The American Scene

An ongoing review of politics and culture

• Politics
• Economics
• The Media
• Culture

• Home
• About
• Archive
• Search

Leave a Reply

1. I could easily be wrong, but based on his autobiography and his 2006 speech, my take is that Obama is something of a curious kind of Christian – one who doesn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ.

   Sailer is right that Obama’s conversion story is curious. Raised by an athiest mother and an indifferent muslim father, (I can’t remember whether his grandparents were religious), Obama appears largely indifferent to religion until his community organizer days. At that point, one of the ministers he is working with tells him that no one will take him seriously until he picks a church.

   Obama eventually settles on Wright’s church, but the narrative is striking for the absense of any relationship with Christ. Obama is overpowered by the sense of community with the other members of the congregation, but that’s it. Later on, he explains that he understands why people would be drawn to Church, so that their fellow members will remember them after they die. In a very personal and detailed account, there is absolutely no suggestion that Obama believes that God or Jesus is accepting him in addition to the congregants, or that he thinks that some people might be drawn to the Church because they believe that they will not only be remembered after they die, but will live after that point.

   You’re right that no one can know someone else’s heart – Obama may have felt more “traditionally” Christian feelings at that time but have chosen not to discuss them, or he may have developed some faith in the 12 years since he wrote the book.

   You’re also right that if he says he’s a Christian, he in some sense is, but if he isn’t at least making his best effort to believe in the divinity of Christ, he’s not what many people would call a Christian.

   Last caveat – I don’t think any of that makes Obama a bad person, even if it’s true. I think his committment to the sense of community at his church, and the Social Justice message of his church, is sincere and admirable. I just don’t think he’s a Christian by the definition that most Christians would use.

   — J Mann · Jul 2, 07:50 PM · #

2. Alan:

   That’s rather behaviorist of you, isn’t it? If what we’re trying to do is predict someone’s future actions, isn’t an understanding of their motives important? Particularly given that the record of their past actions is bound to be ambiguous – even incoherent and inconsistent – to some degree or another?

   Maybe the whole game is pointless; there’s a good case to be made for voting in a purely partisan manner based solely on the clear differences between the parties, on the assumption that predicting anything else is a mug’s game. But if you actually want to try to assess who is the better man (or woman) for the job, don’t you need to try to get a handle on how they think? And how do you do that without trying to assess their “real” motives?

   Or are you making a narrower argument – that, when it comes to a profession of faith specifcally, there is exceptionally little objective evidence, exceptionally little policy consequence, and a real question of rudeness, so in that particular case we should just take everybody at his or her word?

   — Noah Millman · Jul 2, 07:54 PM · #

3. I guess I should also apologize for, or at least explain, my direct refusal of Alan’s request that we not discuss Obama’s religious motivations.

   I am very interested in the motivations and biography of politicians. Obama published a very thoughtful autobiography, and I don’t see how anyone could read it without thinking about what it is that makes this guy tick. I generally feel free to think about and discuss what the nature of Mother Theresa’s faith was, or Jimmy Carter’s, and how it affected their lives — why shouldn’t I do the same with Obama?

   — J Mann · Jul 2, 08:03 PM · #

4. J Mann: The questions you raise in your first post are more accessible, in that they’re an attempt to discern the content of someone’s beliefs based on their actual statements about that content. But that’s very different than a concern with motive or sincerity; and I’m not sure how relevant such a concern is to Obama’s presidential candidacy. You’re free to speculate, of course, but I think it is speculation, and can rarely be anything more.

   Noah: I’d love to know how a presidential candidate thinks, insofar as I can — and I see that Ross just posted on this very issue. But I want to emphasize that such information is very hard to get, in part because no one’s mind is accessible to anyone else, in part because we are only partly accessible to ourselves, in part because most of us are variable in our motives. These are not fixed targets.

   Ross points out that Obama has been a rather changeable figure, and that’s important. His inconsistency should be a matter of concern for voters, and it’s a matter of concern for me. But it seems to me that the fact of the inconsistency is what matters, not the reasons or motives for the inconsistency. Is Obama inconsistent because he’s a shrewd political operative who tests the prevailing winds and steers accordingly? Or is he a people-pleaser who tends to tell people what he thinks they want to hear? Or does he have a disorganized mind that’s most influenced by the most recent (or most vigorously argumentative) person he has talked to? Could be one; could be all three; or maybe it varies from time to time. Hell if I know. So I ned to focus on what I can see, which is the inconsistency itself — especially since actions are what matter most in politics.

