Author: Lee M.

[I]t is good to be reminded from time to time—good for persons like me, with certain pre-modern prejudices—that our relations with the liberal democratic order can be cordial to a degree, but are at best provisional and fleeting, and can never constitute a firm alliance; that here we have no continuing city; that we belong to a kingdom not of this world; and that, while we are bound to love our country, we are forbidden to regard it as our true home. — David B. Hart

The New Atlantis is an online journal that covers the moral and social implications of technology. Two articles of note from the current issue:

“Stem Cells and the Reagan Legacy” by Gilbert Meilaender

“The Pornography Culture” by David B. Hart

I wrote before, “Since war entails significant evil in the form of death and destruction, the good to be achieved has to outweigh this evil for the war to be considered morally licit.”

Put more concretely, in addition to the 1000+ American lives that have been sacrificed for the current mission in Iraq, it is now estimated that somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 Iraqis have been killed, many of them civilians.

Just war theory makes a moral distinction between directly targeting civilians and civilian deaths that result as unintended side-effects of attacking legitimate military targets. But this isn’t the end of the matter, because the idea is not to offer a blank check for killing civilians so long as those deaths are unintentional. There are limits to what degree of “collateral damage” is morally acceptable. The two key concepts here are “necessity” and “proportionality.” That is, when we can forsee that civilians will be killed, even unintentionally, we have to ask if the military operation or war is necessary to acheive a certain good, and we have to ask if the evil of killing the civilians is outweighed by the good to be acheived.

Here’s an interesting report on the failure to uncover mass graves in Kosovo, the war which, you’ll recall, was justified on the grounds of Serbian ethnic cleansing and impending genocide. According to the report:

In alleged ethnic cleansing exercises by Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, as many as 100,000 to 200,000 civilians were said to have gone missing or been killed in Kosovo, many of them buried in mass graves. Members of a Canadian forensic team to the Serbian province have come forward to label the numbers nonsense. No mass graves, they say, and, on both the Albanian and Serb sides, only a few thousand dead. A mockery of the numbers used to justify the war.



And this is an interesting tidbit for those who think having a Democrat in office who can Bring Our Allies on Board will reduce the chances of war:

Looking back a couple of years after the conflict, [Canadian] defence minister Art Eggleton acknowledged that the propaganda coming out of the Pentagon was extraordinary. But the Chrétien Liberals, on close terms with the Clinton Democrats, weren’t about to buck the White House on Kosovo, as they would on Iraq. The allies were all on board for an attack, making it extremely unlikely that Canada would be the odd one out.

(link via Mark Shea)

Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost has a fascinating post about the recent intellectual development of philosopher Antony Flew. Flew has long been known as one of the fiercest critics of natural theology (especially during the heyday of the “falsification” debate). He now appears to be on the verge of accepting a version of the argument from design.

The London Spectator has an interview with liberal Anglican theologian (or do I repeat myself?) Keith Ward. Some of what he says is typically wishy-washy, but there are some interesting bits. To wit:

‘Darwinism is all right as far as it goes — but it can give no adequate account of aesthetic, religious or moral values. Richard Dawkins thinks you really should be moral, but where does the “should” come from? Even if they show that ethics is a successful survival strategy, it doesn’t explain why we should be good.’

and

‘I think the sciences point very much to a religious basis. I’ve never met a world-class physicist who doesn’t think there’s more to the universe than just atoms bumping together, something mind-like at work, some intelligence. Even Einstein believed that. In the last 20 years, there has been an intellectual revolution in thinking in Britain. God has become an option again but it’s just that it hasn’t quite filtered down to everybody else yet.’

Should work make us happy? Or, more to the point, should it be the chief element in defining our sense of self and personal worth as it so often is in the contemporary world? Time to get more realistic about what work can deliver in terms of satisfaction, says philosopher Alain de Botton.

