Month: May 2005

Another positive (indeed, nigh-gushing) review (warning: here be spoilers) of Episode III.

(via The American Scene)

There’s a new edition up of The New Pantagruel.

I haven’t delved in yet, but there appear to be some goodies, including:

• “Harsh Medicine” by Wesley J. Smith
• “Understanding Traditionalist Conservatism” by Mark C. Henrie

Also, speaking of vaguely countercultural online Christian journals, Harbinger directs us to the latest edition of The Other Journal, featuring an essay on capitalism by Daniel M. Bell, Jr.

A tidbit:

[C]apitalism is wrong not only on account of its failure to aid the poor and needy, but also because of what it does succeed in doing, namely, deforming human desire. As Augustine noted long ago, humans are created to desire God and the things of God. Capitalism corrupts desire. Even if capitalism succeeds in reducing poverty, it is still wrong on account of its distortion of human desiring and human relations. As Alasdair MacIntyre has noted, “although Christian indictments of capitalism have justly focused attention upon the wrongs done to the poor and the exploited, Christianity has to view any social and economic order that treats being or becoming rich as highly desirable as doing wrong to those who must not only accept its goals, but succeed in achieving them. . . .Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize.” Capitalism is wrong not simply because it fails to succor the impoverished, but also because where it succeeds it deforms and corrupts human desire into an insatiable drive for more. Capitalism makes a virtue of what an earlier era denounced as a vice, pleonexia or greed – a restless, possessive, acquisitive drive, but which today is celebrated as the aggressive, creative, entrepreneurial energy that distinguishes homo economicus. Diagnoses and critiques of this cancerous desire and its effects abound and need not be repeated here.

I don’t agree with everything in Bell’s essay, but it is well worth reading.

As a follow up on yesterday’s post here are a couple of relevant articles from the Journal of Libertarian Studies:

• “Ambivalence, Ambiguity, and Contradiction: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Nonviolence” by Richard O. Curry and Lawrence B. Goodheart
• “The Radical Libertarian Tradition in Antislavery Thought” by Carl Watner

John Brown seems to have had some ideas in common with Lysander Spooner, the radical libertarian lawyer and theorist. The argument for violent action against slaveholders was premised on the slaves’ inalienable right of liberty and self-defense. According to Spooner and Brown, sympathizers with the anti-slavery cause were entirely justified in coming to the aid of slaves in forcibly resisting their enslavement.

Pacifists like Garrison, on the other hand, saw slavery as part of the broader problem of the use of coercion over one’s fellow man. They were opposed to all use of force, and so would not consent to the use of force even to free slaves. However, Garrison himself seems to have waffled, basically saying that it was ok for those who were not convinced of the truth of nonviolence to use force in the service of a just cause. Ultimately he came to support the war effort and even conscription (though, he favored exemptions for conscientious objectors). It was only a small minority, such as Garrison’s sons Francis and Wendell Phillips, and Adin Ballou who clung to the pacifist position to the bitter end.

What’s interesting is that proponents of violence like Spooner and Brown and pacifists like Garrison and Ballou started from the same natural rights individualist premise that no man had the right to rule over another without his consent and yet reached startlingly different practical conclusions.

Here’s a really interesting post by Caleb McDaniel on the rehabilitation of John Brown‘s reputation, slavery, and violence vs. non-violence.

McDaniel notes that a new book seeking to refurbish Brown’s stature has met with several laudatory reviews from folks like Barbara Ehrenreich and Christopher Hitchens that favorably compare Brown’s “more radical” willingness to deploy violence with the supposed weakness and ineffectiveness of pacifist abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison.

(Incidentally, why is it that Hitchens always seems willing to advocate other people’s deployment of violence in the service of causes he considers just? Oops! Cheap shot!)

McDaniel comments that, contrary to accusations that pacifists are cowards or that it is a privilege of literary types who don’t have to live in the “real world,” Garrison, for one, was nearly lynched and lived much of his life with a price on his head.

As Frederica Mathewes-Green once said about her opposition to the first Gulf War, anti-pacifists seemed to assume that “it took more courage to stand before your enemy holding a gun than it took to stand there empty-handed.”

Anyway, McDaniel also points out that the pacifism of Garrison, et al. was not just a means to ending slavery (a particularly ineffective one, their opponents would say), but was integral to their entire worldview:

[N]nonviolence was not merely an instrumental strategy for many radical abolitionists; for many of them, it was integral to their most radical ideologies. If we view their pacifism as nothing more than a strategy or personal trait, then it is easier to portray that pacifism as a sign of whimsy or weakness. But in fact, for many Garrisonians, a commitment to “nonresistance” was much more than a mere strategy, and certainly more than a simple sign of courage or its lack. It was at the core of their critique of slavery, government, and much else. According to nonresistants, any exercise of violence was an unjust usurpation of God’s authority, an immoral abuse of power. From their perspective, that was a large reason why slavery was wrong–it assigned to the master violent power that did not belong to him or her. For many Garrisonians, then, their renunciation of violence was of a piece with their renunciation of slavery. To call their pacifism a mere lack of spine ignores how it shaped their posture towards slavery and other violent abuses of power–like the treatment of Native Americans, the hawkish expansionism that sparked the Mexican War, and unequal marriages.

