Some thoughts on religion, politics and the impending storm

A major storm is coming

These are insightful comments about the nature of religious belief and mental reasoning that dcleve and PD posted to a discussion here last October, The Limits of Knowledge:

dcleve: It is only possible to lie to ourselves, if selfhood is "multiple", and we are able to compartmentalize, to ignore conflicts between the "truths" for those subaspects of self.

All worldviews are incomplete, and contain contradictions -- that is one of my claims for pluralism. As none of us can ever construct a single fully coherent worldview, the ability to ignore the risk of logic explosion this implies, seems to be something we have innately, We compartmentalize as an innate skill of feature of our psychology. That brings on the strong possibility of lying to oneself.

People I know who lost their religious view -- "faith" in a different meaning -- "knew" of incompatibilities between that view, and critical issues of truth and/or morality for a while. But for quite some time, if they were asked, they would publicly deny this disconnect. IE -- they were lying to themselves. When one fully admits to oneself that one's religious views appear to be falsified -- that is called a "dark night of the soul", in at least some traditions.

These "dark nights" are transitory. A religious member either finds some other way to reconcile the issue, and bury any further doubts (lie to oneself again), or they leave that religion. 

[My atheist friend] had concluded rationally that his prior [atheist] convictions were themselves less certain than they had seemed to him for so long. (I think atheist worldviews, based on my thinking and experience, face a different set, but basically similar self-incompatibilities to religious views). So he made the leap based on the incompleteness of all worldviews, based on the benefits to his personal life that the leap gave him.

PD: As I said in the last para, I was not thinking about strong and weak fideism, but rather I was taking issue with Harris' claim that we can dispense with the concept of faith and in so doing achieve a better understanding of religiosity. (I think you concurred).

The examples that you give don't really strike me as getting to the heart of "dark night" experiences, much less full on Job-like struggles with suffering and adversity as *parts of * the divine experience (Job suffers not in spite of but because of God, and yet ultimately affirms his love of and trust in God).

I think the greatest challenge to the serious religious person is the problem of suffering apparently senseless yet profound pain and injury in a world understood as God-willed. This is not the sort of thing that can be confined to intellectual arguments, or arguments used to deflect other religions or atheism, or to convert unbelievers, etc. No. These are the sorts of experiences that can shake the most steadfast believers to the core, sometimes resulting in apostasy, and at other times resulting (according to those who report the experiences) with a deepening of faith.

Your description of your friend still sounds to me like the reasoning of the gambler, weighing pros and cons/ costs and benefits, degrees of uncertainty, etc., so as to place his Pascal-like wager. Reading the stories of those in, for example, Aushwitz, one is brought face-to-face with experiences so unholy, inhuman, incomprehensible and, it seems, so incompatible with the Covenant, that even those who kept their faith did so only with the greatest difficulty. Wiesel recounts 3 profoundly religious Jewish scholars in the camp that put God on trial for crimes against humanity and indifference to human suffering, found Him guilty and then said evening prayers, i.e. maintained their religion even in the midst of such heartbreak and pain. This is not a calculation on their part. It is not a cerebral but deeply emotional commitment uninformed by any consideration of gain or reward. They've *just found God guilty of inhumanity.

This is just where many others lose faith (not evidential belief, but confidence even in the goodness of God, and the worthiness of the religious life). The dark night of the soul has less to do, very often, with belief and unbelief. It has more to do with the *quality* of one's religious experience. One loses something deeper than evidential beliefs. One loses *inspiration,* one loses reverence for the Divine, even if the divinity is not called into question as imaginary. Very few human beings are brought into the Hell-scape of Aushwitz; but related *feelings* of being abandoned by God in one's direst hour of need are common enough. Priests and ministers console us by reminding the suffering believer that even Christ on the cross exclaimed, "Father why hast thou forsaken me?" It's important to keep in mind that is not doubting God the Father, but rather addressing him the way one might address a cruel or callous father. So theodicy is less about belief than forbearance in the face of seeming cruelty,evil or absurdity.