He contrasts the pre-modern idea that work was necessarily a distasteful thing with the “more cheerful” modern view:

In the writings of bourgeois thinkers like Benjamin Franklin, Diderot and Rousseau, we see work recategorized not only as a means to earn money, but also as a way to become more fully ourselves. … work was now alleged to be capable of delivering both the money necessary for survival and the stimulation and self-expression that had once been seen as the exclusive preserve of the leisured.



Though all this may seem like progress, in truth, modern attitudes toward work have unwittingly caused us problems. Today, claims are made on behalf of almost all kinds of work that are patently out of sync with what reality can provide. Yes, a few jobs are certainly fulfilling, but the majority are not and never can be. We would therefore be wise to listen to some of the pessimistic voices of the pre-modern period, if only to stop torturing ourselves for not being as happy in our work as we were told we could be.



(link via Mere Comments)

I should also note as an addendum to the post below, that Borders makes a move in his article that I’ve seen a lot of libertarians make, irrespective of their views on foreign policy. Oftentimes it is held (or implied) that since rights must be protected by concrete social and political institutions, rights are nothing but the constructs of social and political institutions. The first claim is true – there will be no rights protection without institutions to protect them, such as the rule of law, fair and impartial courts, due process, etc. But it by no means follows that rights don’t exist apart from those institutional protections.

Tech Central Station has an article this morning by a certain Max Borders on whether it is possible to be a libertarian on domestic issues and a “neo-conservative” (his term) on foreign policy. In short: can a libertarian be a hawk? Borders answers in the affirmative:

The libertarian hawk takes her cues from Hobbes, not Locke, as the spaces mostly untouched by globalization are, in her view, like a state-of-nature. She sees threats that organize themselves in the shadows beyond civilization; operating, no less, in an age of deadly weapons proliferation. She fears the world’s great, but nimble powers coalescing into a slothful and ineffectual global body — where the toughest decisions of life and limb must be made in committee. She understands that freedom does not drop like manna from heaven, but is earned drop-for-drop and coin-for-coin by the sacrifices of blood and treasure.

In other words, since great swaths of the world do not recognize Western ideas about the rule of law and individual rights, they provide fertile grounds for threats to the civilized world to metastasize. This has a certain plausibility; since there is no overarching authority under which the entire world stands, disputes will inevitably be resolved in a fashion much more rough-and-ready than what we would expect in a court of law.

However, Borders goes badly astray in the next two paragraphs:

And this is the crux of the libertarian hawk’s position: “rights” as such, are not some Cartesian substance that animates the body in the manner of a soul. Rights are a human construct, just like money. The more we believe in them, the better they work. But there are situations in which the currency becomes, uh, devalued. Better said: there are limits to those on whom we can ascribe rights. (emphasis mine)

We get rights by virtue of some sort of social contract, not from our Creator. In this way, social contract theory splits the difference in many respects between libertarianism and conservatism. The social contract is an idea that people would rationally choose certain constraints on their behavior, constraints which culminate in certain reciprocal rules under which to live. I won’t harm you if you won’t harm me. We benefit through cooperation. And so forth. Those who would choose the rules enjoy the full benefits they confer.

It’s hard to see this as anything but a license to commit virtually any crime we like against those who fall outside of our “social contract.” Those who haven’t chosen to live under our rules can’t expect to be ascribed rights. What is left unsaid, but would be interesting to know, is exactly who falls outside our sphere of moral concern according to this theory? Terrorists? Foreign heads of state? Civilians in states that sponsor terrorism or pursue weapons of mass destruction? All those who exist “in the shadows beyond civilization”? Does this theory recognize any limits on what we can do to them?

What’s not hard to see is how such a theory could be used to deny rights to non-white races, mental “defectives,” and any other inconvenient persons who get in the way of our goals. Why assume that only foreigners will be presumed to lie outside the bounds of the social contract? Who decides who’s “in” and who’s “out”?

