Month: November 2004

Will Wilkinson:

We’ve all seen, and have grown weary of, the wide array of red/blue/purple political maps. The purplish tones are supposed to show us, I guess, that even a “red state” is a mix of red and blue people. It’s not binary: all red or all blue. Yes. I guess. But the thing that gets in my craw is the fairly widespread assumption that individual people are either red or blue, which is just silly if you think about it for a millisecond. […]

One of the reasons I dislike politics, and especially our winner-take-all system, is that it creates a pressure to pick sides in a way that does damage to authenticity. I resent being asked implicitly to join my intellectual urban fellows in therapeutic anti-red scorn-heaping excercises, as if “red” and “blue” actually means something interesting. Let’s all just stick to hating the stupid and pompous, qualities that know no hue.

Read the rest here.

Jennifer at Scandal of Particularity has an answer for those who want religious believers to butt out of public affairs:

…I reject the position that I have my opinion, and you have yours, and thus you should not attempt to force your “opinion” on mine. (Kind of a “get your rosaries off my ovaries” slogan – if you’re against such and such, just don’t do it!) It is scandalous to claim that the Church has some universal claims to make. I recognize that not everyone will agree with them. But science, technology, the state, etc. are sure making a lot of universal claims, too. To pretend that they aren’t, that they are merely presented us with “choices” and “options” is naive.

Jen puts her finger on the crux of the issue here, I think. It’s the notion that there is a “neutral” public space that properly excludes “thick” notions of the good from public deliberation. But as many people have argued, this “neutrality” itself embodies substantive views about human flourishing. One aspect of this view is that “choice” is the highest good and trumps considerations about the content of choice. But this is an eminently contestable proposition. And it’s ultimately incoherent because there will always be some choices that are considered out of bounds.

Here’s Paul J. Griffiths making a similar point:

Among the causes of our present difficulties, both at home and abroad, is a deep sense (usually incohate but not the less deep for that) on the part of many religious people that the rhetoric of toleration is being deployed in a duplicitousand underhanded way to bring about legislative and social goals that are every bit as particular and every bit as contestable as those commended by any religion while simultaneously obscuring these facts.

What Griffiths calls toleration only appears to occupy the moral high ground above all substantive moral positions because it obscures the fact this it also makes moral judgments. To realize this is to level the playing field and recognize that we are dealing with a competing moral vision rather than a pre-moral “neutral” stance.

Commenter Jonathan at Pontifications says:

Nevertheless I promise that I will join with Fr Freeman and Fr Hart when their respective Churches [i.e. Rome and Orthodoxy] are again One. No justification could ever exist for not belonging to the Great Church if and when it is reunited after the schism of 1054.

I wonder how many other Protestants (I assume Jonathan is one) would feel the same way were such a thing to come to pass.

In the past I’ve said to one of my Catholic friends that the fact that Rome and Orthodoxy make competing claims to being the “one true church” is one reason I couldn’t become a Catholic. On what principled grounds could I choose one over the other since both seem able to make equally compelling cases? But if there was reunion…

Which means I can indulge one of my guilty pleasures tonight.

Also see here.

Things are not off to a good start.

Now that that favorite hate-object of the left, John Ashcroft, has resigned, President Bush has nominated former White House counsel and longtime friend Alberto Gonzales for the postion of Attorney General.

First we get the condescending ethnic bean-counting angle:

President Bush paved the way yesterday for Alberto R. Gonzales to become the nation’s first Hispanic attorney general, nominating his White House counsel and longtime friend from Texas to replace the departing John Ashcroft.

Is this really the most important fact about Gonzales? So important that it’s the lead of the story?

Here, in my opinion, is the real story several paragraphs later:

The former Texas Supreme Court justice staunchly supported detention policies – since rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court – that denied even some U.S. citizens access to a lawyer or the courts.

Gonzales, 49, also has come under fire for memos he wrote that seemingly justify the use of torture. Critics contend such memos had set the stage for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. In one, Gonzales called Geneva Convention protections for prisoners “quaint” and “obsolete.”

This is the guy President Bush wants in charge of enforcing federal law.

And in case you had any doubts that the Democrats are worthless as an opposition party:

[T]he reaction among Senate Judiciary Democrats and their staff members was that Gonzales fared well in comparison to Ashcroft, who was beloved by religious conservatives but vilified by civil liberties advocates. Ashcroft’s resignation was announced Tuesday.

“I can tell you already he’s a better candidate than John Ashcroft,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D., N.Y.), one of the panel’s more liberal members.

The committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, also sounded a conciliatory note, saying, “I like and respect Judge Gonzales.”

