We Don't Have to Be Dumb!

I just read a Facebook comment on a Sports Illustrated profile of Johnny Bench someone shared here. The comment: "Very long but good article."

That sort of bugged me because the article didn't seem unduly long: 3239 words. (I checked.)

It strikes me that our attention spans have dribbled down to nearly zero.

And this has consequences for life and society beyond how we perceive profiles of old baseball players.

How will we ever innovate or solve problems if we don't have the patience to wrestle with facts and ideas?

Without a significant attention span or a willingness to read or watch or listen to things that will inform us, teach us, enliven us, challenge us, and stretch us, how can we possibly function, how will we make good, informed decisions in life?

I've thought about this a lot. The founders of this country thought that an informed and educated people were essential for the functionality of a democracy.

When I mention being educated, I'm not talking about college educations. The Founders didn't think that everyone needed to go to college and neither do I.

I'm talking sound basic education that includes science, history, civics, English, the Arts, and physical education.

My grandfather, a man orphaned at the age of eight who was shipped from one foster family to another before graduating from high school, could still, in his sixties and seventies, recite soliloquies from Shakespeare that he learned in his school years.

It's not that these basics aren't being taught in some of our schools; they most definitely are and I have infinite respect for teachers.

But the imposition of "standards" by state legislatures and other government entities trying to impress their constituents, and the advent of "social promotion" have conspired with other aspects of our culture to dumb down America.

Read, for example, a transcript of an average American political speech or public lecture--meant to be heard by ordinary lay audiences--on anything from science to foreign policy from forty years ago, then read some from today, and you'll notice, by and large, this "dumbing down." Yes, we have TED Talks and the like, certainly good things. But even they are tailored for our short attention spans.

When I was an admittedly nerdy teenager, I used to borrow back issues of Vital Speeches, a magazine that presented transcripts of all kinds of addresses, from the library. It helped me understand what was going on in the world from a variety of perspectives. I guarantee that many of the speeches I read back then were longer than 3239 words.

I'm not being nostalgic here. Nostalgia is inaccurate history. I've never been one to pine for good old days that never existed.

For all the information and education available to past generations of Americans, they still managed to justify moral horrors like the murderous subjugation of Native Americans, slavery and Jim Crow laws, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War 2, and on and on.

I believe that education without the personal and societal transformation that only comes through faith in Jesus Christ and the consequent unleashing of the Holy Spirit in our lives, we will operate from the human default mode: The Bible affirms that we are sinners who WILL commit sin, including the perpetration of injustice, unless we take hold of the new life that God offers to those who repent and believe in Jesus. Even then, we will make mistakes, we will sin.

But as we live in an ongoing relationship of accountability with the God Who saves us by grace through faith in Christ, we will encounter the ministry of God's Holy Spirit, Who convicts of our sin and then convinces us as we repent that God is forgiving us and making us new in spite of ourselves. This, in turn, engenders humility, open-mindedness, and open-heartedness. (I'm sure that nothing angers God more than "Christians" misusing their faith to justify things like injustice and hatred or the acquisition of power.)

I wonder though if, in the mad dash to make quick impressions on us, the media elites and others, aren't selling us all short.

I'm convinced that we human beings are far more capable of learning, growing, and thinking than the Kardashians, the politicians, marketers, and media mavens think that we are.

If only we believed it too.

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

Reading

"If you ever get down about American culture, you might like to remember that there are still more public libraries in this country than there are Starbucks." (David McCullough, this morning at the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., aired on CSPAN.)

That is a comforting thought. Reading, widely, is a bulwark of American democracy. The only people who can keep democracy are those who read.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

The "Post-Factual World" and American Democracy

As a Facebook friend pointed out, "post-factual world" is a term now. She went on to write:

That's how low the bar has been set.

Regardless of party, this should be unacceptable.

Post-truth politics (also called post-factual politics) is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy, and by the repeated assertion of talking points to which factual rebuttals are ignored.

I think she's right and that it's a bi-partisan (non-partisan) threat to our country. I responded:

It's all apparently about "feelings" now, irrespective of facts.

This is evidenced in both parties. Anderson Cooper rightly and gently called out one of the CNN contributors last week for saying that millennials feel cheated "because of this electoral college thing."

