Bill Moyers Journal

by Bill Moyers

  First, in chapter 1, God’s sitting in the universe, center stage, totally powerful, totally benign, blessing everything, all that he has made. No favorites, impartial. Within two chapters, God’s completely lost control of his creation. Then the impartial God turns out to be a God that has real favorites. And God the benign creator becomes God the destroyer, at the end of the Flood.

  And by the end of Genesis, God has retired from the scene. Joseph and his brothers have to rely on their own insights and dreams, just as we do. You can’t say what God is. That is, people often ask me, “Ms. Armstrong, do you or do you not believe in the God of the Bible?” And I always say, “Tell me what it is.” I’ll be fascinated to hear, because the Bible is highly contradictory. What it shows, I think, is that our experience of the divine is ambiguous, complex. We can misunderstand it. We can use it to create mayhem because of our own horrible sort of murderous tendencies. And there are no clear answers, no clear theology in the Bible.

  But isn’t the source of the trouble the fact that everyone interprets the text to fit his or her own bias?

  But it shouldn’t, because in the premodern world, you were expected to find new meaning in scripture. You have the beginning of the scientific revolution in Europe in the sixteenth century, and that starts changing everything. It’s a much more literal approach to life. And the scientists, people like Newton, start to write theology, and the churches seize upon this and they start thinking that the Bible is literally and factually true.

  But in the premodern world, what you see are the early Christian and Jewish commentators saying you must find new meaning in the Bible. And the rabbis would change the words of scripture to make a point to their pupils. Origen, the great Greek commentator on the Bible, said that it is absolutely impossible to take these texts literally. You simply cannot do so. And he said God has put these sort of conundrums and paradoxes in so that we are forced to seek a deeper meaning.

  And the Koran is the same. The Koran says every single one of its verses is an ayah, a symbol or a parable. Because you can only talk about God analogically, in terms of signs and symbols. So you must go to the Bible and find new meaning, these early interpreters said. And the same was true of the Greeks. At the beginning of the rationalist tradition in Greece—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle—the people who commented on them didn’t take down everything they did slavishly. They used it as a springboard to have new insights in the present. Rather as we might use weights at the gym to build up our strength. They used it as something to start them thinking. The rabbis used to say, “You may not leave a scripture or text until you have translated it into practical action for the community here and now.”

  Meaning... acts of kindness, acts of compassion.

  Acts of compassion.

  And acts of justice?

  Yes. Absolutely.

  We are all indebted to those Hebrew prophets for their powerful sense of social justice.

  And the rabbis who came after them in the Talmudic age, and who created the Mishnah and said, “Now we have to move on.” We’ve lost that confidence today. And that’s what the Charter is trying to do—trying to nudge people into the hard work of being compassionate. People don’t want to be compassionate. When I go around lecturing about this, I sometimes see the good faithful looking mutinous. They may know that they ought to be compassionate, but what’s the fun of religion if you can’t slam down other people? This is ego.

  I’m glad you mentioned this, because I know many atheists and agnostics who are more faithful, if that’s the right term, to the Golden Rule than a lot of believing religious people.

  Yes. And I also know a number of atheists who have no time for the Golden Rule at all.

  What is it that evokes the empathy and the commitment to people to put themselves in others’ shoes?

  Basically a sense of urgent need. If we don’t manage to do better than this within our own communities, our own nations, and as regards other nations far away, then I think we are in for a very troublesome ride. We are not doing well at the moment. The three monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—have a besetting tendency. That is, idolatry taking a human idea, a human idea of God, a human doctrine, and making it absolute, putting it in the place of God. Of course, there have been secular idolatries, too. Nationalism was a great idolatry.

  This is what we do. As Paul Tillich said, we are makers of idols. We are constantly creating these idols. Erecting a purely human ideal or a human value or a human idea to the supreme reality. Now, once you’ve made something essentially finite, once you’ve made it an absolute, it has then to destroy any other rival claimants. Because there can only be one absolute.

  You wrote A History of God. Who created God?

  Human beings created the idea of God. But the transcendent reality to which the idea of God nudges us is embedded in part of the human experience.

  If we create God, then we can read into God our passions, jealousies, envies, animosities, aspirations.

  Yes, and this is idolatry, when you are creating a God in your own image and likeness. When the Crusaders went into battle with the cry “God wills it” on their lips, they were projecting their own fear and loathing of these rival faiths onto other people. And we get a lot of secular people doing this, too.

  The Stalinists, the Communists, the fascists—

  And even nearer, here in the United States. There are people saying, “We want to get rid of religion.” There are radical Republicans slanging Democrats. We are a very agonistic society.

  Agonistic?

  Meaning competitive in our discourse. Let me say this. In our discourse, it is not enough for us in the Western democratic tradition simply to seek the truth. We also have to defeat and humiliate our opponents. And that happens in politics. It happens in the law courts. It happens in religious discourse. It happens in the media. It happens in academia.

