No Port, No Storm, No Balm in Gilead: Science, Reason and The Enlightenment According to Richard Dawkins

Books Discussed:

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam
Mark Hulsether, Building a Protestant Left
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

Richard Dawkins’ best selling The God Delusion is a jeremiad against religion in general, one that seems particularly appealing to people of secular, liberal-left humanistic persuasion. This essay suggests that this is a great mistake, and examines the historical and philosophical sources of this error.
I know of two excellent reviews of Dawkins book, one by H. Allen Orr in The New York Review of Books, Jan 11, 2007, and one by Marilynne Robinson in Harper’s Magazine, Oct 23, 2006. I will make reference to them below.

Fundamental Arguments of The God Delusion.

Rarely is a non-fiction, serious book as easy to summarize as this one:

• Religion is a very bad thing.
• Religion is the source of most if not all of the evil in the world.
• The traditional proofs of the existence of God prove no such thing.
• The claim that believing in God makes you a better person is false.
• The differences between religious traditions are matters of hair-splitting and not worthy of attention by enlightened people.
• All trustworthy, valuable knowledge comes through science. Religion, standing outside of science, is therefore useless in helping us achieve any sort of true knowledge.

Let me lay out a summary of my critique of these theses:

Religion as a very bad thing.
This is such an enormously general value judgment as to be unworthy of serious consideration. The compelling nature of certain religious impulses will be flushed out below.

Religion as the source of most if not all of the evil in the world.
The evidence for this is rather weak, and the counter-evidence rather compelling. The history of the 20th century, in particular, argues for the falseness, even callousness, of this assertion.

The traditional proofs of the existence of God prove no such thing.
I grant the validity of this claim, which is hardly news. The implications for the other, more important issues are questionable, as I will attempt to show.

Believing in God does not make you a better person.
This is another almost wild generalization. Dawkins’ evidence is deeply flawed and fully anecdotal. Orr argues that Dawkins fails to see how profoundly the notion of ‘being a better person’ is deeply entangled with the western religious tradition; this may be correct, but I’m not sure we need to go that far in order to reject this claim.

The differences between religious traditions are matters of hair-splitting, not worthy of attention by enlightened people.
This claim is empirically false. I describe what I hope is a clear counter-example below.

All genuine knowledge comes through science. Since religion is not science, it is cannot provide such knowledge.
This is Dawkins’ most important claim, one that I believe is radically and profoundly false. I argue this below on philosophical grounds. Without the slightest intent to diminish the importance of science, or in any sense argue against the truth and importance of evolutionary biology, I will argue that Dawkins notion of knowledge is so narrow that the force and meaning of not only religion but many disciplines and cultural productions of humanity would be summarily dismissed if this claim were accepted.

Despite my negative assessment of this book, I believe that the emphatic popularity with which it has been received (as of this writing, The God Delusion has been on The New York Times’ Best Seller list for 30 consecutive weeks) reveals critical insights into our intellectual and political culture. It seems that we are unable to discuss real, concrete religious belief, thought, and action without resorting to caricature and polemical simplifications. We seem unable, in particular, to talk intelligently about Christianity; we are unable make sense of the growing religiosity of our society, and of other societies (in particular Islamic ones), except by seeing this development as a proto-fascist phenomena, created by brainwashing capitalists and mullahs to manipulate their populations. By describing what is defective and wrong-headed in The God Delusion, I hope to suggest other ways of thinking about these things that are more intellectually and politically useful.

Can I get a definition here?
or, Bewitchment by Language: The idea that there is such a thing as Religion in General is fallacious

The number of different movements or social groupings that are in common usage referred to as “religions” are legion: from the sadistic cruelty of Fred Phelps’ ‘ministry’ to the passionate reform movement led by Martin Luther King, from the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi (1626-76) to the equally bizarre Aimee Semple McPherson, and from the left wing Catholic quasi-mysticism of Dennis Kucinich to the God Wants You to be Wealthy and Vote Republican churches, the roll call of the saintly, villainous, deranged, eccentric and courageous in ‘religion’ is endless.

I challenge the reader to state what all of the astonishing varieties of human behavior and belief that are termed “religious” have in common. I do not believe there is anything they have in common. The automatic assumption we make when we presume to speak of “religion,” namely there is some definable thing with that name, shows that we easily fall into what Wittgenstein called “bewitchment by language”—that is, if we have a noun, there must be a thing which it designates. But this noun, religion, is so elastic as to be unhelpful in describing, much less comprehending, any particular form of it.

Most of the time, when people in the west talk of religion, they are talking about Christianity. But even here we have problems. Note that although five of the six religionists I named above were Christians, it still is quite reasonable to ask if they had anything in common. Perhaps they do all proclaim allegiance to some being, real or mythic, known as Jesus Christ; but surely it is plausible to suggest that what we have here is five different beings sharing the same name.