These are the sorts of trials and tribulations around which a whole genre of wisdom literature in religion evolved. Few of us can sustain purely unconditional relationships-- and so of course the kind of cost-benefit thinking you describe is part of religious life. But the scope within which such thinking operates is limited. Most of us, at some point or other, are brought to the very brink of that which has explanation--of that which can truly be comprehended. These liminal experiences can be sublimely beautiful or unbearably painful. When they are sublimely beautiful, they may be experienced as Grace or mystical awakenings. But when the threshold of the comprehensible is crossed leaving us with incomprehensible, unbearable seemingly senseless pain (that most find hard to square with omnipotence and the perfect goodness of all-loving God) rationality and evidential beliefs alone may not suffice to carry the religious believer through. 

What is needed to maintain religiosity at such times is a deeper fortitude in the face of evil and abject suffering. Faith is not just confidence in beliefs and principles, but in the ultimate value of the relationship between the Holy and the human. This, like all strong relationships, can't be reduced to logic and epistemology. Faith names something deeper and more elusive than any justifying beliefs. It involves a letting-go of preconceptions and conditions, a trusting openness to the other, whether friend, lover or God. I am not saying faith flies blindly and lacks any justifying beliefs. Only that it requires something more than those. It includes a strong sense of trust and confidence in the unfolding of outcomes that defy easy categorization as assets and liabilities, pros and cons. Since we "see through a glass darkly," we are not really able to know which outcomes are most beneficial and which most harmful, as this Taoist story illustrates:

Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.” The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” . . . . . 

In a theistic context, along with the embrace of unknowable consequences, there is an affirmation that God's will for humans is all for the best, even if we do not (cannot) know its content. This becomes harder to maintain when situations result in great pain and loss.

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Even though I've been an atheist for as long as I can remember, the uncertainty inherent in my belief means there has to be an element of faith there. I had not consciously considered the pragmatism in converting from atheist to theist when circumstances made that the logical choice, as dcleve's friend apparently did. Some others, such as Francis Collins, head of the NIH, converted in three steps from rock solid atheist to doubting atheist to deeply devout Christian. According to his own account, Collins' mental transition was driven purely by the workings of his own mind. He did not mention any external personal circumstances as being relevant. One can wonder how frequent such major mindset changes are in the two scenarios, i.e., change driven by compelling life circumstances vs. change driven purely by mind.

Stepping back to politics, PD's argument about what can bring some people to lose faith makes modern tribe and ideology-driven politics feel to me even more like a religious mindset than before. In his 2012 book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics, psychologist Johnathan Haidt's grouping of both politics and religion in the same general mental category. I was aware of that. 

But the kind of painful experiences that lead some to question God, e.g., senselessly suffering in a Nazi prison camp, but remain faithful reinforce the idea of how rare it is for a major mindset change to occur. Minds really do not change. Facts, truths and sound reasoning are feeble in the face of far more powerful mental processes. There is just too much psychological and social baggage to make mindset chance anything but rare, at least under current circumstances. In my opinion, current toxic circumstances make such mindset transformations even rarer than in normal recent times (~40-50 years ago) when facts, truths and sound reasoning carried more weight with more people in both religion and politics. 

I can clearly see huge storm clouds on the near horizon. The coming authoritarian storm is going to be cruel and painful. The storm is probably going to literally kill some people, something that has arguably already happened as the first small squalls hit home.  

Questions: 

1. Is my reasoning about mindset change and a coming political storm not rationally linked to dcleve's and PD's comments, i.e., am I full of baloney, driven by flawed motivated reasoning and seeing things that are just not there? Are those political storm clouds a personal illusion?

2. Is this discussion just too dark and/or wonky?

American storm troopers

Troopers in Detroit

Some thoughts on fascism

Vice President Henry Wallace

To some people, what the Republican Party has become constitutes some form of fascist or something approaching that. Naturally, Republicans and most conservatives generally strongly dispute that. They consider the GOP and themselves to be democratic patriots valiantly fighting against the Democratic Party and liberal efforts to destroy America, outlaw Christianity and impose some form of evil socialist or communist tyranny. 

A short post at Free Thought Blogs considered what fascism is in a post entitled The different forms of fascism:

The specter of fascism in the US has been raised with the presidency of Donald Trump. While he has openly flirted with neo-Nazis and white supremacists, his defenders have said that his behavior does not imply fascist sympathies.

The problem is that fascism does not take a single form. In an article in the April/May 2020 issue of The Progressive, John Nichols looks back at the warnings that Henry Wallace, a progressive who in 1944 was vice-president to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, gave about the danger of fascism emerging in the US then and what were some of its signs.

