Author: Lee M.

Since the new conventional wisdom seems to have us all sorting ourselves into our little red and blue camps, I thought it would be a good time to revisit this essay from Frederica Mathewes-Green.

The overriding conflict of our time is not that between democracies and totalitarianism, not between those who are for human freedom and those who seek to repress it. Rather the overriding conflict of our time is the same as that from the beginning for it is the conflict between those that would remain loyal to God’s kingdom and those that would side with the world. And the world is exactly those people and institutions claiming that Christians too must be willing to choose sides and kill in order to preserve the social orders in which they find themselves. As Christians when we accept that alternative it surely means that we are no longer the church that witnesses to God’s sovereignty over all nations, but instead we have become part of the world.

—Stanley Hauerwas

Here’s Wesley J. Smith on the latest developments in the “right to die” movement:

The international euthanasia movement’s first principle is radical individualism. The idea is that we each own our own body and hence should be able to do what we choose with our physical self — including destroy it. Not only that, but if we want to die, liberty dictates that we should have ready access to a “good death,” a demise that is peaceful and pain-free. […]

Phillip Nitschke is another prominent euthanasia advocate who reveals the euthanasia movement’s radical individualist mindset. Nitschke is known as the Jack Kevorkian of Australia, and for good reason: He believes in death-on-demand. And like Kevorkian, he has not limited his “death counseling” to the terminally ill. This included, most notoriously, a woman named Nancy Crick who made headlines when she announced on Australian television and internationally through her website that she would commit assisted suicide because she had terminal cancer. But when her autopsy showed she was cancer free, Nitschke admitted he and Crick had known all along that she wasn’t dying but pronounced that medical fact “irrelevant” because she wanted to die.

Nitschke’s radical individualist mindset was demonstrated most vividly in a June 5, 2001, interview with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez, in which he asserted that suicide facilitation should be available to “anyone who wants it, including the depressed, the elderly bereaved [and] the troubled teen.” Toward achieving this end, funded abundantly by the Hemlock Society of the United States (now merged with Compassion in Dying into the newly named Compassion and Choice), Nitschke experimented with developing a “peaceful pill” that could be used to commit a pain-free suicide. According to Nitschke, the peaceful pill was to be for anyone who wanted it, even asserting in NRO that it “should be available in the supermarket so that those old enough to understand death could obtain death peacefully at the time of their choosing.”[…]

United States advocates like to pretend that legalized facilitated death will always be limited to the actively dying when nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering. But this is highly unlikely. Once one accepts the noxious notion that killing is an acceptable answer to the problem of human suffering, how can it possibly be limited to the terminally ill?

After all, disabled people, the elderly, and those with devastating existential grief caused by, say, the sudden death of family members, may suffer more profoundly — and for a longer period of time — than the terminally ill. If “self-deliverance” is, in principle, okay for those who experience less suffering for a shorter duration, then how would we justify denying termination to those who would seem to have a greater claim to receiving help to die?

I think Smith is right to point to a kind of radical individualism as one of the philosophical underpinnings of this movement. I would add to that the idea that human life is only worth living if it is devoid of suffering. An idea more diametrically opposed to the Judeo-Christian tradition is hard to imagine. Even paganism found nobility in suffering. If we make the lack of suffering the sine qua non of life we will truly have become Nietzschean last men.

Will Wilkinson:

We’ve all seen, and have grown weary of, the wide array of red/blue/purple political maps. The purplish tones are supposed to show us, I guess, that even a “red state” is a mix of red and blue people. It’s not binary: all red or all blue. Yes. I guess. But the thing that gets in my craw is the fairly widespread assumption that individual people are either red or blue, which is just silly if you think about it for a millisecond. […]

One of the reasons I dislike politics, and especially our winner-take-all system, is that it creates a pressure to pick sides in a way that does damage to authenticity. I resent being asked implicitly to join my intellectual urban fellows in therapeutic anti-red scorn-heaping excercises, as if “red” and “blue” actually means something interesting. Let’s all just stick to hating the stupid and pompous, qualities that know no hue.

