Aún Estamos Vivos

The Facebook Thread

2011-09-16T14:10:00.011-05:00

Zeta Beta Tau, Delta Omega Chapter (R.I.P) Oh, how we miss it so... I've gone on record before saying I'm not a huge Facebook fan. I'm not especially enamored of the format, the concept, or the knowledge that I am their product rather than their customer. I don't really appreciate the fact that they are voraciously trying to find out as much about us as they possibly can in order to build marketing profiles on us. If I didn't need to keep an eye on my teenagers' accounts, it's doubtful that I would even have an account of my own at all. Generally speaking, I try to keep a pretty low profile over there, but I admit it's also kind of nice to be back in touch with some old friends again, and every once in a while I'll put a little something up, or comment on something I find interesting.

The other day, I put up a post signifying that I was excited about Elizabeth Warren's entry into the 2012 Massachusetts Senate Race (challenging Scott Brown), and it led to a short political discussion between me and a few of my college fraternity brothers. When I pointed out that they all seemed to share libertarian leanings with different points of emphasis, I was challenged on that by brother Bob, who denied having libertarian inclinations. In doing so, he also voiced some strong views, as is his wont, and in doing so he touched on the topic of abortion.

Now, I don't even really like to talk about the "A" bomb here, let alone on Facebook. It's such an emotional topic, I figure most people I'm friends with really wouldn't appreciate having it in their morning feeds. What do I know about the private lives of some of my FB friends? What do I know about what kinds of pain or losses they've gone through?

At any rate, I suggested taking it up over here. It's not an evasion or a dodge. As many of the people who correspond with me here (if they are still reading, that is) are likely to disagree as agree with me on this, so here goes... Here is how it went on FB:

Bob: Libertarian? Me? Jeff, you are WAY off. I look over my right shoulder with binoculars to see Karl Marx. I exaggerate. A little. I'm a social ultra-liberal and a fiscal conservative. I'm in favor of social safety nets for people that NEED them (as opposed to the leeches that milk them for all they're worth.) I'm in favor of enacting legislation to abolish for-profit health insurance, because the ability of a citizen to get health insurance shouldn't be determined by an HMO accountant. I'm against having military bases all over the planet and being the world's police force. I'm VEHEMENTLY against allowing religion to have ANY say whatsoever in the operation of government, and think churches should pay taxes. I'm in favor of equal rights for all citizens, all the time. I'm in favor of same-sex marriage and transgender non-discrimination bills. I'm in favor of women having the 100% iron-clad right to decide what they do with their bodies - including if and when they will carry a fetus to term. I know (not "believe," but KNOW,) that a collection of undifferentiated cells or an embryo that has yet to develop a central nervous system or a functioning brain is NOT a human being and should not be accorded the rights of one. I'm in favor of erasing all laws that would be enforced by a "vice squad," and vigorously prosecuting the white-collar Wall Street thieves that brought us our current financial crisis. I don't know what all that makes me, but i do know it ain't a Libertarian.
Wednesday at 10:51pm · LikeUnlike

Jeff: Bob, I admit that when I read “I'm a social ultra-liberal and a fiscal conservative,” that translates as “libertarian” to me, and probably to most other people as well, but I suppose it’s not a precise match with the actual philosophical definition.I believe that we should have a social safety net, as every human being has dignity just by virtue of the fact that he or she is a human being, and does not have to earn that basic level of dignity by their utility. At the same time, we should discourage, by non-legislative means as much as possible, the behaviors that cause people to fall into safety nets.

Facebook is not a blog, and I think it’s a horribly inappropriate venue to discuss such an emotionally hot-button topic like abortion, but when you say…

"I know (not "believe," but KNOW,) that a collection of undifferentiated cells or an embryo that has yet to develop a central nervous system or a functioning brain is NOT a human being and should not be accorded the rights of one.”
… I have absolutely no idea how you can come to such a conclusion, or why anyone else should feel compelled to agree with such a subjective value judgement stated with such vehement authority, especially when you reject omnipotent authorities, but I’m not getting drawn into an abortion discussion on Facebook.

I do have a blog, however, where I discuss religious, political, and cultural issues. I’d be glad to discuss such things over there. If anyone is at all interested, you can message me to find out what it is.
Yesterday at 7:25am · LikeUnlike

Bob : It's simple Jeff, if something doesn't have a brain or a nervous system, it's not a human being. A human being has a brain for thinking and a central nervous system for feeling. The idea that "life begins at conception" is a religious belief, not a medical fact. The fetus i described can't think and can't feel, and therefore has no means of experiencing physical distress and no self-awareness to "kill."

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lripmsvxJy1ql6xr1o1_500.jpg

18 hours ago · LikeUnlike

Jeff: Is that a fertilized egg? The acorn already has every single solitary genetic attribute designating what it will ever be as a tree... The caterpillar is not a dress, but it is the same exact creature that will be recognizable later as a butterfly.... By what scientific reasoning does a central nervous system and a brain constitute what a human being is? That's as subjective a value judgement on what "personhood" is as any religious dogma I've ever heard. What gives you the right to say that "thinking and feeling" defines what a human being is, and that it represents a consensus on what the rest of us should believe? The notion that sentience is the defining factor over anything else is philosophy, not science.
7 hours ago · LikeUnlike

Allen: Bob: How do you know that?
7 hours ago · LikeUnlike

Craig: Though we'll likely never resolve the "when does a?" question, we should all recognize the loss we all suffer when the government takes an interest in and insists upon awareness of the gestational status of every female private citizen.
7 hours ago · LikeUnlike

Jeff : Oh well... I asked - politely - to be messaged on this, but my request was ignored... To Craig's point, yes, it is always best to propose rather than to impose... I find it interesting that at the same time the acceptance of gay marriage and full civil rights for gay people is growing, the support for the pro-life postion is ALSO growing. I haven't led an innocent, risk-free and sheltered life, and I do get the nature of the back-alley problem. I get it. Having said all that, I'd like to add that even if we did entertain the notion that 'thinking and feeling" had something do with defining personhood, you need to say * precisely when * that begins, and if you can't do that, you need to err on the side of caution and go back to the begining. If people of a scientific bent want to plant an arbitrary yardstick on this, why not set it at the point when our entire genetic makeup is defined?
6 hours ago · LikeUnlike

Craig: Give us the link! Just caught up with this one late last night, and figured I'd toss in a moderating two cents...
6 hours ago · LikeUnlike

Craig, please feel free to moderate away, if you like...

The Maryknoll Centennial

2011-07-03T08:46:00.013-05:00

Commemorating 100 years of serving in "The Field Afar."

I've always been an admirer of the Maryknolls. They were the subject of one of my very first blog posts, The Church in China. Remembering the first Maryknoll missioners. At one time, shortly after WWII, my father-in-law was a seminarian with them. In his own words, he may have been "too interested in longing for my old motorcycle than in serving in far-away missions."

"I'm only just now discovering the civilization of China and falling on love with it... To think that China was completely equipped with a literature and culture 3,000 years before our ancestors was a hard blow to an Irishman... We come to China not to barbarians, but a civilization thousands of years older... Our Lord never condescended; He never betrayed superiority in His dealing with others."

- Francis X Ford (top-left in photo above). Consecrated as bishop in China in 1935 with the episcopal motto "Condolere," meaning "to have compassion." He died under brutal treatment in a Chinese Communist prison in 1952.

I ran across a very nice video tribute here.

From the very start, Maryknoll men and women have embarked upon courageous missionary service in full knowledge of the risks involved with their vocations, which have extended in some cases to the point of accepting martyrdom, from China in the first half of the 20th Century to El Salvador in the second half.

What I found particularly interesting was the story of one of the first missionaries, Fr. James E. Walsh (at the bottom-right of the photo above - not to be confused with one of the co-founders, Boston priest James A. Walsh - at the bottom-center of the photo above). He entered China with Fr. Ford in 1918. Like Ford, he was also made a bishop (in 1927) and like Ford he was also accused by the Communists of being a spy (in 1959) after years of being under house-arrest, and was given a twenty-year prison sentence. After over a decade in solitary confinement, he was released in 1970 just before the Nixon visit to China. He still had his marbles and wits about him. A tough old mick, for sure. What faith he must have had... He lived until the age of 90.

Some excerpts on the history of the Maryknolls in the America magazine article Outward Bound.

A century ago, an attentive subscriber to the Catholic mission magazine The Field Afar might have noticed the following announcement in its pages: “Youths or young men who feel a strong desire to toil for the souls of heathen people and who are willing to go afar with no hope of earthly recompense and with no guarantee of a return to their native land are encouraged to write, making their letter personal, to the Editor of Field Afar.”

In the words of the historian Msgr. John Tracy Ellis, the first decade of the 20th century was a time when the Catholic Church in the United States finally “attained ecclesiastical adulthood.” The great migrations of European Catholics to the United States were ongoing, and Catholics were trying to take root in a culture more or less hostile to “popery.” As a result, the energies of the institutional church were often directed inward...

The story would change dramatically over the next few decades, however, as the psychology of the U.S. Catholic Church reversed from that of mission territory to that of missionary culture. A driving power behind that transformation was the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, the Congregation of Maryknoll Sisters and, eventually, the Maryknoll Lay Missioners—collectively known as Maryknoll...

Maryknoll also played an important sociopolitical role in U.S. culture. For many Catholics around the world, the Maryknoll missionary became the public face of the American “brand” of Roman Catholicism for much of the 20th century. At the same time, the inspiring and sometimes tragic stories of Maryknoll missioners overseas had a powerful effect on the American national imagination, a phenomenon that continues today, not only in religious circles but in political and social realms as well...

The history of Maryknoll begins with three names: James A. Walsh, Thomas F. Price and Mary Josephine Rogers (known as Mollie and later as Mother Mary Joseph). The first, a Boston priest who had been appointed diocesan director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in 1903, was also founder of The Field Afar, an English-language magazine designed to support foreign missionaries.

Mollie Rogers was a schoolteacher and a 1905 graduate of Smith College. She traced her own desire for mission work to an experience she had while a junior at Smith when she witnessed some of the school’s brightest students dancing in public in celebration of their pledge to go to China to work in Protestant mission schools or hospitals. “Something—I do not know how to describe it—happened within me,” she wrote. “I passed quickly through the campus to St. Mary’s church, where, before Jesus in the tabernacle, I measured my faith and the expression of it by the sight I had just witnessed. From that moment I had work to do, little or great, God alone knew.”

The first group of six seminarians joined in the fall of 1912, when the order also moved its headquarters to a hilly 93-acre farm in Ossining, N.Y., which they named Mary’s Knoll. They were joined in 1912 by four women, including Mollie Rogers, who became the superior of the Teresians. While Father Walsh seems to have envisioned them as a kind of ladies’ auxiliary assisting in the quotidian operations of the seminary, Mollie Rogers retained her vision of direct overseas service.

In September 1918 the first group of Maryknoll men left for China. Father Price was appointed the group’s superior but died in Hong Kong almost exactly a year later of appendicitis. The first group of Maryknoll women religious was missioned to China in 1921.

In China and Korea, the adaptability of the mostly young, mostly American members of the first mission groups proved valuable. China’s interior was not only isolated but underdeveloped by Western standards. Everything from travel to catechetical methods to cloistered living needed adaptation from the Euro-American norm. The American background of the early Maryknollers made them uniquely suited for foreign mission work. Untethered to geographic locations or class distinctions, their attitudes and lifestyles differed markedly from more traditional expressions of Catholic religious life. A more freewheeling approach was also encouraged in their training as missionaries, where both Father Walsh and Sister Rogers stressed that adaptability and individuality could be positive virtues in the missions, rather than simply temptations toward disobedience or pride.

The importance of the “American style” became apparent soon after in Kaying, one of the Maryknoll mission territories of China. After a visit from Sister Rogers in 1923 produced much excitement among the local population (who had never seen a Western woman in direct evangelical work), the local superior, Father Francis Ford, created the Kaying Method, in which religious women were sent out in pairs, living among the local populations for a month at a time or traveling from remote village to village, training lay catechists and establishing contacts with unevangelized areas. They were cut off from the sacramental life of their communities for long periods and also lived with far less privacy than was customary for religious women, making the method controversial. By 1939, however, because of the success of the model (and the large numbers of Maryknollers volunteering for such work), the Kaying Method received a commendation from the Vatican, and its use became widespread throughout mission territories in China.

The association of Maryknoll with the international fight against Communism became more pronounced after the Communist rise to power in China in 1949 brought Maryknoll some of its first martyrs. Many suffered in virtual anonymity, though the stories of two Maryknoll bishops became famous in the United States: Francis X. Ford, who created the Kaying Method; and James E. Walsh. Both had been among the first group to arrive in China in 1918.

Ford had been ordained a bishop in China in 1935. He and his secretary, Sister Joan Marie Ryan, were arrested by Chinese Communist authorities on charges of espionage in 1950 and publicly beaten by mobs as they were taken from town to town in the region. The last American to see Bishop Ford before his death in prison in 1952 described him as so emaciated that another prisoner carried him “like a sack of potatoes.”

Father James E. Walsh served for 18 years as superior of the Maryknoll missions in China and was ordained a bishop in 1927. He was arrested in 1959 on charges of espionage and given a 20-year prison sentence. He served almost 12 years in nearly complete isolation before his sudden release in 1970 at the age of 79, presumably as sop to U.S. President Richard Nixon before his visit to China. The high public profile and obvious suffering of the two Maryknoll bishops made headlines in the United States, where they were lionized in the popular press for their anti-Communism as much as for their religious commitment.

Following the Second Vatican Council, the mandate for reform of religious orders brought new challenges and opportunities to the Maryknoll congregations, particularly from that council’s explicit calls for greater solidarity with the poor, new approaches to evangelization and a greater role for the laity in the mission of the church. The presence of Maryknoll missionaries on the front line of evangelization efforts in the developing world gave particular urgency among Maryknoll’s members to the implementation of all three aspects of this vision in the decades that followed. The political and ecclesial implications were to bring Maryknoll’s missionaries into the forefront of the American imagination once again, with new champions and new detractors.

Instead of China, the new flashpoint was Central America, where the work of Maryknoll missionaries on behalf of the poor and marginalized aroused the ire of repressive governments and raised again the specter of martyrdom. The most famous of these martyrs are “the churchwomen of El Salvador,” Sister Ita Ford (a Maryknoll missionary and cousin of Bishop Francis X. Ford), Maura Clarke (a Maryknoll missionary), Dorothy Kazel (an Ursuline missionary) and Jean Donovan (a Maryknoll lay missionary). All four women were working in El Salvador in the late 1970s in various church ministries aiding the poor and refugees from that nation’s bloody civil war.

At a Maryknoll conference in Managua in December of 1980, Sister Ford read from a homily of Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who had been assassinated earlier that year: “Christ invites us not to fear persecution because, believe me, brothers and sisters, the one who is committed to the poor must run the same fate as the poor, and in El Salvador we know what the fate of the poor signifies: to disappear, be tortured, to be held captive—and to be found dead.”

Upon returning to El Salvador, Sister Ford disappeared along with Sister Clarke, Sister Kazel and Ms. Donovan. Their bodies were discovered days later; all four had been tortured, raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran National Guard... In the decades since, the churchwomen have become symbols of the church’s evangelical efforts against structural economic injustice and political repression, just as in earlier generations Bishops Ford and Walsh had inspired Catholics attuned to the dangers of the oppressive and atheistic Communist regimes...

...as Maryknoll begins its second century in a church that sometimes seems to be turning inward again to deal with its own concerns, can the outward thrust and global mission of its congregations offer a similar challenge to a new generation of American Catholics?

"Reading Jesus" with Mary Gordon: The Prodigal Son

2011-06-18T09:18:00.028-05:00

The Prodigal Son, by Gerrit van Honthorst (1622)

The other day I was going through some America magazine podcasts from last year that I hadn't gotten around to listening to yet. One of them was Kerry Weber's interview with author Mary Gordon. Gordon normally writes novels and memoirs, but in 2010 she wrote a book called Reading Jesus: A Writer's Encounter with the Gospels.

She was inspired to do so out of a taxicab ride she had taken in New York city. The driver was listening to a fundamentalist radio station, and as she listened to the preacher urging his listeners to "pick up your book and read the words along with me" she became indignant about the message.

Then he begins speaking, or rather, shouting, about how at the end of the world Jesus will come in fire, separating the sheep from the goats. He is literally quoting chapter and verse: Matthew 25:31-33. They happen to be chapters and verses I'm familiar with - the words, that is; I wouldn't have known the numbers. He moves from quotation to interpretation.. The goats are homosexuals, abortionists, divorcees.

It isn't call-in radio, but if it were I would say, "Wait a minute, Reverend... that chapter, those verses, don't say anything about homosexuals, abortionists, and divorcees. Jesus is talking about people who will not feed the hungry. Pick up your book, Reverend, and read."

Upon reflection, however, Gordon realized she had been rather diffident about reading the Gospels herself. She had lots of ideas and impressions about Jesus that she had accumulated over the years, but had not read all the way through the four Gospels herself, and realized that whatever her criticisms of the fundamentalists may be, they had. How could she be in a position to criticize if she had not taken the time and effort to do so herself?

The radio preacher and his audience are the kind of devoted readers that writers like me long for and only dream of. They read, and they reread. They know the text more thoroughly than people like me, who think of themselves as living for literature, know any text, even the ones to which we devote ourselves, professionally or for plain love. The radio preacher and his audience are the new people of the book.

When they read the Gospels, they say they are reading the Gospels. When I say that I am reading the Gospels, I say that I am reading the Gospels. And yet I find their readings so different from mine, it is difficult to for me to believe that we are doing the same thing, that one word, "reading," is adequate to describe these very different experiences.

Right then and there, she resolved, as a writer, to read the gospels straight through without stopping and to write her impressions on them "because what is being done in the name of Jesus seems to me a betrayal of everything I understand the Gospels to be about."

Much of what she discovered in the journey is what you might expect. To her surprise and consternation, however, she did discover there were some things she discovered about Jesus that she didn't like, such as what seemed to her to be a callous indifference towards family ties, as in..

"Who are my mother and my brothers? Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God's will is my brother and sister and mother."

..and...

"Do not think that I came to bring peace on Earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me."

...and...

"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple. And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple… In the same way, any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple.”

...and...

"Let the dead bury their dead."

But she has some very clever insights worth sharing. I'm still pretty early into her book, but she had some things to write about the Parable of the Prodigal Son that I thought were very good.

Is that the story of the Prodigal Son is the first story I remember?

There were images that I felt kinesthetically rather than saw. The first were the husks provided for the pigs; he longed for the husks, envied the pigs: even husks had not been provided for him. I imagined used-up corncobs, tossed on the ground after a summer picnic. Dried out; devoid of succulence. I understood that he would have to wait even for these until the pigs had had their fill; without articulating it, I knew that he was less valuable to his employer than the pigs were. This frightened me: that kind of hunger.

I was the child of an ardent father, so I could imagine the heat of a father's embrace that was led up to by a yearning run: the unseemly speed of the father who could not wait to see his child. Who runs for him, unable to bear the slowness of the normal progression, the son's ordinary pace. I could feel the warmth of the father's ardent arms; I knew the boy's safety, his sense of relief. Forgiveness...

Of the four Evangelists, only Luke presents it. Luke, the most domestic, the most poetic, the most contemplative of the four. It is the third of three parables that speak of the importance of recovering loss. The first is the parable of the lost sheep, which makes the point that the good shepherd searches for his lost sheep, and treasures the lost one the most dearly. The second parable of the series, the woman and the lost coin, tells the story of a poor woman who sweeps her house, searching desperately for a lost coin, and focuses on her joy when she at last recovers it. It is a response to an accusation of the Pharisees and scribes, "This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them."

We are told that there is a father, and he has two sons. The younger son wants his money, now. We know this will lead to no good. We doubt the father's wisdom, granting such a heedless wish. Had he said no to his young son, the boy would have been forced to stay at home and share the sensible location, the prudent placement of the elder brother.

But the father says yes. Thus far there are only shadows, traces or hints of characters. The father and his greedy son. Of the older son we as yet know nothing.

Mary Gordon goes on to share some insights the parable reveals in regard to both the younger and older sons, and I'd never thought of them before. Is the parable really more about the older son?

The Prodigal Son, by Gerrit van Honthorst (1623)

We follow the fate of the younger son. He shoots his wad. He blows it on whores. Of the three characters who will populate the story, the youngest son is the least completely drawn, and in a way we know him least: he remains of the three most a type, least a character. A spoiled boy—we aren't even convinced of the sincerity of his apologies to his father. He plans his words in advance; first we hear him rehearsing them, and then repeating them in his father's actual presence. The father's emotions are named; he is "filled with compassion."

We know the elder son's emotional state; he is angry. But the boy — he seems to have the lack of self-consciousness of the irresponsible user.

The father has not much interest in the apology. It is something that has to be said, something to be got through. It is certainly not something that makes possible what follows it.

As a child, and as a young person, I paid no attention to the older son. If you had asked me, I would not have been able to tell you that he had a place in a story. The young are prodigal; providence is a virtue of the middle-aged. I have gone from being heedless to being careful: I have become much more the son who never left home and worked hard than the traveling boy, the squanderer.

And so, reading it recently, my heart goes out to the older brother. Of course he is outraged; his sense of justice has been thrown into a cocked hat. He has worked hard for his father; his brother has run away and squandered everything in a particularly disreputable way. And what has he earned for his good behavior? Not even a goat. Certainly not a party. His father has betrayed him, and he responds to his father with what is usually the child's first ethical statement, "It's not fair."

A great deal is at stake with this unsettling story. Suppose it says that loyalty counts for nothing? Suppose love is unearnable, unearned? Suppose instead of a situation of rights, there is an economy of grace? Suppose it is unfathomable, as divorced from the rational as the impulse that sends the father running to meet his child on the road? That animal impulse, that full of the heat of blood? Suppose that life is larger, odder, less predictable, and more surprising than we had thought or even hoped. Particularly those of us who by the very virtue of reading this particular example of English prose are more likely to be descendents of the careful brother than the prodigal?

"Everything I have is yours."

The good boy is not left bereft. But what has been lost has been found. What is acknowledged here, what is given the greatest weight, is the terrible blow of loss. The loss that has seemed final, and then: reprieve. Resurrection. A new chance. A rebirth whose wage is celebration. "We had to celebrate and rejoice." Had to: an injunction, a duty. The duty of celebration. In King James: "It was meet that we should make merry."

And the story ends here. With an assertion of the rightness of celebration. The propriety of joy.

But what of justice? The difficulty of accepting an economy of mercy is echoed in the parable of the vineyard, which recounts the incident of a landlord who pays the same wages to workers who have worked all day as to those who have worked only an hour. When the workers complain, they are greeted with the question:

"Are you envious because I am generous?"

It is an impossible question, calling for an impossible honesty, one that makes self-love nearly impossible. The answer: yes. I am envious because you are generous. I am envious because my work has not been rewarded. I am envious because someone got away with something. Envy has eaten out my heart.

It is to me one of the most ethically complex, therefore greatest questions ever presented. A question with no answer. A circle without a break. Except the break of mercy, the break of grace.

But why, then, should we strive, why should we give our best, our all? Does this kind of striving only lead to envy?

The radical challenge of Jesus: perhaps everything we think in order to know ourselves as comfortable citizens of a predictable world is wrong.

And then how do we live?

In celebration.
Without envy.
Generously.

And justice? What is to become of that?

It is easy to focus on the potential narcissism of an insistence upon justice if one is not being oppressed by the unjust. But what of justice for the victims? Isn't mercy another excuse for noblesse oblige rather than an assertion of the primacy of human rights? Isn't it better that there should be some clearly stated measure, some setting out of obligations, some recourse to law ... a law which can be enforced or abrogated, but is stable, within reach for consultation and recourse? We are given, instead, two sentences, each in its way unbearable.

"Are you envious because I am generous?"

"Everything I have is yours."

But we are creatures of outsize appetites, and sometimes when we hear "everything," our response is: "Not enough."

That Was Mad Whack

2011-06-16T07:12:00.005-05:00

The Boston Bruins win their first Stanley Cup in nearly forty years

As far as another Boston championship goes, I'm a little late to the bandwagon once again. I confess I don't follow hockey as much as I used to when I was a kid, when I practically lived for it. The Bruins won the Stanley Cup in 1970 and 1972, and it felt like their dominance would last forever. Little did we know that we'd be in the wilderness for decades.

Ever since those halycon days die-hard fans of the Bruins, who were one of the original six NHL franchises, watched in misery as cups were won in cities like Tampa, San Jose, and Anaheim, where hockey usually elicits a big yawn.

It's not like they haven't had good teams over the years. In the playoffs, though, they've been stoned quite often by hot goaltenders. This time, however, we had the hot goaltender in Tim Thomas, and it made all the difference. He made nearly 800 saves in the playoff run, in which the Bruins won an unprecedented three seven-game series.

Another reason this series caught my interest... This Vancouver Canucks team was a really classless bunch, and their fans turned out to match them in kind. As far as I'm concerned, the city of Vancouver really disgraced itself last night by booing in deafening fashion during the presentation of the Conn Smythe Trophy and Stanley Cup, throwing things on the ice, and burning cars in the city.

As for Boston, we will enjoy a long awaited celebration when the cup finally comes back to its proper home later this week. Well done, B's!

Sacred Interiors

2011-06-11T16:55:00.018-05:00

The Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament
St. Clement's Eucharistic Shrine, Boston MA

It's quite easy to instigate a heresy, intentionally or otherwise. In our household, we are dealing with a self-inflicted controversy we call "The Donutist Heresy."

You see, when the children were little we enticed them towards good behavior in church by promising them that they could have donuts after mass if they behaved and comported themselves well. Perhaps in this we were too successful. Over time, the donuts became expected, then demanded, until it finally came to the point where the purchase and consumption of donuts became an almost integral part of the liturgy itself. In fact, if there were no donuts to be had shortly after the recessional it might even lead them to question if it was really a "valid mass."

We tend to cross things up now and then with a different venue, but it can't always be helped... In our relentless Sunday morning pursuit of sweets, we may have even exacerbated matters by upping the ante...

Sacred Heart Church in the North End, Boston MA

As we do on occasion, last Sunday we attended mass at Sacred Heart Church in Boston's North End, which is like New York's version of Little Italy. It's been a heavily Italian neighborhood since the 1870s. After mass, true to form, we couldn't help heading for coffees and capuccinos at the Caffe Vittoria and pastries at Mike's. I'm partial to to Mike's espresso cannolis, myself. I can be be pretty good about sticking to an Abs Diet while I'm at work all week, but on weekends my discipline does tend to break down a little bit.

It always feels very special to me to have all the kids there at Sacred Heart because of family history. My late mother and my aunt used to say novenas there (and in other West End and North End churches) back in the 1940s and 1950s.

It's a small church filled with dozens of statues, votive candles, and a rosary society made up of local elderly ladies replete with their walkers and canes. The second reading and the hymns are always in Italian, and on occasion we have the good fortune to have a Franciscan friar from nearby St Leonard's come by to say a wonderful mass. My daughters say he gives the best homilies they've heard.

One of the things I really like about Sacred Heart is that it's unabashedly, unashamedly, and unapologetically full of statuary and other images. Some of the statues are clearly too big for the small enclosed place, but it's fine just the same.

In looking for an image of the interior, I came across a wonderful little website that I'd like to give a hat-tip to:

The Church Gallery

Lot's of nice photos there of beautiful Catholic churches from around here and elsewhere. One thing I found curious enough was how many beautiful churches there are in Hartford, CT, for some reason...

Anyway, I love the incarnational emphasis that lies behind the adornment, art, and imagery in our churches and I wouldn't have it any other way, iconoclasts be damned. Let God be immanent, and caring of humans and our fragile human flesh, made in the divine image, not remote from us and utterly transcendent. The people who object the most to images tend to be the same ones who insist with the most vehemence that Christians are no longer under the Law, so go figure...

St John Damascene said:

We have passed the stage of infancy and reached the perfection of manhood. We receive our habit of mind from God and know what may be imaged and what may not. Especially since the invisible God took on flesh, we may make images of Christ, Who was visible, and picture Him in all His activities, His birth, Baptism, transfiguration, His sufferings and Resurrection.

We proclaim Him [God] by our senses on all sides, and we sanctify the noblest sense, which is that of sight. The image is a memorial, just what words are to a listening ear. What a book is to those who can read, that an image is to those who cannot read. The image speaks to the sight as words to the ear; it brings us understanding. Hence, God ordered the Ark to be made of imperishable wood, and to be gilded outside and in, and the tablets to be put into it, and the staff and the golden urn containing the manna, for a remembrance of the past and a type of the future. Who can say these were not images and far sounding heralds?

You see that the law and everything it ordained and all our own worship consist in the consecration of what is made by hands, leading us through matter to the invisible God

The diversity of the architecture and imagery in our churches is as wonderful and as diverse as we can be (at our best) within a unified community. Some other fine churches we've been in recently, albeit very different...

The National Shrine of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, Fonda, NY

St. Clement's Eucharistic Shrine, Boston MA

Fear o' Hell II: John Casey's Critique of Calvinism

2011-05-28T13:35:00.058-05:00

Do Double-Predestination and Total Depravity Still Make Any Sense?

The Sorcerer's Apprentice, John Calvin

Question 12: What are the decrees of God?

Answer: God's decrees are the wise, free, and holy acts of the counsel of his will, whereby, from all eternity, he has, for his own glory, unchangeably foreordained: Whatsoever comes to pass in time, especially concerning angels and men.

Question 13: What has God especially decreed concerning angels and men?

Answer: God, by an eternal and immutable decree, out of his mere love, for the praise of his glorious grace, to be manifested in due time, has elected some angels to glory; and in Christ has chosen some men to eternal life, and the means thereof: and also, according to his sovereign power, and the unsearchable counsel of his own will (whereby he extends or withholds favor as he pleases), has passed by and foreordained the rest to dishonor and wrath, to be for their sin inflicted, to the praise of the glory of his justice.

Question 14: How does God execute his decrees?

Answer: God executes his decrees in the works of creation and providence, according to his infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of his own will.

-- From the Westminster Shorter Catechism

A thought experiment...

Suppose that you have been found guilty of a capital offense and that you are in prison on death row with ninety-nine other guilty people.

Before your execution day comes up the governor makes an announcement. According to his sovereign power, and the unsearchable counsel of his own will (whereby he extends or withholds favor as he pleases), he has decided to grant you clemency and spare your life. The other ninety-nine are still consigned to death.

Bear in mind, the clemency granted to you had absolutely nothing to do with your merits in comparison to those of the other prisoners. It had nothing to do with your repentance, behavior in prison, amends, or restitution that you may have made in regard to the crimes you have committed. This decision was made by the governor in an inscrutable fashion, for reasons known only to him and which appeared entirely arbitrary to everyone else. In fact, if you had claimed any merits on your own behalf, or attempts at making amends at all, it probably would have been held against you. The governor hears petitions from no one who calls out to him on their own, only from those he draws to himself.

As you collect your belongings and pass through the gates of the prison into freedom, honestly, would you be crying tears of joy and gratitude that you had been spared the fate that still awaits the other ninety-nine? Would you swear your undying love to the governor and praise him for all eternity for showing you such kindness and mercy?

Or, rather, would you feel a certain quickening in your step as you leave, considering yourself merely lucky to have been the beneficiary of a strange, cruel and capricious whim on the part of a disciplinarian but volatile governor? That you had somehow escaped from the clutches of an unpredictable despot who gets a sense of satisfaction out of levying forms of justice and mercy that are understandable only to himself?

If you answered to the former, I suppose you would feel comfortable within the sect of Calvinism.

What if you were one out of ten instead of one out of ninety-nine? Would it change your answer? What if it was one out of two?

Well, considering how narrow the Calvinists consider the gate to be, the scenario would probably be more like one in a thousand. Maybe even one in a hundred-thousand. I've noticed that those who profess to believe the most in grace alone tend also to believe in the stingiest application of it.

What if the crime that you were guilty of was hereditary? It was for something a distant forefather had done, and was no fault of your own? Same answer?

What if the governor, rather than just letting you walk, actually punished his own beloved son in your place? Would you still be praising him for his glory, or would you think that he was a sociopath?

