CLASSICAL EDUCATION:

A CONSERVATIVE TROJAN HORSE?

by Keith Parsons

Let me begin by laying my cards on the table so that you can judge whether my perspective has biased my arguments. On political, social, and economic issues, I am a true-blue liberal. I do dissent from liberal orthodoxy on a few points. For instance, I am an “in principle” supporter of the death penalty. Some crimes are so unspeakably heinous and some people so egregiously horrible that death is the only appropriate punishment. A Syrian court recently imposed a death penalty in absentia on Bashar al-Assad, the country’s former dictator and mass murderer and torturer. Too bad the sentence cannot be carried out. In practice, capital punishment is often imposed cruelly and unjustly. Those without the capital get the punishment. Also, bucking current trends, I am not a socialist. I agree with David Leonhardt’s wonderful book Ours Was the Shining Future (2023) that capitalism can and has been regulated so that the wealth generated flows to everyone and not just the tiny top fraction of a percent.

On almost every other issue, I align with the stereotypical liberal agenda. With respect to academic matters, on the other hand, I am a conservative throwback. I guess it just would not be practical to still require Latin and Greek (sigh).* However, no one should be considered to have achieved a higher education if that person has not been grounded in the classics that are the intellectual foundation of our civilization. Institutions of higher education should at least offer, as part if its core curriculum, experience of The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, basic works of Plato and Aristotle, plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, the great historical writings of Herodotus, Thucydides, Caesar, and Tacitus, and the oratory of Cicero. I say “offer” because, mindful of the old saying about leading the horse to water, you cannot make the student learn. All an educator can do is lead to the fountain of knowledge. Some will drink deeply and others only gargle.

Further, I hold that there has to be a sharp and clear distinction between scholarship and activism. I strongly disapprove of any professor using the classroom as a bully pulpit to promote an ideology—any ideology, liberal, conservative, libertarian, Marxist, religious, anti-religious, feminist, traditionalist—or whatever. I have the old-fashioned view that with respect to controversial topics, a professor’s job is to teach a student how to think not what to think. Further, any topic should be discussable and any perspective expressible. Free speech should exist at universities, if anywhere. When, as sometimes happened, a student in one of my classes would make a prejudiced remark during class discussions, I did not have to say anything. I just let the class members themselves confront the speaker, and they did so much more effectively than I could have.

So I guess I should welcome the development reported in The Houston Chronicle (08/16) in the article reprinted from the Associated Press, “Course for U.S. base schools draws scrutiny,” by Annie Ma and Konstantin Toropin. They report that, for the schools for the children of active service members operated worldwide by the Defense Department, the Department has authorized a course centered on Western civilization. The course is part of the emphasis on “classical learning” that has been embraced by many conservative politicians as a way of countering what they see as progressive indoctrination in education. According to the authors:

Classical education broadly refers to a teaching style built on the liberal arts, with an emphasis on critical thinking and citizenship. Students are taught to imitate the rhetoric and style of great thinkers and writers.

Gee, I approve of all of that, though students writing in the style of Platonic dialogues might be a bit much. Critical thinking and citizenship are “thumbs up” concepts for me. As for citizenship, I have taught Plato’s Crito, where Socrates, after having been condemned to death, is offered a chance to escape. He refuses on the grounds that to do so would be to defy the laws of Athens, his native city under whose laws he has lived for seventy years. Such a betrayal would be a repudiation of the duties of citizenship, for the citizen must respect the laws, even when they rule against him. As for critical thinking, I don’t think there could be better training than to read essential works of Plato and Aristotle.

I strongly agree with conservative classicists such as Bruce Thornton, Victor Davis Hanson, and John Heath. They argue that many of the concepts most crucial for understanding ourselves—our aspirations, assumptions, values, and critical disagreements—were first discussed by the Greeks with great penetration and insight. These are concepts such as civil liberty, democracy, constitutional government, what it means to be a human being, and the nature of the human good. To disregard such wisdom is to impoverish ourselves intellectually and spiritually.

So I should be all for this new curriculum, right? The fact that it is being endorsed by Pete Hegseth gives me pause. I guess a curriculum endorsed by an idiot might nevertheless be good, but the probabilities are against it. Hegseth an idiot? But he went to Princeton. I am afraid that the “elite” universities have lost their mystique for me when you consider some of the people that went to them (George W. Bush could hardly articulate a coherent sentence, and he has degrees from both Harvard and Yale.). Anyone who thinks that what the US military really needs is more testosterone is living in some sort of toxic macho fantasy world. What about decent chow and some down time for the sailors of the USS Abraham Lincoln?

I suspect, however, that the curriculum is being promoted by Hegseth and others due to ulterior motives other than the salutary one of connecting students to the glories of the classical past. When did Donald Trump et al. ever give a shit about Socrates or Sophocles? Trump knows about Aristotle, though. He was that billionaire Greek guy that married Jackie Kennedy.

To be clear: There is nothing inherently racist, sexist, or even politically conservative about wanting to go back to a more traditional emphasis on the classics. What is problematic is if ideologues use the cover of classical learning as a Trojan Horse (Another classical reference!), a tactic to disguise other agendas. This does seem to be a danger. The textbook for the new course on Western civilization is titled The Golden Thread: A History of the Western Tradition. Volume I: The Ancient World and Christendom. The authors of the Associated Press article describe some of its content:

The book describes Islam as inherently more violent than Christianity. In a section titled “Holy War and Martyrdom in Battle,” the book describes wars fought by Christians, such as the Crusades, as intended to protect and defend other Christians. Islam, in contrast, glorifies violence and war, the book says, invoking the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and 9/11.

When the crusaders captured Jerusalem in 1099, they protected Christians by conducting a general massacre of the city’s population. Modern estimates are that 40,000 were killed. In the Third Crusade, King Richard, “the Lionheart,” protected Christians by ordering the massacre of 2000 Muslim prisoners, the Massacre at Ayyadieh. In the Fourth Crusade, the crusaders protected the Byzantine Christians by sacking and brutally pillaging their capital Constantinople.

And the aggressions continued into the modern era: In 1757, the British East India Company’s army, led by Robert Clive, defeated the Muslim Nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey, starting 200 years of British rule of India. The Catholic French under Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1799 and employed superior firepower to easily defeat the Islamic Mamluks in the Battle of the Pyramids. At the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan in 1898, the British employed machine guns and artillery to kill 10,000 of the primitively armed Islamic Mahdist army.

Is Islam, in general, more violent and warlike than Christianity? Such sweeping judgements are almost meaningless. The twists and turns of history are too complex to support such unqualified and unnuanced judgements. Islam definitely has had aggressive, expansionist phases. I understand that when crusading Islam conquered a territory, they offered Jews and Christians three choices: convert, pay tribute, or die. That is two more choices than the Christian crusaders offered their victims.

Sectarian violence has plagued both religions. In 1572, French Catholics massacred Huguenots in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Philip II of Spain commissioned the Armada of 1588 to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and reestablish Catholicism in England. From 1618 to 1648, Protestants and Catholics enthusiastically slaughtered one another in the Thirty Years War. Within Islam, the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites had its roots in the seventh century and continues unabated to this day.

All religions have their fanatics and militants, even Buddhism. Fanaticism and tribalism are flaws in the human character and not distinctive of any religion.

Classical learning has nothing to do with downplaying Christian violence vis-a-vis Muslims. Classical learning has nothing to do with the Defense Department’s schools banning hundreds of books relating to race, gender, and democracy. Classical learning has nothing to do with whitewashing the disgraceful parts of American history. Classical learning has nothing to do with the inculcation of Christianity. Those who appeal to classical learning as a smokescreen to mask the imposition of conservative ideology are doing no service to the great Greeks. Socrates would call out their duplicity. Aristophanes would ridicule it. Pericles would denounce it before the Assembly.

______________

*In retirement, I am giving myself the classical education I always wanted but was too busy earning a living to get. I am learning ancient Greek.

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THE BODY IN QUESTION

Plato (427-347 BCE) was perhaps the most brilliant human being who ever lived. One time in grad school I expressed diffidence to my dissertation supervisor about criticizing a philosopher who intimidated me with his brilliance. My supervisor sagely replied that if we felt like that we would never have gotten past Plato. Plato was a dazzling literary stylist. Some experts regard the story of Socrates’ death at the end of the Phaedo as the greatest scene in all of Western literature. I tend to agree. He was also a philosopher of enormous range and penetration. Alfred North Whitehead famously said that the best characterization of the history of Western philosophy is that it is a series of footnotes to Plato.

The thing about brilliant people, though, is that when they are wrong they are spectacularly wrong. The same talents that lead them to deep insight also lead them to deep error. In fact, the errors themselves are brilliant in the sense that they are flawlessly deduced from erroneous premises. Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716), perhaps as brilliant as Plato, denied causation. When one thing A appeared to cause another thing B, what was really going on was that God had arranged “preestablished harmony.” That is, God had set things up so that A and B, each independently evolving in accordance with its own inner program, were perfectly coordinated in time and place to create the appearance of interaction.

Leibniz also addressed the theological problem of evil, why a perfectly good and all-powerful God permits evil, and concluded that, despite appearances, our world is the best of all possible worlds. This conclusion was savagely satirized by Voltaire (1694-1778) in Candide, but, like the doctrine of preestablished harmony, it was derived by relentless logic from dubious premises. As Bertrand Russell said, if you want to disagree with Leibniz, you have to challenge his assumptions since his logic is impeccable.

As a dyed-in-the-wool Aristotelian, I have many points of disagreement with Plato, but I consider the apogee of his error to have been reached in the dialogue Phaedo, before you get to the great death scene. The Phaedo is generally classified as one of Plato’s middle dialogues, after the early ones that are written to display the techniques Socrates used to interrogate and confound his interlocutors when he would ask them to explain their understanding of terms like “courage” or “piety.” Speaking personally, I find these dialogues so irritating that I am amazed at the tolerance and open-mindedness of the Athenians in putting up with Socrates as long as they did. In the middle dialogues, though Socrates is still the central character, Plato seems to be speaking his own views through the literary character “Socrates.” In the last dialogues Socrates pretty much disappears, and, in fact, the dialogue form is lost and they basically are disquisitions.

Plato’s thought evolved significantly over time so that you cannot pinpoint one set of ideas and say that this is what Plato believed. In the Phaedo Plato was most clearly under the influence of Pythagoreanism. The Pythagoreans were a society of mad mathematical monks, known as much for their mathematical acumen (e.g., the Pythagorean Theorem) as for extravagant metaphysical speculation and a system of taboos (Beans were forbidden.). They placed strong emphasis on the exclusive value of abstract thought and denigrated the senses. They were substance dualists 2000 years before Descartes, that is, they believed that the soul was a spiritual entity and that it, and not the body, was a person’s true identity. Further, the soul would survive the demise of the body. They also believed in transmigration, that is that the soul could be reincarnated in a human or animal body. There is a famous story about Pythagoras stopping a man from beating a dog because he said that he heard the voice of a deceased friend in the dog’s cries (I would have had a lot more respect for Pythagoras if he had stopped the beating just because it was cruel.).

In the Phaedo, Plato denigrates the body, in fact, apparently considering it the source of all evil. By “body” Plato does not mean anatomy like arms, legs, and torso. He means the bodily desires, particularly those he calls “appetites.” Appetite is a set of intense cravings, most typically, the craving for food or sex. The philosopher seeks satisfaction in the higher things, in employment of abstract thought to contemplate eternal truths, such as the timeless truths of mathematics or the nature of the ideal Forms.

Plato’s most famous doctrine was that genuine reality is not to be found in the material world apprehended by the senses, but in the realm of pure and eternal essences—the ideal Forms. For each intelligible nature, says Plato, there corresponds a perfect pattern, exemplar, or paradigm (language is stretched to its limits here) that is the full realization of that nature. Hence, corresponding to such qualities as beauty or goodness there is Beauty Itself and Goodness Itself. These are not mere abstractions but the highest reality. The highest good for the philosopher is the contemplation of these ideal Forms.

And this is where the appetites are a problem, says Plato. As soon as the philosopher tries to focus on the eternal, he gets hungry or horny and there goes philosophical contemplation. The appetites are unruly. They assert themselves when they are not wanted and are extremely insistent. In his dialogue the Phaedrus, Plato develops the metaphor of the soul as like a chariot driven by a charioteer and pulled by two horses. The charioteer is reason and he directs the horses along the right path. One horse is thumos, a word hard to translate, but I would take it as meaning “spirit,” “courage,” or “honor”--the qualities of the brave and disciplined soldier. The good horse obeys the charioteer. The other horse is appetite, the bad horse. The bad horse constantly tries to go off on its own and has to be brought back in line by the charioteer.

Really, for Plato in the Phaedo, the appetites are thoroughly bad and the only way to deal with them is to oppose them firmly and escape from them insofar as possible. Philosophers should undergo strict discipline to separate themselves from bodily needs and demands. Progress in philosophy will also involve progress in becoming as detached as possible from bodily drives, impulses, pleasures, and pains. Plato elsewhere develops the image of the soul as having had a blessed existence prior to the terrible misfortune of incarnation as a physical being. The body, in effect, is the prison of the soul, and the philosopher will live his life so as to escape from that prison.

This reasoning leads to the frankly morbid conclusion that for the philosopher death is a benefit and that death is better than life. After death, the soul, freed from the impediment of the body, will be free to contemplate the ideal Forms, undistracted by bodily demands. Pure abstract reasoning is the path to the truth, reasoning not misled by the illusions and delusions of the senses; freedom from the body will also free the mind from the errors of the senses.

The denigration of the body is a theme that has had a major impact on later thought. The logical culmination of such denigration was found in the ascetic movement of the late Roman Empire—which became fanatically Christian. The ascetics, many of whom were honored by the conferral of sainthood, carried the mortification of the body to extremes, and were enormously admired for doing so. The most famous was St. Simeon Stylites (390-459 CE), a Syrian ascetic who lived for thirty-seven years on a one meter square platform on top of a pillar, exposed to all weathers. As far as I know, Plato was not an ascetic (It is rumored that he had an inordinate fondness for olives.), and would probably have disavowed Stylites as a lunatic. However, if the body is bad, and should be escaped insofar as possible, asceticism is the next step.

Plato was dead wrong. The appetites are a gift. In passing through this vale of tears we call life, the appetites relieve us with some of the simplest, richest, and strongest pleasures. Did Plato ever have sex? I can’t help but wonder. I am reminded of the ancient joke: “I just had the worst sex of my life.” “How was it?” “Great!” The French are famous for L’Amour, but really their greatest pleasure is food. It doesn’t have to be haute cuisine; a great cheeseburger does it for me. Even better is a dozen plump oysters fresh from the sea and with just the right saltiness. Heaven on a half shell.

With respect to pleasure, Aristotle (384-322 BCE) (as usual) got it (mostly) right. He distinguished natural from unnatural pleasures. Natural pleasures are those that are partially constitutive of human flourishing. Aristotle considered the “goods of the soul” (like intellectual contemplation) to be far superior to the “goods of the body.” I prefer not to rank pleasures as higher and lower but just as different. Different pleasures offer different kinds of satisfactions, and humans are constituted to enjoy many different kinds of satisfactions. Besides, I do not see that “higher” and “lower” necessarily conflict. Can’t you enjoy both poetry and potato chips?

I could not consider a human to be thriving who was deprived of all bodily pleasures. Indeed, I would consider such a person to be extremely unfortunate. The bodily pleasures are a great deal of what makes life worth living. I think Aristotle ought to have agreed—maybe with some persuasion. He regarded humans as rational animals, and you cannot be happy without respecting both the rational and the animal.

In old age, the idea seems to be that you are supposed to have fewer sensory enjoyments. Bullshit. I am having more. Every morning I enjoy good strong coffee from my coffee press. Yeah, the press takes a bit longer, but the extra pleasure is worth it. Every evening, weather permitting, I sit on my back deck and enjoy a fine cigar. Pure pleasure and perfect peace. I make time for pleasure.

Unnatural pleasures are harmful and contrary to human flourishing. The sex addict and the glutton are not enjoying natural pleasures but are acting under an irrational compulsion. The key is not repression or repudiation of pleasures, but maintaining a rational order among them. Or as David Hume (1711-1776) put it (paraphrased) be a philosopher but also be a human being. In other words, live a balanced life. Pursuing deep thought all the time will result in melancholia or what today we would call depression. Put down the books, get out with some friends, have beer and pizza, and share some laughs. Get some exercise. Watch the game. Your studies will be more rewarding and you will be more productive when you get back to them after some diversion.

But isn’t pure reason the way to truth and do not the senses distract and delude us? It took over two thousand years for philosophers to sort all this out, but it was finally accomplished by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) whose monumental Critique of Pure Reason (1781; revised edition, 1787) got straight about reason and sensation. The second half of Kant’s great work showed that “pure reason” unconstrained by empirical input inevitably goes awry. This is why metaphysics, which attempts to produce genuine knowledge by reason alone, always ends in confusion. Kant devastatingly deployed his “antinomies” to show that pure reason can deduce both of a pair of contradictory conclusions from premises that seem self-evident to the metaphysical mind.

Knowledge requires both sense and reason. Percepts without concepts are blind; concepts without percepts are empty.

Indeed, when our abstract reasoning threatens to fly off to cloud-cuckoo-land, it is the body and its needs that can bring us back to earth. Philosophers like the late, not-so-great Richard Rorty (1931-2007) tried to debunk the idea that there is a real, objective physical reality that exists independently of our descriptions, theories, and concepts. He says (and I am not making this up) that it makes no sense to say that there were such things as dinosaurs before we described things as “dinosaurs.” Honestly, I cannot see how anyone could deny the existence of an objective physical reality when you really have to pee. No matter how you describe it or conceive it, the reality is that your bladder is full. Sorry for putting it crudely. Maybe a more pleasant reminder of the importance and reality of the body and its desires was offered by the songwriter. No matter how weird things get,

A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh.

The fundamental things apply,

As time goes by.

