END TIMES: THE INFLUENCE OF MODERN EVANGELICALISM ON AMERICAN POLITICS AND CULTURE

Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap Press/Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("This book draws on a lively cast of characters and extensive archival research to document the ways an initially obscure group of charismatic preachers and their followers have reshaped American religion, at home and abroad, for over a century. Perceiving the United States as besieged by satanic forces--communism and secularism, family breakdown and government encroachment--Billy Sunday, Charles Fuller, Billy Graham, and many others took to the pulpit and airwaves to explain how biblical end-times prophecy made sense of a world ravaged by global wars, genocide, and the threat of nuclear extinction. Rather than withdraw from their communities to wait for Armageddon, they used what little time was left to warn of the coming Antichrist, save souls, and prepare the United States for God's final judgment. Their work helped define the major issues and controversies of the twentieth century, and they continue to exert a tremendous influence over the American mainstream today." Id. at ix-x. "Unlike race, however, social class and region of birth continued to have little influence on who would and would not embrace the radical apocalypticism of modern evangelicalism. Millions of men and women, from the depressed factories of the urban rust belt to the rural oil fields of west Texas to the upper-middle-class tech-boom suburbs of southern California longed for the second coming, There were (and are) no easy ways to predict along class or regional lines who would and would not embrace a theology of doom. Apocalypticism has provided millions of Americans with a powerful lens through which to make sense of difficult and challenging eras." Id. at 351.).

Joel A. Carpenter, Revive Us Again: The Reawakening of American Fundamentalism (New York & Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1997).

FOR GOOD OR ILL, IDEAS MATTER. AND , , ,

SO MANY IDEAS CONCERN THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT, CONCERNING INTELLECTUALISM AND ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM,

Scott L. Montgomery & Daniel Chirot, The Shape of the New: Four Big Ideas and How They Made the Modern World (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) (The four ideas are freedom equality, evolution, and democracy.The three most influential intellectuals: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin. The titles to the seven chapter provide the basic outline to the book: Adam Smith: The Science of Man, Morality, and Money;" "Karl Marx: The Tragic Consequences of a Brilliant Theory;" "Charles Darwin: Struggle and Selection in the Realm of Ideas;" "Making Democracy: The Jefferson-Hamilton Debates;" "Counter-Enlightenment: From Antimodernism to Fascism;" "Christian Fundamentalism: The Politics of God in America;' "Purifying Islam: The Muslim Reaction against the Western Enlightenment;" and "Conclusion: The Power of Ideas and the Importance of the Humanities." "The humanities should in their own way be no less compulsory than the social and natural sciences, and to dismiss them, as too many do today, is to diminish our capacity to know and understand the ideas that have shaped how we think and what we believe." Id. at x. My favorite sentence: "It is not by chance that the national conversation about U.S. democracy has always been more of a street brawl than a debate over brandy." Id. at 219-220. The authors raise the following question" "And so wee need to ask: given their political activism and demands, what would American society look like if fundamentalism were place in power? What sort of America would this be? Let us count the ways. . . ." Id. at 374. "Our analyses in this book are meant to show the great value to be gained by going back to the original texts in order to study the actual thought of seminal intellectuals and to better see where and how they were subsequently embrace (or enslaved) for distinct purposes. Only in this way can we bring to light their vast history fertility, whose full extent we have not yet come near to exhausting. We should say, in fact, that such study is essential both for gaining a more complete understanding about the creation and spread of modern freedom, plus the institutions to implement and protect them, and for comprehending the varied resistance to such freedoms and the reason why this continues." Id. at 419. Both the law, in general, and legal education, in particular, are among the institutions to implement and protect modern freedoms. How good of a job are the law and legal education doing on this count? Reasonable minds may disagree, but I give both B-minuses (A- if grading on an international curve) at best. On so many fronts, America has retreated to the 1950s--if not the 1920s.).

FOOD FOR THOUGHT?

Listening to public radio a few days ago, I heard a nobel laureate assert that the most important thing an education should do is to enable one to recognize the truth. That statement gestated in my head for a few days, with me finally concluding that that is, if one is to have a primary aim, a nice, concise statement of the aim of education per se. An educated person should know how to distinguish, or know how to go about distinguishing, the true from the false, the true from, say, mere public opinion. So much of what goes a truth today is, in essence and at best, mere public opinion.*

Then, however, I also realized that the American educational system, from preschool through university, does a rather poor job of meeting that aim. Most of education, even so-called elite education, is aimed on ingraining conformity, both in behavior and thought. That is, producing a deferential and controlled citizenry, and good, reliable, content employees (e.g., practice ready). Even when, for example, there is a clamor to teach 'critical thinking,' that is not about developing truly independent thinking. One is to think sufficiently independent to come to hold and appreciate the receive wisdom, the receive truths. Yes, they want one to think outside the box, but that really means for one to think outside the size 4 shoebox but not outside the box the refrigerator arrived.

