Religion, nationalism, class: pick your poison

A movement that feels it's losing ground often makes the most noise. It is strange, then, that those dedicated to expanding the place rationality in politics would be so concerned about the political influence of religion, specifically of North America’s aggressive populist Christian churchgoers.

In Canada, it is quite respectable to suggest that, maybe, it is Stephen Harper’s membership in the Christian and Missionary Alliance that motivates him when he’s “muzzling” scientists, “gutting” environmental regulations, and displaying a “low regard for statistics.”

Without what science calls evidence, Lawrence Martin of the Globe and Mail suggests we worry a lot more about Harper’s suspected religiosity:

“The Prime Minister is under no obligation to tell anyone about his religious convictions. But if his government’s policy-making in important areas like the environment is being motivated by religious faith at the expense of reason, it is cause for debate.”

Click on: www.theglobeandmail.com/

In this week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik undertakes an extensive analysis of Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith and its relevance to his politics. He doesn’t fall for Romney, but he doesn’t see his faith as the core problem either:

“Yet class surely tells more than creed when it comes to American manners, and Romney is better understood as a late-twentieth-century American tycoon than as any kind of believer. Most of what is distinct about him seems specific to the rich managerial class of the nineteen-eighties and nineties, and is best explained so—just as you would grasp more about Jack Kennedy from F. Scott Fitzgerald (an Irish and a Catholic ascending to Wasp manners) than from St. Augustine.

“He believes, with shining certainty, in his own success, and, more broadly, in the American Gospel of Wealth that lies behind it: the idea that rich people got rich by being good, that the riches are a sign of their virtue, and that they should therefore be allowed to rule.”

Click on: www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2012/08/13/120813crat_atlarge_gopnik#ixzz233Kwivw4

Surely, Gopnik has got things in the right order: religion, thankfully, hasn’t been in the driver's seat in the West’s politics for two centuries.

Religion didn’t start our wars; it blessed them. It didn’t invent American “Exceptionalism” or its present suspicion about outside ideas, or Harper’s claim that Canada is now the “best country in the world.” It didn’t invent greed, negligence about poverty, Western alienation, Quebec separatism, Star Wars, or wishful thinking about climate change.

The moral issues dearest to the most pious Christians, in both countries, have largely been shunted over to overwhelmingly secular courts.

It is a laughably small bore for rationalists and progressives to dwell on the religious labels of our senior politicians. They’ve been well vetted for their ability to think empirically, to calculate, and to use modern social sciences.

Surely, nationalism remains today the force that most demeans reason and innovation in democratic politics.

For a grating style Sarkozy must go?

One way to avoid thinking about Europe’s dire circumstances is to treat the French presidential election as a matter of style. Who is best tailored for the job? Who has the right body language to grace the ugly meetings and photo-ops ahead?

The stylish Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker devotes his column this week to these aesthetic questions and, without hesitation, asserts that Nicholas Sarkozy must go.

Sarkozy’s style is unbecoming. Sadly for Sarkozy, Gopnik’s case against France’s most pro-American president is rather un-American. Here’s his opening argument:

“The Presidency of France’s Fifth Republic is a monarchical role, shaped to the elongated scale and the grand manners first of Charles de Gaulle and then of François Mitterrand. Although Jacques Chirac more recently gave the role a distinctly sleepy, roi fainéant flavor, it remains a throne more than a mere office. So the idea of a sort of citizen king, who giggles and wears glasses and is known to be on a diet, is a little unsettling.

Read more: www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2012/05/07/120507taco_talk_gopnik#ixzz1tcYB0gNe

Gopnik concludes:

“People will forgive a short man with a beautiful wife if he seems sufficiently surprised; Sarkozy seemed merely showy, and his energy, over time, merely antic and self-pleasing.

“A mild-mannered, European-minded citizen king is, at least, better than a passionately convinced exceptionalist.”

Gopnik and other pundits may want the French presidency to be a sanctuary of high fashion, a place of cool, and big men who can accept failure but have no tolerance for Bling. Nevertheless, the office was consciously designed for an exceptional activist by an arrogant patriot who didn’t care greatly whether other politicians were comfortable with his leadership or not.

De Gaulle had a much slower temperament than Sarkosy by the time he returned to power in order to reshape France in 1958. However, the presidency he crafted, in the constitution he largely wrote, was designed to make big decisions, to get the country out of trouble, to change France. It was tailored to break out of consensus politics—to reach over the political elites—and, if necessary, ask for the consent of French citizens to save France from itself.

While the times again are humbling, the French presidency was not created for a humble politician.

Sarkosy also sees the office and himself in heroic terms. In 2007, he said he wanted to rally France around a new dream and that nothing and no one would stop him “going through to the end.”

Certainly, his ego is a problem. He sees himself as a problem-solver at a time when the problems are bigger than France. This is embarrassing.

His opponent, Francois Hollande, is careful to not diminish his already modest image—or France’s in the wider European context—by being too vivid about France’s unavoidable fiscal and economic problems. He speaks of the “effort” that lies ahead and insists that he’s “not dangerous.”

Hollande has the temperament of a survivor. In large measure, however, two generations of sophisticated survivors got France and Europe into its problems. These problems wouldn’t be so ugly if all Europe needed to do was put more inoffensive survivors in office.