The Real Diversity - Political Philosophy And Why America Will Always Be A Divided Country

The first thing that diversity program facilitators ask participants to do is to choose the group that best defines them – white, black, gay, straight, male, female, or transgender.  Since the purpose of these sensitivity training sessions is to teach straight, white people lessons of tolerance and the generous acceptance of minorities, it is no surprise that choices do not include  intellectual interest, artistic sensitivity, athletic ability, or especially political philosophy. 

Yet political philosophy – the  canon of principles on the basis of which one judges the world and makes personal, electoral, and economic decisions – is in fact who we are; and if ‘diversity’ were taken seriously, we should be sorted as such. 

Liberals and conservatives do not simply differ on economic, social, or international policies; but on the values that underlie them.  Liberals believe in progress towards a more ideal, equitable, and just world; and trust the state, as representative of the people and authorized to act in their behalf, to be the only institution capable of accelerated such progress.

Conservatives believe no such thing.  Human nature – self-interested, territorial, acquisitive, and aggressively defensive and offensive – is a given, a hardwired, permanent, ineluctable, and powerful engine of human activity.  Society may ‘progress’, but it has little do do with externalities and the the arbitrary interventions of the state than it does with individual competition.

It has always been the clash of civilizations and their armies which has resulted in cultural winnowing.  Empires were created and extended, tribes have always been at war to secure and expand resources and territory, and families scramble for status and prestige.

When a conservative votes for the dismantling or disassembling of government, the promotion of the private sector, he is voting less for the abolition of social programs and a restoration of free market competition than for the integrity of the individual.
Intense competition between individuals and groups will always result in the survival of the fittest – the best genes and the creation of institutions led by the strongest - and the culling of those weaker individuals, groups, or nations.  No such philosophical conservative will ever argue that the victor will necessarily create a Persepolis, Athens, or Rome.  History is not a record of social progress but the cultural change and benefits which – for better or worse – which result from conflict.

When a progressive argues for expanded social programs, a more extensive safety net for the poor, increases in spending on public education, or a a more generous and less confrontational foreign policy, he is arguing on the basis of philosophical principle.  Individuals count less than than any collective. grouping.  Communalism is always  better than individualism.  Negotiation always trumps war.  Human beings are basically good, progressives say, and only through the nurturing and encouragement of that goodness, can the world evolve to a  better place.

Everything boils down to political philosophy.  A philosophical conservative will assume that marriage is no more than any other social contract, bound to come apart at the seams.  Husbands and wives may talk of a harmonious marriage, but if true, it has come about through the same territorial imperatives which determine the behavior of tigers and wolves.  Marital equilibrium does not come about because of a fundamental belief in equality, but according to the principle of countervailing force.  There is nothing wrong with this at all, says the conservative.  The goal sis a reasonably stable and civil relationship, and idealistic sense of romance should not get in the way.

Family fortunes are never protected and guaranteed because of love, trust, and respect.  The canny pater familias understands that children always fight over their inheritance, and will take measures that even surprise them to secure it.  Poor relatives will always show up to fight for few crumbs; and unless the treasury is absolutely secure, the money will be wasted, spent, and lost.  Progressives believe that while such greed and venality might occur, it can be avoided through mutual respect, concern, compassion, and a sense of the right and just.

Evangelical Christians believe in the personal relationship between the believer and Jesus Christ.  While church and pastor may help mediate the relationship, it is only through individual faith in the Savior and a belief in his grace that one can attain salvation.  The Puritan settlers of New England brought the same fundamental beliefs with them from Europe.  America’s famous frontier  individualism had its origin in religious belief.   Only the individual was responsible for his salvation.  Government had little to do with either one’s spiritual journey or economic trajectory.  At best it provided the laws and regulative framework to facilitate individual enterprise.

It is no surprise then that many of not most evangelicals are political conservatives.  Their world view is comprehensive and complete.  If the most important element of life – spiritual salvation – is an affair  between the individual and his Maker, then why should individual enterprise be subsumed within any larger social context?  While evangelicism  may be represented by individual confessions and churches, it is still only a collection of individuals striving for grace.  While some churches and denominations have become political and have aggressively promoted their own conservative social agendas, in reality they are still individuals grouped under one aegis or another for identity, status, and recognition.

Progressives by and large are secular, humanists, intellectuals, and idealists.  We may have many of the survival traits of our early ancestors, they say, but our intelligence, enhanced human sensibilities, and ability to reform the world despite human nature make us far different from them.  The individual is not only less important than the groups to which he belongs, but denial of this fact is detrimental to everyone.

