Month: June 2006

Mock me if you must, but I still enjoy the occasional George Will column a great deal. Case in point: this very good piece from last month on the rhetoric of “values voters.”

Via.

Interesting article in Sunday’s Boston Globe about the relationship between the Bush administration’s view of executive power during wartime and an “originalist” approach to interpreting the Constitution. Some legal scholars, including the conservative-libertarian Richard Epstein, say that in making its case the administration is neglecting Federalist 69, a crucial document for understanding the framers’ intentions about the scope of presidential power.

Coca-Cola BlaK (the inexplicable spelling and capitalization are apparently on purpose) – that is, Coke “infused” with coffee extract – is about as gross as it sounds.

Partly in order to see a little bit of historic Boston we decided to make our first church visit in the Beacon Hill area yesterday. Specifically, we attended a 9:00 service at The Church of the Advent (Episcopal), a venerable Anglo-Catholic parish. We figured our Protestant sensibilities would take to the 9 o’clock Sung Mass better than the Solemn Mass at 11:15. Despite following the Book of Common Prayer Rite II Eucharist pretty straightforwardly, there was still plenty of incense, multiple priests in resplendent vestments, and other signs of high-church pageantry.

It was quite a nice service, and the sermon (on the Trinity, of course!) was excellent. The preacher emphasized how, rather than being an abstract bit of metaphysical speculation, the doctrine of the Trinity highlights the personal nature of God and the fact that God reveals himself to us and addresses us as the God of Jesus Christ. After the service we met several members of the parish as well as the young associate priest, who described himself as a “high-church evangelical.” We got on the subject of theology and politics, and he said that, though he considers himself left-leaning, the important thing is Christ and the Gospel and that he thinks the parish does a good job attracting people who want to worship God and love their neighbor, whatever their political affiliation (of course, this being Boston, one has to wonder how wide that political spectrum is).

The parish seems to have a good portion of young adult members, several of whom attend divinity school or are in the process of being ordained. They also have a “Theology on Tap” program where they get together at a local pub and with invited speakers to discuss some theological topic. Beer and theology – what’s not to like about that? It seems like a very friendly, vibrant parish that’s engaged in the community and has a strong commitment to classic Christian faith. While we’ll probably check out some other churches in the area, I could see us making it our church home.

With all the fear-mongering on the Left about an imminent “Christo-nationialist” takeover, it’s nice to read an article like this at The American Prospect. Evangelicalism, much less Christianity as a whole, is not nearly as monolithic as some liberals fear (and conservatives might like!). Not that I’m necessarily on board with the whole “progressive” evangelical/Jim Wallis platform (for starters, I’m not even an evangelical, except in the old-fashioned European sense I guess). Rather it’s that Christians can be, and are, all over the map politically.

One of Ireland’s three patron saints, Columba (c. 521-597) preached the Gospel among the Irish and Picts, had some dust-ups with the local Druids, and was one of the architects of the Irish monasticism which helped preserve reading and culture during the early Middle Ages. (See here for more.)

Next Tuesday the National Religious Coalition against Torture will run an ad in the New York Times calling for “the elimination of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment as part of U.S. policy.” The ad is endorsed by folks like former President Jimmy Carter, Stanley Hauerwas, Bob Edgar of the National Council of Churches, Ted Haggard of the National Association of Evangelicals, Frederica Mathewes-Green, and others. You can view the ad here.

My updated map of U.S. states I’ve been to after some recent trips:

create your own personalized map of the USA

I’d say there’s a pretty good chance I’ll visit Vermont before too long. I don’t know about Rhode Island, though. Are there good reasons to go to Rhode Island?

Noam Chomsky is, to put it mildly, a polarizing figure. For a particular species of left-wing campus activist he’s a kind of guru, someone who has penetrated the veil of illusion and seen reality as it really is. For certain conservatives and “serious” liberals he’s an ayatollah of anti-Americanism, a kind of ritual hate figure.

I’d read some Chomsky in the past, such as Profit over People, which is his take on “neo-liberal” economic policies like NAFTA. Recently, after having a conversation with a friend who thinks highly of Chomsky’s work, I picked up Hegemony or Survival, his analysis of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy and the “war on terror” as both the culmination of those trends and an ominous new stage in America’s bid for global supremacy. Much of it seems to be recycled from earlier works, but there is some good discussion of the run-up to the Iraq war in particular.

In terms of policy, I find I actually agree with Chomsky a lot of the time. I tend toward the anti-interventionist side of things and do think that recent developments in U.S. policy, such as the embrace of “preventive” war are malign indeed. Chomsky does seem to give more credence to the legitimacy of the UN than I would, which I find strange. As a self-styled “anarchist,” why does Chomsky think that an organization whose members consist of states be any more legitimate than those states themselves?

Apart from that, what I find least compelling in Chomsky’s style of analysis is what I would call his “dualism.” We might almost call it a form of Manicheeism. The forces of light and the forces of darkness are easily identifiable: the U.S. versus “world public opinion,” corporate and government elites versus the people, “neo-liberalism” versus democracy and so on. He doesn’t offer much in the way of argument for why we should regard one set of those pairs as good and the other as bad. For instance, instead of treating James Madison’s argument against unchecked majoritarianism as self-evidently evil and wrongheaded, Chomsky could provide us with reasons for preferring more purely democratic forms of government.

