Did the Irish save European civilization?

A few weeks ago, I met someone who worked for the European branch of the American Center for Law and Justice (Pat Robertson's answer to the ACLU). We chatted about his work, and he discussed his latest project, which, in a nutshell, amounted to the subversion of the European Union.

Dum. Dum. Dum.

The issue in question involved the Treaty of Lisbon, which was rejected last week by the Irish people. The Treaty, what the New York Times called "a painstakingly negotiated blueprint for consolidating the European Union’s power and streamlining its increasingly unwieldy bureaucracy," was supposed to reform and solidify the governance of Europe. But for more conservatively minded folks, the Treaty's streamlining procedures also meant that member states would give up much of their control over legislation and regulations in the areas of health care and family life. (In other words, states would no longer be able to regulate abortion and gay marriage.)

The ECLJ brief details the concerns.

But while people may disagree with the ECLJ over the controversial moral issues involved, the serious questions about the approval process that they raise are significant. The major problem with the Treaty is that it amounts to a back-door approval of a European governing system without the democratic consent of the people. Ireland, because of its constitution, was the only member state of the European Union that actually voted on it. The 18 member states that already approved the Treaty did so through more diplomatic (that is, closed) means.

Of course, one can see the Lisbon Treaty as a procedural issue, something that ordinary people wouldn't care to understand or be bothered with. But is that any way to begin a government?

Xenophobic race-baiters, unite!

A few months ago, after watching an insipid History Channel documentary on the anti-Christ of Revelations, it occurred to me that the fundamentalist description of the anti-Christ—that he would be charismatic, come from nowhere, inspire a devoted following that captivated the world, etc.—bore some serious resemblances to Barack Obama.

Of course, in no way, shape or form do I think such a portrayal of Obama is accurate. In fact, I think it is, in a word, kinda nuts and is driven not by religious conviction but out of a xenophobic fear of Obama's "Otherness"—i.e., his race, his name, his non-Western roots. In fact, one could see this xenophobic fear of Obama as reflecting a deeper racial prejudice that is no longer socially acceptable to air in public.

Anyway, when I noted the connection, I became curious, and so I Googled the phrase “obama antichrist” to see what the Religious Right was thinking about it. It turns out that the weblog Wonkette apparently did a similar search in October of 2006 and found only 16,000 pages on Google containing the two words. At the time, Dick Cheney was a far more popular target, with 169,000 pages. This was during the heated mid-term elections, which means that the epithet of "antichrist" was probably used by Democrats, not Republicans. The difference, of course, is that the use of the term by fundamentalist Christians is far more explosive.

The day of the Texas and Ohio primaries, things were far different. I Googled “obama antichrist” at about 9:00 in the morning and got 292,000 pages. Then, in preparing to email some friends about my find, I Googled it again at about 10:30 a.m. and got 382,000. Something, it seems, was brewing, and it has continued to brew.

Since then, the number of pages associating Barack Obama and the End of Days have ebbed and flowed with his chances. Today, when I searched the terms, the number surpassed one million for the first time.

Some of these pages are humorous ones, but many more, like this one, aren’t.

While this is far from a scientific survey, in many ways, the growth of the association between Barack Obama and the demonic on Google seems suggestive of a larger trend, particularly among Christian evangelicals, that occasionally bubbles to the surface.

This leads to some serious questions, not about the eschatological significance of Barack Obama—after all, the antichrist has been everyone from the pope to Colonel Sanders (whose chicken has to be demonic)—but about the tactics that the Religious Right could use later on during the general election. If you want to mobilize evangelical voters, and you don’t care how you do it, you can create a grassroots campaign naming him as the antichrist and warning about the demonic regime he will institute once elected. (This is not unusual. John Guest, the leader of a evangelical megachurch in Pittsburgh, where I live, called John Kerry “Satan’s candidate” in 2004.)

Time will tell.

Haunted by Google?

Last weekend, I received my copy of the June/July Edition of The Atlantic Monthly, arguably the best general interest magazine in the country. I was stunned to find out that the cover story was about the deleterious effects of Google on my cognitive capacities.

Nicholas Carr frets:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

The Googleplex is destroying cognition, in short, because it makes us intellectually lazy. We don't have to think as hard, so we don't.

To his credit, Carr recognizes that his concerns aren't new. In fact, they are precisely the same concerns that Plato had about writing.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.”Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

But Carr is still "haunted" by the horror of Google and Internet technology.

In reflecting on the article, I'm still puzzled. What in the world does this handwringing even mean? Marshall McLuhan reminds us that technology always changes our understanding of ourselves in unexpected, even perverse ways. But that doesn't mean that we're all going to die. The underlying capacity of human beings--creativity, curiousity, ability to learn and adapt, etc.--won't change. So Google is making us think in different ways. In some ways, it will be better; in some ways, it will be worse.

It's not like a meteor is going to wipe out the planet. Oh. The Atlantic covered that last month.

Back On

So I decided to start blogging again today. We'll see how this goes.