Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Divine-Command Ethics in a Secular World

1 Comment

A quick review from Moral Philosophy 101: The divine-command theory of ethics holds that morally laudatory behavior is that which conforms to the will of God or a canonical text; morally blameworthy behavior is that which contradicts divine teaching.

For an ethical theory, divine command is hard to beat in its simplicity. The tough questions about the source of morality or the proper content of a praiseworthy life don’t need to be determined, they merely need to be consulted through a religious text or spiritual leader. Unlike the sophisticated mental gyrations that deontologists or utilitarians must make to obtain some degree of logical coherence for their moral system, people who get their ethics from God have an easy go of it. As they say: RTFM.

Assuming, of course, that you actually believe in God and accept as binding the principles of whatever holy scripture you profess. A problematic assessment, insofar as the patterns of modern religious belief shift religious conviction for more and more people from a deep-seated, unquestioning faith toward a cultural or familial artifact to be observed but not necessarily internalized.

It’s ironic, then, that in the Western world, there’s a resurgence in divine-command ethics — fueled not by organized religion, but within those belief systems that substitute as a quasi-religious alternative for a mostly atheist or agnostic worldview.

The most obvious expression of the “new” divine-command ethics derives from the unshackling of ideology as a first-order motivator, particularly but not exclusively with folks from the Left. Their decline in respect for institutional authority means that neither religious nor political leaders can inspire unquestioned loyalty that helps to impose an externally locused belief system on them. Freed from religious norms and disdainful of mass culture, these souls “deify” their ideological predispositions and use internally derived principles (made absolute) as the yardstick of morality.

Cultural anthropologists argue that humans are hard-wired socially to adopt belief systems that help differentiate friend-from-foe in larger social contexts while providing a reservoir of meaning about one’s purpose and destiny. The reasons for this are vast and deep — E. O. Wilson presents a good high-level overview of the concept in his recent book,The Social Conquest of Earth. Long story short, we need beliefs that situate us within the whole. Religion has played this role for millennia; more recently, religion has been augmented by ideology or nationalism, but the underlying tendency remains unchanged and in some places “augmenting” is giving way to “supplanting.”

As fewer Westerners profess unwavering support for any specific modern faith tradition, the tendency for social belonging — with all of the moral norms attendant to membership — transfers from religion and large-scale politics into increasingly granular social structures with local leaders and deeper passions and less of an intellectual superstructure to keep these local belief systems from falling into solipsism.

Radical environmentalism serves as an excellent case in point. Forget the stereotype of granola-eating, pot-smoking, Birkenstock-wearing long-haired hippies banging drums and communing with Gaia. There are plenty of respectable folks who fit nicely into polite society who nevertheless no longer have a private belief in God and subscribe to radical environmentalist theory. There’s a reason, after all, that Greenpeace types or urban anarchists often hail from upper-middle-class backgrounds: They had a conversion experience, and have traded the boring, empty churches of their parents for the hip, authentic religion of struggle on behalf of the Earth. Anyone who’s read about Saul on the road to Damascus understands the archetype; anyone who’s ever spoken to a radical environmentalist understands their need for social inclusion.

Thus we see increasingly blind obedience to canonical norms:

  • Humans are causing global warming that will destroy the Earth.
  • People who don’t agree that “climate science is settled” are heretics who deserve to be ostracized.
  • Corporate greed must be rejected if the environment is to improve.
  • Humans have all sorts of socioeconomic rights to income security and access to organic/local foods and any opposition to this must be overcome by any means necessary.
  • &c, &c.

One reason that political debate about climate change is so bitter is that it’s taken on the trappings of religious warfare. True believers fight against those who cast a more skeptical eye on some environmental nostrums. The evidence of the phenomenon is vast and deep: Just look, for example, at how the prophets at East Anglia conspired to reject from peer-reviewed journals any suggestion that the (made-up) numbers supporting climate change were, in fact, problematic. Fair-minded people don’t act like this. People caught in the grip of divine-command ethics, do.

I’m picking on the environmentalists because they’re an obvious target, but the shift I’ve outlined covers many newer “faith traditions,” including those who continue to protest against Darwinism or struggle against abortion. Although it seems that this phenomenon is rooted in the Left, the Right isn’t immune to it, either.

The most fascinating aspect of all of this is that the one ethical system that’s so often derided as being the simplistic holdout for the unenlightened seems to naturally attract those who wear their sense of sophisticated upon their sleeves.

Divine-command theory, in a classic sense, proves philosophically interesting because it’s inherently unfalsifiable at its core. This “rock” that anchors religious morality, if unchained by texts and priests and centuries of practical experience, can lead to curious inversions of generally accepted ethics. Like, for example, radical environmentalists who deliberately spike trees in such a way that loggers could be seriously injured or even killed.

Put differently: If any particular implementation of divine-command ethics is unconstrained by institutional or cultural norms, the risk that “anything is permissible” in service to the ideological point at its core increases the relative gridlock and fragility of the political process.

Ethics without God is possible. God-based ethics without God, however, increases the risk of radical absolutism that poisons the well for everyone.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Reflections on the “After Liberalism” Essays in “First Things”

1 Comment

Is contemporary liberalism (in its lowercase-L sense) an exhausted project, or simply in need of rejuvenation? Wilfred M. McClay, Yuval Levin and James R. Rogers address this weighty subject in the May 2012 issue of First Things. While the entire exchange — a lead essay by McClay, followed up with two shorter responses by Levin and Rogers — is well worth the read, one significant point from Rogers really hit home.

Responding to McClay’s reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument “that emotivist propositions have replaced rational argument over objective moral ends,” Rogers advances the claim that “liberals believe that the emotivistic move reduces conflict and opens venues for conversation rather than conflict….” Why avoid conflict? Rogers suggests that the “residual horror at the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, underlined by the English Civil Wars, still prompts a visceral reaction by many to any hint of religion in the public square,” and thus by extension, contemporary politics must answer “whether religious belief is intrinsically dangerous and whether claims of absolute truth are consistent with forms of toleration sufficiently robust to offer credible assurance that devastatingly religious conflict will not be repeated.”

Put more simply: Contemporary liberals favor language and arguments that privilege individual feelings or perspectives, because doing so provides a partial block against abstract arguments sourced from absolute truth statements that, if left unchecked, could engender wide-scale social conflict. Hence the concern about Rick Santorum establishing a “theocracy” or the fear that conservative political ends constitute a “war on [insert demographic group here]” even when dispassionate observers believe the fears rhetorically disingenuous.