   — Alan Jacobs · Jul 2, 08:12 PM · #

5. “Human personalities are complex.”

   bingo. now the key is to map the pattern of that complexity and extract the signal out of the noise.

   — razib · Jul 2, 08:12 PM · #

6. Geez! Obama was 25 when he moved to Chicago and first started getting into religion. Is 25 that late to begin to accept Christianity? (Especially being put into it in a specific context among the South Side of Chicago.) I assumed it was pretty normal given his upbringing in a non-Christian household.

   You all make it sound like he found his bearing in faith 10 days before seeking the nomination, or in his 40s right before his wife was about to leave him for drinking too much (like our current Prez).

   I’m curious as to how one maps the complexities of the human personality.

   — Mike · Jul 2, 08:23 PM · #

7. razib: it’s all signal. That’s the crux of the matter.

   — Alan Jacobs · Jul 2, 08:49 PM · #

8. Are you suggesting that we never can distinguish conscious and unconscious intent in other actors? That all statements about intent are impossible? If so, pretty much all statements about the content of the consciousness of others are off-limits by extension. Or are you setting a standard such that we can never make such statements from the public transcript, only from private experience of other people? I can only say that there’s plenty of evidence that some public readings of the interior state of individuals have looked to be very on target, and many private readings by people with long and intimate experience of other individuals have turned out to be painfully, hugely wrong.

   — Timothy Burke · Jul 2, 09:19 PM · #

9. Tim: as I said in an earlier comment, the kind of information you’re talking about is (a) “hard to get” and (b) “variable” — variable in the sense that the balance of human motive and intent does not remain constant over time, but is subject to alteration by changing circumstances. So I am suggesting that we be very cautious about drawing inferences from people’s observed behavior to their interior states; and I am also suggesting that those interior states are in any case not nearly as important in evaluating political figures as their political behavior is. I would make similar, but not identical, arguments about how we evaluate other kinds of public figures, like columnists: I’m skeptical that you know enough about David Brooks to discern whether his inconsistencies (granting for the moment that they exist) are a function of conscious duplicity or unconscious confusion, and I also doubt that it matters much. A columnist (a writer, a professor) whose ideas are incoherent is not trustworthy in the field in which he or she works, regardless of the reasons for that incoherence. Or so sez me.

   — Alan Jacobs · Jul 2, 09:36 PM · #

10. “But it seems to me that the fact of the inconsistency is what matters, not the reasons or motives for the inconsistency.”- Alan

    That is fair to a point… but I think the reason we like to address issues of intent and motivation is that they suggest whether the behavior we observe is likely to be repeated. As such, for prediction (which is important in elections), some knowledge of intent or motives would be ideal (even if difficult to attain). For example, if Obama’s past policy inconsistency was a function of a dispositional political maneuvering, then we are likely to see it repeated as the political climate adjusts. Alternatively, if this past inconsistency was a function of his redefining a political worldview that is now more solidified, then we are less likely to see it repeated. Motivations matter because they give more hints into an individual’s likely actions in alternative situations. Sadly, it is hard to get at these motivations (as you aptly point out), though not enough to cut out the validity of them as a conversation topic. Perhaps we just need to add a shake of skepticism and humility into any discussion involving motives or intent.

    peter

    — Peter Boumgarden · Jul 2, 10:57 PM · #

11. Alan: I’m really glad that someone of blogger stature has finally called Sailer out on one of his most annoying tics: armchair psychologist. He claims to be able to peer into the soul of many a prominent figure — it is terribly irritating.

    On the other hand, there is an old church saying: “If we put you on trial for being a Christian, would there be enough evidence to convict?” I suspect it is only those who know Obama personally who can answer such a question.

    — Klug · Jul 2, 11:08 PM · #

12. I could put it this way instead: inconsistency in ideas when I think that the inconsistency is a function of valid or interesting ideas which are by nature contradictory is different than inconsistency which as a function of rhetoric or logic is disingenuous. e.g., when this is a feature of the argument itself. So there are ideas which I respect which present difficult or contradictory features, and if those materialize in an argument, no problem. (Well, problem, but not something that enrages or annoys me.) Then there are failures to apply declared standards to one’s own argument, or relentless shifting of the goalposts, etc. In some sense, I don’t care whether there is an inner consciousness to a speaker which is instrumentally aware of that kind of contradictory or disingenous argument, so in this sense you’re right.

