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AR 25:28 - Totalitarian mindset vs. respectful disagreement
In this issue:
FREE SPEECH - the "totalitarian mindset" that seeks to punish even "respectful disagreement"
HOMOSEXUALITY - will "affirming transgender identity determine America's fate?"
SECULARISM - multiple perspectives on its "assorted manifestations"
Apologia Report 25:28 (1,485)
July 16, 2020
FREE SPEECH
"'Successor ideology': Is free speech obsolete?" -- the media may finally be catching on that the Left is out to control everyone and everything. This piece reviews print sources, beginning with: "Has the 'woke' Left killed classical liberalism? asked Jonathan Chait in NYMag.com. <www.tinyurl.com/4uw9a78p> The intolerant mindset about safe spaces and free speech once found on college campuses has migrated to the culture as a whole, and it's grown more adamant amid the racial awakening following George Floyd's killing by police. At private companies, in politics, and at the newspapers and websites, young progressives are demanding the firing, blacklisting, and/or censoring of anyone they deem insufficiently anti-racist. ...
"We used to call this phenomenon 'political correctness' or 'identity politics,' said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. But the revolutionary belief that journalism and all institutions should be governed by a singular, virtuous, anti-racist 'truth' has evolved into what cultural critic Wesley Yang has called the 'successor ideology' to liberalism itself. It is taking hold everywhere from the Ivy League to the publishing industry to 'HR departments all over corporate America.' ...
"If liberalism is dead, Donald Trump killed it, said Jay Rosen in PressThink.org. When a president wages all-out war on the free press, science, every institution checking his power, and truth itself, the belief that good speech drives out bad speech is 'an expensive illusion to maintain.'
"If this 'madness' is all a reaction to Trump, said Rolling Stone contributor Matt Taibbi in his newsletter, then why are the 'Twitter Robespierres' of the woke Left so focused on persecuting heretics in their own ranks?" (The example is given of David Shor, fired for a tweet <www.bit.ly/2CPASsQ> which critics said reeked of "anti-blackness.") "This inflexible orthodoxy is 'closer to cult religion than politics,' and has institutions from The New York Times to the Democratic leadership in Congress kneeling in supplication and fear.
"It's not just the Left, said David French in TheDispatch.com. The climate of fear now gripping liberal newsrooms has a perfect analog in conservative media and Republican politics....
"The totalitarian mindset that wants to punish even 'respectful disagreement' is 'chillingly recognizable in American history, and increasingly in the American present.'" The Week, Jun 26 '20, p6.
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HOMOSEXUALITY
"Under the Rainbow Banner" by Darel E. Paul -- "Queerness has conquered America because it is the distilled essence of the country's post-1960s therapeutic culture. ... Sexual desire plays an especially prominent role in therapeutic narratives. For Freud, sexual drive was the engine of the personality. ...
"Freud himself has largely fallen out of favor. Yet Freud's therapeutic mission continues unabated.... The long-running popularity of American psychotherapeutic or 'mind-cure' movements including transcendentalism, New Thought, Christian Science, Scientology, and New Age spirituality has made the United States unusually fertile soil for the therapeutic. ...
"Queerness owes its privileged status to its relationship to the therapeutic. It epitomizes three central therapeutic values: individuality, authenticity, and liberation. ... None have summarized such individuality better than America's philosopher-king, former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who in 1992 famously defended 'the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.' Although Kennedy wrote these words in defense of the right to abortion, he quoted them when ending the last of America's sodomy laws in 2003 and echoed them as he constitutionalized same-sex marriage in 2015 as an expression of the right 'to define and express [one's] identity.' ...
"From a therapeutic perspective, the more fantastic a sexual identity, the more it expresses individuality and thus the more exemplary it is. ... In a summation of the therapeutic doctrine of individuality, former Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson proclaims, 'There are as many sexualities as there are human beings.'
"Authenticity builds upon individuality as the public expression of each person's unique essence. ...
"Like individuality, authenticity has exceptionally strong cultural connections to queerness. Sexual orientation, sexual identity, and gender identity are invisible qualities of the self traditionally subject to strong social control. ...
