Commonweal Doesn't Get the Joke

Diogenes recently dolloped more cynicism upon the Jesuits' magazine America:

America Magazine is editorially enraptured by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, Brown seems guided by a moral vision that sees it as the government's duty to help the less fortunate.

Translation: he's pro-abortion.

A writer at the Commonweal blog sniffs: "You'll notice that none of the editorial's 253 words endorses Brown's views on abortion." That rather misses the joke. The elevated language conceals a significant lapse in Mr. Brown's duties towards the less fortunate. The praise given to such public figures is as uniform as it is ubiquitous, which makes the "translation" all the more biting.

Commonweal blogger Grant Gallicho seems obtuse to this shade, preferring to blast Diogenes as a bitter tendentious commentator. But this little joke can function in all sorts of other contexts where diplomatic happy talk overshadows the real crimes in which prominent men are complicit. Just imagine the potential for a quote praising to the heavens some Republican, followed by the line

"Translation: he's pro-torture."

This satire blindness seems uncharacteristic of Commonweal. They like Stephen Colbert, don't they?

More discouraging is their attempts to unmask the pseudonym. They claim the CWNews scribe is Paul Mankowski, SJ. While the pseudonym can mask all sorts of unmerited asperities, of which Diogenes has sometimes been guilty, how else other than pseudonymously could a cleric talk frankly without soiling the dignity of his office and his ministry?

Iraq WMD intelligence from poor chemistry student?

If this story is true, we're already living in Mike Judge's Idiocracy.

A US TV network has revealed the name of "Curveball" - an Iraqi man whose information was central to the US government's argument to invade Iraq.

[...]

The programme says he arrived in a German refugee centre in 1999 where he lied to win asylum and was not the chemical expert he said he was.

His claims of mobile bio-weapons labs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq were backed until well after the 2003 invasion.

[...]

The CBS 60 Minutes programme airs on Sunday but material released on its web site says Curveball was "not only a liar, but also a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be".

"It was a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth"

The CIA and French intelligence had turned the Iraqi foreign minister, yet instead we relied upon somebody lying for his green card.

How the Democrats Became Secularist

Deal Hudson interviews Mark Stricherz about his new book Why the Democrats are Blue:

MS: The short answer is that ideological activists controlled the nomination process: They, rather than big city and state leaders -- who have a larger constituency -- were choosing the nominee. It used to be, in the old boss system, that the bosses wanted to pick a nominee based on his ability to win.

The activists were looking for a nominee who could win, sure. But they also had ideological preferences. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the folks who were true believers tended to be feminists and anti-war types. It was a totally different constituency from the old Democratic Party of Catholics, blacks, union members, etc.

DH: Were the old party bosses that were replaced by these activists Catholic? Is this the ethnic Catholic group that was replaced?

MS: Yes, they were almost all Catholic. It's shocking today to look back at some of the old newspapers of the time, but in 1968 the chairman of the DNC, John Bailey; the chairman of the platform committee, Hale Boggs from Louisiana; the chairman of the credentials committee, Richard Hughes from New Jersey; the kingmaker at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Richard Dailey, were all Roman Catholics. And that had been true since 1948, when Catholics took over the machinery. They were in charge; Southerners had played a large role in party affairs before 1948, but the party from 1948 to 1968 was controlled by white Catholics, especially Irish Catholics.

I wonder if the Democrats look on the old Catholic dominance in the same way they look at the old Southern dominance of the party. "Sure," they might say, "we lost a bunch of close-minded bigots, but now we can go down to a principled defeat in our presidential campaigns!"

Of course there are plenty of Catholics in the Democratic leadership, but they are particularly domesticated and servile on the issues that would conflict with the party ideologues. I hope Stricherz' book will provide a how-to guide to reverse the Democrats' decline into the party of the obscene Amanda Marcotte.

Army Anthropologists Mainstreaming Pederasty?

Now I'm sympathetic to the WWII US Army Iraq Guide's advice for soldiers not to make moral reforms part of their job:

Differences? Sure there are differences. Difference of costume, Difference of food. Differences of manner and custom and religious belief. Different attitudes towards women. Differences galore.

What of it? You aren’t going to Iraq to change the Iraqis. We are fighting this war to preserve the principle of “live and let live.” Maybe that sounded like a lot of words to you at home. Now you have a chance to prove it to yourself and others. If you can, it’s going to be a better world to live in for all of us.

But then there's this essay from the NY Times about anthropologists assisting the US Army in Afghanistan:

Nevertheless the military voices on the show had their winning moments, sounding like old-fashioned relativists, whose basic mission in life was to counter ethnocentrism and disarm those possessed by a strident sense of group superiority. Ms. McFate stressed her success at getting American soldiers to stop making moral judgments about a local Afghan cultural practice in which older men go off with younger boys on “love Thursdays” and do some “hanky-panky.” “Stop imposing your values on others,” was the message for the American soldiers. She was way beyond “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and I found it heartwarming.
Richard A. Schweder, A True Culture War

Out of all the differences between Afghan culture and American ethics, Schweder just had to highlight this reprehensible practice for his NY Times readers' approval. Even if soldiers' moral judgments were interfering with their mission, stopping such judgment is a violation of sound ethics. There are appropriate ways of keeping one's disgust private, and I'm sure many soldiers are quite capable of doing so. I pray the writer is overstating what looks like indoctrination of our soldiery.

Schweder invokes stupid relativist slogans. He calls the nonjudgemental acceptance of pederasty "Heartwarming." He speaks in an ironic tone of "Love Thursdays" and "hanky-panky." This is degenerate camp at its worst.

Examining the "Catholic Ghetto"

One hears all the time that American Catholics were stuck in an introverted ghetto until they grew up and joined the larger culture. It's a common self-aggrandizing story told by more than a few baby boomers.

Note how this essay explodes that liberation story with the gunpowder of multi-culturalism.

The history of the ghetto image in Catholic usage tells much about the changes of mood in Catholic life during the past quarter century. When apologists for Catholic behavior and critics of the encircling WASP cultures wanted to reinforce and legitimate Catholic group-bonding, they accented the ways in which ghetto life was imposed on minorities. This Ellis did only briefly, when he said that the “aloof and unfriendly” American intellectual climate had discouraged Catholics, led them to slacken their efforts, and prompted this “minority to withdraw into itself and to assume the attitude of defenders of a besieged fortress.”

At other times during the domestic aggiornamento that followed the Second Vatican Council, however, a self-deprecating, indeed sometimes almost masochistic view of the tradition prevailed. Then the ghetto was seen not as imposed from without but self-imposed from within. Angry James Colaianni typically wrote that “Ghettoism suffocates. It is just another jail man builds for himself to keep from becoming free.” Some such critics were romantic about the surrounding glories of the secular city, naive in their neglect of the role of intimate community in human life, and scornful of ancestors whose ways they could never understand or emulate.

[...]

My thesis is that while Catholicism often did nurture ghetto existence, it was by no means unique in its relative isolation from a putative Protestant-secular world which I shall henceforth call "The Culture." Surrounding the Catholic version were so many other religious, national, and ideological ghettos that they cast the Catholic ghetto in a less distinctive light. Their presence forces us to reconsider whether the The Culture was not in many ways a larger and more expansive ghetto itself.

[...]

Historians of intergroup relations who have concentrated on the anti-Semitism of some Populists or Henry Adams, or on the anti-Catholicism of the nativist American Protective Association at the turn of the century, do have virulent and potent topics on their hands. But they often miss the dynamics of ghetto existence. One sees more vitriol and hears more vituperation, for example, in conflicts between Catholic Americanists and anti-Americanists, Ukrainian Uniates and Ukrainian Orthodox, Czech Catholics and Czech freethinkers, Catholic traditionalists and Catholic modernists, within their ghettos, than between any and all of them, say, the American Protective Association. Sociologist Georg Simmel seems to have been right, at least in the American historical instance; “People who have many common features often do one another worse or ‘worser’ wrong then complete strangers do.”
Martin E. Marty, Locations: At Home in the Ghettos

I was surprised to discover the noted scholar of American religion Martin Marty was the essay's author. It was his 1981 presidential address to the American Catholic Historical Association.

Sponsored by the Raphael Hythloday Foundation for Imaginary Think Tanks

It is easy to ignore the silly self-important descriptions think tanks and activist groups use to name themselves. It is almost as easy to make up hilarious names for such creations.