Take, for example, the gay marriage debate. Proponents on the left usually stake their arguments in a broad reading of human autonomy. Liberals rarely discuss marriage as a socioeconomic institution or a sacramental event and frequently dismiss communitarian objections to gay or plural marriage as inherently discriminatory. Instead, they talk about “marriage equality” or “the right to love whomever you wish” — language that elevates a person’s experiences and his emotional response thereto as an intrinsic good. When you pit a self-referential, emotional plea against an argument that prevents someone from allegedly being true to himself because of inflexible, “uncaring” institutional rules, the progressive will typically favor the former no matter how the latter’s logic unfolds. Why? Because if dispassionate social norms may be brandished to allegedly prevent a person from enjoying the fullness of a loving relationship, what other sociocultural violence may these norms inflict? Thus, the norm itself must be challenged to protect not just gays but everyone from the risk that those rules may be used as weapons against other people in other contexts.

In short: Progressives believe that sociocultural principles founded on abstract or religious truth-claims, by their very nature, increase the risk of theoretical social violence because they infringe on the self-actualization of people who don’t support those norms.  So, hey hey ho ho, your abstract norms have got to go!

Rogers’ insight illuminates in a different way the reasons that the progressive left disdains cultural authority and religion and privileges personal authenticity and a person’s emotional response. Yet it doesn’t answer the Lenin Question: What is to be done?

Commentators decry the polarization in the American electorate, yet the lion’s share of the reason has nothing to do with partisan affiliation but rather with the latent worldview differences between contemporary progressives and everyone else. No matter how you construct the arguments about the proper size and scope of government or fair tax rates or regulatory reform, you cannot escape epistemology. If a progressive by default will often reject “common good” or “historical practice” arguments because they conflict with an emotivist rebuttal, there’s no real chance for a meeting of the minds to resolve pressing political problems. You cannot negotiate or debate in good faith when the discussants haven’t resolved the stark differences in their logic models and value systems.

The central insight into the entire question raised by McClay is that contemporary liberalism faces an existential crisis; from a purely intellectual standpoint, the progressive inheritance is largely spent, with no clear path forward for the dominant political philosophy of the Western world. The question, though, is what happens next. Can liberalism adapt and reform? Will it be supplanted by something different? Will it collapse and some other value system fill the gap (as seems to be happening with the increasingly Islamization of parts of Europe)?

As a conservative in the contemporary American ideological sense, I have a vested interest in seeing liberalism as a political system rehabilitated and strengthened. Alas, it seems that the “fix” has to occur from within, but it’s not clear that anything short of crisis will help today’s progressives to re-evaluate the long-term self-destructive ends that their worldview logically entails.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Reflections on the "After Liberalism" Essays in "First Things"

1 Comment

Is contemporary liberalism (in its lowercase-L sense) an exhausted project, or simply in need of rejuvenation? Wilfred M. McClay, Yuval Levin and James R. Rogers address this weighty subject in the May 2012 issue of First Things. While the entire exchange — a lead essay by McClay, followed up with two shorter responses by Levin and Rogers — is well worth the read, one significant point from Rogers really hit home.
Responding to McClay’s reference to Alasdair MacIntyre’s argument “that emotivist propositions have replaced rational argument over objective moral ends,” Rogers advances the claim that “liberals believe that the emotivistic move reduces conflict and opens venues for conversation rather than conflict….” Why avoid conflict? Rogers suggests that the “residual horror at the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War, underlined by the English Civil Wars, still prompts a visceral reaction by many to any hint of religion in the public square,” and thus by extension, contemporary politics must answer “whether religious belief is intrinsically dangerous and whether claims of absolute truth are consistent with forms of toleration sufficiently robust to offer credible assurance that devastatingly religious conflict will not be repeated.”
Put more simply: Contemporary liberals favor language and arguments that privilege individual feelings or perspectives, because doing so provides a partial block against abstract arguments sourced from absolute truth statements that, if left unchecked, could engender wide-scale social conflict. Hence the concern about Rick Santorum establishing a “theocracy” or the fear that conservative political ends constitute a “war on [insert demographic group here]” even when dispassionate observers believe the fears rhetorically disingenuous.
Take, for example, the gay marriage debate. Proponents on the left usually stake their arguments in a broad reading of human autonomy. Liberals rarely discuss marriage as a socioeconomic institution or a sacramental event and frequently dismiss communitarian objections to gay or plural marriage as inherently discriminatory. Instead, they talk about “marriage equality” or “the right to love whomever you wish” — language that elevates a person’s experiences and his emotional response thereto as an intrinsic good. When you pit a self-referential, emotional plea against an argument that prevents someone from allegedly being true to himself because of inflexible, “uncaring” institutional rules, the progressive will typically favor the former no matter how the latter’s logic unfolds. Why? Because if dispassionate social norms may be brandished to allegedly prevent a person from enjoying the fullness of a loving relationship, what other sociocultural violence may these norms inflict? Thus, the norm itself must be challenged to protect not just gays but everyone from the risk that those rules may be used as weapons against other people in other contexts.
In short: Progressives believe that sociocultural principles founded on abstract or religious truth-claims, by their very nature, increase the risk of theoretical social violence because they infringe on the self-actualization of people who don’t support those norms.  So, hey hey ho ho, your abstract norms have got to go!
Rogers’ insight illuminates in a different way the reasons that the progressive left disdains cultural authority and religion and privileges personal authenticity and a person’s emotional response. Yet it doesn’t answer the Lenin Question: What is to be done?
Commentators decry the polarization in the American electorate, yet the lion’s share of the reason has nothing to do with partisan affiliation but rather with the latent worldview differences between contemporary progressives and everyone else. No matter how you construct the arguments about the proper size and scope of government or fair tax rates or regulatory reform, you cannot escape epistemology. If a progressive by default will often reject “common good” or “historical practice” arguments because they conflict with an emotivist rebuttal, there’s no real chance for a meeting of the minds to resolve pressing political problems. You cannot negotiate or debate in good faith when the discussants haven’t resolved the stark differences in their logic models and value systems.
The central insight into the entire question raised by McClay is that contemporary liberalism faces an existential crisis; from a purely intellectual standpoint, the progressive inheritance is largely spent, with no clear path forward for the dominant political philosophy of the Western world. The question, though, is what happens next. Can liberalism adapt and reform? Will it be supplanted by something different? Will it collapse and some other value system fill the gap (as seems to be happening with the increasingly Islamization of parts of Europe)?
As a conservative in the contemporary American ideological sense, I have a vested interest in seeing liberalism as a political system rehabilitated and strengthened. Alas, it seems that the “fix” has to occur from within, but it’s not clear that anything short of crisis will help today’s progressives to re-evaluate the long-term self-destructive ends that their worldview logically entails.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Observations re: Obamacare at SCOTUS, Contraception, Trayvon Martin, the Ryan Budget, Etch-a-Sketches & Science

No Comments

UPDATE: This post reflects an earlier draft, not the final one. Seems WordPress ate the final edit when the coffee shop suffered a Wi-Fi blip. Please forgive typos, grammar problems, and missing hyperlinks. Ill try to re-edit tonight. JEG 4/2/12.

UPDATE 2:  Lightly revised. JEG 4/8/12. 

Bear with me; there’s a lot on the docket (so to speak).

N.B. — This post clocks in at roughly 2,300 words. I’ve bolded the various sections so you can read only the content that interests you.

