‘The Annihilation of Caste’ – Part 2

by Luis Granados

In the debate on caste between the Untouchable Ambedkar and the Hindu God expert Mohandas Gandhi 75 years ago this month, Ambedkar reminded readers what caste distinction meant in practice:

The Untouchable was required to carry, strung from his waist, a broom to sweep away from behind the dust he treaded on lest a Hindu walking on the same should be polluted. In Poona, the Untouchable was required to carry an earthen pot, hung on his neck wherever he went, for holding his spit lest his spit falling on earth should pollute a Hindu who might unknowingly happen to tread on it.

Gandhi’s reply did not belittle the degradation of the Untouchables, but did attempt to shift the blame away from the Hindu religion. Ambedkar had cited extensive passages in the Hindu sacred scriptures mandating the separation of Indians by caste. Since he couldn’t dispute their plain meaning, Gandhi simply asserted that these particular scriptures didn’t count: “The Smritis for instance contain much that can never be accepted as the Word of God. Thus many of the texts that Dr. Ambedkar quotes from the Smritis cannot be accepted as authentic.”

Thus, following in the footsteps of Christian God experts who pick and choose which Bible passages are divine and which are not, based on their own personal preferences, Gandhi elevated himself to God’s level by sorting out the true God commands from the fakes. He also took pains to shield against the danger that a scholar might establish that the oldest and most authentic parts of the scriptures were those that contained the most objectionable parts:

Who is the best interpreter? Not learned men surely. Learning there must be. But religion does not live by it. It lives in the experiences of its saints and seers, in their lives and sayings. When all the most learned commentators of the scriptures are utterly forgotten, the accumulated experience of the sages and saints will abide and be an inspiration for ages to come.

Thus it is the whims of “sages and saints” we must listen to, and not the actual words of the allegedly sacred texts. Gandhi’s particular whim was that “Caste has nothing to do with religion. It is a custom whose origin I do not know and do not need to know for the satisfaction of my spiritual hunger. But I do know that it is harmful both to spiritual and national growth.” Then, having admitted that caste was harmful, he proceeded to defend it anyway.

The law of Varna teaches us that we have each one of us to earn our bread by following the ancestral calling. It defines not our rights but our duties. It necessarily has reference to callings that are conducive to the welfare of humanity and to no other. It also follows that there is no calling too low and none too high. All are good, lawful, and absolutely equal in status. The callings of a Brahmin – spiritual teacher – and a scavenger are equal, and their due performance carries equal merit before God.

Gandhi's “law of Varna” was the essence of caste: that we have a duty to be locked within the same life our ancestors had. Otherwise, the whole mechanic of karma – rebirth in a particular caste based on how good a past life you had led – wouldn’t work right.

What Gandhi called a “scavenger” was an Untouchable who was required to live on the undigested corn kernels he picked out of cow manure. But since that calling was equal in the eyes of God to that of a powerful Brahmin, that made everything ok.

Ambedkar then published a rebuttal to Gandhi’s response, leading off with a kick to the groin. Gandhi himself had been born into the “Bania” caste of grocers and traders – why didn’t the “law of Varna” apply to him? Gandhi never sold so much as a carrot, but instead waltzed about like a wannabe Brahmin, going to law school and lecturing others on what God did and did not want them to do.

Gandhi’s case is a perfect example of the economic lunacy of caste. It is hard to picture Gandhi surviving as a grocer without going bankrupt; yet his brilliant organizational and communication skills made him a natural for the profession he entered. In all the millions of words Gandhi wrote and spoke over his career, I am not aware of any instance when he offered an explanation of this laughable hypocrisy.

For all his sanctimony, Gandhi’s true feelings about the Untouchables may have been revealed when he criticized Christian missionaries for trying to share the Gospel with them: “Would you preach the gospel to a cow? Well, some of the Untouchables are worse than cows in understanding ... they can no more distinguish between the relative merits of Islam and Hinduism and Christianity than a cow.” In the midst of Gandhi’s “Be kind to Untouchables” campaign, a bill was introduced in the Indian parliament to allow Untouchables to enter Hindu temples. Gandhi had vigorously opposed this idea a few years earlier. He now gave it lip service, but not enough to move even his own Congress party, so it failed.

Ambedkar made good on this threat to abandon Hinduism in 1935. The question became, where would he land? The most politically significant move he could have made would have been to Islam, already a powerful and militant minority. Islam also preached, and in many countries practiced, the equality of all races before God. But Ambedkar despised the rigidity of Islam, especially its shabby treatment of women. He also knew that Muslims had ruled India for centuries before the British arrived, never lifting a finger toward the abolition of the caste system. Besides, as an Indian nationalist, he much preferred to adopt a religion that arose in India -- for the same reason he never gave Christianity a second thought.

Thus he toyed at length with Sikhism, an Indian amalgam of Hinduism and Islam, that played a critical role in the Indian balance of political power. Sikhs, though, insisted that men wear beards, a practice that Ambedkar didn’t want to follow himself, and didn’t think he could sell to other Untouchable men. Besides, Gandhi kept insisting that Sikhs were actually just a subcategory of Hindus. Even though the Sikh leaders vigorously disagreed, Ambedkar wanted to get as far away from Gandhi as he could.

Some historians argue that what Ambedkar really wanted was not to leave Hinduism at all, but to use the constant threat that he might do so and take millions of Untouchables with him as a political club to bring about true reform inside Hinduism. This may explain why he took 20 years to make up his mind. Ultimately, he settled on Buddhism, which satisfied his requirement for a religion of Indian origin. At a ceremony in October, 1956, Ambedkar and 500,000 other Untouchables formally converted to Buddhism. The mass abandonment of Hinduism would have been even greater had not Ambedkar died in his sleep two months later.

