Category: Uncategorized

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)

Giving us more anthropological analysis of our political divisions, Grant McCracken suggests a “Marxian” rapprochement between right and left:

Another way to begin to close the ideological gap is to see if we can’t fashion a peace treaty for the culture wars. “They just don’t get it” comes in part from the fact that we are unacquainted with the founding ideas and documents of the other party. The problem is not so much that they just don’t get it, as that we don’t get them.

One way to do this is to propose the 20 cultural documents that one side should master in order to “get” what the other side is saying.

A first candidate for those on the Right who would understand the Left is DVD just released by Universal that contains 5 Marx brothers movies: Duck Soup, The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, and Horse Feathers.

This will seems an odd choice, but consider this quote from Duck Soup:

A minister of cabinet of Freedonia: I give all my time and energy to my duties and what do I get?

Groucho: Well, you get awfully tiresome after a while.”

The Marx Brothers were one of the founts of my transformation as an adolescent. It was one of the documents that encouraged me to scorn authority. They were in fact architects of the 1960s and its anti-establishment point of few. Some people on the Right believe that this is the time to restore our respect for authority, and they will find this films not the least bit funny. But others will begin to see that even a deeply conservative soul can take pleasure in ludic play. While we are building bridges, this is one place to start.

Karl at St. Stephen’s Musings has a post quoting an Orthodox priest on the value of formal prayers in teaching us how to pray:

Those formal prayers in the prayer book are the examples of how to pray, they are the “pouring out of the heart” of people who were experienced in prayer (the saints). We begin to learn to pray by mimicking the examples.

When you learned to write in school, weren’t you give letters to trace over and over until you could do them without thinking, and then words to trace over and over and so on. Even now you use those same letters and words in your writing – the letters and words you traced have now become your own and are the means of expressing your own innermost thoughts and feelings.

We “trace over the lines” of the prayers by copying them over and over until they sink in and become “natural”, then we use those prayers as the letters and words of our own innermost spiritual expressions. That’s the “role” of the “formal” prayers in the prayerbook.

Part of the idea here is that we don’t “naturally” know how to pray as we should, but this is something we have to learn. The Holy Spirit has to teach us and teaches us through the prayers of the Saints who’ve gone before us.

For similar reasons Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught that our prayers should always have their foundation in the Bible. He says “What matters is not what we feel like praying about, but what God wants us to ask him for. Not the poverty of our own heart, but the riches of the Word of God must decide how we are to pray.”

We learn this preeminently in the Psalms, which Bonhoeffer calls the Prayer Book of the Bible. In praying the Psalms we join our prayer to the whole Church and to Christ himself whose prayers the Psalms are.

In Life Together Bonhoeffer says that meditation on a passage of Scripture should always form the basis of our personal prayers. This is because prayer, for a Christian, is always a response to God’s coming to us, not a work of our own whereby we reach God.

Of course, talking about prayer is easy. The trick, in my experience, is actually doing it.

Christopher Shea follows up on the controversy surrounding the report from a British journal that claimed that casualties from the Iraq war have reached around 100,000:

Here’s how the study worked: The researchers randomly selected 33 towns or neighborhoods distributed throughout Iraq’s 18 “directorates,” or local regions. The Iraqi staffers drove to those towns or neighborhoods and, once there, made their way to a randomly generated longitude and latitude using a Global Positioning System device. Then they interviewed the 30 families who lived closest to that spot — 7,900 people in all. (Cluster studies like this, while far less accurate than national random surveys, are commonly resorted to in countries with weak governments or chaotic circumstances. Health organizations use them, for example, to determine childhood vaccination rates in developing countries.) […]

The mortality rate in these families worked out to 5 per 1,000 before the invasion and 12.3 per 1,000 after the invasion — 7.9 per thousand if you exclude Fallujah. Extrapolate the latter figure to the 22 million population of Iraq, and you end up with the headline-making figure of 98,000 total civilian deaths. The most common cause of death post-invasion was aerial bombing — which caused a quarter of the deaths outside Fallujah — followed by strokes and heart attacks.

Shea also raises the issue of consistency:

Reject the Lancet study and you have to toss out those studies — done with a very similar methodology — that found that war in the Congo in the late 1990s caused some 3 million deaths or that the current crisis in Sudan has killed 70,000. Those numbers, however, have been readily accepted by American commentators and government officials.

Then there is this sobering conclusion:

“We don’t do body counts,” General Tommy Franks has declared, explaining the Pentagon’s decision not to make public estimates of civilian or combatant deaths. The Pentagon doesn’t want a replay of Vietnam, when body counts became a bad joke. But the current occupation is supposed to help the Iraqi people. And there’s just no way to judge how Iraqi civilians are faring under the occupation without studying Iraqi mortality, the Lancet authors argue. And they concede, crucially, that this is just a rough first stab at the problem. Therefore, if the Bush administration doesn’t like the Lancet study, done on a shoestring, they offer a simple solution: Fund and support a better one.

