Wednesday, December 28, 2016

A Tale of Many Elitisms - Part 2: The Plutocratic Elite


“What is the chief end of man? -- to get rich. In what way? --dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must. Who is God, the one only and true? Money is God. God and Greenbacks and Stock--father, son, and the ghost of same--three persons in one; these are the true and only God, mighty and supreme...”
Mark Twain, "The Revised Catechism" 9/27/1871[i]

After a brief exploration of religious elitism, we turn our attention to plutocratic elitism, a form of elitism very familiar to American and Western European readers. At the time of this writing, this form of elitism is at the height of its power in American society. In essence, plutocratic elitists believe that the wealthy have a right to control policy in their own interest, because their profit-seeking activities promote economic growth.

 Throughout history, rulers have almost always been or become wealthy, mostly through plunder or extortion. Plutocratic elitism is a relatively modern trend, which is distinguished by the fact that a wealthy elite believe they are entitled to political power because of their wealth.

Many conservative parties implicitly or explicitly embrace plutocratic elitism. The philosophical roots of this form of elitism are to be found in post-industrial revolution social theories by Herbert Spencer, William Graham Sumner and Ayn Rand. These theories are fatally flawed, as we shall see later, and currently they are being forced upon a partially unaware populace by a powerful and manipulative elite.

In modern American society, plutocratic elitism enjoys a measure of legal protection through the 2010 “Citizens United” Supreme Court ruling[ii], which allowed unlimited spending by corporations, trade unions and other entities such as super-PACs in support of political positions, provided that funds are not directly contributed to a candidate’s campaign. This ruling was based on the questionable principle that money is speech, and as such it is protected by the American Constitution.

If money is speech, it follows that those who have the most money, i.e., the plutocratic elite, have a right to use their money to promote specific political causes. In most cases, these political causes will benefit the plutocrats who pay to promote them. As a result, plutocrats will get even wealthier and have more money to spend on political causes, setting off a positive feedback cycle of increasing inequality. The Citizens United ruling has made the American political process unprecedentedly subordinate to money, thereby establishing the United States as a de facto plutocracy.

Super-PACS created in the aftermath of that ruling devote enormous sums of money to political campaigns, basically turning every election in the US into a fundraising arms race. Conservative lawmakers have blocked laws requiring transparency in the disclosure of funding sources, essentially allowing anonymous plutocrats to purchase influence.

One especially effective group is ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council[iii]. ALEC is a self-described “nonprofit” organization which writes “model” legislation favorable to wealthy donors and promotes its implementation at the state level by legislators whose campaigns are funded by these donors. This group also blocks regulations and other legislation contrary to the short-term interests of the donors. Although it is legally a nonprofit group, ALEC indirectly increases the profits of its donors through favorable legislation. This is an elaborate way of saying that this group buys influence over the legislative process, exploiting a legalized form of corruption.

There is empirical evidence of the increased success of plutocratic elitism in the U.S. Income inequality has steadily worsened in the US since its post-World War 2 Golden Age. A thoughtful paper by Nicholas Fitz which appeared in Scientific American in March 2015[iv] summarizes data and perceptions on income inequality in the US. Polls indicate that the average American agrees that a company CEO should be compensated proportionately to his or her responsibilities, and indicate an ideal ratio of 7:1 between CEO and employee salaries. Americans grossly underestimate the real compensation ratio, believing it to be around 30:1. The actual figure in 2015 was 354:1. American CEOs are paid far more than their equally capable counterparts in Europe and Asia, mostly as a result of an uncontrolled compensation arms race. At the same time, the bottom 40% of American households control only 0.3% of the national wealth. A single family, the Waltons, controls as much wealth 42% of the population. The article lists two likely reasons why this state of affairs does not cause widespread concern and resentment. First, most Americans simply do not realize how unequal the wealth distribution is, and grossly underestimate the actual figures. Second, they overestimate their own chances of upward mobility. About 60% of Americans continue to believe that simply through hard work they can achieve wealth. They are willing to tolerate the existence of an extravagantly wealthy elite because they grossly overestimate their own probability of joining that elite. Interestingly, poorer, conservative Americans overestimate their own upward mobility more than liberal, wealthier Americans. The US is currently the most unequal Western country, and has significantly less upward mobility than less conservative Europe or Canada[v]. Americans keep buying tickets for the American Dream lottery hoping to strike it rich, because too many among them don’t have an accurate sense of how unlikely they are to do so. Of course, a few people will always hit the jackpot. But most never will, and their life circumstances will be dictated by those of their parents, just as they were in Dickensian England and in other 19th century European countries. Plutocratic elitists are on a winning streak, at least until a larger fraction of the population will realize that they are being fed a steady diet of illusions. The remarkable following gathered by Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders in the 2016 campaign may signal the beginning of the end of that winning streak, which is inevitable for reasons that we’ll explore below.

