Month: September 2005

Robert P. George remembers philosopher John M. Dolan, who recently passed away. Dolan was a colleague of G.E.M. Anscombe (see his remembrance of Anscombe here) and shared with her a strong concern about beginning- and end-of-life issues.

Together with the late Cambridge University philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe and the eminent physician and scientist Dr. Hymie Gordon of the Mayo Clinic, Dolan co-founded the Program in Human Rights and Medicine in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Women’s Health at the University of Minnesota. For Dolan (a lapsed Catholic, at the time), Gordon (an orthodox Jew), and Anscombe (a convert to Catholicism) “human rights” meant the rights of every human being — including the unborn. Together, the three scholars provided a powerful witness for the sanctity of human life and the Hippocratic tradition of medicine.

[…]

While an undergraduate at Brooklyn College in the 1950s, Dolan worked full-time for three years on the waterfront and was a member of the International Longshoreman’s Union. He earned his doctorate at Stanford, where he studied with the distinguished philosopher Donald Davidson. He went on to teach and conduct research in mathematics, computer science, philosophy, and computational linguistics at Brooklyn College, MIT, the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller University, and Swarthmore College, before settling at the University of Minnesota.

In part under the influence of Anscombe and Gordon, Dolan’s interests in medical ethics, and especially in beginning- and end-of-life issues, deepened. When most academics began moving in the direction of support for abortion and some began to think favorably about euthanasia, Dolan raised his voice in defense of the pro-life ethic. His arguments were marked by careful attention to scientific facts and strict logical rigor. He was a master dialectician, but he argued for truth, never merely for victory. He treated opponents with civility and respect, regarding them as collaborators in the quest for richer understanding.

[…]

Returning to the practice of Catholicism later in his life, Dolan explained that his lapse from the faith had been caused by arrogance. (This self-accusation was jarring to those who knew him, for he was not an arrogant man.) “I thought I didn’t need God,” he told me in a quiet conversation one evening after I had delivered the inaugural Hymie Gordon Lecture in the Program in Human Rights and Medicine. “I had everything worked out, I thought I knew everything.” (The truth is, he did know an astonishing amount. Here might be the place to mention that on top of all his other interests, he also studied meteorology.) Eventually, he came round to the conviction that all of us are dependent on the God who created us, sustains us, and loves us; he concluded that it was high time for him to get himself to confession and back to mass.

[…]

Dolan did not fit comfortably into any political or ideological camp. He supported George W. Bush (reluctantly) on pro-life grounds, but strongly opposed the decision to invade Iraq and the administration’s policies on the treatment of prisoners. He also had differences with the Republicans on taxes, energy, and the environment. He had been active in the anti-Vietnam war movement and managed to retain friendships with people on the left even after the left chose to embrace abortion. One of his friends, despite many disagreements (though not, perhaps, about abortion), was Noam Chomsky. Chomsky did not break the friendship even when it became clear that Dolan was moving in a more conservative direction in some areas. Nor did Dolan walk away as Chomsky’s anti-Americanism grew more strident. A certain mutual tolerance prevailed between them. Before Hymie Gordon’s death, Dolan offered to introduce the great physician to Chomsky. “No,” replied Gordon — a passionate supporter of the state of Israel — “it would not be a successful meeting. I would throttle him.”

I have no love for professional scold and virtue-crat (and high-stakes roller!) Bill Bennett, but this is ridiculous. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is demanding Bennett apologize for some comments he made on his radio show while discussing the book Freakonomics. You may know that the author, Steven Levitt made the controversial argument that legalizing abortion led directly to a drop in the violent crime rate on the not entirely implausible grounds that many of those babies would’ve been born to poor inner-city mothers (let’s call it pre-natal capital punishment).

Bennett pointed out that, on this line of reasoning, you could sharply cut the crime rate simply by aborting all African-American babies:

“But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down,” Bennett said.

It’s clear from his other comments that Bennett intended this as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the whole argument since such a course of action would obviously be morally monstrous (and Bennett is a well-known abortion foe).

Surely Reid and the other Senate Democrats have more important things to attend to?

Heh. (n.b.: bad language)

The immediate spin on the aftermath of Katrina was that New Orleans had descended into a Hobbesean world of criminality and anarchy. But it’s now starting to look like that ain’t necessarily so. To wit: this LA Times article.

Snippet:

Maj. Ed Bush recalled how he stood in the bed of a pickup truck in the days after Hurricane Katrina, struggling to help the crowd outside the Louisiana Superdome separate fact from fiction. Armed only with a megaphone and scant information, he might have been shouting into, well, a hurricane.