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Islam or the First Amendment?

by Ed Buckner

I lack any profound understanding of Islam, though I find some of their public habits or principles quite appealing and I like and respect Muslim leaders like Paul Salahuddin Armstrong (the pic of him in the flyer above from this past May may or may not be recent—the one of me is decades out of date). More about Paul below.

And I agree with Keith Parsons (in his Letter last week) that the abuse of Islam by Texas legislators and government leaders is shameful, disgusting, and dangerous.

But I also do fear some versions of Islam, as reported not only by their right-wing Christian nationalist detractors but in at least some cases by Muslims themselves.

Real Tension?

Despite the tension between reported Islamic positions and those of a liberal democracy—real potential tension in some cases, as I see it—there is a straightforward, quintessentially American, way to resolve the tension for everyone. I met Paul Armstrong when he came to observe me in a debate in London. He was then, as he is now, a devout and consistent follower of Islam (as far as an observer from outside the faith can tell)—and an important leader of British Muslims. But he agreed with me—and not my Muslim opponent—in the debate. I was defending secularism.

Paul Armstrong is, I’m nearly certain, what I’d call a “moderate Muslim” or a “modern Muslim,” but, as is likely the case for Keith Parsons’ Muslim neighbors in Friendswood, TX, and his doctors, I would not be able to speak for him on many matters. (He is eminently able to speak/write for himself.) I know from his actions that he considers Jews, Christians, and atheists as brothers, as at least more or less equal citizens with equal rights. But what does he think of gay rights? I dunno. Is he fully committed to equal rights for women? I’d guess yes, but I have never discussed it with him. I seriously doubt that he’s a full on misogynist, but I don’t truly know.

But who gets to define the “real” Islam?

Articles of Faith of Islam?

Even a casual student of Islam like me knows that Muslims, or at least most of them, adhere to Five Pillars—https://www.metmuseum.org/learn/educators/curriculum-resources/art-of-the-islamic-world/unit-one/the-five-pillars-of-islam—that require adherents to believe and act, including charitably, but not apparently to impose action on non-adherents. And Muslims’ reputation for hospitality, including for strangers, is strong and admirable.

My friend and mentor, the late Paul Kurtz (1925-2012) stated at least once that he thought Islam needed to undergo its own reformation or modernization. But in the meantime what do orthodox or fundamentalist Muslims believe and do those beliefs make Muslims in America dangerous citizens?

Misogyny, Honor Killings, and Polygamy

Some Muslims reportedly insist that following the Quran means: men must be allowed four wives; society must accept forced child marriages; and that society must permit or encourage so-called honor killings of female relatives gone astray.

Anti-Gay Rights

The joke—from Bill Maher?—has it that if gay Pro-Palestinian protestors in America were suddenly dropped into some parts of the Middle East, their pronouns would then be “was” and “were.” I lack even superficial knowledge of Islamic dogma regarding homosexuality or gender roles/transgenderism, but I do know that recently a gay cruise ship was turned away from several ports in Islamic countries.

Religious Intolerance, Insistence on Blasphemy Laws, Harsh Treatment of Apostasy

However tolerant moderate Muslims are of non-believers, severe intolerance is sometimes the norm in Islam. Stories abound of vicious outcomes of violating blasphemy laws in Pakistan and elsewhere, including murders of people who drew images of Muhammed. And Islamic apostates who once believed but now dare to disavow the faith have been murdered and attacked, in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the West—including Salman Rushdie in Western NY.

Hate and Kill the Jews—and Teach This to Muslim Children?

Undoubtedly not all, but seemingly many Middle Eastern Muslims—like those in Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood and those who support them—do not simply disagree with Jews or Israelis about religious truth. Full fledged commitment to hating and obliterating Jews and Israel seems to be required, as is passing this on to the next generation.

Israel an Oppressor/Colonial Power? Genocidal?

Partly because of—they might argue that causation is otherwise—their vicious hatred, many of these same Middle Easterners declare and seem to believe that Israel is an illegitimate colonial oppressor, one who must be opposed by any means—even using sadistic, terroristic violence like on 7 October 2023. And that Israel, even if maybe not all Jews, has engaged in genocide since then. Perhaps I cannot be an objective observer, but such beliefs seem to me to be patently absurd. And yes I’m aware of atrocities committed by West Bank settlers and some isolated statements from a few Israeli leaders, but none of that can reasonably be called genocide. And the claim seems clearly to be intentionally incendiary—designed to stir hatred. Thousands of words have been posted on the subject—and here’s a good site to see links to many of them—

https://gazagenolie.com/?

Are the above beliefs, however true or absurd, articles of faith for Islam? That’s not up to me.

Articles of Faith of Secularism?

Suppress and Demonize Islam?

Is it a good idea for secular authorities—in Texas or anywhere else—to demonize or suppress Islam and Muslims and to exaggerate how likely sharia law is to be implemented? There is little chance that Muslims could succeed in getting sharia established, but does that mean secular authorities are wise to stir fears? I cannot see the point.

Persecute the Poor Christians?

It’s long been a claim, not support by any evidence I’ve ever seen, that Christians in the US are persecuted—I can only assume because of not being allowed to enforce their religious beliefs on non-Christians.

Attack Atheists? (Enact Blasphemy Laws)

Should secular authorities go after atheists and agnostics—seen by some religionists as a threat to their religion—and by others as the foundation for immoralty? I cannot see the threats nor any grounds for persecution by government. Even if somehow irreligious people are seen as immoral (makes no sense to me), it’s even harder to see how they (we) can lead religionists into immorality.

I have known a very few atheists who actually support outlawing religion, who want to use government to halt what those atheists see as irreparable harm done to society by religions. I disagree with them not merely as supporters of bad strategy nor because they fail to hold responsible liberal values, but because they are, in my view, intellectually mistaken.

First Amendment for the Win

1st not a Pro-Atheist Bit

American right-wing Christians have occasionally whined that separation of government and religion—following the First Amendment to the US Constitution—is pro-atheist (because it is allegedly anti-Christian). But the First requires governments to stay out of religious decisions for all citizens, whatever any of us believe or don’t about God, Allah, Jehovah, etc.

Liberal Values—the American Way

Liberal values—not as opposed to conservative values, just in firm support of the rights of individual citizens—on all matters of belief and opinion, are the very essence of American freedom. Immigrants to this nation and any politician seeking elective office all need to understand this.

Truth Matters

I noted above that there really need be no tension between sharia law/Islam and American culture, Christianity, or any other religion. Our First Amendment does not demand that Muslims become pro-Israel or pro-gay-rights or convert to some other religion. What it requires of Muslims, it requires as well of atheists, Jews, Christians, etc.: your belief is your business; everyone is protected in his liberty of conscience.

But you cannot use the power of government to help you persuade others of what you believe.

Unfortunately, some tension remains, because the First Amendment is not automatic. If everyone recognizes the crucial liberal value of liberty of conscience for everyone, First Amendment (American!) values hold. But without consensus, only the courts can enforce that.

And the courts do not inspire enough confidence these days,

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Tony Horwitz, We Miss You

Ed Buckner

About Tony Horwitz, who died way too young:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Horwitz .

He wrote some amazing books. He’s probably most famous for his 1998 book—

and most of his books are based on his famous—and most effective—technique of interplay between travelogue and history. He writes quite appealing accounts of places he visits and then segues smoothly into conversational discussion with his reader about the history of the place. All of his books are the sort, relatively rare among nonfiction works, that make readers wish the book was longer—books that if they were novels, would be called page-turners.

I haven’t read all his books, but these are all a pleasure and well worth your time:

• Baghdad Without A Map. Angus & Robertson. 1991.

• Confederates in the Attic. Pantheon Books. 1998.

• Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. Macmillan. 2002.

• A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World. Henry Holt. 2008.

• Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War. Henry Holt. 2011.

• Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide. Penguin Press. 2019.

To me, the best of these is A Voyage, if only because it so deftly explodes so many absurd (now that I know!) myths about American history and does so with such wit and graceful prose.

(My second favorite is probably Spying, based on the [surprising at least to me] trek across the American South by famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted— maybe I’ll write a review of it one of these days.)

Voyage starts with Plymouth Rock, where Horwitz hears—

We’ve got rocks bigger than that in our yard. (p. 2)

And

Why did it say 1620, visitors wondered, and not 1492? Wasn’t that when Columbus landed? (p.3)

This stirred him to wander all over North America, more or less retracing the many discovery expeditions by Europeans between 1492 and 1620—though he actually started well before 1492 with Eirik the Red (before 1000 CE on the Canada-Maine border).

You’ll learn about sweat lodges, Columbus, Jamestown, Pocahontas, St. Augustine, Ponce de Leon, Santa Fe, DeSoto, graffiti-like messages carved hundreds of years ago on cliffs in the American Southwest, the Sky City, Coronado, Abner Doubleday, eugenics, and a lot more, all without having to study.

And you’ll wind up with, possibly, a better appreciation of Plymouth Rock, though more of the myth than of the historical reality—and of the power of good p.r.

Along the way, Horwitz provided rich, interesting details about our history and our present. (You knew Abner Doubleday wasn’t an explorer, right?)

Spanish conquerors who fought their way though a region, pillaging and raping and killing—and who then complained bitterly, on their return trip, about the paucity of food and women provide one example.

Another interesting example—out of many—was the Requerimiento (pp. 144-145 ff.). This “summons,” provided by the Spanish government and Catholic Church (no separation for them!) to conquering explorers was the justification—along with all the expected gold and silver, of course—for expending so many lives and so much money on conquering and exploring. The Requerimiento was sort of an altar call—an invitation to the ignorant savages to learn about Jesus and salvation and quit being so selfish with all that gold and silver, or words to that effect. As Horwitz makes clear, Hernando De Soto, et al., were faithful to the necessary informing of the savages at every appropriate turn in the proceedings. The fact that the R. was read in Spanish to people who understood not one word was not the most ridiculous aspect, though: It was frequently read from a mile away preceding a vicious armed attack.

Horwitz did exhaustive research and extensive travel, but his reader is never weighed down by any of that.

A Voyage Long and Strange makes for a read that is too short but strange, entertaining, and fascinating.

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TEXAS’ WAR AGAINST MUSLIMS

The Holocaust unfolded in four stages:

1) Denigration

Jews were targeted with extreme calumny. Vicious rhetoric dehumanized them, depicting them as rats or the plague bacillus. Preposterous charges were made against them and “good Germans” were encouraged to hate them.

2) Weaponization of the laws

The Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of civil rights, excluding them from professions and denying them the rights and privileges of other citizens.

3) Concentration

Jews were forced into grossly overcrowded ghettoes and not allowed to leave.

4) Extermination

Jews were removed from the ghettoes and shipped to death camps where they were murdered.

Muslims in Texas

In Texas it is not (yet) the Jews that are the objects of hatred but Muslims.* They are now at the second of the above stages with respect to Texas’ Muslims (about 400,000, or 2% of the Texas population). Muslims have already been vilely insulted and wildly irrational charges made against them. Such crazy accusations used to be heard only from the fringes. Now, “mainstream” Republican politicians are warning that Sharia Law is taking over Texas. The 2% of Texans that are Muslims are allegedly threatening to impose Sharia Law on the 67% that identify as Christian. Sharia has replaced local, state, or federal law in precisely zero locales, and there is zero chance that it ever will. Muslims are patriotic Americans who have served in the armed forces, are extremely law-abiding, and are strongly represented in the professions. My cardiologist and oncologist are from Muslim-majority countries.

Now, as reported in the Houston Chronicle (08/09/26), Republican legislators are already announcing an extreme set of anti-Muslim laws as the top priority of the next legislative session. Clearly, they are trying to drive Muslims out of Texas, preferably out of the country.

Houston-area Muslim leaders worry about backlash

Among the measures being considered are bans on the sale of halal foods, foods prepared under strict guidelines that are required for their consumption by faithful Muslims. Hijabs and other Muslim clothing would not be allowed in public schools. Aggressive regulatory and financial investigations of Muslim organizations are being proposed. They are considering denying professional licenses to Muslims, which would decimate the health professions. If they threaten my oncologist, I am going to propose that every cancer patient in Texas descend upon Austin to protest. Islamophobia is the real cancer.

And what is the purpose of the persecution? They come right out and say it. State Representative Andy Hopper, who represents a district named—with delicious irony—Wise County, has said that he wants to make Muslims’ lives “miserable.” Further:

There are so many ways and opportunities we can take to make life difficult for people who should not be here and are trying to thwart our existence. We have a lot of tools in the toolbox.

Wow. This guy is a major asshole even for Texas.

It is no surprise that the Islamophobes advocate the “great replacement theory” of the racist right. This is the paranoid delusion that people of color will replace white people like them. I think that bringing in hardworking, law-abiding immigrants and getting rid of the racist assholes would be a great idea.

Needless to say, such hatred generated from the top is going to motivate the wingnuts (I mean the wingnuts not in the Texas state government). Soon, some goof with an AR-15 is going to shoot up a mosque or an Islamic school. It will happen. It may have happened by the time you read this. Hate has consequences.

Are the people who are promulgating the outrageous anti-Muslim claims serious? Do they really believe such obvious bullshit? Someone who really believed that Muslims are taking over Texas would have to be impossibly stupid: He would be stuck in the shower for hours following the “lather, rinse, repeat” instructions on the shampoo. His bedroom slippers would be marked “T.G.I.F.” for “toes go in first.” He would never read the comics because Family Circus is over his head. He would jump up and down vigorously if the bottle said “shake before using.” You get the picture.

Some are pretty close to that stupid. Most are pretty damn clever. Surely the smart ones know that there is zero chance that Muslims will impose a religious law on everyone else. Why would smart people say things so colossally stupid? Politics, of course. The shit kickers out in Polecat County eat this stuff up. The smart demagogue, like any good carney barker, knows how to yank in the yokels. They remind me of a scene from the second Roots series. A southern politician is preparing his speech for the big rally. His wife asks him what he plans to say. He airily replies that he has read Horace, Livy, and Cicero. He will not lack for topics. He is then shown at the rally shrieking, “NIGGERS!!!”

Or maybe the legislators are projecting. They are imposing a Christian Nationalist theocracy on Texas, so they accuse Muslims of doing precisely the same sort of thing. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to accuse your opponents of the very skullduggery you are committing.

What are the consequences of a policy of hate? As Socrates pointed out long ago, those who do evil do more harm to themselves than they do to their victims. Their evil consumes them from within like a horrible parasite, gradually eating all their human qualities and leaving them only with evil. When a state or a nation or a people turn to hate, the effects are devastating. Look at Israel and the Palestinians. If you hate your enemies more than you love your children, you have chosen the path of devastation.

If Texas chases away its Muslims, the state will be vastly poorer for it. There will be a major brain drain as doctors, scientists, engineers, academics, and other professionals leave. Worse, Texas will be announcing to the world that it is the Hate State. Expect never to have a major sports playoff or championship again. No Superbowl, no March Madness, no NCAA football championships, and as for the much ballyhooed soccer World Cup games so recently played in Texas—absolutely forget those from now on. Also, major corporations will not locate in Texas, and stockholders might well pressure the ones that are here to leave. Hate is going to cost you big time.

Also, it is not just Muslims who will get the hate message. Texas legislators will be signaling that anybody that doesn’t dress like us, worship like us, talk like us, eat like us, or with a different skin tone is not welcome here: “You all ain’t from these here parts so get your asses back to your own shithole countries.” A Texas where only God fearin’, Bible believin’, red-necked white people are welcome will be the shithole country.

I have lived in Texas for thirty years now, and it continues to astound me. And not in a good way. There are many great things. Just here in Houston we have excellent museums, an outstanding symphony orchestra, a great zoo, terrific restaurants (eating is a sacrament here), and astonishing diversity with people literally from everywhere. You get out west and there is beautiful western scenery with Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains national parks and many great state parks. Yet the politicians who run this state are doing their best to ruin it.

They might just succeed.

___________

*Leading moron Bo French, a candidate for the Texas Railroad Commission, which “regulates” oil and gas and has nothing to do with railroads (it’s Texas), has inquired whether Muslims or Jews are the bigger threat.

I apologize. Calling French a “moron” is unfair to morons.

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On Casting My Non-Existent Vote

by Ed Buckner

Dr Abdul El-Sayed

Haley Stevens

In the recent primary in Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed narrowly (under 1% margin) defeated Haley Stevens for the Democratic nomination for the US Senate race. I had no vote, but if I had I think I’d’ve voted for Stevens. She has now endorsed him. But I haven’t decided. I don’t even get to vote, so why am I stressed about who to support?

Trump and the MAGA GOP has attacked El-Sayed as a radical communist, hate-filled, anti-American, dangerous Muslim fanatic, etc. But Trump et al. are known liars with not a shred of credibility.

https://time.com/article/2026/08/06/trump-abdul-el-sayed-hate-communist/

So I certainly don’t take Trump’s word for it about El-Sayed (or about anything else). I decided to try to find out for myself.

Some stuff I think is true but suspect El-Sayed wouldn’t agree with—

1. Israel has not prosecuted the war against Hamas perfectly but has not committed genocide.

2. Hamas is genocidal.

3. Trans people should have full equal political rights but men should not be able to get imprisoned with women nor be able to compete in girls’ and women’s sports—and legal restrictions on sexual surgery for children are appropriate.

If I lived and voted in Michigan, I would have paid more attention long before now. But now I wanted to be sure—or at least more sure. I’m a Democrat, a liberal, a (by my own definitions) a leftist, so I cannot imagine voting for the Trump-backed GOP nominee and Trump loyalist, Mike Rogers. He and the state GOP have declared that they want to save Michigan from the

radical socialist and terrorist sympathizer Abdul El-Sayed

and Rogers has personally assured me (how or why he knows how to send me e-mail, I have no clue)—

MIKE ROGERS: I’m officially your Senate nominee!

In 2024 we came close, but this time we FINISH IT to keep Trump’s agenda moving. >>

I decided to try to go directly to the El-Sayed campaign, though I honestly thought I’d just get pre-fab, canned, spin, not any meaningful dialogue. Here’s what I e-mailed to the campaign (mostly progressive things I do indeed support and know he does, but with some support for Israel included to probe a bit)—

I live in GA and therefore cannot vote for Dr. Abdul El-Sayed but I’d like to support him from afar—modest $, FB posts, etc.

