“The first duty of the philosopher in our world today is to fight against fanaticism under whatever guise it may appear.”

-Gabriel Marcel

Listen to what Marcel is saying here. He is saying that we don’t get to pick which fanaticisms we oppose and which we embrace. He is saying that fanaticism as such must be opposed. Given that every “ism” is a fanaticism” more or less cleverly concealed, are we then to oppose all of them? Must we always be “reasonable”?  Or do some things demand a level of commitment from us that cannot be described as anything less than “fanatical”? If so, then on what ground do we base our triage? How to decide which “isms” to oppose and which to champion? Everyone can agree that the fanaticisms of communism and fascism should  be opposed wherever they present themselves. Many would say that capitalism (especially of the uncontrolled, freebooter variety) should equally be opposed.  But what about those “isms” of which  we approve? What about internationalism? Humanism? And what about that most problematical of fanaticisms, idealism? If these fanaticisms are not also to be opposed, then we need to evolve a “truth test” for good vs. bad fanaticisms, a truth test that by the nature of its structure and content would command assent from any rational moral agent. This truth test would require a lot more rigor than “Well, this fanaticism is nice to people and this fanaticism is mean to people.” That’s  the truth test of the schoolyard, and is useless.

This subject demands an expanded essay in itself. More: it demands a book. Maybe some day when I hit the lottery I’ll have the free time to  write it. 🙂

On 9/11, America was shocked to discover that there was an outside world with many, many people in it who quite simply hated America’s guts – and this discovery scared the hell out of America. If the last several years are an indication of what America’s future holds – and I believe they are – then 9/11 will haunt and infest American cultural life for many years to come. Everything that Americans think, write, do and believe will be refracted through this enormous funhouse lens. This event, which contained so much potential to inspire serious-minded reflection and subtle analysis, instead inspired America to do what it does best: unleash its power.

Michel Foucault wrote of:

A power that presented rules and obligations as personal bonds, a breach of which constituted an offense and called for vengeance; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility, the first sign of rebellion .. of a power that had to demonstrate not only why it enforced its laws, but who were its enemies … of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as ‘superpower.’

America’s favorite ritual display is war, something that seems to have an almost addictive power over Americans. America spends as much on war as the rest of the world combined. This is beyond any sane concept of “security”; this is the behavior of a junkie.

I do not describe this behavior as “addiction” lightly. As writer Chris Hedges pointed out (at a college commencement address at which he was shouted down by an auditorium full of fresh-faced, patriotic young Americans), “the seduction of war is so insidious because so much of what we are told about it is true – it does create a feeling of comradeship which obliterates our alienation and makes us, for perhaps the only time in our life, feel we belong.” This is why America – a country full of people who are so un-alike in so many ways – embraces this addictive new chapter in its love affair with war, the “Global War on Terror.” Because as soon as that warm, patriotic glow of togetherness starts to dim (as it appears it is now doing with the “Iraq front in the war on terror”), a new battle in this war without end is served up: pure, uncut, expensive as hell but cheap at twice the price, ready to be mainlined by an eager nation.

America does not view its decades-long string of foreign-policy disasters (most recently the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) as failures of diplomacy and policy. War replaces diplomacy and defines policy. War is the point: so easy, so unambiguous, so damned glamorous compared to the mundane tedium of building consensus and displaying moral leadership.

But what is this frantic, almost compulsive resort to the military option as the default response really in aid of?

I recently found myself re-reading Hobbes’ Leviathan, and I was struck by how easily one can map Hobbes’ mythical authoritarian/submissive society to America in the 21st century. Hobbes believed that a society’s function was to accrue more and more power, to strive constantly to seize the upper hand, all in aid of defending a passive and cowering populace from a world full of evil enemies. Hobbes argued that humans are always willing to accept submission to a strong and domineering leadership in exchange for protection from evildoers. Protection from fear itself, in effect. The citizens of Leviathan were so riddled with fear and doubt that they surrendered their freedom with breathtaking eagerness. America’s default attitude since 9/11 can best be summed up by Derrida’s wonderful phrase: “manic triumphalism.” However, this is mere posturing, intended to cover a deep core of dread. Underneath all the testosterone-laden, Hoo-Rah bravado, America in the 21st century is the new Leviathan, in which the citizens cower like whipped dogs.

