Immigration and the Mark of the Beast (4 May 2010)

Ever since I was a kid and got Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast, the weird numerology of the Book of Revelation has always weirded me out. It didn't make much sense to me then that mainstream religion could accommodate grim eschatological ruminations; little did I know that was one of religion's primary purposes. I remember trying to read Revelation, thinking it would be like cool, doomy sci-fi, and ending up disappointed that despite its many quotable images, it was basically incomprehensible and unreadable. I wouldn't encounter something that inscrutable until I tried reading Spengler. Later I tried reading one of the Left Behind books in the same spirit and had to abandon that project right away. The idea of other people reading that stuff and taking it seriously was very upsetting. The U.S. functions on working compromises, yet not too far below the surface is an apocalyptic spirituality that communes with and yearns for the end-times, a mentality that cannot possibly brook the notion of compromise and enjoys a kind of ecstatic obstinacy that celebrates the failure of civic, secular society.

So, that's probably I found this Dave Emory-ish 3qD essay by Richard Eskow about biometric ID cards and alarm bells they may sound for evangelical Christians fascinating. Did you know that every bar code bears the number of the beast? Do you know about the "tribulation period"? Are you ready to "renounce your faith" and "receive your identification"?

The essay picks up on a Bible passage, Revelation 13:17: "And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name." In other words, without an ID card, you can't participate in the economy -- an idea often touted in immigration-reform debates by moderates. Eskow thus contends that immigration reform may push evangelicals to even higher levels of end-times paranoia. The fear of being marked and counted by a repressive state is not unreasonable, as much of 20th century history shows, and it must have been a pretty salient threat for early Christians under the Romans as well. Secular society has come to address that fear with a robust concept of privacy (that captains of digital industry keep telling us are anachronistic). The video clips Eskow includes of evangelicals exposing the truth about bar codes are really, really creepy -- especially the second part of the second one, which is like a freaked-out, Christianized snuff film. Ditto for the clip titled "Balloons and Beheadings."

In language and content, this law almost seems designed to trigger apocalyptic fears. And just when it seems the symbolism can't get any worse, it gets worse. Way worse. What’s the name of the proposed “national biometric ID system”? ”Believe.” That’s an acronym for “Biometric Enrollment, Locally stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment.” But it might just as well be a neon sign indicating that we’ve just instituted the false One World Church, the Whore of Babylon and consorter with kings described in the prophecies and feared in church communities across rural America.

As Eskow suggests, this sort of sentiment is why Bush failed to pass immigration reform -- some on the right are nativists and racists dead-set against the "pollution" of America, others are evangelicals convinced that immigration reform is a stalking horse for one-world government and the whore of Babylon.

Teaching the textbook controversy (13 March 2010)

Steve Benen links to a NYT article about curriculum changes at Texas high school social studies classes. Here's the lede:

After three days of turbulent meetings, the Texas Board of Education on Friday approved a social studies curriculum that will put a conservative stamp on history and economics textbooks, stressing the superiority of American capitalism, questioning the Founding Fathers’ commitment to a purely secular government and presenting Republican political philosophies in a more positive light.

I am somewhat apathetic. It's not as though the curriculum anywhere is objective and unbiased; the more neutral it claims to be, the more perniciously hidden the ideology is in practice. So with the situation in Texas, the bias (admittedly ridiculous) has been made more overt and easier to teach against if you a subversive teacher and are so inclined. This would have the laudable effect of illustrating for students how the can't automatically trust official-looking books and must learn to read everything critically. And in those districts where the books are taught straight, well, what were those students going to learn in institutions anyway? High school is not about disseminating truth; it's about indoctrination in the abiding mores of a community, as well as training people to be meek workers in the hierarchical systems they will encounter throughout life.

You can't blame the Christians for wanting to Christianize the school systems they control. Once you accept that school are for ideological indoctrination, then it becomes a matter of who has the power to use the institutions to suit their aims. "Truth" is simply a tactical ruse to gain power for your ideology. The Texas Christians are right in thinking that a counter-ideology has been taught in schools, and are simply implementing the logic of power by wanting to substitute theirs for it. (It's like what Lenin said, you look for the person who will benefit and um, um...) But they are merely relativizing what they probably hold as absolutely true by introducing it into the welter of democratic politics. One lesson people can take away from the school-board conflict is that Christian ideology is open to a vote, and that Christianity must build consensus in the same Machiavellian ways as politicians.

