Two Fronts on the War against your Mind

I have been blogging off and on lately about the "culture wars" and ran into several interesting articles about the same today, including an excellent editorial by Robert Garmong of ARI on the refusal of the Supreme Court to rule on a recent challenge to the use of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. What I had been looking for was something on the false dichotomy being offered to Americans by the religious Right and the nihilistic left. I came up empty there, but can summarize it myself as this: the religious Right wants you to surrender your mind by accepting religion on faith while the nihilistic Left want you to effectively surrender your mind by accepting moral relativism. Ironically, this is much like the "difference" between socialism (direct government control of the means of production) and fascism (private ownership stripped of meaning by government power over the owners).

What I did find was better, though. Garmong's article is well worth reading in toto, but he very nicely sums up the real ugliness of the culture war insofar as each side wants to use the government to promote its respective ideology.

This so-called culture war truly is a war: a war against the individual mind. It is a particularly dirty kind of war, with both sides of the political spectrum vying for the right to enslave the minds of legally disarmed victims, and to do it by means of money expropriated from the victims themselves.

This is why the government, as the institution to which we all delegate the use of force, should not be in the business of promoting ideas. This is being done today with our public schools promoting multiculturalism, for example. The solution offered by the religious Right is not the correct one: privatization of education. Instead, social conservatives want religion brought back into the public schools. Either way, someone's tax dollars are being taken to promote ideas he doesn't support, violating his rights to property and free speech in one fell swoop.

I'll now comment briefly on another aspect of the culture wars: how they are being waged. Both sides set up the false dichotomy I described earlier. This "choice" is between religion or "secularism," by which both sides really mean the moral relativism and, ultimately, the nihilism inherent in multiculturalism. Each side in the culture wars describes the other with varying degrees of accuracy (Which is easy -- neither alternative is a good one.) and then sets forth its own philosophy as the alternative, which is untrue. I will follow with two examples that came to my attention recently.

(1) Arnold Schwartzenegger is often called a "liberal" Republican by social conservatives and the liberal media alike because he is a fiscal conservative who does not advocate the religious agenda of the Christian Right. In fact, with the terms of the political discourse so effectively dictated by the two sides in the culture wars, he ends up referring to his own positions on social issues as "left!"

In an interview with Germany's Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily, Schwarzenegger said that "the Republican Party currently covers only the spectrum from the right wing to the middle, and the Democratic Party covers the spectrum from the left to the middle."

"I would like the Republican Party to cross this line, move a little further left and place more weight on the center," he was quoted as saying. "This would immediately give the party 5% more votes without it losing anything elsewhere."

This makes Schwartzenegger appear to be inconsistent, which he is not: he is advocating individual freedom in the economic realm, as many on the Right do, and in the realm of personal behavior, as do many on the Left. To the contrary, it is the Left and the Right as they are today which are inconsistent. Here, we see something that is actually good being attributed to the Left, which can give unearned credit to nihilism and unearned blame to libertarianism, depending on which side of the culture wars wants to discuss it.

(2) Michael Medved takes a swipe at decent secularists by aiming at the large, easy target that is Michael Moore. Apparently, Moore, not content to insult only Republicans, has likened members of his own party to battered wives. (I agree, but he has the wrong party doing the battering.)

The difference between liberal whining and conservative confidence connects to the gap between materialists and believers.

Why is it better to suggest that human beings are a collection of worthless, random chemicals, rather than beings of Divine potential, created in G-d's own image?

Even if atheists were right — and they're not — their vision provides no spur for productive effort or creativity.

Has he ever heard of Ayn Rand, whose novels not only outline an entire philosophic system for living a productive life without resorting to faith, but remain perennial best-sellers? According to this article,

Atlas Shrugged continues to sell more than a hundred thousand copies per year, and in 1991 was rated the "second most influential book for Americans today," after the Bible, according to a joint survey conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club. In addition, the Boston Public Library has named Atlas Shrugged one of the "100 Most Influential Books of the 20th Century."

Ayn Rand aside, how the hell does Medved go straight from atheism to implying that atheists all agree with Michael Moore? He offers no argument: just the bald assertion. But then, he is a "man" of faith. Here, we see something (Moore's nihilism) that is actually bad being attributed to the Left, which can give unearned credit to religion or unearned blame to libertarianism.

Note that in both cases, the real alternative loses. I called it "libertarianism," but I really meant, "the right to use your mind as you judge best to live your own life. "

The choice is yours: just make sure you don't limit yourself to one of two bad alternatives.

-- CAV

UPDATE: Just as I finished this piece, Matt Drudge pointed to this story illustrating the litigious (and logical) result of our government running schools in violation of the ideological neutrality that the Establishment Clause is supposed to protect. One of the lawsuits in particular is very disturbing: "At the University of North Carolina, three incoming freshmen sue over a reading assignment they say offends their Christian beliefs." Recall how boring A.M. radio was back in the days of the so-called Fairness Doctrine? Our universities may be about to become just as bad (or worse) if many more lawsuits like this are filed. So now the very professors who should be teaching young minds how to think for themselves have to worry about offending Christian dogma? The culture wars are moving to the universities and gaining momentum even faster than I thought they would!