This is, or should be, particularly troubling to anyone who supported the Iraq war on just war grounds. This is becuause one criterion of a just war is that the evil brought about by the war be less than the evil prevented or restrained by the war. This is part of the notion of proportionality. But, logically, if one doesn’t know how many Iraqis are dying, then it becomes impossible to make this judgment. And if the U.S. government, as a matter of policy, refuses to keep count, then one can only conclude it is not committed to fighting under the constraints of just war theory.

(link via Godspy)

The post-election conventional wisdom that “values voters” swung the election to President Bush is finally receiving some critical scrutiny. John Hood of the John Locke Foundation offers some pretty persuasive analysis:

The problem with all this is that, while comforting to many Kerry supporters and exhilarating for some social-conservative leaders, the notion that Bush won primarily because religious voters turned out for him does not seem to be backed up by any real evidence. Few reporters or commentators appear to have gone back to examine the 2000 exit polls, which would seem to be necessary if one wishes to assert a trend.

I did. I found that the percentage of voters sampled who said they attended church at least weekly was the same—42 percent—in both 2000 and 2004. The percentage never attending church was also the same, at 15 percent. The middle group, those attending occasionally, was, you guessed it, 42 percent each time. Interestingly, while Bush slightly improved his standing among frequent churchgoers, by about a point in 2004, his support grew by 3 to 4 points among those attending seldom or never.

Yep, it was the atheist vote that really put Bush over the top in 2004. […]

That leaves the initial assertion about 22 percent of voters citing moral issues as most important, higher than the share citing terrorism, Iraq, the economy, or other issues. When I looked more closely at this question, however, doubts immediately presented themselves. For one thing, the answers were broken out in ways that biased the analysis. While the poll did not attempt to distinguish the various moral issues that voters might be thinking about—abortion, marriage, wars for oil, etc.—it did list “taxes” and “the economy” separately, as well as “terrorism” and “Iraq.” Of course, for many voters, these are not separate issues. You may disagree with them, but most voters sampled in the exit poll said that the war in Iraq was part of the overall war on terrorism. And many right-leaning voters see tax policy as inextricably linked with economic growth and job creation (at least a few freedom-loving folks even see tax cuts as a moral issue—imagine that!)

In short, the question is flawed and the answers easily misunderstood. Moreover, it doesn’t compare well with the 2000 exit poll, in which “moral issues” was not listed as an option. On the other hand, you can track the impact of foreign policy over time. In 2000, only 12 percent said that “foreign affairs” was the most important issue in the presidential race, and they broke 54 percent to 40 percent for Bush over Gore. In 2004, a combined 34 percent identified foreign policy (either Iraq or the war on terrorism) as the most important, and they appear to have broken for Bush by 59 percent to 40 percent. Put it all together, and the increase in salience and small increase in Bush preference for foreign policy constitutes a gain of 13.5 percentage points in the Bush vote in 2004.

Obviously, he didn’t win by that much. He lost ground on economic issues, because of the recession. But without his edge on war on terrorism, Bush would have lost. And that proposition—unlike the “it’s all about gay marriage meme”—is testable and fits the available data. Voters worried about partial-birth abortion, same-sex marriage, and other cultural issues are obviously an important constituency within the current GOP majority, but they are no more responsible for Bush’s national victory on Tuesday than voters motivated by other issues to re-elect the president.

The left seems to have internalized the impending takeover by a Christian Taliban as its new metanarrative. Will the facts pierce this (in many ways self-flattering) illusion?

In yet another article on our divided electorate Michael Kinsley writes:

It’s true that people on my side of the divide want to live in a society where women are free to choose and where gay relationships have civil equality with straight ones. And you want to live in a society where the opposite is true. These are some of those conflicting values everyone is talking about. But at least my values — as deplorable as I’m sure they are — don’t involve any direct imposition on you. We don’t want to force you to have an abortion or to marry someone of the same sex, whereas you do want to close out those possibilities for us. Which is more arrogant?

This is a common, indeed nigh-universal, fallacy on the pro-choice side of the abortion debate. It is the notion that pro-lifers want to “impose” their views on everyone whereas pro-choicers simply want to live and let live.

But this simply begs the question since what is at issue is who shall count as a person, and therefore who is being imposed upon. From the pro-life perspective, to permit legal abortion is to condemn an entire class of human beings to living only at the sufferance of others. If this isn’t an imposition what is?

