A Thinking Reed

Month: May 2007

  • Is religion dangerous?

    Saw an ad for this in the new First Things: Keith Ward (see here) has written a response of sorts to the “new atheist” crowd. I imagine it’s the usual kind of irenic, thoughtful stuff Ward is known for.

    I’ve often thought that the whole issue of whether “religion” is on the whole good or bad is a pretty muddled one. In addition to the probably insoluble matter of deciding what exactly counts as a religion, there’s no religion-less society to act as a control group in determing whether the influence of religion has been on the whole good or bad. And beyond that it’s very difficult to see how you would weigh the moral improvements against the moral defects that are arguably attibutable to a particular religion. Was the Inquisition worth the outlawing of infanticide? and so on. Plus there’s the issue of casuality: how do we know what’s attributable to religion? For instance, several scholars, including secular ones, have made the case that modern science arose in the West in part precisely because of the Christian worldview. The idea of a God who creates a universe that displays a rational order served as an impetus to discovering that order. But such a hypothesis hardly admits of definitive proof one way or the other.

  • Richardson – the green candidate?

    Bill Richardson’s energy plan gets a green thumbs up from the environmental site Grist:

    As of today, Bill Richardson has become the boldest, most visionary Democratic presidential candidate on climate and energy policy.

    Is Richardson the dark horse candidate here? Will Obama and Hillary fatigue have Democratic primary voters looking for an alternative early next year? He’s talked the most sense on Iraq, plus he’s got those hilarious ads:

  • Christians and war revisited

    Doug Bandow has an article worth reading on Christians and the Iraq war.

    I think we see here one of the problems with Just War theory, a problem that many pacifists have pointed out, namely that it can be so flexible as to (rhetorically at least) justify virtually any war.

    However, Just War adherents obviously think that pacifism is too high a price to pay for a bright, clear line about when to go to war. But Bandow articulates what some JW thinkers have called the presumption against the use of force:

    Christians should be particularly humble before advocating war. War means killing, of innocent and criminal alike. It means destroying the social stability and security that creates an environment conducive for people to worship God, raise families, create communities, work productively, and achieve success – in short, to enjoy safe and satisfying lives. Wars rarely turn out as expected, and the unintended consequences, as in Iraq, often are catastrophic.

    Indeed, in Iraq the U.S. has essentially killed hundreds of thousands of people in the name of humanitarianism. Christians, even more than their unbelieving neighbors, should be pained by the horror of sectarian conflict unleashed by the actions of their government with their support. Believers especially should eschew nationalistic triumphalism in pursuit of war. And when they err, like predicting health, wealth, liberty, and happiness in occupied Iraq, they should acknowledge fault – and seek forgiveness. At the very least they should exhibit humility before saddling their white horses to begin another crusade.

    I tried to make a similar point here, specifically with respect to proposed humanitarian interventions. A lot depends on whether we see war as an extraordinary last resort, or as a routine tool of statecraft. Andrew Bacevich and others have argued that Americans have come to see war as the latter, with disastrous results. And Bandow is surely right the Christians, even if they’re not pacifists, should be wary of war and set the bar high for supporting it.

  • Is Ron Paul right?

    The debate kerfuffle between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani over the question of the causes behind the 9/11 attacks has generated a fair amount of comment. I think Paul got the better of the exchange and Giuliani came across as a bit of a demagogue, but it’s still worth asking whether Paul is right here.

    Talking about the connection between our interventionist foreign policy and “blowback” in the form of terrorism has been the genuine third rail of US politics over the last 5+ years. What I didn’t hear Paul say was that we in any way deserved the 9/11 attacks. This is the canard frequently used against people who try to explain the motives of the terrorists with reference to US foreign policy. But there’s a big difference between explaining something and justifying it. Saying that OBL and co. want to attack us because we’re “over there” as Paul puts it does not imply that they were right to do so.

