Have faith in the People!

“The fight over evolution has reached the big, big screen. Several Imax theaters, including some in science museums, are refusing to show movies that mention the subject – or the Big Bang or the geology of the earth – fearing protests from people who object to films that contradict biblical descriptions of the origin of Earth and its creatures.

The number of theaters rejecting such films is small, people in the industry say – perhaps a dozen or fewer, most in the South.” (New York Times)

Only a dozen? Well, that’s all right then! And as long as they keep courageously mentioning now and again that the world is round (despite biblical indications otherwise) then we can all sleep happily.

Modern conservatism in the United States is presenting itself as a movement of the People.

Give the People their voice! The liberal elite has run the country and the media for too long, running roughshod over the People’s religious values.

Let the People decide in the marketplace! Remove regulations that deny upstanding business People rewards for their initiative and hard work.

When I mentioned the Imax thing to her, my friend Nancy emailed me this excerpt from a 2002 news story:

“…the New England Journal of Medicine is relaxing its conflict-of-interest rules for authors of its most comprehensive articles because it cannot find qualified experts with no financial ties to drug companies… Critics argue that these relationships can sway research, influence what is being studied and what is not, and create a loss of trust by the public that makes everyone suffer.”

The People reject evolution. Scientists sell themselves. Student ratings help determine their professors’ courses and pay, because students are, after all, the customer. Customers and commerce rule. It’s the new populism.

The educated elite has always mistrusted populism. Not surprising. The People have frequently been wrong: racist, sexist, jingoistic, ignorant – pretty much like the educated elite, but often a few years or generations behind.

The People didn’t pick up the germ theory of disease as fast as the educated elite, who only a few years before had been doing surgery with dirty hands and scalpels. Nowadays the People are getting obese – which was once the elite’s privilege, before they espoused theories about exercise and calories.

Theories! Like the theory of evolution, as opposed to fact? One day medicine will be so genetics-based and effective (assuming a few honest and independent scientists are left) that your health will depend on that theory. Then a future generation of preachers and People will discover God likes evolution, and Imax can revive its old movies.

But by then the liberal elite will be off on some new hare-brained theory – like ways of getting rid of foreign dictators that don’t involve war.

Until Gandhi and Martin Luther King, it was really beyond imagining that the People could shame an oppressive elite into acting right. The old more brutal ways were tried and true. Non-violence was just a theory. It’s still a hard one to fathom, harder to practice. No wonder Muslims and Hindus fought as soon as Gandhi was dead, and the Black Panthers took up the gun to get somewhere faster.

Bush and the neocons believe in the tried and true. More Black Panther than spiritually creative.

What interested me most in openDemocracy’s brilliant Rethinking Iraq discussion was Doug Ireland’s reference to the “alternatives to war put about by war opponents”. Like genetic medicine, this is where the future lies and I want to understand it. The Dubai cafés may be praising Bush’s war for opening up some democracy, but surely there were ways to do that without 100,000 dead?

Still, the People (American and Arab) know that before Bush the democracies were doing basically nothing about Arab dictatorships. To avoid a populist war, you may need first to mount peaceful populist interventions. The People aren’t stupid.

In the last century the People chose capitalism over socialism, dashing the hopes of the left. But they also chose the vote and collective bargaining. The People aren’t stupid.

So populism has risks for the right. The People may want to be sure their medicines are untainted, requiring regulation. They may want someone, like the government, I suppose, to run a no-risk scheme to give them a modest income in their old age.

What if the People, left free to satisfy their desires in the marketplace, decided that what they wanted was pornography? Or divorce, gay unions, or abortion? In short, can the right really afford to trust the People?

So it’s a brilliant tactic of the right to ignore the risks and espouse populism. Because the left is ostensibly dedicated to empowering the People and has a hard time arguing against the People’s baser desires. When the People want war, and a born-again president, and to hit back hard against the Arabs, what is there left to do but sneer?

But however benighted the People can be made to appear, both right and left have something to learn when a lot of the People disagree with them.

Many People who are alienated at work or ground down financially want more than a better paycheque: they want a life that has meaning. The left has failed to understand why the People’s protest against the unpleasant aspects of the modern world is often couched in religious and anti-scientific terms – when it is isn’t expressed in consumerism. Time, then, to sign up for the Progressive Religious conference in New York on 7 May, or for Tikkun’s Spiritual Activism in July.

The Christian right, I think, may be in for a few shocks when the religious left invokes their prophetic language against the rapaciousness of modern capitalism and in support of science, and when more consumers demand regulation to ensure safe and honest products.

The People get there eventually, often even before the elite.