Interesting interview with the progressive firebrand and the libertarian congressman (on Fox of all places), talking about the prospects for a left-right coalition:
Month: January 2011
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Where’s the Left?
Apparently there’s been a dust-up recently about the supposed lack of genuinely left-wing bloggers in the professional blogosphere. (See here for the run-down.) The charge, in a nutshell, is that many of the most prominent bloggers are so-called neoliberals: people with liberal policy goals but who embrace the deregulation/free-trade/globalization model that has been in vogue since the 1970s or so. A genuinely radical Left is virtually nonexistent among the upper echelons of the liberal blogosphere.
If true (and it depends on how you measure importance in the blogosphere), this isn’t terribly surprising. To the extent that bloggers have been absorbed into more traditional media outlets, they are likely to reflect the traditional media ecosystem. It’s not really unexpected, for example, that the range of views you find among bloggers at the Atlantic is about the same as what you’d find on the op-ed pages of the New York Times or the Washington Post. If blogging was once considered an insurgent alternative to the mainstream media, the process of absorption and co-opting is, if not complete, well on its way. This state of affairs reflects American political discourse across pretty much all media. Not only are genuinely far-left views excluded from virtually all mainstream discourse, even old-fashioned liberals (paleoliberals?) are rare birds. Many people consider Paul Krugman to be an ultra-liberal, but he’s basically a mainstream Clinton-era Democrat (possibly he’s moved a bit further left since then). In Europe he’d probably be a conservative social democrat, maybe even a conservative.
What might be cause for surprise, though, is how little impetus the events of the last ten years (and especially the last three) have given to the revival of a genuine American Left. Speaking personally: I have no left-wing credibility or bona fides (I used to consider myself a libertarian), but the Bush era and its aftermath have pushed me steadily to the left. This was partly because of the war in Iraq and the gross abuse of civil liberties and the rule of law–which convinced me that organized conservatism was deeply corrupt and not to be trusted with governance. But I’ve also moved to the left economically. For instance, I used to be of the view that inequality per se didn’t matter so long as everyone, particularly the poor, was getting richer. But the disparities of the Bush era and the abuse of political power they enabled, among other things, have convinced me that a society with such gross levels of inequality could be neither just nor healthy. The fact that in addition to growing inequality, real wages have been stagnating or possibly even declining for working Americans obviously adds to the problem.
In addition to this widening chasm between the ultra-rich and the rest of us, the global economic collapse we’ve come to call the Great Recession (but which has also been called the “new normal”: an ongoing period of high unemployment and generally poor economic conditions for wide swaths of the working and middle classes) further undermined any remaining confidence I may have had in the ability of free markets to be self-regulating or self-sustaining. I recognize that the causes of the meltdown were complex, but it seems impossible to deny that one major cause was the lack of adequate regulation and oversight, which sprang from a faith in the virtual omnicompetence of markets. (Even former Ayn Rand acolyte Alan Greenspan has admitted as much.)
So, after all this, the fact that so many liberal bloggers are still singing from the neoliberal hymnal does come as something of a shock. It’s almost as if the last three years (or ten years) never happened. This phenomenon is only more pronounced on the actual political stage where, for example, a president routinely criticized by the Right for being a socialist (because, e.g., he supported the passage of a moderate, market-oriented, technocratic reform of the health care system) is in reality pursuing a program of tax cuts and deregulation. And the burning question among many politicos and talking heads is how to dismantle the already fragile social safety net so we don’t have to raise taxes on millionaires to pay for all our wars. In other words, the greatest crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression hasn’t provoked any fundamental rethinking by our political and economic elites about the balance we’ve struck between the needs of capital and the needs of society. (The ecological crisis adds a whole other dimension to this problem.) As for the grassroots Left–the activists, labor unions, civil rights groups, women’s groups, LGBT groups, immigrant-rights groups, liberal churches, etc.–it may either be too busy fending off the Right (with good reason) or too disjointed to actually push for such fundamental changes. In that sense at least, the bloggers seem to be in good company.
