A Thinking Reed

Author: Lee M.

  • Pray for peace

    I did not know this:

    Memorial Day is not actually a day to pray for U.S. troops who died in action but rather a day set aside by Congress to pray for peace. The 1950 Joint Resolution of Congress which created Memorial Day says: “Requesting the President to issue a proclamation designating May 30, Memorial Day, as a day for a Nation-wide prayer for peace.” (64 Stat.158).

    (Link via Gaius)

    Of course, there’s absolutely no reason not to pray for fallen soldiers and for peace!

    Also, this piece from the Post wondering why we don’t like to think about World War I is worth reading. The “Great War” doesn’t lend itself to being recounted as a morality play in quite the same way that the Civil War and World War II do. Instead, it tends to highlight the pointlessness of war.

  • Friday metal – ARSIS, “We Are the Nightmare”

    The triumphant return of Friday metal – after a hiatus of at least a few weeks, I think.

    Lately I’ve been majorly digging We Are the Nightmare, the new album from Virginia death metal outfit ARSIS. I’ve seen them referred to as “technical” death metal, which refers to the crazy-ass playing. But these guys don’t sacrifice songwriting–and even hooks–to technical wankery.

    Here’s the video for the title track:

  • Theology and piety

    Marvin echoes a call from Books & Culture‘s Jon Wilson for evangelicals (and, by extension, the rest of us) to get their eucharistic theology in order. Which is all to the good, but only half the battle, I think. Lutherans officially have a “high” eucharistic theology, but the practice at many churches hardly reinforces that. I had to learn most of my eucharistic piety from Anglicans.

  • Radical faith and creation

    As my previous post may have suggested, I’ve been dipping into the greatest hits of H. Richard Niebuhr (Reinhold’s younger brother and no mean theologian himself).

    Right now I’m finishing up his Radical Monotheism and Western Culture, which I had read as an undergrad, and I remember it making an impression on me at the time even though I was in a very different place, religiously speaking.

    Faith, for N., has two aspects, the trust aspect and the loyalty aspect. To have faith in something is to trust it as a source of our worth and well-being. But it is also to have loyalty to that thing, to ally ourselves with it and take it up as our cause.

    N. distinguishes “radical” monotheism from polytheism and henotheism. The latter term referred, originally, to the worship of one god, but a god who is recognized as one among several. This god might be a national or tribal deity, but isn’t identified with the universal lord and creator. It’s generally agreed, as far as I’m aware, that the OT scriptures exhibit a mix of henotheism and monotheism.

    But N. wants to use both polytheism and henotheism in a more extended sense to refer to the ways in which we invest our trust and loyalty. For instance, if my loyalties are divided among devotion to work, family, community, leisure, etc. without any unifying or ordering principle, then I am a functional polytheist.

    N. is more interested in modern forms of henotheism, however, both because forms of henotheism are more significant and because they often masquerade as monotheism. A classic case is when our ultimate loyalty is given to our country. Goodness as such is identified with what is good for the nation. And this is often draped in the clothing of civil religion. The cause of god is identified with the cause of our society. Henotheism always involves elevating the penultimate to the place of the ultimate.

    By contrast, radical monotheism identifies the ultimate principle of value with the ultimate principle of being. Giving our loyalty to God as understood by radical monotheism means recognizing God as the bestower of existence and of worth. It also involves making God’s cause our cause:

    For radical monotheism the value-center is neither closed society nor the principle of such a society but the principle of being itself; its reference is to no one reality among the many but to One beyond all the many, whence all the many derive their being, and by participation in which they exist. As faith, it is reliance on the source of all being for the significance of the self and of all that exists. It is the assurance that because I am, I am valued, and because you are, you are beloved, and because whatever is has being,therefore it is worthy of love. It is the confidence that whatever is, is good, because it exists as one thing among the many which all have their origin and their being in the One–the principle of being which is also the principle of value. In Him we live and move and have our being not only as existent but as worthy of existence and worthy in existence. It is not a relation to any finite, natural or supernatural, value-center that confers value on self and some of its companions in being, but it is the value relation to the One to whom all being is related. Monotheism is less than radical if it makes a distinction between the principle of being and the principle of value; so that while all being is acknowledged as absolutely dependent for existence on the One, only some beings are valued as having worth for it; or if, speaking in religious language, the Creator and the God of grace are not identified. (p. 32)

    God’s “cause” or project is nothing less than all being. N. strikes an impeccably Augustinian note when he says that, for the radical monotheist, being qua being is good. God calls all that is into existence and calls it good. And wills its flourishing.

