[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Hot Air Gods

[Bill Totten]

by Curtis White

Harper's Magazine Notebook (December 2007)


The most bewildering and yet revealing gesture of a truly fundamental
American theology takes place when an individual stands forth and
proclaims, "This is my belief". Making such a simple and familiar
statement implies at least three important things. First, it implies
that I have a right to my belief. Whether this right is God-given, one
of the laws of nature, or simply something we wrangled politically out
of the process of constitution-making, it is something we believe we
have. Second, my statement carries with it the expectation that you
ought to respect my belief, or at least my right to it, even if my
belief makes no sense to you at all. Third, and most important, my
belief doesn't have to make sense in order to carry legitimacy. On the
basis of this belief I not only will claim the right to order my own
life but also will feel free, without embarrassment, to enforce my
belief universally through the election of politicians and through the
sponsorship of legislation, as the battles over abortion, evolution, gay
marriage, and school prayer illustrate all too clearly.

Successful though efforts to enshrine private belief in public policy
have been in certain regions of the United States, in the larger frame
of national life such orthodoxies have no future and very little past.
What reigns in our national spectacle is the pluralistic assumption that
you have a right to your cockeyed belief and that it is something I am
compelled to respect and even admire in you, even though what you
believe may have very little to do with what I believe. Yahweh and Baal
- my God and yours - stroll arm-in-arm, as if to do so were the model of
virtue itself.

What we require of belief is not that it make sense but that it be
sincere. This is so even for our more secular convictions. Recently, for
example, National Public Radio revived Edward R　Murrow's "This I
Believe" program, thus driving the idea of belief to its trite extreme.
Here we can learn that belief is about the little things in life, like
Jell-O. Colin Powell, waxing banal, tells us that America is an
immigrant country and a land of opportunity. Clearly, this is not the
spirituality of a centralized orthodoxy. It is a sort of workshop
spirituality that you can get with a cereal-box top and five dollars.
And yet in our culture, to suggest that such belief is not deserving of
respect makes people anxious, an anxiety that expresses itself in the
desperate sincerity with which we deliver life's little lessons. This
sincerity is surely one part ardor, but it is also a warning. It says,
"I've invested a lot of emotional energy in this belief, and in a way
I've staked the credibility of my life on it. So if you ridicule it, you
can expect a fight."

There is an obvious problem with this form of spirituality: it takes
place in isolation. Each of us sits at our computer terminal tapping out
our convictions. It's as if we were each our own foreign country and we
wanted to know what the people in the land of Ken or Brenda or Eduardo
believe. How quaint their curious customs! How fascinating their rituals!

Consequently, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that our truest
belief is the credo of heresy itself. It is heresy without an orthodoxy.
It is heresy as an orthodoxy. The entitlement to belief is the right of
each to his own heresy. Religious freedom has come to this: where
everyone is free to believe whatever she likes, there is no real shared
conviction at all, and hence no church and certainly no community.
Strangely, our freedom to believe has achieved the condition that
Nietzsche called nihilism, but by a route he never imagined. For
Nietzsche, European nihilism was the failure of any form of belief (a
condition that church attendance in Europe presently testifies to). But
American nihilism is something different. Our nihilism is our capacity
to believe in everything and anything all at once. It's all good!

Ultimately, our beliefs become just another form of what the media call
"content". A book is a sales unit. What's in the book is content, which
is a matter of utter indifference to the people who are responsible for
moving product. Our religious content soon becomes indistinguishable
from our financial content and our entertainment content and our sports
content, just as the sections of your local newspaper attest. In short,
belief becomes a culture-commodity. We shop among competing options for
belief.

Once reduced to the status of a commodity, our anything-goes,
do-it-yourself spirituality cannot have very much to say about the more
directly nihilistic conviction that we should all be free to do whatever
we like as well, each of us pursuing our right to our isolated
happinesses. Worse yet: for that form of legal individual known as the
corporation, the pursuit of happiness can mean fishing with factory
trawlers, clear-cutting forests, and spreading toxins across the
countryside with all the zeal of a child sprinkling candies on a cupcake.