What if everyone was in the prison? According to the governor, we all deserve death for this inherited crime. Isn't it merciful then, for the governor to let some of us live, when none of us deserve to...?

I know, I know, elements of this can be seen in Catholic theology as well... We believe in the Fall, Original Sin, the necessity of grace for salvation, and that Jesus died to take away the sins of the world... We even have a place within our theology for predestination and foreknowledge... After all, St. Augustine was one of ours, we recognize Augustinianism when we see it, and what is Calvinism, really, other than Augustinianism taken to the nth degree?

There is an obsessive fixation within Protestantism, however, and within Calvinism in particular on the Koine Greek word dikaiosune (righteousness) and all of its variations along with an emphasis on the polemical texts in the gospels and Pauline letters that are used in regard to election and chosenness (taken out of the original historical context of the disputes between Jews and Christians and between Jewish-Christians and Gentile-Christians) that negates much of the broader theme of salvation history to be found throughout the Old Testament and New Testament.

All that talk in the Old Testament about taking joy out of contemplating, studying, and following God's laws? All that talk about the law being very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out (Deut. 30-14)? The way the Calvinists read Paul, God's giving of the law was like a father catching his son smoking and subsequently forcing him to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes in order to break him. In other words, the law was meant to convict man of his sin and show him his utter helplessness.

All of the Bible's exhortations to good works, looking after the needs of the widow, orphan, and stranger, of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, of Jesus' own words to the young man who asked what a man needed to do to attain eternal life, to the biblical exhortations to hate evil and love good, to let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream - All of this is subsumed in a system in which God in his wrath is determined to crush and destroy any puny and presumptuous human who dares to take credit for any good that he does... Even though that man's nature, faith, and fate were set up and predetermined by God from the beginning of all time anyway.

Now, if you were to tell a pair of Calvinists that you could never believe in such a monster god, they'd glance at each other, exchange a knowing smile, and one would likely turn back to you and say "I know." You see, they know that the mind of the unregenerate man isn't capable of understanding it. As for themselves, they are fine with it, because a potter has the right to do whatever he wants to do with his clay vessels, doesn't he? Who are you, O man, to answer back?

If you tell them that their theology makes God the author of sin and negates man's free will, they would respond, "Not at all. Man has free will, but due to his depravity his inclination is toward sin, so his free will can only lead him into sin and rebellion against God."

If you were to tell me that these answers were unsatisfactory in answering the charges, I would agree.

My son has a sandbox in which he keeps his toy soldiers. He gives them orders, he moves them about, he builds and takes apart their worlds; everything happens according to his plans. According to his own decrees, for good reasons known only to him, he decides which ones will live and which ones will die. Do his toy soldiers love him? In his own mind, I suppose he can imagine that they do, but in reality they are inanimate. If they could respond to him, it is more likely that they would merely fear him rather than love him, and any love expressed by them would be feigned. He has no real relationship with them.

But we each are capable of having a relationship with God in which we respond to him or refuse to respond, saints and sinners alike, saved and lost.

It's important to be as fair as I can about this before going further. As obnoxious and un-Christian the Calvinist doctrines of Double-Predestination (God has once for all determined, both whom he would admit to salvation, and whom he would condemn to destruction) and Total Depravity (every person born into the world is enslaved to the service of sin and, apart from the efficacious or prevenient grace of God, is utterly unable to choose to follow God or choose to accept salvation as it is offered) are to me, I must admit that they have an ironclad logic to them and plenty of scriptural support, as long as the scriptures are being read through a certain type of lens - as long as you accept certain anachronistic presuppositions that read 16th century European concerns back onto 1st century Near Eastern texts.

The definitions of some of these terms can be subtle as well, and are not always congruent with the way they sound at first hearing. For example, Total Depravity does not mean absolute or complete depravity. It doesn't mean that man is as bad as he can be. To say "total" is to say that the corruption extends to all aspects of the human personality in an extensive way, not an intensive way. It maintains that every part of man is corrupt, even if they are not completely corrupt. Under this doctrine, it is recognized that there are still good things that a person can do out of "common grace."

Nevertheless, Total Depravity assumes that man is dead in his sins and that the "good" that he does is self-centered and egoistic, not God-centered. To quote from here: "This means that his nature is so thoroughly corrupted by sin that it is incapable of producing anything good. There is nothing which the sinner can do which is pleasing in the sight of God. His heart is dead."

Is this credible? Is this supportable from what we know today about human nature? In the field of psychology, we have come a long, long way from the armchair theorizing of quacks like Sigmund Freud. Today we recognize that the capacity for good and evil is built into every one of us from our ancestral past. We have proclivities towards both altruism and selfishness. Humankind is not totally depraved. Neither is human nature a neutral blank slate which can only express evil if evil is learned from others. Both good and evil are coded into our DNA. We are capable of selfless acts of kindness and acts of utter brutality. We tend to base our relationships on reciprocity, and our altruism is usually directed towards kin and others we can categorize as being part of our in-group, and hostility and team aggression are directed towards those we consider strangers or part of an out-group. We are capable of enormous empathy, but we also have an inbred ability to turn it off and to treat others as less than human.

There are some evolutionary atheists like Richard Dawkins who might agree in a certain sense with the notion of Total Depravity, arguing that our altruistic characteristics are motivated at their very bedrock by selfishness. Other, like Frans de Waal, would be likely to disagree.

Take the example of a firefighter who lays down his life as part of his job. Is he selfishly motivated by the notion of posthumous honor and glory? Most probably not... What if he died in the service of rescuing someone of a different race or ethnicity? Did he die trying to unconsciously rescue his own set of recognizable (kin) genes? Again, probably not. Experience shows us that some people, even non-religious people, are capable of true goodness and altruism, with no self-serving motivations behind them.

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned Cambridge University scholar John Casey's book After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. He had an interesting take on some of these matters. In a chapter titled 'Predestination: Augustine to Calvin and Beyond' he takes on Total Depravity in particular....

Casey makes mention of when Erasmus of Rotterdam ('On the Freedom of the Will') took up his pen in a debate with Martin Luther ('On the Bondage of the Will').

Erasmus had, in fact, argued only for a modest contribution of the will to human goodness, and had allowed an extremely limited scope for the will's freedom. He asserted that if the will is simply enslaved, as Luther suggests, and if all human sins are predetermined, there would be no point in passages of scripture that seem directly to call people to repentance. For instance "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand" (Matt. 4:17; Mark 1:15) and Paul's adjuration: "Let us cast off the works of darkness" (Rom 13:12) along with Paul's demand for a "sloughing off of the old man and his acts." How, Erasmus asks, can we be ordered to throw off and strip off our old bad selves if we really cannot do anything for ourselves at all? Erasmus proposes a "middle way" in which the human will is not completely passive, but cooperates with God's grace. Just as reason had been dulled but not extinguished in those who lack grace, so "it is probable that the power of the will has not been absolutely extinguished in them either, but only rendered incapable of doing good."

Luther's rage at the middle way of Erasmus (which would later be confirmed as Catholic orthodoxy by the Council of Trent) may testify to his almost psychotic sense of sin and of personal impotence in the face of the perfection of God. It also shows, though, that he had a very good instinct for the way things were going. The Catholic Church, while keeping predestination in theory, would be in practice ready to soften it and adapt it to more humane instincts—indeed, to something like humanism.

Casey then moves on to describe how John Calvin's views built upon, and in some ways differed from, Augustine's.

It is possible that total depravity is even more certainly a doctrine of Calvin's than it is of Augustine. This is because Calvin does not seem to share Augustine's vision of evil as the privation of good. In the Confessions Augustine writes that all things are good even if they are corrupted. Man's being consists in his enjoyment of God's goodness; so if his corruption is so total as to deprave utterly, he would cease to exist... So Augustine's philosophical theory about the good does —just— mean his picture of human depravity is not quite as thoroughgoing as Calvin's. But it is a close-run thing.

Calvin does add something to Augustine's account of original sin and human depravity. For him man is totally depraved. Yet for Calvin the sense of impotence and even of despair that the conviction of sin engenders, the misery of the human predicament and the sense of a fallen world, are not purely negative, because he sees them as the starting point of our knowledge of God. "For, as a veritable world of miseries is to be found in mankind, and we are thereby despoiled of living raiment, our shameful nakedness exposes a teeming hoard of infamies. Each of us must, then, be so stung by the consciosuness of his own unhappiness as to attain at least some knowledge of God."

Calvin's views are also contrasted to those of Thomas Aquinas.

In the same Augustinian spirit, Calvin concludes that the whole of human nature is overwhelmed by original sin "as by a deluge," so that all which proceeds from man "is to be imputed to sin." It is not just the brute appetites that need to be obliterated, but the whole of man's corrupted heart and mind - indeed, his whole rebellious spirit. Calvin criticizes Plato and Aristotle for believing that reason, though clogged and sometimes conquered by the senses, nevertheless "like a queen governs the will." He rejects utterly their conviction that to be virtuous is, in the end, a matter of free human choice.

Thomas Aquinas had upheld a doctrine of predestination that looks very like that of Augustine. He taught that "some people God rejects" and that this rejection can properly be called "reprobation." There is hardly any softening — for instance, Aquinas says that reprobation does not indicate God's foreknowledge only, for as predestination includes the will to confer grace and glory, so reprobation "includes the will to permit someone to fall into fault and to inflict the penalty of damnation in consequence." Nevertheless, the reprobate abandon grace out of a free decision of their own. Within the general scheme of God's providence Aquinas allows a free choice of the individual will.

It is a tiny concession, but one not to be found in Calvin who (as we shall see) will teach the stern doctrine of "double predestination" — i.e., that God not only determines some souls, before their creation, to eternal bliss but a consigns others, in the unsearchable counsel of his own will, to everlasting torment. (Calvin's Catholic critics accused him of teaching that God actually wills the sins of the damned.) Calvin reserved some of his harshest strictures for those Catholic theologians who even hint that man can, of his own free will, cooperate with God's grace, or that he does, sometimes, even if ineffectively, "somehow seek after the good." He quotes with approval St. Augustine's insistence, in his reply to Julian of Eclanum, that without the Spirit the will is not free. Not even one single good work is possible without grace.

Casey than briefly explicates Calvin's central doctrines.

Since man's will is so corrupted, he actually sins willingly. So, although the will is not free, and man is subject to the necessity of sinning, his very wickedness ensures that he sins with gusto and determination—hence, guiltily. So he sins of necessity, but without compulsion.

It obviously follows that good works avail us nothing — and Calvin, while
grimly praising Augustine because "he admirably deprives man of all credit for righteousness, and transfers it to God's grace," complains nevertheless that Augustine does not go far enough, since he "subsumes grace under sanctification, by which we are reborn in newness of life through the Spirit."

Calvin moves without apparent hesitation to the conclusion that defines "Calvinism" — since man is totally depraved, and since only God's grace, freely granted, can save him, a grace that includes the gift of faith in Christ, which is both necessary and sufficient for salvation; and since God has known from all eternity whom he would chose to favor with his grace and whom he would pass over, it follows that all human beings are, from all eternity, predestined by God either everlasting bliss or everlasting torment — the notorious doctrine of double predestination comes in. As we saw, the Roman Church would put the darkest construction on Calvin's doctrine — that God does not simply permit the sins of those who will (as he foresaw) be damned —he actually wills them. Not only did he permit Adam to sin, he willed it. He furthermore wills every actual sin.

There is no doubt but that the doctrine of original sin, grace, and predestination as developed by Augustine and Calvin has a magnificent logic. If man's nature is indeed as depraved as the doctrine of original sin entails, so that moral evil proceeds not from the appetites and passions overcoming reason — as Plato and Aristotle thought — but in a taint that runs through all of human nature, then it is entirely plausible to conclude that from human nature alone nothing good can proceed. Hence, any good in man comes from the free granting of God's grace, which none of us merits. Therefore we are, through the unsearchable counsel of God's will from all eternity, either of the elect or of the reprobate, and if of the latter, we are condemned to an eternity of torment through a decision God took before time began.

Finally, Casey gets to the heart of the matter as to whether or not this view of Total Depravity holds water.

Post-Enlightenment pictures of human nature have tended to move toward an Augustinian pessimism. At any rate, our being in the grip of forces that we can neither acknowledge nor control is an idea to be found, in one way or another, in Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Augustine's account of concupiscence also finds echoes in modern philosophy. Sartre finds sexual love to be a locus of conflict, a source of impossibly self-contradictory desires. In desiring another, I want to reduce him to his flesh, to abrogate his freedom, convert his subjectivity into an object of my own will. My means of achieving this is to evoke in the Other sexual desire for myself... This has analogies with what Augustine says of concupiscence, and why he finds in the involuntary movement of the sexual parts in erotic love a deformity, a product of original sin.

But can evidence of perversity, irrationality, the power over us of unconscious forces support a doctrine of human nature since the Fall as fundamentally depraved?

In consequence of the horrors of the twentieth century it became quite common for people to say that they had rediscovered a belief in original sin. But did they really mean that they see human nature as so depraved that we cannot possibly bring about any good through our own efforts? For we can bring contrary evidence — of a mother acting with heroic self-sacrifice to save her child; of people sacrificing their lives for the good of their country, of those whose sense of justice overcomes self-interest; those with a generous love of fine qualities in other people; others who struggle with increasing success to overcome childish jealousies and resentments.

In pointing to such things, we need not be falling into some optimistic trap, a Panglossian view of human nature...

Were our understanding as depraved as Augustine and Calvin suggest, it is very hard to see how we could know our own depravity. They argue, of course, that we see our own blackness when we contrast ourselves with God. But this does not help their argument. Whatever our conviction of the supreme goodness of God, it does not follow that we have a clear idea of the profound depravity of man. Even though God be infinitely superior to us in goodness, that does not help us to understand how, say, a moment of irritation with someone is no different in its gravity from mass murder (as Newman appeared to suggest). Nor would the fact that God is entirely just show that we cannot see some human acts as more just than others. The very idea of depravity, of perversity, depends on our being able to think of some actions and motives as being better than others.

We could not understand human actions at all unless we were capable of seeing some people as acting courageously and honorably, others as moved by spite or envy, of distinguishing between kindness and sadism, generosity and mean spiritedness. We know that some people are more dominated by irrational fears than others, that some are more mature and others more childish. Some can subordinate their own urgent desires to the common good, can defer gratifications, can see a situation as it really is.

At any rate, some of us— probably, most of us — can exercise some of these virtues some of the time and fail in them at other times. If we acknowledge that for practical purposes — for the purpose of seeing intelligible patterns in human action —this is true but nevertheless add "But it is not strictly true, for we are helplessly depraved," then that remark and others like it would become simply a sort of incantation or a cog unattached to a wheel. It would be like saying "I have no real belief in the solidity of physical objects" while unconcernedly sitting on a chair or mounting a staircase.

If we accept that we can in practice understand the moral distinctions that we make all the time, but insist that these have no ultimate validity in theory, it is unclear what we are doing. It seems that we are denying that any evidence can come to bear. But this again would seem to be paying lip service to an idea that has no actual purchase on our experience.

Augustine based his belief in human depravity not primarily on experience but on revelation. The support for the idea that he found in experience — especially in sexual desire — was a sort of optional extra. But even revelation cannot make the idea of total depravity ultimately intelligible if does not answer to our experience, and, indeed, if it conflicts with it.

Augustine's picture of fallen nature has power and persuasiveness, but it can never escape its inherent paradoxicality. To refuse to distinguish between different degrees of goodness, or virtue, or benevolence in human motivation makes it impossible in the end to understand human actions at all.

Can't Anyone Ever Admit to Being Wrong?

2011-05-06T07:05:00.008-05:00

Contrary to popular belief, I'll do it from time to time. That may be rare for bloggers in general, but it was one of the biggest complaints my mother and older brother used to lodge against me, so maybe I've been sensitized to the necessity of having to admit to being wrong... at least every now and then.

Take, for example, Osama bin Laden. In one of my inaugural posts, Dead Man Talking, I expressed my opinion that he was already dead, most likely since Tora Bora in 2001. Despite the lack of habeas corpus and the constantly changing story line about the raid itself, I'm convinced that he was indeed alive the whole time. Seems like he might have been just living in semi-retired seclusion, but who knows...? Speaking of which, poor Jay Carney over at the White House... He needs to learn that tried-and-true lesson - never believe the first thing you hear coming from the military.

Paradoxically, my wife is a skeptic about the news of Bin Laden's demise, but I think she's just reluctant to give Obama credit for anything.

Which leads me to the next thing...

It's an amazing indication of how badly this nation has become polarized that the President can't get a bit of credit from his critics for even a day or two. At least on September 11, we were all really unified for at least a couple of months. Now we've got people on the far right trying to claim that their support of waterboarding turned out to be justified, and to give credit to George W. Bush, who said, and I quote:

"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority."

Apparently, wasting resources in Iraq was the priority...and he was echoed by Donald Rumsfeld with...

"He is either alive and well or alive and not too well or not alive."

Helpful and illuminating as always...

Concerning the death of Osama bin Laden, here are just a few random thoughts.

- I don't care about the theological hair-splitting. The overt celebrations in the streets were inappropriate and boorish, but I'm glad he's left this world. If the killing of anyone could be justified, his was. If that makes me a lousy Christian, so be it. Just another thing on that list of stuff that might make me a lousy Christian...

- The decision not to release the death photos was the correct one. We already have enough people being desensitized by war porn on the internet. During this time of the Arab Spring, when young people in the Middle East are showing signs of rejecting Bin Laden's nihilistic philosophy and radicalized religion, this was a good call. Treating vanquished enemies like dead trophy animals might radicalize people who might not otherwise be necessarily inclined to take up arms against us. No need to put our troops at risk in order to satisfy the curiosity of the prurient losers who are surfing the web in their parents' basements.

- In spite of all that, Obama has a little bit of gangster in him, doesn't he? A real cold streak. This business about the burial at sea.... I can't imagine George W doing that. He would have done something freaky like having Cheney and Rumsfeld talk him into demanding to have Bin Laden's head delivered to the Pentagon in a box. I can't picture him dumping the guy's body in the ocean and then saying with a straight face that it was done according to Islamic custom.

But enough about Bin Laden. Back to the importance of being wrong.... It must be nice to be a weatherman or a television pundit. They are allowed to be wrong quite often. In my line of work, not much of it is tolerated. You mess up significantly and everyone gets hauled in to write a root cause analysis document with a subsequent action plan. If you are the origin of too many of those you get shown the door. Why doesn't the same happen with some of these talking heads on TV? I saw an interesting article recently, by the way, on just who seems to be wrong more often than not...

Op-ed columnists and TV’s talking heads build followings by making bold, confident predictions about politics and the economy. But rarely are their predictions analyzed for accuracy.

Now, a class at Hamilton College led by public policy professor P. Gary Wyckoff has analyzed the predictions of 26 prognosticators between September 2007 and December 2008. Their findings? Anyone can make as accurate a prediction as most of them if just by flipping a coin....

The top prognosticators – led by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman – scored above five points and were labeled “Good,” while those scoring between zero and five were “Bad.” Anyone scoring less than zero (which was possible because prognosticators lost points for inaccurate predictions) were put into “The Ugly” category. Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas came up short and scored the lowest of the 26.

Even when the students eliminated political predictions and looked only at predictions for the economy and social issues, they found that liberals still do better than conservatives at prediction. After Krugman, the most accurate pundits were Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – all Democrats and/or liberals. Also landing in the “Good” category, however, were conservative columnists Kathleen Parker and David Brooks, along with Bush Administration Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Left-leaning columnist Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post rounded out the “good” list.

Those scoring lowest – “The Ugly” – with negative tallies were conservative columnist Cal Thomas; U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC); U.S. Senator Carl Levin (D-MI); U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman, a McCain supporter and Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut; Sam Donaldson of ABC; and conservative columnist George Will.

An Unconventional Palm Sunday Reflection

2011-04-17T10:02:00.015-05:00

Shrugging off Atlas Shrugged. The Kingdom of God continues to be obscured for Pie in the Sky... or even less. Fighting the Hijacking of Christianity by Objectivism

Christ Driving the Moneychangers from the Temple, by El Greco (1570)

They make a lot of garbage films in Hollywood and elsewhere these days, but did anyone notice this weekend that the Drudge Report had a link cooing about the release of a film adaptation of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged? I guess it's been a long time coming, but I'm still surprised that someone made a movie out of that stack of trash. With the rise of the Tea Party, I suppose someone thought it was an opportune moment to make it. As distasteful as Tea Party values are to me on a purely secular and political level, what bothers me more is that it seems to have gained credibility and a certain cachet with Christians too, and sadly, young Catholics in particular. They'd never admit that they've bought into Objectivism (an atheistic and virulently anti-Catholic philosophy), but in effect, that is what they have done. By contrast, many young evangelicals seem to be coming to their senses in the opposite direction. They've been down that road enough times to know that they've been used by people who actually disdain them.

Time to dust off and re-present Supply Side Jesus:

By the way, Andrew Sullivan at The Dish absolutely nailed this with a post called Ayn Rand vs Jesus Christ. He reposts some great contrasts between Objectivism and the scriptures from another article, and makes this devastating observation of his own:

It is possible to read the Gospels as entirely a personal and not political message, and certainly not view Christianity as a short route to socialism. But it is impossible even in one's personal life to be a Christian and to be a Randian. The whole point of the Gospels is that Rand's value system leads to profound misery and spiritual loss. And the whole point of Rand is that Nietzsche was onto something.

Fear o' Hell: John Casey on the Biggest Change in the Catholic Church

2011-04-16T05:02:00.027-05:00

Militant and Triumphant. No nonsense in Boston, 1943 (my mother, top-row, far-right)

I noticed the cover article in Time magazine this week - Is Hell Dead? It's about a book by evangelical pastor Bob Bell called Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. Its universalist message isn't going down well with many of the other well-known preachers in the evangelical community. As for my own community, it just might.

A priest in my parish has been heard to say, "There are things that are important, and there are things that are only important on the internet." He would certainly know, as he himself is the subject of a rather strange blog that is uniquely dedicated to "exposing" him.

He's right, of course. Looking at the Catholic blogosphere you would think that the most important issue gripping the Church today is the reception of Summorum Pontificum and the availability of the Tridentine Mass. It's either that, or tales of liturgical abuse, as if every parish in the nation was inundated by wymyn-priests in clown wigs liturgically prancing across our altars every Sunday.

In your average parish, however, day-in and day-out, these issues are practically unheard of and count for nothing. Vatican II did usher in great changes, and I don't mean to totally underplay the impact of the changes in the liturgy, but I don't think that was where the biggest change in the life of the Church occurred. As I've said here before, my own catechesis was a combination of what was presented in the pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II Church. The council occurred during my childhood, and it took a while for things to change at the local parish level in any event. My training for my First Confession (before they called it Reconciliation) and First Communion were decidedly pre-conciliar. It was pretty tough stuff. Things changed significantly later.

During the 60's there were enormous changes in the role of women and young people in society. The introduction of the birth control pill changed the trajectory of human society more than any technological innovation that I can think of, and that's saying something. In the wake of the Viet-Nam War, the assassinations, and Watergate, there was an enormous loss of public trust, and authorities were not held in the same unquestioning esteem as they were before. Some would say Humanae Vitae had the same effect on the Church. As society changed, the life of the Church changed as well. Fr Andrew Greeley likes to say that The “Catholic Revolution” lasted most generously from 1965 to 1974, but was more accurately within the period from 1966 to 1970. In my own experience, I'd put if from 1968 to 1972. In my view, the world was one way before the pivotal year of 1968 and was completely transformed by the time 1972 came along. For all the sturm and drang over litugy, or Humanae Vitae, the role of the laity, the crash in the number of vocations, or whatever hot topic we want to bring up, it doesn't touch what the biggest difference is. Some traditionalists do like to mention it, and in at least this much they aren't wrong...

The biggest difference I can see, is that in the pre-conciliar Church, before 1968 or so, Catholics were deathly afraid of going to hell.

Hell was mostly what you heard about in Catholicism. It was a fire-and-brimstone church.

In the post-conciliar period, for whatever reason, after 1972 or so, nobody talked about hell anymore and nobody was afraid of going there. Well, perhaps I can amend that... They were no longer interested in hearing any priest telling them that they were going there.

I remember some people referring to themselves as "Recovering Catholics" a few years back. If they still do, well, I'm sorry. With the very important exception of people who've suffered from sexual abuse (I ignore that by no means), if you are under the age of 45, you haven't got much to recover from. You never got hit with the brimstone like we did.

A couple of years ago, Cambridge University scholar John Casey wrote a book called After Lives: A Guide to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. In the introduction he summed up this sea-change in his own Catholic Church quite succinctly.

Beliefs held almost without question for centuries, and enforced by the authority of venerable institutions, can unpredictably evaporate.

For almost nineteen centuries the great majority of Christians had accepted, even embraced fervently, certain doctrines about man's final end.

These beliefs were at the center of the Christian imagination. Among Protestants in Northern Europe there had been some dilution of belief among intellectuals and the growth of liberal theology; but this did not begin to affect the masses until the early twentieth century.

The Roman Catholic Church preserved the orthodox teaching on heaven and hell with energy and rigor until the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), after which the deliquescence of serious belief in damnation (heaven remained an attractive, if vague, possibility) was astonishingly rapid. Although the doctrines remained officially in place, they were played down and lost most of the resonance they used to have with the faithful. It could be that the new model army of enthusiastically orthodox priests, which emerged during the pontificate of Pope John Paul II (1978-2005), will eventually reconvert Roman Catholics to a lively terror of the possibility of damnation—but at the moment that seems unlikely. You will rarely meet a Catholic who believes (to use Browning's words) that God watches him "As he believes in fire that it will burn, / Or rain that it will drench him...”

Yet in the nineteenth century, and even in the twentieth, people converted to Roman Catholicism in the conviction that by this means, and this only, could they save their immortal souls. Gerard Manley Hopkins was afraid that his favorite composer, Henry Purcell, was in hell because he was a heretic. Graham Green wrote novels in which damnation was the central them. A vivid assent to the reality of another world was everywhere to be found...

It is hard for modern Christians – at least in the West – to conceive how seriously all this was taken not much more than a generation ago… The integrity of the "deposit of faith" in the world of Darwin, Marx, Freud, Einstein, Stalin, and Hitler was preserved by an authoritarian, managerial discipline. That is why the valiant attempt of Rome to hold on to the ancient convictions is more striking than what happened in Protestantism.

It is also why the changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council were also of great significance. For although that council did not formally change any articles of faith, it produced a climate in which some central doctrines seemed to lose their purchase on the Catholic imagination, shaped as it had been by the Counter-Reformation. The cultural change is still working itself out and its full implications may not be understood until many more years have passed. Before the council, many even among those who rejected the faith were profoundly colored by it. In the early twentieth century there were those brought up in the Roman Catholic tradition who both intimately and imaginatively understood the doctrines about the next life, but who found them so at variance with modem experience that they could only treat them with a profound — if not necessarily unsympathetic — irony.

I'll let individual readers discern on their own whether or not this was a good thing. It's my own opinion that the actual theology discussed and presented in the Vatican II documents was excellent theology - much better than the legalistic neo-scholastic manuals that were in use in the period just prior to that. Can the subsequent collapse be blamed on good theology? Maybe. Maybe a lot of people really do prefer motivation by fear - or prefer "religion" over real faith. That would be a shame if was really the case.

To stress God's love and mercy over the pain of hell was probably the right thing to do, the healthiest thing to do and the truest to Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, in a materialistic, consumeristic society in which virtues have been largely forgotten, and the most elementary trust broken down between both individuals and groups, isn't it a tragedy that we've lost a collective sense of what sin is, and of our own sins?

More on Male Team Aggression...

2011-04-10T09:07:00.013-05:00

Just in case the last post on Team Aggression failed to convince, here it is in a nutshell...

Short of outright warfare, I'd say rugby epitomizes it at the the most primal level, even more than American football. Pretty cool... This is the way to work aggressions out.

Congratulations go out to England for winning the Six Nations Tournament last month, but they were denied the prestige of winning the coveted Grand Slam title (wins in all six matches) by the 2009 Grand Slam champs Ireland, who thumped them pretty good by a score of 24-8.

Italy did not fare very well, but they did have the honor of having the player of the tournament in Andrea Masi.

After receiving the award yesterday, Masi said: "It has been a championship of highs and lows for the Italian team, our win against France will go down in rugby history but to finish sixth frustrated us all. However, to be named the RBS Player of the Championship is a fantastic way to end what has been one of the most competitive Championships I can remember. We have worked hard this year and can be proud of our achievements. Italian Italian rugby continues to strengthen and we are very happy with our progress as a team."

A nice highlight reel of the tournament as a whole, featuring all the nations...

Genghis XXXII ?

2011-04-07T17:14:00.029-05:00

Temujin's progeny and the Founder Effect

A young boy in Kyrgyzstan

In a 2009 post called Is it the "Religion" Gene or the "Tribal" Gene They Should be Worried About? I explored the accusation made by the most prominent of the New Atheists that religion is the primary motivation behind human violence, or at least for war. I doubted this, and was more inclined to think that the primary motivation for war was a tribal instinct bequeathed to us by our evolutionary past. Looking at the raiding behavior to be found in pre-literate, hunting-gathering societies, and in our chimpanzee cousins, I cited author William F. Allman in making my case:

A comparison of the warfare patterns in forty-two foraging societies worldwide reveals that when people live near vital resources such as fertile land or watering holes, the group-against-group aggression is typically over control of these physical resources. Yet, ultimately, these resources are also tied to access to females: Those individuals in the society who accumulated the most wealth typically had the most wives, and so gaining resources is an important factor in access to women.

Recently I’ve been reading a book called Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World, by Malcom Potts and Thomas Hayden. Echoing William Allman, Potts and Hayden propose that the male of the human species is primarily to blame for warfare, and that human males have evolved to define, or, as primatologist Jane Goodall would put it, “speciate” between in-groups and out-groups, and that out-groups can become the dehumanized targets of our “team aggression.”

Human warfare and terrorism require a special sort of violence in men, which we will call team aggression. This behavior is not limited to humans and we will document how in a handful of social mammals, a highly specialized behavior has evolved in which teams of adults—almost always males—attack and kill individuals of the same species. In the process they enlarge their territory and increase the resources available to the group to which they belong, with the side benefit of eliminating potential sexual competitors. In the case of chimpanzees and human beings, the chief practitioners, males are the primary beneficiaries of this kind of team aggression.

Well, there you have it, and who can really argue with this? Perhaps St. Augustine had it mostly right in spite of the ever-increasing proof and acceptance of evolutionary theory. If evolution really did mark our DNA with a kind of “original sin,” it all basically comes down to the sex drive after all, just like Augustine thought (although he may have actually laid more of the blame on women than on men).

Anyway, one of the most intriguing things I’ve seen in the book so far is the assertion made by Potts that certain warlords of history have had a rather outsized effect on the gene pool. If it's true, no wonder we’re so warlike.

Ultimately, the evolution of every living thing has been driven by competition. It is a simple, universal fact that all living things, from bacteria to giant redwoods, reproduce more rapidly than the resources in their environments can support. And thus all living things must compete against not just other species, but also their own kind in order to survive. Competition was there, at the molecular level, when life first began literally billions of years ago, and it has continued to shape the evolution of life in increasingly complex ways ever since. Evolution as a result is a painful, callous process of separating winners from losers, driven by what Charles Darwin called the “war of nature.”

Actually, there are some evolutionary psychologists and primatologists such as Frans de Waal who would dispute this, saying that cooperation and empathy count as much as competition, but this is Potts’s theory we're exploring for the moment…

In complex animals, such as birds or mammals, this competition for survival is frequently associated with violent behaviors. This occurs between species, within species, and even between males and females of the same species. Nowhere is this war of nature made more explicit than in the battles males of many species must win in order to mate. The male deer or bull elephant seal that competes successfully against his brethren and impregnates many females will pass his genes on to future generatlions; his losing competitors will not. Human behavior is considerably more complex than that of deer or seals, but for our species, too, it appears that more competitive, aggressive males have often made outsized contributions to the gene pool—a contribution that inevitably reinforces our warlike tendencies.

Take Genghis Khan. In 2003, an international team of geneticists published a DNA analysis of central Asians. Remarkably, the authors found, 8 percent of the men in central Asia have virtually identical Y chromosomes. Much more than a curious biological footnote, this finding offered a profound insight into our collective past. The Y chromosome defines maleness, and men who share a Y chromosome are all descended from the same man.