Obamacare and the High Court

So picture it: The District of Columbia, 2012. The federal capital seized up in gyrations of agony and ecstasy as our black-robed overlords grace us with the gift of their public hearings on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Conservatives delighted in both the slap-down delivered to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli and the paroxysms of rage the SG’s performance induced among the progressive commentariat. Some liberals took solace in their Kennedyology, trying to predict how the “swing justice” will rule by divining hints from questions posed by the learned jurist (augmented, no doubt, by a careful reading of the cracks upon heated chicken bones) and suggesting that the court could uphold the law 6-3.

Well.

The Court will do as the Court will do. More intriguing was the general sense among the Left that Obamacare’s constitutionality is a slam-dunk. Across the board, from Verrilli to the lowest FDL blogger, the progressive movement as a whole doesn’t seem to have seriously considered the conservative counter-argument. Verrilli was caught unprepared for questions that conservatives have been asking, loudly, for two years. If you thought Speaker Pelosi’s “Are you serious?” stammering about the constitutional authority of the statute was just Nancy being Nancy, think again.  It’s not for nothing that most of the left-wing legal commentators made a point of referring to justices by ideological label as they summarized the questioning, and it’s an excellent case study in the politics of ideological echo chambers that CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin went from a “strong uphold” to a “OMG, all is lost” based solely on two hours of questioning.

I won’t predict what the Court will do. I will hazard a guess, though, that if the Supremes strike down the mandate (or even the entire PPACA) then we will endure long and loud laments about the Court is too right-wing or that it’s engaging in judicial over-reach or that it’s no longer a legitimate reflector of American virtues and requires radical reform. The Left loves the judiciary until the judiciary proves non-compliant; then the judges become black-robed tyrants. Yawn-worthy in its predictability.

I hope the entire law gets voided. We need to hit the “reset button” on health reform. As a person whose day job lives within a hospital revenue cycle, I can tell you that the real financial crisis for health care isn’t access to insurance, but in the lack of meaningful patient financial participation in the system. It’s as if you’ve got insurance, so you don’t care about pricing or service utilization. To effect a real “bending of the cost curve,” we need to cut out unnecessary tests and procedures (read: tort reform) and give patients meaningful skin in the game about what their treatments really cost. Consumer-driven health care, with high-deductible plans and HSAs to bridge the gap,  makes more sense than mandatory free-lunch coverage. Until you change behaviors and attitudes, no amount of tinkering with the reimbursement model will prove viable in the long run.

[Note: My opinions on health reform are my own and don’t reflect my hospital’s position on this subject.]

Contraception — The Bishops and the Flake

What’s not to love about a good public row about contraception?

This sordid tale of social discontent started during the final votes on Obamacare. To secure passage, the administration had to promise a gaggle of Congresscritters, led by former Rep. Bart Stupak, that the feds wouldn’t upset the abortion apple cart. Obama agreed, providing a wholly insubstantial fig leaf that conservatives decried but let Pelosi and Hoyer get the Senate’s astonishingly incoherent bill to the President’s desk.

Fast forward to 2012: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announces regulations that force pretty much everyone to cover abortion and contraception services as part of their employer-provided health insurance (so much for that Executive Order, eh Bart?). A storm of protest follows, led by the Catholic bishops. Who, may I proudly add, finally figured out that they really do have spines.

The administration made another make-believe deal but the USCCB rejected it, as did many other conservative and evangelical groups. The drama continues to unfold. But when the House of Representatives got involved, the story took a different turn. Denied the chance to present witnesses for timing reasons at one of Issa’s hearings, the Democrats made Georgetown law student Sandra Flake their poster girl for contraception. That this 30-something grad student at Georgetown should be considered an ideal role model, I find baffling. But there you have it.

The Democrats announced a Republican “war on women.” Republicans were not amused, but then Rush Limbaugh intervened with his infamous “slut” screed and soon the issue blew far out of proportion. Media Matters tried (and woefully failed) to attack Limbaugh. Bill Maher and Louis C.K. earned targets. Hypocrisy raged in typical MSM/Washington style.

Here’s the thing, though:

  1. Contraception in the form of condoms isn’t hard to find. Most bars and health centers have them. If you can’t find a free condom, then something’s seriously wrong with you. Especially if you live in a metro area. Like, ummm … THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. Heck, you can grab free condoms by the handful from any fishbowl at any self-respecting gay bar. That a grad student at one of America’s leading universities should insist that her school pay for her birth control instead of just dealing with it marks an astonishing sense of entitlement and a thought-provoking example of what’s wrong with higher education.
  2. Contraception in the form of birth-control pills aren’t expensive. Flake suggested it would cost her more than $3k per year unless her Catholic school (to which she voluntarily enrolled, knowing its character) paid the bill. Seriously? Is she buying them in platinum bottles? You could get a copper-T IUD for $647 in 2008 or now you can pay $240 per year for The Pill from Planned Parenthood clinics.
  3. If you can’t afford birth control, you always have the right to reduce your “risk” of pregnancy by curtailing your sexual activity. Seriously. Abstinence works, as does non-vaginal sexual behavior.  Point is, no person has a right to force other people to subsidize his or her sexual behavior.

But, hey. How ’bout that war on women? Apparently the politics of demonization is a heck of a lot easier than encouraging responsible behavior among people who really ought to know better.

Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and Gun Control

No question, it’s a bad situation. A black Florida teen, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed by a “white Hispanic” (whatever that is) slightly nutty neighborhood watch patroller named George Zimmerman while the youth was cutting through a gated neighborhood. The facts in this case aren’t clear despite quite a bit of grandstanding; the evidence and witness testimony suggests that both Martin and Zimmerman made repeated, significant and avoidable errors in judgment.

Three observations:

  • This isn’t a slam-dunk case, either for or against prosecuting Zimmerman. As such, the March of the Race Brigade, led by Sharpton and Jackson, probably does more harm than good. No matter how you slice it, this isn’t a case of institutional racism. Of bad judgment? Sure. Of a police department and prosecutor’s office that may or may not be correctly interpreting Florida law? Perhaps. But this isn’t a flash point in a racial war, and every time the usual suspects come out with their manufactured outrage and their political opportunism — including yet more unnecessary meddling in local law enforcement from Barack Obama — justice for both Martin and Zimmerman fades and cynicism about race relations spikes up.
  • I’ve heard people suggest that the real problem here is Florida’s “stand your ground” statute. Florida is one of 30 states with this type of law;  it’s the converse of “duty to retreat” statutes. In Florida, if you’re attacked, you’re authorized to hold your position and fight back when confronted. The argument I’ve heard is that “stand your ground” allows too much of an escalation path for hard cases, and that less violence would result under a “duty to retreat” regime. Maybe. But it seems like rewarding violence and aggression by privileging it under the law empowers the criminals at the expense of the law-abiding.
  • The million-dollar question — and one not really subsumed under the Martin incident — is the extent to which a person is legally entitled to defend himself against aggression. Concealed-carry, castle and stand-your-ground laws represent a swing back from the over-reliance on spotty police protection. Even now, liberals are torn; on one hand, they often excoriate police departments for being hotbeds of brutality, racism and misogyny — but these same departments are the gold standard of community policing, whose mere presence justifies any opposition to more relaxed self-defense statutes. Which is it? Are the cops ignorant buffoons, or Teh Awesomz? Pick one position and stick with it, please. In any case, the presumption that civilians are incapable of exercising good judgement while police officers remain beyond reproach is blown out the water by the fact that a police officer is 11 times more likely to engage in wrongful shooting than a validly licensed citizen. (Read the link; it’s a Cato study that outlines the history of gun-control laws and reveals just how much of an innovation they really are in U.S. history.)

