Outside the Asylum

Dear Pro-Gun Activists: Nobody is Listening to You Anymore

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Thu, 22 Feb 2018 15:00:00 +0000

An article published Wednesday in American Thinker, “Cries to ‘Ban the AR-15’ Based on Ignorance and Hysteria” by Michael Filozof, is representative of what is sadly the best of pro-gun activism in the wake of the Parkland, Florida massacre. Filozof may know quite a bit about hunting and semiautomatic rifles, but he doesn’t get the opposition. In fact, by the end of the third paragraph, you realize he’s not really talking about the opposition — he’s retailing long-standing right-wing stereotypes about gun-grabbing, Godless libruls. I say he represents the best because at least he had the good taste not to claim David Hogg is a “crisis actor” or to tweet that the deaths were the “worst news [for the survivors] since their parents told them to get summer jobs.”

Really? I remember a time, not so long ago, when conservative commentators were thoughtful, nuanced, and respectful of the opposition. Is this what American conservatism has been reduced to — conspiracy theories and social-media asshattery? At long last, has conservatism lost all sense of decency?

Do Facts Matter Anymore?

Here’s what I mean. Filozof writes:

The pure ignorance of the people bleating for a ban on America’s most popular rifle is appalling. With few exceptions, most of the calls to ban the AR-15 come from liberal, urban women and metrosexual men whose knowledge of firearms comes entirely from watching Rambo movies or playing “Call of Duty.”

Even some in professional law enforcement know not of what they speak. A local radio station interviewed a retired FBI agent who stated that he “could not understand” why people would want such a rifle.

Now, it’s been a while since I fired an M16A1 while training to serve my country, and I have neither owned nor felt a need to own a gun for decades. So in the course of researching the controversy, I may have made the odd error here and there. I do not claim to be an expert on firearms. I don’t need to be an expert on firearms. Why? Because it doesn’t matter anymore.

I’ve said elsewhere that I don’t think a semiautomatic weapons ban will make much of a dent in the school-shootings phenomenon. And I’m sorry responsible, safe, sane gun owners feel like they’re being punished. But whether the ban will “work” or not isn’t relevant. It doesn’t matter anymore.

A Matter of Culture

It’s not a matter of principle so much as a matter of culture. We’re no longer a predominantly rural and agrarian society. We no longer regard the Founding Fathers as infallible founts of eternal wisdom. (In fact, Filozof’s quotation of James Madison from The Federalist expresses a sentiment remarkably similar to that of the Black Panther Party — an oppressed minority has to literally arm itself against a hostile majority.) Majority rule is fine, it seems, only so long as you’re part of the majority; when you’re in the minority, democracy becomes tyranny and demands armed resistance. We no longer uncritically buy into the myth of the citizen militia as the last bastion of freedom.

Put differently, we no longer regard gun ownership as an absolute, God-given right. The obsession many of our fellow citizens have with guns is as bizarre to us as it is to other nations. To assume that the we only includes “liberal, urban women and metrosexual men” (Why stop there? Why not say “dumb bimbos and pantywaists”? Can you say toxic masculinity, kids?) is not only wrong but oblivious and bigoted; it reads like a lifelong suburbanite’s pathetic attempt to pass himself off as a country boy. Wake up, Captain Caveman, and take a look outside your epistemic bubble; there’s a lot more variety in that we than you think.

For what it’s worth, I do agree with Filozof that the problem is at least in part cultural in nature. However, I believe that that part of it is rooted in classical liberalism, and is responsible not only for postmodern neo-paganism but also for libertarianism and Objectivism. Particularly, I’m thinking of the Hobbesian “counter-Genesis” in which Man in his natural state is an autonomous, entitled sociopath who forms social contracts out of sheer self-interest and has no natural obligations to anyone. That “counter-Genesis,” and not the Constitution, is the ultimate source of Louis D. Brandeis’ revisionist “most comprehensive of rights”: the “right to be left alone.” A more classical and Christian view is expressed by Cicero’s dictum, “The welfare of the people is the highest law.”

Promoting the General Welfare

The semiautomatic rifle has become a symbol of everything people — that’s people; not liberals, not libtards, not communists, not gun-grabbers — believe is wrong with the gun lobby, its origin myth of the Second Amendment, and its hammerlock on government. In fact, it’s become the symbol for everything people hate about lobbies and their power to act against the common good for the benefit of special interests. It’s also rapidly becoming a symbol of everything that they believe has gone wrong with the GOP in the last couple of decades: the obstructionism, the brutal insensitivity, the “Christianity” that’s really American jingoism with a thin overlay of piety, the anarcho-capitalist hatred of every tax dollar spent on anything except making the rich richer, the xenophobic fear-mongering.

“Dear gun lobby: Your facts about guns don’t matter anymore. Your statistics don’t matter anymore. Your quotes from the Founding Fathers don’t matter anymore. Your interpretation of American social and cultural history doesn’t matter anymore. No one is listening to you anymore but the people you pay to listen to you. STFU. Love, Your Fellow Citizens.”

Yes, it’s a statement born out of sheer emotion. That emotion is frustration, even anger, caused by a government that’s become frozen and unresponsive because the country it was originally designed to serve has outgrown it, both numerically and culturally. It no longer does what it was designed to do — among other things, “secure justice,” “ensure domestic tranquility,” and “promote the general welfare” — because different minority groups say those things must not be done at their expense lest their unalienable, civil, and/or human rights be trampled or even slightly discommoded.

Everything is Ephemeral

We have the Second Amendment because the Constitution includes an amendment process. The amendment process is there because the Convention recognized that the Constitution they wrote would not serve for all time, that the country would change and develop different needs. Everything is ephemeral. My point: While many of the Founders’ principles and intentions were noble, to suggest that the federal government remain the one they intended because they intended it that way is to confuse the American government with the Catholic Church. Governments exist to serve the common good, not to hold a country in a cultural stasis.