"The therapeutic demands authentic selves that are not only expressed but also socially recognized. Mental health professionals once counseled the development of pro-social interdictions that would enable an individual's adaptation to social expectations. Under the therapeutic, they now advocate for the wholesale transformation of all of society in order to facilitate self-actualization. This is why simple tolerance is wholly inadequate, for without recognition, selves will internalize a sense of inferiority and thus fail to become authentic. ... Employment tribunals in the United Kingdom now teach all employers that conservative, Christian, or feminist 'absolutist view[s] that sex is immutable' are 'incompatible with human dignity' and 'not worthy of respect in a democratic society.' Twitter enforces this same view on over 300 million users worldwide.
"This social duty finds its highest liturgical enactment in the Pride parade, a ritualized demand for and reception of recognition. ...
"Precisely because of its symbolic bond to the therapeutic, queer affirmation is both the fulfillment and the herald of an entire society of authentic and recognized selves. ... The cultural tie joining queerness to love is so strong that 'love is love' has become a sacred mantra recited specifically in support and defense of queer persons. ...
"In his foreword to a 2018 book by transgender activist Sarah McBride, former vice president Joe Biden writes:
'We are at an inflection point in the fight for transgender equality, what I have called the civil rights issue of our time. And it's not just a singular issue of identity, it's about freeing the soul of America from the constraints of bigotry, hate, and fear, and opening people's hearts and minds to what binds us all together.'
"Biden understands recognition as a spiritual crusade. According to the possible future President of the United States, our social glue is a common commitment to the therapeutic. Only then can every American 'live authentically, fully, and freely.'
"While the 'soul of America' has been an object of anxiety since at least the 1850s, never before had anyone suggested that affirming transgender identity would determine its fate. Instead, the state of the national soul was typically said to be determined by the treatment of African Americans. When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference formed in 1957, it chose as its motto 'To Save the Soul of America.' Martin Luther King Jr. used the phrase and versions like it throughout his years leading the American civil rights movement. ...
"Fifty-five years after King's 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail,' Joe Biden speaks to a different people holding a different faith. ... Conversion to a common faith need not produce membership in a common church. Look instead for the saved arm-in-arm at the Pride parade." First Things, Jun '20, <www.bit.ly/31vdVp5>
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SECULARISM
The Oxford Handbook of Secularism, Phil Zuckerman and John Shook, eds. [1] -- Jodie Ann Vann (Dickinson College) tells us that the massive volume "is organized into six parts: 1) Identifying the Secular, Secularity, Secularization, and Secularism; 2) Secular Governments; 3) Contesting Political Secularism; 4) Politics of Church and State; 5) Secularity and Society; and 6) Morality and Secular Ethics. ...
"Approaching the subject matter from the disciplines of philosophy, law, political theory, sociology, psychology, anthropology, education, religious studies, and more, the authors demonstrate not only the complex entanglement of secularism with their various fields of inquiry, but an increased interest in secularism that appears to be growing across the academy. ... The book's major strength, in fact, is its breadth and depth of content. ...
"Part two, which features essays on what the editors refer to as 'Secular Governments' is another valuable aspect of the book. These nine chapters offer perspectives on the assorted manifestations of secularism - from French la icité, to Israel's complex of increased semi-secularity, to the neosacred governments of China and Taiwan. Too often secularism is tied intrinsically to both Western ideological values and an unexamined history of colonialism; this group of essays provides a conscious effort on behalf of the editors to avoid that pitfall.
"As a scholar of religion, I found Mark Juergensmeyer's chapter on 'The Imagined War between Secularism and Religion' a particularly provocative and unique contribution. ... Juergensmeyer explores how secularism often alienates particularly religious people in ways that sometimes result in violent backlash. ...
"However, as Juergensmeyer explains, it is the dichotomy between religion and secularity - the rhetorical assertion that these are fundamentally opposed worldviews - that allows for and even encourages a resultant 'us versus them' ideology to flourish." Nova Religio, 23:3 - 2019, pp118-9, <www.bit.ly/2VxMcQY>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - The Oxford Handbook of Secularism, Phil Zuckerman and John Shook, eds. (Oxford Univ Prs, 2017, hardcover, 792 pages) <www.amzn.to/2YMM5TJ>
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