The National Guard spokesman’s accounts about rescue efforts, water supplies and first aid all but disappeared amid the roar of a 24-hour rumor mill at New Orleans’ main evacuation shelter. Then a frenzied media recycled and amplified many of the unverified reports.

“It just morphed into this mythical place where the most unthinkable deeds were being done,” Bush said Monday of the Superdome.

His assessment is one of several in recent days to conclude that newspapers and television exaggerated criminal behavior in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, particularly at the overcrowded Superdome and Convention Center.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune on Monday described inflated body counts, unverified “rapes,” and unconfirmed sniper attacks as among examples of “scores of myths about the dome and Convention Center treated as fact by evacuees, the media and even some of New Orleans’ top officials.”

Indeed, Mayor C. Ray Nagin told a national television audience on “Oprah” three weeks ago of people “in that frickin’ Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people.”

Journalists and officials who have reviewed the Katrina disaster blamed the inaccurate reporting in large measure on the breakdown of telephone service, which prevented dissemination of accurate reports to those most in need of the information. Race may have also played a factor.

The wild rumors filled the vacuum and seemed to gain credence with each retelling — that an infant’s body had been found in a trash can, that sharks from Lake Pontchartrain were swimming through the business district, that hundreds of bodies had been stacked in the Superdome basement.

“It doesn’t take anything to start a rumor around here,” Louisiana National Guard 2nd Lt. Lance Cagnolatti said at the height of the Superdome relief effort. “There’s 20,000 people in here. Think when you were in high school. You whisper something in someone’s ear. By the end of the day, everyone in school knows the rumor — and the rumor isn’t the same thing it was when you started it.”

Follow-up reporting has discredited reports of a 7-year-old being raped and murdered at the Superdome, roving bands of armed gang members attacking the helpless, and dozens of bodies being shoved into a freezer at the Convention Center.

Today is the feast of St. Michael and all angels. There’s very little serious discussion of angels (and the demons, their wicked counterparts) these days ; popular images tend to involve either a saccharine Hallmark-card type spirituality or lurid horror-movie imagery. But as our pastor pointed out last night, the Bible mentions angels over 200 times and seems to take them pretty seriously.

So, how should we think about these things? Are there really personal spiritual beings inhabiting other planes of reality and which may occasionally influence events here? Or are they just metaphors for powers of light and darkness in our world? Or something else?

Just wanted to try and come to some kind of conclusion regarding Christopher Insole’s The Politics of Human Frailty: A Theological Defense of Political Liberalism (see here, here and here for previous posts on this topic).

In his concluding chapter Insole wants to clarify what the defender of political liberalism is and isn’t committed to. He says:

The position I have been circling around in this book is that there is order, meaning and participation, but that it comes to us in ways that are fragmented, graced, unbidden and hidden. I have argued that a refusal to conflate the visible and invisible Church leads us to endorse some strands of political liberalism, while cultivating an aversion towards global invocations of new (or ancient) world-views and divinely sanctioned political activism. On the other hand, the Church – because of the specific and theological nature of its endorsement of political liberalism – is always called to resist liberal triumphalism and global revolutions and wars in the name of ‘liberty’, when these campaigns ride roughshod over the fallenness and complexity of our shared human condition. (p. 170)

Insole concedes that such a position may risk falling into a complacent acceptance of the status quo. But, he argues that the 20th century experiments in “transformative projects” – such as communism and fascism – give us good reason to appreciate anew liberalism’s prosaic virtues. And Insole’s brand of liberalism can, he thinks, provide a check on the more millenial version of “crusading liberalism” that seeks to impose one model of political and economic life on the entire world:

An aversion to political liberalism, one suspects, is frequently motivated by a profound discomfort at the ravages of late global capitalism; such a discomfort I would suggest is the driving force behind Milbank’s self-styling as a Christian socialist. If nothing else, this book should show that there is a tradition of political liberalism that is much older than global capitalism, and that is conceptually quite distinct from it. Political liberalism is motivated by the desire to preserve the liberties of the individual within a framework of law and fair institutions. A sense of the frailty of human individuals and their vulnerability to the enthusiasms of other individuals leads the political liberal to adopt a cautious attitude when presented with attempts to plan society on the model of a unifying common good, a ‘political community’. (p. 172)

He notes that the liberal as such isn’t committed to any particular view of political economy; “liberal” views range from the relatively laissez-faire of F.A. Hayek to the rather extensive degree of redistribution and regulation envisioned by John Rawls. Nor must the liberal demand that “market values” be extended to every sphere of society – i.e. that all professions, communities, etc. be “run like a business.” Burke, though a fan of Adam Smith’s economic theories, certainly didn’t think that the “little platoons” of family, community, church, college, etc. should consist entirely of contractual relationships. And neither is the liberal committed to the global extension of a particular social and economic model that runs roughshod over indigenous customs and institutions.

