Category: Uncategorized

Francis Fukuyama writes:

 

Of all of the different views that have now come to be associated with neo-conservatives, the strangest one to me was the confidence that the US could transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy and go on from there to democratise the broader Middle East.

 

It struck me as strange precisely because these same neo-conservatives had spent much of the past generation warning about the dangers of ambitious social engineering and how social planners could never control behaviour or deal with unanticipated consequences.

 

I’ve had the same thought myself. I read Irving Kristol’s essays and thought they were sensible, balanced, and incisive criticisms of utopian thinking on the left. Indeed, I took “neoconservative” to be practically synonymous with “anti-utopian.” Kristol was himself a man of the far left at one time, but rejected it in favor of a pragmatic and humane conservatism. Sort of an American Michael Oakeshott. His intellectual heirs, however, seem to have accepted the conclusions of Kristol’s conservatism without its style of thinking: skeptical, empirical, and mistrustful of ideological abstractions.

Some items of note from around the web:

 

Here’s a heart-warming article from today’s Philadelphia Inquirer (registration req’d) about a network of volunteers who rescue stray dogs from high-kill shelters in rural areas and find homes for them in the urban northeast. (Sadly, according to the article, there were still over 8,000 stray dogs put to death in Philly last year.)

 

Over at Tech Central Station, Arnold Kling criticizes both the Canadian and American approaches to health care and proposes what he calls “limited paternalism” as an alternative.

 

A great post at Disputations on God’s forgiveness and ours.

 

A thought-provoking article from the New Criterion: “Fundamentalism Isn’t the Problem”  (link via Pontifications)

You may be familiar with The Hunger Site where with a simple mouse click you can “donate” food to someone in need (i.e. you indirectly donate – sponsors donate the food based on the number of unique visits the site receives).

Also see The Birth Site, a similar site dedicated to providing support and resources to women facing unplanned pregnancies. This site is not affiliated with political activists on either side of the abortion debate. They just think that no woman should feel like she has to have an abortion. Pretty hard to argue with that.

Which Christian Theologian Are You?

A creation of Henderson

Sounds about right…

“The basic right not to be treated as a thing is the minimal condition for membership in the moral community. This is the one right we all agree is inalienable; you can get greater protection, but if you are going to be a member of the moral community–if you are not going to be a thing that has no protected interests–then you cannot get less protection than this right affords. If you are a thing, then you have no rights at all, and your value can be determined exclusively and completely by someone else–and that person is your owner.” — Gary L. Francione, Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog?

Here’s a nifty little article at Tech Central Station arguing that we’ll inevitably see a cinematic remake of The Lord of the Rings:

 

Star Wars could be remade, but the story could only be retold — not re-imagined. Cinematically, there is nothing more to the Star Wars world beyond what George Lucas has chosen to show us. Star Wars offers no themes to balance, no nuances to explore, and no room for a director to craft a new vision. A remake could only imitate the original. It could not create, but only re-create.

 

By contrast, a remake of LOTR could be art. Tolkien’s novels teem over with themes, motifs, and plot notes that a thoughtful director could explore in ways that Peter Jackson didn’t. For example: my favorite aspect of the LOTR novels is the pervasive and melancholy sense of loss that permeates every page. All the wise characters realize that the world they knew is slipping away, and even victory cannot prevent the great ships from sailing into the West. The heroes fight less for their own dying world than for a world yet to come; strength and vitality ebb from all things great and marvelous, and the stain of evil is not easily erased, if indeed it is erased at all. Jackson touches only lightly upon this dolorous theme; a different director could make that theme the center of the movie, thus changing the trilogy completely. Then again, one could imagine a lighter, more childlike LOTR told from the point-of-view of the Hobbits — or a LOTR that focuses more explicitly upon the religious overtones of the novels — or a LOTR told from the perspective of the One Ring itself. One LOTR trilogy cannot come close to telling the story in every way that it can and should be told.

 

Hey, I can certainly get behind a new LOTR trilogy every ten years or so…

Josh Claybourn has a “Christian libertarian” take on the apparently now-deceased Federal Marriage Amendment:

At the root of Christian libertarianism is the biblical conviction that God grants men the freedom (never the permission) to sin. It allows Christians to transform the culture through the church and the family. This transformation is no business of the state’s. The early Christian church, and America’s Founders, saw this and kept the church and state in two different spheres, permitting the church to influence the populace (and the state) freely. The church best flourishes in that sort of environment. The virtuous life cannot be brought about by government.

I would add that the Christian emphasis on humankind’s proneness to sin also speaks in favor of limiting state power (it speaks in favor of limiting economic and social power too; balancing these is the trick).

As C.S. Lewis put it:

I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments.

Bill Vallicella at Maverick Philosopher posts an excerpt from the 1942 George Orwell essay “Pacifism and the War” (link via Bill at Bill’s Comments) in which Orwell accuses the pacifists of his day of being “objectively pro-fascist.”

Orwell writes:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

Now, there are (at least) two kinds of pacifists. Some pacifists believe that non-violence will, on balance, bring about better consequences than violence. According to this view, non-violent means stand a better chance of achieving our objectives than violent ones, and without the costs associated with violence. These are the kinds of pacifists that Orwell derisively (and accurately, for all I know) characterizes as believing “that one can somehow ‘overcome’ the German army by lying on one’s back.”

Whether or not pacifism “works” in this sense is an empirical question that will, presumably, have different answers in different situations. Did the pacifism of Ghandi and Martin Luther King “work”? Would violent methods have been preferable? Would non-violent methods have “worked” against the German army?

Putting this question to one side, there is another form of pacifism, the kind of pacifism that holds that violence is wrong irrespective of the consequences. For this kind of pacifist, it is worse to be guilty of committing violence than to have violence committed against oneself (it is, obviously, possible to simultaneously hold that pacifism is right and it will work better than force). This kind of pacifism accepts, in principle, that pacifism might not “work,” but that it is nevertheless right.

So, is this kind of pacifism “objectively pro-Fascist”? That is, is it responsible for hindering a just cause, and therefore deplorable? Well, if it is, then it seems to me that the same could be said of just war theory. After all, just war theory, in its classic form, holds that there are certain jus in bello criteria (criteria for the just prosecution of a war) that cannot be violated, no matter how expedient it might be to do so. For instance, it is usually held by theorists of just war that it is always wrong to intentionally target civilians (not that this has stopped many governments from doing just that). But, clearly, there are cases where a war effort would be hindered by refraining from targeting civilians. So, is just war theory also “objectively pro-Fascist”? (or “objectively pro-Communist,” “objectively pro-Islamist,” etc.)

Necessarily, moral rules restrain our actions. So long as we recognize these restraints, there is always the possibility they will conflict with our goals. Even a good cause does not, at least according to most moral theories, give us carte blanche in pursuing victory. Pacifism and just war ethics agree that committing a grave evil is worse than even defeat.

Bill of Bill’s Comments has also graciously linked to this humble site. I’m hoping to put together the beginnings of a blogroll sometime this week, of which Bill and Keith will be charter members.

to Keith Burgess-Jackson for kindly mentioning this site at his blog Anal Philosopher. He offers an eclectic mix of, among other things, animal rights, philosophy, and conservative politics. He also runs two other “boutique” blogs: Animal Ethics and The Ethics of War (which are exactly what they sound like). Good reads all.