Progressives dismiss genetic determinism and refuse to accept inequality as an inevitable fact of life.  Their support of the state in its programs to encourage self-esteem, respect for multiple intelligences, and absolute social, cultural, and intellectual equality is a logical expression of a fundamental political philosophy which devalues the individual and redirects investment to the collective state.

Progressives do not accept the fundamental nature of human conflict; and believe that despite the bloody history of the 20th Century, see hope for a more peaceful world.   The way to international peace is not through confrontation but conversation.  If only we are persuasive enough about the rightness of democracy and civil rights, we can convince even the likes of Kim Jong Un, the Grand Ayatollah of Iran, and Vladimir Putin.

To defect to the conservative camp – i.e. to adopt the most aggressive, militaristic, and win-at-all-costs foreign policy – would not be so much a change based on current events and recent history; it would be a moral defection.

Can two people with radically opposed political philosophies ever be good friends?  Unlikely unless the friendship began before social and moral convictions were formed and hardened.  If two men have known each other since the age of 12 – a time when personality matters more than character – then the answer is yes. Children like each other for reasons that have nothing to do with individualism or collective socialism.  They find each other engaging, funny, spirited, quiet, thoughtful, or any one of a hundred more reasons to like someone.  They can know each other on a primal level.  The way you are at age 12 is a product of genes and family.  If you are relaxed, at ease, nervous, afraid, happy, or withdrawn, you come by it naturally; and friendship is a matter of spontaneous, unexplained reactions.

Yet few people know each other for so long nor have they based a friendship on such unspoken, unarticulated feelings.  Adult friendship is a function of the intersection of political philosophy.  In a few cases opposites attract; in most they do not, and likes tend to group together.

For the most part, then, political philosophy will determine not only votes but friendships and relationships with others and communities.

Not My God - Queer Theology And The Remaking Of Jesus

The sign outside the Westover Congregational United Church of Christ said, “Queer Theology Is For Everyone.  Pastor Phillips at 11am Sunday”.  The congregation, most of whom joined the church exactly for this reason – to hear how Jesus embraced the new theology of race and gender and how the New Testament must be reinterpreted to dispel old, patriarchal myths and repatterned to promote acceptance of the new man -  filled the pews that day.

“Who was Jesus?”, Pastor Phillips. asked the congregation. “ He was a young single man until the age of 33 and his unfortunate death.  Gay? Perhaps, and more than likely given his intimate ‘brotherhood’ with his all male disciples.  The Last Supper was the apotheosis of male, queer bonding, his allusions to marriage and family metaphorical and culturally bound, and his personal relationships with women incidental.

The gospels speak only of duty, obligation, and reproductive necessity; and Paul was quite outspoken about the nasty confines of marriage.  Better avoid it, he said, and lead a single life.

“Paul and Jesus were more than friends, sharing a particular male affection – a kind of Lawrentian bonding of sexual interest and spiritual epiphany that raised them both higher in the sight of God.

“And of course Jesus was a man of color.  Those faux white interpretations of the Renaissance were nothing but patriarchal racism.  Jesus, a Palestinian Jew was not white, but colored with the tints of his cultural and genetic community.  There was not a drop of white European blood in him.  He was a proud black man preaching the gospel.”

Hunter Blakeley squirmed in his seat, frowned and absently leafed through hymnbook and there, by pure chance, was the Christian hymns of all Christian hymns:

Onward, Christian soldiers,
marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus
going on before!
Christ, the royal Master,
leads against the foe;
Forward into battle,
see his banner go!

Now that was what Christianity was all about, muttered Blakely – a masculine, militant leading the faithful into war against the heathen.  A message of might, resolution, and indomitable right.  God did not send a woman down to earth to reform it and mend its ways, and most of all he didn’t send a dubious man.

At the sign of triumph
Satan's host doth flee;
On, then, Christian soldiers,
on to victory!
Hell's foundations quiver
at the shout of praise;
Brothers, lift your voices,
loud your anthems raise!

‘Brothers’, the verse read, not sisters or partners or companions, but brothers! Men going forth, men battling evil, not men in tights, no pirouettes or sweetness and light, no feminine side.

“…And so it is that we must conclude", said Pastor Philipps, "that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were only stand-ins for Jesus, and that no one in today’s pluralistic, inclusive, and diverse society should take them at their word.  After all, every writer has an editor, and theirs were bullish, regressive men in robes who denied everything really holy about the gay men whose writing they concluded was hopelessly fey and insinuating.  No, the Biblical editors did a job on the papyrus originals, expunged every last innuendo of unusual maleness, and so ensured the propagation of a defiantly cis-gender book of fantasy”.