I got on a roll and couldn't stop, so I offer my inventions below:

Samuel Johnson Center for a Cant-free Future

Scientists for Unethical Research

Foundation for an Opportunistic Punditry

Students for a Reactionary Tomorrow

The William O. Douglas Center for Emanated Penumbras

Office of Convenient Statistics

Coalition of Subtle Panderers

People for a Progressive Yesterday

The Evelyn Waugh Foundation for Nostalgic Bitching

Students for Transient Enthusiasms

The Irresponsible Policy Foundation

Future Senior Citizens of America

Center for Incoherent Studies

Citizens for Improvident Government

Librarians for a Surreal Future

The Office of Abnormal Development

Center for Satirical Studies

Citizens Ignorant of Logic

Federation for Comical Legislation

Alliance for the Advancement of Minor Idiocies

The Institute for Poorly-worded Phrases

Taxpayers for Improvident Government

Students for an Unspecified Cause

Citizens for Bipartisan Sleaze

Technologists for Automated Folly

Dentists Against Saccharine Appeals

Academics for Regrettable Policy

Americans United for Random Emoting

The Department of Sensual Bureaucracy

Students for Faddish Posturing

The Office of Indescribable Horror

Center for Unlikely Legislation

Federation of Labored Analogies

Union of Phantastickal Accountants

The Center for Useless Distinctions

Americans for Aromatic Sewage

Foundation for Casual Diplomacy

Alliance for Shiny Objects

Coalition for Dubious Honors

The Bureau of Predictable Appearances

Students for Diversity in Failure

Office of Snide Dismissals

The Center for Centralized Mismanagement

Foundation for Anachronistic Analysis

Please feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

Nicolosi on the Hero, Nicolosi on Bella

Barb Nicolosi makes a nice examination of heroism in story, film, and real life and the qualities of the hero. Though it is only in note form, her advice seems more practical and substantive than what I've seen of Joseph Campbell's writings.

Here's a sample:

Things that are not heroic:

To have an illness. To be a victim. To have a bad hand dealt to you. HEROISM is in still serving others with an illness or bad thing.

To survive your own iniquity. (In the Bill Clinton sense. I heard a lady on TV say that she admired Clinton because he was "a survivor." Well, by that standard, you could admire roaches.)

It isn’t heroic to have a great talent or skill. To be able to run fast or sing well.

Nicolosi, a professional screenwriter, also isn't impressed by Bella, the new movie some pro-lifers are rallying around. I worry Nicolosi's standards can be too artistic and elite-oriented. Surely there is a craft to making popular mediocrities. I suspect the aspiring artist must first know mediocrity before he can know excellence.

Then again, I haven't seen the movie and don't plan to. When the film's own publicity highlights the fact it is made by "first-time filmmakers," I'm not inspired to open my wallet.

Charles Taylor Gets a Blog

A new academic blog called The Immanent Frame is dedicated to Charles Taylor's and others' interpretations of secularism.

On the shelves for only a handful of weeks, Charles Taylor's A Secular Age is already receiving at least some of the attention it well deserves. The book has been reviewed in the pages of The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, and two short excerpts were recently published in Commonweal. Taylor's massive tome--it's just shy of 880 pages long--was even held aloft and glossed earlier this month by a young denizen of youtube.

Although it won't be supporting video, The Immanent Frame--a new SSRC blog on secularism, religion, and the public sphere--will provide a venue for sustained dialogue and critical exchange on the work of Charles Taylor and other scholars of "the secular." And we're kicking things off with a series of posts on Taylor's big book.

(via James Poulos)

The Nadir of the Jack Bauer Mentality

By way of Mark Shea, a story of a man suspected of terrorism for possessing an airline pilot radio in his hotel room.

...the investigator said his family would go through hell in Egypt, where they torture people like Saddam Hussein. Higazy then realized he had a choice: he could continue denying the radio was his and his family suffers ungodly torture in Egypt or he confesses and his family is spared. Of course, by confessing, Higazy's life is worth garbage at that point, but ... well, that's why coerced confessions are outlawed in the United States.

So Higazy "confesses" and he's processed by the criminal justice system. His future is quite bleak. Meanwhile, an airline pilot later shows up at the hotel and asks for his radio back. This is like something out of the movies. The radio belonged to the pilot, not Higazy, and Higazy was free to go, the victim of horrible timing. Higazi was innocent! He next sued the hotel and the FBI agent for coercing his confession. The bottom line in the Court of Appeals: Higazy has a case and may recover damages for this injustice.

The legal documents were apparently withdrawn from the internet for redaction.

Historical Fiction, with Space Aliens

After reading the reviews at Curt Jester and Darwin Catholic, I picked up a copy of Michael Flynn's novel Eifelheim. It's the first science fiction I've read in years, and better than I expected.

The premise is simple: space aliens make first contact with Earth after shipwrecking near a remote German village. In the fourteenth century.

Flynn depicts with talent the political, religious, and intellectual ferment of the times. The main character is an intellectual parish priest named Father Dietrich. He is in hiding, having been a member of the fraticelli, the radical and violent Franciscan sect that strived for the abolition of property. Educated at the University of Paris, he is well-attuned to the philosophical thought that became foundational for the natural sciences.

Enter the extraterrestrials.

The Krenken are an insect-like race the German villagers compare to grasshoppers. Shipwrecked after some unrevealed technical malfunction in their ship, their appearance provokes fears they are demonic visitors. Father Dietrich, though as confused as anyone else, uses a bit of scholastic logic to deduce they are in fact natural creatures comparable to the dog-headed men and headless anthropoids reputed to live in the antipodes. In a wry inversion of sci-fi standbys, the limitations of medieval knowledge of the world provide grounds for acceptance instead of mob violence. It recalls the irony of Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz, in which monks become the only custodians of scientific knowledge after a nuclear catastrophe incites anti-intellectual obscurantism.

Michael Flynn shows an immense capacity for intellectual sympathy through his priest character's attempts to fit advanced scientific knowledge into the categories familiar to him. Flynn makes the medieval mind come alive, while suggesting the strangeness of our own times. The aliens strain to make their knowledge intelligible as Father Dietrich suggests Latinate or Greek neologisms to describe concepts well-familiar to the modern reader. Scientific concepts we take for granted, like protein, bacteria, and gravity, take on a marvelous appearance when seen through the eyes of an intelligent man living in a less advanced age. The priest's arguments with the aliens are amusing in their defense of fourteenth-century cosmology, but too honest and sophisticated to disdain.

While considerably hindered in scientific argument, Father Dietrich actually wins some of the religious disputes. His Christian faith, though explained through a poorly translating computer, gains a few adherents among the stranded aliens. The society of the Krenken is never elucidated, but it seems to be a hierarchical culture based on violent strength and a brutally Darwinian survival of the fittest. The lowest-ranked Krenken find Christian love and self-sacrifice convincing. Despite its alienness, Christianity provides them a welcome relief from their overbearing superiors.

Of course Michael Flynn must take poetic liberties with history. For the most part, they work to the good. However, he makes a few stumbles. At one point he references the ad orientem orientation of the Christian liturgy as a new phenomenon replacing the versus populum, which certainly doesn't correspond to what liturgical history I know. Further, he presents William of Ockham as a proponent of a proto-Lockean revolutionary natural rights theory that I don't think came into its own until the sixteenth century. Though some anachronisms are necessary to such a work, these two instances in particular bothered me.

Flynn's work is in many ways a defense of the medieval against contemporary caricatures. Most of the time this defense is well-done and subtle. I think it superior to Umberto Eco's In the Name of the Rose, which rested on the comical premise that a monk would hate laughter and comedy.

However, one crude apologetic for the Inquisition struck me as crude and not particularly relevant to its context.(It took place in one of the "present day" scenes that occasionally interrupts the historical fiction. In these scenes an historian seeks the reason Eifelheim remained abandoned through the centuries. As other reviewers note, these scenes don't gel well with the rest of the work.)

I have previously noted Michael Flynn's depiction of the excitement of scientific discovery in his fictionalized account of medieval science. If Eifelheim's imaginative sympathy and historical awareness are now typical of science fiction, I will have to look twice at the genre novels I happen upon.

