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Volume Fourteen
The Underground Grammarian 
Page 467
The UndergroundGRAMMARIAN
Volume Fourteen, Number One . . . . . February 1990
Heretics and Malignants
To ye aged and beloved Mr. John Higgenson:There be now at sea a ship called
Welcome
,which has on board 100 or more the heretics andmalignants called Quakers, with W. Penn, who isthe chief scamp, at the head of them. TheGeneral Court has accordingly given sacredorders to Master Malachi Huscott, of the brig
Porpoise
, to waylay the said Welcome slyly asnear the Cape of Cod as may be, and makecaptive the said Penn and his ungodly crew, sothat the Lord may be glorified and not mockedon the soil of this new country with the heathenworship of these people. Much spoil can bemade of selling the whole lot to Barbadoes,where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugarand we shall not only do the Lord great good bypunishing the wicked, but we shall make greatgood for His minister and people.Yours in the bowels of Christ, Cotton Mather
T
HERE is no doubt that Gorbachev was the mostvisible and effective benefactor of mankind in1989. He will surely win, and should win, theNobel Peace Prize along with other awards andrecognitions. His wife, furthermore, is adorable.He has our best and warmest regards and wishes.He is not, however our own Man of the Year for1989. For that honor, and for the First FalteringFootsteps Prize for 1989, we have chosen a manwho has been called, by no less an authority thanJerry Falwell, speaking no doubt from those verysame bowels, “the No. 1 enemy of the Americanfamily in our generation.” He is, furthermore, aman who calls himself a “civil libertarian,” in awell-known phrase which seems to derive from apopular belief that the idea in the word “liberty”really ought to be sanitized with some adjective,lest naughty folk get “the wrong idea” aboutliberty. And he is also a man who has surelyprovided Americans with much that they didn’tneed in the form of cute and inane entertainment.As to all that, we say, all the better. It makes hisbreakthrough all the bigger. Some of you willprobably have heard of him. He is Norman Lear,who is quite well known in the world of televisionas the producer of some comedy shows whoseoccasional and socially useful didacticism wasimpenetrable only to the likes of Jerry Falwell.In November of 1989, Lear spoke to a gatheringof members of the American Academy of Religion. His unshaken commitment to theseparation of church and state notwithstanding, hetold the assembled scholars that it was time for thepublic schools “to nurture the sense of the sacredthat underlies all religions.”“While we civil libertarians have beentriumphant in most of our legal and constitutionalbattles,” he said, “I am troubled that so many of usremain blocked or blind to the spiritual emptinessin our culture which the televangelists exploitedso successfully.”Lear did not drop his opposition to organizedprayer in schools, and neither did he espouse suchnonsense as adding alternative creation myths tosatisfy the true believers of this or that persuasion,but he did say, in effect, that the purging fromtextbooks of anything that might offend anybodywas a dumb idea. Pathological thinning of the skinis one of the inescapable side-effects of spiritualemptiness, and we wish he had made that point, if only to himself. He might then have noticed somedegree of spirituality less than fullness in some of the religious scholars.From them, he won that sort of praise thatIsraelis measure out to the possible unification of the Germans. They were not, apparently, about totake the risk of letting anyone suggest thatreligions could be “reduced to a commondenominator,” lest ardent parents complain aboutthe “relativizing” of religion. And a certain Mrs.Haynes “stressed the need to teach about religiousdifferences and how society could learn to livewith them,” believing apparently—probably herstock in trade—that it will take only a few lessonsto reconcile Islam with Shamir and to bring suchas the warring tribes of the Irish to detect somenaughtiness in blowing up each other’s Sundayschool buses. (Of course, on this point we couldbe very wrong. By “live with them,” she mighthave meant that such as the Christians andMoslems of Beirut could come to a sociallyacceptable appreciation of diversity, and liberally
 
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Volume Fourteen
The Underground Grammarian 
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grant each other the
right 
to lob shells across thecity, just so long as that’s what they truly believein.)Against such views, apparently, Lear could onlysuggest that he would like to make somedistinction between “religious” and “spiritual,”which seems to us a very intriguing thought, butthe newspaper account of the event reports nofurther consideration of it. We guess that it is nota distinction that Scholars of Religion even wantmentioned, never mind made. And, notsurprisingly, all Lear could imagine that theschools might actually do to nurture the sense of the sacred was to teach about “the role of religionin history.”Well, that’s a good place to start. The role of religion in history. Quite a role. So we haveprovided the first lesson above, in the form of aletter from Cotton Mather. We’d like to see it inthe textbooks. We’d like the seventh graders torelate to it, and rap a bit. We’d like to listen to theschoolteachers telling the kiddies all about theappreciation of diversity, and the need to betolerant of alternative life styles. And we’d like tohear from the parents too, those who have bitchedabout the lack of attention paid in the schools toour great Christian heritage, and who now mustbitch about the paying of attention. We’d like tohear from the organized atheist parents, whosedelicate children are injured and insulted by themention of a Christian pirate, and from theMoslem parents, whose delicate children areinjured and insulted by the inclusion of 
only
