Long live Pope Benedict XVI!
CNN story here.
Read his (quite good) homily from yesterday here.
Stay tuned for various media fits that the notorious “enforcer of orthodoxy” is now pope.
UPDATE: via Amy Welborn, Andrew Greely (nobody’s idea of a conservative) makes the case for Ratzinger (written before his election).
Kevin Kim had a good post the other day on where he fits in on the political spectrum and his take on the ideologies of left and right. Kevin’s refusal to engage in the Manichean exercise of declaring one team the embodiment of all that is good and pure and denouncing the other as the spawn of hell is certainly refreshing.
This got me to thinking about the principles I tend to take for granted when thinking about politics, so I thought I’d jot them down. This isn’t intended as a full-throated defense of these principles, much less anything as grandiose as a “political philosophy.” More like some loosely connected thoughts, ruminations, and speculations on what I take to be the purpose and scope of political authority.
No Salvation Through Politics
Against postmillennialists of the Right and liberationists of the Left I take it as axiomatic that nothing we can do will bring in God’s Kingdom. Politics is not a means by which we build the Kingdom of God on earth. It is a strictly this-worldly affair whose aim is to secure the conditions of tolerable earthly existence during this age.
For Christians at least, politics can never be the locus of one’s final allegiance or the bearer of one’s identity. They are first and foremost citizens of the heavenly Jerusalem, and their commitment to any earthly kingdom will be penultimate at best. This results in the “desacralization” of politics and a sober realism about what it can and can’t achieve. No regime, political system, cause, or candidate is above criticism or immune to the effects of sin. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.
Arguably the worst horrors of the 20th century were precipitated by the desire to bring in by force a political utopia – heaven on earth. Fascist and Communist revolutionaries tried to “immanentize the eschaton,” to use Eric Voegelin’s phrase. Not only is this an attempt to play God, it neglects to take seriously the extent of human sin and the limits of human wisdom in this age. Any responsible politics will have to be limited in its aspirations.
Coercion is Bad
Longtime readers (both of you) know that I renounced my former adherence to doctrinaire libertarianism, but one thing that the libertarians get which often seems to elude conservatives, liberals, communitarians, etc. is that coercion is inherently morally problematic. All use of government power implies at least the possibility of the use of force. Laws are backed with enforcement power, which means, if necessary, you will be fined, imprisoned, or possibly killed for not complying. As the father of our country put it “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master.”
Which is not to say that I think the use of coercion is always wrong. But it does seem to me that there is a prima facie duty (to borrow from W.D. Ross) to refrain from coercion. And the burden of proof falls on the person advocating coercion to show why it’s necessary. (This would apply a fortiori to lethal force, requiring an even higher burden of proof on the person advocating war or capital punishment.)
One, Two, Many Loves
“Pluralism” has become a kind of liberal shibboleth, but there are good reasons for respecting the limits that pluralism puts on government action. The usual argument put forth begins with a kind of value relativism (or at least a skepticism that we can know the good) and then concludes that no one should “impose their values on others.” This argument conveniently overlooks the fact that it presupposes the non-relative value of non-imposition, and threatens to lapse into a contradiction.
Fortunately, one can take value pluralism seriously without retreating into relativism. Augustine points the way with his famed notion of the “two loves.” According to Augustine, our loves (i.e. what we “value,” to put it in the parlance of our times) can either be oriented toward God or toward the finite goods of this world. Those who love God above all else constitute the “City of God” and those who love finite things constitute the “City of Man.” Moreover, in this life there’s no telling who’s who. And, we could add, at any given point in time, particular individuals may be at different points along the road toward loving God; our selves remain divided. Plus, at any given time none of us are able to examine our own selves objectively enough to determine whether our own loves are properly ordered; we are right to be humble about imposing our own prefrences as a matter of public policy. This de facto pluralism makes the imposition of anything more than a partial peace impossible, since it can’t be assumed that everyone shares the same scale of values.
