Not dead, just down

Several factors have conspired to keep me from blogging as frequently as I did. One is that I stopped using my primary browser a couple of months ago because it has abysmal memory management, but the replacement I've been trying out has, um, issues with a number of sites I frequent, Blogger being one of them. Another factor is my having gotten back into the habit of reading books, a glorious pastime that my previous job kept me too busy and tired to pursue. Unfortunately, my choice of books has left me in a thoroughly discouraged state of mind, another factor contributing to my silence.

It started with Michael Sandel's Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy, which identified our nation's paralyzing conservative/liberal division as far back as 1996. Back then, it seemed things could get no worse, what with Republicans' poisonous rancor toward Bill Clinton -- and of course, things have gotten worse. But then, why should we be surprised? Some of us also thought that conservative extremism couldn't get worse than what we experienced under Reagan, who mistook roaring oil fires for a new American dawn and succeeded in killing the limited progress the nation had made toward weaning itself off of oil and exploring alternative energy sources. And of course, things have gotten so much worse since Reagan that even moderates look back a little wistfully at his two terms. (Like Nixon, Reagan's reputation has been enhanced merely by contrast with the thoroughgoing ineptness and stridency of his successors -- not just George W. Bush, but those whom the GOP has embraced, like Sarah Palin.)

I had been hoping Sandel would prescribe some bold, imaginative ways to fix the widening gap between conservatives and liberals, but he could only cite others' small, largely local efforts which, if you squinted hard enough, could be construed as hopeful for renewing comity between the two sides. His incisively observed text petered out with a whimper rather than a clarion call to action.

It's hard to fault Sandel, though, because the next volume I tackled was Harold Bloom's The American Religion: the Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. Bloom surveyed some of the most enduring and idiosyncratically American faiths, including Mormonism, Seventh Day Adventism, and Christian Science, and identified a couple of common features. They all focus quite intensively on revelation and salvation through a deeply personal connection with God, and they have something of a hangup with the end times. Bloom argues that the emphasis on the personal connection to God renders the core of most American Christian sects (including the larger and supposedly more mainstream Protestant denominations, like the Southern Baptist Convention) profoundly different from Christianity as it is understood and practiced in Europe. It is so different, in fact, that Bloom contends that what most Americans practice isn't really Christianity at all, but is something closer to the (now heretical) Gnostic sects that last flourished in the first few centuries after the birth of Christ.

Your mileage on that last score may vary. Myself, after a lengthy detour through Hans Jonas' magisterial The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, while I can see the parallels Bloom drew, I'm not sure he didn't overplay his hand. However, Bloom's book remains valuable to me, if only because his frequent hints at the frighteningly strong hold that religion has on the majority of Americans were a valuable primer for the nigh-apocalyptic message of Kevin Phillips' American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. I'm still reading the latter, but have gotten far enough to be extremely discouraged about the future not merely of the United States, but of the human race as a whole.

You can see, perhaps, why I've written about religion more than once since the beginning of the year. And that doesn't include my two entries about marriage, or the two about gay teens in a small town, or the brief mention of the Pew Religious Landscape Survey, or the one about Jay Leno being sued over a Romney joke that ticked off some Sikhs, all of which touched on matters religious in some way. Due to the happenstance choice of Sandel's work several months ago, religion has been on my mind.

Phillips, though, makes explicit what I've merely suspected: that American religious zeal is out of control and having dangerous, cancerous effects on our body politic. In particular, we can't afford either the preoccupation with the afterlife at the expense of the present or the deep-seated and thoroughly irresponsible rejection of rationality in favor of blind, intolerant faith. Phillips cautions that such overzealousness in the past has accompanied imperial decline. My concern is a whole lot bigger: the trend toward fundamentalism, the headlong retreat from and wholesale, contemptuous dismissal of science and reason by the devout is a worldwide phenomenon that could mire the entire human race in war, famine, disease, and ultimately a new Dark Age. And that's if we're lucky. The consequences could be a lot worse if fanatics manage to unleash weapons of mass destruction from which humanity is unable to recover as a species. It took an asteroid to wipe out the dinosaurs (yes, I know there's some controversy about that); it would be the ultimate disgrace to humanity if we wiped ourselves out by reverting to our basest and most parochial instincts after three or four centuries of (admittedly halting and often fitful) progress toward a better understanding of ourselves and our place in the universe. And yet, that's what the surrender of our fate to holy writ, any holy writ, promises for us.