What seems to have appealed to Ambedkar is that Buddhism is the most flexible and diverse of the major world religions. There is variety within Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, but not as much as within Buddhism. At one extreme is the “Imperial Way” Buddhism of the Japanese military dictatorship, and at the other a gentle philosophy that barely qualifies as a “religion” at all. Ambedkar chose that latter extreme; as one of his admirers put it:

Buddhism does not believe in revelation; does not depend on miracles; does not lay emphasis on mystic or metaphysical abstractions; does not hold out a promise of heaven; does not believe in coercion. It stands for equality and unity. It has no rituals, no ceremonies, no priests with hereditary rights, no glorification ceremonies, no Shankracharya to dogmatize. In place of fear of God, there is morality. It is based on purity of thought, deed and action, compassion and love, self-respect and self-help.

Re-read that paragraph, replacing the word “Buddhism” with the word “humanism.” Reads pretty well, doesn’t it? So why didn’t Ambedkar go one step further, and stand by his original prescription that “You must destroy the Religion ...”? The best explanation I can come up with is simply that everyone makes mistakes.

The Luminous, Illuminating Writing of Richard Powers

by Gary Berg-Cross

Summer is traditionally a season when we have time to add books to our lives life. There are summer reading lists for children, gardeners, fans of detective stories, light fiction, science and more. I’ve even lists put together for atheists or freethinkers. Susan Jacoby had a list of 10 in WaPO a year ago for example. The Minnesota Athiests have a nice list too . Perhaps readers of this blog will suggest some that we can put together and post on a suitable outlet.

Most such lists are made up of non-fiction works, but summer includes time for fiction. Edd Doerr already pointed in this non-fiction direction with his recommendation of Philip Appleman's latest book of poetry "Perfidious Proverbs and Other Poems: A Satirical Look at the Bible".

I want to nominate a candidate writer and his body of work to the summer pile. (Or for any season really.) His name is Richard Powers already a recipient of a MacArthur ``genius'' grant “when I encountered him in the 90s. He quickly became my favorite American under 40. His fiction is a wonderful mixture of agile sentences and tangled plots that gallop across time gaps with piercing intelligence and thicken into brilliantly imaginative confrontations.

John Updike put it simple, “Nothing less than brilliant.” To me Powers simply writes earnest, deeply moving and intellectually stimulating novels on importance topics. The most wonderful insight emerge from suffering often in mundane settings. Here is an example from Powers's Operation Wandering Soul (a difficult plot to follow I found) where Linda Espera, a rehabilitation therapist on a ward of desperately ill children, uses fables (Pied Piper of Hamelin is one) to ease the children pain’s and provide a Peter Pan type of hope:

"Read-alouds, the oldest recorded remedy, older than the earliest folk salves: these are her only way to trick her patients into downing, in concentrated oral doses, the whole regimen of blessed, bourgeois, fictive closure they have missed. Tales are the only available inoculations against the life they keep vomiting up for want of antigens."

Of special interest is that he is a remarkably secular, scientific and intellectual writer. People deal with their real problems in natural ways. He describes societies and its technological side vividly and makes historical points clearly. For example:

“The port of Fayal, in the Azores, turned whale oil into wine. A trip to the Sandwich Islands sufficed to change percussion‐cap rifles into sandalwood. Everyone everywhere wanted what was only to be had somewhere else…Yet the man who moved these goods around the globe could not sell to Ohio. The prospect had no profit in it. The nine dollars that moved a ton of goods from Europe to Boston moved that same ton no more than thirty miles inland….. “But above all else, he dealt in risk. Profit equaled uncertainty times distance. The harder it was to haul a thing to where it humanly belonged, the more one made.”
From Gain

Powers has lots of fans. Margaret Atwood compares him to Herman Melville in his ability to paint a big, vivid picture while drawing analogies they illuminate fundamental tension arises from the relationship between some human construct/artifice/artifact and nature’s reality.
Like John Dewey Powers treats science as a construct with many similarities to art, music or poetry. They all arise from the human mind in human culture and serve as tools through which we can better understand the world. One problem they may also alienation us from nature.
There is no religious Deus Ex Machina, but there are wonders of the natural and artistic world, which are often fused. Starting with his 3rd novel it is easy to see themes from other works fused into an interesting whole. The title Gold Bug Variations suggests both Johann Sebastian Bach’s intricate musical composition The Goldberg Variations plays a key role in the book's intellectual structure, as does Edgar Allan Poe's short story mystery The Gold Bug which is about the solving of a puzzle.

In every work he leverages an extraordinary knowledge on a range of topics from history, art, music, science and technology (e.g. search for genetic coding, artificial intelligence and computer programming), mysteries of brains and language. When he gets on a subject be it music or art or Ai his language is luminous as sentence after sentence and paragraph upon paragraph has a quotable razor-sharp quality. Aphorism roll off his pen. For example. in his first novel we hear:

• "a man with moral cause stands outside the law"
• "foolishness went over better in public than gravity
• "Technology could feed dreams of progress or kill dreams of nostalgia."


In his 6th novel Gain he takes the reader through the fruits of American capitalism and industrialization of soap – What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and….

All are woven into sagas with sweep but yet have a foreground of characters you are interested. Here is a small, random sample of his prose from Gain talking about industrialization leading to the “Golden Age” of the robber barons.:


The country did itself over in steam. Steam: the world’s first new power source
since the dawn of time: so slight, so obvious, so long overlooked that no one could say whether the engine was discovered or invented. A separate condensing chamber and governor—twinned iron planets rising to dampen with greater drag the faster they spun—with these small changes, time took off. Life now headed, via a web of steamcut canals, deep into the interior. No later chaos would ever match this one for speed and violence: the first upheaval of advancement without advance warning. The backpressure of governed steam eructed in railroad. Rail threatened to render distance no more than a quaint abstraction. America at last split open its continental nut. Populace consolidated; the week vanished into hours. In turn, the energies released by this energy launched ocean steamships and set machine presses stamping out the tools needed to make their own replacements. Infant factories forged a self‐cleaning steel plow, which beat a reaper, which called out for vulcanized rubber, which set in inexorable motion a sewing machine that left half of Boston out of work, turning upon itself, poor against poorer.”