The upshot is that, for Augustine, there is no hierarchy of values shared by the denizens of the City of God and the City of Man. It would be evil for earthly values to be imposed on those who love God, and it would be fruitless for the heavenly values to be imposed on those whose loves are turned toward finite goods, since only God can induce spiritual regeneration in a soul. Genuine community requires loves held in common, but no earthly kingdom can meet this standard. At best, governments can impose a kind of peace, but they can’t bring people’s loves into alignment with the true hierarchy of values. Virtue cannot be coerced.
The Limits of Pluralism
However important it is to respect pluralism, everyone (or nearly everyone) agrees that out and out anarchy would be bad. A helpful distinction here, I think, is between pursuing goods and preventing harms. Goods are plural, and often irreconcilable. Promoting one may lead to a diminishing of others. And people are divided on how they rank various goods.
But there is much less diversity of opinion regarding harms. Nearly everybody regards violent assault, invasion of bodily integrity, deprivation of material goods, starvation, and ill health as evils to be avoided as almost any cost. So, it seems to me that a politics of limited aspirations dedicated to securing the peace of the earthly city should be dedicated, above all, to minimizing these types of harms.
It is, not coincidentally, precisely in avoiding these kinds of harms that coercion seems most justified. It’s a lot easier to justify the use of force to prevent certain death than to round up support for the NEA. But, lest this be mistaken for merely a libertarian relapse on my part, I take it that harms like starvation, ill health, destitution, and environmental degradation are just as serious and so there is no reason why, in principle, government action wouldn’t be appropriate to mitigate or prevent those kinds of harms (via wealth redistribution, regulation or whatever is deemed to work best).
Some harms are, of course, controversial. For instance, abortion is clearly a serious harm to if you think the fetus has the same moral standing as a newborn infant (or even if you think it has some degree of moral standing), in which case there would seem to be a justification for government action to prevent or curtail it. However, given its controversial nature in this time and place, a lot will depend on prudently assessing what laws can be realistically enforced given the current moral consensus (or lack thereof).
A Chastened Liberalism?
So, what we end up with is a government that is aspirationally limited, minimally coercive, tolerant of pluralism, and empowered primarily to secure peace (however limited and fragmentary) by preventing harm and meliorating the worst effects of human sin.
Not a very exciting or exalted view of the role of government, I grant you. I’m probably still more influenced by libertarianism than I realized (or maybe better the more chastened classical liberalism of someone like F.A. Hayek). But in a world where untold evil has been committed (and is being committed) in the name of exalted political ends that may not be such a bad thing. I have to say that these words from C.S. Lewis have always resonated with me:
The secular community, since it exists for our natural good and not for our supernatural, has no higher end than to facilitate and safeguard the family, and friendship, and solitude. To be happy at home, said Johnson, is the end of all human endeavour. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him; and that all the economies, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save insofar as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit. (“Membership,” in The Weight of Glory, pp. 161-2)
Best I can come up with at the moment, anyway…
Increasingly annoyed by the general crumminess of our local Blockbuster, the wife and I finally succumbed to the siren song of Netflix. I have to say I’m impressed. Great selection, and it’s so darn easy!
This past weekend’s selections brought us, inter alia:
Interesting interview (via Thunderstruck) with Dan Haseltine of Jars of Clay, who just released an album of re-worked traditonal hymns:
“Redemption Songs” includes in-your-face messages about God and Jesus and faith, which is a lot different from the music your audience is accustomed to. Did you want to appeal to a new audience—the worship audience?
We definitely wanted to be able to contribute to the worship audience. There is a part of the post-modern church that is desperately trying to rid itself of what might be called organized religion. But they’ve cut themselves off from a lot of the good, rich traditions of the church. What we hope to do is present this record and say “These are people [from] 300 years ago [who] are asking the same questions that we’re asking today.” They’re important questions and we benefit from hearing how people wrestled with them and what conclusions they’ve come to or couldn’t get to 300 years ago. That’s the roots of our faith. The roots of these traditions are what actually give us the ability to move forward.
[…]
What’s wrong with the Christian music industry today?
There’s a lot of different things that don’t seem to be working that should in the music industry. It’s a hard thing—selling the Christian message [in pop music], because pop music is telling people what they want to hear and packaging it in a way that’s familiar to them.
