Fanatical Doubt, part I

"When everything worth believing is so mysterious, what is there to do?"
--Fucked Up, from Hidden World.

You won't believe it because you've never heard of it, but then why on earth should you? Probably the most influential religious group in Washington is a private (not "secret") Evangelical organization known as the Family. Bipartisan (involved with everyone from Ronald Reagan to Hilary Clinton and Sarah Palin) they got their start in the 30s as a spiritual alternative to unionism. In the 40s they recruited former Nazis, and in the 70s they encouraged American politicians to support dictators. The unifying idea is the pursuit of power in the interest of divinely controlled politics: "Let go, let God." They endorse what they called "the totalitarianism of God:" if you could recruit just one dictator to heed Him, you'd bring a whole country under His rule in one stroke.

It would be cool if they were right. If God is God, of course we should listen to Him, of course we'd prosper under Him. Exactly what's so horrible about trying to obey our benevolent creator?

What is so fucking horrible about it is that it can never, ever work, and we will always, always want for it to, so it will never stop being available as an incredibly powerful coverup for something else. Because of the way our minds work, we cannot possibly know that we are doing God's will. This limit is rooted in a fundamental problem of human nature: we cannot truly know things outside of our own experience. All we can do with a text (forgery?) or a vision (hallucination?) or a voice in our head ("sacrifice your son--the special one, the one you love most") is believe or doubt. Thomas Hobbes argued this devastatingly over 300 years ago, in 1651. And if every Western Civilization blowhard who touted "the classics" actually read this one, or Machiavelli's similarly classic Discourses on Livy (the classic exposé of revelation as crowd control) they'd want to burn them in one big pile.

We have no reason to believe that even once did anyone listen to these people because of God; they were just attracted to their certainty. This kind of satisfying conviction born of baseless knowledge is what Kant called Fanaticism. And in a country where sheer conviction doubles as moral force, this style of muscular Christianity has a balls-out mystical appeal. Jesus Himself was anything but muscular (or, Hell, Christian) but something sounds totally righteous about the idea of Todd Palin winning a 2000 mile snowmobile race with a broken arm.

We do have reason to believe that people like this succeed because of their unyielding conviction, pragmatically channelled into ruthless action. And this tends to make doubters feel both superior and impotent. Nothing's as boring as one of these cautious, right-thinking people, with their endlessly qualified wishy-washy hesitations.

But the sunny years of Reaganite conviction gave birth to at least one kind of doubt that walks and talks like fanaticism: Hardcore, the sound of twisting Todd Palin's arm the rest of the way off...

for the next step, see here