Merry Christmas!

THE WISE MEN

by G.K. Chesterton

Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all the labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
And we know all things but truth.

We have gone round and round the hill
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And serve the made gods, naming still
The furies the Eumenides.

The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.

Go humbly…it has hailed and snowed…
With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the road,
That we may stray from it.

The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.

The Child that was ere worlds begun
(…We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone…)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.

The house from which the heavens are fed,
The old strange house that is our own,
Where trick of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
And Honour is as hard as stone.

Go humbly, humble are the skies,
And low and large and fierce the Star;
So very near the Manger lies
That we may travel far.

Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain.
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
For God Himself is born again,
And we are little children walking
Through the snow and rain.

One Year In

Amen, amen I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.

-John 12:24

On December 17, 2003, my health took a turn for the worse, and has yet to recover. I've become habituated to the constant nausea and vomiting, but the fatigue is really getting to me. Fortunately, brain cancer has just been ruled out, but the doctor is otherwise stumped and it looks as though I am afflicted with an anti-miracle, a disease--and not a cure--with no known natural cause. If my doctor followed Paracelsus, perhaps he'd classify my affliction as an ens deale, an affliction sent by Providence.

Thankfully, I came to terms with human dependency long ago, and I know what to do with suffering. I'm fortunate enough to have the support of a caring family, though my future is quite uncertain. So much for law school.

Pray for me, all you saints.

Berdiaev on Dostoevsky

Berdiaev reads Dostoevsky's work in all its complexity as one continuous, spiritually intense struggle to answer Ivan's arguments. His novelistic version of theodicy, just like Berdiaev's own philosophical praxis, begins and ends with the attempt to justify the human personality in the light of Christ's mysterious gift of freedom. Berdiaev writes: "I would sum it up in a paradoxical form, thus: The existence of evil is proof of the existence of God. If the world consisted wholly and uniquely of goodness and righteousness there would be no need for God, for the world itself would be God. God is, because evil is. And that means that god is because freedom is."

Slanting the Debate

Amy Welborn notes how political television shows work:

I was once interviewed at length for an article profiling pro-life and abortions rights advocates for a 1/22 piece. My section of the article was cut in favor of an imprisoned direct-action protestor because, I was told, "They wanted someone who was more intensly committed." I once heard...I can't remember her name off the top of my head, but she's an African-American woman who was for several years the main PR person for National Right to Life. It got to the point, she said, at which the networks (this was really before cable) stopped asking her to represent the pro-life position - why? Because once they heard that she would be there, folks like Faye Wattleton and Kate Michelman would routinely cancel their end of the appearances, not wanting to argue their point with a young African-American woman, but preferring, as they ended up getting, to do so in opposition to a middle-aged white man.

Death is not the Solution, Death is the Problem

The first officially sanctioned infanticide in Germany occurred in 1939 after the father of a disabled baby, “Baby Knauer,” wrote to Chancellor Hitler seeking permission to have his son euthanized. Hitler, believing the time was ripe to begin eradicating the “defectives,” sent his physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, to inform Baby Knauer’s doctors that there would be no legal consequence for killing the infant. This was done, so pleasing Hitler that he issued a secret directive licensing doctors to kill disabled infants.

In The Nazi Doctors, Robert J. Lifton quotes a 1973 interview in which the father of Baby Knauer recalled the reasons Brandt and Hitler agreed to the killing of his son:

He [Brandt] explained to me that the Führer had personally sent him, and that my son’s case interested him very much. The Führer wanted to explore the problem of people who had no future—whose [lives were] worthless. From then on, we wouldn’t have to suffer from this terrible misfortune, because the Führer had granted us the mercy killing of our son. Later, we could have other children, handsome and healthy, of whom the Reich could be proud.

-Wesley J. Smith

The Netherlands now has the blood of four Baby Knauers on its hands. See Netherlands Hospital Euthanizes Babies

For more, see Hugh Hewitt here and here and also Dawn Eden

Someone to check out

Robert P. Kraynak refers to Hungarian political philosopher and conservative critic of liberalism Aurel Kolnai in this review of John Hittinger's Liberty, Wisdom, and Grace: Thomism and Democratic Political Theory.