William James' Religion

Tolstoy’s conversion account appealed to James on many levels, not least because churches and clergy played no role in it. Though James sometimes self-identified with Protestant Christianity, that label was accurate only in the narrowest cultural sense. Theologically, he was as heterodox as he was unsystematic—he theorized, for example, that there might be multiple deities. But if he was at most a marginal Christian, James was enthusiastically a Protestant. In Varieties, he pointedly reduced religion to its minimalist essence. “As I now ask you arbitrarily to take it,” he wrote, religion “shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” This was unmediated Protestantism in its purest, most unfettered form.
Theo Anderson, One Hundred Years of Pragmatism

One can't help but wonder how much the Jamesian approach to religion has influenced First Amendment jurisprudence. Out of respect for Protestantism(respect I didn't even know I had), I must protest Anderson's characterization of Protestantism in terms of its most individualistic liberal form. It's not always that bad.

Nevertheless, Anderson's essay is an excellent complement to my current read, Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club, a history of the American pragmatists with a talent for depicting the zeitgeist of late nineteenth-century New England.

Note that Anderson also intimates in James the beginnings of so-called therapeutic deism:

James’s writings contain glimmerings of the spirituality industry that would burgeon in the later 20th century. He posited other realms of consciousness and higher energies as agents of human “empowerment,” themes that have become ubiquitous among self-help authors. James likely would have deplored much of this genre, yet it is in some ways a logical outgrowth of his emphasis on the pragmatic consequences of faith. The ecumenism of the ­self-­help genre is also quintessentially Jamesian: Spirituality is presented as an unmediated relationship between the individual and the divine. Institutions only get in the ­way.

The Internet Kills

"During a dark time in her life, a troubled girl wandered into a room filled with people who were eager to love and support her, to validate and accept her, and to encourage her to kill herself."

Jeff Harrell's story of Suzanne Gonzales makes me want to set off a worldwide technology-killing EMP. Despairing of her life but mistrustful of her loved ones, she took her suicidal obsessions to a dingy corner of the internet where their power could only be magnified. The demonic advice on display in that Usenet group is more chilling than any mere horror novel.

Addendum:

Jeff Harrell is reporting the progress of the Suzanne Gonzales Suicide Prevention Act at Suzy's Law, which will make it a crime to encourage someone to commit suicide over the internet. I doubt that the law can survive First Amendment scrutiny, but it has obvious consequences for euthanasia and so-called assisted suicide activism.

Steve Sailer on Divisions of Intellect and Class

A big problem for modern class warriors like Pat Buchanan on the right or Jim Hightower on the left is that over the years the number of blue collar workers with the verbal talent needed to articulate their class interests has plummeted. Where'd the smart ones go? To college and then into white-collar jobs. In the past, unions and other working class institutions had leaders and spokesmen who were both highly intelligent and authentically representative of the rank and file.
How to help the left half of the bell curve

This same kind of brain drain is evident in regional migrations. The smart kids move to the big cities and local leadership becomes ever more stultified.

Sailer's essay scores some other points. When human equality of capacity is presumed as a matter of fact, the moral imperative to use one's special talents for the good of the less fortunate becomes obscured. Everybody's equal, so people who aren't successful must have some culpable personal failing that kept them from success.

My New Favorite News Agency

Though many bloggers hope to parlay their writing into a paid position, I never considered myself one of them. But thanks to the fortuitous recommendation of a certain Kevin Knight, I am now a part-time staff writer at the Catholic News Agency.

Here's the lead to one of my reports, this one discussing Archbishop Burke's analysis of the worthy reception of Communion:

In an essay certain to have an impact on American politics, Archbishop Raymond Burke of the Archdiocese of St. Louis has criticized lax attitudes concerning the reception of the Holy Eucharist. His words continue a long-standing debate about whether Catholic politicians who support abortion rights should receive communion.

The archbishop's full paper is here.

It feels so very good to be working again after nearly four years of disability. Though my health is still not optimal, and probably never will be again, I think I can now aspire to forge a career in something or other. Journalism seems as likely a field as any other, and I am most thankful for this opportunity.

Internet Roundup I

I originally intended this blog to be a record of sites, essays, and articles I thought noteworthy.

Lately I have been using StumbleUpon to record more easily the good work others have done. This has led me to neglect posting here at Philokalia Republic.

So I have decided to post here every few weeks a roundup section of items recorded in my StumbleUpon blog. I hope this division of labor will prompt me to create more original content here without foregoing news of worthy stories elsewhere.

Here we go:

varenius contrasts a classic Christian carol with its neo-pagan ripoff:

"Good King Wenceslas", Christian version: The King and his page bring gifts to a poor man.

"Good King Wenceslas", Neo-Pagan version: The King and his page bring gifts to the woodland creatures.

Varenius also imagines some conversations from a biotech future.

*****

How statutory rapists eliminate evidence:

"In "Jane Roe" vs. Planned Parenthood, a 13-year-old was sexually abused by her soccer coach. The coach, 21, posed as a "stepbrother" and paid for the abortion in 2004, using an I.D. that did not match the girl's name. It was not reported.

The girl's parents sued, saying Planned Parenthood did not notify them and helped the abuser conceal his crime. They say records will prove the abortion clinic fails to report rape as required by law."
Ruling Against Teen Looks Like 'Abortion Distortion'

Abortuary protesters sometimes note with gravity the repeated phenomenon of an older man escorting an obviously un-related, very young woman into the facility.

*****

Jennifer Rorback Morse uncovers some statistical manipulation in sex education:

These figures cast new light on the debate over contraception education. The commonly quoted failure rates of 8% for the Pill and 15% for the condom are inflated by the highly successful use by middle-aged, middle-class married couples. Yet, the government promotes contraception most heavily among the young, the poor and the single. The "overall failure rates" are simply not relevant to this target population.

That the young and fertile are more immune to the effects of such methods is not surprising. That we expect them to use such methods effectively in irresponsible relationships and alcohol-fueled hook-ups is very surprising.

*****

Cosmos-Liturgy-Sex on the anti-HPV vaccine being in some jurisdictions mandatory for young teen girls:

Just to put the massive but deceptive marketing of Gardasil into perspective, an inoculated child may be protected from 4 (70% of cancer causing) out of the possible 200 strains of the virus for a yet to be determined amount of time (4 years?) from a type of cancer which make up about 0.007 % of new cancer cases and 0.006 % of cancer deaths that occur annually in the U.S. In return for these modest benefits of Gardasil in 2007, there have been (1) 5 deaths, (2) 31 life-threatening adverse events, (3) 1,385 required visits to the emergency room with (4) 451 of the girls not having recovered as of July 2007 , (5) with 51 of the girls resulting with a disability

Though these warnings may originate from anti-vaccine activists merely finding another arrow for their quiver, Peter Hitchens explains why their objections deserve accommodation.

*****

Euthanasia by a doctor in a New Orleans Hospital during Katrina.

*****

Islam and Christianity blog by an Anglican missionary in the Middle East. I met the author at a ROFTERS meeting.

*****

Corruption in the Legionaires of Christ aided by illicit and self-serving regulations:

Recently, Fr. Alvaro Corcuera, Director General of the Legion of Christ, has been discreetly visiting different legionary houses to explain to his religious the repeal "apparently ordered by higher authorities" of the secret vows, also known as the private vows.

There are two such vows. The first prevents a religious from criticizing any personal aspect of a superior, including his moral character. It also prevents him from listening to conversations in which a superior is being criticized.

*****

Mark Stricherz explains Why the Democrats are Blue:

In this exceptional book, Stricherz shows why -- even today -- the Democrats are blue. He reveals how a group of secular professionals seized control of the Democratic Party, driving away Catholics and blue-collar workers. He shows how these secular liberals did nothing less than hijack a commission created at the 1968 Democratic convention, toppled the party bosses, created an activist-dominated nomination system, and built an affluent, secular base of support.

Georgetown's Flight from Judgement

Georgetown's quest to refuse funding for student internships at immoral organizations recently gave up the ghost. Georgetown political theorist Patrick Deneen ties this failure to our society's diffident habits of thought and action:

Judgment succumbs to those forces that Tocqueville rightly diagnosed as being at the heart of modern democracies: the rejection of distinctions and forms, the revulsion against discrimination and boundaries, the abolition of mediation and the eschewal of divisions. What can begin as the righteous opposition to unjust discrimination easily becomes indignation of all forms of distinction. Thus, the rightful rejection of laws against miscegenation becomes the rejection of laws that defend marriage of one man and one woman. The justified fight against racial discrimination becomes the crusade against any judgments that threaten our self-esteem, leading to a culture in which every child receives a trophy after the season and grade inflation is rampant (and these are hardly the most pernicious forms that this impulse takes). Tocqueville rightly predicted history would become the story of forces, rejecting the idea that history was made by great men and women; poetry would become populated by ordinary people, not heroes or models, an anticipation of the poetry of Whitman; and religion would become pantheistic, collapsing the divide between heaven and earth so that the sacred and the profane became one. He also told us that all political problems would become judicial problems, in the main because we would reject the messy realm of politics for the winner-take-all universalism of the courts.
There's More

The Fires of Savonarola's Florence

The ferocious energy of the Renaissance republic and its most famous preacher is expertly captured in Lauro Martines' Fire in the City. With patient understanding of his subject Martines describes to a modern audience the triumphs and travails of the Dominican monk Savonarola and the political energies which he channeled--energies which, in the end, destroyed him.