Pastor Philipps’ sermon was the last in a series sponsored by the church.  Those that had preceded it were entitled: ‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph – A Cis-Gender Fairy Tale’; ‘Men At Play – Sex and Sexuality Among the Apostles’; and ‘Jesus and the Jerusalem ‘Hood – Down and Dirty in the Holy Ghetto’.  The church had been filled to the gills every Sunday.

The Catholic Church across the street was known for a welcoming embrace of queerness.  So many young gay men had flocked to the seminaries that there was no room for all of them.  The priesthood was nirvana.  Living in close, intimate quarters with similarly sexually attuned men and never having to bother with women was why they were priests. One of the greatest reforms of Vatican II was to reduce nuns to the status of all women, thus reduce their ranks to zero, and prompt an exodus, so all traces of the feminine side of things was eliminated.  

Church rectories were now happy social gathering places, witty, familiar enclaves for the lighthearted priests who now formed the Catholic clergy.

Catholic priests never had to bother with all the Jesus-is-gay fol-de-rol of Pastor Phillips who, a gay man, was welcomed into the rectory most Saturday nights, but whose sermons were a bit over the top.  Jesus was God, for Christ’s sake, they hectored Phillips when he had had too much to drink and was banging on about the gay scene in Judea.  Leave the poor man alone, meaning Jesus, and focus on the mysteries of the cross, the trinity, and transubstantiation.  The priests were good Catholics – good Christians, actually, carrying the world of the gospels without ‘rephasing’ as Phillips like to call it.

Martin Luther opened the door to such secularization.  Once Christians were loosed from the embrace of the Holy Mother Church, they could search for God without mediation – a good thing, said Luther, corrupt as the Vatican was, but a  bad thing in that people without institutional guidance could easily go off the rails

Pope John Paul II condemned the new Protestant sects that were based on nothing more than ecstasy and personality.  Faith is nothing without the logic of theology that precedes it, he said, referring to the four centuries of Christian theological debate before Constantine closed it down at Nicaea.  

John Paul II was never more apt in his remarks.  Not only are Protestant sects proliferating, and the mainstream churches gone secular, he said, but they have drifted into a a secularized theology, such as the one at the Westover church.

“I would like to leave you with these words”, Pastor Phillips concluded.  “Queer theology is for everyone.  Not just for the LGBTQ+ community, but for the straightest Tom, Dick, and Harry among you”.  He had given the slightest ironic smiling pause at ‘Dick’ to which the congregation chuckled.  “It is not revisionism, counter-revolutionary, anti-Athanasius cant, but the truth which as we all know can set you free”.  

Applause was frowned upon, but the congregation could not help themselves.  They were proud of their pastor and proud of themselves for being members of the church.  Some things were absolutely, positively right.,

I Think, Therefore I Am–The Absurdity Of Gender And Racial Identity

I ain’t playin’ no old white bitch”, Snoop Dogg said when approached by his agent for the title role in a modern remake of Hyde Park on the Hudson, this time featuring FDR’s wife, Eleanor.  It had to be a joke, some weird Broadway-meets-AOC shit that his agent had cooked up with David Mellick wannabees in the Brill building. “Yes, massah, I’se gwine to plow dem fields o’ cotton bullshit, harness up ol’ Dogg, dress me up like a black mammy talking slave talk to de white folk.  Fuck that shit”.

Dogg’s career had been lagging for some time since his old rap days, peddling beer in be happy bonding commercials was his latter day showpiece, and he admitted he needed a boost.  “Just think of it”, his agent offered.  “Playing the whitest lady in American history, crossing the color line once and for all, burying racism and white assumptions forever.  Forget Denzel Washington as Macbeth or Papaa Essiedu as Hamlet.  Whiteface, white aspirations, white thinking.  You, my man, are the  blackest black man around, the black man who has given authenticity the attention it deserves.  Now any black actor can be Oscar, Emmy, and Golden Globe material when the ur- black man, Snoop Dogg, plays a fluty-voiced, bosomy, buck-toothed old woman.

‘You jivin’ me’, said Dogg.  Despite being brought up in Long Beach, he turned into a Compton bad boy right before his parents’ eyes (they wanted him to be a doctor).  They should have seen the genius of the boy and how he could play George Washington if he wanted, transforming the ghetto into a white Elysium. Dogg could be authentic – playing a crackhead – but could also suspend disbelief.  Black actors could play anyone of any stripe and make it real. Minority actors, the disabled, dwarfed, and LGBTQ+ were encouraged to play against type.  What was wrong with Dogg playing Mrs. Roosevelt? Good for his career and integration. Bernstein was a genius of both authenticity and cross-identity placement.