Borders doesn’t even address one of the chief libertarian arguments against foreign intervention, namely that it will inevitably result in the increased power, prestige, and influence of the State. Libertarian hawks want an all-powerful State that can preemptively crush its enemies abroad but will leave us in peace and freedom at home. The idea that foreign policy and domestic liberty can exist in hermetically sealed compartments seems willfully naïve given historical precedent.

Jim Henley offers a justification (of sorts!) for minimal government in response to anarchist critiques:

As a minarchist/constitutionalist, I’ll cop to inconsistency of principle. But while I agree with the anarcho-capitalists that All governments are gangs, I don’t think governments are the only gangs. It’s an observed fact that, wherever and whenever you go, armed groups will gather to dispossess people of the fruits of their labor, because it’s easier than working, or at least more fun.

More here.

(For earlier installments see here, here, and here.)

In addition to being a revelation of God’s love and a sacrifice that effects reconciliation between humanity and God, Christians have always seen the Atonement as the act whereby God redeems us from the powers of sin and evil. In ancient times, redemption meant literally to purchase someone’s freedom. According to Christianity, we are enslaved to the powers of sin and death, and on the cross God “purchases” our liberation.

This is perhaps the point at which Christianity departs most sharply from the view of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thought sees human beings as fundamentally rational and capable of being good on their own. At most the life of Jesus may provide a kind of supreme moral example, but this is only an accidental, not essential, condition for spurring us on to virtue.

Christianity, by contrast, sees humanity as deeply enmeshed in sins, both personal and corporate, sins from which we cannot free ourselves. Whatever else we might mean by the “principalities and powers,” the phrase at least refers to social, political, and economic systems of violence and exploitation in which we are all deeply implicated. We often benefit from unjust systems, and the structures of those systems often make it nearly impossible for us to avoid evil. For instance, a CEO may find it nearly irresistable to exploit third-world workers, not from personal greed, but because if he doesn’t take advantage of such an opportunity, his competitors will.

And within each of us, we find a nearly irresistible pull toward sin – toward taking the easy path, the path of self rather than self-giving. St. Paul himself was no stranger to this struggle:

I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (Romans 7:15-20)

Sin here is not just making the wrong decision, but something like a sickness, an alien power that infects us and creates a fundamental orientation whereby the self is “curved in on itself” in Luther’s fine phrase. In order to be good, we need a fundamental re-orientation of the self, something that’s outside of our power to secure.

Added to this is the fact that humanity and creation as a whole suffer from decay and ultimately death. Christian tradition has always seen a connection between sin and death, even though our modern ways of thinking treat death as completely “natural.” Death may be “natural,” but it is not part of God’s original intention for his creation.

The Incarnation, Cross and Resurrection are the means by which God enters human history and disables the powers of sin and death, liberating us for lives of genuine freedom, which is orientation of the self toward God.

How is this accomplished? First of all, Jesus lives a perfect life of self-giving under the conditions of sin. The “powers” are unable to defeat his intention to live in perfect obedience to the Father’s will, even unto death. Rather than lashing back and feeding the cycle of violence, Jesus takes the world’s violence onto himself, ultimately defeating the powers on the cross. The cross is a victory precisely because the powers were not able to coerce Jesus into sinning.

The Resurrection is the vindication of Jesus’ life and the sign that the period of the powers’ dominion over human life is at an end. It is also, most dramatically, the defeat of death and the demonstration that God’s love is more powerful than the forces of decay and dissolution.

Jesus’ Resurrection inaugurates a new age; his perfect self-offering elicits the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which becomes the agent that empowers the new community formed around him to live a life of resistance to the powers of sin and death. The Church becomes the first fruits and sign of the redeemed creation where sin and death no longer hold sway. The consummation of this redemption takes place only at the second coming, but in the “age between the ages” we can be taken up, if only partially, into the life of the Trinity, which is one of eternal blessedness and mutual self-giving love.