This started off as a response to a comment in my previous diary, "Karen Armstrong On Bill Moyers Journal", but after posting it, I realized that it deserved more prominence, not least because of the fact Chris has been hammering home for years on end--the religious pluralism (including atheism, agnosticism and secularism) of the progressive coalition.
There is a strain of atheism, represented by folks like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, which sees religion as a threat to be attacked in the name of science. This is, I would argue, a form of secular fundamentalism that misunderstands almost as much as religious fundamentalism does.
Science and religion are two quite different things, and trying to judge them both by one standard is guaranteed to produce all sorts of confusion. On the flip, I'm reproducing part of an article from Science magazine that indicates a different way--it's a brief passage dealing with a scientific approach to understanding how religion functions in human society, based on our evolved biology. It clearly recognizes that the purposes and methods religion employs are quite different from those of science, and thus it's easy, in light of this approach, to see how foolish it is to judge religion in terms of science, as simply an inferior form knowledge-gathering.
Once upon a time, the American people could actually think. They had to. Life did not come to them all pre-packaged. A certain level of critical intelligence was absolutely vital for everyday survival.
This was quite different from Europeans at the time, who were still oppressed by a stultifying conservative political, and who, for the most part, simply lived their lives as there parents had done. Of course the elites had to think critically, they lived in a much more fluid world. But in America, everyone--aside from slaves, of course--lived in more or less fluid circumstances, where one could not escape the necessity of seeing beyond face value.
Okay, it's a bit of a fairy tale. But it does contain a kernel of truth--Americans were a practical people, because they were building a New World, not inheriting an old one, and an inherent part of that practical attitude was the necessity to of thinking about the purpose of things. "Practicality" was not a given. What was practical for one purpose might be totally unworkable for another. And in a new world, where everything was being built anew, off-the-shelf guidelines requiring no thought beyond how to implement them had only very limited usefulness.
Such are the roots of American pragmatism, and in the late 19th Century, a neurologist turned psychologist turned philosopher named William James captured the essence of this approach, and translated it into the framework of Western philosophy. The use of the term today is a far cry from what it was then, and we are all much the poorer for it. Indeed, there is often nothing very practical about the sorts of things today's so-called "pragmatists" achieve--and William James would have been first in line to criticize them. He was, after all, a leading anti-imperialist of the day, keenly aware that the question "practical for what?" always needed to be answered first.
Among other things, the discussion thread of my diary "Obama Praising Reagan--An Echo, Not A Choice???", again surfaced the confusion that falsely jumbles together framing, spinning and lying. Because framing is so fundamental, so important, and still so badly misunderstood, I felt compelled to address it, with yet another attempt to set the record straight.
Here's the basic picture:
Framing:
A: "The glass is half full."
B: "The glass is half empty."
Both are objectively true, but represent different views.
Spinning:
A: "The glass is half empty."
B: "Why didn't you say it was half full?"
A: "But that's what I DID say! They're both the same, you know."
Objective truth is involved, but it's being played with. You don't lie outright, but you clearly mislead. The sense in which what you say is true is not the sense in which you intend and expect to be taken.
Lying:
A: "The glass is half full."
B: "Why are you saying it's half empty? You're such a pessimist! Liberals are all pessimists!"
B is simply lying, and then generalizing from the lie.
The false equation of framing, spinning and lying comes in two particularly pernicious forms-those who make the false equation in order to attack framing, and those who make the false equation in order to support spinning and lying. A couple of years back, I stopped posting at Booman Tribune, because Booman dogmatically insisted on this false equation, irrationally rejecting repeated solid arguments, not just from me, but also from a number of other diarists and commentators.
Now, here at OpenLeft, I'm getting it from the other side, from folks who are defending Obama's parroting of rightwing lies about Ronald Reagan as simple acts of "reframing." Well, yes, technically, that's true, since lying is a form of framing, and recasting a lie in a somewhat different form is a form of reframing.
But there are important differences between the essence of lying and framing, and when you obscure those differences, what you're doing is spinning. The best way I can think of to defend framing, and distinguish it from lying and spinning, is talk about where it comes from, and what it's all about-and then to show how deeply contradictory the arguments against it generally are, once you understand what it really is.
In my previous diary on the decline of American journalism (aka the decline of America), "Prediction And The Wretched Fall of American Journalism", I promised a second installment on how we got to the point where sheer gossip has come to dominate our national discourse:
This diary-and the one following-represents a brief attempt to explain just why and how this state of affairs came about. This diary takes a short-term focus on the historical why and how of recent times, not in a comprehensive fashion, but with reference to a few significant signposts. The next takes a longer-term focus on the philosophical/normative underpinings, and is more analytical. The two are related by the broad thesis that we live in a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy, and the subthesis that the nature of masquerade changed significantly from around 1980 onwards.
If the previous diary was a rehash of material that was surely more or less familiar to many, I trust that this one will not be. It starts with English philosopher of science, Francis Bacon. If René Descartes dreamed that reason by itself could unlock all truth, the English empiricists took the opposite approach, relying on the accumulation of facts, and reasoning from the systematic analysis of them. Bacon was one of the foremost expositors of this view. Fast forward a few centuries, just a wee bit past the French Revolution, and the French had started to come around, as Auguste Comte promoted the notion of a social physics-a hard science of human affairs, and promoted the term "positivism". Throughout the 19th Century, the notion of positivism-an absolute truth rooted in objective, scientific observation-became extremely popular among educate elites. It was, in a way, a form of post-religious fundamentalism. The notions of certainty, and an unassailable foundation for truth were preserved, but placed on a secular foundation. Eventually, under the post-WWI, 1920s-era polishing of the logical positivists, the claim would be made not simply that this was the way to truth, but that anything less than it was not simply unreliable, but meaningless. This had the added advantage of demoting even the very possibility of a critical discourse to the level of meaningless gibberish.
This was in sharp contrast to the philosophy of pragmatism....
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