Dawkins Decks Aristotle

The one major claim in The God Delusion that seems straightforwardly correct is the refutation, or dismissal, of the traditional arguments for the existence of God. As Orr demonstrates, there is very little new here. Dawkins’ assertions are largely repetitions of arguments made roughly a century ago by another British thinker, Bertrand Russell. Lord Russell was also uninterested in religion as it was actually practiced, and though he condescended to those of lesser intellect who took Christianity seriously, he seems a model of civility compared to Dawkins’ monotonously mocking, indignant tone and snide belligerence. I refer the reader who is interested in these arguments for God’s existence, and in the comparison to Russell, to Orr’s excellent review. I decline to discuss these “philosophical” issues at length, though I grant that they are substantially correct, because this entire anti-theological tradition from Russell to Dawkins is so obtusely unaware that ‘proofs’ of the ‘existence’ of ‘God’ have next to nothing to do with actual modern Christian belief. Let me put this another way: nothing in the world changes because of, or is affected by, the “truth” or “falsity” of these exercises in abstract thought. Actual human belief and action is untouched [My quotes around words such as 'proof', "God," "truth," etc, are meant to indicate that I am dubious that we know what we mean when we use these words in this context].

It is very strange, therefore, for Dawkins to believe that people might join or leave the church based on their agreement or disagreement with Aristotle’s notion that a ‘Prime Mover’ is necessary to explain the world. Dawkins does believe this, or says that he does: he stresses he is out to convert people from monotheism to atheism. Dawkins can think this way because he is utterly intellectually isolated from religion as it actually functions in the lives of people in our society. He assumes that what goes on in his head about religion is more interesting and important than the lived experience, thoughts, and feelings of the people for whom religion is real, alive, and compelling. In other words, his thoughts about his subject are more important than actual knowledge of his subject, or the subject itself.

Theological logic-chopping, Pacifism, and World War

According to Dawkins, differences between different types of monotheism are not worthy of note, and are in fact a sort of foolishness: “Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs: such has also been the way of theology” [p.33]. And then: “…All three Abrahamic religions can be treated as indistinguishable” [p.37]. Let me give one interesting counterexample, from Mark Hulsether’s “Building a Protestant left.” Staring in 1941, the journal Christianity in Crisis disputed theology and politics with The Christian Century, a somewhat older liberal Protestant periodical. The Christian Century preached the Social Gospel, a progressive reformist and pacifist creed that emphasized the importance of carrying on Jesus’ ministry to the poor and oppressed. One would not even know such a form of ‘monotheism’ exists from reading Dawkins. Christianity and Crisis was founded by Reinhold Neibuhr and colleagues, splitting from the Century over several issues, especially whether to enter World War II against the Axis powers. To both sides in this argument, theology and politics were intertwined. The hair splitting here, then, was whether to fight Hitler or not. Similarly, the history of religion schism often turns on very real world issues: the struggles between the Catholic Church, Martin Luther, and John Calvin centered on issues of monarchy, aristocracy, freedom of thought, and democracy. These are surely issues at the center of the humanistic tradition. Dawkins’ ultra-simplification of the entire breadth of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religion into some indistinguishable foolish thing called monotheism shows, I think, the ahistorical superficiality of his so-called humanism.

The Repressed Returns – Scientific Knowledge, Human Being, and Self-Knowledge

At the other end of the philosophical spectrum from the abstract discussions of supernatural beings and creation myths, are questions about human identity, about what the self is, about how people decide what is real and what is important and what is good, and how they should live their lives. It is in this context that I challenge the most important claim Dawkins makes, about science being the fundamental source of human knowledge. Do we know who we are through neurochemistry? Are the various political and ethical spins put on the notion of “survival of the fittest” actual knowledge, or polemical exercises? The most important thing – the most important kind of knowledge – for most of us – is the sense of who we are, what goes on in our minds and hearts as we make our way through our lives, discover what we care about, choose (or are compelled to choose) our vocation, decide who to live with, and where, struggle to learn how to make ourselves happy, and how to love and be loved. How do we know these things? How do we know who we are, and what we should focus on while we live in this world? The answers to these questions are, of course, notoriously controversial. But how much does science, physics, chemistry, biology, neurology, electrical engineering, primatology, aeronautics, or meteorology, help us in these critical human concerns?

Some people would answer “quite a lot.” One sees repeated articles in places like The New York Times Magazine or its Book Review claiming to establish scientific bases for ethical and political decisions. For example, the argument that altruism is an evolutionary enhancement in the human species, allowing complex societies and civilizations to develop, based on the cooperative instincts that altruism enables. There are many versions of themes like this, and of course their opposite, which is that humans, “like all animals,” are naturally selfish and naturally often brutal, and that therefore ethical codes like “love thy neighbor as thyself” are utopian and doomed to fail. It seems to me that if one knows what science is – a discipline involving repeatable experiments, measurable data, peer review, and dispassionate observation – it becomes clear that these arguments are metaphorical extensions of science into the realm of ethics and politics. Though the people making these arguments are often well-intentioned, they fail to see that this sort of argument is of the same nature as the more pernicious doctrines of social Darwinism and eugenics. Robinson is particularly eloquent on this point, in her review of Dawkins, and even more in chapter 1, “Darwinism,” in The Death of Adam.

