A Child’s Machiavelli: A Primer on Power

 

These quotes are from a book by the title above. Once you have read them, you might not need to read the original. To what extent The Prince was right or not, I will not comment.

• It’s best to have a family with a famous name ‘cos then you’ll automatically impress people and become really popular.
• If you want to take over some place, don’t forget to kill not just the boss, but also all his kids!
• Either be really nice to people or kill’em. If you don’t kill’em and you’re not so nice, then they’re gonna come after you.
• If you just took over some place, raise everybody’s allowance. Then people will think you really like ‘em, and you can do whatever you want to ‘em for a little while.
• If you help make someone Big, watch out. They’re gonna wanna get rid of you so everyone thinks they did it alone.
• It’s easy to take over some place with a really strong Chief. Everyone’s used to being bossed around all the time, so when you get rid of him, people’re barely gonna notice.
• If you wanna take over some place where the people could decide for themselves, you have to destroy everything.
•  Never be afraid to beat someone up if you have to. First, try to talk ‘em into listening, but just in case, you know what to do!
• The hardest job you can ever do is try to make things better for the Little Guys. The Big Guys are gonna hate your guts. And the Little Guys will be afraid to open their mouths.
• People always think Bosses are bad news, so when you surprise ‘em with your niceness, they’ll be so happy, they’ll totally turn into your slaves!
• Try to make everyone you know totally dependent on you, then you don’t have to worry so much that they’re gonna try to get rid of you.
• When you take over some place, kill off everyone who’s against you, pronto, then act really nice to everyone left.
• A gun is a man’s best friend.
• Only give things away when people are watching. If you wanna give presents to people, make sure it’s other people’s stuff.
• If you’re not a Boss but you wanna be one, make sure you trick everyone into thinking you’re a really generous guy.
• Everyone says you should be nice, but no one really is, so if you do what you should and be nice all the time, you’re probably gonna get screwed.
• You can do anything to people. As long as you don’t steal their girlfriends, they’re never really gonna hate you.
• You’re better off having people scared of you than liking you. Now, it’s okay if people are scared of you. Just make sure they don’t hate you.
• Be really nice to your closest underlings. Make them love you by giving them lots of presents.
• If somebody’s got to hate you, make sure it’s a bunch of weaklings with no money.
• Don’t keep your promises if there’s no reason to anymore—nobody else does.
• Have five best friends who tell you what they really think, but only when you ask.

Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part twelve. The Problem of Politics

Back when I was writing in my spiritual journal in 2005, I felt a mission to the world, to rescue it from political oppression (as embodied in the right wing parties in every country including my own) from Easter 1984 until election day 2004, a period of just over twenty years.

I decided, in February 2005, to stop calling myself a Christian. I do not own the language. If I call myself a Christian, I wrote, people will think of me as a follower of George W. Bush. (Today it is even worse; to be a Christian is, in popular language, to be a Trumper.) The question is not, do I want to call myself a Christian; but, am I what the world thinks of when they hear the word Christian? Clearly, the answer was (and is) no.

Some of what I wrote below was during the worst of my medical problems, but also at a time when a Republican president aspired to be a world dictator and use war as his tool of domination. Remember George W. Bush? [Bush and Cheney] “have galloped out on their Texas steeds to conquer the world, and other Republican horsemen of the apocalypse, only slightly worse than Democratic mules…Most of the universe is gas-jets of hydrogen, and in one small space, there is a miracle of complexity—and it is evil.”

“For the law of the universe seems to be thermodynamics—whenever there is, in one place, a brief shining moment of inspiration, beauty, order, and love, the great mass of stupidity, hatred, and bloated gluttony will flop over on it and obliterate it. All that is good and God is an aberration quickly blasted by the sick universe…Whenever there is a glint of beauty and peace, the leaders of the world delight in trashing it.”

I was reading Rabbi Kushner’s book, Who Needs God? But can there be one, even in the diffuse form I have fantasized? Kushner also wondered how one can get angry at a God that one believes does not exist. But we are angry because there should be a good God who will rescue the world.