Again, I’m sorry responsible gun owners have to bear the brunt of the people’s anger. Life isn’t fair. But this conflict has been a long time coming. Just some food for thought, though: The last time one side of a controversy decided they weren’t going to take their turn at losing and decided to fight for what principles they thought the U.S. had been founded on, it turned into a horrible, costly civil war. And they still lost. Save us the money and the blood, and just give up your goddamn automatic rifles.

The New Pro-Life Movement and Its Critics

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 15:00:00 +0000

Since its inception in 2016, the New Pro-Life Movement has drawn criticism from conservative Catholic writers, not least because the NPLM began with the rejection of the old guard’s unhealthy attachment to conservative/Republican politics. The most recent attack, coming from the Charismatic Episcopal Church’s CEC for Life blog, had some me-too reprinting from Life Site News and Church Militant just as Crux Now published an interview with M.T. Dávila, an NPLM member and associate professor of Christian ethics at Andover Newton Theological Seminary. While some of CEC for Life’s criticisms are worth considering, more of them show why the old movement needs in-house censure.

Semantics Matter

Let’s begin with what the CEC for Life article gets right:

Under the NPLM’s “Women’s Rights and Justice” section of its 11 Pillars, the first paragraph begins, “Since women are the central figures in the abortion debate ….” Women are at the center, sure; they’re certainly not irrelevant to the debate. But neither are the unborn, who are also at the center of the debate. This particular phrasing simply begs to be misunderstood as saying the unborn and their right to life are of secondary consideration. The effect of legal abortion rights on fathers also gets no attention, enhancing this error.

Semantics matter. Murphy’s Law for Writers holds that “whatever can be misunderstood will be misunderstood, usually in the worst way possible.” Granting that opponents will deliberately misrepresent your position, you still write to be understood by those who rely on your words as you state them. Unlike a person in a casual conversation, the writer can’t afford to metaphorically let words just fall out of their mouths under the assumption, “Oh, they’ll know what I mean.” A political manifesto is the last place to be careless in your phrasing.

I’m well aware that no one in the NPLM sets a lower value on the unborn’s life than they do on the mother’s. But I’m not the one that has to be convinced.

Also, CEC for Life points out that, whatever the national leaders of the old movement do, there are more and more localized efforts to address the “demand” side of the abortion equation. “Ultimately, ... [the NPLM] fails to acknowledge a long-standing history of compassion and hard labor made evident through the hundreds and thousands of resources now available for mothers and fathers and their preborn child. Not to mention counseling and services available to abortion workers looking for healing and a new life.” The NPLM would do well to acknowledge these contributions and limit its criticism to the national leadership.

Hypercritical? Or Just Critical?

However, even when CEC for Life is right, the author of the statement ruins the point through hyperbole and sly hints that maybe founders Rebecca Bratten Weiss and Matthew Tyson have some other agenda in mind. [Full disclosure: I was Matthew’s managing editor when he wrote for Catholic Stand; we remain in contact through Facebook.]

This starts right at the beginning with the invocation of Abolish Human Abortion, a comparison which is invidious as most of NPLM’s members, including Bratten Weiss and Tyson, are Catholics who support the Church’s teaching magisterium and social doctrine.

The NPLM is the cheery version of AHA, who wants to work with everyone (as long as they didn’t vote for Trump), but remains publicly hypercritical of the current movement. Like AHA, they too, believe the movement has failed — but not because we are too soft. Rather, because the movement is too hard. Too narrowly focused. And more Republican than they can stand.

The term hypercritical implies that the NPLM’s criticism of the GOP and the old guard’s association with it is to some degree overboard, in the same way that pro-choice advocates typically describe the pro-life movement inter alia as “far-right wing.” This simply begs for a defense of the movement’s association with the GOP and backing of Pres. Trump, or even a candid admission of the extent to which the criticism is justifiable. But the CEC for Life writer gives us neither: the NPLA is “hypercritical” simply by dint of being critical, as if the movement establishment were beyond reproach.

Too Picky? Not Picky Enough?

This Republican defensiveness comes up again later when the CEC for Life writer accuses the NPLM of a hypocritical stance:

The NPLM prefers the phrases “consistent life ethic” or “whole-life ethic.” They state that a “true pro-life ideology focuses on more than just abortion,” which refers to their 11 Pillars. If you aren’t willing to support all of their positions — including universal healthcare and preventing climate change — then you aren’t really pro-life. (And again, if you voted for Trump, just leave now.)

… There’s room for an “ethical pro-choicer” — whatever that is — to sit at the table. But if you are already pro-life, suddenly the standard flies skyward. There is no middle ground on gun control, or healthcare, or the environment — issues on which pro-lifers have always held varying opinions with no trouble.

But wait a minute! How does the NPLM find room at the table for pro-choicers?

See, the CEC for Life writer agonizes over the NPLM’s willingness to work with pro-choicers on other issues under their umbrella, such as universal health care and social safety-net programs. Of course, the writer explains to us, that’s a waste of time because the Hillary Clintons and Cecile Richardses of the pro-abortion faction are unreasonable and unreachable. “To shy away from the idea of a culture war in order to more fully embrace the opposition is not only an error in judgment, but a fatal flaw that will ensure failure. There is simply no common ground for murder.”

Nowhere and at no time has any NPLM representative said they’re unwilling to work with the establishment or embrace members who are less than 100% enthusiastic about the 11 Pillars. CEC for Life’s accusation is a hideous exaggeration based on a single line about a “true pro-life ideology”, which at best could be deemed subtly antagonistic (again, semantics) without stretching credulity. More to the point, CEC for Life has accused the NPLM of being at once too picky about their potential allies and not picky enough. Which is it? Or is any stick good enough to beat them with?