In fact, where most of us look, consciously or not, for answers to life’s big questions is various forms of fictional and artistic creations, in novels, poetry, theatre, movies, psychology, therapy, music, philosophy, and religion. Of all these cultural forms only psychology pretends, in my view unsuccessfully, to be a science. This does not mean that any of these central human activities are useless or foolish or superstitious or irrational, or that the knowledge gained through them is unreal; on the contrary, they are the arts/disciplines that human being and human societies have developed to try to understand and even improve themselves. They help us know ourselves. If someone’s definition of knowledge does not include this kind of knowing, it would seem a deficient definition.

History, Sociology, Journalism, and Gossip

Our language and our traditions encourage us to blithely speak generally about religious belief and religion. I believe this is a drastic mistake, because I do not believe that all the things that are called religious have any common denominator. I do not even believe that all the things that are called Christianity have of a common essence. On these grounds, the notion that ‘religion does not make people better’ is not even a meaningful proposition, much less a true one. One must define what religion, and even what type of that specific religion one means to be speaking of, before sensible claims about it can be made. A general and vague a proposition – that would cover all people in all classes and walks of life, in all religions, all societies, and all historical epochs – is inherently foolish: can we imagine what evidence could be brought to establish or disprove it? So it is not surprising to find, as Orr thoroughly documents, that the kind of evidence that Dawkins supplies is entirely anecdotal. A chance remark by a Bishop shows how insipid the Christian view of death is; a remark by a nurse shows the cowardice of Christians in the face of illness. Based on anecdotes such as these, Dawkins pontificates about who is moral and who is not in a rather random and disorganized fashion. Serious thoughtful analyses of these issues do not interest him. He seems glad to not be limited by knowledge, and thus free to tell us what is true and good and what is false, stupid, or irrational. Because of this cavalier attitude toward evidence, careful reasoning, and scholarship, the arguments in this part of the book dissolve into (barely) intellectual gossip. It is disappointing and depressing to see someone trained in the rigorous canons of scientific evidence, in serious evolutionary biology, reason this way.

Why So Many Intelligent People Love This Book

The popularity of this book would seem enigmatic. How could such an anti-Christian screed be so popular in an overwhelmingly Christian nation? (I adapt the phrase “Christian Nation” from the title of the latest book by Dawkins’ colleague Sam Harris). If, as polls allegedly regularly confirm, 85 to 95 percent of Americans are believers, who is buying up the copies of this book? Only a small number could be perverse enough to enjoy it as a kind of transgressive theological pornography. But If I am right about this books’ intellectual insubstantiality, why would the 5 to 15 percent of us non-believers embrace it so passionately?

Dawkins’ ignorance of and incuriosity about the very thing he attacks, religion, especially American and British religion, is a clue to the appeal of this book. The history of religion in America is a strange and fearsome tale. The actual beliefs, attitudes and behavior of religious persons, institutions, and movements are not easily catalogued or narrated, much less understood. Yet they are barely discussed, hardly noticed, in this book. If Dawkins was interested or curious about these things, if he didn’t feel so sunnily omniscient about them, there is much history and anthropology he could read to find out how religion manifested itself in the lives of earlier and other societies. There are also sociological works and serious journalism to let him consider and try to comprehend the many varieties of religious movements in the contemporary world. But Dawkins assumes that deeper knowledge about the past and sharper observation of the present are irrelevant to his task. This, I believe is the most important aspect of this book: its popularity among liberal secular intellectuals reveals our willingness to cheer him on in a remarkably vociferous and extravagantly uncompassionate denigration of the beliefs and feelings of most of his fellow citizens and fellow humanity.

Why This Really Matters

Dawkins assumes that he can generalize about and refute the beliefs of what we call religion. This is an illusion, based on a superficial caricature of what religion is. The image of bigoted, irrational, anti-scientific not-very-sharp blockheads is the focus for his attacks. In every century a thousand varieties of religious belief are born, flourish, die out, linger and then flourish again. It would no doubt come as a surprise to Dawkins (and to most secular intellectuals) to find that in the present moment in America the evangelical movement continues to grow, while the fundamentalist part of that movement declines. Not only the beliefs, but the social and political activities of these many religious tendencies are often radically opposed to each other. The gap between this complex reality and the simplistic straw men mocked in The God Delusion prevents this book from being a genuine contribution, even a hostile one, to the understanding of religion. Orr acutely describes Dawkins stance and style as ‘defiantly middlebrow.’ Perhaps this is too kind.

