Author: Lee M.

The prolific Keith Burgess-Jackson has started another blog – The Conservative Philosopher. KBJ has enlisted several contributers so far, including Bill Vallicella. As a dabbler in philosophy and a student (though not quite an adherent) of conservatism, I’m sure I’ll be visiting regularly. Long may it prosper!

I really want to like this column by Roberto Rivera y Carlo because I think it gets some important things right. Rivera y Carlo criticizes our culture of careerism that emphasizes work over family:

In the West, however much we “value” marriage and family, our approach to the matter says that we esteem them less than career and a high standard of living. Think about it: we see ads urging 20- and 30-somethings to plan for their retirement now. Have you ever seen anything advising the same level of forethought to marriage and family? Of course not. In our culture, the order is work then family.

Unfortunately, this order ensures that marriage and family, not work, will do the bulk of the accommodating. (Sometimes this can’t be helped: heroic single moms like my own have no choice but to try and balance the demands of work and family. They didn’t choose the conflict between work and family; it was chosen for them.) Marriage and family will be grafted onto already-existing obligations and routines created by our work lives.

He advocates a restructuring of priorities as an anitdote:

So if focusing on our careers before settling down is inadvisable, what’s the alternative? It’s following the cultural model that prevailed until only recently: regarding work as a mean to an end — the end being caring for your family — rather than an end in itself. It’s keeping in mind that, as “Hallmark-y” as it may sound, your marriage and family are the most important thing you will ever do. They, not what you do for a living, are your legacy.

In recent decades there has been a shift away from the old view of work as necessary to survive toward seeing paid work as the locus of our identity, providing our chief source of meaning and self-fulfillment. We are then encouraged to pour our heart and soul into our work, sacrificing the other aspects of our lives when necessary (e.g. the advent of being connected to the office 24 hours a day via pagers, cell phones and e-mail which is touted as “liberation” but is actually the opposite).

Plus, this view of work just doesn’t square with most people’s experience. It tends to reflect the outlook of white-collar professionals, especially those in the more “creative” fields, but would probably resonate less with the people who clean their offices or tend their gardens. For many, perhaps most, people work is primarily a means to providing for themselves and their families, not a creative adventure of self-exploration and fulfillment.

So, I think work could stand to be taken down a peg or two and Rivera y Carlo is right on that score. But I also have to take issue with his claim that “your marriage and family are the most important thing you will ever do. They, not what you do for a living, are your legacy.”

For a Christian (and Rivera y Carlo is writing as a Christian) our identity should be rooted first and foremost in our status as redeemed children of God. My own Lutheran tradition has been particularly good at emphasizing that, before God, we are passive – our staus is not secured by any work of our own, including being good spouses or parents.

Some evangelical Protestants seem to have embraced a kind of cult of the family, where it becomes a haven in a heartless (godless, secularist) world. Early Christianity was, however, rather subversive of family ties. As Camassia recently reminded us, romantic or sexual love should not be taken by Christians to be the highest good, and consequently neither should family life. What room is there in Rivera y Carlo’s scheme for those who, whether by choice or necessity, don’t marry? Do they contribute something valuable to the community?

Now, I wouldn’t deny that the sphere of the family is one of the primary places where we exercise Christian discipleship. Charity begins at home as they say. But the Gospel invites a relativization of all penultimate goods and ties, however much that may seem to go against our “natural” inclinations. By all means, lets depose the idol of work, but without replacing it with that of family.

An fascinating article from Salon. Maybe they can make common cause with the League of the South?

The Vermont economist mentioned in the article, Thomas Naylor advocates a “peaceful, democratic, libertarian, grassroots movement opposed to the tyranny of the United States” and “the Vermont of small towns, small farms, small businesses, local governance, grass-roots democracy, green activism: Vermont as the gentle Switzerland of North America (but armed to the teeth, as Vermonters enjoy hunting in the woods).”