The fact that one in twelve men in Central Asia has the same Y chromosome can mean only one thing: At some point in history probably within the last thousand years, one man had a vast number of offspring. And Genghis Khan, Mongol Emperor from 1206 A.D. until his death in 1227, is the one historical figure who fits this role.

Still revered as a great leader in parts of Central Asia and reviled elsewhere as the ultimate barbarian, Genghis Khan presided over one of the greatest military expansions of all time. In just over twenty years, he united the tribes of the Central Asian Plateau, and extended the reach of the Mongol Empire from the Sea of Japan in the east to the Caspian Sea some 6,000 kilometers to the west. He reinforced loyalty by sharing out the spoils of war—including vanquished women—after every battle, but the Great Khan saved the most beautiful women for himself, and he boasted of the pleasure of violating other men’s wives and daughters.

Just a century after his birth, a Chinese historian claimed that Genghis Khan already had 20,000 descendants, and whether that was an exaggeration or not, modern science suggests that today the number of his descendents has grown to 16 million worldwide. Put another way, fully one in 200 of all men now alive on this planet are likely descendants of Genghis Khan.

I’m just going to butt in for a second... If Genghis Khan really had that many descendants, I’ll venture to guess that one of them was certainly not John Wayne, who was horribly miscast as Genghis Khan in the 1956 film The Conqueror. What was “Duke” thinking in taking on this role? I can’t think of a worse case of Hollywood miscasting off the top of my head, except maybe Marlon Brando as a Nazi SS officer in The Young Lions.

Sez the Duke to Susan Hayward: Dance, Tartar woman!

I digress. Potts continues….

If Genghis Khan is the most dramatic example of this ‘founder effect,” he is hardly the only one. Another recent Y chromosome study, conducted on almost 800 men in Ireland, found that 20 percent shared a common genetic signature thought to show descent from a Middle Age king called Niall. In all, the study’s authors estimated that as many as one in twelve people in Ireland—and perhaps two to three million people worldwide— could be descended from King Niall...

If evolution judges success by the number of an individual’s progeny, then Genghis Khan, King Neill, and other, lesser warriors are among the most “successful” men in history (None of them lived long enough ago to be credited with the evolutionary invention of aggression or war, however. They, like all of us, were the products of evolution occurring over millions of years before their time on Earth.) Fortunately, human beings have also evolved as social animals capable of empathy, altruism, and love. But even if most of us would prefer to live in a world where the Genghis Khans do not win, we can’t begin to understand the raids and wars that still permeate our present world without understanding why they so often won in the past.

Throughout history and across cultures, rich and powerful men typically have had more sexual partners, and thus more offspring, than those lower in the social hierarchy The Bible tells us that King Solomon had 700 wives, and 300 concubines. Large harems were the order of the day for the Egyptian Pharaohs, the Aztec Kings, the Turkish Sultans, the African Kings, and the Chinese Emperors. Idi Amin, the Ugandan despot of the 1970s, had four wives and thirty children. Queen Victoria’s son, later King Edward VII, had several mistresses and many short affairs. From his box in a theater he would survey the women in the audience and send his equerry to invite the most attractive to join him—one hundred years later heavy metal bands echo the strategy, with roadies taking the place of squires. President John F Kennedy had several long-term extramarital sexual relationships and many one-night stands, aided by a kind of cultural acceptance that Bill Clinton must surely have envied.

Even if not all generals rape as did Genghis Khan, and not all kings and presidents are promiscuous—nor all philanderers violent—we still need to explain why in every society, across time and space, men on average are much more violent than women. We argue that our evolutionary history is the key, and that while. the different behaviors of men and women in relation to sex and violence are modified by our upbringing, they are also written in our genes.

The standard social science paradigm tells us that the differences between the sexes are almost entirely determined by culture.

An evolutionary paradigm, in contrast, recognizes biological differences in male and female behavior, put in place over millions of years of evolution.

This is not an argument that nature necessarily triumphs over nurture, nor that culture is unimportant and genes omnipotent: It is simply a recognition that humans are subject to the same biology as every other living species.

History demonstrates that a behavioral predisposition is not predestination, because we can choose to express the impulses and tendencies we have inherited in many ways, some of them peaceful or creative. Our genes certainly help to set our personalities and temperaments, but our behavior can be molded by our families, environment, and cultures—and by our own decisions—in a rich variety of ways.

Still Men and Women

2011-04-04T17:02:00.003-05:00

Martin Luther King Jr was gunned down at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. He was in town to support striking sanitation workers represented by AFSCME Local 1733.

A public employee union.

Forget All That Mayan Stuff in 2012

2011-03-29T16:28:00.043-05:00

The Countdown to Armageddon will begin on my birthday

The Last Judgement, by Peter Paul Rubens (1617)

I saw this in the Huffpo the other day:

Sorry, Maya. Just when peculiar apocalyptic interpretations of the ancient Mayan calendar were about to thrust you into the media frenzy sure to come in 2012, some knuckleheads cut in front of you by predicting the return of Jesus on May 21, 2011.

It's a reference to a bold prediction by Harold Camping, described in Wikipedia as the May 21, 2011 Doomsday scenario.

I hope I have a chance to finish my cake and ice cream first. Even more importantly, I hope my wife isn't raptured up if we're in the midst of canoodling. If there's anything to this Millerite or Darbyite reading of scripture, she has a better chance of getting raptured than I do. It would be just my luck...

Joking aside, where lies hope? Christians are supposed to be hopeful people by definition, but just what is it that we are supposed to be hopeful for? In his autobiography Just As I Am, the celebrated evangelist Billy Graham described a meeting he had with German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer shortly after the end of World War II, as Berlin still lay in ruins. Graham picks up the story as he stands waiting in the man's office as Adenauer gazes out of his window at the shattered city below.

Even more memorable was German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. One time when I was preaching in Germany, he invited me to his office. Coffee was served, but before my first sip, he started in.

“Young man, do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ?”

“I most certainly do,” I replied.

“So do I. If Jesus Christ is not risen from the dead, there is not one glimmer of hope for the human race. When I leave office, I’m going to spend the rest of my life studying and writing about the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s the most important event in human history.”

I don't know if he ever made good on that conviction or not, but I do know that Adenauer, a devout Catholic, skillfully led the rebuilding of Germany from out of the ashes with his Christian Democratic Union Party, which has dominated German politics almost up to the present day. After the war, Prussia lay behind the Iron Curtain. As a result, Catholics from the south and the west were quite influential in leading the way towards building a society and a body-politic in West Germany that was heavily influenced by Catholic social teaching and the principles of social justice. Germany became a highly prosperous and efficient social democracy, respecting both the rights of capital and labor (union members sit on corporate boards and consult with management at every level), while providing universal health care and affordable education to its citizens. Even today, despite having high labor costs, it is a creditor nation, a net exporter of goods, and has even been able to bail out struggling neighbors after having successfully absorbed and re-integrated a failed socialist state. Perhaps in all this, they've been too successful. In parallel with this lofty and enviable level of security and equality, the practice of faith in Germany has fallen through the floor in a manner that surely would have distressed Konrad Adenaur.

On the other hand, in a land with far less security, equality and public trust, Billy Graham's son Franklin has been parlaying a less hopeful message about what lies ahead for mankind to the benefit of his own success (examples here and here) in a manner his father probably never would have.

So who's right?

Ironically, to borrow the German term of "schadenfreude," many so-called evangelists in the USA have been doing very well for themselves presenting a vindictive vision in which their enemies - the secularists, the unbelievers, the liberals, the skeptics, the scoffers - will suffer their just deserts at the hands of a wrathful God, while they themselves are whisked away from the awful tribulation beforehand.

This represents no small fringe movement in the USA. Hal Lindsay's The Late Great Planet Earth was one of the biggest selling books of the 1970s and 1980s, and the books in Tim Lahaye & Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind Series have been some of the biggest sellers of the 1990s and 2000s. There are even video games based on them.

Earlier this week on Drudge there was a big hoopla about a CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) report that the clerics in Iran are saying that recent world events point to the imminent arrival of the Mahdi (also known as the "Twelfth Imam") and a series of apocalyptic events to shortly follow.

With alarmist tones, and with typically superficial simplicity they make it seem as if the entire Islamic world puts stock in this. Never mind the fact that the majority of the world's muslims are Sunnis who discount it, resent Iran's muscle-flexing, and reject "Twelver Shi'ism" out of hand.

In any case, why all this alarm on the part of the CBN? Well, actually, I know why. It's because they are heavily lobbied and funded by AIPAC to show alarm over it, but in their heart of hearts, don't they actually predict (and actually hope for) essentially the same thing?

Now, it's true that it is a tenet of faith for all Christians that Jesus will return. After all, we recite in our Creed at every Mass "He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end." When we consider, however, the "End Times," or the "Last Things," what is it that we are hoping for?

It is certainly fair enough to hope for a transformed world, of God finally setting the world right and of peace and justice to reign. Professors like Bart Ehrman are quick to point out that in the academy, it is the widely accepted view among New Testament scholars, first posited by Albert Schweitzer a century ago, that this was exactly the agenda of Jesus - that Jesus was just who he said he was - An Apocalyptic Prophet for the New Millenium (think of the Son of Man as described in the Book of Daniel).

When we look at the fear-mongering going on, however, isn't it important to stress that no one knows the hour? Instead of looking for signs according to earthquakes, floods, famines, war, and rumors of war, isn't it at least equally valid exegesis to look at the words of St. Paul and realize that he thought all of these last things were to occur once the "full measure of gentiles" had been brought to faith (Romans 11:25-26)? By God's standards, who knows what that full measure might be? Nearly everyone? Everyone? Wouldn't that be a positive sign being manifested instead of the envious, vengeful, fear-ridden, and bitter scenario being pushed by the Armageddon peddlers?

Did God so love the world that he gave his only Son so that we may have eternal life, or did God hate the world so much that he punished his only Son so that a few elect could escape a doomed planet? This is one of those areas where the strength of the incarnational and sacramental emphases of our tradition can be brought to bear. Thomas Groome, in a recent review of a new book by Michael Leach, Why Stay Catholic, writes:

In my view, the two best reasons for staying Catholic, as the book stresses, are the twin principles of incarnation and sacramentality. Of course, Catholicism is incarnational in its focus on Jesus. Leach is convinced that the Jesus event and his paschal mystery is not about a God who needed to be appeased for our sins but one who came looking for us out of love....

The other side of the incarnational coin is the sacramental nature of Catholic faith. Again, this emphasis reaches a climax in the seven great liturgical sacraments that we celebrate in church, but these arise from and flow back into the sacramentality of the ordinary and everyday of life. Because “God is everywhere,” God looks for us and we respond through our lives in the world. In the words of St. Augustine, “If you have an eye for it, the world itself is sacramental.” It is the sacramentality of Catholic faith that makes it so humane, so life-giving. “Catholicism seen through the eye of a needle is a religion of rules and regulations.

Seen with the sacramental imagination, it is a unique take on life, a holy vision, a way of seeing the chosen part of things... These twin principles—the incarnational and sacramental—are what make Catholicism most worthwhile, why anyone can well stay, regardless of disappointments and complaints and the scandals that beset the church. Indeed, these very principles lend Catholic faith its rich spiritualities; “When it comes to spirituality, “the author writes, “the Catholic Church is a Garden of Eden.”

Did Nader Call It?

2011-03-26T09:07:00.017-05:00

An interview with Ralph Nader on what an Obama presidency would be like - election night 2008

As a preface to the following remarks, I'd like to make it clear that I supported Obama for president in 2008. I still do. In spite of various disappointments, I'm thoroughly of the opinion that under McCain and Palin things would be a lot worse than they are now. For one thing, I'm convinced that they would have had us involved in a full-scale war with Iran by this point.

Nevertheless, when I look at a candidate who raised expectations so high by running under the mantra of hope and change, and look at how those expectations were disappointed, I think it's fair to be hard-eyed and to take stock of the man that we elected.

Granted, Obama stepped into as bad a situation as any President in living memory.

Still, as he embarks upon another miltary adventure without consulting the will of the people, freezes the pay of federal employees and fails in the following weeks to show anything more than the most tepid support for a public employees union fighting for its life, keeps Guantanomo Bay open despite his campaign promises to shut it down, signs free-trade agreements putting even more American jobs at risk, and escalates the war in Afghanistan, bleeding it even further into Pakistan, can we ask if this self-proclaimed conciliator is the man who was advertised to us in the campaign? Is Obama, whose biggest campaign contributor was Goldman Sachs, nothing more than a Corporate Democrat?

One person who seems to have had Obama completely pegged and sussed-out, even during the 2008 campaign, is the long-time consumer activist and Green party candidate Ralph Nader. He's getting too old to run for President anymore, and it saddens me to see that in the last thirty years or so he's come to be regarded as somewhat of an eccentric and sour crank. Ralph Nader has been a superb servant to the American public. Someday he will be remembered for the national hero that he is. Mark my words, in years to come he will be regarded as a towering figure in American history. For whatever people think of his views and positions, he is the real deal.

Nader gave an interview to Realnews on election night in 2008, and I though the remarks he made about the prsopects for an Obama presidency were amazingly prescient. Please see the video clip further below.

At 1:00 minute, he describes the apathy and resignation to be found throughout the country despite all the talk of "Hope and Change" during the campaign.

At 1:24 he asks, what is really still left for the American people themselves to decide?

At 2:50, he explains that at this point, with an Obama victory and a Democratic Congress, the Democrats will have no more excuses.

At 3:15 he describes corporate domination of society and points out that Obama was the candidate most heavily funded by Wall Street.

At 3:50 he finally gets to Obama himself, claiming that he lacks a transformative personality, and he decries Obama's lack of willingness to be confrontational, and his unwillingness to take on power, particularly corporate power.

In this second part, commentators Bill Fletcher and Tony Monroe show a bit of prophetic wisdom of their own, speaking about US adventurism, the meaning of the demobilization of the union movement during the Clinton years, and the difficulty that Obama would face in standing up to an entrenched national security and intelligence apparatus that is resistant to change.

What has Nader been up to lately? He seems to be sending out feelers to the right-wing populists who were stirred up by what he describes as a media-driven Tea Party movement. Not too long ago, he was seen on Andrew Napolitano's show on FOX with Ron Paul, discussing their shared conviction that the Federal Reserve needs to be reigned in, the troops brought home, and the corporatization of government resisted.

Will an alliance between progressive Ralph Nader Greens and libertarian Ron Paul Tea Partiers ever work? Meh. I doubt it. I think Nader and Paul are both more interested in seeing third party movements taken seriously rather than ever seriously working together. In the last two minutes of Napolitano's interview you can see the philosophical fissures between them on health care reform that would prevent them from ever really collaborating.

For his part, Ralph Nader has asked the Tea Party ten questions about the things they really care about, and speaking for myself, I don't think that he is going to find as affirmative a set of responses as he may hope for.

1. Can you be against Big Government and not press for reductions in the vast military budgets, fraught with bureaucratic and large contractors’ waste, fraud and abuse? Military spending now takes up half of the federal government’s operating budgets. The libertarian Cato Institute believes that to cut deficits, we have to also cut the defense budget.

2. Can you believe in the free market and not condemn hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare-bailouts, subsidies, handouts, and giveaways?

3. Can you want to preserve the legitimate sovereignty of our country and not reject the trade agreements known as NAFTA and GATT (The World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland) that scholars have described as the greatest surrender of local, state and national sovereignty in our history?

4. Can you be for law and order and not support a bigger and faster crackdown on the corporate crime wave, that needs more prosecutors and larger enforcement budgets to stop the stealing of taxpayers and consumer dollars so widely reported in the Wall Street Journal and Business Week? Law enforcement officials estimate that for every dollar for prosecution, seventeen to twenty dollars are returned.

5. Can you be against invasions of privacy by government and business without rejecting the provisions of the Patriot Act that leave you defenseless to constant unlawful snooping, appropriation of personal information and even search of your home without notification until 72 hours later?

6. Can you be against regulation of serious medical malpractice (over 100,000 lives lost a year, according to a study by Harvard physicians), unsafe drugs that have serious side effects or cause the very injury/illness they were sold to prevent, motor vehicles with defective brakes, tires and throttles, contaminated food from China, Mexico and domestic processors?

7. Can you keep calling for Freedom and yet tolerate control of your credit and other economic rights by hidden and arbitrary credit ratings and credit scores? What Freedom do you have when you have to sign industry-wide fine print one-sided “contracts” with your banks, insurance companies, car dealers, and credit card companies? Many of these contracts even block your Constitutional access to the courthouse.

8. Can you be for a new, clean system of politics and elections and still accept the Republican and Democratic Two Party dictatorship that is propped up by complex state laws, frivolous litigation and harassment to exclude from the ballot third parties and independent candidates who want reform, accountability, and stronger voices for the voters?

9. If you want a return to our Constitution—its principles of limited and separation of power and its emphasis on “We the People” in its preamble—can you still support Washington’s wars that have not been declared by Congress (Article I Section 8) or giving corporations equal rights with humans plus special privileges and immunities. The word “corporation” or “company” never appears in the Constitution. How can you support eminent domain powers given by governments to corporations over homeowners, or massive week-end bailouts by the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department of businesses, even reckless foreign banks, without receiving the authority and the appropriations from the Congress, as the Constitution requires?

10. You want less taxation and lower deficits. How can you succeed unless you stop big corporations from escaping their fair share of taxes by manipulating foreign jurisdictions against our tax laws, for example, or by letting trillions of dollars of speculation on Wall Street go without any sales tax, while you pay six, seven or eight percent sales tax on the necessities you buy in stores?

Now What? From the 47 Ronin to the Fukushima 50

2011-03-16T09:33:00.003-05:00

The 47 Ronin assault Kira Yoshinaka's mansion

Last week we all witnessed the horror of a tsunami wave racing across the plains of Sendai like the wrath of some dark agent, destroying everything and everyone in its path.

Shortly afterward, we all became increasingly aware that the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima complex was more dire than initially reported.

It's a bit surreal to see the way all of this is unfolding, to see our reaction to it. There is widepsread reporting and awareness, of course, about the immensity of the tragedy that has struck Japan, but just the same, we seem to be whistling in the dark and trying to wish away the reality of what is occurring at Fukushima.

I watch the content of the news, I watch the content on Facebook, but for the occasional rumblings underneath, we are going about our daily lives trying to consider the ramifications of this as little as possible. As a society, we still seem to be obsessed with stories built around the likes of Charlie Sheen and Vanessa Hudgens. Pity the Libyans and the Bahrainis who have been suddenly forgotten altogether.

As of this morning, I'm hearing that the idea of pumping water into Reactor 3 has become too dangerous and risky due to the high levels of radiation, and the option of a water cannon is being contemplated. If the Fukushima 50, who seem to be on a one-way mission and upon whom so much of the world's hope lies, fails to get these reactors under control, it's likely that a Hail Mary pass will be thrown to the US miliary.

We read assertions that the Fukushima 50 is not afraid to die. They're three men over, but in their willingness to lay down their lives in what might become a suicidal effort, I'm reminded of the Japanese story of the 47 Ronin.

Trying to repair damaged cooling systems with battery power, pumping in sea water while containment buildings explode around the reactors, dropping water from helicopters, using water cannons from a distance.... has each measure become more primitive and desperate?

If none of these work....?

More on Atonement: Did Jesus Come to Die?

2011-02-26T13:30:00.018-05:00

Was a Blood Sacrifice Necessary?

Pieta, by Lorenzo Lotto 1508

Previous posts on the meaning of atonement can be found here, here, and here.

Previous ruminations on the elasticity of scripture can be found here and here.

God did not need the blood of Jesus. Jesus did not just come "to die," but God used his death to announce the end of death.
-- Richard Leonard, SJ in Where the Hell is God?

It's a pure, noble, and uplifting sentiment expressed by Father Leonard. It sounds very pleasing to our ears in 2011, but how often these days are we allowing our postmodern sensibilities to shape our way of looking at Jesus and in looking at faith, rather than the scriptures themselves? Are we drifting away from meanings more clearly relevant to the Bronze Age, when those books were written?

It is true that in Catholic theology, following St. Thomas Aquinas, we affirm that the satisfaction model of redemption was not absolutely necessary. In other words, God could have chosen some other way to redeem us other than way He did.

Nevertheless, it does seem like Father Leonard's assertion does take rather lightly our historical understanding of how important blood was as a symbol of life in Second Temple Judaism, and also how several biblical passages strongly emphasize the necessity of shedding blood for forgiveness, both in the Old Testament...

Since the life of a living body is in its blood, I have made you put it on the altar, so that atonement may thereby be made for your own lives, because it is the blood, as the seat of life, that makes atonement.
-- Leviticus 17:11

..and in the New Testament...

According to the law almost everything is purified by blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. Therefore, it was necessary for the copies of the heavenly things to be purified by these rites, but the heavenly things themselves by better sacrifices than these. For Christ did not enter into a sanctuary made by hands, a copy of the true one, but heaven itself, that he might now appear before God on our behalf.
-- Hebrews 9:22-24

They are justified freely by his grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as an expiation, through faith, by his blood, to prove his righteousness because of the forgiveness of sins previously committed...
--Romans 3:24-25

Christ ransomed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written, "Cursed be everyone who hangs on a tree."
--Galatians 3:13

Father Leonard advocates for a much different view of atonement in Chapter 5 of his book Where the Hell is God? How well does he make his case? Of particular interest is the way he takes the hymn How Great Thou Art to task for its shaky theology... I've never been very fond of it myself. Whenever I hear it at Mass, I find myself looking around to see if Elvis has entered the building.

Excerpts from Chapter 5 of Father Leonard's book:

We should be very careful about what we sing. Spiritual songs and hymns are not part of our liturgy to fill in time, accompany a procession, or annoy the tone deaf who are pressed into making a noise. Hymns carry theology. We sing scriptural texts or a poetic version of a fundamental Christian truth to affirm our faith. Setting these texts to music makes them popular and memorable. That is why they can be so powerful and important, but also dangerous.

Hymns matter, and one verse of one hymn has more to answer for than most. “How Great Thou Art” takes its place in the top five of nearly every survey of the most loved hymns in the English speaking world. Written by the Swedish Lutheran lay preacher and later parliamentarian Carl Gustav Boberg in 1885, “O Store Gud” (O Great God) was translated into English by Stuart Hine. Hine was an English evangelical missionary in Ukraine, where he learned the hymn in Russian. In 1939, he returned to England and the following year published the first version of the hymn we now call “How Great Thou Art.” Its worldwide fame can be attributed to Billy Graham’s international crusade in London in 1954, during which time this hymn was sung over and over as it accompanied the altar call, and was broadcast and televised to an audience of millions. It did not hurt the hymn’s fortunes that it was the Gammy Award-winning title song of Elvis Presley’s 1967 hit record.

The Protestant pedigree of this hymn Is important. A little history first. Building on the earlier work of St. Clement of Alexandria, St. Anselm of Canterbury, an 11th-century Benedictine monk, wrestled with the question why God came into the world as one like us. In his famous treatise, Cur Deus Homo (Why God Became Human), he developed a theory that Jesus came into the world to act as a substitute for us. We were the ones who had offended God, but rather than sacrifice us all, God sent Jesus to take our place in offering up his own life to the Father as restitution for our sins. He paid the ransom that God demanded to set us free.

This way of thinking relies heavily upon St. Paul, where on many occasions he calls Christ our Redeemer. The word redemption literally means, “buying back,” It comes from the practice in the ancient world where there were two types of slaves—those who were born or forced into slavery, usually for life, and those who paid off a debt or a crime by becoming a slave, usually for a period of time. The second type of slave could be set free when someone else paid their debts, or the ransom their master now demanded for them was settled. They would then either be the slave of the purchaser, or set free completely.

St. Paul introduced this metaphor into Christian theology to describe how we, who are enslaved by our destructive behavior, gained a liberator in Christ who entered into a sinful world, subjected himself to its violence and death, in order to set us free. At its best, the notion of Christ the Redeemer shows us that we do not have to live destructively anymore. Now claimed by the love of Christ, we are no longer slaves, but his friends; indeed, through the redeeming work of Christ we have been welcomed into God’s family.

The Protestant Reformers took up these substitution ideas and gave them a more biblical spin. Relying on a literal and tougher stand on the role of the Fall of Adam and Eve, John Calvin held that, because the first parents of humanity in the Book of Genesis rebelled against God, our whole human nature was corrupted forever. There was nothing we could do about it. God was so angry with us that, in time and in his mercy, and even though we did not deserve it, he decided to save us. However, because humanity could not do anything to save itself, to satisfy God’s wrath at Adam and Eve and all humanity’s subsequent ingratitude, the Word of God had to take our flesh, our place, and offer up the sacrifice of his own life in and through his suffering and death as atonement for our inherited and ongoing sinfulness. It is often called “satisfaction theology” because it was through the violent death of Jesus that God’s wrath was satisfied. It must be admitted that some elements of this satisfaction theology continue in Catholic theology as well, though we have never held that humanity was totally corrupt or depraved, and that God had only one option in appeasing his own anger.

There are libraries written on the stuff of the last couple of paragraphs, but for our purposes here, this wholly inadequate summary will have to do.

In its more stark form, satisfaction theology is given a full confessional expression in the third verse of “How Great Thou Art”:

When I think that God his Son not sparing
Sent him to die, I scarce can take it in.
That on the Cross my burden gladly bearing,
He bled and died to take away my sin.

Why does this matter? Well, if we keep singing hymns like this, then some people may think it is true, may remember it, and want it sung at all their family’s baptisms, weddings, funerals, and other rites of passage. And they do. But this hymn gives a very limited version of the truth it is trying to articulate, and the implications it holds in regard to where God is to be found in our suffering and pain cannot be underestimated. God’s will for Jesus affects everything about how we think God deals with us. If our God wants and sends suffering, even setting up a grizzly (sic) death for his only beloved son, then why should we complain when we get a disease, an illness, lose a child, or become a quadriplegic? We are getting off lightly in comparison to what some claim God wanted from Jesus.

For Christians, the paschal mystery—the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—is the central paradigm around which our faith in God is constructed, It is the central story through which we explain our own origins, meaning, and destiny. This hymn concerns itself with this mystery, and I can scarcely take in that God simply sent Jesus “to die,” and to die a gruesome and bloody death, at that. If that were baldly true, then why did God spare him from the outcome of the most unjust theological story in the New Testament—the slaughter of the innocents (Matt 2:13—23)? If Jesus was murdered by Herod at two years of age, then God could have gotten his blood sacrifice over nice and early.

Alternatively, If all God wanted was the perfect blood offering (echoes of Zeus here) of his only Son for the sake of appeasing his anger, why did Jesus not leave Nazareth, stir up plenty of trouble around Galilee (as he did), and then march straight into Jerusalem and offend everyone and get crucified early on? It would not have been hard. If Jesus was simply sent “to die,” then what was the point of his hidden years and the public ministry? They were not there for God’s sake, but for ours.

The simple truth is that the third verse of this beloved hymn is wrong. Jesus did not simply come to die. Rather, Jesus came to live. As a result of the courageous and radical way he lived his life, and the saving love he embodied for all humanity, he threatened the political, social, and religious authorities of his day so much that they executed him. This is, I think, an easier way for us to make sense of the predictions of the passion. Jesus was not clairvoyant; he was a full and true human being and therefore had informed but limited knowledge. His full and true divinity cannot obliterate his humanity or else he would be play-acting at being human. His divinity is seen in and through the uncompromisingly loving, just. and sacrificial way he lived within the bounds of his humanity.

Many of the most morally courageous people in history knew that their personal life and liberty were threatened because of what they were saying or how they were living. They may not have known beforehand that they would be executed or murdered or assassinated, but they could read the signs of their times well enough to predict that there were serious consequences to the freedom they were embodying and to which they were attracting other people. Sometimes they spoke or wrote about the cost of the stands they took. In this regard, they reflect Jesus Christ.

Our martyrs are not Christian versions of suicide bombers. They do not go looking for death in any active sense. That would be the ultimate betrayal of God’s gift of life. They know, however, that they may die as a result of witnessing to their faith and the demand for justice that must flow from it. In their lives and deaths they follow the pattern of Jesus. He did not seek death for its own sake, but would not and could not live any other way than faithfully hopefully, and lovingly. In his day, as in our own, this is immensely threatening to those whose power base is built on values opposed to these virtues. The world continues to silence and sideline people who live out the Christian virtues and values now, just as Jesus was thought to be ultimately sidelined in his crucifixion. But God had the last word on the death of Jesus: Life.

For most of Christian history, the question that has vexed many believers seems to be, “W’hy did Jesus die ?“ I think it is the wrong question. The right one is “Why was Jesus killed?” And that puts the last days of Jesus’ suffering and death in an entirely new perspective.

This is how we can stand before the cross and listen to Jesus in John’s Gospel say, “I have come that you may have life, and have it to the full.” This life is not about the perfect Son of the perfect Father making the perfect sacrifice to get us back in God’s good books, and thereby saving us. It Is the Trinity’s inner life overflowing to the world in Christ through the power of the Spirit.

Our God does not deal in death, but life. Everything in the New Testament shows this, even the grand apocalyptic narratives about the end of time, which show all the hallmarks of an inspired rabbinic teacher drawing big strokes on the largest of canvases. Jesus did not intend us to take this imagery literally. I assume the experience of judgment will not actually be a livestock muster of sheep and goats. However, the lesson behind the imagery is a real one for us to learn. God’s compassion and love will ultimately see that justice is done. He will hear the cry of the poor and we will be called to account in the next life for what we have done and what we have failed to do in this life.

In this context we need to look at one other gospel text. Some people quote Jesus in the garden saying, “My Father, if this cup cannot pass unless I drink It, thy will be done” (Matt 26:42) or “Put your sword back into its sheath. Am I not to drink the cup that the Father has given me ?“ (John 18:11) as conclusive proof that God wanted and even needed Jesus to suffer and die. It all depends on what we think the will or the cup of the Father is for Jesus. If it is, as the hymn sings, “to die,” then that is quite clear and final. However, if, as argued earlier, the will of God is that we are faithful, hopeful, and loving, then Jesus’ prayer is about the Father strengthening and emboldening the Son to stay on the Way, to speak and be the Truth, and to witness to the Life, even if it costs him his own. Such a life of transparent goodness is never easy; it always involves a cup of suffering. In the garden scene we have Jesus becoming aware of his impending doom and struggling to finally claim the power to confront death and destruction and sin head-on. Jesus’ anguish at whatever might be his fate is an entirely human response, one that consoles all of us as we face our own anxieties.

And think about what we have done to the cross of Christ. Many of us now wear small crosses and crucifixes in rolled gold. platinum, or sterling silver. They dangle around our necks or from our earlobes… This provocative and contemporary image brings home what Paul calls the scandal or “foolishness” of the cross (1 Cor 1:18—26). The cross of Christ is not a fashion accessory, no matter how many of them Madonna and Eminem wear. Looking upon it should still take our breath away, not only because it shows us how far Jesus was prepared to go in establishing his reign of justice and love in this world, but also because it spells out the cost for all of us who follow his Way, speak his Truth, and live his Life. This should be as radical and threatening now as it was in the first century. For those of us who put on a cross, and for everyone who carries one, we want to answer Christ’s question, “How far will you go out of love in following me?” with the same answer he gave the Father, and us, “I will go to the end. I will see it through, no matter the cost.”

I like creative and stirring arrangements of “How Great Thou Art.” I am very happy to sing strongly about how we can wander through the woods and glades and praise “all the worlds Thy Hands have made.” And in the final verse, I sing more loudly than anyone about “When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation and take me home what joy shall fill my soul.” It is just verse three. Because I take popular theology seriously, I cannot and will not sing it because I hope the verse, and the bloodthirsty God behind it, just isn’t true. In fact, what makes God great is that he wants nothing to do with death.

Here is an Elvis version of How Great Thou Art. It leaves that third verse out...

Holding the Scorpions on the Street Accountable

2011-02-26T11:38:00.016-05:00

Or, the Vampire Squids, as Matt Taibbi calls them

I know that the following quotes will seem a bit out of character for the nature of this blog, but muckraking journalist Matt Taibbi makes a blunt and important point in his Rolling Stone article Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? Right off the bat he quotes congressional officials on how useless it has been for the SEC to try to police Wall Street, even in the wake of the 2008 economic meltdown:

"Everything's f____ed up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that."

