A Thinking Reed

Category: Social justice

  • Capitalism, liberalism, and the good life

    I enjoyed this review by philosopher Gary Gutting of Robert and Edward Skidelsky’s How Much Is Enough? (I haven’t read the book.) The Skidelskys, according to Gutting, argue that, under capitalism, we find ourselves with relative material abundance but without enough time to pursue “intangibles such as love, friendship, beauty, and virtue”–which are essential ingredients of a good life. Moreover, capitalism, with its seemingly insatiable drive toward increased production and profit, creates in us the desires for more and better things, and these desires crowd out our desires to pursue the intangible “higher goods.” They say we need to redirect our society toward the good life with measures to curb these pernicious effects of capitalism–such as a guaranteed basic income and a consumption tax on luxury goods.

    This isn’t an unfamiliar line of argument, but Gutting goes on to consider two types of objections. First, utilitarians might argue that the good life consists in maximizing subjective states of satisfaction (i.e., happiness as commonly understood), not the attainment of objective goods. Appealing to Robert Nozick’s “experience machine” thought experiment, Gutting replies that it’s implausible to think that subjective satisfaction is sufficient for a good life–though he agrees it’s probably necessary. And he thinks the Sidelskys could easily take subjective satisfaction on board as part of their account of the good life.

    More difficulty for the Sidelskys’ argument is posed, Gutting thinks, by liberalism’s insistence on personal autonomy and its demand that the state be officially neutral among competing views about what constitutes a good life. Liberal societies, according to this view, shouldn’t try to impose a specific vision of the good life as a matter of public policy. So the Sidelskys’ proposals seem like non-starters because they would violate the liberal commitment to anti-paternalism.

    Gutting thinks the liberal objection can be met by a renewed emphasis on liberal education. Such an education exposes us to different ways of living and can act as a counterweight to the acquisitiveness fostered by capitalist society. This would provide, Gutting hopes, a “bottom-up” rather than a “top-down” corrective to the problems the Sidelskys identify:

    There is a risk that free citizens educated in this way will not arrive at the truth we have in mind. They may, free and informed, choose the material illusions of capitalism. But, in a democracy, an ideal of the good life has no force unless the people’s will sustains it. Liberally educated consumers—and voters—are our only hope of subordinating capitalism to a humane vision of the good life.

    While this is good as far as it goes, I think Gutting may be underestimating the resources political liberalism has for addressing these concerns. Gutting says that the “basic goods” advocated by the Sidelksys, such as “health, security, respect, personal freedom …, harmony with nature, friendship, and leisure” differ from the “primary goods” that liberals advocate as prerequisites for effective individual freedom to pursue a variety of lifestyles. But I wonder if the Sidelskys’ list is really at odds with what liberals like John Rawls or Martha Nussbaum (or for that matter sophisticated utilitarians) would advocate at the level of public policy.

    People sometimes underestimate how radical the implications are of what philosophical liberals advocate. If we really took seriously the requirement to ensure equal access to primary goods (Rawls) or capabilities for functioning (Nussbaum), or equal consideration of interests (utilitarianism), I think American society would look a lot different. It would be much more economically egalitarian and probably as a result would produce fewer luxury goods. Besides, on any reasonable, non-totalitarian view of public policy, there has to be some scope for people to make choices that depart from some officially preferred vision of the good life. Indeed, as liberals from J.S. Mill onward have argued, such freedom is an indispensable ingredient of the good life. On a practical level, then, I’m not sure how much the Sidelskys’ desired end-state differs from that of liberalism.

  • Election 2012: A victory for Christian values

    Some religious conservatives have been near-apocalyptic in their predictions of a second Obama term, insisting that he’s leading the country away from Christian principles and down the road to perdition. But from my perspective, last night’s election was a triumph (albeit a partial one) for Christian values.

    –In rejecting the Romney-Ryan plan to dismantle the welfare state and repeal Obamacare, voters reaffirmed the principle that the government has an indispensable role in caring for the most vulnerable members of society and ensuring universal access for basic goods necessary to a flourishing life.

    —Victories for marriage equality in Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, and, hopefully, the state of Washington suggest that Americans are coming around to the idea that all God’s children deserve equal rights and respect.