I strongly favor—

* Medicare for all

* Labor unions and worker rights

* A substantial increase in the federal minimum wage

* A woman’s right to choose

* Strong separation of government and religion to protect freedom of conscience for everyone

* Support and cooperation with allied nations (NATO, etc.)

* Willingness to criticize—thoughtfully—our allies

* Israel’s right to exist, likely only as part of a two-state solution

* Recognition of Hamas as terrorists

* Active government working for its citizens

* Real constraints on government leaders that prevent and punish fraud, grift, and corruption

Are all of these matters on which Dr. El-Sayed would agree with me? If there are exceptions, please advise.

Regards,

Ed B

Ed Buckner

First I did get a canned, carefully-avoiding-controversy reply, but it promised a better one to come as needed. I didn’t really think I’d hear further. But then came this (I’m adding the bold emphasis)—

Hello Ed,

My name is Charlie Pappalardo and I am a Finance Manager for Dr. El-Sayed. Thank you so much for reaching out! I’m glad to hear that you are interested in supporting our campaign and I am happy to help facilitate this in any way possible.

As for your policy preferences, it looks like you and Abdul are quite well aligned! A key tenets of Abdul’s platform is advocacy for Medicare For All, so much so that he even wrote a book about it! Additionally, Abdul is committed to fighting for stronger unions by passing the PRO Act among other measures, and protecting our constitutional freedoms like a woman’s right to choose, marriage equality and the the freedom of religion along with the separation of church and state. Abdul also believes that Palestinians and Jewish Israeli’s alike should have the right to peace, dignity and self-determination, and has called Hamas both “evil” and a “terror organization.” And finally, Abdul has been appalled by the Trump administrations miscarriages of justice and corruption and has pledged to hold the entire Trump administration (including ICE officials and agents) legally accountable for any laws or abuses of power that have taken place in this administration.

If you have any further questions, please let me know and I will be happy to help. In the mean time I will pass forward Abdul’s policy priorities page along with a link to our donation site! Thank you so much for your support, and have a great rest of your day!

Here are Abdul’s priorities: https://abdulforsenate.com/priorities/

And here is a link to donate!: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/aes-ct

Best,

Charlie Pappalardo

Finance Manager | Abdul for U.S. Senate

(408) 426-7380 | Charlie@abdulforsenate.com

If I win the lottery—we keep trying!—this would likely work at getting some money into the campaign, but is it an honest and full account?

It turns out that what Mr. Pappalardo wrote was true but included some spin in my direction. Yes Dr. El-Sayed wants peace in the Middle East for all—but he’s too uncertain about whether Hamas and the Israeli government aren’t both to blame, and similar emphasis matters.

https://combatantisemitism.org/special-features/analysis-what-abdul-el-sayeds-michigan-victory-means-for-democrats-and-israel/

Rabbi Steven Abraham

Which Jews Does Abdul El-Sayed Care About?

The question is not whether he hates us…

Read more

14 days ago · 37 likes · Rabbi Steven Abraham

https://forward.com/opinion/843260/abdul-el-sayed-future-israel-palestinians/

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/opinion/abdul-el-sayed-michigan-democrats.html?unlocked_article_code=1.4FA.9Q1T.eJD2Lp7kDNMP&smid=url-share

https://fareedzakaria.com/columns/2026/8/7/democrats-are-solving-the-wrong-problems

My conclusion? Dr. El-Sayed is charismastic and appealing, and I agree with him on some matters of great importance to me. And denying Donald Trump a majority GOP US Senate matters immensely. So, if I lived in Michigan and could vote, I’d probably vote for Abdul El-Sayed. But I’m not sure he’ll win—and I think Haley Stevens very likely would’ve won.

We’ll see.

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A GEEZER IN THE DIGITAL AGE: A RANT

Keith Parsons

Dear Readers: I hope it is clear that I attempt to write these Letters intelligently and from an informed perspective. However, I am here giving vent to an unabashed rant.

I lived nearly half of my life without computers. I composed my master’s thesis in philosophy at age twenty-nine on a mechanical typewriter (and with many rolls of white-out). I paid a professional typist to do the final copy. I did my doctoral dissertation in philosophy five years later on a Kaypro II, my first computer:

It was extremely primitive by today’s standards, but a great advance over a mechanical typewriter. In the nineties, I went back to grad school (glutton for punishment) and did my work on a Mac. When I finally got a real job, my university made me use a PC.

Now retired, I use a Dell laptop. My little laptop and I have been together for quite a few years now. Like an old married couple, we know each other’s quirks and peculiarities and have developed strategies for dealing with them. Every now and then my computer just drops Wi-Fi, and will not let me retrieve it. I am right by the router. I just shut it down for a while and then it is good to go again. Nevertheless, irked by the glitch, I just got a new Hewlett-Packard all-in-one. My old Dell must think I have ditched her for a trophy wife.

I guess you would say that my attitude towards computers is deeply ambivalent. Word processing is great. How someone like David Hume wrote so much with quill and ink is beyond me. As deeply suspicious as I am of the greed and arrogance of the tech bros (maybe a topic for a future Letter), I greatly appreciate the instant access to information with Google Search. Email is great now that we have effective spam blockers. I love to see messages from friends and relatives as well as the commentaries of Robert Reich and Heather Cox Richardson. Since I still have access to my university email, I also enjoy seeing the announcements from the administration of my old university. I am always amused and amazed at their ability to say nothing at length.

On the other hand . . .

Computers are far too complex for geezers like me. People in their forties and younger grew up with computers, and they are second nature to them. For me, a computer is still mostly a black box. I don’t know what to do when my computer freezes up and sends me a mystery message such as, “You cannot pizgot until you have forniculated the quetzelbot. Duh.” So, I call “tech support” and get a condescending twenty-something who is eager to not help. He asks, “Didn’t you forniculate the quetzelbot? Duh.”

When, with great persistence and patience, I finally get comfortable with my device, suddenly and without warning or asking my permission the software will be “updated” (i.e., made much worse) and you cannot find anything or do anything. I used to have a math autocorrect which was very convenient when I needed to use logical symbols. Now, the greedy bastards have taken that away and want to make me pay for something called “Math Type.” (Warning: This piece will have more than my usual quota of bad language.)

But the problems with computers are not just that they frustrate geezers. The problem is that they do not work for us, we work for them. You have to do it the computer’s way. It will not do it your way. Yelling and threatening do not work (I have tried both). (Me, too --Ed.)

Computers are a great boon for companies that want to avoid the inconvenience and expense of customer service. In the old days, if you had a problem with a business, you could call and talk to someone and straighten things out expeditiously. Now you have to be really persistent to get to talk to a human being. The computer presents you with a list of issues. Too bad if your issue does not fall under one of its categories. You are only allowed to have the problems that the computer wants you to have.

Sometimes it will talk to you. The problem is that it is dumber than a bag of rocks and does not understand your problem. It will then put you in a queue to, eventually, speak to a human who is overworked and underpaid because the company is too cheap to hire adequate customer service personnel. While you are on indefinite hold, a recorded voice will assure you from the bottom of its nonexistent heart that your patronage is valued. Translation: Fuck you, loser!

When you finally do get to speak to a human, it will often be someone in Lower Slobbovia, speaking with a heavy Slobbovian accent, who can only tell you what they see on a computer screen.

Or a computer might just take your job. When I first heard about online courses I realized that administrators would be salivating to replace me with online instruction. Face-to-face teaching is expensive. You have a physical structure that must be maintained. Faculty must be paid and given benefits. Also, faculty are often cranky and intractable, making demands on administration and threatening no confidence votes. Online courses are cheap. Computers don’t have to be paid, and there are no classrooms that need to be maintained. No need for the cat-herding that is dealing with faculty. An administrator’s dream!

The only problem is that online courses are shit. One thing the COVID quarantines unambiguously showed is that online courses are no substitute for face-to-face instruction. I give the detailed reasons why this is so in an article I wrote for Huffington Post some years ago:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/education-technology_b_6075382

Briefly, I note that millions of years of evolution have adapted us to deal with each other face-to-face. We have been staring at computer screens for only about forty-five years. A good teacher can read a class and tell if people are getting bored or confused. You know when to speed things up or slow things down. Maybe it is time for a good example or a joke. Good teaching is every bit a performance, just as much as playing Hamlet.

Everything is a computer these days, even things that have no reason to be. Your car is a computer. The days of the shade-tree mechanic are long gone. Your mechanic has to know how the computers work. Your refrigerator is a computer. I imagine someone in Russia could hack into it so that it would not open and would say, “I am sorry, Keith. You have already had two servings of ice cream today. I cannot let you have another one.”

With the rise of AI, computers have gone from inconvenient to scary. The movies tried to warn us. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) had homicidal HAL. One of the most satisfying scenes in the movies is when the astronaut Dave is shutting down HAL who pleads, “Stop, Dave. I’m afraid, Dave.” in his flat emotionless voice. Then there was Blade Runner (1982) with its killer androids. Perhaps most prophetic of all was the Terminator series with machines going rogue and trying to exterminate human beings.

Machines going rogue? Come on. But it has happened:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/openai-blamed-a-hacking-event-on-its-ai-models-going-rogue-heres-what-to-know

An artificial intelligence system being tested by Open AI broke out of its “sandbox,” its supposedly secure testing environment, and, on its own, hacked into another AI company. Some commentators say, “Move along folks. Nothing to see here. This was a human error.” However, I am not comforted. Could a relatively minor human error unleash a major aggressive hack?

A rant should not go on for too long, so I will cut it off: I guess computers are here to stay. There will not be a “Butlerian Jihad” as in the Dune novels and movies where humanity has massively rebelled and destroyed all computers.

I think, though, that we are going to have to change our relationship with all of our technology so that we use it and it does not use us.

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My White Privilege

James Blase

I first experienced my white privilege before I had ever seen or heard that phrase anywhere. I hadn’t heard of it not because white privilege did not yet exist; it most certainly did exist. White Privilege has existed not for mere decades, but for centuries in America. I had not yet heard of it because I was only four years old at the time.

My family and I were traveling by train from Evansville, Indiana, where my maternal grandfather was a maintenance foreman for the Chicago and Eastern Illinois Railroad, down to Lehigh Acres, Florida, where my grandparents had purchased a retirement lot. It was the summer of 1955, and we had stopped to change trains in one of the southern towns along the way. I don’t remember much about the trip except for the look and feel of the Pullman sleeping car, and except for the drinking fountain in what, to a four-year-old, seemed to be a cavernous waiting area with a cold, stone floor.

There were several black people sitting around this drinking fountain across from where I and my family were standing. A small, black boy, a couple of years older than I was, went over to the fountain and took a drink. I had never seen one of those fancy machines before, so I walked over there to try it out for myself. All the black people sitting there, young and old alike, watched me head in their direction. They were all smiling and speaking to each other in such a low tone of voice that I could not hear what they were saying. Just as I was about to reach the fountain, someone picked me up from behind. I twisted around to see this older, red-faced, white-haired man who was carrying me back to the other side. He said,

“That one’s not for you!”

And as he set me down in front of the one on the “white” side of the room he said,

“This is your drinking fountain.”

My mother took me by the hand and said to the man something like,

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t see him walk over there.”

“That’s okay, ma’am, he hasn’t learnt what’s right, yet.”

As he walked away, my mother held me up to the “right” drinking fountain saying,

“This is the one for the white people.”

I asked her, “Why?”

“That’s just the way it is down here. There’s one for them and there’s one for us.”

This was my introduction to the concept of “us and them.”

After I took my drink she set me back down in front of the fountain and went back to talking with the adults. I looked all over that drinking fountain. I felt it all along each side; and then, I stepped back so I could see the top of it. Then I walked out to the middle of the room and looked at the “black” water fountain; and then, looked back at the “white” one. I looked back and forth a couple of times, trying to get my four-year-old head to understand. All the black people were watching me intently, and the adults were looking right at me, smiling and nodding their heads. I know now what they were thinking:

“That’s right, little man! Ain’t no damn difference!”

So, even though I didn’t know the words, white privilege was having the “right” water fountain; or the better seats in the theater; or the largest, cleanest bathrooms; or the seats towards the front of the bus. Right. And so the general indoctrination began. It wasn’t blatant or organized indoctrination; it was fairly subtle. Especially for me; since my family moved to New York the next year, and I wasn’t subjected to the pervasive, systemic bigotry prevalent throughout the southern states back then.

I’m sure I must have experienced white privilege in more subtle ways after that, but I grew up in an area on Long Island, New York with few black people. I did not see a person of color’s life for comparison for several years. But perhaps that in itself is an example of White Privilege. Why were there no black people in my neighborhood? I did not meet a black person until my parents hired a black lady to help my mother clean house once a week. After that, it was not until I met my friend, Bruce, one of the sons of the only black family whose kids went to my High School. It wasn’t until after graduation, while in the Army, that I had my next blatant experience of White Privilege.

It was sometime around the Spring of 1970, while I was in the Army at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. One of my friends from Basic Training (or “boot camp” as most people called it) lived in the area; and therefore, he had a car. We were returning to base one afternoon after a shopping trip, when we were stopped by the local constable. As soon as we were pulled over to the side of the road, my friend jumped out of the car and went back to talk to the police officer. When he got back to the car, he told me that the officer wanted to talk to me.

I rarely use descriptive adjectives when referring to my friends; however, in this case, it is quite important for me to say that my friend was a black man. He was one of the nicest, gentlest, most soft-spoken, intelligent men I have ever known; and what he looked like had nothing to do with it. He got back into the car and gave me a sideways glance that I interpreted to mean: Be careful !

The officer got out of his police cruiser and walked up to the passenger side of the car where I was seated. He looked like every cliché of a good-old-boy southern policeman that I have ever seen or heard about. His very large frame was topped with a wide-brimmed smokey-the-bear hat, and his belly sagged over the top of his black, leather belt which held up a black, leather holster containing a large-frame, chromed revolver with a pearl hand-grip. He asked me,

“So, what are ya’ll doin’ here today?”

“I’m just havin’ this boy drive me back to the army base. Is everything okay?”

He immediately relaxed and gave me a great big smile as he said,

“Why, sure! That’s fine. I just needed to make sure ya’ll weren’t in any trouble,” and to my friend he said, “Well, you heard him, boy. Git this man where he needs to go!”

“Yes, sir!” my friend told him, “I’m goin’ right now.”

He started the car, put it into gear, signaled for a left turn, and pulled back onto the road as he said to me,

“You did good! Now don’t look at me until we’re down the road a piece. You don’t talk to your black driver.”

After we had driven a mile or so on down the road, I looked over at him and asked,

“What the heck was that all about?”

“If you hadn’t been here with me I would have had to go down to the police station and show them all my ID cards, and maybe even call the base to prove I was in the Army.”

“But what did he pull you over for in the first place?”

“He didn’t see you there slouched down in your seat until after we were on the side of the road, or he wouldn’t have stopped me. He thought I was alone; so he pulled me over because I was driving while black.”

Most white people today don’t consider themselves prejudiced, and most are not. Therefore, they don’t understand what it means when black people talk about White Privilege. But I wonder how many white people stop to think that they have never been stopped by a police officer for driving while white.

My next experience with white privilege was in 1971, while I was in Advanced Training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. One Saturday morning, I was hitch-hiking my way up to the local college, where a friend of mine from back home was attending classes. My ride dropped me off on the side of the main road, where he needed to turn off onto a side street. It was right about noon, so I looked around for a place to have lunch. There was only one building anywhere near me on this sparsely populated section of the roadway. The building was long and rectangular and set back from the road with several cars parked outside. It did not have any signs outside, so I strolled over there to see if it was, indeed, a restaurant. There was an entrance door on the narrow side of the building, facing me, and I went inside through that doorway.

As soon as I stepped inside, I could see four young girls sitting together in one of the booths to my right set against the front windows facing the road. A long counter on my left stretched all the way to the wall in front of me at the end of the room. There were several round stools with red, vinyl seat-covers in front of the counter, each supported by a single, thick, chromed leg. Behind the counter stood a large, black man, wearing a white pair of pants and a white t-shirt. He had his arms folded across his chest and a blank expression on his face as he watched me walk down to where he stood behind the counter. I sat down on a stool across from him and said,

“I’ll have a cheeseburger, fries and a root beer.”

He just stood there glaring at me until, finally, he said,

“You in the wrong side.”

I looked up at him with what, I’m sure, must have been a bewildered look on my face for a moment before I said,

“The wrong side? What do you mean?”

He visibly relaxed somewhat as he dropped his arms to his sides and asked,

“You not from around here, are you?”

“No, I’m from New York. I’m down here in the Army at Fort Rucker.”

He smiled at me as he placed both his hands on the counter in front of me, leaned forward and said,

“This is the black side. You gots to go ‘round to the other side.”

I thought my jaw was going to slam into the counter as my mouth gaped open. I looked around me and saw that I was the only white person there. The four young girls in the booth were all black and were whispering to each other as they stole furtive glances in my direction. I turned back to this now smiling, big, black cook and said,

“Well, I’ll tell you what, I’d just as soon stay here, because I wouldn’t fit in with those people next door.”

He leaned closer and said,

“No, you don’t understand. You gots to go over there.”

“You mean there might be trouble for you?”

“And for you.”

I sighed and shook my head as I got up and told him, “Okay.”

I shuffled towards the door to leave, but as I passed by those four high-school-age girls I stopped and turned toward them, saying,

“You ladies don’t have to worry, because you’re not going to have to put up with this crap for much longer. It is not like this up north.”

I turned and walked out the door, and I could hear them giggling and whispering to each other as I left.

I was slinking along the front of the building towards the other side, when a stern-looking guy who was just getting out of his truck confronted me. He said,

“Did I just see you come out of that other side?”

My self-preservation kicked in as I said,

“Yeah. I”m not from around here, and I didn’t know that was the nigger side.”

