Month: March 2005

I’ve been reading a very interesting little book called Christian Anarchy: Jesus’ Primacy over the Powers by Vernard Eller (you can access the entire book online here). Eller is a theologian of the Church of the Brethren, a radical reformation church similar to the Mennonites.

By “anarchy” Eller doesn’t mean political anarchy – i.e. striving to overthrow or abolish the state. Rather, he means the fundamental attitude Christians should take toward all the world’s “arkys” – those forces and structures that seek to govern human behavior. This includes governments obviously, but also “churches, schools, philosophies, social standards, peer pressures, fads and fashions, advertising, planning techniques, psychological and sociological theories.”

An an-archist, then, is not someone opposed to all “arkys,” but someone who is, in a sense, indifferent to them. Just as an a-moralist is not necessarily immoral, but rather regards the whole area of morality with indifference.

Eller argues that since Jesus is THE arky (arche – governing or first principle), a Christian cannot give to the arkys of the world the reverence or respect that they demand. Nor, however, do they need to oppose those arkys by entering into a power struggle. The perpetual temptation for us is to bless our “good” arkys, giving them a religious imprimatur, and going into battle against the “bad” arkys.

As Eller puts it:

“Anarchy” (“unarkyness”), it follows, is simply the state of being unimpressed with, disinterested in, skeptical of; nonchalant toward, and uninfluenced by the highfalutin claims of any and all arkys. And “Christian Anarchy”–the special topic of this book–is a Christianly motivated “unarkyness.” Precisely because Jesus is THE ARKY, the Prime of Creation, the Principal of All Good, the Prince of Peace and Everything Else, Christians dare never grant a human arky the primacy it claims for itself Precisely because God is the Lord of History we dare never grant that it is in the outcome of the human arky contest that the determination of history lies.

Human arkys can be of the Establishment or the Revolution, conservative or progressive, etc. The point is that the Christian is enabled to stand “outside” the power struggle between the arkys:

At this point of definition, then, we should note that the idea of “revolution” is not anarchical in any sense of the word. Revolutionists are very strongly opposed to certain arkys that they know to be “bad” and to be the work of “bad people.” However, they are just as strongly in favor of what they know to be “good” arkys that are the work of themselves and other good people like them. For instance, these revolutionists might seem to be superanarchical, finding nothing good to say about the establishment U.S. arky; but they turn out to be very proarchical, finding nothing but good to say about a revolutionary Sandinista arky. Indeed, the regular procedure of “revolution” is to form a (good) power-arky that can either overthrow and displace or else radically transform the (bad) arky currently in power. This selectivity amounts to a passionate faith in the power of arkys for human good and the farthest thing possible from a truly anarchical suspicion and mistrust of every human arky. Thus “anarchical” is a synonym for “nonpartisan”; and “anarchy” and “partisanship” are direct opposites.

Though Christians may participate in the arkys when they see some good to be accomplished, they will not place their hopes in them as means to usher in God’s Kingdom, the “just society” or what have you. This is because they know that God will bring in the Kingdom in God’s own time, and that the means by which God has chosen to do this is through death and resurrection (rather than say, by revolution, top-down social engineering, or incrimental progress):

Christian anarchists occasionally are willing to work through and even use worldly arkys when they see a chance to accomplish some immediate human good thereby. This is an admittedly risky business; the regular pattern is to make a quick entrance and just as quick an exit.

For example, the civil arky of Christoph Blumhardt’s day was really putting it to the working classes, and anarchist Blumhardt saw the revolutionary arky of the Social Democrats as a vehicle for helping those people get their rights. He joined the party, spoke for it, ran for office, and won a six-year term in the Württemberg legislature. But it didn’t take a whole lot of arky red tape and politicking before he lost not only his interest but his cool: “I am proud stand before you as a man; and if politics cannot tolerate a human being, then let politics be damned.” That, my friends, is pure Essence of Anarchy: “Human beings, yes; politicians, never!” Blumhardt got out as soon as he graciously could.

Eller is also concerned to point out that while Christians are irreverent to the claims of the arkys for respect, they are not revolutionists seeking to tear them down. This is the lesson he draws from Jesus’ refusal to be a political messiah, and Paul’s admonition to be subject to the ruling authorities. Eller advocates what he takes to be biblical non-resistance.

There’s a lot packed into this little book, including discussion of Karl Barth, Bonhoeffer, Jacques Ellul and others. What I think is a valuable contribution of this book, though, is his insistence that no worldly cause, however important it may seem from our vantage point, can be identified with the Gospel. He is skeptical that there is any one “Christian morality,” much less a “Christian politics.” At a time when the “Christian Right” and the “Christian Left” seem increasingly at each others’ throats, it’s good, I think, to hear things like this:

The fact is that any number of different moral systems can be and have been derived from the biblical gospel–with each having about as good arguments, documentation, and support as another. Nothing is to be gained (and a great deal of Christian charity is to be lost) by the church splitting up to battle over whose is “the truly Christian moral system.” I am quite confident, for example, that the liberal Left’s is not true Christian morality and the conservative Right’s is actually immorality (or vice versa). Doubtlessly the Left is reading its Bible correctly on some points and wrongly on others–and the Right likewise. I would be happy to have it said either that both represent Christian moralities or that neither does (good arguments either way). But what the evidence will not allow is any party’s claiming that what it represents is “Christian morality” while any party else represents “un-Christian immorality.”