Why are the philosophical underpinnings of plutocratic elitism fatally flawed? Basically, the ideology that justifies this form of elitism is so called “Social Darwinism”. This theory maintains that in a competitive economy a sort of natural selection occurs in which “the fittest” i.e., the most capable individuals, gather more wealth than the others. In other words, the wealthy deserve to be wealth because they are superior individuals, whereas the poor deserve to be poor because they are either incapable of achieving wealth or too lazy to do so. To be sure, every complex character including avarice will show a distribution of values in any population. However, the analogy with Darwinism is completely inaccurate. Like other unscientific social philosophies including Marxism, “social Darwinism” does not take into account the basic biology of H. sapiens, and treats humans as abstract, pliable entities to which different thinkers ascribe different ranges of behavior based on their own personal preferences.

In biological evolution, natural selection plays no favorites. Someone born with a crippling genetic disease will develop that disease, and his reproductive fitness will be affected by his genome irrespective of how well connected his parents are. He may get better care, but ultimately his genome will determine his fate. In biology, chances of reproduction depend on the interaction between environment and genomes. A genome more adaptive to certain environmental conditions will have a higher probability of spreading in that environment. In human society, life circumstances stack the deck in favor of the progeny of wealthy individuals irrespective of their genetic fitness. In other words, children born to privileged parents will inherit wealth irrespective of how able they would be to accumulate that wealth on their own. This is not only inconsistent with natural selection but contrary to it. Inherited wealth can allow otherwise mediocre individuals opportunities to accumulate more wealth simply by investing what they inherit and leaving investment choices to experts. Complex characters like exceptional talent in business, science, sports or the arts are the product of large sets of genes and epigenetic circumstances affecting the expression of these genes. Because of the constant mixing of genes due to sexual reproduction, chromosomal crossing over and recombination, and because of the fact that no two people have completely identical life experience, the probability that the entire package of genes and epigenetic modifications responsible for exceptional talent will be passed along to the next generation is vanishingly small. This is the well-known phenomenon of regression to the mean. Neither one of Albert Einstein’s sons was as talented a scientist as their famous father. Some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s 20 children were good musicians, but none were as exceptionally talented as their father. Christina Onassis was not nearly the businessperson that Aristotle was. Diego Maradona’s son is a mediocre soccer player. The only way to stabilize a certain gene combination in the population is to maintain relentless selective pressure. In economic terms, this would happen only if we abolished inheritance altogether. If at every generation everyone started with an equal sum of money and identical opportunities for education, and if only people who achieve superior wealth on their own in a level playing field were allowed to have children, we could conceivably breed a race of super-businesspeople, like the Ferengi of the Star Trek universe. This is how real Darwinism works. However, as mammals we are compelled to take care of our children and stack the deck in their favor. As long as that is allowed, social Darwinism will remain no more than an elaborate excuse for selfishness. By allowing the accumulation of privilege in families through inheritance, capital gains and low taxes, social “Darwinism” is essentially anti-meritocratic, and is actually the antithesis of real Darwinism.

Plutocratic elitism based on social "Darwinism" is simply a rehashing of Old World aristocratic notions, whereby direct descendants of kings, emperors or nobles were assumed to be rightfully part of an elite because of exceptional qualities inherited from their direct ancestors. This was a widespread misconception in the pre-genetic era, but it has no biological basis. Assuming non-consanguineous mating, even after a mere 3 generations a descendant contains a random sample of a direct ancestor’s DNA making up only 12.5% of his DNA. After 5 or 6 generations, this fraction becomes essentially meaningless. Our genes get quickly diluted into the great river of human DNA, and individual characters are transmitted to distant descendants. To illustrate this fact, we’ll use a familiar example. The Gospels of Matthew and Luke go to great lengths to outline the genealogy of Jesus. These genealogies are likely arbitrary reconstructions meant to place Jesus in a direct line of descent from David. Luke lists 42 generations between David and Jesus, Matthew 28. Assuming for a moment that these pedigrees were real, Jesus would have inherited a fraction of David’s DNA equal to 2-28 or 2-42. Given that the total DNA content of a human genome is about 39 nucleotides, this is equivalent to saying that Jesus would have inherited less than 1 nucleotide according to Luke and about 11 nucleotides according to Matthew (which is far less than even the smallest gene). In other words, genetically Jesus was as related to David than I am to Homer, direct descent notwithstanding.  Any special qualities David possessed would have never been transmitted to Jesus through genetic inheritance. The same is true of any human families. To allow individual families to accumulate extravagant wealth because of the talent of a distant ancestor does not reward or select any special qualities or merits. In fact, it subtracts resources from other especially talented individuals that may arise in the population, thereby reducing their opportunities to develop their talents. There is no Darwinism at all in social “Darwinism”