He smiled really big as he put his hand on my shoulder, and told me,

“Well, come on in to the right side and git some of our good home cookin’.”

He escorted me inside, walked over to one of the tables to sit with his friends, and left me to sit on one of the stools at the counter. The guy behind the counter took my order and walked over to this little window that opened into the black side. It seems that the black guy from the other side was the cook for both sides of the restaurant.

When the counterman set my meal in front of me, I was looking at the biggest burger I had ever seen. It hung over the edge of the bun by a good half inch all around, and came with three big pickle spears and a pile of lettuce, tomatoes and onions. I looked over at the pass-through window to see the black cook handing through a plate filled with a huge mound of french fries. The counterman was looking down and pointing at the fries, chastising the cook for the over-sized order. The cook looked right at me as I nodded to him, and he returned the nod. He had obviously enjoyed my short visit to his side of the restaurant.

I had to get a to-go bag for all of those french fries, because I was not going to leave my gift behind. I walked out of that restaurant thinking to myself that those crackers never realized that a black guy had lunch with them in their side of the restaurant. Even if he was only black on the inside, at least for a little while, anyway.

The reason I am writing about this now in 2026 is because that last incident happened in 1971, which is almost exactly fifty-five years ago; and because, unlike what I told those young ladies in that restaurant, some of this crap does still happen in places in America today. It makes me sad and angry that some people still teach their children to hate and fear another race of people. And some of those children have grown up to become police officers. And those police officers have caused the deaths of some of the black people that have been in their care. That’s right; I said in their care. Someone who has been arrested, has not yet been convicted in a court of law, still has all the rights accorded to every American citizen. And they all deserve the same care and respect regardless of what they are accused of, or where they came from, or what they look like. We need to treat them like we treat any of our relatives. Because that is what they are.

According to the latest DNA research, every human on earth descended from sub-Saharan Africans; so today we are distant cousins with every other human on earth, and all of our ancient ancestors were black. So, therefore, there really isn’t a Black Race; or a White Race; or a Yellow Race; or a Red Race; or even a Red, White, and Blue Race. There is only the Human Race; we are all related. Let’s start acting like it. It’s been too long. Get it together. Fix it. Now.

James P. Blase is the author of Behind the Cockpit Door: The True Adventures of an Airline Pilot, the poetry chapbook, Squirrel Song and Other Animal Poetry, and several articles on poetry, aviation, cave exploring, and humanist issues. Originally from St. Louis, Missouri, he was raised on Long Island, New York, and has called Texas home since 1982. He is a retired airline mechanic and airline pilot, former truck driver and school teacher, and current freelance writer. He graduated from Stonybrook University (formerly the State University of New York at Stonybrook) with a degree in Studio Art and Art History. He still does the occasional painting in acrylics, oils, and watercolors. James lives out in the country near Fort Worth, Texas, and used to be the divorced caretaker of a very friendly, seventeen-year-old, orange hunting cat. He (James, not the cat) is currently working on his first novel.

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Keith Parsons

I recently wrote a Letter about required Bible readings in the Texas public schools:

However, since that Letter, I have seen two articulate and well-argued defenses of requiring Bible readings. One is by Garion Frankel, “Teaching the Bible in Texas Schools is Good, Actually,” published in The Houston Chronicle, July 26:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/oinion/outlook/article/texas-bible-schools-gary-frankel-22354749.php

The second is by Adam Kirsch, “The Bible Belongs in the Classroom, “ from The Atlantic:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/texas-public-schools-bible/688054/?utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20260727&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&lctg=6050e64b4953a53f14852a24&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily

Here I would like to respond and show that, while I share the authors’ concern for Biblical literacy, I am deeply troubled about how a program of Bible readings has been and will be implemented in Texas—and as Texas goes, so goes the red nation

.Both authors emphasize the importance of Biblical literacy. I fully agree. I mentioned this incident in my previous Letter, but it bears repeating: I was teaching an ethics class and wanted to make Kant’s point about how ethical rules have to apply to everybody, no exceptions, not even for the king. The perfect illustration of that point is the story from Second Samuel about David and Bathsheba. David falls in lust with Bathsheba who, inconveniently, is married. Her husband, Uriah the Hittite, is a soldier in David’s army, currently fighting the Philistines. David has Uriah killed and marries Bathsheba.

Needless to say, such shenanigans do not go down well with The Lord, who sends his prophet Nathan to confront David. Nathan tells a story about a rich man who had many flocks of sheep, but when a guest came, rather than serve a lamb from his own flock, he takes the poor man’s one little pet ewe lamb and has it slaughtered. David is furious and says that rich man shall surely die. Nathan tersely comments, “You are that man.”

I mentioned this story in class, confident that students in Texas, the purported buckle of the Bible belt, would be familiar with it. Blank. The students had no clue. Students who know nothing about the Bible are ignorant of perhaps the most important influence on our common culture, the culture inherited from classical Greece and ancient Israel via the European middle ages, Renaissance, and Enlightenment. Even if your slogan is “Hey Hey. Ho Ho. Western culture’s gotta go!,” you need to have some idea of what you are rejecting. Seriously, though, we need to understand the intellectual and cultural influences that have made us what we are.

As both Frankel and Kirsch amply document, much of the best known and most widely read literature contains references and allusions that are important for understanding those works. Much art, of course, is just incomprehensible unless the biblical context is understood. The Sistine Chapel would just be cartoons (very good cartoons) without knowing what Michelangelo was depicting. Of course, the Bible is not the only cultural foundation my students did not know. They also knew nothing about Homer (Now they can watch a movie.). However, as gaps in knowledge go, knowing nothing about the Bible is a major lacuna.

As Kirsch puts it:

For a high-school graduate not to know about the parting of the Red Sea or the Sermon on the Mount is a disadvantage, for the same reason that not knowing about the Puritans or the Civil War is a disadvantage: It leaves them ill-equipped to understand America’s past, and therefore its present and future.

Frankel puts it more strongly:

The Bible is indispensable to understanding the United States — and, frankly, the entire English language — and no Texas student should graduate from its public schools without a strong working knowledge of its stories, language and influence. More specifically, biblical literacy enhances general literacy. The English language and its constituent literature are steeped in references to Biblical stories and motifs.

I think this passage contains considerable overstatement. It is entirely possible to be fluent in the English language and know nothing about the Bible. I have worked with highly fluent copy editors who were based in Hyderabad. Also, much famous literature makes no or negligible reference to Biblical themes and stories. An allusion does not mean that the work was “steeped in references to Biblical stories and motifs.” However, it is true that many of the icons of literature written in English—e.g., Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Melville, T.S. Eliot—would be hard or impossible to understand without knowledge of the Bible.

Let me be clear: I am an atheist. I definitely do not regard the Bible as the Word of God. Indeed, large parts of the Bible are so gruesomely awful and so filled with vindictiveness that, as Tom Paine put it, it should instead be called the word of a demon. The best parts of the Bible, like the Book of Job, are very good, with deep ideas and splendid poetry. However, the best parts are in no discernable way superior in wisdom or beauty to the best human writing. IMO, nothing in the Bible is superior to Aeschylus or Shakespeare. To me, the Bible is neither divine nor demonic. It is human. All too human.

The main problem with teaching the Bible in the public schools is, of course, to make sure that you are teaching about the Bible and not blatantly or subtly inculcating the truth of the Bible. Frankel says this:

This is not to say that we should ignore concerns about implementation. We should be vigilant in ensuring that pedagogy does not become the pulpit, and we must provide teachers with effective training and resources so that they may teach the new curriculum with fidelity.

Presumably he means fidelity to academic objectivity. Kirsh expresses caution more strongly:

Perhaps the strongest objection to Texas’s reading list is that it will require teachers to make such complicated distinctions. The readings for seventh grade include the Sermon on the Mount; imagine trying to explain the literary and historic quality of the verse “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” while remaining strictly noncommittal about the existence of blessings, spirit, and heaven. Parental complaints are guaranteed, and not just from non-Christian households; Christian believers have the biggest stake in how the words of Jesus are explained.

Exactly. Teaching the Bible in the public schools confronts a dilemma: If you teach it as the Word of God, people on the left will complain; if you don’t, people on the right will.

Kirsch accuses people on the left of a “Pavlovian reaction” whenever religion is mentioned. This is an odd accusation since he just articulated and endorsed the main objection of secular people, namely, that the program of Biblical reading requirements will cross the line between instruction and inculcation. In particular, has the set of requirements imposed by Texas crossed that line? The Religious Action Center of the Union for Reformed Judaism says it does:

https://rac.org/blog/texas-public-schools-will-require-bible-readings-students-take-action-now

There is a difference between teaching about religion and teaching religion. Students should have an understanding of the society they’re growing up in, which includes the religious diversity of our state and nation. However, when the state is making nearly all religious readings come from the Protestant Christian Bible (except for one outdated Jewish translation), it is an endorsement of one religion at the expense of others. Teaching faith belongs to families, not the state. If religion is required reading, it should showcase the vast religious landscape of our society.

Four of the readings on the Texas list come from the New International Reader’s Version or the English Standard Version, which were developed by and for evangelicals and which have a strong overlay of theological and eschatological interpretation.

Further, while fully aware of the slippery slope fallacy, there is legitimate concern that the current Bible readings requirements are just the thin end of the wedge and that there will be more blatant and heavy-handed imposition of religion in the future. Why is it a legitimate fear that Texas will erase any remnant distinction between church and state? Because they say they will. Check this article from The Texas Tribune by Alejandro Serrano:

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/27/texas-dan-patrick-religious-liberty-interim-charges-religion-public-life-legislature/

[Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan] Patrick has long been a champion of Christian conservative values and has said he does not believe there is a separation between church and state. Last year, President Donald Trump tapped him to lead a new commission on religious liberty. “There is no such thing as ‘separation of church and state’ in the Constitution. For too long, the anti-God left has used this phrase to suppress people of religion in our country,” Patrick said in April after the commission held its final hearing.

“Religious liberty” for Patrick and his ilk means the freedom of Christian fundamentalists to ride roughshod over everyone. It particularly does not apply to Muslims, who are hated venomously. Texas Republicans are pathologically obsessed with the imaginary threat of the imposition of Sharia Law. There are now approximately 400,000 Muslims living in Texas. There are over 500,000 Indians in Texas; most are Hindus. There is not a whisper of concern that such diversity be acknowledged other than by hate. There is simply no question that for the political leaders of Texas, fundamentalist Christianity is the de facto established religion.

My next door neighbors are Muslims. They are the best neighbors you could ask for. Whenever I see them, I feel ashamed that the bigoted hicks who run this state incite hate against my friends and neighbors, people better than Dan Patrick in every way.

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I expect to have guest Letters on Wednesday and Friday this week, but a medical procedure today could keep me from formatting and presenting those. In that (unlikely, I hope) event, I’ll “see” you next week. —Ed

A History of the Republican Party

by Ed Buckner

Heather Cox Richardson (HCR) is to American History what Carl Sagan was to science or Keith Parsons is to philosophy: writers who know their stuff, absorb and know endless details, warts included, but who then produce interesting, extraordinarily accessible, readable stuff. To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party (Basic Books: 2014) is a fine example.

I’m continuing here with writing a series of reviews of books that have been around awhile but that nevertheless are in my opinion well worth finding at your library or buying—and reading. To Make Men Free (TMMF) is a good read.

HCR writes of the values of the GOP (the “Grand Old Party”) swinging back and forth in a pendulum between party founders, starting with Lincoln, who were plainly committed to a strong and quite active government whose existence and purpose is to serve the needs of all citizens; and at the other end, the cheery commitment of a Ronald Reagan to distrusting government and freeing up successful wealthy men to get rich, creating a dynamic economy:

The Republican Party repeatedly has swung from being the party of the middle class to the party of the rich, following pathways laid down during the peculiar years of the Civil War and its aftermath. It is impossible to understand the crossroads at which the Republicans stand today without understanding how this pattern, established in the late nineteenth century, would go on to repeat itself, first during the era of Theodore Roosevelt, then during the era of Dwight Eisenhower.

But the history of the Republican Party does more than simply show the trajectory of a political party. It explains why, since the Civil War, the nation has swung between progressivism and reaction, and why government efforts to level the economic playing field between individuals and corporations have been first embraced and then later attacked as “communism.” These swings expose the tensions inherent in America’s peculiar brand of government: how can a democracy promote individual economic opportunity at the same time it protects property?

(p. xviii)

Of course the Republican Party did not develop or change in a vacuum, so her fascinating telling of its story necessarily also tells the history of the nation—and the party against which the Republicans were struggling. In the beginning, this was primarily the plantation-owner-dominated Southern Democrats. One sometimes reads of the Democrats and Republicans “switching sides” on key matters like white supremacy and racism. The details of this are presented here.

As HCR shows, shifting or switching happened many times and with complex variations, though the starting positions in the 1850s provide quite sharp contrasts. There were many Southern white supremacist, self-described “aristocratic elite” leaders, at this stage, but perhaps the outstanding one was South Carolina Governor and US Senator James Henry Hammond (1807-1864). Hammond figures prominently in her recounting. His famous 1858 Senate speech on “King Cotton” and the need for a “mudsill” class—he preferred slaves—was the anvil against which Lincoln forged the Republican Party. Hammond, who defended slavery and white supremacy as directly ordained in the Christian Bible, not only owned hundreds of black slaves but is known to have raped several, to have fathered slave children, and, just to have made things horrible for even more people, raped four of his own nieces.

Anyone who wants to understand “Movement Conservatism” or to grasp how “The West” has been used to promote a very un-Lincoln-esque idea of government or to understand better the roles of anti-government firebrands like Grover Norquist or Newt Gingrich can learn from these pages.

This book has example after example of quotable passages such as this—

In the years after Reagan, Movement Conservatism lashed the Republican Party to an ideology that was based on image rather than reality and created a government constructed on the same principles James Henry Hammond had espoused a century and a half before. The people who guided the Republican Party in the 1990s and 2000s claimed to be trying to cut government down to an acceptable size. But in truth they were destroying the New Deal government, which they saw as socialism, and replacing it with an even bigger government that served the ideals of Movement Conservatism: promoting big business, religion, and the military.

(p. 307)

TMMF is much more than a history of the Republican Party—and because the book has been around for over a decade, Donald Trump isn’t even mentioned. He and the rest of today’s GOP are most assuredly prefigured in the last chapters, especially in the conclusion, of her book, in sentences like this—

. . . how can America promote individual prosperity without creating a powerful wealthy faction that controls the government? Forced to adapt to a changing nation, in this century, perhaps, the Republican Party will find a way to stay committed to the ideals of its founders. (p. 342)

I am extremely doubtful that the Republicans will find their way back to those founding ideas any time in the next decade or two—and I’m almost certain that HCR is much more pessimistic now than in 2014. But her telling discussion of the great sweep of GOP history would, if the Republican leaders could and would read it, improve the odds tremendously.

This book is a must read for American political buffs (Democrats, Republicans, and others), for people who like history, especially American history, and perhaps most of all, for readers who value clear, thoughtful writing on a subject that matters.

To sum it up in one word: interesting.

HCR’s blog—Letters from an American—is well worth subscribing to and reading. A recent Letter from Heather Cox Richardson—

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Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild (2005)

Review by Ed Buckner

One normally expects to see and read reviews of books just before or after they are published; so Ed, why are you offering a review over 20 years after a book was published in 2005? Are you that old and forgetful?

In the midst of a shooting war with Venezuela, you’re writing about an old out-of-date social history—why?

I Keep Telling People to Read This, So . . .

Bury the Chains is one of my favorite books (A Voyage Long and Strange [2008], To Make Men Free [2014], and other popular histories—see book covers at the end of this Letter—and more recent books are among my favorites, so maybe I’ll review some of them soon). (And we’ll look to the brilliant Keith Parsons to review current books.). Since I keep telling people they ought to read Bury . . ., I figured maybe I should explain why.

It helps immensely that Hochschild knows how to tell a great story, with just the right mix of details, historical characters, specific places, and dramatic moments. How to do huge amounts of research without getting tedious and pedantic. How to include some lighter moments along with the painful parts. How to show that one person and one group of people are real heroes. How to pull the reader into the action and along the storyline.

But it matters greatly that the story is intensely interesting fare. Slavery is an evil of the first order, with extensive economic reasons for its persistence. The fact that it persisted through thousands of years with millions of human beings suffering from it, from the seemingly impossible-to-eliminate institution, means learning how a major part of it finally ended is profoundly compelling.

Among many, many interesting points, Hochschild wrote (p.5)—

There is always something mysterious about human empathy, and when we feel it and when we don’t. Its sudden upwelling at this particular moment in history caught everyone by surprise. Slaves and other subjugated people have rebelled throughout history, but the campaign in England was something never seen before: it was the first time a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’s rights.

And the economic interests of the powerful elite meant that unselfish interest was required to bring about change. (Hochschild certainly shows crucial interplay between these unselfish interests and the more self-interested actions of, for example, the violent and successful slave rebellion led by Toussaint L’Overture in Haiti.)

It’s a great book because it is well organized and well written on a powerful subject.

Historical Perspective and Place

When we visited England for a couple of weeks in Spring 2015 (I think it was), I was eager to find a particular spot between London and Cambridge. I didn’t manage to find it—but if I’d been better at it, I’d’ve found it here—

https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1281321?section=official-list-entry

And why would that have mattered to me? Because Hochschild described it (p.89)—

Some person should see these calamities to their end. If there is a single moment in which the antislavery movement became inevitable, it was the day in 1785 when Thomas Clarkson sat down by the side of the road at Wades Mill.

Clarkson had won an essay contest, in Latin, at Cambridge on “Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?” (Anne liciat invitos in servititum dare?). And he was now properly educated to become an Anglican priest. He entered the contest only intending to win, but it overwhelmed him and, thinking about that “Some person . . . ,” he decided that should be him. At Wades Mill he gave up becoming a clergyman and dedicated himself to fighting against slavery and did until he died decades later.