I put down my notebook. "Just that?"

"That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's f____ed up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there..."

"You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."

In her book Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, Judith Stein describes the shift that began in the late 1970s when America started shedding its manufacturing jobs and shifted to an economy based on finance and consumption. It was deemed at the time to be more important to fight inflation than unemployment, but in her view it was a failed strategy that has increased income inequality, weakened the nation, and left us in a more precarious position than before.

As the controversy in Wisconsin drags on, much of the anti-union sentiment coming from the right reminds me of what I was hearing back in the 1970s. In the comments posted on the American Thinker article Why I Changed My Mind About Unions I found a litany of the kind of stories I was well familiar with hearing in those days. In fact, I'd venture to guess that most of the union horror stories in those comments were from the 1970s. They'd almost have to be, considering that less than 7% of the private sector workforce is unionized today.

I have to admit, I saw some of this myself. When I was in college during the 1970s, I worked a landscaping job on campus during the summers. The guys on the full-time landscaping crew could be interesting characters, to say the least. One guy, almost perpetually high, used to tell me about his union days working in the shipbuilding yards down South. The union-management relationship he described to me sounded contentious, if not outright vicious. What struck me was that he saw no apparent irony or contradiction between his stories about finding a secret place to sleep off hangovers on the ships they were building, and his stories about the petty-minded bosses "who wanted to take food out of the mouths of my kids." I wasn't shocked that the shipbuilding industry collpased in the USA as a result, and I told him so.

At any rate, 30-35 years ago? That's a long time. Did American union workers get fat and lazy by the time the 1970s came along? I suppose some did, but that is a far cry from saying that the unions, that people bled and died to form, by the way, were unnecessary then and are unnecessary now. Anyone who agrees that:

- Greed is associated with our fallen human nature and can affect any of us, whatever our state in life happens to be, and...
- Any human endeavor is best served by a healthy system of checks and balances ...

...should be able to see this. In any case, it's a mystery to me how so many people can be resentful over the size of a unionized teacher's pension, but are non-plussed over what gets raked in by a Lloyd Blankfein, or the rest of that den of thieves on Wall Street. I'm reminded of a quote by the late columnist Molly Ivins

The trouble with blaming powerless people is that although it's not nearly as scary as blaming the powerful, it does miss the point.

Not only does it miss the point, it's increasingly absurd. Through the paucity of their numbers combined with the pressures of globalization, unions have long ago been rendered largely powerless and toothless. Nevertheless, the right still uses them as their favorite whipping boys. They will tell you that the GM bailout was done at the behest of unions. They will even tell you that the SEIU was the main beneficiary of the Supreme Court's Citizen's United decision.

Rick Santelli and the guys on the trading floor at the Chicago Board of Trade want to talk about moral hazard... Sure. We can put some blame on people who got into houses over their heads and didn't read the fine print on their mortgage agreements. Shame on them. But let's put bigger blame on people who should have known better, people with MBAs who knew that these loans were crap but gave them AAA ratings and collateralized them and sold them as bogus assets anyway.

As far as union money goes, they can blame the people who work cleaning the bathrooms at night in our office buildings for all of this if they want to. After all, the Tea Party is a revolt of the "haves" against the "have nots." They can try to make the case that the unions have the same kind of lobbying clout as the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce in our political process, but I don't think rational people will think it's very convincing.

Then again, what does rationality have to do with it? Clearly, not much. It's hard to let go of some of our most cherished myths about America and the Horatio Alger stories we adore.

If we feel a need to assign blame, we can see that it has been next to impossible to assign blame where it properly belongs. Matt Taibbi, author of the recent book Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America, tries gamely to rectify this as he describes in Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail? the chummy, revolving door relationship between the Wall Street investment banks and the agencies that are supposed to be overseeing them.

The system is skewed by the irrepressible pull of riches and power. If talent rises in the SEC or the Justice Department, it sooner or later jumps ship for those fat NBA contracts. Or, conversely, graduates of the big corporate firms take sabbaticals from their rich lifestyles to slum it in government service for a year or two. Many of those appointments are inevitably hand-picked by lifelong stooges for Wall Street like Chuck Schumer, who has accepted $14.6 million in campaign contributions from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other major players in the finance industry, along with their corporate lawyers.

As for President Obama, what is there to be said? Goldman Sachs was his number-one private campaign contributor. He put a Citigroup executive in charge of his economic transition team, and he just named an executive of JP Morgan Chase, the proud owner of $7.7 million in Chase stock, his new chief of staff. "The betrayal that this represents by Obama to everybody is just — we're not ready to believe it," says Budde, a classmate of the president from their Columbia days. "He's really f____ing us over like that? Really? That's really a JP Morgan guy, really?"

Which is not to say that the Obama era has meant an end to law enforcement. On the contrary: In the past few years, the administration has allocated massive amounts of federal resources to catching wrongdoers — of a certain type. Last year, the government deported 393,000 people, at a cost of $5 billion. Since 2007, felony immigration prosecutions along the Mexican border have surged 77 percent; nonfelony prosecutions by 259 percent. In Ohio last month, a single mother was caught lying about where she lived to put her kids into a better school district; the judge in the case tried to sentence her to 10 days in jail for fraud, declaring that letting her go free would "demean the seriousness" of the offenses.

So there you have it. Illegal immigrants: 393,000. Lying moms: one. Bankers: zero. The math makes sense only because the politics are so obvious. You want to win elections, you bang on the jailable class. You build prisons and fill them with people for selling dime bags and stealing CD players. But for stealing a billion dollars? For fraud that puts a million people into foreclosure? Pass. It's not a crime. Prison is too harsh. Get them to say they're sorry, and move on. Oh, wait — let's not even make them say they're sorry. That's too mean; let's just give them a piece of paper with a government stamp on it, officially clearing them of the need to apologize, and make them pay a fine instead. But don't make them pay it out of their own pockets, and don't ask them to give back the money they stole. In fact, let them profit from their collective crimes, to the tune of a record $135 billion in pay and benefits last year. What's next? Taxpayer-funded massages for every Wall Street executive guilty of fraud?

The mental stumbling block, for most Americans, is that financial crimes don't feel real; you don't see the culprits waving guns in liquor stores or dragging coeds into bushes. But these frauds are worse than common robberies. They're crimes of intellectual choice, made by people who are already rich and who have every conceivable social advantage, acting on a simple, cynical calculation: Let's steal whatever we can, then dare the victims to find the juice to reclaim their money through a captive bureaucracy. They're attacking the very definition of property — which, after all, depends in part on a legal system that defends everyone's claims of ownership equally. When that definition becomes tenuous or conditional — when the state simply gives up on the notion of justice — this whole American Dream thing recedes even further from reality.

Pension Envy?

2011-02-22T17:14:00.003-05:00

Maybe there is power in a union after all. Hang tough, Wisconsin! Don't back down!

To a certain extent, I've understood the common urge to bash teachers' unions around a bit. I suppose there have been ways in which they could have shown more flexibility over the years, and they could have shown more interest and effort in providing quality education to our kids over protecting their own tenure and benefits. I have even questioned in the past whether or not unions are even necessary in the public sector.

In today's political climate, however, especially in light of the recent events in Wisconsin, I'm willing to go to the wall and fight for them. I'd say it is more important to fight for the right to collective bargaining than ever before. With private sector unions beaten down and all but practically extinct, the public sector unions represent the last trench for worker's rights.

In speaking up for social justice on traditionalist Catholic blogs in the past, I have been accused of class envy and of advocating class warfare. To the accusation of envy, I say not so. I work for a Fortune 500 company. Our family is doing OK, but we don't necessarily need or want what the nouveau riche at the top of the economic ladder want. We certainly don't want it at the expense of our fellow countrymen. Those of us who are content to live simply should be left alone by those who'd put others out on the street because they refuse to live simply. As for class warfare, I'll just quote Warren Buffett on that. He's a rich guy who gets it.

There's class warfare, all right,but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.

Thank you for stating it plainly, Mr Buffett. There has been a class war for three decades now, but it has been unilateral. Read Mike Lux today, in The Politics of Envy:

Conservatives love to write off progressive populism as "the politics of envy," saying we envy the rich instead of recognizing them for being the hardworking entrepreneurs they are. Given that, the current conservative exercise of attacking public employees for getting pensions, decent health care coverage, and occasional salary increases is irony on a scale rarely seen. Republicans and conservatives' basic argument is that since private-sector workers have been so thoroughly screwed on wages, health care, and retirement plans in recent decades, those same workers should be mad that teachers and cops and social workers have gotten a little more economic security than they have. If that ain't the politics of envy, I don't know what is.

Pitting workers against workers for the scraps of the economic system as a few people and corporations at the top rake in, and then hoard, most of the money is a tried and true tactic, and it sometimes works. But the movement revolt that started in Wisconsin and is spreading rapidly to other states is so far successful in turning the argument around. When 70,000 pro-union progressive protesters show up at the Capitol in Madison, and the numbers keep building day after day, and the kind of folks coming are just soft-spoken teachers and hearts-on-their-sleeve firefighters, it gets impossible to write these people off as a narrow special interest.....

There is no envy on our side of these demonstrations: people just want a fair shake. There are no tantrums about being unwilling to talk or compromise or sacrifice in hard times, they just want to have a voice through collective bargaining. And a majority of people in Wisconsin get it -- 65 percent support the right of public employees to bargain...

And speaking of envy: the Tea Party folks in all their ballyhooed hype have never been able to turn out these kinds of crowds, even with the enormous corporate money behind them....

The Democratic senators in Wisconsin are doing the right thing in staying away and showing solidarity with the attacked unions. Now the national Democratic Party is going to have to step up to the plate and show whose side it is on. They need to embrace the protesters and embrace this moment. There has been a widening gulf between establishment D.C. Democrats and grassroots progressives, as the latter have gotten more and more alienated from too many Democrats taking on the pro-big business and bankers ideology. In this movement moment, Democrats need to stand unapologetically with progressives, which so far too many seem to have been wobbly about doing...

This fight is for all of us; it is about preserving the American middle class and our ability to organize collectively. It is about human rights. It is about focusing the blame for the economic crisis where it belongs, on bankers and policy makers, not teachers and cops. And the fight isn't just in Wisconsin: All over this country, the conservative movement is trying to take away our rights, and everywhere in America, we should be showing solidarity with our embattled brothers and sisters in Wisconsin.

Yves Congar on the Monarchical Episcopate and Tradition

2011-02-16T14:29:00.007-05:00

Are priests and bishops necessary? Yes, and at least by historical necessity if nothing else

A theologian with the hands and wrists of a farmer. Yves Congar, O.P. (1904-1995)

One of my first jobs coming out of college was in the Audio-Visual Department at Polaroid’s corporate headquarters in Cambridge, MA. I maintained an image library, and assisted with product photography and the production of multi-projector slide shows. Great fun.

During my tenure there I became close friends with the staff photographer, who had about twenty years with the company. Among other things, he used to entertain me with stories about a year he once spent on hiatus, working as a “bodyguard” in Muhammad Ali’s extended entourage. We worked cheek-by-jowl every day and talked about all sorts of things, including religion. He was a Pentecostal at the time.

It would be more accurate to say that it was an internship rather than a job. I was getting paid peanuts. Even though it was a lot of fun, eventually I had to move on and do other things in order to earn a real living, but my friend and I stayed in touch periodically over the years.

A couple of years ago he called on the phone and informed me that he was no longer a Pentecostal, but was now a member of the Church of Christ, which, as he described it, “was the original church founded by Jesus Christ.” “Oh no, here we go,” I thought… When I demurred and mildly suggested that my church was the one that was actually founded by Jesus Christ, well, I was regaled with an earful about how the Roman Catholic Church was a man-made institution founded by Pope Boniface (which Pope Boniface, I’m can’t quite recall… perhaps it was a reference to Boniface VIII, on account of his bull Unam Sanctum, which declared “that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff”), and thus, no true church at all. We got into a long heated discussion about the primacy of Peter, praying to Mary and to the saints, purgatory, “thou shall not call any man father,” the sins of priests, etc, etc…

I actually felt rather badly for him, because I had the sense that he had been declared by his church community to be a “discipler,” which means that he had a certain quota that he needed to make in terms of winning converts. In having to deliver his speil to me, of all people, he must have been pretty desperate... When I told him in a later conversation that the Church of Christ was not the original church, but traces its origins to the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement in 1832, it didn’t go over too well with him.

In any case, one of the things we debated in the first call was the three-fold ministry of bishop, deacon, and priest, and what precisely was meant by the New Testament’s Koine Greek terms of “presbyteros” and “episkopos.” We discussed whether or not the Catholic priesthood was a biblically valid form of ministry.

The debates to be found over it on the web are lively to be sure, but a passage that I found particularly useful in discussing the question, and for that matter, how scripture, tradition, and church history interplay in general, was written by the great French theologian Yves Congar OP in his book The Meaning of Tradition.

We can look finally at the Church herself and her ministries. What has been handed down in writing on this subject is certainly considerable, and infinitely precious, but it is also fragmentary and sporadic. It is well known that the word “Church” itself occurs only twice in the Gospels (MT 16:18) and 18:17) and that 1 Peter, while it deals at length with the idea, does not mention the word once. As for the ministries, they are mentioned more from an ethical point of view, with regard to the binding nature of their exercise within the community, than that of their organization. It is significant and worth noting that the same is true of the ordination rituals. But the scriptural evidence is of a nature to provide endless discussion, and in fact there has been so much argument over its exact meaning that a critical reader of the Bible can always produce reasons for doubting a given piece of evidence, for dating it differently, for attributing it to another writer who was stupid or biased, and so on. What are the “presbyters” and the “episcopos”; what is the origin of their institution?

The Church could not wait until the critics were agreed among themselves; she had to live. She lived her own life, which had been handed down to her as such, before the texts and together with them, in the texts and yet not limited to them, independently of them. She did not receive her life from them. She was the Church from the time of the apostles and not the product of their writings; she used these writings, not following them word for word, as a pupil copies an exercise imposed from outside, but treating them as a mirror and yardstick to recognize and restore her image, in each new generation.

Tradition, as understood in this paragraph, is the communication of the entire heritage of the apostles, effected in a different way from that of their writings. We must try to define it more precisely and describe the original way in which it was done…. It could well be compared to all that is implied by the idea of upbringing as opposed to instruction. We do not bring up a child by giving him lectures in morality and deportment, but rather by placing him in an environment having a high tone of conduct and good manners, whose principles, rarely expressed as abstract theories, will be imparted to him by the thousand familiar gestures that clothe them, so to speak, in the same way that the spirit informs the body and is expressed by it.

Education does not consist in receiving a lesson from afar, which may be learned by heart and recited, thanks to a good memory, but in the daily contact and inviting example of adult life, which is mature, confident of foundations; which asserts itself simply by being what it is, and presents itself as an ideal; which someone still unsure and unformed in search of fulfillment and in need of security, will progressively come to resemble, almost unconsciously and without effort. A child receives the life of the community into which he enters, together with the cultural riches of the preceding generations (tradition!), which are inculcated by the actions and habits of everyday life.

This is erudite and very well-appreciated. The passages about maturity and upbringing as opposed to instruction are very relevant for today in particular. Those of us in the laity who are still engaged with the Church are no longer content to be treated like mere children, and the words “we do not bring up a child by giving him lectures in morality and deportment, but rather by placing him in an environment having a high tone of conduct and good manners, whose principles, rarely expressed as abstract theories, will be imparted to him by the thousand familiar gestures that clothe them, so to speak, in the same way that the spirit informs the body and is expressed by it” should be heard by the institutional church in this time of scandal, and well-heeded... It would certainly make arguing with people like my friend a little bit easier.

Recently over 200 German-speaking theologians issued a memorandum entitled Church 2011: A Necessary New Departure, advocating not only for a married clergy, but also serious reflection and calls for change on areas pertaining to: Structures of Participation, Community, Legal Structure, Freedom of Conscience, Reconciliation and Worship. It reflects a recognition by the representatives of the "threefold ministry," or "monarchical episcopate," of what they are hearing from responsible members of the laity. I think Yves Congar would have agreed that the suggestions contained therein would represent a healthy adult understanding and living out of the tradition, if followed through upon.

Excerpts from the intro... I urge you to read it all:

Many responsible Christians, women and men, in office and unofficially, have come to realize, after their initial disgust, that deep-reaching reforms are necessary. The appeal for an open dialogue on structures of power and communication, the form of official church offices, and the participation of the faithful in taking responsibility for morality and sexuality have aroused expectations, but also fears. This might be the last chance for departure from paralysis and resignation.

Will this chance be missed by sitting out or minimizing the crisis? Not everyone is threatened by the unrest of an open dialogue without taboos - especially since the papal visit [to Germany] will soon take place. The alternative simply cannot be accepted: the "rest of the dead" because the last hopes have been destroyed.

The deep crisis of our Church demands that we address even those problems which, at first glance, do not have anything directly to do with the abuse scandal and its decades-long cover-up…. The renewal of church structures will succeed, not with anxious withdrawal from society, but only with the courage for self-criticism and the acceptance of critical impulses - including those from the outside.

The Church does not exist for its own sake. The church has the mission to announce the liberating and loving God of Jesus Christ to all people. The Church can do this only when it is itself a place and a credible witness of the good news of the Gospel. The Church's speaking and acting, its rules and structures - its entire engagement with people within and outside the Church - is under the standard of acknowledging and promoting the freedom of people as God's creation. Absolute respect for every person, regard for freedom of conscience, commitment to justice and rights, solidarity with the poor and oppressed: these are the theological foundational standards which arise from the Church's obligation to the Gospel. Through these, love of God and neighbor become tangible...

Don't Bother Sucking Up to Them. They've Already Checked Out...

2011-01-27T16:19:00.027-05:00

..and many of them are convinced they're doing "God's work."

Call me less than impressed by President Obama's shift to the center-right in the wake of the November elections, as evidenced by his recent State of the Union address.

Playing to what he presumes the independent voters want to hear, he threw in a heavy dose of business-friendly rhetoric and American exceptionalism, which the Republicans and Tea Party types have heretofore accused him of not believing in sufficiently.

In calling attention to the challenge posed by Asia to our claims to supremacy, Obama called this our "Sputnik moment." Well, even though I hate to jump onto the Tiger Mom cliche bandwagon, the Tiger Mom comparison fits better than the Sputnik comparison.

We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world. We have to make America the best place on Earth to do business.

I've heard this promise to fix the education system in every SOTU speech I can remember, and it never happens... That's all very well and good Mr. President, but even if we managed to discover tomorrow the magic elixer to set education right in this country, it would take at least a generation to take effect. We don't have that kind of time. What about the people who are suffering here and now? In this globalized economy we could theoretically compete on education and skill even if we couldn't compete on costs, but the fact of the matter is, we have already gotten to the point where we can't compete on costs and can't compete on education and skill either.

In effect, we are screwed, and the only thing that can possibly save us is protectionism, but the Tom Friedmans of the world have succeeded in making protectionism a dirty word.

As he begs hat-in-hand in suck-up mode to corporate America, Obama even designated GE's Jeffrey Immelt as head of his new "Council on Jobs and Competitiveness." Talk about a fox being sent to take charge of the chicken coop... If there is any US-based company that trail-blazed the loss of our intellectual capital to foreign companies and the loss of American manufacturing jobs through offshoring, it was GE, under Imelt's predecessor, the fraudulent buffoon Jack Welch.

So, if we cannot compete under the economic globalization paradigm as it currently stands, and if protectionism is still a dirty word, we'd better start learning to speak the language of cooperation rather than competititon, especially if the threats of climate change and peak oil have any thruth to them (and they do).

This, however, will not occur. You see, it is a lie to say that the Chinese are merely the manufacturing plant to the world and have nothing to offer other countries politically or culturally. Their ideal of a Confucian meritocracy dovetails very nicely with the laissez faire, free market dogmatism to be found among the world's global elites who hobnob and schmooze together in Davos, Manhattan, London, Moscow, Shanghai and Hong Kong. These entreprenuerial, innovative, noveau riche citizens of the world are quite happy with the way things are, thank you very much, and if you haven't the gumption to climb up the way they have, well that's your tough luck. The way they see it, there was nothing stopping you. If the world goes to hell in a handbasket, they are going to make sure that they and others like them are going to be OK, regardless of nationality, because they share more in common with each other than they do with their own countrymen..

In 2007, I wrote about Peggy Noonan's op-ed piece A Separate Peace: America is in trouble --and our elites are merely resigned. She said at the time:

Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us... I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they're living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they're going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley's off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.

I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, "I got mine, you get yours."

You're a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you're an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you're a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, and you're making your life a little fortress. That's what I think a lot of the elites are up to.

I think this tendency is even more pronounced today, although I don't think Ms. Noonan gives the recent phenomenon of the new, globally-oriented, capitalistic philanthropist enough recognition and credit.

The Atlantic magazine is always a great read, but last month's issue was absolutely superb. Some of the great articles included:

A reminder of Eisenhower's prescient warning about the military-industrial complex: The Tyranny of Defense Inc.

A profile of the dour and cynically obstructionist Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: Strict Obstructionist.

The effects of brutally mysogynistic internet pornography on our de riguer sexual mores: Hard Core.

...But the article I recommend most heartily is the cover story: The Rise of the New Global Elite.

Some extended excerpts below... Class warfare? You betcha. But I didn't declare it. They did.

On the set of Meet the Press, the host, David Gregory, was interviewing a guest who made a forceful case that the U.S. economy had become “very distorted.” In the wake of the recession, this guest explained, high-income individuals, large banks, and major corporations had experienced a “significant recovery”; the rest of the economy, by contrast—including small businesses and “a very significant amount of the labor force”—was stuck and still struggling. What we were seeing, he argued, was not a single economy at all, but rather “fundamentally two separate types of economy,” increasingly distinct and divergent.

This diagnosis, though alarming, was hardly unique: drawing attention to the divide between the wealthy and everyone else has long been standard fare on the left. (The idea of “two Americas” was a central theme of John Edwards’s 2004 and 2008 presidential runs.) What made the argument striking in this instance was that it was being offered by none other than the former five-term Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan: iconic libertarian, preeminent defender of the free market, and (at least until recently) the nation’s foremost devotee of Ayn Rand. When the high priest of capitalism himself is declaring the growth in economic inequality a national crisis, something has gone very, very wrong...

Before the recession, it was relatively easy to ignore this concentration of wealth among an elite few. The wondrous inventions of the modern economy—Google, Amazon, the iPhone—broadly improved the lives of middle-class consumers, even as they made a tiny subset of entrepreneurs hugely wealthy. And the less-wondrous inventions—particularly the explosion of subprime credit—helped mask the rise of income inequality for many of those whose earnings were stagnant.

But the financial crisis and its long, dismal aftermath have changed all that. A multibillion-dollar bailout and Wall Street’s swift, subsequent reinstatement of gargantuan bonuses have inspired a narrative of parasitic bankers and other elites rigging the game for their own benefit. And this, in turn, has led to wider—and not unreasonable—fears that we are living in not merely a plutonomy, but a plutocracy, in which the rich display outsize political influence, narrowly self-interested motives, and a casual indifference to anyone outside their own rarefied economic bubble.

The rich of today are ... different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didn’t succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a transglobal community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home. Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today’s super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

The Winner-Take-Most Economy

The rise of the new plutocracy is inextricably connected to two phenomena: the revolution in information technology and the liberalization of global trade. Individual nations have offered their own contributions to income inequality—financial deregulation and upper-bracket tax cuts in the United States; insider privatization in Russia; rent-seeking in regulated industries in India and Mexico. But the shared narrative is that, thanks to globalization and technological innovation, people, money, and ideas travel more freely today than ever before.

Peter Lindert is an economist at the University of California at Davis and one of the leaders of the “deep history” school of economics, a movement devoted to thinking about the world economy over the long term—that is to say, in the context of the entire sweep of human civilization. Yet he argues that the economic changes we are witnessing today are unprecedented. “Britain’s classic industrial revolution was far less impressive than what has been going on in the past 30 years,” he told me. The current productivity gains are larger, he explained, and the waves of disruptive innovation much, much faster.

From a global perspective, the impact of these developments has been overwhelmingly positive, particularly in the poorer parts of the world. Take India and China, for example: between 1820 and 1950, nearly a century and a half, per capita income in those two countries was basically flat. Between 1950 and 1973, it increased by 68 percent. Then, between 1973 and 2002, it grew by 245 percent, and continues to grow strongly despite the global financial crisis.

But within nations, the fruits of this global transformation have been shared unevenly. Though China’s middle class has grown exponentially and tens of millions have been lifted out of poverty, the super-elite in Shanghai and other east-coast cities have steadily pulled away. Income inequality has also increased in developing markets such as India and Russia, and across much of the industrialized West, from the relatively laissez-faire United States to the comfy social democracies of Canada and Scandinavia. Thomas Friedman is right that in many ways the world has become flatter; but in others it has grown spikier...

Executive pay has skyrocketed for many reasons—including the prevalence of overly cozy boards and changing cultural norms about pay—but increasing scale, competition, and innovation have all played major roles.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of U.S. workers, however devoted and skilled at their jobs, have missed out on the windfalls of this winner-take-most economy—or worse, found their savings, employers, or professions ravaged by the same forces that have enriched the plutocratic elite. The result of these divergent trends is a jaw-dropping surge in U.S. income inequality. According to the economists Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics, between 2002 and 2007, 65 percent of all income growth in the United States went to the top 1 percent of the population...

Plutocracy Now

As with the aristocracies of bygone days, such vast wealth has created a gulf between the plutocrats and other people, one reinforced by their withdrawal into gated estates, exclusive academies, and private planes. We are mesmerized by such extravagances as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s 414-foot yacht, the Octopus, which is home to two helicopters, a submarine, and a swimming pool.

But while their excesses seem familiar, even archaic, today’s plutocrats represent a new phenomenon. The wealthy of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s era were shaped, he wrote, by the fact that they had been “born rich.” They knew what it was to “possess and enjoy early.”

That’s not the case for much of today’s super-elite. “Fat cats who owe it to their grandfathers are not getting all of the gains,” Peter Lindert told me. “A lot of it is going to innovators this time around. There is more meritocracy in Bill Gates being at the top than the Duke of Bedford.” Even Emmanuel Saez, who is deeply worried about the social and political consequences of rising income inequality, concurs that a defining quality of the current crop of plutocrats is that they are the “working rich.” He has found that in 1916, the richest 1 percent of Americans received only one-fifth of their income from paid work; in 2004, that figure had risen threefold, to 60 percent.

A Nation Apart

Another defining characteristic of today’s plutocrats: they are forming a global community, and their ties to one another are increasingly closer than their ties to hoi polloi back home. As Glenn Hutchins, co-founder of the private-equity firm Silver Lake, puts it, “A person in Africa who runs a big African bank and went to Harvard might have more in common with me than he does with his neighbors, and I could well share more overlapping concerns and experiences with him than with my neighbors.” The circles we move in, Hutchins explains, are defined by “interests” and “activities” rather than “geography”: “Beijing has a lot in common with New York, London, or Mumbai. You see the same people, you eat in the same restaurants, you stay in the same hotels. But most important, we are engaged as global citizens in crosscutting commercial, political, and social matters of common concern. We are much less place-based than we used to be.”

America's own super-elite is rapidly adjusting to this more global perspective. The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often discusses the question of who wins and who loses in today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His point was that if the transformation of the world economy lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad trade,” the CEO recalled.

I heard a similar sentiment from the Taiwanese-born, 30-something CFO of a U.S. Internet company. A gentle, unpretentious man who went from public school to Harvard, he’s nonetheless not terribly sympathetic to the complaints of the American middle class. “We demand a higher paycheck than the rest of the world,” he told me. “So if you’re going to demand 10 times the paycheck, you need to deliver 10 times the value. It sounds harsh, but maybe people in the middle class need to decide to take a pay cut.”

At last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival, Michael Splinter, CEO of the Silicon Valley green-tech firm Applied Materials, said that if he were starting from scratch, only 20 percent of his workforce would be domestic. “This year, almost 90 percent of our sales will be outside the U.S.,” he explained. “The pull to be close to the customers—most of them in Asia—is enormous.” Speaking at the same conference, Thomas Wilson, CEO of Allstate, also lamented this global reality: “I can get [workers] anywhere in the world. It is a problem for America, but it is not necessarily a problem for American business … American businesses will adapt.”

Revolt of the Elites

Wilson’s distinction helps explain why many of America’s other business elites appear so removed from the continuing travails of the U.S. workforce and economy: the global “nation” in which they increasingly live and work is doing fine—indeed, it’s thriving. As a consequence of this disconnect, when business titans talk about the economy and their role in it, the notes they strike are often discordant: for example, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein waving away public outrage in 2009 by saying he was “doing God’s work”; or the insistence by several top bankers after the immediate threat of the financial crisis receded that their institutions could have survived without TARP funding and that they had accepted it only because they had been strong-armed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. Nor does this aloof disposition end at the water’s edge: think of BP CEO Tony Hayward, who complained of wanting to get his life back after the Gulf oil spill and then proceeded to do so by watching his yacht compete in a race off the Isle of Wight.

It is perhaps telling that Blankfein is the son of a Brooklyn postal worker and that Hayward—despite his U.S. caricature as an upper-class English twit—got his start at BP as a rig geologist in the North Sea. They are both, in other words, working-class boys made good. And while you might imagine that such backgrounds would make plutocrats especially sympathetic to those who are struggling, the opposite is often true. For the super-elite, a sense of meritocratic achievement can inspire high self-regard, and that self-regard—especially when compounded by their isolation among like-minded peers—can lead to obliviousness and indifference to the suffering of others.

Unsurprisingly, Russian oligarchs have been among the most fearless in expressing this attitude. A little more than a decade ago, for instance, I spoke to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, at that moment the richest man in Russia. “If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him,” Khodorkovsky told me. “Everyone had the same starting conditions, everyone could have done it.” (Khodorkovsky’s subsequent political travails—his oil company was appropriated by the state in 2004 and he is currently in prison—have tempered this Darwinian outlook: in a jail-cell correspondence last year, he admitted that he had “treated business exclusively as a game” and “did not care much about social responsibility.”)

Though typically more guarded in their choice of words, many American plutocrats suggest, as Khodorkovsky did, that the trials faced by the working and middle classes are generally their own fault. When I asked one of Wall Street’s most successful investment-bank CEOs if he felt guilty for his firm’s role in creating the financial crisis, he told me with evident sincerity that he did not. The real culprit, he explained, was his feckless cousin, who owned three cars and a home he could not afford. One of America’s top hedge-fund managers made a near-identical case to me—though this time the offenders were his in-laws and their subprime mortgage. And a private-equity baron who divides his time between New York and Palm Beach pinned blame for the collapse on a favorite golf caddy in Arizona, who had bought three condos as investment properties at the height of the bubble.

It is this not-our-fault mentality that accounts for the plutocrats’ profound sense of victimization in the Obama era. You might expect that American elites—and particularly those in the financial sector—would be feeling pretty good, and more than a little grateful, right now. Thanks to a $700 billion TARP bailout and hundreds of billions of dollars lent nearly free of charge by the Federal Reserve (a policy Soros himself told me was a “hidden gift” to the banks), Wall Street has surged back to pre-crisis levels of compensation even as Main Street continues to struggle. Yet many of America’s financial giants consider themselves under siege from the Obama administration—in some cases almost literally. Last summer, for example, Blackstone’s Schwarzman caused an uproar when he said an Obama proposal to raise taxes on private-equity-firm compensation—by treating “carried interest” as ordinary income—was “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

However histrionic his imagery, Schwarzman (who subsequently apologized for the remark) is a Republican, so his antipathy toward the current administration is no surprise. What is more striking is the degree to which even former Obama supporters in the financial industry have turned against the president and his party. A Wall Street investor who is a passionate Democrat recounted to me his bitter exchange with a Democratic leader in Congress who is involved in the tax-reform effort. “Screw you,” he told the lawmaker. “Even if you change the legislation, the government won’t get a single penny more from me in taxes. I’ll put my money into my foundation and spend it on good causes. My money isn’t going to be wasted in your deficit sinkhole.” He is not alone in his fury. In a much-quoted newsletter to investors last summer, the hedge-fund manager—and 2008 Obama fund-raiser—Dan Loeb fumed, “So long as our leaders tell us that we must trust them to regulate and redistribute our way back to prosperity, we will not break out of this economic quagmire.” Two other former Obama backers on Wall Street—both claim to have been on Rahm Emanuel’s speed-dial list—told me that the president is “anti-business”; one went so far as to worry that Obama is “a socialist.”