Lots of predictable hand-wringing over President Bush’s appointment of John Bolton to the post of UN ambassador. Bolton has, after all, said things like this:

“If the UN Secretariat building in New York lost ten stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.”

Well!

In more temperate moods, Bolton has written things like this (via Justin Logan):

We should…eliminate assessments altogether, moving toward a UN system that is funded entirely by purely voluntary contributions from the member governments. Such a system of voluntary contributions would allow each government to judge for itself whether it was getting its money’s worth from the UN and each of its component agencies.

Now, as far as your humble scribe is concerned, the problem with Bolton is not that he’s anti-UN, but that he’s an ultra-hawk. As David Corn points out:

Bolton is a hawk’s hawk in the Bush administration. He is the agent conservateur in Colin Powell’s State Department. He has led the administration’s effort against the International Criminal Court. Last year, he single-handedly tried to revise U.S. nuclear policy by asserting that Washington no longer felt bound to state that it would not use nuclear weapons against nations that do not possess nuclear weapons. (A State Department spokesman quickly claimed that Bolton had not said what he had indeed said.) Bolton also claimed that Cuba was developing biological weapons–a charge that was not substantiated by any evidence and that was challenged by experts. In July, he was about to allege in congressional testimony that Syria posed a weapons-of-mass-destruction threat before the CIA and other agencies, who considered his threat assessment to be exaggerated, objected to his statement. When England, France and Germany recently tried to develop a carrot-and-stick approach in negotiating an end to Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program, Bolton huffed, “I don’t do carrots.”

However, where Bolton and the UN-niks agree is in thinking that someone’s gotta run the world. They just differ on whether it should be done “unilaterally” (i.e. by the U.S.A.) or “multilaterally.” What’s never put on the table is unilateral mind-your-own-business-ism (=non-interventionism=”isolationism”=my preferred policy).

As far as the UN – that continuing object of inexplicable devotion and reverence in some liberal circles – goes, I’m with lefty Alexander Cockburn who called it a “repellent harbinger of world guv’mint.”

Now, how are we supposed to believe those conservatives when they tell us they are underrepresented in academia when we now have two conservative philosphy blogs? (In fairness, there does seem to be some considerable overlap in contributors – including friend of VI Bill Vallicella.)

But seriously folks, the lineup at Right Reason looks good. It’s the brainchild of Max Goss, whose public split from Keith Burgess-Jackson’s Conservative Philosopher shocked the blog world! Posting is slated to start tomorrow.

Here’s a piece John Lukacs wrote last year on the increasing “militarization” of the image of the presidency. Catch anyone at the Heritage foundation writing something like this:

Like the boy soldier salute, the sentimentalization of the military is juvenile. Television depictions of modern technological warfare, for example, make it seem as if a military campaign were but a superb game, an occasional Super Bowl that America is bound to win – and with almost no human losses. (“We’ll keep our fighting men and women out of harm’s way” – a senseless phrase that emerged duringthe Clinton years.) The exaggerated vesting of the president with his supreme role as commander in chief is a new element in our national history.

When the Roman republic gave way to empire, the new supreme ruler, Augustus chose to name himself not “rex,” king, but “imperator,” from which our words emperor and empire derive, even though its original meaning was more like commander in chief. Thereafter Roman emperors came to depend increasingly on their military. Will our future presidents? Let us doubt it. And yet . . .

John Lukacs is a grouchy European-style conservative who doesn’t go in for what he deems the populist demagoguery of the American Right. Read a profile of him here.

A debate in the American Conservative between Robert Locke and Daniel McCarthy.

Locke:

Libertarianism’s abstract and absolutist view of freedom leads to bizarre conclusions. Like slavery, libertarianism would have to allow one to sell oneself into it. (It has been possible at certain times in history to do just that by assuming debts one could not repay.) And libertarianism degenerates into outright idiocy when confronted with the problem of children, whom it treats like adults, supporting the abolition of compulsory education and all child-specific laws, like those against child labor and child sex. It likewise cannot handle the insane and the senile.

McCarthy:

Libertarianism is a political philosophy, not a complete system of ethics or metaphysics. Political philosophies address specifically the state and, more generally, justice in human society. The distinguishing characteristic of libertarianism is that it applies to the state the same ethical rules that apply to everyone else. Given that murder and theft are wrong—views not unique to libertarianism, of course—the libertarian contends that the state, which is to say those individuals who purport to act in the name of the common good, has no more right to seize the property of others, beat them, conscript them, or otherwise harm them than any other institution or individual has. Beyond this, libertarianism says only that a society without institutionalized violence can indeed exist and even thrive.

Thanks to some comments from Marcus and a conversation with the wife, I’m now convinced that the argument in this post doesn’t show the impermissibility of “collateral damage.”

