``What's needed is a concrete linking of source material to belief to action to the political consequences. Isn't this a great deal like the sort of thing Chip Berlet does?'' .d.
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Maybe. But I think Chip tries to make the cut between ordinary Christians, their fundamentalists brethren to the right, and the real extremists---like those who seem to have inordinate sway over the current political milieu. I certainly wish he had posted on liberalism, how he imagines a reconciliation where I can not.
[Chip Bertlet chimes in at this point in defence of Gay and Reproductive rights... So I decided to post this under a new thread...]
What I am interested in is a different matter, the way theocratic thinking has influenced our concepts of law, society, and political power. I've been through a very long path of this with the early Strauss and his readings of Judaism, Zionism, German Enlightenment philosophers, and Spinoza. I still haven't got through with figuring out Spinoza, although George di Giovanni's work on Jacobi, his later work on Kant (Freedom and Religion in Kant and his Successors), and J. Israel's The Radical Enlightenment have been a tremendous help. (I recommend every one of them. They are big, and Giovanni is about the best current historian of German Enlightenment philosophy alive--or that writes in English anyway). All this circles around what we think of as the separation of church and state.
I'll try to get to the point quickly. Caution. Big leaps ahead...
What makes all these obscure philosophical issues so pertinent is of course the internal politics of the US, but also the fact we are at war in the Middle East---where these same theological-political issues dominant all of these societies. Their whole political dynamic is based on these problems, and none of them have found any resolution, because there is none. Maybe its the other way around. You are attracted to your enemies because you see some reflection of yourself in them.
My theory is that you have to be very careful who you go to war with, because like love and sex, you will become your enemy---you simply can not help it. Truth is I am becoming Strauss in some strange way too.
What made Spinoza so radical was essentially that he read the OT as a secular political philosophy, and found it riddled with rational contradictions. In particular Spinoza honed in on the conflict between relevation and reason, and the impossibility of miracles in a rational universe. If it is argued that the universe can be explained through reason (via Descartes), then miracles, or extra-rational means are impossible and a contradiction of the laws of nature.
Strauss examined the conflict between revelation and reason, and found as Jacobi did that reason was insufficient, because it left no room for God, revelation, and inspiration, that is the irrational, or in theological terms, revealed truths. All well and good, but that isn't the key political conflict between these antagonists. The political conflict between a rational and a revealed truth is that the former is public and the latter is private, one is relative and the other is absolute. And, this difference has very large political consequences.
Consider for example the difference between a law based on a rational argument, and a law based on a revealed truth. A rational truth is discovered as an argument, performed in public, as in a debate that persuades an audience. The latter or revealed truth is a public declaration that is beyond argument or debate. When Moses came down from the mountain, he held the revealed law, based on the revealed truth. He didn't come down to argue with his errant children.
Who could argue I didn't see Calypso in my bedroom last night? (And she told me to screw everything in sight.) I declare it so, and then challenge the dubious to believe, since they can not disprove it by rational means.
To understand the political consequences of such declarations of revealed truth, let's make the apparently rational argument that the poor need public assistance because they are the victims of circumstances that our society makes inevitable by its highly competitive and hierarchical political economy. Somebody has to be on the bottom.
We all know the Right's argument. Those on the bottom lack the moral force to raise themselves, as the rest of us have done. In effect the former statement claims the poor are poor through no fault of their own. The latter claims just the opposite. The poor are poor because of their failure to follow the moral precepts of our social order. The first makes an amoral systemic argument, the latter makes a moral argument.
In a much more penetrating analysis than I can provide (mainly because I have downed three martinis), one sees the entire dilemma is false. The very nature of a modern state, absolves itself of these moral dilemmas. The state is in some fundamental way amoral, that is without foundational moral principles. It is a mechanism, a method, a process, a means by which we collective reach decisions about the moral dilemmas of our time, and more particularly how to structure our society and resolve its conflicts. In and of itself, the state has no moral virtue at all. In the liberal ideal, the state is a moral void. It is simply a set of procedures with requisite institutions to resolve political (and economic) conflicts.
In a scholastic and historical view, we can see this contradiction between a good state and an amoral state in the conflict between the imaginary worlds of Erasmus and Machiavelli. Erasmus assumed that the hightest good (echoing Aristotle) was served by a state committed to the highest good, in effect ruled by the prince of light. Machiavelli on the other hand assumed that any state would of its own nature seek the most power. That is, the state would form itself about the very means of power and ignore the question of the greatest good. Rule issues from the prince of darkness. It was his focus on the means of statehood that brought Machiavelli into the discourses of the Enlightenment. The intellectual milieu of the pre-revolutionary Enlightenment finally understood that the means of statehood were far more important than the ends of the state. The ends of state were always committed to the most power over its people. So the most important question was how to limit state power. The answer was found in restricting the means of state, inhibiting the means to power.
Although they never enumerated the idea, the US founding fathers did see that the nature of their project was not about creating a good state, but a functional state that could, perhaps from time to time arrive at a consensus on the public good. And, most especially, if such a state could not arrive at such a consensus, then it could at least be prevented from doing harm to its polity, whether it succeeded or failed. This generalized idea became the foundation of modern liberalism, raught from the terrible conflicts between secular and divine power.
CG