The Ryan Budget

Paul Ryan released a kick-ass budget that just passed the House comfortably. It reduces the deficit, moves to a premium-support model for Medicare and protects defense spending. In short: The gentleman from Wisconsin seems to be the only serious adult in Washington when it comes to spending and entitlement reform. Not only has Ryan submitted a workable model, he’s succeeded in changing the entire intellectual dynamic about taxing, spending and reform in Washington. He’s put Obama on defense.

[Read the passage story about the Ryan budget, including a summary of its major points, from WaPo, then digest commentary from Doug Schoen in Forbes.]

Three cheers for Paul Ryan.

Political Etch-a-Sketches

Eric Fehrnstrom’s comments about Romney and the political Etch-a-Sketch seem overblown. Every politician emphasizes some things in a primary race and other things in a general race. To the extent that the election in its final 12 weeks will look radically dissimilar to the GOP nomination fight, the proper reaction to Fehrnstrom’s statement is … duh.

I can understand liberals trying to make hay from his comments, but for conservatives to keep swiping at Romney — well, it feels like an ongoing tantrum. Look, guys, Romney’s our man in 2012 whether you like it or not. We’re not going to have a brokered convention. Paul won’t win the nomination. Gingrich has no path to victory and increasingly looks like a bad-faith candidate. Santrorum lacks organization and money and his negatives (even apart from his self-inflicted gaffes) make an Obama re-election seem more likely than not. At this point, whether you like it or not, the time has come to circle around Romney and focus on sending Obama back to Chicago for good.

Conservatives and Science

One of the big news stories of last week flowed from a survey that suggests that conservatives have little faith in science. Plenty of stories abound about the study; Ars Technica did a decent job of summarizing the key points.

I think the focus is a bit off. I don’t believe that conservatives distrust science per se; you don’t see many Republicans pretending like organic chemistry is a hoax or that the moon landing was staged or that the laws of physics are a left-wing conspiracy to increase taxes by denying people the ability to fly through the air like Superman. What you see, rather, is conservative distrust in what seems like increasingly obvious alignment between “scientific results” and progressive policy preferences. Like scientists, conservatives are also capable of conducting linear regressions to arrive at reasonable conclusions.

Consider:

  • The theory of anthropogenic global warming is based on science that pretty much everyone acknowledges requires refinement. Climate scientists have done an excellent job of trying to piece together historical evidence of climate change. Much of it is compelling. When they’re up-front about known problems with the data, I trust their conclusions even more. But there’s a world of difference between saying, “here’s the trend over the last 2,000 years” versus “observation X is definitively caused by human behavior, and therefore we scientists must now dictate to you the specific sociopolitical reforms you must immediately execute to avoid Armageddon, conveniently written up for you by your friends from Greenpeace, so STFU and bow to the consensus we’ve manufactured by suppressing contradictory findings.” Climate science can tell — imperfectly, so far — what’s happening. It can speculate as to why. The leap from observation to political change isn’t the realm of science, however. It’s the realm of politics. When scientists insist that disaster is upon us because of our behavior, when their leaked emails note to the contrary, is it any wonder that people lose confidence in those scientists?
  • Watch the Discovery Channel or read some of the scientist profiles in higher-brow popular science magazines. One thing will strike you: No matter the discipline — and, surprisingly, one of the most susceptible seems to be theoretical physics — the group think and polarization is so high that plausible theories don’t get a hearing because senior researchers and theoreticians get an almost partisan adherence to their preferred perspective and won’t listen to countervailing ideas. Study the development of string theory for a case study. Anyone who says “science” isn’t political has never tried to advance a complex theoretical argument lately.
  • Scientists are human beings. Human beings tend to be ideological. Why, oh why, must people assume that scientists are immune to ideology? The jig is up, I think, when scientists sign on to a great number of things (the nuclear freeze, global warming scaremongering, etc.) that almost always fall on the left side of the spectrum. Gee. Can you blame conservatives for being skeptical?

All for now.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Observations re: Obamacare at SCOTUS, Contraception, Trayvon Martin, the Ryan Budget, Etch-a-Sketches & Science