In the final analysis, if one really wants to get an education--and learn to recognize the truth--, one really has to educate oneself. That is a hard row to hoe, but it is a very rewarding row once hoed.

* Here is the food for thought: 

 Roberto Calasso, The Forty-Nine Steps, translated from the Italian by John Shepley (Minneapolis: U. oF Minnesota Press, 2001) (From "On Public Opinion": "The most obscure history is the history of the obvious. There is nothing more obvious than public opinion, a term that public opinion holds to be innocuous and that's come to comprise in itself huge areas of what can be said: The vast pastures of public opinion are the pride of civilization. And yet public opinion is a fearful thing, whites undergone tortuous, ridiculous vicissitudes until its triumph in the present. There was a time when philosophers used to start with facts, which have now fled among the unicorns. Public opinion remains: mistress of all regimes, shapeless, everywhere, and nowhere, its oversized presence is such as to allow only a negative theology. With the fall of divine rule and the debasement of the vicariate of metaphysics, public opinion has been left in the open as the last foundation stone t cover swarms of worms, some iguanas, and a few ancient serpents. How does one recognize it? Or rather, how does one recognize what is not public opinion? There is no map of opinions, and even if there were it would not be of any use. For public opinion is first of all a formal power, a virtuosity that grows endlessly and lacks any material. Its hoax is to accept any meaning, thereby preventing it from being recognized for whatever ideas it has to offer. Indiscriminate, perinde ac cadaver, public opinion swallow up thought and reproduces it in similar terms, only with a few slight modifications." Id. at 186, 186.).

By the way, I hope no one reading this blog thinks Columbus "discovered" America.

A SUGGESTED READING FOR SERIOUS 'PUBLIC LAW' STUDENTS

Anthony B. Atkinson & Joseph E. Stiglitz, Lectures on Public Economics (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("Public economics . . . deals with key issues facing governments all around the world. The subject matter--taxes, government spending, and national debt--is very much in the minds of citizens and the elected representatives. What is more, it draws on the whole range of economics. To understand public policy, it is necessary to consider how households and firms make decisions, how they interact in a market economy, and how the economy develops over time." Id. at xi. "Reading Lectures on Public Economics in the twenty-first century, one is immediately struck by the absence . . . of any discussion of the international dimension of public finance. If we were writing the book today, this would be different. [] Fiscal policy cannot be analyzed simply in terms of a nation-state in a closed economy. This is true of tax policy where the threat of tax competition limits what national governments can achieve. The firm . . . as to consider choices not just about investment and it financial but also about the location of production and indeed of its headquarters. National governments in turn have to allow for these reactions when designing tax policy. Personal taxpayers make choices regarding location and fiscal domicile. Migration decisions are influenced by taxation and by government spending policy." "National government conduct of fiscal policy now has to be set in a context of international competition and international co-operation. What is more, it is evident that there are global problems that require a global response, such as trading imbalances, the funding of development, and the challenge of climate change. This means that we have to consider public finance of global policy by the responsible international organizations, Where there are global goods to be financed, these has to be agreement on burden =-sharing." Id. at xi-xii.).

COSMOPOLITAN CULTURE

E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Sather Classical Lectures) (Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1951) ("Despite its lack of political freedom, the society of the third century B.C. was in many ways the nearest approach to an 'open' society that the world had yet seen, and nearer than any that would be seen again until very modern times. The traditions and institutions of the old 'closed' society were of course still there and still influential: the incorporation of a city-state in one or other of the Hellenistic kingdoms did not cause it to lose its moral importance overnight. But though the city was there, its walls, as someone has put it, were down: its institutions stood exposed to rational criticism; its traditional ways of life were increasingly penetrated and modified by a cosmopolitan culture. For the first time in Greek history, it mattered little where a man had been born or what his ancestry was: of the men who dominated Athenian intellectual life in this age, Aristotle and Theophrastus, Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus were all of them foreigners; only Epicurus was of Athenian stock, though by birth a colonial." Id at 236.).