Much of this pique stems from simple self-interest: in addition to the proposed tax hikes, the financial reforms that Obama signed into law last summer have made regulations on American finance more stringent. But as the Democratic investor’s angry references to his philanthropic work suggest, the rage in the C-suites is driven not merely by greed but by a perceived affront to the plutocrats’ amour propre, a wounded incredulity that anyone could think of them as villains rather than heroes. Aren’t they, after all, the ones whose financial and technological innovations represent the future of the American economy? Aren’t they “doing God’s work”?

You might say that the American plutocracy is experiencing its John Galt moment. Libertarians (and run-of-the-mill high-school nerds) will recall that Galt is the plutocratic hero of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. Tired of being dragged down by the parasitic, envious, and less talented lower classes, Galt and his fellow capitalists revolted, retreating to “Galt’s Gulch,” a refuge in the Rocky Mountains. There, they passed their days in secluded natural splendor, while the rest of the world, bereft of their genius and hard work, collapsed. (G. K. Chesterton suggested a similar idea, though more gently, in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday: “The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”)

This plutocratic fantasy is, of course, just that: no matter how smart and innovative and industrious the super-elite may be, they can’t exist without the wider community. Even setting aside the financial bailouts recently supplied by the governments of the world, the rich need the rest of us as workers, clients, and consumers. Yet, as a metaphor, Galt’s Gulch has an ominous ring at a time when the business elite view themselves increasingly as a global community, distinguished by their unique talents and above such parochial concerns as national identity, or devoting “their” taxes to paying down “our” budget deficit. They may not be isolating themselves geographically, as Rand fantasized. But they appear to be isolating themselves ideologically, which in the end may be of greater consequence...

And, ultimately, that is the dilemma: America really does need many of its plutocrats. We benefit from the goods they produce and the jobs they create. And even if a growing portion of those jobs are overseas, it is better to be the home of these innovators—native and immigrant alike—than not. In today’s hypercompetitive global environment, we need a creative, dynamic super-elite more than ever.

There is also the simple fact that someone will have to pay for the improved public education and social safety net the American middle class will need in order to navigate the wrenching transformations of the global economy. (That’s not to mention the small matter of the budget deficit.) Inevitably, a lot of that money will have to come from the wealthy—after all, as the bank robbers say, that’s where the money is...

It is not much of a surprise that the plutocrats themselves oppose such analysis and consider themselves singled out, unfairly maligned, or even punished for their success. Self-interest, after all, is the mother of rationalization, and—as we have seen—many of the plutocracy’s rationalizations have more than a bit of truth to them: as a class, they are generally more hardworking and meritocratic than their forebears; their philanthropic efforts are innovative and important; and the recent losses of the American middle class have in many cases entailed gains for the rest of the world.

But if the plutocrats’ opposition to increases in their taxes and tighter regulation of their economic activities is understandable, it is also a mistake. The real threat facing the super-elite, at home and abroad, isn’t modestly higher taxes, but rather the possibility that inchoate public rage could cohere into a more concrete populist agenda—that, for instance, middle-class Americans could conclude that the world economy isn’t working for them and decide that protectionism or truly punitive taxation is preferable to incremental measures such as the eventual repeal of the upper-bracket Bush tax cuts...

The lesson of history is that, in the long run, super-elites have two ways to survive: by suppressing dissent or by sharing their wealth. It is obvious which of these would be the better outcome for America, and the world. Let us hope the plutocrats aren’t already too isolated to recognize this. Because, in the end, there can never be a place like Galt’s Gulch.

Is the Naturalistic Fallacy Real?

2011-01-22T11:52:00.007-05:00

If the world shouldn't be like the natural world is, why not?

Rape of Lucretia (Tarquin and Lucretia) by Titian (1568-71)

The founding fathers of the United States were an eclectic mix of deists, skeptics, enlightened free-thinkers and devout evangelicals. Despite their individual differences it was a stroke of genius on their collective part to agree to include within the Declaration of Independence the proposition that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

In spite of many false starts, trials, and missteps, the viability and the survival of this republic, and by extension, all republics, rests upon the shared idea that our unalienable rights come to us by a non-negotiable divine mandate, and are not granted to us on the basis of either mutual consent or coeercion. We can look back at the diversity of that group of men who drafted the declaration and recognize the sheer brilliance in the way in which a "creator" is referred to.

This emphasis on our rights being unalienable inheritances from a creator is crucial, because there is not much in the natural world to support the notion that there is any such thing as Truth, or liberty, or that we are all equal, or that we have any rights at all, certainly not "unalienable" ones.

In a couple of earlier posts about Frans de Waal, I was exploring the idea of whether of not a Darwinist needed to be a Social Darwinist by necessity. De Waal emphatically said no. He also said that it was a mistake to try to derive the goals of society from the goals of nature. He said that trying to do so is an error known as the naturalistic fallacy, which is the impossibility of moving from how things are to how things ought to be.

The definition is subtle. I've heard of the naturalistic fallacy being referred to in a variety of ways. Sometimes when it is used it is actually referring to the appeal to nature argument, or the is-ought problem. Basically speaking it was a term defined by the philosopher G. E. Moore in 1903, noting the error inherent in drawing values from evolution or from any aspect of observed nature.

I understand what is being stated about the fallacy and its variants, but what I have a harder time grasping is why it is actually considered a fallacy. It might be very unpleasant to contemplate that evolution's goals, "red in tooth and claw" as they are usually described, might serve as the basis for what we consider to be moral, but I'm not sure why that disqualifies them automatically, especially if there are people who want to take God honestly and completely out of the discussion. There are still nihilists around, and even sociobiologists like E.O. Wilson who are willing to face this.

If nature is indifferent at best, and pitilessly cruel at worst, can a moral system be built without a belief in God? If so, on what basis?

Last year I took a run at reading Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe, by Harvard's Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, an ordained Humanist Rabbi. I wasn't able to get all the way through it. I should have known I'd have issues with it just by the very nature of the fact that he refers to himself as a "Humanist Rabbi," a non-sequitur, or oxymoron if you will, if I've ever heard one.

Epstein's book is a spirited defense of secular humanism. I had very much looked forward to reading it. I was extremely interested in learning what the argument was for building a subjective system of morality based upon reason alone, written in a tone that was respectful of the sensibilities and opinions of theists, but I was disappointed in it. It was a work of apologetics, with more than a couple of derisive remarks of the "man in the sky" variety thrown in with the purpose of rankling people of religious belief.

I admit that I might have been hasty in this judgement, not having read the book all the way through, but the passage below reflects the sort of thing that bothered me, and it comes back around to the naturalistic fallacy, or Is-Ought Problem:

As the great eighteenth-English philosopher and skeptic David Hume pointed out, there is a huge difference between what “is” – what exists, the way the world is – and the way the world ought to be. One of the basic questions philosophers have occupied themselves with, then, is where do we get our values? Who says something that is one way ought to be another way, if not God?

This is not a mere egghead question that only professional philosophers and theologians deal with. It is the first thought that goes through the head of a young husband and father of three, sitting in an oncologist’s office, told that his pancreatic cancer has metastasized and is inoperable. “You may have about six months,” the doctor softly informs him. He understands that that’s what is. But with every fiber of his being he feels: it’s not what ought to be! And some theologians claim that the only way we can justify believing that it shouldn’t be that way is if God told us so.

In God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, Catholic theologian John F. Haught asks, “Can you rationally justify your unconditional adherence to timeless values without implicitly invoking the existence of God?”

This question – where do we get timeless values (such as the fact that it is good to heal a sick father of three so that he can live and be with his wife and kids) without God – is a variation of the is-ought problem, and it comes up not just in the doctor’s office but in most of our debates about political and social issues. Of course, when it does, we should ask our questioners what they mean by timeless values, inviolable “oughts.” They usually cite as an example that murder is wrong, which of course makes you wonder why they aren’t pacifists. Or they may say that rape is wrong, which is despicable when you realize they’re implying we need religion to figure that one out…

As for those … who would suggest that there cannot be any justice or any good without God, Plato’s dialogues Euthyphro, written in 380 BCE, provides … the “knockout punch” against them.

In the dialogue, Socrates reminds his friend Euthyphro that a crucial question is not simply whether we can know if one or another particular action is good, but on what basis we determine whether any action is good. Euthyphro answers “Piety, then, is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them.”

But Socrates responds: “Is that which the gods love good because they love it, or do they love it because it is good?”

If the former is true, then who says the gods are not evil, unfair, or frivolous? The gods could choose to love anything they want, regardless of whether or not human beings would consider it just. Is that the kind of system we want to live by? Do the gods want us to be blindly, unquestioningly obedient to them, even if they behave like murderous scoundrels? And if the gods love the good simply because it is good, then it could damn well be good on its own. We wouldn’t need a god or gods to tell us what morality is – we’d be responsible for figuring it out just as they were.

In either case Euthyphro drives home the point that mere belief in God can’t make us good, and it can’t point the way to “timeless values” that we humans aren’t capable of arriving at on our own terms. Gods don’t – can’t – create values. Humans can, and so we must do so wisely.

I see the point he's trying to make with Euthyphro, but for me, it's a poor response towards addressing the Is-Ought problem. In particular, I have a real problem with these particular passages when he refers to the arguments made by theists:

They usually cite as an example that murder is wrong, which of course makes you wonder why they aren’t pacifists. Or they may say that rape is wrong, which is despicable when you realize they’re implying we need religion to figure that one out…

Well, the disgust over even discussing the topic of rape in a naturalistic context is a good preemptive strike by Epstein. His firm and heartfelt outrage boldy stated is a good way to close the issue without having to defend his basic premise. It's a clever debating tactic on his part, for sure. Yes, rape is despicable, but if it is despicable he needs to spend more than half a sentence explaining why it is despicable in a naturalistic universe.

What we could categorize as "rape" is commonly seen in the animal kingdom. In addition, when we look at the widespread prevalence of human sex trafficking across the globe with its victims numbering in the hundreds of thousands, it is evident that a large part of the human family, at least of the male gender (unfortunately), finds rape largely unobjectionable as well. Our natural human outrage over this is not as cut-and-dry as Epstein supposes. A number of books and articles have actually been written speculating that rape, despicable as it may be to our sensibilities, may have evolved as an evolutionary strategy. Robert Wright notes in The Moral Animal:

The rape and abduction of women was once a common feature of war in pre-literate societies...

There is an ongoing debate within evolutionary psychology over whether rape is an adaptation, a designed strategy that any boy might grow up to adopt, given sufficiently discouraging feedback from his social environment…. One (non-Darwinian) study found the typical rapist to possess “deep-seated doubts about his adequacy and competency as a person. He lacks a sense of confidence in himself as a man in both sexual and nonsexual areas.

If it seems I'm playing fast and loose with Epstein's argument, I do actually understand the point he's trying to make - that is should be intuitively obvious to us that what causes human pleasure is relatively good (as long as it does not harm anyone else) and what causes human suffering is evil.

Still, as far as I see, a problem remains... if you take God out of the mix.

If we can theorize that everyone of good will can agree that happiness (or contentment) is good, and suffering is bad, why isn't it equally valid to take an unflinching and bracing look at nature like the Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer did and follow the flow (as he saw it) instead of fighting it, and see morality couched in terms of what benefits the survival and trajectory of the species overall? If the behavior we see in a particular evolutionary adaptation benefited the survival and longevity of the human race as a whole, even if the trait seems on it's face to be obnoxious and repugnant to us, why can't it be concluded that that behavior is moral? If it can be shown that another type of behavior does not benefit the survival and longevity of the species, why can't it be categorized as immoral?

There are debates that occur right now in scientific circles about whether or not we are the product of "selfish" genes or if "group selection" was the key to our adaptation and survival as a species, but the key seems to me - if people wish to postulate the absence of a deity, that is - that morality depends upon us rejecting certain facets of the natural word. That we treat the general thrust of evolution in particular as an enemy. Robert Wright, once more in The Moral Animal:

Once Darwin fathomed natural selection, he surely saw how deeply his ethics were at odds with the values it implies. The insidious lethality of a parasitic wasp (who feeds within the living body of a caterpillar), the cruelty of a cat playing with a mouse - these are, after all, just the tip of the iceberg. To ponder natural selection is to be staggered by the price for a single, slight advance in organic design. And it is to realize, moreover, that the purpose of this "advance" - longer, sharper canine teeth in male chimpanzees, say - is often to make other animals suffer or die more surely. Organic design thrives on pain, and pain thrives on organic design...

If there's one thing natural selection "wants" us to believe, it is that our individual happiness is special; by pursuing goals that promise to make us happy, we will maximize the proliferation of our genes. Leave aside for a moment that pursuing goals which promise to make us happy, in the long run, often doesn't; leave aside that natural selction doesn't actually "care" about our happiness in the end and will readily countenance our suffering if that will get our genes into the next generation... We are designed not to worry about anyone else's happiness, except in the sort of cases where such worrying has, during evolution, benefited our genes...

There were of course, the utlilitarians like John Stuart Mill who tried to deal with the problems posed by this realization. According to the utilitarians things could be considered "good" to the extent to which they raised the amount of happiness in the world and "bad" to the extent to which they raised the amount of unhappiness and suffering. The goal was to raise the overall happiness. Darwin himself tended to agree with this, even if he preferred to stress "the general good and welfare of the community" over the notion of "general happiness." Distinctions have arisen between "act" utilitarians who focus on the pleasure principle and emphasize personal liberties and "rule" utilitarians who focus on the common good and emphasize that which most benefits the whole society.

One of the first to shift from the Spencerian view, in which ethics should imitate nature, to one in which the state of nature should be viewed as an enemy to be conquered, was "Darwin's bulldog," the biologist Thomas Huxley. I have to say, I found Huxley far more helpful in this area than Epstein. In his 1893 paper Evolution & Ethics he compared our imperative to build an ethical civilization to that of a horticulturalist's never-ceasing attempt to cultivate and rescue his garden from the state of pure nature and cosmic forces.

The practice of that which is ethically best—what we call goodness or virtue—involves a course of conduct which, in all respects, is opposed to that which leads to success in the cosmic struggle for existence. In place of ruthless self-assertion it demands self-restraint; in place of thrusting aside, or treading down, all competitors, it requires that the individual shall not merely respect, but shall help his fellows... It repudiates the gladiatorial theory of existence... Laws and moral precepts are directed to the end of curbing the cosmic process.

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before. Some day, I doubt not, we shall arrive at an understanding of the evolution of the aesthetic faculty; but all the understanding in the world will neither increase nor diminish the force of the intuition that this is beautiful and that is ugly.

Not only is the state of nature hostile to the state of art of the garden; but the principle of the horticultural process, by which the latter is created and maintained, is antithetic to that of the cosmic process. The characteristic feature of the latter is the intense and unceasing competition of the struggle for existence. The characteristic of the former is the elimination of that struggle, by the removal of the conditions which give rise to it. The tendency of the cosmic process is to bring about the adjustment of the forms of plant life to the current conditions; the tendency of the horticultural process is the adjustment of the conditions to the needs of the forms of plant life which the gardener desires to raise.

Of course, this type of view has always been hard for theists like myself to get our heads around. In our imaginations, the naturalists have always extolled the goodness of nature, and as a result we've imagined them believing that ethics divorced from God should imitate nature. This is not necessarily so... Going even further than Huxley was the recently deceased Stony Brook biologist George Williams, who said:

Huxley viewed the cosmic process as an enemy that must be combated. I take a similar but more extreme position, based both on the more extreme contemporary view of natural selection as a process for maximizing selfishness, and on the longer list of vices now assignable to the enemy. If the enemy is worse than Huxley thought, there is a more urgent need for biological understanding.

What these philosophically-inclined biologists discovered as a truism is similar to what the great religious minds over the centuries have discovered as well. The origin of human suffering often (though not exclusively) lies in selfishness, and the origin of human happiness (both individually and for the largest number) depends upon our own individual willingness to be unselfish and to self-sacrifice for the good of others.

Closing out with Robert Wright again, who uses the issue of homosexuality as a backdrop and example:

Why should the “naturalness” of homosexuality in any way affect our moral judgement of it? It is “natural,” in the sense of being “approved” by natural selection, for a man to kill someone he finds sleeping with his wife. Rape, may, in the same sense, be “natural.” But most people rightly judge these things by their consequences, not their origins.

What is plainly true about homosexuality is the following:

1) Some people are born with a combination of genetic and environmental circumstances that impels them strongly towards a homosexual lifestyle;
2) There is no inherent contradiction between homosexuality among consenting adults and the welfare of other people. For moral purposes (I believe) that should be the end of the discussion.

In this light, the argument for a utilitarian morality can be put consicely: widely practiced utilitarianism promises to make everyone better off; and so far as we can tell, that’s what everyone wants.

Mill followed the logic of non-zero-sumness to its logical conclusion. He wanted to maximize overall happiness; and the way to maximize it is for everyone to be thoroughly self-sacrificing. You shouldn’t hold doors open for people only if you can do so quite easily and thereby save them lots of trouble. You should hold doors open whenever the amount of trouble you save them is even infinitesimally greater than the trouble you take. In short, go through life considering the welfare of everyone else as important as your own welfare.

This is a radical doctrine: People who preach it have been known to get crucified. Mill wrote: “in the golden rule of Jesus of Nazareth, we read the complete spirit of the ethics of utility. To do as one would be done by, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality.

I Speak No Catalan...

2011-01-20T10:48:00.006-05:00

...but I like the vibe

Corren by Gossos, with Dani Macaco

És tard, no sé quina hora és,
però és fosc fa estona.
És fàcil veure que no hi ets,
ni un paper, ja poc importa.
Poso els peus a terra, vull caminar,
necessito despertar en un dia radiant.
Encara em queda temps per descobrir
tot alló que m'he amagat i que no m'he volgut dir.

Corren, corren pels carrers, corren
paraules que no s'esborren, imatges que no se'n van.
I ploren, ploren pels carrers, ploren
com gotes d'aigua s'enyoren, aquells que ja no es veuran.

Difícil descobrir qui soc avuí.
Una gota em cau mentre un altre em treu la set.
Plou i fa sol alhora
Tomba la bala bala,
tomba la bala que m'apuntava, era la meva
i jo mateix em disparava.
Raig de llum il·lumina'm, treu-me el fum.
Una revolució dins meu, la sedueixo i es transforma
No s'esborren, en conformo en mirar-me
Mirar-me de dins cap a fora.

On puc anar-te a buscar? Nena no és broma...
Hauria d'haver estat diferent,
però en un moment s'han tancat les portes.
Poso els peus a terra, vull caminar
necessito despertar en un dia radiant.
Encara em queda temps per descobrir
tot allò que t'he amagat i que no t'he volgut dir.

Corren, corren pels carrers, corren
paraules que no s'esborren, imatges que no se'n van.
I ploren, ploren pels carrers, ploren
com gotes d'aigua s'enyoren, aquells que ja no es veuran.

Heard them on the Putomayo catalogue - The España CD.

Autumn

2010-11-18T14:56:00.012-05:00

A Positive Reflection on Matters Both Cosmic and Quantum

Study for The Punishment of Haman (Sistine Chapel), by Michelangelo, (1508-1512)

He started to kick out with his feet to move what was under his legs. He only started because he didn't have any legs to kick with. Somewhere just below his hip joints they had cut both of his legs off.

No legs.

No more running walking crawling if you have no legs. No more working.

No legs you see.

Never again to wiggle your toes. What a hell of a thing what a wonderful beautiful thing to wiggle your toes.

No no.

-- Dalton Trumbo : Johnny Got his Gun

As we head deeper into middle-age, we become more acutely aware of the fact that our bodies are no longer automatically seeking healthy growth and vitality on their own, at least not unaided. Instead we recognize that our bodies are seeking ways to shut down. They are searching for ways quiesce, and they do it quite successfully.

Not too long ago, I read this in the introduction to Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Welcome. And congratulations. I am delighted that you could make it. Getting here wasn't easy, I know. In fact, I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize.

To begin with, for you to be here now trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It's an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years (we hope) these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of deft, cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable but generally underappreciated state known as existence.

Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, your atoms don't actually care about you- indeed, don't even know that you are there. They don't even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive. (It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you.) Yet somehow for the period of your existence they will answer to a single overarching impulse: to keep you you.

The bad news is that atoms are fickle and their time of devotion is fleeting-fleeting indeed. Even a long human life adds up to only about 650,000 hours. And when that modest milestone flashes past, or at some other point thereabouts, for reasons unknown your atoms will shut you down, silently disassemble, and go off to be other things. And that's it for you.

Still, you may rejoice that it happens at all. Generally speaking in the universe it doesn't, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on Earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere. Whatever else it may be, at the level of chemistry life is curiously mundane: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, a little calcium, a dash of sulfur, a light dusting of other very ordinary elements-nothing you wouldn't find in any ordinary drugstore-and that's all you need. The only thing special about the atoms that make you is that they make you. That is of course the miracle of life….

So thank goodness for atoms. But the fact that you have atoms and that they assemble in such a willing manner is only part of what got you here. To be here now, alive in the twenty- first century and smart enough to know it, you also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on Earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions and billions of species of living thing that have existed since the dawn of time, most-99.99 percent-are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

The average species on Earth lasts for only about four million years, so if you wish to be around for billions of years, you must be as fickle as the atoms that made you. You must be prepared to change everything about yourself-shape, size, color, species affiliation, everything-and to do so repeatedly. That's much easier said than done, because the process of change is random. To get from "protoplasmal primordial atomic globule" (as the Gilbert and Sullivan song put it) to sentient upright modern human has required you to mutate new traits over and over in a precisely timely manner for an exceedingly long while. So at various periods over the last 3.8 billion years you have abhorred oxygen and then doted on it, grown fins and limbs and jaunty sails, laid eggs, flicked the air with a forked tongue, been sleek, been furry, lived underground, lived in trees, been as big as a deer and as small as a mouse, and a million things more. The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary shifts, and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in the top of your head before diving sixty feet for a mouthful of delicious sandworms.

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favored evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely-make that miraculously-fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth's mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result-eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly-in you.

You know, I never really thought of it that way... I don’t know why not. It’s so obvious… It’s fascinating as well as humorous to consider that every one of my ancestors was able to get a date, even though there were many times in my youth when I despaired that perhaps I couldn’t and never would. Besides taking a certain comfort out of that, there are other ways in which I take encouragement out of those passages as well.

I look at my hands. They are a map and a reminder of several stages of my life.

The same tributaries and intersections still remain (although in deeper relief) in the “life line” on my palm which my sister playfully used to read in order to “tell my future” when I was small.

On my left hand, there is the scar on my index finger where I cut myself with a steak knife when I was 12, trying to saw through a piece of thick rope for some foolish reason I can’t recall. I probably should have gone for stitches, but I didn’t want anyone to know about it.

On my right hand, I still see two nickel-sized scars that are there as the result of a friendly wrestling match in the driveway of my friend Freddy D’s house when I was 16.

I look at both hands and I see marks and spots that I can only assume are the result of sun damage inflicted upon them during the furnace-like summers of my youth when I played and worked outside all day long before sunblock was invented. The best I could do to protect my fair skin back then was zinc oxide, or gardening gloves in 95 degree heat.

Today, when I hold the smooth, flawless, unblemished hands of my children in mine, they remark upon how close the veins of my hands are to the surface, and I can’t help noticing as well the reduced elasticity in the skin and the ever-increasing appearance of wrinkles. Autumn is here...

Whether our deaths represent the total end of our existence, or whether our bodies are glorified in some resurrected state in an age to come, I find Bryson’s words to be comforting, reassuring, and conducive to a greater appreciation of life itself. Life is a precious gift, and the illuminating introduction by Bryson certainly puts all of our troubles into perspective when we are honest enough to look at the grand scheme of things.

When we look at the infinitesimal speck of time that our brief lives represent in the capricious and often indifferent scope of eternity, it invites contemplation upon what a miracle every moment of existence is. Echoing Dalton Trumbo in a certain way, I hold up my hand and I move the fingers about in their full range of motion, and I think to myself what an wonderful, amazing thing it is to be able to do that, for however briefly I’ll be able to do it. Mundane, yet truly miraculous.

We are going to spend an awfully lot of time dead, when our hands will be stilled and eventually will be no more. An awfully long time. To dust we will return, and our atoms will go on to form other things, as Bryson points out. What an incredible thing to watch those fingers move, and despite everything that may have gone wrong in the day, week, month, year or decade, we can say “Look at this… I am here… And I am still alive... Eventually, I will have to exit the stage with all of the grace and dignity I'll be able to muster and make way for those who come behind me, but today - I live!”

Appreciate this gift for all it’s worth.

I Can't Believe This is Happening in the United States

2010-11-12T18:35:00.004-05:00

Glenn Beck Pushes Open Fascism on FOX

FOX takes a lot of heat in progressive circles for their lineup of talking heads, but criticism needs to be leveled at the folks at CNN too for giving guys like Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs a start to begin with.

Liberal media my ...

If you watch FOX News in your home or in your bar, I don't want to know you, let alone hear from you.

I'm stunned that this sort of thing can get an airing in this country and not spark widespread outrage. We are in very dangerous waters.

Almost forty years ago, this kind of conspiratorial nonsense was spoofed in National Lampoon in pieces like Let's Get America Out of Dutch, a satirical newsletter tract written in caps and cheap paper about a Dutch conspiracy to take over the United States. It was the kind of pathology that was thought to be disappearing with the likes of the Birchers. Now it seems the Birchers are back...

Read more on Beck's George Soros "expose" from Michelle Goldberg on the Daily Beast.

Young Lions

2010-07-21T08:09:00.011-05:00

The 2010 U14 National President's Cup Champions

Nationals (July) in Murfreesboro, TN

Regionals (May) in Saratoga, NY

Enough! Call in the Army Corps of Engineers

2010-05-24T20:26:00.005-05:00

BP isn't getting it done. Call in the Army & Navy and blast

It's been... what? Thirty-four days now? Thirty-Four days and BP is still ditzing around with this oil spill... Enough. We've left it to the private sector long enough. I don't know much about this stuff, but I'm begining to suspect that BP has been more interested in preserving this exploration well as a viable production well than in stopping the leak. After all, they've a hell of a lot of costs to recoup.

It's time to call in the military with a 'Bunker Buster' and just blow the damned thing shut.

Embrace Your Inner Neanderthal

2010-05-15T07:57:00.034-05:00

The Ascent of Man as formerly shown...
Neanderthal Man, Cro-Magnon Man, Modern Man

I remember as a kid when we had some of those Time-Life books in the house, back around the 1970's or so. One of the ones I found particularly fascinating was the one titled Early Man, which was focused on human origins. It featured a double-page chart with a fairly famous picture sequence showing what the prevailing anthropological consensus at the time considered to be the most likely progression of the ascent of man, from a gibbon-like creature all the way up through various hominds such as Australopithecus (Africanus and Robustus), Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, Rhodesian Man, Neanderthal Man, Cro-Magnon Man, and finally, modern Homo Sapiens Sapiens. I'm sure you've all seen it at one time or another. It has been copied and lampooned many times

There was a fairly detailed and lengthy section in the middle of the book dealing with Neanderthal Man, whose fossils were first discovered in Germany's Neander Valley 140 years ago, and who is thought to have arrived in Europe some 300,000 years ago before ultimately disappearing about 30,000 years ago. At the time, this information was presented as if human evolution occurred in a fairly straight line, with each species representing a link in the chain leading directly to the next. In other words, the stout, beetle-browed, short-limbed and supposedly unimaginitive Neanderthals were considered to be our direct ancestors.

That all seemed to change during the last couple of decades. Anthropologists and genetic scientists revised their estimation of Neanderthals and were claiming instead that the Neanderthals were an entirely separate hominid branch, a rival form of humans that co-existed with modern humans for a certain period of time and eventually became extinct. A dead end. Just one of several waves of hominds who came "out of Africa" before eventually being replaced by the last wave of modern humans.

This thinking stayed current until several weeks ago. In this 2007 video, it is hinted at darkly that the Neanderthal may have even been the victim of genocide at the hands of modern humans - that it is "almost certain that they were extinguished by our forebears."

If the physical descriptions of Neanderthals I've read are true, I doubt they were as lissome as the one represented in that British museum (a girl with the head of a monkey). By most accounts, the visible physical differences between Neanderthals and modern humans were quite significant. Jared Diamond asked in his 1992 book The Third Chimpanzee:

"Did some invading Cro-Magon men mate with some Neanderthal women? If Neanderthal behavior was as relatively rudimentary, and Neanderthal anatomy as distinctive as I suspect, few Cro-Magnons may have wanted to mate with Neanderthals.... the differences may still have been a major turnoff. And if Neanderthal women were geared for a twelve-month pregnancy, a hybrid fetus may not have survived. My inclination is to take the negative evidence at face-value, to accept that hybridization occurred rarely if ever, and to doubt that living people of European descent carry any Neanderthal genes.

One thing I like about Jared Diamond is that even if he has strong opinions, he's more than willing to be contradicted by evidence. I wish there were more scientists out there who were humble enough to state their opinions less definitively and with less "certainty" as they often do, because a new study comparing the Neanderthal and human genomes indicates that it does appear after all that modern humans did in fact interbreed with Neanderthals. Apparently people of European and Asian descent carry 1% to 4% of Neanderthal genes.

A new study of the Neandertal genome shows that humans and Neandertals interbred. The discovery comes as a big surprise to researchers who have been searching for genetic evidence of human-Neandertal interbreeding for years and finding none.

About 1 percent to 4 percent of DNA in modern people from Europe and Asia was inherited from Neandertals, researchers report in the May 7 Science. “It’s a small, but very real proportion of our ancestry,” says study coauthor David Reich of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Mass. Comparisons of the human and Neandertal genomes are also revealing how humans evolved to become the sole living hominid species on the planet.

Neandertals lived in Europe, the Middle East and western Asia until they disappeared about 30,000 years ago. The new data indicate that humans may not have replaced Neandertals, but assimilated them into the human gene pool...

Researchers recreated the Neandertal’s genetic blueprints using DNA extracted from three bone fragments — each from a different Neandertal woman — found in a cave in Croatia.

Comparing the resulting blueprints of the female Neandertals, who lived about 40,000 years ago, with those of five present-day humans from China, France, Papua New Guinea and southern and western Africa, revealed that people outside of Africa carry Neandertal DNA.

Scientists were surprised to find that people from China and Papua New Guinea (places where Neandertals never lived) have just as much Neandertal ancestry as people from France. The group did not find traces of Neandertal heritage in the two African people studied. The result probably means that interbreeding between Neandertals and humans took place about 50,000 to 80,000 years ago in the Middle East as humans began migrating out of Africa to colonize the rest of the world...

Since humans and Neandertals could interbreed, some people question whether the two groups are different hominid species. The question doesn’t hold interest for John Hawks, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Genealogically, he says, the new study shows that many humans had a Neandertal great-great-great-great … grandfather. “It’s impossible to talk about them as ‘them’ anymore,” he says. “Neandertals are us.”

I find this sort of thing very interesting, but on the other hand, I do worry about what this kind of information will mean to people who tend to misuse science for their own bigoted racial theories. The late Stephen Jay Gould wrote about how science and pseudo-science was often applied to The Mismeasure of Man. If non-Africans carry Neanderthal genes and Africans don't, will certain race-baiters be able to claim that Africans are a somewhat different species from everyone else after all? It's good to remember an important point shown in the video above that is still valid - "We are all Africans in disguise."

Want to check yourself out as a Neanderthal? Download a free Smithsonian app for your iPhone or Android at MEanderthal.app

In any case, when we look at cavemen, perhaps we shouldn't be so quick to underestimate the adaptability of those Neanderthals.

The Ascent and Descent of Man as more recently shown...

A Darwinist Against Social Darwinism III

2010-05-08T15:53:00.018-05:00

Frans de Waal examines the differences between the USA and Europe, and the relative merits of each... Is competition good for us?