In chapter ten, Hittinger gives further consideration to Kolnai's "metaphysics of political conservatism" and tilts in favor of this approach over Maritain's and Simon's democratic progressivism and defensive neo-Thomism. Kolnai contrasts conservative metaphysics, which views life in terms of "hierarchy, privilege, and liberty," to democratic metaphysics, which views life in terms of "identity, sameness, and rebellion." Kolnai defends conservative metaphysics against democratic metaphysics because the former is more noble than the latter and accords with the natural order of things. The problem with this judgment, of course, is that conservative metaphysics point toward an aristocratic order of politics while democratic metaphysics point to the mass culture of the common man, neither of which is entirely acceptable. Kolnai tries to solve the problem by combining the two orders in a view of "constitutionalism" that separates limitations on power from individual rights and connects "liberty under God" with dispersed centers of power based on privilege and corporate hierarchy. It is unclear, however, if Hittinger completely accepts this political solution because he senses that Kolnai's spirit is at odds with the Second Vatican Council and with the views of Pope John Paul II, a champion of the rights and dignity of the human person.

I'm sympathetic to dispersing centers of power, but the advocacy of privilege triggers egalitarian suspicions I didn't even know I had. Granted, this is a prejudice on my part; but as Edmund Burke has noted, there is something to be said for prejudices.

There's more informaton on Kolnai in this brief review: FindArticles.com - A neglected political thinker

The Natural Law: A Study in Legal and Social History and Philosophy

The Liberty Fund has made Henrich Rommen's excellent natural law study available on-line.

From the introduction:

Heinrich Rommen is known in the United States primarily as the author of two widely read books on political philosophy, The State in Catholic Thought: A Treatise in Political Philosophy (1945) and The Natural Law (1947), and as a professor at Georgetown University (1953–67). Yet, before 1938, when he fled the Third Reich for the United States, Rommen was neither a scholar nor a university professor, but a professional lawyer—trained in civil and canon law—who had devoted considerable energies to Catholic social action during the dissolution of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Nazi Party. The two books that secured his academic reputation in the United States were written in Germany in the midst of his legal and political work, for which he was imprisoned by the Nazis.

Although The Natural Law displays erudition in a number of academic specialties (law, philosophy, history, theology), the reader will appreciate that the book was written by a lawyer in response to a political and legal crisis. As a practicing lawyer, Rommen watched with alarm as the Nazi party deftly used German legislative, administrative, and judicial institutions to impose totalitarian rule. “Our modern dictators,” he remarked, “are masters of legality.” “Hitler,” Rommen concluded, “aimed not a revolution, but at a legal grasp of power according to the formal democratic processes.”

Every generation, it is said, finds a new reason for the study of natural law. For Rommen and many others of his generation, totalitarianism provided that occasion.4 As he put it in his book on the state, “When one of the relativist theories is made the basis of a totalitarian state, man is stirred to free himself from the pessimistic resignation that characterizes these relativist theories and to return to his principles.” Rommen’s writings were prompted by the spectacle of German legal professionals, who, while trained in the technicalities of positive law, were at a loss in responding to what he called “Adolf Légalité.”

What caused this loss of nerve, if not loss of moral perspective? Rommen points to the illusion that legal institutions are a sufficient bulwark against government by raw power—as though a system of positive law takes care of itself, requiring only the superintendence of certified professionals. “Forgotten is the fact that legal institutions themselves can be made the object of the non-legal power struggle. Who does not know that in a nation the courts or the judges themselves are subject to the power strife, showing itself in the public propaganda of contradictory social ideals?”

The Constitution of Liberty within Christendom...

is the title of a brief essay by Paul Rahe on liberty in the middle ages. It's lifted in part from Volume I of his _Republics Ancient and Modern_, my current read. Rahe links the evolution of political liberty to the Canon Lawyers' reinterpretation of the Roman Law principle "What touches all must be approved by all."

Two Essays on War

Ecumenical Councils of War, reviewed by David B. Hart, outlining the just war tradition in Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Hart raises a key problem in contemporary just war reasoning:

More importantly, by beginning his account of just war theory by bothering to recognize the legitimacy of a state not explicitly bound to divine law—however much he may urge that Christians must attempt to make the state conscious of that law—Cole puts himself in the odd position of having to argue that Christians must both obey the principles of just war and also resign themselves to fighting at the behest of a political order that has not necessarily placed itself under the sway of those principles. It is, after all, the liberal state that gave us total war in the modern age and that has often, precisely on account of its liberal utopian abhorrence of all war (as Cole himself quite acutely observes), forsaken even the pretense of justice in making war.

It is a curious thing indeed, then, for Cole to begin his defense of the just war tradition by arguing on behalf of a political system that is in its essence intractably post-Christian. If the most for which Christians can hope is that they have a “voice” in the political determinations of a government that does not otherwise acknowledge the spiritual and moral supremacy of the Church in worldly affairs, what remains of just war theory but a collection of axioms by which individual Christians must try to ascertain for themselves whether they may or may not consent to a particular war being waged by their government?

