Why Politics Feels Like Armageddon
A short reflection on faith, politics, and how I think they can best get along.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
– F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Listen to this essay on YouTube)
Say I agreed to help you paint your house. Say I showed up with a hammer. It’s brand new, I announce, Isn’t it great? Sure, you reply, it’s a wonderful hammer. And I’m sure it can pound nails like nobody’s business. But it’s not so good for painting. Say I called you anti-hammer and stormed off.
And then went looking for a job at Kirkus Reviews.
Let me explain.
After writing the book The Science Spell, I paid Kirkus Reviews $400 to review it. I wanted an intelligent blurb from a respected source. What I got was some mild praise for the writing and a dismissal of the book as anti-science. They didn’t exactly storm off, but they were anonymous, so they may as well have.
I was astonished (and stung). The book is an exploration of the limits of science, not its faults. I thought I had made this clear. The Science Spell repeatedly affirms the value of science. At one point I even nominate it for “humanity’s greatest achievement of the last three hundred years.” Over and over, I praise its contributions and accuracy within a certain sphere. But the reviewer seemed unable to hold in his mind two simple thoughts at the same time: science is great and science has limitations. Just like hammers.
Welcome to 21st century public discourse. Please check all subtlety, nuance, and complexity at the door.
I’ll go out on a limb and assume that my anonymous reviewer was a leftie. A lot of my friends are lefties too. And since they know me, they know I am not even in the general vicinity of anti-science. But some still worry that, in the current climate, my probing could fan the flames of those who are.
According to some on the left, I’m not even allowed to claim that the book—or anything, for that matter—is not political. Even though, you know… it’s not. Despite the ardent wishes of many to see politics under every bed and on every piece of toast, the book isn’t saying anything about who’s right or wrong—or what should be done—in the public sphere. The Science Spell is intended instead for individuals. It invites you to wander off, sit under a tree, and consider reality in ways you may not have before. To reduce the book to a label like “anti-science” is to decline that invitation.
My Kirkus Reviewer didn’t engage with any particular point I tried to make in The Science Spell. Instead, they ran to the nearest big tent where all the familiar flags are flying. It seems to me that my reviewer needed one of those flags. A glorious cause. A grand proclamation. “I stand with science!”
Why couldn’t my reviewer accept the simple idea that, like hammers, science has both uses and limitations? Why in general are people so quick to disengage from conversations about particulars and make sweeping pronouncements? Why are we meeting complex issues by shouting sound bites? Why is everything so political?
It’s not. Nothing is political these days. Not even politics.
What we call politics is missing the two fundamental elements of its definition.
Politics is fundamentally communal. It attempts to contain a riotous mix of people with different beliefs, goals, and preferences in a way that allows them all life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. (An impossible job, maybe, but so is teaching high school.) If you want to live by your rules only, you belong in a cabin in Montana, not the White House.
Politics is also fundamentally practical. Politicians aren’t supposed to theorize about governing, they’re supposed to govern. If you want to live in a world of unreachable ideas, you belong in a university, not the U.S. Senate.
Yes, politics is informed by the individuality and unreachable ideas of each politician, but if it stops being communal and practical, it stops being politics.
This is what we’re seeing more and more. Our representatives are not so much bad at their job as indifferent to what that job is: to recognize the reality of different kinds of people and to somehow work with them. Like plumbers who’ve decided their job is now to mow your lawn, politicians are practicing something other than politics.
That something is religion.
For most of the twentieth century, church membership in the U.S. remained high and consistent at roughly 70%. Then it began a dramatic decline. By about 2020, membership had fallen below 50%, the largest recorded drop in American history.
Our drift away from churches coincides with the rise of the lunacy we’ve been calling politics. This isn’t proof the two are connected, but I suspect they are. We didn’t, I think, stop listening to preachers. We just took them out of church and put them in public office.
Of course, religion has always bled into government. Moral ideas have to inform politics. And both embody community standards and agreements. Like politics, religion is communal. But there’s a reason our founding fathers wanted to separate the two: unlike politics, religion is absurd.
A lot of us agree that politics needs to get less absurd. What fewer recognize, I think, may be even more important: while it may be possible to get the crazy out of politics, it’s impossible to get the crazy out of being human.
There is something inherently absurd about being human. First of all, you exist. Why did that happen? Nobody knows. OK, fine, we say. We’ll accept that. But then, guess what? You don’t exist. You’re here… and then you’re not. Same for everyone you love. OK, time out. That’s one absurdity too many. That’s stepping over a line.