A Darwinist Against Social Darwinism: I

A Darwinist Against Social Darwinism: II

Looking at current events in the USA and in Europe today, we can see evidence within two huge ongoing self-inflicted crises that says something about the culture which each region has chosen to build for itself.

In the USA we see the environmental and economic disaster that has resulted from the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. As of the date of this post the massive leak has still not been contained. Despite the boorish mantra of "Drill baby, drill!" at the 2008 Republican Convention, and Obama's campaign promise not to do so, Obama relented not too long before this disaster struck in an extremely unfortunate case of poor timing and agreed to allow the resumption of some offshore drilling. Our American addiction to cheap gasoline and cheap energy in general has come back to bite us in a big way. Up until this point, our sense of American exceptionalism, our hyper-individualistic ethos and our free-market dogmatism has prevented us from being as clear-eyed about environmental sustainability as the people in other comparable countries in the world have been. There doesn't appear to be much willingness to make personal sacrifices in order to change things...

In Europe, the Greek debt crisis has sent shock waves across the continent as fear of contagion spreads. Riots have broken out in Greece as the government has called for new austerity measures. The fate of the euro, if not the entire European Union, is in doubt according to more pessimistic observers. The causes of the Greek crisis are complex, and there is no doubt that some of it can be laid at the feet of the US subprime fiasco, but part of it also lies within a culture that enjoyed an influx of new (unearned) money and was enjoying having too much of something for nothing. There doesn't appear to be much willingness to make personal sacrifices in order to change things...

I had posted twice before about what the primatologist Frans de Waal has to say about evolution, human empathy, competition, and cooperation. He's from the Netherlands, but has spent the past few decades working in the USA. In light of his ongoing thesis, I'd be interested to know if anyone has any thoughts about his observations on the relative merits and demerits of the USA and Europe.

I have received in a Manchester Newspaper a rather good squib, showing that I have proved “might is right,” & therefore that Napoleon is right & every cheating Tradesman is also right.
—Charles Darwin, 1860

Enlightened Self-Interest

(photo: Herbert Spencer) The idea of competition within the same species over the same resources appealed to Charles Darwin and helped him formulate the concept of natural selection. He had read Thomas Malthus’s influential 1798 essay on population growth, according to which populations that outgrow their food supply will automatically be cut back by hunger, disease, and mortality. Unfortunately, Herbert Spencer read the same essay and drew different conclusions. If strong varieties progress at the expense of inferior ones, this was not only how it was, Spencer felt, but how it ought to be. Competition was good, it was natural, and society as a whole benefited. He applied the naturalistic fallacy to a T.

Why did Spencer’s ideas fall on such receptive ears? It seems to me that he was offering a way out of a moral dilemma that people were only just getting used to. In earlier times, the rich didn’t need any justification to ignore the poor. With their blue blood, the nobility considered itself a different breed. They showed their contempt for manual labor by being wasp-waisted in the West or growing elongated fingernails in the East. Not that they felt absolutely no obligation toward those underneath them — hence the expression noblesse oblige — but they had no qualms living in opulence, feasting on meat, slurping fine wine, and driving around in gilded carriages, while the masses were close to starving.

All of this changed with the Industrial Revolution, which created a new upper crust, one that couldn’t overlook the plight of others so easily. Many of them had belonged to the lower class only a few generations before: They evidently were of the same blood. So, shouldn’t they share their wealth? They were reluctant to do so though, and were thrilled to hear that there was nothing wrong with ignoring those who worked for them, that it was perfectly honorable to climb the ladder of success without looking back. This is how nature works, Spencer assured them, thus removing any pangs of conscience the rich might feel…

Long ago American society embraced competition as its chief organizing principle even though everywhere one looks—at work, in the street, in people’s homes—one finds the same appreciation of family, companionship collegiality, and civic responsibility as everywhere else in the world. This tension between economic freedom and community values is fascinating to watch, which I do both as an outsider and an insider, being a European who has lived and worked in the United States for more than twenty-five years. The pendulum swings that occur at regular intervals between the main political parties of this nation show that the tension is alive and well, and that a hands-down winner shouldn’t be expected anytime soon. This bipolar state of American society isn’t hard to understand. It’s not that different from the situation in Europe, except that all political ideologies on this side of the Atlantic seem shifted to the right. What makes American politics baffling is the way it draws upon biology and religion.

Evolutionary theory is remarkably popular among those on the conservative end of the spectrum, but not in the way biologists would like it to be. The theory figures like a secret mistress. Passionately embraced in its obscure persona of “Social Darwinism,” it is rejected as soon as the daylight shines on real Darwinism. In a 2008 Republican presidential debate, no less than three candidates raised their hand in response to the question “Who doesn’t believe in evolution?” No wonder that schools are hesitant to teach evolutionary theory, and that zoos and natural history museums avoid the e-word. Its hate love relation with biology is the first great paradox of the American political landscape.

Social Darwinism is all about what Gordon Gekko called “the evolutionary spirit.” It depicts life as a struggle in which those who make it shouldn’t let themselves be dragged down by those who don’t. This ideology was unleashed by British political philosopher Herbert Spencer, who in the nineteenth century translated the laws of nature into business language, coining the phrase "survival of the fittest” (often incorrectly attributed to Darwin). Spencer decried attempts to equalize society’s playing field. It would be counterproductive, he felt, for the “fit” to feel any obligation toward the "unfit.” In dense tomes that sold hundreds of thousands of copies, he said of the poor that “the whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better. "

The United States listened attentively. The business world ate it up. Calling competition a law of biology Andrew Carnegie felt it improved the human race. John D Rockefeller even married it with religion, concluding that the growth of a large business “is merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.” This religious angle — still visible in the so-called Christian Right — forms the second great paradox. Whereas the book found in most American homes and every hotel room urges us on almost every page to show compassion, Social Darwinists scoff at such feelings, which only keep nature from running its course. Poverty is dismissed as proof of laziness, and social justice as a weakness. Why not simply let the poor perish? I find it hard to see how Christians can embrace such a harsh ideology without a massive case of cognitive dissonance, but many seem to do so.

The third and final paradox is that the emphasis on economic freedom triggers both the best and worst in people. The worst is the aforementioned deficit in compassion, at least at the governmental level, but there is also a good, even excellent, side to the American character—otherwise I might have packed my bags long ago—which is a merit-based society. Silver spoons, fancy titles, family legacies, all of them are known and respected, but not nearly as much as personal initiative, creativity, and plain hard work. Americans admire success stories, and will never hold honest success against anyone. This is truly liberating for those who are up to the challenge.

Europeans are far more divided by rank and class and tend to prefer security over opportunity. Success is viewed with suspicion. It’s not for nothing that the French language offers only negative labels for people who have made it by themselves, such as nouveau riche and parvenu. The result in some nations, has been economic gridlock. When I see twenty-year-olds march in the streets of Paris to claim job protection or older people to preserve retirement at fifty-five, I feel myself all of a sudden siding with American conservatives who detest entitlement. The state is not a teat from which one can squeeze milk any time of the day, yet that’s how many Europeans seem to look at it.

And so my political philosophy sits somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic—not too comfortable a place. I appreciate the economic and creative vitality on this side but remain perplexed by the widespread hatred of taxes and government. Biology is very much part of this mix as it is for every ideology that seeks justification. Social Darwinism sought to supply a scientific endorsement craved by a nation of immigrants who had quite naturally developed a strong sense of self-reliance and individualism. The problem is that one can’t derive the goals of society from the goals of nature. Trying to do so is known as the naturalistic fallacy, which is the impossibility of moving from how things are to how things ought to be. Thus, if animals were to kill one another on a large scale, this wouldn’t mean we have to do so, too, any more than we would have an obligation to live in perfect harmony if animals were to do so. All that nature can offer is information and inspiration, not prescription.

Information is critical, though. If a zoo plans a new enclosure, it takes into account whether the species to be kept is social or solitary, a climber or a digger, nocturnal or diurnal, and so on. Why should we, in designing human society, act as if we’re oblivious to the characteristics of our species? A view of human nature as “red in tooth and claw” obviously sets different boundaries to society than a view that includes cooperation and solidarity as part of our background. Darwin himself felt uncomfortable about the “right of the strongest” lessons that others, such as Spencer, tried to extract from his theory. This is why I’m tired, as a biologist, to hear evolutionary theory being trotted out as a prescription for society by those who aren’t truly interested in the theory itself and all that it has to offer.

Does Hitchens Fight Fair?

2010-04-19T18:20:00.017-05:00

He has no way of knowing whether or not Martin Luther King was a Christian, but he's sure that Adolf Hitler was.

I'm sure everyone has heard about how Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are urging UK human rights lawyers to have Pope Benedict arrested for "crimes against humanity" when he arrives for an official visit in September.

I remember the first time I saw Christopher Hitchens on TV several years ago. I forget what the topic of the program was but the ex-Marxist made my jaw drop when he drolly remarked that "Mother Teresa is just a mouthpiece for the Vatican."

After 9/11 Hitchens scrubbed away the last residues of his leftist ways and became an ardent neo-con supporter of George Bush's War on Terror, which for Hitchens is really a War on Islam. In fact, as a committed atheist he has extended his own personal battle to a War on Religion in general, with a special virulence in his heart reserved for Catholicism, a virulence he shares with his confrere Dawkins.

He's certainly one of the most visible of the militant "New Atheists" and is often seen on the circuit debating theists and Christian apologists such as Dinesh D'Souza. In the UK last year, Intelligence Squared hosted a debate on the proposition "The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world." Hitchens was teamed up with the actor David Fry against Anne Widdecombe MP and Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja, Nigeria. The Catholic side got massacred. When they polled their audience, Intelligence Squared said they had never seen such a lopsided result. If you can bear it, you can watch it here. It was a debacle.

Hitchens is a formidable and polished debater, quite capable of eviscerating his opponents with his enyclopedic knowledge of history and his sharp, keenly poisonous dry wit. My daughter T and I almost went to see him debate Rabbi David Wolpe when he was in Boston a few weeks back, but Anne had to work that night and we needed to stay home.

One thing I've noticed about Hitchens, though. When he debates someone he's not above using cheap tricks and he doesn't always fight fair. This was brought home to me quite clearly when I saw him in a Bloggingheads.TV discussion with the author Robert Wright. Wright is not a theist. He writes about evolutionary psychology and non-zero sum game theory, yet Hitchens argued with him as if he was a theist anyway. It appears to be the only thing he knows how to do. He's like an old record player that can run at only one speed.

Still, I'm amazed by his glibness and his command of the language. Despite the fact that he's clearly got a buzz on, fencing adroitly with Wright while he imbibes from a glass of red wine - his pupils dilated as large as dinner plates - he manages to talk all around Wright, even when he's on the defensive.

I'd like you to see these clips and let me know what you think. In a 2-hour discussion, Wright and Hitchens were discussing Hitchens' book God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Wright was pressing him on just what he meant by everything, pointing out that religion often motivates people to do great good; people like Martin Luther King whose religion had motivated him to pursue justice in the Civil Rights struggle. Watch how Hitches responds...

Amazing. Hitchens claims that without having known the man, he has no way of knowing whether MLK was a sincere and committed believer or not. He goes on to suggest that using the pulpit in the South would have had to have been done tactically out of necessity, implying a degree of cynicism on MLK's part. I don't see why that would be so. The churches in the South were just as segregated as everything else was back then. White Southern Baptists proved they were quite capable of bombing black churches if they felt a need to.

He also claims that "Social Democrats" such as Bayard Rustin and Asa Philip Randolph, co-organizers of the 1963 March on Washington along with King, deserved at least as much credit for the success of the Civil Rights movement as MLK. That's an interesting point. It may very well be that they don't get the credit they deserve, but I'm not sure that they were as "non-godly" as Hitchens suggests. After all, Bayard Rustin went on to become the very first African-American member of the Board of Trustees of Notre Dame.

In the clip directly above, well, I'll leave it up to you as impartial observers to decide if you agree with Hitchens that "the American Communist Party's most shining record was in the Civil Rights movement" and that "heroic communists" deserve just as much credit for being willing to lay down their lives for it as Dr. King.

Things really start to get interesting, however, when Wright challenges Hitchens on how some of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century were sponsored by non-theists, such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Hitchens replies cooly "Oh, to the contrary..."

Despite the mountain of sermons written by Martin Luther King, Hitchens has no way of knowing if he was a sincere and committed Christian believer, but since Hitler signed a concordat with the Vatican and because Wehrmacht belt buckles read "Gott Mit Uns," then Hitler must have been. Where Hitchens sees cynicism on MLK's part, he sees nothing but the mark of a true believer on Hitler's part. Wright does his best to call him out on this, and rightly so.

World War I German Army belt buckle with imperial insignia and "Gott Mit Uns" inscription. Yes, World War II German army belt buckles had "Gott Mit Uns" (God is with us) embossed on them. They did in World War I too, and probably well before that. It was merely a continuation of Prussian military tradition. The Wehrmacht was as full of conscripts as any other army. The SS Divisions, however, were full of Nazi Party members. They were covered in pagan-influenced SS runes and deaths-head insignias. All SS troops were required to renounce their church memberships and affiliations. If the Nazis had a theology at all, it hearkened back to ancient Germanic myths and romantic notions of Aryan supermen.

If you look out on the web you will see all sorts of conflicting statements about whether or not Hitler was a believing Christian. You can take all that any way you like but to consider Hitler a Mass-going Catholic, or as someone who took Catholic doctrines seriously at all would be utterly absurd. All I can tell you is that I've looked up every indexed reference to the Catholic Church in Mein Kampf and the only thing Hitler was interested in as far as religion was concerned was subsuming both the Catholic and Protestant churches under an overarching Pan-Germanism. The German Volk was the only ideal that mattered to him.

Hitchens also brings up a reference to the basilica near El Escorial in Spain. He's referring to El Valle de los Caidos, General Franco's massive monument to the Nationalist Civil War dead, built primarily upon the sweat and blood of his defeated Republican prisoners. Hitchens says that if you look up at the ceiling of the basilica you will see a swastika and a steel Nazi helmet embedded in the mosaic.

I have found no independent corroboration of this, but I've never been there. I find it hard to believe that a consecrated basilica, even one as distasteful and dubious as Franco's garish monument, has a swastika on display inside of it, even if there are tapestries celebrating the victory of the Nationalist forces there. About half of the people who read this blog have lived in Spain. Maybe they can let me know, if they've been there themselves. Putting the best-face on it for Hitchens' sake, perhaps he is confused. Spanish army helmets, worn by both the Nationalist and Republican forces during the conflict, did not look entirely unlike German army helmets (see image in poster). Perhaps this is where the confusion lies.

Don't get me wrong. The last thing I'm interested in doing is defending Francisco Franco or the Catholic Church's role during the Spanish Civil War. I'm defending neither. Christopher Hitchens seems to me, however, to be a man very interested in words and in the precise use of words. Just as I'm irritated to see the word "fascist" being used today to describe President Obama, it irritates me somewhat to hear the same word used to describe General Franco (although not anywhere near as much).

Was Franco really a fascist? He certainly wasn't a National Socialist, as Hitchens claims. Despite having received help from Hitler during the Civil War, Franco resisted strong attempts to draw Spain into the Axis Powers and he never rounded up Jews for the Nazis. Yes, Franco was a bad man. Franco was an authoritarian military man, a believer in "law and order," a staunch anti-communist, a believer in traditional Catholicism and of his society's traditional class structures built upon latifundist lines. He was certainly vindictive and cruel towards his defeated adversaries. He was a military strongman much along the lines of what you would see in the recent decades past in Latin America, but I don't know if I'd call the drab, listless and colorless country he ran until the 1970's a true totalitarian state. Jose Antonio Primavera was the leader of the fascist Falange Espanola at the start of the Spanish Civil War, and he was executed by the Republicans. His replacement, the slow-witted and uncharismatic Manuel Hedilla was easily dominated by Franco. Franco co-opted the Falange and all the other right-wing groups that fought on the Nationalist side, such as the Carlists and Monarchists, under one umbrella he could control. The old joke in Spain was that the system could more rightly be called "cunadismo" (brother-in-law-ism) instead of "fascismo" because it was run by Franco's brother-in-law Ramon Serrano Suner (who died in 2003 at the ripe old age of 102) and various Opus Dei technocrats.

Hitchens insinuates that the origin of fascism can be found in Europe's southern Catholic countries, citing Franco, Salazar and Mussolini as examples, perhaps based upon the Catholic teachings on corporatism and solidarism. Now, maybe it's been a tepid defense of the Church on my part in regard to this particular point. I suppose it may be, but I think Hitchens is being a little more than imprecise in his use of terms such as fascism and National Socialism, especially in how they supposedly intersect with Catholicism.

After all, the first real fascist was Benito Mussolini, and he was an avowed atheist. In his Doctrine of Fascism he wrote this about religion:

The Fascist conception of life is a religious one, in which man is viewed in his immanent relation to a higher law, endowed with an objective will transcending the individual and raising him to conscious membership of a spiritual society. Those who perceive nothing beyond opportunistic considerations in the religious policy of the Fascist regime fail to realize that Fascism is not only a system of government but also and above all a system of thought... The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative. Individuals and groups are admissible in so far as they come within the State...The Fascist State is not indifferent to religious phenomena in general nor does it maintain an attitude of indifference to Roman Catholicism, the special, positive religion of Italians. The State has not got a theology but it has a moral code.... The Fascist loves his neighbor, but the word neighbor “does not stand for some vague and unseizable conception. Love of one's neighbor does not exclude necessary educational severity; still less does it exclude differentiation and rank. Fascism will have nothing to do with universal embraces; as a member of the community of nations it looks other peoples straight in the eyes; it is vigilant and on its guard; it follows others in all their manifestations and notes any changes in their interests; and it does not allow itself to be deceived by mutable and fallacious appearances.

In that system, religion... Catholicism, in fact, is only useful in the way it serves the State. This is not how Catholicism or any other religion defines itself.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the exchange however, is that Hitchens actually felt personally insulted when Wright suggested that Hitler was a secularist... and presumably, like him. Wright was absolutely dumbstruck and incredulous at this.

Hitchens didn't think Wright meant to insult him, but suppose he had? Suppose Wright had wanted to link him personally to secular atrocities? Could he have done so?

By some estimates, as many as as seven million people were killed in China's Cultural Revolution in the years between 1967 and 1972. What was Hitchens doing during those years? He had recently joined a Marxist group called the Luxemburgists and he started writing for International Socialism magazine. Can we therefore say that Christopher Hitchens has some of the blood of the Cultural Revolution on his hands?

Unfair ad hominem, perhaps, but no more unfair than what he dishes out himself.

What Color is this Wrapper?

2010-04-11T22:08:00.009-05:00

The Grape Tootsie Pop Conundrum

And now for something completely different.

I've developed a little family ritual. Every Friday evening (outside of Lent) I bring home Tootsie Pops for all the kids. Lord help me if I should ever forget.

It actually started with Starbursts a long time ago, but I started to worry about our potential dental bills (Starbursts can just about pull your fillings out). I suppose it all began as a sort of end-of-week celebration, but maybe this little indulgence is a subtle insurance policy too. Maybe it's a way to make sure that at least one of them says something nice about me at my eulogy someday. "Dad was a real bastard, but at least he thought about us enough to deliver with the Tootsies every Friday..."

Well, while handing some Tootsies out recently I referred to a grape one as "the one in the purple wrapper." My daughter T looked at me incredulousy and said, "Dad, that wrapper is blue!" And so the controversy began....

I insisted the wrapper is purple and T insisted it's blue. In between peals of laughter she explained to me that males tend to be more color-blind than females, and anyway, men at my age tend to start losing the ability to discern colors accurately.

I take umbrage to this. Just a few years ago I took a still-life drawing class with charcoal and pastels at the Danforth Museum. I don't think my instructor thought much of me as a draftsman but she did tell me that I was a superb colorist. Most of my classmates weren't envious of my drawing ability but more than a few of them were envious of my ability to blend pastels together and reproduce colors exactly.

Besides, as I explained to my daughter, still convulsed in disbelieving mirth, why would the Tootsie people wrap a GRAPE-flavored PURPLE pop in a BLUE wrapper? Couldn't she see the logic of my position? I guess not.

Am I color blind? If I ask for impartial answers on this, I know I'll probably lose the debate. Now look... I know that it clearly isn't this color. It's just as obvious, however, that it isn't this color either. It's more along the lines of this color. The thing is, what do you call it?

I'm willing to concede that one might want to call it a bluish-purple, but I'm afraid that most people will say it's a purpley-blue.

If so, I declare that purple doesn't get enough credit as a color in its own right. I remember when the LA Lakers basketball team and the LA Kings hockey team wore purple jerseys they called "royal blue." Royal blue my eye... Those shirts are purple. Of that I'm sure.

Marcel Dionne in a PURPLE royal blue uniform

Endgame?

2010-04-06T15:15:00.026-05:00

When 19th Century men are sent to do 21st Century jobs

"I don't give them Hell. I just tell the truth about them and they think it's Hell."
-- President Harry S. Truman

Have we reached a tipping point? Are we nearing the end of the days of imperial papacies?

I do get a sense that we've reached a crossroads of sorts. Things are so bad right now, I feel like things can go one of two ways.

Either we're reaching the end of the period of conservative retrenchment and Vatican II-rollback that started in the late 1970s and has intensified markedly since 2005, or we are heading into a period when just about everyone but the staunchest traditionalists may feel compelled to leave.

On March 14th Fr. Federico Lombardi SJ, director of the Vatican press office, said "It is obvious that in recent days there are people who have tried -- with a certain tenacity in Regensburg and Munich -- to find ways to personally involve the Holy Father in the matters relating to the abuses. For every objective observer it is evident that these efforts have failed."

If only it was that easy.

At around the same time, the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano thundered that there was a "clear and despicable intention" to strike at Pope Benedict XVI "at any cost."

That's not really what I see. What I see is the Vatican calling all-hands on deck and mounting a full court press to defend the pope "at any cost."

It isn't just the obtuse, bizarre, and in some cases, inflammatory remarks we see coming out of Benedict's close circle of Vatican advisors such as Gabriele Amorth, Angelo Sodano, and Raniero Cantalamessa. Just this past Sunday I picked up a copy of Boston's archdiocesan paper The Pilot (which seems ever more like an Opus Dei publication), and in addition to George Weigel's blistering attack on the New York Times coverage of the abuse scandal, Scoundrel Time(s), there was this smattering of headlines.

Vatican intensifies defense of pope on sex abuse decisions

Bishops restate concern for abuse victims, praise pope’s leadership

Priest who presided at Murphy trial calls news reports inaccurate

Vatican defends action in case of Wisconsin priest abuser

Pope John Paul was model of untiring love, pope says

Is that the most important thing to do right now? To defend the pope and the memory of recent popes?

None of this stuff is particularly helpful at this point. Self-pity, hunkering down, and blaming the media is not what we need from the Vatican and it's battle-ready apologists right now. Watch, there will be a spike in reports about visitations of the Virgin Mary too. We are already hearing more about Medjugorje these days.... Rallying the faithful against an external threat and fostering increasing devotion to the Virgin Mary has worked for them many times in the past. It won't work anymore.

It's a tough time to be the pope? It's a tough time to be a priest? I'm sure it is. It's a tough time to be a layperson too, let's remind them of that. The humiliation we endure, and the questioning we get from people who wonder how in the world we can still remain Catholic is intense, but the pressure felt by clerics and laity alike is nothing compared to the pain that is still being felt by the victims of sexual abuse, and there still appears to be a massive blind spot in the Vatican on that count.

I've even seen conservative luminaries like Peggy Noonan, who once wrote a laudatory biography of "John Paul the Great," being taken to task and branded in some circles as a traitor for her column The Catholic Church's Catastrophe, in which she said:

All sorts of people have all sorts of motives, but the fact is that the press—the journalistic establishment in the U.S. and Europe—has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on this issue. Let me repeat that: The press has been the best friend of the Catholic Church on the scandals because it exposed the story and made the church face it. The press forced the church to admit, confront and attempt to redress what had happened. The press forced them to confess. The press forced the church to change the old regime and begin to come to terms with the abusers. The church shouldn't be saying j'accuse but thank you.

Without this pressure—without the famous 2002 Boston Globe Spotlight series with its monumental detailing of the sex abuse scandals in just one state, Massachusetts—the church would most likely have continued to do what it has done for half a century, which is look away, hush up, pay off and transfer.

For this, there was a post labelled Noonan Iscariot? in Whispers in the Loggia.

Do you know what I say? Enough of whispers! Enough of whispers in the loggia or anywhere else in the Church! Enough of "Clerical Whispers" and all of this junk in the life of the Church that celebrates and revels in this lacy Romanita culture of silence and secrecy. This culture is killing us!

Sure, there are anti-Catholic elements in the press that are revelling in this, but sorry, we are just going to have to take it and bear it. The press was handed by the hierarchy a great big sword to skewer us with. We have no one to blame but ourselves.

The Boston Globe, which Cardinal Law once famously called down the Hand of God upon, actually did us a huge favor in doggedly sticking with the story and exposing these crimes. They forced us to deal with it here in the USA, even if Cardinal Law still holds a cushy post in Rome and continues to sit on dicasteries. At least we forced him out of here.

Personally, being from Boston, I'm offended. I'm offended by both the Vatican and by the European press. We went through all of this in 2002. It's painful for us to go through it again. Where was the European press in 2002? Did they think this was a peculiarly American problem? They must have thought so. We thought the curial officials in the Vatican got the message in 2002, but apparently they didn't. Apparently, they were convinced that this was just an American problem too. It clearly isn't. These problems around sexual abuse and concubinage are wordwide and have been going on for centuries.

Is the news coverage and focus on Ratzinger/Benedict fair? For the most part, I think it is. His record in Munich is fair game, and quite frankly, I'm surprised that no one looked at it more closely before. He's been tougher on abusing priests than his predecessor, that is certainly true, but until this crisis burst into the open in the USA in 2001-2002, he was as clueless and/or indifferent to the issue as the rest of them. Yes, he eventually came down on Fr Maciel harder than John Paul did, but not initially. Remember him swatting and dismissing a reporter who had the temerity to ask him about Maciel?

Okay, he seems to have "gotten religion" about clerical abuse around 2001 or so, but one still gets the sense that it was more about protecting the reputation of the Church and quashing scandal than it was about the victims or about protecting children. His response was the same as it was for everything else. Send it all to the CDF. Centralize everything to the CDF. As with every other piece of "petty gossip" he ever heard about in those years and didn't like, it was a reaction of "I'll handle it myself!" He still told the bishops to keep things secret, and it rings hollow for the Vatican to say now that this was not an admonition to the bishops to avoid going to civil authorities. Even so, are bishops being disciplined in any meaningful way? Are any doing time? No.

He's getting a lot of mixed reviews for his letter to the Irish. I thought it was reprehensible. He chided the bishops strongly for behavior he apparently engaged in himself prior to 2001, and he had the gall to lay blame on the Irish themselves for having become secularized and for the laxity that supposedly was introduced with Vatican II. In a pastoral letter to the Irish people he managed to squeeze in political references to his two favorite whipping boys, secularism and the Spirit of Vatican II. Too bad for him that there was never any liberation theology spoken of in Ireland. He could have beaten up on that hobby-horse too. The fact of the matter is, if there was one place in the world where clerics were held in the unquestioningly adoring esteem that Benedict likes to see, and where the Spirit of Vatican II never took hold, it was Ireland.

In light of where we are today, I think it might be a good idea to post up this call for reform that was written by Henri Boulad SJ, the Rector of the Jesuit school in Cairo. (Hat tip to Enlightened Catholic).

I wouldn't have agreed with all of this in years past, but now I'm more inclined to do so.

Holy Father,

I dare to speak directly to you for my heart bleeds upon seeing the abyss into which our Church is falling. Hopefully, you will forgive the filial frankness, inspired by the liberty of the children of God to which St. Paul invites us and for my impassioned love for the Church.

I will be pleased also that you forgive the alarmist tone of this letter for I know that little time remains and that the situation remains dire. Let me first tell you a little about myself. I am an Egyptian Lebanese Jesuit of the Melkiterite. I will soon turn 78. For the last 3 years, I have been the rector of the Jesuit school in Cairo. I have also carried out the following responsibilities: superior of the Jesuits in Alexandria, regional superior of the Jesuits in Egypt, professor of theology in El Cairo, director of Caritas-Egypt, and vice president of Caritas International for the Middle East and North Africa.

I am well acquainted with the Catholic hierarchy of Egypt having participated over many years in meetings as president of superiors of the religious orders of Egypt. I have very close relations with each one of them, some of whom are my former students. I also personally know Pope Chenouda III, whom I saw frequently. As far as the Catholic hierarchy of Europe goes, I had the opportunity to meet personally with some of its members such as Cardinal Koening, Cardinal Schonborn, Cardinal Daneels, Cardinal Martini, Archbishop Kothgasser, Bishops Kapellari and Kung, other Austrian bishops and bishops of other European countries. These encounters occurred during my annual trips to give conferences throughout Europe, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Hungary, France, Belgium, etc. During these visits, I spoke and engaged with diverse audiences and the media (newspapers, radio, television, etc.) I did the same in Egypt and the Near East.

I have visited 50 countries on 4 continents and have published some 30 books in 15 languages--mainly in French, Arabic, Hungarian, and German. Of the 13 books in German, perhaps you have read Sons and Daughters of God which was published by your friend, Fr. Erich Fink of Bavaria. I say this not to brag, but rather to tell you simply that my intentions are grounded in a realistic knowledge of the universal church and its current situation in 2009.

Returning to the reason for this letter, I will try to be as brief, clear, and objective as possible.

In the first place, there are several topics [the list is not exhaustive].

Number 1
Religious practice is in a constant decline. A continually shrinking number of seniors [who will soon disappear] are those who frequent the churches in Europe and Canada. The only remaining remedy will be to close these churches or change them into museums, mosques, clubs, or municipal libraries as is now being done. The thing that surprises me is that many of these churches are being completely renovated and modernized at great expense with the hope of attracting the faithful. But this will not stop the exodus.

Number 2
Seminaries and novitiates are emptying out at the same speed, and vocations are in sharp decline. The future is very somber and one has to ask who or what will bring relief. More and more African and Asian priests are in charge of European parishes.

Number 3
Many priests abandon the priesthood. The few who remain--whose median age often is beyond that of retirement--have to be in charge of many parishes in an expedient and administrative capacity. Many of these priests, in Europe, as well as in the Third World, live in concubinage in plain sight of the faithful who normally accept them; this occurs with the knowledge of the local bishop who is not able to accept this arrangement, but who needs to keep in mind the scarcity of priests.

Number 4
The language of the church is obsolete, out of date, boring, repetitive, moralizing and totally out of synch with our age. The message of the Gospel should be presented in all its starkness and challenges. It is necessary to move towards a "new evangelization" to which John Paul II invited us. But this, contrary to what many think or believe, does not mean repeating the old which no longer speaks to us, but rather innovating and inventing a new language which expresses the faith in a meaningful way for the people of today.

Number 5
This is not able to be done without a profound renewal of theology and catechesis which should be completely reformulated. A German religious priest whom I met recently was telling me that the word "mystic" was not even mentioned once in "The New Catechism." I could not believe it. We have to concede that our faith is very cerebral, abstract, dogmatic, and rarely directed to the heart and body.

Number 6
As a consequence, a great number of Christians are turning to the religions of Asia, the sects, "new-age," evangelical churches, occultism, etc. This is not unexpected. They go to other places to look for nourishment that they don't find in their own home. They have the impression that we give them stones as if it were bread. The Christian faith in another age gave a sense of life to people. It appears to be an enigma to them today, the remains of a forgotten past.

Number 7
In the moral and ethical areas, the teachings of the magisterium repeated " ad nausaeum," about marriage, contraception, abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, married priests, the divorced who remarry again, etc. etc., no longer affect anyone, and only produce weariness and indifference. All of these moral and pastoral problems deserve something more than categorical declarations. They need a pastoral, sociological, psychological and human treatment that is more evangelical.

Number 8
The Catholic Church, which has been the great teacher of Europe for many centuries, seems to forget that this same Europe has arrived at its maturity. Our adult Europe does not wish to be treated as a child. The paternalistic style of a church "mater et magistra" is completely out of touch and no longer works today. Christians have learned to think for themselves and are no longer inclined to swallow just anything that someone else proposes.

