G-Dub and faith
Scott sent this to me earlier: a New York Times magazine article by Ron Suskind on George W. Bush and faith [registration required]. Suskind says what I think everyone knows by now: George Bush runs this country based on his particular personal religious beliefs. Here are some excellent snippets from the article:
"This is why he dispenses with people who confront him with inconvenient facts," [former Reagan domestic policy advisor Bruce] Bartlett went on to say. "He truly believes he's on a mission from God. Absolute faith like that overwhelms a need for analysis. The whole thing about faith is to believe things for which there is no empirical evidence." Bartlett paused, then said, "But you can't run the world on faith."
"I was in the Oval Office a few months after we swept into Baghdad," [Senator Joe Biden] began, "and I was telling the president of my many concerns" -- concerns about growing problems winning the peace, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanding of the Iraqi Army and problems securing the oil fields. Bush, Biden recalled, just looked at him, unflappably sure that the United States was on the right course and that all was well. "'Mr. President,' I finally said, 'How can you be so sure when you know you don't know the facts?"
Biden said that Bush stood up and put his hand on the senator's shoulder. "My instincts," he said. "My instincts."
Biden paused and shook his head, recalling it all as the room grew quiet. "I said, 'Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough!'"
And in the first presidential debate, many Americans heard the discursive John Kerry succinctly raise, for the first time, the issue of Bush's certainty -- the issue being, as Kerry put it, that "you can be certain and be wrong."
The disdainful smirks and grimaces that many viewers were surprised to see in the first presidential debate are familiar expressions to those in the administration or in Congress who have simply asked the president to explain his positions. Since 9/11, those requests have grown scarce; Bush's intolerance of doubters has, if anything, increased, and few dare to question him now. A writ of infallibility -- a premise beneath the powerful Bushian certainty that has, in many ways, moved mountains -- is not just for public consumption: it has guided the inner life of the White House.
The article is eleven screens long and it makes the point that George W. Bush operates the presidency as though it were a religion: through "instinct," "gut," and "faith." Faith is the belief in something despite empirical evidence to the contrary, or the absence of empirical evidence. Faith necessarily acts opposite reason, the latter being the use of empirical evidence to make a decision. These definitions are not designed to cast a pejorative light on faith; I believe that anyone -- religious or otherwise -- can agree that faith acts contrary to reason (and note I am not attempting to infuse the word "reason" with other words that have "reason" in them, like "reasonable," as though I were suggesting that reason is reasonable and faith is unreasonable. I am attempting to make positive statements, not normative ones).
Faith requires an unwavering, unquestioning belief in whatever it is you believe in. Since there is no empirical evidence to confirm or deny the existence of God, for example, believers in God must switch to a different epistemology in order to understand Him: faith. The very idea of questioning the truth of something is a tactic of reason, not faith. To question faith -- to subject it to the rigorous interrogation of reason -- will always result in a dead end, since faith and reason live on separate epistemological levels. One cannot be explained with the other.
Being the president -- indeed, being any secular leader -- requires the use of reason to come to conclusions about national policy. Kerry's point about the difference between being certain and being right is well taken. We know that Bush values certainty -- personal certainty -- more than he values being right. He has made many decisions over the last four years which outside observers might think defied reason. Take his policies on the environment, sex education, or stem-cell research. His sex education policy, support for abstinence-only education and only abstinence-only education, defies studies which show that such education is only as effective or less effective than other kinds of sex education which acknowledge that kids have sex and explain to them their options beyond not having it (A WHO study "concluded that abstinence-only programs are less effective than comprehensive classes that include abstinence and safe-sex practices such as contraception and condom use." Source). Bush's stem-cell research policy is founding in the belief that, whatever larger good may come from destroying a human embryo to harvest its stem cells, the destruction of that embryo is an absolute and unjustifiable evil. This belief is religious in nature; Bush feels that an embryo is endowed with a soul and as such it is evil to destroy that embryo, for whatever reason. The president's policies on science are so far removed from science that four thousand scientsts -- included forty-eight Nobel laureates -- signed a petition urging the administration to restore "scientific integrity" to the White House.
The job of the president does not involve personal morality. It involves an understanding of what is good for the nation (and by the way, what is good for the nation is not the same as what is good for the president!). Bush has proven over the course of four years that he operates the nation based on his 1) faith and 2) personal morality. As a president, he has failed in his use of reason because he places more importance on faith. Faith, however, has no place in a job where reason is required. The very unquestioning nature of faith makes it disturbing in a public policy arena, where opponents of the president's policies are demonized and branded disloyal. Faith is personal, and an attack on a decision reached through faith is a personal attack. Public policy is something that can and must be subjected to scrutiny, an impossible task when the policies have been reached through a non-empirical means, meaning that we cannot go back and look at the process and evidence by which the decision was reached. A policy based on faith puts all of its trust in one man -- the president -- to do the right thing. The evidence is "because I said so." That's a very good way to run a church, but it's no way to run a country.