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part six: War

In his 2012 book The End of War, John Horgan explained that it is really possible for humankind to bring all war to an end. Of course, he did not consider this to be very likely. Here is a quote that indicates that there could be an end to all war, if the United States decided to seek this goal. But it is also extremely unlikely that the United States will ever do this:

“We claim to revere peace and human rights—and yet we keep embarking on unnecessary wars, in which we treat alleged enemies and even civilians cruelly. We pay lip service to the principles of national sovereignty and international law while secretly carrying out deadly commando raids and drone attacks around the world. We sell weapons to other nations, and to their adversaries. We prop up dictators if they let us build military bases on their land, exploit their cheap labor, or sell us their oil and other resources at low prices. We are guilty of shameless hypocrisy. If we practiced what we preached—if we showed through our actions that we recognize how wrong war is—we Americans could lead the entire world to an enduring peace.”

This was back during the Obama administration. Things are even worse now under Trump who is best known for antagonizing even our allies. It is clear to everyone that we will never stop selling arms to dictators and terrorists, even when these arms come back to take aim at us. America profits—or, at least the American corporations who control the federal government profit—from keeping the world on the brink of war.

War in Yemen, 2018, from New York Times

This is yet another part of a cynical viewpoint of life, but one that can allow us to be healthy and happy. We need to simply accept the fact that the world will never embrace peace and prosperity, and then make preparations for living as well as possible despite this fact. I can’t do anything about the world, but just about my own life, work, and relationships.

Cynicism for Fun, Health, and Profit, part five. The Political Cynic.

I grew up hearing about the lofty ideals of democracy, as enshrined in the American Constitution. I grew up thinking that politicians were actually statesmen who really wanted to do the right thing for their fellow citizens, who entrusted them with leadership. As incredible as it may sound, I actually believed this when I was a kid. It was not hard to feel this way. I first became aware of the world during the administration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. I remember where I was when the news of his assassination was broadcast. I was a first-grader, who heard it from the sixth-graders in my elementary school. I ran home for lunch and my mom confirmed the news. In upcoming years, I listened to recordings of Kennedy’s speeches, and they were very stirring. “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” That’s the most famous line. But even better is this one: “Here on Earth, God’s work must truly be our own.” His assassination made me revere political leaders even more, since the official story (which nobody really believes anymore) was that the assassination was entirely conceived by a deranged man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

And I still revere Kennedy, even though revelations have come out since his death about some bad things he did, such as cheating on his wife. Even during the Vietnam War, I trusted our politicians to be telling the truth that North Vietnamese communism really was a threat to world peace and that we had to stop it, sort of, advance and retreat, advance and retreat, in which corporations that supplied the military got very rich over a war that seemed to never end and which was supported by an endless supply of federal dollars and conscripted lives.

Then came Watergate. I had been enthusiastic about Nixon, and I felt betrayed. I felt good about Gerald Ford, who took his place (the only president to not have been elected), because he projected an image of being clean. He said, “The national nightmare is over.” In Japan, which I visited about the time Ford took office, they referred to Gerald Ford as “Mr. Clean,” because Ford did resemble a little bit the white white white janitor on the cleaning supply boxes and bottles.

The presidency of Jimmy Carter was almost boring because of its lack of scandal. To this day, Carter remains about the only clean politician of which most of us can think. Then came Ronald Reagan, who inspired everyone with his words, but then did whatever the hell he wanted to, whether it was legal or not. He sold armaments to Iran, whom he had labeled an enemy of freedom, in order to get money to supply to “Contra” terrorists in Nicaragua so that they could kill civilians. Reagan once said, “I don’t like having to consult a committee of 545 every time I want to do something.” This committee, of course, was Congress, and he was required to obey them by this little tiny document that you may have heard of, the Constitution.

The rest of the story you probably know. I have filled in the 1960s through 1980s for my younger readers. Particularly noteworthy was the administration of George W. Bush, which was so filled with conservative corruption that John W. Dean (a Republican and Watergate whistleblower) wrote a book about it, Conservatives without Conscience. (Donald Trump recently called Dean a rat.)

