PREFACE
When I began my teaching career in the mid-sixties, it
rarely occurred to
me that I would live to see the twilight of American democracy. The
mid-sixties were the high tide of liberalism, as Lyndon Johnson’s “Great
Society” rolled through Congress and as Barry Goldwater, the “conscience
of conservatism” suffered a crushing defeat in the 1964 election. In the
New York City area, where I lived and worked at the time, Ayn Rand and
her disciples would appear from time to time on talk radio and TV (where
I was an occasional participant), but they were generally regarded as
voices at the fringe and as curiosities. Little did we suspect what was
ahead.
Today, the once-vibrant, varied and free press has been largely
assimilated into six mainstream media mega-corporations that are
ill-disposed to publish or broadcast opinions that dissent significantly
from conventional conservative dogma. The ballot has been “privatized,”
as thirty percent of the votes are cast, and eighty percent of those
votes compiled, on machines manufactured by, and with secret software
written by, private corporations that are openly in support of the
Republican Party. Thus many suspect (myself included) that the
government of the United States may no longer be answerable and subject
to recall by, the voters. In other words, that government may no longer
“derive its just powers from the consent of the governed.”
If so, American democracy may be dead, or if not, then critically and
perhaps terminally injured. What remains – for how long, we do not know
– is a remnant of free expression in the remaining independent media and
the internet. It is in this theater of operations that this philosopher,
with no political power and meager financial resources, chooses to take
a stand and resist, with the best resources at my disposal: my words and
the talent and ideas acquired over four decades of teaching, research
and writing.
My professional specialty is environmental ethics,
and moral philosophy (ethics), with penumbral interests in political
and social philosophy, and philosophical analysis. As a journeyman
philosophy professor, I have also, of course, taught the usual array
of introductory courses. Throughout those four decades, I have
frequently published in scholarly journals and participated in
scholarly conferences, and portions of that output will be adapted
and incorporated into this book. Since I retired from teaching
twelve years ago, my output of writing has expanded
considerably. In addition to the usual conference and journal papers, I
have published over two hundred essays on the internet, and these have
been written a style that is accessible to a general audience. The
internet essays, which appear on numerous progressive websites,
originated first at my personal website, The Online Gadfly
(www.igc.org/gadfly), which I launched in 1998, and then in
The
Crisis Papers (www.crisispapers.org),
established with Dr. Bernard Weiner in November 2002. Most of my
internet writing has dealt with contemporary social, moral and
political issues, prompted by my grave concern about unfolding
threats to American democracy, the natural environment, and world
peace. Some of this work is also
incorporated into this book.
But the book is not an anthology, it is a focused and integrated work
containing a considerable amount of newly composed material. It’s theme
and objectives are simple and straightforward: a defense of political
progressivism (i.e., “liberalism” in its traditional sense, uncorrupted
by right-wing “spin”), and a critique of the radical right-wing and
libertarian doctrines (falsely labelled as "conservative") that now dominate political discourse and
policies. This theme and these objectives direct my research, and
determine the selection and adaptation of my forty-year accumulation of
lecture notes, research materials, books and files, conference papers,
published papers, and internet publications.
A brief word about
my philosophical and religious perspective may be in order, although
they will both be elaborated in the course of the book. My political philosophy might be characterized as “contractarian,”
owing in
some degree, to the influence of John Rawls’s landmark book, A Theory of
Justice, which was the subject of my doctoral dissertation,
“Rawls and the Duty to
Posterity” (University of Utah, 1976). My contractarian views
preceded my reading of Rawls, though this outstanding book clarified and
validated these views.
Religiously, I describe myself as a “secular Christian.” I reject
traditional Christian theology, but endorse (with some critical
reservations) the ethics of Jesus of Nazareth. Thus I am in polar
opposition to the fundamentalist religious right which endorses a type
of traditional Christian theology as it rejects the ethics of Jesus –
the latter a contentious point, which I intend to defend in the course
of the book.
From my perspective of secular, analytic philosophy, and historical
scholarship, I do not accept The Holy Bible to be “the word of God.” The
book, or more correctly the anthology, contains both great moral wisdom
and moral atrocity, along with an abundance of mythology. The authors
are largely unknown and no original texts are known to exist. The books
of the Bible are believed by most scholars to have been written from
between the sixth century BC and late in the first century AD.
I make this notation about my approach to The Bible as fair warning to
the reader. In my youth I studied the Bible, first as a believer and
then as a skeptic, and so I have a better than average acquaintance with
it. In this book I will frequently be citing Chapter and Verse from the
Bible (usually but not exclusively the King James Version), but never as
an offer of evidence or proof. Usually, these citations will be directed
to the religious right. In such cases, it matters not that I don’t
believe that these are the inerrant words of God; what matters is that
the “targets” of my criticism believe this. It is my conviction that
much (but not all!) fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity, and in
particular those factions enlisted in the radical right, are a betrayal
of the ethics of Jesus, and that the New Testament clearly testifies to
this betrayal. And I fully intend to point this out, with frequent
citations from The Bible, as I challenge the religious right to come to
terms, not with the arguments of this agnostic philosopher, but with
what they believe to be the “inerrant” words of their Lord and Savior.
It's nasty work, but somebody’s got to do it!
For the rest, I will offer arguments based on evidence available to any
educated reader, and to the ordinary experience and general fund of news
familiar to most citizens. Progressivism/liberalism is, at its
foundations, a reasonable, common-sense, political orientation, based
upon a wealth of historical information and practical experience, much
of it acquired through trial and error and eventual resolution. The same
cannot be said for the dogmas of the radical right, which are
promulgated through “spin,” distortion, fallacy, and constant repetition
of vacuous slogans.
Or so I will argue in this book.