Number 9
The most Catholic nations of the past, for example, France, "the first-born daughter of the church," or ultra-Catholic French Canada, have made a hundred and eighty degree turn and have fallen into atheism, anti-clericalism, agnosticism, and indifference. Other European nations are proceeding down the same path. We are able to state that the more a nation was dominated and protected by the church in the past, the stronger is their reaction against it today.

Number 10
The dialogue with other churches and religions is in a worrisome decline today. The great progress made over the last half century is on hold at this time. Facing this almost devastating situation, the church's leadership reacts in two ways:

1. They tend to minimize the seriousness of the situation and to console themselves by focusing on a resurgence of the most traditionalist factions and on growth in the Third World countries.

2. They appeal to their confidence in the Lord who has sustained the church for over 20 centuries and who is able to help them overcome this new crisis.

To this I respond.

Neither relying on the past nor holding on to its crumbs will solve the problems of today and tomorrow. The apparent vitality of the churches in the Third World today is misleading. It appears very probable that these new churches eventually will pass through the same crises that the old European Christianity encountered.

Modernity is irreversible and having forgotten this is why the church today finds itself in such a crisis. Vatican II tried to reverse four centuries of stagnation, but there is an impression that the church is gradually closing the doors that it opened at that time. The church has tried to direct itself backwards towards the council of Trent and Vatican I rather than forward toward Vatican III. Let's remember a statement that John Paul II repeated many times, "There is no alternative to Vatican II."

How long will we continue playing the politics of the ostrich hiding our heads in the sand? How long will we avoid looking things in the face? How long will we continue turning our back and rejecting every criticism rather than seeing it as a chance for renewal? How long will we continue to postpone a reform that has been neglected for too long a time?

Only by looking forward and not backward will the church fulfill its mission to be the light of the world, salt of the earth, and leaven in the dough. Nevertheless, unfortunately what we find today is that the church is the caboose of our age after having been the locomotive for centuries.

I repeat again what I said at the beginning of this letter. Time is running out! History doesn't wait especially in our era when it its rhythm flows ever more rapidly.

Any business when confronting a deficit or dysfunction examines itself immediately, bringing together a group of experts, trying to revitalize itself, and mobilizing all its energies to overcoming the crisis. Why doesn't the church do something different? Why doesn't it mobilize all its living forces to have a radical aggiornamento? Why?

Because of laziness? Lethargy? Pride? Lack of imagination? Lack of creativity? Culpable passivity in the hope that the Lord will take care of things and because the church has weathered other crises in the past.

In the Gospels, Christ warns us that "the children of darkness manage their affairs better than the children of light."

So then, what needs to be done? The Church of today has an urgent and compelling need for a three-pronged reform.

1. A theological and catechetical reform to rethink our faith and reformulate it in a coherent way for our contemporaries. A faith that has no significance and gives no meaning to life is nothing more than an ornament, a useless superstructure that eventually implodes upon itself. This is the current situation.

2. A pastoral reformulation that re-thinks from head to toe the structures inherited from the past.

3. A spiritual renewal to revitalize the mystical and to rethink the sacraments with the view of giving them an existential dimension, one that connects with life.

I would have much more to say about this. Today's church is too formal, too formalistic. One has the impression that the institution suffocates its charisma, and in the end what one finds is purely external stability, a superficial honesty, a kind of facade. Don't we run the risk that Jesus will describe us as the "whitened seplechres"?

In conclusion, I suggest convoking a general synod at the level of the universal church in which all Christians would participate-Catholics and others-to examine with openness and clarity the issues raised above and their ramifications.

Such a synod would last three years and would conclude with a general assembly-let's avoid the word council-which would synthesize the results of this exploration and draw its conclusions.

I end, Holy Father, by asking your pardon for my outspoken boldness and I ask for your paternal blessing. Let me also tell you that in these days I live in your company thanks to your extraordinary book, Jesus of Nazareth, which is the focus of my spiritual reading and daily meditation.

With the utmost affection in the Lord,

Henri Boulad

The 30th Anniversary of Oscar Romero's Martyrdom

2010-03-24T10:22:00.003-05:00

This video clip isn't a bad piece, but it was wholly inappropriate for Msgr. Fernando Saenz Lacalle to be commenting on Oscar Romero. He was like the antithesis of Romero during his tenure as archbishop.

Bravo to Bart Stupak!

2010-03-21T22:41:00.004-05:00

And to the other Pro-Life Democrats who helped put the Health Care Bill over the top

I've always felt convinced that Pro-Life Democrats could make a great contribution to this country if only given half a chance. I've argued the case here long, often, and in loneliness, and it's great to see something so momentuous finally come to fruition out of it.

It's also great to see Catholic laymen like him and several others step up and be heroes when the hierarchy from the Pope to the bishops on down have filled us with so much embarassment and humiliation lately.

Kudos also go to President Obama, for having the courage to promise to sign this executive order, and for having the guts, along with Nancy Pelosi, to fight this thing through when the Scott Brown election made it look like it was going to be impossible.

A Darwinist Against Social Darwinism: II

2010-03-16T18:19:00.026-05:00

Frans de Waal straightens out Milton Friedman, Enron's Jeff Skilling, and Richard Dawkins

In Part I I wrote about primatologist Frans de Waal's campaign to make more people aware of the origins of empathy in nature and to consider how this knowledge might benefit society. When discussing "nature" and "human nature" he stresses the importance of knowing the difference between Darwinism and Social Darwinism, with the latter being an inaccurate caricature of the former. In the video I embedded in the Part I post he says:

The thing that I'm reacting to strongly is that conservatives in the US try to present society as an imitation of nature, like "nature is a struggle for life, nature is a process of competition, and we need to mimic that in society..." and I'm not convinced that nature is like that, first of all, and I'm not convinced that what nature does needs to be mimiced in society... And my argument would rather be that we have a lot of cooperative and empathic and nicer tendencies, and if that's part of human nature then that needs to be represented in society as well. We need to build a society that has room for that and is not just based on competition.

A ton of people write about science, evolution and ethics these days. So why do I find him enjoyable to read and listen to? In the prologue to his 2001 book The Ape and the Sushi Master he wrote:

My personal prejudices probably shine through, even though I may be less good at spotting them than some of my readers. I come from the southern part of the Netherlands. Since I was not born in the actual province of Holland, I rarely refer to my country by this name. The cruel hand of the Spanish Inquisition, which in the sixteenth century reached all the way to Flanders and my part of the Netherlands, put a halt to the Reformation that brought Calvinism to the North. The South stayed Roman Catholic, and as a result my upbringing instilled less fear of God's wrath than is typical of the rest of Northern Europe. We have street carnivals (not unlike those in New Orleans), and in general we pride ourselves on a certain joie de vivre.

I knew it! Just listening to him and reading his work I could tell he had Catholic roots. We can always tell one of our own, even when they've lapsed or strayed.

That might not seem like an important point to make when it is clear that he's not a religious man at all, but I do think it makes him inherently different from the Dawkins/Hitchens/Harris types who throw a lot more heat than light around the public discourse on these issues. He clearly has a host of different sensibilities.

He has a strongly Catholic sense of ethics whether he still realizes it or not.

I take his point about the Spanish Inquisition, and of course our current nightmare just seems to go on and on, but I think one of the great tragedies of history is that the so-called Reformation largely put an end to the allegorization of certain parts of the Bible, and it leapfrogged back past the Catholic Church's attempted synthesis between faith and reason (using both Aristotle and Renaissance Humanism). It fell backward into dreary Augustinian obscurantism and the rejection of reason. Galileo and Cardinal Robert Bellarmine were great friends. If it wasn't for Luther, Calvin & Co., Galileo probably would have been hailed as a hero instead of being censured, but the Catholic Church was afraid of being seen as "soft on the Bible." It retreated behind fortress-like walls.

On the Freakonomics blog Frans de Waal wrote:

When I came to this country, over twenty-five years ago, I was amazed that creationism was still taken seriously, and assumed that it would blow over. It never did, of course. I can’t help but look at it as a left-over of a medieval mind-set unresponsive to overwhelming counter-evidence.

At the same time, I must say that I don’t think the recent wave of God-questioning rants have helped much. They have polarized the issue, whereas in my mind it is eminently possible to look at religion as a collective value system and at science as telling us how the physical world operates. Even though I am not religious myself, I think the conflict between science and religion is unnecessary and overblown.

That's refreshing. It's an attitude I greatly appreciate, coming from an evolutionary biologist.

Anyway, did you know that convicted Enron felon Jeffrey Skilling, who was found guilty on 19 counts of fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and lying to auditors, is seeking to have his conviction overturned by the Supreme Court? What nerve.

Skilling was a big fan of Richard Dawkins, and found justification in his own selfish cutthroat ways in Dawkins' writings on nature and evolution.

For this very sort of reason Frans de Waal takes strong exception to the language Dawkins uses to describe evolution, and for his part, Dawkins criticizes what he considers de Waal's tendency to be "poetic" when describing the behavior of animals.

In the excerpts below, de Waal examines the role of economics in society... Economics is, after all, a social science, not the "science of money." He also gives us his take on Milton Friedman, Skilling and Dawkins...

Does an economy serve society, or is it the other way around?

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant saw as little value for human kindness as former U.S. vice president Dick Cheney did in energy conservation. Cheney mocked conservation as “a sign of personal virtue” that, sadly, wouldn’t do the planet any good. Kant praised compassion as “beautiful” yet considered it irrelevant to a virtuous life. Who needs tender feelings if duty is all that matters?

Celebrated economist Milton Friedman claimed that “few trends could so very undermine the foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.” Friedman thus offered an ideology that puts people last.

Even if Friedman were right in theory about the connection between money and freedom, in practice money corrupts. All too often it leads to exploitation, injustice, and rampant dishonesty. Given its colossal fraud, the Enron Corporation’s sixty-four-page “Code of Ethics” now seems as fictional as the safety manual of the Titanic. In the past decade, every advanced nation has had major business scandals, and in every case executives have managed to shake the foundations of their society precisely by following Friedman’s advice.

Enron and the Selfish Gene

Outside a hip restaurant I finally met my celebrity. My friends had promised that this place was frequented by Hollywood stars, and indeed when darkness fell in the middle of dinner, and we spilled out onto the street, I found myself next to a cigarette-smoking movie idol whom I chatted with about this and that, and how our food must be getting cold. The encounter took place thanks to one of those rolling blackouts that struck California in 2000. Fifteen minutes later everyone was back at their table, back to normal, but of course what had just happened was extraordinary.

No, I don’t mean meeting the star, but witnessing the wonders of unrestrained capitalism, all thanks to Enron, the Texas-based energy company that had developed innovative ways of tweaking the market and creating artificial power shortages so that prices would soar. Never mind that the blackouts posed serious risks for people on respirators or in elevators. Social responsibility just wasn’t part of Enron’s mindset. They played by Friedman’s rules but were inspired by an unexpected additional source that came straight out of the world of biology. The company’s CEO, Jeff Skilling—now in prison—was a great fan of Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, and deliberately tried to mimic nature by instigating cutthroat competition within his company.

Skilling set up a peer review committee known as “Rank & Yank.” It ranked employees on a 1—5 scale of representing the best (1) or worst (5), and gave the boot to everyone ranked 5. Up to 20 percent of the employees were axed every year, but not without having been humiliated on a website featuring their portraits. They were first sent to “Siberia”—meaning that they had two weeks to find another position within the company. If they didn’t, they were shown the door. The thinking behind Skilling’s committee was that the human species has only two fundamental drives: greed and fear. This obviously turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. People were perfectly willing to slit others’ throats to survive within Enron's environment, resulting in a corporate atmosphere marked by appalling dishonesty within and ruthless exploitation outside the company. It eventually led to Enron’s implosion in 2001.

The book of nature is like the Bible: Everyone reads into it what they want, from tolerance to intolerance, and from altruism to greed. Its good to realize though that if biologists never stop talking of competition, this doesn’t mean they advocate it, and if they call genes selfish this doesn’t mean that genes actually are. Genes can’t be any more “selfish” than a river can be “angry,” or sun rays “loving.” Genes are little chunks of DNA. At most, they are “self-promoting,” because successful genes help their carriers spread more copies of themselves. Like many before him Skilling had fallen hook, line, and sinker for the selfish-gene metaphor, thinking that if our genes are selfish then we must be selfish, too. This is not necessarily what Dawkins meant, though, as became clear again during an actual debate that we had in a tower overlooking my chimpanzees.

As brief background one needs to know that Dawkins and I had been critical of each other in print. He had said that I was taking poetic license with regard to animal kindness while I had chided him for coining a metaphor prone to be misunderstood. The usual academic bickering, perhaps, but serious enough that I feared some frost during our encounter at the Yerkes field station. Dawkins visited in connection with the production of a TV series, The Genius of Charles Darwin.

The producers arrived ahead of him to set up a “spontaneous” encounter in which Dawkins would drive up to the door, step out of his van, walk toward me, shake my hand, and warmly greet me before we’d walk off together to see the primates. We did all of this as if it were the first time—even though we’d met before. To break the ice, I told him about the epic drought in Georgia, and how our governor had just led a prayer vigil on the steps of the state capitol to make sure we’d get some rain. This cheered up the staunch atheist, and we laughed at the marvelous coincidence that the vigil had been planned as soon as the weatherman had announced rain.

Our tower debate was frosty indeed, but only because it was one of those unusually chilly days in Georgia. With Dawkins unselfishly tossing fruits at the apes below, we quickly settled on common ground, which wasn’t too hard given our shared academic background. I have no problems calling genes “selfish” so long as it’s understood that this says nothing about the actual motives of humans or animals, and Dawkins agreed that all sorts of behavior, including acts of genuine kindness, may be produced by genes selected to benefit their carriers. In short, we agreed on a separation between what drives evolution and what drives actual behavior that is about as well recognized in biology as is the separation of church and state outside Georgia.

In Part III, Frans de Waal examines the differences between the USA and Europe, and the relative merits of each.

A Darwinist Against Social Darwinism: I

2010-03-14T17:41:00.023-05:00

Not By Competition Alone. Frans de Waal on the Origins of Altruism and Empathy

As I've stated in earlier posts, I see no particular reason for us to pit science against religion. Some people consider that a self-deluding dodge, but I really don't have a problem with Darwinism. I have no problem accepting the Theory of Evolution, although I do have strong concerns that if left philosophically unchecked, if misconstrued or narrowly construed, if taken exclusively as the basis for ethics and morality, it can lead to Social Darwinism and eventually towards Eugenics. We've seen ample evidence of this within the past 150 years.

In this present age full of apologists and polemicists I find Frans de Waal a breath of fresh air. He mitigates my fears towards Darwinism to a certain extent. If only there were more spokesmen like him coming from that side.

De Waal is a primatologist who teaches at Emory University, where he also heads up the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. I first became aware of this good-natured Dutchman last year when I read his book Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. In that work he presented his thesis, based upon his long study of primates, that morality is not limited to humans alone and that certain traits we share with other primates such as kindness, altruism, and empathy have biological origins built upon the principles of natural selection. In the book he also takes to task and debates several philosophers and evolutionary psychologists such as Robert Wright, Philip Kitcher, and Peter Singer, who tend to argue (I think) that de Waal anthropomorphizes animals, and that what he (and we) call morality and altruism is really self-serving behavior at its very root, and that our selfish genes in a sense "trick" us into thinking we are doing something good for someone else when we are really just looking after ourselves. In one particular chapter I thought he did a terrific job arguing against the bizarre Peter Singer, an ardent advocate of animal rights, that animals don't have "rights" per se, but that people should find it imperative to treat them ethically and with dignity in any case.

This past year de Waal has expanded on his general theme in The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society. Following a decade of war, terror, the failure of various institutions and the ruination of the Western financial sector due to greed, speculation, and deregulation, he ponders the lessons we humans might want to take from nature and from evolution, as properly understood, rather than improperly understood.

I know he's a scientist, a skeptic in matters of faith, an agnostic at the very least and probably an atheist, but I appreciate his tone and his irenicism. I have a feeling that he, as one of a large Dutch family of seven children if I recall correctly, is willing to engage with people of faith and good will quite differently from the likes of evolutionary fundamentalists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens,who've inherited that specifically English strand of virulently knee-jerk anti-Catholicism, which, if my perusal of the comboxes attached to recent articles on Catholic topics in The Times and The Guardian indicates, is very much alive and well there.

An excerpt from The Age of Empathy:

We are group animals: highly cooperative, sensitive to injustice, sometimes warmongering, but mostly peace loving. A society that ignores these tendencies can’t be optimal. True, we are also incentive-driven animals, focused on status, territory; and food security, so that any society that ignores those tendencies can’t be optimal, either. There is both a social and a selfish side to our species. But since the latter is, at least in the West, the dominant assumption, my focus will be on the former: the role of empathy and social connectedness.

There is exciting new research about the origins of altruism and fairness in both ourselves and other animals. For example, if one gives two monkeys hugely different rewards for the same task, the one who gets the short end of the stick simply refuses to perform. In our own species, too, individuals reject income if they feel the distribution is unfair. Since any income should beat none at all, this means that both monkeys and people fail to follow the profit principle to the letter. By protesting against unfairness their behavior supports both the claim that incentives matter and that there is a natural dislike of injustice.

Yet in some ways we seem to be moving ever closer to a society with no solidarity whatsoever, one in which a lot of people can expect the short end of the stick. To reconcile this trend with good old Christian values, such as care for the sick and poor, may seem hopeless. But one common strategy is to point the finger at the victims. If the poor can be blamed for being poor, everyone else is off the hook. Thus, a year after Katrina, Newt Gingrich, a prominent conservative politician called for an investigation into the “failure of citizenship” of people who had been unsuccessful escaping from the hurricane.

Those who highlight individual freedom often regard collective interests as a romantic notion, something for sissies and communists. They prefer an every-man-for-himself logic. For example, instead of spending money on levees that protect an entire region, why not let everyone take care of their own safety? A new company in Florida is doing just that, renting out seats on private jets to fly people out of places threatened by hurricanes. This way, those who can afford it won’t need to drive out at five miles per hour with the rest of the populace.

Every society has to deal with this me-first attitude. I see it play out every day. And here I am not referring to people, but to chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, where I work. At our field station northeast of Atlanta, we house chimps in large outdoor corrals, sometimes providing them with shareable food, such as watermelons. Most of the apes want to be the first to put their hands on our food, because once they have it, it’s rarely taken away by others. There actually exists respect of ownership, so that even the lowest-ranking female is allowed to keep her food by the most dominant male. Food possessors are often approached by others with an outstretched hand (a gesture that is also the universal way humans ask for a handout). The apes beg and whine, literally whimpering in the face of the other. If the possessor doesn’t give in, beggars may throw a fit, screaming and rolling around as if the world is coming to an end.

My point is that there is both ownership and sharing. In the end, usually within twenty minutes, all of the chimpanzees in the group will have some food. Owners share with their best buddies and family, who in turn share with their best buddies and family. It is a rather peaceful scene even though there is also quite a bit of jostling for position. I still remember a camera crew filming a sharing session and the cameraman turning to me and saying, “I should show this to my kids. They could learn from it.”

So, don’t believe anyone who says that since nature is based on a struggle for life, we need to live like this as well. Many animals survive not by eliminating each other or keeping everything for themselves, but by cooperating and sharing. This applies most definitely to pack hunters, such as wolves or killer whales, but also to our closest relatives, the primates. In a study done at Tai National Park, in Ivory Coast, chimpanzees took care of group mates wounded by leopards; they licked their mates’ blood, carefully removed dirt, and waved away flies that came near the wounds. They protected injured companions and slowed down during travel in order to accommodate them. All of this makes perfect sense, given that chimpanzees live in groups for a reason, the same way wolves and humans are group animals for a reason. If man is wolf to man, he is so in every sense, not just the negative one. We would not be where we are today had our ancestors been socially aloof.

What we need is a complete overhaul of assumptions about human nature. Too many economists and politicians model human society on the perpetual struggle they believe exists in nature, but which is a mere projection. Like magicians, they first throw their ideological prejudices into the hat of nature, then pull them out by their very ears to show how much nature agrees with them. It’s a trick we have fallen for for too long. Obviously, competition is part of the picture, but humans can’t live by competition alone.

In Part II, Frans de Waal will straighten out Milton Friedman, Enron's Jeff Skilling, and Richard Dawkins.

American Nō Theatre

2010-02-21T07:37:00.003-05:00

"Whatever it is, I'm against it!"

Recently I've become aware of Bloggingheads.tv, which features videochats of sharp people from different walks of like just talkin' about stuff.

Here's a segment of a long conversation between Robert Wright (author of The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, and The Evolution of God) and Washington Post writer Joel Achenbach (author of Why Things Are & Why Things Aren't, and The Grand Idea: George Washington's Potomac and the Race to the West) discussing what they call "the Audacity of Nope" and an "againstness epidemic."

The topic is the reaction and resistance to Obama's healthcare reform process, characterized as "Obamacare" and Socialized Medicine even though it was hardly radical in nature and didn't even present a single-payer system in the end (although I wish it did). In their view, there is no longer any tolerance for the ugliness associated with the deal-making and "sausage-making" of government. Instead of allowing for things to get done, the system now only allows us to mobilize against what we don't want.

Are they just Obama supporters carping and complaining, or are they onto something? Does this Senate supermajority system, which allows a tyranny of the minority, mean perpetual gridlock and hopelessly broken government?

Senator Quincy Adams Wagstaff explains...

The original from Horsefeathers (1932)

What Makes for Catholic Lite?

2010-02-14T22:02:00.007-05:00

For that matter, what makes for Taliban Catholicism?

In his book The Courage to be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church, George Weigel famously came up with the term "Catholic Lite" while saying:

The answer to the current crisis will not be found in Catholic Lite... It will only be found in a classic Catholicism — a Catholicism with the courage to be countercultural, a Catholicism that has reclaimed the wisdom of the past in order to face the corruption of the present and create a renewed future, a Catholicism that risks the high adventure of fidelity... There is little in Catholic Lite theology that poses a serious countercultural challenge to the spirit of the age. Catholic Lite is a soft Catholicism, understanding and sympathetic. Being understanding and sympathetic are, of course, virtues. But as G. K. Chesterton pointed out long ago, the world is filled with old Christian virtues ‘gone mad.’ When a religious tradition is profoundly challenged, as Christianity is by modernity, more than vices are set loose in the world, Chesterton wrote: ‘The virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more damage.’ That is precisely what has happened in the culture of dissent.

John Allen, writing recently in the National Catholic Reporter, had a thought-provoking take on this. In his column A 'Dallas experiment' in Orthodoxy and Openness he mentioned his coining of the term "Taliban Catholicism" and the criticism he has taken for it. That criticism continued after that column. I share the feeling of many conservatives that the term is hyperbolic, insulting, and not very useful, but what I found particularly interesting was his observation on how he sees the problem of "Catholic Lite" on the right and "Taliban Catholicism" on the left:

In fact, there's a right-wing form of Catholicism Lite that's just as watered-down and sold out to secularism as its kissing cousin on the left. In the States, it can take the form of a country club Republican Catholicism -- untroubled by the inequities of global free-market capitalism, quite at home with anti-immigrant rhetoric, the death penalty, and the use of armed force.

At least in my mind, the defining feature of "Catholicism Lite" is not a liberal or conservative outlook, but rather taking one's cues from secular culture rather than the faith. No ideological camp has a monopoly on that.

Similarly, there's a Taliban instinct on the Catholic left that can be just as noxious as its right-wing version. It generally includes paranoia about almost any exercise of authority in the church, coupled with derision of any attempt to defend traditional Catholic thought, speech or practice -- a liberal "hermeneutic of suspicion" that can easily shade off into rage. Try telling a certain kind of Catholic liberal that Benedict XVI isn't actually "rolling back the clock" on Vatican II, for example, and you'll want to duck and cover.

I see where Allen is coming from, but I wonder about that last part. I get what is behind his critique of liberals and I understand the rationale that lies behind the claims for a "hermeneutic of continuity" and a reform of the reform" but there are plenty of centrists and conservatives who think that Benedict is "turning back the clock" too. In fact, many conservatives openly celebrate it.

Squawkin’ Rich Dawkins Weighs in on Haiti and Christianity

2010-01-30T12:53:00.012-05:00

Is Pat Robertson the Real Christian?

Every now and then there are writers on post-modern comparative religion such as Karen Armstrong (The Case for God) who prevail upon the evolutionary biologist and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins to cool down his rhetoric a bit towards people of religious faith, arguing that there is too much heat being generated already in a world full of colliding fundamentalisms. He tries to tone down it down for a while, but he is what he is, and eventually he lets fly again.

Recently, in a response to Pat Robertson’s statement indicating that the Haitians were being punished by God for having made a pact with the devil, Dawkins came out swinging hard with both fists, not so much at fundamentalists like Robertson, whom he credits for being a real and unabashedly honest Christian, but at Christian moderates, whom he accuses of dissembling and duplicity.

His article Haiti and the Hypocrisy of Christian Theology is hard-hitting and lays down a provocative indictment and challenge towards all Christians. For all believers, it’s certainly worth reading in its entirety. Is he right? Are people like Pat Robertson the real Christians?

We know what caused the catastrophe in Haiti. It was the bumping and grinding of the Caribbean Plate rubbing up against the North American Plate: a force of nature, sin-free and indifferent to sin, un-premeditated, unmotivated, supremely unconcerned with human affairs or human misery.

There are plenty of Christians who acknowledge this. I did so myself, along with a few commenters here not two posts ago. The world is built to change via the forces unleashed by volcanoes and earthquakes. They were essential for life itself to flourish to begin with, and shifting continental plates and volcanoes actually provide a means for the world to recycle and renew itself. As we learn more about these things it forces us to reconsider how we view God and our relationship with each other and with creation itself. It doesn't necessarily force us to abandon faith.

The religious mind, however, restlessly seeks human meaning in the blind happenings of nature. As with the Indonesian tsunami, which was blamed on loose sexual morals in tourist bars; as with Hurricane Katrina, which was attributed to divine revenge on the entire city of New Orleans for harboring a lesbian comedian, and as with other disasters going back to the famous Lisbon earthquake and beyond, so Haiti's tragedy must be payback for human sin. The Rev. Pat Robertson sees the hand of God in the earthquake, wreaking terrible retribution for a pact that the long-dead ancestors of today's Haitians made with the devil, to help rid them of their French masters.

Needless to say, milder-mannered faith-heads are falling over themselves to disown Pat Robertson, just as they disowned those other pastors, evangelists, missionaries and mullahs at the time of the earlier disasters.

What hypocrisy.

Loathsome as Robertson's views undoubtedly are, he is the Christian who stands squarely in the Christian tradition. The agonized theodiceans who see suffering as an intractable 'mystery', or who 'see God' in the help, money and goodwill that is now flooding into Haiti , or (most nauseating of all) who claim to see God 'suffering on the cross' in the ruins of Port-au-Prince, those faux-anguished hypocrites are denying the centrepiece of their own theology. It is the obnoxious Pat Robertson who is the true Christian here.

Where was God in Noah's flood? He was systematically drowning the entire world, animal as well as human, as punishment for 'sin'. Where was God when Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed with fire and brimstone? He was deliberately barbecuing the citizenry, lock stock and barrel, as punishment for 'sin'. Dear modern, enlightened, theologically sophisticated Christian, your entire religion is founded on an obsession with 'sin', with punishment and with atonement. Where do you find the effrontery to condemn Pat Robertson, you who have signed up to the obnoxious doctrine that the central purpose of Jesus' incarnation was to have himself tortured as a scapegoat for the 'sins' of all mankind, past, present and future, beginning with the 'sin' of Adam, who (as any modern theologian well knows) never even existed?

True, but that’s just one model of atonement. Loren Rosson, a Unitarian, does a fine job here (a much better job, in fact, than many Trinitarians would be capable of) of explaining how biblical texts can support not only this model of atonement, but several others besides (martyrdom, sacrifice, scapegoat, and ransom redemption).

Just a note regarding Dawkins' accusation of hypocrisy. It has to be taken seriously, there is certainly plenty of hypocrisy to go around, but he ought to consider if he’s a bit guilty of his own. How delicious it must be for him to throw an indictment against all Christians with his catalog of God’s genocidal misdeeds as described in the Old Testament. If Dawkins’ examples are to be culled from the Books of the Torah, why doesn’t he hew to his own standards of intellectual honesty and consistency by hurling his accusation against Judaism? Would he dare to? I tend to think not, because he knows the consequences of doing such a thing. How much safer it is from his perspective to attack Christianity instead.

To quote the President of one theological seminary, writing in these very pages:
"The earthquake in Haiti, like every other earthly disaster, reminds us that creation groans under the weight of sin and the judgment of God. This is true for every cell in our bodies, even as it is for the crust of the earth at every point on the globe."
You nice, middle-of-the-road theologians and clergymen, be-frocked and bleating in your pulpits, you disclaim Pat Robertson's suggestion that the Haitians are paying for a pact with the devil. But you worship a god-man who - as you tell your congregations even if you don't believe it yourself - 'cast out devils'. You even believe (or you don't disabuse your flock when they believe) that Jesus cured a madman by causing the 'devils' in him to fly into a herd of pigs and stampede them over a cliff. Charming story, well calculated to uplift and inspire the Sunday School and the Infant Bible Class. Pat Robertson may spout evil nonsense, but he is a mere amateur at that game. Just read your own Bible. Pat Robertson is true to it. But you?

Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for 'sin' - or suffering as 'atonement' for it? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick, sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up.

You may weep now too, Mr. Dawkins, but where have you been up until now? You make an ostentatious donation and urge your atheist followers to do the same in order to prove that you are as compassionate as the religious, but where have you been and what is your answer to evil, but nothing?

I reiterate what Sean Michael Winters recently wrote

My friend Christopher Hitchens says that the suffering of one child should force us to question the existence of God. And so it should. But, it is more than a little ironic that Hitchens’ robustly secular worldview does not require anything in the way of solidarity with the suffering of a child and the religious worldview he questions not only demands such solidarity, it already had people on the ground before the earthquake. The Church’s concern and care for the poor does not need a headline to become manifest, it is on-going, and has been from that day when the Master fed the hungry multitudes with five loaves and two fish until today.

I’m not really trying to be confrontational here. I actually do have some respect for flat-out atheists, even the new radical variety we see in people like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and PZ Myers, etc… At least they come by their skepticism honestly. They trust in empiricism and nothing else, and that’s understandable . Arguments crafted around the Bible, apostolic witness and succession, Aristotle’s First Cause and Unmoved Mover, Anselm’s Ontological Argument, and Pascal’s Wager are unconvincing and unpersuasive for them. OK. Fair enough. In addition, it has to be admitted that theodicy is certainly a problem for Christianity. It’s always been there, it’s nothing new, but at least we grapple with it. One thing I’ve noticed about the new atheists, however, is that no one looks to them for comfort or for an explanation when their children die. They have none to offer in either case.

When he posted this column on his website, he got plenty of accolades and “attaboys” from his admirers, and some counter-arguments from religious believers, but of the thousands and thousands of comments that rolled in I appreciated this humble and cautionary note I happened to notice that came from a humanist, a certain Luis Cayetano:

Good article, but there is an important qualification that needs to be made: the Haitian disaster wasn't simply the result of plate tectonics, it was also the result of economic fundamentalism. A similar earthquake that struck California killed 63 people. In Haiti, they've registered 170,000 bodies in Port-au-Prince. We should be asking why Haiti doesn't have any building codes, why its government isn't empowered to make sovereign economic decisions on behalf of its people, and why so many people live in slums in the first place.

The religious exploitation of the tragedy should be treated with the contempt it deserves (this is of course something that shouldn't even need mentioning), but let's not miss the most important factor here: how WE might have contributed to this disaster. We already know that Robertson is a sorry excuse for a human being. That's easy to acknowledge, and easy to deal with in the sense that it doesn't provoke any cognitive dissonance within us. What's harder is to challenge doctrines that WE'RE responsible for allowing to be perpetuated and implemented. If we miss the elephant in the room, then we effectively endorse doctrines just as pernicious and harmful as anything being spouted by Robertson, and our critiques of Robertson, while justified, won't be as principled as we would like to imagine. As Dawkins has said on so many occassions, ideas have consequences. Let's not overlook that when it comes to secular mythologies. If anything, we should hold ourselves to standards far higher than we would ever dream of holding religious fanatics up to, if we dare to call ourselves rationalists and humanists in the fullest sense of those terms.

