Community, Conservatives, and Cynics

A round of assorted links from the past couple weeks.

• The yearning for community, and how the churches are failing that yearning;
• Adam Lee on the Supreme Court and how conservatism is focused on privileging wealthy, white, male Christians;
• Thom Hartmann on how Republicans have tried it their way for 40 years, and it hasn’t worked;
• And how a Canadian study to give $7500 to homeless people defied cynical conservative expectations.

The post here compiles reader responses to the opinion essay, shown above, from Aug. 21.

Washington Post, 28 Aug 2023: Opinion | Readers react to Perry Bacon seeking a ‘church of the nones’

The original essay notes the psychological motivations for wanting to belong to a community, and the difficulty some people have with church communities both for the socially reactionary behavior of so many of them, and of course the complete absence of evidence for any of their supernatural claims. This first letter especially struck me:

AlexanderTheGoodEnough: What Bacon pines for is not at all new. Plato recognized the problem about 2,400 years ago in “The Republic,” and what Plato proposed, and what Bacon lacks, is the essential Socratic “noble lie.” In “The Republic,” a “noble lie” is a myth or a lie knowingly propagated by an elite to maintain social harmony. For nearly two millennia, the Christian church supplied that essential myth for Europeans. The problem now is that, thanks to modern science and the information environment, religion is rapidly losing its power.

The loss of community that has resulted is real and painful. While people might have lost their religion, they’ve not lost their religiosity. People still crave the “religious” communal experience. Thus, they are now substituting all manner of secular communal experiences for effete religion such as rock concerts, sports fandom and, recently and too often dangerously, extreme political involvement and politician worship.

Without a compelling “noble lie” to motivate people, I really cannot offer a truly satisfactory alternative to his lost and bereft religiosity.

Religiosity is of course part of that tribal, Savannah morality, precisely because it serves to bind people into communities.

I am reminded also of “lies-to-children,” the term Terry Pratchett and his co-authors (see here) used to describe simple explanations to children before they are mature enough to deal with more complex ideas. But of course many adults, in supportive communities, never need to deal with complex ideas either; thus religion is a kind of such lie.

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Ostensibly about Clarence Thomas, this piece has some good opening paragraphs about people who call themselves conservatives.

Adam Lee, OnlySky, 28 Aug 2023: The cartoonish corruption of the Supreme Court

Let’s stipulate one thing to start: I don’t doubt that some people call themselves conservative because they believe in small government, low taxes and individual freedom.

However, even granting this, it’s hard to argue that this is the animating idea of the American conservative movement as it exists today. Based on the policies they support, it’s plain to see that its organizing principle is very different. Namely, conservatism appears most concerned with protecting the privileged class—wealthy, white, male Christians for the most part—and ensuring they can do whatever they want. Meanwhile, they want to subject everyone else to increasingly harsh, oppressive and arbitrary laws.

Donald Trump’s shameless attempts to exploit the presidency for his own profit—about which Republicans raised not a peep of protest—are the most glaring example. However, those efforts were unusual only in that they were so brazen. He didn’t pioneer the tactic. He only engaged in it after lesser lights of conservatism had been getting away with it for years.

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Here’s another good overview.

AlterNet, Thom Hartmann, 29 Aug 2023: Opinion | Dear Republicans: We tried it your way and it doesn’t work

Hartmann reviews US history from the 40 years prior to the 1970s, then the birthing of the modern-day Republican party, and the beginning of the Reagan age in 1981.

By 1982 America was agog at the “new ideas” this newly-invented GOP was putting forward. They included radical tax cuts, pollution deregulation, destroying unions, and slashing the support services the New Deal and Great Society once offered people (because, Republicans said, feeding, educating, or providing healthcare to people made them dependent).

Their sales pitch was effective, and we’ve now had 42 years of the so-called Reagan Revolution.

It’s time to simply say out loud that it hasn’t worked:

Followed by lots of examples of how things have changed over 40 years. The failure of “trickle down” economics; how the US has the greatest income inequality in the world; and a rate of gun carnage “unmatched anywhere else in the developed world”; a return to back-alley abortions; ignorance of basic civics; and so on with issues about student debt, industry monopolies, medical bankruptcies, and global warming.

The bottom line is that we — as a nation, voluntarily or involuntarily — have now had the full Republican experience.

And now that we know what it is, we’re no longer listening to the Republican politicians who are continuing to try to sell us this bullshit.

We don’t want to hear Republicans sermonizing about deficits (that they themselves caused).

Or welfare (that they damaged and then exploited).

Or even whatever they’re calling “faith” these days, be it the death penalty, forcing raped women to give birth at the barrel of a gun, or burning books.

We’re over it, Republicans. A new America is being birthed from the ashes of the Reagan Revolution and you can’t stop it much longer.

This would be nice to think so, but I don’t see it happening any time soon.

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One more, along the same lines. Over and over, evidence suggests that people aren’t as bad as conservatives — who are relentlessly cynical, attributing the worst motivations to everyone, something derived from their religion, I suppose — think they are.

Vox, Sigal Samuel, 2 Sep 2023: A Canadian study gave $7,500 to homeless people. Here’s how they spent it. subtitled “The results show the power of cash transfers to reduce homelessness.”

The newly published, peer reviewed PNAS study, conducted by the charity Foundations for Social Change in partnership with the University of British Columbia, was fairly simple. It identified 50 people in the Vancouver area who had become homeless in the past two years. In spring 2018, it gave them each one lump sum of $7,500 (in Canadian dollars). And it told them to do whatever they wanted with the cash.

Conservatives always suppose that homeless people, who surely are irredeemably dissolute, will spend it on alcohol or drugs. Thus:

Separately, the research team conducted a survey, asking 1,100 people to predict how recipients of an unconditional $7,500 transfer would spend the cash. They predicted that recipients would spend 81 percent more on “temptation goods” like alcohol, drugs, or tobacco if they were homeless than if they were not.

And yet:

The results proved that prediction wrong. The recipients of the cash transfers did not increase spending on drugs, tobacco, and alcohol, but did increase spending on food, clothes, and rent, according to self-reports. What’s more, they moved into stable housing faster and saved enough money to maintain financial security over the year of follow-up.

“Counter to really harmful stereotypes, we saw that people made wise financial choices,” Claire Williams, the CEO of Foundations for Social Change, told me.

The study, though small, offers a counter to the myths that people who become poor get that way because they’re bad at rational decision-making and self-control, and are thus intrinsically to blame for their situation, and that people getting free money will blow it on frivolous things or addictive substances. Studies have consistently shown that cash transfers don’t increase the consumption of “temptation goods”; they either decrease it or have no effect on it.

There’s a mention here of a 2014 TED talk by Rutger Bregman (whose book I reviewed here) on Why we should give everyone a basic income.

And yet cynical conservatives, who don’t do evidence, will simply not believe this. Thus our progressive society, our walk from our primitive Savannah ancestors to the kind of global society that will be necessary to ward off existential threats (let alone expand into any kind of galactic empire as science fiction imagines), may be irredeemably stalled.

And yet, we can find a bit of optimism from reflecting on how different modern society is from that of, say, 1000 years ago, or even 200 years ago. Progress may be incremental, even back and forth (two steps forward one step back), but it is happening, and we’ll get over this regressive Republican regime, inevitably.