We should embrace liberté, égalité, and fraternité — not stupidity
Last year the Pope warned us that “more aggressive forms of secularism” threatened “traditional values” while last week it was the turn of Conservative Party Chair, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, to caution that Europe was under threat from a rising tide of “militant secularisation”.
Asked to expand on how secularism — which, despite the rather alarmist prefixes consistently attached to it, is nothing more than a quaint belief in the importance of the separation of church and state — is heralding the end of civilisation as we know it, and its detractors suddenly become decidedly vague. After all, traditional values once comprised, among other horrors, the detention of single mothers in Catholic-run laundries and the placement of allegedly errant children in religious-run workhouses so, patently, they’re not all worth saving.
Furthermore, the French, who take great pride in their secular state, would probably frown on any suggestion that their society, founded on the worthy precepts of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, was somehow inherently inferior to our own. While religious people seek to equate an increase in secularism with a consequent increase in subjective immorality the truth is they are ignoring a far more damaging phenomenon — the insidious rise of unfettered cross-denominational stupidity.
One doesn’t have to be a militant atheist, or even an aggressive secularist, to be a reckless nonsense-spouting halfwit whose every utterance serves to belie the existence of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
This endemic idiocy is already a veritable epidemic in a post-Enlightenment United States where increasingly medieval sounding right-wing zealots, none of whom can be described as remotely secular, are merrily leading their loony followers through the looking glass. The phenomenon is manifest in the rantings of conservative preacher Pat Robertson, who has said federal judges pose a greater threat to the country than Al Qaeda; presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, who has likened the danger posed by gay-marriage to the 9/11 attacks; or philandering moralist Newt Gingrich, who has called for US marshals to round up and arrest activist judges — but only those judges whose activism he disagrees with.
It is evident in the fact that in a country where 46 million people live below the poverty line and 15 million people are unemployed, members of Congress spent a large part of last week getting their knickers in a twist over contraception. Or the fact that those who loudly profess their deep-seated Christianity while quoting scripture ad nauseam, seem to always conveniently forget the part that says “blessed are the poor” and react with horror at the notion that the state would afford some level of basic health care to those 50 million citizens who can’t afford it.
It is apparent in the equivalence afforded, on opinion-driven news shows hosted by god-fearing shock jocks, to those loud-mouthed egoists who arrogantly belittle arguments based on facts and figures, preferring to instead anchor their bombastic hypotheses in anecdotes, distortion and innuendo.
It is obvious in the continued fiction, posited by Republicans like zillionaire Mitt Romney, that the super wealthy, or the middle-class as they like to call themselves, because they pay nominally more taxes than everybody else, shouldn’t also pay a proportional level of tax to those who subsist on a tiny fraction of their fortune.
Tethered as we are, culturally at least, to Boston and not Berlin, the untrammelled rise of unchecked stupidity is also increasing at exponential rates in this country and has infected everything from our politics to the IQ-sapping celebrity culture that we greedily consume.
Despite our crippling levels of state debt and 14% unemployment rate, the most pressing issue for many rosary-bead-wielding TDs still remains, incredibly, the closure of the Vatican embassy — the continued controversy surrounding the decision leading one to assume that, for some, its closure is seen as a greater injustice than the abhorrent behaviour of that state in covering up the decades-long sexual abuse of children.
The continued furore is undoubtedly related to the vagaries of our parish pump political system and the self-serving Pavlovian reactions of bellwether politicians who apparently believe that the closure of an opulent embassy in a religious autocracy is of greater import to the people of this country then cuts to health and education services. The same sort of latent stupidity is evidenced by the continued sycophancy shown to a small cabal of bankers and developers, whose arrogance and ineptitude brought this country to its knees, by a craven political class elected on a long-forgotten platform of injecting a modicum of transparency and accountability into brown-envelope business dealings.
This idiocy has also seen the state pump over €30bn into Nama, with the intention of enabling banks to return to lending, only to instead bail out developers, who have had their loans vastly reduced and are now paid salaries of up to €200,000 a year to manage their own insolvent property portfolios. While state institutions act with disgusting obsequiousness to developers who are too big to fail, relatively small-time borrowers who bought at the height of the boom and are now unable to meet their extortionate mortgage repayments are patronisingly told to talk to bank managers who won’t even deign to return frantic phone calls and would rather see them homeless than write down their debt.
MEANWHILE, the same illiberal debates that have been raging for decades in the United States, in which the unemployed are vilified as malingering good-for-nothings for having the temerity to lose their jobs in the midst of the worst recession in the history of the state, have begun to gain currency among even our allegedly left-of-centre government politicians.
The same psychosis also patently infects the entire government if it thinks that citizens will continue to accede to endless cuts and taxation increases if they believe the money is going to be used to balance an accounting trick that was used by the Central Bank to conjure up over €30bn in promissory notes to shore up a defunct Anglo Irish bank.
Baroness Warsi chose last week to travel to the rarified surrounds of the Vatican and warn about some nebulous threat from those godless secularists who would prefer a clear line of demarcation exist between church and state but who absolutely respect the right of everyone to privately practice their own religious belief.
She did this apparently oblivious to the fact that her warning is approximately four years too late and Europe has already been ravaged, not by secularists, but by the far more dangerous threat of failed neo-liberalism, which has laid waste to economic growth and prosperity since the economic crisis first struck.
Voltaire, who was himself viewed as a dangerous secularist in his time, said that the only way to grasp the mathematical concept of infinity was to contemplate the extent of human stupidity. One wonders what he’d make of the fervently religious, and totally iniquitous, American model of society that a myopic Baroness Warsi seems so eager to ape.
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