    But intention does matter in many domains of moral and political judgment. We guess at it as best we can. Of course we can’t be certain, but if uncertainty dictated that we never guess at intention, we might as well all be solipsists.

    — Timothy Burke · Jul 3, 12:40 AM · #

13. I agree with all of you who say that motives matter, and that it’s good to know them if we can. I’m just emphasizing the largeness of the “if” and the smallness of the “matter.”

    Tim, you mention two possible reasons for inconsistency, but there are many others. Sometimes people are inconsistent because they change their minds; and some reasons for changing one’s mind are good, others not so good; and all of these are hard to discern, hard to parse. It’s not solipsistic or even especially skeptical to acknowledge this.

    Consider this: many people who originally supported the invasion of Iraq (from Andrew Sullivan to Hillary Clinton) later changed their minds, and they said they did so because they received further information that mandated that change. Some observers believed them; others suspected their motives (especially those of the political figures) and claimed that they only changed when the political winds changed and it became profitable to do so. My points are simply these: (a) I don’t know how, in the vast majority of cases, you could know something like that with confidence; and (b) I’d rather have politicians and even journalists making the right decisions from bad motives than possessing the purest of hearts and having piss-poor judgment. Point (a) is emphasizing the “if”; point (b) is challenging the “matter.”

    That’s the political side of the equation. And I would argue that the various motives that are at work in a person who proclaims religious faith are far more complex and even less amenable to external judgment.

    — Alan Jacobs · Jul 3, 01:21 AM · #

14. Timothy Burke…But the (political and moral) judgments about intentions we feel within our rights to make typically refer to the intentions behind actions, no? The problem – and I’m not saying its insurmountable, just a problem, a bigger one than re. action – in the Obama case is that it involves his self-presentation. This poses a problem for discerning intention, in a public and political context especially, in two ways. First is the scale of the accusation in the face of inherently inconclusive evidence. On the basis of one’s murky inferences, you’d be accusing the person not just of a lie, but a pretty monstrous pageant of bad faith, a whole life’s worth of it, or a whole person’s. Second is that it take place in language, discourse, the fabric of which – if I may go Habermasian for a second – is threatened when we suspend the mutual assumption of good faith and force people to defend the intentions behind their utterances. (What’s to keep them from returning the favor?) Again, I’m not saying these things are insurmountable as a philosophical matter, but they amount to a sort of iffiness that explains why people might be sensitive about launching such an inquiry in the first place.

    — Matt Feeney · Jul 3, 01:36 AM · #

15. Obama is the frontrunner for the Presidency. A lot of people seem to prefer a Know-Nothingist approach to Presidential candidates, but that’s pretty much what we did with the current President back in 2000, and how’s that working out for us?

    We have a rather disjointed paper trail on Obama — not much from the 1980s and 1990s, except for an enormous 1995 autobiography of high literary merit; and then a lot of stuff from the mid-2000s onward that’s more conventional.

    The essential problem is that there are a lot of contradictions between his 1995 autobiography and his David Axelrod-spun “biography-based” campaign of 2008. All we can do is look at the record and try to make sense of it. (Or, perhaps somebody in the mainstream media could someday ask Obama, or if he’s too august and sacrosanct a personage, ask Axelrod about the contradictions.)

    Jonathan Raban writes in “The Church of Obama” in The Guardian:

    “Obama is cagey, in a lawyerly way, about the supernatural claims of religion. Recounting a conversation about death that he had with one of his two young daughters, he wrote, ‘I wondered whether I should have told her the truth, that I wasn’t sure what happens when we die, any more than I was sure of where the soul resides or what existed before the Big Bang.’ So I think we can take it that he doesn’t believe—or at least doesn’t exactly believe—in the afterlife or the creation.”

    The underlying reality, Raban surmises, isn’t very exciting. Obama believes, more or less, in nothing. He is, argues Raban, a “scrupulous agnostic.”

