As for [an aquaintance’s] literal interpretationism -- "literal translation," I believe you called it -- have someone point out to her that the very phrase itself is oxymoronic. A reading can't be literal if it's an interpretation, nor certainly if it's already been translated, i.e. interpreted.
In truth, "literal" reading of anything doesn't actually exist. When we use the phrase "to take something literally," we mean to interpret it in the most customary, normal, commonly understood way. Obviously, this too is something one could never get "right" -- we just make estimates based on our understanding of normal usage. And if you don't understand normal usage all that thoroughly, like most uneducated folks don't -- simply because they haven't been trained in it, or norm-alized -- then your sense of "normal" will be a little off. As you can see, the more remote one is from a given culture, the less familiar one is with its linguistic norms. Less-than-hugely-literate ("literal") people have trouble guessing at the norms of their own culture; how much harder, then, to guess at the norms of a culture from the Middle East 2,000 years ago?
This is precisely why all serious people of faith, including the Catholic church, rejected "literal interpretation" as heretical and impossible nonsense over 400 years ago. These "literalists" are defending a position that their own tradition rejects. On what grounds? None. Pure ignorance. Well-meaning; an entirely understandible grasping for truth in the absence of education. But they're as ignorant as medieval serfs, who were the last people to believe in literal interpretation of the Bible. But they're also increasingly common -- among the masses.
Meanwhile, the leaders of science and education and business don’t even believe in God, much less literalism. But they profess belief, or spout it through mouthpieces like DeLay and Frist and Bush, in order to organize the zealots. Just like the Nazi regime (3rd Reich); just like Rome (which was, to the Nazis, the 1st Reich, Hohenzollern Germany being the 2nd). Religious zealotry is a cultural cancer that spreads like wildfire and, when it reaches a critical mass, kills its host. Look at the Middle East; this wasteland is the smoking shell of what 1000 years ago was the world's most advanced empire. The Muslims carried the light of the world's advanced science and philosophy while the wreck of Rome smouldered for 1000 years. Look at them now: a third of the world, suicide bombers in mud huts. They've been that way ever since Europe snatched back the prize of economic prosperity in the 18th century, and zealotry swept the Middle East. What you're hearing down the road and on the airwaves is what they heard in Rome, Baghdad and Berlin as the empire collapsed and chaos filled the void.
And zealotry IS chaos. When literalists like Christy can't give a reason to justify their oxymoronic reasoning -- when they reject the demand that they must -- when they refuse to talk, reason, justify -- what can their beliefs governed by, then? Any arbitrary thing behind their veil of irrationality: any whim they feel, anything suggested to them. "Order" in society means reason, not mere organization; mere organization is habit, and animals have that. Only humans are capable of JUSTIFYING an order (or failing to). Lemmings are perfectly organized as they commit mass suicide, but they can't tell you why they do it. When lemmings preach to their choirs, exchanging greasy falsehoods with those who agree and refusing to debate and justify points they can't -- this is the mark of reason having died and habit won; this is, and has always been, the mark of the antichrist, the final symptom of cultural death.
Republican leaders today mistake Christian organization for rational order in exactly the same way that Soviet leaders mistook Communist party organization for rational order and Nazi leaders mistook German nationalism for rational order. The "orderliness" that they all think (or thought) they were celebrating is in fact a terrifying cancer of animalistic, anti-rational habitualism spreading like wildfire through their culture. And just as a creature that can't think won't live long, a culture that can't think won't, and never has. Unless we exterminate the poison now, the irrationalism that's poisoning American society will explode in our national bloodstream the minute the massive Asian economies pinch our economic windpipe. There are two retirement plans for a former empire: Switzerland or Iran. And all this sort of religious insanity is not what one hears yodeled in the impeccable streets of Zurich. Either one goes gently into that good night, or one goes violently. We are not a gentle nation; we are greedy, drunk on our former power and desperate to retain it as it slips away. These are the exact ingredients of Weimar.
Last time we talked, you said that history repeats itself. It does. You meant that the history of decades repeats itself -- the shallow left-right swings of generational politics. Absolutely. But history repeats itself by century as much as by decade. My students naïvely believe that the horrors of World War 2, which happened only a generation ago, are impossible today. I ask them: has humankind been miraculously struck wise and moral once and for all in the last short fifty years? Lucky us! -- to have grasped that holy grail that mankind's pursued for all human history. Of course, if we have NOT been struck wise and good, hold on to your seat: the next disaster's coming, and it'll be fought with suitcase nukes in our home towns. Humans are clever, but as a whole we've still not learned to put truth before greed. And truth is holy, and greed is a sin -- and, as wise Christians once said without hypocrisy, the wages of sin are death. Either we love and nurture and educate and communicate or we all go to hell in war. Mark my words: Switzerland or Iran. Name a epoch in human history when the choice has not been that.
So vote for sham irrational "Order," look out the window and say goodbye. "Order" isn't coming; it's here, and simply coming into power.