Reducing the Demand

Much of the opposition to the New Pro-Life Movement targets its “whole life ethic”; the most absurd and slanderous criticism ever made is that the NPLM is a pro-choice sabotage looking to “kitchen sink” the established movement to death with extraneous causes. The argument could be made — and has been made ad nauseam — that the priority of life establishes a natural hierarchy of concerns for the movement. In practice, however, that “natural hierarchy” simply means any policy or program which doesn’t suit the GOP agenda disappears from the establishment radar, even if that policy or program could reduce the demand for abortion.

That there is a demand for abortion should not be questioned. But the existence of a demand for an abortion, like the existence of a demand for illicit drugs, means that merely illegalizing the supply won’t make abortion go away; the clinics will just take up residence in the back alleys again. Elizabeth Bruenig pointed out some years ago, “If a woman considers herself too destitute to care for a child, there is no transvaginal ultrasound demoralizing enough and no accompanying narration excoriating enough to make her decision [to abort] seem any less plausible.” Reduce the demand, and support for the supply will weaken.

But what about the pillars that don’t touch on abortion demand, such as just war, the environment, and gun control? Again, this goes to the credibility of the movement, the question of whether the movement is really pro-life or just “pro-birth”. Threats to life come in many different forms, not all of them as direct as euthanasia or abortion, and some of which are driven by economic greed. While Prof. Dávila correctly points out that “the March for Life cannot become the March for Everything that is Unjust,” limiting the movement’s interests to abortion, euthanasia, and doctor-assisted suicide is hardly enough to qualify as “building a culture of life”.

Making Common Cause

The point of reducing the demand for abortion is reducing the perceived “need”, if you will, for its legality. But there is another point toward working with abortion supporters on other action items:

Simply put, as long as there is a hard core of abortion supporters, the “mushy middle” — the 77% of Americans (more or less) who are not either solidly pro- or anti-abortion — will continue to be mushy. Not until we weaken by defection the bloc of “powerful people who [make] certain that abortion is entrenched in our society” will the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the end of the atrocity come into sight. And so long as we’re perceived as 1) “pro-birth but not pro-life” and 2) radically uninterested in the challenges to equality faced by women, the hard core will not listen to us.

This apparently doesn’t bother the CEC for Life writer. From their perspective, the Hillary Clintons and Cecile Richardses of the pro-abortion faction are unreasonable and unreachable, so we should waste no effort trying to work with them on anything. But it’s precisely these people that keep organizations like Planned Parenthood and NARAL going, so it’s precisely these people we have to convert to the pro-life cause. Given that they are our opponents on the abortion issue, it doesn’t follow that we must be enemies on every issue; that’s the same kind of black-and-white thinking of which they accused the NPLM (if you’re not 100% with us, you’re against us).

Conclusion

If CEC for Life is bothered by the NPLM’s disparagement of Donald Trump and the Republicans, they should consider that the Republican-dominated Congress is yet again funding Planned Parenthood. The Party of Donald Trump bears little resemblance to the Party of Ronald Reagan; post-Christian libertarian populism (with heavy doses of white racism) has largely replaced the Christian neo-conservatism that once drove the Republican core. To the GOP, the pro-life movement is little more than a particular bloc of useful idiots and has been for some time. The movement doesn’t have to settle for being the Republicans’ side piece.

CEC for Life admits that “there is no problem in changing tactics to win any war; sometimes a tactical change is necessary.” But it’s not the tactics that need changing; rather, it’s the strategy. While the reversal of Roe v. Wade is still a proper goal, everything that supports the demand for abortion must be undermined; otherwise, even a friendly SCOTUS won’t repeal Roe’s core holding, as was demonstrated in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. The political landscape has changed in the thirty years since Webster. It’s time for the movement to change as well.

The Triumph of the Idiot

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Fri, 08 Dec 2017 15:00:00 +0000

Thomas Hobbes. (Image source: totallyhistory.com)

The word idiot, I am reliably informed, comes from the ancient Greek ἰδιώτης idiōtēs, via the Latin transliteration idiota. On the face of it, an idiōtēs was merely a private individual, as opposed to a government minister or military officer. However, among the Athenians, it was a derisive term applied to anyone who declined to take an active role in civic affairs, or who cut themselves off from the community in pursuit of their own interests. This pejorative application became associated with a person of low intelligence or skill, who could contribute little to the polis.

Res Idiotica

America is becoming (or has become) a nation of idiots, according to writers and thinkers who deliberately reference this half-forgotten sense of idiōtēs. That’s to say, we are becoming increasingly self-absorbed and disconnected, isolated not only from each other but from any sense of community or history. Their critique of millennials has gone beyond sneering at “snowflakes” and hooting over participation trophies. Instead, their concern is for the disturbing number of twenty-somethings checking out of adult social interaction and the burgeoning industry of “self-care” products.

Writes philosopher Michael Liccione, “It’s as if real relationships and real community engagement are all just too much for many people, who prefer to define and live in their own little worlds, insulated as much as possible from the pain and inconvenience of regular involvement with the big bad world.” Another philosopher, Reilly Smethurst, reminds us that St. Augustine “famously associated idiocy with ostentatious self-authorization. In his Confessions, Augustine referred critically to his younger self as ‘a prisoner, trying to simulate a crippled sort of freedom.’ The specter comforting America is that of the juvenile Augustine — free to enjoy its own vacuity, empowered ironically by crippledom.”

The best use of this equation between self-absorption and idiocy came from Notre Dame professor Patrick J. Deneen’s critique of the education system:

Above all, the one overarching lesson that students receive is to understand themselves to be radically autonomous selves within a comprehensive global system with a common commitment to mutual indifference. Our commitment to mutual indifference is what binds us together as a global people. ... Ancient philosophy and practice heaped praise upon res publica — a devotion to public things, things we share together. We have instead created the world’s first res idiotica .... Our education system excels at producing solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history.