    This theory fits well with Obama’s 1995 book. Indeed, while Obama’s 1988 “conversion” is dramatically described on p. 295 of Dreams from My Father, I can’t find it coming up again in the last 147 pages of his autobiography, most of which takes place later that year in Kenya. Apparently, his conversion didn’t make much of an impression on him.

    And, as Obama describes it, the lengthy “conversion” scene during Rev. Wright’s “Audacity of Hope” sermon is essentially racial rather religious in the Christian sense. It’s the moment he finally feels black enough.

    Possibly Obama has changed his mind since his 1995 autobiography. I don’t know. Perhaps somebody should ask him.

    — Steve Sailer · Jul 3, 10:29 AM · #

16. Matt Feeney is concerned that the fabric of discourse “is threatened when we suspend the mutual assumption of good faith and force people to defend the intentions behind their utterances.”

    Presidential candidates are not your friends, neighbors, or co-workers. They are incredibly ambitious people who want power, more power than anybody else on earth has. You can assume their good faith if you want, but I’ve been burned enough.

    — Steve Sailer · Jul 3, 10:40 AM · #

17. Here’s what Obama wrote about Wright and Trinity in 1995:

    http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-obama-wrote-about-wright-in-1995.html

    — Steve Sailer · Jul 3, 10:46 AM · #

18. Sorry to keep coming back, but it occurs to me that, obviously, Obama’s religion, if any, matters a huge amount because it would explain why he spent 20 years in Rev. Wright’s church and why he gave $53,000 to that church from 2005-2007. As www.Craptocracy.com points out:

    “During the Jeremiah Wright ‘crisis’, the Obama apologists excused his attending a radical church claiming Obama was there for the Jesus talk, which Obama loves, not the hate whitey ranting, which Obama grudgingly tolerated.”

    Or is it the other way around?

    It seems like something worth trying to find out about a would-be President…

    — Steve Sailer · Jul 3, 11:05 AM · #

19. Steve, it’s hard to have a meaningful conversation with you. You throw out so many accusations, many of which are self-contradictory, and you present even the smallest details in such a tendentious have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife kind of way, that I hardly know where to begin. And what’s the point, really? It’s not like you’re willing to consider another point of view. You don’t even seem to be aware of what my argument is.

    — Alan Jacobs · Jul 3, 12:20 PM · #

20. Alan and Steve – you guys are on such different frequencies that I have trouble even translating. I can’t resist, though.

    1) Back on the original thread, Reihan hypothesized that “It is also possible that Obama’s objections to same-sex marriage are rooted in his Christian beliefs.” Then southpaw said that Obama’s “own definition of marriage and his understanding of the social order is presumably drawn from his Christian faith.” Sailer came back and said that based on what we can glean from the record, Obama’s Christian faith is based more on his sense of community and justice and less on his faith in the supernatural than many might assume, and does not appear to be the kind of Christian faith that would be likely to cause Obama to oppose same-sex marriage. (Being Sailer, he said it much more aggressively than that).

    2. Alan responded that it is gauche and usually counterproductive to question the sincerity of another person’s faith, or to deny that faith altogether.

    3. Steve came back with a bunch of scattershot evidence that Obama is at least doubtful about the existence of God, if not fully agnostic, and that Obama’s own description of his religious experience is focused primarily on the community with the other congregants, not with God.

    It’s true that it’s hard for Steve and Alan to have a conversation in this case. Steve wants to talk about the nature of Obama’s experience as a Christian, and Alan wants to talk about whether it’s appropriate (or useful) to talk about the nature of Obama’s experience as a Christian.

    To go back to the beginning, if it is important to a voter to know whether Obama actually opposes gay marriage, I don’t see how we can avoid looking at the nature of Obama’s Christian faith. He says he opposes gay marriage, but Obama is prone to overheated rhetoric, so he may not oppose it nearly as much as he claims. As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything significant either to impede or promote gay marriage, so all we have to go by are his words and his biography.

    — J Mann · Jul 3, 01:26 PM · #

21. Of course Obama’s a Christian. I can recall the Southern churches from the fifties that taught the inferiority of the black man and the deviltry of the Jew. They were Christian. Obama’s church switched the ‘black’ to ‘white’, but other than that the doctrine’s the same. That’s Christian enough for me, and exactly why I won’t be voting for Obama.

    No * More * Christians *. America, the real America, has had enough of them.