It is even worse today. Not just the corruption, which we have always had, except for brief shining Camelot moments. But today the powerful conservatives are leading America in a direction of totalitarianism, and even a revival of respect for Nazis. Dean quotes Professor Bob Altemeyer: “If you think [the United States] could never elect an Adolf Hitler to power, note that [Nazi sympathizer] David Duke would have become governor of Louisiana if it had just been up to the white voters in that state.” White supremacist Richard Spencer was taken seriously by Steve Bannon, who was the national security advisor for Donald Trump. Trump said that the white supremacists in Charlottesville and the diverse people who protested against them both deserved equal respect and equal blame, even though the only person killed was a young woman, by a car driven very fast into a crowd by a white supremacist. Trump said that the Congressmen who had not clapped for him at his State of the Union address were committing“treason.”  The link is to the Telegraph, a U.K. newspaper, to show that Trump’s outrageous statement was taken seriously overseas.

In the political arena, then, it appears that the facts support a cynical point of view on the national level. On the state level (I live in Oklahoma), the legislature for a long time refused to allow public school teachers to receive a living wage, and instead of trying to solve the state’s fiscal crisis, they spend their time trying to enact creationist laws. The purpose of the state of Oklahoma, they think, is to make oil companies more profitable, even if it means the poverty and disease of the state residents. Is it any different in your state? Probably not.

I think I have made my point: cynicism is the only realistic summary of the political world. There is probably nothing you can reasonably imagine that can even come close to the reality of that world, only a little bit of whose corruption is visible to outsiders.

Clearly, the momentum of politics right now is toward Trump demanding, and getting, personal adoration. And slightly fewer than half of Americans are eager to give it to Him.

But we can’t stop on such a depressing note. Otherwise you will be exactly like the miserable man I described in an earlier essay. But knowledge is power. As a cynic, you know that politics is thoroughly corrupt. The practical result is that you know it is hopeless, utterly hopeless, to try to solve any of our major problems by working through existing political channels. At least, cynicism can keep you from wasting a lot of time and resources, only to get your heart stomped into a quivering mass of protoplasm on the Rotunda floor. Find something else to do to make the world better. But, as a good cynic, you should not expect any of your efforts to make a difference in the end.

This will leave you lots of time to do things that make the world better and that you enjoy. I mean, WWGCD? What would George Carlin do? Take, for example, the fact that Trump used a ceremony that supposedly honored the Navaho Code Talkers as a chance to insult both liberals and Native Americans by calling Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” and by holding the ceremony right underneath the portrait of Andrew Jackson, the president who broke the law in order to steal Native American land in the 1830s. What can you do in the face of such an insult from the highest office in the land? Humor, of course. A political cartoonist depicted a Native American saying to Trump, “You could learn a thing or two from us. We know how to run casinos that don’t go bankrupt.”

Why I Am Not a (Public) Christian

I received an email from a man whom I knew back when I was an up-and-coming leader in an organization of Christians in the sciences, the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA). Had I stayed with them, I might have been one of their most prominent members. But my participation became sporadic after 1994, and I attended no meetings after 1999, as my conventional faith gradually fell apart. This man had run across a 1987 article I had written for the ASA journal, in which I struggled with the ideas about why God would allow apparently evil things to happen in the natural world. He wanted to know what had become of me and hoped I was still a Christian.

At first, I intended no response whatever. Not because I have any ill feeling toward the ASA; they are reasonable and sincere people, unlike most self-described evangelical Christians, but because I could write a book in response. I finally decided to write a short but vivid response, parts of which I include below. I decided on a pamphlet-length response, sort of a Thomas Paine instead of an Aquinian Summa Theologica.

“Dear Ted,

I was surprised and pleased to receive your email, but I am afraid that what I have to say won’t be entirely pleasant. I have nothing bad to say about the ASA, or the many fine people I have known in its ranks, which includes you.

But I have entirely distanced myself from any public identification with Christianity. My private views are between me and God, however defined. I am one of those people whom an evangelical Christian would label as an atheist, although I do not affirm this label. Thank God American evangelicals will not be my judges. (Do I hear an amen on that?)