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Christopher on “marriage as discipleship”
Christopher makes some important points here, offering a corrective, I think, to some of the things I said here. For Christians, marriage isn’t just about “happiness,” but as Christopher rightly points out, it’s also a way of living out our discipleship. Or in Lutheran terms, it’s a vocation that allows us to learn to love the neighbor in a particular context. This doesn’t refer just to loving our spouses and children (if any), but also making our households blessings for the larger community. A household turned in on itself–concerned solely for its own prosperity and happiness, say–falls short of what Christians are called to. This may be a particularly countercultural word that the Christian understanding of marriage offers today.
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New book on animal rights
Here’s a new book that may be of interest to some readers of this blog: Animal Rights: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Paul Waldau.
From the product description:
Organized around a series of probing questions, this timely resource offers the most complete, even-handed survey of the animal rights movement available. The book covers the full spectrum of issues, beginning with a clear, highly instructive definition of animal rights. Waldau looks at the different concerns surrounding companion animals, wild animals, research animals, work animals, and animals used for food, provides a no-nonsense assessment of the treatment of animals, and addresses the philosophical and legal arguments that form the basis of animal rights. Along the way, readers will gain insight into the history of animal protection-as well as the political and social realities facing animals today-and become familiar with a range of hot-button topics, from animal cognition and autonomy, to attempts to balance animal cruelty versus utility. Chronicled here are many key figures and organizations responsible for moving the animal rights movement forward, as well as legislation and public policy that have been carried out around the world in the name of animal rights and animal protection. The final chapter of this indispensable volume looks ahead to the future of animal rights, and delivers an animal protection mandate for citizens, scientists, governments, and other stakeholders.
There are several good introductions to animal rights out there, but judging by the table of contents, this one provides a lot of up-to-date factual, legal, political, cultural, and scientific information that is in short supply in some of the more philosophical works. Might be worth checking out.
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Saved from God or saved by God?
Michael Westmoreland-White points to the website and blog of Ted Grimsrud, a professor of theology and religion at Eastern Mennonite University. Both sites focus on Christian pacifism in the Anabaptist tradition, particularly as represented by John Howard Yoder.
Prof. Grimsrud also has a series of essays on his site looking at core Christian doctrines. I read the chapter on salvation and really liked the way he framed the problem:
The theology I was first taught as a Christian implicitly told me that it was God from whom I needed to be saved. God is furious at each of us because of our sin. So we are doomed—and we fully deserve our doom. Our only way out is through Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross. God visits upon Jesus the violence we deserve because God must punish sin. Jesus is our substitute who saves us by paying the price required to satisfy God’s righteous anger.
I’ve never heard it put quite that way, but this really pinpoints the problem with what often passes for “traditional” atonement doctrine: it portrays Jesus as saving us from an angry God rather than portraying God in Christ as the origin and agent of our salvation.
Prof. Grimsrud goes on to argue that we aren’t saved from God, but saved by God. More specifically, God is not bound to some cosmic cycle of retributive violence that requires inflicting punishment on Jesus in order for God to forgive us, but instead seeks to heal us from the damage we inflict on others and ourselves when we turn away from trusting in God and put our trust in various idols.
He sees the salvation taught by Jesus as fully continuous with the salvation story of the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. God acts to save without needing to be appeased, sacrificed to, or otherwise bought off, because it’s God’s nature to be merciful. “Contrary to many Christian soteriologies, for Jesus the salvation story of the Old Testament remains fully valid. He does not tell a different story, but proclaims the truthfulness of the old story.”
Jesus’s ministry of healing, forgiving, and proclaiming God’s love (exemplified in parables like the story of the prodigal son) leads to his death on the cross, but the cross is not a necessary condition for God being willing to save us:
Jesus’ death adds nothing to the means of salvation—God’s mercy saves, from the calling of Abraham on. Rather, Jesus’ death reveals the depth of the rebellion of the Powers, especially the political and religious human institutions that line up to execute Jesus. Even more so, Jesus’ death reveals the power of God’s love. Jesus’ death does indeed profoundly heighten our understanding of salvation. It reveals that the logic of retribution is an instrument of evil and that God’s love prevails even over the most extreme expression of (demonic) retribution.