    — tehag · Jul 3, 01:38 PM · #

22. Assuming that David Brooks is actually being honest, even assuming he’s being correct and consistent, it’s still understandable why people would think otherwise. He has a tendency to phrase his opinions as advice to people who disagree with him. It’s a stratagem that has both tactical and, if used with sincerity and empathy, ethical merit, but it’s just natural for the person receiving it to doubt your motives. Natural doesn’t mean good, though, and if the advice is bad, one should be able to explain why it’s bad without reference to motives.

    Given Obama’s dream of being the grand conciliator bringing Pareto improvements for everyone, he’ll be stuck in the same position of trying to tell multiple sides what’s “good” for them. And while issues of motive may not matter in the “public sphere” of punditry and opinion making (truth is independent of motive), they ARE relevant in issues of negotiation and arbitration. So questioning the sincerity of Obama’s politics is entirely reasonable and justifiable in a way that questioning Brooks’s sincerity probably isn’t. I can’t see how questioning his Christianity gets anywhere, though.

    — Consumatopia · Jul 3, 01:51 PM · #

23. Obama is a christian in exactly the same way that Ken Miller is a catholic, or that I am a sufi.
    He’s bright enough to acknowledge the sociobiological substrate of belief but willing to accept the postulate of godelian incompleteness, that we can never really know it all.
    ;)

    — matoko_chan · Jul 3, 02:00 PM · #

24. Steve:

    You keep harping on this $53,000 amount he gave to the church — have you ever heard of tithing? When you keep harping on that amount, I keep thinking: why so little? Are you even a conservative?

    — Klug · Jul 3, 02:07 PM · #

25. I’d be interested to see Steve’s read on Obama’s faith-based initiative.
    That seems to validate the community service part of Steve’s hypothesis.
    How ever, if Obama was a “true” christian, he wouldn’t include the faith-neutral hiring policy. Proselytization is a base tenent of christianity.
    It almost seems like Obama is focusing on “spreading the good WORK” instead of “spreading the good WORD”.
    Steve and Razib at least should see how very Scott Atran that whole program would be— channeling religious drive to do good…even exploiting bricolage and social network theory.

    — matoko_chan · Jul 3, 02:10 PM · #

26. FYI, for those haven’t read Dr. Kilcullen, social network theory and bricolage are what worked in the “Anbar Awakening”.
    For those that haven’t read Dr. Atran, I highly reccommend “In Gods We Trust”.
    ;)

    — matoko_chan · Jul 3, 02:16 PM · #

27. You’re also right that if he says he’s a Christian, he in some sense is, but if he isn’t at least making his best effort to believe in the divinity of Christ, he’s not what many people would call a Christian.

    Does faith require you to actively force your neurons to assent to certain propositions? Suppose a non-believer is inspired by the behavior and personality of a believer and thinks “I can’t find any independent or introspective evidence that his beliefs are true, but out of love and respect for this believer I will trust in his belief system and act as though it were true.” Would such trust qualify as sufficient faith, or does one have to start practicing self-hypnosis here?

    — Consumatopia · Jul 3, 02:16 PM · #

28. also….didn’t Obama excuse Wrights ranting at one point by saying how wonderful the reverends community building had been? Isn’t that what Wright got an award for?
    Perhaps Obama merely sees christianity as a localized tool for raising up a communities poor and disadvantaged.

    — matoko_chan · Jul 3, 02:29 PM · #

29. Consumatopia writes: Does faith require you to actively force your neurons to assent to certain propositions?

    That’s a fascinating question, C, and it was the one I was trying to get at. A self-identified Christian who doesn’t believe in the divinity of Christ[*] is definitely still a Christian by some definitions, and where to draw the line is very interesting, both from a religious perspective and a semantic one.

    [*] To repeat my caveat, I can’t see in Obama’s heart, so I don’t know with much confidence whether this description applies to Obama.

    — J Mann · Jul 3, 03:27 PM · #

30. Yeah… that is interesting C. There are certain propositions in the Christian faith that in many senses I want to believe as true, but often fail to find highly plausible (where what I experience is similar to how Charles Taylor talks about a loss of meaning of religious language… or a shift in plausibility structures in the words of Berger/ Luckman). I think there are certain concepts that I identify as beautiful, but have a hard time understanding their historicity.