Hobbes, Rousseau, and the Idiōtēs

But while these thinkers peddle their observations in outlets such as The American Conservative, Front Porch Republic and Intellectual Takeout, I hesitate to call any of them “conservatives.” In fact, Deneen (a self-described “radical Catholic”) is as critical of conservatism as he is of liberalism, contending that “the basic political division in America merely represents two iterations of [classical] liberalism — the pursuit of individual autonomy in either the social/personal sphere (liberalism) or the economic realm (‘conservatism’ — better designated as market liberalism).”

To understand Deneen’s criticism better, we must look at two foundational works of classical liberalism, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men. Both men posited Man in his primitive or “natural” state as an amoral, self-interested brute — an idiōtēs — who took whatever he desired whenever he desired it, and who had no God, no natural kinship ties, and no social obligations to hold him back.

For Hobbes, society exists only to protect us from each other; government’s sole duty (in theologian Benjamin Wiker’s words) is “merely to reproduce a happier version of the Hobbesian state of nature, where there is a maximum of liberty to pursue one’s personal desires but without the nasty, violent death part” (10 Books that Screwed Up the World, 39). For Rousseau, society is a positive evil brought on by claims of private ownership of property. Where in Hobbes we see the first hints of free-market capitalism and objectivism, in Rousseau we see a preliminary form of communist thought, in which government exists only to protect the rich from the poor. For both men, though, the cure for all social ills was to return so far as possible to our natural state, in which everyone can get everything he wants and is obligated to nobody for anything.

The Idiot as Social Ideal

Of course, both Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s accounts of primitive man are myths, Enlightenment-atheist attempts at a “counter-Genesis” (Wiker) to replace the Biblical account of Adam and Eve. Created before the dawn of scientific archaeology and anthropology, they have no evidential backing, no basis in anything we know or can reasonably guess about prehistoric human society. Nevertheless, classical liberalism in all its descendants carries at its heart the conviction that Homo idioticus — antisocial, self-referential, materialistic, entitled and libidinous — is not only our natural state but the ideal around which our society should be ordered.

Think about that last observation: Society should be ordered around the idiot, for whom society as such is at best a necessary evil and all too often an enslavement. A common set of values must be erected around the idiot, for whom a common morality is an abomination and an oxymoron. This society must give that idiot access to everything he does not possess, even if it requires government intervention, and at the same time keep other idiots from taking his possessions, especially through government intervention. Ironically, the idiot does not perceive how his minimalist idea of justice can require an ever-mounting pile of laws and regulations to enact and an ever-expanding government to enforce.

The miraculous resolution of all these conflicting imperatives becomes possible through the dangerous fantasy of enlightened self-interest: Despite all the detriments associated with society and government, Homo idioticus will make (some) sacrifices voluntarily because society and government will provide them with benefits equal to or surpassing the sacrifices. Just as the classical liberal’s idea of justice — “I won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt me” — is negative and ignoble, enlightened self-interest is devoid of true generosity or magnanimity, limited to merely seeking quid pro quos, “win-win solutions,” and socioeconomic rent.

“Men are Born for the Sake of Men”

But the most relevant observation we can make about any falsehood is that it is false. That we are by nature social, political, and relational is the most profound fact about human existence. We were made not only to live but to live together — in families, in bands, in tribes, in towns. Living together requires not merely refraining from doing harm but actively contributing to the common good; cooperation is more imperative than competition and true generosity more necessary than self-interest. Common justice requires a common moral code by which we not only obligate others but allow ourselves to be obligated.

But since ... we are not born for ourselves alone, but our country claims a share of our being, and our friends a share; and since ... everything that the earth produces is created for man’s use; and as men, too, are born for the sake of men, that they may be able mutually to help one another; in this direction we ought to follow Nature as our guide, to contribute to the general good by an interchange of acts of kindness, by giving and receiving, and thus by our skill, our industry, and our talents to cement human society more closely together, man to man. (Cicero, De Officiis [On Duties, tr. Walter Miller] 1.22)

In the true business of society, the idiot is deadwood, a leech and an obstruction; he wants all the benefits of community life but none of its obligations. He is a “taker,” albeit the kind of “taker” that can be found in any economic stratum, quite frequently at the top, privatizing the rewards while socializing the costs. A healthy, stable society can tolerate a certain number of idiots, but it cannot dedicate itself to catering to their demands and still remain either healthy or stable. Most certainly, a society ought not to be run by idiots.

Where Orwell and Huxley Erred

Yet that is what Corporate America and the academic left, working from their different priorities, have striven in common to produce: a nation of isolated, self-indulgent ninnies mainly incapable of maintaining relationships, scarcely interested in the public good, mostly unwilling to sacrifice for others’ sake. Nu, progress.

Over the last four decades, social critics like Neil Postman and Christopher Hitchens have repeatedly compared American society’s decline to both George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. And we can still point to our equivalents of Big Brother and soma, or thoughtcrime and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. But both Orwell and Huxley, their minds formed in the classical liberal tradition, supposed that when Dystopia came it would be a triumph of the collective, a mistake of prioritizing the community over the individual.

Neither could foresee the triumph of the idiot.

Uncivil Discourse 2: Kathy Griffin and the “New Normal” of Obscenity

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Fri, 02 Jun 2017 01:34:00 +0000

Kathy Griffin, desperate attention-seeker.
(Photo: Getty Images.)

I absolutely cannot stand Scotch whiskey. People tell me that Scotch is an “acquired taste.” To which I always respond with some bewilderment, “Why would anyone want to acquire a taste for it?” Why would anyone, having found something vile and disgusting, deliberately take in more and more of it until it becomes their go-to consumable? This is just one of many questions we should ask ourselves while we’re all in a flutter over the picture of “comedian” Kathy Griffin holding up a bloodied mock-up of Donald Trump’s head.