Dogg’s favorite role had been the crippled crack dealer in Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day, a street-tough motherfucker more ghetto than ghetto in a wheelchair goddamn it; but then he was typecast, locked in to street crime, jive, and bling when he preferred Picasso.  He hit the big time in the black salad years – everything black was good, street creds spiked on the market, the black experience; but the black thang had trapped him in the same cotton pickin’ wagon white people had for generations.  Maybe it was time to lose the ‘hood.

Yet losing the ‘hood meant that ‘they’ wanted you to act as white as white could be – Hamlet, Macbeth, and Alexander Hamilton – to prove your real worth.  if you could act so white, so bloody upper class English white that audiences would forget you were black, you had really made it.  Make black disappear, then turn around and make it appear as nasty, bad, and ghetto as you could make it.  A whiplash, stable boy to king and back again.

Tennessee Williams was once told by a reviewer that he created such good roles for women because he was a woman – a proud gay man who would rather be a floozy than a stud – but Williams was nonplussed.  I create great parts for women, he said, because i am a great playwright, and Sean Penn no limp-wristed Castro boy played Harvey Milk to a ‘T’.  Why not? he said.  He was a great actor.  So the only better offer from Bernstein would have been to play Vita Sackville West or her lesbian lover Virginia Woolf –gay white women played by a pimp-walking Compton banger.

In this woke age where transformation is the rule, and playing against type is A-list, where macho men turn frilly and sensitive, where girly girls go E-boots and flannel in Bernal Heights, where identity is a gender-reveal parlor game, and where race is a shell game, which black man will pop up and disappear before your eyes?

This, thought Bernstein, Dogg’s agent and master of the cross-acting authenticity phenomenon and never troubled about principle and therefore a super-agent , is what Xi and Putin see when they look at America.  America the vaudevillian, the carny clown, the side show freak, a gay Punch and Judy, a black Goodnight Moon.  They, imperialist nationalists, czarists and Mandarins, and modern day princes,  rule homogeneity.  ‘Diversity’ is a bad joke.  Rus and the Tang Dynasty are not.

Bernstein had become known as the go-to agent for the younger generation of minority actors who saw their window of opportunity finally open.  Bernstein could sniff out diversity roles and create them where none existed.  Why don’t you put a gay actor here, a black one there, an Asian one where nobody thought to look.  My stable is filled with thoroughbreds, he said, of many breeds.  He could produce a disabled white or black man, a gay Asian or Pacific Islander, and any combination thereof.  Jerome Martin, a black, gay dwarf was his biggest money-earner.  Producers looking for a two- or three-in-one minority gesture paid top dollar for Martin, and Bernstein had two equally identified and qualified stand-ins in the wings.   Business was booming, and he was featured in a lead article in the New Yorker (‘Black Stars Align For the Genius of the Great White Way’).  According to the magazine, Bernstein could do no wrong, so attentive was he to the reformation and restructuring of Broadway and Hollywood.  ‘No one is missing from the client list of this most catholic of agents’.

As a matter of fact, wrote the New Yorker, Bernstein represents no white actors.  ‘They have had their day’, he said. ‘A good run, but their finish line has long been crossed’.  Bernstein of course felt no such thing.  The greatest actors on stage and screen were still white.  Laurence Fishburne could never match Olivier’s blackface Othello, nor could any black actor possibly match Gielgud as Hamlet; and here Bernstein played the race card – the same one played by aspiring black actors and their supporters.  British actors had Shakespeare in their blood and the blood of Henry IV, Richard III, and Margaret of Aquitaine.   Al Pacino was told by classic British Shakespearean actors that he couldn’t possibly Richard III.  It was not a matter of talent, but inheritance.

Since Bernstein was a canny, savvy agent fortunately free from the trammels of political philosophy, he willingly and happily promoted his stable of blacks, gays, women, small people, and the disabled to play any role at any time.  What better Richard III than a dwarf? Why not a gay man playing Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, mutilator of women, rape-protagonist, and viciously ambitious harridan?

When the producer of a play or movie called for authenticity – black men for black male roles, for example – he was right there.  When another producer asked for against type, revolutionary roles, he always had innovative ideas.  Be ironic, he said, and pick a lesbians to play tough, brutish kings.  Bernstein was not the go-to man on Broadway for nothing.

“Who said there’s no money in diversity?”, Bernstein – Park Avenue, Hamptons, Biarritz, Gstaad, Rimini Bernstein – opined.