aChristian pirate.As to “the role of religion in history,” CottonMather is every bit as relevant and informative asMother Theresa. In that role, and in every religionin that role, you can find everything, all that is fairand all that is foul, the best of us and the worst,the edifying and the horrid.Children should certainly know a lot about it,but the school people are in no position to handleit. They serve too many masters, and they arethemselves but little informed in those matters.But we will not leave Lear out on a limb. He is,after all, right, however confused he may be aboutthe meaning of his rightness. And his confusionhas been built into him, and into millions more, bythe very people to whom he spoke.As we think back through the last few years of this sheet, we see something that we neverintended. More and more we see ourselves talkingabout an emptiness, a soullessness, that seems, tous of course, to be a condition regularly anddeliberately induced by the government schools. Itmasquerades as tolerance and liberality, but itsreal name is the Loss of the Good of Intellect, asyou may recall from that discussion of Dante in“The Curriculum from Hell.” It is a condition notthe same as stupidity, not even the same asdeliberate stupidity, but a highly specific disorderin which the mind can contemplate no convincingway in which to distinguish between the betterand the worse, so that it abandons the task asfutile, and is indeed pleased to do so, for the habitof such distinguishing is certain to bring, probablyten times a day, bad news in the form of self-knowledge. Notice, for instance, that the on-goingcraziness about self-esteem in the schools seemsnever to contemplate the obvious and unsettlingquestion: What would we have to say of self-esteem in one who has little or no self-knowledge,and who knows no principle but emotion out of which to distinguish what is estimable from whatis not? And, in any case, the school people don’teven like to hear such words as “estimable.” They just don’t sound democratic.It is out of something akin to the loss of thegood of intellect that we are not able to think of some important distinction that can be madebetween religion and the religions. Strangelyenough, this sort of mind work would be easier tocome by and do if only we saw to it that allchildren in school studied some foreign language,and the schoolers’ distaste for such study has,therefore, an interesting, nasty smell. Anyone whostudies another language comes to grasp a strangefact, the fact that there is some fascinatingdifference between the languages and languageitself. And language itself can be contemplated.Likewise with religion. Here again we now seethe tendency of an earlier piece, “The GreatDivide,” where it was said that while religionsneed the Tao, which term was used there in aspecial narrow sense, the Tao needs no religion.People, especially people who call themselvestolerant, are fond of pointing out that “there isgood in every religion.” To say that makes yousound big of heart, because you are not required tosay what must follow, that is, that there is also thatbad from which you have chosen out the good.We can also say, and with more justice and
 
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completeness, that what is good in every religionis just about the same in all of them. No religion,whatever subterfuges its adherents may devise,preaches treachery or cowardice or even piracy.All of the religions, like all of the seers, say thesame things: Love each other; share things; takecare of each other; try to stop wanting so much;know yourself.There’s more, of course, but not much more.Not an encyclopedia full. Not even a prayer-book full. Now this is puzzling. If you encountered inthe forest twelve different animals which, for alltheir differences, shared nevertheless oneremarkably prominent and beneficial attribute,would you not think to have detected somekinship? Would you not think to have detectedalso some common ancestor, or at least somethingthat was prior to all those beasts? And if all that isgood in all these religions did not turn out toprecede them, but had to be accountedcoincidence, would you not be much surprised?And can you imagine that, after the inevitabledisappearance of all the religions that we nowknow, that there will arise new ones in whichthere is no trace of that to which we point whenwe say that there is some good in all religions?Mrs. Haynes did not at all like Lear’s attempteddistinction between “spiritual” and “religious.”The reason is clear. There was religion longbefore any of these religions were dreamed of,and there will be religion long after they are gone,but the adherents of the religions don’t like thatthought. If it’s religious, dammit, it’s ours, andwe’re not going to let some entertainer get awaywith the spiritual either. That’s also ours.The religions are always local and temporary.They are institutions. They are outside, out therein the world, not in us, and at time’s mercy. That’swhy they’re so feisty. They fear death. Anddiminution smells of death. So they recruit. If you join one today, you’ll hear all sorts of fascinatingassertions, and you’ll hear what good it has tooffer, which is the same in the religions that youdon’t join today, but just about the only hard factyou’ll get is your own copy of the Enemies List.Now you’ll know who to spit at in the street, whoto despise as an evil-doer, who to recruit, andwhere to lob your shells.Lear is right, but he is wrong. There is indeed anemptiness, but it is not the religions that will fill it.It is Religion.In the root of the word “religion” is the idea of tying back together. It’s too bad we don’t have theword as a verb, for it becomes most useful whenseen not as an abstraction or the name of this orthat club of believers, but as something that youcan do. Strictly speaking, the religious view is theone that sees the connections, and, seeing them,tries to see others, and even suspects that allthings my be connected in some way.Lear stumbled on this understanding when hesaid that we seemed unlikely to be able to solveenvironmental problems without “a freshexamination of what we regard as sacred in theuniverse.” He is right. But it won’t fly. We are notallowed to use that word; the people in the Godbusiness have convinced the people in the schoolbusiness that “sacred” belongs to them, and suchis the nature of the people in the God business thateven teachers are embarrassed to be associatedwith them. It’s not really the church and statebusiness that keeps spiritual concerns out of theclassroom; it’s a perfectly respectable disgust atthe thought of standing forth in an ostensiblyintellectual enterprise and sounding like one of them. And so it is that not even the liberalest of activists can say that Earth is the Holy Mother of us all, who gave us life and nourished us, and towhom all honor and respect are due. It is preciselyhis “liberalism” that puts him “above” suchancient “superstition,” so he has to make vileappeals to those who suppose that the longerempty life is more to be prized than the shorter.The people we call ignorant savages, however,can say that, and can even seek to live by it.This is the great achievement of the religions inour time: they have at once pre-empted andbesmirched what was once understood to be theproper business of all people: the consideration of our meaning and the contemplation of the goodlife. So it is that the schools are playing it safe bysticking to the consideration of our employabilityand the contemplation of successfully competingwith the Japanese. And if that is life, thenemptiness is meet and right.But you do not have to be a member of any of the religions to live as though your deeds and yourdestiny were tied together, and that, not eventhrough belief but through choice, bydistinguishing between the life that is led asthough it were meaningful, and that which is ledas though it were not. You need no membership to
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