So you post something... you go out to run a day's worth of errands... you come back and find that Steven Menashi has given you a mention over at Andrew Sullivan, and you've got over a thousand new friends sitting in your virtual living room.
Wow.
Thanks, Steven. And thanks, Andrew.
And to everybody else, welcome.
A quick note about what I'm up to here. There are many, many good, talented people who are eminently qualified to comment on policies, politics, issues, and current affairs.
There are relatively few, however, who specialize in the irrational.
That's where I come in.
As you may have learned by reading the "about" page, I have a somewhat strange, somewhat multi-layered (you could also say "mongrelized") background.
A couple of decades ago, as an undergraduate, I studied basic theories of mythology and religion, and I studied the intersection of religion and history, specifically in the context of mass movements. For example -- I modeled the Nazi movement as a secular religion. The model works pretty well, by the way.
Later in life I did graduate work in policy analysis, so I have a quant side, too.
Professionally, I started as a writer and over time became a communications adviser, mostly to corporations. As I did that work, I found over time that I was drawing heavily on both the left brain (quant) and right brain (religionist) parts of my background. Because to communicate effectively, an organization needs to plan rationally. It also needs to understand all the irrational factors -- values, beliefs, patterns of mythic thinking -- that drive people to identify with issues, care about them, and make decisions about them.
As in my consulting, so here. My goal at Metaphor Country is to comment on religiosity and mythic thinking, and look at the ways in which they drive politics, policy and the news.
Sometimes I'll talk about institutional religion. There are a few small matters to cover there -- fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the U.S., Islamism across the globe, such as that.
But my basic viewpoint -- which I owe to Columbia and especially to two professors, Peter Awn and the late Theodore Gaster, is that there's something called "religiosity" -- an attitude, not an institution. Religiosity sometimes plays out through traditional religions. But sometimes -- especially in times like these, when traditional institutions have come loose from their moorings and people are wandering everywhere, looking for meaning -- religiosity plays out through secular institutions. Political movements can become religions. Science is sometimes a kind of religion. And people approach issues -- not only abortion but environmentalism and globalization -- through a complex of faith-based assumptions and religious fervor.
How do I feel about this? That it's inevitable -- we're hard-wired to operate in these terms. As far as institutional religion and personal spirituality are concerned, I'm sometimes for them and sometimes against them -- it depends on the outcome. "You shall know them by their works." Jon Stewart got it right on Larry King Live a couple of weeks ago -- religion is a powerful, morally neutral force, like nuclear energy. Depending on how you approach it, you get either electricity, or the end of the world. He suggested we create an International Atomic Energy Agency for religion -- not a bad thought.
When it comes to the religious dynamic in the secular sphere -- the challenge, most of the time, is to recognize what's going on -- to understand that a religious dynamic is in fact playing out. We tend to think of politics and economics as their own domains, not informed by religious or mythic sensibilities. There's been some good recent work on the religious dimensions of, say, economics (if you stop and think about it, the invisible hand is a somewhat metaphysical concept), but it's hardly mainstream. So much of the time, I'll be trying to drag that dynamic into the light -- to show the extent to which mythic thinking is the driver of, for example, the debate about the privatization of social security, or sentiment about the pharmaceutical industry, or discussions of global warming, or decisions about national security.
Mythic thinking drives editorial decisions about what is and isn't news. And advertising and corporate positioning often turn on it. So I'll be looking at media and corporate matters as well.
Sometimes you'll have a hard time figuring out my politics. That's because sometimes I won't have a political point of view. If an issue is really muddy, the first thing I want to do is clean off the mud -- show the hidden dynamics of both sides of a debate, so that it's easier to follow. That's not the same thing as taking sides.
But I will take sides when it matters to me. Like anyone else, I have my viewpoints and I have my issues. Full disclosure -- I'm a registered Democrat who grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I live just a few blocks south of there now. But I'm essentially centrist -- especially in the aftermath of September 11. Given my background, I'm convinced -- unlike some of my classical liberal friends -- that there are religiously motivated people who mean to kill me. I'm probably best described as one of Andrew Sullivan's "Eagles" -- social liberal, fiscal conservative. But I'm not convinced that the Bush administration knows its way around Islam -- no administration ever has -- and you couldn't call me a Bush supporter.
I'm Jewish though not observant; I read extensively in all the traditions and might be described as spiritual. And I'm a third-generation Manhattanite, which means I get quite exercised in a positive way about the virtues of societies where many people from many backgrounds live together in close proximity and manage not to kill each other. I believe in cosmopolitanism -- Imperial Rome, medieval Baghdad, modern New York. I oppose all fundamentalisms and all tribalisms. And I'm fascinated by the possibility that the old American civil religion -- the melting pot and "E Pluribus, Unum" -- might be the best counter to the rise of domestic fundamentalism and the attempt to Christianize America.
I hope that makes some sense of the site. And I hope that having read it, you'll stick around and read some more. It will be lively here on the religio-political frontiers. Pull up a seat, relax and enjoy!
And, once again, welcome!
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