Yo, Leftish Atheists — Cool It for a Bit: Organizing Against Trumpism

“Be diligent in the study of Torah, and know how to answer an Epicurean.”

—   Rabbi Elazar, Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Hebrew Fathers)

And an Epicurean scientific materialist should know how, and when not to, answer a rabbi.

—   Rich Erlich

The context here is the rise of Trumpism in the United States, following a trend toward right-wing, authoritarian movements in Europe and elsewhere. My fear is the rise of an articulate successor to US President Donald J. Trump, a successor who is truly charismatic and can lead a genuine Mass Movement; my hope is that decent people can soon get a broad coalition to oppose such a movement, and defeat it.

Given that most Americans, indeed, most adult human beings, follow some sort of faith; given that most adult Americans strongly oppose “hate speech” but also dislike “political correctness”; given that “social justice warrior” has gone from a mildly hyperbolic compliment to a rebuke — given such fairly hard facts, I want to at least talk at some of my comrades on the Left and ask them, for a while, to tone down their language — and, on some subjects, for a bit, to shut up. 

Such a request is, let’s say, a problem for me as a recovering academic and Life Member of the ACLU.

Such a request will be problematic for the spiritual descendants of Abolitionists and war resisters and, at a great distance, the Prophets of old: people in the US Puritan tradition, but without the black clothing, big buckles, and (usually) God. 

So I’m going to go at this issue carefully and at a long length for one of my blog posts, making a few passes at the topic.

Pass 1: The story goes that the great scholar and scientist Pierre-Simon, Marquis de Laplace, once explained to the Emperor Napoleon his  (Laplace's) theory for the origin of the solar system. The Emperor complained that Laplace had described creation without ever mentioning God, to which Laplace responded (in the story), "Sire, I do not need that hypothesis."

And that (without the "Sire") is the proper scientific response. Whether or not God exists is not testable, but it is an inelegant, unparsimonious, and a clear violation of "Occam's Razor" to introduce so large an element as God into an argument unless necessary — really, really necessary.

            When God might be useful, is for a bit later. For now, let’s just stick with the Laplace principle. Any sentence beginning “Science proves” is bullshit-ish ‘because “Science” is too abstract to prove much, and the scientific method doesn’t exactly give final proofs of anything for what we experience as the real world. It’s the discipline of theology, not any of the sciences, that studies God; so don’t say “Science proves there is no God” or get into such arguments at all. What various sciences and their pre-scientific precursors have done over the last couple or so centuries is make God increasingly irrelevant for explanation of natural phenomena. And for big questions like free will and “Why is there anything rather than nothing?” — the God hypothesis isn’t very useful. (Strict Calvinists strongly believe in God, not necessarily free will. That God willed the universe to be as opposed to not be, just puts the mystery one step back: "And why would God necessarily prefer Being to Non-Being"? Plus, the description in Genesis is the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos, without explaining out of what Nothingness the Chaos arose.)

            So, on scientific grounds, don’t argue religion: “I don’t need that hypothesis” is all you need to say. And if religious sorts press the issue, they are the problem, not you.

Pass 2: Leftish Faith

Note: If you want a more respectable source than a retired English professor’s blog, see Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2015) on Natural Rights, and some of Mr. Harari’s follow-up writing.

            In 1976. for the US Bicentennial Celebration at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio), I was asked to speak on … well something relevant. At the speech, I looked out at an audience far larger than I’d expected — at least one Speech teacher had required attendance — and started out with a thoroughly-rehearsed ad lib on how I was from Chicago and Chicagoans rejected the elitist concept that one had to be an expert to talk usefully on a subject, “OR, Chicagoans rarely let our ignorance get in the way of shooting off our mouths. And tonight I’m going to shoot my mouth off on the Declaration of Independence as a revolutionary document, far more revolutionary than most of us recognize.”

            And I proceeded to talk about something I did know about: from around Shakespeare’s time the Homily — a canned sermon — on Obedience to Authority and “An Exhortation concerning good Order, and obedience to Rulers and Magistrates.” 