These efforts to control textbooks as though that will ensure control over the kids who pretend to read them and teachers who pretend to teach them seem sort of desperate, as though the books were to blame for the waning popularity and unreality of some of their views. To paraphrase Thomas Merton (and also a rebel princess from some movie), the more they tighten their ideological grip, the more students will slip through their fingers. I mean, they are dealing with people who say things like this:

“The topic of sociology tends to blame society for everything,” Ms. Cargill said.

Yes. And historians -- man, they have historical explanations for everything. And mathematicians, all they ever talk about is math. Where is the Scripture?

I suppose I am skeptical that people take textbooks as some sort of gospel, but that may be because I have always had autodidactic tendencies and figured that what was in textbooks was pabulum for indifferent students and fodder for rebellion for anyone else who was engaged.

The ideological takeover is a classic enhance-the-contradictions moment; it's so blatant an effort that it makes the underlying problems self-evident. The heavy-handed efforts to safeguard hegemony exposes how frail it has become. This sort of inanity should prompt sane people to withdrawal from the system altogether if they can, or at least put in place local forms of resistance to the tyranny. It calls the phony objectivity of schools to everyone's attention, including those who ordinarily wouldn't give a shit.

Anyway, some of these proposals don't strike me as all that outrageous.

In economics, the revisions add Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek, two champions of free-market economic theory, among the usual list of economists to be studied, like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes. They also replaced the word “capitalism” throughout their texts with the “free-enterprise system.”

The double-talk about capitalism is pretty dumb, but kids should be taught about the sort of neoliberalism that has actually shaped policy for the past few decades. They should understand Hayek's idea about the market as a system for conveying information. They should understand Friedman's conflation of liberty with economic freedom of choice. At that point you can constructively critique these ideas, or reject them as part of institutional learning. If teachers were suddenly mandated to teach Frankfurt school theory in high schools, then those ideas would truly be dead.

"The faith-based economy" (15 Oct 2008)

Via 3QD comes this intriguing essay by Arjun Appadurai about the role of faith in capitalism.

we are in a new Weberian moment, where Calvinist ideas of proof, certainty of election through the rationality of good works, and faith in the rightness of predestination, are not anymore the backbone of thrift, calculation and bourgeois risk-taking. Now faith is about something else. It is faith in capitalism itself, capitalism viewed as a transcendent means of organizing human affairs, of capitalism as a theodicy for the explanation of evil, lust, greed and theft in the economy, and of the meltdown as a supreme form of testing by suffering, which will weed out the weak of heart from those of true good faith. We must believe in capitalism, in the ways that the early Protestants were asked to believe in predestination. Not all are saved, but we must all act as if we might be saved, and by acting as if we might be among the saved, we enact our faith in capitalism, even if we might be among the doomed or damned. Such faith must be shown in our works, in our actions: we must continue to spend, to work hard, to invest, and, as George Bush long ago said, “to shop” as if our very lives depended on it. In other words, capitalism now needs our faith more than our faith needs capitalism.

Capitalism no longer has to justify itself through its efficacy; we are simply supposed to believe in market magic, which tests our individual worthiness by requiring us to believe -- to trust and take on debt and spend -- whether or not we ultimately profit from it. The faith alone is presumed to be edifying, its own reward. This faith, which we the subjects of capitalism must demonstrate, is different from the trust required by capitalism's high priests -- the financiers who fuel its wondrous achievements. That has broken down, and the state is laboring to rebuild it -- it remains to be seen whether trust can be compelled with a mountain of money. But in the process of chasing risk to enhance yields in the past decade, prompting ever more opaque means of risk management, capitalism took on further religious overtones. Derivatives worked not because anyone could explain the mechanism but because investors seemed simply to accept them as truth, especially since the initial outcomes were favorable. Appadurai mentions "re-enchanted capitalism," alive with the sort of faith sociologists once expected its rational underpinnings to obviate. Instead, As Appadurai explains, we are not trying to rescue capitalism by ending superstition and letting economics work scientifically, but instead we are taking measures to restore faith, to encourage the belief in belief despite economic fundamentals.