    This is why radical monotheism qualifies all partial loyalties, at least when they threaten to displace the whole. Even putatively monotheistic faiths like Judaism and Christianity aren’t immune from henotheistic tendencies. A Christian tribalism that confines its concern to “the brethren” or an ecclesiasticism that comes close to identifying the church with God is a betrayal of the principle of radical monotheism:

    In church-centered faith the community of those who hold common beliefs, practice common rites, and submit to a common rule becomes the immediate object of trust and the cause of loyalty. The church is so relied upon as source of truth that what the church teaches is believed and to be believed because it is the church’s teaching; it is trusted as the judge of right and wrong and as the guarantor of salvation from meaninglessness and death. To have faith in God and to believe the church become one and the same thing. To be turned toward God and to be converted to the church become almost identical; the way to God is through the church. So the subtle change occurs from radical monotheism to henotheism. The community that pointed to the faithfulness of the One now points to itself as his representative, but God and church have become so identified that often the word “God” seems to mean the collective representation of the church. God is almost defined as the one who is encountered in the church or the one in whom the church believes. (p. 58 )

    The ethical implication of this radical faith, according to N., is to make the cause of all being our cause. Radical monotheism breaks down the barriers between the sacred and profane. Rather than there being “holy” places, objects, and classes of people are “secularized.” “When the principle of being is God–i.e., the object of trust and loyalty–then he alone is holy and ultimate [and] sacredness must be denied to any special being” and a “Puritan iconoclasm has ever accompanied the rise of radical faith” (p. 52). But the flip side of this iconoclasm is “the sanctification of all things”:

    Now every day is the day that the Lord has made; every nation is a holy people called by him into existence in its place and time and to his glory; every person is sacred, made in his image and likeness; every living thing, on earth, in the heavens, and in the waters is his creation and points in its existence toward him; the whole earth is filled with his glory; the infinity of space is his temple where all creation is summoned to silence before him. Here is the basis then not only of a transformed ethics, founded on the recognition that whatever is, is good, but of transformed piety or religion, founded on the realization that every being is holy. (pp. 52-3)

    One thing that struck me is how N. follows his own logic to its rather non-anthropocentric end; non-human creation has its own intrinsic non-utilitarian value:

    How difficult the monotheistic reorganization of the sense of the holy is, the history of Western organized religion makes plain. In it we encounter ever new efforts to draw some new line of division between the holy and profane. A holy church is separated from a secular world; a sacred priesthood from an unhallowed laity; a holy history of salvation from the unsanctified course of human events; the sacredness of human personality, or of life, is maintained along with the acceptance of a purely utilitiarian valuation of animal existence or nonliving being. (p.53)

    N.’s Augustinian outlook provides a foundation for a theocentric worldview. As Christopher has recently blogged, Christianity is still stuck much of the time in an anthropocentric perspective, seeing God’s concern aimed primarily at us. For N. this would just be another form of henotheism; God is being used to prop up the human project.

    However, what N. doesn’t provide (which is perhaps understandable given the brevity of this book) is a criterion for ranking the importance of the needs of different kinds of beings. Are we too embrace a flat egalitarianism where all existents have the same value? That doesn’t seem right. And yet, any hierarchical ordering threatens to bring anthropocentrism in through the back door.

    What I’m inclined to say is that ethics have to be grounded in the nature of different beings and the needs that arise from those natures, along with their relationships with other beings. What’s good for x is what x needs to flourish as the kind of being it is.

    For instance, it’s sometimes absurdly claimed that proponents of animal rights want animals to have the same rights as human beings. But a right to vote or to an education, say, isn’t going to do a pig much good. Rather, what a pig needs arises out of her nature: room to root around, be social, to nest, and nurture offspring. If we are depriving our fellow creatures of the opportunity to express their essential natures, then that’s a good sign that we’ve overstepped the bounds of what we truly need to flourish. To attend to all being, then, doesn’t require us to reduce everything to the same level, but it may require us to curtail our own desires when they threaten the essential needs of other creatures.

    The most appealing version of this vision that I’ve come across is Stephen R. L. Clark’s “cosmic democracy,” where each kind of creature is provided with sufficient space to thrive. But this presupposes a couple of things, first that the world is set up in such a way to permit this (which is, in part, a question about providence) and second, and more pressing, that human beings can learn to see themselves as one species among many.

