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Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 22:38:11 +0100
To: "'Daniel Reeves'" <dreeves &AElig umich.edu>, <improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu>
Cc: "'Nicole Poellet'" <poelnico &AElig umich.edu>
From: agiereeves &AElig t-online.de (Barbara Agnes Reeves)
Subject: AW: article on red-blue alliance
Status: O

Hi Everyone,

I started writing this e-mail a while ago, then got caught up with work
and holiday vacation preparations...Danny, your latest e-mail is so
right on that it has inspired me to finish my thoughts on that Red-Blue
alliance article:


(Danny's paternal aunt Augie, for those of you who don't know me)...
I've waited a while to respond to this article, wondering if my initial
reaction to it would mellow a bit. Quite the contrary: I found the
article not only incredibly naive, but downright scary. Frankly,
"refreshing" is just about the last thing that comes to my mind as a
comment.

Expecting the intellectual secular community to attempt to forge
alliances with fundamentalist Christians is, to me, analogous to
moderate, critical Muslims seeking commonalities with Osama bin Laden
and his followers. The problem is identical: it is impossible to use
rational arguments to counter positions that are Bible- (or Koran-)
based.

How does one argue in favor of equal rights for women when the response
is "God is head of man, and man is head of woman!"? How can you talk
rationally about gay rights when the response is (in a RARE example of
right-wing humor) "The Bible talks about Adam and Eve, not Adam and
Steve!"? How can we hope to put effective sex education, family planning
and reproductive health policies into place when the fundamentalist
Christian approach is to have teenagers sign chastity pledges? (Studies
show, by the way, that the rate of sexual activity, teen pregnancy and
sexually transmitted diseases is no lower among those who have signed
the pledge.)

The author (a fundamentalist Christian Harvard law professor, which is
indeed somewhat of an oxymoron to me) suggests "changing the issue menu"
to identify Red-Blue commonalities instead of differences. What a
dangerous notion! He says that "judging from the speeches of liberal
Democratic politicians, what poor people need most is free abortions."
Well, guess what? In addition to adequate education, health care and
access to birth control, they DO need free (and safe and legal!)
abortions so that nights of pleasure (...if they're lucky...) don't turn
into perpetuated squalor. Change the issue menu to exclude the issue of
gay marriage? Who were the ones who worked tirelessly to get that issue
on the ballot of 11 states, counting (correctly, as it turned out) that
the gut-level bigotry exhibited on that issue would benefit GW and co.?
A serious debate on "how a loving society should treat its poorest
members? Is he seriously claiming that U.S. society is "loving"??? Oh
please, he must be kidding - which is the only Western society with no
national health care plan? Which is the only "civilized" society with
the death penalty? Which is the only industrialized society with a
welfare system that fails to meet even the most basic requirements?
Which is the country with astronomical figures of violent crime, numbers
of prisoners, etc., etc. etc, ad nauseam? And lo and behold, where does
one find most of those who support this state of affairs against
communist/liberal/pacifist insurgents? 

The author's description of the humility of the fundamentalist Christian
movement, and that their every statement is accompanied by the
recognition that they might be wrong (and that the intellectuals can
learn from this), is so blatantly preposterous that it frankly leaves me
speechless. Is that how he would describe those who murder physicians
who perform abortions or bomb abortion clinics? Is that how he would
describe their attitude about gay rights - that they might be wrong? Are
"liberals" forcing them to have abortions or be gay? Excuse me, but I
indeed conform to the intellectual stereotype by believing that they are
fools or bigots (actually, usually both) for thinking differently than
me on these issues.


In my (not that humble!) opinion, the LAST thing the USA needs right now
is to forge Red-Blue alliances. Fundamentalist Christians are dangerous
people - every single bit as dangerous as fundamentalist Muslims (or
does anyone want to argue that the Christian church's hands are not the
most bloodstained of any religion in human history?). Calling them
"evangelical," as the author attempts to "upgrade" them, is nothing more
than "ein Wolf im Schafspelz" (a German expression: a wolf disguised as
a sheep).

Instead, (and of course I might be wrong - and let me say at this
juncture that I have no problem with being wrong. I basically decided to
leave the States after Ronald Reagan was re-elected, one reason being
that I was completely convinced that a nuclear "incident" between the
USA and USSR was imminent. Instead, I experienced the fall of the Berlin
wall. Yes, I am very glad that I was wrong. [This should not be
interpreted as in any way condoning or approving of the presidency of
Ronald Reagan - if he had not f*cked up the Supreme Court 20 years ago,
we would now be in the Gore II era.]) I believe that what the USA needs
is a much sharper delineation of the differences between Red and Blue.
Instead of trying to understand the fundamentalists, get it into Ralph
Nader & co.'s head that there is at least ONE CRUCIAL DIFFERENCE between
the two parties - namely, that the Democrats are not controlled by
religious fanatics. 

