Author Archives: Larry Franz

Shared Perspectives

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Quoting myself from almost two months ago:

In writing about perspective, I’m a little concerned that I may be conflating or improperly jamming together two different kinds of perspective. But I think the two kinds have enough in common to justify discussing them at the same time. One kind of perspective is the personal or individual kind. The other is more social or abstract. 

An individual’s perspective is the place from which an individual perceives the world, where “position” includes not only the individual’s location in space and time, but also anything else that affects how the individual perceives or understands things. For example, my perspective is affected by my perceptual abilities, my history, memories, beliefs and desires, and also by external factors like whether the sun is shining or how much noise there is from passing traffic.

Usually, something like the noise from passing traffic won’t affect my perspective on an issue like global warming, and having seen An Inconvenient Truth won’t affect my perspective on whether you said “yeah” or “nah” just now, but the factors that affect my perspective can be mysterious. Since so many factors can come into play, my perspective is “where I’m coming from” in a very broad sense. Regardless of what affects my current perspective, whenever I offer an opinion or reach a conclusion about anything at all, I do so from my particular perspective or point of view.  

The other kind of perspective is, at first glance, divorced from individual perspectives. The other kind of perspective is shared. It’s a general way of thinking or perceiving. Pope Francis, for example, has his individual perspective on global warming, but he also views the issue from a Catholic perspective. Many other members of his church do so as well. When thinking about global warming, they take into account the Church’s teachings regarding the creation of the world and our relationship with nature, as well as the church’s position on science.

Yet there are many Catholics who don’t agree with the Pope about global warming. Some of them are ignorant about the science or the church’s teachings. Some of them don’t look at the issue from a Catholic perspective at all. Others think the Pope has the Catholic perspective wrong or is misapplying it in this case (even though the Pope has the authority to speak on global warming from the church’s perspective, if anyone does). 

One problem is that it’s often difficult to say what constitutes a particular perspective. What is, for example, the Catholic, scientific, French or Tea Party’s perspective on any given subject? When trying to put a shared perspective into words, the best we can do is summarize the relatively common features of the individual perspectives of the individuals in the group being considered (for example, scientists or the French).

But not all of the common features are relevant. It’s only the features that pertain specifically to the group of people we’re interested in. The French, for example, are all Europeans, so they have a European perspective. But to identify the specifically French perspective, we would have to identify the perspective shared by French people qua French people (by virtue of their being French and not, for example, Danish).

We might try to identify the French perspective or the scientific perspective on a given question by conducting a very good opinion poll. We could try to find out how the majority of French people or scientists would answer the question, but also what factors affected the answer they gave. We would want to know what considerations they thought were important, but also what unconscious assumptions or tendencies came into play when they gave their answers.

In some cases, however, we wouldn’t be interested in what the majority of our target population thought. Perhaps the majority of our population allowed unrelated factors to affect their thinking. For example, the truly scientific perspective on a difficult or controversial topic might differ from what the majority of scientists are currently thinking. From a scientific perspective, we now understand that human activity is raising the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere and oceans. But if most scientists were employed by oil or coal companies, they might weigh the evidence differently. They would be more likely to share their employers’ perspective while supposedly viewing the evidence scientifically.

Finally, we should keep in mind that any conclusions anyone reaches about a general, shared perspective will be made from that individual’s own perspective. Every claim that a certain fact is true, or a particular course of action is correct, from a common perspective, not merely from the speaker’s perspective, is made from the speaker’s perspective, and should be evaluated on that basis. In other words, if I claim to view the issue of global warming from a scientific perspective, I may be mistaken about what the scientific perspective really is. I may even be trying to borrow the prestige of the scientific perspective for my own point of view. All judgments are made from an individual’s perspective, including judgments about shared perspectives.

Both kinds of perspective, the individual and the shared, are ways of thinking and perceiving that are affected by certain features of the world. The difference between them is that one is a mixture or summary of the other.

The Decline of the Militia

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From What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe:

Jeffersonians of the founding generation had reposed great confidence in the militia as an alternative to a standing army that could be used against the liberties of the people it supposedly protected.This militia, organized in each locality, consisted of all physically fit white males of military age, who would supply their own arms and donate as much of their time as necessary to keep in training and readiness when called upon to deal with insurrection or invasion. This was the “well regulated militia” postulated in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights and prescribed by the federal Militia Act of 1792.