Real Darwinian evolution does have an effect on human society. Evolution has molded human nature, and biology restricts the range of social behaviors and stable societal arrangements available to humans. We are mammals and we are a social species, like our great ape cousins as well as dogs, horses, wolves, dolphins or orcas. This means that we are programmed to take care of our young, which contain approximately 50% of our DNA, and to extend this empathy to other relatives in measure roughly correspondent to the amount of DNA we share. In addition to that, it also means that we are programmed to belong to a cooperative group, as cooperation enhanced our ancestors’ chances of survival. Within our group, we are programmed to appropriate resources as much as possible, but not to the point of disrupting group cohesion. Positive social interaction is necessary for normal humans to maintain their sanity. This is why isolation cells are a form of torture. We are not eusocial insects like ants or honeybees, which function as completely altruistic colonies where individuals are expendable, but we are not individualistic predators like sharks. To paraphrase Edward O. Wilson in “On Human Nature”, a rational ant would find the concept of individual rights intrinsically evil. Similarly, a rational shark would find the concept of empathy and cooperation incomprehensible. Humans live between these two extremes. They are perennially engaged in a constant Prisoner’s dilemma, teetering between “cooperation” and “defection”, between empathy and selfishness. Ideologically-driven attempts to construct political philosophies that ignore either of these drives are unscientific and doomed to failure. “Social Darwinism” and its derivatives postulate a hyper-individualistic society devoid of empathy, where individual gain is the only engine of progress, sharing is anathema and cooperation towards a common good is precarious at best. Had humans been only capable of producing such a society, they would not have survived as a species. They evolved to be highly social because social cooperation helped them survive. The scientific literature has quantified the evolutionary advantage deriving from cooperation and documented non-kin cooperative behavior in human and animal societies (see for example [vi],[vii],[viii]). A tribe made up of selfish “Social Darwinists” would have been unable to hunt cooperatively, and would have been readily wiped out by more cohesive enemy tribes. Membership in a social group requires altruistic behavior as the price for the advantages conferred by cooperation. Hence, freeloaders are vilified and punished in primitive human societies. In modern society, tax cheats are the equivalent of primitive freeloaders.

On the other hand, the Marxist theories popular in the 20th century postulated, based on Hegelian philosophy and an economic analysis of early industrial England, that humans would reach a final Nirvana, the classless society, in which all means of production are collectively owned and humans essentially turn into a eusocial species like ants or honeybees. As much as this sounds idyllic in theory, such a society is biologically impossible to present-day humans as a species. Some individuals may be able to function in that fashion, but all it would take is a few “defectors” to wreck the Nirvana. In real life, Marxism has generated totalitarian societies where the plutocratic elite was simply replaced by a political-bureaucratic elite. In every communist society, some people were always “more equal” than others, and human nature was not appreciably changed by living in such societies for generation. In fact, people in Russia and China promptly reverted to their selfish ways once the constraints of communist policies were removed.

Ancient religions have a more realistic picture of human nature than either right-wing or left-wing political philosophers. Ancient Greek religion included the concept of original sin, an innate selfishness residing in human nature. This concept is a good metaphor for our genetically hardwired selfishness, and was later borrowed by Christianity. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all recognize that humans are capable of both sin and redemption, of abject selfishness and sublime selflessness. These religions condemn hyper-individualistic behavior and prescribe beneficence, offering divine rewards to individuals who practice in-group altruism. Christianity even encourages out-group altruism. Virtually every religion humans have created sanctifies and rewards dedication to a group larger than the self, in some cases to the point of self-immolation, and reviles selfishness. These ancient myths and religious prescriptions had survival value, in that they discouraged behavior disruptive of social cooperation. The Ten Commandments are a prime example of that. Prohibitions against murder, stealing, dishonesty, adultery and coveting discourage selfish and antisocial behaviors. Obligations to follow common rituals and to avoid blasphemy reinforce conformity and cooperation.

Clearly, there is a wide range of human phenotypes when it comes to capacity for empathy. Mother Theresa and infamous profiteer Martin Shkreli are both H. sapiens, at the two extremes of this distribution. It is possible and even likely that individuals are born and can be raised more or less empathic due to genetic and epigenetic factors. However, it is a constant of human societies that tolerance for selfishness is limited. A society in which a small group of individuals hoards an increasingly large share of resources is inherently unstable. The innate tendency of humans to punish antisocial behavior and reward cooperation would predict that a society dominated by a plutocratic elite becomes increasingly polarized, as the elite attempts to gain and retain control of an ever-increasing share of common resources through propaganda and repression while the dispossessed majority becomes increasingly resentful of the elite, skeptical of their promises and disenchanted about its future. Eventually, the dispossessed majority becomes ripe for demagogues of all stripes promising dramatic change. These usually turn out to be just aspiring dictators. The increasing polarization of American society is consistent with this prediction.

Historically, when a breaking point is reached where the dispossessed majority rebels against the plutocratic elite, social unrest and revolution become more likely. The French and Russian Revolutions, and a host of other bloody or bloodless revolutions in deeply unequal developing countries, are examples of what happens when populations driven into abject poverty become resentful of their elites.

Biology establishes that “Social Darwinism” is as unscientific, unrealistic and dystopian as communism, and that “survival of the fittest” neither explains nor justifies the existence of plutocratic elites that amass enormous wealth through inheritance and low taxes. The last remaining question is whether a wealthy elite, even assuming it truly consists of individuals high talented in the field of wealth accumulation, is ideally qualified to lead a democracy.  This case has been made in US politics, based on a flawed analogy between businesses and countries.