In Martines' sympathetic telling, Savonarola was a fierce patriot who in 1495 helped expel the Medici from power and strengthen the new republic formed in their wake. Though a lover of liberty, he nonetheless preached clemency for the allies of the exiled rulers when tyrant-hating vengeance waxed. He also countered oligarchic tendencies among the city's elite in favor of wider citizen participation. In foreign policy he embraced the invasion of the French King Charles VIII as the scourge of Florence's enemies and Italy's flaccid believers. He even did all this without holding formal political office.

Yet first in his priorities was church reform, universal in scope but with Florence at its center. Reform was much needed, to say the least. The Great Schism had weakened religious authority. The papacy was held by the simonious decadent Alexander VI. Bishoprics were collected like so many choice financial properties and ruled in absentia, badly.

Against this established venality the righteous Savonarola spoke. Two lines from his sermons display his driven power: "I want men to be illuminated by truth. I want to fight the whole world and win."

He had no tolerance for corrupt clerics. His early polemical poems were written long before his days in Florence. Titled De Ruina Mundi and De Ruina Ecclesiae, they will appeal to those tired of laxity in the Catholic scene who will find in Savonarola the under-represented rigorist flavor of anti-clericalism. He could be writing of present-day episcopal malfeasance when he declares:

Ah, look at that catamite and at the pimp,
Dressed in purple, frauds looked up to
By the common people and adored by the blind world.

Later he advises:

Avoid all those who put on purple.
Flee from palaces and ostentatious loggias,
Speaking to the few alone,
For you will be the enemy of all the world.

What enjoyment one finds in these passages should be tempered by the observation of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: "After two hundred years of cheerful and ironic anti-clericalism the Reformation came after all, and destroyed the fabric of the Church in a number of nations."

Despite all this youthful talk of contra mundum, the monk avoided exclusive elitism in his Florentine ministry. At points, his thirst for justice and freedom and his significantly genuine patriotic piety captivated a vast portion of the city. His charisma shines through his recorded sermons. In one oft-used rhetorical device he converses with a fictional interlocutor:

-Oh, friar.... they say you are a heretic.
-Throw any low insult at me, but don't call me a heretic.
-They say you're crazy.
-Oh, now there you've said something beautiful. [As sinners] we're all a bit mad.
-Ah, but you've said the Church is a whore. O father, the Holy Church? What have you said?
-You're a fool ... go and do some more studying.

The pre-lenten Florentine carnival traditionally involved deadly rock fights among youths and debauchery among their elders. The monk's famous bonfires of the vanities attempted to subvert and redirect these energies towards spiritual renewal. Savonarola, believing their elders to be incorrigible, would send out groups of teenage boys and young men to collect "vanities" from the people. These collections, with few exceptions, were entirely voluntary. The collected dirty books, games, and luxurious clothes were then set ablaze in a vivid symbol of Lenten sacrifice.(This suggests a cheerful and productive activity for modern-day parish youth groups.)

Savonarola's popularity was not total. His efforts at moral reform provoked a backlash from among its targets. Street gamblers started accosting and threatening the zealous youths who had once driven them indoors. The wealthy hated the Savonarolan fashion police who would publicly deride and humiliate luxurious dressers. But his political and ecclesiastical opponents were the most potent of the friar's adversaries.

In June of 1497 his enemies finally secured an excommunication from the papacy. For months they had reported trumped up charges of heresy and misconduct, but they also merely repeated the man's heated attacks on papal corruption. Earlier the pope had wished Savonarola to defend his positions in person. Though a worldly man, Alexander VI seemed to fear the monk really was the prophet he claimed to be. Savonarola, who needed the protection of an armed guard in his home city, feared assassination if he were to leave his home turf. In an effort to reign in the recalcitrant frair, his monastery at San Marco was ordered to submit itself to the authority of another, more diplomatic, Dominican congregation.
This order was simply ignored, and it was only a matter of time before the papacy bowed to the anti-Savonarolan factions.

Yet even the excommunication did not end Savonarola. He denied the legitimacy of the punishment on the grounds it was based on fraudulent accusations. He began preaching again with even more anti-papal vehemence.

But his position weakened. Florence feared worsening tensions with the papacy and other Italian powers and severe domestic factionalism strained political comity. Savonarola was challenged by a Franciscan opponent to undergo a trial by fire in a city square. Though one of Savonarola's disciples had accepted the challenge and a great crowd gathered and prepared the site for the event, the great test of fire never took place. This abortive trial in some minds confirmed Savonarola as a false prophet. An angry mob beseiged San Marco, captured the monk, and turned him over to hostile elements in the city government. Accused of fraud and heresy, he was tortured. Savonarola, very intolerant of pain, soon accused himself of being a megalomaniacal fraud. He abjured all his extraordinary efforts as exercises in vanity. He and two fellow monks were hanged in May of 1498, and what vanities of their bodies remained were themselves immolated by fire.

See also: Daniel Larison's review

Experiments in Virtual Living: Law and Justice in Second Life

Second Life, the virtual world created by Linden Labs and a few hundred thousand users, makes for a living laboratory in political science. One nice essay examines the politics of Second Life, tracing its subsidized and well-regulated beginnings to its quasi-anarchic present:

There are no central regulatory authorities. You cannot file abuse reports for fraud. You have no way to know if someone is a known fraud or a reputable businessperson. Although word-of-mouth helps to spread the reputation, that’s all there is. There are also no taxes. And until very recently, there was no control on the kind of content that you could sell.

Some communities established, locally, a way to deal with frauds and abuse from either producers or consumers. On a mall, for instance, it’s customary to kick out a fraudulent merchant; but they’ll simply move to the mall next door, defame the previous mall owner, and business goes on as usual. There is no way to file a suit against someone. Consumers have no rights and no way to enforce them, even if they managed to band together to protest (which they do, but are mostly ignored); producers can be ripped off using several techniques, and they have no way to legitimately claim for justice.

If the technology and economy supported the effort, this situation would be a nice test case for the Libertarian dream of private law and justice committees.

"The Jeweler's Shop" On Stage

The Theophany Theater Company was recently in town to perform The Jeweler's Shop, a play written by Pope John Paul II when he was still Karol Wojtyla, archbishop of Krakow. The play explores love and marriage as experienced by three couples: one ends by a death, another by separation, and later the third begins with the betrothal of two children of these unions. All three couples visit a mysterious jeweler's shop whose magical rings and vatic instructions bracket these couples' experiences of engagement and marriage.

The Jeweler's Shop, I am told, is representative of the Polish nationalist movement which tried to preserve and extend Polish culture despite foreign domination. Originally meant for performance in small homes, the intimacy of the play can be adapted to larger venues only with difficulty. Theophany's performance did not transfer well. The actors were difficult to distinguish at a distance. Costumed in uniform black dress, their appearance evoked distracting comparisons to avant garde productions. Their delivery lacked significant dramatic energy, being over-reliant on the script and its author to carry the production.

The writing itself is often provocative. At times the imagery flourishes into self-interpretation. In one scene an affianced couple stands outside a shop, contemplating each other in the store window:

[the shop window] became, however, a mirror reflecting us both-Teresa and myself. Moreover, it was not an ordinary flat mirror, but a lens absorbing its object. We were not only reflected but absorbed.

A lover's gaze upon himself and his beloved suggests the iconic nature of holy matrimony, which segues into iconographic theology. Rarely has such interrelated symbolism so echoed off a stage.

The soliloquy has but a small place in American film or theater but it frequents The Jeweler's Shop. Indeed the soliloquies are so many that at times the characters seem to have talked themselves into isolation from one another. On occasion this serves dramatic purpose, as when an abandoned wife futiley seeks comfort in a crowded village street, but at other places attentive staging must channel the solitude which was too prominent in Theophany's performance.

