Re: There are an awful lot of people who share their beliefs and want to live like that, and ignoring them or trivializing them is a mistake.
I agree... yet, another problem is that those "holy preppies" are sometimes the harbingers of a more ominous flock, they make up but the tip of a portentous iceberg --and ignoring that is an even bigger mistake. Clue:
Then there was America, where the Covenant, Sword & Arm of the Lord Christian Identity enclave in Bull Shoals Lake, Arkansas, had planned the bombing of Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building in the 1980s, and where a Christian Identity hanger-on named Timothy McVeigh, boosted by phone calls to another Christian Identity stronghold in the Ozark Mountains, had followed up on the Oklahoma bombing strategy and killed 16,889 enemies of Yahweh's chosen race. The Aryan Republic Army was on a rampage of midwest bank robberies designed to finance triumph for the one true form of Christianity. Sandpoint, Idaho's, Promise Ministries91 were charged with planning similar hold-ups, the bombing of a newspaper, and the demolition of an abortion facility. The Phineas Priesthood provided encouragement to a network of lone killers "cleansing" in the Bible's name. Christian Reconstructionists like Gary North insisted that women who undergo abortion be hung or stoned to death. The Aryan Nations movement93 was determined to seize the mountains of the west as a new Canaan94 for pure Anglo-Saxon whites. The North American Militia of Southwest Michigan stood accused in court of having targeted the Battle Creek Federal Building, an IRS office in Portage, and, in the words of one militia member, "anybody in higher ranks of politics," including the state's two senators. At the same time, self-styled eco-"warriors" were setting up clandestine "direct action cells" devoted, as one anonymous cell-organizer put it, to ever "bigger and better actions...with more severe amounts of damage being done to the target. This, of course, includes arson." America was the land where Eric Rudolph, the accused bomber of abortion clinics and of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, roamed free in the mountains of North Carolina, supported by the local populace. Ours was the nation where college students in Oklahoma had tied a gay 21 year old to a fence post and beaten him to death encouraged by Christian guardians of righteousness who said all homosexuals must die, where a Buffalo, New York, obstetrician had been killed by a sniper as he stood with his wife and children in his kitchen, and where this murder had been cheered by the organizer of The Christian Gallery, a website dedicated to such causes as "secession via nuclear weapons" and the replacement of the two-party system with "God's plan for government." The Gallery had posted the medical practitioner on a cyber-hit-list of "child-killers" whom it declared to be in the "war zone." In the hinterlands of fifty states, extremist Christian militias drilled their detonation, reconnoitering, and shooting skills as thoroughly as their doppelgangers in Pakistan and in the former Soviet States, aiming for the day when the use of violence would eradicate the blemish of secular democracy and allow them to structure the ways of men according to the dictates of an unforgiving Deity. As right-wing Christian theoretician Gary North put it, "Man...is under God in the same way that a military man is under his commanding officer. He is to abide by his Commander's instructions, and he is to 'do it by the book,'" The Spartan premise Plato had stated in his Laws was very much alive again: "in reality every city is in a natural state of war with every other, not indeed proclaimed by heralds, but everlasting."
The threat of today's Spartan storm troopers turned some defenders of democracy toward what in better times could have been dismissed as paranoid delusion. However when one is up against a real-life conspiracy, paranoid thinking can produce accurate predictions of reality. Wishing away a concerted attack from the other side was tried in the 1930s and proved a failure of the highest kind. Whatever approach one takes has to keep the ferocity of a real enemy in mind. Those who despise alarmism forget the lesson of 1933, when a Keystone Cop political party which had been able to boast a mere 25,000 members in 1925 declared itself ruler of the German nation and swept democracy away. Democrats use words. Zealots use weaponry. With guns and bludgeons, 25,000 rapidly de-factos into a majority. Hitler seemed preposterous to his opponents. There was no way, they felt, that someone with such outlandish views could take over the nation of Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Handel, and Brahms. Lack of paranoia lost these defenders of reason their lives, their homes, their children, and their wives. The Germany they were sure could never fall to lunatics soon plunged beyond the fringe of sanity. It was the sane, the sober, and complacent who were erased from Germany's collectively-enforced reality.
Monkeywrenching the Works
When conformity enforcers overwhelm diversity generators, all of us are in trouble. Spartans - fundamentalists, militia groups, fascists, and ultra-nationalists - can freeze the machinery of collective mind. A shutdown of urban diversity devastates that exercise of collective acumen we call an economy. Christian Fundamentalism has been shown by the research of sociologists Alfred Darnell and Darren E. Sherkat to retard the learning of children raised within its grasp. Darnell and Sherkat sum up a common Fundamentalist attitude in the following words: "No schooling is better than secular schooling." Then there's the paralysis of thought which outright battle brings. When World War I erupted, Sigmund Freud was horrified by the sudden "narrow-mindedness shown by [even] the best intellects, their obduracy, their inaccessibility to the most forcible arguments." Such closings of the mind may explain why authoritarians are prone to ignore it when their approaches flop. They goose-step from one year to another rigidly glued to backfiring ways.