The Gospel is the most offensive thing anybody would want to hear. It’s telling you that apart from God you are nothing, that you need God in order to exist, in order to have life. And pop music would say, “Yeah, you’re amazing.” It wants to build us up when the Gospel wants to tear us down in a way that says ‘You need God. With God you are everything, without God you are nothing.’ How do you marry that with pop music? It’s a contradiction in and of itself.
I’ve never been much for “CCM” myself; my musical tastes were formed (thankfully?) completely outside of any kind of Christian subculture. But I do like JoC quite a bit.
From Bruce Bawer in the NYT:
The received wisdom about economic life in the Nordic countries is easily summed up: people here are incomparably affluent, with all their needs met by an efficient welfare state. They believe it themselves. Yet the reality – as this Oslo-dwelling American can attest, and as some recent studies confirm – is not quite what it appears.
Even as the Scandinavian establishment peddles this dubious line, it serves up a picture of the United States as a nation divided, inequitably, among robber barons and wage slaves, not to mention armies of the homeless and unemployed. It does this to keep people believing that their social welfare system, financed by lofty income taxes, provides far more in the way of economic protections and amenities than the American system. Protections, yes -but some Norwegians might question the part about amenities.
In Oslo, library collections are woefully outdated, and public swimming pools are in desperate need of maintenance. News reports describe serious shortages of police officers and school supplies. When my mother-in-law went to an emergency room recently, the hospital was out of cough medicine. Drug addicts crowd downtown Oslo streets, as The Los Angeles Times recently reported, but applicants for methadone programs are put on a months-long waiting list.
[…]
All this was illuminated last year in a study by a Swedish research organization, Timbro, which compared the gross domestic products of the 15 European Union members (before the 2004 expansion) with those of the 50 American states and the District of Columbia. (Norway, not being a member of the union, was not included.)
After adjusting the figures for the different purchasing powers of the dollar and euro, the only European country whose economic output per person was greater than the United States average was the tiny tax haven of Luxembourg, which ranked third, just behind Delaware and slightly ahead of Connecticut.
The next European country on the list was Ireland, down at 41st place out of 66; Sweden was 14th from the bottom (after Alabama), followed by Oklahoma, and then Britain, France, Finland, Germany and Italy. The bottom three spots on the list went to Spain, Portugal and Greece.
Alternatively, the study found, if the E.U. was treated as a single American state, it would rank fifth from the bottom, topping only Arkansas, Montana, West Virginia and Mississippi. In short, while Scandinavians are constantly told how much better they have it than Americans, Timbro’s statistics suggest otherwise. So did a paper by a Swedish economics writer, Johan Norberg.
Contrasting “the American dream” with “the European daydream,” Mr. Norberg described the difference: “Economic growth in the last 25 years has been 3 percent per annum in the U.S., compared to 2.2 percent in the E.U. That means that the American economy has almost doubled, whereas the E.U. economy has grown by slightly more than half. The purchasing power in the U.S. is $36,100 per capita, and in the E.U. $26,000 – and the gap is constantly widening.”
The one detail in Timbro’s study that didn’t feel right to me was the placement of Scandinavian countries near the top of the list and Spain near the bottom. My own sense of things is that Spaniards live far better than Scandinavians. In Norwegian pubs, for example, anyone rich or insane enough to order, say, a gin and tonic is charged about $15 for a few teaspoons of gin at the bottom of a glass of tonic; in Spain, the drinks are dirt-cheap and the bartender will pour the gin up to the rim unless you say “stop.”
In late March, another study, this one from KPMG, the international accounting and consulting firm, cast light on this paradox. It indicated that when disposable income was adjusted for cost of living, Scandinavians were the poorest people in Western Europe. Danes had the lowest adjusted income, Norwegians the second lowest, Swedes the third. Spain and Portugal, with two of Europe’s least regulated economies, led the list.
Of course, consumption isn’t everything, but surely the unavailability of relatively cheap booze counts against Nordic social democracy!
