Hank Kalet

I had the chance to interview Chris Hedges, author of “American Fascists” and “I Don’t Believe in Atheists” yesterday on his books and other writings, a discussion that explored the inherent fallibility of humanity and the dangers of assuming our perfectibility. (The interview is for a story for our Time Off magazine that will run in April, in anticipation of Hedges’ appearance at the Princeton Library.)

The notion that we are moving forward, evolving, that there is an inevitable perfection that we are striving t0ward is a dangerous one, a notion that creates divisions, that privileges some at the expense of others. His contention is that the Religious Right and what he calls the New Atheist (radical nonbelievers with an almost messianic believe in science and progress) view the world through this false paradigm of progress.

The rhetorical parallels between Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and atheists like Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens are striking. They see those they disagree with as being stains on the potential perfectibility of the human race that have to be removed. They brook no disagreements, tolerate no difference. All who are different, who disagree contribute to the greater evil and must be opposed, by force if necessary.

“There are lots of parallels between the Christian right and the proto-fascist movements in the former Yugoslavia,” he told me. Hedges spent almost 20 years as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East and the former Yugoslavia.

“They were movements that got their identities through religion,” he continued. “The sanctification of violence, the elevation of a particular group to a higher moral claim, the demonization of other belief systems — the religious right has that in spades, as do the new atheists.”

Both rely on a simplification of belief — Robertson and his ilk reducing religious faith to a set of hard-and-fast rules that eliminate choice and free will, rules that make it easy for he and his followers to claim a false moral high ground; Hitchens and his compadres do the same, substituting science and reason for religion.

That’s why it is no accident that both groups supported the Iraq War, that both groups justify the use of torture and the constriction of rights and liberties.

Faith, however, is more complicated. Faith, as Kierkegaard wrote, demands a greater intellectual commitment than the totalitarian approach of the religious right. It is deeply personal, built on the realization that we are not perfect, that we are connected and that there is something greater out there or within us.

Sin is a part of us, he says; it is at our core. To acknowledge this allows us to understand and empathize with others, to see the common humanity we share.

As Hedges writes in “American Fascists:

God is inscrutable, mysterious and unknowable. We do not understand what life is about, what it means, why we are here and what will happen to us after our brief sojourn on the planet ends. We are saved, in the end, by faith — faith that life is not meaningless and random, that there is a purpose to human existence, and that in the midst of this morally neutral universe the tiny, seemingly insignificant acts of compassion and blind human kindness, especially to those labeled our enemies and strangers, sustain the divine spark, which is love. We are not fully human if we live alone. These small acts of compassion — for they can never be organized and institutionalized as can hate — have a power that lives after us.

It is this understanding that is at the base of our democratic culture, a tolerance and empathy that allows for our imperfectability, that encourages us to lend a hand, to reach out, to become part of a larger community of humanity.

It also is deeply patriotic, a central tenet of the American experiment. James Carroll, the fine Boston Globe columnist, explored this theme Monday in his reaction to Barack Obama’s speech last week on race:

In this nation, that imperfection has been permanently manifest by the racial divide, which gave Obama his subject. The imperfections of racism spawned the responses of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, “as imperfect as he may be.”

But don’t let the imperfections of response outweigh the far graver imperfections of a grotesquely unfair social system. People who benefit from an imperfect power structure speak warmly of love, while those who suffer from it angrily demand justice.

But the deeper question goes to the human condition itself: In our unending quest for a better world, how do we deal with the inevitably flawed character of every society, and of every citizen? How does each of us deal, that is, with the inevitable complicity of our leadership – our preachers, our politicians – in what ails society? How do we deal with our own complicity?

Carroll goes on to echo some of the themes that Hedges explores in his two books:

The ingenious American framers took for granted the universality of human imperfection. The Constitution is a system of checks and balances because every officeholder in government – from president, to judge, to legislator – is assumed to be flawed. Every power center – from state to federal – is capable of abusing power.

Therefore, officeholders are checked by one another, power centers are in balance, and the entire arrangement is accountable to an electorate, whose prerogatives are enshrined in the Bill of Rights. Constitutional democracy, even balancing majority rule with protections for minorities, is the political system that came into being when humans stopped pretending that perfection was possible. The American paradox is that this rejection of utopian ambition is the beginning of authentic political equality.

This equality, protected by our fragile democratic government, is not the culmination of some inevitable political evolution. It is the result of much trial and error, its frailty inherent, permanent (if anything can be permanent, it is frailty and impermanence).

Our responsibility is to do what we can to maintain this fragile arrangement.

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