Still, the unabashed willingness with which Americans surrendered their freedoms must give us pause. Because at the end of the day, that is the fundamental question: why did so many Americans toss off the burden of freedom with such eagerness? I would like to propose at least a partial answer. America is a country where 90% of the people describe themselves as “religious” and 46% describe themselves as “evangelical.” Eighty-six percent of Americans believe in miracles; 83% believe in a real, literal Virgin Birth. Over 40% of Americans believe the world will end in an actual battle of Armageddon, and a stunning 45% believe in a real, anthropomorphic Devil. With horns, mind you. To the majority of Americans, the people who live and die within such a belief system, America’s vaunted “freedom” – and, more importantly, the consequences of that freedom – is, quite simply, horrifying. Profanity and nudity on TV, gay marriage and adoption, “Feces Madonna” and “Piss Jesus” and Mapplethorpe’s photos of men with bullwhips jammed up their asses, on and on and on. They look at America’s free society, they look at the things that this free society permits to happen and they hate what they see. They absolutely hate modern America, and they believe that surrendering their freedom is a very small price to pay in order to make it stop.  These Americans have more in common with Muslim fundamentalists than they can ever admit to themselves. This is the secret heart of darkness in 21st century America. America will have another Bush some day, because it is what so many Americans want and need.

Recently publisher here and crossposted here.

I wanted to try and generate some discussion on a subject that will continue to resonate regardless of who wins in November: the pathological coupling between fundamentalism, flag worship, and what can be called, for lack of a better term, “warrior worship.” Join me below the fold, won’t you?

Originally posted at The Crusty Polemicist.

1. Clermont on the Potomac

On November 27, 1095, at a religious council held in Clermont, Pope Urban II delivered

what is perhaps the most famous sermon ever composed. He informed the assembled

faithful that he had “come into these parts with a divine admonition for you”.  Urban’s

listeners, who probably expected a mundane, workaday bit of preaching, instead found

their faces burning with holy shame as their Pope cried out, “O what a disgrace if such a

despised and base race, which worships demons, should conquer a people which has the

faith of omnipotent God and is made glorious in the name of Christ!”  Urban was calling

Christendom to strike out at the “despised and base race” known as the Muslims, and

strike them down in the name of a vengeful and broad-shouldered God. Europe thrilled to

Urban’s depiction of it as the very sword-arm of Christ, and it promptly marched off en

masse to commence the long-lived folly we now call “The Crusades”.

This sort of militant Christian religiosity is viewed nowadays by most developed Western

nations as a quaint though bloody aspect of a long-ago period of de facto religious

insanity in Europe and the Middle East.  I say “most” because there is one glaring

exception: the United States, where precisely this sort of militant Christian religiosity is resurgent, rampant, and (as the American President assures us) “on the march”.  The American “War President” is totally engaged as a constant, zealous cheerleader for this sense of a unique Christian mission.  Mister Bush’s “war on terror” has been and will continue to be a war by a militantly Christian country against a predominantly Muslim part of the world, led by a President who genuinely believes he was called by God to this one great task.

Bush’s militant Christian zeal, and his deployment of the discourse of a distinctly American sermonizing in the service of war, simply confirms the worst suspicions of the rest of the world that America is indeed fighting a “Crusade” against Islam. Any European leader who spoke to his people in the language used by Bush would be sent packing to the sound of gales of laughter, but Europe adopts a condescending attitude towards Bush’s new Crusade at its peril. Bush’s followers may sound like classic religious loonies – indeed, as we shall see, many of them are – but they are also (for the moment) at the steering wheel of the world’s last remaining superpower. As such, they are very dangerous indeed, and it is worth the time to try to decipher the strangely hypnotic cadences that Bush uses to lift up his faithful to fight the   great Crusade.