Read the rest here.

Jennifer at Scandal of Particularity has an answer for those who want religious believers to butt out of public affairs:

…I reject the position that I have my opinion, and you have yours, and thus you should not attempt to force your “opinion” on mine. (Kind of a “get your rosaries off my ovaries” slogan – if you’re against such and such, just don’t do it!) It is scandalous to claim that the Church has some universal claims to make. I recognize that not everyone will agree with them. But science, technology, the state, etc. are sure making a lot of universal claims, too. To pretend that they aren’t, that they are merely presented us with “choices” and “options” is naive.

Jen puts her finger on the crux of the issue here, I think. It’s the notion that there is a “neutral” public space that properly excludes “thick” notions of the good from public deliberation. But as many people have argued, this “neutrality” itself embodies substantive views about human flourishing. One aspect of this view is that “choice” is the highest good and trumps considerations about the content of choice. But this is an eminently contestable proposition. And it’s ultimately incoherent because there will always be some choices that are considered out of bounds.

Here’s Paul J. Griffiths making a similar point:

Among the causes of our present difficulties, both at home and abroad, is a deep sense (usually incohate but not the less deep for that) on the part of many religious people that the rhetoric of toleration is being deployed in a duplicitousand underhanded way to bring about legislative and social goals that are every bit as particular and every bit as contestable as those commended by any religion while simultaneously obscuring these facts.

What Griffiths calls toleration only appears to occupy the moral high ground above all substantive moral positions because it obscures the fact this it also makes moral judgments. To realize this is to level the playing field and recognize that we are dealing with a competing moral vision rather than a pre-moral “neutral” stance.

Commenter Jonathan at Pontifications says:

Nevertheless I promise that I will join with Fr Freeman and Fr Hart when their respective Churches [i.e. Rome and Orthodoxy] are again One. No justification could ever exist for not belonging to the Great Church if and when it is reunited after the schism of 1054.

I wonder how many other Protestants (I assume Jonathan is one) would feel the same way were such a thing to come to pass.

In the past I’ve said to one of my Catholic friends that the fact that Rome and Orthodoxy make competing claims to being the “one true church” is one reason I couldn’t become a Catholic. On what principled grounds could I choose one over the other since both seem able to make equally compelling cases? But if there was reunion…

Which means I can indulge one of my guilty pleasures tonight.

Also see here.

Things are not off to a good start.

Now that that favorite hate-object of the left, John Ashcroft, has resigned, President Bush has nominated former White House counsel and longtime friend Alberto Gonzales for the postion of Attorney General.

First we get the condescending ethnic bean-counting angle:

President Bush paved the way yesterday for Alberto R. Gonzales to become the nation’s first Hispanic attorney general, nominating his White House counsel and longtime friend from Texas to replace the departing John Ashcroft.

Is this really the most important fact about Gonzales? So important that it’s the lead of the story?

Here, in my opinion, is the real story several paragraphs later:

The former Texas Supreme Court justice staunchly supported detention policies – since rebuked by the U.S. Supreme Court – that denied even some U.S. citizens access to a lawyer or the courts.

Gonzales, 49, also has come under fire for memos he wrote that seemingly justify the use of torture. Critics contend such memos had set the stage for the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. In one, Gonzales called Geneva Convention protections for prisoners “quaint” and “obsolete.”

This is the guy President Bush wants in charge of enforcing federal law.

And in case you had any doubts that the Democrats are worthless as an opposition party:

[T]he reaction among Senate Judiciary Democrats and their staff members was that Gonzales fared well in comparison to Ashcroft, who was beloved by religious conservatives but vilified by civil liberties advocates. Ashcroft’s resignation was announced Tuesday.

“I can tell you already he’s a better candidate than John Ashcroft,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D., N.Y.), one of the panel’s more liberal members.

The committee’s top Democrat, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, also sounded a conciliatory note, saying, “I like and respect Judge Gonzales.”