            On the basis of Holy Scripture and Natural Law, the writers of the Homilies were convinced that

Almighty God has created and appointed all things in heaven and on earth and all about, in a most excellent and perfect order. In heaven, he has appointed distinct and several orders and states of Archangels and Angels. In earth he has assigned and appointed Kings, Princes, with other governors under them, in all good and necessary order. […]  The sun, moon, stars, rainbow, thunder, lightning, clouds, and all the birds of the air, keep their order. The earth, trees, seeds, plants, herbs, corn, grass, and all manner of beasts keep themselves in order […].

Human beings also have all parts both within and without, like soul, heart, mind, memory, understanding, reason, speech, with all and singular corporal members of our body in a profitable, necessary, and pleasant order: every degree of people in their vocation, calling and office, is appointed to them their duty and order: some are in high degree, some in low, some Kings and Princes, some inferiors and subjects, priests, and layfolk, masters and servants, fathers, and children, husbands and wives, rich and poor, and everyone needs the other, so that in all things God, in good order, is lauded and praised, without which no house, city or commonwealth can continue, endure or last. For where there is no right order, there reigns abuse, carnal liberty, enormity, sin and Babylonian confusion.

Take away Kings Princes, Rulers, Magistrates, Judges, and such estates of God's good order, and no one shall ride or go by the highway un-robbed, no one shall sleep in their own house or bed un-killed, no one shall keep their spouse, children, and possession in quietness, all things shall be in-common, and there must needs follow all kinds of mischief, and utter destruction of souls, bodies, goods and social well-being. But blessed be God, that we in this realm of England, feel not the horrible calamities, miseries, and wretchedness, which all they undoubtedly feel and suffer, who lack this godly order: and praised be God, that we know the great excellent benefit of God shown towards us in this behalf, God has sent us his high gift, our most dear Sovereign Lord the King, with a godly, wise and honourable counsel, with other superiors and inferiors, in a beautiful and godly order.

            I have no doubt that somewhere in the back of a church or two, some rebellious soul was mouthing silently the subversive old rime, from John Ball, and the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, “When Adam delved and Eva span, / Who was then the gentleman?” I.e., when Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden to earn their livings by toil like digging and spinning — “From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude,” serfdom and exploitation, “came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men” (“naughty” was a much more powerful word back then). Still, the orthodox, non-heretical, traditional, obvious view was that the universe was a Great Chain of Being, running from the hand or footstool of God down through the orders of the angels to the stars and planets, and then humans in our order, and down through plants and animals to the minerals and down to your basic rock. Everything in its order, held together by the love of God for all and the love of each conscious creature for those above and below, and our sense of different obligations to those above and below.

            This “most excellent and perfect order” had been obvious among the educated (and otherwise privileged) since the time of Aristotle. 

            Human hierarchy was part of this “godly order”; human love and obligation was natural.

            It’s a beautiful and useful view, especially from the top. From the bottom … well looking up, the human part might look more like a multistory outhouse, if one were so privileged as to own an outhouse. And if you lost faith in that “godly order,” well you were “an heretic,” and if you acted or even spoke aloud that loss of faith, you were open to a charge of treason and finding yourself, if male, hanged, drawn, and quartered, or, if female, burned alive. So if there were any doubts, most people probably kept them quiet, and they were lost to history; and this orthodox view of hierarchical society came down to the time of the American Revolution, and parts last to this day.

            Seriously.

            If you play Twenty Questions, you begin with “Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?,” and in that order because, ultimately, that is the order in the Great Chain of Being. If you talk of “higher” and “lower” animals, higher and lower in terms of what? Possibly in terms of a simplistic idea of evolution, more likely in terms of the Great Chain of Being and the possibility of drawing a firm line and making radical distinction between humans as “the paragon of animals” and “a little lower than the angels” — and the rest, many of whom you want someone to kill and skin and cook or pluck and cook and feed you, without your feeling guilt.

            Against such well-established doctrine, it’s difficult to argue, and Thomas Jefferson and the guys didn’t bother. Instead, in the subversive tradition of John Ball, they offer a competing creation myth, if not for the universe, then for human society — and like John Ball find justification for rebellion against “the unjust oppression of naughty men.”