  • Surprisingly relevant

    H. Richard Niebuhr on what Karl Barth called “culture Protestantism”:

    How often the Fundamentalist attack on so-called liberalism–by which cultural Protestantism is meant–is itself an expression of cultural loyalty, a number of Fundamentalist interests indicate. Not all though many of these antiliberals show a greater concern for conserving the cosmological and biological notions of older cultures than for the Lordship of Jesus Christ. The test of loyalty to him is found in the acceptance of old cultural ideas about the manner of creation and the earth’s destruction. More significant is the fact that the mores they associate with Christ have at least as little relation to the New Testament and as much connection with social custom as have those of their opponents. The movement that identifies obedience to Jesus Christ with the practices of prohibition, and with the maintenance of early American social organization, is a type of cultural Christianity; though the culture it seeks to conserve differs from that which its rivals honor. The same thing is true of the Marxian-Christian criticism of the “bourgeois Christianity” of democratic and individualistic liberalism. Again, Roman Catholic reaction against the Protestantism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries seems often to be animated by a desire to return to the culture of the thirteenth; to the religious, economic, and political institutions and to the philosophical ideas of another civilization than ours. In so far as the contemporary attack on Culture-Protestantism is carried on in this way, it is a family quarrel between folk who are in essential agreement on the main point; namely, that Christ is the Christ of culture, and that man’s greatest task is to maintain his best culture. Nothing in the Christian movement is so similar to cultural Protestantism as is cultural Catholicism, nothing more akin to German Christianity than American Christianity, or more like a church of the middle class than a workers’ church. The terms differ, but the logic is always the same: Christ is identified with what men conceive to be their finest ideals, their noblest institutions, and their best philosophy. (Christ and Culture, pp. 102-3)

    It’s not hard to think of several contemporary parallels here: the fundamentalist yearning for a “Christian America,” the reduction of Christian distinctives to left-wing peace and justice sloganeering, or the reactionary Christian urge to defend “Western Civilization” at all costs (against immigrants, Muslims, etc.). Niebuhr would have no trouble spotting these as variants of the “Christ of culture” theme.

  • Fair warning

    I’m considering a post – perhaps a series! – on the greatness of my long-beloved Beverly Hills 90210. My wife and I have been watching the just-released DVD of season 4. So great.

  • One of these things is not like the others

    Rod Dreher writes:

    I think the most common, and superficially common-sensical, questions that comes up in discussions of this issue is, “How does Jill and Jane’s marriage hurt Jack and Diane’s?” The idea is that unless you can demonstrate that a gay marriage directly harms traditional marriage, there is no rational objection to gay marriage.

    But this is a shallow way to look at it. We all share the same moral ecology. You may as well ask why it should have mattered to the people of Amherst, Mass., if some rich white people in Charleston, SC, owned slaves. Don’t believe in slavery? Don’t buy one. Similarly, why should it matter to the people of Manhattan if the people of Topeka wish to forbid a woman there to have an abortion? Or, conversely, why do the people of Topeka care if women in New York City choose to abort their unborn children? Don’t believe in abortion? Don’t have one.

    Gee, what could possibly be the morally relevant difference between 1. owning another human being as a chattel slave, 2. disposing of an unborn human life and, 3. entering into a lifelong loving partnership with another consenting, adult human being?

    “Moral ecology” arguments, while not something I’d dismiss out of hand, depend on there being something intrinsically wrong with whatever act or phenomenon it is that’s under consideration. If it’s not bad in itself, what reason is there to believe it will “pollute” (i.e. affect in a harmful way) the moral ecology?

    In the case of slavery, and arguably abortion, it’s not at all difficult to see what makes them bad–they harm other human beings, or violate their liberty, etc. However, in the case of gay marriage, its goodness or badness is precisely what’s at issue. For those of us who see same-sex marriages as just as capable, in principle, of manifesting virtue and contributing to human flourishing as opposite sex ones, there’s no particular reason to worry about damaging the moral environment (and, by implication, straight people’s marriages). The moral ecology argument depends on a prior demonstration of the inherent wrongness of gay marriage itself, which hasn’t been forthcoming.

  • The sanctimonious carnivore

    I really don’t want to turn this into the all vegetarianism all the time blog. For one thing, I do have other interests. For another, I can only assume most readers don’t like being hectored about their dietary choices all the time. Plus, I’ve never been the proselityzing type.

