Archive for the ‘conservatism’ Category
Conservative Christianity is strange
choose your messiah
I’m not a Christian and never have been, though I was sent to a Salvation Army Sunday School every week, from about the ages of six to ten, where I listened with bewilderment to very serious stories about our father in heaven, who made us and loves us and who we should be endlessly grateful to for our existence, and who knows our every thought, and who will punish us for our bad deeds, and who is everywhere though he lives in heaven, which is in the sky somewhere, and we should pray to him regularly, because then he’ll know that we love him, though he doesn’t really need our love because he is omnipotent and omniscient and words like that, and he had a son who lived for a while on earth, but that’a another story.
It all sounded pretty unlikely to me, but it was actually scary how seriously these Salvation Army people took it all. However the Jesus stuff seemed a bit more comprehensible, as mostly he seemed to be a real person who lived long ago preaching kindness and forgiveness and telling stories about good deeds and healing the sick and saying nice things about the meek and the weary and the heavy-laden. His being the son of this invisible all-seeing and all-knowing god bloke didn’t make much sense, except that he also performed miracles like his Dad, who miraculously created the whole world. But what seemed to make sense was that Jesus was like some model human being, a kind of example to us all as to how to live a good life.
Which brings me back to conservative Christianity, especially in the USA, where Christianity holds sway more than in any other putatively Christian nation. Interestingly, the two countries I’m most associated with, Scotland, where I was born, and Australia where I’ve long lived, are both leading the field in abandoning that religion, doubtless due to my enlightening, or baleful, influence.
The question being, was Jesus, as portrayed in the gospels, a conservative?
Some years ago, during Trump’s first term, I went to a meet-up, of sorts, called ‘deep thinkers’, which turned out to be a bit of a joke. At the bar I encountered a bloke who I deemed to be of Middle Eastern origin (I had a lot of Arabic-speaking students at the time, and he looked similar), and we talked briefly about his work in computing. Then I asked him where he was from. ‘Port Pirie’, he said – pointedly, it seemed to me. Oops, he didn’t want to be considered a ‘foreigner’, presumably. Then, more or less out of the blue, he announced that Donald Trump was the greatest President in US history. Well, I never. He also described himself as a conservative Christian – I can’t recall which announcement came first, but the combo immediately linked Jesus and Trump in quite a curious way.
Years ago in either this or a previous blog, I wrote, over a number of posts I think, an analysis, of sorts, of the gospels, influenced no doubt by the classical scholar Robin Lane Fox, especially his books The unauthorized version: truth and fiction in the Bible, and Pagans and Christians. There are many difficulties – different translations soften or ‘beautify’ the original language, the gospel of John differs markedly in its account from the synoptic gospels, some events, such as ‘the woman taken in adultery’ (John 7:53–8:11), are later interpolations, and the whole Christmas day as the birth of Jesus thing is of course spurious. Arguably, the Jesus character is full of contradictions – ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ on the one hand, and ‘I come not to bring peace but a sword …. to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’, etc, on the other. But generally I’ve always preferred the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ version – I mean, who wouldn’t?
But again I ask myself, did he preach conservative values? Not consistently. If this means ‘family values’, I’ve just quoted his words against them. In another speech he says ‘Whoever reviles his father and mother must surely die’, which doesn’t leave much room for nuance – but then again, everyone must surely die, so it’s a bit meaningless. And what if the mother of X is an axe-murderer and the father of X is a whore?
Anyway, I was wanting to argue that conservative Christianity is self-contradictory but now I’m not so sure, since Jesus himself is not as coherent a character as might have been hoped. My vague image of him wandering around Judea barefoot, healing the sick, telling stories about good Samaritans, changing water into booze, and encouraging little children to come to him, for some reason, is one of a well-meaning, slightly eccentric Mr Nice Guy, a bit pompous at times, but, according to his many portraits, quite nice-looking in a pleasantly effeminate, and surprisingly non-Jewish, non-Levantine way.
