The Democratic Mess

For the past two months I have driven past many yard signs that tout political candidates whom I favor. I have driven by lots of signs trumpeting candidates for whom I will not vote. And I have investigated the platforms of candidates on the ballot whose names I do not see at all on local signs.

When I drive past the adverts for candidates who will not receive my vote, I am tempted to think that somehow those "opposing" voters have missed something. I am easily drawn into the fantasy that if only they would see the world more completely--in other words, the way I see it--then they would agree with me. Then so much of our political rancor would recede into reasonable agreement.

I suppose that many of those who would never vote for my favored candidates think the same way about me.

I cannot depend on "reason" or "enlightenment" or "patriotism" or "sanity" leading us all to the same candidates. The reason we have two opposed main parties and a plethora of candidates in every election is, I think, precisely because we cannot agree on what characteristics or principles make a candidate or a governmental system good and effective. The only common feature among us as voters is the fact that "we" are all voters.

"We" are a collection of "I"s living our lives, having our thoughts and experiences, and forming our political opinions. And since we are independent "I"s, we are living, having, and forming those things independently. But each of us will vote from our foundation of "I."

So the process of voting, of politics, is an assertion of my thoughts, desires, and ambitions. Voting is the most selfish of political endeavors. What I want, what I think, what I believe is important will guide my vote. Some of us will vote one particular way because we hope to get more money (from the government, from our business, from tax breaks) as a result. Some of us will vote one particular way because we hope to fight climate change, or help immigrants; some because we hope that the government will just do less and therefore give us more freedom.

But all of these motivations to vote as we do come from a sense of selfishness: my gain, my principles, my goals.

This is the seed of democracy: that the one thing we can all agree on, politically, is that we're all pursuing our own interests. The only thing we can depend on, as free Americans, is that we're in it for ourselves. This might sound like a downer--elevating selfishness, and all--but in fact it is part and parcel of the American project. The moment I am not allowed to pursue my self-interest to the fullest is the moment I am no longer free.

"Life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness": These words describe the character of freedom and mandate that politics become a scrum of self-interested individuals. Those individuals may clot up for a while--out of self-interest, to get their needs met--but when a party's direction no longer aligns with their interests, they're off and away. Freely.

In fact, as Americans the distance we go as "we" is very short before we become a feline herd of "I"s. That distance is the Constitution, and at the end of that parchment our political unity ends. To prove the point, even the matter of how to interpret the Constitution divides us. But at least we agree that the Constitution is the thing we need to interpret in order to establish our laws. Of course, if enough us believe that the Constitution does not serve our interests then . . . and the American project continues.

So it seems right and proper that the diversity of voices in the United States leads to the political mess of this year's election, and every election in fact. The system is working. Freedom of speech is working. The right to vote--and the parallel sense of entitlement to vote however I want--is working.

I will take comfort in the yard signs whose perspective I cannot fathom. I will worry when we're all in lock-step with a party or candidate and I am pleased by every yard sign. Because then we won't be in a democracy anymore.

Faith and Law

 Reading some of the early commentary on Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett, I was struck by constitutional attorney Andrew Seidel's reference to Ms. Barrett's "past comments about the conflict between faith and law." (Mr. Seidel works with the Freedom From Religion Foundation.) I have not looked up whence came those "comments about the conflict between faith and law," but the phrase itself gave me pause.

It pinged for me the remembrance of many conversations in which folks asserted that the United States is a "Christian nation," or that somehow being American intrinsically allies one with Christian faith and ethics. And with that ping in my grey matter came a thought that I've been mulling over for some time: the references (or lack thereof) to Christ in the founding documents of the United States.

The Constitution has no reference to Jesus Christ, or even to God. It is a non-theistic document. If the authors wished to somehow ground the Constitution in some sort of theological foundation, we would expect that grounding to appear in the Preamble at least. But no reference to the divine appears there. The only god of the Constitution is "the People."

Our next search for a Christian basis for the United States would be in the Declaration of Independence--not, strictly speaking, a document founding this nation but justifying its separation from Britain. Here, at first glance, we might think we had found our proof.

"The Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" figures in the first paragraph as the authority determining which peoples may become their own nation. The term "God," however, is without explicit content. In contrast, Christians stake their lives on the assertion that the God of the cosmos is the God who is filially connected to Jesus Christ (see 2Cor1:3, et al). The name Jesus Christ circumscribes the nature of God. Not only did the authors of the Declaration omit the name of Jesus Christ, they may also have indicated that they were only interested in invoking the God belonging to Nature, that is, the God who is known through Nature. That God is not known through revelation, whereas the God of Jesus Christ is known only through revelation. The authors of the Declaration may have intentionally set their document apart from the Christian God.

The second paragraph references a "Creator," and the final paragraph mentions both a "Supreme Judge of the world" and "divine Providence." These three serve as ambiguous pointers to something above humanity but indistinct and certainly not connected to Jesus Christ. In fact, the "authority" on which the Declaration rests is expressly "the good People of these Colonies." Given that the founding authors were intellectually astute, literate, and raised in a Christian culture, the omission of a connection between Jesus Christ and the God in the Declaration could not be happenstance. They did not intend for the document to be "Christian" in any meaningful way. They intended it to be literally "democratic": ruled by the People.