This would all be unimportant, just another ill-considered book by a scientist who has wandered out of the safer pastures of his expertise into the treacherous terrain of the real world, were it not for this: Dawkins’ willful incuriosity about religion is shared by, and representative of, most of contemporary secular liberal-left thought. The wholesale dismissal of serious religion thought, belief, and life is so commonplace in academic/intellectual circumstances that it is usually not noticed. Of course the more ‘New Age,’ often ersatz, varieties of religion do get some airtime, as long as they don’t go anywhere near monotheism. Zen is surely very Zen. But major thinkers in the modern era who took pains to understand religion thoughtfully, sometimes even sympathetically, are taken seriously after the religious content of their work is filtered out. The list of such thinkers is very long: Rilke, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Kafka, Kant, Neibuhr, M.L. King, and William James for a start. The three greatest artists in the Western tradition, Shakespeare, J.S. Bach, and Mozart, were suffused with religious belief and passion. Nietzsche, Marx, Freud and Camus all felt that a subtle, complex analysis of what religion is about was critical to serious philosophy, sociology, psychology, and political theory. But all these contributions to our understanding are consigned to the trash bin of history by the dominant assumption that religion is largely the domain of right wing bigots like Pat Robertson, and that intelligent grownups now disdain it as a relic of a superstitious past. I suggest that this is an ideological, not a thoughtful, stance.

Evidence of both a collective and individual kind to contradict this contemporary view is overwhelming. This list of modern, subtle thinkers who have struggled with the meaning of and truth/falsity of Christianity, mentioned in the last paragraph, is evidence on the individual level. On the collective, various forms of Christianity are growing, and growing most quickly, not among people who live in trailer parks, but among successful real estate brokers, technology workers, corporate middle managers, and other prosperous members of the middle class. It is not level or education or ability to reason that determines whether people are drawn to the Christian message. Then what is it?

Why People Believe:
What People believe about How to Live in this World

What separates those who think religion is atavistic and pernicious from those who find it necessary to live a meaningful life? It is clear that it is not level of education, or geography, or ethnicity, or race. To answer this, let us position the questions about self-understanding and life choices described above, in the context of life in contemporary society. What world do people have to adapt to while they are growing up and deciding who they are and what they want to be? To me, and I have reason to believe I am not alone, it is a preposterously inane televised world, dominated by foolish celebrities, tabloid violence, ever more intrusive commercial manipulations of our least noble instincts, the prospect of a series of crassly hypocritical wars against nations our government nominates as Satan of the Year, all within an economic system that grows more unjust and more violent every day, and a coming ecological cataclysm we ruefully celebrate every Earth Day. This emphatically distressing reality calls forth emergency adaptive mechanisms, at least for people who assumed they would get to live in a world less predatory, more innocently enjoyable, more just, and less emotionally brutalizing. For those who do not or can not block most of this out, despair about the nature and prospects for human life abounds. The kind of ‘Enlightenment’ world view that Dawkins has, which he says we are getting ever closer too as science spreads and superstition recedes, implies a secular politics which holds out the hope that by understanding the world one can work to transform it into a better one. Oppositely, many forms of Christianity claim to offer a refuge from this evil world, a place where people can trust each other, shield each other from the depredations of ‘pagan’ commercialized society, and through trying to be a good person and by having faith, offer the hope that life can be endured, enjoyed, and/or transcended.

For much of the 20th century, the enlightenment-secular viewpoint seemed ascendant, at least among the educated classes in the West. It was assumed by many that progress in science, in rationality, in democracy, would lead to a world where individuality, freedom of thought, and creativity would flourish. Similarly, it seemed inevitable that the kind of religion based on promises of salvation from this world would wither away. Yet, except for some very limited time slices in some very limited places, this did not widely come about. Seen in this light, the religious impulse seems quite other than the bigoted irrationality that the dominant paradigm portrays it to be. The last 70 years of the 20th century were dominated by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Kissinger, Pinochet, Reagan, and Bush. As Orr says, the 20th century can be seen as experiment in secularism, with nightmarish results. So why should it be surprising, as Robinson puts it, that a public used to living under policies with names like Mutually Assured Destruction, that is, world wide imminent catastrophe, should turn to apocalyptic beliefs? For so many people, independent of religious upbringing, the desire to be saved from this world of sin, of normative greed, and violence, is very powerful. It would seem rather hard-hearted to dismiss as foolish this alarmed response to an alarming world. This is what people turn to when they turn to Christianity: Shelter from the Storm. The Balm in Gilead, which heals the sin-sick soul, and makes the wounded whole.