That question was answered by Plato 23 centuries ago in his memorable dialogue “Republic” (Polytheia)[ix]. I have nothing to add to what one of the greatest minds humanity ever produced had to say, other than briefly summarizing his thought. Plato, speaking through his teacher Socrates, states that the merchant (business) elite is the least qualified segment of society to hold power, being too concerned with filling its own belly and not sufficiently concerned with the common good. In other words, those who excel in business are motivated by short term greed, which is in conflict with the best interests of society as a whole. Running a business is an exercise in maximizing the short term profits of that business at the expense of everything else (competing businesses, customers, workers, the environment and society). A country contains multiple constituencies with disparate and conflicting interests which must be balanced, and it also needs to manage multiple international relationships without resorting to conflict unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Uncontrolled plutocratic elitism which is not held in check by self-corrective mechanisms allowing for reasonable wealth redistribution carries within it the seed of its own demise. In future posts, we will explore meritocratic elitism, briefly touch on racial and military elitism and finally discuss the relationship between different forms of elitism.  



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Sunday, December 25, 2016

A Tale of Many Elitisms - Part 1: The Religious Elite


“Elitism” is a term used very frequently these days. It’s used by pundits of every stripe to pour scorn over ivory tower academicians or “coastal elites” guilty of being dynamic, productive and progressive. There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over how these “coastal elites” failed to understand white rural and small-town America, leading to the rise of right wing populism. I believe that reading to be superficial and only partially accurate.

This topic deserves a deeper exploration, and will devote a few posts to an exploration of the topic of elitism, real or perceived, and its role in society.

The definition of “elitism” according to the Oxford Dictionary of British and World English is the belief that society should be led by an elite, or the superior attitude or behavior associated with an elite.

Elite is a French word of Latin origin, meaning “the elected ones”, from the Latin “eligere”, or “to elect”. It designates “a group or class of people seen as having the most power and influence in a society, especially on account of their wealth or privilege”:

My suggestion is that elitism is far from being a monopoly of cosmopolitan, left-leaning intellectuals. There are actually multiple elitist groups in American society and elsewhere, vying for power, forming shifting alliances with one another and accusing one another of elitism.

Let’s look at the supposedly non-elitist group that progressives are accused (and accuse themselves) of not understanding: religiously conservative white middle America. This group has been deified and pandered to as “the real America” and “the silent majority” and reviled as “flyover America”. Both characterizations are simplistic. Voices from within that group paint a more complex picture. A fascinating essay by Forsetti’s Justice that recently appeared in AlternNet[i] describes an insider’s view of white rural America, emphasizing the role that fundamentalist religion plays in keeping large swaths of the population impervious to reason. This article is not from a know-it-all New York City-based editorialist or a Harvard sociologist who has never set foot in a farm. It’s from someone who grew up in that world and experienced it from within. The essay is long but worth reading, and I won’t summarize it here. I will say that it is consistent with my experience of white rural America and with what I hear from others who grew up in that environment and eventually left it.

The role of religion in American society and politics is larger than in any other Western countries. Most European countries have had Presidents and/or Prime Ministers who were not religious, and quite a few that were openly secular. In 2016 America, that would be unthinkable. Millions of people are conditioned from an early age to believe one or more of the following statements: 1) The Bible contains absolute truth, and all the truth you need to know is in the Bible; 2) If anyone tells you otherwise, they are prideful sinners who are trying to tempt you into the ways of the Devil; 3) Any development or theory that contradicts the literal truth of the Bible is sinful and must be rejected. People who promote such sins are the enemy; 4) your pastor will explain to you what the Bible means, and all you’ll ever need to know you can learn from him; and 5) Your white skin means you are one of the chosen who keep the True Faith, and you are blessed. Darker people were cursed because of some sin committed by their ancestors, and they are cursed.

Needless to say, not everyone in white rural America is so benighted. However, enough people are, and I have personally met people believing some or all of the statements listed above, and people who have never read any other book than the Bible. As an example, here is a true episode from a couple of years ago. I was driving through the rural Mid-South, between Alabama and Mississippi. I turned on my radio to what I believed was the local NPR station. A well-educated, articulate voice entirely free of Southern accent filled my car’s cabin. The speaker sounded like an academician giving an interview to the real NPR. It took me a minute to realize how wrong that first impression was. This was a fundamentalist Christian radio station, using the same wavelength used by NPR in the rest of the state. The professorial-sounding individual being interviewed was saying the following: evolution is a conspiracy by godless scientists to drive the faithful away from the Truth. Any news stories describing evolution you may see in the mainstream media are lies concocted by this evil cabal and are not to be trusted. And then came the punchline. “Why”, he asked, “would scientists be so wicked as to deceive good, God-fearing people”? “The only possible reason is that they are in league with the Devil”. In the 21st century, I was listening to someone on live radio accusing scientists of being agents of Satan. I started scanning the dial for other stations, but all I got was preachers, Bible quotes and “Christian Rock”. I could find no station that wasn’t promoting fundamentalist religion for some 100 miles. A fascinating anthropological experience, but a deeply unsettling one.