No Comments

UPDATE: This post reflects an earlier draft, not the final one. Seems WordPress ate the final edit when the coffee shop suffered a Wi-Fi blip. Please forgive typos, grammar problems, and missing hyperlinks. Ill try to re-edit tonight. JEG 4/2/12.
UPDATE 2:  Lightly revised. JEG 4/8/12. 
Bear with me; there’s a lot on the docket (so to speak).
N.B. — This post clocks in at roughly 2,300 words. I’ve bolded the various sections so you can read only the content that interests you.
Obamacare and the High Court
So picture it: The District of Columbia, 2012. The federal capital seized up in gyrations of agony and ecstasy as our black-robed overlords grace us with the gift of their public hearings on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Conservatives delighted in both the slap-down delivered to Solicitor General Donald Verrilli and the paroxysms of rage the SG’s performance induced among the progressive commentariat. Some liberals took solace in their Kennedyology, trying to predict how the “swing justice” will rule by divining hints from questions posed by the learned jurist (augmented, no doubt, by a careful reading of the cracks upon heated chicken bones) and suggesting that the court could uphold the law 6-3.
Well.
The Court will do as the Court will do. More intriguing was the general sense among the Left that Obamacare’s constitutionality is a slam-dunk. Across the board, from Verrilli to the lowest FDL blogger, the progressive movement as a whole doesn’t seem to have seriously considered the conservative counter-argument. Verrilli was caught unprepared for questions that conservatives have been asking, loudly, for two years. If you thought Speaker Pelosi’s “Are you serious?” stammering about the constitutional authority of the statute was just Nancy being Nancy, think again.  It’s not for nothing that most of the left-wing legal commentators made a point of referring to justices by ideological label as they summarized the questioning, and it’s an excellent case study in the politics of ideological echo chambers that CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin went from a “strong uphold” to a “OMG, all is lost” based solely on two hours of questioning.
I won’t predict what the Court will do. I will hazard a guess, though, that if the Supremes strike down the mandate (or even the entire PPACA) then we will endure long and loud laments about the Court is too right-wing or that it’s engaging in judicial over-reach or that it’s no longer a legitimate reflector of American virtues and requires radical reform. The Left loves the judiciary until the judiciary proves non-compliant; then the judges become black-robed tyrants. Yawn-worthy in its predictability.
I hope the entire law gets voided. We need to hit the “reset button” on health reform. As a person whose day job lives within a hospital revenue cycle, I can tell you that the real financial crisis for health care isn’t access to insurance, but in the lack of meaningful patient financial participation in the system. It’s as if you’ve got insurance, so you don’t care about pricing or service utilization. To effect a real “bending of the cost curve,” we need to cut out unnecessary tests and procedures (read: tort reform) and give patients meaningful skin in the game about what their treatments really cost. Consumer-driven health care, with high-deductible plans and HSAs to bridge the gap,  makes more sense than mandatory free-lunch coverage. Until you change behaviors and attitudes, no amount of tinkering with the reimbursement model will prove viable in the long run.
[Note: My opinions on health reform are my own and don’t reflect my hospital’s position on this subject.]
Contraception — The Bishops and the Flake
What’s not to love about a good public row about contraception?
This sordid tale of social discontent started during the final votes on Obamacare. To secure passage, the administration had to promise a gaggle of Congresscritters, led by former Rep. Bart Stupak, that the feds wouldn’t upset the abortion apple cart. Obama agreed, providing a wholly insubstantial fig leaf that conservatives decried but let Pelosi and Hoyer get the Senate’s astonishingly incoherent bill to the President’s desk.
Fast forward to 2012: HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announces regulations that force pretty much everyone to cover abortion and contraception services as part of their employer-provided health insurance (so much for that Executive Order, eh Bart?). A storm of protest follows, led by the Catholic bishops. Who, may I proudly add, finally figured out that they really do have spines.
The administration made another make-believe deal but the USCCB rejected it, as did many other conservative and evangelical groups. The drama continues to unfold. But when the House of Representatives got involved, the story took a different turn. Denied the chance to present witnesses for timing reasons at one of Issa’s hearings, the Democrats made Georgetown law student Sandra Flake their poster girl for contraception. That this 30-something grad student at Georgetown should be considered an ideal role model, I find baffling. But there you have it.
The Democrats announced a Republican “war on women.” Republicans were not amused, but then Rush Limbaugh intervened with his infamous “slut” screed and soon the issue blew far out of proportion. Media Matters tried (and woefully failed) to attack Limbaugh. Bill Maher and Louis C.K. earned targets. Hypocrisy raged in typical MSM/Washington style.
Here’s the thing, though:

  1. Contraception in the form of condoms isn’t hard to find. Most bars and health centers have them. If you can’t find a free condom, then something’s seriously wrong with you. Especially if you live in a metro area. Like, ummm … THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. Heck, you can grab free condoms by the handful from any fishbowl at any self-respecting gay bar. That a grad student at one of America’s leading universities should insist that her school pay for her birth control instead of just dealing with it marks an astonishing sense of entitlement and a thought-provoking example of what’s wrong with higher education.
  2. Contraception in the form of birth-control pills aren’t expensive. Flake suggested it would cost her more than $3k per year unless her Catholic school (to which she voluntarily enrolled, knowing its character) paid the bill. Seriously? Is she buying them in platinum bottles? You could get a copper-T IUD for $647 in 2008 or now you can pay $240 per year for The Pill from Planned Parenthood clinics.
  3. If you can’t afford birth control, you always have the right to reduce your “risk” of pregnancy by curtailing your sexual activity. Seriously. Abstinence works, as does non-vaginal sexual behavior.  Point is, no person has a right to force other people to subsidize his or her sexual behavior.

But, hey. How ’bout that war on women? Apparently the politics of demonization is a heck of a lot easier than encouraging responsible behavior among people who really ought to know better.
Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman and Gun Control
No question, it’s a bad situation. A black Florida teen, Trayvon Martin, was shot and killed by a “white Hispanic” (whatever that is) slightly nutty neighborhood watch patroller named George Zimmerman while the youth was cutting through a gated neighborhood. The facts in this case aren’t clear despite quite a bit of grandstanding; the evidence and witness testimony suggests that both Martin and Zimmerman made repeated, significant and avoidable errors in judgment.
Three observations:

  • This isn’t a slam-dunk case, either for or against prosecuting Zimmerman. As such, the March of the Race Brigade, led by Sharpton and Jackson, probably does more harm than good. No matter how you slice it, this isn’t a case of institutional racism. Of bad judgment? Sure. Of a police department and prosecutor’s office that may or may not be correctly interpreting Florida law? Perhaps. But this isn’t a flash point in a racial war, and every time the usual suspects come out with their manufactured outrage and their political opportunism — including yet more unnecessary meddling in local law enforcement from Barack Obama — justice for both Martin and Zimmerman fades and cynicism about race relations spikes up.
  • I’ve heard people suggest that the real problem here is Florida’s “stand your ground” statute. Florida is one of 30 states with this type of law;  it’s the converse of “duty to retreat” statutes. In Florida, if you’re attacked, you’re authorized to hold your position and fight back when confronted. The argument I’ve heard is that “stand your ground” allows too much of an escalation path for hard cases, and that less violence would result under a “duty to retreat” regime. Maybe. But it seems like rewarding violence and aggression by privileging it under the law empowers the criminals at the expense of the law-abiding.
  • The million-dollar question — and one not really subsumed under the Martin incident — is the extent to which a person is legally entitled to defend himself against aggression. Concealed-carry, castle and stand-your-ground laws represent a swing back from the over-reliance on spotty police protection. Even now, liberals are torn; on one hand, they often excoriate police departments for being hotbeds of brutality, racism and misogyny — but these same departments are the gold standard of community policing, whose mere presence justifies any opposition to more relaxed self-defense statutes. Which is it? Are the cops ignorant buffoons, or Teh Awesomz? Pick one position and stick with it, please. In any case, the presumption that civilians are incapable of exercising good judgement while police officers remain beyond reproach is blown out the water by the fact that a police officer is 11 times more likely to engage in wrongful shooting than a validly licensed citizen. (Read the link; it’s a Cato study that outlines the history of gun-control laws and reveals just how much of an innovation they really are in U.S. history.)

