Seeking order in the world

The area that is supposed to be a dining nook in the kitchen of my studio apartment is where I have my desk, printer, and file cabinet. I figured since I usually eat at my desk while web-surfing (a bad habit, I know), why bother wasting the space with a table that will just become a de facto desk.

Yesterday I spent hours organizing my kitchen-office. Today there is more clear space on my desk than I think I've seen since moving a year and a half ago. My tea cupboard has been cleaned out of old spices and teas. The counters are less cluttered with old bottles of cough syrup and Chinese patent herbs dumped in the trash. The piles on my desk have been filed. The books stacked on top of my printer have been returned to their shelves. File bins on and next to my desk filled with various sorts of stuff have been sorted and material that long ago became irrelevant has been recycled. I was in one of those grooves where orderliness became obsession and by 2 am I had to convince myself that sleeping was more important than sifting through anymore paperboard file folders.

My own little world has felt so out of order the last several months with illness and pain. I like things to be tidy. To look pretty. But for the most part, I've felt too tired to bother. I still feel tired, but I suppose my need to control something overwhelmed my fatigue. Gave me something to think about other than the pain in my back that is starting to feel similiar to that horrible pain I lived with for most of September, suggesting that the latest round of antibiotics hasn't killed whatever infection has been raging in my kidneys and urinary tract and that something is more wrong than we thought.

The big world has felt so out of order as well. I was numb late Tuesday night and woke up depressed on Wednesday. People are going to die because Bush has been reelected. And not just even more than the 100,000 Iraqis we've already killed, but people here in America. Almost two years ago when the president refused to help states like Oregon that could no longer afford to maintain current funding of Medicaid, people died when their prescription drug coverage was cut. Literally. With looming budget deficits, the president's promise to make permanent his tax cut, and the coming retirement of the baby boomers, I'm truly afraid of what will happen to the already inadequate social services in this country.

"...I struggle to get through the day," said Lakshmi Chaudhry of Alternet.org, "...watch the CNN blowhards natter on about "unity"; read the inevitable lefty post-mortems that crowd my e-mail inbox.

They talk about everything except the obvious: It hurts! All this ink spilt on the sell-out Democratic Party, the incompetent media, and the future of a divided nation and not a word about the emotional reality of loss...

...All the blame-mongering in the world can't erase the pain or, more importantly, the fear. My mind can handle the body blow of defeat, but it's the slow, seeping chill of dread that is harder to fend off."

The papers were replete with stories about the shock liberals and progressives are feeling. Tina Brown in the Washington Post said that Tuesday night "was the night when the cliche of two Americas stopped being only a concept and was finally internalized by the side that lost." The New York Times had a story about the despair of the Left Coast (where I had to smile at the reference to Portland as the "People's Republic of Portland"), as well as one about the disconsolation of New Yorkers. To add insult to injury, John Edwards' wife, Elizabeth, was diagnosed with breast cancer the day they conceeded the election.

And of course, there was a lot of discussion about the role of faith and moral values. How gay marriage really did mobilize religious conservatives. Garry Wills saw Tuesday as the "the day the enlightenment went out." Faith versus Reason. Lots of analyses examining what "people of faith" believe and think. Lots of hand-wringing (or gloating, as the case may be) that Democrats must learn to understand how those Baptists in Ohio or Florida tick. "But people aren't going to hear what we say until they know that we don't approach them as Margaret Mead would an anthropological experiment," said Rahm Emmanuel, a former Clinton aide.

I grew up Baptist. Now that I'm a Byzantine Catholic, I'm more out of the loop than I used to be, though I attend a parish of Catholics who are pretty much just as conservative politically. I know that conservative Christians are not bad people. They are some of the most generous, kind people I know. They are not stupid but rigorously follow a certain logic about how the world works and are suspicious of anyone outside of their world view who offer evidence to the contrary of it.

Garry Wills was right that in some ways, Tuesday was William Jennings Bryan's revenge. You may remember him as the ignoramus at the Scopes trial of 1925 defending the six day creation story in the Bible. The battle between Fundamentalism and Modernism was supposedly won by the Modernists during the Monkey Trial. Yet, they clearly did not win the war. Fundamentalists retreated from politics after 1925, but they came back with a vengence after Roe v. Wade. And they've been winning the battles every since.