Trusting in God’s love–the love revealed in the story of Israel and in Jesus–frees us to break the cycle of retributive violence (shades of Girard) and to live a life of celebration and “creative and healing nonconformity.”
This view also strikes me as being very similar to that of Clark Williamson, who argues that the salvation we receive through Jesus is the self-same salvation present in God’s covenant with Israel. Jesus does not make possible salvation, but re-presents God’s universal saving will. This universal, unmerited love of God and the ever-expanding love of neighbor it elicits are the two foci around which the Christian life revolves.
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Toward reading more fiction
I noted in my earlier reading list post that I wanted to read more fiction in 2011. To that end, I’ve started a pile at home of novels I’ve acquired but never got around to reading. So far I’ve got
– Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
– Cormac McCartrhy, All the Pretty Horses
– W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted VeilOther suggestions welcome!
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Ethics and human-animal relationships
Philosopher Clare Palmer provides a summary of her new book Animal Ethics in Context (via Scu). The intent of her book, according to Prof. Palmer, is to
argue that animals’ capacities, while important, are not all that’s morally relevant. We need to take context and relation into account as well—just as we do in the human case.
It’s often argued in ethical theory that particular relations can underpin special moral obligations—relations such as creating a dependent child, or being causally implicated in harming others. If we create someone who needs us to thrive, or if we set back the interests of someone who would otherwise have flourished, we owe them something special that we don’t owe to people in general. I argue that some human-animal relations have a similar structure.
I think there’s something plausible about this. We often do ascribe moral weight to particular relations (of family, friendship, etc.), and it also makes sense that this would hold in animal-human relations (I have special obligations to my pets/companion animals, for instance). In fact, Mary Midgley’s Animals and Why They Matter explored some of this territory with her notion of the “mixed” human-animal community. Stephen R.L. Clark has made similar points.
What I’m less sure of is whether relationships can do as much ethical work as Palmer seems to be suggesting, at least based on her summary. Consider our dealings with our fellow human beings: just because I don’t have a prior relationship with someone, it doesn’t follow that they fall into the moral outer darkness where I have no obligations to assist them. I may well have an obligation to help people on the other side of the planet simply because their need is great, not because we share some special relationship. Might the same not be true, other things being equal, of our duties to animals? I certainly agree that as a general rule, we shouldn’t go mucking around in otherwise healthy ecosystems in order to protect the well-being of individual animals. But that may be because in the long run such interference would actually harm the well-being of a greater number of living creatures, not because we don’t have obligations to help those animals. In fact, it seems plausible that we have an obligation to foster the well-being of ecosystems because we have duties among other things, to foster the well-being of individual creatures.
This is somewhat speculative of course; I’d like to read the book to see where she goes with this.
EDIT: See also this post.
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Jesus at the movies
Crystal, who blogs at Perspective, had a post recently that referred to the 1999 TV movie Jesus. This got me thinking that I still regard Franco Zeffirelli’s 1977 miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (with scripting by Anthony Burgess, based in part on his book Man of Nazareth) as the definitive film adaptation Jesus’s life. I also enjoyed Scorsese’s Last Tempation of Christ, and think that it’s actually more reverent than its reputation would lead you to believe. (Though I still have a hard time with Harvey Keitel as Judas.) If it’s classic Hollywood epic you’re after, George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told is hard to beat. (Charlton Heston as John the Baptist! John Wayne as the centurion at the foot of the cross!) There was also the 2003 movie The Gospel of John, which, if I recall correctly, was a word-for-word retelling of the fourth gospel (and starred Henry Ian Cusick–a.k.a. Lost‘s Desmond–as Jesus!). And who could forget Mel Gibson’s notorious Passion of the Christ, which I have to admit I found powerful, even if troubling in several respects.
What’s your favorite portrayal of Jesus on film?
A Thinking Reed 