We need to understand that George W. Bush is not a President. He is a preacher. He is only at home when he is delivering a sermon. Outside the familiar ground of the fundamentalist tent, Bush is testy, impatient, insecure, uncomfortable inside his own skin. But when he has worked himself up to the sort of pure, testifying eloquence that evokes a form of religious mania created and purified on dusty American back roads by sun-maddened itinerant preachers, the naked outpouring of almost devotion and affirmation from his congregation is a darkly terrifying thing to see. Bush the preacher knows something that his audience also knows, something that America alone in the world knows: Evil is real. The End Times are coming. The Devil is real, and waits for the unwary at every moonlit country crossroads. And America, alone among all the nations of the Earth, is called by God to accomplish the thing that has never been accomplished in the whole long, sad history of religion:  “to rid the world of evil.” We need to explore the history, the structure, and the passion of Mister Bush’s long and continuing sermon, if for no other reason than to conjure ways to blunt its dangerous influence in the world.

2. “God Speaks Through Me”

One can savor the irony of the famously messianic

chest-thumping of the atheist President Lincoln and of the vicious white supremacist

President Wilson, but we must understand that there has always been a strain of

what I have chosen to call “sermonic discourse” in the war rhetoric of American

Presidents.

For instance, in his address to the American Congress at the beginning of 1942, Franklin

Roosevelt stated unequivocally that “victory for us means victory for religion. And they

[the enemy] could not tolerate that. The world is too small to provide adequate living

room for both Hitler and God.” Roosevelt ends this amazing and little-known sermon using words that sound all too familiar today: “We are fighting to cleanse the world of ancient evils,  ancient ills.”

One can easily trot out example after example of this sort of sermonic discourse in the

history of the United States. It is really not surprising, given

that those settlers who first “tamed” the “New World” consisted of small sects (today we

would call them “cults”) composed of people whose religious peculiarities were considered too radical and dangerous to be allowed to remain in Europe

(no small feat, given the general religious madness infesting Europe at the time).  But —

and this cannot be emphasized too strongly — all of these sermonizing Presidents (with the

possible exception of Wilson) understood that their rhetoric was rhetoric, which gave

them the saving grace of a sense of proportion and distance.  George W. Bush is

another species of President. When Bush preaches, he is completely sincere. This is a

man  who delights in telling people that, were it not for the saving power

of Christ, he would be sitting at a bar somewhere in Texas instead of running the world.  

As head of the most overtly Fundamentalist administration in memory, Bush is utterly

convinced that “God speaks through me.”

George Bush’s single rhetorical gift consists in conveying this sincerity to large numbers of  Americans. He does this, not through a single  “call-to-arms” sermon, as Urban did at

Clermont, but rather by refining and amplifying the uniquely American sermonic

discourse, by using the cadences and imagery of the Baptist pulpit so that his every

speech becomes yet another passage in one long sermon, a sermon with the power to

hypnotize.

3. “Let he who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

One must be wary of conflating sincerity with transparency when unpacking the content

of the Bush sermon. Bush is utterly sincere and utterly obscure in his meaning – unless

you are one of the faithful. It is impossible to ever take a single word of the Bush sermon at face value. All of Bush’s speeches are sermons, and all of his sermons are parables. One can never understand Bush’s power over the faithful unless one learns the “code” he uses to give a wink and a nod to his fellow believers.

All due credit for crafting the ongoing discourse of the Bush sermon must be given to

Michael Gerson, Bush’s one-time chief speechwriter. Gerson, the man who gave us

the unforgettable phrase “Axis of Evil”, is a typical product of the American Midwest. He

is also a theology graduate, and as such is capable of manufacturing the perfect  Christian allusion to complement Bush’s often inarticulate passion. But we must never mistake the servant for the master. Bush dictates the content, Bush dictates the underlying message, and Bush is the master of the code.  Let us take a look at a few

examples of how the code is deployed.

In one of his annual “State of the Union” messages, Bush spoke of the “wonder-working

powers” of the “goodness and idealism and faith of the American people”. For a non-

American (or even a non-religious American, of which there are still a few), this

would seem like an odd, “quaint” sort of phrase for America’s highest elected

official to use. But a member of the Fundamentalist faithful would immediately recognize

the phrase as coming from the gruesomely-named hymn, “There is Power In The Blood”.

