[Earlier today, Jeffrey Feldman held a quiz on countering Mike Huckabee's aww shucks huckleberry. My comment/submission as usual morphed into diary length and when that happens I usually leave it in the 'draft' folder and get back to pretending to paying the bills. Here's throwing caution to the wind...]
An ancient and anonymous saying goes that "Faith moves mountains. But bring a shovel." But in Mike Huckabee's view, faith seems to be the mountain you drop on scientists who say factual things that discomfort certain spiritual beliefs. Or, it's a mountain he insists scientists must shovel around in their search for the straight and best path to fact and national strength and security. In a short vid here via Jeffrey, he says he would "turn this country loose with technology." I take that to mean technology is necessary to aid in solving our biggest problems. If you're not paying attention, it's easy to miss what he doesn't say. He doesn't say what technology is, what it derives from. He avoids one simple word. Science.
Gee. How come?
In order to "turn this country loose with technology" it would require renewing America's historic faith and hope in science. It would mean Mike Huckabee would have to plainly speak out both sides of his face. It would mean that he would be asking us, and, most tellingly, the so-called "crazy" evangelical base to trust science, to put their faith and hope in its abilities and tools. Yes, pray for and praise science because of it's switchgrass fuel and french-fry-oil-burning-car-of-the-future ingenuity; hate and fear it because of it's fossil collection.
Love. Hate. Faith. Shovels. Faith, and hope, are big requirements for the kinds of 21st century problems we face. But we'll need more than a shovel. We'll need science and all its shovels, at their best, most focused and most unpoliticized. Yes, we'll need science without a Mike Huckabee, on the heels of a George Bush, throwing mountains in its way. In our way. In the way of our collected safety, opportunity, security and best interest. Why would this be, pray tell? Let's have a look.
Theologian Mircea Eliade said, and I mangle/paraphrase, "The bargain of the 20th Century has been to trade faith for truth." The truths have been cures for polio or better understanding of how acid rains down and kills our fish and wildlife, how pollution damages our bodies and, in turn, those of our children. The truths have revealed that potential and merit, when actually sought out, embraced and encouraged wherever found, are far preferable to who you know or where you live or whose palm you've greased to gain advantage. The truth has shown us that, despite what the media headlines might indicate, the American journey is to less corruption, more transparency, more accountability and, most necessarily, all of these things more quickly. Yes, our modern times reveal far more rocks overturned, and far more snakes under them. But before, even 50 or 100 years ago, those snakes went undiscovered, unknown and about their business as usual, and arrogantly so.
And so, yes, the bargain makes us uncomfortable. The bargain required the labor of lots of shovels and not a little faith and hope. And the fact that there's so much shoveling still to do makes us forget how much progress we have made. We forget that bribery and cop, deception and businessman or corruption and politician went together hand in hand, that they were once the rule not the exception. Today, it is less easy for the guilty to hide, but more easy for us to hear about them, and sooner too, if not soon enough for most of us. Because the truth is winning. We--are winning, despite what many would have us believe about things like families, equality, immigration, pollution and many other things. We are winning, but we have not "won." But when the truth wins more and more like this, in this way and at this speed, our fragile faith in many things is assaulted. The truth makes us want to deny our semi-comfortable place, our well-worn convenient worldview.
It makes us seek solace in our one faith that, because of it's spiritual and mystical nature is difficult to disprove. Finally, some of us think, a goalpost that nobody's going to move. And that's most likely best left as is as long as Science and Faith maintain a respectful distance--as long as they maintain their own separation of church and state. But alas, no.
We see no organized science initiative to disprove the fact of God. (No fan of empirical method, that guy, nor of explicitly claiming credit.) It's probably for the best, too, as unsettled as we are today. An initiative like that most likely would be more damaging than useful because so many of us go to our spiritual sense of a God or Karma or a natural order of things as the font of our spirituality and for our hope. Does science discomfort those who prefer scriptural fact to scientific ones? Of course it does. But so too does one religion's doctrine contradict that of anothers. In fact, Mr. Huckabee "meekly" points out just such a thing about the faith of Mr. Romney just hours ago: Christ and Anti-Christ sharing a sacred bunkbed and matching footies? Ouch. Guess that is the way of free thinking and free choice called live and let live. Jesus said expect to be ridiculed for your beliefs, but in an America of Johns Wayne and Rambo, that's a hard poke to absorb without wanting to redecorate the place and bust some heads--a conundrum of Huckabee two-faceism that a marketplace of scriptural choice is only too pleased to downplay and get all medieval and pre-emptive on. Sort of a perverse Viet Nam flip: We had to destroy the meaning of our faith in order to save it... we hope. Yeah, weird.
But, however occasional and disorganized any seeming assault on faith is, it's a reactive not a pre-emptive one. It comes from strident voices who see some try to equate the proveable with the unknowable and insist that the mysterious should more inform a learned, technical, Six-Sigma and science-powered juggernaut like the United States. No, you cannot go home again, Mr. Huckabee, nor would the slave, sharecropper, suffragist or oppressed sectarian likely want to. Facts versus Faith is not a fair or proper fight. They are in different leagues, each more powerful and useful in their own arenas, rendering to a God and a Caesar each their own distinct "miracles" and benefits and possibilities.
I'm a big believer in faith and hope, because nothing big happens without the courage they give you, from whichever source you find them. Up until recently one of our culture's big advantages (in what many are fond of reminding us is a Judeo-Christian culture), has been religion's ability to largely accommodate and coexist with the miracles of science since people like Isaac Newton got their chance to speak free of dogma and doctrine and the religious regulators of whatever's the current piety. Doctrine. Regulators? Gracious me! I just realized that Atheists and Mormons are both Politically and Religiously Incorrect. Well then, case closed. Proof positive, for me at least, that God not only exists, he also has a wicked special sense of humor.
So what is the practical sense of all this? Given the laws of supply and demand applied to rocks overturned, the result of Eliade's wise prediction is that Faith has become a more, not less, precious commodity. And it's a lonely rock. It has become something that many Americans deem as under threat of danger and they do so thanks to many axes being ground, not shovels being wielded. Sadly, many politicians fan the flames of this fear not for reasons of a particular spiritual health worry but instead for pure political or social advantage. They take our natural greed for mattering and slide us a laminated, sanctioned, pretty but unbalanced equation that says in the simplest phrasing of an Ernest Becker: "you cannot matter if they matter too." They promise in order to take away. They take our love of precious things like faith and hope, threaten them for temporal political and commercial gain to divide citizens and, then, make hostages of religious cum-civic ideals such as charity, compassion, fortitude and justice. A cruel and stark bargain indeed, with much in the way of shackled cold comfort and little in the way of energizing hopeful leadership.
And there's the thing.
While he may be a well-intentioned man and have a minister's practiced calm demeanor, there's nothing but chilly starkness in the choice Mike Huckabee would like us to make in choosing him. As we face problems requiring research into hundreds of thousands of years of Earthly energy and climate data, he prefers to believe our planet is 6,000 years old. As he somberly touts his ideas on justice and lawbreaking immigrants, he finds no fault in releasing serial rapists against the tearful wishes of the perpetrator's many victims for reasons unknown or morally unsupportable. As he reassures us of his compassion, character and concern, he feels that quarantine and biblical condemnation are the natural response to viral medical epidemics. And, as he guides and counsels us to the ideal 21st century family, his message is that "a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband."
"...to the servant leadership of a husband." Speaking as a husband with some tenure in the job, faith and hope and a big shovel are called for most urgently on that last count.
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See, Jeffrey? I told you it would make an awful comment.