I picked up a copy of his first book Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance sometime in the 90s, probably because the intriguing photo on the cover and the flyleaf described it as an intellectual history of the 20th century. The novel has 3 intertwined story lines starting with the narrator’s, Peter Mays, encounter with a photograph, exhibited in a Detroit Institute of Arts. This is a real photo by German August Sander taken on the eve of WWI. It was fascinating to learned that Sander was a real person famous for epic photographic collection later called "Man of the Twentieth Century." The novel alternates between fiction chapters and others that are like reading a Harper’s article on a topic (such as the role of Henry Ford in the 20th century). As the novel progresses the reader is encounters discussions on the subjectivity of history that stand in contrast to the seemingly solid reality of the art of photography. There is usually a tension along the subjective-objective dimension in Power’s books. I liked the style and was instantly riveted to the story that has Mays embark on an exhaustive search for any information that will help interpret it and account for its extraordinary impact on him. The novel jumps back and forth between the early 20th century the 1980s and events in between. As the stories intersect, we start to understand photograph unveils the interconnectedness of individuals that is history and demonstrates that the individual's search for self through the past is likely to pose more questions than it answers.

"The realities of the past become true only when they intersect the present. Then, only, they become present, known. . . Only when grief sets in - grief, like sound, that varies with the temperature of the air - does the past in fact die."

One final thing to mention that grabbed me in reading Three Farmers was the amazing way he portrayed the male-female relations, particularly the quiet way he has fall in love. He has reporter’s eye for the behavior and a poet’s touch of the interior life. In his early books we hear that interior voice from the male perspective. His later works provide a women’s perspective on the behavior and the emotions. All his works feature an overflowing cup inventiveness laced with sweet, sad and fun moments that I hope others can enjoy as I have.

"We must be able to endure seeing the truth, but above all we should pass it on to our fellow men and to posterity whether it be favorable or unfavorable to us." Richard Powers

Assuring Accountability for the Egyptian Security Sector

Egyptian Police on Trial for Killing Protesters

Egypt’s revolutionary youth recognize the importance of reforming the security sector to the future of Egypt. Their targets have included the police, prisons, State Security, Ministry of Interior and the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Yet they have yet to develop an integrated view of the security sector. They do not yet have a clear vision on how the security sector must evolve to meet the needs of the Egyptian people and be accountable to them. Such a vision could be based on the concept of security sector reform (SSR), an idea that developed from the realization by many governments, academics, civil society actors and donors that strengthening law and order and security must be integrated with efforts to promote democratic development.

Attempts to Rein in the Security Sector

Prior to the January 25 revolution, anger against the police and state security had been mounting for decades. Under the emergency law, police abused human rights, tortured suspects and political opponents, and were free to engage in corruption. Some judges followed the dictates of the Ministry of Interior on important cases. Prisons held thousands of political prisoners. State Security was omnipresent, intimidating anyone who could potentially challenge the ruling party. Retired military leaders held major government positions and served as centrally appointed governors for many governorates. The military gained control of large portions of the economy through investments in key sectors. Civil society had no effective power to challenge abuses of these security sector institutions. The media had limited ability to analyze and report on them. The Parliament, captured by the ruling National Democratic Party, was too weak and disinterested to provide effective oversight.

Anger about the population’s treatment by security forces helped inspire activists to organize the first revolutionary demonstrations on Police Day, the day set aside to celebrate the police. Over the next 18 days, police killed perhaps 800 protestors and wounded thousands more. State Security facilitated attacks on protestors by thugs. Many police stations were burned, and prisons attacked. Several days into the demonstrations, the Ministry of Interior, hoping to turn the population against the protestors, removed police from the streets. An ensuing crime wave forced residents to form neighborhood protection committees, in recognition that State Security had turned against the population and that the police were not serving their needs. Since February, the number of police on the streets has not increased to its previous levels, and many police have been reluctant to take steps to control crime. Individual safety has deteriorated significantly.

The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces ordered President Mubarak to give up power on February 11. Protestors welcomed this step, declaring that they had complete trust in the military. In February and March, the military stationed soldiers, tanks and other equipment in sensitive areas. Hundreds of protestors were arrested and tried by military, rather than civilian courts. Some of those arrested complained of torture. Protestors attacked State Security Offices and retrieved files kept on political dissidents. Recognizing the rage of the population over mistreatment by State Security, the Minister of Interior announced the dissolution of the Agency, to be replaced by an organization called National Security, with the sole mandate of addressing terrorism.

Demonstrators and their families grew increasingly frustrated at delays in prosecuting those police identified as killing protestors. In early July, demonstrators were outraged when a judge ordered the release on bail of seven police accused of killing protestors in the town of Suez. Police then used tear gas and force against the family members of those killed, after some of them were excluded from a memorial service. Consequently, activists organized the second phase of the revolution, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to express their displeasure at the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces and the Prime Minister. The SCAF, in turn, vowed not to interfere with trials, in order to protect judicial independence. However, they recognized that justice must be expedited. In mid-July, the Ministry of Interior reshuffled about 4,000 police, including those held responsible for the killing of protestors and those believed to be corrupt. About 500 police generals and 150 senior officers were forced to take early retirement. The Minister declared this reshuffle the largest in Egypt’s history.