The sole authority for the governance of the United States, as per the Constitution, is the People. We may well argue whether or not the founders assumed that all People would cast their vote, legislate, execute, and judge based on Christian values. The final texts with which they left us, however, produce no such mandate.

If the god of the United States is the People, then we the People of the United States are doomed to encounter conflict between the Christian faith and American law. The God of Jesus Christ does not accommodate any other gods. We Christians are living the Mosaic dilemma: We discover God's commandments on the summit only to learn that the masses (to which we belong) are doing their own thing at the bottom of the mountain. The dilemma gets rehashed in Jesus' lifetime: The crowds that listen rapt to Jesus' teaching call for his crucifixion.

The only alternative to this conflict would be the establishment of a Christian theocracy (or bibliocracy) in the United States. I suspect that the founders sensed that such an establishment would have resulted in a far more contentious and bloody national life than the vicissitudes of rule by the populace. Here is the genius of making the People the supreme ruler of a nation: The successes of the nation will be ours and the failures of the nation will be ours, no matter our creed.

Mr. Seidel is right to insist that those examining Amy Barrett for the Supreme judicial bench ask her about her religious beliefs. Doing so will reveal conflicts between her Christian ethics and the ethics of the People. All Christians will experience conflicts between their ethics and the ethics of the People, as will Muslims, Baha'i, Hindus, Jews, and every other faith besides the faith in the People.

Supreme Court justices take an oath of office swearing allegiance to the Constitution. It would seem unfair to ask justices to set aside their core convictions about the world as they do their job. So perhaps our quest for good justices should not seek out those who believe the way we do. Rather we ought to call for justices whose only god is the People; otherwise will not their oath of office be hypocrisy?

Of course, the answer to this leads us into the question of whether Christians, beholden to trust only in the God of Jesus Christ, may swear allegiance to another entity. That's a topic for another time.

~ emrys

The Doom of Education

 "Sesame Street ruined education." So said a friend of one of my family members, a seasoned educator of elementary children. His assertion was that in joining entertainment and learning at the hip, Sesame Street (and now Dora, Diego, Prodigy, Reflex, and so many others) had established an expectation that education must be entertaining. The idea that learning can be complemented by entertainment, especially on the screen, morphed into the expectation that learning without entertainment will not work.

I presently oversee a good deal of my children's learning because we chose to enroll them in online education this term. The saintly teachers at our local school district mediate the curricula and online learning platforms, but the bulk of monitoring and question-answering falls to my wife and me. As a result I have been given a window into the media that convey lessons to my kids.

There are a lot of cartoons.

There are a lot of expanding and shrinking stars that dance across the screen at the completion of a lesson.

And in the case of, say, Prodigy (a math game designed to "encourage a growth mindset and foster success"), there is a whole lot of clicking an avatar character around a cartoon map with a few math problems thrown in.

As you brace yourself to tolerate another "back in my day" diatribe, let me say that I have fond memories of when my teachers discovered that PowerPoint allowed them to make a Jeopardy game out of course material. (Take a moment to figure out my age. Then keep reading.) I experienced lots of Fridays at school in which we played games with our vocabulary and problem-solving skills. And we sometimes even got candy for prizes.

Let me also put to rest your suspicion that I'm going to say learning ought to be a drag. I find education, by offering new vistas of understanding and by building new skills, a positive experience. I think discovery itself is fun and success in learning brings its own joy.

But I want to draw a distinction between the joy of learning and entertainment. I want also to draw a distinction between receiving some form of entertainment as a reward for learning and receiving entertainment as the medium through which learning is expected to occur. I use the word "medium" here pointedly, as in Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message." I think it is dangerous to embed learning in entertainment precisely because we will gain the implicit understanding that if something is not entertaining it's not worthwhile to learn, or we will excuse ourselves from the learning with something about "learning styles" or a lack of ability. Learning will become a subset of entertainment.

I believe, as I wrote, that learning brings a reward. We receive the satisfaction of correctly completing a geometry proof. We finally figure out the key to a wiring diagram on a Zetor tractor so we can fix the heating fan. We work over an obscure bit of Schleiermacher until we grasp its meaning and it opens up our world. We practice suburi with our bokkens until we memorize the flow of the sword blade.

But the process of learning may not be--I dare say probably will not be--entirely fun. It will not do what entertainment does: allow us to passively receive pleasure produced by someone else. There will be moments of frustration and moments of choice in which we could forfeit the whole enterprise if we do not persevere. Especially in learning the hardest, most important parts of life--like how to be reconciled to someone whom we have injured--I think that entertainment is antithetical to learning and the habits being learned. One who expects learning to be forever fun will never be able to learn those kinds of skills.

I have not reached a place in my meditations from which I can propose a method by which to stem this tide that I see. But perhaps you have and, I hope, are already pursuing it. Or perhaps you can observe with me and discern whether what I'm describing is accurate and, if so, look with me for an adequate response. It would seem to me better to encourage now a culture of joy in rigorous learning than have to cure a culture that rejects any task not entertaining enough.

~emrys