I found this article by Andrew Linzey while searching for something yesterday. Good stuff.
I reviewed Linzey’s Animal Theology here.
Author: Lee M.
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Blue-state blues
For one thing, your vote no longer matters.
Meanwhile, here in Massachusetts, I was amused to see the Republican candidate for governor go out of her way to assure the voters that her positions on abortion and stem-cell research are indistinguishable from her Democratic opponent.
Massachusetts: where even the Republicans are Democrats!
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Is our atheists learning?
Thomas wonders why high profile atheist provocateurs like Richard Dawkins seem to know so little about the religions they criticize and frequently traffic in straw-man arguments. He also excerpts a take down of Dawkins’ latest book by agnostic Thomas Nagel.*
Scientific popularizers like Dawkins often seem to think that their expertise in one field translates into a general expertise about broader philosophical issues. Not that nonspecialists should be forbidden from discussing these things (among other things that would rapidly put most blogs, including this one, out of business), but there is still an obligation to familiarize oneself with the arguments of the field one is wading into.
For instance, a recent interview with Dawkins gave me the impression that he thinks that the history of religious belief is neatly dividable into the pre-Darwin era where most people believed in God based on some version of the argument from design, and a post-Darwin one where theology is shown to be intellectually bankrupt. This evidences a profound ignorance of the history of philosophical theology. If anything, theism has made a remarkable comeback in the last few decades in philosophical circles.
Unfortunately, Dawkins is able to impress people with his status as a member of the high Priesthood of Science. And his bombastic pronouncements drown out more nuanced thinkers like Michael Ruse. Ruse and Nagel, though nonbelievers, recognize that matters aren’t as clear-cut as Dawkins would have them and that well-informed intelligent people are to be found on all sides of the debate.
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*I discussed Nagel’s The Last Word here and here. -
Damn statistics
Speaking of war and death and other cheery topics, here’s a helpful analysis of the results of the recent Lancet study on the mortality rate in post-invasion Iraq (via Confessing Evangelical).
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Double effect double standard
This post by the Bull Moose blogger (via Marvin) brings to mind a point made by Robert Holmes in his excellent On War and Morality (I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may not get all the details right).
Pacifists and anti-interventionists are often criticized for their unwillingness to take up arms in the defense of the innocent. According to interventionists, the blood of those innocents is on their hands.
However, Holmes points out, interventionists usually deny that they are morally responsible for the innocent lives lost in the course of waging war. But how, he asks, can they fail to be responsible for the deaths of people they actually kill, while pacifists are held responsible for the deaths of people they had no part in killing?
In other words, if double effect is sufficient to get the “warist” off the hook for the innocent deaths the war he supports causes, it should be more than sufficient to get the pacifist off the hook for the deaths he merely fails to prevent by refusing to wage (or support) war.
This doesn’t show whether, say, intervention in Darfur would be on balance a good or bad idea, but it would be nice if interventionists canned the self-righteousness.
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Friday metal mayhem
Read a review of the new Trivium album, Crusade in the Metro this morning. You can listen to it streaming on AOL here (don’t know how long that link will be good for). Sounds fantastic, especially if, like me, you’re a big fan of 80s thrash metal (early Metallica, Megadeth, Anthrax, etc.).
And don’t tell me that cover art isn’t awesome.
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Story of my life
I’m going to flagrantly rip off Marvin and write my own “political autobiography” post, for my own benefit as much as anyone else’s.
As Marvin points out in recounting a conversation with his right-of-center friend, location, if not everything, is something. I spent the late 90s and early 00s in two of the most left-wing environments imaginable: academia and Berkeley (though not at the same time). Naturally I became a conservative. 😉 I don’t know if it was the insufferable complacency of my lefty colleagues or a natural disposition to being contrarian, but I started reading National Review, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, and First Things (as a concession to liberalism I also subscribed to the New Republic). I started digging into conservative political thought: Kirk, Weaver, Hayek, von Mises, Nisbet, Sowell, Friedman and other stuff you don’t typically find on your grad school syllabus. (The one political theory class offered in my graduate program was pretty much all Marxism and John Rawls was about as far right as the spectrum of permissible political positions seemed to extend.)
At this time I was a religious agnostic, but found myself gravitating toward a conservatism heavily tinged with libertarianism. In 2000 I voted for George W. Bush with some trepidation, but my concerns were mostly from the Right. In my view the Bush campaign represented at best an uneasy alliance between ideological conservatism of the National Review variety and the old-fashioned Rockefeller Republicanism of his father. I voted for him primarily on the grounds that he was, ostensibly, committed to free trade and a less interventionist foreign policy (oh how naive I was!) and seemed to be a moderate social conservative.
Then came the move to Berkeley in early 2001. If conservative thought was not so much unwelcome as ignored in my grad school experience, in the Bay Area a registered Republican ranked somewhere just above a child molester in the scale of popularity. I also sat through some sermons at our very left-wing Lutheran church that set my teeth on edge, as you might imagine.
But 9/11 changed, if not everything, at least some things. Though I supported the campaign in Afghanistan at the time, I was alarmed by what seemed to be the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude toward civil liberties and, eventually, its obvious desire to widen the theatre of war well beyond the pursuit of al-Qaeda and its confederates. By the time the run up to the Iraq war began I was firmly in “opposition” mode.