The speeches themselves often turn into philosophical asides. Observing two immature lovers, the everyman Adam states:

love carries people away like an absolute, although it lacks absolute dimensions. But acting under an illusion, they do not try to connect that love with the Love that has such a dimension. They do not even feel the need, blinded as they are not so much by the force of their emotion as by lack of humility. They lack humility toward what love must be in its true essence. The more aware they are of it, the smaller the danger. Otherwise the danger is great: love will not stand the pressure of reality.

Poetic imagery is lacking, to say the least. How is it that a play can tolerate such analytical ventures?

I suspect the oppresive state of 1960s Poland is one reason. Communist suppression of unofficial cultural events required that distinguishable artistic goals be concentrated into the power of one work. Archbishop Karol Wojtyla lacked the time and the flexibility of the free artist to explain and expand upon his vision. The playwright must do the work of criticism because few others will.

The play's confluence of aesthetic goals also includes the moral. The specialization of American society shuns the combination of education and entertainment. Such a union suggests the brightly-colored monstrosities of children's television. But didacticism is not necessarily an artistic sin. It is certainly a failure when a work of art teaches us something shallow or something wrong, so it is good for moviegoers that Hollywood usually shuns the didactic in favor of pure entertainment. Didacticism is also a risky tactic when advancing something the audience would rather not want to learn. The market pressures for mass appeal cannot afford any resentful patrons.

The effort to teach goes awry worst when one teaches something badly, and here performances of The Jeweler's Shop risk the most danger. The play is inescapably foreign. Its design for the house theater, its numerous soliloquies, its dramatic choruses, and its philosophic interludes have little appeal to action-loving American audiences. There are even a few rhetorical clunkers, as when one Chorus begins to speak of a wedding:

"The occasion is most beautiful, it evokes so many associations. We are looking only at what is!"

One hopes this is a fault of the translator.(*)

As much as a fifth of the audience at Theophany's performance ducked out at intermission. While one can excuse the players or the playwright by blaming the average American's taste, I think it is instead a sign that The Jeweler's Shop is a play fit only for the more academic or more adulatory sectors of American Catholicism. Written to compete with the bland socialist realism and the quasi-rationalistic Communist ideologies of its age, it can hardly challenge today's multi-billion dollar entertainment industry that stirs appetites for the spectacle and the sarcastic one-liner.

There is great potential for some budding playwright to remix this play for an American audience, as Christopher West distilled the pope's Theology of the Body for ease of understanding. Such a writer must unite the contemplative self-reflection of Wojtyla to an accessible story with characters and style more common to American performances. This effort will require considerable talent, but without it the best points of The Jeweler's Shop will remain trapped in a diamond uncut for its setting.

* On second thought, this line would work well when whispered in a home setting.

What Does John Milbank Know About Eric Gill?

Scott Carson examines Radical Orthodoxy and its rather conventional denial of traditional Christian sexual ethics. One selection from John Milbank caught my eye:

In just what way can there be a sexual path that is also a spiritual path? In a sense, this is a debate about human ecology, and it is notable that today, as earlier in the twentieth century, those who are "conservatively" critical of over-technologization and the exploitation of nature also tend to be in favor of a more positive attitude toward sex (D.H. Lawrence, J.C. Powys and Eric Gill, for example). Inversely, those who are more conservative, puritanical and legalistic about sex are often those who fully embrace technological modernity, the ruthless exploitation of nature and economic liberalism.

Daniel Mitsui expands on just how positive Eric Gill's sexual attitudes were. Those wishing to preserve what remains of innocence should not read it. Suffice to say, Gill obtained gratification from his dog and frequently violated his own daughters. He matter-of-factly records these events in his diaries. One does not become more exploitative than that.

One is left wondering if Milbank is simply ignorant of Gill's perversions, which were not revealed until 1989. He could even believe the contorted thesis that Gill's artistry is utterly disconnected from his personal debaucheries. An admirer's powers of self-deception are legion.

Another possibility is far worse: he really is so satanic that he approves.

Francis Beckwith on Secular Reason

Francis Beckwith, professor and Right Reason blogger, lectured at CU-Boulder to a surprisingly large Friday night audience. His speech, "Bioethics and the Pluralist Game," examined the failings of some of the commonplace arguments used to shut down ethical and legal objections to secular liberal policies. Though his inaugurating speech was more academic than the typical undergradate could handle, it bodes well for the new lecture series sponsored by the St. Thomas Aquinas Institute.

Beckwith's arguments were solid, and I particularly enjoyed his analysis of the oft-claimed need for political reasoning to be secular:

[Robert] Audi offers another principle that may be employed, the "secular reason requirement." It goes like this: one has a prima facie obligation not to advocate or support any law or public policy that restricts conduct unless one has and is willing to offer adequate secular reasons for advocacy or support.

...this principle requires, without argument, that the citizen's reason be secular. But "secular" is not a relevant property of a reason that is offered in support of a conclusion that an advocate is advancing. For instance, the terms "true, false, plausible, implausible" are adjectives that we apply to reasons to test the property relevant to its purpose as part of an argument. A property is characteristic had by something. So for example one can say "the dog is brown," which means the dog has the property of brownness. However, if one were to say "the set of all even numbers is brown," one would be saying nonsense. Numerical sense cannot have the property of color.

But reasons, like dogs or numerical sets, are things that can only have certain types of properties. Just as a dog cannot have the property of a rational number, and a numerical set cannot have the property of "blue," "valid," or "tall," a reason cannot be secular. For "secular," like "tall," "fast," "stinky," or "sexy," has no bearing on the quality of the reason one may offer in an argument to advance a particular public policy or point of view.

Suppose one believes the conclusion that unjust killing is morally wrong, and offers two reasons for it. The first reason is "the Bible prohibits unjust killing," and the second reason is "the philosopher Immanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative prohibits unjust killing." Most people would call the first a religious reason and the second a secular reason, because the first contains the name of a religious book, the Bible, and the second contains a non-religious principle, the Categorical Imperative. But how do the terms religious and secular add or subtract to our assessment of the quality of the reasoning?

If one, for example, has good reason to reject the authority of the Bible, then that good reason about the nature of the Bible is the good reason for rejecting that reason. On the other hand, if one has good reasons to believe the Bible is a better guide to moral philosophy than Kant's Categorical Imperative, in that case one ought to conclude that the first is a better reason than the second.

But again, how do the properties of "religious" and "secular" affect such a judgement? At the end of the day, reasons are weak, strong, true, or false, but "religious" and "secular" are not relevant properties when assessing the qualities of reasons a person may offer as part of her argument.

In practice, this requirement of secular reason functions as a hindrance for properly understanding the bioethical issues addressed and the positions held by Christian citizens.

To label an argument "religious" or "secular" is not to speak the language of logic but the language of anthropology or sociology. This tactic, widespread and often unconscious in use, tries to change the topic of the discussion from the argument itself to the category of person who is making the argument.

When this rhetorical shift takes place in jurisprudence, it suggests an implicit assumption that a certain type of people is in charge. Arguments are judged not on their merits but on whether they cater to this ruling type. The need to justify the rule of the secular tribe doubtless partially motivates the fervid insistence that the United States is a secular state.

The Demise of the Constitution

The last time the left tried legitimately to amend the Constitution was with the ERA. It failed, but it didn't matter because the courts read it into the 14th Amendment in rulings such as the VMI decision. No one is bothering to propose an amendment to guarantee a right to same sex "marriage." Instead, it's taken as a given that the courts will eventually add this amendment by fiat. Instead, conservatives are trying to amend the Constitution to stop it. So we've come full circle from what our Founders intended. Instead of requiring super-majorities to change the Constitution, it's now expected that it will change automatically in a liberal direction unless conservatives can get super-majorities to keep it the same.
Tim W. at View from the Right

Though there is a list of largely symbolic proposed federal constitutional amendments, only conservatives and libertarians appear to care enough about such things to make amendments part of a unified campaign platform. That appearance is itself dubious. Any serious amendment fight would be protracted and a career-ender for many politicians from divided districts and so would never happen.

The Constitution continues to be a figurehead.

Alasdair MacIntyre on Video

The video archives at Notre Dame's Center for Ethics and Culture is another fine resource. I was happy to see MacIntyre lecture, especially since he is a better speaker than he is a prose stylist. He discusses the compartmentalization of life required by so-called pluralism, wherein standards of action in one area of life simply do not translate into other areas of life.

Other videos look very promising.