But surely just war theory is not supposed to function as a private calculus, but as a social and political rationality. In the age of the liberal state, what authority may Christians trust in times of war, if the state cannot—by its own constitutional logic—speak under the clear guidance of the Church?

Second, an essay by the Rev. Michael Baxter, CSC, Just War and Pacifism: A "Pacifist"
Perspective in Seven Points.

The Nation-State and the Common Good

Via Verbum Ipsum, we find the essay Killing for the Telephone Company: Why the Nation-State is not the Keeper of the Common Good,(PDF Format) in which William T. Cavanaugh makes a very contrarian argument. He holds that the nation-state never claimed to look after the common good, that "society," in its unitary sense, is actually a creation of the modern nation-state, and, echoing Simon Schama, claims that a potent state is the enemy of vibrant communities.

A few quotations:
"Globalization is, in part, the hyperextension of the triumph of the universal over the local on which the nation-state is founded."

"The nation-state may be understood theologically as a kind of parody of the Church, meant to save us from division."

He also has a revealing quotation from a political scientist named Michael Budde, on his encounter with the ecclessial bureaucracy:

Once upon a time, I was hired as a consultant for a public-policy arm of a state-level Catholic bishops’ conference. The bishops, according to the institution’s staff people, wanted to engage in rededicated efforts to confront the realities of poverty in their state.
What the church bureaucracy had in mind was something on the order of a new lobbying initiative in the state legislature or perhaps an expert conference on poverty in the state.
I told them that they should attempt to take every Catholic in their state on an intensive retreat, with follow-up programs upon their return. Nothing the Church could do would benefit poor people more, I argued, than to energize, inspire, and ignite the passion of larger numbers of the faithful. Without attempts to “convert the baptized,” in William O’Malley’s phrase, the stranglehold of self-interest, isolation, and religious indifference would continue to throttle the church’s attempts to deal seriously with poverty in a global capitalist order.
My advice, to put it gently, was unappreciated. I was fired. They had an experts conference. As far as I can tell, poverty in their state remained indifferent to their efforts.

Political Philosophy and Science Envy

"For just as Galileo could look at the path of a cannon ball and see it as the resultant of the force of gravity and linear velocity, or Priestley look at a chemical reaction and see it as an exchange of atoms, so the new social theorists looked at the state and saw it as the resultant of the actions of all the individuals who make it up. But note please that these individuals who are the primary constituents of the state and the elements of reductive analysis of society are not individual human beings. They are social atoms, totally denuded of individuality, of character, of emotion(except fear and greed) and ov value. The individual, in this mode of analysis, is not a real human being but an abstract quantity, comprehensible because of his abstract nature and ultimately manipulable by social controls. The relevance of the reductive mode of analysis for modern politics should be immediately obvious, for in the ideologies of modern totalitarian movements, we can see this method of perceiving human beings as abstract quantities in the full light of practice."
-John C. Caiazza, Modern Science and the Origins of Our Political Discontent(PDF File)
Intercollegiate Review, Fall 1977

I am beginning to better understand Chantal Delsol's suspicions of essentialism, since the "essentialism" of modern theory posits a reductive nature of man in order that man can be manipulated by a technocracy, in contradistinction to the essentialism of classical and Christian philosophy, where human nature is not a thing to be manipulated but a norm to be fulfilled.

Caiazza also notes how modern science follows the Cartesian route, moving away from experience and into abstraction. Modern political philosophy, in its envy of the promises and accomplishments of physical science, tries to follow suit: "Just as it becomes the mark of an educated man to say that the physical universe is not as it appears to be, so it becomes possible to say that the phenomena of politics are not what they appear to be; are not what our experience tells us they are." He critiques social contract theory as one such abstraction. "Hobbes based his idea of the state on the contract theory not because he was committed to the idea of individualism, but because he was modeling his analysis on the reductive method of science." Obviously, this preference for abstraction over experience engenders the rabid anti-traditionalism of modernity.

Truth and Freedom

A ruminative essay by Joseph Cardinal Raztinger on the relationship between truth and freedom. I read it years ago, but I only just now noticed that its critique anticipates that of Chantal Delsol in Icarus Fallen. Delsol is more wary of "essentialist" philosophy than Ratzinger, but I think Ratzinger goes further in providing the anthropology that Delsol so pined for.

The Kleptocracy at Work

US Senators' stock portfolios routinely beat the market

Tumor growing in Democratic Party by Fran Maier, the chancellor of the Catholic Archiocese of Denver.