A propos of Memorial Day, Pen at The Gutless Pacifist links to this interview from last year with pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas. The ever contrarian Hauerwas, as we might expect, rejects the received view of World War II:

This Memorial Day, the new monument to World War II veterans formally opens on the Mall in Washington, D.C., commemorating the war we regard as blameless, since it fought Nazism. Is World War II a blameless war, from the nonviolent Christian’s point of view?

Not at all, because World War II was not a just war, because the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender. In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that. Those actions were also not in keeping with just-war theory, since they involved the intentional killing of civilians.

I think there are (at least) two senses in which we might say World War II was “not a just war,” and it might be helpful to distinguish them.

In the first place, Hauerwas is right that certain actions of the Allies violated the norms of the just war tradition as generally understood. The bombings of civilian population centers, whether with conventional or atomic weapons, pretty clearly violates the requirement of discrimination, i.e. that civilians never be deliberately targeted.

The demand of “unconditional surrender” is often thought to violate just war criteria because it seems to require the enemy to be totally subjugated to the victor. It is, effectively, to demand that the enemy submit to a condition of slavery.

On the other hand, to show that the war as actually fought by the Allies failed to comport perfectly with just war criteria in certain ways is not to show that no possible war against the Axis would have been just or that it would have been better not to fight at all. It’s certainly conceivable (though historians would have to judge whether it would have been feasible) that the Allies could have resisted German aggression but conducted that resistance within the constraints of just war criteria.

For instance, instead of insisting on unconditional surrender they could have demanded that Germany surrender its ill-gotten territorial gains and return to its pre-war borders (similar to the demands that were made upon Iraq in the first Gulf War). And they would have had to refrain from deliberately targeting civilians in enemy countries (it has been argued by several historians that this wasn’t militarily necessary anyway).

This still leaves untouched the question of Germany’s treatment of the Jews, which, quite apart from German territorial aggression, would seem to have called for some kind of intervention (though it’s doubtful that any of the powers of the day would have been willing to undertake such an intervention on purely humanitarian grounds). Conceivably some kind of intervention could’ve been undertaken without requiring unconditional surrender, though, since it entails disregarding the offending nation’s sovereignty it might come to amount to the same thing. But in the case of massive extermination of innocent people, unconditional surrender may well look like the lesser evil.

The upshot, I would say, is that though Hauerwas may be right that some of the actions of the Allies violated the canons of just war theory, there was still a just war to be fought against the Axis. And, moreover, the war as it was actually fought may well have been vastly preferable to not fighting at all (unless, that is, we follow Hauerwas in taking the pacifist position).

A downright positive (although somewhat spoilerish!) review of Revenge of the Sith from Variety (via Big Hominid).

I never had any doubt I would see it – my love of Star Wars was imprinted on me at a very young age, making it virtually impossible for me to be objective about the series (for what it’s worth, though, following the conventional wisdom I thought Episode I was terrible and Episode II was a slight improvement).

There’s an ongoing debate between proponents of free trade and those who favor “fair trade” (or, alternatively, “trade justice” – not sure of the extent to which the latter two terms mean the same thing). Fr. Jake had a post on the topic the other day, linking to this sermon by Rowan Williams as well as this pro-free trade piece (PDF) by Alex Singleton at the Globalization Institute.

Personally, I found the Singleton piece pretty convincing, but I don’t think one has to buy into the whole free trade argument to see that there could be a considerable overlap between free traders and fair traders.

Part of the debate boils down to whether its unfair to expect producers in poor countries to compete in a global market. Fair trade proponents often argue that poor countries should protect their nascent industries by means of tariffs or other trade restricitions. However, they also think that rich countries should lower their trade barriers, opening their markets to goods produced in the third world.

Free traders, on the other hand, think that everyone will be better off by lowering trade barriers and allowing the free flow of goods and capital.

In fact, the way most of the international trade agreements function is precisely by a kind of tit-for-tat – you lower your tarriffs on textiles, say, and we’ll lower ours on agricultural products. But fair traders criticize agreements like NAFTA and organizations like the WTO on the grounds that they force poor countries to open their markets to goods from richer countries, which supposedly undermines indigenous producers.