So I like to take the view that Jesus was a nice guy who mostly promoted peace and love, so I wondered at this conservative Christian being a fan of Donald Trump. Surely no Christian, conservative or otherwise, could possibly see ‘Old Shitmouth’, as a like to call him, as bearing any resemblance to their religious hero. And yet, my Christian interlocutor did talk about ‘illegal people’ on the USA’s southern border – this at a time when the news was full of children being locked in cages in southern Texas. I have to say that I was so flabbergasted that someone who was so keen to announce to me that he was a Christian should talk about people being ‘illegal’ in any sense, that I was rendered speechless. Much later, the Yiddish term trepverter, picked up from a Saul Bellow novel, came to mind. It’s about thinking of a smart retort, or comeback line, after the moment has passed – though for me it was less a retort than a disquisition on the legality and legitimacy of all creatures great and small, because, after all, the Lord God made them all….
And that’s the point – many of the biggest US supporters of old Shitmouth label themselves as conservative Christians, which raises the question of what Christianity actually means to them. Love thy neighbour? Blessed are the peacemakers? It can’t mean these things. It must mean that sword stuff, the crucesignati, the fight to death against the infidels – with Old Shitmouth as their Dear Leader….
From this distance, in Australia, it’s tragicomedy on a grand scale. We shall see how it all ends…
some observations on governments and the people they represent
fighting the conservative wave in Canada
Bonobos don’t have nations, but humans invented this concept, and tried to make something of it, a few centuries ago. Modern nations all have governments, some of which are elected by the soi-disant citizens of those nations. Elected governments belong to a ‘party’ or an alliance of parties that has gained more votes than another competing party or coalition of parties. For a period of time, until the next set election – in three, four or five years – this government gets to deal with the finances of the nation, including how much finance, garnered through taxation, that government gets to play with. Some parties believe in minimal government, and tend to reduce taxation, while others feel that the government should have a larger role in such public benefits as healthcare, education, welfare, infrastructure, and legal and policing systems, requiring a larger tax burden on the populace, based roughly on that much maligned dictum, ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’.
So the burden on citizens would be indexed according to income. Children who have no income, wouldn’t pay tax, and the elderly, no longer able to work, would, depending on their savings and assets, be supported by government pensions. As to the rest, the amount paid, and the manner in which that amount is spent, is subject to endless debate and scrutiny.
So this post will focus solely on democratic nations. It’s interesting that the concept of ‘nation’ has become so reified and so positive that Aboriginal or ‘First Nations’ people, in Australia and the Americas, have happily adopted it. We likely now think of the ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians, or Genghis Khan’s Mongols, as belonging to a nation, so it’s worth noting that, only a few centuries ago, we could have travelled from the region of Lisbon to that of Vladivostok – nearly 14,000 kilometres – without crossing a border or being asked to produce a passport or a visa. Not that we wouldn’t have been treated with suspicion or hostility along the way!
I remember years ago hearing of people who, rather heroically in my opinion, refused to belong to a nation. They rejected passports, citizenship and all such paraphernalia and designations. They fully accepted, however, that they were human beings. Interestingly, when I look this up on the internet, all I get is stuff about people who are refused citizenship – the Rohingyas of Burma and other discriminated minorities, and of course refugees around the world. These people, of course, greatly outnumber the few who take what they consider a heroic stand against national identity.
So, from the preceding, you’d be right in assuming that I take a somewhat skeptical view of nations and nationalism, possibly because I was born in one nation and transported to another as a child – no free will after all. But given that the human world is divided into nations for the foreseeable, and that nations must be governed, it seems obvious to me that democratic systems, in which the people have some input into how they’re governed, are the best systems available, though the oscillations between limited governments and over-arching ones can be quite frustrating.