Happy Trails through Classlessness at Oxford

It is no accident that the world as described in these last two paragraphs does not appear in Dawkins’ book. This is not because he is uninterested about the state of the world; on the contrary he offers many opinions about it. But language again easily leads us astray: the world that Dawkins inhabits and talks about is not the world most of us have to live in. The prosperous and privileged life of an professor with a prestigious chair at Oxford encourages fanciful notions about the past, present, and future. He opines that we are experiencing an evolving paradigm of tolerance, love of science, and the decline of the superstitious thought forms of religion. He sees this happening now, and believes it has been happening for centuries. Recent trends toward churchliness and bigotry, he reassures us, is a temporary aberration, caused by the unhappy accident of the current administration in Washington. The old cliche about well paid professors living in an ivory tower seems irresistible here. In Dawkins’ world, all is well; no one starves, no one dies for want of medicine, no one turns to the church to get the social services that Thatcher, Reagan and Bush eliminated from the secular state, and, by the by, racism is withering away. Perhaps all is in fact well in Richard Dawkins’ world. But most of the rest of us face very different prospects, and often turn for solace to beliefs more quaint than those of abstract logic and self-satisfied empiricism.

Topics for Further Consideration

• Richard Dawkins’ reputation is that of an enlightened, humanistic man of science. He holds the Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Yet, according to my analysis, he relentlessly wages an illiberal, dogmatic and polemical rhetorical war against all religious belief, and indeed against scientists who disagree with him on the implications of evolutionary biology for ethics, philosophy, and religion. How can this discrepancy be explained?
• Dawkins repeatedly asks for ‘Darwinian’ answers to a host of questions, especially the one that I think is fairly paraphrased thusly: How could rational beings believe in any thing as ridiculous as religion? He plays with answering this by reference to the concept of ‘memes,’ a term he invented 30 years ago. The thrust of this concept seems to be to lay the foundation for explanation of social and intellectual phenomena in terms of something analogous to natural selection, i.e. in a Darwinian manner. Is this a useful or profitable mode of explanation? To what extent is ‘Darwinism’ useful outside of its traditional realm, biology? I hope to consider these issues in a future essay.

Bob Mason, May 4, 2007

Left Wing Religious Agitation

We must overturn so many idols,

The Idol of self first of all,

So that we can be humble

And only from our humility

Can we learn to be redeemers

Can we learn to work together

In a way the world really needs.

Oscar Romero

The Violence of Love

The Contradictions of Media Democracy

Media Democracy and its Contradictions
Notes on Matthew Lasar’s “Uneasy Listening: Pacifica Radio’s Civil War”

In Which is Discussed:

1. Pacifica Radio and its Discontents

2. Good Guys and Bad Guys – or What?

3. Whose Democracy? Our Democracy?

4. Your Basic People’s Radio Station

5. Mundane Realities of Ownership, Power, and Control

6. We, Them, Us, It, and all the Others

7. How Come We Always Lose?

8. If Only They Did Need to Attack Us

9. So how should we carry on?

In Which it is concluded that:

The struggles at Pacifica Radio illustrate how the left’s inability to develop a realistic and useable concept of democracy has made its political posture appear incoherent, and thus be marginalized and dismissed.

1. The Pacifica Radio Tempest – Why?

Matthew Lasar’s second book on the history of the Pacifica Radio Network focuses on the power struggle that raged from 1999 to 2001 for control of its stations. Lasar raises very basic yet rarely articulated questions about our media, about the idea of media democracy, and, I think, about the nature and incoherence of the contemporary American left. This essay is an attempt to come to terms with those questions.

This Pacifica story is difficult to tell well – the sheer number of personalities, groups, radio programs and political and cultural tendencies expressed and exposed on the Pacifica stations in their 5 locales - New York, Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area, Washington DC and Houston – boggles the mind. The psychological and anthropological terrain of the Pacific network is largely the terrain of the American political and cultural left over the past half century. Socialists, Feminists, Black Liberationists, New Age Spiritualists, Liberal-Left Antiwar dissidents, Conspiracy Theologians, La Raza activists, Rastafarians, Palestinians, Haitians, Students of the middle east, Africa, East Timor, Central America, South America, and Korea, Hip-Hoppers, Left Folkies, Trotskyists, Leninists, Stalinists, Anarchists, West Coast Buddhists and many more types show up, often proclaim the righteousness of their cause, and appeal for support. Reviewing the history of these left wing radio stations even over just the last decade leaves one exhausted and out of breath, wondering what this rather preposterously complicated struggle is/was all about.

Lasar tries to answer by framing the struggle in the context of (a) contemporary patterns of media control; (b) the left’s desire to fashion a response to the Right’s dominance of American politics since 1980; and (c) the growth of identity politics on the left and in the country. To wade into these issues, I start with a very brief description of what happened at KPFA/Pacifica from 1999-2001.