The Ryan Budget
Paul Ryan released a kick-ass budget that just passed the House comfortably. It reduces the deficit, moves to a premium-support model for Medicare and protects defense spending. In short: The gentleman from Wisconsin seems to be the only serious adult in Washington when it comes to spending and entitlement reform. Not only has Ryan submitted a workable model, he’s succeeded in changing the entire intellectual dynamic about taxing, spending and reform in Washington. He’s put Obama on defense.
[Read the passage story about the Ryan budget, including a summary of its major points, from WaPo, then digest commentary from Doug Schoen in Forbes.]
Three cheers for Paul Ryan.
Political Etch-a-Sketches
Eric Fehrnstrom’s comments about Romney and the political Etch-a-Sketch seem overblown. Every politician emphasizes some things in a primary race and other things in a general race. To the extent that the election in its final 12 weeks will look radically dissimilar to the GOP nomination fight, the proper reaction to Fehrnstrom’s statement is … duh.
I can understand liberals trying to make hay from his comments, but for conservatives to keep swiping at Romney — well, it feels like an ongoing tantrum. Look, guys, Romney’s our man in 2012 whether you like it or not. We’re not going to have a brokered convention. Paul won’t win the nomination. Gingrich has no path to victory and increasingly looks like a bad-faith candidate. Santrorum lacks organization and money and his negatives (even apart from his self-inflicted gaffes) make an Obama re-election seem more likely than not. At this point, whether you like it or not, the time has come to circle around Romney and focus on sending Obama back to Chicago for good.
Conservatives and Science
One of the big news stories of last week flowed from a survey that suggests that conservatives have little faith in science. Plenty of stories abound about the study; Ars Technica did a decent job of summarizing the key points.
I think the focus is a bit off. I don’t believe that conservatives distrust science per se; you don’t see many Republicans pretending like organic chemistry is a hoax or that the moon landing was staged or that the laws of physics are a left-wing conspiracy to increase taxes by denying people the ability to fly through the air like Superman. What you see, rather, is conservative distrust in what seems like increasingly obvious alignment between “scientific results” and progressive policy preferences. Like scientists, conservatives are also capable of conducting linear regressions to arrive at reasonable conclusions.
Consider:

  • The theory of anthropogenic global warming is based on science that pretty much everyone acknowledges requires refinement. Climate scientists have done an excellent job of trying to piece together historical evidence of climate change. Much of it is compelling. When they’re up-front about known problems with the data, I trust their conclusions even more. But there’s a world of difference between saying, “here’s the trend over the last 2,000 years” versus “observation X is definitively caused by human behavior, and therefore we scientists must now dictate to you the specific sociopolitical reforms you must immediately execute to avoid Armageddon, conveniently written up for you by your friends from Greenpeace, so STFU and bow to the consensus we’ve manufactured by suppressing contradictory findings.” Climate science can tell — imperfectly, so far — what’s happening. It can speculate as to why. The leap from observation to political change isn’t the realm of science, however. It’s the realm of politics. When scientists insist that disaster is upon us because of our behavior, when their leaked emails note to the contrary, is it any wonder that people lose confidence in those scientists?
  • Watch the Discovery Channel or read some of the scientist profiles in higher-brow popular science magazines. One thing will strike you: No matter the discipline — and, surprisingly, one of the most susceptible seems to be theoretical physics — the group think and polarization is so high that plausible theories don’t get a hearing because senior researchers and theoreticians get an almost partisan adherence to their preferred perspective and won’t listen to countervailing ideas. Study the development of string theory for a case study. Anyone who says “science” isn’t political has never tried to advance a complex theoretical argument lately.
  • Scientists are human beings. Human beings tend to be ideological. Why, oh why, must people assume that scientists are immune to ideology? The jig is up, I think, when scientists sign on to a great number of things (the nuclear freeze, global warming scaremongering, etc.) that almost always fall on the left side of the spectrum. Gee. Can you blame conservatives for being skeptical?

All for now.

Religion

Initial Thoughts About the Revised Roman Missal

No Comments

This fall, the revised English translation of the Roman Missal — the big book of procedures and prayers used at Mass in Catholic churches — will take effect in most dioceses of the United States. The Missal has generated some small degree of controversy, but the translation protocols used in this document mark a substantial improvement in liturgical fidelity compared to today’s Sacramentary.

The fault lines in the Church that broke most cleanly over the revised Missal reflect the divide between inclusiveness and permissiveness, under the guise of “the Spirit of Vatican II,” and the more traditional elements who favored elevated language that reinforced orthodoxy and orthopraxis. 

Some historical context is in order. In the immediate years following Vatican II, the bishops largely abdicated their liturgical leadership to various lay liturgists who, more often than not, adopted the 1960s-era attitudes of “modernization” and “non-judgmentalism.” This led to the introduction of translation protocols from Latin into the vernacular that occasionally raised eyebrows. This left-leaning tendency of the liturgists reached its apogee with the 1970 Sacramentary, which used the “official” version of the Roman Missal as more a source of inspiration than a document to be faithfully and literally translated.

Thus, Catholics in the English-speaking world were subjected to additional Eucharistic prayers than the rest of the Catholic universe experienced. The language of various prayers, too, was changed.

The most significant, and most illustrative, translation deviation occurred with the Creed. The Latin version begins, “Credo in unum Deum,” which in English translates to, “I believe in one God.” The Sacramentary, however, lists the English as, “We believe in one God.” No one with more than two weeks’ Latin study would translate “credo” as “we believe” — and that’s the point. The liturgists who wanted to take the Church in a radically different direction took ample liberties with official Latin texts under the theory of “lex orandi, lex credendi” — “the law of worship is the law of belief.” If you make people pray using certain words and images, then they will eventually believe those words and images.

The tide against the Mighty Liturgists started to turn in the 1980s. Rome slowly and carefully started to require more orthodox modes of translation, which effort culminated in a document that set clear norms for liturgical translation. Given the hue and cry from left-leaning Catholics, you’d think the Church decided to reconstitute the Inquisition, bonfires and all.

But at long last, the Roman Missal was revised in Rome. The various liturgical conferences then shepherded the translation of the Latin version into the vernacular of the conference. The first go-around in the English-speaking world met with a rejection in Rome — even under the new translation rules, the liturgists took too many liberties. But at long last, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops approved a translation that earned Roman approval.

The major points of departure from the Sacramentary to the newly revised Missal include:

  • Greater fidelity to the words and phraseology of the original Latin. For example, the current call-and-response greeting at Mass — “The Lord be with you”/”And also with you” — will more accurately reflect the traditional formula of “The Lord be with you”/”And with your spirit.” 
  • Various phrases in the Creed have changed. “One in being with the Father” is now more accurately, “Consubstantial with the Father.” “Born of the Virgin Mary” is now “Incarnate of the Virgin Mary.” Etc.
  • The rules about music have tightened, although whether this will have a direct effect on most parochial music from the outset is unclear.
  • The rubrics have been updated to reduce the temptation to lay clericalism that often derails parishes with weak priests.

From my perspective, these are welcome changes. They help to correct some of the abuses of a more permissive mindset that gave us the infamous “Wonder Bread Masses” of the 1970s and hokey folk-music repertoires for worship.

The changes may be hard for some, but they are a necessary and salutary corrective to an unbalancing of liturgy and theology that developed in the last half-century. AMDG.

Politics & Culture, Religion

Preferential Option for the Poor, Take Two

No Comments

Jesus says: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for the Kingdom of God is theirs.” Jesus instructs his followers to engage in corporal and spiritual works of mercy, including feeding the hungry and clothing the naked. And Jesus warns his flock: “What you do onto the least of your brothers, you do onto me.”