In the next “State of the Union” speech, Bush deployed vivid imagery that

contained words and echoes  guaranteed to resonate with Fundamentalists. When

he spoke of his belief that “History has called America and our allies to action”, he knew

that his followers, hearing the potent word “call”, would immediately make the necessary

substitution in their minds and hear “God” instead of “History”.  He sent the same

message in a speech to the Association of Religious Broadcasters when he stated that “we

must also remember our calling as a blessed nation to make the world better … and

confound the designs of evil men.”  Continuing, Bush claimed that “Freedom is not

America’s gift to the world. It is God’s gift to humanity. Therefore, the nation which

embodies freedom should bear this gift to every human being in the whole world.”

We need to step back and take a long look at this problematic word, “freedom”. Note

how often Bush uses the word “freedom” in his sermon, and how often it seems to stand

out as so “odd,” both in the context in which he uses it and against the realities of the Bush project. I have come to the conclusion that, when speaking of “freedom”, Bush is

employing the time-honored preacher’s tool known as the parable. When you hear a Bush

sermon, do a little thought experiment: every time he says “freedom”, mentally substitute

the word “Christianity.”  I have been going back over many of the components of

Bush’s long sermon, and the substitution works so precisely that I am forced to

conclude that this is no accident, that he is sending a nudge-nudge wink-wink to the

faithful. Let us try substituting the word “Christian” in place of “free” and “freedom” and see what happens.

“Christianity is not America’s gift to the world. It is God’s gift to humanity.”

“I believe that God wants everybody to be Christian.”  

Here is a longer example. Note that even in this extended passage, the substitution maps

perfectly.

“Christianity is both the plan of Heaven for humanity, and the best hope for progress here

on Earth. The progress of Christianity is a powerful trend. Yet, we also know that

Christianity, if not defended, can be lost. The success of Christianity is not determined by some dialectic of history. By definition, the success of Christianity rests upon the choices and the courage of Christian peoples, and upon their willingness to sacrifice.”

See, one can treat this as an entertaining intellectual parlor game – but a game with dark, sad  consequences.

For those who naively believed that Bush was not sincere, and that he

would drop the sermonic discourse in his second term, his 2004 inaugural address must

have been a chilling wakeup call. If you have never  read a transcript of this address, I invite you to do so. In this short address, he used the code word “freedom” 27 times (and the word “free” an additional 8 times). Many who lacked the ears to hear the parable

embedded in this sermon puzzled over this constant drumbeat of the word “freedom”.

Once one understands what the word “freedom” actually means to Bush and his

followers, the speech is terrifying.  Italy’s newspaper La Republica summed it up by

saying, “there is a sense of a man who considers the whole world as his own parish.”  I

personally felt a cold chill when Bush proclaimed to American that “we have

a calling from beyond the stars to spread freedom across the world.” In trying to shake

this disturbing invocation from my mind, I joked “well this proves it — he’s getting his

marching orders from alien space invaders from beyond the stars!” None of my friends

laughed.  Come to think of it, neither did I.

4. “Like Joan of Arc, You Must Be Brave”

If my suspicion is true, and Bush is sending “coded sermons” to American

Christian Fundamentalists, one would assume that every major denomination would be delighted to discover that one of their own holds the highest post in the

land. In fact, Bush’s relationship with the major denominations is problematic

at best. When I watch how Bush conducts himself in regard to the American religious

establishment, I am reminded of the great lyrics by Lene Lovich: “Like Joan of Arc, you

must be brave, and listen to your heart.” Like Joan, Bush is constantly being picked up and carried forward by voices in his head – voices that he believes come from God Himself.  There is no trace of irony or symbolism in his manner when Bush tells another head of  state, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then He instructed me to  strike at Saddam, which I did.” Imagine then the impact that this hardwired direct  connection to The Almighty has on those religionists who naively believe that Bush is “one of them”.