I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous. Some people find the miraculous so hard to believe that they cannot imagine any reason for my acceptance of it other than a prior belief that every sentence of the Old Testament has historical and scientific truth. But this I do not hold, any more than St. Jerome did when he said that Moses described Creation “after the manner of a popular poet” (as we should say, mythically) or than Calvin did when he doubted whether the story of Job were history or fiction. […]
I have therefore no difficulty in accepting, say, the view of those scholars who tell us that the account of Creation in Genesis is derived from earlier Semitic stories which were Pagan and mythical. We must, of course, be quite clear what “derived from” means. Stories do not reproduce their species like mice. They are told by men. Each reteller either repeats exactly what his predecessor had told him or else changes it. He may change it unknowingly or deliberately. If he changes it deliberately, his invention, his sense of form, his ethics, his ideas of what is fit, or edifying, or merely interesting, all come in. If unknowingly, then his unconscious (which is so largely responsible for our forgettings) has been at work. Thus at every step in what is called–a little misleadingly–the “evolution” of a story, a man, all he is and all his attitudes, are involved. And no good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. When a series of such retellings turns a creation story which at first had almost no religious or metaphysical significance into a story which acheives the idea of true Creation and of a transcendent Creator (as Genesis does), then nothing will make me believe that some of the retellers, or some one of them, has not been guided by God.
–C.S. Lewis, from Reflections on the Psalms
A lot of the commentary I’ve been reading on the papal conclave has had a peculiar tick: it seems to treat as newsworthy the fact that the next pope, whoever he is, will not likely deny or change the central teachings of the church. For instance, in today’s Inquirer story 11 of the 14 contenders for the papacy are referred to as “theological conservatives,” “doctrinally conservative,” or just plain “conservative.” (Some are partly redeemed by having “progressive social views.”)
Now I’m no expert on the inner workings of the Catholic Church, but could it be that you aren’t likely to get to be a cardinal, much less pope, if you dissent from the central teachings of the church? Wouldn’t that be like a corporation appointing a CEO and board of directors who didn’t buy in to its mission statement?
A lot of the press coverage seems to presuppose a rather strange view of the Catholic Church, one in which the pope, more or less on a whim, makes up the doctrine as he goes along. In the accompanying story on Cardinal Hummes of Brazil we learn that “He is pledged to John Paul’s stance against abortion, euthanasia and stem cell research,” as though these were just wacky, idiosyncratic positions that John Paul came up with and foisted on the church.
Not that there’s anything wrong per se with dissenting from Catholic teaching. I mean, I dissent from certain points of Catholic teaching, but I don’t think I’m in the running to be pope.
The other day Eric Lee (in his triumphant return to semi-regular blogging) posted an image of the books on his “to read” list (pretty ambitious there, Eric!).
Not having access to such fancy-pants technology, I must remain content with just listing those titles that I’m either currently reading or have on deck.
Currently reading:
On deck:
That oughtta keep me busy…
Over at Right Reason, Edward Feser links to a provocative article of his which argues that libertarians should support not only government protection of the physical environment*, but also the moral environment, at least so far as children are concerned. He also argues that libertarians should, on their own premises, oppose legal abortion.
Feser’s contention is that libertarians can’t consistently maintain neutrality with respect to “moral issues” since their own principles require them to take sides in these controversies.
Feser admits that this puts him considerably at odds with the policy prescriptions of mainstream libertarianism, so he now thinks of himself as a “conservative inclined to favor limited government and free markets.”
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*It’s often thought that libertarianism implies a lack of concern for the envioronment, but in strict logic there’s no reason that this should be the case. Libertarians argue that you are entitled to do what you want with your person or property so long as you don’t aggress against the person or propety of anyone else. Things like pollution, then, obviously can be construed as aggression from which other people are entitled to be protected. Moreover, public interest in things like clean air, which cannot be secured simply by protecting private property rights (since the air can’t be owned), clearly calls for some measure of government intervention. The fact that libertarians tend to be perceived as indifferent to the environment probably has more to do with the political coalitions that exist in the real world than theoretical consistency.
Christianity Today interviews Gilbert Meilaender on feeding tubes and the “right to die.” As usual Meilaender is full of sober wisdom. His book Faith and Faithfulness is one of the best books on Christian ethics I’ve come across.
A Thinking Reed 