But often overlooked is the free trade case against such agreements. According to orthodox free trade theory, we benefit from lowering our trade barriers even if other countries don’t. This is because by lowering trade barriers we gain access to cheaper goods, thus improving our standard of living. There’s no need for high-level trade agreements; we could reap the benefits of free trade simply by unilaterally lowering trade barriers, including tariffs, “anti-dumping” laws, etc.

The insistence on tit-for-tat trade “concessions” only reinforces the notion that trade agreements are really about serving the interests of big corporations who want access to third world markets. But that’s not free trade at all, it’s managed trade or mercantilism.

A true free trader would like to see all countries lower their trade barriers, but if other countries want to shoot themselves in the foot (as he sees it) by engaging in protectionism, what business is that of his? He can still push for his own country to lower its trade barriers since, on his own theory, any country that does this benefits regardless of whether other countries follow suit. On free trade theory, it would be positively irrational to insist that other countries lower their trade barriers (however desirable that might be) as a precondition for lowering ours. As Singleton points out, that would be like throwing rocks into your own harbor just because someone else is throwing rocks into theirs.

But the lowering of trade barriers in the developed world is also a policy favored by fair traders because they want third world producers to have access to markets in rich countries. Thus they favor, for instance, the abolition of agricultural tariffs and subsidies.

So I don’t see any reason, in principle, why free traders and fair traders couldn’t concentrate on their shared interest in seeing rich countries lower barriers to trade, while letting developing countries chart whatever course they see fit.

An interesting discussion going on about sexual ethics. Hugo started things off with a bunch of posts about how he approaches sexual ethics with his youth group (several on Hugo’s front page – scroll down). Good follow up posts from Lynn at Noli Irritare Leones (here and here) and Camassia.

Also, a good post on pornography from Marvin at the Ivy Bush.

Hey, it’s the Feast of the Ascension!

I like this:

Consider this. Suppose Jesus was resurrected and returned to earth. But like any person who has come back from a near death experience, after a brief period of euphoria, things would have returned to normal. The days would have passed like those of any other life … and the years and the decades, to be followed as it is for everyone of us, with death.

Resurrection without the Ascension is a one day wonder, soon to fade. As it did for Lazarus who came back from the dead only to be remembered as the passive figure in one among many miracle stories of the Bible.

With Jesus the story does not end in this way. As the creed attests, “he ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of the Father.”

Visually the scene is dramatic. A body defies the force of gravity and ascends towards the sky until it disappears. But behind the visual imagery, there is a still more stunning reality.

When the gospel writer refers to the “right hand of God,” that phrase would have been understood to mean not that God has a left hand and a right hand, but rather that God is powerful and active. Speaking of the hands of God is the biblical writer’s way of saying that God is present in the here and now, taking part in the stream of events that touch us all. The right hand in particular is the hand of vitality and power. Those seated on the ruler’s right hand share in the ruler’s power and authority.

It’s not Christ in outer space, but the Christ within that counts.

Further, since one of God’s remarkable features is omnipresence, this means that in the Ascension Christians affirm that Christ, too, is present now, at all times and in all places, whether one is conscious of the divine presence or not.

To affirm that Jesus has “ascended” connotes his continuing activity in and through all the miracles of daily life. Whereever the work and will of God are done, that is where we see the spirit of the living Christ at work.

And how is the work of God to be done in this world? As many a gospel hymn expresses it, “we are the hands of God.” The community of faith consists of those who consciously or unconsciously carry out the will of God by doing the work of Jesus in the world today. And the work of Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever; it is the work of peace, of justice, and of loving kindness.

Affirming that Christ has “ascended” as the Church does when it celebrates the Ascension constitutes a declaration that Christians are called be a visible and active in the world today, representing the will and the ways of God to all of humanity.

If by the Ascension it is understood that Jesus disappeared from view to reside in some distant, supernatural realm never to be seen or heard from again, the meaning of the holiday is lost completely. Understood correctly, the Ascension means that the Spirit of the living Christ rules in the hearts, the minds, and the wills of those who dare to call themselves his disciples now.

This is the only way that Christ’s victory over death will ever be complete. The miracle is completed in the community where Christ’s love reigns. This happens both within and outside the walls of any church. And thus is Christ’s own prayer fulfilled, and God’s kingdom has come “on earth as it is in heaven.”

Isn’t it kind of funny that people tend to use the expressions “desert island” and “deserted island” interchangeably? Usually when talking about things like “What five books” etc. would you want to take to a desert/deserted island.

Surely what we usually mean is deserted island, right? As in being stranded alone somewhere. Though I guess desert islands would probably not tend to be that populated either.

But are desert islands even that common? Most of the islands people frequently go to are quite tropical. Don’t deserts usually exist on large continents?

No larger point there, really.