Naylor wrote an book along these themes with William Willimon (Duke chaplain, Methodist bishop and sometime collaborator with Stanley Hauerwas) called Downsizing the U.S.A., kind of a libertarianism meets E. F. Schumacher manifesto.

In principle, it’s hard to see why secession shouldn’t be permitted. If a group of people doesn’t want to live under the sovereignty of a larger political entity, why should they have to? Of course, how far down do you allow secession? Radical libertarians go so far as to advocate individual secession.

Plus, any state considering secession would have to reckon with the fact that the U.S. government would have claims to some of the land (national parks, etc.), much of the infastructure and other investments it had made. Would peaceful secession require the secessionists to buy out the feds? Another problem is the question of individuals who didn’t want to secede from the larger units. Would they be forced to come along or get out?

Still, an interesting idea to entertain.

Radley Balko has a post very much worth reading on the inevitable consequences of war, no matter how well-intentioned.

Some highlights:

Let’s look at this in purely self-interested terms. What do you suppose is going to become of this little girl? Think she’ll dismiss her dead parents in light of the larger picture, this grand scheme to remap the Middle East? What do you suppose the prospects are, now, that we’ll win her over to our cause? What about her sister, who was also wounded? What about their extended family? Friends? Neighbors? What about moderate Arabs/Muslims who see this image on TV? …

I’ve written before that I think out troops are on par the most measured, humane, restrained military force in in history. I still think that. I think we do more to avoid collateral damage than can really be reasonably expected of us. We ought to be proud of that. But you know what? It doesn’t matter. Reality isn’t important. Perception is. My point with this picture isn’t “look at how brutal the United States is.” My point is, “what do you think the world’s billion Muslims think when they see this?” What happened before the picture doesn’t matter. What happens after doesn’t matter either. What matters is the picture. Screaming kid. Covered in blood. America killed her parents. For the people who we’re trying to win over, that’s the entire story.

Shit like this is always going to happen in war. No matter how well-intentioned the military waging it. It happens in every war, as do Mi Lais and Abu Ghraibs. It’s not the nature of America or the American military. It’s the nature ofwar. That’s why we’d better be damned sure any war we fight is essential only to defend us from grave, immediate harm, because even if it is all of that, shit’s going to happen to make new people hate us.

Or at least that’s what Jody Bottum suggests in this article on the President’s inagural speech:

No, President Bush’s opponents should be afraid of this speech because it signals the emergence of a single coherent philosophy within the conservative movement. Natural-law reasoning about the national moral character gradually disappeared from America in the generations after the Founding Fathers, squeezed out between a triumphant emotive liberalism, on the one side, and a defensive emotive Evangelicalism, on the other. Preserved mostly by the Catholics, natural law made its return to public discourse primarily through the effort to find a nontheological ground for opposition to abortion. And now, three decades after Roe v. Wade, it is simply the way conservatives talk–about everything. With his inaugural address, President Bush has just delivered a foreign-policy discourse that relies entirely on classical concepts of natural law, and, agreeing or not, everybody in America understood what he was talking about.

In other words, the argument over abortion changed the way the nation speaks of every moral issue. “We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies,” the president declares–and thereby carries natural law out to the world.

This is a claim about the universal, which the old foreign-policy realists rejected. This is a claim about the moral, which the libertarians despised. And this is a claim about the eternal, which the Social Darwinists renounced. But these older strains of conservatism have lost the battle to set the nation’s rhetoric. They are welcome to come along for the ride, but George W. Bush announced, there in the bright cold of a Washington January, that the nation would be moving to the beat of a different political philosophy.

The older conservative tradition, when it was influenced by Christian thought, tended to emphasize the fallenness of humankind, and the limits that imposed on our ability to reconstruct the social order according to some kind of abstract pattern. Bush’s vision (to the extent it really is his vision) seems to lack that older pessimism and skepticism about the limits of human power, and that’s what worries me.

