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.
- Sin is a means to a higher purpose.
- Use or change the meaning of a word to make sin less reprehensible.
- Compare your crime with someone else’s worse behavior.
- When an authority legitimizes evil behavior you are no longer personally responsible for it.
- When your group acts in an evil way, you are less responsible than if you acted alone.
- You can ignore consequences that you have not experienced and do not understand.
- When people are dehumanized it becomes more acceptable for us to mistreat them.
- 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.
n
church on Sunday, we sang a hymn unfamiliar to me in which we asked the
Lord to deliver us from “love of pleasure,” which, as I sang it, I
realized I have no intention of giving up. None. Okay, it’s Lent but I
was raised fundamentalist and it took me a long time to enjoy pleasure,
let alone love it. This was on the windy wintry northern plains where,
frankly, Lent seems redundant.
ow
that I've spent a few hours wading through the Great Grimpen Mire
exposed by Robert Mueller and his prosecutors, I don't know why it is,
but this one sentence put on its hobnailed boots and jumped off a cliff
right onto my exposed last nerve. It comes in a passage about how the
White House and the president* were trying to lie their way around the
fact that James Comey was being fired as director of the FBI because he
refused to let go of Michael Flynn. The administration* concocted an
elaborate story about how one of its reasons to dismiss Comey was that
morale had cratered at the Bureau.
