The Game is over!

       GEORGE TEMPLETON: COMMENTARY  

By George Templeton
Rim Country Gazette Columnist
       

 
“A people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives.  A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy or perhaps both”.   James Madison

"I tell you the truth, unless you turn from your sins and become like little children, you will never get into the Kingdom of Heaven.”  Jesus

Morality is behavior judged against a set of rules.  Behavior leads to ethical laws.  Morality and ethics are circular and recursive, feeding upon and growing out of each other, and never standing still.  We are either growing or dying.  We can and must improve on our ethical systems.  We won’t find the answer in objective laws and regulations.  It exists somewhere within subjective personal relationships.

The game is not over, as Donald Trump claims on his Twitter Feed.  It’s not a game.  Like Charlie Brown and Lucy in the comic strip Peanuts, the Republicans are not going to let the Mueller Report snatch their president away at the last minute.

James Morone’s 2003 book, Hellfire Nation, traces the politics of sin in America going back to the time of the Puritans.  Professor Charles Mathewes traces it all the way to the ancient Near Eastern creation myths of Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh.  The pendulum has swung back and forth, from individualistic conservative morality to the liberal Social Gospel and back again, many times.   

Our Sinful Nation

The world admired us, but now they don’t know what to expect.  There is one burning issue.  Who are we?  This is the coming political battle.  It won’t be about fine tuning policy nuances.  The wonder is not that we have selected a political party that is all about power and control.  It is that more than 90% of the GOP favors mental dysfunction and depravity.

Albert Bandura, psychologist and Stanford University professor of social science, noted that standards of right and wrong are highly personal.  We learn from one another.  Debauchery involves our sources of willful evil.  He listed our self-exonerating justifications.

1. Sin is a means to a higher purpose.
2. Use or change the meaning of a word to make sin less reprehensible.
3. Compare your crime with someone else’s worse behavior.
4. When an authority legitimizes evil behavior you are no longer personally responsible for it.
5. When your group acts in an evil way, you are less responsible than if you acted alone.
6. You can ignore consequences that you have not experienced and do not understand.
7. When people are dehumanized it becomes more acceptable for us to mistreat them.
8. Blame someone else.

The 1997 TV show Ally McBeal was about two high-priced lawyers.  So far, it was good.  We admire conspicuous wealth and materialism.  It’s our president’s outstanding qualification.  But this show was about powerful women, one of who was an Asian minority (Ling Woo).  We are not as accepting of that.  But then the stars fell into each other’s arms, kissing.

It’s no wonder!   The conservative preacher, Pat Robinson, claimed, “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women.  It is a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians”.

Moral fervor, right and wrong, public and private, underlies who we are.  It is a positive force.  Our Constitution, slavery, war, prohibition, suffrage, social security, civil rights, Medicare, Medicaid, unleaded gasoline, seatbelts, global warming, sustainability, abortion, gay marriage, eldercare, genetic engineering, and witch hunts reveal social conflict.  Our aspiration is to fix everything.

The liberal ethos peaked in the tumultuous sixties which revealed that our values and rights were in conflict. But the social gospel did not solve all the world’s problems.  Future shock was fatiguing.  It was inevitable that the pendulum would swing to a conservative, individualistic viewpoint, one that substitutes an iron rule for the golden rule.  The moral switch, that government was the problem instead of the solution, began in the Reagan administration and has accelerated ever since.  It will not switch back until Americans feel the pain that comes from polarization. 

“Love thy neighbor as thy neighbor loves thee… He thinks nothing of jeering at me, insulting me, slandering me, and showing his superior power, and the more secure he feels and the more helpless I am, the more certainly I can expect him to behave like this to me.”  So wrote Sigmund Freud in his 1930 book, Civilization and Its Discontents.

You can see how words distort the truth.    

Deceitful Words

Words contain intent.  They paint with a broad brush, unlike the narrow law.  The ones we hear go far beyond politics to narcissistic petulant behavior.

Court ordered surveillance can be spying, free speech politically incorrect hate speech, and critique treason.

Liars who believe their lie are not liars.  They fool themselves. 

In support of our classification of the Iran Revolutionary Guard as terrorists, a TV show argued that economic warfare would make the Iranians fear us and consequently join our side.  They said our president needed to find a way to force congress to do his bidding.

According to John Bolton, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua are the troika of tyranny.  The Trump administration has opened economic warfare with them.  The intent is to force regime change.

Jeff Sessions said the children seeking asylum along with their families are smuggled.  Others claim they are recycled.

Stephen Miller, Trump’s anti-immigration senior advisor, explained that Trump’s power cannot be questioned, but what is needed is like Truman’s 1948 Marshall Plan, not the cancelation of foreign aid.

