America's religious Right and the West's romantic Left now share an Arcadian, pre-modern vision similar to that of Muslim conservatives, says Michael Lind
(...) In 2000, both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates claimed to be evangelical Protestants who had 'found Jesus'. Al Gore's vice-presidential candidate was an Orthodox Jew who refused to work or travel on the sabbath and claimed that non-believers could not be good citizens. During the 2000 presidential campaign, George Bush Senior asserted that 'on the issue of evolution, the verdict is still out on how God created the Earth'.
A predecessor in the White House, Woodrow Wilson, asked 78 years earlier about his views on evolution, replied that 'of course, like very other man of intelligence and education I do believe in organic evolution. It surprises me that at this late date such questions should be raised'. In 1912 former President Theodore Roosevelt referred in a speech to 'the great Darwin', and later wrote of his education: 'Thank Heaven, I sat at the feet of Darwin and Huxley...'
Although they now control the Republican Party, ensuring that no supporter of evolutionary biology, biotech research, abortion or gay rights can be nominated as President or Vice-President, Christian conservatives lack the power to impose their vision on society as a whole. They are finding new allies, however, on the environmental Left. Quayle's former chief of staff, William Kristol, a crusader against abortion and gay rights and editor of Rupert Murdoch's Washington magazine The Weekly Standard, has teamed up with the radical leftist Jeremy Rifkin to persuade Congress to ban therapeutic cloning, which is legal in Europe. Under pressure from the Religious Right, George W. Bush has already crippled stem-cell research in the US, causing research projects and some scientists to move to Britain and other countries. Rifkin and other leftists have also joined the Southern Baptists in an effort to outlaw the patenting of plant and animal genes.
Will Protestant and Catholic abortion clinic bombers soon be comrades-in-arms of Greenpeace activists who destroy genetically modified crops? The fundamentalist-green alliance against technology and scientific research is not surprising. For the past quarter-century, Darwinian sociobiology has been attacked by the Left, which believes human nature is infinitely malleable, and by the Religious Right, which believes the Hebrew Creation myth. Both the Religious Right and a large part of the romantic Left share an Arcadian vision, similar to that of secular fascists and Muslim conservatives, of a premodern, rural community of spiritual people who have not been alienated by secularism and capitalism from nature and God.
This alliance of fundamentalists and greens has found a spokesman in former Vice-President Al Gore. Gore, a born-again Baptist, fused Christian and environmentalist clichés in his 1992 bestseller, Earth in the Balance. Calling environmental problems an 'ungodly crisis,' Gore echoes Right and Left by attacking 'the froth and frenzy of industrial civilisation'. Praising ecological activists as 'resistance fighters,' he predicts 'a kind of global civil war between those who refuse to consider the consequences of civilisation's relentless advance and those who refuse to be silent partners in the destruction'. The greatest villain in history, he says, is Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon's 'moral confusion-the confusion at the heart of much modern science-came from his assumption, echoing Plato, that human intellect could safely analyse and understand the natural world without reference to any moral principles defining our relationship and duties to both God and God's creation.' Gore calls for science to be supervised by religious elites who would be qualified to carry out those duties.
The dismissal of Darwin by Bush and the denunciation of Bacon by Gore prove how far the US has drifted from the enlightened humanism of the American founders. Jefferson claimed his rival, Hamilton, asked him at a dinner party at Jefferson's home to identify three busts on his wall. They were his 'trinity of the three greatest men the world had ever produced,' Sir Isaac Newton, Bacon, and John Locke, the host said.
Jefferson claimed Hamilton's greatest man of all time was Julius Caesar. Evidently neither Jefferson nor Hamilton considered Moses or Jesus, whom they considered mortals. That oversight was remedied during the 2000 campaign, when Bush Senior, asked to name his favourite philosopher, replied: 'Jesus Christ.'
Humanist civilisation, then, is threatened today both from beyond its borders and inside them. The liberal democracies can resist Muslim terrorism, if they are willing to pay the price. The greatest long-term threat to secularism, democracy and science may come from within, from the emerging coalition of the Religious Right and the romantic Left, brought together by a loathing of the open society they share with each other - and with Osama bin laden.
· Michael Lind, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author, with Ted Halstead, of The Radical Center.