    –The “Maryland Dream Act” will allow undocumented immigrant students to pay in-state tuition at state colleges and universities and access financial aid,  upholding the principle of “welcoming the alien and the stranger.”

    –Although it barely rated a mention during the campaign, a second term for Obama opens the possibility for meaningful action on climate change, an urgent part of our calling to care for God’s creation (not to mention our survival as a species).

    –President Obama has reaffirmed that we’re in this together and that we are each other’s keeper, in contrast to the rhetoric of economic individualism from the Right.

    I admit this is a partial and somewhat one-sided list. The election didn’t allow for a dramatic choice against a hyper-militarized foreign policy, for instance. And religious conservatives would likely take issue with how I’ve characterized these election outcomes. But as far as I’m concerned, care and respect for the vulnerable fellow citizen, the immigrant, and the earth are core Christian values, and they gained some significant headway last night.

  • Was Jesus married? Does it matter?

    It looks like there’s some skepticism among scholars about the authenticity of the already much-discussed “Jesus’ wife” papyrus–said to be a fragment from a non-canonical Coptic gospel that has Jesus referring to “my wife” and saying that she will be a “disciple.” Much of yesterday’s breathless reporting on the papyrus centered around its potential to “shake up” debates about women’s role in the church. So if the fragment is spurious, does that mean no such re-thinking is necessary?

    To start with, we should be clear that, even if it’s authentic, all the papyrus would seem to show–at most–is that there was an early tradition that Jesus was married. (Curiously, few people seem to have considered the possibility that the wife “Jesus” refers to might be the church–an image that goes back to the NT itself.) It wouldn’t, as even the professor who discovered it acknowledges, show that Jesus was in fact married.

    Second, even though Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was unmarried and celibate, it’s not clear to me that anything of theological significance stands or falls on this. How would the central Christological doctrines–the Incarnation, Atonement, Resurrection, Ascension, etc.–be affected by the discovery that Jesus was married? It’s true, as one Twitter-friend pointed out, that it may call into question the reliability of the gospels since you’d think they might mention such a significant fact about Jesus. But against this we should remember (1) the gospels don’t provide “biography” in our modern sense; they are theological-confessional documents intended to witness to faith in Christ, and (2) historical criticism has already called the reliability of the gospels into question in many respects, and yet they still function as the Word of God for people in the church.

    All of this aside, I think it’s wrong to suggest that we need certain facts about the historical Jesus to be true in order to authorize things like the full equality of women in the church. As theologian Clark Williamson has written,

    The problem with feminist theology is that in its constitutive assertions it is right. Women are fully human, clearly the equal of men, and need liberation from sexist oppression. But if the only way to warrant being a Christian feminist is by appeal to the empirical-historical Jesus as a norm, then Jesus will turn out to have been a feminist. . . . [But i]f Jesus was not a feminist, am I still not free to be one? Is it the role of Jesus . . . to authorize our conformity to him or to author our freedom and creativity, our right to reform the church? Dare we allow the historical Jesus to be himself, a first-century Jew, different from us, or must he reflect our concerns and ideals back to us? If so, how can he ever correct us? (Williamson, A Guest in the House of Israel, p. 190).

    Williamson is concerned to correct the tendency in some feminist theology to portray Jesus as the egalitarian, feminist liberator from an oppressive, patriarchal Judaism, an opposition that in effect “de-Judaizes” Jesus and reinforces the long history of Christian anti-Judaism. But his point has broader application, I think. If modern Christians want to be feminists (and they should!), they don’t need to justify it by appealing to a shaky historical reconstruction of a “feminist Jesus.” Many churches, drawing on the resources of the canonical scriptures and Christian tradition, have come to see sexual equality as a gospel issue–and that provides a much stronger foundation. Christians shouldn’t be threatened by historical research, but neither should they build their faith on it.

  • Speaking of equality…

    From this really interesting interview with philosopher Elizabeth Anderson:

    The idea that human beings are fundamentally equals from a moral point of view is ancient. I suspect it can be traced all the way back to the origins of monotheism, in the idea that we are all equally creatures of God, all made in God’s image, all in principle equally eligible for salvation. However for most of history most monotheistic churches have promised equality only in the next life; in this one a thousand reasons were invented to uphold various forms of social, political, and religious hierarchy.