Our president repeatedly explained that his tariffs are forcing China to deposit to our treasury, but tariffs don’t work that way.  That art is not in the deal.  Recently Trump threatened to place tariffs on Mexican cars, but there is no such thing.  They are our cars and Mexico is our partner.  A religious textbook referred to Godless Globalization.

A Republican Congressman explained that Robert Mueller, ex FBI director and Special Counsel for the Department of Justice was a professional witness.

Our Attorney General has said that he will investigate the investigators.  Mad Magazine’s Spy Versus Spy cartoon accurately portrays human nature.  By joining the fray and politicizing justice, Trump has made himself no better than his advocates and accusers.  

Do we no longer trust experienced experts?  Do we want a novel, childlike leader who has yet to encounter reality demons?  Would we deep down inside prefer a dictatorship?  We should consider that dictators get their power from people’s fear and their belief in simple solutions to complicated problems.  

When Things Fit Properly

Man’s ideas and inventions combine with biblical generations of history to create our perception of time and place.  Youth will assemble tomorrow.  They will have to figure out how to put the pieces together.  They have the higher stake in the future.  But have we acted responsibly to leave them a manageable world?

There are three dimensions, x, y, and z.  We can rotate each symmetric piece of the future about any axis and then assemble them in the changed orientation.  For example, up becomes down, left becomes right, and top becomes bottom.  Some orientations are the only correct ones, where everything works, but we stand on our own two feet.  As a result, we miss the perspectives made apparent by having to look at things from different angles.

A single short physics equation has hundreds of pages of implications.  The root we look for here is not obvious or necessarily found in any book.  Most of us can drive a stake into the ground without understanding energy, momentum, friction, inelastic collisions, and deformable bodies, yet when it comes to life or death we would want the surgeon to know more than a common laborer.  Everyone is a mechanical engineer because they can see, but many things in electronics, physics, and humanity call us to see the unseen.  The problem is that proven science is not always intuitive or even rational.

Search for the root of things.  Put yourself into every situation.  It is not what anyone else claims.  There is no perfection.  It is the reason why we need to be more critical.  If we don’t plan for the future, and if we are not willing to strive for it, there will be no future. 

Reality is terrifying.  We are responsible!  How do we deal with that?  The answer is not to adopt false views of ourselves and the rest of the world.  We must have the courage to live a life of hope, not pride.  Our lives matter.  The universe is a place of meaning and value because we live in it and are entangled with it in ways that are not appreciated or understood.  It is not a place of absolute truths.  It is as Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate physicist wrote, “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing.  I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong”.

A Golden Rule

Jesus taught in parables.  They require us to read between the lines.  One of his many lessons concerned the story of the prodigal son.  In it, a younger son ran away and squandered his share of the family estate on extravagant living while the elder son stayed at home and helped his parents.  When the money ran out, the young son returned to his father pleading for support.  The father’s reaction, much to the chagrin of the elder son who should receive the first share, was to throw a big party and welcome the irresponsible youth home.  Shouldn’t reward correspond to merit?  The example is not about how fathers ought to behave or ancient Jewish law.   It illustrates how they do behave.

We say our beliefs are justified when there are things that support our claims and reduce doubts.  That which comes from men fades away, but they cannot destroy ultimate reality.  The first century Jewish teacher, Gamaliel, explained, if one chooses the wrong thing to destroy, they might find themselves fighting against God.

The young earth crowd pictured President Obama as the Anti-Christ, complete with horns, cloven hoof, and tail.  It was the idea of personified evil.  But there is no such thing as evil or the supernatural.  Look inward instead of outward to understand.  The universe is completely natural, but mysterious.  We have good and evil behaviors.  They reveal adjective evil.  It all depends on the situation.

Religion has two functions.  One is to provide a foundation for moral behavior.  The other is social.  It is ironic that people who so badly want to do the right thing, who love their group, end up doing the wrong thing.

It is the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, where friends murdered 800,000 of their good neighbors in a 1994 three month blood bath.  Now a 4 year proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran threatens 12 million Yemen civilians with starvation.  There is no response like the 1948 Berlin airlift.  It supplied food, clothing, and medical supplies to German civilians.  The murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi prompted Congress to challenge our President’s authority with a bill to stop the military support of Saudi Arabia.  He vetoed it.

Feeling Jealous

Altruism may not benefit the individual.  It promotes weakness.  But that was evolution before the complexities of the modern world.  History demonstrates that prosperity depends on stability.  Minorities can overthrow the majority by dividing them.  We are all in the same sinking boat.  It makes little sense to say that we will not operate the bilge pumps because somebody could be getting more than their fair share.  This is the problem with the Trump administration.