It’s also worth noting that, regardless of whether right or left wing governments are in power, some nations have more of a tendency towards collectivism, and others towards individualism. We can see this in national data regarding the role of government in education, welfare and healthcare, amongst other things. For example, most national democratic governments stipulate a minimum wage, though obviously comparisons between nations would be difficult. For example, Austria has no clear minimum wage, and wages appear to be set via collective bargaining by ‘job classification for each industry’, and India has over a thousand minimum wage rates over many different industries and roles. Federalist nations such as the USA and Canada may have many state rates that are higher than the federal rate, and so on. And of course many countries, even democracies, have unregulated ‘under the counter’ labour of all kinds. The USA, with its large contingent of libertarian, anti-government types, would be a prime example.
Given that I’m fully convinced that free will is a myth, I’m no libertarian. In fact it seems obvious to me that we dominate the biosphere, and have developed our complex neural structures and our scientific know-how, due to our hyper-social nature rather than individual liberty. It’s also interesting to note that libertarianism is a predominantly male ideology. Interesting but hardly surprising.
And then there’s communism and socialism. As someone who’s long taught English to Chinese students, young and old, I’ve noted how defensive and proud many of them are about their government, and it seems to me obvious that those who choose to remain in China (though of course many would have no choice) would be even more defensive of the so-called communism that their government claims to provide. What I’ve noticed, typically, is that their government, known as the Politburo – that’s to say the full 24-member body, not its Standing Committee, which currently consists of 7 individuals – is entirely male. There have been only 6 female members in the history of the Politburo, formed by Mao in the 1950s. They’ve mostly been wives of other members, and there has never been a woman on the Standing Committee. Funny that, considering that women tend to be more community-minded, which is what communism is supposed to be all about. But then, if China is a communist country, then it must surely be the case that my arse is another planet.
Other countries, such as Russia and North Korea, no longer pretend to be communist, if they ever did. The official title of one, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is about the sickest joke I’ve ever heard, whereas the other’s former title, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was about nothing if not Empire, and wee Vlady wants it all back, and then some.
Of course, virtually all dictatorships are governed by males, but then, so are virtually all democracies. But it’s beginning to change – obviously too gradually for old codgers like me, but certain outliers – we may call them the ‘quiet countries’, such as New Zealand, the Scandinavian nations, and even Australia and Canada – these are the places where women are tending to come to the fore politically. I compare it to the bonobo world surrounded by a rather more dysfunctional chimpanzeeism. What are the countries that make all the headlines? The dysfunctional ones and the brutal ones. And I’m still shocked to find that people have no knowledge of or interest in bonobos.
Australia is heading for a federal election soon, and the buzz in the air is we’re going to succumb to the current wave of conservatism, along with New Zealand and the USA – as if current ‘liberal’ governments are anywhere near heading in the direction of a bonobo humanity.
I suppose we have to play the long game and keep plugging away….
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_wage
Concerning the future, I suspect things might change…
As we’re just about to have an election in the UK I listened to a vox populi set of interviews, which seemed to take place in traditionally conservative electorates, about who should run the country over the next several years. There were complaints about everything being run down, too many immigrants, too many scandals, they shouldn’t have kicked out Boris Johnson, or they shouldn’t have allowed him anywhere near the Prime Ministership, no they won’t be voting Labour, no the Liberal Democrats are useless, I haven’t decided who I’ll vote for, might not vote at all… And there were plenty of complaints about the general neglect of their particular fraction of London, and plenty of images of abandoned and broken down homes and buildings.
By all accounts, the Tories are set to lose this election big-time, after 14 years of incumbency preceded by 13 years of Labour government. I’ve not been paying too much attention to UK politics, having left the place (Scotland in fact) for the balmy shores of Australia as a five-year-old. I was surprised to learn just this week that voting isn’t compulsory there, which I think is a shame. When a few years ago there was a vote in Scotland regarding national independence, I mentally sided with the ‘no’ vote, as I generally take a ‘together’ view over a ‘separated’ view. But then Brexit happened, which of course was a shambles.