    Alan.. moving away from trying to understand others… from your theological perspective (and the perspective you map out here) how do suggest we understand our own mixed feelings/ uncertainties/ beliefs? Do we just move to behavior again, and forget motives (due to their conceptual muddiness)? Is that ideal or even possible in a religion where ‘membership’ or ‘belonging’ has historically been (at least partly) defined by self identification with a specific set of propositions (e.g. divinity of Christ, witness of Church, love of God?

    — Peter Boumgarden · Jul 3, 03:57 PM · #

31. Alan:

    I think you are exactly right in this post.

    Ultimately, we only have access to observable information: this person said X, they moved their hand in this way, they chose to wear this shirt and so on. If we want to predict his future behavior, we are implicitly buildng a useful model that relates prior observations to future observations. Since there are almost an infinite number of observations, in order to be functional this model must abstract to simplifying concepts: “when he yawns a lot, or rubs his eyes, or says “I’m tired”, or has not slept for 24 hours, he is likely to sleep. I unify this with the concept of “tired”. When it comes to the unifying concept of religious belief, the range of observations that I need to account for, the mercurial nature of the concept as experienced by any living human being and so on make this almost impossible to do in a way that increases my ability to predict future behavior.

    Or as you put it much more pithily, if I understood your point, “It’s all signal”.

    — Jim Manzi · Jul 3, 04:08 PM · #

32. Agree that it’s all signal before we know what the message is. If you are on the receiving end of a communique holding a thousand (seemingly) randomly placed letters, and you are trying to decode the message, you must, initially, treat each and every letter as potential signal rather than presumptive noise; otherwise, you risk missing out on relevant information.

    In this case, we are still trying to decode the inner beliefs of Barack Obama (for better or worse). He’s sent to us, across various channels, vast amounts of data — some obviously contradictory, some seemingly contradictory, some mutually coherent, some mutually amplifying, and some redundant. So yes, as we stand now, it is all signal (or more precisely, it should be treated as signal). Separating signal from noise is the historian’s job.

    — JA · Jul 3, 04:28 PM · #

33. I suppose I should say “Stamping the label of ‘signal’ or ‘noise’ over data is the historian’s job.” Separating signal from noise is what we’re trying to do.

    — JA · Jul 3, 04:33 PM · #

34. That said, judging the intentions of other agents from scant data is something we’re hard-wired to do; you might even call it our spesh-ee-al-itee. It’s a fundamental part of our moral faculty.

    In fact, it’s this element of intent that provides the basis for Ross’s moral-continuum argument. Without some theory of the unseen mindstate of the man watching porn, there is no physically sound way to connect ‘watching porn’, or ‘leering at woman on subway’, with the act of adultery. It’s all “motive-mongering”. It’s just that the latter feels more comfortable for you, while the former — i.e., inferring dispositions towards religious doctrine from observed data — is natural for Sailer.

    — JA · Jul 3, 04:47 PM · #

35. judging the intentions of other agents from scant data is something we’re hard-wired to do

    Yes, but are we hard-wired to do it well? Our judgments are based not only on the evidence we see, but also on our own cultural and political biases, personal experiences, etc.; and we tend not be very aware of these personal biases and thus overestimate the reliability of our conclusions.

    I’m reminded of a study from a few years ago where the test subjects watched some people make some statements and were then asked to say for each one (a) whether they thought s/he was lying and (b) how confident they were in that assessment. On average, the subjects had a 90% confidence rate in their ability to separate the liars from the truthtellers, but their actual results were only about 50% correct (i.e. no better than random chance).

    — kenB · Jul 3, 06:12 PM · #

36. Yes, but are we hard-wired to do it well?

    Exactly! You’ve just asked the $64,000 question. You’ve also uncovered the primary implication: the inherently heteroglot, irreconcilable nature of moral judgments (see, e.g., Jonathan Baron’s book Judgment Misguided, available for free at the link).

    — JA · Jul 3, 06:27 PM · #

37. J. Mann makes a good point, though it doesn’t go far enough: as far as we know, “he hasn’t done anything significant either to impede or promote” <i>anything</i>, “so all we have to go by are his words and his biography”. His words change, and he insists, perhaps truthfully, his associations, even long term ones such as the one with his pastor, don’t matter. All that’s left is pyschology, which is what his biography is an excercise in.