A bit of Capitalist Messianism

Former CEO of GE Jack Welch writes

Last but not least, the leader of the United States must love business, because a thriving economy is the free world’s last, best hope.

So much for "In God We Trust." Most money is digital now, anyway.

Something else they don't teach in schools

Social Darwinist excerpts from the book under question in the Scopes trial, via Eve Tushnet.

Addendum 7/22/05: More excerpts

The New Pantagruel, Winter Edition

I have a review essay covering Claes G. Ryn's _America The Virtuous_ in the latest issue of the New Pantagruel. I fear I'm a bit out of my league, being in the same issue as excerpts from Eric Voegelin and two superlative essays on place and locality. Still, one doesn't learn to swim by staying out of the water. My thanks to Caleb Stegall and the other TNP editors for the opportunity.

A few links on Voegelin

First, the essay What is the Metaxy? analyzing the concept in Plato and in Voegelin's interpretation of Plato. The author provides some useful guidelines for interpreting Plato.

Second, a handy Dictionary of Voegelinian Terminology, found via The New Pantagruel

With equal pleasure I have as often taken notice that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people--a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

-John Jay, Federalist #2

Jay is, of course, citing a putative American unity in a persuasive, even propagandistic manner, to support the cause of Union. But it is telling to note that the diversitarian multiculturalists among contemporary activists do not take the supposed diversity of America as a reason to split, or at least decentralize the Federal government. Perhaps it is because it is easier to turn one central, homogenized government to the multiculturalist cause than fifty recalcitrant state governments.

On the French Revolution

From Simon Schama's Citizens:

"Very often the eager theatergoer could pay for his place by signing on with one of the organzied claques, paid to cheer or jeer at actors and plays, depending on the commission. And because of the license expected in the parterre, it was here that the tone could be set on first night for the success or failure of the play." p. 137

"On March 6 the article[of the playwright Beaumarchais] was brought to the King's attention and, presumably still smarting from his wishes being thwarted, he took the reference to wild(rather than verminous) creatures as a personal attack. It was enough to put Beaumarchais in prison. And Louis, full of silly pique, decided that the most crushing reproof he could give to an ironist would be comic humiliation. That evening, while at the card table, he scribbled on the back of the seven of spades that Beaumarchais should be confined not in the Bastille(the usual detention for insubordinate writers) but in Saint-Lazare, the correction center for delinquent boys. In the short term, this facetious humiliation took the wind out of Beaumarchais' sails. Refusing to emerge from the prison, knowing he was the butt of jokes, he never quite regained the breezy confidence which had sustained him through many misfortunes. In the very last years of the old regime he himself became the whipping boy of radicals and reactionaries alike." p. 144

Incidentally, Beaumarchais' play The Marriage of Figaro in fact found an eager patron in Marie Antoinette, contra the Austrian Emperor's concern about Mozart's operatic adaptation depicted in Amadeus.

"Startling as it may seem, the court and the high nobility were prime customers for the works that did most to damage their own authority. The town of Versailles had a number of shops where the most professional hawkers(colporteurs unloaded their stock. Delorme, for example, who used Dunkirk as a port of entry for his books, had his own outlet at Versailles and he was by no means alone. The appetite of the court for daring literature--both political and erotic--may be gauged from the fact that similar outlets were located at towns to which the court seasonally moved... In an only slightly less direct manner, the immunity of the great aristocratic families from search and seizure meant that the colporteurs used them shamelessly to smuggle their goods. The coachman of the Duc de Praslin was a virtual colporteur in his own right and in 1767 six bales of clandestine books were discovered in a wagon bearing the arms of the Marechal de Noailles. Even the King's youngest brother, Artois(who as Charles X was to take a censorious line with seditious literature), was said to be protecting hawkers of libels.
These stories seem to vindicated de Tocqueville's view that th eold regime brought about its own undoing by irresponsibly flirting with ideas it only half understood, but which it found diverting: the literary equivalent of the Figaro syndrome." p. 175

"It could be argued, though, that the French Revolution was as much the interruption, as the catalyst, of modernity. Not in all respects, since in its most militant phase, the Revolution did indeed invent a new kind of politics, an institutional transference of Rousseau's sovereignty of the General Will that abolished private space and time, and created a form of patriotic militarism more all-embracing than anything that had yet been seen in Europe. For one year, it invented and practiced representative democracy; for two years, it imposed coercive egalitarianism(thoguh even this is a simplification). But for two decades its enduring product was a new kind of militarized state." p. 184