Security Sector Reform

Transformation of the security sector is based on the understanding that people need safety and security through services that are accountable to them and protect their human rights. It also recognizes that the state needs to be protected from attack beyond its frontiers, but that military and intelligence services must operate within the rule of law. Safety and security require not only competent police, but also effective prosecutors and independent judges committed to the rule of law. The aim is to reform security forces and services so they have clear and appropriate roles; adequate resources, training and incentives to achieve them; and operate in a manner that is both transparent and accountable to those they serve. Security sector reform also requires empowerment of civil society, the media and Parliament, so that they provide appropriate oversight and demand accountability. Where there are non-state security forces such as militias and thugs, SSR requires their removal or strict control. An effective security sector requires common expectations and effective coordination by elected leaders, security forces and services, civil society and the media. A good reference on security sector reform is “Safety, Security and Accessible Justice,” prepared by United Kingdom Department for International Development in July 2002, http://www.gsdrc.org/docs/open/SSAJ23.pdf.

In Egypt, the security sector requires reform desperately. With support from international donors, military leaders, police and prosecutors have been trained on human rights and anti-corruption. Such training is far from sufficient. The country requires a major transformation of the culture and institutions of the police and intelligence services, as well as clarification of the roles of the military and the prosecutors. In addition, judges need to be protected from interventions from security services and the executive branch. The military has had difficulty playing its temporary role of leading the government overtly. After elections, it will have an opportunity to focus more on national defense. However, it should remove itself from all aspects of governance, including withdrawing retired military leaders from high government positions. Ideally, it should also give up control of its economic investments, which enables it to operate without civilian control. The new Parliament must gain an understanding of what to expect from the security sector, how to use the budget as a tool to control it, and how to use its capacity to summon officials to provide close oversight. The media requires improved investigative journalism skills. Civil society organizations also need to be clear about what they expect from the security sector. They should organize a movement to promote the sector’s reform and sustain efforts to monitor its transformation.

Initiating Security Sector Reform in Egypt

With each institution requiring so much attention, it is difficult to determine where to start. Revolutionary youth and political party and civil society leaders are in a good position to initiate the process, although implementation will require close coordination with elected leaders and each service. All of these actors need to develop a deep understanding of security sector reform. To facilitate dialogue, Egyptian research institutes, with help from retired security sector officials, should undertake analyses of each service. Each analysis should focus on the service’s current and desired role, culture, leadership, information system, inspection, incentive structure and customer service. In addition, it should assess the service’s coordination, transparency, accountability, and commitment to the rule of law and human rights. Such studies will enable those outside the government to raise questions and identify issues that must be addressed by elected leaders and the services themselves. Further, these assessments will provide the basis for oversight by civil society, the media and Parliament as the process of security sector reform continues.

One methodology for a Security Sector Reform assessment is provided by USAID in its “Interagency Security Sector Assessment Framework,”October 2010, www.afcea.org/events/nps/11/documents/ISSAFFinal_001.pdf. Egyptian researchers have made some initial efforts to assess the security sector in the post-revolutionary period. (See“Egyptian Security Sector Reforms,” Mohamed Kadry Said and Noha Bakr, January 2011, http://arab-reform.net/IMG/pdf/Egypt_Security_Sector_Reforms-M-Said_and_Noha_Bakr_Eng.pdf) and “Reforming the Egyptian Security Services,” Tewfick Aclimandos, June 2011, http://www.arab-reform.net/IMG/pdf/Security_Sector_Reform_Tewfick_Aclimandos.pdf.

Security sector reform will not take place overnight in Egypt. However, common awareness of the objectives and required process will keep the issue alive for the many years that will be required for these transformations to occur. The benefits to Egyptian citizens and civilian leaders will be evident early on, while security sector personnel will gradually become more comfortable with their new roles.

Rick Gold

cross-posted in Post-Revolutionary Egypt

The Scandal of Anti-Intellectualism and Elites

by Gary Berg-Cross

Like a civil society, secular humanism and its kindred freethinking cousins require a certain base mixture of tolerance, curiosity, sophisticated of thinking, respect for truth and an intellectual environment. The hard truth of contemporary America is that we swim in a tide that seems less tolerant and appreciative of sophisticated thinking, such as required to understand systems of things.

I recently wrote about Transparency into Conservative Media Influence and the soft corruption of its methods. These combine threats, bribes, distractions and plain-out lying. It's unbalanced too. I expressed the hope that a larger group of people would take the opportunity to see how things work among the real power elite. For decades, Murdoch and his empire has cultivated the ability to influence elections on both sides of the ocean. As the dominatrix of News Corp, he ruled a layered suite of British papers. He could use the daily tabloid Sun to set the tone of electoral debate and echo it with a higher-minded Times, which was then backed by more aggressive voices coming from other parts of his empire. You get the tone from the way the American Propsect described the 1992 election:

"It was The Sun Wot Won It" declared the tabloid the day after the Labour party's fourth successive General Election defeat in 1992. The surprise result followed a sustained campaign of character assassination against its leader, Neil Kinnock. Pages and days of "Nightmare on Kinnock Street" propaganda culminated in an election day front page with his head on a lightbulb: "If Neil Kinnock wins today, would the last person to leave Britain please turn off the lights?" The British public decided that Kinnock wasn't prime-minister material.

Clearly, subsequent candidates and party leaders got the threatening message. On this side of the Atlantic the Clintons didn't need to think too hard about this, since it came at them at the speed a multiple scandals backed by conservative money. In Britain later pols pragmatically sought Murdock's support or at least a pass from his active opposition. And in a democracy this all comes at a chilling price, which should get our attention for the upcoming American election.