    I also recommend Anderson’s paper “What is the point of equality?” (PDF), though it’s a bit philosophically dense.

  • Do the evolution

    As everyone not living under a rock now knows, in an interview with ABC yesterday, President Obama–who recently had said that his views were “evolving”–announced that he now supports the right of same-sex couples to get married.

    Some liberal critics complained that Obama’s announcement does nothing to change the status quo, with marriage still being essentially a state matter. This of course was vividly demonstrated just two days ago by North Carolina’s amendment of its state constituion to exclude recognition of any relationships other than heterosexual marriage, even civil unions.

    But others pointed out–such as in this article–that this may be part of a broader strategy on the part of the administration. This strategy includes its ending of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy and its decision to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in federal court. In addition to being good ideas on the merits, these may help set the legal stage down the road for the courts to recognize a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. As Chris Geidner, the author of the article, sums it up, “Obama’s legal, policy and personal views are not in any way contradictory and present a clear path forward toward the advancement of marriage equality across the country.”

    Also worth noting is that the president couched his change of mind in explicitly religious terms. Writing at Religion Dispatches, Sarah Posner highlights this part of Obama’s comments:

    when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule, you know, treat others the way you would want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids and that’s what motivates me as president and I figure the most consistent I can be in being true to those precepts, the better I’ll be as a as a dad and a husband and hopefully the better I’ll be as president.

    Posner goes on to contend that

    Obama didn’t just endorse same-sex marriage today. He abandoned conservative religious rhetoric about it and signaled that religious conservatives, even his close religious advisors, don’t own the conversation on what Christianity has to say about marriage.

    Similarly, Ed Kilgore writes today that Obama’s “evolution” actually puts him in closer alignment with his own relgious tradition, the United Church of Christ, which has affirmed same-sex relationships as a denomination since 2005:

    Relgious conservatives may scoff at the UCC (or the Episcopalians, or other mainline denominations that are, to use the buzzword, “open and affirming” to gay people). But the UCC is the country’s oldest Christian religious community, and among other things, was spearheading the fight against slavery back when many of the religious conservatives of the early nineteenth century were largely defending it as a divinely and scripturally ordained instituion.

    So Obama has pretty strong authority for saying there’s no conflict between his faith and support for same-sex marriage.

    Liberals are prone to arguing in bloodless, technocratic terms, so it was nice to see Obama making the case in explicitly moral–even religious–language. I personally think liberals could stand to do this more often.

    Of course, no one seriously doubts, I think, that there was at least some degree of political calculation in this announcement. (Do presidents ever say anything that isn’t politically calculated to some degree?) And it remains to be seen if that calculation will pay off in November. But even granting mixed nature of his motives (and Christians of all people should be the first to acknowledge that we never act from completely pure motives), it was the right thing to do. Nice job, Mr. President.

  • Better theology needed in the public debate over homosexuality

    One criticism I’ve seen of mainline churches is that they don’t do a very good job of connecting theology to congregational, individual, or public life. Whether or not this is true as a general matter, one area where it does seem to me to happen is the public debate–particularly in American Christianity–over the place of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in the church. To hear people talk, you wouldn’t know that theologians have been grappling with these issues for literally decades or that over this time, a rich body of biblical and theological material has been developed supporting the case for the full equality of LGBT people. (Case in point: this recent exchange between Ross Douthat and William Saletan; to read this, you would never know that there was more than one “Christian” position here.)

    It would seem that very little of the work that has been done in rethinking Christian attitudes toward LGBT people–largely by academics in theology and biblical studies–has filtered down to the congregational level and out into the public sphere. We still find ourselves rehashing the same half-dozen or so “clobber texts” and framing the debate in terms of “traditionalists” who uphold orthodox faith and “liberals” who are moral and doctrinal relativists. What this leaves out is, for example, the robustly theological (or theological-ethical) case for equality that has been developed by people like James Allison, Eugene Rogers, Gareth Moore, and others, or the work that has been done on the meaning and context of the relevant biblical texts. Bringing this to bear on the discussion would scramble the usual narrative of “liberals” being indifferent or hostile to theological arguments.