In modern Catholic social-justice theory, good Christians must put the needs of the poor at the top of moral ratiocination. We must give a “preferential option” for the poor, as it were. Particularly in matters governing man’s relationship to man, protecting the poor and ameliorating their plight must always be paramount.

It’s a commonplace of secular contemporary socioeconomic discourse to ascribe various government-intensive solutions to address the plight of the poor. You see this in the “War on Poverty,” various social-welfare programs, the burgeoning diversity movement, anti-poverty activism and direct-transfer payments from the wealthy to support programs for the poor.

In “Preferential Option for the Poor,” new First Things editor R.R. Reno raises a salient point about this bedrock principle of Catholic social justice. He notes that we almost never consider poverty in anything but raw economic terms: No one seems much to care about moral and spiritual poverty. Reno’s conclusion is that a more holistic understanding of “the poor” will lead us to a conservative social agenda that favors stabilizing families, nurturing shared community norms and enriching public culture.

The problem, as I read Reno’s perspective, is that a secular “preferential option” focuses on economic conditions, leaving moral poverty to libertine impulses. “Who are we to judge?” after all. Yet this bastardizes a properly Christian conception of care for the poor; what good does it do to provide material benefits to a family without the the moral sense to make sound long-term decisions? For example, why should the state subsidize pregnancies among single low-income women without also teaching them the virtue of chastity?

Poverty of spirit is just as dangerous and just as open to repair as material poverty, yet left-wing activists encourage redistribution and big-government schemes to repair the latter while paying the former no heed. Is that virtuous? Or is it a bastardization of the full and authentic meaning of the “preferential option?”

Reno’s analysis is spot-on, and well-worth the read. Were I to add anything to his commentary, it would merely be this: Even if you do focus only on helping the poor in a material sense, the virtue that attaches comes from doing it yourself. There is no real spiritual benefit to paying higher taxes to fund a government redistribution of wealth. The spiritual and moral benefit to helping the poor comes from working the soup kitchen or rape crisis center. It doesn’t come from mere advocacy or from writing a check.

Jesus also said: “Woe to the rich, for they have already enjoyed their reward.” Woe also to the armchair liberal who would rather be seen to be virtuous among his peers while doing very little to help the poor in the ways that matter most. They have already enjoyed their reward.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture, Religion

Obamanomics: Or, Reflections on the Redistribution of the Wealth of Others

1 Comment

The spin by the major media is that the medium was the message, but the substance of the remarks delivered on April 20 by President Barack Obama to a crowd of Facebook employees deserves attention.

Indeed, for a speech panned as featuring softball, scripted questions, the Commander in Chief said a few things worth a raise of the eyebrows. Courtesy of Wired’s Ryan Sengal:

“If you are an entrepreneur with a startup in a garage, good luck getting health insurance,” Obama said. “Nothing is easier than solving a problem on the backs of people who are poor, who don’t have lobbyists and don’t have power.” … “We lose $4 billion a year on subsidies to oil companies. Now think about this: The top 5 oil companies have made between $75 billion and $125 billion each year over the last few years. No one is doing better than Exxon — well, maybe Facebook is. Why can’t we remove the tax cuts and spend the money on alternative energy to save the planet,” Obama said, to big applause.

First, some translation is in order. “Remove the tax cuts” is code for “raise taxes,” which is the centerpiece of Obama’s domestic economic agenda. To “save the planet” means to impose federal regulations that make it more difficult to be one of those start-up entrepreneurs in a garage. And the $4 billion in subsidies to oil companies pales next to the $8.8 billion in public-sector union dues that largely subsidizes the Democratic Party — perhaps eliminating these dues could help pay for health insurance for sick garage-bound entrepreneurs?

It seems that the more Obama speaks, the more he suggests that it’s necessary and proper for government to redistribute the income of those accursed “millionaires and billionaires” and put it to some public purpose. Recall his famous comment that “at some point, you’ve made enough money.”

Think about that for a moment, and ask the question: What moral right permits the government to expropriate the income of successful Americans in order to fund the pet projects of liberal activists?

Consider a hypothetical small town in Middle America — a small city, with bonds of community. If a family becomes financially strapped, perhaps because of the loss of a job, does a neighbor have a moral duty to render financial assistance? A good Christian soul should affirm with a resounding aye. The roots of that duty lie in a person’s link to other people, and taking care of one’s brothers and sisters is a virtue that requires both good intent and good action. If taking care of one’s neighbors becomes disassociated from private virtue — chiefly through taxation, and the replacement of local charity with public welfare — then the bonds of community fray. The donor obtains no moral benefit, and the recipient has no corresponding duty to the community or to remove himself with all due speed from the public dole. Public morality requires individual actors, not the mass transfer of assets with decisions made in a distant capital. The alternative is to turn needy people into anonymous casefiles and taxpayers into cash spigot turned on and off at governmental whim. You simply cannot enforce community values through the channels of large government. Real community happens among real people in small groups across the fruited plain.

President Obama is skilled at using red herrings and straw men to suggest that opposition to his redistribution scheme comes from the greed of wealthy special interests. Yet the real question is why Obama’s plans to confiscate income from the successful ought to be considered as morally proper on its face. Why should the wealthy pay a greater percentage of their income in taxation than the poor? Why must millionaires and billionares be excoriated for their success? What is the moral claim to the income of others? I have yet to hear a dedicated, coherent moral argument for why it’s appropriate for 1 percent of taxpayers to surrender almost 35 percent of tax revenues and the top 50 percent of taxpayers to cough up more than 96.5 percent of tax revenues. Why is this preferable to everyone paying the same relative tax rate?

You don’t hear Obama talking about the why of it, only about the how. He assumes the virtue of his position, but there’s no ethical paradigm on the books that’s comfortable with his redistributionist agenda (except, of course, egoism). A consequentialist would have to look at 60 years’ accumulated evidence that high taxation and government-sponsored welfare programs has led to the breakdown of poor families and the loss of jobs at the margin related to the tax squeeze. A deontologist would have to evaluate the relative duties of a taxpayer under the Constitution. A divine-command or natural-law theorist would have to study Scripture for its injunctions about chairty. The list goes on, but the result is the same: Redistributionist policies have no serious moral foundation.

Except, of course, in the “moral drama” of the political stage. Obama is promising bread and circuses for free for everyone but the small percentage of taxpayers who must foot the bill. Such a strategy gets votes, and power, but without the benefit of virtue.

Spending others’ money is easy. Finding a moral justification for it, not so much.

Personal, Philosophy, Religion, Vices

Sabbath

1 Comment

After returning home this evening from a laborious day at the office, I retired to the verandah to enjoy a cigar (A. Fuente Rosado Gran Reserva R54), a cocktail (a Sazerac — a rye-based drink with bitters, simple syrup and a hint of absinthe) and the current issue of Cigar Aficianado magazine.  While reading the feature interview with Matthew McConaughey, and especially the parts about the launch of his career, a thought occurred to me: The reason I so enjoyed the billowing smoke and sweet beverage and the early-spring sun was because the whole experience was, in a way, sabbath.

