Why We Fight

Today's NY Times contains an article about the struggle to teach evolution in Florida's public schools. In recent years many school districts around the nation have actively sought to limit or indeed ban evolution from biology curriculum. "Intelligent Design" has become a buzzword for supposed alternative theories, but the real conflict is not between two theories of natural life, but rather between those who utilize science in the quest for knowledge and those who discount science outright.

Over the last 50 years a continual %50 of American adults have proclaimed to believe that human life was created by God, fully formed, roughly 10,000 years ago. No other First World nation shows such bizarre belief in creationism. It speaks to some element of the American psyche that predicates the idea of knowledge on unquestioned leaps of faith, on received wisdom delivered from on high. Namely, it speaks to a nation of followers, eager to be led, eager to have their belief systems laid out for them, and eager to be dominated.

Is it any wonder that so many people would be so gullible in believing that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, or that the Iraqi regime had something to do with 9-11?

Eugene Jarecki's film "Why We Fight" analyzes the American impulse for war, as well as the mechanisms that both make war possible and sell it to the public. It is not so far a leap to connect the American willingness to wage foreign wars with the prevalence of anti-scientific sentiment both in the American public and in certain intellectual circles. There is a definite element of American thought that aims to repeal the principles of the Age of Enlightenment. It seems implausible in the year 2008 but it is impossible to deny.

Pre-Enlightenment thinking embraced the concept of divine ordination. The monarchies of royalist Europe derived their power from the notion that they were only one step below God's holy authority. Even without President Bush's evangelical fervor, the repeated insistence that the American public unflinchingly put their faith in the moral righteousness of their Commander-in-Chief cannot help but reek of feudalist despotism.

As we come up on a critical election season it is worth noting that the mechanisms of domination and aggression are deeply entrenched in the very fabric of American politics and also lay at the core of public thought in America. No simple change in executive leadership can undo those shackles.

But it is also worth noting that when Dwight Eisenhower warned us to guard against the unfettered rise of the military-industrial complex, he was doing so as a precautionary measure against something which had yet to happen. True, in the last 40 years a vast consolidation has occurred across the spectra of power, but what has been built can also be dismantled, and 40 years can be but a mere blip in the biography of a nation. One thing a leader can do, though it is risky, radical, and - as the assassinations of the 1960s showed- often fatal, is to seize the reigns of the power and have the fortitude to steer things in a path of rectification rather than destruction. It remains entirely unclear whether anyone in the current political climate has the gall attempt such an action.

Many words have been spent on the 2008 election, and many more will be before November finally rolls around. But the only real issue is whether the next President will choose the to continue to write the biography of the United States, or author its obituary.