The Massacre in Arizona

Before we go further, I’d like to cast your memories back to January 2011, to the mass shooting in Tucson in which six people died and thirteen others were wounded. As I wrote at the time, “The smoke from Jared Lee Loughner’s weapon had hardly a chance to dissipate when liberal hate-mongers in the MSM started to accuse Sarah Palin and the Tea Party as accessories before the fact to mass murder. The grounds? One of the victims, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, is a Democrat ‘targeted’ by the Tea Party for unseating in her next re-election bid.” And among the accusers was Kathy Griffin.

Palin had posted an online map that had Giffords’ and other Democrat incumbents’ pictures with cross-hairs drawn on them. Had Loughner never fired his weapon, no one would ever have thought it unusual; it would have been like the Sunday-morning mailman in Chesterton’s Father Brown mystery. False cause fallacy, folks; nothing to see here. The accusation was baseless and stupid, and the conservative chatterati tore the most visible offenders, Keith Olbermann and Paul Krugman, to tiny little shreds. Even some liberals participated in the beatdown.

Other conservatives, however, went the tu quoque route, serving up some violent talk from liberal thought leaders from then-Pres. Barack Obama to also-unfunny comedian Sandra Bernhardt and queen emeritus of pop Madonna. At the time, Michelle Malkin had been collecting such examples for ten years; she posted them with the admonition, “... [Don’t] let the media whitewash the sins of the hypocritical Left in their naked attempt to suppress the law-abiding, constitutionally-protected, peaceful, vigorous political speech of the Right.” Peaceful and vigorous, I assume, includes the various lynchings and burnings of Obama, as well as rocker Ted Nugent’s later invitation to the president to “suck on my machine gun.”

“Licorice-Flavored Jell-O”

Now the shoe is on the other foot. However, the left is having some trouble admitting that it fits. Chelsea Clinton and Anderson Cooper immediately condemned the photo in no uncertain terms. Debra Messing valiantly tried for the tu quoque: “It wasn’t right when [people] hung lynched Obama effigies, just as what Kathy Griffin did isn’t right now.” And when alt-right troll Mike Cernovich tweeted, “CNN has yet to issue a statement about Satanic-ISIS death threats made by its employee Kathy Griffin,” the Church of Satan replied, “Please do not include us in this.” Man, you really have to screw up when Satan wants no part of your mess.

Others, however, don’t seem to get the fuss. For instance, @VeeVee, responding to Clinton, said, “… to call it wrong is condemning it [duh?]. Total disagreement. It’s not my style, but it’s not wrong.” Ho-hummed Yahoo’s Ken Tucker, “Now, instead of inflicting further hours of Griffin imagery upon us, let’s hope that Fox — the only news channel that has turned this into a lead-story, time-eating crusade — will start ignoring this non-event, okay?” One Dr. Drew fretted about the “mob response”(!) he thought was worse. And @PopehatWitchHunt (seriously?) compared the matter to “licorice flavored jello” [sic]: “I understand being repulsed by it but I don’t get being incensed by it.”

The ultimate I-don’t-see-the-problem-here came from GQ’s Drew Magary:

Do I even need to point out that Trump once suggested that “Second Amendment people” take action against Hillary Clinton, or the countless times President Obama was burned/hung/slashed in effigy by his naysayers? Of course not. Griffin is guilty of being tasteless [we’ll get to this in a bit], but her biggest crime was shoveling an extra heaping of coal into the Right Wing Bullshit Furnace, allowing everyone from Paul Ryan on down to the sweatiest men’s rights activists to focus national conversation with atom-level precision on THIS transgression while Trump sets the rest of the world on fire. We’ll hear about the hypocrisy of the “so-called tolerant left” for at least the next 48 hours, and I’m already shaking my head over it.

Somewhere between the beginning of his spittle-flecked nutty and the paragraph quoted, Magary managed to trim down the expected shelf life of this issue from the death of the universe to merely forty-eight hours. It’s somehow Trump’s fault, with his ability to “make himself the MacGyver of chickenshit,” that we’ll not get over this for … a couple of days. And because we’re shocked and offended by this, it means we can’t be equally shocked and offended by Trump’s consideration of withdrawing the US from the Paris climate agreement. Only one issue can matter at any time. Quit drinking the Haterade, Magary; it’s making you incoherent.

Beyond the Pale is Further Away

What is the problem, really? Is the problem that Griffith crossed a line that should never be crossed? Or is the problem that the line has been pushed so far out Griffith had to “behead” a sitting president in order to cross it? Griffith’s idiocy wasn’t “tasteless” so much as we haven’t acquired a taste for it … yet. If she had waited a couple of years to do it, the backlash might not have killed her career; eventually, the stunt may even be considered “groundbreaking”. So let me repeat the question I started with: Why would anyone deliberately consume something vile and disgusting until they come to prefer it?

A friend of mine called Griffith’s bad joke “unprecedented”. But the fact is, there’s a whole series of precedents for it. We didn’t get to this point, from Jack Benny and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to South Park and The Vagina Monologues, in twenty-four hours. Rather, the boundary between the acceptable and the intolerable has been pushed back by little steps. We got here in much the same manner that people learn to prefer Scotch — by consuming violence and obscenity as “humor” in ever-increasing doses, by refusing to exercise any kind of social control over all the jackasses who have simulated violence against our elected leaders for the sake of entertainment.