    My view has been that our interventions in the Middle East are at least a contributing factor in Islamist terrorism and the 9/11 attacks. I don’t want to discount the role of Islamic extremism, as some leftists and anti-war conservatives seem to do. The former often advert to sheerly economic or political explanations, while the latter sometimes fixate on the role of Israel. Nevertheless, as Paul pointed out in the debate, bin Laden and his confederates have explicitly said that they attacked us because of our presence over there. It would be extremely foolish to disregard their own account of their motives, even if it’s not the full story.

    An important component, I would think, of any sound strategy against terrorism would be to “peel off” potential supporters of terrorist groups by listening to their concerns about our presence in the region. Granted there are a hard core of radicalized jihadists who will be swayed by nothing, terrorist groups seem to thrive only when they have some kind of support from the larger public. Presumably one of the reasons the IRA was able to carry on its campaigns for so long was that there were people not directly involved who at least sympathized to some degree. Paul is surely right that it’s important to ask how we would feel if some other country was meddling in our affairs like we do in the Middle East (and elsewhere).

    And even apart from the question of blowback, we need to ask whether our interventions are a) good for the US on the whole and in the long run and b) morally legitimate. Even if Osama bin Laden didn’t oppose it, there’s still reason to doubt whether US forces should’ve be stationed in Saudi Arabia, just like there’s a legitimate question whether our forces should remain stationed in Iraq. And the fact that it would likely make the Iranian people dislike us even more (possibly leading to terrorist reprisals) is not the only reason to doubt the wisdom of attacking Iran to prevent the government there from acquiring nuclear weapons.

    Conservatives have reacted (at times understandably) against the leftist litany of American misdeeds, but this has all too often spilled over into an uncritical approval of everything the US does or has ever done. If conservatism means anything it means dealing with reality as it is, not as you would wish it to be. At least the kinds of conservative thinkers I’ve always found congenial are those who criticize simplistic, utopian, and ideological thinking. Repeating the mantra that “they hate us because we’re free” won’t help us understand our enemies and ultimately deal more intelligently with them.

    Moreover, Christians of all people should be able to look unflinchingly at their own sins. We don’t need to pretend that we, individually or collectively, are free from fault. Believing in the power of forgiveness ought to enable us to look honestly at our own failings and those of our country, without sliding into self-loathing. We shouldn’t have to fear acknowledging them and, if necessary, changing course. That’s part of what I think Christians should bring to the civic conversation, especially when political parties seem institutionally committed to an uncritical nationalism.

  • Wanted: realists

    Ross Douthat makes a point not unlike the point I made here. Much as I enjoy Ron Paul’s red-meat isolationism, the chances that such a view will actuall carry the day are slim to none. With Romney, Guliani, and McCain all trying to out-hawk each other, it would be great if the realist-internationalist school of thought was represented in the current debate. Unfortunately, Chuck Hagel seems more interested in playing will-he-or-won’t-he with the press than making substantive contributions to the current debate.

  • C. S. Lewis on Barthians

    I was reading selections last night from a volume of C.S. Lewis’ letters and came across an interesting (and rather amusing) one to his brother on February 18, 1940. Apparently Lewis had recently encountered a group of zealous students of this newfangled theologian Karl Barth:

    Did you fondly believe – I did – that where you got among Christians, there, at least, you would escape (as behind a wall from a keen wind) from the horrible ferocity and grimness of modern thought? Not a bit of it. I blundered into it all, imagining that I was the upholder of the old, stern doctrines against modern quasi-Christian slush: only to find that my “sterness” was their “slush.” They’ve all been reading a dreadful man called Karl Barth, who seems the right opposite number to Karl Marx. “Under judgment” is their great expression. They all talk like Covenanters or old Testament prophets. They don’t think human reason or human conscience of any value at all: they maintain, as stoutly as Calvin, that there’s no reason why God’s dealings should appear just (let alone, merciful) to us: and they maintain the doctrine that all our righteousness is filthy rags with a fierceness and sincerity which is like a blow in the face…

    I don’t know if Lewis ever changed his opinion about Barth in light of the latter’s developed thought, but it’s interesting to see Lewis, the old-fashioned Christian humanist and upholder of reason in matters of faith and morals, clashing with the upstart “neo-orthodox” theology. Certainly “Barthians” of various stripes seem to dominate much of the field of academic theology nowadays, which makes you wonder where Lewis would fit in if he were still around. His critical approach to the Bible would not find favor with a lot of conservative evangelicals, but the high value he placed on human reason wouldn’t sit well with various neo-Barthian, “radically orthodox,” and post-liberal theologies.