However, what Wills and most people forget is that Jennings was known as "the Great Commoner." His speech accepting the Democratic party's nomination in 1896 decried the imposition of the gold standard, which he believed would hurt the working man. I get goosebumps whenever I think of his last line: "You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold." Democrats would do well to read the whole speech. As Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson, Bryan resigned in 1915 rather than go against his pacifist beliefs and declare war on Germany. When the Great War was over, Bryan was horrified by the enormous loss of life.

“...The world is just emerging from the bloodiest war known to history; thirty millions of human beings lost their lives directly or indirectly because of the war. . . This war cannot be blamed upon ignorance. . .the battleships, the dreadnaughts. . . were built by college graduates. . . scientists mixed the poisonous gases and manufactured liquid fire. Intellect guided the nations, and learning without heart made war so hellish that civilization itself was about to commit suicide.” (William Jennings Bryan, "Darwin's Christ was Nobody" in Williard B. Gatewood, Jr., ed., Controversy in the Twenties: Fundamentalism, Modernism, and Evolution (Nashville: Vanderbilt, 1969), 137.)

Like Bryan, evangelicals fear the excesses of modernity. A pastor in one of the many "moral values" analyses yesterday stated, "The Democratic Party stands for, by and large, the dismantling of marriage as we've known it as a civilization." Yet, clearly we cannot say that evangelicals want to retreat from modernity as their desire to preserve civilization is very much in line with modernity and the Enlightenment. And frankly, that deep need to preserve civilization is not a bad thing. Bryan's horror at the staggering loss of life that came with modernity was perfectly reasonable. And while I strongly disagree with their myopic approach, the fear of religious conservatives about the cost to human life (abortion) in what they see as the excesses of individual morality does have merit.

Evangelical scholar George Marsden has argued that what has really been at the heart of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversies has been two ways of approaching science. Fundamentalists favored a Baconian ideal of classification. The study of theology, as well as nature is about classifying accurate, literal observations and not about shaping theoretical, uncertain hypotheses. Modernist, however, tend toward a more Cartesian ideal which starts with a hypothesis and then gathers evidence to support (or refute) that hypothesis.

For the evangelicals I grew up with, you start with what is already established fact, like say, the Bible, and then see how nature supports that fact. Anyone who challenges already established fact is willfully chosing not to follow logic. And if you chose to live outside of established fact, then civilization as we know it is in danger.

Of course, it's not always quite that clean. Evangelicals are completely dishonest when they refuse to acknowledge that the Bible is not established fact but their own constructed version of reality and can be just as guilty of creating their own hypotheses and gathering evidence to prove them. Particularly the more "neo-evangelicals" who broke away from their fundamentalist brethern in the 1950s to make greater gains in evangelization. What they did was create a parallel culture to compete with secular culture that became painfully obvious on Tuesday. A parallel culture that says there is another approach to dealing with the angst of modernity than secularism.

That other part of the Bryan equation that hasn't been discussed is economics. Exit polls showed that Tuesday's vote was also a class vote. Voters in Ohio and Florida who made less than $30,000 voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. As we see in the speech mentioned above, Bryan was also horrified at the excesses of capitalism. Not capitalism itself, mind you.

"We say to you that you have made the definition of a business too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer...the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, who begins in spring and toils all summer, and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the Board of Trade and bets upon the price of grain..."

So many lefties over the last few months and certainly in the last few days have decried the fear mongering of the Bush administration and quite rightly. Terrorism appears to be a worry for those rich enough to not have to worry about how to pay for their medication or rent. BUT, that doesn't mean there isn't real, legitimate fear out there about whatever world postmodernity is dumping us in. And not just on the right, as we lefties are afraid of a hell of a lot right now too. And while this will probably sound like a call for one big Oprah show, we must begin talking about what we are afraid of and listening to what the other side is afraid of instead of decrying the end of the Enlightenment and acting like William Jennings Bryan was some sort of demon come back to haunt secular modernity, when in actuality he may very well be its patron saint.

Ah, okay. Now my desk, kitchen counters and my brain are decluttered. Even if it may not bring much order to the world, it does make it easier to breathe in the chaos.