How the Right Lies

Posted on June 18, 2003 in Evolution & Creation Secularism Thinking

…it is one thing to change one’s mind, another to eradicate it. — Marianne Moore

Yet another apologist for the Confederacy dropped by my site to comment, erroneously as usual, on the War of Southern Arrogance. The attempted revision of history that has sprouted up in the last several years I think is a direct product of the dissemination of a false adage: “There are always three opinions: yours, mine, and the Truth”.

The promulgation of this myth is one of the reasons why the Right has been so successful. The implication is that no one can know the Truth, so it’s OK to make up facts and pick and choose facts to suit your case, ignoring those which truly damn the case against you. (e.g. Every single Southern state named slavery as the principal reason why it was seceding from the Union. Abraham Lincoln expressed his reservations about the institution as early as 1855 in letters to friends.)

Consider the parallel example of the Weapons of Mass Destruction that we just haven’t been able to find in Iraq. Apologists for the war have invoked the following excuses:

• Saddam destroyed them just before the war (no evidence for this)
• Saddam put them on a boat before the war (and ran the blockade?)
• We just haven’t found them yet.
• Well, uh, it was a good thing because we got Saddam out of power and he was terrible (but hardly worse than the rioting, vandalism, and terrorism — both state and otherwise — that followed the “liberation”)
• It was our oil anyways. (That lie, oddly enough, comes closest to the real reason why we invaded: GREED.)

were shown that those who buy the myth of the blameless Confederacy are the principal constituency holding the beliefs I have outlined above. We can add to that those who quote the Bible to justify racism, jingoism, the death penalty, homophobia, and anti-choice views. In all these cases, regardless of the smoking gun, they deny the Truth because in their minds, the Truth is something that can be shifted around to fit their political aims and prejudices.

They have eradicated their minds for the sake of prejudices that they don’t have the guts to give up.

I side with the anti-war movement and those who criticize the Confederacy for seceding to preserve the institution of slavery for the simple reason that these groups have the facts far more straight than the apologists do. They haven’t just bought into lies, they have bought into something far more sinister: a methodology for condoning evil.

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Given the racist underpinnings of the cause to justify the secession of a state to preserve an evil, I have to further wonder: Could this belief in heriditary, this de facto Spencerism which holds “nature red in tooth and claw” as the basis of society, be causing these people to believe that if their ancestors were bigots, then by genetic inheritance they must also be; therefore by defending the “pure motives” of their ancestors (many of whom probably got dragged along against their will due to the 3/5s compromise and expert gerrymanders by the slaveholders) they are defending their own genes?

Here again we see a nice example of picking and choosing. They don’t want the earth to be billions of years old and they don’t want to be descended from a common ancestor held with monkies, but they want that genetic inheritance as long as it means that they are superior to others and therefore gain the right to persecute and control others, even if their IQs and educational background is worse than those others! (The good old days when black doctors had to scrape and bow to white garbage collectors.)

This example is another reason why it is imperitive that we accurately teach the Facts of Evolution as well as the Theory of Evolution. Much of what I have described has been invalidated by evidence for nearly a hundred years. Only the desire to believe something else that suits them better keeps discredited science alive.

Deep down, every Fundamentalist is really a Spencerist evolutionist who also wants to believe in the Garden of Eden.

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Further thought: I am agnostic. The reason is that I can see no way of proving or disproving the existence of God through the senses. The Right has taken the fundamental notion implicit in my thinking and reversed it: it says that things we can accurately measure and sense are “not provable” and it says that the existence of God is provable or disprovable. (Hence the unlikely coalition of Fundamentalists and atheists.)

Turn things on their head: deny the truth, push out disinformation, but declare that you can prove the unprovable. People prefer water gushing out of solid rock to having it come out of a tap. Just don’t tell them about the broken water main in the first instance.