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Now earlier I mentioned that there are times when God can get useful … and this one is a biggy, with that bit about being created equal and created endowed by our Creator “with certain unalienable Rights.” That requires some long leaps of faith. First, that a Creator-God exists, that that God created us and somehow cares about us, and that that God created us equal in some sense, and “with certain unalienable rights.” But get rid of a Creator, and then what? If we have rights, where do they come from? And if we’re equal, equal in what sense? 

            Believing in a Creator is a leap of Faith; that the Creator would care about us, takes the jump into the Absurd — but that absent that Creator that we have some sort of rights from … Nature? That’s also a leap into the absurd, and the idea that we’re equal is just, to put it politely, “counterfactual,” or “ingenious” in a very negative sense of the word.

            Personally, I believe in human rights, and believe strongly. But that’s belief, an act of faith. If you also believe in human rights, that far you too are a person of faith. That makes you no worse than those who believe in the Great Chain of Being, and in some practical ways probably a good deal better; but your belief in equality is built on the same ontological sand pile as their belief in hierarchy. 

            You probably also believe in the American Republic and quite likely the American Nation, which Harari points out are imagined or “imaginary communities”; and you probably believe in corporations — “fictive persons” — and the value of money, including paper money that has just about no value outside the belief that such fancy paper has value. 

            So don’t get snarky with God-believers, with “How can you believe …?” Not if you believe in other people’s belief in money enough to take paper for goods of actual value — and not if you believe in your nation enough to say you’d die for it.

Pass 3

            I spent some forty years teaching and doing scholarship, and before that I did a little bit of science; so let’s say I’m fond of truth and that I rather compulsively try to lay truth upon people. There are times, though, when one can assert one’s truth quickly and then shut up, or just avoid various topics of conversation. 

            Specifically here, if you want people to face courageously the human condition and throw away their crutches of ridiculous beliefs — okay, good; but please face up to what you are asking, and please note that dropping their faith and facing the universe without it, may exact a price some highly useful potential allies are unwilling to pay. 

            3.A

            In African Genesis(1961), Robert Ardrey recounts a theory from the early 1940s: The Illusion of Central Position. According to the theory, this illusion "is the birthright of every human baby." A baby boy enters the world and "Bright objects appear for his amusement, bottles and breasts for his comfort. His groping consciousness finds no reason at all to doubt the world's consecration to his needs and purposes. His Illusion of Central Position is perfect" (African Genesis144; ch. 6). With maturity, however, the illusion is undercut and the child and then the man comes to a truer perception of his place in the scheme of things.

Nonetheless the theory grants that should a man ever attain a state of total maturity — ever come to see himself, in other words, in perfect mathematical relationship to the tide of tumultuous life which has risen upon the earth and in which we represent but a single swell; and furthermore come to see our earth as but one opportunity for life among uncounted millions in our galaxy alone, and our galaxy as but one statistical improbability, nothing more, in the silent mathematics of all things—should a man, in sum, ever achieve the final, total, truthful Disillusionment of Central Position, then in all likelihood he would no longer keep going but would simply lie down, wherever he happened to be, and with a long-drawn sigh return to the oblivion from which he came. (145; ch. 6)

And we can add today that our universe may be only one among several or many or an infinite number of universes, and that whether our universe peters out through entropy or reduces to nothingness in The Big Crunch, our universe is doomed; so even if a human being gained galactic glory, that, too, would be, in terms of the Big Picture, fleeting. Definitely, totally fleeting, and trivial. 

            Similarly, in The Big Picture, for the value of the human species, let alone any individual human. 

