The line between religion and science seems to be increasingly sharp and abrasive these days, which is bit of a puzzle if you know something about history.  Scientists have not been atheists, by and large, and believers have not always been so certain of their beliefs.

Sir Isaac Newton devoted the major part of his energies to writing religious tracts, after he completed his monumental work on celestial mechanics and the laws of motion.  Blaise Pascal, noting that God’s existence could not be definitively proved, developed his famous wager:  it is better to believe in god as the benefits of belief outweigh the consequences of doubt.

But strident politicians today seem to have few scruples in asserting their fundamentalist convictions.  For them everything is black or white.

One historian of the evangelical movement referred to such beliefs, for example, as the world is 10,000 years old (based on a literal reading of Genesis) as an “intellectual disaster.” “The scandal of the evangelical mind,” he wrote, “is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.”

It appears to be contagious.  Political candidates refer to evolution as “a theory” as if other theories had just as much accumulated evidence to back them up.  Or they challenge global warming as a conspiracy.  Or they believe that Obama was not born on American soil because – well – it just doesn’t seem right to them that all those rumors could be wrong.

So it’s refreshing to hear different voices from the evangelical Christian community speak up about trying to maintain a balance between knowledge and faith.

Karl W. Gilberson, a former professor of physics, and Randall J. Stephens an associate professor of history, both evangelical Christians, have recently written:  “Within the evangelical world, tensions have emerged between those who deny secular knowledge, and those who have kept up with it and integrated it with their faith.”  (See. “The Evangelical Rejection of Reason.”)

Gilberson and Stephens note:  “Almost all evangelical colleges employ faculty members with degrees from major research universities — a conduit for knowledge from the larger world. We find students arriving on campus tired of the culture-war approach to faith in which they were raised, and more interested in promoting social justice than opposing gay marriage.”

War can’t be the basis of education.  You can’t learn anything new or complicated if you have to defend established ideas at all costs.  Yes, someone may “win” the battle in the sense that the enemy of the moment will retire from the field silenced and shaken.  And the enemy may even be sufficiently discouraged to give up trying altogether.  But ideas are resilient and indestructible, and someone else is likely to take them up again.

Common sense suggests we could be wrong, or we could change our ideas.  It has happened before – and can happen again.  What is the threat that makes such openness feel so dangerous?

On the other hand, to know everything with such certainty is to live in a very dark place.

Voter Fraud and Income Inequality in the Voting Booth

How could anyone object to a campaign against fraud?  In a society mesmerized by the presence of fraud everywhere – on Wall Street, in corporate headquarters, in politics and, of course, on street corners – it looks all too plausible for government to mount a campaign against voter fraud as well.  But looking closer reveals that the campaign itself is fraudulent.

Risa Goluboff, a law professor at the University of Virginia, and Dahlia Lithwick, a Senior Editor at Slate, pointed out:  “There is no evidence for widespread vote fraud, despite Bush administration efforts to find some.”  They add: “a major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop. (See, in Slate, “A Fraudulent Case.”)

The real purpose of the campaign, they argue, is to disenfranchise African Americans.  Take the proposed requirement that voters show a government-issued photo ID:  “The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that while about 12 per­cent of Americans don’t have a government-issued photo ID, the figure for African-Americans is closer to 25 percent, and in some Southern states perhaps higher.”

But it looks to me, more broadly, like a campaign against the poor.  To be sure, a disproportionate number of blacks are impoverished, but they are far from the only ones.  The usual photo IDs are a drivers licenses and passports, both of which reflect a certain social and economic standing.  People who don’t travel for business or pleasure won’t usually bother to get passports.  And a usable drivers license suggests access to a car — and lots of people don’t have those.

There was a time when only those who had property could vote.  That time is long past.  But this amounts to a newer version of the property requirement.  Earlier there were poll taxes, then literacy tests, residency requirements or other complex tests of residency.  All of those made it easier for those who have money to get into the polling booth.  The new requirements proposed to combat “voter fraud” are more subtle, but they also work to discourage and sometimes prevent the poor from casting ballots.