In short, the best spiritual environment for free-market corporate
malfeasance is one that is as anarchic as its own form of economic
reason. After all, we are not accustomed to saying "no" to anyone who
proceeds in sincerity, and oh boy is corporate capitalism ever sincere.
So we are called upon to respect the businessman's right to pursue his
company's "happiness" just as we are called upon to respect all forms of
personal belief. Ken and his personal convictions out in Omaha have very
little to say about the convictions of Monsanto even if he is fated to
die from their expression.

As Jean-Paul Sartre understood, the sincerity of belief is mostly about
the anxiety that one may not be what one thinks one is. "I am a
Christian", someone says, eyeing uneasily all those others, other
Christians especially, who plainly think something very different from
what he thinks. As Sartre argued, "every belief is a belief that falls
short", which is also a way of saying that each of the little
affirmations of personal belief that are so common in our culture are
unwitting confessions of despair. But it is exactly this despair that
dares not speak its name, dares not confess itself.


To speak this way of American belief - since no one speaks this way
about American belief - is to suggest that we are strangers to
ourselves. But of course the idea that we are in need of a period of
self-reflection and self-criticism is welcomed by no one and seems only
to stimulate more heat, more fervor, more desperate sincerity. We would
prefer to be left alone, warmed by our beliefs-that-make-no-sense,
whether they are the quotidian platitudes of ordinary Americans, the
magical thinking of evangelicals, the mystical thinking of New Age
Gnostics, the teary-eyed patriotism of social conservatives, or the
perfervid loyalty of the rich to their free-market Mammon. We are thus
the congregation of the Church of the Infinitely Fractured, splendidly
alone together. And apparently that's how we like it. Our pluralism of
belief says both to ourselves and to others, "Keep your distance".

And yet isn't this all strangely familiar? Aren't these the false gods
that Isaiah and Jeremiah confronted, the cults of the "hot air gods"?
The gods that couldn't scare birds from a cucumber patch? Belief of
every kind and cult, self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement of every
degree, all flourish. And yet God is abandoned. For first and foremost,
"the Lord is a God of justice" (Isaiah 30:18). And that is the problem
that we ought to have at heart: our richness of belief masks a culture
that is grotesquely unjust.

Western Europeans look with astonishment upon the things that we are
willing to say we believe (for instance, our pie-eyed confidence -
shared by more than one recent president - that Jesus is coming back and
that our Middle East policy can help him on his way), but even more
astonishing is what we are willing to do in spite of our beliefs.
Several years ago, Norway began identifying corporations with which it
had ethical concerns and removing its investments from those firms. It
was an international list, but a great number of the businesses were
from the United States (including Wal-Mart, most prominently, but also
the mining industry and military contractors). Our ambassador to Norway,
Benson Whitney (a venture capitalist), noted astutely that Norway's
actions were "an accusation of bad ethics". He also complained that
American companies were being unfairly excluded from Norway's investment
portfolio through unfair screening and "lack of rigor". But I think it
is safe to say that Norway's pleas for justice have fallen on deaf ears.

And yet those who have ears ought to hear. But hear what? Or perhaps it
would be better to say "hear how?" Shall we turn against pluralism and
relativism in the name of obedience to a single authority? I don't think
so. The credibility of univocal meta-narratives of a traditional sort,
or any sort, is gone. Those tablets are indeed broken. The innocence
that allowed us to come as children to a singular faith, to faith as a
revealed Truth, was always a dangerous innocence. But a freedom to
believe that is nothing more than freedom in an abyss is no less
dangerous, as both our domestic and our international antagonisms testify.


