Gus diZerega

One of my favorite blogs, Balloon Juice, brought my attention to an article reporting research demonstrating that a perception of personal powerlessness leads to a greater tendency towards superstition, conspiracy theories, and false conclusions.  I think this has enormous implications for understanding America today.

As institutions become ever greater and farther removed from any sensitivity towards real people, increasingly we are immersed in a society where our influence in many of our daily activities is small and indirect.  Government is not open to our influence in any way we can actually experience.  The same holds for big business, big education, big medicine, and any other area of life where the personal has been overwhelmed by the impersonal.

That indirect emergent processes that coordinate our actions with others may be at work is irrelevant because we do not experience any efficacy on our part.  Thus, the emergent social process I study however beneficial they may be are inadequate for creating a good environment for human flourishing.  I fact, they may breed habits of perception and thinking that ultimately weaken the significant contributions they do make to human well-being.

I have been groping towards a theory of civil society as the actual realm of human well-being because it is not dominated by any single impersonal feedback processes.  This research suggests my intuition may be even more important than I had imagined.

In terms of broadly liberal social theory, it makes the case for focusing on the individual rather than some abstraction of a part of an individual as the unit of analytical and ethical concern.  Out with the ‘consumer,’ the ‘rational actor,’ the ‘citizen,’ and let us return to human beings in all their complexity. I believe this research also radically strengthens arguments for ‘small is beautiful,’ ‘buy locally,’ and the importance of a sense of place approaches towards social life.

I have recently seen many discussions by conservatives, real and feigned, attempting to analyze the collapse of the Republican Party at the polls and the apparent repudiation of ‘conservatism’, with no sign of any improvement in the next elections in two years.  This led me to think about what went so terribly wrong in conservative circles over the past several decades, as a movement with a strong intellectual heritage became associated with the blitherings and blatherings of Limbaugh, Coulter, Kristol, and others while jettisoning almost all its former political principles on the altar of George Bush and the new imperial presidency.

I think I have something worth adding to the discussion. (more…)

One reason I wanted this site was to serve as a place where much of my published work could be made easily available.  Some hacker removed it a while ago and left junk.  It has taken me a while to restore it because of a year from Hell - a death in the family, a stroke,  move, and various other things.  But due to the efforts of my wonderful web mistress, the original articles are back up along with a number of other more recent ones.

If you look up at the top right, under ‘pages’ you will find the basic headings.  Click on one and it will take you to where you can see what is available.

All wars suffer casualties on both sides.  Worse, there is always substantial collateral damage.  The wars against liberal civilization, both hot and cold, that punctuated the Twentieth Century were no exception.  Liberalism emerged triumphant, but hardly unbloodied. (more…)

George Bush has left a fearful wreckage behind him.  Most of those who will read this blog will think of our constitution, justice system, military, foreign policy, health policy, and environmental policy as examples, and you will not be wrong.  But I want to shed a tear for a far less sympathetic victim who in fact shares in the blame.  The Republican Party.

(more…)

I think Kagro X at Daily Kos got it right in the fewest words:

“It’s a great day for Democrats and Republicans alike. For Democrats, Barack Obama was elected President. For Republicans, there was finally dancing in the streets and Americans greeted as liberators.”

Jason Pitzi-Waters at the wonderful Wild Hunt Blog interviews me about issues raised in Beyond the Burning Times, a book of Pagan-Christian dialogue jointly written by m’self and Philip Johnson, an Australian Evangelical.  He will soon have an interview with Johnson up as well.  His blog has lots of other good stuff as well.

Who then would have guessed George Orwell’s predictions in his novel 1984 might simply have been premature?  One of the novel’s most memorable features was depicting the endless stream of lies the government used to manipulate the people and justify its endless wars.  These distortions were imposed therough a deliberate debasement of language, called Newspeak, such as we are seeing today, where Sarah Palin’s abysmal ignorance is considered a virtue.
The lies of the McCain campaign simply put into electoral politics what has become standing operating procedure for the government and its right wing enablers.  One of my favorite online reporters, Glenn Greenwald, captured this point in a perceptive observation:

Way beyond Fox, this is the same thing that our media generally (and with some important exceptions) has been doing for years, at least — mindlessly repeating and confirming false Government claims. That’s what makes Carlotta Gall’s on-scene actual investigation of the Pentagon’s Afghanistan claims so notable — it’s so unusual. From Jessica Lynch’s heroic Rambo-like firefight to Pat Tillman’s murder by Al Qaeda monsters to pre-war claims of the Iraqi menace to post-war claims of Glorious Progress to current claims of the Grave Russian and Iranian Threats to the concealment and then justification of virtually every act of government radicalism over the last eight years, our media has, by and large, done what Fox News did in the Azizabad case — offer itself up as an uncritical conduit for state propaganda.

and

for the last seven years, virtually every American news program has employed as “independent analysts” people who were part of a formal, coordinated and likely illegal U.S. Government propaganda program run out of the Pentagon, a program which resulted in countless false stories broadcast by these networks to boost Government lies. And even after all of that was revealed and documented on the front page of the NYT, these media outlets — all 3 networks, plus CNN and others — continue to employ the propagandists, and worse, refuse even to tell their viewers about what happened, or even to disclose to their viewers the existence of the story, and then — at best — actually defend it all when forced on their obscure blogs to mention it.

Greenwald is abut as peceptive analyst as there is.  Read him at Salon.

One fascinating aspect of this national disaster is the failure of the arument that privately owned press is sufficient to preserve the media’s watchdog functions in a free society.  It clearly is necessary, but it just as clearly is not sufficient.

Although apparently not yet available here in the Sates, Beyond the Burning Times (Lion Hudson, 2008) is now out.  The few reviews I have seen, both Pagan and Christian, suggest our book is living up to our hopes: to initiate a dialogue that practitioners of both traditions believe fairly presents their own position in an atmosphere of mutual respect and openness. In this respect I am very happy.

But I am also intrigued how at crucial places some Christian reviewers appear to have misunderstood my meaning.  The problem may be that I am not theologically trained, coming to this discussion rather late, after encountering deity in a Pagan context, and so being self-taught.  Perhaps also it is that Christian readers read through their own filters, as we all do, and so do not grasp what seems obvious to people wearing a different set of filters.  Perhaps it is due to my own inadequacies as a writer.  Likely all are involved.

Whatever the reasons, I have found myself in the position of many writers, wondering “How can He have read Me as saying That?”

Given that our effort is to promote dialogue, I will use this space to carry it a step farther.  I will keep comments open till they are smothered with porn spam.  By that time hopefully another post on these topics will have appeared.

The nature of the Sacred is hard to discuss for several reasons.  First, it is superhuman and we are not.  Second, many who have had what they took to be experiences of such a Power report it is beyond words, particularly in its most ultimate manifestations.  I agree.  Third, I think reports by those who have never experienced such phenomena can be set aside as rooted in theories that attempt to identify what is most fundamental based on purely human categories.

I would not ever try and discuss this topic except that I had one such experience.

In an otherwise perceptive review, Gerald McDermott, professor of religion at Roanoke College, refers to the long discussed distinction between a personal and an impersonal God in criticizing my perspective.  He writes for example,