2. The Good Guys and The Bad Guys – or Not.

The struggle of the local management and staff of KPFA in Berkeley against the national Pacifica Board saw firings of senior staff, the station being shut down, armed guards being posted, 10,000 people marching against the Board’s control, and eventually, a remarkable victory for grass-roots listener-activists, who gained control of the station. Or that’s how the narrative usually goes. The national Board claimed that it was consolidating Pacifica, in order to make it one effective organization( not 5 disorganized ones ), make its listener-ship more diverse (especially more African-American), and make it a stronger network, capable of broadcasting a progressive viewpoint to a increasingly non-progressive America. The local activists claimed that they were the voice of the people, the defenders of democracy and free speech, and that the board represented a non-democratic authoritarian force. Sometimes ‘non-democratic’ meant corporate interests in general, sometimes it designated the corporate drive to media consolidation, and other times the centrist politics of the Democratic Party. Lasar shows that this mutual demonizing masked the fact that this conflict was not primarily political – as in left vs. right, or progressive vs. centrist, or grassroots vs. corporate. Rather, it was a bitter struggle for a resource that has become extraordinary scarce – airtime, in the middle of the FM dial, with a powerful transmitter – a resource made increasingly precious by the ferocious rate of media consolidation and monopolization. There were not just 2 sides to this struggle: on the contrary, many different groups, with different agendas, and very different competing notions of what the terms ‘democracy’, ‘free speech’, ‘progressive’, ‘diversity’, and racism meant.

The victory of the ‘listener-activists’ came about because these groups that would normally be in conflict found a way to work together against the Pacifica Board. Pacifica had, over several decades, alienated, angered and aggrieved legions of listeners of different persuasions and scores of ex-program hosts and staff, turning them into remarkably relentless activists. They were relentless, Lasar shows, because in the surrounding media landscape these left alternative minority media activists had nowhere else to go.

The attempts by the disgruntled radio activists to regain airtime was largely unsuccessful until the mid-to-late 90’s. Things changed because of the availability of the Internet, proffering free or inexpensive ways for people geographically separated to unite against an common foe. That foe was the increasingly impersonal and distant Pacifica Board. Indeed, perhaps the greatest difference between the Board and it supporters on one side, and their opponents on the other, was in the effective use of these electronic resources of web sites, email, and listserves. When KPFA was forcibly taken off the air, people were told to go to a save-Pacifica web address. They immediately began to receive email updates on the increasingly outrageous actions of the board. They became energized members of a dynamic community, a community both real and virtual. They came to the rallies posted on the net. They gave money. They wrote letters, and emails, and successfully pressured their representatives, their cultural heroes ( Alice Walker, Noam Chomsky, Joan Baez, June Jordan), their mayors, even their attorneys general to intervene on their side. Meantime, the Board, with all of its money and its legally binding control of the stations, seemed to think that stonewalling was better than communicating. The Board was completely blind to the new form of power latent in the bonding of an alternative radio station, one with a devoted, educated following, and the internet community that surrounded it. In this obduracy, the Board surrendered to its opponents both the moral high ground and the media power it would seem to have controlled.

3. Whose Democracy ? Our Democracy!

Many would like to see the outcome of the struggle as a victory for ‘democracy’, or for ‘radio for the people’. But a closer look at these dominant left concepts (e.g. peoples democracy) shows them to be entangled with, and a cause of, the endless institutional wrangling at Pacifica. One of the main groups that fought the good fight was called the “Coalition for a Democratic Pacifica”. But what is a Democratic Radio Network? What does the word democracy, in the context of a left, alternative, ‘free speech’ radio station mean?

Leftists preach about democracy as though we all know what it means. Maybe we do, when we use it as an adjective to describe national governments. We can apply it ( or deny it) to Sweden, Israel, Pakistan, Cuba, Indonesia, Canada, and so forth. Other institutions, like labor unions, are democratic if they are not run by an authoritarian clique; “democratic reforms” are changes that give those at a political disadvantage more leverage. But within the left itself, ‘democracy’ is a sacred cow of a concept with a checkered past. Having lost the credibility with the American people necessary to espouse socialism, the explicit condemnation of capitalism, an end to the master-slave relationship inherent in the modern corporate state, and even liberal secular humanism, we have been driven back to using mainstream-acceptable words like democratic, progressive, and diverse.

One small but not trivial episode in history of ‘democracy’ in American political thought occurred in the 1960s, when perhaps the most influential organization in the student movement of that time called itself ‘Students for a Democratic Society’. In SDS people constantly argued and theorized about the relationship between internal democracy (how SDS was run) and the ends of the organization (creating a democratic society). The prevailing notion, within the student left, and other movements of the 60s-70s, was that as you built egalitarian institutions within the ‘movement’, groupings in which each person has an equal say, you simultaneously strengthened your ability to bring about radical social change. To many of us, this hopeful, romantic discourse about democracy ended with the ascendancy Ronald Reagan, and came to be seen to be utopian and naïve.