    But for whatever reason there seems to be a lot of stuff on the topic lately. Like this from the Post:

    The path to becoming a more conscious carnivore has become a publishing industry trendlet. This spring also saw the release of “The Compassionate Carnivore: Or How to Keep Animals Happy, Save Old MacDonald’s Farm, Reduce Your Hoofprint, and Still Eat Meat,” by Catherine Friend (Da Capo, May 1), and “The Shameless Carnivore: A Manifesto for Meat Lovers,” by Scott Gold (Broadway Books, March 18). All three follow on the heels of last year’s critically acclaimed launch of a quarterly magazine, Meatpaper, which aims to assess the American “fleischgeist.”

    The books address a topic that has long been taboo among carnivores. Many of them prefer not to think too much about the moral, ethical and environmental implications of eating meat. But recent exposés about inhumane treatment of food animals have made it harder for thinking meat-eaters to put such thoughts aside. At the same time, artisanal charcuterie, grass-fed beef and, most of all, bacon have become “it” foods for chefs and chowhounds.

    As I’ve said repeatedly that I’m all for people eating less meat and eating more sustainable and humanely-raised meat. For one thing, there is, as I’m fond of quoting Andrew Linzey, no “pure land” on which to stand; I, for one, not being a vegan am responsible in part for the male chicks and male calves who are killed as “byproducts” of the egg and dairy industries (and that’s true even if you stick to cage-free eggs and organic dairy products). And even thoroughgoing vegans compete with animals for resources. So, no one here is in a position to cast stones.

    I can’t help, though, but pick a few nits with some of the claims put forward by the new breed of compassionate carnivores. For instance:

    Gold’s tale is likeably swashbuckling. (Chef and gustatory adventurer Anthony Bourdain clearly is one of his heroes.) But he doesn’t shy away from the meat of the matter. For Gold, being “shameless” means eating meat without shame, not eating it in a way that’s unprincipled or corrupt, the word’s secondary definition. “To be a real carnivore, a true carnivore, you have to be conscientious and discerning,” Gold says. “Eat good meat and source it well. Acknowledge where it comes from. And respect the fact that the animal died for your dinner.”

    “The Compassionate Carnivore” takes a more nuanced approach. Author Friend paints a picture of her life on a sheep farm in Zumbrota, Minn., and provides a guide on how to be both an animal lover and an animal eater. In a chapter titled “Letter to the Lambs,” she writes: “Tomorrow morning, when we load you onto the trailer for your trip to the abattoir, we will be thinking about the life you’ve lived on this farm — running around the pasture at dusk, sleeping in the sun, and grazing enthusiastically for the tenderest bits of grass. We will say out loud, ‘Thank you.’ ”

    This sort of pseudo-mystical talk about “thanking” the animals we kill for food reminds me a little too much of Rene Girard’s theory of the scapegoat. As you may recall, Girard proposes that the myths of many cultures are actually ways of covering up, or forgetting about, the murders of innocent victims. They posthumously turn the unwilling victims into quasi-divine sources of mystical power, power to heal the divisions within a community. This power is real in a sense because the scapegoat mechanism is the means by which conflicts within a community are defused – rivalry threatening to turn into violent conflict is focused on one, arbitrarily chosen victim whose “expulsion” restores, for a time at least, comity and peace.

    Similarly, I can’t help but see the image of the animal who we “thank” for their “sacrifice” as a cover up of what is, if we’re being honest, the killing of an unwilling victim. Obscuring that fact strikes me as dishonest. Maybe it says something about our bad conscience that we feel the need to sanctify it this way.

    Better, I think, is Karl Barth’s perspective:

    If there is a freedom of man to kill animals, this signifies in any case the adoption of a qualified and in some sense enhanced responsibility. If that of his lordship over the living beast is serious enough, it takes on a new gravity when he sees himself compelled to express his lordship by depriving it of its life. He obviously cannot do this except under the pressure of necessity. Far less than all the other things which he dares to do in relation to animals, may this be ventured unthinkingly and as though it were self-evident. He must never treat this need for defensive and offensive action against the animal world as a natural one, nor include it as a normal element in his thinking and conduct. He must always shrink from the possibility even when he makes use of it. It always contains the sharp counter-question: Who are you, man, to claim that you must venture this to maintain, support, enrich and beautify your own life? What is there in your life that you feel compelled to take this aggressive step in its favour? We cannot but be reminded of the perversion from which the whole historical existence of the creature suffers and the guilt of which does not really reside in the beast but ultimately in man himself. (Quoted in Linzey, Animal Theology, p. 130)

    Barth’s point here seems to be that killing shouldn’t be taken lightly or prettified or dressed up with some kind of nature mysticism. Whatever we may feel required to do under the pressure of necessity, it’s important to recognize that killing is not God’s ultimate will for creation, even if it is permitted under some circumstances (the analogy with Barth’s view of war as an ultima ratio is clear).