            3.B

            In the Book of Ecclesiastes, Koheleth, the Preacher, decides, "[…] as regards men, to dissociate them [from] the divine beings and to face the fact that they are beasts. For […] the fate of man and the fate of beast [are] one and the same fate: as the one dies so dies the other, and both have the same lifebreath; man has no superiority over beast, since both amount to nothing. Both go to the same place; both came from dust and both return to dust. Who knows if a man's lifebreath does rise upward and if a beast's breath does sink down into the earth?" (Tanakh 1985; cf. KJV 2000: 3.18-21). That last question is rhetorical: no soul in ancient Jewish theory — that was an Egyptian and Greek idea — but “lifebreath,” and the lifebreath animating human beings and what we consider the “lower” animals is the same: not doggy heaven but oblivion or Sheol: “the grave” or “pit,” with maybe a kind of amorphous semi-existence. And taking such a hard-nose, hard-ass, hard-look view at the world, Koheleth doesn’t lie down and die but cries out on life’s “Emptiness, emptiness! All is emptiness!” And chasing after the wind (Eccl. 1). 

            And such an analysis can be pushed beyond Existential despair and into some nasty conclusions in ethics.  

3.C

You want to put that Epicurean on steroids and get a truly rigorous materialism? Well, the Marquis de Sade is far out of date in his science and was far, far out of his mind — psychopathic serial killer and all — but he was strong on intellectual daring and pushing an idea to its conclusions. "What we call the end of the living animal," Sade notes in a very long philosophic pause from a pornographic novel, what we call death and killing of a human or other animal (or plant) is not "a true finis" — end, goal — "but a simple transformation, a transmutation of matter, what every modern philosopher acknowledges as one of Nature's fundamental laws" ("Manners" section of " Yet Another Effort Frenchmen, If You Would Become [Real] Republicans" 1795). Modernizing the argument: Kill someone, bury the corpse, let it rot, dig it up, and weigh it, and the biomass of the human remains, and the feeding putrefactive bacteria, maggots and such will show no significant loss of weight. If you feel that a living human being is superior to a mass of putrefactive bacteria (and I certainly hope you do), how is that feeling any more than the product of our "small human vanities," species chauvinism, and "stupid notions of pride"?

            Which gets us back to human rights and, more deeply, human value. If you believe in human value, you believe in human value. 

            If God exists and cares one way or another about a recent species on an unremarkable planet in a rather banal galaxy, and if that care is love for what in some sense He/She/It has created and created in some sense in His/Her/Its image — yeah, we humans have value. Or you can skip the mystic stuff and just believe without a whole lot of evidence that in a huge universe and maybe multiverse not just our species but individual humans have some sort of significant value.

So: A broad alliance is necessary to resist what looks like a resurgence of fascistic rule, maybe moves toward outright fascism; and necessary for that alliance — parallel to the entry into US politics of Vietnam Veterans Against the War by the US in Vietnam — necessary for that alliance will be religious folk, and the more Evangelical the better. And so for good, Machiavellian, pragmatic reasons, people of faith should be cultivated, not pushed away. And, I hope I have shown, there are considerations that should make it possible for sensible atheists and agnostics to work with faith folk honestly, without hypocrisy. 

            It just takes a little humility.

            “Know how to answer an Epicurean [materialist],” Rabbi; and responsible Leftist materialists should know how to talk to rabbis and other people of faith enough to get them to resist Trumpism, and to plan how to do it.

“Solidarity Forever!”, people; or at least until the current crises in the American Republic have settled down.

Reprint: Yo, Secular Leftists — Arguing with Religious People (an Introduction)

From Richard D. Erlich, Views from a Jagged Orbit (before 2014)

De Gustibus & Intelligent Argument

A fair number of people are familiar with the idea that you really can't have a useful argument over tastes ("De gustibus non est disputandum"), and a quick check of what people think neat to put up on YouTube — or a quicker check of YouTube's pornographic spawn — will point to the truth of that assertion.

Less well known in the injunction from the Hebrew Fathers to, not surprisingly, "Be diligent in the study of Torah, and," relevant here, "know how to answer an Epicurean." That is, at least for my purposes, the old rabbis enjoined knowing one's own tradition and premises and being able to argue with someone with very different ideas. A religious follower of Scriptures, the rabbis taught, should know how to argue with — the rabbis would want you to defeat — a materialist philosopher.

In arguing with an "Epicurean," a religious person could not use the final formulation of more recent rabbis and their more authoritarian followers: "Er steht!" — "It's written"; "It's a commandment!" The obvious Epicurean response to that would be, "So what?" To answer effectively a materialist, a secularist — then and now — one would have to argue from premises you can both agree on.

