Appendix Continued

Gingrich's title, To Same America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machine, begs a number of questions.   Whether the evangelical frame of reference is ipso facto anti-socialist being one matter.  Just last MLK day, I listened to an academic speaker use similar Gospel-based arguments, while railing against the capitalist machine.  His frame of reference was overtly Marxist, with several direct quotations of Marxist thinkers winking among the Biblical references.  Because he had made several slighting comments about the right's use of the same Gospel, I asked if that, in an of itself, might not be the danger -- the theocratic justification of political positions -- and he responded, as did several of a sympathetic audience, that one could not read the Gospel well and come to the conclusions of the evangelical right, that any good reading would lead one down King's path of liberation theology, a path necessary to America's salvation.  I didn't dispute the response, but it did reinforce for me a version of the two-cultures-argument -- setting secular pragmatism against the religious right, but on a broader scale setting those who Hayek referred to as the "planners" against those predisposed to "faith."  It is not simply, or not only, a distrust of government, but as Hayek put it, the "habits of thought engendered by the preoccupation with technological problems, the habits of thought of the natural scientist and the engineer," and here one might add, the "social scientist," particularly those who practice the dismal science of "economics."  Hayek, of course, was concerned with just "how these at the same time tended to discredit the results of the past study of society which did not conform to their prejudices and to impose ideals of organization on a sphere to which they are not appropriate," those spheres which should be left to the invisible hand of the market and, by extension, the equally invisible hand of God in the fulfillment of His plan for mankind.  The "planers" have engineered an assault on the more accessible truths of revelation, and the absolute personal recognition implied in the evangelical versions of salvation -- one need only believe.  For the "planers," not only is the individual reduced to a data point, but the truths of science and engineering, the truths of the economists, have grown so arcane and often so counter-intuitive as to be inaccessible to the lay public, those who do not have the 10,000 hours that it takes to become expert in a field.

To be Continued