    — Carter · Jul 3, 06:58 PM · #

38. What kind of black beetle have YOU got?

    — William Carlton · Jul 3, 07:09 PM · #

39. Huh? Didn’t you just make the opposite argument a few weeks ago in that Wall Street Journal article (discussed here under “The Weakness of Religion”)?

    Alan wrote: When people say that they are acting out of religious conviction, I tend to be skeptical; I tend to wonder whether they’re not acting as I usually do, out of motives and impulses over which I could paint a thin religious veneer but which are really not religious at all

    And: Discerning a difference between people’s professed aims and their real aims is just what intellectuals do.

    — Michael Straight · Jul 3, 08:12 PM · #

40. While it’s no fascinating to philosophize about how to deal with limited information on important subjects, I would suggest that, in general, the public would be better off with more information about the men who would rule us.

    There are well-known ways to obtain more information about people, such as asking them. I’ve long recommended that literary critic Shelby Steele, who, like Obama has a black father and white mother and who has read Obama’s books with care, would be the ideal person to conduct a long, live interview with Obama on the question of who he really is.

    — Steve Sailer · Jul 3, 08:41 PM · #

41. Many people seem to feel a quasi-religious urge to have an unquestioning faith in a powerful politician (e.g., see attitudes toward George W. Bush for a few years after 9/11).

    When skeptical questioning bring up facts about the politician that raise doubts about their comforting assumptions about his nobility of nature, a lot of anger gets directed not at the politician for misleading us, but at the person who asked the impertinent questions.

    As Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox said about Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, the psychology of the end of the story is all wrong. As you’ll recall, the two “weavers” contend that only intelligent people worthy of holding their jobs can see the new clothes. Just because one little brat is saying “The emperor has no clothes,” the mob isn’t going to suddenly agree with the kid. They are instead going to get very angry at this obviously stupid child who, clearly, isn’t even worthy of holding his job of street urchin, unlike all of the respectable people who deserve their positions of authority, who are smart enough to see that the Emperor is wearing a new, higher form of clothing.

    — Steve Sailer · Jul 3, 08:55 PM · #

42. Michael, I very much understand your puzzlement, but no, it’s exactly the same argument, just from the other side of the issue. Today I’m saying, “Don’t be so confident that you can know that someone is faking religious belief”; in that earlier piece (directed to a different audience) I was saying, “Don’t be so confident that you can know that someone is acting out of sincere religious belief.” In both cases I’m warning against the presumption of thinking we can read people’s minds and hearts and know their “real motives.” I’m skeptical of any claims about purity or perfidy of motive, whether they come from observers or from people doing self-analysis. I’m skeptical when someone says, “Ah, he’s just faking it to get votes,” and I’m skeptical when someone says, “All of my thoughts and deeds are determined by my love of Jesus.” As I’ve said elsewhere on that thread, people are more complicated than that.

    — Alan Jacobs · Jul 3, 09:13 PM · #

43. Whoops, hit “Submit” too early: That line you quote, Michael — “Discerning a difference between people’s professed aims and their real aims is just what intellectuals do” — is directed to some of our contemporary atheists who, qua intellectuals, pride themselves on their gimlet eyes — but then immediately abandon all critical inquiry as soon as someone defends evil deeds by claiming the authority of Allah or Jesus. I’m not an intellectual myself, so that comment wasn’t mean to apply to me.

    — Alan Jacobs · Jul 3, 09:20 PM · #

44. The main inconsistency I see, Alan, is that you want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt when he says he’s a Christian motivated by Christian principles, but you want us to be skeptical when (e.g.) Osama Bin Laden says he’s a Muslim motivated by Muslim principles.

    And do you really think that we have to be agnostic, that we don’t gain much insight about people’s actual beliefs from their words, actions, and background? I still think that your books (e.g) are pretty strong evidence that you’re a Christian motivated by Christian beliefs.

    — Michael Straight · Jul 3, 09:56 PM · #

45. Separating signal from noise is the historian’s job.

    nope, its a linguist’s.
    or better yet, use the Theory of Forms.

    — matoko_chan · Jul 3, 10:16 PM · #

46. you want to give Obama the benefit of the doubt when he says he’s a Christian motivated by Christian principles, but you want us to be skeptical when (e.g.) Osama Bin Laden says he’s a Muslim motivated by Muslim principles.