For if C (the innocent bystander) doesn’t have a duty to sacrifice himself to save A, it doesn’t seem like we can say that A has an obligation to sacrifice himself to save C. In other words, what we get is a kind of “lifeboat” situation where two people’s rights come into irreconcilable conflict and one person has to be sacrificed.

However, this would only seem to be the case in instances where the use of lethal force is the only way for A to save himself. If A can defend himself in some other way, he has the obligation to take that route (even perhaps at considerable risk to himself).

Looks like pro-life Democrat Bob Casey Jr. will be running for US Senate next year. There has been a minor controversy because the Party bigwigs have been pushing for Casey and trying to get other possible candidates not to run, clearing the field for him. (Casey doesn’t want a draining and expensive primary before going up against Santorum.)

However, two possible challengers to Casey, former state treasurer Barbara Hafer and Rep. Joe Hoeffel (who ran unsuccessfully against Arlen Specter last year) have balked at bowing out of a primary. Hafer is a former Republican who left the GOP over the abortion issue (Hoeffel is also pro-choice).

Though I would definitely be pulling for Casey in the primary and the general election, I think the Democrats would be doing the voters a disservice by trying to squash a primary contest. Some of us are still ticked at the PA Dems for going to such great lengths to kick Ralph Nader off the ballot last fall.

UPDATE: The Inquirer reports today that Hafer and Hoeffel will step aside to clear the way for Casey.

An interview at CT. I read and liked his Answering God. This makes me want to read more of his stuff.

This bit is good:

Many people assume that spirituality is about becoming emotionally intimate with God.

That’s a naïve view of spirituality. What we’re talking about is the Christian life. It’s following Jesus. Spirituality is no different from what we’ve been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It’s just ordinary stuff.

This promise of intimacy is both right and wrong. There is an intimacy with God, but it’s like any other intimacy; it’s part of the fabric of your life. In marriage you don’t feel intimate most of the time. Nor with a friend. Intimacy isn’t primarily a mystical emotion. It’s a way of life, a life of openness, honesty, a certain transparency.

Doesn’t the mystical tradition suggest otherwise?

One of my favorite stories is of Teresa of Avila. She’s sitting in the kitchen with a roasted chicken. And she’s got it with both hands, and she’s gnawing on it, just devouring this chicken. One of the nuns comes in shocked that she’s doing this, behaving this way. She said, “When I eat chicken, I eat chicken; when I pray, I pray.”

If you read the saints, they’re pretty ordinary people. There are moments of rapture and ecstasy, but once every 10 years. And even then it’s a surprise to them. They didn’t do anything. We’ve got to disabuse people of these illusions of what the Christian life is. It’s a wonderful life, but it’s not wonderful in the way a lot of people want it to be.

Yet evangelicals rightly tell people they can have a “personal relationship with God.”

That suggests a certain type of spiritual intimacy.All these words get so screwed up in our society. If intimacy means being open and honest and authentic, so I don’t have veils, or I don’t have to be defensive or in denial of who I am, that’s wonderful. But in our culture, intimacy usually has sexual connotations, with some kind of completion. So I want intimacy because I want more out of life. Very seldom does it have the sense of sacrifice or giving or being vulnerable. Those are two different ways of being intimate. And in our American vocabulary intimacy usually has to do with getting something from the other. That just screws the whole thing up.

It’s very dangerous to use the language of the culture to interpret the gospel. Our vocabulary has to be chastened and tested by revelation, by the Scriptures. We’ve got a pretty good vocabulary and syntax, and we’d better start paying attention to it because the way we grab words here and there to appeal to unbelievers is not very good.

There’s been a lot of “I told you so’s” form war-hawks and even a few mea culpas from war opponents in the wake of the Iraqi elections, and now the apparently hopeful signs in Egypt and Lebanon.

In a recent TCS piece, war supporter Michael Totten avoids gratuitous I-told-you-so-ism, but goes on to make this curious argument:

Iraq has made morons out of a lot of people, as perhaps it should. Getting history right in the present tense is hard work. It’s probably impossible for any one person to do it consistently. And if somebody could do it, how would we know? In the 1960s Zhou Enlai was asked what he thought of the French Revolution. He wisely said “It is too soon to tell.”

Great events should shake people and change them. I have a hard time trusting someone who says this never happens to them. After the toppling of Saddam’s regime, it happened first to the hawkish right. And now the anti-war left has had its turn.

The good news is that the latest earth-shaking news is good news. The Iraqi election was flawed, to be sure, but it still exceeded the expectations of most of us. The case for optimism is therefore stronger than it recently was. But the existence of unexpected and earth-shaking events should remind us that — ultimately, as always — it is still too soon to tell.

What I find curious is the assumption that making moral decisions is somehow equivalent to “getting history right,” as though we’re dealing with some Hegelian dialectic. Too soon to make judgments about the French Revolution? I’d say the Reign of Terror was aptly named.

Totten’s argument, in fact, makes the case against consequentialist thinking. If we can’t evaluate the outcome of events until years (or centuries) down the road, then consequentialism doesn’t seem to provide a very good guide to moral decision-making. We’re stuck having to evaluate actions based on their intrinsic character, not as something that “history” might someday judge to be right.