A great book by Jerry DeWitt describes this reality from the inside. Mr. DeWitt, a former Pentecostal pastor from rural Louisiana, writes of his profoundly life-altering experience as he progressively lost his faith. The book is called “Hope after Faith: An Ex-Pastor's Journey from Belief to Atheism”. It’s a fascinating read and a remarkable example of intellectual honesty. It gives the reader an insider’s look at the workings of white rural churches throughout middle America, traveling pastors, training centers, Christian “revivals” and the social milieu surrounding them. Not surprisingly, infighting, politics and greed feature prominently in this behind-the-scenes story. What the book shows is the extent to which entire towns full of apparently reasonable people practice magical thinking on a daily basis. It also shows the extent to which magical thinking is identity-defining for these folks, leading them to reject outsiders and ostracize anyone who questions their beliefs. Towards the end of the book, Mr. DeWitt loses his job for appearing in a Facebook picture with Richard Dawkins, the British biologist and author of atheism-promoting books such as “The God Illusion”. Mr. DeWitt had gone to Texas to attend a convention at which Dr. Dawkins was speaking, to expose himself to secular thinkers and gauge his own reactions to their perspectives. The fact itself that he had attended that convention and his picture appeared on Facebook was enough to cause his entire town to turn on him, including his own family. The in-group peer pressure is tremendous in fundamentalist America, because fundamentalist beliefs define the identity of a whole tribe of Americans.

Another essay, by rural Ohio-native Patrick Thornton[ii] focuses on the reality bubble in which rural America is trapped, due to geographical and especially cultural isolation. Mr. Thornton, who now lives on the East Coast, points out that growing up in Middle America does not expose people to experiences they would need to develop a realistic worldview. “My high school had about 950 students. Two were Asian. One was Hispanic. Zero were Muslim. All the teachers were white” he writes. What changed Mr. Thornton’s life and opened his mind was going to college. “The first gay person I knew personally was my college roommate - a great man who made me a better person. But that’s an experience I would have never had if I didn’t go to college and instead decided to live the rest of my life in my hometown” writes Mr. Thornton. Since three quarters of Americans don’t attend college, and many dwellers of Southern and Midwestern states live all their lives in their native states, there are large segments of the population that simply don’t experience enough of life to understand the modern world.

  What all three writers emphasize is that rural white Americans do not see themselves as under-educated, under-informed and in desperate need of change. Quite the contrary. They proudly and self-righteously see themselves as a religious, moral, racial and cultural elite, the custodians of truths and traditions that must be jealously guarded from the assaults of godless liberals, inferior races and false religions. In their own way, they are as elitists as Boston liberals who have never seen a cornfield. In fact, their beliefs are textbook elitism. They hold the belief that society should be led by an elite, and have the superior attitude or behavior associated with an elite. Except, they believe that the elite should be white fundamentalist Christians, and that this elite has a right to dominate the US and force everyone else to accept their values.

That is a large part of the reason why these folks are scornfully dismissive of progressives who try to tell them that they are voting against their own interests. It’s not because they are too stupid and ignorant and need help to understand. It is because they have no interest in listening to progressive messages, since they believe themselves to be morally superior to “liberals”.

I am not suggesting in any way that white middle Americans are inherently inferior to other tribes in our society, nor that they are evil. Many of them are helpful, friendly, caring persons who make great neighbors, provided no one challenges their deeply held beliefs. What I am suggesting is that they are victims of two factors, namely isolation and early conditioning, which program their minds to see the world in starkly religious terms and themselves as a moral elite, no matter what their material circumstances may be.

A few years ago, I had an opportunity to examine the data gathered by an ambitious pilot program of health education carried out throughout the U.S. South by the American Cancer Society. The program promoted mammography and Pap smears for the early diagnosis and prevention of breast and cervical cancer, and tested the acceptance of HPV vaccination, which can prevent nearly all cervical cancers. It was a resounding success among African-Americans, in both urban and rural settings. The group that proved most difficult to reach was rural whites living in Appalachia. Women attending meetings with local, trained community health advisors reported being fearful of domestic violence if their male partners discovered they were talking to strangers about sex-related parts of the body. They and especially their husbands and boyfriends viewed health advisors as dangerous interlopers trying to import sexual debauchery into their world. This was despite the fact that rates of teen pregnancy and cervical cancer among them were extremely high, indicating that premarital sex and the transmission of STDs in these areas did not require any outside encouragement by godless liberals.

The “Left Behind” series is a hugely popular series of novels[iii] describing the aftermath of the biblical End Times. The True Believers are raptured into Heaven, and everyone else is “left behind” to be punished for their sins in a post-apocalyptic world. The series has a website, and one of the authors calls himself a “Dr.”, suggesting that he holds a graduate degree. Millions of people read these books and believe themselves to be chosen by God to be raptured into Heaven, because of their unquestioning faith in fundamentalist Christianity. Science and reason are no more than evil temptations to them. Reality doesn’t matter, because God can alter it as he wishes. God can make the Earth cooler if he so chooses, even though the faithful keep burning coal. God will make the infidels pay and will reward the faithful in the end.