So maybe we can learn something from the unfolding scandal and take steps to change the environment through what Jefferson stressed - learning, which is essential in a Democracy. The media hasn't been helping to provide 2 things people need - knowledge of the facts but also an historical perspective so they can understand how things have developed and who did what and why. Both are necessary to hold politicians accountable for their past acts and current plans.

After the failures of the conservative policies leading to unnecessary wars, loss of rights, inequity and a financial meltdown at the end of 8 years, have we learned too little? The 2010 election suggests that Americans remain too receptive and unskeptial about well packaged, conservative messages. All too often we are lulled into passive acceptance of lies and manufactured explanations. A convenient history is invented and packed into a tale. If that is not enough to lull us, then pop culture & distracting video images fills up the cognitive space leaving little room for reflection.

Now a scandal has our attention. For a while get to peak behind the curtain and see some of those ugly power elites relations, but also some of the techniques that influence the populace.

I've previously mentioned the use of Framing of issues and the masking role of false dichotomies. One may add that unfactual facts used on both sides of the Atlantic, but another technique is to appeal of the common man. Tabloids and Fox appeal to the common man and identify various enemy to what they call the American Way of Business, I mean Life.

For conservartive convenience the enemy is an amalgamation of liberals, gays, secularists, intellectuals etc. These are the parts of society that are out of touch with the common person as well as common sense. You can hear it from Fox & newsreaders that lip sink the party line. It opines that traditional news organizations are out of touch with the real America. Rupert Murdoch provided this talking point, when he bought the Boston Herald in 1982, complaining that other media (not his) had too much "allegiance to the upper class" which has a liberal attitude. It's a bogus claim that a healthy dose of skepticism can challenge, but mainstream media seems unable to knock intellectual elitism claims down and point to the real troubling network of allegiances. Indeed the current scandal shows a bit of what really goes on with what Janine R. Wedel calls the Shadow Elite (Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market ).

These elite are a new breed of flexible political operators ("flexions") who may serve the roles of lobbyist, government insider or elected official but who converge into a single network such as seems to be the case with Murdock's network. Wedel sees them: "snaking through official and private organizations, creating a loop that is closed to democratic processes." We saw this during the Bush administration where a a core group of flexions provided a witch's brew of power to advance several cultural transformations that favored their networks:

1. government outsourcing
2. privatization
3. deregulation, and
4. "the embrace of 'truthiness.'"

By wearing several hats simultaneously (think tanker, retired military or government official, corporate representative, "objective" expert) flexions can gain extraordinary insider knowledge and influence in order to custom-tailor a version of the "truth" benefiting the highest bidder. Some bidders are media tycoons like Murdock, but there are many others. Versions of truth can then passed as memes to a media network like Fox. In this way, they not only "co-opt public policy agendas" but "craft policy with their benefactors' purposes in mind." We end up saying, "What's the matter with Kansas, and Wisconsin etc."




Rational analysis, skepticism and critical thinking are all means of challenging shadow elite gambits and for that reason they and the intellectual power they represent are enemies that must be marginalized by the Sharow Elite.

This enemies list of intellectuals becomes a convenient whipping boy for the failings of society and its anti-intellectual message has been a long time coming. You could hear a proto-version of this enemy story in the 50s when the John Birch Society equated intellectualism with disparate philosophies like atheism and communism. Both were undermining American/Christian values. Intellectualism and intellectuals had to be defeated. To some degree they have succeeded in shoving progressives and progressive policy off to the side.

In The Age of American Unreason Susan Jacoby tells the story of the advance of anti-intellectual in the past 4+ decades. It has resulted in a flight from reason by way of a right-turn descent into a realm that combines intellectual laziness, a lack or curiosity and reflexive skepticism. Jacoby also singles out a lack of knowledge and memory that allows an outlet like Fox to fabricate an alternate, bubble world. Together these created the current anti-rational landscape, personified by the rise of the ultra right wing and its sometime creature the Tea Party. They can get away with crazy claims (like birtherism) because rational challenges are discounted. It's an environment that enables the shadow elite with its power through connections and self serving agenda to rise and thrive.



But slowing and solving this sorry state may not be as simple as identifying a dues paying member of the elite like Rupert Murdock or Larry Summers. As Jacoby notes, the anti or non-rationality seen in our governance is not a simple result of a Machiavellian plot by current politicians. They are opportunists leveraging anti-intellectual tendencies now realized and embodied in a pretty passive populace. Too many of our ordinary citizens, like their elected representatives, live without the basic set intellectual tools needed for sound public decision-making.

We need to work on this steadily. It's not just rationality at elections that matter. It's an entire life of balanced life that is needed. An respect for a richly interlinked world of ideas, truth and facts that makes for an intellectual.

Confess to the Pope???

by Edd Doerr

On July 14 the New York Times, the Washington Post, and probably a zillion other media carried the story, as the Times headed it, "Irish Report Says Catholic Church's Sexual Abuse Scandal Has Persisted", dealing with the Irish government's just released Cloyne Report, the fourth report in just Ireland on the abuse scandals and coverups. Over the past year and a half I have accumulated a three inch thick file on the clergy abuse scandals in 16 (sic!) countries from just the New York Times and the National Catholic Reporter.

On the same day, July 14, USA Today ran a story with this head, "Teens to confess their sins to Pope Benedict XVI". Quite naturally I felt impelled to post this comment on the USA Today blog:

"Rather than having teens confess their sins to the pope, wouldn't it be better if the pope would confess the sins of the clergy and bishops (regarding the worldwide clergy sexual abuse scandals, etc) to the teens and ask their forgiveness? The Vatican needs repentance far more than the teens. Benedict gives new meaning to the word chutzpah (Latin: impudentia; German: Frechheit)."