“The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way,” argued Wallace in his essay. He charged that those who sought to divide the United States along lines of race, religion, and class could be “encountered in Wall Street, Main Street, or Tobacco Road.”

“Some even suspect,” Wallace wrote, “that they can detect incipient traces of it along the Potomac.”

Wallace did not limit his critique of American fascism to the overt racists and anti-Semites that at least some of the mainstream politicians of his day decried. He was determined to go deeper, to talk about the enablers of the racists and anti-Semites.

“The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others,” Wallace wrote. “The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis.” Rather, he warned of “a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information and those who stand for the KKK type of demagoguery.”

This was a definition of fascism that brought the issues of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, of media manipulation and political machination, home to America. Wallace even saw the prospects of an American fascism in the predictable machinations of big business.

“Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise,” he wrote. “In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.”

…

Even today, there are debates about how to define fascism, but we recognize now that it cannot be identified by a single rigid set of characteristics. Fascism “takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects,” author Adam Gopnik observed in 2016. “In Italy, it is bombastic and neo-classical in form. In Spain, Catholic and religious. In Germany, violent and romantic.” He added: “It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television.” 

And Henry Giroux, a cultural critic who has written extensively on authoritarianism, says: “Fascism looks different in different cultures, depending on that culture. In fact, it is the essence of fascism to have no single, fixed form.”

 

Wallace’s strong critiques of the enablers of American fascism earned him the ire of the ruling classes and the supporters of big business including, of course, establishment media like the New York Times. Their opposition led to him being denied the re-nomination as vice-president in 1944, replaced by FDR with Harry Truman.

The Nichols essay in The Progressive Magazine includes this: 

Wallace did not limit his critique of American fascism to the overt racists and anti-Semites that at least some of the mainstream politicians of his day decried. He was determined to go deeper, to talk about the enablers of the racists and anti-Semites.

“The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others,” Wallace wrote. “The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis.” Rather, he warned of “a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information and those who stand for the KKK type of demagoguery.”

This was a definition of fascism that brought the issues of authoritarianism and totalitarianism, of media manipulation and political machination, home to America. Wallace even saw the prospects of an American fascism in the predictable machinations of big business.

“Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise,” he wrote. “In an effort to eliminate the possibility of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself.”

This was all too much for the editorial page of The Times, which took the extraordinary step of denouncing Wallace’s essay on the very Sunday it was published in the newspaper’s magazine. Decrying what it referred to as the “shrill cries of ‘Fascist’ ” that foster “an atmosphere charged with emotion, suspicion, and bitterness,” the Times editorial accused Wallace of going too far in his denunciations of monopolies and cartels.

“It is astonishing that Mr. Wallace cannot see that in going to such lengths he approaches the very intolerance that he condemns,” the editorial said. The Times was effectively arguing that “it can’t happen here.”  

Wallace initially ignored The Times editorials demanding that he explain what he meant when he spoke of the “American fascist.” But he eventually wrote his famous reply, which filled three pages of its Sunday magazine on April 9, 1944.

“The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact,” Wallace wrote. “Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy . . . . They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.”

The fight against American fascism would not be waged by pointing fingers of blame at this industrialist or that editor, Wallace wrote, but rather by remaining on “guard against intolerance, bigotry, and the pretension of invidious distinction.”

That was the 1940s. Is it true that, as the New York Times wrote that fascism can't happen here, and simply condemning it in blunt terms amounts to something that approaches the intolerance that actual fascism usually evinces? Does what Wallace tried to warn about in the 1940s look a lot like the Republican Party of 2021?

How Joe Manchin and his family makes his money and betrays West Virginia

This 8 minute video goes into some detail about Manchin and his family and how Manchin serves the people of West Virginia. I have argued here before that both Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are corrupt. This gives a hint at how deeply corrupt Manchin really is. This is more evidence that ethics in the federal government is a toothless norm that has been blown to smithereens. Ethics in government is now mostly extinct in view of how corrupt a US Senator can be and not be prosecuted. 

The disappearing small family farm

Jeff Uhler in his 1980s vintage harvester that 

he cannot afford to replace so keeps repairing himself

The New York Times writes about the impossible economic situation that many small and medium sized farms face. The economics are just not there to support small or midscale farming. The NYT writes about a struggling farm family in Nebraska:

In his earliest memories of his family’s farm, Ethan Uhlir rides in an old truck with his grandfather Arden, feeding cattle and mending fences.