Instead, Chomsky tends to rely on narrow legal arguments, pointing out inconsistencies between the behavior of the U.S. government, and, say, its professed commitment to enforcing UN resolutions. While there’s certainly something to be said for making those arguments, I’d like to see something in the way of more substantial moral argument. Any political position has to rest, ultimately, on a moral vision of some kind, but by keeping this implicit Chomsky ends up making higly contentious claims as though they were self-evident and only an idiot could disagree.

Here’s a link (via Eve Tushnet) to a blog called Bloggers Against Torture, sponsored in part by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. They’ve declared June “Torture Awareness Month” as “an effort to respond to the growing evidence that the United States government is engaging systematically in the use of torture and inhuman treatment as part of the Global War on Terror.” It makes me sad to think that such a thing might even be necessary, but the evidence piling up over the last few years is increasingly difficult to deny.

And here’s where I’ve come to think that the “war on terror” has been a big mistake. Not that I oppose going after the perpetrators of the 9/11 atrocities and their confederates. Whatever justice there may be in complaints from the Arab and Muslim worlds about U.S. foreign policy (and I think there’s some), the mass murder of thousands of civilians is unjustifiable and calls for a serious response.

But the language of “war” has had some bad consequences. First, it makes us think in terms of conventional-style military conflict and leads us to believe that launching wars along the models of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns is the best way to deal with the problem of terrorism. This may be partly motivated by our government’s wish to be seen as “doing something” about the problem in an obvious and visible way. But also by our view about the proper role of military power. As Andrew Bacevich argues in The New American Militarism, we’ve come to see war as a routine tool of policy rather than as a last resort.

Secondly, and maybe more importantly, for many people “war” defies normal categories of moral evaluation. Despite our public use of the categories of “just war,” many people, I suspect, still think that “war is hell” and anything goes in the name of victory. They see things like torture and the killing of civilians as inevitable, if regrettable, parts of waging war.For example, here’s Mark Steyn, a well-known pro-war columnist, writing about the alleged massacre in Haditha:

I don’t know any more than you do about the precise nature of events triggered in Haditha by Cpl. Terrazas’ death. But assume every dark rumor you’ve heard is true, that this was the murder of civilians by American service personnel. In the run-up to March 2003, there were respectable cases to be made for and against the Iraq war. Nothing that happened at Haditha alters either argument. And, if you’re one of the ever swelling numbers of molting hawks among the media, the political class and the American people for whom Haditha is the final straw, that’s not a sign of your belated moral integrity but of your fundamental unseriousness. Anyone who supports the launching of a war should be clear-sighted enough to know that, when the troops go in, a few of them will kill civilians, bomb schools, torture prisoners. It happens in every war in human history, even the good ones. Individual Americans, Britons, Canadians, Australians did bad things in World War II and World War I. These aren’t stunning surprises, they’re inevitable: It might be a bombed mosque or a gunned-down pregnant woman or a slaughtered wedding party, but it will certainly be something. And, in the scales of history, it makes no difference to the justice of the cause and the need for victory.

(Don’t ask me what “the scales of history” bit means. The only sense I can make sense of it is that the slaughtered innocent won’t be remembered by the people who write the history books and that (somehow) proves that it was okay to kill them.)

Steyn’s point seems to be taking the common view that “war” justifies pretty much anything so long as the cause is just. Neeless to say, this is completely at odds with the just war tradition which stresses the necessity of choosing permissible means to achiever one’s goals. As a matter of fact he may be correct that war tends to bring these things in its trail, but that isn’t the same thing as justifying them. If Steyn is right about the nature of war, he’s wrong in concluding that “it makes no difference to the justice of the cause and the need for victory.”

A better perspective is offered here by Matthew Yglesias:

The best way to avoid war crimes and related abuses is to fight fewer wars. Which isn’t to say you should never fight a war, but part of what needs to be in the mix when you think about these decisions is that, in practice, you’re not going to have a perfectly clean war anymore than you’re going to have 100 percent compliance with speeding rules. If you’re considering initiating a military action — or, as is more relevant right now in Iraq, prolonging one — it’s worth being realistic about the fact that you don’t get to have an idealized one, you’re going to get a genuine, flawed one. Thinking about this ought to make one more hesitant about endorsing the application of military force as a means of solving problems.

If something about declaring a “state of war” clouds people’s judgment about what’s right and wrong, then we should be that much more cautious about doing it. This would seem to be especially true in our present circumstances where our leaders have delcared a state of virtual permanent war, with an vaguely-defined enemy (terrorism? terrorist groups “with a global reach”? Islamism? “violent extremism”?) and an equally vague notion of what would count as victory.

What George Washington said about government in general would seem to apply especially to war, a particularly fierce application of government power: “it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” For some reason a lot of conservative skepticism about government power seems to stop at the water’s edge.