The militia had proved ineffective on many occasions in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 (George Washington never put much trust in it), but its gradual disappearance in the generation after 1815 had nothing to do with its military shortcomings.

The militia gradually ceased to function because most male citizens resented it as an imposition, and hated serving in it so much that they either refused to show up for the periodic musters and drills, or if they came made a mockery of the occasion. Since the men who defied the militia laws constituted the electorate, politicians dated not to coerce service. White male democracy could successfully defy the law, as squatters defied landlords or Indian treaties…. When the war with Mexico came in 1846, the administration made little use of the militia and relied instead on its small professional army plus volunteers trained and equipped at government expense [p. 491].

Now, 170 years later, we have the most powerful military and most heavily-armed police in the world, while sad, angry men, with a death wish for themselves and others, “serve” in the “militia”.

PS – “994 mass shootings in 1,004 days”

It Was the Understatement of the Year

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Planned Parenthood’s president Cecile Richards said it this morning when she testified before the Republican-run House Oversight and Reform Committee:

It doesn’t feel like we’re trying to get to the truth here.

If only Ms. Richards had noticed the inscription on the wall behind her.

Richards

“We are not trying to get to the truth here” is the committee’s official motto.

Of course, I made that last part up (with apologies to the Associated Press), but it might as well be true.

For more sober coverage of today’s event, National Public Radio has a few choice audio clips that “you should hear”, Jezebel has a summary that’s painful to read and Mother Jones shows how to make a misleading chart by leaving out the y-axis.

Wow! Could This Be the Beginning of a Movement?

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Shepard Smith works for Fox News but sometimes doesn’t sound like it.

It was still quite a surprise to see what he said about Pope Francis and President Obama today:

I don’t know — I think we are in a weird place in the world when the following things are considered political. Five things, I’m going to tick them off. These are the five things that were on his and our president’s agenda. Caring for the marginalized and the poor — that’s now political. Advancing economic opportunity for all. Political? Serving as good stewards of the environment. Protecting religious minorities and promoting religious freedom globally. Welcoming [and] integrating immigrants and refugees globally. And that’s political? I mean, I don’t know what we expect to hear from an organization’s leader like the Pope of the Catholic Church, other than protect those who need help, bring in refuges who have no place because of war and violence and terrorism. These seem like universal truths that we should be good to others who have less than we do, that we should give shelter to those who don’t have it. I think these were the teachings in the Bible of Jesus. They’re the words of the pope, they’re the feelings of the president. And people who find themselves on the other side of that message should consult a mirror, it seems like. Because I think that’s what we’re supposed to do as a people, whatever your religion. I mean, it seems to me and I think to probably, as Bill O’Reilly would put it, most clear-thinking Americans — that that’s how we’re supposed to roll.

Yes, that’s how we’re supposed to roll! 

The remarkable video in which Mr. Smith states the obvious (at around 0:36) is available here.

Evangelical Christians for Sanders, the Left-Winger?

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Two articles about Christianity and American politics caught my eye this week.

The first was a New York Magazine interview with someone named Jim, an alumnus of Liberty University, who now works as a pastor and therapist. Liberty University is the Southern Baptist school in Virginia founded by Jerry Falwell, the well-known televangelist and right-wing troublemaker. Jim posted some anonymous remarks on Reddit in response to Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’s recent speech at Liberty. Here’s the part New York Magazine quoted:

As I heard Bernie Sanders crying out to the religious leaders at Liberty University, in his hoarse voice, with his wild hair — this Jew — and he proclaimed justice over us, he called us to account, for being complicit with those who are wealthy and those who are powerful, and for abandoning the poor, the least of these, who Jesus said he had come to bring good news to.

