On Oogedy Boogedyism

Jonah Goldberg asks,

What aspects of the Christian Right amount to oogedy-boogedyism? I take oogedy-boogedy to be a perjorative reference to absurd superstition and irrational nonsense. So where has the GOP embraced to its detriment oogedy-boogedyism? With the possible exception of some variants of creationism (which is hardly a major issue at the national level in the GOP, as much as some on the left and a few on the right try to make it one), I'm at a loss as to what Kathleen is referring to. Opposition to abortion? Opposition to gay marriage? Euthanasia? Support for prayer in school?

To which I would answer, roughly, "yes."

First, Jonah tries to steal a base when he fobs off the creationist issue by saying it "is hardly a major issue at the national level in the GOP." It's a little like saying that affirmative action isn't a major national issue in the Democratic Party because some Democrats support it strongly and the rest don't really care either way. It's not that easy.

Until fairly recently, the Democrats were happy to have the loud and vocal support of groups that favored massive restrictions of gun owners' rights. While most Democrats said (honestly, I think) that they had no problem with hunters and guns kept in the home, gun owners listened to what the Democratic fringe was saying and voted Republican. This GOP advantage has dissipated over the past 5-10 years because the Democrats no longer put Sarah Brady on stage at every major event, and are happy to showcase loudly pro-gun Democrats.

It is clear that the Republican party is publicly comfortable with oogedy-boogedy creationists in the same way the Democrats once were with the most extreme anti-gun campaigners. It doesn't matter that they're relatively limited in number, or that at heart, they represent a viewpoint that is much more common than the left-wing media would like you to believe. So long as we continue to entertain their affections unconditionally, we will be viewed as the party of flat-Earthers.

But there is another, larger force at work as well, and that is the increasing militancy of atheism and agnosticism. The Catholic Mass is a ritual of great beauty and cultural resonance, but that whole transubstantiation thing is rather oogedy-boogedy, no? It's interesting to note that in Japanese pop culture, elements of Christian ideology and iconography are occasionally used to impart the same air of exoticism which Hollywood gets from the Tao, Buddhism, or Hinduism.

As a conservative, I respect the great faiths of the world just as I would respect any other venerated tradition, and Christianity especially, as it is the great tradition of my tribe. If it happens that we celebrate Easter with the Saxon pagan fertility symbols and Christmas with Odin, well, big whoop. But if you are fundamentally a rational materialist, then all of this stuff is, as Jonah calls it, "absurd superstition and irrational nonsense."

But then, the US is also not a remotely atheist or rational-materialist nation. If the bayous of Louisiana are full of tongue-speakers and snake-handlers, the byways of Cambridge are filled with tantric yogis, reiki healers, and Wiccans. How many of them have ever even glanced at the Republican column?

No, the issue here is not "absurd superstition and irrational nonsense." It is Christian morality, and its proper role in setting public law.

Arrr... Pirates!

The recent spike in Somali piracy ought to serve as a reminder of what the world begins to look like when there's no one there to play cop. While we're sitting around counting hairs on polar bears looking for signs of global warming or worrying about god-knows-what, we get this fine reminder that the world we know rests on a foundation of systems whose operation is largely unknown to most people. Daily newspapers used to list the ships arriving and departing each day in harbor cities. Agriculture, manufacturing, and infrastructure used to provide dozens of jobs each for every marketer or middle-management mandarin. Today it is the opposite.

An occasionally-recurring storyline in science fiction is that of a society which relies on ancient technologies they have long since ceased to understand. Such a thing actually happened in Western Europe when the Roman Empire fell--if Roman engineering impresses us today, imagine how an aqueduct looked in 650AD, when they were being pulled down for stone to build meagre huts.

Specialization is inevitable. I work in software and unlike most executives, I still retain a vestigial ability to write code, but I couldn't build a computer from scratch. In the early Renaissance it was still possible for one man to read nearly every book then in existence in his natural lifetime. The warmth, safety, and comfort in which we live have grown in direct proportion to the specialization that makes renaissance man something of an anachronism. I do not worry that most people have no idea how to ride a horse, plant corn, build a barn, and forge iron.

But I do worry about ignorance--ignorance of what it actually takes to keep civilization running on a day-in, day-out basis.

When Barack Obama made an offhand remark about bankrupting coal-fired power plants, I heard the yawp of a community organizer who has no idea how many men it takes to turn on a light bulb. I don't know that this is particularly partisan--I suspect it's more of a social class issue, with the upper 10-20% paying tradesmen and Mexicans to do all or most of the grunt work needed to make all the things in their life run properly.

In this sense it's easy to understand some of the affection (and perhaps antipathy) for Sarah "the Moose Slayer" Palin. In Alaska, everybody either works in the oil fields, on a fishing boat, or for the railroad, how to survive a couple weeks without electricity, butcher a moose, and 10% of adults have a pilot's license. Even if it is a frontier made possible largely by pork from DC, it remains a place where ignorance of the basics is simply not practical.

At heart this is probably an instance of what Jacques Barzun referred to as "primitivism," an atavistic desire to recapture the simplicities and certainties of a long-lost age more golden than our own. But the lights do not stay on by willpower and hope. When borderlands are left unpoliced, pirates appear. I am a conservative because I respect the hard and often dangerous work of the centuries that have led to our moment.