This worldview is no different than that of Medieval villagers from 1000 years ago. The modern villagers may have smartphones and drive cars, but they view the world in magical terms as much as their distant ancestors did. The only concession to modernity is that a scientist trying to explain evolution to such “true believers” may not be actually burned at the stake as a heretic, though he or she may be run out of town, and violence could not completely be ruled out.

If right wing white Christians see themselves as an elite, how do they rationalize the fact that their circumstances have been steadily deteriorating? To quote Mr. Thornton again: “Change has not been kind to the Midwest and rural America. And rather than embrace it, rural and white working-class Americans are twisting and turning, fighting it every step of the way. We will never return to the days where a white man could barely graduate high school and walk onto a factory floor at 18 and get a well-paying job for life. That hasn’t set in for much of the Midwest.” Why is this proud group of people being left behind by the economy?

In the 1950s, a white middle American’s life was better than that of most other human beings on the planet, with the only exception of ultra-wealthy jet-setters. They were blessed by God Almighty. There was no competition to speak of from Europe or Asia, still recovering from World War 2 devastation. America was the only large industrialized country left intact, and jobs were plentiful for white males. Then, things started to head South (or perhaps North, East and West would be a better analogy): Blacks gained civil rights and voting rights. Women got birth control and started divorcing their husbands. Abortion was legalized. Non-Christian and/or non-White Christians demanded equal rights. Even gays, the epitome of sinfulness, demanded recognition and the right to be married. And to top it all off, a black man was elected President! These are the factors that many white Christian middle Americans blame for their current predicament, not worldwide economic trends such as global competition, digitalization, automation, job migration to cheaper countries and companies hiding profits overseas. What could civil rights, race and social trends have to do with the declining standards of living of white working class America? This is where religious rationalization comes in handy to explain widely held attitudes.

Fundamentalists regard the Bible as a single, literally true book, and tend to quote the Old Testament as often as they do the New one or more. The Old Testament God, you may remember, is a rather vindictive character, much like a tribal chieftain from the Iron Age. He makes liberal use of collective punishment, exterminating entire populations for the sins of a few. Witness the story of Sodom and Gomorrah[iv]. God incinerates two cities, including any innocent adults, children, animals and even vegetation, to punish a group of men who had attempted to gang rape Lot’s guests, who were angels in disguise. Interestingly, Lot offers the mob his two virgin daughters to gang rape at their leisure in order to protect his male guests. That is seen as a sign of righteousness rather than a horrible abuse of his innocent daughters, consistent with Iron Age views of women’s rights. Or read the book of Exodus, describing the ten plagues of Egypt[v], a series of calamities brought by God upon all Egyptians, including innocent babies, to punish the Pharaoh for his unwillingness to free the Jews.

Fundamentalist Christians see world events through a biblical prism. It is not difficult for them to believe that they are being punished by God for allowing the ways of unbelievers to pollute society. Fundamentalist pastors have repeatedly stated that natural disasters such as hurricanes are God’s punishment for gay rights and abortion. In this worldview, the right wing Christian elite would have a religious obligation to wrest power from the unbelievers and restore God’s order. Then they will be rewarded with prosperity.

Interestingly, this attitude is very similar to that of fundamentalist Islamists. They see Judaism and Christianity as good beginnings, and acknowledge Abraham, Jesus and Mary among revered figures in the Quran. However, they believe that Islam is the ultimate monotheistic religion, destined to supplant the older versions. They see themselves as the world’s religious elite, and see Westerners as infidels who are purveyors of idolatry and debauchery. This sets the stage for a religious obligation to gain power through jihad. At one time, Islam was in fact the most advanced civilization in the Mediterranean world. During the “Golden Age of Islam” (750-1258 AD), Islam was the center of science, astronomy, mathematics, geography and medicine[vi], having inherited and expanded Hellenistic knowledge. They were also reasonably tolerant of people practicing other religions living in their midst, though conversion of infidels was their ultimate goal. At the same time, Europe was going through the Middle Ages, and the only advanced Christian civilization was the Byzantine empire. The Muslim Ottomans conquered it in 1453, using a new fearsome technology: artillery. The fall of Constantinople was the medieval equivalent of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb. In 1453, Islam was the world’s main superpower. But the Golden Age ended, and by the time the Industrial Revolution begun, the Muslim world was hopelessly behind the West in science, technology and economy. In his comprehensive book “The Middle East: a brief history of the last 2000 years”, Bernard Lewis argues that the decadence of the Islamic world coincided with the takeover of the Arab empire by Turkish mercenaries who became the Ottomans. This process was accompanied by rejection of science and education in favor of religion and militarism. The Turkish Ottoman Empire missed out on the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration (which was actually spurred by a need to circumvent the Turkish stranglehold on commerce), and the Enlightenment. By the 19th century, the Muslim Ottoman Empire had very few printed books or newspapers. Its culture was stagnating and no new inventions were being created or adopted. Inevitably, the Ottomans were overtaken, defeated and humiliated by more dynamic European countries that had embraced science, technology and innovation. Islam has yet to recover from that decadence, and it will need to abandon fundamentalist religion and rediscover science and reason to do so.