Amazingly, given his billing as “America’s most religious President”, Bush is the first

president not to have met with the leadership of any of the mainstream religious

organizations. The Rev. Fritz Ritsch, writing in the Washington Post,

complained,  “The president apparently believes that he can talk about theology from the

bully pulpit without talking to theologians.” The sense of anger and spite at having been

cut out of their traditional (and very lucrative) role as intermediary between the

Sovereign and his God is palpable among American religious leaders. This was felt

most keenly during the mad charge towards war in Iraq. In the weeks before the war

began,  a ranking member of the Council of Methodist Bishops sulked publicly over the

fact that his organization had spent several months in a fruitless attempt to obtain an

interview with Bush, himself a Methodist (at least,  on paper). “The President has not

been willing to hear the voice of his own church.” That lovely old Biblical phrase, “stiff-necked”, seems appropriate here. Bush, quite simply, does not need the religious hierarchy to fulfill his mission. He has his God. And he has his People.

5. Alibi

If George Bush’s sermon did not resonate with a significant portion of the American

people, his high-bandwidth line to The Lord and his apocalyptic discourse

would be of no more interest to us than the rants of some lunatic wandering the streets of

any major city in the world, proclaiming the reality of Evil and the imminent end of this

tired and dissolute old world. Unfortunately, the Bush sermon does resonate across large

stretches of America, and one is forced to confront the question: why?

First, though by no means most importantly, Bush is just like them. He’s a redeemed

sinner, he has seen the light, he has felt his heart moved and changed by a personal

encounter with Jesus Christ. Like so many Americans, he is convinced that he would

have nothing and would be nothing without his unshakeable faith in The Lord.

This view of the world echoes powerfully in the anachronistic backwater of George

Bush’s America. In contrast to the developed Western world, where religion is

withering away due to lack of interest, more than 90 percent of the American people

believe in a real, personal God. Eighty percent of Americans believe in miracles, with 40

percent of them stating that they had personally experienced or witnessed a miracle.  Half

the population of America attends church on a weekly basis, and 53 percent say religion

is a “very important” part of their lives. Amazingly, 43 percent of the American people

believe in the Devil, with horns and a tail. With Bush in the White House, the

nation’s capitol is now the heart of this Christian darkness. A few months ago, I was driving up the highway to give a presentation at a philosophical conference in Washington, DC. As I got closer and closer to Washington, tuning in to a series of fundamentalist rants that showed up and then faded away on my radio dial, I had the eerie sensation – for just a moment — that I was Marlow, coming up the Congo River to the place where Kurtz squatted, waiting.

Bush sermonizes with a finely crafted combination of soothing and inspiring praise

alternating with deep and unequivocal condemnation. America good. Evildoers bad

America battles Pure Evil, so any action America takes in that holy crusade is by

definition Good.   Bush hypnotically repeats the same phrases and cadences of love of

Country and love of God like the invocation of a powerful spell:

“We are the most peaceful country on earth.”

“Americans are a resolute people, who have risen to every test of our time. America is a

strong nation, and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without

conquest, and sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.”

“This nation fights reluctantly….We seek peace. We strive for peace. And sometimes

peace must be defended. Adversity has revealed the character of our country, to the

world, and to ourselves.”

These elements of the Bush sermon are delivered with the utter conviction of passages

from Scripture. They are never questioned because they are beyond

question. The sermon tells the American people every sweet-sounding thing they want to

believe about themselves – and they love him for it. His most fervent supporters

often sound like disciples rather than supporters.  At any of his rallies (stage-

managed to the nth degree and always packed with an audience of loyalists), one gets the

real sense that these Americans believe they are in the presence of their savior (or

Savior). Bush has been told by God to lead this Crusade to rid the entire world of Evil.

He takes this charge from The Lord very seriously. The American people embrace his

certitude and, infused with their own equal measure of certitude, they line up to march off behind him.  Bush tells them that “this crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while”, and that’s just fine with his followers. They’ve never felt so alive, so vital, so sure of America’s place in the world, and of their own place in America. The American people understand that, in the words that Urban used at Clermont, “there remains still an important work for you to do”. Bush’s sermonic discourse, which resonates on such a deep level with the American people, echoes Urban’s call so many centuries ago:  “Now go against the infidels and end with victory this war which should have been begun long ago.”