If you’re a libertarian (as I once thought I was) or just interested in libertarian ideas, you might be interested in this debate between minarchist and anarchist libertarians. The participants include Charles Murray (he of the (in)famous Bell Curve) and economist David Friedman (son of Milton).

As far as I’m concerned, the anarchists are wrong because they assume that the weak and vulnerable won’t be trampled (even more) in a society without government. The minarchists are wrong because once you’ve justified coercive government to protect person and property, it’s hard to see why it’s not also justified in providing basic economic goods to those who are unable to provide for themselves and in protecting against the externalities (physical, social and moral) generated by the market.

As G.K. Chesterton remarked, the poor object to being governed badly while the rich object to being governed at all.

Beliefnet‘s Steven Waldman is, as usual, full of good sense:

Let’s be clear about who these “values voters” were in 2004. Somewhere between 30 percent and 40 percent of Americans are born-again Christians. About 15 percent of the population is religious conservatives of the sort we used to call the “religious right.” The other born-agains consist of a group that Beliefnet has labeled “freestyle evangelicals”—Bible-centered, religious, church-going, and politically moderate.

How could Democrats reach freestyle evangelicals? Bob Wright nailed one way: cultural pollution. Violence and sexual explicitness in the media are something on which red-state and blue-state parents can agree.

But it wasn’t just evangelical Protestants who gave Bush the margin, it was also moderate Catholics. Last time, Gore won Catholics; this time, Bush did. In fact, with the exception of the 1984 Reagan landslide, John Kerry did worse among Catholics than any Democrat since the Gallup organization start measuring such things in 1952. And the most ominous trend in the election for Democrats was Bush’s strong performance among Hispanic Catholics.

For that reason, I think the Democrats must swallow hard and reassess their approach to abortion. No, Catholics are not all pro-life, but even the ones who are pro-choice are uncomfortable with partial-birth abortion. On that issue, Bush came off as the sensible, moral moderate. Kerry, on the other hand, came off as an amoral extremist.[…]

Democratic politicians should never forget something simple: Most Republicans and most Democrats are religious. Using faith language is not just about sucking up to their voters, it’s about talking to your own base, too—and those Catholics who abandoned the party this year.

On some level, the hardest thing that Democratic leaders, activists, and journalists have to do is honestly ask themselves this: Do you hold very religious people in contempt? If you do, religious people will sense it—and will vote against you. And there are more of them than there are of you.

I think Waldman correctly identifies two things that Democrats would do well to keep in mind. First, winning “red-state” voters isn’t just a matter of dressing up liberal positions in religious language. Many religious people disagree with liberal Democrats on substantive matters of policy, not just on the language used to convey those policies. Secondly (and this works to the Dems’ advantage), apart from the hard-core members of the “religious right,” whom Waldman identifies as about 15% of the electorate, many theologically conservative Christians are open to liberal political positions on a host of issues.

Here’s evangelical Ron Sider from an article in this Sunday’s Inquirer:

Sider notes that 55 percent of U.S. evangelicals – who number about 50 million – favor strict environmental regulations, and 45 percent think homosexuals should have the same civil rights as others. Forty-three percent say the middle class should be taxed to fight poverty, and 29 percent support more government spending.[…]

The National Association of Evangelicals adopted a landmark statement last month calling its 30 million members to have “a biblically balanced concern that reflects the full range of God’s concerns for the well-being of marriage, the family, the sanctity of human life, justice for the poor, care for creation, peace, freedom and racial justice.”

The statement, which Sider helped draft, said that “no longer dare one accuse evangelicals of being ‘one-issue’ voters focused exclusively on one or two issues.”

Moreover, it’s not good for Christians to be (or to be seen as) wedded to one party. The temptation there is to identify the positions of that party as the Christian position.

President Bush’s re-election doesn’t mean that real differences don’t still exist within the broader conservative movement. The NYT reports here on the continuing struggle between conservatives who supported the Iraq war and the “antiwar Right”:

The euphoria of Mr. Bush’s victory postponed the battle, but not for long. Now that Mr. Bush has secured re-election, some conservatives who say they held their tongues through the campaign season are speaking out against the neoconservatives, against the war and in favor of a speedy exit.

They argue that the war is a political liability to the Republican Party, but also that it runs counter to traditional conservatives’ disdain for altruist interventions to make far-off parts of the world safe for American-style democracy. Their growing outspokenness recalls the dynamics of American politics before Vietnam, when Democrats first became identified as doves and Republicans hawks, suggesting to some the complicated political pressures facing the foreign policy of the second Bush administration.

The question is: how much of the opposition to the war is the disaffection of a handful of conservative intellectuals and activists compared to that at the grass-roots level?