Since then, radical Islamists have been trying to explain the decline of their civilization by blaming the West rather than Islam’s own historical trajectory and the endless sectarian fighting between Shias and Sunnis. They still see themselves as the religious elite of the world, and violently reject Western culture and civilization as the work of the devil.

Thus, disgruntled white Christians in Middle America have more in common with disgruntled radical Islamists in Iraq’s Anbar Province or Afghanistan than they realize. Both groups are self-righteous religious elitists who see themselves as the custodians of perfect truths and disdainfully reject change. The views of these groups on issues such as women’s rights, gay rights and the relationship between state and church are strikingly similar.

In summary, I am arguing that religious fundamentalism is a form of cultural elitism that hinders the progress of civilization, in America and elsewhere, by refusing to accept rational arguments for change. 

Ironically, both Christians and Muslims were at the top of their respective games when they embraced progress, reason, science, technology and change. The ossification of traditionalist cultures into intolerant religious fundamentalism is the root of the decline of their civilizations.
How religious elitism interacts with othe
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Friday, December 23, 2016

Dreaming of a White Christmas


Ah, the magic of the season! Festive decorations adorn every store and colorful lights grace houses and public buildings. Holiday music fills the air and the airwaves. Synthetic bells jingle for months in a Pavlovian call to purchase, although most of the people hearing that familiar sound have never traveled in a horse-drawn sleigh. Traditional sounds and sights are everywhere. The newest tradition in the increasingly long Christmas season is ritual complaints from right wing media that Christmas is under attack. This fictional “war on Christmas” is apparently waged by miscreants and liberal elitists who insist on wishing “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” and even question the biblical story of the Nativity. Indignant talking heads extoll the virtues of the traditional Christmas, rejecting any calls for inclusiveness and decrying the increasingly popular “Happy Holidays” greeting as an attack on the traditions of the people who built this country.

It goes without saying that these claims have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with politics. The question I am more interested in is why they resonate with a segment of society. More on that later.

First, a bit of history. Anyone interested in researching the matter can readily ascertain that the modern American Christmas is a rather recent creation, imported from Victorian England. The original New Englander colonists disliked Christmas, which at the time was a rowdy, drunken feast resembling Mardi Gras rather than a family-oriented holiday. The marriage of Queen Victoria to German Prince Albert introduced the German tradition of the Christmas tree into English culture. Victorians completely redesigned Christmas, with help from the illustrious pen of Charles Dickens. Americans imported it, and greatly hypertrophied it not because of its religious connotations but because the gift-giving tradition (a Roman heritage, as we shall see) presented a tremendous commercial opportunity to sell stuff. In fact, today the Christmas season is crucial to the earnings of most companies. I have suggested that the holiday be renamed “Commercialia” after its original Roman name “Saturnalia”, because its primary importance to our society is commercial rather than religious.

                In other words, the Christmas we know is much younger than the United States, and the Founding Fathers would not recognize it. It is a late 19th century combination of German, English and Dutch traditions grafted onto Pagan holidays that greatly antedated Christ.

                The most important and oldest holiday in the Christian calendar is actually Easter, the Paschal holiday celebrating the resurrection of Jesus around the Jewish Passover. But, alas, Easter is not associated with gift giving, and so its importance in modern America has been greatly diminished and it’s not widely celebrated. If Christians want a truly identity-defining holiday, Easter is it. Just as churches were built on the foundations of Roman temples, the Christmas season was grafted by early Christian bishops onto a pre-existing Roman holiday called “Saturnalia”, which preceded the winter solstice, and the new year’s day celebration, also a Roman tradition. Gifts were exchanged during Saturnalia. Between the beginning of Saturnalia and New Year’s Day, December 25th was celebrated as “Dies Natalis Solis Invicti”, or “Birthday of the Unconquered Sun”. This festivity was imported from Persian Mithraism, itself derived from ancient India some 1400 years before Christ[i]. The most likely origin of the date is that around December 25th in the Northern emisphere it becomes obvious that days are getting longer, and therefore “the Sun is reborn”. Since “Dies Natalis” means “Day of the Birth”, clever bishops decided to make December 25th the arbitrary day of the birth of Jesus. To this day, the name of the holiday in Italian, the closest language to Latin, is “Natale”. In Spanish and French, it is “Navidad” and “Noel”. All these are literal translations of the original Latin. The word “Christmas”, or “Mass for Christ”, is an English medieval creation, and it described a rowdy holiday completely different from what we see today. We actually have no evidence that the historical Jesus was born on that date, and accounts from the Gospels are somewhat contradictory (Herod died 4 years before the traditionally accepted date of Jesus’ birth, and the Census of Quirinus took place 6 years after that date).