You may recall the all-out fight against Aschcroft’s nomination in 2001, but this makes it sound like the Dems are going to roll over for Gonzales.

Now, say what you will about John Ashcroft – there’s plenty to criticize. But for all his flaws, he was enforcing laws that were duly enacted by Congress (for a liberal semi-defense of Ashcroft see here).

Gonzales, by contrast, is an explicit advocate of government power unrestrained by such quaint notions as the rule of law.

A lot of the anti-Ashcroft hysteria was motivated not so much by his record as by his persona. He was a white, red-state conservative Christian. He doesn’t drink, gamble or dance (whatta rube!). He is anti-abortion and holds a host of other positions anathema to modern liberalism.

It appears that Gonzales, on the other hand, is a “moderate” on such issues.

Does this tell us something about the priorities of the Democrat Party? That being a religious conservative is worse than being an advocate of torture and chucking due process?

Stephen L. Carter examines the case for “humanitarian” war:

[M]ost of us agree that war is morally permissible to defend one’s own country against aggression. There are difficult questions still. (What counts as aggression? May one attack before the enemy strikes?) But wide consensus exists on the general principle of self-defense.

The more difficult question, and one that increasingly confronts the world, is the justice of going to war to protect not our own people but someone else’s. In other words, if Christian morality will permit Country A to fight Country B if Country B attacks it, will it allow Country A to fight Country B if Country B attacks Country C? Or what if Country B is slaughtering only its own people? May Country A go to war to protect the people of Country B against their own government? […]

Indeed, one might argue that there is a provincialism, if not selfishness, in saying that it is moral for me to defend my own people but not someone else’s. In much the same way, my right to defend myself against an attacker on the street also gives me the right to defend the fellow next to me.

I am not offering a settled answer to this question. The literature of just-war theory is strongly divided on many issues. I insist on two propositions, however. First, the morality of humanitarian intervention has nothing to do with whether others agree that the action is appropriate. (Although, as I have noted, international opposition might render it impractical.) Second, to refuse to protect the people of another country simply because they are not fellow citizens is, to say the least, uncharitable.

I think many thinkers in the just-war tradition would agree with Carter here. Paul Ramsey held, for example, that the legitimate use of force was nothing more or less than the expression of neighbor-love in the political realm. If I am called to help the man in distress by the side of the Jericho Road, would I not also be called to use force to repel the robbers if I came upon them in the act? And it’s hard to see why, on Christian grounds, this obligation should be limited to our fellow citizens. There may be, as Carter points out, practical reasons not to intervene, but not necessarily moral ones.

However, just-war theory (as this blog has discussed before) requires several other conditions to be met for any prima facie case for third-party intervention to carry the day. Prospect of success and proportionality are key here (i.e. will war stop a greater evil than it will bring in its wake?), as is discrimination or immunity of non-combatants.

Even more troubling to me (see here) is the question of whether the modern secular nation-state can be relied upon to restrain itself in warfare and to act according to just-war principles. Though just-war theory has gained wide currency in secular thought (see Walzer most prominently), it retains its roots in Christian ethics. And history shows us that the dictates of “realism” tend to hold sway over just-war scruples whenever the going gets rough and victory is on the line (WWII is the classic example here).

If the secular state refuses to place itself under those constraints, then I have a difficult time seeing how a Christian can be anything other than a de facto pacifist, refusing to endorse or support any wars. I’m not comfortable with this position, but it may be that just-war principles only have bite if the state itself is explicitly committed to them.

Today my wonderful wife gave me the Johnny Cash “Unearthed” box set as a birthday gift. It contains four discs of previously unreleased material from the years of Cash’s collaboration with producer Rick Rubin.

After just one listen I think I can safely say that the jewel of this collection is disc four: My Mother’s Hymnbook which offers the Man In Black’s take on some of his momma’s favorite spirituals.

Also not to be missed: the Cash/Joe Strummer duet on Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” Great stuff.

(And yes, I share a birthday with Martin Luther)

Giving us more anthropological analysis of our political divisions, Grant McCracken suggests a “Marxian” rapprochement between right and left:

Another way to begin to close the ideological gap is to see if we can’t fashion a peace treaty for the culture wars. “They just don’t get it” comes in part from the fact that we are unacquainted with the founding ideas and documents of the other party. The problem is not so much that they just don’t get it, as that we don’t get them.

One way to do this is to propose the 20 cultural documents that one side should master in order to “get” what the other side is saying.

A first candidate for those on the Right who would understand the Left is DVD just released by Universal that contains 5 Marx brothers movies: Duck Soup, The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, and Horse Feathers.

This will seems an odd choice, but consider this quote from Duck Soup:

A minister of cabinet of Freedonia: I give all my time and energy to my duties and what do I get?