  • Confessions of a thirtysomething right-wing peacenik

    Marvin points to a blog post discussing a poll indicating that we thirtysomethings are the only age group still giving majority support to the Iraq war. Much speculation abounds in the comment thread about us children of the 80s having been brainwashed by the evil Reagan.

    Coming near the tail end of this cohort (I’m 32), I’ve always been anti-war, beginning with my teenage skepticism of the Gulf War propaganda fed to us by the classroom “news” program Channel One when I was in high school. I did have a slight deviation during the Afghanistan conflict, seeing it at the time as a justifiable response to the 9/11 attacks (I’m a bit more ambivalent about that now).

    Perhaps surprisingly, it was really the liberal “humanitarian” wars of Bill Clinton that put me solidly in the anti-war camp. A truly self-defensive war I could theoretically get behind, but the whole idea of dropping bombs on foreigners to make them get along better always struck me as incredibly corrupt and perverse. I think this is actually part of the reason I became something of a right-winger in the late 90s – in those days it was the congressional Republicans who were opposing the President’s wars! This trend of Republican dovishness probably peaked with candidate George W. Bush’s “more humble” foreign policy and skepticism about nation-building.

    Obviously times have changed, and the anti-war position is only represented in the current crop of GOP candidates by Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul made the case that non-intervention is the traditional conservative and constitutional position, though it might be a bit of a stretch to call Ike an isolationist of any sort. It’s indicative of how surreal these debates are that Paul, a radical libertarian “fringe” candidate, is the only GOP contender who comes anywhere close to the position of the majority of Americans on the war, even if not us warmongering thirtysomethings.

  • Against beer snobbery

    I largely agree with this.

    Also, not only are Bud and Miller union-made brews (as Matthew Yglesias points out), “macro” brews are often more likely to be vegetarian/vegan than many microbrews.

    Now, look: I enjoy microbrews, but for an everyday drinkin’ beer I’d just as soon crack open a Bud or a High Life as most of them. Sue me.

  • Mitchell’s 8 Ways

    I took the red-eye home last night from the meeting I was attending in SF and so took most of today off from work to catch up on sleep and stuff around the house.

    I also started reading a fascinating book called 8 Ways to Run the Country by Brian Patrick Mitchell. Mitchell, the Washington Bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily is seeking to complexify the Left-Right dichotomy in a way that makes sense of various ideological groups in American politics.

    Like some other political taxonomies such as the Nolan Chart, Mitchell posits a two-axis grid to plot various ideological groupings. But unlike the Nolan Chart with its rather simplistic axes of “personal freedom” and “economic freedom” (criteria which bias it towards libertarianism in a fairly obvious way), Mitchell plots along the axes of arche and kratos. Arche is social authority and kratos is political power. Thus various political positions can be identified according to the attitude they have to these two concepts.

    Thus you get the classic left-right spectrum of attitudues toward authority – the various -archies such as hierachy, the patriarchy, etc. and a top-bottom axis of attitudes toward political power, with akratists (those opposed to all political power) at the top. So, in Mitchell’s terminology, an anarchist, properly speaking, is someone who wants to abolish all social hierarchy, but wouldn’t necessarily oppose political power. Meanwhile, an akratist is primarily concerned with the use of force or coercion and may for that reason oppose government while being ok with social authority.

    Intriguingly, Mitchell says that this two-axis categorization is possible only in the west because it’s the west which separated social authority from political power in the first place. Christendom vested authority in the church and power in the state (obviously the reality is a bit more complex than that). This distinction makes possible political positions with varying attitudes toward these two social phenomeneon.