  Very different from Socrates, the founder of the rationalist tradition. When you had dialogues with Socrates, you came in thinking that you knew what you were talking about. Half an hour later, you realized you didn’t know anything at all. And at that moment, says Socrates, your quest can begin. You can become a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, because you know you don’t have wisdom, you seek it. And you had to go into a dialogue prepared to change, not to bludgeon your conversation partner into accepting your point of view. At every single point in a Socratic dialogue, you offer your opinion kindly to the other, and the other accepts it with kindness.

  But you can’t have a dialogue with people who don’t want to have a dialogue.

  No. But that doesn’t mean we should give up altogether. Because I think so-called liberals can also be just as hard-line in their own way. Most fundamentalist movements, in every tradition that I’ve studied, in every fundamentalist movement in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have begun with what is perceived to be an assault by the liberal or secular establishment. Look at your Scopes trial. You have this absurd ban on teaching evolution in the public schools. And after the trial, the secular press does a number on the fundamentalists.

  H.L. Mencken was ruthless in caricaturing them.

  And they crept away. And we thought we’d seen the end of them. But of course, they were just regrouping. But before the Scopes trial, fundamentalists had often been on the left of the political spectrum. They were—many of them—prepared to work alongside socialists and alongside Social Gospel reformers in the slums of the newly developing industrialized cities. After the Scopes trial, they swung to the far right, where they remain. Before Scopes, fundamentalists tended to be literal in their interpretation of scripture. But creation science, so called, was the pursuit of a very tiny minority. After the Scopes trial they became more militant in their literal interpretation of scripture. And creation science became, and has remained, the flagship of their movement.

  Does your notion of compassion embrace liberals, in the interest of harmony, accepting state schools teaching creationism alongside Darwin’s no
tion of evolution?

  You see, the assault by Richard Dawkins on creationism has resulted, for the first time, in a worry about Darwin in the Muslim world.

  What do you mean?

  There was no worry about Darwin in the Muslim world up until very recently. The Koran doesn’t say how God created the world. The texts tell you this is an ayah—we don’t know what happened in the beginning. And there was just no problem about not knowing. Now, because of the attacks on religion, it’s headline news when British scientists slang creationism. And Darwin has now become an anathema as a result of that assault. So I think we’ve all just got to come off our high horses a bit to cool down the rhetoric. There must be an openness toward science, as St. Augustine pointed out years ago. He said if a religious text is found to contradict contemporary science, you must find a new interpretation for this text. You must allegorize it in some way. We need to get back to that. I don’t want this to be going after the fundamentalists. I don’t want this to be going after extremists. But I want this to just say, quietly, let us remember the primal duty of compassion.

  Which is?

  To feel with the other. To experience with the other. Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you. If you don’t like to be attacked, don’t attack others. As Confucius—who was the first to propound the Golden Rule, five hundred years before Christ—said, you seek to establish yourself, then seek to establish others. If you don’t like hearing your own traditions traduced, then have the discipline not to traduce the traditions of others. It’s hard. People who say it’s a simplistic idea, obviously, never tried to practice the Golden Rule, as Confucius said, “All day and every day.”

  ROSS DOUTHAT

  In the eight years George W. Bush and Dick Cheney reigned in Washington, conservatives made a mess of things. They bungled Iraq and deserted the fight against terrorists in Afghanistan, never getting their hands on Osama bin Laden, dead or alive. They sent spending into the stratosphere, rewarded the rich with huge tax cuts, and borrowed trillions from the future to pay for their indulgences. They botched Katrina and turned a wrecking crew loose on government agencies whose mission is to protect the environment, consumers, and the public interest. They used earmarks and contracts to fatten lobbyists on K Street as Tom DeLay and his congressional cronies honed a ruthless shakedown machine that turned the Conservative Revolution into a racket. More than fifty top administration officials were implicated in scandals that cost them their jobs. By 2008, as the discredited regime came to its demoralized end, principled Republicans were asking what went wrong, and how to redeem their future.

  A member of the founding generation of modern conservatism, Mickey Edwards signed up with the movement when Barry Goldwater mobilized it in 1964. Edwards served sixteen years in Congress from Oklahoma, was one of three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative nerve center, and was elected chairman of the American Conservative Union. When

  MICKEY EDWARDS

  we spoke, he was turning heads with a new book, Reclaiming Conservatism: How a Great American Political Movement Got Lost—and How It Can Find Its Way Back.

  On the other end of the generational spectrum, young conservatives were also offering thoughtful prescriptions for the recovery of their party. Ross Douthat was born in 1979, one year before Ronald Reagan was elected president. He and his colleague at The Atlantic Monthly, Reihan Salam, wrote what the conservative columnist David Brooks called “the political book of the year,” Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.

  Since then, events have altered the equation yet again. The collapse of the economy, although on Bush’s watch, cast a shadow over the first years of Obama’s presidency, giving Republican candidates ample ammo as unemployment remained high. On top of that, the GOP ignored the counsel of both Edwards and Douthat and sought recovery via the cognitive dissonance of the Tea Party movement. So keep in mind that our conversation took place in the middle of the 2008 presidential campaign, before Barack Obama’s victory, before the financial meltdown, and after the 2006 midterms, when for the first time in decades, the Republicans turned both the House and Senate back to the Democrats. Ross Douthat has since become an op-ed columnist at The New York Times. And Mickey Edwards is teaching courses on national security and American foreign policy at George Washington University in Washington, D. C.