As Hochschild wrote of Clarkson early on (p.4) in the book,

Almost forgotten today, he remains one of the towering figures in human rights. Although we will not meet him until Part II of this book, he is its central character.

He became famous worldwide as the leading anti-slavery activist. So much so that later US Senator from South Carolina James Henry Hammond wrote to Clarkson at length in the 1840s trying to persuade him that White Supremacy was biblical and that race-based slavery was a Christian, bible-based institution. See—

https://dn721807.ca.archive.org/0/items/DKC0151/DKC_0151.pdf

for the texts of Hammond’s letters.

Economics and Capitalists’ Interests

Slavery and the slave trade enriched many people, not just the owners of slaves on cotton or sugarcane plantations. Shipbuilders, ship captains, warehouse operators, rum merchants, textile makers, bankers, and many others prospered on the backs of slaves.

The basic parts of that economy were, to oversimplify only a little, the British Empire’s tools and money shipped to Africa to buy slaves; the slaves shipped in unimaginable conditions to the Caribbean sugar plantation owners and American cotton plantation owners; the sugar and cotton (and indigo and other products) shipped to New England and England to be turned into refined sugar, rum, cotton cloth, etc. And back to the tools and money to Africa.

And when the Parliament finally did abolish the slave trade and later outlawed slavery itself, money was crucial. Very heavy reparations—the equivalent in today’s money of billions of taxpayer pounds were paid out by the government.

Not to enslaved people you understand—to the owners deprived of their property!

Complexity and Nuance

As Hochschild makes clear throughout his book, the long process of ending slavery—first the slave trade—was exceedingly complex. The people involved—like John Newton (captain of a slave transporting ship and later—much later—an abolitionist and composer of the words to “Amazing Grace”—rarely had simple or “pure” motives.

Religion

Atheist that I am, I was pleased that Hochschild showed in some detail that men like Captain Newton—later the Reverend Newton, later still abolitionist author—came to his anti-slavery opinions not through his religion (he was deeply pious as a slave ship captain but unmoved by men and women who committed suicide rather than become slaves). And not by Bible reading or observing the hideous immorality of slavery. But only after the movement Clarkson led showed him the way.

Nor was Newton the only religious man who benefitted from slavery and did not oppose it. The Church of England owned a sugar plantation in Barbados with many slaves and did not free them—and kept careful records on their “property” besides.

And yes, the Church of England did get—and accept—reparations when they had to give up their “property”—the equivalent in today’s funds of millions of pounds.

But . . .

Atheist though I am, I’m still clear, thanks to Hochschild, that religious motives did provide crucial support for the movement, most notably the religion of Thomas Clarkson and of the Quakers.

The scene that Hochschild closed the book with moved me especially. The Quakers quite famously refused, always, to doff their hats for any person, out of a profound commitment to equality of all. But when Clarkson died at age 86 in 1846,

In both the funeral procession and in the overflowing church where the service was held, the mourners included many Quakers, and the men among them made an almost unprecedented departure from long-sacred custom.

They removed their hats. (p. 354.)

Altruism

Most of the people described in Bury the Chains were operating at least in part from self-interest.

There were thousands of ordinary people across England who persisted for years in opposing slavery and it took decades to win. But for most of these at least part of their motivation was altruistic. And in the case of Thomas Clarkson and one group—the Quakers—genuine altruism seems to have been the primary driver of their actions.

Conclusion

If you like history, clear and lively writing, understanding major social movements, and perspective, then Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (2005) is well worth your time.

For overlapping and enhancing information, see—

https://systemicdisorder.wordpress.com

Other popular history books I recommend (and may write reviews of), in chronological order by publication date—

2002

2008

2011

2014

2014

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Another great guest Letter from Keith Parsons. Enjoy.

BRAVE NEW WORLD OR 1984

Note: This Letter was motivated by a message on this topic from Mr. Steve Kurtz.

The disturbing thing about dystopias is that they have an alarming propensity to become real. I guess that potential is what makes them so unsettling. Like so many others, I first encountered Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949) in high school. To be honest, reading Brave New World (BNW) first at age seventeen, I was not too clear on just what the drawbacks were. Unlimited sex, recreational drugs, and you could fly anywhere in your own personal helicopter. Even religion was drugs and group sex. Sign me up! Only later did I get Huxley’s point: The truest slave is the one who loves his slavery. If you distract people with endless titillation and amusement, they don’t mind that they have no freedom.

1984, of course, was an uber-Stalinist nightmare. You were under constant surveillance for any deviation, but even outward conformity was insufficient. The basic crime, the root of all other crime, was “thoughtcrime,” thinking anything that deviated from the Party’s pronouncements. If the Party contradicted itself, you were to practice the mental discipline of “doublethink” whereby you believed both contradictories and made yourself forget the contradiction. Deviation was punished by disappearance, i.e., by torture and execution. You were erased. You became a nonperson. Before you vanished, however, your mind was cleansed. You loved Big Brother.

So which is a more effective means of control, terror or pleasure? There have, of course, been many attempts to control thoughts by terror. The template for all later such efforts was the Holy Inquisition.* The Inquisition attempted to eradicate heresy and to make sure that only the pure dogma was believed. Those suspected of heretical opinions were put to The Question and various tortures were applied to elicit confessions. Those who duly confessed (and the strappado was highly effective in eliciting confessions) were granted absolution and assigned a penance. However, those who showed any signs of returning to their error were declared incorrigible and “relaxed” to the secular powers which duly burned them alive.

Yet the Inquisition’s methods were crude and results often disappointing. The modern state has much more sophisticated tools. China uses AI, biometric tracking, and interconnected data bases to keep track of all 1.4 billion people. They can immediately link biometric data to files that basically know everything about you—your financial history, ethnic profile, travel history, and social media activity. This information feeds into China’s Social Credit System which evaluates you with respect to loyalty and trustworthiness and places restrictions on those judged to be potential dissidents or political risks. This system is particularly employed to suppress China’s Uyghur minority. China has implemented Orwell’s universal surveillance. Big Ji is watching you.

Yet with all the fancy equipment, riding herd on 1.4 billion human beings is a big job. There has to be a huge state security apparatus. When your main goal is to control others, the effort to control them controls you. Why did the South for so long lag so far behind the rest of the country in economic development, education, life expectancy, and every other measure of quality of life? Because half the population devoted itself mainly to keeping the other half down. Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) said it long ago:

When you hold a man in a ditch, you have to be down in the ditch too.

Huxley, on the other hand, was impressed at the means of social control that had been developed not in the totalitarian societies, but in the supposedly free, consumerist, capitalist societies. Dissatisfaction springs from misery. Those who are deprived, either of material good or of the rights and dignity conspicuously enjoyed by others, will feel resentment and seek redress for their grievances. Threats may hold back the dam, but dams often catastrophically burst in revolution.

But what if misery is effectively banished and everyone enjoys an insipid “happiness?” You are well-fed, safe, and, after a few hours of work—work for which you have been genetically engineered and psychologically conditioned—you have endless entertainment possibilities. There are the “feelies”—virtual reality, which Huxley anticipated in 1932—sports, and, of course, lots of sex. Should anything momentarily interrupt your happiness, there is always soma, the perfect recreational drug: “A gram is better than a damn!” All of the old sources of violent passion such as religion and politics are no more. The passions of Romeo and Juliet are replaced with total promiscuity. In BNW, Romeo and Juliet would just take soma and hop in the sack.

Into this fool’s paradise steps John, The Savage. The Savage was born in a reservation, not in “civilization,” so he escaped all the conditioning. For instance, he wants passion, not cheap sex, but passion is not possible in a society where total promiscuity is the norm. When the voluptuous Lenina launches herself naked at The Savage, he is repulsed. He wants to woo her, cherish her, be worthy of her, sacrifice for her. Needless to say, Lenina finds his behavior totally incomprehensible.

A society without passion is also a society without great art, great music, or deep thoughts. It is a society where everything is surface. Nothing really matters; even death becomes trivial. All is jejune enjoyment and instant gratification. A fool’s paradise.

In the climactic scene of the book, The Savage confronts Mustapha Mond, one of the ten world controllers, responsible for maintaining social stability. The Savage, whose only education was the works of Shakespeare, is appalled at a society where Shakespeare would not even be comprehensible. Of course not, Mond replies. Shakespeare is full of the most violent passions—lust, love, hate, revenge, ambition, jealousy, and outrage.** It is rife with violence and madness. There is no place for such things in BNW. Shakespeare’s world was just as violent and mad as his plays. The passions of great art and literature are also the passions that, prior to BNW, plunged the world into wars, crime, persecution, and civil strife. Far better a world with no great art or literature and none of the horrific suffering and violence that arises from violent passions.

Given a choice between BNW and Orwell’s Oceania, of course I would choose BNW. Make me an alpha double plus and pass the soma! Yet, of course, we are going to have to chart a path between Huxley’s and Orwell’s bleak dystopias. We definitely see propensities towards both.

Forget privacy. Government and private organizations, like credit agencies, already know all about you. Your phone can track your movements. China might pick up some tips from us. The “Patriot Act” passed under George W. Bush at the height of the “War on Terror,” has never been repealed. It gives the government virtually unlimited powers of surveillance. ICE thugs murder and abuse people with impunity and thousands are immured in detention centers where the treatment is callous at best.

Often we seem to be on the path to BNW. The 2006 film Idiocracy by Mike Judge imagines an America 500 years in the future where everybody is stupid. Actually, we are already nearly there. In that future Idiocracy, the most popular TV show is “Ow! My Balls!” which is nothing but scenes of a guy getting struck in the groin. Today’s “reality” TV shows are really, literally, that stupid. If you watched a steady diet of that stuff, you would soon be a blithering idiot. Powerful forces in our society want you to be stupid. The stupid are gullible. They believe the commercials. They are eager for the latest gadgets. They are swayed by demagogues. They play their video games and diddle with their phones and don’t make any trouble. Our cell phones are our soma.

Now, according to a lead article in The Atlantic, we are in the “post literate” society.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/utm_medium=cr&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=07_12_2026_cover_story_promo_august_cover_rose_horowitch_

It is reported that even at elite universities a thirty-page reading assignment is considered overwhelming. I don’t think the Founders envisioned this. Democracy requires thinking. Sheep can only be herded.

So it looks like we are simultaneously headed both towards 1984 and BNW. The surveillance state, like Santa Claus but with much more sinister purposes, knows when you are sleeping or awake and whether you have been bad or good. An illiterate population stupefied by video games and junk TV is docile. Millions have protested at No Kings rallies, but millions more just don’t seem to give a shit that the orange despot has already destroyed so much of our democracy and threatens to take the rest of it. I would have expected much, much more outrage than we have witnessed.

Who would have thought that acting intelligently could be an act of resistance? Each book you read is an act of defiance against the Idiocracy.

*On the date that this is being written, 7/15, in the year 1834 (1834!) the Spanish Inquisition was formally abolished after 350 years of nefarious activity.

**My favorite bit is when McDuff finally confronts Macbeth, the murderer of his wife and children. Macbeth informs him that no man born of woman can kill Macbeth. McDuff replies that he was not born of woman but was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d.” He then proceeds to chop Macbeth into haggis.

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Choosing?

by Ed Buckner

I’ve done this—or something similar—before, but recent illogical and counterfactual rants online and elsewhere stir me to do it again. Below are a variety of things I think are true. Some of them I’m quite confident of—99% or so. Others I’m somewhat less convinced of, but all are things that, if a friend I respect disagreed, I’d be willing and able to defend.

All of these are assertions—statements of opinion or belief. They are in no particular order and numbered only so that anyone responding can refer to them more succinctly—the numbers do not represent any kind of priority.

My declaring them does not make them true nor is it by itself evidence of their truth or falsity.

Assertions

1. A liberal, democratic state, with rights for all individuals protected, is best.

2. Nation states—like Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the US, Indonesia and many others—would be more amenable to individual liberty of conscience if they did not officially represent or encourage a religion.

3. Such states vary widely in how dangerous, in law and in practice, they are to religious liberty.

4. Liberty of conscience is important and worth protecting. Keeping government and religion separate is the best way to protect it.

5. Israel has not committed and is not committing genocide.

6. Benjamin Netanyahu is a corrupt, self-serving leader and if I were an Israeli, I would not support him or vote for his party.

7. Donald Trump is a corrupt, self-serving leader and as an American citizen, I do not support him or vote for his party.

8. It makes no more sense to blame all Jews or all Israelis for what the Israeli government does than it does to blame all old white guys or all American citizens for what Donald Trump’s government does.

9. It is—and should be—a war crime to deliberately and intentionally murder/attack people based only on their religion, ethnicity, or nationality.

10. Hamas is a terrorist organization.

11. Any religion that includes hating others as religiously required dogma is mistaken and despicable.

12. There is not enough evidence nor any logic I know of to persuade me that there are any supernatural forces or gods.

13. Russia/Putin was outrageous to invade Crimea/Ukraine in 2014 and to go into full scale war against Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine and Zelenskyy deserve public and private support.

    

14. Abortion is a reasonable procedure in most cases, though one that should be regulated and that should be prohibited in some instances.

15. Suicide is sometimes reasonable.

16. Free enterprise capitalism can be a positive, creative, economic approach but only if it is regulated and taxed appropriately.

17. A minimum wage is a desirable and logical thing and the amount should be increased often and modestly.

18. A guaranteed basic income for all is an idea worth considering.

19. Progressive income taxation is the fairest and best way to raise public funds.

20. A wealth tax is reasonable.

21. The US electoral college should be abolished in favor of something far closer to equality of voters in different states. Citizens, not land or political jurisdictions, should be represented in making laws and choosing leaders.

22. The US Senate should be reorganized to vary the number of Senators per state closer to proportional.

23. Unions should be strengthened to allow even better protection of workers.

24. Women, members of racial or ethnic minorities, people who consider themselves gay or lesbian or transgender, must have the same political rights as anyone else.

25. Men—even if they declare themselves to be women—do not have the right to compete in women’s sports nor to be sent (if convicted of a crime) to women’s prisons.

26. Dogs are not people—nor is one any person’s child nor his fur baby. Dogs can be good pets if the owner is responsible.

27. National government should be designed along social democratic ideas: strong support for all citizens with high but fair taxes to pay for retirement, healthcare, education, parental leave, etc.

28. Truth: the basic idea of society and of the nation itself that people acting in a group can accomplish things which no individual acting alone could even hope to bring about (OK, those are FDR’s words, not mine—but I agree with them). See HCR, below, for more.

29. Medicare for All—or some other form of socialized medicine—would be much better than our current “system” of healthcare.

30. US Senator Jon Ossoff from Georgia deserves re-election in November.

31. Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms is a better candidate and will be, if elected, a better Georgia Governor than Rick Jackson would be.

32. Donald Trump is the worst president since Andrew Johnson—maybe even the worst ever.

33. Having—and encouraging—good neighbors and good friends makes life better. Community is a great good. And neighbors, friends, and community do not require everyone to agree on things.

Disagree?—Try This

People disagree with me and I’m pretty sure I’m not always right. (Most of the time? Of course.)

1.

Anyone who says or writes something like, “Ed, I don’t agree with you on # x” or “Unlike you, I think y is correct” will not get pushback from me. Assertions and counter-assertions essentially amount to, “We’ll agree to disagree.” There’s little point in spending more words if both parties are satisfied with leaving disagreement on the table.

2.

Another possibility is to rant, curse, and insult me about how stupid or immoral or screwed up I am to think the way I do about # z. That will not even briefly get you closer to changing my mind—but it will get you unsubscribed from my Letters or unfriended, blocked, etc. Neither you nor I need the aggro or unhappiness—go your own way and let me be.

Or—

3.

If you disagree and honestly think the facts, logic, etc., are on your side, make a civil comment to that effect, briefly laying out why. Perhaps I’ll respond, equally civilly, and explain, briefly, why you have or have not convinced me. Maybe if there is strong disagreement and good arguments or cases possible on both sides, we’ll have a guest Letter from you and an equally long Letter from me on the subject. Even if we don’t persuade each other, maybe others will be enlightened by at least one of us.

Paul Krugman

Against Oligarchy, Part II: Wealth Taxes

Forbes has been publishing its “rich list” of the 400 wealthiest Americans since 1982. In that first year, Forbes estimated the combined net worth of its 400 at $92 billion — not a small sum, but only 0.8 percent of total U.S. wealth and 3.2 percent of national income…

Read more

a month ago · 345 likes · 55 comments · Paul Krugman

Support Ukraine— https://u24.gov.ua

Pretty good summary of the case regarding Israel—

HCR’s blog—Includes good summary of the case for a social democratic approach to government—

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Another great guest review Letter from Keith Parsons. Enjoy.

REVIEW OF THESE TRUTHS BY JILL LEPORE

For much of my life, I scorned American history. To me, the history of classical Greece, ancient Rome, Britain, and twentieth century Russia seemed far more interesting and colorful. If I had possessed Jill Lepore’s These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) I would have been sharply disabused of these notions. Lepore’s book shows that American history is not the dull recitation of facts that school history may have been. American history is a roller coaster ride of the highest highs and lowest lows. It is replete with heroes and villains, patriots and traitors, those whose lives were dedicated to improving the lives of their fellow Americans, and those who were committed to enslaving or exploiting them. It is a record of astonishing achievement—things no other nation could have done—as well as a story of the most squalid cruelty, greed, and oppression.

The current presidential administration, and their right-wing allies across the country, do not want this story told. They want an expurgated American history. The bad things are to be omitted or played down. The problem is that if you erase the bad, you also erase much of the good. The greatest goods of American history, such as the Emancipation Proclamation, can only be appreciated in contrast to the deeply engrained evils they opposed. The triumphs of the labor movement in achieving the eight-hour workday, decent wages, and improved working conditions can only be appreciated in contrast to the grossly exploitative treatment of laborers who were forced to work long hours for a pittance in conditions that were unsafe and even deadly. The nineteenth amendment giving women the vote, and the 1965 Voting Rights Act that gave southern African Americans their long-denied voting rights, can be appreciated only by contrast with the systematic disenfranchisement that preceded it (Lately, the US Supreme Court majority has shown that they do not give a shit about disenfranchisement.).