As the poor get poorer and the rich richer, there is a growing likelihood that the disparity will become a political issue.  The rich of course have a disproportionate influence on the electoral process, as it is, as candidates need their contributions to mount expensive campaigns.  Finding clever ways of disenfranchising the poor is another strategy for the rich to protect their wealth.

This can happen because most of us are governed by unconscious assumptions about fraud, about race and about poverty.  A campaign against voter fraud looks good on the surface.  But is actually caters to our prejudices, while promoting a conservative agenda.

Frankly, I don’t think that the poor will be misled.  They are used to reading between the lines.  It’s the rest of us who might unwittingly be taken in, allowing this campaign to succeed.

The Reactions

Those who took the “carnival” on Wall Street seriously seem to have been right.  The protestors camping out in lower Manhattan and other financial sites around the world have struck a deep chord that continues to resonate.

They may not have a coherent program or set of proposals, and they may not link to conventional politics as many think they should, but they have a theme that no one else is raising: the runaway influence of the finance industry in our society and the failure of our political system to make it accountable.

When I first wrote about Occupy Wall Street two weeks ago, I drew the analogy with the canaries in coal mines that signal the presence of deadly fumes.  Now it’s more than that – and far more than can be summed up in one image or metaphor.  And it has generated enough support to get New York’s government to cancel its plans to “clean up” the park it has taken over.

The Democrats, seeing a counter-weight to the Tea Party, seek to make connections with a movement that has an astonishing 56 percent approval rating, according to Time.  Last week, Bill Clinton commented in Chicago:  “The Occupy Wall Street crowd basically is saying, ‘I’m unemployed and the people that caused this have their jobs again and their bonuses again and their incomes are high again. There’s something wrong with this country. This is not working for me.’”  For their part, the Republicans have been speaking of “mobs,” “Nazis” and “commies.”

There are interesting individual anomalies. The Wall Street Journal noted yesterday that the CEO of Citigroup, Vikram Pandit, expressed sympathy with the occupiers, and today’s New York Times quotes him as saying “that trust has been broken between financial institutions and the citizens of the U.S.”  He added, “The protesters should hold Citi and others ‘accountable for practicing responsible finance.’” And some Tea Party members have noted parallels between the two grass-roots movements, their opposition to the bank bailouts.

But generally, according to The New York Times, “bankers dismiss the protesters as gullible and unsophisticated. Not many are willing to say this out loud, for fear of drawing public ire — or the masses to their doorsteps.” (See, “In Private, Wall St. Bankers Dismiss Protesters as Unsophisticated.”)

The media, predictably, are focused on various human-interest angles:  who started the protest, how they make decisions, their eating habits, and their hygiene.  (See, “From Canada to Meetup.com, the Journey of a Protest Meme.”)  But they don’t seem to know what to make of the movement itself.  It is too multifaceted and elusive, too much a collection of incongruities.  It’s just not like the other forms of political action they have come to know over the years.

Perhaps, though, it should be viewed as not political at all.  Perhaps, as the protestors themselves say, it’s about justice and morality.  They are less interested in a political agenda than in bearing witness to a profound ethical violation of our social contract.  Some might want to get arrested, but many just want to be seen.  A better analogy might be those who conduct a vigil at an execution, or the mothers of the “disappeared” who showed up regularly in mourning to reproach the Argentine generals for their crimes.

Clearly they are saying something important, but not the kind of thing that politicians usually find themselves thinking.

Looking Under the Hood

Focusing on the unemployment crisis alone can cause us to ignore the quality of the jobs we need to create.

Rick Perry has boasted of his track record in increasing jobs in the Texas’s Rio Grande Valley by 42 percent between 2000 and 2010.  But the MIT economist Paul Osterman, writing in The New York Times, noted: “the median wage for adults in the Valley between 2005 and 2008 was a stunningly low $8.14 an hour (in 2008 dollars). One in four employed adults earned less than $6.19 an hour.” (See, “Yes, We Need Jobs. But What Kind?”)  And it’s not just a problem in Texas. One fifth of all American workers received wages at or below the poverty level.