Lest I be accused of being anti-Catholic, let me state clearly that I differentiate between the misbehavior, overreach, patriarchalism, anti-choice activism, school voucher promotion, and general highhandedness of the Vatican, the bishops and some conservative laity, on the one hand, and the moderation, progressivism, and decency of most Catholics, on the other. I applaud the progressivism of Catholic Democrats in Congress and state governments, the great contributions to religious liberty and church-state separation of people like the late Justice William Brennan and Rep Robert Drinan (who led the fight against a school prayer amendment in Congress in 1971), such organizations as Catholics for Choice, and such publications as the National Catholic Reporter.

The preceding, along with my admiration for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (on whose board I represented the AHA for over 30 years), the Interfaith Alliance, assorted Jewish groups, etc, represent a humanistic approach to the world in which we find ourselves.

Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) goes viral

by Gary Berg-Cross

I heard on NPR this morning that a manifestation of the church of the flying spaghetti monster (FSM) has surfaced in Austria. Well at least the concept of this Church made popular by Richard Dawkins has an adherent who worships that god-like idea by wearing a pasta strainer on his head. His name is Niko Alm and he adopted FSM pose to test the recent Austrian law that allows head coverings to be used in official documents, like drivers licenses, for religious reasons.

The FSM, concept was used satirically in response to the Kansas School Board's irratonality over evolution education. Later it was popularized in Dawkins book The God Delusion as an illustration of how religious beliefs are based on irrational thought. What is the evidence for the existence of invisible beings controlling our world and judging our behavior? None for FSM and none for Yahweh either.

Niko, a self-proclaimed atheist, built on Dawkins’ construct by applying for a new driver's license wearing the strainer as "religious headgear. " He claimed to be a "pastafarian" from that Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Members in the Church firmly believe in the existence of a flying omnipotent Spaghetti Monster – one that can even hide its existence from us. The “you can’t prove I don’t exist” claims for such a flying monster fits Dawkins' dictum about irrational claims:

"To claim a supernatural explanation of something is not to explain it at all and, even worse, to rule out any possibility of its ever being explained. Why do I say that? Because anything ‘supernatural’ must by definition beyond the reach of a natural explanation. It must be beyond the reach of science and the well-established, tried and tested scientific method."

After a long 3 year fight Niko won the right to get his picture taken with a pasta strainer on his head.

Some people were put out by Niko’s success. It seems like an irrational thing to do and isn’t the whole point of being an atheist is the celebration of being all logical and reasonable? Well yes, and perhaps Niko could have stuck to being an atheist as defined by John Bucha’s definition that “An Atheist Is A Man With No Invisible Means Of Support.”

But Niko makes a reasonable point lifting up a mirror so others can see how foolish unreasonable claims are. Doesn't matter if you can claim to be a believer in the FSM or Thor or Yahweh. As Dawkins said “Nobody even thinks to calls themselves atheist, just as nobody thinks to calls themselves athorist now.”

I wonder if we can expect there to be a surge of Athorists next.

Tea Party vs Public schools

by Edd Doerr

While the Tea Party movement is an aglomeration of a great many separate groups waving the Tea Party banner, it has many common themes. One theme that is becoming more visible is an antipathy and hostility toward public education. This shines through in the nationwide drive by Republican governors and state legislators, not to mention GOP members of Congress, to slash public school budgets and do all possible to divert public funds to private, mainly conservative church-related, schools through the mechanisms of vouchers or tax credits.

Writing in the Thinkprogress blog on 7/11/11, Zaid Jilani calls attention to the Independence Hall Tea Party Association, which operates a major PAC in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware and has been part of the drive to pass private school vouchers, an issue that has convulsed the Keystone State for months. Teri Adams, president of the outfit, has said that "public schools should go away". She said that their "ultimate goal is to shut down public schools and have private schools only, eventually returning responsibility for payment to parents and private charities. It's going to happen piecemeal and not overnight."

Adams criticized current voucher plans because they "discriminate" against the wealthy and seek only to help poor kids in inner cities.

To show how phony the Tea Party movement is, with its presumed linkage to the country's founders, we need only look to history, real history, not the fanciful nonsense of Glenn Beck or David Barton.

In May of 1785 Congress passed the Land Ordinance to divide the Northwest Territory (what became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin) into 36 square mile "townships", each containing 36 sections of one square mile. About 3% of the land in each township was to be used to support public education. From that time until now the overwheming majority of Americans have supported public education. The annual Gallup/Phi Delta Kappa polls for the last 40 years have backed this up, not to mention the more than two dozen referenda since 1967 that have defeated all attempts to divert public funds to nonpublic schools by superlandslide margins, even in very conservative states like Utah.

So it is not a stretch to label Tea Party efforts to weaken or wreck public education as "un American".

Religious References in Presidential Oaths

By Mathew Goldstein (Explicit Atheist)

Claims that every president has appended "so help me God" to his presidential oath office can be found in various publications and on the Internet.  One of the earliest such claims appears in The Pittsburgh Press, Jan. 20, 1937 where the one exception is said to be George Washington during his first inauguration.  The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies web site, which is administered by the Senate Rules Committee, features a "so help me God" video which says that all presidents have appended this phrase.  The National Conference on Citizenship, chartered by Congress since 1953 (it is one of 94 organizations so chartered), publishes a  History of the Oath of Office web page that says "Although the U.S. Constitution does not include the words, “So help me God,” George Washington, upon taking the Oath of Office, added it and every President since has said it".  Many more publications, while not saying that all presidents appended this phrase, claim that George Washington did during his first inauguration and that other presidents, following that precedent, have done the same.  But is this true?

A film clip from Paramount Sound News that records Herbert Hoover's 1929 inaugural oath recitation demonstrates he did not append this monotheistic phrase and was not prompted to do so by the Chief Justice.  So claims that every president did so are not only unsupported, as I will show below, but they are positively disproved.