Malkin is correct to point out that the left has a long history of violent hate-talk directed toward right-wing politicians. But Magary, for all his hyperventilating incoherence, also has a point: the red tribe, especially the alt-right, has contributed its share of anti-left violent hate talk. And to say “Well, they started it!” is a child’s strategy to evade taking ownership of our share of the problem. Logicians consider the tu quoque a material fallacy of relevance; however, I know of one Wise Person who considered it a highly relevant argument:

“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” (Matthew 7:1-5)

We Deserve Donald Trump

Liberals and conservatives alike — real conservatives, not the yowling ball of viciousness known as the “alt-right” — are quite properly embarrassed by the self-aggrandizing idiot we must call our President. By comparison, George W. Bush can be considered competent; commentators have even begun to think better of Richard Nixon’s administration in the light of “Dolt 45”. In a sane, decent democracy, Trump would never have been elected dogcatcher, let alone Chief Executive.

However, as French diplomat and philosopher Joseph de Maistre once wrote, “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” Donald Trump is our President because we have more or less deliberately created for ourselves a culture in which self-absorption, dishonesty, crudity, philistinism, and even some degree of amorality have been normalized. Donald Trump is who We the People of the United States are now, and both red and blue tribal leaders have had hands in making us this way. Once you convince yourself that morality is merely a matter of taste, you forget how to distinguish between the merely tasteless and the intrinsically evil.

Kathy Griffin has held up a mirror to the soul of our culture and shown it to be diseased, bloody, and rotting. But until we take ownership of that fact — until we recognize ourselves in the mirror — healing will never come. Our culture will continue to rot until our society and government can no longer survive it.

Scarcity No Excuse For Avoiding Health Care Reform

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Wed, 31 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Image Source: Center for American Progress.

Plenty of people have written ad nauseam about liberal smugness. Heck, even liberals have written about liberal smugness. I’ve already pointed out that liberals’ supposed intellectual superiority is oversold. But for sheer condescension, try reading a conservative on economic issues. It’s hard to find a conservative talking head who doesn’t assume liberals know nothing about economics, who doesn’t treat liberals like third-graders in need of a stern talking-to about grown-up stuff. Case in point: Kevin D. Williamson, whose National Review piece, “Health Care, from the Top”, can serve as a model for How to Write Like a Patronizing Ass.

“Those Poor, Simple Liberals”

“Our ongoing troubles with health care,” Williamson begins, “stem from an unwillingness to deal with certain facts. One of those facts is scarcity.” Just from the way Williamson tees up the ball you can see where he’s aiming: “Those poor, simple liberals think everything is available in mind-dazzling abundance and shouldn’t have to be paid for (except by other people).” Apparently, to Williamson liberals are all college-age kids going to school on Mommy and Daddy’s nickel, who don’t have to pay for anything except Jell-O shots and the occasional reefer (thanks to Obamacare, the Trojans are covered).

To give Williamson his due, his attitude never verges into a Scroogean desire for the unfortunate to die and decrease the surplus population. “There is a certain libertarian tendency,” he writes, “to … throw up one’s hands, exclaiming: ‘Just let markets work!’ We should certainly let markets work, but not ‘just.’ We aren’t going to let children with congenital birth defects suffer just because they might have stupid and irresponsible parents [people are poor because they’re stupid and irresponsible, don’cha know], and we are not going to let old people who have outlived their retirement savings die of pneumonia because we don’t want to spend a couple of thousand bucks treating them.” He even writes approvingly of “giving poor people money and money analogues (such as food stamps) to pay for food,” which makes him a rarity among conservatives.

However, these heartwarming glimpses of Williamson’s humanity aren’t enough to dispel the irritation produced by his ham-handed belaboring of the obvious. It might distress him to learn that not all liberals are spoiled-brat millennials mindlessly parroting Bernie Sanders’ Facebook memes. Indeed, it might cause him consternation to know that liberals are fairly evenly distributed among income strata and that college graduates are a bit more likely to lean left than right. I can’t imagine what would happen to Williamson if it were revealed to him that there are even a few liberal economists still around.

Comparison-Shopping for Diabetes Management?

Moreover, Williamson assumes that, if we only knew what he knows about economics, insurance, and health care, we would immediately cease all clamor for health care reform and choose to stick with the present system. It doesn’t occur to him that we might have good reason to stick with the clamor. And, in explaining to us what we already know about scarcity and insurance, Williamson reveals certain blind spots imposed on him by his uncritical acceptance of classical economics theory.

For instance, speaking of elasticity of demand, Williamson asserts, “But not every medical procedure is a life-and-death matter, and, even in the matter of serial chronic conditions such as diabetes, there is opportunity for comparison shopping and negotiating.” In reality, patients with such conditions can’t comparison-shop. Conditions aren’t auto parts, legs of lamb, or kitchen dinette sets; they can’t be managed separately from the rest of one’s health. For most basic health care needs, insurance makes competition irrelevant: you pay the same copay regardless of what your GP or clinic charges the provider. Competition is not a factor in many areas of health care; that’s one of the reasons why health care is in desperate need of reform. This is one of those issues which led Arthur Fiedler to say, “For economists, the real world is often a special case.”

And as for negotiation — please, don’t make me laugh. In fact, if Williamson really thought through the logic of scarcity, he’d realize it means that situations will arise in which one party has the other by the short ’n curlies, and to accept or refuse is a Hobson’s choice. Martin Shkreli, ex-CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, hammered this point in with his price-gouging on the drug Daraprim. But Shkreli’s villainy also illustrates two further points: 1) not all health care commodities are scarce to the same degree (aspirin scarce? seriously?); and 2) scarcity can be created artificially.