    With the grid in place Mitchell sees four major traditions of American political thought vying for dominance throughout our history. In the lower left are Progressive Democrats who oppose social hierarchy and want to use the power of the state as a means to bring about greater equality. In the upper right are Libertarian Individualists who oppose social authority (bourgeois morality, etc.) and government power. In the top right are Republican Constitutionalists who want to check state power in order to allow the institutions which embody social authority, such as church, family, and community, to flourish, and in the bottom right you have Plutocratic Nationalists who are comfortable using centralized state power to shore up the national community and seek a harmony among business, government, and social institutions.

    Adding to this already interesting mix, Mitchell refines these four quadrants, so you end up with a circle of eight positions plotted according to their views on arche and kratos with anarchists on the far left and akratists at the top:

    Communitarian (bottom-center): a pro-government pragmatist and technocrat “whose focus is always on the good of the community”

    Paleolibertarian (top-center): Anti-government but more comfortable with social authority than left-leaning cultural libertarians.

    Theoconservative (right-center): Primary concern is for the social instutitions that shore up family and faith; not overly fond of government, but willing to use state power to shore up these institutions.

    Radical (left-center): Chief concern is to overturn oppression and social hierarchy; like the Theocon on the opposite side of the circle, is suspicious about government, but willing to pragmatically use state power to serve the interests of the oppressed.

    Individualist (top-left): Takes a negative attitude toward government power and social authority; primary concern is personal, individual freedom.

    Neoconservative (bottom-right): Characterized by “belief in a strong central government to defend the established order, with all necessary cooperation between the social and political powers–church and state, business and government.”

    Paleoconservative (top-right): Suspicious of government precisely because he believes that the modern state is corroding traditional forms of life and culture. Wants a decentralized polity that allows local communities to set their own standards.

    Progressive     (bottom-left): Wants to use government power to aid social progress; anti-traditionalist and “confident that the human condition can be infinitely improved if we just keep trying.” More focused on democracy than individual rights and liberties.

    This is a really fruitful way to make sense of political ideologies that goes beyond Left and Right and even some of the more complex typologies. For one thing, it helps me makes sense of my own political views a little bit. I definitely tend toward akratism in Mitchell’s terms in that I’m highly ambivalent about the use of force and coercion and consequently can sympathize at least somewhat with Radicals, Libertarians, Paleolibertarians, Paleocons and Theocons. I’m far less enamored of the centralizers in the bottom half of Mitchell’s compass: the big-government progressives, the communitarians (at least in their nationalizing variety), and the neocons.

    Subsequent chapters, which I’ve just started to get into, define each position in more detail, largely with quotes from representative figures. The book is brief and clearly written and yet adds a great deal of nuance to the ways most of us think about Americal politics.

  • The moral impotence of science

    Although it’s dressed up in the pseudo-scientific language of evolutionary psychology, this defense of free trade and outsourcing elides the same issues as most such defenses. The question of trade policy isn’t just whether our society gets richer as a whole or on average, but also what the effects on particular people are and whether those costs are worth, say, a cheaper widget. Talking about our supposed evolutionary history of in-group and out-group psychology doesn’t address the issue at all. Jeremy is absolutely correct to point out that science (and I use that term loosely in this instance) is being used here as a substitute for moral and political judgment. Whether or not the loss of jobs is an acceptable side effect of free trade isn’t something that our evolutionary history can tell us. It’s a fundamentally moral and political decision.

    You see a similar obfuscation at work whenever anyone raises objections to forms of medical research such as embryonic stem cell research. Defenders of ESCR like to say that “science” should decide such matters. But science as such is utterly incapable of deciding such matters. It’s morally impotent in that sense. It can tell us what states of affairs we can bring about and what they might entail in terms of consequences and costs, but it can tell us absolutely nothing about which state of affairs we ought to bring about. To talk about what “science” tells us we should do is nothing more than a naked appeal to authority, and not a particularly convincing one.