonymous sources but with little success.  It assures us that it has a detailed written policy on the subject and that it never grants this grace casually.  It reminds me of Brutus’ wonderful circularity in trying to persuade the Roman people that assassinating Julius Caesar was a moral undertaking:  “… believe me 
for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that
 you may believe.”

By now, plagiarists and prospective plagiarists should know that The Times is obsessed with a subject that bores almost everyone else.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they scrutinized every term paper submitted in every college class in America.  For a reporter, to be assigned to the plagiarism beat has got to be the most tedious purgatory imaginable.  The reason, of course, is that the editors have been stung so often themselves.  Thus they get all discombobulated whenever they get wind that some publication contains material of questionable authorship.  It can be almost anything in almost any publication:  the newspaper of record swoons whenever it thinks writers have abused the trust of readers.  To be fair, it reserves its highest vigilance for its own reporters.  Still, such excitement is not good for the old lady so, as a public service, I thought I would review the moral theology of prose promoted as non-fiction.  Or, to borrow the current idiom, "fake news."

As you know there is a moral compact between writers and readers.  In overview, it amounts to this:  you don’t abuse my intelligence and I won’t abuse yours.  There is an exception for critics and pundits who can say any damn fool thing they want because nobody pays attention to them anyway.  Otherwise the deal is the writer will not deliberately mislead the reader in any way.  I will try to warn you about my biases insofar as I know them.  I will not report opinion as fact and I will do my best to avoid logical fallacies.  Oh, yes, I will not try to pass off the work of others as my own.  There are at least two reasons for this.  First, it frequently represents theft of intellectual property.  This objection is getting harder to sustain in a world where information is ubiquitous and wants to be free but it is still a violation of the seventh commandment and partakes of at least four of the seven deadly sins.  Second, it is abusive to the reader in that it imputes to the writer and the work an authority they have no claim to.

A compact, of course, needs at least two parties.  For the reader, the first clause of that agreement is “Caveat lector.”  It is crucial that you know not to believe everything you read.  As an adult, you have a responsibility to assess what you read which means to be familiar with basic logic and routine fallacies.  Moreover, you must never suspend your natural skepticism.  Practically everybody who wants to communicate with you has something to sell whether it’s salvation or snake oil.  Priests, pundits, politicians, journalists and convicted felons all have a shtick.  It may be sublime or ridiculous but they want you to believe it and, to persuade you, they may employ tactics that are less than kosher.  Does this surprise you?

Think about Caesar’s Gallic Wars.  The purpose of the book was not to set forth a definitive history of the conflict but to promote the idea that its author, who wanted to be Emperor, was a military genius.  Now, first, remember the natural skepticism you were born with.  The phrase “military genius” is almost always an oxymoron.  Caesar was pretty good but he never faced major league pitching.  His  only really effective enemy in Gaul had been Vercingetorix, a chieftain of the Arverni whom he defeated only with great difficulty.  Do you think his account accurately portrays how he was often outsmarted by this barbarian?  Do you expect him to make a laughingstock of himself?  Of course not.  As another military genius, Winston Churchill, once said, “I expect history will treat me kindly because I propose to write it.”  Which he did to predicted effect.  Thus the author of three of the most disastrous military follies of the twentieth century, Gallipoli, Anzio and Dieppe, is remembered as the Lion of England.  Caesar was not nearly as inept as Churchill but still his is the only eye witness account we have which is why it is regarded as history instead of advertising.

Or take the Venerable Adam Bede.  In writing his Ecclesiastical History of the British Nation, he had no personal ax to grind.  He wasn’t running for Abbot of Jarrow which is a good thing because he couldn’t have been elected.  But knowing he was an employee of the direct descendants of the winners, do you for a moment think his account of the Synod of Whitby is a simple factual recitation?  Granted he was remarkably fair to Bishop Colman.  But do you really think the members of the Irish party, “…both high and low, signified their agreement and, abandoning their imperfect customs, hastened to adopt those which they had learned to be better?”  Do you think they capitulated to the absurd logic of Oswy’s decision?  They did none of these things.  Colman and most of his monks bowed to the inevitable and retreated to Iona.  He later founded monasteries in Mayo and Galway.  The Irish continued to resist Roman hegemony for five hundred years.  If you read Bede’s Preface with some understanding of the history, you cannot help but notice that all his sources were, like himself, members of the Roman party.  That should put you on notice:  either Bede was excessively credulous or he really did not know what the Romans had been up to.  His book is still invaluable but only if you read it with a grain or two of salt.