I try to be impartial about politics, but of course I have my hobby horses, e.g. moving towards a bonobo humanity, and that involves change, very much. And the very word ‘conservative’ means wishing to conserve, to preserve, to maintain and so forth. Small government, reduced taxation, minimal involvement. Here in Australia, our former long-standing PM, John Howard liked to say ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. But this, of course, misses the point. Landlines were once an acceptable form of communication – I recall how sophisticated we felt when we had a phone connected in the early sixties – but now we all have ‘smart’ phones, which don’t seem to have made us smarter people. We came to Australia by ship, which now seems quaint. Elly Noether, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, had to work without pay, teaching only male students, and often surreptitiously, because it was widely accepted in the 1910s and 1920s that maths and physics were beyond the ken of women, and that wasn’t so long ago in my time frame (we’ll reach bonobo humanity in about 1000 years). Conservatism generally tends to face backwards, as culture moves forward.
Is it a fear of change? We all fear it, to different degrees. The interviewees were reluctant, mostly, to mention particular issues, though they all seemed to voice a general weariness and dissatisfaction with the current government. Immigration was mentioned a couple of times, and unions once. A different video presented a poll of voters’ main concerns heading into the election, and their dissatisfaction with the current National Health Service (NHS) came out well on top. So, low tax, low government revenue, cuts to the NHS, too bad.
I’ve often thought there’s something wrong or missing about current representative democracies, in which there are two major parties locked in combat for the support of the majority, and I’ve written previously about my issues with adversarial systems in general – for example in the law, in industrial relations, in politics, and even in the media, especially in the US. And with the rise of social media, a sort of bloated juggernaut of disinformation and abuse, the future doesn’t appear to look good for the kind of consensus approach to social issues I’ve always hoped for. The dog-eat-dog world of the USA is no example to follow – a broken system of mutual hatreds. ‘The United States exhibits wider disparities of wealth between rich and poor than any other major developed nation’, according to inequality.org, Quelle surprise.
Could it be that, in the long long view, nation states will be in the rear-view mirror? Currently, complaints about immigration and ‘illegals’ are commonplace, but national borders, passports and visas are a recent phenomenon, and so many of us think we’re living in a ‘thousand-year reich’ or an eternal present. Of course I’ve no idea what the human planet will be like in a thousand years, but there’s nout wrong with speculating. And hoping. My hopeful expectation is that transnational and international activities and lifestyles will grow, and that both the local and the global will become more rather than less important. It will become increasingly clear that centralised control – powerful national government – is failing distant local regions with their specific issues requiring specialised local expertise. At the same time, more effective global communications will bring about better dissemination of knowledge and ideas, with ‘red tape’ being reduced or bypassed. Sounds a bit utopian I know…
And the human world will have become more bonoboesque. Not only with female dominance, but a reduction if not a complete dissolution of monogamy. Our scientific discoveries and enquiries will proceed apace, underlining what can be achieved through teamwork and collaboration as well as friendly rivalry between teams. Adversarial approaches will be greatly watered down, and elected representatives will work together for the best results, always allowing for input from the represented. Dictatorships will be almost a subject of ancient history… well perhaps not quite ancient, but history. Children will indeed be cared for communally, and a thriving and happy sexuality will be normalised. Education will be respected, and those doing the educating will be held in particularly high regard. An overwhelming proportion of leaders, in all areas – decision-making, research, education, group dynamics, sanctioning – will be female, though males will be well-treated, consulted and respected.
And if there are no nations? Freedom of movement and interaction will be greater than it is today, facilitated by increasingly improved telecommunications and transport. Language barriers will be reduced by effective translation algorithms. The mechanisation of food production will continue to advance, and housing will undergo a revolution corresponding to the dissolution of the nuclear family and a preference for more communal living. Diets will change as we focus more effectively, both on health and the biosphere we share with all other species. The human population will stabilise, as will its calorific intake. Inequalities will not, of course, disappear, but they will greatly reduce, as the community will insist on nobody being left behind or forgotten. Education and community participation will be the highest priority, as we know that exclusion will fuel resentment, ultimately leading to violence… But involvement in communal activities will be so highly prized that few would be willing to turn their backs…
Okay, okay, just kidding. In a thousand years, we might survive, but things’ll be much more fucked than they are today. I’m glad I’ll be outta here…
But then again…
References
Wealth Inequality