The electoral college may have outlived its usefulness. But American kids are taught about the electoral college in elementary school. It's a fact of life for now, no matter how a person may feel about it. Nobody got cheated by the system that's been in place since 1789.

Similarly, the "feelings" of people on the other side that crime is up and that every immigrant seeking asylum from oppression and violence in Muslim countries in the US is a terrorist are heedless of facts.

Facts should matter. But in a society that has dismissed the notion of objective truth, entry into a "post-factual" world is, I suppose, inevitable. It's frightening, un-American, and, I might add, un-Christian.

This post-factual world is also abetted by an intellectual laziness that prefers being entertained to learning about things like truth or facts or listening to those with whom we may reflexively disagree.

Democracy is a messy business. As Churchill said, it's the worst form of government except for every other form that's been tried. But unless citizens are "diligent," as you put it, democracy is lost. For some though, life is about being a sated lab rat. They're perfectly willing to let everyone do their thinking for them...as long as they get what they want and don't "feel" violated. (Their feelings being a moving target, subject the their fickleness.)

People seem to want a kind of elected monarch who will act in accordance with their feelings. This is the kind of king Jesus' fellow Jews tried to force Him into being in John's Gospel. He resisted. That was the beginning of people's disenchantment with Him. Their feelings were hurt.

At the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention, someone supposedly approached Benjamin Franklin and asked, "What have we got--a Republic or a monarchy?" Franklin answered: "A Republic, if you can keep it."

An uninformed, self-indulgent, selfish citizenry that ignores and doesn't care about the facts cannot keep a republic.

Time to pray more. And insist on making fact-based, not feeling-based decisions.

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

'The Promise and the Perils of Democracy'

That's the name of a three-part series I wrote back in 2005. The reference to then-current events dates the pieces a bit. But I think that the principles I talk about still hold true. Check it out and tell me what you think (don't expect the usual political mumbo-jumbo or, as Bruce Cockburn once put it, the "idolatry of ideology"):

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

"The Promise and the Perils of Democracy"

That's the title of a series of pieces I wrote six years ago. On this day when we celebrate the resignation of Hosni Mubarak as president of Egypt and a hoped-for transition to democracy in that country, the series seems appropriate again.

"Democracy is the worst form of government," Winston Churchill said, "except for all those other forms that have been tried." Democracy holds great promise. But it has its perils, especially when it lulls us into selling out for less than the complete freedom God wants all people to experience.

The Promise and the Perils of Democracy (Part 1, March 2, 2005)
The Promise and the Perils of Democracy (Part 2, March 11, 2005)
The Promise and the Perils of Democracy (Part 3, March 15, 2005)

New Battle in War Over Turkey's Future

Is Islamic fundamentalism Turkey's future, with secularism, what we in the West would call democratic pluralism, its past?

Apparently secularists who plotted a coup against Turkey's democratically-elected Islamic fundamentalist government fear that seemingly topsy-turvy scenario. Many have been arrested for plotting against the government there.

Many in the West have presumed that because democracies have tended to be less aggressive or oppressive, having elections will necessarily result in less aggressive or oppressive regimes. But that's faulty logic. Without what I would call the idea base, the metaphysical turf from which true pluralism arises, being in place, exercises in democracy may be little more than legitimized mob rule, the proverbial lipstick on a pig.

Most democratic and pluralistic societies have arisen from ways of thinking that support the value of individuals and free inquiry, not values upheld by fundamentalists of any religious tradition, really. (Historian Rodney Stark argues in The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success, that democratic pluralism and capitalism arose in Europe and North America arose because Christianity, particularly Protestant Christianity, encouraged a belief in reason.) If those basic cultural assumptions don't exist or if they're questioned by large enough numbers of people, regimes that don't conform to Western notions of democracy or pluralism may be duly installed.

Is that what's happened in Turkey, a country that, unlike many of its neighbors, has had a tradition of democratic pluralism? And are the Turkish secularists wrong or right to plot the current government's downfall?

Whatever the answers to those questions, the battle over Turkey's future continues.

[See also here and here.]