A Pocket Deity for Ethical Living and Self-Esteem

"Moralistic-therapeutic deism" is a mouthful. It is a habit of thought which exploits the typically American impulse towards self-improvement and revises traditional religious thought and practice to that end. Its god is distant, invoked only to solve some personal problem. Its heaven is well-populated and its hell, if it exists at all, is vague and only for Hitlerian levels of evildoers. This mindset reduces religious ethics to being nice and happy while living a safe and productive life spent thinking warm and fuzzy thoughts about self and universe.

It's also apparently a major religious influence among youth today, no matter what their denomination.

Sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton spent time with American teenagers, collecting their reflections and opinions about religion and God. It is hardly surprising that the teens were unsophisticated. However, the language they used was that of therapy and self-help. Truth, sanctity, and sacrifice were of little importance. Rather, religion was for most of these youths an instrument of personal self-realization.

Christian Smith sums up his work in the twelve-page essay On "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism" as U.S. Teenagers’ Actual, Tacit, De Facto Religious Faith(PDF).

The Revealer also provides an overview:

Smith and Denton’s most significant contribution to our understanding of American teenagers’ religious and spiritual lives begins when the authors attempt to explain why teens believe what they believe -- in a sense, why they are so conventional. The authors first identify the social contexts in which adolescents live and believe, starting with a discussion of therapeutic individualism, a set of assumptions and commitments that "powerfully defines everyday moral and relational codes and boundaries in the United States." Personal experience is what shapes our notions of truth, and truth is found nowhere else but in happiness and positive self-esteem. In religious terms, according to teenagers, God cares that each teenager is happy and that each teenager has high self-esteem. Morality has nothing to do with authority, mutual obligations, or sacrifice. In a sense, God wants little more for us than to be good, happy capitalists. Smith and Denton elaborate: "Therapeutic individualism’s ethos perfectly serves the needs and interests of U.S. mass-consumer capitalist economy by constituting people as self-fulfillment-oriented consumers subject to advertising’s influence on their subjective feelings." And to be good, happy capitalists, we should be good, unless if being good prevents us from being happy.

It is to be hoped against experience that this attitude is a passing phase of unstudied youths. The loss of religious vocabularies must result in an impoverishment of religious thought itself.

Cardinal Arinze to visit Arvada Parish

To my surprise, he will be speaking at a conference at my home parish. From the Denver Catholic Register:

Cardinal Francis Arinze is coming to Denver. The cardinal, prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments in Vatican City, will celebrate Mass and deliver the keynote address at a stewardship conference next month.

Spirit of Christ Church in Arvada will host the Sept. 20 conference titled, “Eucharist, Nourishment for the Christian Steward.” In addition to Mass and the cardinal’s keynote address, the conference will include breakout sessions and a roundtable discussion. Opening remarks to the conference will be delivered by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

Estrogen Pollutes Colorado Waterways, Mutates Fish

In jest, I mentioned here a British study on the effects of estrogen contamination in the waterways of Englan The excess estrogen comes from some plastics, cosmetics, and detergents, but most especially from birth control pills and hormone replacement therapies which pass through humans into the sewage system. The most disturbing effect of excess estrogen in the water is the "frankenfish"--male fish with acquired hermaphroditic characteristics like egg production and a more feminine physical appearance.

When I heard this story, I cheerfully reflected on Colorado's location upstream from the rest of the country. Now the frankenfish phenomenon hits closer to home.

Boulder Weekly writer Wayne Laugesen tweaked Boulder Valley environmentalists with news of estrogen pollution in the effluent of Boulder. (Laughnesen also summed things up for the National Catholic Register) He knew well which choice residents would make if given the option of saving the environment or of maintaining their lifestyle.

He follows up with worrisome news of a new experiment by Boulder researcher David Norris:

In response to public denial over the results of his survey, Norris took extraordinary measures to prove his findings. This column is likely the first you've heard of them, because the mainstream media desire to ignore this subject.

Norris obtained funding from the Colorado Division of Fish and Wildlife and the EPA for a study under peer review today by scientists from the United States Geological Survey. The Norris team set up a lab next to the sewage plant in the summer of 2006. They removed all external variables and isolated fish, creek water obtained upstream from the treatment plant, and Boulder's estrogen-rich effluent. Then they altered life.

"With a ratio of water-to-effluent identical to what's immediately downstream from the plant, we were able to feminize the fish within seven days," Norris told me. "They all started producing female proteins. We shut down their production of sperm, and they all started acting like females."

One can't help but fear the effects such estrogenated water is having on humans. Norris notes: "emerging evidence suggests correlation between Ethinyl Estradiol pollution and increased abnormalities in the reproductive systems of newborns, increased prostate cancer and reduced human fertility." One even wonders if it is responsible for an increased incidence of homosexuality and male effeminacy.

If one subtle corruption of human sexuality indeed redounds upon the health of nature and the health of the human race, how much more fearsome will appear the order of the cosmos!

The Church: An Effect Not Greater Than Its Cause

"Our reflections on Julicher's exegesis of the parables have already led us to the conclusion that no one would have been condemned to the Cross on account of such harmless moralizing...

The anonymous community[of early Christians] is credited with an astonishing level of theological genius--who were the great figures responsible for inventing all this? No, the greatness, the dramatic newness, comes directly from Jesus; within the faith and life of the community it is further developed, but not created. In fact, the "community" would not even have emerged and survived at all unless some extraordinary reality had preceded it."

-Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth

The Varieties of Corporate Welfare, Exposed

Big Business is one of the obvious features of modern life. Its left-wing opponents regard corporate America as rogues relentlessly maximizing profit and bristling at every government regulation, intent on returning American law to the age of unregulated robber barons. Its right-wing defenders valorize the corporation for its economic productivity and seemingly tireless pursuit of consumer satisfaction through innovation and sound business sense--all without the inefficiency and stultification of government intervention.

Tim Carney's The Big Ripoff attacks many of these superficial themes, but also reveals how such rhetoric does not go far enough in its criticism or its praise. Subtitled How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money, his book reveals the curious alliance of business and government interests as two symbiotic parasites leeching upon taxpayers, consumers, and smaller entrepreneurs.

Regulation too often is written by the largest actors in the very industries targeted for legal constraints. Regulation means higher costs of entry for would-be competitors and more overhead for already-existing but less powerful competition. Regulation efforts ensure closer cooperation between the most influential businesses and the public sector. Such efforts serve the expansive tendencies of government bureaucracies and provide politicians the resume-building opportunity of Standing Up to Big Business. The businesses supporting state regulation also gain a reputation for being responsible corporate citizens, while their more radical political opposition find attempts at more restrictive legislation forestalled.

Carney reports that tax increases are also often supported by business organizations. Tax hikes often provide funds for direct or indirect corporate subsidies. The potential variety of this indirect support is unnerving: infrastructure improvements, worker education programs, and mass transportation, even when serving public purposes also reduce some business expenses. Even redistributionary schemes could find support in some sectors: Walmart, the corporate bugbear par excellence, would benefit from the welfare-induced increased spending power of its lower-class clientele, and such logic was at work in its political support for a minimum wage hike.

The story of the American sugar industry is perhaps the most grievous example of corporate welfare recounted in The Big Ripoff. US Sugar and the Fanjul family both dominate the American sugar supply. They have secured not only a highly protective quota against foreign importers, but also exemptions from said quota for their corporate-owned sugarfields in the Dominican Republic. They are major beneficiaries of the damaging swamp-draining infrastructure of the Everglades, governmental loans, and guaranteed sales at twice the international rate. Worse, the artificially high price of sugar has established corn syrup as the leading ingredient in many American foods, thus allying corn-growers with an industry that would otherwise be its competition.

The Florida-based Fanjuls carefully guard their privileges through bipartisan support for key politicians in their crucial swing state, and they get their money's worth: Carney estimates the sugar complex needlessly costs taxpayers and consumers $1.9 billion per year.

Other anecdotes explore the revolting abuses of eminent domain, the incoherence of programs which join foreign policy with business expansion, and the sad, wearisome ways in which legislation merely allies itself with cartelization and oligopoly.

At times the thought of this incestuous network of collaborating interests induces hopelessness. How can one repeal even one subsidy benefitting a powerful, energetic few but of only minimal consequence to most voters?. How can one start a business if one faces a mountain of regulations cooked up by one's largest competitors?