And, more important in our time, vice versa — for a secularist arguing with a religious person.

For a secularist to argue effectively with a religious person, the secular person must know "Torah": i.e., what the religious person at least claims to hold authoritative. It's nice that Protestants and Catholics are no longer burning one another at the stake nor taking turns burning Baptists and flogging Quakers. And it's nice that atheists are coming out of the closet and arguing for their position.

The danger to my beliefs, though, is an alliance of Believers against not just strident atheists but secularists in general, and against those of us who want to follow a religious tradition in a society that welcomes us and (aiding that welcome) runs a thoroughly secular state. The danger to my political positions, and that of many, is a Left that becomes increasingly militant in its secularism and (therefore) increasingly politically marginalized among an American public composed largely of various kinds of cooperating Believers.

So, my atheist friends: a bit of advice. Recall the great principle of Occam's Razor and the story of the mathematician-astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace and Napoleon. When Napoleon asked Laplace how he, Laplace, could write a substantial book "on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator," Laplace replied that he "had no need of that hypothesis." Even so, American atheists, when an argument comes up about God, just say, "I have no need of that hypothesis" — and let it go at that. More generally on the Left: gals and guys, "Know how to work with religious people" — including at times with religious people with whom you have profound disagreements.

If some apocalyptically-minded Christians are right, it's important to get Jews in control of all of what was ancient Israel and Judea and (even) Samaria to bring on the End of Days, at which time those Jews will either submit to Jesus or burn forever in the Lake of Fire. No Jews like that idea, but if they're Likudnik Jews or even further to the Right, they can ally with Right-wing Christians on Zionist issues. And they have allied, and not just regarding Israel.

So it shouldn't be so goddamn difficult for today's secular Leftists to learn the history of effective political movements in the USA, bone up on the more radical teachings of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets, and renew the old alliances for peace, social justice, and the equitable distribution of the world's resources and wealth.

"The Earth is the Lord's / and the fullness thereof, / The sea and all that in them is" saith the 24th Psalm, and the psalmist goes on to justify God's ownership by a labor theory of property: "for he founded [the world] upon the seas / And established it upon the waters." If you're trying to get people to make the U.S. economy more fair, that's a good place to start — and you can omit arguing that the true story of creation is Big-Bang Cosmology.

Et bloody cetera for the divinity of Jesus if you want allies against militarism and against coddling the rich. You, my Liberal-Leftist-Peacenik friend, want a more humble U.S. foreign policy; Jesus enjoined downright pacifism. Use that!

And if anyone accuses you, correctly, of "cherry-picking" teachings, point out that there are not ten commandments in Torah but, by traditional count, 613. Moses was just the beginning. Selecting, emphasizing, de-emphasizing, rationalizing, modifying, allegorizing, and sensibly gentling (and sometimes just ignoring) religious doctrines has been the name of the game since the old rabbis decided that "an eye for an eye" meant equitable compensation, Jesus healed chronic medical problems on the Sabbath, and St. Paul said a guy could be a saved follower of Messiah without circumcision and that nobody needed to follow all those finicky Jewish food regulations.

So, devout religious folk, "Know how to answer" us materialists — or at least talk with us politely. My fellow Leftist-pinko-peacenik sorts (including small "b" believers): If you want to effect change, learn how to talk to and with religious people. Effective politics are coalition politics, and as of now the Right is kicking our asses at it.

Don't Talk Sex or Religion! (Coalition Conversations in the Age of Trump)

To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. […]

To those not having the law I became like one not having the law […],

so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak,

to win the weak. I have become all things to all people

so that by all possible means I might save some.

(St. Paul to the Corinthians [9.20-22])

"I had no need of that hypothesis." — Attributed to

Pierre-Simon Laplace, responding to Napoleon I's

question, "But where is God […]?" in Laplace's

discourse on an issue in astronomy

         A While back — 8 October 2014, to be exact (reposted 19  March 2015) — I blogged a short, relatively moderate rant against Leftist allies who declined to play nice with those with whom they had converging political interests but deep-rooted philosophical disagreements. In that piece I quoted from memory a line from Ursula K. Le Guin's great 1969 novel, The Left Hand of Darkness, "You don't have to be kemmerings to haul a sledge" — i.e., you don't have to be bonded lovers to cooperate on a project.

