Thank God I'm a Country Boy

By many accounts, I am a bit of an odd duck as regards my political history. When I first began thinking about politics in middle school, I was rather right-wing, and remained conservative-leaning all the way through high school. I had some forays into libertarianism and Objectivism as I attempted to articulate myself a bit more sharply late in high school. But when I went to attend university in a medium-sized city, I took a hard turn to the left. I left school and remained residually attached to leftism for a few years, and have returned to conservatism, bolstered by my conversion to Mormonism.
Now, why was leftism so appealing to me in college? On the one hand, leftism is appealing in college in general. College campuses are a cornucopia of liberal causes, with no shortage of activities in which to involve oneself. But I would say something else was at work as well. Even though I adopted left-wing politics, I always retained an antipathy for the Democratic Party. I was a socialist, a Trotskyite. Looking back on it now, I think there was a desire to appease my social environment in adopting a left-leaning political line, but also to express my instinctual revulsion towards liberal politics.
I had no home amongst the urbane College Republicans. In the first instance, I wanted to discuss and elaborate ideas, NOT campaign for candidates. It became clear after not long that the College Republicans were a prep school for party functionaries. These individuals seemed to possess a detached, country club smugness about their own perspective that I found off-putting, to say the least. They had no interest in grappling with ambiguities and hard compromises. They were emphatically not the party of ideas.
Who was? The only community I found was amongst the liberal activists. It was not the measured, thoughtful community of scholars that I had hoped for, but it was the only game in town. But throughout it all, there was an underlying tension between my natural inclinations and my reality.
Pittsburgh was the first place I had lived in that was a significantly liberal (or at least Democrat-controlled) enclave, and the first bona-fide city I had lived in. As part of a military family growing up, I lived primarily in suburban bedroom communities, and usually in areas near military installations where, since these forts and bases contributed immensely to the local economy, they exerted a conservatizing influence on already middle-class local attitudes. Combine this with the fact of the “nomadic existence” of military life as my father put it, and the only sense of roots I came to have were in the backcountry of Appalachia from where my parents had moved. So, much about the assumptions that informed Pittsburghers lives I did not understand.
In fact, I don’t think I ever came to truly understand it. Instead, I subscribed to a brand of left politics that gave me the opportunity to speak the language of the leftists while retaining my criticisms of the meat and potatoes of modern liberalism. For instance, with respect to gun control, instead of sticking to the traditional right-wing arguments against it, I cited the targeting of the Black Panthers in the gun control laws of the 1960s. It was more acceptable to be against something that had a detrimental effect on a radical political organization than it was to have ideas about neo-republican virtue or radically Lockean liberty. So, that was the tack I took. To that extent, I think the Davidsonian “left in form, right in essence” characterization of my politics was correct. Interestingly, I discovered an article in The American Conservative concerning this very issue:

• The endless gun-control brouhaha, which on the surface appears to be a bitter battle between liberal and conservative whites, also features a cryptic racial angle. What blue-region white liberals actually want is for the government to disarm the dangerous urban minorities that threaten their children’s safety. Red-region white conservatives, insulated by distance from the Crips and the Bloods, don’t care that white liberals’ kids are in peril. Besides, in sparsely populated Republican areas, where police response times are slow and the chances of drilling an innocent bystander are slim, guns make more sense for self-defense than in the cities and suburbs.
  White liberals, angered by white conservatives’ lack of racial solidarity with them, yet bereft of any vocabulary for expressing such a verboten concept, pretend that they need gun control to protect them from gun-crazy rural rednecks, such as the ones Michael Moore demonized in “Bowling for Columbine,” thus further enraging red-region Republicans.
  

It is quite fascinating that, unable to take the country out of the boy, I came to argue against crypto-racism when confronted with an urban setting.

Letter to Dawkins

I recently sent a letter to Richard Dawkin's website, critical of his views. If I get a response I will post it as a comment. Below is the letter.