Misplaced Anger and Misguided Populism

2010-01-26T18:40:00.015-05:00

The Meaning of Scott Brown

Oh, how soon we forget. Bill Moyers and Thomas Frank discuss how blame was shifted from Bush/Cheney to Obama in just one year

Said Cristina from Aosta (Northern Italy):

The Brown election ( and the voters attitude against Obama and Heath care) reminds me a Italian saying : ” Un uomo che si evira per fare dispetto alla moglie” – “A man to play a nasty trick on his wife castrates himself.”

I was going to write a post congratulating Google for standing up to the Chinese government and refusing to abide any longer by China's censoring rules once they had detected organized and coordinated hacking attempts on the gmail accounts of various Chinese dissidents. It would have been nice if they had acted earlier out of conviction; out of principles related to respect for free speech and human rights and less out of their concern about intrusions into their proprietary operating systems, but at least it's something. At least somebody is standing up to China over something.

I've been by turn both solicitous towards China as in here (in the case of their earthquake), and critical of them (as in here, here, and here). I don't get many comments on this blog, but the majority of the ones I do get these days are Chinese language spam getting bounced off of various servers in Taiwan and making its way past Blogger's word verification. I've had a couple of bad viruses on my home machine in the past year that have required me to re-install the O/S from scratch. That might explain why I’m a target for all of this, but I also find myself wondering if just a bit of it has anything to do with my content.

I wanted to congratulate Google. After the Supreme Court’s astonishing SCOTUS decision, however, which seems to equate speech with money and further solidifies the court’s dubious contention that a corporation is actually the same thing as a person, I’ve been giving second thoughts towards publishing a “Good for Google” post. After all, with their doggedly proven determination to be the dominant personal information owners & brokers in the age of cloud computing, I find myself wondering who we should fear more…. Authoritarian governments such as China’s, or corporate behemoths like Google?

I found great irony in the fact that the day after Republican Scott Brown’s winning of “the people’s seat” in Massachusetts, hailed by both him and his supporters as a victory of “the common man over special interests,” the Supreme Court, with a majority built around recent Republican appointees, voted to overturn precedent and to grant corporations and unions the right to spend unlimited funds on political campaigns. You can’t make stuff like this up. I mention the unions, toothless and insignificant as they are by virtue of the fact that they only represent 7% of the private sector workforce, because it’s the only way to get a conservative to pay any attention to this decision at all. The whole thing doesn’t seem to matter much to Brown or to the people who voted for him. It doesn’t seem to matter much to the whole Tea Party crowd in general, which is why I suspect that a lot of the so-called right-wing populism we see these days is manufactured and orchestrated rather than genuinely spontaneous.

As a blogger from Massachusetts, I suppose it would be remiss of me not to offer my take on the whole Scott Brown phenomenon. I really hadn’t paid a lot of attention to him during the tail end of 2009 because I don’t have much use for pro-choice Republicans as a rule of thumb in any case, but when I was watching Brown's acceptance speech the other night I was struck by what an intellectual lightweight he appears to be. All of this nonsense about his “available” daughters and pickup trucks... I felt like I was watching an event in Alabama. In the midst of that crowd I didn't recognize Massachusetts at all. The guy from Wrentham in the pickup truck, playing the regular-guy populist role as if he was a pipe-fitter, is a BC Law School grad who owns 5 properties, including a timeshare in Aruba.

I don't know what all of these ecstatic people think Brown is going to be able to do for them. Is he going to advocate for more of the same failed deregulatory Bush policies that were so thoroughly discredited in the financial meltdown of 2008? Sadly, I think the constant paranoiac drumbeat at FOX News has sunk into the American mindset more than I would like to admit. People in my state were cheering for the suspension of constitutional rights and the negation of the rule of law? It’s chilling, and these people have voted for another failed presidency in a time when we can least afford one.

I have to put some of the blame on the Democrats too. They raised people's hopeful expectations at the federal level and in our state too (under Deval Patrick), and failed to deliver on national health care reform despite the fact that they controlled both the White House and Congress. Now, angry people are just lashing out at whoever is in power without thinking, swinging like a gate in the wind.

I offer no defense for the Democrats. Martha Coakley ran a miserably lackadaisical, arrogant and impersonal campaign. She’s an extremely bright and competent woman, but a terrible campaigner. I’ll always have fondness and respect for her for the way she won justice for Matthew Eappen as a prosecutor against a team of dishonest defense lawyers in the Louise Woodward case (Coakley was the victim of popular anger in that instance too, and a spineless judge bowed to public pressure and set aside the verdict). Nevertheless, she couldn’t get away with arrogant remarks that revealed her as being out of touch with the public, and her suggestion that devout Catholics shouldn’t work in emergency rooms (in response to a question about conscience clauses and medical workers) was inexplicable, especially considering that her husband is a daily communicant. Is this really what the Democratic Party has come to? By Democratic Party standards, at least in Massachusetts, if someone has difficulty comprehending how two men make for a marriage he’s branded as a homophobe and a bigot, but at the same time it’s not unreasonable for Democrats to suggest that people with religious scruples shouldn’t work in emergency rooms... This is a seriously confused party that has lost its way in some key fundamental areas. It’s small wonder that so many people found it impossible to cast a vote for her even though they may have wanted to find reasons to do so.

There’s a place for populist anger. I consider myself a populist in many ways, but what frustrates me is how misplaced the anger in this country is and how misguided the trajectory of the middle class populist movement has been. Despite what was done to the country by Wall Street, middle class anger is being directed downward (towards immigrants and people receiving public assistance), not upward. Instead of being angry at people at the top who’ve rigged the game so that they have everything, the middle class is angry at powerless people who have next to nothing. They’ve also been conditioned to hold nothing but contempt for government, which does not bode well for the future of a republic.

IMHO, the biggest problem this country faces is the mass disappearance of middle class jobs as a result of technological automation and of the competitive pressures of globalization. The exodus of these jobs coupled with the effects of deregulation which created a superclass of corporate executives and financial professionals has created the largest gap in income equality we’ve seen since 1929. Bruce Judson, Senior Faculty Fellow at the Yale School of Management writes:

In 2007, the percent of total income received by the top 10% of families was 49.74%, or effectively one-half of the nation's total. This compares to 1980, when the top 10% received 34.63%, or about one-third of all income.

No republic can survive this kind of widening of income inequality without experiencing great social upheaval. Despite this, the mantra you hear at FOX News these days from libertarian apologists is how unfair it is that “40% of Americans pay no federal income taxes and that the wealthy shouldn’t be expected to keep shouldering more of the burden.” I don’t know if that statistic is correct or not, but if that many people are experiencing downward mobility to the extent that they are now eligible for earned income tax credits, it should be a cause for alarm for all of us about where we are heading, not a battle cry of resentment on the part of the wealthy.

As for my impression of Scott Brown, I have a feeling that people don’t know him as well as they think they do. The Tea Party folks are one thing, but I think a lot of social conservatives are going to be quite surprised at his views over time. As David Gibson pointed out in Politics Daily:

The political flexibility of religious conservatives in backing the pro-choice Brown certainly worked, and indeed may have put Brown over the top. But it also revealed two other realities of modern American politics.

The first is that there are Christian conservatives and there are Christian conservatives. The largely evangelical and conservative Catholic support for Brown and against health care reform contrasts sharply with the position of progressive evangelicals and the influential Catholic bishops of the United States, who have declared universal health care a "pro-life issue" and who were ready to throw their support behind Obamacare if, as was possible, it included sufficient bars on abortion funding. That is a gap wide enough to drive a health care bill through, though Democrats have never figured out how to exploit it.

The second is that the same powerful forces that carried Brown to victory -- and that many religious conservatives embraced in their zeal to block Obama -- often pay little heed to moral issues like abortion and gay marriage and stem cell research. Tea Party conservatism is at its core about unemployment and economic anxiety and anger and throwing out the rascals, whoever they are, or even if they are on the side of the angels. That could come back to haunt social conservatives.

Scott Brown seems like an affable enough fellow, and the following might seem like needless ad hominem, but I have a persistent feeling that Scott Brown is really pretty much all about Scott Brown.

I could be wrong. He could surprise me, but with the nude Cosmo shoot in 1982, his shallow frat-boy kind of remarks in Cosmo at the time, the marriage to the popular local news personality, the daughter on American Idol, the triathlons, etc… I just get the distinct impression that this is an extremely narcissistic man who craves attention. Then again, he wouldn’t be the first such senator by a long shot.

By the way, Scott Brown isn’t alone in that family for having posed for provocative shots. His wife, the extremely professional and impressive Boston newsreporter Gail Huff, was in a 1980s Digney Fignus rock video – The Girl with the Curious Hand. Here it is, just for kicks (click image).

Prayers and Help for Haiti

2010-01-13T18:22:00.009-05:00

Starting last Fall, my son has had the exceedingly good fortune to have a chance to play for a club soccer team that is run by the New England Revolution midfielder Shalrie Joseph. He's great at working with kids, and so are his coaches. Many of the coaches and staff associated with the club are from Haiti.

As more and more reports come in, we are seeing the horrific consequences emerging from Haiti as a result of the earthquake that struck this week. The scope of the destruction is enormous and the death toll may reach into the tens of thousands.

It took some of the coaches a long time to get any news out of Haiti, but as of today we now know that they've lost family members. Please join me in praying not only for them and their families, but for the thousands and thousands of people who are suffering in Haiti from this tragedy.

Ways to help:

Doctors without Borders. Hit Donate, choose ecards and tributes; choose donate online; and under tribute information type Shalrie Joseph SC Lions (If you write 'Shalrie Joseph SC Lions' for the tribute, they will ensure all donations go to Haiti).

Also, see America magazine:

Ways to Help

More Ways to Help in Haiti: JRS

How to Help in Haiti

Michael Sean Winters writes On Suffering:

On mornings like this, only the tears flow easily. Thoughts and words grapple with the enormity of a tragedy so devastating. Three of the four horsemen of the apocalypse have made their grim way to Haiti – War is busy elsewhere – and yet, already, we discern a fifth horseman on the horizon, Chaos, and know that he may bring the most evil and be the most difficult to overcome...

My friend Christopher Hitchens says that the suffering of one child should force us to question the existence of God. And so it should. But, it is more than a little ironic that Hitchens’ robustly secular worldview does not require anything in the way of solidarity with the suffering of a child and the religious worldview he questions not only demands such solidarity, it already had people on the ground before the earthquake. The Church’s concern and care for the poor does not need a headline to become manifest, it is on-going, and has been from that day when the Master fed the hungry multitudes with five loaves and two fish until today. Still, Hitchens’ question cannot be dismissed by good works. Why is there this new, acute suffering in a land where suffering was already chronic?

There is no answer to the question of suffering...

Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete ... spoke about the mystery of suffering. He warned us not to try and seek answers to our suffering lest we become like Job’s friends. They, too, tried to explain to Job why he suffered and, at the end of the story, God upbraids them for this. He told us that only those who love suffer, that only a heart that is open is capable of breaking, and so the mystery is not suffering, the mystery is love. In the end, we are not called to understand suffering nor to explain it, but to embrace it as the price of love.

Today, let us embrace the suffering we feel in our hearts and the much greater suffering we see in the streets of Haiti. Let us turn our prayers to God, not in the manner of Job’s friends, but in the manner of the Mother of God, silently standing at the foot of the Cross... In a word, let us not be crippled by the suffering we see but let us find ways to love these Haitian neighbors in this dreadful hour. The mystery is not suffering. The mystery is love.

Christmas 2009

2009-12-22T23:15:00.006-05:00

The Star of Bethlehem, by Edward Burne-Jones (1890)

Folk say, a wizard to a northern king
At Christmas-tide such wondrous things did show,
That through one window men beheld the spring,
And through another saw the summer glow,
And through a third the fruited vines a-row,
While still, unheard, but in its wonted way,
Piped the drear wind of that December day.

--From Prologue of the Earthly Paradise, by William Morris

The Christmas Spirit

2009-12-21T17:32:00.005-05:00

Modern Warfare 2 and PTSD

Not to be all holier-than-thou and all, and I certainly know that not all gamers confuse fantasy with reality, but is anyone else troubled by the fact that Call of Duty's Modern Warfare 2 is the highest selling video game in Europe and the USA this Christmas Season, even beating out FIFA 10, even though soccer is the world's most widely followed sport? Is this really Christmas fare...?

I guess the main reason I find it troubling is because there are soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq who are doing their fourth, and even fifth tours of duty. The brunt and burden of this war is being placed upon the shoulders of a small set of families while the rest of the nation has been asked to make no sacrifice whatsoever. Moreover, the realistic action portayed in MW2 is precisely the kind of thing, which, when it occurs in reality, afflicts our troops with PTSD. It reminds me of paintball weekend-warriors who would never dream of actually enlisting themselves. I'm sorry, I'm not anti-gaming or anti-escapism, but I think there's something obscene about this kind of thing while there's an actual war going on.

From Time magazine, on December 14th, A Mounting Suicide Rate Prompts an Army Response:

The recently released figure for November show that 12 soldiers are suspected of taking their own lives, bringing to 147 the total suicides for 2009, the highest since the Army began keeping track in 1980. Last year the Army had 140 suicides.

Although Army officials don't blame the spike on repeated deployments to war zones, evidence is mounting to the contrary. Only about a third of Army suicides happen in war zones, officials note, and another third are among personnel who had never deployed. But that means two-thirds of Army suicides have deployed, many returning home with mental scars that make them prone to take their own lives, the Army's No. 2 officer said last week...

Nearly 1 in 5 soldiers — more than 300,000 — comes home from the wars reporting symptoms of PTSD. Army officials also acknowledge that substance abuse, fueled by repeated combat tours, and a war-created shortage of mental-health professionals, contribute to mental ills that can lead to suicide...

Chiarelli, the Army's top suicide fighter, finds the challenge daunting. "This is horrible," the Army vice chief of staff said recently. "The challenge of suicides," added the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, "is without a doubt the toughest that I have had to tackle in 37-plus years in the Army."

Chiarelli has singled out abuse of alcohol and prescription drugs by soldiers as a mental-health issue that can lead to suicide. "I think there's a link to substance abuse in some of the issues we're seeing," Chiarelli said last month. A recent Army study shows that the percentage of soldiers in Afghanistan taking antidepressants and other mental-health drugs nearly tripled — from 3.5% to 9.8% — between their first and third deployments.

The Army's corps of substance-abuse counselors is hundreds short of the number of trained personnel needed. "I have been pounding the system to say we have got to sit down and determine what we need after eight years of war," Chiarelli said. That shortage has made it tougher "to handle what I think is a higher rate of substance abuse today than eight years ago." Why is it higher? "I think it's only natural you're going to see that as soldiers come back [from war], you know, with the dwell time that they have [before returning to war], that we're going to have a higher rate." Last week, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said pressure on the Army means that for the next two years, soldiers will continue to ship off to their next combat tour without sufficient rest at home.

The Hidden Front - Combat PTSD

Today's Boston Herald cover story:

911 on video game obsession

Prof: Games are fun, but play down pain of warfare

Oil Well Plug

2009-12-09T15:33:00.004-05:00

Exactly two years ago I put up a post about peak oil and the ramifications that are likely to result from reaching it.

I mentioned my good friend Joe in that post, and now I'd like to put in a plug for his new blog. Based in Madrid, Joe is now writing about this topic in Visions of Another Time - an exploration of peak oil and its repercussions for tomorrow. If you're interested in what all this means in practical terms, and also what the impact of the falling US dollar is going to be, this blog will be a good one to keep an eye on.

They ain't makin' many Jett Rinks anymore... Jimmy Dean in Giant

A Bit of Reciprocity Would Have Helped...

2009-12-07T17:24:00.021-05:00

As much as I hate to admit it, I think the Swiss referendum that put a constitutional ban on the new construction of Islamic minarets on mosques may have been reasonable.

First, a story from around these parts... As you head eastbound towards Boston on Route 2, the highway begins to rise steeply shortly after you've crossed Interstate 95, and it hits its apex at a point in Belmont where the vast panorama of Boston and Cambridge suddenly appears before you as the rustic woods and ponds of Concord and beyond recede behind... Right at the crest of the hill stands an enormous Mormon Temple, a massive grey stone edifice with a towering steeple crowned by an enormous sculpture of the angel Gabriel blowing his trumpet.

It positively dwarfs everything else in the area. A much smaller Lutheran church on the other side of the highway has gamely erected a large cross which they illuminate at night, but it barely makes an impression compared to the behemoth across the way.

The construction of the temple was controversial from the day it was proposed. I have to say quite frankly that it seems very much out of character in this area, although I have an appreciation for the size of the Mormon community in Belmont. I do confess to feeling a certain sense of disquiet as I pass by it, but as a Catholic, I also realize that I need to feel an extra bit of sensitivity in this area.

For example, I must remind myself every time I see the gargantuan St. Francis de Sales church in Charlestown, perched upon a hill as if dropped there from some dreary place in Northern Ireland, and visible for miles around in every direction, that the Yankee WASPs allowed us to build our churches much larger than theirs when we arrived as largely unwelcome immigrants in this country, even though our faith was most distasteful to them. They lived true to their ideals of religious liberty and allowed us to build our churches, hospitals, and schools on a vast scale even though we were officially still preaching extra ecclesiam nulla salus at the time. When you drive through a city like Providence, RI, this is even more visible, as the enormous Catholic churches to be seen in every direction make everything else in Roger Williams' old city seem miniscule in comparison.

Civic and religious leaders in the USA have almost always stood by the principle of religious tolerance, realizing that an attack on any one religion could easily be directed against another, or against all. Why, therefore, do I think the Swiss decision is defensible?

Maybe I don't have a particularly good reason, but my gut tells me this situation is quite different somehow. Both the Vatican and the Catholic bishops of Switzerland, increasingly wary of the creeping militancy of the secular left in Europe, and wanting Islam as an ally in their advocacy for conservatism on cultural issues, have criticized the results of the referendum stating:

"The decision of the people represents an obstacle and a great challenge on the path of integration in dialogue and mutual respect.. and increases the problems of coexistence between religions and cultures... the measure will not help the Christians oppressed and persecuted in Islamic countries, but will weaken the credibility of their commitment in these countries."

That may all be true, but as far as mutual respect and peaceful coexistence is concerned, perhaps a bit of reciprocity is in order from the Islamic world, and perhaps that reciprocity needs to be insisted upon by the West with sharper emphasis and alacrity.

Those who immigrated to the USA in years gone by knew that they needed to assimilate to the Enlightenment/Protestant-ethos in America to at least some extent. Catholics who managed to flourish in this country while abiding by those principles, thriving more than the churches of Europe at the time, were even accused by the Vatican of the heresy of Americanism, but skillfully hewed to the same course just the same.

Switzerland itself may do a better job than most, but at least a few European nations have had great difficulty in assimilating their Muslim minorities, and much of that is their own fault, but at the same time Europe seems to be going through a great crisis of identity right now, and when a continent in which a dwindling population of even more dwindling faith encounters a growing minority population with a vibrant faith (which can also be quite militant at this point in history), I wonder if the Swiss can be forgiven for wanting to keep Switzerland looking like Switzerland. Europe is not beholden to commit cultural suicide.

Although Andrew Sullivan on his Daily Dish found this decision to be quite bigoted, I'm more inclined to agree with one of his commenters who wrote:

I have no problem with anyone wanting to practice their religion so long as it hurts no one else. And I also have no problem with the Swiss being unwilling to listen to “Allahu akbar, etc.” at dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset and nightfall. The Roman Catholic church down the street from me has a carillon that rings the hours. I like it; it’s pretty and it provides a useful function for the entire neighborhood. But, if it broadcast its priest intoning “Introibo ad altare Dei” every time Mass was said, I’d be on the phone to City Hall every time I heard it.

Sullivan responded by pointing out that none of the minarets that are currently in Switzerland are issuing calls to prayer. Yes. For now. Ultimately, though, what are they for? They are not merely for architectural decoration. I give some creedence to the argument that they are edifices of thriumphalism.

The problem of reciprocity is outlined very starkly in the December 7 issue of America in an article by David Pinault called Hidden Prayer in Yemen: Islam and the problem of religious intolerance (subscription only). Until we see some signs of a reforming spirit within Islam that allows for some reciprocity regarding the free exercise of other faiths in Islamic countries, I think decisions like those made by the Swiss can be defended to at least a certain extent, although anyone who still reads this blog can feel free to contradict me without recrimination. Some excerpts from Pinault's article, which described the necessarily furtive and underground practice of Christianity in Yemen.

Unfortunately, the plight of Christians in Yemen is not unique. In Iraq, Saudia Arabia and other countries in the Muslim world, freedom of worship is severely restricted, and the number of Christians has dwindled. The values of pluralism and diversity are dismissed in favor of a strict adherence to the rule of the Koran, which sees any visible Christian presence as an attempt at evangelization. Yemen is emblematic of an Islamic culture that fails to see the spiritual growth that can come from encounters with people of other faiths.

The government does not prohibit foreigners from private Christian worship, but authorities are intent on discouraging conversion from Islam. I heard reports of young Muslim men, apparently commissioned by the Yemeni government, posing as potential converts in an attempt to lure Christian foreigners into proselytizing. In one recent case, a Christian Ethiopian working in Sanaa as a day laborer gave an Arabic text of the New Testament to a Yemeni who feigned interest in the faith. The result: three months in jail followed by deportation.

Consequences can be far harsher for Yemenis who genuinely desire to convert. In a culture where religious identity is equated with loyalty to family, clan and nation, conversion from Islam is seen as treason, a threat to Yemen ’s communal identity—hence what one Muslim cleric described to me as al-khawf min al-tansir, “the fear of Christianization.” (Tansir comes from the root nasrani, “Nazarene.”) Muslims caught flirting with the “Nazarene” faith are routinely arrested, imprisoned and made to reaffirm their allegiance to Islam. Others suffer violence at the hands of their own
families—“the only way,” as one American resident told me, “in an honor/shame society for a father to erase the stain of shameful behavior on the part of his children.”

Violent hostility to religious minorities is a problem in other Islamic countries as well. In Iraq in recent years, terrorists have used death threats against indigenous Christians in Mosul and elsewhere in northern Iraq to extort payment of what is known as the jizyah. This is the discriminatory tax imposed on “People of the Book” — Jews and Christians living under Islamic rule — in accordance with Chapter 9, verse 29 of the Koran: “Fight against those who do not believe in Allah…from among the People of the Book, until they pay the jizyah and have been humiliated and brought low.”

Enforced during the height of Islamic political power in the days of the caliphate, collection of the tax was abandoned by secularizing governments of the modern Middle East. But some of today’s Islamist movements view the jizyah as a marker of the resurgence of Islam. For years, Paulos Faraj Rahho, archbishop of Mosul’s Chaldean Catholic community, had made jizyah payments to local militants on behalf of his diocese’s Christians. Finally, as the security situation in Iraq improved, he refused any further payments, a decision that led to his kidnapping and murder in 2008. Eventually a member of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia was convicted of the crime. Under such pressure, almost half of Iraq’s Christians have fled the country.

Analogous developments are occurring in Pakistan. In April 2009 Christian day laborers residing in an impoverished part of Karachi known as Khuda ki Basti found warnings chalked on the walls of their neighborhood: “The Taliban are coming.… Be prepared to pay jizyah or embrace Islam.” When the Christians registered their defiance by erasing the threats, ethnic Pashtuns living in Karachi attacked the neighborhood, killing an 11-year-old boy and injuring several men and women. The assailants torched homes and set fire to copies of the Bible...

Several years ago, in a conversation with Ali Abdullah Saleh, president of Yemen, Pope John Paul II petitioned for the construction of a church in Yemen’s capital. The president promised he would see to it. Nothing has come of the promise.

There are no churches in Saudi Arabia either, despite the presence of over one million foreign Christian workers and a personal plea from Pope Benedict XVI in 2007. Pope Benedict noted that in the 1990s the Italian government permitted the construction of a Saudi-financed mosque in Rome, a short distance from Vatican City. Yet so far Saudi Arabia’s leaders have refused to follow suit and recognize the right to freedom of worship in their own country. Anwar Ashiqi, a Saudi religious scholar, summarizes the government’s position: “It would be possible to launch official negotiations to construct a church in Saudi Arabia only after the pope and all the Christian churches recognize the Prophet Muhammad.”

I raised this issue in a conversation in June with a Sunni imam in Yemen’s capital. An affable individual in his early 30s, this imam directs a mosque in Sanaa and is known as a hafiz (someone who has learned by heart the entire Koran). When I pointed out the disparity—mosques in Rome, no churches in Sanaa—he said this struck him as right. Islam, he stated, is al-din al-niha’i (the final, definitive religion). But Christianity and Judaism, he said, were religions from the past, outdated and superseded. “They may be permitted to exist,” he continued, “but they shouldn’t be allowed to propagate.” A church in Sanaa might attract Yemeni Muslims, thereby facilitating al-tansir: the propagation of the Nazarene faith. Better, he said, to keep Yemen as nearly as possible 100 percent Muslim.

What this imam articulated was an attitude I encountered in all too many conversations in Sanaa: a resistance to religious pluralism. By pluralism I mean the notion that spiritual paths alternative to one’s own have value; that these alternatives have something to teach us, even as they challenge us by their difference; and that one’s religious identity and spiritual life are deepened by the self-reflection triggered in the encounter with diversity. Such encounters can take place only in settings where freedom of worship is allowed to flourish. In hindering the construction of Christian churches, countries like Yemen impoverish their own Islamic faith.

I'll Be Home For Christmas..."Is that a threat or a promise?"

2009-11-07T10:58:00.006-05:00

--Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly

Bob Dylan has just released, of all things, a Christmas album.

Christmas In the Heart

I'm really not sure what to make of all this (try his Must Be Santa). It might be better than David Archuleta's album of nearly the same name, but he ain't no Mitch Miller or Burl Ives when it comes to kicking out the Christmas tunes.

At least it's for charity... For samples and commentary, listen to:

Is Dylan's Heart Really In This 'Christmas'?

For those not especially enamored of Dylan's vocal "style," or who favor the sacred over the secular in any case, hey, there's always Pope Benedict's album coming out on November 29th...

More Friday Music

2009-10-30T09:33:00.002-05:00

Dear Mr. Fantasy... Steve Winwood with Clapton's band at the Crossroads Guitar Festival, 2007

I knew he could play a lot of instruments, but I always thought of Stevie Winwood primarily as a keyboards guy. Shows how little I know...

Friday Musical Interlude

2009-10-23T11:53:00.005-05:00

Comfortably Numb - Van Morrison w/ Pink Floyd

I was rewatching Martin Scorcese's 2006 film The Departed a few nights back, and the Leonardo DiCaprio - Vera Farmiga love scene had this track as a backdrop. The song stuck in my head for days. I like this version.

I've been looking forward to seeing Scorcese's upcoming adaptation of Shusaku Endo's book Silence, although I wasn't too thrilled with Scorcese's recent defense of Roman Polanski.

Hello.
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone home?

Come on, now.
I hear youre feeling down.
Well I can ease your pain,
Get you on your feet again.

Relax.
I need some information first.
Just the basic facts:
Can you show me where it hurts?

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ship's smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I cant hear what youre sayin'.
When I was a child I had a fever.
My hands felt just like two balloons.
Now I got that feeling once again.
I cant explain, you would not understand.
This is not how I am.
I have become comfortably numb.

Ok.
Just a little pinprick. [ping]
Therell be no more --aaaaaahhhhh!
But you may feel a little sick.

Can you stand up?
I do believe its working. good.
Thatll keep you going for the show.
Come on its time to go.

There is no pain, you are receding.
A distant ship's smoke on the horizon.
You are only coming through in waves.
Your lips move but I cant hear what youre sayin'.
When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse,
Out of the corner of my eye.
I turned to look but it was gone.
I cannot put my finger on it now.
The child is grown, the dream is gone.
I have become comfortably numb.

Traditionalist Trifecta II: Thoughts on the TAC Moving Towards Rome and the Upcoming SSPX Talks

2009-10-21T13:56:00.008-05:00

Pope Benedict's vision of a creative minority made up of traditionalists of various stripes

St. Edmund Campion S.J, martyred in 1581.
I wonder what he'd make of this...

I've let a few timely topics slip by recently because I hardly have time to blog anymore, but I wanted to say a few things about these latest developments before they get too dated.

Regarding the joint Anglican/Catholic announcement on October 20th that members of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) would be welcomed into the Catholic Church, operating under a personal ordinariate... I guess I have mixed feelings about it. It's always good to see people coming into the Church, especially since there's been so much bad news for us in recent years, accompanied by a mass exodus that has made ex-Catholics one of the largest "denominations" in the country... It's a pretty bold and creative move in terms of building a united church with diversity within it. It would have been unthinkable years ago. On the other hand, I worry if the Vatican is consciously trying to build appeal to groups who are anti-women's ordination and anti-gay. That part's a little spooky. I find Benedict's tendency to build bridges to some of the most reactionary elements out there to be troubling.

I felt a little bad for Archbishop Rowan Williams too, having to stand up there for this announcement. He must have felt a bit like the Vatican's beeyatch. The British press and the liberal Anglican blogosphere certainly see it that way too. They're pounding him over it. He doesn't deserve it. He's a very good man and a fine scripture scholar, and he's faced a daunting challenge trying to hold together his fractious communion over the past few years. I don't know how he hasn't suffered a breakdown over it. In a way, I suppose the departure of the TAC takes a lot of the pressure off of him.

Was Rowan humiliated in an act of ecumenical insensitivity? On the America Blog, Austen Ivereigh reports (via the Times of London):

Cardinal Levada, prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), came to London only last weekend to brief Dr Williams and the English and Welsh bishops on what was being proposed, and that the Vatican's Council for Christian Unity had been left out of the plans.

Ivereigh goes on to downplay that aspect, however, noting that the TAC had approached Rome themselves regarding these issues long ago, and that the Vatican had waited to make this overture for more than a year after the crisis that occurred at the last Lambeth Conference.

Does it speak well for ecumenism, or does it spell the end of meaningful dialogue between Catholics and Anglicans? It's hard to tell. Certain TAC priests and bishops may do one thing and their congregations may do another. This might not go over well in the long run with other Anglicans either. We'd do well to keep in mind that the existence of Eastern-Rite "Uniate" churches in communion with Rome is despised by the Eastern Orthodox. In the dotCommonweal post History is Being Made, Rita Perrone made a very good point in response to the claim that this move serves as a new model:

New model or blueprint? You are dreaming. The uniate churches are an exact parallel. And they have set back the cause of church unity with the East for centuries, not advanced it. The only difference here, besides the canonical terminology, is that the Anglican liturgy is descended from the Latin rite, unlike the Eastern rites. In this sense it’s new.

And in regard to the anger over this expressed in Anglican and Episcopalian circles, at least a few people over there are aware that this goes both ways. They've been maintaining their ranks with disaffected Catholics for years. In fact, I think there'd hardly be any Episcopalians left at all in this country if it wasn't for former Catholics. Appreciate as well, that Anglicanism in its original form was largely imposed on the British people from above, not from below, as Eamon Duffy has pointed out very well in his books The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 and Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor. Catholicism in England did not disappear naturally or easily.

It seems that Benedict has a grand vision of uniting Catholicism, The Eastern Orthodox Churches, and the Traditional Anglican Communion into one grand Church characterized by "Tradition" that will revitalize Christendom in Europe. Says Sandro Magister:

Today more than ever, with Joseph Ratzinger as pope, the ecumenical journey seems not a pursuit of modernity, but a return to the terrain of tradition.

I wrote about a Traditionalist Trifecta once before. Here is the latest Trifecta:

1) The excommunications on the SSPX bishops were lifted last year.
2) The Traditional Anglican Communion has been brought into the fold.
3) The SSPX will be brought back into the fold next.

I do admit to being nervous about what this means for the upcoming SSPX discussions, which are going to be held in private. They'll find some way to let the SSPX back in, and why does this group, that willingly went over into schism, get to debate what Vatican II meant (in private) while the rest of us don't get that privilege?

One final question:

If this "personal ordinariate" is going to have its own seminaries, can a married Catholic man become a priest through an Anglo-Roman seminary?