Groucho: Well, you get awfully tiresome after a while.”

The Marx Brothers were one of the founts of my transformation as an adolescent. It was one of the documents that encouraged me to scorn authority. They were in fact architects of the 1960s and its anti-establishment point of few. Some people on the Right believe that this is the time to restore our respect for authority, and they will find this films not the least bit funny. But others will begin to see that even a deeply conservative soul can take pleasure in ludic play. While we are building bridges, this is one place to start.

Karl at St. Stephen’s Musings has a post quoting an Orthodox priest on the value of formal prayers in teaching us how to pray:

Those formal prayers in the prayer book are the examples of how to pray, they are the “pouring out of the heart” of people who were experienced in prayer (the saints). We begin to learn to pray by mimicking the examples.

When you learned to write in school, weren’t you give letters to trace over and over until you could do them without thinking, and then words to trace over and over and so on. Even now you use those same letters and words in your writing – the letters and words you traced have now become your own and are the means of expressing your own innermost thoughts and feelings.

We “trace over the lines” of the prayers by copying them over and over until they sink in and become “natural”, then we use those prayers as the letters and words of our own innermost spiritual expressions. That’s the “role” of the “formal” prayers in the prayerbook.

Part of the idea here is that we don’t “naturally” know how to pray as we should, but this is something we have to learn. The Holy Spirit has to teach us and teaches us through the prayers of the Saints who’ve gone before us.

For similar reasons Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught that our prayers should always have their foundation in the Bible. He says “What matters is not what we feel like praying about, but what God wants us to ask him for. Not the poverty of our own heart, but the riches of the Word of God must decide how we are to pray.”

We learn this preeminently in the Psalms, which Bonhoeffer calls the Prayer Book of the Bible. In praying the Psalms we join our prayer to the whole Church and to Christ himself whose prayers the Psalms are.

In Life Together Bonhoeffer says that meditation on a passage of Scripture should always form the basis of our personal prayers. This is because prayer, for a Christian, is always a response to God’s coming to us, not a work of our own whereby we reach God.

Of course, talking about prayer is easy. The trick, in my experience, is actually doing it.

Christopher Shea follows up on the controversy surrounding the report from a British journal that claimed that casualties from the Iraq war have reached around 100,000:

Here’s how the study worked: The researchers randomly selected 33 towns or neighborhoods distributed throughout Iraq’s 18 “directorates,” or local regions. The Iraqi staffers drove to those towns or neighborhoods and, once there, made their way to a randomly generated longitude and latitude using a Global Positioning System device. Then they interviewed the 30 families who lived closest to that spot — 7,900 people in all. (Cluster studies like this, while far less accurate than national random surveys, are commonly resorted to in countries with weak governments or chaotic circumstances. Health organizations use them, for example, to determine childhood vaccination rates in developing countries.) […]

The mortality rate in these families worked out to 5 per 1,000 before the invasion and 12.3 per 1,000 after the invasion — 7.9 per thousand if you exclude Fallujah. Extrapolate the latter figure to the 22 million population of Iraq, and you end up with the headline-making figure of 98,000 total civilian deaths. The most common cause of death post-invasion was aerial bombing — which caused a quarter of the deaths outside Fallujah — followed by strokes and heart attacks.

Shea also raises the issue of consistency:

Reject the Lancet study and you have to toss out those studies — done with a very similar methodology — that found that war in the Congo in the late 1990s caused some 3 million deaths or that the current crisis in Sudan has killed 70,000. Those numbers, however, have been readily accepted by American commentators and government officials.

Then there is this sobering conclusion:

“We don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks has declared, explaining the Pentagon’s decision not to make public estimates of civilian or combatant deaths. The Pentagon doesn’t want a replay of Vietnam, when body counts became a bad joke. But the current occupation is supposed to help the Iraqi people. And there’s just no way to judge how Iraqi civilians are faring under the occupation without studying Iraqi mortality, the Lancet authors argue. And they concede, crucially, that this is just a rough first stab at the problem. Therefore, if the Bush administration doesn’t like the Lancet study, done on a shoestring, they offer a simple solution: Fund and support a better one.

This is, or should be, particularly troubling to anyone who supported the Iraq war on just war grounds. This is becuause one criterion of a just war is that the evil brought about by the war be less than the evil prevented or restrained by the war. This is part of the notion of proportionality. But, logically, if one doesn’t know how many Iraqis are dying, then it becomes impossible to make this judgment. And if the U.S. government, as a matter of policy, refuses to keep count, then one can only conclude it is not committed to fighting under the constraints of just war theory.

(link via Godspy)