Prior to 1854 there appears to be no record of any assertions that any president appended the phrase "so help me God" to their inaugural oath of office.  None, zip, nil, zero.  You heard me right, the evidence that this occurred is an empty void, it doesn't exist.

The earliest published claim that any president added that phrase to his presidential oath which I am currently aware of appears in "The republican court; or, American society in the days of Washington" by Rufus Wilmot Griswold.  The Reverend Griswold wrote that George Washington said "with fervor, his eyes closed, that his whole soul might be absorbed in the supplication, "so help me God!".  Although Griswold claims to have obtained his information about the inauguration from Washington Irving, who Griswold claims witnessed the inauguration, this "eyes closed" description of George Washington appears to be an entirely fictional embellishment.  Washington Irving was 6 years old at the time of the inauguration and Griswold places Irving too far away from the balcony to reliably see such details or even reliably hear what was said. Friends of Griswold knew him as a consummate liar and coined the phrase "Is that a Griswold or a fact?". Washington Irving is not known to have ever claimed that he heard the oath recitation when he was six years old.

This was followed by Life of George Washington, by Washington Irving,  Life and Times of Washington, by John Frederick Schroeder (completed by R.W. Griswold), and Memoirs of Washington, by Caroline Matilda Kirkland, all published in 1857.  Irving was a lawyer and author, Schroeder was an Episcopalian minister, and Kirkland was a writer, and all four had social ties to each other.  None were historians, and none of these authors are known to have done serious research for their books.  The editor of the  Memoir of the life of Eliza S. M. Quincy, ed. E S Quincy, Boston [Printed by J. Wilson] 1861, complains in a footnote at the bottom of page 52 that "The previous pages, which describe the entrance and inauguration of Washington, were sent to Mr. Irving, in 1856, at his request, by the Editor, and are inserted in his "Life of Washington," vol iv. pp. 510, 513, 514, but without reference to their source."  Also, according to The Religious Beliefs of Our Presidents, by Franklin Steiner, 1936, most of Washington Irving's biography of George Washington is copied from the biography written by historian Sparks, and Irving did little if any original research for his popular biography of George Washington. Similarly, in his article on Washington in the Dictionary of American Biography (1936), J C Fitzpatrick wrote, "Washington Irving, Life of GW (5 vols., 1855-1859) is satisfactory from most viewpoints, though its reliance on [Jared] Sparks lessens the confidence it would otherwise command."

There is one contemporaneous, first hand, eyewitness account of George Washington's first inauguration that quotes the entire oath recitation and describes what happened immediately thereafter. It is the letter of the French consul, Comte de Moustier, April 30, 1789, written in french to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of France. No shmG. So the overall weight of the overall available evidence favors the conclusion that George Washington did not say shmG. Washington Irving's more than six decades after the fact, and non-sourced, assertion otherwise in his book is counter-evidenced by this letter.

Other books and articles subsequent to 1854 continue to not depict George Washington appending so help me God. Examples include  Abridgment of the Debates of Congress from 1789 to 1856, Volume I, by Thomas Hart Benton, and Joseph Gales and William Winston Seaton and John C Rives.   Memoir of the life of Eliza S. M. Quincy, ed. E S Quincy 1861. Reminiscences of an Old New Yorker, by William A. Duer, 1867. 

However, the assertion that George Washington added this monotheistic codicil to his oath of office is widely repeated.  Examples include "Mount Vernon and its associations: by Benson John Lossing, 1859.  "The reconstruction of the government of the United States of America: a Democratic empire advocated" by William B. Wedgwood, 1861.  "Washington and the American republic ..."  by Benson John Lossing, c1870.  "Our first century: being a popular descriptive portraiture of the one hundred great and memorable events of perpetual interest in the history of our country" by Richard Miller Devens, 1876.  "Our country. A household history for all readers" by Benson John Lossing, With illustrations by Felix O. C. Darley, 1877. "Harper's popular cyclopaedia of United States history from the aboriginal period to 1876" by Benson John Lossing, 1881.  Chapter VIII of the Centennial Anniversary of Washington's Inauguration. Proceedings in the First Parish Meeting House at Groton, Massachusetts, titled "Inaugural Ceremonies of President Washington" by the Rev. Frank C Whitney.  The Century Magazine, volume 37, issue 6, April 1889, "The Inauguration of Washington", by Clarence Winthrop Bowen.  "The story of the city of New York,..."  by Charles Burr Todd, 1890.  "The History of the Centennial Celebration of the Inauguration of George Washington, by Clarence W. Bowen 1892.  The Washington Post, March 4, 1893 says that George Washington "murmured" shmG during his first inauguration.  "The American metropolis, from Knickerbocker days to the present time: New York City life in all its various phases" by Frank Moss, 1897.

The Macon Daily Telegraph, February 22, 1861, and various other sources, reveal that the phrase "so help me God" was appended to the Oath of Office by the President of the Confederate States (Jefferson Davis).  The eyewitness accounts of Abraham Lincoln's March 1861 inauguration suggest that he did not append this phrase to his oath of office. 

"So help me God" was appended in 1862 to a revised federal oath of office.  This is a different oath from the presidential oath office that is specified in the constitution. The Civil War-era members of Congress were intent on using this new "Ironclad oath" to keep Confederate loyalists out of the government. This Ironclad oath was replaced in 1884 by Congress.