At other points, Carney's efforts encourage that shadow of despair: cynicism. While any piece of legislation has self-interested parties for and against, the capacity for disinterested deliberation can be corrupted by constant analysis of ulterior motives as much as by monied interests. Though Carney is careful to qualify his polemic, his work needs the complement of a wise understanding of sound public policy.

That said, The Big Ripoff is a certain cure for the naivety found among both reformers and free marketeers.

See Also: An earlier selection from Carney

Ancient Greek on Google Books

Summa Minutiae has some links tempting me to resume my Homeric studies. Has some classicist compiled a bibliography of the good nineteenth-century books available on Google?

Update:

The answer to my question is "yes." Classics in Contemporary Culture and Tarik Wareh list Greek and Latin works from both Classical and Patristic eras.

Mike Aquilina recommends his own favorite patristics sites.

Psychologists Liable for Quack Advice to Bishops?

Susan Brinkman gives the details in her book, The Kinsey Corruption (Ascension Press). Certain Catholic Church administrators hired sexuality educators who taught Kinseyan values. This employment pattern held as well for some selected psychologists who screened aspiring seminarians, many of whom were rejected because they were said to be too sexually “orthodox,” not “tolerant” of homosexuality. Bishops sent pedophile priests for treatment to therapists who accepted pedophilia as an “orientation.”

[...]

The Johns Hopkins clinic and St. Luke Institute [in Maryland] are two Kinseyan therapeutic venues. Fr. Rossetti took over St. Luke Institute after its founder, Michael Peterson, a priest and practicing homosexual, died of AIDS. Some of their infamous pederast patients included Fr. Rudy Kos of Dallas and Fr. John Geoghan of Boston .

...medical malpractice is one approach that immediately comes to mind. These “sexperts” held themselves out as authorities; bishops and vocations directors listened and commonly followed their directives. Yet, almost all of these "sexperts" built their therapies on the fraudulent research of Kinsey and his disciples.
-Judith Reisman, Sue the "sexperts"

Of course, the bishops bear the most proximate responsibility for the treatment and punishment, or rather lack thereof, for predatory priests. They abandoned centuries of Christian ethics and psychology for the insane fads of the moment. Yet the pseudoscientific cranks deserve some exposure too.

The psychological malpractice alleged here is also reminiscent of reports that psychotherapists destroyed the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

Justice Potter Stewart on Secular Education

It might also be argued that parents who want their children exposed to religious influences can adequately fulfill that wish off school property and outside school time. With all its surface persuasiveness, however, this argument seriously misconceives the basic constitutional justification for permitting the exercises at issue in these cases. For a compulsory state educational system so structures a child's life that, if religious exercises are held to be an impermissible activity in schools, religion is placed at an artificial and state-created disadvantage. Viewed in this light, permission of such exercises for those who want them is necessary if the schools are truly to be neutral in the matter of religion. And a refusal to permit religious exercises thus is seen not as the realization of state neutrality, but rather as the establishment of a religion of secularism, or, at the least, as government support of the beliefs of those who think that religious exercises should be conducted only in private.
-Justice Potter Stewart, Dissent, School District of Abington Township, Pennsylvania v. Schempp

The logical and practical failings of State neutrality have been detailed by many thinkers such as David Schindler. I had not realized that these failings were apparent even in 1963.

Destructive Human Embryo Research at the University of Colorado

The Rocky Mountain News reports on current stem cell research and the funding thereof. The author of the piece curiously omits ethical objections.

Colorado Right to Life seems busy picking fights with James Dobson. Perhaps it should direct its energies into placing a few candidates in the CU Regents race so bioethical concerns have a voice at the university.

Worthy Lectures from ISI

Browsing the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Videos I came across two of note. Christendom College's William Fahey introduces Hillaire Belloc to a new audience, including a good summary of the origin and habits of Modernity.

Reactionary Radical Bill Kauffmann sings the praises of localism. He recounts one visit to Columbus, Mississippi:

We entered the eatery and were seated behind four ladies with lovely, mellifluous Southern accents. They spent the next half hour recounting the plot of the previous night's episode of Friends, that smuttily witless show by which archaeologists of the twenty-third century will condemn our civilization.

I wanted to confront them, to plead with them:

"Look, here you are, daughters of a poor, reviled state, which is nevertheless one of the culturally richest states in the union. Your home gave us the Delta Blues, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, Shelby Foote,

And yet you consume the commercial products of cocaine-addled greedheads in Manhattan and Hollywood, people who hate your guts, who despise you as ignorant crackers and stupid rednecks. Get off your knees, Mississippi! There are new Robert Johnsons and Eudora Weltys in your midst. Support them. Look inward, look homeward! With a little water, the flowers in your own backyard will bloom a thousand times more brilliantly than anything on your high definition TV set."

Billy Graham gets the Michelangelo Treatment from Time

Newsbusters is making hay about an obvious subtle allusion to Michelangelo's "Moses", which also has horns.

If You Want to Send a Message...

I've blogged many, many times about how the language of 'giving a sense of' and 'sending a message' makes sensations and emotions more important than the acts and realities that cause them, and how alienating this actually is to our emotional psychologies themselves. It reinforces a permanent remove from your own actions, putting you into an essentially ironic relationship with your own life and self.
-James Poulos

The Streaking Cleric

I can't say I have much to say about the local priest caught doing some nudist jogging, but Diogenes noticed the timeline. It seems disciplinary action followed quickly not after the deed was made known to the chancery, but after the deed was made known to the public five weeks later. It tempts one to cynicism.

Mushroom Cloud Morals

The anniversaries of the nuclear strikes on Japan have come around again, providing the opportunity to distinguish between those who see ethics as a peacetime luxury and those of a more principled bent.

Andrew Cusack compiles contemporary reactions, citing at least one author featured here before.

Roger Kimball brushes aside objections.

Peak Oil and Peak Individualism

Patrick Deneen of Georgetown University has written an examination of Peak Oil and Political Theory in five parts: Part I, II, III, IV and V. He holds that an irreversible spike in cheap, effecient fossil fuels portends the end of liberalism:

The liberal goal of individual autonomy – the liberation from oppressive limitations in the form of locality, custom, “given” circumstance, etc., are likely to be increasingly revealed as resting profoundly upon the oil platform – as much, if not more, than the success of the modern economy. While tending not to think of autonomy in these terms, nevertheless its basis upon open opportunity, liberation from circumstance, and extensive mobility, all can be seen in this light as deriving from the unparalleled wealth and liberty provided by our one-time use of the world’s fossil fuel reserves. Various iterations of this form of autonomy, including lifestyle choice, “self-creation” or Emersonian “self-reliance,” expressionist individualism, widespread irony indicating a studied distance from society’s norms, technologically-based personal expression (e.g., in the form of internet identities), and – perhaps most alarmingly to some – feminism in the form of liberation from the drudgery of the household and localities and easy entry into the mainstream economy, are potentially all in danger of extinction as the age of oil comes to a close. A future in which communal demands and local identification becomes far more prevalent suggest a fundamental redefinition of human identity away from a “liberationist” ethic and toward one of communal solidarity (in, perhaps, the most positive-sounding form of the likely change) or (to take the negative case) loss of individual liberty and the oppressive inescapability of folkways and circumstance.

Cheap oil powers not only Middle East oligarchies but destructive modes of Western life.

Deneen also questions whether capitalist optimism can get us through coming difficulties:

We place our hope in the market: just as Malthus was proven wrong, the market will again defeat the pessimist. However, again, a caution is needed: it should be recognized that the stunning modern success of “the market” has only existed in the age of coal and oil. “The market” may be as much an artifact of fossil fuels as the growth economy and liberalism itself. We up the ante of modernity’s wager, believing that a fix will save us just in time. Very little must change, and we continue to invest our hopes in the future of progress. In the future, we may wonder how our ancestors could have been so blinkered.

Professor Deneen's interpretation of our global fossil fuel use suggests we are sacrificing the resources of future generations to the present.

The Amputated Ethics of Liberalism

Dangerous Intersection writes of psychologist Jonathan Haidt's enquiry into contemporary popular ethical deliberation. Haidt groups ordinary ethical considerations into five categories: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect and purity/sanctity. Curiously, liberals tend to view only the first two sets as acceptable ethical concerns, while conservatives tend to include all five.