    Not at all, Michael; I haven’t said anything of the kind. You’re conflating two very different issues. Claims like “I am a Christian” or “I am a Muslim” are very different than claims like “I am motivated largely (or wholly) by my religious beliefs.” My comments about Obama have focused on the first kind of claim. As far as I know, he hasn’t claimed that his politics is wholly motivated by his Christianity — but if he did, my response would be a mixture of skepticism and indifference. Maybe his Christianity is that central to him, maybe it isn’t; but it’s more important to me to know what his policies are — insofar as they can be discerned — and how likely it is that he will be able to implement them — insofar as that can be discerned in advance of the Congressional elections.

    Again, if a politician is inconsistent or incoherent, that matters far more to me that the supposed reasons or motives for his inconsistency. I’m not in the motive-hunting game, but if I had to guess which modern American president was most fully driven by his religious beliefs, I’d guess Jimmy Carter. And while his beliefs are very close to my own, I don’t think they made him a good President, because I think his political judgment was poor.

    So, for the last time, my position on politicians’ motives is a combination of ignorance and apathy: I don’t know and I don’t care.

    — Alan Jacobs · Jul 3, 10:26 PM · #

47. “Separating signal from noise is the historian’s job.

    “nope, its a linguist’s.”

    But, in the case at hand, it’s the citizen’s job, to be assisted by the press.

    In the case of the frontrunner for the Presidency, he’s done an excellent job of creating an appealing “biography-based” image of himself as a post-racial reconciliator … except that all of these facts about his actual biography keep emerging — first Wright’s sermons, then Wright’s set-the-record-straight-tour, then the Pfleger-Pike brouhaha that led Obama to finally disown Trinity, etc. — that suggest his image is bogus. And Obama’s responses to all this have been to lie, to obfuscate, to bloviate, and to try to change the subject.

    Now, it could be that the candidate has a legitimate explanation reconciling the facts with his campaign image. That’s why I’ve long suggested that he submit to an interview with Shelby Steele, who has written a book about him, and, having the same racial background, can’t be intimidated by Obama playing the race card.

    What else does Obama have to do that’s so pressing at the moment? It’s the dog days of summer.

    Of course, he has little reason to do it. There’s a strong Will to Believe out there within significant portions of the media and electorate, and he’s only running against an elderly cartoon character, so why risk being put in a situation where you might have to be honest?

    — Steve Sailer · Jul 3, 10:38 PM · #

48. Steve, surely you admire Obama as the dominant lifeform in the evolutionary political landscape. He is opportunistic and exploitive, conservative of energy and position, a tactician and a strategist.
    I certainly do.
    Its a feature, not a bug. lol.

    He is a machine for harvesting votes like a great white is a machine for harvesting protein.

    “But, in the case at hand, it’s the citizen’s job, to be assisted by the press.”
    The press is unuseful here, they have pretty much succumbed to teh glamor.
    I think you should put out the Bat Sign for Citizen Jeff Goldstein, the greatest student of intentionalism in Known Blogspace.

    — matoko_chan · Jul 3, 11:50 PM · #

49. I think Dr. Krauthammer pretty much gets it.

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/03/AR2008070302451.html

    Obama sees christianity kinda like the Reihan and Ross model of “vibrant community churches”. Away of inserting uplifting social benefit. That was what O most admired about Wright and TUCC, was the community outreach.
    Obama is comfortable about Chritianity, but somehow I dont think we will ever see him authoring papers on demonic exorcism like Jindal, a Charismatic Catholic (read Evangelical Catholic).

    — matoko_chan · Jul 4, 03:47 PM · #

50. I think it would be a mistake to dismiss Obama’s faith as some kind of wishy/washy Emerson/Bishop Spong Universalism. Obviously, he has his doubts and insecurities as to certain aspects of Christian Doctrine, as do most members of mainline Christian denominations(my own PCUSA self included). But he has repeatedly indicated his belief in the divine and transformative nature of Christ, which is enough to make one a sincere Christian, is it not? And it’s not like conservative Christians don’t have their agonies of doubt too, as C.S. Lewis “A Grief Observed” and Mother Teresa’s letters elegantly show.

    — Bert · Jul 6, 03:39 AM · #

Commenting is closed for this article.

↑ Fetchez Lavache

↓ Racism Everywhere!

All contents copyright The American Scene unless otherwise noted. Colophon. Archive.