I’ve been skeptical that the Left was willing to embrace Christians (even “progressive” Christians) with open arms, and this column (via Get Religion) from The Nation‘s Katha Pollitt supplies further evidence for such skepticism. Pollitt just can’t bring herself to believe that Jim Wallis, for all his progressive bona fides, isn’t itching to put the clamp down on “reproductive freedom”:

Wallis often points out that the Bible mentions poverty thousands of times and abortion only a few. I’m not sure what this tells us–first we eradicate poverty and then we force women to have babies against their will? But in any case, Wallis is wrong: The Bible doesn’t mention abortion even once. Wallis cites the text antichoicers commonly use to justify their position: “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). Say what? Nothing about abortion there, pro or con. Nobody who wasn’t sure that somewhere in the Bible there must be a proof text against terminating a pregnancy would read that meaning into these words.

That so many Christians are firmly persuaded that the Bible condemns abortion suggests that God’s politics tend to be the politics of the people who claim to speak for him. Since these men, and now women, have been arguing for centuries without reaching agreement on even the simplest matters, the rest of us are entitled to wonder if perhaps they are reading the wrong book.

Pollitt is the same writer who lambasted Dennis Kucinich for his longstanding opposition to abortion (which he promptly abandoned after declaring his presidential candidacy) despite the fact that Kucinich was hands-down the most progressive candidate in the race.

Wallis is on record saying he is not in favor of “criminalizing” abortion, but that he supports measures that would serve to reduce the number of abortions. Now, leave aside whether that’s the best stance – it’s certainly a defensible one. The question is, can the “pro-choice” Left bring themselves to admit that 1,000,000+ abortions a year is a bad thing, even if there is room for reasonable debate about how to publicly address it?

Chrisitans of a more liberal bent often criticize more conservative Christians for selling out their beliefs for the sake of joining the conservative political coalition. I wonder what kind of sail-trimming the left side of the spectrum might demand from their would-be allies.

(Incidentally, since when did liberals become such strict biblical literalists? The Bible doesn’t mention abortion? Well, I guess that settles that! Doesn’t mention global warming or welfare reform either. Huh.)

A very good piece from Archbishop Rowan Williams (via Scandal of Particularity):

Do I have a right to die? Religious believers answer for themselves that they do not. For a believer to say, “The time could come when I find myself in a situation that has no meaning, and I reserve the right to end my life in such a situation,” would be to say that there is some aspect of human life where God cannot break through. It would be to say that when I as an individual can no longer give meaning to my life, it has no value, and human dignity is best served by ending it.

That would be in the eyes of most traditional believers, Christian or otherwise, an admission that faith had failed. It would imply that life at a certain level of suffering or incapacity simply could no longer be lived in relation to God. …

What anyone’s life means is not exclusively their own affair. He lives in relation – to others and to a society. At the simplest level, what often most shocks and grieves people who have been close to a suicide is the feeling that someone who has killed himself did not know what he really meant to his friends or family, did not know he was loved and valued. And even when someone who contemplates suicide is confident that he has no friends or families to hurt, we can hardly say that his life is without significance just because he says so; the society he lives in has a view about the worth of human life which can not be mortgaged to how any individual feels.

This argument begins to bite in the present debate because assisted dying involves others in an act of suicide. Someone else has to accept your decision that prolonged life could have no meaning, and to act on that decision. We rightly talk a good deal about the dangers of the elderly and dying being pressurised by relatives or hospitals to take a quick way out that is convenient for others. What about the pressure a sick person who is determined to die places on those around them?

Rights create responsibilities, we often like to say. Does the recognition of a legal right to assisted dying entail a responsibility on others to kill?

Read the rest.

Just in case you were wondering.

I should mention that I commend the Grant McCracken post linked to in the previous post in its own right. He offers a thoughtful critique of “buy local” movements and other attempts to artificially restrict choice for the sake of some kind of aesthetic “purity.”

It really is a vexing question: how much choice is too much? For most of history, perhaps, the problem was scarcity and lack of choice. The fact that we now have an abundance of choice has led in some quarters to a kind of “anti-choice” backlash.