Why the Russian Attack on Georgia is Inexcusable..and Some Spinoff Thoughts from Me

[These are just my thoughts. Please don't think that because I'm a pastor, I think that they're imbued with the truth of God. I'm just me and I could be wrong.]

Columnist Trudy Rubin says that she's gotten a lot of flak for her support of the US government's condemnation of the Russian attack on neighboring Georgia. The objections have, she says, fallen into three main categories:

• Because of the US invasion of Iraq, the US has lost any moral authority in condemning Russia
• Because the Georgian president "miscalculated" by "invading" South Ossetia, a province of the Georgian nation
• Because the US allegedly put the Georgians up to the aforementioned "invasion"

Rubin opposes the Bush doctrine of preemption and acknowledges what she sees as errors in the US policy in Iraq. But, she asserts, "they don't excuse Russia's brutal behavior in Georgia or toward its other neighbors, behavior that began long before Bush took office. America's 'moral standing' is irrelevant in judging Russia's actions." She also says that President "Saakashvili may have acted rashly, and he may have flaws as a leader, but he's the elected president of a tiny nation next to a giant nuclear power." [emphasis mine]

She goes on to write:

Russia presents itself as a champion of Ossetian self-determination. That's absurd. Russia has brutally repressed separatist movements inside its territory, particularly in Chechnya, where Russian artillery and bombs have killed untold thousands of civilians.

This is an important point. A recent poll in the US says that a frightening percentage of Americans think that it's okay for a portion of our country to secede any time it wants. An even higher percentage of younger Americans believe secession is fine.

This sentiment overlooks a fundamental assertion of the Founders, one that was underscored by our own Civil War: Secession or independence can only be legitimate when rooted in moral imperatives.

The Declaration of Independence legitimized the US breakaway from Great Britain on the basis of "self-evident" moral principles. When the Confederate States broke away from the US, they claimed to do so on the basis of similar moral principles. They wanted freedom. But the freedom they wanted was the freedom to enslave others unencumbered by moral considerations.*

The two troublesome provinces in Georgia may want independence. But it appears that the desire has nothing to do with moral principles. That is one more factor which, for Americans conversant with their history anyway, should further delegitimize Russia's invasion of Georgia.

And Russia, which has, at best, limited concern for other peoples' "self-determination," is acting solely on the desire of Vladimir Putin to in some way reconstitute the Soviet Union. As Rubin writes:

Putin has been clear about wanting to restore the Kremlin's former empire, calling the Soviet breakup the "greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century."
Given what has happened to Georgia, other former Soviet Republics now have good reason to worry. Putin has threatened to target Russia's nuclear weapons against Ukraine if that country continues efforts to join NATO (and a Russian general just warned that Poland could face attack over a missile-defense deal with Washington).
Russia has cut supplies of natural gas to Ukraine and waged cyberwar against Baltic states. Ukraine's President Viktor Yushchenko believes Moscow was behind an assassination attempt by poison that nearly killed him...
So it doesn't matter who "started" the crisis in Georgia. It has little to do with Ossetian rights and everything to do with Putin's drive to restore Russian power. Had Saakashvili not sent troops into Ossetia, Russia would have found another excuse to attack.