Jim grew up supporting right-wing politicians, as so many evangelical Christians are taught to do. But he eventually realized that his politics conflicted with the Bible. He says that Bible study convinced him:

that the gospel of Christ is what he says it is in the Book of Luke. He says the messenger comes to bring good news to the poor, to heal the sick, and to set the captives free. If our gospel is not good news to the poor, to the captives, to the indebted and the broken, then it is not the gospel of Jesus Christ…

The Bible talks about God destroying those who destroy the Earth and standing for the weak and the penniless. That same God was being displayed on our flags and in our songs as this warrior king who doesn’t like the Muslims and who doesn’t like the poor and who wants us to have free-market capitalism and no regulations. I thought that was inconsistent. This is the same God who designed … his theocratic government in Israel so that the poor were cared for. This is the same God that designs into the concept of ministry a tithe of 10 percent to care for others…

Jim is remaining semi-anonymous for the time being. He says he doesn’t want his patients or congregants caught up in controversy. Nevertheless, he’s going to continue explaining why it makes sense for an evangelical Christian to support Senator Sanders:

I’m calling my fellow Evangelicals to raise their eyes and to pay attention, to read their Bibles carefully, as I was taught to do in an Evangelical school. So many get their faith points from [right-wing TV personalities] Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity, but if they would get their faith from Jesus, they would be surprised at how he does not fit into any box and flips the tables of the money-changers and stands with the adulterers and prevents the death penalty…

Bernie at Liberty, for me, struck such a nerve because he treated us like grown-ups. He presented the message thoughtfully, politely. He was warmhearted, he was jovial, he didn’t play any political games. He didn’t tell us what we wanted to hear. He was just plain, and it reminded me of John the Baptist.

But why does someone like Jim seem like such an outlier? Aren’t evangelical Christians the natural ally of right-wing politicians and Big Business?

No, not according to One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, a book by Kevin Kruse, Professor of History at Princeton. As explained in a review at the website of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Kruse argues that there was an organized effort in the 1950s to link religion and corporate capitalism. For example, a group called:

Spiritual Mobilization sought to rally clergymen to fight liberalism, arguing that the only political position compatible with Christianity was laissez-faire. They aimed to counter the ideas—summed up as the Social Gospel—that good Christians might have obligations to help the poor, that there was something spiritually problematic about the love of money, and that working to create a better and more egalitarian social order might be necessary to live a righteous life. In his first inaugural address, Roosevelt had celebrated the expulsion of the money changers from the “temple of our civilization,” and called for replacing the “mad chase of evanescent profits” with a return to more noble social values. Spiritual Mobilization begged to differ, insisting instead that profit could be the cornerstone of a moral vision.

Spiritual Mobilization was funded by conservative businessmen and a number of corporations, including General Motors and Gulf Oil. Its leader “embraced his identity as a man who preached to the rich: “I have smiled when critics of mine have called me the Thirteenth Apostle of Big Business or the St. Paul of the Prosperous.”

Kruse says that:

 … long before the 1970s, religious leaders … and the businessmen who backed them sought to politicize the country’s churches, seeing them as a natural and sympathetic base. Their concern was not social or sexual politics, but rather economics—they wanted to advance a libertarian agenda to undermine the economic program that became ascendant during the New Deal. This top-down Christianity in turn provided an image of the United States as an explicitly religious nation, creating a rhetoric that inspired the populist Christian conservatives of a later generation. When the men who built the religious right in the 1970s—such as Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority—issued their jeremiads about the United States as a fallen nation, they made the implicit case that the country had hewed more closely to faith before the 1960s. But in fact, Kruse suggests, the pumped-up image of America as a Christian nation had gained popularity only a decade before.

Before Jerry Falwell, there was the evangelist Billy Graham:  

… one of his major concerns [was] the encroachment of the liberal state… Graham opposed the Marshall Plan and the welfare state, and attacked the Truman Administration for spending too much on each…  [In 1951] Graham warned the audience at a North Carolina crusade that the country was no longer “devoted to the individualism that made America great,” and that it needed to return to the “rugged individualism that Christ brought” to humankind.

America has been a Christian nation for a long time in the sense that most Americans have thought of themselves as Christians and still do. The question is: what role should Christianity play in a our democracy? The Constitution requires separation of church and state, but people have the right to support politicians who share their religious ideals. This makes me wonder what America would be like if there were more Christians like Jim.