Noah Brooks, a political confident of Lincoln, author, and a journalist for the Sacramento Daily Union, claimed that Lincoln added shmG at his 2nd Inauguration in an March 4, 1865 article published by the Sacramento Daily Union.  However, the Introduction of the book "Lincoln Observed: Civil War Dispatches of Noah Brooks" edited by Michael Burlingame, 1998, has the following commentary: 'When he wrote about Lincoln's religion, Brooks dubiously ascribed his own Christian piety to the sixteenth president. Shortly after the assassination, Brooks told a clergyman: "I am glad now that I never hesitated, when proper occasion offered, to talk with him upon religious matters, for I think that the best evidences of his belief in Christ are those which I derived in free and easy conversations with him. You know I had an intimate acquaintance with him, which was not hampered or embarrassed by any official or business relations, nor did he have the same undefined reluctance which a man in his position would have had in talking upon religious matters, if I had been a clergyman." Brooks's able biographer, however, thinks it "extremely doubtful" that Lincoln "talked openly to anybody about Christ's atonement for man's sins."'  In "Christ the King" by Reverend James Mitchell Foster, 1894 we find the following observation about Lincoln's inaugurations:

Every President, after George Washington and before RB Hayes, took the presidential oath without an appeal to God, omitting the very essence of the oath. Rev. A. M. Milligan, D.D., wrote Abraham Lincoln before his inaugural in 1861, and also before his second inaugural in 1865, asking him, in deference to the consciences of the Christian people of the land, to take the presidential oath in the name of God. He replied both times that God's name was not in the Constitution, and he could not depart from the letter of that instrument. 

  The response from Lincoln to the first letter from Rev. A. M. Milligan is quoted in  Reformation Principles Stated and Applied,  by James Mitchell Foster, 1890, F.H. Revell, Chicago and New York, page 234-5  as follows: 'Rev. A. M. Milligan, D. D., of Pittsburgh, wrote President Lincoln, in 1861, asking if he would not take the Presidential oath in the name of God. He replied: "The relations between the Northern and Southern States are so strained I would not dare violate the letter of the Constitution. The name of God is not in that instrument."'  Other newspapers that quoted the oath recitation indicated that Lincoln did not append "so help me God" to his oath during his second inauguration.

The next mention of any president adding these four words to the oath is Chester Arthur in 1881.  Chester Arthur would have appended shmG to his oath of office as Vice President that same year (President Garfield was shot and died the year he was elected) as a result of the Civil War modification to the federal oath for executive office holders 19 years earlier.

In 1885, one newspaper, Boston Investigator, March 25, 1885, published commentary accusing Grover Cleveland of "violating the constitution" by adding the words "So help me God" (note: Contrary to this commentary, the real constitutional issue is arguably what the Chief Justice says when leading the oath recitation, not what the president says after the official oath recitation is completed).  But other newspapers did not report that he had, in fact, appended those four words.  Nor is Cleveland quoted appending those four words eight years later in 1893 during his second inauguration. 

There are some reports that Theodore Roosevelt appended this phrase in 1905, but other reports indicate that he did not.  There are similarly contradictory reports about Taft in 1909 and Harding in 1921. Calvin Coolidge appended shmG in 1923. Chief Justice Taft prompted for this four word phrase during Calvin Coolidge's 1925 inauguration, but there are contradictory reports about whether Coolidge responded by repeating that phrase or just responded "I do".

Starting in 1933, all presidents have included this monotheistic codicil to their oath of office, almost always, if not always, at the prompting of the Chief Justice, even though these four words do not appear in the legal oath as it was inscribed in the U.S. constitution.  This raises a question:  Is it legal for government officials who are leading oath recitations to simply add, on their own initiative, a religious codicil of their own choice to governmental oath recitations? Generally speaking, the answer to this question clearly must be no, but apparently there has been a double-standard exception here for the Chief Justice.  A federal Court of Appeals denied Michael Newdow standing to challenge the legality of the Chief Justice doing this when leading presidential inauguration oath recitations and the Supreme Court refused to consider the complaint against this extra-legal modification of the presidential oath of office in May of this year.

Could some judges be influenced by this distorted "history" that claims all presidents have appended 'so help me God' to their oath office?  Chief Justice Rehnquist, writing for the majority in  ELK GROVE UNIFIED SCHOOL DIST. V. NEWDOW, and Justice Scalia's dissent in  McCREARY COUNTY, KENTUCKY, et al., PETITIONERS v. AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION OF KENTUCKY et al., both mistakenly endorsed as a historical fact this counter-evidenced legend that George Washington appended "so help me God' during the first presidential oath of office.

If you are interested in challenging purveyors of this inaccurate history regarding George Washington and every subsequent president then you can write to the National Council of Citizenship (NCoC) and ask them to drop these non-evidenced, so called "historical" and "factual", assertions.  You can write to David B. Smith, Executive Director, and Kristen Cambell, Director, Programs and Media on Citizenship with a carbon copy to the Office Manager, Ian H Dubin.  The corresponding email addresses are dsmith@ncoc.net, kcambell@ncoc.net, and idubin@ncoc.net.  For physical address and telephone number visit their NCoC web site. Tell them to either cite contemporaneous eyewitness accounts for George Washington and all the other presidents or stop asserting this happened given that there is no such evidence.

Follow up: The NCoC Office Manager sent me an email citing the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies (JCCIC) as claiming that George Washington added these four words and "this added phrase has been repeated since". However, the JCCIC also has no evidence that every president, or George Washington, said those four words, so NCoC citing JCCIC is irrelevant, circular finger pointing, that fails to deliver any evidence to support these assertions. In your emails, letters, and/or telephone calls to NCoC, please insist that the NCoC ask the JCCIC for the evidence. Also, provide NCoC with this link to the Jan. 9, 2009 USA Today article by C.L. Grossman that quotes the historical editor for the U.S. Senate Historical Office acknowledging that there is insufficient evidence that any 18th century or early 19th century president included this monotheistic codicil: No proof Washington said 'so help me God' -- will Obama? If you receive a noteworthy response from the NCoC then please share it with us.

For more details see: So help me God in presidential oaths.