  —Bill Moyers

  Republicans suffered only one sweeping defeat in the last thirty years. Why are you so upset?

  EDWARDS: Republicans used to believe in a certain set of basic principles about divided powers, limited government. What happened is, with the Bush presidency, we have become the exact opposite of what we used to stand for. So we may win elections, but we are now standing for an allpowerful presidency, with limits on civil liberties. We’ve changed everything we believed in order to win elections.

  DOUTHAT: In a sense, the GOP is a victim of its own success on a lot of fronts. Crime has fallen dramatically since the early 1990s. Marginal tax rates are vastly lower than they were when Ronald Reagan was running for president. The welfare system has been reformed. The Soviet Union obviously no longer exists. And so the GOP has sort of run out of things to say.

  Sure, they’ve only lost one election, but if you look back to the Democratic Party in the early 1970s, a lot of Democrats after 1972, and then again after Reagan won in ’80, would say, “Oh, well, we’ve only lost one election. We just need to regroup and come back.” But there were deeper structural problems facing the Democratic Party. And that’s what the GOP’s facing today.

  EDWARDS: It’s not just a matter of Republicans losing an election or losing some by-elections. Our party is very unpopular. President Bush is very unpopular, and the party itself is very unpopular. Having a candidate like John McCain means that, running as a Republican, you have this giant weight around your neck.

  How did this movement, which organized around Barry Goldwater, flowered with Ronald Reagan, and was consummated by George W. Bush, come to embody soaring spending, trillion-dollar deficits, an unpopular war, political corruption, moral decay, and an imperial presidency? How did that happen?

  DOUTHAT: That’s a mouthful right there.

  EDWARDS: Sure is.

  But it’s true, right?

  EDWARDS: Well, one of the things I talk about in my book, Bill, is how during the Gingrich years, some of the things were good. But there was a change in the dynamic for Republicans in Congress and winning power and holding power became the most important goal they had. It wasn’t about what they had come there to stand for.

  Party loyalty over principle?

  EDWARDS: Party loyalty or loyalty to a person. Because what happens is, instead of the president becoming the head of a separate branch of government, all of a sudden you look at him as your team captain. So instead of keeping a check on him, what you do is you find a way to rally around him and help him.

  And you said Newt Gingrich actually made the Republicans in Congress the handmaiden of the executive.

  EDWARDS: Pretty much.

  DOUTHAT: What’s interesting about Gingrich is, in the short run, he was trying to change that. He was really the only figure on Capitol Hill in the last few decades who’s tried to shift the center of political gravity in Washington back to Congress.

  The problem was, the only way he could do it was by trying to rally the GOP around him and make it much more partisan, more like a parliamentary party, really, than a traditional House of Representatives–Senate party. And as a result, once the control of the White House flipped, once the GOP held all three branches, you did have this mentality that Mickey’s describing, where Republicans in Congress were on the same team as George W. Bush. And they were going to go along with what whatever he was going do.

  But we shouldn’t underestimate the impact of 9/11. National traumas always produce overreactions, overconcentrations of executive power. They always produce power grabs in Washington. And if yo
u look at what George W. Bush has done on this front, whether it’s the detainee policy as it relates to prisoners in Guantánamo Bay or wiretapping citizens, some of it is an overreach. It also pales in comparison to what happened during World War I. Woodrow Wilson was imprisoning his political enemies. FDR was rounding up Japanese Americans and interning them. And even when you were getting started in politics, J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and Lyndon Johnson. So there is this long-term trend toward an imperial presidency. It is troubling. But I’m hopeful that some of it is just a temporary post-9/11 reaction.

  EDWARDS: Justice Kennedy said, in the Guantánamo case, that the Constitution is not something to be set aside when it’s convenient. And we have this tendency to do it. Every year as we do things like this, we lose a little more of our system of separated powers and checks and balances. And I’m not as sanguine as you are about the fact that we can resume the constitutional system as it was, which is how we protect our liberties.

  DOUTHAT: But the challenge for conservatism, as a governing philosophy, is that it’s a theory of limited government that’s operating in a society and in a framework that was built by liberals. We have the New Deal. At least parts of the Great Society have endured to the present day. And this has always been the challenge for conservatives—that is, how do you govern as a party that’s critical of the welfare state when most Americans want you to run the welfare state?

  That’s why the most successful conservative reforms over the last thirty years haven’t been about abolishing government. They’ve been about taking programs that liberals built and reforming them. The problem is when you run out of things to do on that front. And I think that’s one of the deeper problems of the Bush administration. Bush came to power in the late 1990s as a reaction against an overweening small-government fervor on the right.

  If the most fundamental tenet of conservatism is small government, how do you explain the fact that Republicans keep expanding it when they are in power?