    Mainline congregations have often exhibited good instincts in this area, basing their stance of equality for LGBT folks more on concrete experience than theory. But this leaves mainline Christians ill-equipped to make the case in theological and biblical terms, and they often end up ceding the theological high ground to their conservative opponents. It also allows more conservative forms of Christianity to be seen as the sole legitimate public expressions of the faith.

  • The failure of welfare reform

    The 1996 welfare-reform law, passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Clinton (who famously said that the “era of big government is over”), has been hailed by people in both parties as a great triumph. It replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families program (emphasis on “temporary”). The TANF program restructured the funding of federal assistance to the poor, creating block grants to be administered by states. Crucially, it also imposed strict limitations on the amount of time someone could receive benefits, increased requirements to move people off the rolls and into jobs, and gave states much more flexibility in designing their programs.

    At first, it did seem like a success, and the direst predictions of some of the critics (Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned of children sleeping on city grates) didn’t come to pass. Welfare caseloads plummeted, and a booming economy seemed to promise jobs for anyone who wanted one.

    Of course, the story in 2012 is quite a bit different. In the wake of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression and a continuing unemployment rate hovering around double digits, the seams of the revamped welfare system are starting to pull. This story from the New York Times details how cash-strapped and jobless people (many of them single mothers) are coping with the absence of state support:

    [M]uch as overlooked critics of the restrictions once warned, a program that built its reputation when times were good offered little help when jobs disappeared. Despite the worst economy in decades, the cash welfare rolls have barely budged.

    Faced with flat federal financing and rising need, Arizona is one of 16 states that have cut their welfare caseloads further since the start of the recession — in its case, by half. Even as it turned away the needy, Arizona spent most of its federal welfare dollars on other programs, using permissive rules to plug state budget gaps.

    The poor people who were dropped from cash assistance here, mostly single mothers, talk with surprising openness about the desperate, and sometimes illegal, ways they make ends meet. They have sold food stamps, sold blood, skipped meals, shoplifted, doubled up with friends, scavenged trash bins for bottles and cans and returned to relationships with violent partners — all with children in tow.

    The article notes a couple of interesting facts. First, because the food stamp program is fully funded by federal dollars, while TANF comes via state block grants, states have been pushing people toward food stamps. (Hence the favorite GOP talking point about soaring food stamp enrollment under President Obama is actually a result, at least in part, of welfare reform.) Second, the “greater flexibility” given to states under TANF allows them to divert funds from providing cash assitance to the poor and unemployed to other uses–and not always ones that directly help the intended beneficiaries of the program. Or, as a representative from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities put it: “The states use the money to fill budget holes.” The upshot is that, despite increased economic hardship, the flow of direct aid has been slowing to a trickle. (It’s also worth mentioning, as the article points out, that this kind of structure–block grants to states and incresed restrictions–is one that Repbulcians like Rep. Paul Ryan would like to apply to other welfare-state programs, like Medicare.)

    The story notes that “the number of very poor families appears to be growing.”

    Pamela Loprest and Austin Nichols, researchers at the Urban Institute, found that one in four low-income single mothers nationwide — about 1.5 million — are jobless and without cash aid. That is twice the rate the researchers found under the old welfare law. More than 40 percent remain that way for more than a year, and many have mental or physical disabilities, sick children or problems with domestic violence.

    Welfare reform was driven by the assumption that jobs were available and that the only problem was the “perverse incentives” created by the existing welfare program. This was, and is, a popular view in conservative and “neo-liberal” circles. Take away the cash assistance, the theory went, and people would be “incentivized” (i.e., forced) into participation in the workforce. Whatever the merits of this as an explanation for why people remained on welfare, it falls apart if there aren’t enough jobs to go around. And for better or for worse, we aren’t, as a nation, committed to a policy of full employment. (During the Depression, for example, the government just flat-out created jobs for people.) Without the jobs is it any surprise that people turn to dubious means to feed themselves and their families?

