“On Being Woke”
Andrew Greeley (Chicago Sun-Times, February 18, 2001): "It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us. Perhaps the reason is that rich men are very clever at covering up what they do."
Conservative Washington Post columnist, Max Boot, wrote this week:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-ignoring-the-worst-attack-on-america-since-911/2018/02/18/5ad888f2-14f3-11e8-8b08-027a6ccb38eb_story.html?utm_term=.c9322723d68b
Imagine if, after 9/11, the president had said that the World Trade Center and Pentagon could have been attacked by “China” or “lots of other people.” Imagine if he had dismissed claims of al-Qaeda’s responsibility as a “hoax” and said that he “really” believed Osama bin Laden’s denials. Imagine if he saw the attack primarily as a political embarrassment to be minimized rather than as a national security threat to be combated. Imagine if he threatened to fire the investigators trying to find out what happened.
Imagine, moreover, if the president refused to appoint a commission to study how to safeguard America. Imagine if, as a result, we did not harden cockpit doors. If we did not create a Transportation Security Administration and a Department of Homeland Security. If we did not lower barriers between law enforcement and intelligence. If we did not pass a USA Patriot Act to enhance surveillance. And if we did not take myriad other steps to prevent another 9/11.
That’s roughly where we stand after the second-worst foreign attack on America in the past two decades. The Russian subversion of the 2016 election did not, to be sure, kill nearly 3,000 people. But its longer-term impact may be even more corrosive by undermining faith in our democracy.
Now, as I said, Max Boot is a conservative columnist and there is a lot about what he said here that I would take exception to regarding what he is applauding as appropriate steps following 9-11, but the larger theme of what he is saying is that the Russian interference with our 2016 presidential election is the most serious foreign attack on the United States since 9-11 but because it was done through the internet, it has been possible to pretend that it didn’t happen, or dilute its significance, or even try to divert blame.
American intelligence agencies have made it clear that Russia successfully used disinformation campaigns through Twitter and FaceBook to influence both print and broadcast media during the election. They usually feel compelled to add either that this activity did not change the outcome of the election or, more subtly, that it cannot be proven that it affected the outcome, but what they are clearly doing is sidestepping the apparent fact that they did affect the outcome but to tell the truth about that would create a constitutional crisis that would be disruptive to the stability of the whole world.
You could not, months later, say that Trump won only due to Russian influence and go back and make Clinton president or call for a new election without creating absolute chaos, so they take the safe route of offering an all too convenient lie, which is that the Russians did not affect the outcome of the election when they quite obviously did. And this is why trusting the government becomes increasingly difficult these days.
In some cases, such as these, I can see why it may be convenient to tell the public a lie but every obvious lie you tell erodes your credibility and makes it less likely that we will believe you the next time, and, as Max Boot detailed, it undermines our faith in Democracy.
I want to avoid dwelling too much on the indictments handed down by Special Prosecutor, Bob Mueller, against Russian agents and businesses involved in this hacking of our elections. And, while there is a great deal to be said about the social obligation of such vehicles as FaceBook and Twitter not to be seduced by profit to such a degree that they become passive tools for foreign meddling in elections, I’m going to say that is not really pulpit material. It is interesting and, as Americans, it is relevant, but we are in church and I am preaching and I want to focus on church business and the business of preaching, which has more to do with morality than it does with such political and judicial concerns.
As citizens we are rightly disturbed by the fact that Russia has tried to upset the process of voting, not just here but in many other nations as well, but as a pastor, I am disturbed by how they went about it. They didn’t try to hack into voting machines and change who was voted for, or alter the numbers.
Instead, they came at voters with misinformation. They exploited the algorithms of social media on the internet to distribute rumors, slander, to plant conspiracy theories. In short, they played us like a violin, only, in this case, one string was prejudice, another was partisanship, a third was paranoia, and the fourth was ignorance.
Russia didn’t attack America’s democracy through the hardware of voting machines or even the technology of media so much as they just sucker punched us in our weak spot… which turns out to be our weak intellect and morality.
Yes, shame on the Russian government for acting to muddy the elections of foreign nations, but shame on us for being so easy to manipulate through propaganda that appeals to our partisan hatred, our fear of immigrants, our paranoia about people whose religion, skin color, or language is different from our own.