The essence of the liberal view of political society is that it is (to use Michael Oakeshott‘s terms) a nomocracy and not a teleocracy. In a nomocracy, the job of government is to establish a set of rules under the constraint of which people can pursue whatever goals they choose. A teleocracy, by contrast, seeks to direct its subjects to a particular goal or purpose. For instance, when people talke about America’s “mission” or “purpose” they’re speaking teleocratically. Which is not to deny that the various communities within liberal society – churches, schools, associations of various sorts – may be legitimate teleocracies. The crucial distinction for the liberal is that political society has the power to impose a particular ordering of values, whereas these other bodies can only propose.

Critics of liberalism sometimes charge that it celebrates an essentially empty notion of freedom without taking a stand on which choices we should make. But for the political liberal that’s as it should be, because political liberalism isn’t a comprehensive theory about the good life, but a doctrine about the proper limits of political authority. The liberal wants the discussion about the proper ends of life to be hashed out in the essentially non-coercive sphere of civil society rather than being imposed from above by government.

Which is not to say that there aren’t versions of liberalism that do propose (or maybe presuppose) a comprehensive theory about the good life. There is a strain in liberal thinking (perhaps derived from J.S. Mill) that sees the development of individual personality without restraints as the highest good, period. This “expressive individualism” is what critics of liberalism often have in mind I think. Since it denies the existence of an ordering telos of human life it is inconsistent with more robust accounts of what makes for a good human life (including religious ones). But what Insole and other political liberals want to say is that political liberalism can exist independently of liberalism as a comprehensive view about the good life.

The critics, on the other hand, think that political liberalism will bleed into the rest of social life, dissolving all social bonds into relationships based on contract and consent, and promoting a nihilistic denial of any good beyond the preferences of individuals. That is, they think that political liberalism will inevitably lead to a society of expressive individualism and moral nihilism (critics like Alasdair MacIntyre think that our society has already reached such a point).

While I think Insole has done a good job showing that political liberalism is conceptually distinct from liberalism more broadly conceived, I doubt the critics would be convinced that there isn’t still a slippery slope from one to the other. On the other hand, I think he’s done a good job reminding us of some of the virtues of liberalism at a time when perhaps there are neo-traditionalists and communitarians itching to have society reflect a prescribed set of values. And for all their polemics, I don’t think the theological critics of liberalism want to see the replacement of the liberal political order with a confessional state, so maybe there’s less substantive difference here than some of the rhetoric might lead us to think.

Zod in 2008! (via Unqualified Offerings)

But wouldn’t this require amending the constitution? (I believe he’s an immigrant, after all.)

I don’t usually agree with John McCain, but props to him for calling for an investigation into new allegations of torture of prisoners in Iraq.

Y’know, it’s funny (not ha-ha funny) that after all the tortured arguments (pardon the expression) about whether it would be justified in various contrived “ticking bomb” scenarios, the actual torture that has taken place has been done for no good end, but rather out of what looks like a spirit of sheer sadism.

In today’s paper the story of Cindy Sheehan getting arrested at the White House was right next to the story of five Shi’ite elementary school teachers being lined up against a wall and executed by Sunni terrorists. Intentional or not, it’s enough to make me question the wisdom of the “get out now” crowd.

One popular argument on the anti-war side has been that the presence of the U.S. actually exacerbates the violence in Iraq and that it will only begin to subside if U.S. troops leave. However, it’s hard to see why there will be fewer instances of things like the slaying of those five teachers if we leave. I’m not sure we should assume things can’t get worse than they are.

But there is a more pessimistic argument for leaving – namely, that Iraq is going to descend into increasing violence and sectarian strife no matter what we do, so we might as well leave now and spare ourselves the additional casualties. The more positive spin on this course of action is the “declare victory and get out” strategy that some have advocated; we toppled Saddam and made sure there were no WMD’s – mission accomplished!

I just wish I could be as sure what the right thing to do is as a lot of other people seem to be.