A Thinking Reed

Month: December 2006

  • Greeley against the draft

    Great response by Fr. Andrew Greeley to Rep. Charlie Rangel and the other “authoritarian liberals” who want to use conscription to provide a check on executive warmaking and/or to promote social and racial equality and/or as a moral tonic. (via Conservative Green)

    The obvious point is that the draft has historically not acted as a check on warmaking and if anything made possible wars like Korea and Vietnam. Greeley sharply questions the implication that draft riots would somehow be a preferable way to express opposition to war policy over, say, voting.

    Greeley goes on to say that the “government has no claim on the time and life of anyone, except the people who volunteer for military service (often, alas, because they have not many other choices in life) and convicted criminals. Conscription is just barely tolerable in times of great national emergency, if then.” He also notes that the recently departed libertarian economist Milton Friedman helped bring an end to the draft during the Nixon administration on the grounds that it was “an inequitable tax levied against the young and in favor of the middle-aged and the old.”

    The editorial writers of the New York Times, who have often had a soft spot in their hearts for national service, lament that Rangel’s proposal will fail. Like most authoritarian liberals, they think it right and proper and orderly that young men and women be pushed into adulthood by government pressure to do good. It will teach young people, they imply, maturity and responsibility and self-control (and get them away from video games and beer bashes!).

    In fact, volunteer service rates among young Americans are the highest in the world. The generosity and the merit of volunteering is diminished if it becomes compulsory and is destroyed altogether when the young people are forced to work for an inept and incompetent government.

    Moreover, volunteering as a requirement for graduation is a perversion. Humans grow in virtue not by being forced to repeat virtuous actions but by freely choosing such actions.

    My personal view has been that any polity worth defending won’t need to resort to a draft, except perhaps under extreme circumstances. Granted that there may be problems with our current system, coercing people into the military isn’t the answer. How about reducing our overseas commitments for starters?

  • The meanings of limited government

    This post at the anabaptist blog Levellers does a good job encapsulating where I tend to differ from contemporary American conservatism. I had wanted to write a post for a while about the different meanings given to “limited government” by people whose primary concerns are, say, concentrated executive power versus those who are most worried about high taxes and regulation, but now I don’t have to. The post promises to be the first in a series.

  • Animals, nature, and Christian ethics

    Stephen Webb, theologian and author of On God and Dogs and Good Eating, has an intriguing article at The Other Journal called “Theology from the Pet Side Up: A Christian Agenda for NOT Saving the World” which combines two of my pet interests (pardon the pun), Christian concern for animals and the theology of nature. In it he argues that Christians should not sentimentalize “unspoilt nature” and ecosystems which routinely sacrifice, often in brutal and painful ways, individual creatures for the sake of the integrity of the whole. Rather, he says, we should see pets as in some ways the paradigm for what God intends for animals. They are to be brought into the circle of communion and companionship which God has established. Consequently, he suggests that Christian concern for “the environment” should properly begin with attention to particular creatures:

    [T]heologians are often in too much of a hurry to talk about nature these days, and thus they do not take the time to reflect about the nature that is closest to them—their pets. Environmentalists lift up the values of interdependence and holism, which they adopt from ecology, but these principles are another way of saying that eco-systems do not care about individuals. Rather than interdependence, I would want to emphasize relationships. Interdependence suggests that nature works quite well on its own accord, and human intervention inevitably upsets the balance. When I think of interdependence, I think of a spider’s web, not a mutual affirmation of difference and dignity.

    Christians have no business promulgating the aesthetic appreciation of coherence—a part of the whole is good as long as it contributes something to that whole—which reflects the old idea that this is the best of all possible worlds. The world is fallen, and nature is not what God intended it to be. The violence of nature is not all our fault, either, because the world into which Adam and Eve were expelled was already at odds with the peaceable harmony of Eden. If nature is fallen and its fall preceded our own, then there is little we can do to change nature in any dramatic way. Yet we can, like Noah with his ark, save a few fellow creatures from suffering as we try to warn others about God’s impending judgment.

    […]

    Beginning a theology of the environment by reflecting on pets will lead to a very different place than beginning with nature in general or wild animals with their freedom threatened by human population growth. The nature that God pronounced good in the Genesis creation account was not the nature that forced humans to toil for their food and animals to fight each other. Animals were named by Adam, which suggests that the authority of humanity over animals is not incompatible with intimacy and friendship. Animals are meant to stand in relation with God by being in relation with humanity. In his science fiction novel, Perelandra, C. S. Lewis describes a planet where the fall has not (yet) occurred. He portrays the animals as both mysterious and gentle, living according to their own laws but also welcoming human company.

    Traditionally, Christian theology portrays heaven as a garden, not a wild jungle, a place, like the original Garden of Eden, where God allows life to grow without the countless sacrifices of violent death. It is thus possible to argue that pets are the paradigm for the destiny of all animal life. In other words, according to the Christian myth, animals were originally domesticated, in the sense of being nonviolent and being in a positive relationship with us, and they will be again.

    I think Webb is right to resist turning nature as we find it into something that is normative for our attitudes toward the natural world. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and it’s proper for humans to alleviate (or at least not exacerbate) the suffering that seems endemic to our fallen world.

    But I also think Webb is a bit dismissive of legitimate environmental concerns. Granted that nature is “fallen” or, at the very least, not what God ultimately intends her to be, and granted further that we shouldn’t idealize “wild” nature, does it follow that we shouldn’t be concerned with fostering what integrity and beauty she displays? Webb is right that environmentalism can take on religious overtones, but this argument is often used by conservatives to shrug off environmental issues. Just because some people make an ersatz religion out of environmental concern doesn’t mean that there aren’t real problems that need attending to, for our own sake if for no other reason. The need to adress environmental problems arises quite naturally from the concern for the well-being of individuals (including our animal friends) that Webb places at the center of the Christian ethos.