To protect a necessary fantasy

As I lay ruminating in the early morning hours of yesterday, the realization that Gamma was telling me "So there!" wasn't the only thing that came to me. I had a dream in the hour or two that followed. I can remember only two, maybe three things about it.
    Two African-seeming personages were speaking to me (I wasn't "on screen"; they faced my dreaming mind, so to speak). I understood that they were father and son, the father being the primary speaker. He was astonishingly striking (only his head was presented), his face as long as a horse's, the distance from his eyes to the tip of his nose four or five inches and the distance from there to his lips another four inches. A sort of totem pole face. [I am reminded this morning, by Wikipedia, that the totem pole derives from "cultures of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America"—that is, Chief Seattle's people.]
    I wish I could remember the older man's words. At the time of my dreaming I understood that he was telling me there was a religious key of some sort that would unlock the mystery of the "So there!" folks I wrote about on Friday. Glad of this knowledge, I made a mental note to write about Friday afternoon's email interchanges and revisit that day's post. Yesterday I found that writing about the interchanges was enough for one post. But today....

Today I'll try to articulate the beginnings of a "religious" understanding of the "people who don't want the truth," as my old friend the judge characterizes them.
    It seems to me that whatever belief they espouse with their voices raised and their faces red (at once threatening opponents and brooking no debate) is their talisman. A talisman (from Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary) is:

An object bearing a sign or character engraved under astrological influences [!] and held to act as a charm to avert evil and bring good fortune, something producing apparently magical or miraculous effects

    "The scientists [who say the evidence shows that Cameron Todd Willingham did not murder his children] are 'latter-day supposed experts'" absolves Texas Governor Rick Perry. I did not put an innocent man to death!
    "There is no global warming" averts the potential catastrophe threatening the Earth. We and our descendants are safe!
    "There is no credible evidence of evolution" wards off an unimaginable horror. We aren't the descendants of monkeys!
    "Obama does not meet the constitutional requirements of being a naturally born American" is the magical charm that might avert the evil of our having a "black" president. Obama will be disqualified!
    "The Bible is true" is a talisman with enough magic for all exigencies. Suffering will be rewarded! Evil will be punished! We will not die, but will live forever and ever!

To the people wearing these talismans about their necks, the things to be averted are to them truly evil. Unimaginably, heart-sickeningly so. To be avoided at all costs, not least the cost of the truth:

Governor Perry did put an innocent man to death. "In a clemency plea four days before the execution, Willingham's attorney raised questions about the forensics. Perry has said he examined the information. But he did not delay the execution."
    Human activity is raising global temperatures.
    We evolved from simpler life forms.
    Obama is our legitimate president (and arguably more legitimate than George W. Bush, given the extraordinary fact of his having been appointed by [a 5-4 vote of] the U.S. Supreme Court).
    Suffering often goes unrewarded.
    Evil often goes unpunished.
    We are all going to die, not to awake again.

If, as seems to be, religion is a support system for mutually assuring people's most profound protective fantasies, then a whole variety of lesser sorts of delusionary practices would seem to serve the same purpose. A pertinent project for cultural relativism would be to discover what it is about a particular culture that explains its members need for the culture's distinctive fantasy. In other words, what is it about the people who seem to need to believe, for example, that President Obama is not legit that defines their culture, over against the rest of us, who accept the fact that he is our legal, elected president?

What road got us here?

A friend of fifty-three years (we were high school classmates, he went on to become a judge, now retired) wrote me last night (from California):

Read the October 12, 2009 edition of The Los Angeles Times ["Fired commissioner in Texas execution inquiry says governor's aides pressured him": "The panel is looking into disputed arson forensics that convicted Cameron Todd Willingham, who was put to death in 2004"], page A-11.
    For the political crowd that pushes execution as good politics, science means nothing and they will stop at nothing to give it their own spin. Governor Perry is both trying to keep the truth from being published and spinning the denial with the same sort of dismal rhetoric and junk science that led to Willingham's execution in the first place. The trouble is that the country is full of people who don't want the truth. "There is no global warming or if there is it's a cyclical thing and not the result of human activity." "There is no credible evidence of evolution; evolution has been guided by divine intelligence." "Obama does not meet the constitutional requirements of being a naturally born American." Etc., etc.
    When it became intellectually fashionable to believe that all truth was the product of culture and that therefore there was no absolute truth, we got started down this path. Is there any turning back?
    Everyone I talk with agrees it's crazy, yet the public remains apathetic and caught up in celebrity baloney or worse yet, exhibitionism through Facebook, YouTube, etc.
    In the same vein, we learned today that Michael Pollan (the movie "Food Inc.") was prevented from speaking at Cal Poly [California Polytechnic Institute, in San Luis Obispo] because the Harris Ranch Beef Company threatened to withdraw a $150,000 grant unless some allegedly disinterested scientists (food experts hired by the company, no doubt) would also be allowed to present countervailing views at the same forum.

I agree with my friend on where we are now, but was cultural relativity the road that got us here? The vehement certitude with which people argue their positions sounds anything but relativist. When Texas Governor Rick Perry characterizes as "latter-day supposed experts" the scientists attempting to investigate the true nature of the fire that killed Willingham's children (for which he was convicted of murder and executed a dozen years later), he gives the impression of believing absolutely that they (rather than he) are charlatans.
    Those who utter the howling falsehoods quoted by my friend ("...no global warming or...not the result of human activity," "...no credible evidence of evolution...," "Obama...not...a naturally born American") utter them as absolutely true. Ironic if this came about because of cultural relativism. It seems rather the opposite, but with little more than raised voices and red faces to argue for a babble of preposterous absolute claims.
    I'm not up on the literature of cultural relativism, but I did read two classic, influential books that argued against relativism and for objective truth. They are William F. Buckley, Jr's God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (1951) and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (1987).
    I don't know how we got here, but I don't think it was by the road of cultural relativism...unless what we're seeing is a reaction to (even a backlash against) cultural relativism. That would tend to explain the raised voices and red faces, I think. "My position isn't just culturally relatively true, it's absolutely true. So there, and screw you into the bargain!"
    But loudness and redness won't gain anyone admittance to Buckley's¹ or Bloom's truth bandwagon.
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1. By the way, according to Buckley's son Christopher, in his memoir, Losing Mum and Pup, Buckley himself had a way of "raising his voice" in debate—by never yielding even an inch, even with his son—that struck both his son and me as curiously inconsistent with a proper regard for truth.