RSS« Well done Wolfowitz Comment | Hariri and Leb Land: further »
March 29, 2005
Theocracy in America - edited: comments closed.
Theocracy in America
I have to say that I was fairly appalled at the spectacle this past week or so in re the Schaivo case (and as well what appears given my disconnected reading of US events, a new anti-science “God Botherers” –as my dear old ultra-con and yet ultra secularist father puts it – push against evolution and the like.).
I confess that in many ways I really don’t care very much about American domestic politics, except when it very directly intersects with personal interests. However, I found this spectacle truly irritating, even disturbing. While always a pragmatist, I have always rather respected bedrock yankee liberalism (or libertarianism in purely American parlance) as a guiding value set for a society. Non-interference in personal affaires, meritocratic values, etc. I have always been too pragmatic and anti-ideology to mistake the idealized vision for reality, but in terms of guide posts or soft ideology, old yankee conservatism is by far the most attractive to me. I suppose it is the real source of my politics – informed by my highly utilitarian and pragmatic willingness to bribe the masses to enable markets to operate and throw them a bone for their undemocratic and anti-liberal leanings [and yes, to enable my own elitism and snobbery from time to time]. A certain Dubaiwalla has heard me express in person such sentiments – I forget what precisely I said but it had something to do with me having nothing against transparent bribery (side payments as we like to say in economics); I am not sure if that appalled him more than my perhaps moderately cold blooded comments on the camel nomads – and I meant them. Oil to grease the wheels of commerce. Not too much one hopes, or the wheels spin, but too little and one wears those wheels down in a penny-wise, pound-foolish manner. I wish more of my free market compatriots understood this calculus.
However, returning to the subject of Theocracy in America and the “God Botherers” – I confess one of my favorite memories of my father, otherwise … well a model for my personality, was his reducing some Mormon missionaries to tears, quite inspirational that – I find myself appalled in a real sense by this case. More in the sense in which these so called “Conservatives” in the American government lost their hypocritical attachment to local rights, family and whatnot to use the power of the State to intervene and even try to override the courts. These are the policies of Right Bolsheviks, not classic liberals by either instinct or nature. They are the actions of theocrats (in the wide sense the very same people often use in regards to the Islamists (who are not so far away from them in their thinking)), with this talk of “God’s Law” and the like. To take Central Government action to rip a case from its proper context and place it into another sphere, into the Federal court system in this case, is an abuse of power worthy of any theocracy.
This is dangerous thinking, and I am glad Shays of Connecticut gave it its proper name. In combination with the assault on the teaching of proper science, and generally the theologically driven assault on evolution, I frankly see a real danger in my yankee homeland. I rather despise the God Botherers, who are in general one in the same with the Know Nothings of Foreign Policy. They are no better than the woolly headed morons on the Left bleating on about the “Washington Consensus” and confusing World Bank and IMF, and now they are a good bit more dangerous being far, far closer to the center of power. Confusion of science and theology is a sign of idiocy and decline, and unworthy of any nation pretending to civilization. It strikes me that American “Conservatives” need to relearn liberalism, or they become naught but the stalking horses of dark ages theocratic morons.
Ah well, without satellite TV and the people in from the States I might have remained blissfully unaware of this idiocy; although Andrew Sullivan also touches on this: http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_03_27_dish_archive.html#111203137716792801
Comments have grown far too irritating and stupid. I am hopefully freezing them to spare me the distraction.
Posted by The Lounsbury at March 29, 2005 09:35 AM
Filed Under:
Jan-July 2005
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.aqoul.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/816