The point of all this is that truth is a seductive but coy mistress.  The reader is a sitting duck, the underdog in the transaction, an easy victim for an unscrupulous writer.  But that does not absolve readers from the obligation to manage their expectations.  You have a right to the truth or, more accurately, to what the writer sincerely believes is true.  And, unless you’re totally naïve, you should make allowances for error, honest and otherwise.  For example, Paul Samuelson, author of a classic introductory text in economics, really did think that supply and demand are the only important forces influencing prices.  But that is not an eternal verity;  it is an opinion supported by some data, some logic and a fair amount of ideology.  The latter particularly must be borne in mind and it is the reader’s job to do so.  All things considered, you are well advised not to form an opinion about evolution from reading the works of Pat Robertson.

There is a wide spectrum of writerly sins ranging from innocent trivia to heinous villainy.  Just where a particular sin falls on that spectrum depends on the importance of the deception and on the context.  In an academic or journalistic setting, plagiarism, however minor, is an unacceptable violation of the social contract.  In most other contexts, it tilts toward the trivial.  It is never morally laudable but let’s be careful and reasonable.  If I lift 50 words from the work of another writer, it’s okay as long as I acknowledge it.  So what The Times is complaining about is the lack of notice and the world is not going to end if I fail to note my borrowing of some words.  (It is, by the way, perfectly acceptable, to borrow freely when it comes to ideas.  Just be sure to rephrase them.)

Plagiarism happens.  But aside from the sophomore who borrows 1,500 words from the encyclopedia to write a term paper on the Docetist heresy, most of it is quite minor and probably inadvertent.  The idea that an author like Stephen Ambrose or Doris Kearns Goodwin, both former targets of The Times’ Page One wrath, would deliberately steal somebody else’s work has a probability approaching zero.  So if you do find a couple of hundred words that seem plagiarized, the natural assumption is that it is a mistake.  It is certainly not front page news and should never be treated as a gotcha.  I’m not so sure I see much of a difference between splashing a condemnation for plagiarism across the front page and forcing Hester Prynne to wear the scarlet letter A.  When you’ve been indicted, tried and convicted of what the newspaper of record considers a crime against humanity, it’s sure to follow you all the way to your obituary.  As a matter of fact, Doris Goodwin’s alleged sins were reprised in The Times’ obituary of Stephen Ambrose.  The poor woman can’t catch a break from the paper’s relentless pursuit.

People, present company excluded, do stupid things.  Even brilliant people.  It may be the arrogance of the common pickpocket:  they’ll never catch me because I’m too smart.  It may be a sense of entitlement or a symptom of narcissism.  It bears repeating that plagiarism is never justified and, in some few instances, it is a slap in the face to the core values of an institution in which case it can take on a bit of the flavor of treason.  But the obsession of The Times has long since taken on a bit of the flavor of a witch hunt and more than a bit of yellow journalism.  It’s an epidemic.  Every day it seems, there are examples of lesser offenders whose misdeeds are greatly amplified by the media.  I think of Abe Fortas, Pete Rose, Michael Milken, Tonya Harding and especially Richard Milhous Nixon.  Nixon’s sins were many but venial.  His achievements were monumental but virtually ignored.  To The Times and the Washington Post, he was a whipping boy and they piled on him and the others with glee as living proof of their own moral superiority.  The nadir of their sanctimonious posturing was, of course, the Monicagate fiasco during which they took every opportunity to reprise in excruciating detail the adolescent pornographic fantasies of Kenneth Starr and Henry Hyde.  In this sense, plagiarism is merely a subset of the syndrome of building journalistic mountains out of molehills.

As any five year old will be happy to tell you, it’s a free country and The Times will add that the First Amendment is sacred juju.  Which it is.  On the other hand, ginning up circulation through sensationalism and indulging in character assassination are hardly textbook examples of distinguished journalism.  Editors and publishers might bear in mind that the co-inventor of yellow journalism was none other than Joseph Pulitzer who also created the eponymous prizes for journalistic excellence.  Which is rapidly becoming extinct.