- How the Walz/Vance debate revealed two different views of America: conformity v liberty;
- How we depend on friends and neighbors, and Oprah’s DNC speech;
- How morality evolved, and religion merely captured it;
- Brief items about crowd sizes and looks; taking credit; the Gish Gallop; Christian Nationalist lies; and how some Christians would ban other religions.
The most striking item I saw today is this, which goes to the heart of the distinction between conservatives and liberals.
Washington Post, Matt Bai, 22 Aug 2024: Opinion | Tim Walz and JD Vance are having the argument that matters, subtitled “In his convention speech, Tim Walz articulated a view of America sharply contrasting with JD Vance’s.”
You can see why Kamala Harris picked Tim Walz as her running mate, and why Democrats have fallen in love with him. The guy delivers a stemwinder in the tradition of the great plains populists, full of passion and humor and plain-spoken defiance.
But let me tell you something: Nobody delivers a speech that good unless he’s got a clear intellectual argument behind it and a burning conviction that he’s right. And that’s why the contrast between Walz and JD Vance might be the most interesting of the campaign.
We’ve seen Donald Trump meander and contradict his way through endless stretches at a lectern. You’ll soon see Harris capably work her way through an amalgamation of platitudes and applause lines.
But in the contrasting rhetoric of Walz and Vance, in particular, we get a much sharper sense of what’s really being litigated in this election: two sharply contrasting views of what being American actually means.
It comes down to this: Vance’s Republican America is about conformity; Walz’s Democratic America is about liberty and freedom (which Republicans say they’re for, but don’t act that way in their plans to enforce their morality upon everyone). It’s about
whether we conceive of American liberty as something that exists chiefly to protect White, Christian Americans from having their culture trampled, or whether we understand liberty to mean the freedom to choose whatever culture you like, as long as you respect the Constitution while you do it.
Bai goes on,
My own sense is that historians in the distant future will place the Trump movement among periodic eruptions in our history of the basest kind of nativism — Know-Nothings, the Immigration Restriction League, the Japanese American internment, Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan. How significant this eruption will be in that continuum depends, I suppose, on whether Trump is elected a second time.
As it happens I’ve just finished two books on these themes: Heather Cox Richardson’s DEMOCRACY AWAKENING, which reviews American history from different perspectives, and Stephen Prothero’s WHY LIBERALS WIN THE CULTURE WARS. I’ll summarize them here soon.
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The theme of neighbors keeps coming up. Popular culture thinks when catastrophe hits, chaos will break out, that everyone will turn on everyone else. (That people are essentially bad.) Such stories make for arresting dramas, but evidence suggests neighbors actually help each other in emergencies. (I just saw an item on Nextdoor about someone who had a motorbike accident out in Orinda, and people in four cars stopped to help him.) And, listening to the DNC last night, Oprah spoke about it too. I found a transcription of her speech. It’s inspiring.
CBS News, 22 Aug 2024: Watch: Oprah Winfrey’s full speech at the 2024 DNC
I have actually traveled this country from the redwood forests, love those redwoods, to the gulf stream waters. I’ve seen racism and sexism and income inequality and division. I’ve not only seen it. At times, I have been on the receiving end of it. But more often than not, what I have witnessed and experienced are human beings, both conservative and liberal, who may not agree with each other but who still would help you in a heartbeat if you were in trouble. These are the people who make me proud to say that I am an American. They are the best of America. And despite what some would have you think, we are not so different from our neighbors. When a house is on fire, we don’t ask about the homeowner’s race or religion. We don’t wonder who their partner is or how they voted. No! We just try to do the best we can to save them. And if the place happens to belong to a childless cat lady…Well, we try to get that cat out, too.
There was this idea in Junger’s book, discussed yesterday.
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The larger question is about whether morals derive from religion, which itself was handed down by some supernatural intelligence, or whether morality evolved to enable cooperation among humans who then over time captured its principles in religion. The answer seems obvious to me.
Big Think, Harvey Whitehouse, 22 Aug 2024: Do you need religion to be a moral person?, subtitled “Religion is a product of, and not a source of, our evolutionary moral dispositions.”
An excerpt from a new book, shown in the image. I’ve ordered it.
Key Takeaways
• While some moral intuitions, like deference to authority, may align with religious beliefs, the link between religion and morality is not inherent. • Scientific research suggests that morality is rooted in universal principles of cooperation, not necessarily tied to religious beliefs. • A study across 60 diverse societies found that seven cooperative principles, such as loyalty, reciprocity, and respect for property, are universally judged as morally good, with rare exceptions rooted in specific cultural contexts.
And,
If asked what the most important social consequences of religion are, many people would say it is that religious beliefs make us act more morally. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2007 showed that in answer to the question ‘Do you need to believe in God to be moral?’, the overwhelming majority of people in countries outside Europe said yes.
But surprisingly, perhaps, scientists remain divided on the question. Part of the reason for this is that there are many gods and many moral systems, and it isn’t always clear what we mean when we refer to either religion or morality. Nevertheless, one might still ask whether morality is in some way integral to religiosity bias. Do our intuitive ideas about the afterlife, contagion, or intelligent design fundamentally alter our moral behavior? Socrates posed a similar question when he asked whether goodness is loved by the gods because it is good or whether goodness is good because it is loved by the gods.
I’ll grant this: there is evidence that belief in God leads to better behavior because of the notion that one is being watched. Anyway, this is somehow the most interesting issue to me: how humans claim certain knowledge without evidence, that in fact has been derived from the tribalistic strategies of our evolutionary survival. I’m also fascinated by the technicalities of biology and physics, evolution and cosmology, but those key around the ability of people to understand and accept such conclusions. And very few people do, or can.
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Relatively trivial? Or examples of insights into the limitations of human nature into understanding reality?
NY Times, 22 Aug 2024: What’s Vexing Donald Trump Now? Kamala Harris’s Looks., subtitled “From the vice president’s looks to the ‘angel’ judge at his trial, the former president can’t help commenting on the appearance of others — especially in relation to himself.”
Trump is concerned about the superficial: crowd sizes, and looks.
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Washington Post, Catherine Rampell, 20 Aug 2024: Opinion | The GOP’s greatest skill: Taking credit for things Democrats did, subtitled “One party keeps lying about its public service record. Talk about ‘stolen valor.'”
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AlterNet, Alex Henderson, 21 Aug 2024: Evolutionary biologist explains the creationist debating technique Trump uses to push ‘lie after lie’
Another example of the “Gish Gallop,” and how conservatives do not debate in good faith. They’re about winning over crowds, not honing in on truth.
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Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 20 Aug 2024: Tim Barton and the Evolution of Christian Nationalist Lies
This is about David Barton’s son. Broadly speaking, I think all religious movements gradually lie, more and more, about their pasts, in order maintain their constituencies, who know nothing about the world and history except what is told by their religious leaders.
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Right Wing Watch, Kyle Mantyla, 19 Aug 2024: Christian Nationalist Pastor Joel Webbon Would Ban ‘Public Displays of Worship to False Gods’
Because, to adherents of any one religion, all the others are false, and ideally, banned. Smart people figure out the implications of such claims.