The appetites of the beast require restoring uncertainty to its more calculable form as risk, as a first step in restoring trust between lenders, so that they will move money to yet others, so that in turn the wheels of commerce can begin to turn and our faith in the eternal mysteries of capital can be restored. Among these are the mysteries of debt as the virtuous bride of consumption, money as capable of begetting more money, and profit for the few as the key to the welfare of all. The cardinal mystery of the market, of course, verily its Spirit, is the Invisible Hand. For the Invisible Hand to move again, it needs a Helping Hand from us, the wretched of Main Street. And in lending this helping hand, in the biggest bailout in human history, we are asked to show our Faith in the Economy. For once, and perhaps for the last time, capitalism needs our Faith as much as we need its mysteries. The global economy will never be secular again.

Stumbling on Bibles (14 June 2007)

On a recent flight I traveled beside a 13-year old boy who spent most of the flight not munching complementary pretzels and sucking down Cokes or watching the Ryan Phillipe movie most of the other passengers "enjoyed" but reading passages from the Bible he carried with him. Why I found this reassuring, I can't immediately say; perhaps it was as Zizek theorizes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, and I was comforted by the material presence of an object that resonates belief -- it believes so that I don't have to. Its very existence, and the boy reading it, establishes beyond doubt the reality of a whole substratum of faith without my having to make any spiritual effort. Zizek cites a Stalinist expression: "Whatever I may be thinking, objectively I am believing" thanks to the presence of an object that connotes the material reality of belief. I don't have to believe myself to be in an objective state of belief -- this is why cultures have often developed designated mourners that can do the formally required grieving, freeing up the bereaved to take care of more pressing matters. So in this case it may be that I have convinced myself that the passenger beside me has freed me to write blog entries and play computer chess (about which more later) by carrying the visible signs of his belief with him, participating in that great religious stratum in American society in which I grumblingly subsist but in theory I'd be lost without. I need the forms of spirituality enacted around me to not be troubled excessively by spiritual questions myself. I need there to be religious folk so I don't have to be religious myself. I have faith by proxy.

I'm not entirely convinced by this reasoning, though Zizek's use of it to explicate laugh tracks is pretty interesting -- the shows laugh so we don't have to, and we can experience enjoyment without making the effort necessary to understand, make the movements in our thought to produce genuine amusement, laughter. We can rest assured that we participated without effort, which is its own reassuring satisfaction, the pleasures of passivity. As Zizek puts it, "Even if, tired from a hard day's stupid work, all evening we did nothing but gaze drowsily into the television screen, we can say afterward that objectively, through the medium of the other, we had a really good time." In other words, a really good time can be had merely by mimicking the form, perhaps more so by mimicking the form rather than genuinely experiencing pleasure. Purer pleasure is always already secondhand, mediated, predigested, since this preempts the difficult questions of purpose, why am I bothering with pleasure? What is this pleasure supposed to accomplish?

Which brings me back to Bibles. One of the comforting things I find about the Bible is that it is a book whose meaning is almost entirely exogenous; it makes little effort to justify itself by present a thesis, by mounting a coherent and unifying argument, by rationalizing its heterogeneity. This means that despite the laborious efforts of concordance, the work to organize the text and being it all to account, it still promises the leisure of unstructured reading; it invites being picked up and flipped through at random -- hence the divination procedure of opening it at random and trying to deduce the horoscopic relevance of the passage chosen. Approaching the text with that spirit feels as though it frees us from the hassles of belief as well; we can demystify the words by reading them without preconception, without needing to understand them, and this becomes a practice of faith as well -- we can take care to not make any interpretations to assure our faith's perfection. We validate the religious without partaking of it; haphazard Bible reading thus becomes a kind of homeopathic remedy for becoming overwhelmed with theological complexities and conundrums and puzzles, which after all may lead one to question faith, to question the spiritual altogether. Thus the path to spiritual sublimity may be a principled ignorance, taking for granted what you are searching for without necessarily suspending your quest or conceiving its ultimate end.