Paul Handover, from Learning From Dogs, a commentator of this site asks: “Your essay, Patrice, clearly depicts your views towards Western religions but here’s a question: why do so many Americans embrace Christianity in what one might describe as almost a fundamentalist manner? For such a forward-looking nation in so many ways, this aspect has puzzled me for some time.”
Both aspects are related, the religious primitivism, and the charge forward. Metaphysics, like other things meta, is primarily to address down to Earth questions. Literally:
God Given! Let the USA Bless God. Alleluia.
[Don’t You Ask How We Got All This.]
The USA is like a horse with blinds: it is forced by its masters to pull a heavy load, and devices around its head do not allow it to look sideways. Not looking around and questioning is fundamental. Sitting in a café’, and chewing the world for hours, is best done somewhere in Europe. Americans do not like to discuss the big issues as much: they are too close to “conspiracy theories”.
An all-encompassing philosophical attitude looks around too much, away from the task at hand. It would ask too many questions about the reigning plutocracy. The plutocrats do their best this not to happen. The USA functions like an empire driven by masters, and common people think accordingly.
The coming back of the Christian God in the USA, since the 1940s, corresponded to an enormous influx of cheap labor from (then) primitive areas of the world (say Mexico). The Latinos provided with cheap labor, but they have a strong family structure. Primitive Christianism is a proven recipe to keep them down (just ask the Conquistadores).
In 1954, “IN GOD WE TRUST” was made the motto of the USA, and enforced in public schools in many states (not Hawai’i). So now we have a president who asks God to bless the USA, as if he were the Pope, urbi et orbi.
I have written numerous essays on the connection between the Bible, where God Himself conducts holocausts, and the barbarity of the first three centuries of occupation of North American by English speaking Europeans. Whereas in Spain, Charles Quint, as early as 1550 CE, ordered to stop holocausts in the Americas, such an order to stop the massacre, was never given in the territory that was going to become the USA.
The result can be contemplated in the Brazil football world cup: whereas the Central American football teams (Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras) are genetically mixed with Indian genetic stock, there is not one speck of Indian facial trait in Team USA.
A successful holocaust is not conducive to introspection. Especially when one enjoys its fruits every day.
But let’s look at it from a different angle. Obama named a commission to look into the disappearance of the bees. Well, there is no need to do this: the factors are well known, including nicotinoid insecticides.
So the leadership of the USA is playing stupid, to gain time for those who make and use such nicotinoids: playing dumb has its uses to gain time. After slavery was officially outlawed at the end of the Secession War, in December 1865, racism kept on going strong in the USA. Obsessing about the Christian God, allowed not to notice that: how could people obsessed by becoming good, be bad?
After all, the Bible is racist enough to endorse any tribal excess: it’s all about the Chosen People (whom Hitler chose for a perversely inverted special treatment). The myths of the Bible, such as the “city on a hill”, and, of course, the chosen people, in this case, the Pale Faces, was to rule what was obviously the Promised Land.
Naivety can be brutally effective. And it’s not always wrong.
Minds in the USA are concentrated on achieving practical tasks. Instead of remaking the world in their head, the world is God-given.
So citizens of the USA work, and work, and never, ever, contest the established order seriously.
That’s why you will never see Paul Krugman contest deeply the banking system. Quite the opposite: he wants central banks to send it ever more money.
Paul is practical: he camps on popular positions. That makes him the most popular blogger for progressives on BOTH sides of the Atlantic (so Americanization is progressing, even among self-proclaimed progressives!)
Popular now, sure, but a future dwarf, not to say flea, in the history of thought.
All and any Americans are deeply uncomfortable when one makes deep critiques against “their” system. I had a rich, highly successful architect with plenty of skyscraper under construction, become red in the face, when he accused me of wanting to change the Constitution of the USA, and that never, ever, any reasonable American would take me seriously. Never mind that dozens of European countries change their Constitutions continually. In the USA, it’s the proverbial “third rail”, where all the electricity goes through. He never invited me again, an experience I had too many times to bother counting them.
Challenging the system, in a country such as France, for at least three centuries (after Louis XIV croaked), has been seen as the most interesting exercise (except for when the humor-less Robespierre and Napoleon ruled). In the USA, it’s viewed as a personal threat (by all too many).
Americans come from all over the world. Only very strict simplifying principles keep their minds compatible with each other. At least, so all too many of them feel.
Yesterday I was swimming in a lake in California. It has a small official “Swim Area”, watched over by no less than four official would-be rescuers armed with loud speakers. Going outside is “Against The Law”, although deprived of danger. Other arcane laws apply: a five year old child, going out of such and such a particular limit, within the “Swim Area”, exposes the accompanying parent(s) to a $300 fine.
Being “Against the Law” is even more important than God, in the USA. Some laws seem set-up, just to test whether one will respect the “Against The Law” Principle. Those who do not respect that Principle are “outlaws”, and definitively not felt to be socially acceptable.
As this happened in Berkeley, a supposedly rebellious, flower power town, if there ever was one in the USA, some swimmers braved the interdiction, and were soon yelled at through the loudspeakers by adolescents a third their age, threatening them with the long arm of the law.
(Unsurprisingly, old foggies from the 1960s tend to be more rebellious than the youth whose parents were raised by Reagan; so, all too often, the enforcers are young, the old disobedient.)
As in all good American movies, the cavalry was called to the rescue against the terrorists. Black uniformed police officers swarmed the edges of the lake. A police helicopter flew low overhead, barking out orders. Never mind the budget crisis. Never mind this is a narrow 300 meters deep valley adorned with giant eucalyptuses and towering redwoods.
What is important, is to demonstrate how important law and order is in the USA. “Shock and Awe” will be applied. If the helicopter crashes, the rogue swimmers will be no doubt charged with conspiracy to commit murder.
Order starts with God. The God that gave the “Promised Land” to the “Chosen People” is best. He has proven his worth by killing millions, emptying continents, and torturing David’s son to death, because his father had not respected the law of God. The law of God is now applied to European banks and Argentina, bankrupting them all, empowering and enriching Americans some more, proving how this metaphysics of brutal primitivism is all worthwhile.
Let Obama conclude: “God bless the United States of America!” OK, children! Now that we are done with philosophy, back to work!
Patrice Aymé
Patrice Ayme's Thoughts 