So, why are present day American conservatives so attached to this composite and ever-changing holiday? The answer may lie in the claim that Christmas is a White holiday, not because of the snow invoked in Irving Berlin’s 1942 hit song, but because of the race of the characters celebrated in it or the people who claim credit for creating it. Fox News talking head Megyn Kelly famously claimed on live TV in 2013 that “Jesus and Santa Claus are what they are. They are White!”[ii]. The obvious subtext is that all the people diluting the Christmas tradition are actually attacking the position of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants as the dominant tribe in this country.

                Obviously, the historical Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew. It is exceedingly unlikely that he would have looked anything like the blue-eyed strawberry blonde guy depicted in modern American iconography. And what about Santa? He’s just a fictional character, right? Not exactly, as the popular character is based on a historical figure. His name was Saint Nicholas, bishop of Myra, in modern day Turkey. Nicholas lived in the 4th Century AD, and survived the great persecution of Christians by Emperor Diocletian. It is said that he gave presents to the poor, and one of the stories associated with him describes him saving two young girls from poverty-induced prostitution by secretly coming at night with a bag of gold and leaving it to them as a present[iii]. Since Nicholas lived before the Turkmen, hired as mercenaries by the Arabs, came to modern day Turkey, he would have been of Greek ethnicity. When the Muslim Ottomans conquered the Byzantine Empire in 1452-3, Christian sailors from Italy stole his remains and re-buried them in Italy, where they remain today. “Santa” is buried in the St. Nicholas Cathedral in the city of Bari. Based on his bones and sophisticated 3D imaging, a forensic reconstruction of his face has been produced. This reconstruction, and the ancient icons depicting him, show that he would have been thin, austere-looking and swarthy[iv]. His nose was broken. Apparently he was not at all jolly or obese, and he most certainly was not from the North Pole. The mostly Catholic Dutch retained the tradition of St. Nick the gift-giver, and brought it to America with them. That figure was secularized, because Protestants do not recognize Saints, nicknamed “Santa” in a nod to its historical origins and merged with German mythical characters like “Ru-Klaus” and “Perz-Nickel” that would be invoked to watch over the behavior of children and punish them if they didn’t behave[v]. While Coca-Cola did not invent the now ubiquitous red-clad character, it did a lot to popularize it and standardize him as a holiday fixture, beginning in 1931[vi].

                It’s clear that the Christmas we know today is a modern construction, cobbled together from multiple traditions, which celebrates the birth of a Middle Eastern Jew on the date of a much older Roman/Persian/Indian holiday. A Greek bishop is the historical basis for Santa. Given the fact that many African-Americans are devoutly Christian, their slave ancestors having been forced to convert to Christianity by their masters, and that Hispanics are also predominantly Christian, the claim that Christmas is a “White” holiday is downright absurd. Add to this the fact that Jesus is prominently mentioned in the Quran as a messenger of God who was born without sin of a virgin Maryam, and a great prophet who was the precursor of Muhammad, and things get even more culturally complicated.

                And yet…a Google search for the words “War on Christmas” returns over 29 million sites, and a cursory examination of the most shared sites reveals a persistent controversy. The reason why the “War on Christmas” meme persists is that it’s designed to push hardwired emotional buttons in human nature that have nothing to do with religion. First, it is a conspiracy theory, created to instill fear (see my post “Lies, Damn Lies and Conspiracy Theories”). Second, it builds on the innate tribalism of human beings (see my post “Why Does Racism Persist”). It clearly pits “us”, i.e., the White good guys who built this country entirely based on Christian values versus “them”, the brown and black usurpers, the jaded liberals etc. In his somewhat dated but brilliant book “On Human Nature”, sociobiology pioneer Edward O. Wilson points out that religious rituals “act to circumscribe a social group and bind its members into unquestioning allegiance”.

                Now the picture is starting to become clearer. The “War on Christmas” meme is a symbol of a group (White American Evangelicals) tightly bound together by a set of rituals and perceiving itself as the rightfully dominant tribe in the US. Thus, any reasonable request to acknowledge the fact that other cultures and other holidays deserve equal respect in a multicultural nation based on freedom of religion and the separation of state and church becomes a challenge to tribal dominance. In this context, religious intolerance is simply a phenotypic manifestation of tribalism. In this fashion, Christian traditions perceived as immutable, no matter how recent and hybrid in origin they may be, become identity badges for a group that sees its power slipping away. Resistance to the slightest challenge, real or imaginary, is a predictable consequence.

                Of course, all this is in complete contradiction with the fundamental tenet of Christianity, which is universal altruism and benevolence unrestricted to one’s tribe (the parable of the Good Samaritan is an example of that). But as history shows, human nature has a way of morphing noble ideals into pretexts for discrimination, hatred and violence.

                 To those still dreaming of a White Christmas, I wish peace and enlightenment. Happy holidays.

           





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