You may recall the all-out fight against Aschcroft’s nomination in 2001, but this makes it sound like the Dems are going to roll over for Gonzales.

Now, say what you will about John Ashcroft – there’s plenty to criticize. But for all his flaws, he was enforcing laws that were duly enacted by Congress (for a liberal semi-defense of Ashcroft see here).

Gonzales, by contrast, is an explicit advocate of government power unrestrained by such quaint notions as the rule of law.

A lot of the anti-Ashcroft hysteria was motivated not so much by his record as by his persona. He was a white, red-state conservative Christian. He doesn’t drink, gamble or dance (whatta rube!). He is anti-abortion and holds a host of other positions anathema to modern liberalism.

It appears that Gonzales, on the other hand, is a “moderate” on such issues.

Does this tell us something about the priorities of the Democrat Party? That being a religious conservative is worse than being an advocate of torture and chucking due process?

Stephen L. Carter examines the case for “humanitarian” war:

[M]ost of us agree that war is morally permissible to defend one’s own country against aggression. There are difficult questions still. (What counts as aggression? May one attack before the enemy strikes?) But wide consensus exists on the general principle of self-defense.

The more difficult question, and one that increasingly confronts the world, is the justice of going to war to protect not our own people but someone else’s. In other words, if Christian morality will permit Country A to fight Country B if Country B attacks it, will it allow Country A to fight Country B if Country B attacks Country C? Or what if Country B is slaughtering only its own people? May Country A go to war to protect the people of Country B against their own government? […]

Indeed, one might argue that there is a provincialism, if not selfishness, in saying that it is moral for me to defend my own people but not someone else’s. In much the same way, my right to defend myself against an attacker on the street also gives me the right to defend the fellow next to me.

I am not offering a settled answer to this question. The literature of just-war theory is strongly divided on many issues. I insist on two propositions, however. First, the morality of humanitarian intervention has nothing to do with whether others agree that the action is appropriate. (Although, as I have noted, international opposition might render it impractical.) Second, to refuse to protect the people of another country simply because they are not fellow citizens is, to say the least, uncharitable.

I think many thinkers in the just-war tradition would agree with Carter here. Paul Ramsey held, for example, that the legitimate use of force was nothing more or less than the expression of neighbor-love in the political realm. If I am called to help the man in distress by the side of the Jericho Road, would I not also be called to use force to repel the robbers if I came upon them in the act? And it’s hard to see why, on Christian grounds, this obligation should be limited to our fellow citizens. There may be, as Carter points out, practical reasons not to intervene, but not necessarily moral ones.

However, just-war theory (as this blog has discussed before) requires several other conditions to be met for any prima facie case for third-party intervention to carry the day. Prospect of success and proportionality are key here (i.e. will war stop a greater evil than it will bring in its wake?), as is discrimination or immunity of non-combatants.

Even more troubling to me (see here) is the question of whether the modern secular nation-state can be relied upon to restrain itself in warfare and to act according to just-war principles. Though just-war theory has gained wide currency in secular thought (see Walzer most prominently), it retains its roots in Christian ethics. And history shows us that the dictates of “realism” tend to hold sway over just-war scruples whenever the going gets rough and victory is on the line (WWII is the classic example here).

If the secular state refuses to place itself under those constraints, then I have a difficult time seeing how a Christian can be anything other than a de facto pacifist, refusing to endorse or support any wars. I’m not comfortable with this position, but it may be that just-war principles only have bite if the state itself is explicitly committed to them.

Today my wonderful wife gave me the Johnny Cash “Unearthed” box set as a birthday gift. It contains four discs of previously unreleased material from the years of Cash’s collaboration with producer Rick Rubin.

After just one listen I think I can safely say that the jewel of this collection is disc four: My Mother’s Hymnbook which offers the Man In Black’s take on some of his momma’s favorite spirituals.

Also not to be missed: the Cash/Joe Strummer duet on Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song.” Great stuff.

(And yes, I share a birthday with Martin Luther)