Yes, yes. I know; Sabbath — I can hear you say the word with a capital S — is a religious thing. It’s the stuff of Judeo-Christian tradition, whereby people don’t do manual labor on Sunday and … um … like go to church or something. It’s hard to argue with 3,000 years of recorded history.

Yet small-S sabbath is vital for one’s mental health. We all need downtime. We need to take time to escape from the worries and cares of the day to unwind and enjoy the moment. Too many take too few such opportunities, even if briefly.

I burned the candle from both ends in the wild and crazy days of my youth. I’d get up by 7 a.m., go to work, then drive 60 miles south for school, then return. One semester, I made the Grand Rapids-to-Kalamazoo trek twice daily. And through it all, rare was the day I’d be home before midnight. In those days such schedules were routine; I never had any extended and uncommitted time, and even my weekends were filled with work and church volunteering and sundry social events.

Six years ago I kicked that habit and downsized most of my day’s schedule. It took a full three months before I could come home at night and have no commitments and not feel stressed out that I should be doing something. Now I find that if I go too long without a break, I get surly and tired.

We need sabbath. We need periods of rest to recharge our emotional and spiritual batteries. We need to take time to enjoy the small things without the guilt pangs that come from thinking we should be occupied with that huge to-do list. Without real rest, we get stressed to the point when enjoyment of any kind becomes a fleeting thing.

I’ve been tinkering with the idea of taking an entire day each week, perhaps Sunday, to do nothing but vegetate. Read, go for a walk, go out for breakfast, watch the latest delight from Netflix, whatever. Just not anything I must do. That’s why this evening’s 90 minutes of relaxation proved so refreshing, because I had spent most of last weekend writing papers and running errands and otherwise being busy. As a wise philosopher once said, “No downtime and no beer make Homer go … something-something.”

It’s cliche to suggest we all should stop every now and then to smell the roses. Yet without sabbath, we never manage plant the rose bushes in our souls that allow us to enjoy the sweet fragrance in the first place. No one is so busy that he cannot profit from real and regular sabbath and learn to enjoy the moment before the moments worth enjoying become the unplumbed regrets of old age.

Politics & Culture, Religion

On Mosques and Religious Tolerance

4 Comments

“As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country … That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances … This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”

So says President Barack Obama, in reference to the plans by an Islamic group to build a major mosque near the site of the former World Trade Center. Interesting perspective, that.

The response to the $100 million project sponsored by the Cordoba Initiative is depressing if only because of its banality: Lefties who ordinarily gloat at the erosion of the Judeo-Christian perspective in the public square nevertheless demand a mosque at Ground Zero to show how much America values religious pluralism, while conservatives who normally champion religious freedom demand that the mosque be suppressed or at least located elsewhere.

Both sides are wrong, and hypocritical. As usual.

Conservatives should know better than to impose a sectarian litmus test on the placement of mosques; building the facility a few blocks away from Ground Zero may be tacky, but it does not represent a threat to national security or to religious freedom, even if the project’s funders have shadowy ties to terrorism (hint: that’s what the FBI is for). Cries about the sensitivity of the “victims of 9/11” ring hollow, as well — the dead have no feelings to offend, and in any case, appealing to victimhood is hardly a staple tactic of the Right’s playbook, and for good reason. I cannot adduce a single non-aesthetic conservative principle that should justify opposition to the Cordoba Initiative’s plan.

However, liberals who assert that permitting a mosque in that location is a sign of America’s robust religious tolerance are not fooling anyone. The Left leads the assault against religious freedom in America, through incremental restrictions against the public display of Judeo-Christian sensibilities in the public square. No serious person believes that liberals are unabashed proponents of religious expression: Look no further than the ongoing drama over the Christian Legal Society’s funding for proof. If anything, this situation is a sign that the Left’s embrace of non-Western diversity is genuinely as muddle-headed and chronically unserious as many conservatives feared — that liberals cannot distinguish between Islam as a religion and Islam as a culture, nor grasp that the Muslim world has no American-style “wall of separation” between religious faith and political authority that allows for the purely private religious belief characteristic of WASP social mores.

The one aspect of this situation that disturbs me the most isn’t the hypocrisy of it, however. Rather, it’s the unspoken assumption that the Cordoba Initiative’s plan somehow marks a referendum on America’s commitment to religious pluralism.

You hear it from Barack Obama. You hear it from New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. You hear it from New York governor David Patterson. The refrain is the same: We must permit the Cordoba Initiative to do exactly as it wishes, because any restrictions on mosque placement will necessarily imply that the last 221 years of the U.S. Constitution and its First Amendment protections will thereby be  irrevocably refuted. Or, in its more crude form: We must let them do as they want to show how tolerant we are.

Conservatives have missed the boat on picking up on the substantive argument, instead preferring by-and-large to offer twofold opposition on the grounds that, first, allowing a mosque at Ground Zero means the terrorists win, and second, that a mosque so close to the allegedly sacred ground of the Twin Towers constitutes a fresh trauma for the survivors of 9/11. Both claims are unadulterated nonsense. This is a logistics issue, not a political-philosophy dilemma.

The real problem here is the astonishing failure of leadership by New York city and state leaders. If we concede the Cordoba Initiative’s inherent right to build a mosque, and we accept that there is a legitimate perception problem (as well as public opposition) for a mosque at Ground Zero, then the solution is pretty simple: Let elected leaders apply the incentives and dis-incentives of government to “facilitate” the mosque somewhere else in New York. If they can do it to preserve spotted toads in California, why not a mosque in Manhattan?

I seriously doubt that New York under Mayor Giuliani and Gov. Pataki would have ceded its moral authority to a group of shadowy imams the same way that Bloomberg and Patterson have allowed. The fact that this is even an issue speaks volumes about the leadership ineptitude from city hall and from Albany. The reason that American religious pluralism has been so robust is because the state serves as an impartial referee among competing interests without giving any particular interest the right to make an absolute claim. We didn’t allow the Mormons to engage in polygamy, we don’t allow just anyone to smoke peyote, we don’t say that molesting kids is OK as long as it’s only in the confessional, and we don’t let soldiers suddenly decide, a week before they deploy, that they have a religious opposition to war. So why should government abdicate its power to influence the placement of the mosque on the flimsiest of religious-freedom grounds? It’s hard to say which is more breathtaking: The irrationality of the situation, or the incompetence or cowardice of those at the helm of the involved governments.

Let there be no mistake: The Cordoba Initiative should be allowed to build a mosque. Placing the mosque at Ground Zero is tacky and insensitive and will be a thorn in the community for many years to come. But this whole brouhaha is less a referendum on America’s commitment to religious freedom than an indictment on the failure of political leaders to respond with foresight and wisdom to an entirely foreseeable controversy.

Let us pray that New Yorkers wise up to the real problem.