    Secular liberalism and Christian social thought agree that a society should be judged, in significant part, by how its worst-off and most vulnerable members fare. By this measure, it’s very difficult to judge welfare reform a success.

  • Updated thoughts on Christianity and capitalism

    A while back I wrote a post called “What’s a Christian to do with capitalism?” in which I tried to outline some principles for a Christian approach to economics. I’ve since thought that those principles weren’t stated as clearly or exactly as they should have been, and I’ve updated the post to try and reflect this.

  • John Wesley on slavery and human rights

    I’ve been reading Theodore Runyon’s The New Creation: John Wesley’s Theology Today, which aims to offer a synoptic account of Wesley’s thought and its relevance for the contemporary church. As the title suggests, Runyon argues that the notion of the renewal of creation is key to understanding Wesley’s theology. Specifically, it refers to the renewal of the image of God in humanity through the power of divine grace. Runyon offers the analogy of a mirror to help understand Wesley’s account of the “image of God.” It doesn’t refer to some inherent capacity of human nature, such as reason or freedom, but is a relational notion: we receive the love of God and we reflect it back to the world around us. Wesley was a genuine “evangelical catholic” who combined the Reformation emphasis on justification by faith with an equally strong belief that God’s grace would transform human life and, ultimately, the entire creation.

    In the final chapter, “Wesley for Today,” Runyon discusses how Wesley’s theology might be applicable to some current pressing social and political issues. And in articulating Wesley’s approach to what we would now call human rights, Runyon draws extensively on Wesley’s ardent opposition to slavery, which I admit I wasn’t really aware of.

    Here’s a pamphlet Wesley published on the question of slavery. An excerpt with Wesley’s response to certain pro-slavery arguments:

    “But the furnishing us with slaves is necessary for the trade, and wealth, and glory of our nation” [says the defender of slavery]. Here are several mistakes. For, First, wealth is not necessary to the glory of any nation; but wisdom, virtue, justice, mercy, generosity, public spirit, love of our country. These are necessary to the real glory of a nation; but abundance of wealth is not. Men of understanding allow that the glory of England was full as high in Queen Elizabeth’s time as it is now; although our riches and trade were then as much smaller, as our virtue was greater. But, Secondly, it is not clear that we should have either less money or trade, (only less of that detestable trade of man-stealing,) if there was not a Negro in all our islands, or in all English America. It is demonstrable, white men, inured to it by degrees, can work as well as them; and they would do it, were Negroes out of the way, and proper encouragement given them. However, Thirdly, I come back to the same point: Better no trade, than trade procured by villany. It is far better to have no wealth, than to gain wealth at the expense of virtue. Better is honest poverty, than all the riches bought by the tears, and sweat, and blood, of our fellow-creatures.

    And here’s a letter–one of his last, written on his deathbed–to William Wilberforce, then a member of parliament:

    Unless the divine power has raised you up to be as Athanasius contra mundum, I see not how you can go through your glorious enterprise in opposing that execrable villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature. Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God before you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it.

    Wesley, Runyon notes, is sometimes caricatured as a conservative, or even reactionary, “high-church Tory,” but according to Runyon this misunderstands his reasons for, e.g., supporting the monarchy. Wesley distrusted democracy precisely because he feard that it would ride roughshod over the liberty of the individual, particularly religious liberty. He had first-hand experience to draw on, as early Methodists were often attacked by angry mobs, sometimes whipped up by local authorities. Wesley saw “liberty under law” in the form of a constitutional monarchy as the best defense against mob rule. He also observed the hypocrisy of American colonists complaining about the “tyranny” of the crown while at the same time maintaining the institution of chattle-slavery. Had Wesley lived to see the establishment of genuine liberal democracy he might have changed his mind, but his opposition at the time was rooted in a concern for what we would today call human rights. And for Wesley, this inherent dignity was in turn based on the creative love of God.

  • What would it mean for progressives to “support” Ron Paul?

    There’s been a bit of back and forth recently in the left/progressive blogosphere about whether people who meet that particular description should “support” libertarian Texas Republican congressman Ron Paul’s candidacy for president. Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, and others have expressed varying degrees of support for Paul’s candidacy, noting that his stances on civil liberties and foreign intervention and war-making are arguably to the “left” of President Obama’s.

