Nightfall

I walked to Trader Joe’s to buy dinner. On the way, I passed a bar. Men gathered around the bar’s door to smoke. I heard a flash of conversation.

One of the men complained that "the currency from the Federal Reserve" was "worthless".

Mind you, this man was outside of a bar. He was probably drinking. I doubt that he paid for his beers with Krugerrands. I doubt that he paid for his beers with chickens, or Chiclets, or other barter. Same with his cigarettes, his clothes, and the motor vehicle that he used to drive to the bar.

The bartender took his "currency" and gave him beer. Walmart took his "currency" and gave him jeans. Boot Barn did the same with his footwear. And (shall we say) Harley Davidson was not different.

All of his material needs are met with currency. Yet, to him, this "Federal Reserve" currency – I assume he meant dollars – to him was "worthless".

How so?

1. Devaluation of facts.

I am amazed. I wilt with ignorance. Where does the hard-right get its facts? The hard-right is convinced that a white American woman from Kansas traveled to Kenya to give birth to her child, who would become president of The United States. But if a birth certificate from Hawaii and birth announcements in the Honolulu papers don’t convince them otherwise, "proof" ain’t the point.

I was mugged by a stranger on Facebook. On the way to some serious insults, he pointed out that the Communist Manifesto endorsed confiscatory, progressive income taxes. He pointed out that liberals believed in progressive income taxes. So he concluded that communists and liberals were the same. Never mind that private enterprise is a basic tenet of liberalism. Never mind that the opposite is true of Marxism. It’s a little like saying that Charles Manson and Roman Polanski were big in Sharon Tate’s life, so Charles Manson and Roman Polanski are the same.

(On the other side of the political spectrum, a visiting Marxist (I think) professor taught an economics class at UCR when I was a student there. He claimed that there was no difference between conservatives and liberals. He made this claim by presenting scraps of similar-sounding rhetoric from liberals and conservatives.)

Before I eavesdropped on the political sages outside the bar, I passed a protest on two corners of Orange Street and Redlands Boulevard in Redlands. It was more loud than big. There were, on the two corners, maybe thirty people. But some of them had bullhorns.

And the bullhorn-magnified speakers proclaimed that Barack Obama was a "socialist" and a "communist". Yet I’ve never seen convincing proof of that. (Oh, yeah, aside from progressive income taxes – I forgot).

So I conclude that facts are not the issue, and proof is not important, as a basis for opinions from my hard-right cohorts.

3. The rise of collective opinion.

If their opinions aren’t based on fact, what then?

I’ve heard that morality is a group phenomenon. More than religion, more than education, the people around you, and what they do, determine your ethics.

I think the same is true of opinions. Rightly or wrongly, it seems to me that searching for proof and counter-proof is not the method of the hard-right. Evidence, like a birth certificate, like a birth announcement, is, to them, beside the point.

They don’t trust such facts. They trust their hard-right cohorts. What matters is consensus. Those who accuse Barack Obama of creeping collectivism themselves find certainty in collective opinions.

So far as I can tell, the sources of their collective opinions are their friends, their families, right-wing media, and the internet. You can point out that when NBC distorts the news, somebody gets fired; but when Fox News distorts the news, Sean Hannity makes a joke about it – it doesn’t matter. There is trust. There is faith in the collective opinion that is its own proof.

4. Am I a hypocrite?

The hard-right is a religion. Like a religion, it has a body of believers. This body of believers shares a (to them) un-assailable gnosis.

I’m a believer, so I accept the truth of Christianity. I trust the Bible. I trust Paul when he says that Christians "walk by faith, not by sight". (2 Cor. 5:7.) I trust Paul when he asks "Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" (1 Cor. 1:20.) But I don’t accept that modes of Christian thought apply to all ideologies.

So I wonder: am I a hypocrite for accepting a mode of thought for my religion that I deny to the hard-right for their politics?

Must I accept the acceptableness of believing without proof that the president was born in Kenya, because I accept that Jesus was crucified, rose from the dead, and now is crowned king of heaven?

If not, why not?

I’m not sure that I know the answer to that.

5. Judgment.

But I wonder: how far does this mode of thought properly extend?

I practice law for a living. My clients sometimes are judged by the twelve. I hope that the twelve form their collective judgment by hearing the law and examining the evidence. But I know that some jurors decide cases based on habitual deference to the government, especially as against a, to them, unattractive defendant – unattractive by race, unattractive by occupation, or unattractive by personal appearance. You hope to weed out these people in jury selection, but you can’t always.

6. All roads lead to war.

The endpoint of this collective mode of measuring reality is that facts don’t matter; only opinion matters – especially the opinion of trusted cohorts.

Maybe that is why politics has become so nasty and so personal. The battle is no longer over facts; the tools of debate aren’t the tools of investigation. Instead, the battle is the battle of a cohort with opinions struggling to monopolize the pool of opinions by marginalizing the opposite cohort. This war of one cohort against the other has supplanted, in the minds of some, the idea of public debate as a quest for truth. Politics for many has become more nakedly a quest for dominance among cohorts.

The struggle is not a struggle for proof or truth; it is a struggle to undermine opponents, to silence their opinions, to make them, in one way or another, shut up.

This mode of politics explains the politics of character-crushing falsehoods. It explains effort by Republican legislatures to deprive democratic constituencies of their voting franchise.

Because once politics becomes untethered to the truth, it becomes important to silence any innocent who might call attention to factual nakedness. Orwell lives.

7. Equality is right and fair.

In the meantime, there is a leveling quality to collective opinion: my opinion, supported by carefully uncovered credible sources with reputations for accuracy to protect, is entitled to no more weight than a vaguely-sourced rumor repeated on U-Tube by a man in a cowboy hat who claims to be a retired U.S. Marshall.

Certainly, between my opinion and the opinion of the man in the cowboy hat, there is an equality at the ballot box. His vote counts the same as mine. And when that happens, the system is working as it was designed to work.

My love of democracy permits no other opinion.

8. What is truth?

What is truth, then? The truth is that, in my opinion, I am lucky that I have the training that I have. It gives me skills to investigate and evaluate sources, however imperfect those skills are.

The truth is that, in my opinion, I am lucky that I have friends who are like-minded. The truth is that, in my opinion, I have a duty to try to reproduce what skills I have in the world.

And the truth is that, in my opinion, based on my theology, the collective mind of America will be only as clear as God permits it to be. We should celebrate clear thought, as much as we have it, while we can. For "the night cometh, when no man can work." (John 9:4.)