One could argue that a bad job is better than no job at all, but there are serious hidden costs to poor wages.  Families struggling to get by on inadequate wages put off health care, frequently with long-term consequences.  As parents struggle with extra jobs to pay the rent, their children are often neglected. They fail to do their homework, get into trouble, eat poorly.  Seeing how their parents work hard but still fall behind, they lose incentive to complete school and join the work force.

Then there are the psychological costs of anxiety and depression, stress factors that lead to generally higher rates of illness and domestic violence.

We tend to assume that unemployment and poverty go together.  That is, if you work, if you’re not lazy and you try, you’ll be OK.  But Charles Blow pointed out two weeks ago:  “Three out of four of those below the poverty line work.”  (See, “For Jobs – It’s War.”)  Either they are paid poverty wages, or they are victims of “wage theft,” practices by employers in low-wage industries who don’t pay overtime or who call their workers “independent contactors” to avoid paying them benefits.

This is not to imply that employers, by and large, are mean spirited or exploitative.  Most of them are also struggling to make their budgets.  They must produce goods and services while staying competitive.  Workers who are content are more productive and loyal, but employers still have to watch the bottom line.

That’s why it is up to government to set standards and monitor compliance.  Not only does the federal government set the minimum wage (now at the low 1968 level, adjusted for inflation), state and local governments can tie contracts and zoning easements to higher wage standards.  Much can be done — if government is not hamstrung by pressure against “regulation” and “interference” by ideologues.

No one likes regulations, and many object to the infringement on personal freedom they entail.  But they prevent us from simply believing what we want to think, what’s convenient, or what’s in our own interest.

In a competitive world where we are all struggling to survive, they keep us honest.

Over the Edge of Politics

The “Occupy Wall Street” demonstration that has grown over the past few weeks has attracted growing media attention, but not always much respect.  Reporters are captivated by the odd assortment of protestors that keeps showing up. Commentators sense it is important, but they don’t know what to make of it.

That seems to reflect an ambiguity among the demonstrators themselves.  They have no specific goals, no way of knowing even when they will have succeeded, or when it will be time to go home.  Charles M. Blow called it a “festival of frustrations” in today’s New York Times, and noted that it highlights “the failures and ineffectiveness they feel from the current government.”

He is correct in that.  The demonstrators not only fail to call for specific reforms, they bypass electoral politics entirely.  Blow goes on to link the demonstrations to a new Gallop Poll that shows that 81 percent of Americans said they were dissatisfied with the way the country is being governed.  “Americans’ confidence in the people who run for or serve in office is also at a new low.”  (See, “Hippies and Hipsters Exhale.”)

But he doesn’t emphasize another defining characteristic of the demonstrations:  the focus on Wall Street.  To me, that means they grasp that the problem is about money and corruption.  It is not just unemployment, the loss of social benefits, or the collapse of consumer credit.  These are concerns, to be sure, but the demonstrators are united in the conviction that they can’t trust politicians to represent their real interests because moneyed interests have taken over.  Government has become indifferent to the interests of the vast majority or, at worst, an instrument of exploitation.

Earlier in the week, a remarkably wide-ranging article on the front page of The New York Times noted that protestors around the world are showing “wariness, even contempt, toward traditional politicians and the democratic political process they preside over.”  (See, “As Scorn for Vote Grows, Protests Surge Around Globe,”)

Usually the issue is played in the media as a matter of self-indulgent citizens who do not want to give up the benefits they got used to enjoying but hadn’t really paid for.  This is designed to isolate the protestors, and prepare the ways for their defeat.  But the piece in the Times makes clear how widespread this is and how multifaceted.

Some commentators see signs of hope in a younger generation that is using social media in creative ways and evolving more participatory forms of organization.  But as someone who shared in the hopes of a new era of democracy in the sixties and participated in the protests back then, I too am struck by the lack of any specific focus.  Then, we wanted the Vietnam War to end.  What does “Occupy Wall Street” want?

But the protestors in Spain and Athens, New Delhi, Israel, London and, now, New York may be less about agitating for a new era.  A better analogy might be the canaries that warn of toxic levels of fumes in coal mines.  Perhaps they are telling us that ours is longer a viable democracy, not even a very good oligarchy.

Will it end up in anarchy and some form of dictatorship?