Maybe this really does boil down to the question of identity. As Griffiths points out, forging an identity often means identifying yourself with a certain niche or subculture. The “buy local” people and the purist movie directors Mr. McCracken mentions want to think of themseleve (and want others to think of them) as a certain kind of people. In premodern times your identity was more or less handed to you; now its something you have to strive for.

The biggest challenge to transmitting the faith in the 21st century, according to Paul Griffiths, is that we have been inculcated by the culture of “late capitalism” into thinking of our identities as essentially items of taste. The Church (and he means the Catholic Church, but it could just as well apply to Protestantism) cannot help but appear as just one more “community of taste” appealing to a certain market niche, rather than a truth-bearing community. The problem is especially acute among members of “Generation Y” (b. 1978-1991) who, perhaps more than any preceding generation, have been formed by this kind of culture:

So far, then, we have Generation Y floating in an aural and visual flood, catechized by the late-capitalist market into seeking and finding identity in increasingly segmented communities of taste. Such communities are Lockean churches, in the sense conveyed by John Locke, in his 1685 Letter Concerning Toleration. There Locke defined a church as “a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord, in order to the public worshipping of God, in such a manner as they judge acceptable to him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls.” This is a community of taste and choice, constructed by a particular catechesis of desire. In all important structural respects, it is like the communities of people who mourn the passing of the jam band Phish or who read qvMagazine (a ‘zine for gay Latinos) or who go to monster-truck demolition derbies.

The problem, Griffiths continues, is that:

If membership in a community requires a catechesis of desire; if, too, that catechesis is contingent (it could have been otherwise) and not coerced, then it follows that the community in question is just a community of taste, preference, and predilection. It makes no sense from a late-capitalist, Lockean perspective to identify a community so joined as a community of truth, to say of it that it is the community that preserves and transmits more fully than any other the truth about human beings and the world. The members of Generation Y find it difficult to understand that anyone can seriously make such claims.

Much of Protestantism (especially the “free-church” tradition) has held that joining a church must be a matter of individual choice and conscience (hence “believer’s baptism”). How do these kinds of churches differ from the “communities of taste” that Griffiths bemoans? Well, in classic Protestantism, you joined a church (ideally) because you became convinced that it was indeed a “community of truth” (however we might want to unpack that).

One danger, it seems to me, of the fascination with “postmodernism” (usually used to refer to a grab-bag of cultural, intellectual and political phenomena) among some Protestants is that, in many ways, postmodernism is the ideal complement to a late capitalist economy. The limitless play of differance can quite easily go hand-in-hand with a celebration of “choice” as the highest good, as well as the seemingly inexhaustible plenitude and diversity of the market. The market is our counterpart to the medieval great chain of being – every niche is filled.

Grant McCracken makes a similar point from a more libertarian perspective:

What’s really scary about this “choice against choice” inclination is that it dresses itself up in indignation. It becomes the way sophisticated people show their discernment in matters of food and film, and their disdain for the mainstream. Is this what the avant-garde has come to? It is no longer an experimentation in the very new, an exploration of the far edge of possibility, but a refusal of the full range of choice. Could this be a fit of pique practiced by the Left in protest against the fact that markets did what markets were supposed to stand against: the creation of more and more options and the effortless incorporation of the new. Can we say at least that the most important locus of creativity and innovation has moved away from the artist into the very thing the artist stood against: the marketplace?

The question, it seems to me, is not whether we are going to be “pro-market” or “anti-market;” obviously the market is an indispensable part of human existence. But we can sensibly ask whether the values of the market will be allowed sovereignty over all other aspects of life. Sometimes (and I suspect even libertarians would agree with this) we must indeed refuse the full range of choice. That’s what commitment (to a cause, a family, a church) entails. The question for churches that downplay the question of truth is whether they can resist the hegemony of the market (as many postmodern types bravely claim to be doing), or whether they will become just one more consumer choice.