“Fear of Scarcity Become Pathological”

Let’s put it a different way: Williamson’s argument requires we accept that, in all cases, the potential supply will always be less than total demand (S_P < D). However, this isn’t true because at least some commodities can be produced in excess of demand (S_P> D). For instance, the market for Daraprim is small and the 64-year-old drug neither difficult nor expensive to make; it should be (relatively) cheap to produce it in abundance. However, there are no mass-market generic equivalents, no herbal supplements with which the consumer can replace it. And since Daraprim is an essential component of the “drug cocktail” used to treat AIDS, the patient can’t simply do without it. Ergo, Daraprim is price-inelastic (i.e., price has little effect on demand) and makes a perfect tool for a greedy weasel like Shkreli to rape — er, reap a windfall.

Economists and economics wonks still tend to equate rational behavior with self-interested behavior. And, indeed, people can have cogent, coherent reasons for self-interested acts, such as robbing banks or keeping wage increases below the inflation rate. But reasoning can produce bad decisions as well as good; and self-interested behavior can very well be self-defeating behavior (e.g., “the tragedy of the commons”). Self-interest, in the absence of solidarity and the virtues of compassion and self-restraint, cannot produce the healthy, cohesive society which best enhances the individual members’ survival.

Classical economics assumes the necessity of competition and the rationality of self-interest, and even gives a backhanded endorsement to Gordon Gekko’s axiom “Greed is good.” But greed isn’t good. Greed is the fear of scarcity become pathological. Greed is incapable of saying, “I have enough; let others have what I don’t need.” Greed doesn’t recognize the right of others to enough. And while some income/wealth inequality is inescapable in any working human system, even conservative economists recognize that a high degree of inequality is a sign of bad economic health. Left unchecked, greed poses a threat to the survival of the community. To survive, the community needs cooperation more than it needs competition, and solidarity more than self-interest.

Equality vs. Merit

But where Williamson’s argument from scarcity really falls down is that it fails to connect the dots between “We can’t treat everybody for everything” and “The rich deserve first crack at what’s scarce”. And no wonder, because the territory between the premise and the conclusion threatens to trap him in explicit moral Darwinism. Many conservatives and libertarians implicitly assume that all individuals are in 100% control of their economic destiny and that they become or remain poor due to bad judgment, lack of foresight, ignorance, or indolence, or some combination of those factors. The poor aren’t merely victims of misfortune; rather, they fully deserve poverty and everything that goes with it. As one Evangelical put it, “Why should I stand in the way of God’s judgment?”

Objectivism would argue that the rich merit the most access to health care because they’ve already demonstrated superior survival skills. However, Objectivism posits selfishness as its only real virtue, when in the real world (as I’ve argued above) selfishness is not just a threat to the community but also sick and often self-defeating. Utilitarianism would argue that the rich are more socially useful than are the poor. However, as I’ve argued elsewhere, once you assert that Person A can be worth less than Person B, it’s no great stretch to conclude that Person A can be worthless, a lebensunwertes Leben (“life unworthy of life”), and therefore not entitled to any rights or consideration. By implicitly equating social utility with the right to live, Utilitarianism categorically denies the cornerstone of democracy and foundation of individual rights — the intrinsic equality of individuals to each other.

Williamson’s argument from scarcity, then, fails on at least three grounds: 1) it fails to recognize the extent to which the status quo frustrates competitive health-care pricing; 2) it fails to account for those commodities that can be produced in sufficient quantities to meet demand; and 3) it fails to demonstrate on philosophically tenable grounds that people merit health care in proportion to their ability to pay for it. But there are other problems with Williamson’s argument, such as his reliance on the trope that universal health care and economic freedom can’t coexist, as well as his blindness to the fundamental absurdity at the core of the insurance industry (you’re paying for something on which both you and the company hope you’ll never need to collect).

Perfect Hostile to Better

The fact is, private insurance tries to do exactly what universal health care would do — it tries to bring as many people together to spread out the costs of health care. However, the private insurance industry hasn’t shown itself more effective at driving down the costs than a semi-private or public single-payer system would be. In fact, the health care industry in its entirety has developed several groups who have significant financial interests in maintaining the cost spiral; the health care industry outspends the defense industry in lobbying government by around 3:1.

We know some things in health care are scarce, that not everyone will have access to everything. It doesn’t follow, however, that we should do nothing to improve access to those things we can produce in abundance and cut out the industry’s ability to create artificial scarcity through price-gouging, unethical billing practices, and lack of competition. We’re not asking for a perfect system. Perfect is not only the enemy of good enough, it’s often hostile to better. Scarcity is no excuse to put off the hard and extensive task of health care reform.

The Day Melania Trump Became a Real Person

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Sat, 27 May 2017 14:00:00 +0000

First Lady Melania Trump, just before meeting Pope Francis.
(Photo credit: Gregorio Borgia, AP)

I’ve felt some pity for Melania Trump for some time now. It’s hard not to.

In the Shadow

For one thing, for all the money they make — and it’s not necessarily as much as you’d think — supermodels don’t get much more respect than ordinary models, who rate more respect than fast-food workers but less than nursing assistants. To the average person, being a model requires only three attributes: height, skinniness, and photogenic looks. No one expects you to have a brain, let alone opinions worth listening to; after all, if you had a brain, you’d have pursued some socially useful career, like (fill in the blank), instead of trading on such an ephemeral quality as beauty.

For another thing, Melania’s married to the shamelessly self-promoting Donald Trump. As such, to the public eye, she’s been little more than an accessory to The Donald, a gold-electroplated accouterment. Nobody actually knows the dynamic of their relationship, which has never stopped anyone from treating speculation as fact (“trophy wife!”). Being Trump’s wife has made her a target of spite. Melania recently settled a libel lawsuit with the British tabloid the Daily Mail, who had asserted that at one point she supplemented her modeling income with prostitution. And her delivery of the Lord’s Prayer at a rally in Melbourne, Florida garnered both howls of outrage from secularists and sneers from bigots who made fun of her accented English.