Russians are not looking for Russian sympathizers or trying to spread propaganda to seduce people into being pro-Russian… they were looking for people who hated Hillary Clinton to feed them outrageous lies so that they would hate her more and try to get their friends to hate her too. And they appealed to the poor, the unemployed, the fearful, in more or less the same ways that Hitler appealed to economically disadvantaged Germans, to get them to blame Jews for their woes.
But folks, it wasn’t just the low-information voters on the right they were appealing to. When they released DNC emails from the Clinton campaign, revealing dirty tricks and unfair practices in the primaries, they were ginning up liberals who were Bernie and Jill Stein supporters.
Let me give you a more personal example: those of you who spend any time on social media are likely to have seen the meme that declares that Australia and New Zealand have outlawed Fox News because those governments have accurately labeled Fox News as being propaganda. And, honestly, it is propaganda. As one saying goes, I don’t listen to Fox News for the same reason that I don’t drink out of the toilet.
I have also noticed that several of my favorite journalists on MSNBC have started calling Fox News “Trump TV.” So, folks, when I saw the claim that Australia and New Zealand had banned Fox News, I believed it. I believed it because it fits within my prejudice. I believed it because I want Fox News to get every black eye the world can give to them. The problem is that it just ain’t so. No country, not Canada, not Australia, not New Zealand, and not even the fictitious home of the Black Panther, Wakanda, has banned Fox News . . . even if all of us should, no one has.
But this is how prejudice works. We stop listening for news. We stop trying to gain new information. We allow ourselves to be seduced by confirmation of bias. We seek only to read, hear, and see things that confirm what we already believe to be true. That’s not being informed, that’s just narcissism. And in that, there is nothing more to be proud of in being an educated liberal than there is in being a low-information conservative because both have just staked out a position and are unwilling to consider new insights. The truth is neither liberal nor conservative. Facts do not belong to either Republicans or Democrats.
A genuinely spiritual person is interested in honesty, integrity, depth of character, radical compassion, and reality. And, it needs to be confessed, that churches have often tried to foster good character in people by telling them lies about fiery punishments, or glorious eternal rewards, packaged in mythological stories and incomprehensible scriptures. The traditional role of religion has been to get people to believe in the absurd while manipulating them into civil conduct and compliant productivity. That is just as dishonest as deceptive news media and manipulative government disinformation.
The church needs to speak with a clear prophetic voice that can be counted on to always tell the truth while calling upon the people of the world to strive to be more compassionate, loving, and caring people. If we won’t tell the truth, can we really expect our government or our media to be honest on our behalf?
Look, I really want to lose weight, but asking all of you to eat more salads wouldn’t really do much for me, now would it? The dedication to truth has to be personal. You have to be suspicious of your own predilictions.
The Americanized version of the Buddhist sutra is a bit tortured but without going into the weeds too much on the Sanskrit names for divine beings, the Buddha was asked if he was a god, or a spirit, or a demi-god and each time he rejected such inflated and exaggerated titles and in the end he asked only to be thought of as being awakened.
As much as it may upset some of my peers to hear me say it, I am convinced, with good evidence, that the historical Jesus didn’t think of himself as being divine. Jesus was a wisdom teacher. I suspect that he was a wisdom teacher with some sharp criticisms of the ruling authorities, both in the palace and the temple, but I don’t think that Jesus spent a moment thinking that he was a son of God who had to die for the redemption of our sins. That’s the kind of yarn that religious people spin but I do not take Jesus for having been a fool.
I think that the real goal of the spiritual life is to, in the Buddhist sense, attain to enlightenment. But being enlightened does not mean to gain secret wisdom about other worldly existence. Enlightenment means having the blinders of false thoughts removed from us, to wake up from the slumber of dreams and magical thinking.
In the Buddhist sense, it does involve transcending ego to see the truth that we are all connected. In the Judeo-Christian sense, it means rising above our greed and self-serving prejudices and appetites to engage one another more compassionately.
You cannot “get woke” if you insist upon living in the dream world of fake news, magical religious beliefs, and self serving prejudices. A prophetic church is a church that is so devoted to both ethics and the absolute truth that they are necessarily thought leaders in a world that is sadly bereft of believable leadership. So we if we can’t give the world a prophetic voice then we have no reason to exist. Besides, the world always needs another office building doesn’t it?