Dear Professor Dawkins,

Forgive me that I am not terribly up to date, but I stumbled on the podcast of a debate you participated at Westminster in March in which the motion was “We’d be better off without religion.” I wondered if you would take a moment to reply to some questions and comments on what you said there.
Responding to the previous speaker Dr. Spivey, you say that religion is not part of your human nature or countless others that subscribe to atheistic beliefs. I don’t think the point was that each individual must necessarily be religious, rather that there is a collective disposition towards religion inherent in the social psychology of humans. It is perhaps not the most desirable quote to employ for the defender of religion, but James Madison once aptly pointed out that "passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob." The gist here is that, whether for good or for ill, we act in ways qualitatively different in our mutual interaction than we might as purely isolated individuals. So I’m not certain how isolated enclaves of atheists, especially ones in academic positions, really show that religion isn’t an innate part of our collective human condition.
You next assert, in essence, that religion’s cultural contributions like King’s College Chapel or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are simply incidental to the historical circumstances of wealth and power being vested in religious bodies to which artists were beholden. You then muse about what types of cultural contributions a society culturally dominated by science would have produced. Is it so easy to treat religion and science as interchangeable ideologies? Perhaps the technocratic concerns of a science-dominated world would make it less predisposed to the aesthetic endeavors we see in a religious society. What unique circumstances would have brought about a scientific society that would have made its institutions fundamentally different from the institutions that religious society produced and in the context of which so much art, music, and literature was composed?
The contingencies of history seem too complex to make facile counterfactual claims about what might have been if this or that alternate condition had been in place. Exchanging science for religion in the cultural history of Western Civilization is not as simple a matter as exchanging a blue couch for a white one and leaving the rest of your living room intact. It just seems much more reasonable to just accept that, yes, as a matter of fact, religiosity was a contributing causal factor in some of Western Civilization’s greatest cultural achievements for whatever it’s worth.
Your comments then turn to religion’s consolatory, inspirational, and explanatory functions. In the midst of your discussion of the inspirational, you gush with awe at the achievements of modern science, the mysteries of “deep space,” “deep time,” and “deep complexity.” I must say, I have at least a rudimentary understanding of the achievements of modern science from my undergraduate education, and I still don’t see why it is or ought to be that inspirational. There is no doubt that modern physics, for example, is highly complex, both mathematically and conceptually speaking. But is venerating it in the way that you seem to an inevitable reaction? I personally find economics to be a fascinating field of study, yet it is popularly referred to as the “dismal science.” Is there any objective reason to imbue science with all of these feelings of awe and grandeur, or is this merely a whimsical expression of love and pride for your own chosen discipline?
Concerning consolation, you say that certainly a human being can be consoled by a lie. You’re missing the point here. Roger Scruton, I think, later hits the nail on the head when he compares religion to love. I would say that religious modes of thinking are also comparable to poetic modes of the thinking in some respects. The point of postulating an afterlife, for instance, isn’t that you just can’t accept that your grandfather has returned to the dust from whence he came and thus you invent a lie that he is in heaven to comfort the bereaved. It’s that in a very real way he does live on, and the wisdom of life experience that he carried with him lives on as well. The psychological disposition that the notion of an afterlife provides is the only fully satisfying way of expressing the way that he continues to live on for you and your loved ones. To attempt to stifle this essentially poetic experience of the world with a hoity-toity recitation of naturalistic technicalities completely wrongly dismisses the way that ordinary individuals integrate their emotive experience into a satisfying schema. And it evidences a profoundly distasteful condescension toward the mass of humanity. Scruton was correct to compare this to the imposition of the type of exclusionary reason we find in Plato’s Republic.
Concerning explanation, as a student of history myself, I find your attitude toward religion totally bereft of any real explanatory merit. One of the very first things an historian must do is adopt a sympathetic attitude to the subjects of his study. It does little for any balanced understanding of the ancient Israelites relationship with the God of their scriptures to hear Yahweh characterized as a “bully” like you did in another talk at Randolph-Macon Women’s College (I believe reading from The God Delusion, which I admit I have not read), as much as it may make for cleverly invective polemic. I am sympathetic to you insofar as your concern is the advancement of scientific education, but there comes a point where you cross a line and obstruct a level-headed approach to inquiry in the humanities by browbeating what doesn’t conform to scientific rationalism into silence. I am grateful that you are not a Religious Studies scholar, even a secular one.
At any rate, I thank you for taking the time to read my comments, and (hopefully) responding to them.

Sincerely,

John Headley

New Blog

I used to run a blog called "Now for Something Completely Different" on blogsource.com, but that site was recently shut down, and I lost much of the data associated with it. Anyway this blog's title is an ode to the previous blog's. I haven't been blogging as much over the last year or so, but it's always nice to have the space.