    Further on, vegetarians are scolded for not playing the compassionate meat game:

    “People who become complete vegetarians for the sake of animals are basically getting up from the table and leaving the room. Although they might work to help better animals’ lives through their words, those words won’t keep a sustainable farmer in business,” she writes in a chapter called “Making a Difference.” “Flexitarians, vegetarians who eat meat occasionally, are remaining at the table. Carnivores who choose to go meatless now and then are remaining at the table.”

    Here’s the thing. While I’m all for supporting sustainable agriculture, veggies who think it’s wrong to kill an animal needlessly for food aren’t in the business of supporting animal agriculture. That doesn’t mean that sustainable farms aren’t preferable – for animals and people – to factory farms, but it’s an odd argument to accuse principled vegetarians of not wanting to make meat eating more palatable (pardon the expression).

    Plus, there’s nothing stopping vegetarians from supporting sustainable agriculture and/or moves toward more humane forms of animal husbandry. Buying vegetables and other non-meat products from local farmers is one very good way. One can also support measures to reform animal agriculture even if one doesn’t consume its products. For instance, I’m happy to support the efforts of groups like the Humane Society, which are reformist rather than abolitionist organizations. I’m not sure that the complete abolition of animal agriculture is either possible or desirable, so I consider the efforts of these groups to ameliorate the worst abuses of factory farming to be good and necessary. Why is that “getting up from the table”?

    OK I’ll try and make that my last shrill vegetarian post for a while. 🙂

  • Book meme redux

    Marvin also tagged me for this book meme, which I’m pretty sure I did a while back, but maybe it’d be interesting to do it again without looking at my old answers. Here goes:

    1. One book that changed your life:
    Miracles, by C.S. Lewis. Reading this book as an undergrad was the occasion for my seriously considering that Christianity in more-or-less its traditional form (rather than some attenuated or watered down version) might actually be true. Or at least that it was a live option.

    2. One book that you’ve read more than once:
    Cash: The Autobiography, by Johnny Cash

    3. One book you’d want on a desert island:
    I guess I should say the Bible, right? Or maybe the collected works of Shakespeare? Or something clever like “How to Escape From a Desert Island”?

    4. One book that made you laugh:
    The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams

    5. One book that made you cry:
    I can’t really think of a time this has happened. Maybe I’m just a cold-hearted SOB.

    6. One book that you wish had been written:
    How I Changed My Mind, by Saul of Tarsus

    7. One book that you wish had never been written:
    I’m with Marvin here: I’m enough of a Millian liberal to be for the untrammeled expression of ideas. Though the world probably would’ve gotten by fine without Luther’s Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants and On the Jews and Their Lies.

    8. One book you’re currently reading:
    A Moral Climate, by Michael Northcott (just came yesterday!)

    9. One book you’ve been meaning to read:
    The End of Oil, by Paul Roberts. I’ve had this one on my shelf for months.

  • (Eco)culture wars

    Via Jeremy, a smart post from Patrick Deneen on the way Left vs. Right thinking is driving a lot of people’s reactions to environmental and resource challenges.

    I continue to be somewhat amazed at the glib dismissal of global warming and other environmental problems on the part of many conservatives. There is almost no attempt to actually engage the issues except occasionally by cherry-picking experts like Bjorn Lomborg who take a contrarian view (though even Lomborg concedes that human caused climate change is a reality). As Professor Deneen quotes from a Salon.com article by Andrew Leonard, the “very idea that dirty Gaia-worshipping hippies might be right is absolute anathema.”

    Deneen concludes:

    What may be most productive in coming years is to stop calling this cadre of economic libertarians – what we now call “the Right” or even conservatism – conservatives. There is nothing they want to conserve – nothing in the natural or moral ecology. They are rapacious exploiters who want to use every last natural and cultural reservoir for their own immediate profit – even at the price of leaving nothing for their children. Recall, it was Dick Cheney who said “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis all by itself for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.” Probably true, but it’s a damned good place to start, and we fool ourselves if we think we are not going to need substantial reservoirs of personal and political virtue in coming years.

    Soon, if not soon enough, I predict, there will be a party of conservatives and a party of “live now’ers.” Live now’ers have original sin on their side, and are likely to win a lot of votes until it’s clear that the grasshopper was wrong and the ant was right. Then they will tell us it’s time to get the guns. Are you sure that’s the side you want to be on?