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AR 24:11 - "Why We Hate Each Other"
In this issue:
ALIENATION - "Community is collapsing, anxiety is building, and we're distracting ourselves"
NEOPAGANISM - "a genuinely post-Christian future for America"?
Apologia Report 24:11 (1,419)
March 14, 2019
HATE
Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal, by Benjamin E. Sasse [1] -- St. Martin's Press: "[C]ontrary to conventional wisdom, our crisis isn't really about politics. It's that we're so lonely.... [R]eversing our decline requires something radical: a rediscovery of real places and real human-to-human relationships. [O]nly a recovery of rootedness can heal our lonely souls. ...
"We're in danger of half of us believing in different facts than the other half, and the digital revolution throws gas on the fire."
Publishers Weekly (Nov 11 '18): "Republican senator Sasse provides here a common-sense, politically moderate interpretation of America's social and political ills. ... He opines that the collapse of traditional social bonds and community structures in recent decades has created a vacuum that has been filled by 'anti-tribes' - associations and groupthinks characterized by being 'against' ideas, political movements, or groups of people. ... Americans have become politically discouraged, and that growing political antagonism and 'partisan tribalism' have poisoned our political scene.... Sasse doesn't hesitate to criticize his fellow conservative Republicans. The solutions he proposes - pulling oneself away from screens to form connections with one's family and neighbors, for instance - are overwhelmingly social and personal, rather than political."
Booklist (Oct 1 '18): "In this time of upheaval, we increasingly occupy ourselves with isolating technology, fake news, and angry rhetoric and distance ourselves from our neighbors and communities. ... Sasse presents a compelling, well-supported look at why so many of us no longer have strong community ties and why, in spite of all the interconnectivity in our constantly expanding, internet-driven world, so many people feel lonely. Alienation and the desire for belonging, Sasse argues, have caused us to seek like-minded people and become tribal and often angry as we unite against those we disagree with. While not completely apolitical, Sasse is careful in his disclaimers about how his beliefs shape the book, and whether readers readers agree with his political views or not, Them is a crucial contribution to a more open and productive social dialogue."
Kirkus (Sep 15 '18): "The future of the republic depends on humility, empathy, and respect for pluralism. 'We are in a period of unprecedented upheaval,' [Sasse] writes. 'Community is collapsing, anxiety is building, and we're distracting ourselves with artificial hatreds.' Those hatreds are fomented by what he calls 'polititainment,' niche media outlets, social media, and websites - on the right and the left - that confirm biases rather than allow people to become well-informed. Sasse singles out Fox News' Sean Hannity, who hammers the message, 'liberals are evil, you are a victim, and you should be furious,' and he also criticizes the quashing of free speech on college campuses by those who object to 'dissenters from campus majoritarian orthodoxy.' ... A sensible and thoughtful yet hardly groundbreaking political analysis."
Also see Sasse's impressive New York Times interview (Nov 21 '18): <www.nyti.ms/2Ht3lVF>
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NEOPAGANISM
"The Return of Paganism: Maybe there actually is a genuinely post-Christian future for America" by Ross Douthat, New York Times Opinion Columnist (Dec 12 '18) -- "There has to come a point at which a heresy becomes simply post-Christian, a moment when you should just believe people who claim they have left the biblical world-picture behind, a context where the new spiritualities add up to a new religion.
"Which is why lately I've become interested in books and arguments that suggest that there actually is, or might be, a genuinely post-Christian future for America — and that the term 'paganism' might be reasonably revived to describe the new American religion, currently struggling to be born.
"A fascinating version of this argument is put forward by Steven D. Smith, a law professor at the University of San Diego, in his new book, Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac [2]. Smith argues that much of what we understand as the march of secularism is something of an illusion, and that behind the scenes what's actually happening in the modern culture war is the return of a pagan religious conception, which was half-buried (though never fully so) by the rise of Christianity.
"What is that conception? Simply this: that divinity is fundamentally inside the world rather than outside it, that God or the gods or Being are ultimately part of nature rather than an external creator, and that meaning and morality and metaphysical experience are to be sought in a fuller communion with the immanent world rather than a leap toward the transcendent. ...
"[I]n Western and American religion, ... his account takes two major forms.
"First, there is a tradition of intellectual and aesthetic pantheism that includes figures like Spinoza, Nietzsche, Emerson and Whitman, and that's manifest in certain highbrow spiritual-but-not-religious writers today. Smith recruits Sam Harris, Barbara Ehrenreich and even Ronald Dworkin to this club....
"Second, there is a civic religion that like the civic paganism of old makes religious and political duties identical, and treats the city of man as the city of God (or the gods), the place where we make heaven ourselves instead of waiting for the next life or the apocalypse. This immanent civic religion, Smith argues, is gradually replacing the more biblical form of civil religion that stamped American history down to the Protestant-Catholic-Jew 1950s. Whether in the social-justice theology of contemporary progressive politics or the transhumanist projects of Silicon Valley, we are watching attempts to revive a religion of this-world, a new-model paganism, to 'reclaim the city that Christianity wrested away from it centuries ago.' ...
"Is the combination of intellectual pantheism and a this-world-focused civil religion enough to declare the rebirth of paganism as a faith unto itself, rather than just a cultural tendency within a still-Christian order?
"It seems to me that the answer is not quite, because this new religion would lack a clear cultic aspect, a set of popular devotions, a practice of ritual and prayer of the kind that the paganism of antiquity offered in abundance. And that absence points to the essential weakness of a purely intellectualized pantheism: It invites its adherents to commune with a universe that offers suffering and misery in abundance, which means that it has a strong appeal to the privileged but a much weaker appeal to people who need not only sense of wonder from their spiritual lives but also, well, *help.* ...
"To get a fully revived paganism in contemporary America ... the philosophers of pantheism and civil religion would need to build a religious bridge to the New Agers and neo-pagans, and together they would need to create a more fully realized cult of the immanent divine, an actual way to worship, not just to appreciate, the pantheistic order they discern.
"It seems like we're some distance from that happening...." <www.nyti.ms/2UyYDJW>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Them: Why We Hate Each Other - and How to Heal, by Benjamin E. Sasse (St. Martin's Prs, 2018, hardcover: 288 pages) <www.amzn.to/2EPMadX>
2 - Pagans and Christians in the City: Culture Wars From the Tiber to the Potomac, by Steven D. Smith (Eerdmans, 2018, hardcover: 384 pages) <www.amzn.to/2zVU18R>
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