Another important change in the way that I looked at the world was a embrace of Christianity after wrestling with the question off and on for the better part of a decade. I started to reevaluate certain positions I held, realizing that secular conservatism sometimes seems more interested in religion as a prop for the social order than in its truth claims. And whatever the correct policies were for addressing, say, poverty or the environment, it occurred to me that a Christian approach to them was not necessarily going to coincide with the ones favored by many political conservatives. At the very least I was willing to look at liberal positions with fresh eyes. (I also blame my wife for forcing me to take bleeding-heart liberal positions more seriously.)
At this point I haven’t really re-thought a lot of my fundamental views on, say, economics or the scope of government so much as I’ve been continually dismayed by the way the GOP has behaved in power. I’ve become sharply attuned to the failures of “actually existing” conservatism you might say. I don’t think I need to rehash all that for anyone who’s read this blog over the last couple of years. Suffice it to say that I now find myself agreeing with the analysis coming out of liberal and Left organs much more frequently than those of the establishment Right, at least on the (to me) crucial issues of foreign policy, civil liberties, executive power, and the treatment of prisoners. So, I don’t know if that puts me on “the left” or just makes me a disgruntled conservative. For the forseeable future it may not make much difference.
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Revolutionary pamphleteers as proto-bloggers
I started reading Bernard Bailyn’s fascinating book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution and was struck by his description of pamphleteering as the primary means by which revolutionary ideas were spread:
It was in this form — as pamphlets — that much of the most important and characteristic writing of the American Revolution appeared. For the Revolutionary generation, as for its predecessors back to the early sixteenth century, the pamphlet had peculiar virtues as a medium of communication. Then, as now, it was seen that the pamphlet allowed one to do things that were not possible in any other form.
Bailyn offers this quote from Orwell:
The pamphlet is a one-man show. One has complete freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious; or, on the other hand, to be more detailed, serious and “high-brow” than is ever possible in a newspaper or in most kinds of periodicals. At the same time, since the pamphlet is always short and unbound, it can be produced much more quickly than a book, and in principle, at any rate, can reach a bigger public. Above all, the pamphlet does not have to follow any prescribed pattern. It can be in prose or verse, it can consist largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of “reportage.” All that is required of it is that it shall be topical, polemical, and short.
Bailyn continues:
The pamphlet’s greatest asset was perhaps its flexibility in size, for while it could contain only a very few pages and hence be used for publishing short squibs and sharp, quick rebuttals, it could also accomodate much longer, more serious and permanent writing as well. Some pamphlets of the Revolutionary period contain sixty or even eighty pages, on which are printed technical, magisterial treatises. Between the extremes of the squib and the book-length treatise, however, there lay the most commonly used, the ideally convenient length: from 5,000 to 25,000 words, printed on anywhere from ten to fifty pages, quarto or octavo in size.
The pamphlet of this middle length was perfectly suited to the needs of the Revolutionary writers. It was spacious enough to allow for the full development of an argument — to investigate premises, explore logic, and consider conclusions; it could accomodate the elaborate involutions of eighteenth-century literay forms; it gave range for the publication of fully-wrought, leisurely-paced sermons; it could conveniently carry state papers, collections of newspaper columns, and strings of correspondence. It was in this form, consequently, that “the best thought of the day expressed itself”; it was in this form that “the solid framework of constitutional thought” was developed; it was in this form that “the basic elements of American political thought of the Revolutionary period appeared first.” And yet pamphlets of this length were seldom ponderous; whatever the gravity of their themes or the spaciousness of their contents, they were always essentially polemical, and aimed at immediate and rapidly shifting targets: at suddenly developing problems, unanticipated arguments, and swiftly rising, controversial figures. The best of the writing that appeared in this form, consquently, had a rare combination of spontaneity and solidity, of dash and detail, of casualness and care. (pp. 2-4)Bailyn goes on to identify three main types of pamphlet: the direct response to a current event, the “chain-reacting polemic” – a series of back-and-forth debates “which characteristically proceeded with increasing shrillness until it ended in bitter personal vituperation,” (my emphasis) and ritualistic commemorative orations.
At any rate, I think it’s clear that if the Revolutionary generation had lived today they would’ve been ardent bloggers. 😉
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The theologian as amateur economist
Usually any book review symposium will have a mix of negative and positive reviews, but the one on Kathryn Tanner’s Economy of Grace in the most recent Journal of Lutheran Ethics – not exactly a right-wing rag – has four pretty scathing reviews.
In fairness, I haven’t read Prof. Tanner’s book, but if these reviews are at all accurate it sounds like she may be guilty of what seems to be a common failing among theologians who write about economics – being long on moral prescription and short on actually coming to grips with the findings of the discipline.
I’m not saying that economists are infallible – far from it. But we can’t simply wish away things like scarcity and trade offs because they don’t gel with the way we think the world should be. If economics provides an accurate – if partial – understanding of the way the world works, then Christians should use that knowledge to help craft policies that make people better off.
For a good introduction to a variety of Christian perspectives on these issues I’d recommend the book Wealth, Poverty, and Human Destiny, edited by Doug Bandow and David Schindler.
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Blood Mountain
Naturally one is a bit suspicious of any metal album that receives accolades from indie/hipster types, but I have to say that Mastodon’s new album Blood Mountain is pretty darn incredible.
The critical hype about them being the second coming of Metallica (circa 1986) may be a bit overstated, but their dizzying mix of thrash, power, death, and prog elements is impressive (actually, the drumming along might be worth the price of the CD).
Plus, the album’s about, well, a blood mountain. I mean, c’mon!
A Thinking Reed 