And for those who don't feel like sticking around to fight this
important but oh-so-frustrating battle, I continue to advocate a massive
brain drain from the United States. Danny, how come I'm not hearing
anything about your emigration plans? Weren't you the one who said to me
a week before the election, when you and Kapoo were driving me to the
airport, that "if Bush gets back in, I'm outta here!"?? 

How come everybody's all of a sudden so conciliatory? And while I'm on
this rant, let me express my disgust that (at least from what I've seen
& heard here in Germany) that OF ALL PEOPLE, Donald Rumsfeld was able to
keep his job with a minimum of outraged outcry. Shocking!!!

Come on guys, don't get sucked in by these calls for reconciliation and
cooperation. Stay angry!!!

On that note, happy holidays and happy new year to everyone - I'm flying
to Zurich on Thursday, spending Christmas with friends in Buchs,
Switzerland (right on the border to Lichtenstein), then taking the train
to Imst, Austria, meeting up with friends from Berlin and skiing in St.
Leonhard im Pitztal for a week! So think of me in the Alps when you're
skiing into the Mississippi Valley in Galena! (Danny, is emigration
sounding any more attractive?!?!)

Looking forward to hearing the responses to this rant!

Love,

Augie

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: Daniel Reeves [mailto:dreeves &AElig umich.edu] 
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 2. Dezember 2004 03:08
An: improvetheworld &AElig umich.edu
Cc: Nicole Poellet
Betreff: article on red-blue alliance

Cam writes,

> My goal here is to urge everyone to create a better world by trying to
> understand each other.  In this case, it means researching the other
> side to the same extent we research our own vs. blindly pushing for
the
> extreme right or left, while in reality hoping to end up with a
slightly
> different definition of the middle.

Here's an article in that spirit that I found interesting:

http://www.techcentralstation.com/112904A.html
 [text of article follows]

Faculty Clubs and Church Pews
 By William J. Stuntz 	 
 Published  	 11/29/2004 

The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue America, 
mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who find the other 
side a mystery.

It isn't a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past 
twenty years, I've belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, the kind

where George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past
eighteen 
years, I've worked in secular universities where one can hardly believe 
that Bush voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its 
reddest. And universities, especially the ones in New England (where I 
work now), are as blue as the bluest sky.

Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory to the 
other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I'm terminally 
weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think that if my church

friends and my university friends got to know each other, they'd find a 
lot to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives of each 
side would learn something important and useful from the other side.
These 
institutions may be red and blue now. But their natural color is purple.

You wouldn't know it from talking to the people who populate
universities 
or fill church pews.

A lot of my church friends think universities represent the forces of 
darkness.  Law schools -- my corner of the academic world -- are 
particularly suspect. A fellow singer in a church choir once asked me
what 
I did for a living. When I told her, she said, "A Christian lawyer?
Isn't 
that sort of like being a Christian prostitute? I mean, you can't really

do that, right?" She wasn't kidding. And if I had said no, you don't 
understand; I'm a law professor, not a lawyer, I'm pretty sure that
would 
not have helped matters. ("Oh, so you train people to be prostitutes?")

You hear the same kinds of comments running in the other direction. Some

years ago a faculty colleague and I were talking about religion and 
politics, and this colleague said "You know, I think you're the first 
Christian I've ever met who isn't stupid." My professor friend wasn't 
kidding either. I've had other conversations like these -- albeit
usually 
a little more tactful -- on both sides, a dozen times over the years. 
Maybe two dozen. People in each of these two worlds find the other 
frightening, and appalling.

All of us are appalling, I suppose, but these reactions are mostly due
to 
ignorance. Most of my Christian friends have no clue what goes on in 
faculty clubs. And my colleagues in faculty offices cannot imagine what 
happens in those evangelical churches on Sunday morning.

In both cases, the truth is surprisingly attractive. And surprisingly 
similar: Churches and universities are the two twenty-first century 
American enterprises that care most about ideas, about language, and
about 
understanding the world we live in, with all its beauty and ugliness. 
Nearly all older universities were founded as schools of theology: a 
telling fact. Another one is this: A large part of what goes on in those

church buildings that dot the countryside is education -- people reading

hard texts, and trying to sort out what they mean.

Another similarity is less obvious but no less important. Ours is an 
individualist culture; people rarely put their community's welfare ahead

of their own. It isn't so rare in churches and universities. Churches
are 
mostly run by volunteer labor (not to mention volunteered money): those 
who tend nurseries and teach Sunday School classes get nothing but a pat

on the back for their labor. Not unlike the professors who staff
important 
faculty committees. An economist friend once told me that economics 
departments are ungovernable, because economists understand the reward 
structure that drives universities: professors who do thankless 
institutional tasks competently must do more such tasks. Yet the trains 
run more or less on time -- maybe historians are running the economics 
departments -- because enough faculty attach enough importance to the 
welfare of their colleagues and students. Selfishness and exploitation
are 
of course common too, in universities and churches as everywhere else.
But 
one sees a good deal of day-to-day altruism, which is not common 
everywhere else.

