Harper's Wins Again

“Capatlism, not christiantity or the enlightenment, is what most defines our national character”

“…do Christian Republicans truly not understand the fundamental ways in which an unfettered corporate capitalism betrays Christ’s ethical vision and their own economic well being? (It is an astonishing irony that many of these religious anti-Darwinians are in their politics economics the most uncompromising Social Darwinians, with naïve and self defeating assumption of the virtue of competition. Of course, the people of “lowest development” to be “weeded out,” as Herbert Spencer put it, are demonstratably themselves!) Most fantastically, do Christian Republicans really not recognize their own perverse marriage with secular rationalism? Or that there is an unacknowledged alliance between pragmatic, ultra rational needs of corporate capitalism and the blarney of Christian cleansing through the “social values” movement?”


“The Spirit of Disobediance: An Invitation to Resistance” By Curtis White – Harper’s Magazine April 2006


The article is really about confronting our culture of “duty and legality” – duty in that “Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as necessity, or even a duty.” (Simon Weil quote). It incorporates a lot of the criticisms of Thoreau.