Is Christianity Anti-American?

This question came to me when I was thinking about the Republican conception of freedom that I loosely outlined in the post below. What this conception (which guides our government's ethos of Liberty) states is that to be free, we need a non-dominating dominator, someone who can protect us without infringing on our freedoms. How is this possible? One answer is that a ruler can simply be benevolent and let the citizen have free rein like a horse whose rider lets it go wherever it may please, but the Republican conception of freedom regards the presence of an arbitrary will, irrespective of it being invoked, as infringing upon one's liberty. This train of thought comes from classical democracy where such a relationship was only thought of in slave-master terms, and he who has a master is never free just as the horse with free rein is in constant peril of being jerked back by the rider. So long story short, government by the people is a way to have each person rule themselves, in some form or another, to prevent an arbitrary dominating will from ruling.

Given this essential American value, how can a ("devout") American regard the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious premises as just or fair beliefs? I know that is a strange way to phrase the question, but having a god with an arbitrary will who may either control your life 100% of the time or may be like the rider letting the horse wander is submitting to a tyrannical regime. If your god is all-powerful, etc., then you are at the mercy of an arbitrary will and thus unfree. While the separation of church and state in this country may provoke many to not conflate their thoughts on government with those on religion (although it doesn't seem to deter some from applying religious beliefs to government) I find this apparent contradiction worth pressing. Maybe this is why our founding fathers were deists rather than Christians, since reconciling these beliefs doesn't seem to be an easy task.

Modern Freedom

"Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains," said Rousseau quite a while ago. I think his quote can be applied in much different ways today than he had originally intended, without compromising the essential truth of the statement. While he was concerned more with how government can be a non-dominating protective force, an aspect of individual freedom in contemporary, industrial society that I have been mulling over recently is institutional freedom, or better put, freedom from the constraints of institutions.
Whether we enter them voluntarily or not, social institutions that govern our use of time and constrain our choices through their requirements are a form of arbitrary will to which we all succumb. Even when we enter these institutions voluntarily, such as going to school or taking up a job, there is a point where the duties to the institution are not like the pain undergone by Ulysses when he was bound to the mast as he passed the Sirens. (He was under his own will, despite the pain it caused him, and he came out the better for it.)
Being a slave to obligations isn't always like Ulysses' case though... this one is unfinished for now

Beauty

Is attraction to beauty shallow or deep? That's a basic way of expressing a question I've been grappling with for a while. You could ask if there's any other goal in life than to seek out and create beauty (and its related forms such as love, kindness, etc.), yet at the same time, life seems at times nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes put it. I think it was Sartre that said that the only thing left to figure out is how to live, and maybe living in search of beauty is the answer. There's a lot more to say there, but I think it goes with the flow of our times- Beauty is both objective and completely subjective, collectively experienced and different to every individual, and appreciated by all. Plus, we live in an era where the ugliest parts of life, notably the decay of the human body, are mitigated by science and control over our surroundings. In other times when people lived with physical maladies and often died of chronic conditions, no wonder the afterlife was the repository of all beauty. And I digress, but there's much more to be said here...

Hot Technology

In many places around the world, heat from combustion-fueled power plants is used to heat surrounding homes. In America, this byproduct heat is usually wasted, piped out of smokestacks in billows of steam or sent with the cooling water back to the lake or river. In a way, this wasteful practice represents the American preference for independence over centralization, and indeed centralized heating is found in mostly socialist and former communist countries. Moreover, American dwellings aren't ideally arranged for central heating of this type since many areas are so spread out and power plants are often located far from cities. (Of course, in many universities and urban areas, cogeneration facilities do provide heat and power.) But, how can we recapture wasted heat in suburban or rural areas in a manner that is respectful of our national ethic? 
One idea I've been mulling over is using heat and steam to warm tropical greenhouses to grow produce such as tropical fruits. Since many power plants are cooperatively owned state owned, the right to plant in these greenhouses could be auctioned off with the proceeds going to lowering electricity rates. Of course, the point would be more to use the extra heat and water (to create business!) than to lower electricity rates, but if the program could pay for itself, I would consider it a success. 


Similarly, since combustion power plants produce prodigious amounts of waste carbon dioxide, the waste heat, steam, and carbon dioxide could be used to grow and keep warm (especially in the winter or up north) algae that uses communal sewage for nutrients. Algae must be exposed to sunlight to grow, which means that it has been so far limited to being researched in warm, southern areas. With a virtually free heater to keep the algae alive through the cold, a power plant could grow its own fuel, reducing its fuel costs at least to the break-even point, and have a small carbon offset system right on site! 
Just a thought. 

Anti-Anti-Intellectualism

Here's a letter I almost sent to an editor somewhere... 

Obama should denounce those accusing him of being an intellectual elitist, deluded by higher education and wealth. By not doing so, he legitimizes the growing cult of the common, the notion that since the country is made up of ordinary people, it should be led by the average Joe. While the hypocrisy of any such sentiment on behalf of a political leader in this country should be glaring, the cult of the common is growing. The attention given to the likes of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and even Joe the Plumber as figures of national political dialogue evinces the growing interest in putting "common sense" back into government. But with the rise of this anti-intellectual movement, America risks forgetting that governing is no job for the ordinary. Our founding fathers were the most learned men of their time and certainly comprised the colonial elite. Aristotle found rule of super-virtuous as the only form of government more desirable than democracy, and we should strive to mix the two in our system. Intellectual elites should and do run our country. The American people should not be fooled into thinking it could work otherwise. 

Beyond Monoculture

A common fear about the advance of globalization is the development of a global monoculture in which local traditions, languages, and ways will disappear under the shadow of the developed world's exported values and institutions. I agree with the rationality of this fear, as this cultural dissolution has already advanced around the globe in ways different than the mingling of cultures seen over the past few thousand years. But in today's thought, notions of cultural absoluteness and authenticity are out, so how then to describe this phenomenon of "cultural loss" while recognizing that cultural is fluid, ever-changing, and unable to have an ideal?
Rather than worrying specifically about a global monoculture, I find it more frightening and more accurate to conceive of the oncoming age of the global mono-experience. While culture may never be "lost," the variety of human experience can be. Certainly my neighbor and I may have an infinitely different range of experiences in our lives, but the we live essentially interchangeable lives in terms of lifestyle and activity. There is no shortage of dystopian novels and movies to this effect, and I believe that the recent focus on localism is a reaction to this identity-erasing globalism.
Maybe I'm being romantic, thinking of far-off people as strange and wondrous. I see my own life as vastly different from that of my neighbor, yet I believe that diversity of experience on all levels enriches humanity and is our security in times of crisis. When we are all the same, we are susceptible to the same threats, much like monoculture agriculture. The Irish Potato Famine eliminated an entire species of potato, and since there was little other agriculture, people starved. Similarly, when the world sheds its nomads, forest-dwellers, and subsistence farmers in the name of quality of living and growth, these alternative ways of living are lost and we know no longer what to do if the Western conception of daily life is fundamentally challenged.
I'm making a poor argument for the necessity of diversity as we know it today, and as I write, I wonder if my idea is more poetic than realistic. What do you think? Does the threat of the mono-experience exist?