But many others on the left – including many who influence the discourse about governance at Pacifica – are still tied to this way of thinking. Of course, it was very useful to stigmatize the national board as authoritarian, corporate, anti-free-speech, anti-democratic. This pro-democratic identity successfully hid the huge differences of opinion about almost everything that abided among the numerous pro-democracy-listener-activists. This concept therefore produced both temporary unity for our side, and public ignominy for the other. It was, in a literal sense, a very opportune ideology. But opportunistic ideologies carry a virus within themselves – they give excellent cover for opportunists to take over, or at least attain serious leverage, within the movement using them. This, more than anything else, seems to me to be the sad moral of the Pacifica story so far.

At its worst, within KPFA circles, being against ‘democracy’, in any sense, will be called elitist, patriarchal, racist, sexist, etc. At one point even claiming that only those who know how to install a transmitter should decide how to install a transmitter, was resisted on ‘democratic’ grounds. Competence is seen as a authoritarian imposition of patriarchal paradigms. Or something like that. People with this mindset claim participatory democracy as the central way to promote grassroots liberation, unifying process and purpose, subjective and objective. This is a facile, sometimes jejune, largely symbolic style of thinking, and a very destructive tendency in left organizations – particularly, it seems to me, at Pacifica stations. One example of this is the claim that if we “be the change we want to see”, like become compassionate and non-violent and sustainable and so forth in our private lives, we will bring about stuff like the end of war and a just economic and social order in the wider world. This idea seems to me mainly wish-fulfillment. Thinking this way defeats the reality principle and encourages utopian fantasies. Running a successful radio station/network in a decent, fair way, and building a successful movement to achieve global social equality are 2 very different, and very difficult undertakings. Conflating them gains nothing and loses much.

4. A Democratic Radio Station For the People?

So what were we fighting for when we said it was a ‘Democratic Pacifica’? What makes a radio station democratic, and is democracy a meaningful goal for a radio station to have? Some possible meanings of democracy with a radio station are:

. Internal democracy, where staff decide, together, who is hired and fired and who gets what on-air time.

. Democracy for the paying listener sponsors, whereby everyone who subscribes to the station gets an equal say in those same critical matters.

. The commitment of the station’s resources to the building of democracy in the larger world outside, focused on advocating for the interests of oppressed and exploited peoples, whether those people listen to the station, subscribe to the station, work at the station, or have ever or will ever hear of it.

My sense is that while we might think we know what we’re talking about when we say that we want a democratic radio network, unless we disambiguate these (and other) different meaning, we actually don’t know. We carry around a vaguely defined mixture of these concepts, and we let ourselves believe – since we want to be on the side of the angels – that this mixture is coherent, virtuous and useful. Lasar’s narrative makes us look at these questions and issues as they exist in reality, not in the safe world of our ideology and our left habits of mind. The rather bracing truth that Lasar thus reveals is that the different forces in Pacifica struggles always claim to be advancing democracy and progressive politics and defeating racism, but most of the time, what they are actually struggling for is for their group to gain turf and airtime on Pacifica.

5. Ownership, Power, and Control

When the protestors outside KPFA in 1999 shouted and chanted “ Who’s Station? OUR Station!”, they were making the central claim to ownership in the battle over Pacifica. Lasar, somewhat provocatively, claims that those who made this claim may have been morally right but were factually and legally wrong. The station was owned by the Pacifica Foundation, which did not consist of the listeners. Further, he reveals the central irony of the struggle in 1999-2001: that owners of the station – The Pacifica Board – made their biggest mistake not in the falsehoods they told but by telling this truth about ownership, the raw, distasteful truth, bluntly asserted in a seemingly mindless and brutal fashion. To wit, the Board told the Listeners that, no, it is not your station, now please shut up and go away. The Listener-Protestors went into a paroxysm of outrage at this, and who, really could blame them: as Lasar notes, remember that these people had had the pleasure of listening to about 8-10 weeks of marathons a year, decade after decade, in which they were incessantly informed that this was THEIR radio station, and please send us your money! What is unusual is that this outrage was channeled into effective organizing, and that the disagreements that usually pull the left apart via internecine warfare were avoided for the 3 years it would take to prevail. And it is notable that this victory, as Dick Cheney would put it, changed the facts on the ground. The rules of Pacifica ownership were actually changed; the activists had reclaimed the station. Which meant we/they were about to find out what democracy looked like.

6. We, Us, Them, It, The Others

The ideology of a democratic Pacifica, like all ideologies, can trump reality only for a while. Pacifica was now ‘ours’; it was now going to be democratic. How are ownership and democracy related? When something becomes ‘Ours’, does it become democratic? This depends on many things: such as who ‘we’ are, and how many divisions and competing interests are latent or become apparent among us; how we relate to each other; what kind of institutions and informal power sharing agreements we can work out; and how those who are not ‘us’, but whom we claim to represent – ‘the voice of the voiceless’, as it were – relate to us, or do not. And so, after the Listener Activists prevailed, and made it our/their station, we/they had to go back to being us, which meant fighting over airtime, fighting over who was really democratic, who really represented the people, who the people were, and who had a right to bump who off the air and for what reasons.