Here are the implications of a neural net simulation carried out at Tokai University in Kanagawa, Japan. If citizens combine civility's self-restraint with social freedom, the neural net in which they're twined spills forth solutions of the finest kind - those which produce a host of winning strategies. If citizens rage out of control when left alone but are held in check by a police state, the neural net goes blank. All power seeps into the hands of a central authority. This maximum leader, implies the research, can be a previous fringe figure and an utter incompetent. What's worse, complexity pioneer Stuart Kauffman has shown with yet another mathematical model how a "Stalinist" chief and his morality enforcers can give the collective brainwork a lobotomy.
The Kanagawa simulation implies that Fundamentalist strategies of beating up on others for their sins rather than controlling one's self drags us all toward authoritarian ferocity. The trick is to reassert the right to self-restraint and to the definition of one's own boundaries of behavior and privacy, boundaries which include that consideration toward those who disagree with us which we call civility.
The consequences of imposing control on others rather than controlling one's self show up in the American South, where culture pushes a disproportionate number of men to discipline those who wrong them while letting their own instincts rip. A University of Michigan study demonstrates that when they are threatened, the testosterone level of Southern males shoots up to almost three times the level of males in northern society. Northern males have a greater grip on their emotionality. One result: "43% of the murders in the United States occur in the sixteen Southern states," according to an ABC Weekend News report digging into the phenomenon. In an interview on the broadcast, Southeastern Louisiana University historian Samuel C. Hyde explained that, "Here in the South violence is not merely an accepted response, it's an expected response." Both Hyde and sociologist Dr. Edward Shihadeh agreed that when one's honor was violated a Southern male had to retaliate, even if it meant the end of his own life. If the simulations of neural net researchers are correct, this helps explain why the Southern swathe which harbors so many of this nation's murders is also the Bible Belt - where the word-for-word Scripture of the Lord is still the Great and Inerrant Authority, harboring absolutes of true Platonic rigidity.
Other research indicates that the wider the horizons of a subculture, the more its citizens are likely to exercise the self-control which tweaks a group brain to top strength. In large-horizon situations among ants, each worker is a law unto herself, exploring the landscape in the way that she feels best. This allows the collective mind to test a maximum of new possibilities. In small-horizon ant colonies, each worker seems restricted by the presence of others, puts the clamps on her rambunctiousness, crimps her path, and with her tightened focus becomes a thread in a search-web which zeroes in on just one thing. In human groups, a society open to distant horizons also produces those who will probe for the next great uplift, a soar into the wonders of dreamworked possibilities.
Fundamentalism and its fellow militancies are one way in which authoritarian small-town subcultures like that of the South, of Muridke, or of Voronezh assert themselves in the national and the global body politic. This was true of ancient Greece, in which liberty-loving Athens was a big city for its time, while Sparta - the home of the muzzled mind - was an encampment of remarkably small size. It's true of the United States, where Christian Fundamentalism has been called a suburban upheaval of nostalgia for small town certainties. It seems to have pertained in the Nazi party, whose leaders were so parochial that few had ever travelled internationally. And it's equally true of the Middle East, whose fundamentalisms hark back to the days when Ibn Khaldun's desert nomads came in to "purify" the corrupt cities through a control-the-other-rather-than-yourself sweep with a broom of sword and flame. It's even true when the subculture of a city's parochial enclaves (like those in Boston's Southie, New York's Queens, and L.A.'s Orange County) clash with the subcultural movers and shakers whose connections snake across continents and seas.
Open-minded internationalists are part of a massive social brew. The folks who've seldom travelled outside their neighborhood are part of a tiny social stew. Sometimes a society needs the cutting focus of small-town single-mindedness. But more often it benefits from pluralism's many points of view, from carrying many arrows in its quiver, not just one or two.
As in Elm Hollow, the new Spartans are poised for a kidnap of mass mind. Each subcultural army has its weapons ready: the Internet, Armies of Virtue, and instruments of massacre. And each feels chosen to impose its purged and regimented paradise on all humanity. But the mass mind needs its Faustian introverts, its oddballs, kooks, and deviants, its challengers of holy Mother Nature, sectarian Righteousness, and traditional ways. It needs its internationalists, cross-cultural floaters, homosexuals, abortion-supporters, cosmopolitans, explorers, and imagineers, those who extend their reach beyond old boundaries and open new frontiers. The blasphemers the Fundamentalists feel God-bound to eliminate are the mass mind's option-makers, its catalysts of new hypotheses. In an atmosphere of debate, new approaches thrive. But when bullets replace words as disagreement-settlers, the mass intelligence nose dives. The totalitarian Spartans must be stopped by pluralists. This is a task which falls to our century's Athenians. It is a task which falls to you and me.
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