A more positive way of looking at the situation I have described is to
say that through the concept of religious freedom, American political
culture has succeeded in mediating the competing claims of true religion
and idolatry. If it has not purged the hatred from this distinction, it
has at least prohibited most of the violence. And if there is wisdom in
this, it is less the wisdom of benevolence than the pragmatism of
imperial policing. Our culture is, as economists put it, a "disciplined
pluralism". Historically, we are not unique in this regard. The Persian
and Roman empires also endorsed religious freedom so long as it didn't
interfere with the orderly administration of the imperial dispensation:
the right to fleece the provinces. In our case, capitalism accommodates
a pluralism of religion (toward most forms of which it may be
intellectually disdainful) so long as its own universal principle -
privatization of wealth - is allowed to move forward in plain view and
yet as if in secret. What capitalism has successfully obscured is the
fact that the competition it prizes is not just between business
entities internal to it but between capitalism as such and all other
possible systems of value. Capitalism as an ethical system has succeeded
in convincing the people living under it that it is not a system at all
but a state of nature. In this way, it has managed to remain above the
fray of culture war, and restricted those value systems that might
compete with it to competing with each other. In short, culture war is a
great comfort to capitalism.

Capitalism has been so successful in this orchestration of reality that
it has even created the illusion that, in spite of every fact, the
Market works for all of us, or will eventually. In spite of the fact
that the poor are ever greater in number, and that education, health
care, and retirement are ever more inaccessible, the majority of
Americans persist in believing (with all the obliviousness of Voltaire's
Dr Pangloss) that our economic system is "the best of all possible
worlds". This is a form of wishful and magical thinking no stranger than
the belief that a statue of the Madonna can cry.

The reality that this magical thinking obscures is complex and exists on
at least two levels. First, there is the level of culture war itself.
Culture war for us is a domestic version of the Cold War, in which every
insider is also an outsider and all neighbors are potential enemies. The
tragedy of American culture in this regard has been its failure to
provide what religious scholar Jan Assmann calls "intercultural
translation": the capacity to translate my beliefs into your beliefs and
vice versa. Unhappily, we have very little interest in the challenge of
translation, largely because we very much wish to remain cordially at
one another's throats.

The second reality that needs to be addressed is what one might call the
Logos or essential structure of capitalism as a system of values. We
need to come to an honest acknowledgment of what capitalism is, and that
has been made very clear for us in recent months by the Chinese
entrepreneurs who fill our pet food, toothpaste, animal feed, and even
our Viagra with toxic filler. For the entrepreneur, such filler is
poison only if someone dies; otherwise it's just a profit margin. The
game is to take profit as close to the poison line as possible. When on
occasion profit spills over into poison and someone dies, there is a
wild wringing of hands (and, in China, death sentences), but soon back
we go in search of that ideal balance between profit and death. We see
very much the same principle at work in industrial agriculture. Just how
much herbicide and pesticide can we put down before it starts killing
something more than bugs and pigweed? Here we see the creed of
"cost/benefit analysis" presided over with loving-kindness by
accountants and legions of liability lawyers.


What's called for, then, is an enormous project of translation on two
fronts. First, the translation that must take place between groups of
believers, and second, the translation that will transform capitalism
from a state of nature to an ethical system that must defend its values
in, if you'll forgive me this phrase, a competing market of values. In
fact, this process of translation can be seen at work already. For
example, the recent turn of Christian evangelicals to a politics that
includes environmentalism ("Creation care") has "translated" their
beliefs into something that they can now share with mainstream
environmentalists, pantheists, ecological scientists, and even
outdoorsmen. For all these groups, the world is, if not something holy,
then something that ought to be the object of great and abiding Care.

To borrow again from the work of Jan Assmann, the process of translation
tends toward the abolition of what he calls the "Mosaic distinction":
the opposition of the idolatrous and the true. Assmann's project is
"part of the general humanist quest for overarching ideas that would
help to destroy the boundaries between nations, confessions, religions,
and classes and to 'deconstruct' ideological distinctions characterized
by hatred, incomprehension, and persecution".

What I would add to Assmann's project is the idea that beyond the Mosaic
distinction lies another distinction and another antagonism. This
opposition is between those - whether religious or humanist - who see
nature and humanity as a culture of life and those who see nature and
humanity "instrumentally", as things to be manipulated rationally and
technically in a culture of profit. For when at last the evangelical
advocate of "Creation care" and the pantheist "nature lover" come
together as one, they will see that what stands opposite them is
something un-moored from any meaning other than its own relentless
internal procedures: the Market God.

_____

Curtis White's most recent book is The Spirit of Disobedience (Polipoint
Press, 2006).


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