For reasons of brevity (this piece is way too long already, I’m sorry) I will not discuss the struggle since 2002 within Pacifica. It’s thick and it’s ugly: few would disagree with that. Those who represent all sorts of social groups and all sorts of ideologies have struggled for control, more often than not claiming to be the white hats. I’m actually thankful that the station (KPFA is the only one I’ve stayed familiar with) has survived as well as it has. I get to hear Democracy Now in the morning, I get to hear a lot of wonderful, beautiful, challenging music, and the schedule allows me to mostly safely avoid the stuff that drives me nuts.

7. Hey, if we’re the people, how come they kick our ass all the time?

While writing this, I was told that the FCC is about to open up some 300 new licenses for non-profits in America. Groups of all kinds are submitting applications, making their case that they represent people not represented by the for-profit media. It would seem – to the degree these 300 licenses will change things – that the forces for media democracy have won a big battle. But who will actually get these licenses? There is a real fear among those who follow media issues closely that the Christian Right will acquire many, maybe most, of the stations. Because, lo and behold, they think they are ‘the people’, too. And they think that corporate America — who they call ‘pagan’ – has frozen them out, as we do. The Christian right has for nearly half a century been better organized than the left. And now, not only better organized, but ( I estimate) more numerous as well. They are, more than we are, ‘the people’. And in a democracy they will get more say than us. If you feel like saying ‘Jesus Christ’ right now, it’s all right. The practical bankruptcy, if not hypocrisy, of Pacifica style posturing about democracy becomes clear if we see these facts for what they are.

8. If Only They Needed to Attack Us

I believe that the depressing irrelevance of most left activity to the prevailing political order it wishes to change is partly due to the contradictions in its rhetoric about democracy. We are not the people; the people do not believe what we believe, nor do they want us to represent them. These harsh realities, I think, inform Lasar’s demonstration that the notion that corporate power was allayed against Pacifica in order to silence the voice of the voiceless was a sadly self-serving conceit. I say sadly, because I wish that it were so – I wish that Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton needed to worry about what is said on Pacifica stations, or even whether Pacifica exists. They don’t – because the marginalization of the left and the left’s radio network is so successful. My guess is that the reason Lasar’s book hasn’t been more discussed, above all on Pacfica itself, but also within the liberal-left media democracy movement, is this: He maintains that the allegation that the Pacifica Board represented the interests of Corporate America, with an agenda to stop Free Speech Radio, was a powerful, compelling, yet false claim in Pacifica’s civil war. This is a larger pill than the media left wish to swallow.

9. What to Do

The great gaggle of voices that make up the Pacifica stations in its 5 cities, have among them the wonderful and articulate and beautiful and honest, and also the intolerant, boring, painfully pathetic, and the hostile. All of these voices have the right to exist, the right to make their claims on the radio, the right to lobby for more power and convince others of their viewpoints and make their calls to action. But none of them/us have the right to speak for the people, especially now in this ultra-complex hyper-urban globalized electronic society, where no one can honestly and intelligently claim to know who “the people’ are. What we have is the right to represent ourselves individually and collectively, the right to say what we think, the right to struggle for what we honestly think is our fair share in the economic, political, media and all other arenas. If the left were to take this more humble and realistic stance – and accept that being straightforwardly on one’s own side will always ring more true than claiming to be pure and just and always struggling against evil incarnate – perhaps we can find a new direction, and see some way out of being suffocated even by our own radio network.

“Uneasy Listening: Pacfica Radio’s Civil War” by Matthew Lasar is available at http://amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/002-4602287-4629663?url=search-alias%3Dstripbo

Bob Mason

Bernal Heights, San Francisco, Sunday, Jan 28, 2007.

2008 : Get Ready For Nothingness

A nearly full page article in the NY Times a couple of days ago described, in detail, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, and should warn all of us of the monstrous emptiness of content coming in this already begun campaign.

The world is in conflagration (even more than usual, even more than before), the outsourcing of everything accelerates ( everything being jobs, money,etc ), medical care is (a) more expensive than ever (b) more difficult to procure than ever and (c) more dangerous than ever, the decimation and neglect of New Orleans continues. But not only does Ms. Clinton decline to address these issues — worse, the Times reporters seem comfortable with describing her campaign the way they would discuss Tiger Wood’s plans for the coming year.

I am neither opposed nor in favor of Hillary Clinton. I don’t consider her to be a genuine entity, or person, or politician — but rather a media entity, a virtual projection of the technology of focus groups and the ultra-superficial political discourse that is our ‘intellectual’ environment. I mentioned to a friend of mine that this emptiness of content in Clinton’s program to get herself elected was very distressing to me, considering what’s going on in the world ( I was thinking of Saddam’s execution video, and the ’surge’ of murder between Sunni and Shia consequently imminent) . He said that if I think this is vacuous, just wait. The orgy of vacuousness has only just begun.