DEMOCRACY AND THE ROLL OF TYRANT KILLING LAW

David A. Teegarden, Death to Tyrants!: Ancient Greek Democracy and the Struggle against Tyranny (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2014) ("In this book, I demonstrate that the ancient Athenians invented, and the citizens of many Greek poleis subsequently adopted, an institution that facilitated large-scale, pro-democracy uprisings: tyrant killing law. This peculiar law type essentially harnessed the dynamics of bandwagoning. It encouraged brave individuals to strike the first public blow against a nondemocratic regime--to 'kill a tyrant'--and convinced everybody else that, should he follow the tyrant killer's lead, other individuals would follow. Thus, in the event of a coup, somebody would likely commit a conspicuous act of political defiance and thereby precipitate an ever-growing pro-democracy cascade. It was a simple, yet profound invention. And I will argue that it contributed to the success of democracy in the ancient Greek world." "Democracy ultimately represents a victory of the nonelite masses over the elite and powerful few. But the victory is not 'once and for all.' I think it is safe to say that there always have been and always will be enemies of democracy: individuals and groups that seek to overthrow the people and hold the reigns of power themselves. The ancient Greeks learned how to combat those forces and thereby helped to ensure the success of democracy for several generations--the world's first democratic age. I suspect that the length and scope of our modern democratic age will likewise depend on how well pro-democrats learn to drawn upon their collective strength and combat the modern 'tyrannical threats." Id. at xi-xii. Of course, today, it may not be necessary to literally kill the tyrants if one can effectively permanently neutralize (imprison, exile, de-legitimize) them. However, in contemporary America, if there is a tyrant, it comes in the from of a complex web of institutes (corporate institutions?) for which is unclear who, exactly, are the heads. Institutions are harder to kill than individuals.).

STILL RELEVANT: DEMOCRACY IN ATHENS

Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1996) (From "Introduction: Athenian Democracy and the History of Ideologies": "But Greek democracy is not only interesting as a historical rarity. The inherent interest of a well-documented example of a real democracy is especially great in the twentieth century [LJL: I would add in the twenty-first century], because very influential thinkers, notably Robert Michels and other 'elitist' theorists, have denied that a true democracy could exist. Though Michels and other theorists of elitism are perhaps not much read today . . . their ideas have become generalized both the scholarly culture of classical history and in Western political culture. If we are today . . . all democrats in principle, most of us nonetheless seem to regard the authority of an entrenched elite an inevitable .The debates among historians and among citizens are . . . not so much about whether a ruling elite exists now or existed in past cultures. Rather, they are about, first, the identity of an aprioristically postulated ruling elite and, next, the question of whether the rule of a given elite is a good or a bad thing. Twentieth-century conceptions of ruling elites are both plentiful and colorful: the socialist vanguard, the military-industrial complex, the Trilateral Commission, the shadow government, the information elite, the best and the brightest--the list could be extended indefinitely. What seems to have been lost in these debates is the notion that a social and economic elite could effectively be controlled by the political authority of the citizenry at large. 'We the People' have lost faith in our powers." Id. at 3, 5. By the way, one means of understanding Citizens United is as the Court's, explicitly or implicitly, recognizing and empowering a corporate-elite. Those wanting to reverse Citizens United either do so because they advocate for some other "elite" or do so because they are true "democrats" who believe in "We the People." Note however, that the former may use, disingenuously,  the rhetoric of the latter. From "Power and Oratory in Democratic Athens: Demosthenes 21, Against Meidias": "To study politics and political life is to study power and the play of power. But what is power?" Id. at 86, 88. "[A] second approach to power, which we may call the 'discourse' paradigm, is less interested in overt coercion, sovereignty, state apparatuses, and law as such. It focuses instead on how social and political knowledge is produced and disseminated throughout society. According to this second paradigm, power is not centralized anywhere, and is neither 'legitimate' nor 'illegitimate.' Thus sovereignty is not at issue, and a study of formal juridical institutions alone will not reveal the fundamental workings of power. Rather than seeing power as repressive, the discourse paradigm sees power as productive: it emerges through the production of social understanding regarding what is true and what behaviors are right, proper, even conceivable. As a consequence, the concept of freedom becomes problematic. Since power is productive and omnipresent (rather than repressive and located in the state), it is not simply a matter of my being free to do whatever is not prohibited. Rather, all of my social interactions, including my speech, are (at least potentially) bound up with a regime of power that is also a regime of truth. It is not easy to get outside power, since all forms of social communication (including speech) will depend upon generally agreed-upon truths (e.g., schemes of social categorization) as fundamental premises of meaningful interchange. Coercive violence itself is thus part of discourse: the regime of knowledge will prescribe under what conditions one category of person may or may not perpetrate violence upon another and what constitutes violence (e.g., whether a free man may strike a slave; whether it is meaningful to speak of a husband raping his wife). The regime of knowledge/truth/power is thus maintained through discourse. A key question that faces the student of power working within the discourse paradigm is how, and by whom, social understandings are produced and reproduced--or challenged and overthrown." Id. at 89-90.).

Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) ("How should a democratic community make public policy? The citizens of classical Athens used a simple rule: both policy and the practice of policy making must be good for the community and good for democracy. A time-traveling Athenian democrat would condemn contemporary American practice, on the grounds that it willfully ignores popular sources of useful knowledge." "Willful ignorance is practiced by the parties of the right and left alike. The recipe followed by the conservative George W. Bush administration when planning for war in Iraq in 2002 was quite similar to the liberal William J. Clinton administration's formula for devising a national health care policy a decade earlier: Gather the experts. Close the door. Design a policy. Roll it out. Reject criticism.* Well-know policy failures like these do not prove that the cloistered-expert formula inevitably falls short. But the formula can succeed only if the chosen experts really do know enough. Our Athenian observer would point out that the cloistered-experts approach to policy making--insofar as it ignores vital information held by those not recognized as experts--is both worse for democracy and less likely to benefit the community. Contemporary political practice often treats citizens as passive subjects by discounting the value of what they know, Democratic Athenian practice was very different." Id. at 1. * I would add that, between the design-a-policy step and the roll-it-out step, there is often another step. It is the step where the policy makers hold meetings for the stated-purpose of obtaining input from interested persons on making policy. However, this is just a show: the policy has already been decided upon, but let's pretend that it has not. You know what I mean. Haven't you ever gone to a 'brainstorming' meeting where you suddenly realize that the power-that-be have had a meeting before the meeting and have pretty much decided what is going to be done?).

Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1989) ("The existence of economic inequalities created considerable tension in Athens. The demos needed the rich men, since with the loss of the empire the democracy was able to function only by taxing their surplus wealth. The wealthy in turn knew that the state was run out of their pocketbooks; they expected to be, and indeed were, allowed to retain certain social privileges in compensation for their cash outlay. The recognition that the rich were privileged inevitably led to a sense of resentment among the masses, whose dominant ideology stressed political and equality. Clearly, if the advantage enjoyed by the rich got out of hand, democracy would end. The power of the majority, acting in concerted defense of their interests, had to limit the dangerous accretion of power to the rich citizens." Id. at 240. Sounds like a problem or condition confronting twenty0firs-century America in it New Gilded Age. Except, given our tax laws and policies, one could argue that the rich men and women do not pay for the government out of their pocketbooks. What is surprising is that the American masses do not resent the rich more. The reason for that is the American mass does not view itself as part of the mass. Instead, the mass is perceived as those other Americans (e.g., the poor, the people of color, illegal immigrants, and so on, who are often viewed as not really American.).

Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1998) ("The Western tradition of political and ethical thought crystalized in the Greek city-state of Athens in the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C. But why just there and then? And why have ancient Greek discussions of politics--of power and justice, individual and community liberation and enactment, class conflict and public interest, eros and education--seemed so compelling to so many readers ever since?" Id. at 3. "Greek elites (those who were wealthy, highly educated, and relatively cosmopolitan in outlook) were well aware that their inability to monopolize public affairs was anomalous, and they sought by various means to 'normalize' the situation. Their sub-elite fellow citizens typically resisted these attempts. And thus city-state politics were characterized by intermittent civil conflict and by incessant social negotiations between an elite few who sought to gain a monopoly over political affairs and a much larger class of sub-elite males who sought to retain the privileges of citizenship or to gain that coveted status. Those hard-fought political conflicts and complex social negotiations proved to be very fertile grounds for the development of philosophical speculation and literary culture." Id. at 4. "Aristotle's conception of justice is the good of each and every member of society (both those who were shareholders in the polis and those who belonged to it by belonging to a native oikos), and he supposed that the polis existed for the sake of autarky and eudaimonia. The theory of natural slavery is the only practical way to ensure both the common good and 'autarkic' productive capacity without resorting to (actual or potential) citizens-laborers. If he lacked a way to assure that all potential citizens were actual citizens and that all actual citizens were leisured, Aristotle had no way of transcending the aporia with which Ps.-Xenophon's text ends. Democracy, the politeia that is at once unnatural and all-too natural, remains the best Greeks can hope for. That was an unhappy prospect for the philosopher and for his elite interlocutors. The Greek polis, the only form of human organization that allows for true eudaemonia, has no way to confront the coming Macedonian revolution--no way, to speak anachronistically, of existing happily with the Hellenistic world. And so, in order to escape democracy, Aristotle necessarily embraced racist theory of natural slavery that remains an embarrassment to analytical philosophers who regard him as a model of clear thinking and to political theorists attracted to his vision of political society as moral community." Id. at 346-347.).

Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("My goal is to measure the classical Greek efflorescence [Note: By "periods of efflorescence, " Ober means "periods of increased economic growth accompanied by a sharp uptick in cultural achievement." Id. at 2.] and to explain how political institutions and culture enabled the Greek world to rise to greatness from humble beginnings, how the great state of Greece fell to a predatory empire, and how Greek culture was subsequently preserved for posterity." Id. at 6. "The purpose of this book has been to present anew the inspiring story and cautionary tale of the rise and fall of classical Greece, using newly available evidence and the explanatory tools of twenty-first century scholarship. I have thereby sought to keep faith with my predecessors: the generations of scholars and writers--from Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aristotle onward--who made the political history of ancient Greece a living resource for all who aspire to end domination and to advance toward citizenship." Id. at 315 (italic and bod added). "After the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth to seventh centuries CE, classical Greek culture was sustained by the successor Eastern (Byzantine) empire and by scholars and scientists in the medieval Arabic-speaking world. When, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE, in the face of Ottoman Turkish imperial expansion, Greek literature was reexported to the West during the Italian Renaissance, and when Greek learning was popularized in northern Europe by Erasmus and other luminaries, in the sixteenth century, its immortality was ensured." Id. at 296-297.).

However, consider (with its twenty-first century ring) this . . .

Cynthia Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1988) ("The purpose of this book is to retrieve a distinctive and neglected form of democratic thought from behind the shadows cast by Plato, by Aristotle, and by our own preconceptions. This version of democratic theory is to be found in the ideas espoused by Protagoras, Thucydides and Democritus. All were fifth-centre thinkers . . . For all their differences, these three thinkers are importantly alike. . . . I attempt to show, first, that the similarities reveal a coherent analysis and critique of democratic man, i.e. of the possibility of achieving order and freedom when all citizens, rich an poor, exercise autonomy. Second, I argue that the differences reveal the difficulty of maintaining a stable and itegrated understanding of democracy man and avoiding extremes of order or freedom." Id. at 1-2. "It is no accident that we have tended to look right past the fifth-century thinkers and to treat Plato and Aristotle as the first political theoriests. For like Plato and Aristotle, we have lost confidence in democracy and its corollary, the integration f the reflective and the concrete. That is, we have lost confidence in politics, in the possibility of reconciling the autonomy of particular individuals with a social order that can withstand reflective scrutiny. We think of ourselves as private individuals with concrete sentiments and desires, imbedded in our personal lives; we we think of political order either instrumentally, as the arena for the fulfillment of antecedently-established desires, or as a formal system for realizing abstract principles of equality and fairness. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, however, we do not seek to bridge the divide by binding man and society in one universal order. We do not attempt to unite ethics and politics by reconstructing man or society in terms of the cosmic foundations of the good. Modern thinkers turn neither to a meaningful universe nor, as the ancient democratic theorists did, to political order, to integrate man's understanding of himself in society. We rest discontent with a schism between the realms of the 'private' and the 'public' citizen. The self of private existence is isolated and hemmed in; its values find no anchor, no supporting structure outside their own sphere of operation, and when challenged can seem arbitrary, pointless, without connection to any larger order of nature or society, merely self-indulgent. If the way we structure the world comes to seem an expression of self-indulgence or narrow self-interest and the formal, procedural order intended to buttress our sense that this is not all there is to human interaction comes to seem unrelated to our sense of self and our purposes, then we are apparently left without any basis for attributing worth or objective force to our values. The choice appears to be between a formal, abstract order and pure self-interested struggle." "It is democracy, as conceived and lived by Athenians in the fifth century B.C., that offers at least the possibility of healing this spiritual and social fragmentation." Id. at 274.).