Rubin, I think, is right to say that the next US president will have to evolve a common policy with the Europeans for dealing with the Russian government's desire to keep its neighbors--and others--under its thumb.
Russia, as Rubin concedes, has every right to develop a sphere of influence via economic and diplomatic means. But Putin's Neo-Stalinism must be confronted by the world. (Please don't think I'm advocating a war with Russia. I'm not.)
There are several implications that arise from the events in Russia, the emailed reactions received by Rubin, and general US ignorance of our own history:
1. Given the enormous challenges represented by the repressive regimes in both Russia and China, the next president will have to make international cooperation a top priority. This doesn't mean ceding US sovereignty, but ensuring its continuation.
2. The US has dithered on this point for thirty years, but it is essential that we develop our own energy sources. There appears to be an increasing consensus, even in this contentious election year, that we must develop multiple energy sources and they must be of the domestic variety. The US can ill-afford to allow itself to be raked over an energy barrel. With the rise of the BRIC nations--Brazil, Russia, India, and China, there will be increased competition for world oil and gas resources. Two of those countries can, I think, be classified as hostile competitors. (Note: I did not describe them as enemies.) In the real world of the twenty-first century, the US must engage these powers, but understand that we cannot look into the eyes of their leaders and detect benign democrats. We must ensure energy self-sufficiency.
3. Reports of the demise of the state in deference to a globalized world in which organizations and corporations that cross national lines play the supreme role are greatly exaggerated. Richard Branson's Virgin brand may, for example, undertake space flight, taking on benign functions previously associated with governments. And the evil of terrorism may be directed by a wealthy person like Osama bin Laden. But governments, with their power (and responsibility) to tax, are the entities that have the greatest ability to help their people or project power in a way that endangers and enslaves their own nation and other peoples. US foreign policy must not forget that we still live in world in which governments wield great influence in human affairs.
4. Domestically, we must give higher priority to teaching history and other social studies. For Americans to so misread the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence as to accept that secession can be undertaken just when people feel like it, thereby legitimizing not just breakaways in distant Georgia, but maybe even within this country, is frightening. The ethnic and religious fragmentations in today's world are buttressed by such ignorance. "A knowledge of the past prepares us for the crisis of the present and the challenge of the future," John Kennedy once wrote. We will do more to ensure America's future with a true, honest, and appreciative understanding of our history and the principles that underlay our Revolution, Declaration of Independence, and Constitution than we will by enhancing science education, important though that is. Ignorant citizens are ill-prepared to make wise judgments when they go to the voting booth. An understanding of our own history will be a positive lens through which to view world events.
End of this far-flung lunchtime rant.

*Ann Althouse, a professor of Constitutional Law, recently wrote about this here.

Author Joyce Hakim also wrote about when secession is legitimate or illegitimate in her readable history of the United States. Writing of the sentiments of the rebel Confederate States in the present tense, Hakim notes:

...the Southerners...believe in "states' rights." They think any state should have the right to pull out of the Union, and that it is tyranny to keep them in against their wishes. They say they are doing the same thing George Washington and the other revolutionaries did against King George: fighting for their freedom. But it is a white freedom they are fighting for, and the North won't let them do it. Revolution is only right, says President Lincoln, "for morally justified cause." The South has no just cause. So, said Lincoln, secession is "simply a wicked exercise of political power."

Not all revolutions or secessionist movements should be wrapped in red, white, and blue bunting.

Imagine...

if the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, announced that she was awarding Germany's highest civilian honor posthumously to a Nazi death camp commander.

How would we react to that?

What would such an award say about Germany's intentions today or how it viewed its despotic past?

Questions like this rattled around in my mind the other day when I read this profile of George Koval in The New York Times. Koval was the Iowa-born son of Russian immigrants who gained high security clearance to the Manhattan Project in which America's atomic bombs were developed. He then passed the information he gained along to the late Soviet Union.

Koval, of whom I'd never previously heard, died recently. Russian president Vladimir Putin has honored Koval for helping to "speed up considerably the time it took for the Soviet Union to develop an atomic bomb of its own.”

Putin's apparent intention for honoring Koval was to give his Russian nation someone to celebrate. But he's honored a spy who betrayed the United States while in the US Army. His greatest achievement was stealing technological secrets that allowed the Soviets to develop atomic weaponry they would not have likely developed on their own intellectual firepower.

Putin could honor people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning author who courageously stood up to Soviet Communism and fought for democracy. Or someone like Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet-era physicist who also became a democracy advocate. Those and countless others like them could legitimately be recognized as Russian heroes.

But it says volumes about Putin, the former KGB-agent who apparently will let go of executive power only in name once his presidential term is completed, and about his nation, that they select as a hero a quisling whose thievery supported one of the most murderous empires in human history.

Democracy is a wonderful system of government. But it doesn't cure all ills. Unless a nation has what I call the metaphysical infrastructure to allow for the functioning of democracy, it won't behave differently from traditional, more despotic, forms of government.

Democracy, of a kind, has come to Russia. But Russia's national inferiority complex, evident since the days of Peter the Great, who slavishly imitated European ways, and the strong tendency of Russians to applaud authoritarianism mean that it's plausible for the country's president to honor someone like Koval.