And each side of this divide has something to teach the other. 
Evangelicals would benefit greatly from the love of argument that
pervades 
universities. The "scandal of the evangelical mind" -- the title of a 
wonderful book by evangelical author and professor Mark Noll -- isn't
that 
evangelicals aren't smart or don't love ideas. They are, and they do.
No, 
the real scandal is the lack of tough, hard questioning to test those 
ideas. Christians believe in a God-Man who called himself (among other 
things) "the Truth." Truth-seeking, testing beliefs with tough-minded 
questions and arguments, is a deeply Christian enterprise. Evangelical 
churches should be swimming in it. Too few are.

For their part, universities would be better, richer places if they had
an 
infusion of the humility that one finds in those churches. Too often,
the 
world of top universities is defined by its arrogance: the style of 
argument is more "it's plainly true that" than "I wonder whether." We
like 
to test our ideas, but once they've passed the relevant academic hurdles

(the bar is lower than we like to think), we talk and act as though
those 
ideas are not just right but obviously right -- only a fool or a bigot 
could think otherwise.

The atmosphere I've found in the churches to which my family and I have 
belonged is very different. Evangelicals like "testimonies"; it's common

for talks to Christian groups to begin with a little autobiography, as
the 
speaker describes the path he has traveled on his road to faith.
Somewhere 
in the course of that testimony, the speaker always talks about what a 
mess he is: how many things he has gotten wrong, why the people sitting
in 
the chairs should really be teaching him, not the other way around. This

isn't a pose; the evangelicals I know really do believe that they -- we 
(I'm in this camp too) -- are half-blind fools, stumbling our way toward

truth, regularly falling off the right path and, by God's grace, picking

ourselves up and trying to get back on. But while humility is more a 
virtue than a tactic, it turns out to be a pretty good tactic. Ideas and

arguments go down a lot easier when accompanied by the admission that
the 
speaker might, after all, be wrong.

That gets to an aspect of evangelical culture that the mainstream press 
has never understood: the combination of strong faith commitments with 
uncertainty, the awareness that I don't know everything, that I have a
lot 
more to learn than to teach. Belief that a good God has a plan does not 
imply knowledge of the plan's details. Judging from the lives and 
conversations of my Christian friends, faith in that God does not tend
to 
produce a belief in one's infallibility. More the opposite: Christians 
believe we see "through a glass, darkly" when we see at all -- and that 
we're constantly tempted to imagine ourselves as better and smarter than

we really are. If that sensibility were a little more common in 
universities, faculty meetings would be a lot more pleasant. And it
should 
be more common: Academics know better than anyone just how vast is the 
pool of human knowledge, and how little of it any of us can grasp.
Talking 
humbly should be second nature.

There is even a measure of political common ground. True, university 
faculties are heavily Democratic, and evangelical churches are thick
with 
Republicans. But that red-blue polarization is mostly a consequence of 
which issues are on the table -- and which ones aren't. Change the issue

menu, and those electoral maps may look very different. Imagine a 
presidential campaign in which the two candidates seriously debated how
a 
loving society should treat its poorest members. Helping the poor is 
supposed to be the left's central commitment, going back to the days of 
FDR and the New Deal. In practice, the commitment has all but
disappeared 
from national politics. Judging by the speeches of liberal Democratic 
politicians, what poor people need most is free abortions. Anti-poverty 
programs tend to help middle-class government employees; the poor end up

with a few scraps from the table. Teachers' unions have a stranglehold
on 
failed urban school systems, even though fixing those schools would be
the 
best anti-poverty program imaginable.

I don't think my liberal Democratic professor friends like this state of

affairs. And -- here's a news flash -- neither do most evangelicals, who

regard helping the poor as both a passion and a spiritual obligation,
not 
just a political preference. (This may be even more true of
theologically 
conservative Catholics.) These men and women vote Republican not because

they like the party's policy toward poverty -- cut taxes and hope for
the 
best -- but because poverty isn't on the table anymore. In evangelical 
churches, elections are mostly about abortion. Neither party seems much 
concerned with giving a hand to those who most need it.

That could change. I can't prove it, but I think there is a large,
latent 
pro-redistribution evangelical vote, ready to get behind the first 
politician to tap into it. (Barack Obama, are you listening?) If liberal

Democratic academics believe the things they say they believe -- and I 
think they do -- there is an alliance here just waiting to happen.

Humility, love of serious ideas, commitment to helping the poor -- these

are things my faculty friends and my church friends ought to be able to 
get together on. If they ever do, look out: American politics, and maybe

American life, will be turned upside down. And all those politicians who

can only speak in one color will be out of a job.

I can hardly wait.

William J. Stuntz is a Professor at Harvard Law School.


-- 
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/dreeves  - -  google://"Daniel Reeves"

Q. How do you tell an extrovert computer scientist? 
A. When they talk to you they look at your shoes rather than their own.