    Others have countered that Paul is a social reactionary who lent his name to (and profited handsomely from) a series of newsletters in the 90s that trafficked in racist and other inflammatory language as part of a “redneck outreach” strategy among self-described “paleo” libertarians and conservatives. Paul is furthermore a libertarian of a peculiar sort: one who would devolve much of the power of the federal government to the states, a move whose likely effect on individual liberty is debatable at best.

    I’m neither a libertarian nor do I have much street cred as a “progressive.” But what I wonder is: what’s at stake in these arguments? What sort of “support” do Greenwald, et al. have in mind? Are they proposing that progressives, who one assumes are mostly registered Democrats, re-register en masse to vote in the Republican primary? Or that they should vote for Paul in the general election were he to get the GOP nomination?

    What I think needs to be kept in mind here is that Ron Paul is very, very unlikely to win the nomination and why this is the case. It’s because, among other things, his stances on issues where he is appealing to the likes of Sullivan and Greenwald, are precisely where he is most at variance with the modern Republican party and the conservative movement. The Republican Party and the conservative movement, recall, are largely a fusion of economic, social, and national-defense conservatives. And I agree with the longstanding thesis of Jim Henley that, contrary to popular belief, these factions are not really “in tension” with one another to any great degree. These three varieties of conservatives are, if not identical, largely in sympathy with one another. Among conservatives of whatever stripe, free-marketeerism, cultural conservatism, and military hawkishness are seen as mutually reinforcing. Paul’s eccentric blend of isolationism, decentralization, Austrian economics, and social conservatism are out of sync with what remains the overwhelming conservative consensus.

    So it remains unclear what sort of support a progressive or liberal is supposed to offer Paul’s candidacy. Is it that they (we?) should commend Paul for promoting certain perspectives (e.g., a critique of American interventionism) that fall largely outside of the bipartisan mainstream? Liberals can certainly do that without voting for him. But beyond this, what else is “supporting” Paul supposed to mean apart from wishing (and working?) for the success of his candidacy? Are liberals supposed to support (e.g., give money to or vote for) a candidate who opposes every facet of the regulatory and welfare state going back to the 19th century on the minuscule chance that he’ll win the presidency and dismantle the American empire? This seems like an odd allocation of resources for liberals to make. A better use of those resources would seem to be to try to move the Democratic Party–which after all already has a large progressive constituency–in a more progressive direction.

    UPDATE: Kevin Drum makes a similar argument, focusing more on what he calls Paul’s “crackpot” ideology:

    Bottom line: Ron Paul is not merely a “flawed messenger” for these views. He’s an absolutely toxic, far-right, crackpot messenger for these views. This is, granted, not Mussolini-made-the-trains-run-on-time levels of toxic, but still: if you truly support civil liberties at home and non-interventionism abroad, you should run, not walk, as fast as you can to keep your distance from Ron Paul. He’s not the first or only person opposed to pre-emptive wars, after all, and his occasional denouncements of interventionism are hardly making this a hot topic of conversation among the masses. In fact, to the extent that his foreign policy views aren’t simply being ignored, I’d guess that the only thing he’s accomplishing is to make non-interventionism even more of a fringe view in American politics than it already is. Crackpots don’t make good messengers.

    Now, if you literally think that Ron Paul’s views on drugs and national security are so important that they outweigh all of this — multiple decades of unmitigated crackpottery, cynical fear-mongering, and attitudes toward social welfare so retrograde they make Rick Perry look progressive — and if you’ve somehow convinced yourself that non-interventionism has no other significant voices except Ron Paul — well, if that’s the case, then maybe you should be happy to count Paul as an ally. But the truth is that you don’t need to. Ron Paul is not a major candidate for president. He’s never even been a significant presence as a congressman. In a couple of months he’ll disappear back into the obscurity he so richly deserves. So why get in bed with him? All you’ll do is wake up in March with a mountain of fleas. Find other allies. Make your arguments without bothering to mention him. And remember: Ron Paul has never once done any of his causes any good. There’s a good reason for that.