Before Arden’s death five years ago, he “reminded me that I was a good cattleman,” Ethan said, and “I have to keep it like that.”

Ethan, now 17, still notices his grandfather’s wiring technique in fence posts scattered across the farm in the rolling plains of northeast Nebraska, along the South Dakota border. He walks along the same paths as six generations of Uhlirs, but Ethan may be the last to work the land.

“There’s enough labor for four people but not enough income for one,” his father, Jeff, said.

Like most farmers, Jeff sells his cattle, corn and soybeans at prices set by a global commodities market, but only large farms can absorb the narrow profit margins.

Though the family’s small farm is valuable — its 880 acres [1.375 sq. mi.] are assessed at $1.3 million — property taxes eat up most of the money it does make.

Even in a good year when the farm grosses $60,000, Jeff feels lucky if he has money left over for savings. [what constitutes a bad year, ~$40,000?]

“I’ll have to work an hour before my funeral,” Jeff, 51, said. “I have no retirement.”

For families like the Uhlirs, farming is increasingly unsustainable, as drought and extreme weather, fluctuating commodity prices and rising costs alter the economics of running a small- to midsize operation. Hundreds of family farms file for bankruptcy each year in the United States, with the largest share routinely coming from the Midwest.

Nebraska’s high property taxes, which it collects from its 93 counties and reapportions, are compounded by Knox County’s shrinking population.

About 8,400 people live in the county, down 26.8 percent over the last 40 years. With fewer taxpayers, farmers who own hundreds of acres must shoulder the cost of schools, roads and other public services. After paying for necessities like fertilizer, seed and pesticides, Jeff must cover a $15,965.68 property tax bill.

Nebraska’s agricultural land property taxes are 46 percent higher than the national average, according to a 2019 report by the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and most farmers pay 50 to 60 percent of their net income in taxes [that seems too high].

Sixty percent of Nebraska property taxes pay for schools.

Next fall, Ethan hopes to pursue an associate degree in nursing. “I don’t think that I would be able to financially support myself just living off the farm,” he said.

On a crisp, bright afternoon in early October, Ethan watched his father weld their broken 1980s combine harvester head, which cuts and threshes corn.

Most of “the equipment we have, my grandfather bought,” Ethan said.

Ethan had once hoped to be named the Future Farmers of America’s “Star Farmer,” just like his grandfather Arden in 1960.

During the 1980s farm crisis, Arden nearly lost the farm. He took on debt and worked to pay it off up until the last few years of his life. His wife, Karen, worked for 16 years in an Alzheimer’s unit at an assisted-living facility in Verdigre.

“They never went to the dentist. They couldn’t afford to,” Jeff said. “They never went on vacation. They never spent any money on each other.”

Seeing his parents struggle, Jeff has avoided debt.

“I’d love to be able to buy land close to me and expand what I do, but there ain’t no way at 51 years old,” he said. “I’d have to live to 160 to be able to pay it off.”

Jeff’s financial situation is worse than previous generations, he said. “Every year, the property valuations get higher and everything else don’t keep up.”

The family has farmed the land for 151 years, he said. “How do I sell it?”

Knox County classifies four soil types when taxing agricultural use of land, and much of Jeff’s soil received the highest rating and a higher tax rate, despite lower yields than farms in other counties with less sandy soil. “We're taxed based on sales and soil composition,” he said. “At no point does rainfall become a factor.” [F]or more than two months, “we didn’t get a drop” of rain. Drought yielded short ears of corn and tiny, pea-sized soybeans.

Farming becomes more challenging as he ages, Jeff says, and he wonders what it will be like without Ethan next year, when he’s at college. “As my helper goes away, things get tougher.”

“At some point, the people raising your food are going to be dead,” Jeff said. “Once we’re gone, we’re not coming back.”

Karen and Jeff Uhler

This story resonated because my dad worked on farms all over Eastern Nebraska years ago. He probably worked on the Uhlir farm at some time or another. I might have worked there with him. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, the farm economy was better and small to medium sized farm operations generally did better. The little towns still had some life in them. Now many small towns are withering away. The economy is forcing many family farmers to sell, sometimes to agriculture giants like Cargill ($115 billion revenue in 2020) and ADM ($64 billion).

When the economy does not support something, it has to eventually cease operating or be independently supported somehow. What, if anything, should be done?