Buckley, God and the Conservative Mind

Cross-posted in ksprogressives :

After hearing William F. Buckley’s contribution to NPR’s revival of the famous “This I Believe” series, many of my impressions of him and what has passed for conservative intellectualism has been confirmed. In Buckley’s audio essay, he argues for belief in God by saying, essentially, that it’s intellectually easier to believe in God than to buy a grander and more complex evolutionary theory. He makes this fundamentally indefensible position sound profound and well-considered by delivering it in his typical cloud of smoky erudition.

But through the fog lies the same old landscape: a traditional Judeo-Christian God preferable because it is a prepackaged explanation, one hashed out over 2000 years of Western tradition. This God would seem to have all the answers and is, therefore, the “easiest” explanation. That in no way implies it’s the right one nor that it really does explain everything. Rather, difficult questions and complete explanations – such as the persistent presence of evil or the sticky difficulty of reconciling an omnipotent God with free will – simply get written out of the equation because they conflict with traditional notions.

This is typical of conservative thought in other areas as well. It’s intellectually (not to mention emotionally and economically) easy to ignore the fact that our diamonds, coffee, and chocolate are often the products of slave labor or that CEOs make 500 times what the average worker makes or that our “free” press ignores the fact that the Republicans are systematically dismantling our democracy. It’s intellectually easier to ignore North Korea’s nuclear weapons or global warming than to do anything about them. But that ease alone makes these problems no less real.

To his credit, what Buckley probably means by “intellectually easier” is “theoretically elegant,” but as applied to the existence of God these are hardly the same thing. An elegant theory explains the facts as fully as possible in the simplest way, not necessarily the easiest or the most comfortable. Buckley’s argument does not do that. Instead, it takes a profound and difficult question and dismisses it in a flourish of linguistic puffery.

No, I too believe in a creator; I merely take issue with the Big Old man in the Sky idea so glibly described by traditionalists. A good look at The Good Book that so inspires conservatives would actually tend to support my view rather than theirs: the Bible is much less a unified view of God, and still less a consistent moral guide, than it is a series of often conflicting histories, stories, and arguments about God and our responsibilities to one another. To abuse an old proverb, the Bible is just a finger pointing toward the heavens, and one of many. Because it’s near and its nature is known, Buckley and his ilk have taken to bowing down toward that corporeal digit.

Postmodernism – a Definition

Postmodern is everything my spleen says it is.

It involves eating my own heart with an apple stuck in the bloody, still sucking aorta.

It’s a sad scene, like a starfish in a blender.

And, like that, it reconstructs itself into a starfish.

Like Modernism before, it practices slash-and-burn evangelism: if you don’t accept my Jesus, I’ll scalp you. If you accept my Jesus, I’ll scalp you.

It’s a good monkey. Like Mr. Magoo, it’s infinitely trainable with pen and inc. It’s a good dye job, but totally, insufferably blind, accidentally surviving falls down manholes into sewers, driving the car off cliffs, dropping lit matches onto powderkegs only to be blown sky-high – “Hey! What’s the big idea, making all that noise?!” – but with its clothes, its nose, its eyebrows, impossibly intact.

Ignorance, they say. To the postmodern it is not just bliss; it is survival. Merely not realizing it’s been blown sky-high, it wins the downhill and the Super G while sliding the slippery slope in a hatbox it didn’t even know it had stepped in. This is the true creation of the übermench: not a will-to-power but a fall-into-accident. Po-mo is the American way; history will say: the Germans and the French had no idea what hit them