In this age of radical Islamic terrorism and the rise of China, it would be good for Americans and American policymakers to remember that many Russians and Russian leaders still brood over the way the Cold War ended and still see something laudable and heroic in the Communist era.

If Angela Merkel honored an old Nazi, we would be appalled. We should be no less horrified by Vladimir Putin's recognition of George Koval.

[From The New York Times, above, left to right: George Koval, Vladimir Putin.]

Michael Mandelbaum's New Book

discussed here, reminded me of this old series of posts:

The Promise and the Perils of Democracy
Part One
Part Two
Part Three

What If the Iraqis Were Asked to Vote on a Continued US Presence in Their Country?

What would they say? Those intriguing thoughts are raised by this post. The guy who wrote it has a particular axe to grind. I don't; I'm not advocating anything in the way of policy here.

But, given that Iraq has held several successful elections, it isn't entirely implausible to believe that they could hold a successful nationwide poll or referendum on a continuing US presence there.

If the Iraqis voted that we should stay, what impact would that have on US public opinion or US policy?

And what if they wanted us to go?

I obviously don't know how the Iraqi people feel or how we might respond to a vote on this matter. But as we weigh future US policy in Iraq, it would be interesting to know what the Iraqis think.

What M. De Tocqueville Discovered About Democracy in America

Every American high schooler has heard of Alexis de Tocqueville. He was the French social commentator who traveled to this country in the 1830s in order to understand what made the United States tick.

America was unique. Until the US came into being, democracy had only been tried in places like cities or regions. The audacious American experiment extended democracy to an entire nation.

Many thought it an impossible feat. Yet by the time Alexis de Tocqueville came here, the US had survived two wars with Great Britain (then the world’s preeminent power), expanded well beyond its original thirteen states, and emphatically told Europe not to meddle in the Western Hemisphere.

Of course, the US was still home to the shameful institution of slavery. Women were still unable to vote and their subjugation to males was taken for granted. Native Americans were dismissed for being subhuman savages. Yet even with those unconscionable deficiencies, the US was more democratic than any other nation and, to the mystification of the world, thriving.

No wonder de Tocqueville wanted to check things out. In the book about his observations, Democracy in America, de Tocqueville sought to explain how this nation worked.

He gave special attention to the way Americans handled their freedom. Most political thinkers believed that if everybody in a nation was free, everyone doing what they wanted when they wanted to do it, chaos would ensue. Of course, they were right.

James Madison and the other framers of the US Constitution had known this. They had an accurate sense of just how selfish and self-serving we human beings can be. Almost to a person, irrespective of their own religious views, they would have affirmed the Biblical teaching that all human beings are born sinners with a tendency for “looking out for number one” coming as standard equipment in our make-ups. That was why they included an elaborate system of checks and balances in the Constitution, designed to ensure that nobody used freedom to run roughshod over others.

But no legal system, however well-constructed or well-enforced can prevent human beings from misusing freedom. So, how was it that America worked?, de Tocqueville wondered.

Americans, he said, had developed certain “habits of the heart,” rooted in their faith in Jesus Christ. Several decades before, the United States had undergone a “great awakening.” A nation that had been largely agnostic and disinterested in God had seen a vast majority of its citizens turn to faith in Christ. Americans had renounced selfishness, received the free gifts of God’s forgiveness and favor, and adopted the ethic of Jesus’ kingdom: love of God and love of neighbor. Without Americans’ faith, de Tocqueville concluded, America’s democratic experiment would devolve into chaos. But, he saw that American democracy valued not only freedom, but also equality and community. It was America’s faith, he said, that explained how democracy in America worked.

This is how he put it: “Despotism may be able to do without faith, but freedom cannot. Religion is much more needed in...[a] republic...than in [a] monarchy...How could society escape destruction if, when political ties are relaxed, moral ties are not tightened? And what can be done with a people master of itself if it is not subject to God?”

In this political year, there are many Christians speaking out on political issues. Often, I feel, they do so less from Christian perspectives than from politically ideological ones. Yet, as de Tocqueville learned, people with faith in Christ bring attitudes, beliefs, and habits to the body politic, assets that help make democracy work. In my next few columns, I intend to talk about the positive things that Christian faith can bring to democracy’s table.