response to alex and karl

My friends Karl Smith and Alex Kim are two very smart, thoughtful people, who share a blog called a A Civil Union that is dear to my heart:
http://acivilunion.blogspot.com/

They had a debate recently about the pope, abortion, and Catholic American legislators that is worth reading. It prompted me to think some thoughts in a slightly different direction...

I find myself compelled to ask a question of deep heresy (it is my duty as an anthropologist): in our society's hierarchy of authority-sources, the one authority-source that is never questioned, or at least is always nominally deferred to, even by Americans of a completely non-compartmentalized sort of faith, is the Constitution itself. Its seems to inspire a certain religious reverence in the American population that I find surprising. The Constitution is that against which we measure everything else for civil soundness, even when we can't agree on what it even says.

Why is this I wonder? How did this piece of paper acquire such mana? The contents are questioned and argued - but the authority it holds is revered as if it is sacred.

I suspect that the answer is much more than just its association with our founding myth (creation-story) and technologies of citizen-formation required of our imagined community. I think it has something to do with a cultural model of authority, rooted in submerged cosmologies of religious conviction and sensibility in the western traditions of empire. Our faith in the Constitution is downright monotheistic, but we don't know how to think about it otherwise. Alternatives are beyond the edges of reasonable thought.

I know this presupposes an ontological kinship between political being and religious being - but its a presupposition that stands, in my experience.

my soul is a gibbon

The subtlest sacred secular story for kids in print is soon to be transferred to celluloid...a gloriously inventive reworking of Miltonic heresy. And of course I have succumbed to the marketing hype, and therefore now have a daemon, named Philon.



Apparently, friends can dispute the self-assessment that got me my daemon. I'm not sure where they got "modest" from.