Welcome friends!
I’m sure I’ve discussed it before, probably many times, but the arrival of the winter holiday season here in the USA makes me want to write a little something more about the increasingly clear relationship between religious modes of thought and the sort of overtly authoritarian and anti-democracy sentiment we’ve been seeing more and more from conservatives and members of our right wing Republican Party.
Of course, by winter holiday season I’m talking especially about Christmas which, in case you’re not already familiar with the history of the holiday, is basically now a nominally Christian holiday that postulates Jesus Christ was born in late December suspiciously near the date of the winter solstice, a date and an event that was apparently already or also celebrated as a holiday by various non-Christian cultures including the Ancient Romans, who had a big holiday in mid-December to honor their god of agriculture, Saturn, and the ancient Germanic tribes of Europe, who celebrated a holiday around the same time called Yule, which involved their own god Odin. Seems the tendency of American religious conservatives to not take things too literally and to be always up for a good story if it serves a rhetorical purpose didn’t begin with Donald Trump but has been around a good long while. But that’s not what I wanted to talk about. No, the relationship of American style political conservatism to religion that crossed my mind recently has more to do with the religious view of ethics than with a penchant for convenient fictions, although maybe it amounts to much the same thing.
Yes, I thought it might be a good time to just reiterate my belief that the most reliable basis of support for the ethos of political democracy is the realization that ethics are ultimately subjective and that the only sensible, stable, peaceful way for a society to temporarily and contingently resolve issues of social ethics, or at least the social ethics expressed in the law and in particular the law governing economic relationships, is to periodically agree upon them socially in some ongoing, perpetually reassessed way, that is to say, through democratic government. The opposing view, that ethics are objective, in the religious version laws set down by supernatural law givers, generally leads to fundamental dissatisfaction with democratic government and a yearning for a system in which high priests, or philosopher kings in the less common secular version, are given the power to enforce the one true code of ethics no matter the potential disagreement of the unfortunate populace.
There are exceptions, as I’ve pointed out previously. Historically, some religious groups who presumably supported religion-based objective ethics argued right behavior resulting from government enforced edicts doesn’t really count for much in a religious sense and were perfectly willing to leave it to democratic government to come up with laws expressing popular ethics that might or might not correspond to what they believed represented the one true ethics. How else to demonstrate one’s ethical superiority and hence one’s religious credentials? And, of course, some religious folk who have historically endorsed objective ethics seem to have supported political democracy out of the rather sensible and practical fear the wrong sort might end up in charge of government and pronouncing on what they felt were the one true ethics and that diverse secular democracy ensuring individual freedom of conscience was their best bet to preserve a realm in which to discuss and pursue what they saw as the authentic as opposed to government endorsed one true ethics. Certainly religious warfare between different Christian sects was rampant in Europe in the centuries preceding the founding of the United States, so one can understand their concerns. However, in general, I would suggest the realization from the world of modern secular philosophy that ethics are based ultimately in a fundamentally subjective moral sense that must then be reconciled in some way with those of other people is one of the fundamental building blocks on which the ethos of political democracy rests.
Now don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t argue for a moment a belief in religion-based objective ethics is the only point of connection between religious modes of thought and contemporary political conservatism and Republicanism here in the USA. Surely the peculiar suspension of human reason and normal modes of thought on the part of many conservatives and Republicans today is simply an application of pathological religious modes of thought to politics in which, in this instance, one’s faith in the chosen one must supersede anything and everything, including the evidence of the senses, and only slavish obedience to the chosen one promises salvation, with the opposition apparently irredeemably evil and in league with the devil and so on. The fanaticism, ignorance, bigotry, hatred, and ever present threat of violence alone would be enough for most objective observers to perceive the contemporary conservative and Republican movements in the USA to be little more than an expression of a modern religion inspired Age of Ignorance, which if unchecked one supposes must inevitably result in a benighted era here in America comparable in scope and intensity to medieval Europe’s long and unfortunate Dark Ages.
The rather obvious connection between religious modes of thought and political conservatism and Republicanism should remind us all the monster of contemporary conservatism is a multi-headed beast that we must address in some way in all its many guises and contexts. But fighting the multi-headed monster of modern conservatism is essential for the future not only of democracy here in the USA but elsewhere and indeed for the future of humanity itself.
I wish you all a happy holiday season and a new year very much better in every way than the old.
