Culture in the Blender

Listening to Pandora at work, a song called New American Century by KMFDM came on. The lyrics caught my attention. In context of what I’ve been reading (and re-reading) this seems right on the money. There are strong directions in American politics that could endanger not only democracy and freedom in America, but given America’s importance in the global economy and proto-community, could have reverberations worldwide. Already now, some issues that should stay America’s internal struggles and problems get transmitted elsewhere – like faith-based abstinence-only education in countries that desperately need condoms (As America itself, one might note.) and a stubborn insistence in face of facts to the contrary that global warming doesn’t exist. America may be taking a sharp swing toward the unreasonable, and they are often not aware of the mirrors they could see themselves in to get a reality check. If you’re really dominionist, you can always dismiss the mirrors as insufficiently something or other, insufficiently Christian or insufficiently American or why not both. While we’re making things up, might as well run with it.

The more I think about whether this is a real threat or not, and what would be ethically justified and/or required to resist it, I am starting to (once again) realize the magnitude of my blind spot for societies where faith plays a key role. I re-read Sam Harris’s The End of Faith again. Perhaps the way in which Sweden (and the other Nordic countries) is (are) the most secular is in that evidence is always key. You are politically free to believe the Sun orbits the Earth, but society will see no virtue in your faith. Faith for the sake of faith is not seen as a virtue. Strong convictions without logic or facts is seen as a vice. I feel this way, of course, but when I think about my feelings on the matter, I feel an imagined community behind me. Just like you just can’t say that gender roles are a good idea, you can’t expect people to respect your opinions if you can’t argue for them logically and with facts as support. Feel free to believe whatever you like about God in your free time, but reality trumps faith as soon as you try to do anything at all. If you accept that if you stick your fingers in an electrical outlet, you will get an electric shock, and this is real, then you have to leave religion for those moments when you’re feeling contemplative, perhaps after a few glasses of wine. Of course, this is not globally how people feel about it. After the recent discussion with my mother about spirituality and how I can be an atheist, she a Christian and agree on spiritual, moral and ethical matters through our feelings and experiences with nature, I’m wondering if religious dogma historically never gained the hold they did in southern Europe up north, because people have engaged almost by default in another kind of spirituality that is more rational and also spiritually satisfying. I’m sure not everyone feels this way (I imagine many Chinese may not, based on their behavior in Swedish forests), so perhaps it’s culturally symptomatic that I feel at once small and powerful alone in a vast forest. Listening to the sounds of the forest and feeling the harmony (or, if the forest is hurting, its plight) is for me greatly conducive to losing my sense of self, which Harris lays out as a main goal of spiritual practice. Why should I listen to dogma when I can go into the forest?

Anyone who made claims like my mother-in-law – that she believes that the Bible is literally true and that science is true – would be quietly avoided or quietly derided in gossip. In fact, I heard of such a person in Sweden once. It was delivered as dirty gossip, and it didn’t occur to me that it could be seen any other way. Being deeply and professedly irrational is a dirty secret you don’t want your co-workers to know. Something you might confess to a very trusted friend. But not here! Here, in fact, making a big show of your irrationality is encouraged. We are not perfectly rational – in fact, we may mostly be irrational – but that is no excuse to cling to dogma that fly in the face of evidence. Sam Harris points out in his book that many liberals – myself included – do not appreciate the gravity of the threat that truly believing religious dogma presents. Reading that section, I laughed out loud, because I saw myself on the page. Looking around in the US, it is difficult enough for me to imagine life when you really believe that the Bible is the literal Word of God. I just… dismiss it as ridiculous in several ways, unrelated to my concept of theology or religion per se. Ideas in the Koran are equally unrelated to life for me. Prior to moving to the US as an adult, I had never encountered another person who acted as if they did. I have been encased in a bubble of reality, it seems. The religious people I met in Europe had, as Harris points out, discarded large parts of past dogma and texts as unreasonable. Trying to imagine really believing them is for me an exercise where my heart screams with injustice and my head feels about as comfortable as trying to imagine that invisible pink elefants have decreed that I must have six cups of coffee a day or I will suffer for all eternity. It’s very distressing, in fact, and to get rid of the cognitive dissonance I just leave the thought be.

The New American Century is a very, very scary project. Such megalomania that is untouched by reality or facts or critical thinking is one of the scariest things I can think of politically. Maybe it’s because I feel I share Europe’s burden to make sure fascism never, ever returns, but I have to do something. If this is all going to hell, I want my conscience to be clear. We could still either stop this or make sure it won’t happen. But how?