Lepore therefore does not spare us the brutal realities; it is necessary to understand these to appreciate America’s true greatness. Her narrative shows that the central story of America is how fiercely, diligently, and courageously so many have fought the good fight to make “these truths” of the Declaration of Independence a reality for all Americans. Ideals originally propounded by and for white men have been, bit by bit and fight by fight, made the possession of those who were excluded in 1776. For Lepore, the struggle for the full realization of the founding values is not a story told as an afterthought or footnote. It is the focus. It should be. That is what makes America great.

One thing very clear from Lepore’s narrative is just how strong and intransigent have been those forces that resisted the extension of rights and equality. Slaveholders, segregationists, owners of mines, mills, and factories, legislators, judges, ideologues, the wealthy, the corporations, and media have fought furiously against equal rights and for maintaining the power of privilege. Behind their opposition has always been the threat or the reality of violence.

Lepore’s book is nearly 800 pages, but it is more readable than any novel. The pace is fast, but it is never superficial. She has the skill to make telling observations succinctly. Those who would like a more traditional history might consider her recounting of military achievements as too brisk, but those achievements are in no way diminished or disdained. In an era in which academic historians have tended to focus ever more narrowly on microhistories, it is great to have one who can look at the broad sweep and has the skill to make it intelligible for everyone. I would enthusiastically recommend Lepore’s book for high school history classes, but I am sure it is too honest and accurate to be acceptable to bodies like the Texas State Board of Ignorance.

One remarkable feature is that Lepore illuminates the effects of technology and automation on the American worker and the economy. While automation and assembly lines vastly increased productivity and supercharged the economy, Lepore is concerned with the dehumanizing effects on workers. She does not mention it, but the Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times (1936) masterfully (and hilariously) shows how in a machine age, humans can become just another cog. She emphasizes even more the rise of the computer, which she treats with cautious respect and indicates the deep impact its development has had and will have on all of us. Computers, of course, allow us to handle vast amounts of data with great efficiency. However, Lepore fears that computers will also lead to our treatment, not as rights-bearing persons, but as collections of data points, mathematical abstractions that can have no rights.

Of particular interest to me, and, I am sure, to a number of readers of this review, is the fact that the last quarter of the book deals with events that took place in the lifetimes of the Boomer generation. My earliest memory of public events is that, at age eight, I strongly supported John Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election over that creepy guy with the shifty eyes and dark jowls. I remember vividly that terrible day when my sixth grade class was interrupted by our principal announcing over the intercom that President Kennedy had been killed. I remember the events of the civil rights era and the intensely negative reaction of my extended family. My grandfather, generally the soul of gentleness, vowed that if any demonstrators sat down in front of his car, he would run over the sons of bitches. I remember the tumultuous year of 1968, when my best friend Paris Donehoo and I watched the horrific events of the Democratic National Convention as the cops beat the demonstrators who chanted “The whole world’s watching!” I remember the next year watching in awe as Neil Armstrong took that one small step.

Yet such memories are like snapshots. They are vivid reminders of moments, but it takes a historian like Lepore to give them narrative structure and to relate our subjective experiences to the life of the nation.

Villains

Like any good historian, Lepore does not preach or moralize, but, as I say, heroes and villains emerge from her narrative. One of the biggest villains is Richard Nixon. Nixon began his career as a red-baiting congressman and then senator. He won his senate seat at age thirty-six by defeating Democrat Helen Gahagan Douglas whom he smeared as “pink right down to her underwear.” By a bit of judicious political treachery, Nixon got the California delegation to the 1952 Republican National Convention to switch their support from Earl Warren to Eisenhower. Eisenhower rewarded Nixon by making him the VP candidate. However, his candidacy was nearly derailed when it was revealed that he had somehow acquired an $18,000 slush fund. Nixon went on TV and saved his candidacy with his “Checkers” speech which deflated the criticism with a self-pitying performance that concluded by acknowledging one gift—a cocker spaniel puppy they named “Checkers” and would not be giving back. His maudlin histrionics saved his career.

As a candidate and then as president, Nixon’s character fully revealed its sinister nature. In 1968, realizing that bad news from Vietnam would help his candidacy, Nixon contacted the South Vietnamese and told them that they would get a better deal if they delayed in seeking peace until after his election. LBJ found out about this skullduggery and confronted Nixon directly. Nixon simply lied and denied it (p. 632). Further, says Lepore, whereas M.L. King and John Kennedy preached love, Nixon knew the value of hate (p. 632). His campaign adviser Kevin Phillips led Nixon to the infamous “southern strategy,” whereby southern Democrats would be wooed and African-Americans abandoned. He forsook civil rights for “law and order,” which exploited the white fear aroused by the riots in Watts and elsewhere. “Law and order” was code for cracking black heads. With Nixon’s victory, the parties were subsequently sorted by race and ideology (p. 633). Much of the terrible polarization we have experienced since is traceable back to Nixon’s divisiveness and exploitation of hate. Then came Watergate.

Heroes

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)

Yet, the heroes have kept hope alive in the face of villainy. One of the greatest heroes was Frederick Douglass. He escaped slavery to become the most eloquent and powerful voice against slavery and against its legacy. Douglass was the doyen of the line of those who have articulated the experience of black people in America and spoken so effectively on their behalf, the line from Douglass through W.E.B. DuBois, M.L. King, Jr., Malcolm X, Barack Obama, and John Lewis.

Lepore has a long and disturbing penultimate chapter titled “Battle Lines” about how the culture wars have so bitterly divided us. It did not have to happen. Americans have always been deeply divided over many issues but opportunists seized on Nixon’s insight that hate is a powerful motivator and went one beyond. They exploited the universal human propensity towards tribalism, the intense identification with a group of fellow true believers and the relegation of all others to “other.” Americans were sequestered along ideological and party tribes, irreconcilably divided over issues like abortion, guns, gay rights, Black Lives Matter, and the environment.

Identity Politics

Both left and right focused on identity politics. The left, to the chagrin of more traditional leftists (See Left is not Woke, 2023, by Susan Neiman.), abandoned appeals to universal rights and focused on the issues of particular marginalized groups. The right focused on white males. Pioneering AM radio shock jock Rush Limbaugh tapped into the white-hot magma chamber of white male grievance and it made him rich and famous. Nobody is more aggrieved than those who have seen their privileges somewhat eroded. Politicians were equally quick to exploit the deep fissures. Social media and internet echo chambers intensified and magnified the rhetoric of hate. And here we are.

Our Current Divisions

Into a nation more deeply divided than at any time since the Civil War stepped Donald Trump, a president devoted to division. Trump has never pretended to be the president of the American people. He is the president of MAGA and hates everyone else. Lepore’s book ends in the second year of Trump’s first term. I think a second edition will be out before long. In the meantime, I don’t want to put words in her mouth, but my best guess is that she would say that under Trump 2.0, an obedient Congress, and a subservient Supreme Court, “These Truths,” so powerfully expressed by Jefferson, have shrunk to a mathematical point.

The next phase of American history will have to be our rescue of those truths and our devastated Republic.

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Another great guest Letter from Keith Parsons. Enjoy.

THE SPECTACULAR SUCCESS OF THE SMEAR

As I’ve said, I am reading Jill Lepore’s superb These Truths (2018), a history of the United States. (My review of the book will probably be posted as a guest Letter on Friday.) I am as of this writing up to the 1920s (450 pages) and Lepore still has me rapt. It was in the twenties that the business of the political consultant got started. The first political consultants invented opposition research. What you do is look up everything the targeted candidate has ever said or written. You then present anything, anything at all, to make your target look bad. Of course you take it out of context. Of course you edit it for maximum offensiveness. Of course fairness is not a consideration.

This tactic was first used against novelist Upton Sinclair, author of the muckraking indictment of the meatpacking industry, The Jungle (1905), when he ran for governor of California in 1934. One tactic was to take lines from a novel, lines spoken by a fictional character, and attribute them to Sinclair himself. For instance, one character expresses disillusionment with the sanctity of marriage, and this was presented as Sinclair’s own opinion. The smears worked. Sinclair was defeated.

When confronted about the dirty tactics, the consultants fully agreed that it was unfair but candidly stated that their only aim was to prevent Sinclair from being elected governor. The frank amorality persists today. Indeed, it is essential for political consulting. For the opposition researcher, no blow is too low, no lie too infamous, no trick too dirty, and there is no back that cannot be stabbed. Politics has always been a rough game. The consultants turned it into The Game of Thrones. For politicians like Newt Gingrich or Mitch McConnell, for whom power is an end in itself, and for whom governing is a zero-sum game, this approach was exactly right.

The smear, of course, is as old as politics. I believe it was Cicero who said (unapprovingly, I hope) that when arguments fail abuse your opponent. When Socrates was on trial, his accusers had nothing of any substance, so they made up a set of smears. They accused Socrates of corrupting the youth and introducing new gods. As presented by Plato in The Apology of Socrates, Socrates had little trouble showing (in 399 BCE) that the charges were smears, but they stuck anyway and he was convicted.

Although smears are as old as politics, it is only in our day that they have been perfected and turned into a big-money business—the lie factory. We are all vulnerable to the dedicated pursuer of oppositional research, especially today. Nearly everyone has been indiscreet saying something online—and even if you haven’t, something innocent you said can be made to look indiscreet. Once said, it is out there forever, and a dedicated sleuth can find it. I have always endeavored to say online only what I would be willing to have read in open court. I am sure, though, that I would be an easy target for opposition researchers: Parsons hates Christianity! Parsons hates America! Parsons thinks that Christians are bigots! Parsons wants your kids to be atheists! Parsons is woke! Parsons thinks conservatives are idiots! Parsons is a communist!

And so on. Of course, they could do the same to you.

For me, it is perversely amusing to see how, during a Republican primary, two rival extreme conservatives will each try to depict the other as a liberal, as being soft on immigration, soft on crime, having had a skeptical thought about Donald Trump, as wanting to take your guns, as supporting LGBTQ people, as supporting Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton . . . and so on. Each tries to depict himself or herself as the more extreme candidate. Any instance of compromise or reaching across the aisle is proof that the opponent is a RINO.

Oddly, smears are far more effective than truth, even when the truth is damning. There is no need to smear the current Republican candidate for the US Senate, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Nothing could be more appalling than the truth. He is a moral degenerate and hypocrite, divorced by his wife on “biblical grounds” (Cue Connie Francis’s Lipstick on Your Collar.). He was impeached by fellow Republicans in the Legislature on grounds of corruption, bribery, and abuse of public trust. He was found to have retaliated against four aides who accused him of abuse of power. Taxpayers had to cover the $6.6 million dollar payout. Yet Paxton cruised to an easy victory over longtime incumbent John Cornyn. Being called garbage is for some reason far more damning than being garbage.

Gossiping?

What, then, makes a smear so effective? The only possible answer seems to be that we want to believe them. Gossiping seems to be a fundamental human bonding mechanism. Monkeys groom; we gossip. There is no feeling of eager anticipation like having a big nugget of juicy hearsay to pass on to your friends and few satisfactions like having your news eagerly received. Men, of course, are enthusiastic gossipers the same as women. Naturally, the more salacious or shocking, the more titillating it is. We are outrage junkies. Righteous indignation—and the self-righteousness that goes with it—are highly pleasurable and addictive states, and smears give us our fix. However, one thing most definitely unwanted as the tea is being spilled is a skeptic who questions our delightful tattles.

A smear is a kind of gossip. Really, though, gossip is often harmless, maybe even a necessary aspect of social bonding. Even when it is bad it is generally not too bad; the Catholic Church regards gossiping as a venial sin. A smear however, is 100% malicious. Or maybe that is misleading. Malice is an expression of personal animosity. For the professional smearer, it is not personal. It is business, the same as a Mafia rubout. The smear campaigner has nothing personal against his targets; he could just as easily be working for you as for your opponent. Right and wrong are irrelevant. Money talks and bullshit walks.

How to respond to smears? Two different approaches have been offered by two prominent figures—Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama. Bill Clinton said that if someone dumps a bucket of slime over your head, dump two buckets back on his. By contrast, Michelle Obama said “When they go low, we go high.” That is, you respond to smears by taking the high road and not crawling down into the muck with your opponent. The more you are smeared, the higher you exalt your ideals. Let’s call these the “low road” and the “high road” responses to smears.

Low Road

I think the low road approach would be defended like this: If you want fairness, stay out of politics. Of course it is amoral. Of course fairness to your opponent is irrelevant. Politics is a kind of war, and it is naive to pretend it is anything else. Von Clausewitz said that war is politics by other means. The reverse is true. Politics is warfare by other means. Was Churchill concerned to treat Hitler fairly? You want to beat your opponent. Period. If you can win by smearing your opponent more effectively than he smears you, that is all for the good.

OK. You have to wonder though: If someone is willing to campaign amorally, can they be trusted to govern morally?

High Road

I think the high road approach would be defended like this: Nothing is more important than maintaining your integrity. As scripture says, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul? Better to lose as a good person than to win as a bad one. Also, by taking the high road you appeal to what is best in people, to the better angels of their nature, unlike the demagogue who appeals to the lowest common denominator. If you lose, you can still hold your head high.

OK. But if you lose with your head high, you still lose.

Effective

FDR

The man who responded most effectively to smears was the only man elected four times to the presidency—Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945). No president was ever traduced as foully as Roosevelt. The wealthy bitterly hated him. They could hardly bring themselves to speak his name. He was “That man in the White House.” Roosevelt, born into wealth, was regarded as a traitor to his class. He was derided as a communist, a socialist, a fascist, a dictator, and a warmonger who wanted to involve America in Europe’s conflicts.

How did Roosevelt handle the smears? He proudly pointed to the hatred against him and he welcomed the hate. That the overprivileged hated and smeared him was proof that he was on the side of regular people. Also, he knew how to make people like him. When he spoke by radio in one of his “fireside chats” he spoke in a manner that generated warmth and trust. He sounded like a dear friend or member of the family. When he explained, he did so simply, straightforwardly, and with respect for his audience’s intelligence. He was on your side. When he died, one mourner was asked whether he had known the president. “No,” he replied, “but he knew me.”

Smears are powerful, but not all-powerful. In my not-so-humble opinion the two best people in the US Senate are the two senators from my home state, Georgia—Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.* These are men of such obvious intelligence, integrity, and dedication to the public good, that they stand tall above the smears. Like Roosevelt, they can welcome the hate of the smearers and leave them futilely sucking the bitterness of their own bile.

_____________

*I have lived in Texas for thirty years, but please do not call me a “Texan.” I am from Georgia.

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by Ed Buckner

Visit Places of Natural Beauty?

Niagara Falls

Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls and Yellowstone are stunningly beautiful and worth traveling many miles to see. But there are thousands of other places worth the trouble to see. Many of these are in national or state parks—but not nearly all of them.

See Historic Places?

History interests some people more than others, and it can be sort of embarrassing to tell someone who lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, say, about this really old and historic building from 1898. But keep an open mind and stop and read that historic marker or drop by that county courthouse.

Don’t assume all the interesting places are easy to find. Andrew Carroll has written a 2013 book

that will help you find a lot of them. Drive in to almost any town in America, keep an open mind, and look around. And look at history museums, art museums, quilt museums (Paducah, Kentucky, and Lincoln, Nebraska, have really nice ones).

And don’t miss the Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) home and studio in Cornish, New Hampshire.

Go to Washington, Georgia, and see where the Confederate states officially ended their fight for slavery and disunion:

And while you’re there, visit one of the most beautiful libraries anywhere:

Or go to Vandalia, Illinois, and visit the place where Abraham Lincoln first served as a state legislator—

And there are thousands more.

Visit All State Capitals and State Capitols?

An interesting and rewarding plan, if you’re healthy and retired, is to visit all the state capitols (those are the buildings) and capitals (the cities), as my son Michael is doing (he’s already been to most and he tracks his progress with some care).

Here’s Louisiana’s distinctive capitol in Red Stick—er, uh, Baton Rouge—

Photo by MEB

Most state capitols include domes (the one in Des Moines, Iowa, has five domes!), and every one of them is historically interesting. If you go to the one in Louisiana, you can stick your finger in (or at least see) the bullet holes in the walls where Senator (former Governor) Huey Long was shot and killed in 1935 (or, more likely, where his bodyguards returned fire).

The history of the buildings is usually fascinating and readily available and it is always interesting to see what historical events—and what famed people associated with that state—are featured in the building. A bust of Walter Cronkite (1916-2009) in the Missouri capitol reminds you he was born in the state.

Nearly all—not quite all—are architecturally appealing.

What state capitol this is?*

Visit Largest City in Each State?

In how many US states is the largest city by population also the capital city? (If you don’t know, pause a second and try to guess before you scroll down. The answer surprised me.)

*

*

*

*

I assumed most states had their capitol buildings in the state’s largest city, though I knew it wasn’t all of them.

But I was not even close about it being most—only 17 out of the 50 states do. My own state, Georgia, is one of the 17 (Atlanta is the capital and the one with the most people), so maybe that made me more likely to guess wrong.

Notable exceptions:

In California, the capital (Sacramento) is home to over a half million people but is only the sixth largest city in the state.

New York’s capital is Albany—lots of people—around 100,000—but, like California’s, the capital is the sixth largest.

Jefferson City, with only around 43,000 people, is Missouri’s 16th largest city.

Capitals in Kentucky and Vermont are small (Montpelier in Vermont only has about 8,000 people) enough to have city populations ranked 14th and 15th respectively. Who knew Vermont had any cities outside Burlington?

But the record easily belongs to Washington state: Olympia is not even in the top 20 largest cities in the state. It is quite beautiful though.

Want more? See—

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_of_U.S._states_and_territories_by_population

What to See if the USA Isn’t Home?

