Faith and science

When I was last at my local library, a book about Michael Moore caught my eye because it’s a critique that comes from the Left, not the Right. The book, by Jesse Larner, is called Forgive Us Our Spins: Michael Moore and the Future of the Left. Reading the front inside jacket, I understood that the book’s author concedes that Michael Moore, while entertaining, could be deflecting voters’ attention from the seriousness of the Left, and feeding into the Rights’ accusations about the extremism of the modern “liberal” agenda.

Here’s the Publishers Weekly review about Forgive Us Our Spins:

After the left’s electoral defeat of 2004, filmmaker and all-around provocateur Michael Moore has been an easy target. In his second book, Larner deftly argues why Moore is also a just target. For liberals who never liked Moore but couldn’t figure out why, the book provides essential and definitive muckraking, and the reasons why Moore has attained such prominence within America’s conflicted self-image. Larner, a staunch liberal whose rage at much of the current administration’s policy is palpable, also despises “political work that emphasizes emotional appeal over factual content” from either side. Moore, he argues, is similar to Anne Coulter in producing journalism of false pretext and sleight-of-montage, sabotaging his own credibility and, by proxy, that of the causes he espouses. Hence, the book is foremost an assiduously researched and impassioned exposé of the foibles that have rendered the left so vulnerable to attack. Some will undoubtedly read it as the revolution’s devouring its own children. But Larner’s undertaking is admirably unflinching: a call for nuance and evenhandedness from liberals who would revile that same reductionism in the right.

I’m sure you can see why I thought the book what be interesting. What’s been most interesting, so far, is the introduction, which is about how far I’ve gotten into the book. (That’s not quite true. Embarking on the first chapter, I just read that Moore, as part of his “activist” youth worked to get his high school principal fired, not because he didn’t like the man — he did — but on the principle that principals ought to be fired.)

What’s striking about the introduction is the venom Larner feels for the Right. Everything on the Right is extreme, bigoted, and hate-filled, with the agendas being evil schemes to destroy the poor, imperialize America and disenfranchise minorities. Whew! I got sweaty just reading it. As for the liberal agenda, Larner advances it, without factual support, as all that is pure and good and true.

Reading Larner’s introduction, I was struck by something both banal and (I hope) profound. When you think about it, the liberals bring their science to religion and their faith to politics. Conservatives on the other hand, bring their faith to religion and their science to politics. Having stated my aphorism, let me expand upon it.

With regard to religion, there is a strong effort on the liberal side (not a monolithic effort, just a strong one), to disprove religion. Modern atheists hope that every scientific discovery will go one step further to towards decimating religion. Evolution disproves Genesis. The Big Bang disproves Genesis. Modern archeology disproves as many Biblical books as the progressive atheists can get their hands on. And by chipping away at the factual underpinnings of certain Biblical stories, these atheists are confident that they can disprove God entirely, something they think would be a good thing.

It doesn’t seem to occur to these doubters that, to the faithful, the world itself is proof of God’s existence.  The beauty of the Big Bang or the code of modern Genetics, rather than disproving God, merely go to show that he operates in ways more powerful and wonderful than man could ever have conceived in a pre-Scientific age. I don’t pretend to have faith, but I do know that the Big Bang, instead of answering all my questions, leaves me with many more questions than answers.

Interestingly, this rigorous scientific approach seems to vanish quite away when it comes to political doctrines. Larner’s book shows that he believes unquestioningly that the progressive political agenda will do away with all political ills in the world. It’s this faith that inspires his book. Because the liberal agenda is inherently good, he believes that only evil, obfuscating Rightists and grandstanding Leftists (that would be Moore) could account for the unaccountable failure of the American voters to get the faith, to see the way to the shining afterlife that is a pure progressive political system. Who cares that the laboratory of real world experience has proven that much of the Leftist approach doesn’t work? Larner is unimpressed by the fact that unmediated welfare, wealth-destroying taxes, unlimited immigration, socialism, communism, etc, when put into effect, have routinely failed — a hard fact that really ought to convince someone with a logical mind that one might want to rein in these ill-fated approaches and try different, and possibly more successful, ways to reach the same ends.

The opposite, of course, is true for Conservatives. They recognize that religion is a matter of faith. No one can see God. He can only be extrapolated from the evidence around us, whether that evidence is the literal word of the Bible, the mystery of the Big Bang, or the scent of a flower. As a PhD in physics once explained to me, the more he learns, the more he is impressed by God’s glory. And as for those of us conservatives who don’t have religious faith, I think we’re wise enough to a say that, as long as we have shared values, we’ll respect the road you took to those values, just as we hope you’ll respect our road. Significantly, we don’t feel the need to expend our energies trying to tear apart your religious infrastructure.

When it comes to matters of politics, though, Conservatives suddenly show themselves to be much more rigorous. While demanding that “the rich pay their share” may sound like a great line at a progressive revival meeting, conservatives have figured out that, as John Stossel explains:

as the Laffer Curve illustrates, lower rates mean higher rewards for productive activities. People undertake investments and work that higher tax rates had discouraged. They are also less likely to invest time and energy in using accountants and tax lawyers to find ways to avoid taxes.

(John Stossel also explains that increased Government earnings are irrelevant if the Government won’t stop spending, something the Democrats never understood and the Republicans seem to have forgotten.)

Contrary to liberal smears, Conservatives also value the idea of a society free from racism. However, having watched the Great Society at work for more than 40 years, Conservatives have concluded that programs that focus with laser-like intensity on race, and that draw ever bigger and brighter lines between the races in America, have proven to be counter productive. Quota systems, many of which suffer from the law of unintended consequences, and all of which force Americans to compete against each other on the basis of color, not quality, have produced the exact opposite of Martin Luther King’s dreamed of world in which “my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

And on and on….

As for me, having wandered in the liberal wildness for so many years, I feel that I’ve landed comfortably in a world where faith is reserved for matters of faith, and rigorous intellectual thinking gets applied to practical areas such as politics.