         Indeed! And now in the Age of Trump it is even more the case that we need coalition politics of the responsible Right, Left, and Center to oppose an incipient mass movement of Trump supporters that can move into all the nationalistic authoritarianism threatened by the slogan "America First."

         So I have some unsolicited free advice — worth every cent you pay for it and more — for my potential allies of the atheistic persuasion.

         First, notice that the lines of St. Paul to the Church at Corinth may sound cynical and hypocritical, and from my point of view, they kind-of are. Still, toned down a bit, they are the standard device of rhetorical decorum: fitting one's words to the audience, subject, and general context. And for those of us of the fact-respecting, "reality-based community," there is the relatively simple fact that Paul was an extraordinarily successful propagandist — check the etymology of the word — and Jesus-Movement organizer.

         And to this add such facts as the survey data that religiosity in the US may be decreasing but still remains high and that churches, synagogs, mosques, and such are by definition already organized communities-of-interest that can be used for group action, e.g., sponsoring immigrants or providing highly traditional sanctuary … up to more radical action.

         There's also the fuzzier philosophical "fact" that asking people to give up God sets up a logical chain leading to conclusions such as that the idea of humans' holding any importance in the universe is a product of an infantile "illusion of central position" and that our loves, losses, achievements, wars, and strivings are radically trivial and described more or less accurately as "a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing," as a despairing Macbeth still so poetically puts it.

         Less poetically but more vividly, the mad but philosophically rigorous Marquis de Sade has a pamphlet perused during a pause in the orgy-ing in his Philosophy in the Bedroom (1795) entitled "Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become [Real] Republicans," wherein he notes that homicide does not destroy life: kill someone, bury the corpse, wait … wait a bit longer, dig it up and weigh what nowadays is called the biomass. If it is not significantly less than the weight of the murder victim, no life has been destroyed. If you argue that human life is more valuable than that of (I'll modernize here) maggots or putrefactive bacteria — on what grounds? Nature alone gives no greater value to human life than any other, and if we humans think otherwise, it is only our conceit.

         So quick conversions to a rigorously materialist view of things are unlikely, not to mention that your average atheist seems open to challenge to being way, way too comfortable in a non-rigorous materialism.

         What agnostics without a lot of time on their hands for theological disputes, or an atheist can do in political organizing is respond to ultimate questions about God with recycling Laplace and saying, "I don't need that hypothesis" — and then shut up about God-stuff and get to immediate political goals.

         Better, of course, effective atheists could imitate St. Paul and work with the literate in the target religious traditions (and that "literate" bit excludes many people who claim the faith) and couch their arguments in religious terms.

         E.g., the opening of the 24^th Psalm says, "The earth is the LORD'S, and all it contains; / The world, and all who live in it. // For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods." That gives a labor theory of property, and lays the groundwork for theories of social justice developed at some length and high intensity by the Hebrew Prophets and their Jewish, Christian, and Muslim successors.

         Get the point?

         Disagreeing on fundamentals means that eventually religious and secular activists will come to serious practical disagreements. But as anyone who's ever been politically active for more than a few months knows, secular political sorts can get into doctrinal controversies without a hint of God-thought and form circular firing squads with almost the alacrity of religious fanatics gathering the wood to burn heretics.

         If devout Catholics can work with you murderers and damn-ers of the unbaptized unborn, you can work with infantile believers in the Great Spaghetti God with 6^th-c. BCE beliefs about sexuality and the sexes.

         Lovers in bonded-relationships, Earthly kemmerings, should acknowledge, talk over, and work through their differences. Two people hauling a goddamn sledge should just shut up when it comes to important differences until they get the sledge where it needs to go.

         "I don't need that hypothesis" can close the argument on God until nobody needs to worry that large hunks of the Americas and Europe are threatened by Fascists.