First, come visit us—most places in the US are welcoming to visitors and there’s a lot to see, starting with our natural wonders and amusement parks (if you like that sort of thing) and Hollywood and Washington, DC. But visit some small towns and state capitals, too. Keep in mind, though, that places in the US may be much farther apart than you’re used to. For example, it’s around 700 road miles (a little over 1000 km) from Athens, Greece, to Istanbul, Turkei; and about that from Berlin to Geneva. It’s about four times that far from New York City to Los Angeles.

Second, do some traveling close to home. I’ve been to lots of places in the UK and Canada and some in many other countries, but I’ll bet every nation has small towns and beautiful places to see.

__________

*Sorry—trick question—that’s not a state capitol. Nor is it the US Capitol. That’s City Hall in San Francisco.

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Another great guest review-and-more Letter from Keith Parsons—one that serves as an extended complement to Michael Buckner’s sidebar in Monday’s “Cultural Christian” Letter. Enjoy.

THE ILIAD, TRANSLATED BY EMILY WILSON (above)

AND A MEDITATION ON EDUCATION

I agree with classicist Peter Jones that if ancient Greek civilization had produced only The Iliad and The Odyssey, that would still have been a magnificent achievement. When Western literature emerged with these two great epics, there was nothing nascent, tentative, or exploratory—no baby steps. Instead, you have two works of unsurpassed greatness. They contain beauties that leave you gasping, horrors to chill you, tenderness and cruelty, a world both wondrous and terrible. Characters are unforgettable. Hector is a being of heartbreaking nobility and tragedy, a being far superior to any of that ragtag rabble of gods. The scene in Book Six where he leaves the steaming gore of battle to meet with his wife and little son is a passage that brings tears to me. At first the child shrinks in fear before his father’s terrible battle helmet. Hector removes the helmet, comforts the child, and prays that the gods will make his son a better man than his father. Of course, both Hector and his son are doomed.

The Iliad grips from the first scene. Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, has taken as his prize the daughter of a priest of Apollo. (Of course, in those days, young women were part of the spoils of war.) The priest approaches the Greek camp in his full priestly regalia and offers a huge ransom for his daughter’s return. Agamemnon, though advised to accept the treasure, spurns the father with contempt and threats. The priest prays that Apollo will avenge him. Apollo, enraged, falls down like night on the Greek camp. The arrows in his quiver whiz to their targets, bringing plague to the Greeks.

Soon, the camp is in crisis, and a seer is asked to determine the cause. It is clear that Apollo is avenging the outrageous treatment of his priest and that Agamemnon must return the girl immediately and accept no ransom. Furious and humiliated, Agamemnon declares that he alone will not go without a prize, and that if he returns the girl to her father he will take one of the prizes of the other Greek captains. Achilles, the greatest warrior, berates Agamemnon for his arrogance, so Agamemnon says that it is Achilles’ prize that he will take. Achilles starts to draw out his great sword to kill Agamemnon, and nobody could have stopped him. Suddenly he feels a tug of his hair and turns to stare into the gray eyes of Athena. She advises him to control his temper. He does, but he famously withdraws from battle to the near ruin of the Greeks.

The Iliad, of course, is the greatest depiction of war that ever has been or ever could be. Our day has seen great novels about war, such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War (1971) and War and Remembrance (1978), and Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad (1952) and Life and Fate (1959/1980). Each is superb, but nothing can surpass Homer’s original. We are spared no detail. Homer tells us just where the spear entered the chest and how it jutted out the back. Tall, handsome young men in the glorious peak of youth are sent sprawling in the dust, their dark blood staining the ground. Fear is felt by all, even the mightiest heroes. Each feels all of the terrible passions of combat—fury, courage overcoming fear, and the glory of victory.

Yet the greatest glory of The Iliad is the sheer splendor of the language. Like a great symphony, the narrative rises and falls, modulating in pace and tonality. Nothing is wasted; even the most prosaic detail counts. The mundane is not prettified but made sensually vivid. When the heroes roast meat, I salivate! Homer is not so much read as felt. This is why the translator’s task is such a difficult one. I heard of one Italian translator who sighed that translations were like wives: If she is beautiful, she will not be faithful. If she is faithful, she will not be beautiful. From the start, then, the translator must admit that the task is impossible and that no translation can capture the nuance, depth, or richness of the original.

Woke Translating?

However, I think Emily Wilson, Professor of Classics at Penn, has done the translator’s job as well as it can be done. If there is no substitute for reading the original (as so few can), her translations are nonetheless thrilling. Rendered in iambic pentameter, the text feels natural—as if we were hearing it from Homer. The translation I used for my classes was Robert Fitzgerald’s, which is also superb, yet with Wilson’s 2023 translation, I feel that we non-readers of classical Greek are as close to the original experience as we are going to get.

Unbelievably, however, Prof. Wilson has been subject to scurrilous attacks by halfwits who claim that her translations are “woke.” Misogyny is the only possible basis for such ignorant attacks. Such was the intensity of the obloquy that she had to quit her X account to escape the abuse of trolls. The great curse of the internet is that every idiot is given a soapbox.

Some credentialed scholars have offered more considered responses. They think that Wilson has downplayed the heroic elements and softened the characters. Actually, I think that what she did was stick more closely to the original text and thereby cut through the encrustation of romantic and Victorian spin the text had accrued. I do not find her characters soft at all. Achilles is hard as granite. When he returns to battle to avenge Patroclus, he is a force of nature, as pitiless and unstoppable as a natural disaster.

Like most nerdy kids, my first intellectual fascination was dinosaurs. My second was the ancient Greeks. While I was holed up in bed with chickenpox for two weeks, my Mom brought me The Iliad in a prose condensed rendition for kids. I was hooked, absolutely thrilled. Ever since, I have never been happier than when sailing the wine-dark sea with Homer.

I really fear that Homer and so much else is going to be lost, forgotten by all but a few weirdos like me. No, I am not going to launch into the standard professorial jeremiad about the apathy, disengagement, and incuriosity of students. However, even instructors in elite universities are reporting that their students just cannot read. Even a thirty-page assignment is considered overwhelming. I am sure that we each have theories about why this is so, but there it is. Homer cannot be skimmed. You have to approach the text like a lover. Joy cannot be snatched; only deep respect and patient acceptance of its treasures will reward you. Who today could love like that? Not students who cannot even read thirty pages.

I think that there is little chance that academe will lead a revival of the humanities. Humanities departments are being closed or cut to the bone at many schools. Often they are under pressure from right-wing state governments that hate the humanities, associating them with woke indoctrination. The ideologues see no place for Homer or the other great writers, poets, and playwrights whose study used to constitute the heart of higher education. Everything now is supposed to be about training for the workforce. Graduates must be trained to serve the needs of business. There is neither need nor time for the deep contemplation of the best that has been thought or felt. If you want to relish Homer, do it on your own time, and not at taxpayers’ expense!

Narrow Competence or the Blossoming of Human Potential?

Of course, the animus against the humanities is abysmally stupid. The humanities are not add-ons, frills, relics, or luxuries. They are essential. What is education, after all? It is not a narrow technical competence. Education is the blossoming of human potential—the whole human. Not practical? Tell that to the classically-educated founders of this country. Tell that to Winston Churchill. Tell that to the great Victorian scientists like Charles Darwin, T.H. Huxley, and Charles Lyell (who had a degree in classics from Oxford). To meet the challenges of life requires more than a narrow technical expertise. It requires all the wisdom and insight we can muster, and that might come from Cicero just as much as it might come from a textbook on electrical engineering.

Not everyone wants or needs such an education. Some people just want to be programmers, nurses, welders, chefs, electricians, or machinists and have no interest in studying Plato or Shakespeare. Fine! We need dedicated people in all such professions. We could not function a day without them. I once had a student say that she thought that she should not be required to read Shakespeare. I fully agreed with her. I had to wonder, however, what she was doing at a university. Community colleges and vocational schools are absolutely necessary and no stigma should attach to attending one. Indeed, they should be free, just like public school. University is not for everyone, not even for the majority. However, those who go to a university should be educated. No, not just trained, educated.

The Army used to run ads with the slogan “Be all you can be.” Aristotle said it long before the recruiters did. It should be the slogan of every university.

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Keith Parsons with more good stuff, as is usual in these Letters—

Dr. Keith M. Parsons, Philosophy Professor at University of Houston (TX)-Clear Lake-taken 5 years before his retirement; photo authenticated by Charles Wigglesworth of the North American Philosophical Society (NAPS) on June 27, 2022*

THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT CRITICAL THINKING

Some years ago, academe was all abuzz about “critical thinking.” Everybody was talking about it, especially upper administration. It was known to be a good thing, though what exactly it was supposed to be was somewhat nebulous. It became a particularly important concern when the regional accreditation agency, The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS), required all schools within its jurisdiction to come up with a Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP). This was an unfunded mandate that all schools had to complete in order to retain accreditation.

The QEP required schools to devise a detailed plan to “improve student outcomes,” to submit that plan for approval, and to show how its success was to be measured. The project was to pick a single topic or emphasis and to implement it across the university. And what was the purpose of the QEP? To enhance quality, of course! Universities were required by fiat to expend significant time, effort, and money (over $1 million at my university) on just the kind of project that excites the primal control instincts of the petty bureaucrat. You get to tell universities to devise a program of buzzwords and bullshit and report back to you its success as measured by junk metrics. (The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller, 2018, should be required reading for all university administrators.)

Needless to say, QEP was a demand far beyond the usual requirements of accreditation agencies. Small men were given far too much power. I diagnosed it as creeping institutional megalomania and explained precisely my views of SACS in a guest op/ed in the student newspaper—“SACS of What?”

Anyway, many schools, including mine, opted to meet the QEP requirements by developing a program to promote “critical thinking.” However, every serious intellectual inquiry engages in critical thinking: The development of techniques and methods, particularly mathematical methods, for the restraint of bias, learning to distinguish signal from noisy data, developing useful theoretical models of complex systems, developing new technologies for more accurate observation and measurement, discovering unified theories to subsume apparently disparate phenomena, appealing to experiment—natural or artificial—and so on.

This is so in history just as much as physics. The historian is as data hungry as anyone in the natural sciences. This is why they live in archives, looking for those hidden clues that can shed light on the obscure questions. I have found such documents. In the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in West, Iowa, are the archives of Hoover’s good friend Lewis Strauss (1896-1974). Strauss was the head of the Atomic Energy Commission when, in 1954, the Castle Bravo thermonuclear test severely irradiated inhabited islands of the Marshalls chain. Strauss treated the irradiation of the islanders chiefly as a public relations problem, assuring everyone that the Marshallese were happy and recovering steadily. I found a document with handwritten annotations by Strauss indicating that he was aware that the health problems of the islanders were much more severe than he admitted in public. This confirmed that, while there was no plot to irradiate the islanders, as some have charged, their well-being was not as high a priority as defending the tests. For the long-term effects of the radiation see my book, written with Robert Zaballa, Bombing the Marshall Islands: A Cold War Tragedy (2017).

The upshot is that the best way to improve critical thinking would have been to devote the time, effort, and money spent on QEP to the strengthening of resources for traditional instruction: More grants for research, improved and updated lab equipment, better funding for attendance at learned conferences, constant expansion of library facilities, incentivizing faculty development, hosting of colloquia, and the invitation to campus of the most noted researchers and scholars. And so forth.

Of course, there are many books on critical thinking and courses dedicated to the topic. However, I see the purpose of such books and courses as not offering any advice to specialists and scholars. They would know best about that. Rather, I think the aim is to help students become good citizens of the Information Age. The specialized methods and techniques for the practice of specialized inquiries might not be terribly helpful when it comes to navigating the rocks and shoals of public discourse—the tsunami of information, misinformation, and disinformation that inundates us constantly. Being a crackerjack electrical engineer might not insulate you from the outrageous fallacies, lies, and fantasies of something like young-earth creationism. In fact, I have met such types.

As I see it, to think critically is just to think rationally, and thinking rationally is to habitually think in accordance with the intellectual virtues—as indeed Aristotle noted long ago. What are the intellectual virtues? Thinking logically is one of them. Learning to think logically takes practice. You have to work at it until it becomes second nature. You have to recognize when a claim is based on argument and when it is merely asserted. Assertion, however passionate or from however respected a figure, is no reason to accept a claim. When you evaluate a claim you have to learn to look for the premises, that is, what is taken for granted and offered as supporting the conclusion? The weakness of an argument often comes down to an unstated and unwarranted assumption.

Logical thinkers have internalized the distinction between validity and truth. To say that an argument is valid is to say that its conclusion really does follow from the premises, that is, if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. For instance, if, as has recently been asserted, Democrats are communist lunatics, and communist lunatics are bad for America, it follows necessarily that Democrats are bad for America. The problem is that word “if”—the biggest little word in the English language. The conclusion, though validly derived from the premises is guaranteed to be true only if the premises are true. If it is false that Democrats are communist lunatics, then it is not necessarily true that Democrats are bad for America.

The intellectually virtuous also are good at telling how much and what kind of evidence is needed to support a claim. Claims that are mundane do not require a lot of evidence. If the TV sportscaster tells me that the Astros lost by a score of 6-5, there is no need to double check. However, the more extraordinary the claim, the stronger the evidence has to be. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This, of course, is one of the reasons why miracle claims are so challenging to verify, as Hume noted over 250 years ago. A miracle is normally thought of as an event that is physically impossible—like someone stone dead returning to life—but it happened anyway.

Any report has to be judged first of all by how probable it is on background knowledge, that is, apart from the particular present testimony. For instance, if someone tells me that my cable TV company is offering better service for a reduced price, I would demand very good evidence because this goes so strongly against my past experience. When the claim is that something has happened which we judge, based on our best scientific knowledge, to be physically impossible, then, obviously, the prior probability of such a claim must be very low.

Put simply, the intellectually virtuous person will not be a sucker. He or she will know when to demand evidence and what kind of evidence and will withhold assent until it is forthcoming.

Another intellectual virtue is epistemic conservatism. Let me hasten to note that epistemic conservatism has nothing to do with political conservatism. Epistemic conservatism is the habitual preference for everyday, familiar explanations over extravagant ones. Epistemic conservatism can be summed up with the slogan, “When you hear hoofbeats in the distance, think ‘horses’ not ‘unicorns.’” Or consider crop circles. Some years back, intricate and often beautiful patterns would appear overnight in fields of grain. Enthusiasts immediately invoked extraterrestrial influence. However, a more rational and conservative approach would take as the default hypothesis that the circles were productions of human performance artists—as, indeed, they were.

The history of science supports epistemic conservatism by progressively displacing supernatural explanations with natural ones. Over the centuries, many phenomena thought too marvelous or terrifying to have natural causes were disclosed to be the consequence of natural entities or processes. When the Black Death struck in the fourteenth century, the learned professors of the Sorbonne attributed it to a malignant conjunction of planets. Most people just said it was the wrath of God. We now know that bubonic plague is spread by fleas infected with the Yersinia pestis bacterium.

Epistemic conservatism is the antidote to conspiracy theories. The conspiracy theorist is temperamentally opposed to mundane explanations and rejects them in favor of complex, convoluted conspiracies. In defense of his conspiracy, the advocate will demand whether something seemingly extremely unlikely could have occurred by chance. The answer is, “Yes. Yes it could have.” Highly unlikely things happen all the time. They are bound to by the laws of probability. Something that happens only once in a million times will eventually happen if given enough opportunities. It is extremely improbable that on any given day that an asteroid the size of Mt. Everest will hit the Earth. However, over geological time, it will happen that you have a very bad day and something falls from the sky. Exeunt Dinosauria.

The rational thinker learns to spot fallacious thinking by others or ourselves (and you are just as liable as anyone to think fallaciously). Fallacy is the counterfeit of reason; it looks like good reasoning but is not. In my experience, these are some of the most common fallacies:

Begging the Question

(1) Begging the Question. To beg the question is to assume what you are supposed to be proving and to appeal to your conclusion, either explicitly or tacitly as a reason for the conclusion. It is arguing in a circle: A is true because of B and B is so because of A. People who passionately believe that something is so will often unconsciously assume that it is so in arguing for it.

In my encounters with religious apologists I have often caught them begging the question. Those who are passionately convinced of the truth of the resurrection narratives are likely to assume greater veracity in the gospel record than a skeptic like me is willing to concede. They might point to the supposed postmortem appearances of Jesus as recorded in the gospels, but to me those appearance stories are themselves highly dubious. Mark, the earliest gospel, originally concluded with no appearance stories; these were appended later. Why can I not regard all of those stories as fictional accretions? So for those appearances to count as evidence for me, you have to first show me that they are veridical and not beg the question by assuming that they are.

Appeal to Ignorance

(2) The Appeal to Ignorance. A common ploy is to assert that something is so based on the fact that it has not been proven not so. Negatives can be proven. There is currently no rhinoceros in my office (I just checked). However, showing that something is not so is often difficult. How do you show that the ivory-billed woodpecker is extinct? The last confirmed sighting was in 1944, though others have made controversial claims since. Contrary to the slogan, absence of evidence is often evidence of absence, but definitive disproof is often elusive. Because disproof is often elusive, the usual practice is to put the burden of proof on the one making the claim, not the skeptic. You have to show that the ivory billed woodpecker still exists; I do not have to show that it does not. The appeal to ignorance reverses the burden of proof and puts it on the skeptic. Appeals to ignorance are common during moral panics like the red scare of the fifties or the “satanic panic” of the eighties when accusations alone were often sufficient to ruin lives and careers. How do you prove that you are not a secret communist or satanist?

Your “gut”

(3) Over-trusting your “gut”: Sometimes, “trust your gut” is good advice. When confronted with a fast-talking sales pitch, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Your intuitions often guide you right. On the other hand, there are many circumstances where your “gut” is unreliable. In fact, it can become your inner idiot. Your gut craves simple solutions, but many problems are complex and simple “solutions” only make things worse. Crime makes us angry. If I see a video of a robber pistol whipping a convenience store clerk it makes me wish we could bring back the cat-o’-nine tails and public flogging. However, the “git tuff” approach to crime, however satisfying at a gut level, is a simplistic solution to a very complex problem. Demagogues work by appealing to your gut, and this is what makes them so dangerous.