American evangelical Christianity has increasingly become the private playground of the Republican Party and, more recently, worshipers of Donald Trump. To me, American evangelical Christianity has become blasphemous. It’s been like this a long time. When I first worked at The King’s College, it was pretty much a Republican institution. After I left, they hired Dinesh D’Souza as president, mainly because of his political views, ignoring the warning signs that later they had to admit: that he was morally unsound. When I worked at Huntington College, it was another Republican institution, although those were back in the gentle days of George H. W. Bush and Dan Quayle (Huntington was his hometown). Under George W. Bush, American evangelical Christianity was largely supportive of war and torture. And now, the American evangelical church seems to either worship Donald Trump, or to go along with those who do. Where is there any public outcry among evangelicals against Trump committing nearly every sin that is possible for a man to do? For the love of God, I keep my distance from American Christianity and its support of, or its silent acquiescence to, Trump.

Moreover, I live and work in rural Oklahoma, where Christianity is also tied almost completely to the accumulation of automatic weapons. The local church, which sometimes posts condemnatory signs against me (I’m the local evolution professor), sometimes gives away automatic weapons as door prizes for its revivals.

When I teach my classes, I begin the first day by writing on the board, “Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these.” I have yet to have any student, although most of them have been drilled in Sunday school, identify the source of this quote. They think of Jesus holding a machine gun, not as getting down on his knees to look at wildflowers. I want to get them to start looking at the natural world around them and marveling at it, regardless of its origin. I give surveys to my classes, which consistently reveal the profound ignorance that my students have about the Bible, the religious ones even more than the non-religious ones.

A recent national survey showed that only 30 percent of white evangelicals, in 2011, thought that a president could be forgiven of moral lapses; today the figure is 72 percent. Evangelicals hated Barack Obama, an astonishingly moral man, while admiring the pussy-grabbing Donald Trump. This has nothing to do with God, Jesus, or the Bible. It’s all about politics, money, power, and guns.

The scientific credo of American evangelical Christianity seems to be, regarding what they call God’s creation, “It’s okay if you pour oil on it, it’s okay if you chop it down, it’s okay if you shoot it, it’s okay if you drive your truck over it, so long as you don’t believe that it evolved.” (Did I mention that I live in Oklahoma?)

Meanwhile even the moderate Christians seem powerless to stand up to the right-wing conquest of Christian faith. Last year, I wrote to every member of the English department at Calvin College (from which my daughter graduated) to ask their views on what constitutes Christian literature. I believe I sent twelve emails. I received not a single answer. I know that the messages were received. I think the faculty must have just been confused: to them, the world consists of Calvinism and atheism, therefore their brains simply had no binding sites for the peptides of my intermediate ideas.

Meanwhile, the ASA has, I assume, remained reasonable. But after a while, I began to feel the futility of agonizing over unanswerable questions. I remember how hard David Wilcox struggled with trying to reconcile Adam and Eve with the record of human evolution. Good try; I admire him still. I think it is safe to say that the ASA has no discernible impact on American Christianity. I have devoted myself instead to writing books (I’m completing number 5 now for fall publication) about topics that might actually help to educate people, for example, how to think scientifically.

Maybe the ASA needs to refocus. When it started, Christianity did not dominate politics. Today a twisted version of Christianity is threatening the world. Maybe the need now is not to get more people to believe in God but to get believers to rediscover peace and love.

Maybe when we move to France, which we plan to do some year soon, I might start going to church again. In France, nobody becomes a Christian for money, power, or sex. The only Christians in France are those who want to be.”

When Religion Is Really Just Politics

A brief post as I get ready to teach a class.

Ted Cruz announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. He was born in Canada. The Constitution says that the president must be born in the United States. But apparently Cruz and many other Republicans believe this does not apply to them. In contrast, the “birther” contingent is still powerful within the Republican Party: they consider that Barack Obama is not really an American despite the fact that he was born in Hawaii. Clearly, many Republicans do not consider themselves bound by the Constitution.

Cruz made his announcement at Liberty University, which is the pulpit of the late Jerry Falwell. For both Cruz and Falwell, God’s work on Earth consists entirely of whatever the conservative wing of the Republican Party decides it wants to do.

Christianity is sort of irrelevant to all of this. The only relevant connection with religion here is that Republicans consider themselves to be the chosen people of God upon the face of the Earth.