…

Google claims it exists only on this page. We need to expand its seductions.

I think I’m going to go scrub my brain with bleach and then drink way, way, way too much.

’scuse me.

that makes me peg Noonan

Gah…I’ll try not to get started on this…I could go on for way too long if I do.

Oh, let ‘er rip. I spent a long time thinking about Noonan today, and it would help clean out my poor, abused cortex…

Well, I actually was going to dig into the Noonan oeuvre to see what sort of Dominionist connections I could find, but in an act of astonishing Christian charity and compassion, my motherboard self-immolated before I could start, saving me from looking at any of his logorrhea. For real….I’m on a friend’s computer right now. Hopefully mine’ll be up and running by Monday.

It’s really this infamous article that makes me peg Noonan as a Dominionist sympathizer. it’s a pretty classic page from their playbook.

Evolution is, oddly enough, probably the the most significant frontline battle in the culture wars. In fact, if you make an analogy where the forces of secular rationalism are Stalin’s Russia and the forces of Christian theocracy are Hitler’s Germany, then the battle over evolution is the equivqalent of the occupation of the Ruhr. It seems like a small enough thing – unless you’ve been paying attention to what your enemy has planned. If you’ve been paying attention, it’s the start of something much bigger, much worse.

The deal with evolution is that it provides us with a secular, materialist account of the origins of humanity (not the origins of life, mind: the origins of humanity). In doing this, it usurps TWO of the domains traditionally reserved for religion – it tells a “creation story”, and it uses reason and empirical inquiry to do so. This puts it in direct, unavoidable confrontation with literalist understandings of the Bible. And in doing so, it cuts directly at the heart of literalist morality and authority – by giving us a reasonable alternative.

The people who want to see this country completely goverened by the tenets laid out in a literalist reading of the Bible cannot allow such a competing mythology to go unchallenged. And that’s exactly how they see it, too: as a series of competing metanarratives (It’s funny how the Biblical literalists seem to be so inspired by the freewheelingly liberal poststructuralists, but there you go).

To these guys, any time there is a conflict between basing a decision on reason and basing a decision on faith, you’re in a situation where you are confronting two alternate and equally valid views of the world: one inspired by God, and one inspired by the fallen, sinful world. Don’t ask me how they reconcile stuff like the germ theory of disease or anything, because I haven’t figured it out myself.

The clearest place where this insanity gets laid out that I know of is in something called the Wedge Document. They don’t even bother to hide what they’re up to, clearly stating that they want to “replace materialistic explanations [in science] with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”. Ironically enough, this brings us right back around to our good friends at the Discovery Institute, as the Wedge Document was produced by them.

Sheesh. That’s enough for right now, I think. I need a drink after that.

how do I get that gig?

I only wish that I had conceived of Noonan when I wrote Praise of Folly. That is all I shall say on that subject, beeyotch.

First, Menshevik, thanks. You’ll see there’s a few professional medievalists in this thread. I’m one of them. So, 1) serfdom isn’t something that endemic throughout the middle ages. So far as I know–and this is way outside my field of specialty–you have slaves, and you have free peasants, up until, say, the 11th c. And you have serfs for a while, but in some places, that lasts only a couple of centuries. In other places, notoriously Russia, you don’t have serfs at all prior to, what, the 17th or 18th c. So, yeah, it’s a great deal more complicated, and, at any rate, there’s not a great deal of difference–in terms of freedom of movement, in terms of freedom of labor, in terms of quality of life–between a serf and people working in a pre-union factory, whether we’re in England c. 1800 or China or South Carolina c. now; 2) a great many people other than clerics could write. Chaucer, for instance. Literacy becomes an important skill for secular elites and their employees in the 12th c., but you really should say reading rather than writing, since writing is something you hire someone else to do, at least if you have the money to do that. You have to think literacy, in other words, in a different way than we do now; 3) translations of the Bible into vernacular languages begin with translations into Old English in pre-Conquest England. There’s a break of a hundred years or so, and then we start to see a huge amount of biblical material translated into French in the 12th and 13th centuries, both on the Continent and in England. You probably know the translations into Middle English in the late 14th/early 15th centuries best, but only because those Lollard translators had an ideological program of democratizing information: which explains why they were chased into exile, silenced, or burned at the stake; 4) the sun around the Earth thing, you’ll remember, continues to be an error well into the “modern” era (which is an era, you’ll know, rife with religious conflict: someone mentioned the 30 years war, above, and the French massacres of the Huguenots); 5) people knew the earth was round in the MA.

Now, I mentioned critiques of the Enlightenment, above. Noonan, knowing nothing, likely doesn’t know anything about critical theory, so he doesn’t know deeder about the Frankfurt School, but there have been critiques of the Enlightenment from the left at least since the 1920s, right?

–

You know what’s funny and sad to me? Noonan’s an Irish name, right? Why the f would an Irishman long for the 12th c.? Is he crazy? It’s sort of like an Irishman falling in love with Cromwell or Churchill.

It’s the Muslims fault for keeping all those Greek and Roman books in hiding even after we burned the entire library of Alexandria and declared Mission Accomplished.

It’s the Indians fault for inventing zero and creating a mathematical symbol of my value to early 21st century civilization.

The ironic thing is that the very concept of progress seems to be medieval (apparently invented by Joachim of Fiore), as up until then history was described as a constant decline from a past golden age or as going through a series of recurring cycles or at best as static (the “Roma aeterna” idea of the Roman Empire).

The “indictment” of Tom Delay is entirely bogus – from what I’ve read, Tom Delay didn’t know about the perfectly legal transaction he is accused of conspiring to make. We have now left entirely the field of normal political conflict and entered a twilight world where fantasy is presented as fact and the only standard of conduct is “will it work?”. This is not the actions of a political Party engaged in seeking a majority – it is the action of a Party determined to destroy its opponents entirely and seize all power for itself…it is, in short, the stuff from which civil wars are made…

I really do urge our Democrats to step back from the edge – you are sitting in a lake of gasoline and you are playing with fire. We on our side will only put up with so much before we start to pay back with usury what we have received. If you can’t defeat Tom Delay in the electoral field, then you will simply have to accept him as Majority Leader of the United States House of Representatives – and you’d better start accepting political reality before things get really bad.

The benighted Noonans et al used to be consigned to the darkest corner of the bar along with the pay phone and the wet-naps. Intermittently, sunspots or changes in the earth’s magnetic field would arouse them from hermetic stupor to geyser spouts of nonsense aimed at no one in particular . Now they have the Internet, to our delight.