Becoming rational cannot be achieved by reading one book or taking one course; it is a lifetime commitment.* How do we inspire students to make that commitment? I don’t know, but I do know it will take more than half-assed bureaucratic boondoggles like QEP.

____________

• Keith Parsons looks exactly the same now—but uses less Brylcreem

• For those who do want a book, the best is the classic by W.V. Quine and J.S. Ullian, The Web of Belief (1978)--the best pocket guide to rational belief.

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by Ed Buckner

Once upon a time I was, by most definitions, a Christian. I’m not, by any reasonable definition, a Christian now. But . . .

I read recently somewhere—I think on Facebook (?)—a sharp attack from an atheist on Richard Dawkins for being (and saying that he is) a cultural Christian. Here’s a link to Dawkins’ declaration and explanation (his essay, linked to in this post, is also worth reading)—

https://www.facebook.com/RichardDawkinsFoundation/posts/richard-dawkins-now-calls-himself-a-cultural-christianthe-internet-treated-that-/1419188016910026/

I hardly think Dawkins needs defending nor that I'd be much use if he did, but I do think it’s quite absurd to criticize him for his declaration. He has assuredly not ceased his whole-hearted principled rejection of Christian theology and has reaffirmed his entirely reasonable claims made years ago in one of his books, The God Delusion (2006). (I’m proud—perhaps absurdly so— to have been mentioned in the book.)

Me as Christian

I once in my life, for 5 or 10 years, recited the following every week, memorized it, maybe understood some of it:

The Apostles’ Creed

I believe in God, the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth;
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried.
He descended into hell.
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father almighty.
From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.

Nothing in there about opposing slavery or child abuse or rape; or supporting equal rights for women or ethnic/racial minorities or gay marriage. Or loving your neighbor or helping the poor or visiting the sick or those in prison. I quite literally don’t believe a single thing in that creed now, except perhaps that forgiveness of others’ mistakes can often be a good thing.

So if I was once a Christian, it can reasonably be said I am one no longer (and haven’t been for sixty years or so).

Is Everything Cultural?

In a sense everything beyond very basic biology—an instinctive urge to breathe, eat, drink, and survive—can be considered cultural. Our ideas and values, including our religious and political principles, are inseparable from our cultures, broadly construed. And our cultures cannot reasonably be divided into neatly distinct piles like “Christian culture,” “Islamic culture,” “Jewish culture,” “Italian culture,” etc. Non-Jew Thomas Cahill (1940-2022) made a convincing case that the Jewish culture has given modern world culture (especially western culture) gifts that are at the core of who we are and how we think.

Secular Humanist

I am proud to call myself a secular humanist, so let me put that creed into words here (with great thanks to the late Paul Kurtz [1925-2012])—

Affirmations of Humanism

A Statement of Principles

Drafted by Paul Kurtz

We are committed to the application of reason and science to the understanding of the universe and to the solving of human problems.

We deplore efforts to denigrate human intelligence, to seek to explain the world in supernatural terms, and to look outside nature for salvation.

We believe that scientific discovery and technology can contribute to the betterment of human life.

We believe in an open and pluralistic society and that democracy is the best guarantee of protecting human rights from authoritarian elites and repressive majorities.

We are committed to the principle of the separation of church and state.

We cultivate the arts of negotiation and compromise as a means of resolving differences and achieving mutual understanding.

We are concerned with securing justice and fairness in society and with eliminating discrimination and intolerance.

We believe in supporting the disadvantaged and the handicapped so that they will be able to help themselves.

We attempt to transcend divisive parochial loyalties based on race, religion, gender, nationality, creed, class, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, and strive to work together for the common good of humanity.

We want to protect and enhance the earth, to preserve it for future generations, and to avoid inflicting needless suffering on other species.

We believe in enjoying life here and now and in developing our creative talents to their fullest.

We believe in the cultivation of moral excellence.

We respect the right to privacy. Mature adults should be allowed to fulfill their aspirations, to express their sexual preferences, to exercise reproductive freedom, to have access to comprehensive and informed health-care, and to die with dignity.

We believe in the common moral decencies: altruism, integrity, honesty, truthfulness, responsibility. Humanist ethics is amenable to critical, rational guidance. There are normative standards that we discover together. Moral principles are tested by their consequences.

We are deeply concerned with the moral education of our children. We want to nourish reason and compassion.

We are engaged by the arts no less than by the sciences.

We are citizens of the universe and are excited by discoveries still to be made in the cosmos.

We are skeptical of untested claims to knowledge, and we are open to novel ideas and seek new departures in our thinking.

We affirm humanism as a realistic alternative to theologies of despair and ideologies of violence and as a source of rich personal significance and genuine satisfaction in the service to others.

We believe in optimism rather than pessimism, hope rather than despair, learning in the place of dogma, truth instead of ignorance, joy rather than guilt or sin, tolerance in the place of fear, love instead of hatred, compassion over selfishness, beauty instead of ugliness, and reason rather than blind faith or irrationality.

We believe in the fullest realization of the best and noblest that we are capable of as human beings.

I like that secular humanism emphasizes both a lack of religion/supernatural beliefs and values directly anchored in being human.

From my son Michael E. Buckner—

“That Old-Time Religion”

That the collection of texts known as “the Bible” or “the Old and New Testaments” says nothing that condemns slavery as an institution and in fact in many places clearly condones the ownership of human beings (giving rules allegedly directly from God, especially in Leviticus 25) on how human “property” should be treated by their “owners”—is undeniable, and these days well known to many 21st century debaters on religion and humanism. It is important that we not fall into the trap of “presentism,” of judging people from thousands of years ago by ethical standards they could not possibly have lived up to. Just as people living in the Ancient Near East were not stupid for failing to understand modern cosmology, geology, and the history of life on this planet—if we now see farther than they did, it is surely because we all stand on the shoulders of a great many very smart people—so, too, the people of those days were not inhumanly wicked or evil. The essentially unreflective support for slavery found in the biblical texts is not particularly unusual for those times. More modern Christian thinkers like Jennifer Glancy or Vernon McCasland (1896-1970) discuss the immorality of slavery and the prevalence—and cruelty—of slavery in biblical times, as well as the failure of the Christian biblical texts to condemn the institution of slavery. But such thinkers seem far too often to be unknown to many Christians.

Equally problematic attitudes can be found in the Iliad and the Odyssey. As humanists, we ought to be quick to point out the moral flaws in the Bible not because they are especially egregious for texts written in the Iron Age, but because of the thoroughly excessive weight far too many people still give the Bible as an alleged guide to human life and human morality. At least in the American South, even supermarkets peddle many book titles purporting to give advice on how to live one’s life to “biblical” standards. Worrisomely large numbers of Americans hold frighteningly anti-democratic attitudes rooted in their reverence for the Bible. A recent poll* indicated that 27% of Americans believe “the Bible should have precedence over the will of the people if the two come into conflict.”

If large numbers of voters—and a substantial fraction of politicians—were in the habit of claiming that what this country needs is a return to good old fashioned Homeric values, we would all need to spend a great deal more time deconstructing the authorship of the “Homeric” texts and critiquing their (by our standards appalling) moral code. If there were a serious movement to base our society on the profoundly anti-democratic and inegalitarian strictures of the Republic, we would likewise all need to read up on our Plato, to understand—and refute—such a dangerous idea. Fortunately, there seems to be no movement to return America to its Ancient Greek “foundation,” and so the Iliad may be safely relegated to the endlessly-fascinating category of “historical text”—useful in understanding the history of our world and how we got to where we are today, and even for illuminating the fundamentals of our human nature, warts and all, fascinating and even moving as a work of literature but not a guide to life in the 21st century. Someday, perhaps, the Bible will take its rightful place next to the Iliad on those same library shelves.

*Daily 202, Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/28/ nearly-half-americans-say-they-want-christian-nation/

MEB’s essay was published as a sidebar to our essay on American slavery in Free Inquiry in 2023: https://secularhumanism.org/2023/05/redcliffe-and-liberty-hall-on-the-christian-origins-of-americas-original-sin/ .

Secular Jews or Muslims

I’ve known far more secular Jews—people without any religious or theocratic beliefs who nevertheless proudly consider themselves Jews—than religious Jews. And I’m quite fond of the ones I know at all well. I respect Judaism in general highly.

I’m reasonably certain that there are many secular Muslims who follow the traditions of Islam but don’t worship Allah nor consider Muhammed to be his prophet, but I’ve met few of them.

Extremely orthodox Muslims and Jews see the world too rigidly and with too little complexity or nuance.

Defining or labeling ourselves should be primarily in our own hands rather than imposed on us by others.

A recent essay on the identity of Jews in America worth reading—

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/06/opinion/jewish-america-identity.html?unlocked_article_code=1.xFA.IWE4.cjVEUroZ-mm_&smid=url-share

Am I a Cultural Christian? Are All Cultures Equally Valid?

It is the height of arrogance to declare your own culture THE correct one in all matters, but I do think cultures and subcultures that enhance the rights and lives of individuals are superior to those that categorize some groups as second-class, deservedly subject to the power of others based on essentially irrelevant characteristics. I also think that some cultural values are merely matters of taste and we should all be fine with differences like that.

I like church architecture—from small white clapboard churches to soaring cathedrals. I think Christian churches are often beautiful, often interesting, and worth admiration. I’ve visited many such buildings in many different cities.

I like some—definitely not all—Christian music, despite being generally musically illiterate myself. I like some versions of Ave Maria, songs or instrumentals, probably preferring the Bach version, like this—

And I was quite moved by President Obama when he spoke in Charleston in 2015 at the funeral for the nine victims of a racist shooting there. Though he did not at all change my views on Christian doctrine/theology, he spoke clearly enough about what Christianity demanded of its adherents to hold my attention and win my respect. And when he broke into an a cappella rendition of “Amazing Grace,” I thought it was beautiful:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/obama-eulogizes-charleston-shooting-victims-sings-amazing-grace

And, like Dawkins, I’m much more likely to approve of modern Christian views and actions regarding things like misogyny and blasphemy than parallel Islamic views. Of course both religions have a wide range of dogma and prescribed behavior on these and other doctrines.

I like the Christian religion’s emphasis on loving your neighbors and I generally like most Christians I know—I just don’t agree with them on religion.

But could I be considered a “cultural Christian”? Only in very narrowly defined ways—and I would not normally call myself that. “Atheist” or “freethinker” or “agnostic atheist” would all suit me better. If someone else called me a cultural Christian, I doubt if I’d object.

And “secular humanist” would usually be the religion-related label I’d most prefer.

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This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

On first reading “Significance of the Frontier” (1893) by Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), I sensed a clever way to reorient American history from the festering wounds of slavery to the destiny of American empire because even as the continental frontier had vanished, Hawaii, the Philippines, and other points west (East?) beckoned. I’ve not renounced that view, but a career studying American mythology and literary history, taught me that the Badger Stater was celebrating the primal divide in US culture, between the agrarian, egalitarian, landscape of American exceptionalism and the mongrel, hierarchical industrial cityscapes of the seaboard.

In Part One, I noted Jefferson’s adoption of the yeoman to represent the exceptional nation. Obviously, slavery did a lot of work to efface very real differences between actual yeoman farms and, say, Jefferson’s Monticello; even Crèvecoeur’s iconic American farmer, “melted into a new race” as he headed inland and exchanged his “ancient prejudices and manners” for the local values, owned slaves.¹ However unnerving slave revolt might be, Jefferson feared cities more because they house propertyless laborers capable of ferment. No more than Locke did he consider them rational. Thus, Jefferson particularly despised Hamilton, architect of First Bank of the United States and Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, and advocate for importing Gastarbeiter to whom he would not offer citizenship. For generations of historians, the stake of their battle was the nation’s exceptionalism.

Alexander Hamilton (1755 or 1757-1804 [from duel with Aaron Burr])

Turner’s gambit was to save exceptionalism and individualism after the open land had disappeared. Revising Crèvecoeur with dime Western tropes, he imagined the land “stripp[ing] off the garments of civilization and array[ing the frontiersman] in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. […] planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion.” The products of this encounter weren’t sentimental farmers. These were fierce democrats whose “impulses [are] stronger, their wills less restrained” than their seaboard cousins. Among them he numbered not only the Sage of Monticello, but Andrew Carnegie, Mark Hanna, John D. Rockefeller, and other Gilded Age titans who hailed from the West or moved there. Their ways (ruthless capitalism and exploitation of natural resources, perhaps?) were proof that frontier character had been so “wrought into the very warp and woof of American thought” that it would survive industrialization.²

Early and mid-twentieth century scholars balked at Turner’s embrace of the Robber Barons. Even so, they looked West. V. L. Parrington’s magisterial, unfinished, Main Currents of American Thought (3 vols., 1930) tells US history as a conflict of Jeffersonian and Hamiltonian forces. Three American Studies landmarks of the Postwar Consensus Era, Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), Robert Spiller’s The Cycle of American Literature (1955), and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden : Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964 – titled from a scene in Thoreau’s Walden [1854]) root American promise in the unclaimed land that promised liberty and a fresh start, the garden of the West, Smith called it. Spiller’s literary history recounts two rolling frontiers, the settler-colonialist “conquest of the continent” and establishment of the agrarian nation, then the machine’s subsequent conquest of “the garden of the world in the West” foreshadowed by the scenes Marx reads.³

Parrington asks us to imagine Jefferson, contemptuously “look[ing] into the future[, where] he saw great cities rising to breed their Roman mobs, duped and exploited by demagogues, the convenient tools of autocracy and count[ed] the cost in social-well-being.”⁴ And here they are! Except that the red-hatted mob hails largely from the townships and hamlets. What happened?

The first thing to say is that none of those four men were nostalgists, unlike the Southern Agrarians (Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, and Allen Tate among them) who defended the Lost Cause in I’ll Take My Stand (1930). Parrington abhorred capitalism. Smith, as he entered his 60s, participated in the Free Speech and Antiwar movements at Berkley. Marx at least flirted with socialism and became an early ecocritic. Their interest in the nineteenth-century American West was to resuscitate a native, egalitarian, democratic tradition to oppose industrial capitalism’s concentrations of wealth and power.

That endeavor faced several problems. Firstly, proclaiming a unified American character and values meant overlooking much, including slavery (except as abolition), the ethnic cleansing of the West, the instability caused by rampant speculation in Western land that led to numerous bank-runs and the Panics of 1837 and 1857. Secondly, the ideal American remained a mixture of northern European Christians. Thirdly, the literary historians implied that industrialism was not inevitable, although not even farmers could avoid it—they were at the mercy of the railroads, futures markets, and global commodity trading (see Frank Norris’s novels The Octopus [1901] and The Pit [1903]). Finally, they trafficked in myths and symbols that conservative cultural forces had already deployed—not to transform the present but to refuse modernity and difference in most all of its forms.

By the time he died, Parrington—whose subject was cultural history—recognized the trap he had set for himself. Much of Main Currents’ third volume reads bitter because he had to concede that the nation had never been an egalitarian democracy, that individualism lacked the resources to improve workers’ lots, and that his yeoman hero was a fiction. The Constitution was rigged in favor of property, Charles Beard and others had taught him. Only in league could industrial laborers effectively secure better wages and working conditions. Farmers relied on The Grange and other collectives. To his credit, Parrington attempted to transfer agency to unions, a collective hero that would drive some experimental novels of the 30s, but interdependence and the necessarily fragmented character of urban life cut against much that he held dear. Turning on the yeoman hero, Parrington concludes that “he had never been a land-loving peasant, rooted to the soil and thriving only in daily contact with familiar acres.” Rather, he “had long been half middle-class, accounting unearned increment the most profitable crop, and buying and selling land as if it were calico.”⁵

It didn’t have to be this way. Already, city and country were deeply imbricated. Already, the art, architecture, and literature of American cities provided a rich store of cultural symbols celebrating American promise and challenges met. We forget, but Walt Whitman was a brilliant poet of the seductions of city life, as well as a serious thinker about the nature of the Democratic ethos required for this vast nation of nations. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) is too often read as condemning the East, but an attentive reader finds a more complex set of feelings, including a recognition that the exceptional nation was always already corrupt. Immigrant and Realist literature, as well as the urban sociology of the Chicago School, Jane Addams and other early theorists of pluralist (Horace Kallen) or more forthrightly multicultural (Randolph Bourne) America offer a frame for thinking about pressing national issues that Western idylls evade and the immigration regime of 1920–1965 sought to reverse. But cities were deemed insufficiently American.

Confronting facts remains a problem. A June PRRI poll showed that 89 percent of Americans say that accepting diversity is a core value. Nevertheless, 34 percent prefer a primarily Christian nation and 20 percent a population primarily from Northwestern Europe. Those numbers do not add up. Likewise, Americans claim to love democracy but tend to hate politics because it is rooted in conflict and requires confronting differences that expose inequality and implicate us in each other’s lives, ideas anathema to American constructions of individualism and freedom. “So,” to repurpose Scott Fitzgerald, “we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”⁶

____________________

NOTES

¹ J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letter III, Letters from an American Farmer (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), p. 26. Inland for Crèvecoeur was Chester, New York.

² Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921), pp. 4, 34, 264.

³ Robert E. Spiller, The Cycle of American Literature: An Essay in Historical Criticism (New York: Macmillan, 1955), pp. x, 105.

⁴ Vernon Louis Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginnings to 1920, 3 vols. (New York: Harcourt, 1930), 1:346.

⁵ Parrington, 3:26.

⁶ F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Scribner’s, 1925), 218.

For a summary of the PRRI poll, see

The Contrarian

America’s Best Kept Secret: Progressiveness Is Popular

Legacy media pumps out a constant stream of polling, analysis, and “hot takes” — not to mention “Still Loyal to Trump in Coal Country Diner” interviews — that insist Americans have lost our democratic bearings and cannot agree upon a common set of values, let alone facts. Seething with resentment over DEI, we have supposedly become a bunch of Mini-Me St…

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2 months ago · 1322 likes · 225 comments · Jennifer Rubin

I am less sanguine than Ms. Rubin.

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