And so we step over lines. All the time. We are crazy. Batshit crazy. We do batshit crazy things. We climb the face of El Capitan without ropes. We drive cars as fast as we can in circles. We slaughter people by the millions to defend our “honor.” We paint the Sistine Chapel. We care for a disabled child, without fanfare, our whole lives. We work day in and out at a job we hate. We pretend we’re not going to die right up to the time we do. Every choice we make is crazy. But how could it be otherwise?
Human beings are crazy because being human is crazy.
We can call religion absurd, then, but that’s just what the doctor ordered. We need it. Or something like it. If we need politics to meet the reality of a bunch of different people trying to coexist, we also need something to meet a more fundamental reality. We need faith.
Despite what many modern civilized people think, faith doesn’t just come in the form of religion. More importantly, faith isn’t optional. It isn’t just a collection of delusions entertained by primitive yahoos. Whether we call ourselves an atheist or a believer, we need to have faith in something.
Faith frames our lives. Faith is the story we tell about ourselves. It’s the story we feel ourselves to be a part of, even if we’re a bit player.
All cultures have had big communal stories. Before they were called religions, they were called myths. But our stories don’t need to be shared with the entire culture. They can be shared only within certain institutions, sub-cultures, informal groups, families, or with no one at all.
And they are always running in the background. From going to work to dying for our country, some story guides us and gives our actions meaning. “Because I am a father, my job is to provide for my family, even if it sometimes makes me unhappy.” This is a commonly held faith. There’s no proof for it anywhere. Indeed, some men do not worship at this church. Their scriptures tell them something different: “Yes, I am a father, but I’ve got one life to live and I’m free to do what I want, even if it makes my family unhappy.”
Telling ourselves a story is like breathing. It’s so embedded in how we live that we almost never think about it. If we stopped breathing, we’d be dead. If we stopped having a faith, we’d feel dead. Life would become nothing but a series of meaningless, disconnected impressions, events, thoughts, and feelings. Without a story, humans break down.
To ignore this—to imagine we all just need to be “rational” or “scientific”—is to invite the very ills we are witnessing today. The crazy is just going to build up somewhere and then blow its top: “Jews are evil!” “Immigrants are evil!” “Corporations are evil!”
Science can’t save us. We need a faith. Science isn’t one. Science is a collection of neutral facts and laws and a method for discovering them. It allows us to build nuclear bombs or nuclear power plants. Its logic, curiosity, and application have to be directed somewhere. No one has faith in a hammer. We have faith—or don’t—in the person holding it. Similarly, we can’t have faith in science, only in the people doing it and deciding how to use it.
Yes, science solves problems. But people choose what problems to solve. You can have the best hammer in the world, but if crazy holds it, things get broken.
And so faith has continued deranging our minds alongside all our brilliant scientific discoveries. If it isn’t wearing its traditional religious clothes, it shows up disguised as ideologies like nationalism, communism, individualism, fascism, racism, and antisemitism. Atheist zealots have killed and died for all of these, just as religious zealots kill and die for their God. (I’ve got no problem with people dying for their faith. It’s the killing for it that bothers me.) Intelligence has not exempted people from choosing faiths, including the most horrifying ones. As Saul Bellow noted, “A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”
Of course, there are those who see themselves as purely rational who speak out for kindness, equality, tolerance, and happiness. This is wonderful. I would, though, point out that their faith is hiding in plain sight. Kindness, equality, tolerance, and happiness all glow with the light of some sort of faith, even if it’s complex or hard to name.
I think almost all intelligent people who claim not to believe in life-after-death or a God of any kind, do at least believe in something crazy, if unnamable—decency, love, beauty, kindness, the grandeur of a sunrise, the romping of a puppy, Michelangelo’s David, or McCartney’s “Hey, Jude.” But they can’t justify it rationally. While their brains say they’re headed for eternal extinction, something else sings in their blood—some inordinate longing and extravagant desire. A song of faith.
The song never ends. There is something about faith that calls for more—more than can be proved, more than this physical world. It can’t be satisfied by a form of government any more than it can by science. Whether the equal distribution of wealth or its unlimited accumulation sounds good to you, neither is enough. Faith dreams beyond both the overalls and the yachts—beyond the normal, beyond the reasonable, beyond the material.
Science and government have their place, but neither can make faith go away. That is not their job. Their job is to build a kind of playground. Their job is to create a sane and reliable space in which each of us can live out our own chosen faith—our own chosen story, our own form of crazy.
If that sounds, well, crazy, it’s because we’ve been missing something fundamental about faith. Just as we’ve forgotten that politics is fundamentally communal, we’ve forgotten that faith is fundamentally not communal.
Faith is individual.
Faith is the most powerful force in our lives. It is also a territory as vast and intricate as the Amazon rainforest. Yet our culture tends to either ignore it or treat it simplistically. In Part Two, I’ll explore the nature of faith more.
You can find The Science Spell here.