Haidt speculates on how such a split could have arisen:

How did it come to pass that in much of Europe, and in some parts of the United States, moral concerns have been restricted to issues related to harm/welfare/care and justice/rights/fairness? We believe that a team of historians and sociologists could easily tell such a story, probably involving references to the growth of free markets, social mobility, science, material wealth, and ethnic and religious diversity. Mobility and diversity make a morality based on shared valuation of traditions and institutions quite difficult (Whose traditions? Which institutions?). These factors help explain the electoral map of the United States in the 2004 presidential election. When viewed at the county level, the great majority of counties that voted for John Kerry are near major waterways, where ports and cities are usually located and where mobility and diversity are greatest. Areas with less mobility and less diversity generally have the more traditional five-foundation morality, and therefore were more likely to vote for George W. Bush – and to tell pollsters that their reason was “moral values.”

Of course, historians and political scientists have long told this tale. Liberalism has long been held to be a "least common denominator" morality which truncates traditionalist ethics for the sake of peace in the wake of destroyed religious unity. Many also note how reductionist ethics increase business opportunities by opening up markets for what was once regarded as sacred, or redirecting loyalty towards brands instead of towards people. As standards become increasingly utilitarian this reductive spirit sidelines other considerations, hampering one's ethical growth.

The wider vocabulary of traditionalist ethics allows for greater nuance in theory. Though friendship or marriage, for instance, can be understood as matters of harm and care or fairness and reciprocity, the concepts of loyalty and purity provide further layers for ethical exploration and discussion. Likewise the abandonment of such categories renders the critic powerless to correct their abuses. The lazy secularist must dismiss all appeals to holiness, while a writer genuinely concerned about the sacred is better equipped and motivated to eviscerate cant masquerading as piety.

The Pro-life Movement and Criminalization

National Review On-Line has put together a symposium reacting to Anna Quindlen's insistence that anti-abortion logic demands that women procuring abortions should be prosecuted.

Clarke D. Forsythe remarks:

In fact, the irony is that in nearly all of the reported court cases explicitly addressing the issue of whether a woman was an accomplice to her abortion, it was the abortionist (not the prosecutor) who pushed the courts to treat the woman as an accomplice, for the obvious purpose of undermining the state’s criminal case against the abortionist (including the abortionist Ruth Barnett when Oregon last prosecuted her in 1968).

Parochial Schools as Heretical Media

TS quotes Steve Kellmeyer on the catechetical failures of the parochial school system:

Religious orders have their own regulations and formation processes, their own discipline systems...It is useful at this point to remember that the only order in the two-thousand-year history of the Church that has not required reform at some point is the Carthusians...Monastic orders have historically had their share of problems, but they tend to eliminate many of these problems by intentionally limiting contact wit the secular world. These orders do not seek out secular formation. Religious teaching orders have not this luxury.

In effect, with the formation of the compulsory parochial school system, the bishops had created a double-edged sword. The system would not only allow doctrine to be efficiently disseminated, it would also allow heresy to sweep unchecked through their flocks if, or more likely when, the religious teaching orders became heterodox. Furthermore, these religious taught children, that segment of the population that is least able to resist the blandishments of error and heresy.

I am somewhat sympathetic to Kellmeyer's diagnosis. Yet the collapse of catechesis in Western countries seems to have been too widespread to have been the fault of religious orders. Surely some orders would have been more resistant to heresy than others.

Further, many of the problems in religious education are due not to theological error but lax, content-free educational styles. Though indifferentism is technically a heresy, indifference is also a vicious habit undermining quality education.

The Dissatisfied Sadness of Rasselas

"He had been before terrified at the length of life which nature promised him, because he considered that in a long time much must be endured; he now rejoiced in his youth, because in many years much might be done."
-Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

Few works are so affecting as Johnson's study of human limitation and discontent therewith. His protagonist described here has not been worn down by poverty or illness, but rather luxury: Rasselas is an Ethiopian prince confined to a Happy Valley where all his desires are apparently met. Yet man gets unused to anything, and so the prince abandons his regimented life of ease to explore the real world, that he might find true happiness.

Rasselas meets philosophers, robbers, an eighteenth-century mad scientist, and men wealthy and poor yet no way of life relieves his sense of unfulfillment. He must content himself with the limits of life, dissatisfying and otherwise. Johnson plays with one of the basic paradoxes of life: limited goals are the only attainable goals, yet human improvement rests on our often boundless resentment of limitations.

That Johnsonian wit which powered Boswell's biography is present throughout. Regarding the the perils of moralism Rasselas' guide cautions "Be not too hasty to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men." One such moralist, after enchanting a crowd with his praises of the philosophical life, soon finds himself disconsolate after the death of his daughter:

"Sir, said the prince, mortality is an event by which a wise man can never be surprised: we know that death is always near, and it should therefore always be expected."
"Young man, answered the philosopher, you speak like one that has never felt the pangs of separation."
"Have you then forgot the precepts, said Rasselas, which you so powerfully enforced? Has wisdom no strength to arm the heart against calamity? Consider, that external things are naturally variable, but truth and reason are always the same."
"What comfort, said the mourner, can truth and reason afford me? of what effect are they now, but to tell me that my daughter will not be restored?"

Vanity and pride aspire to eradicate sadness and explain away death, but find their efforts thwarted in the end. The thematic parallels with Ecclesiastes are obvious.

Johnson rightly concludes his tale inconclusively. The optimism of the young Rasselas is tempered by experience, though the prince still itches for greatness. His anxieties about choosing the proper path fade after examining the catacombs of Cairo. His philosophical interlude itself appears vain in the face of mortality, and he makes an uneasy peace with the dissatisfied life. The futile quest for worldly happiness is resolved only in the hope of eternal happiness with God. And fallen creatures that we are, that great hope still does not satisfy.

See also: Theorodre Dalrymple favorably compares Rasselas to Voltaire's Candide.

Inflation at Work

From the headlines: Top US Market Hits All-Time High

Dollar Wavers near All-Time low

Catholic Social Thought and the New Deal

In the Boston Review essay In Search of the Common Good Lew Daly pens an examination of the roots of the New Deal in Catholic social thought especially as interpreted through the work of Msgr James A. Ryan. At times he echoes Murray Rothbard's analysis of the liturgicalist-pietist fissures in early twentieth-century American life. Daly's particular focus, however, is the rise and fall of the common good as an objective of good government.

Limiting capitalist acquisitiveness, securing a living wage for the working class, and instilling social solidarity between workers and owners were goals which found support among activist clergy inspired by papal encyclicals and the Catholic working class. Daly takes particular aim at the concept of a secularist New Deal:

The Catholic press had little doubt that the New Deal’s vision of social justice was rooted in Christian thought. As Commonweal magazine urged readers to recognize, Roosevelt’s triumph in 1932 was “likewise the Catholic opportunity to make the teachings of Christ apply to the benefit of all.” The Christian journalist and editor Stanley Hoflund High, who organized the interdenominational Good Neighbor League to mobilize religious support for Roosevelt in 1936, similarly argued that “the fundamental objective of what we call the New Deal is religious.” This is the first time in modern history, he stated, “when a Government in any nation has set out to give practical application to the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.”

At a minimum it should be clear that the common good of New Deal liberalism involved much more than the bland commitment to self-sacrifice proposed by Tomasky. Indeed, it was in many ways a product of extraordinary developments in religious thought (if not “religious faith”). We cannot ignore or deny the religious roots of that ideal if we want a revival of the common good to motivate significant changes today.

By way of contrast Dorothy Day, another American devotee of Catholic social thought, found the New Deal to be an unacceptable compromise. In her view its programs locked workers in place, keeping them from another key goal of the papal encyclicals: ownership of economically productive property for the lower classes. Here she is on Social Security:

Security for the worker, not ownership; security for the industrialist, the owner, not confiscation--that is what Beveridge plans and Wallace plans of permanent employment lead to.

There is more vision, more Catholicity in that plan of the Auto Workers Union, CIO, to buy one of the Ford plants for reconversion and make prefabricated homes for workers. At least this is a step in the right direction toward ownership and responsibility.
The Servile State

Day aside, the collapse of the New Deal coalition marked the decline of Catholic influence on the national scene. As Daly writes:

Sexual freedom, extreme secularism, and other agendas of the new social liberalism did not merely replace the common good as a normative framework. It shifted the whole framework of rights from the worker and his family and community, viewed as something in need of protection, to the detached individual of liberal philosophy, regardless of economic position or need. Essentially, the common good was supplanted by individual liberation, and what remained of it in public discourse was little more than empty rhetoric (think “compassionate conservatism”).

While the economic individualism of the Right undermines its declared support for "Family Values," the lifestyle individualism of the left compromises its efforts at economic solidarity.