All told, however, most of Melania’s time is spent in the shadow of the lurching, bellowing PR ogre that is Pres. Donald Trump. For the press and for a large proportion of the Trump-hating public, she is little more than a cardboard cutout, or a pretty face posted on a punching bag — the First Bimbo. Even her son Barron gets more positive attention than she does.

Is FLOTUS a Catholic?

Then, at an audience on Wednesday, May 24, Pope Francis blessed her rosary, which apparently had been her mother’s. As Kate Bennett of CNN put it, “That [Melania] even had rosary beads was news.” Some reporters thought the pope gave them to her. But popes don’t ordinarily give rosaries as gifts to people who they don’t know to be Catholic. Then, during a visit to the Bambino Gesù pediatric hospital, the First Lady spent time in prayer in the chapel, then tweeted about a boy whom she had visited using the hashtags #Blessings and #Faith. Suddenly, the media started wondering: Is Melania Trump a Catholic?

Yes, FLOTUS is a Catholic, the second such in US history. Spokesperson Stephanie Grisham confirmed it on Thursday, May 25. Pontificates Get Religion’s Terry Mattingly, “To say the least, it is interesting that mainstream (or church) journalists have not asked this question before, during the barrage of coverage that … greets someone who becomes First Lady.”

The answer to the question prompts more questions. For instance, we know Melania’s father, Viktor Knavs (pronounced like “Knauss”; Melanija Knavs Germanized her name for professional reasons), did not sponsor her baptism or First Communion because he had to be a Communist Party member to hold his job. What, then, were the circumstances of her religious formation? How and when did she attend Mass? Does she attend Mass regularly? Barron was baptized at the Episcopal church where Donald and Melania married; however, when he makes the move to DC, he’ll attend an Episcopal school where the Catholic kids slightly outnumber the Episcopalians. So is Melania raising Barron Catholic?

The Mystery of Melania Knauss

How much, really, do we know about the woman who was once a little girl growing up in a little town called Sevnica? Before Melania left Slovenia to pursue her career, Slovenia had to carve itself out of Yugoslavia over a course of five tumultuous years. What was it like to come to her majority in those heady times of the “Slovenian Spring”, as the Slovenes found their voice and struggled for their independence? What did Melania do during the Ten-Day War (26 June – 4 July 1991), as the tanks of the Yugoslav People’s Army rolled across her country? Up until then, did she have to hide her faith? Did it pose any challenges for her as a child?

And is there a story connected with the rosary Melania’s mother gave her — the rosary which she wore with her wedding dress and which was recently blessed by Francis?

Do we really know anything about Melania Trump, save for the usual fluff generated by PR flacks for consumption through celebrity gossip magazines and the Fashion section of the New York Times? Univision did some background, sketching a secretive person prone to inflating her accomplishments, but again came up with more questions than answers.

For the first time since Trump’s presidential campaign began, Melania Trump has gained a third dimension; she has become a person in her own right. Or, to put it more brutally truthful, we finally recognized the third dimension that had been there all along. It’s a third dimension packed with mystery, full of stories she hasn’t told (and may not be willing to tell). But it’s there, waiting for enterprising journalists to explore it.

A Real Catholic™ or a CINO?

Of course, haters gonna hate, and those who hate Pres. Trump are already busily engaged in finding reasons to declare her a CINO (“Catholic In Name Only”). “Melania Trump is not Catholic,” spluttered “Carol” on The American Catholic’s combox. “… So she said the *Our Father*! When have we seen her go to Mass on Sunday? Is he [sic] son baptized Catholic? She was married in a Palm Beach Church. I am not questioning her devotion to Our Lady — or her love of God. Please do not say she is a Catholic, or worse yet — a *practicing* Catholic!!!! This is a disgrace.” Another commenter suggested tongue-in-cheek (I think) that Melania be compelled to present her baptismal certificate just as Republicans demanded Fmr. Pres. Obama’s birth certificate. And this is The American Catholic, a blog that looks at doctrine through red-colored glasses!

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, it’s neither our job nor our right to kick “fake Catholics” to the curb. Since we know very little of what goes on within the Trump marriage, we don’t know what limitations it imposes on Melania’s ability to practice the faith. But no matter how much “Carol” and like-minded souls may fuss, so long as Melania was validly baptized and confirmed in the Latin-rite Church, it isn’t heretical to call her a Catholic. The definitions of heresy, schism, and apostasy — the only three sins that, according to Ven. Pius XII, separate one from the Body of Christ (Mystici Corporis § 23) — are found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church § 2089 and the Code of Canon Law § 751. Marrying a divorcé and failing to show up regularly for Mass may be grave sins, but they don’t qualify as either heresy or schism or apostasy.

The Dignity of Being Real People

In any event, I hope that this little revelation, as minor as it may seem to some, may be the catalyst which gets the MSM drilling into the Melania Trump story. What the drill reveals may not be pretty, if the Univision reportage is reliable. Nevertheless, we owe her, as we owe all celebrities, the dignity of being real, three-dimensional people. Even fashion models are children of God, created in His image (cf. Genesis 1:27) and thus endowed with a natural dignity incalculable by merely human measures.

And if her Catholicism is imperfect, that’s about par for the course. We call the Church a “hospital for sinners”; but we need to remember that hospitals don’t cure the sick by kicking them out. The only Christian church without sinners is an empty church. Or, as the joke goes, the Catholic Church is not full of hypocrites … there’s always room for more.

Dreher’s “Benedict Option” Not THAT Hard to Understand

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Wed, 17 May 2017 16:00:00 +0000

Monday, while perusing Big Pulpit, I came across a link to Deirdre Mundy’s Aleteia post, “Where [Rod] Dreher lost me on the ‘Benedict Option’”. I recently bought the book The Benedict Option: A Strategy For Christians in a Post-Christian Nation (New York: Sentinel Books) but hadn’t got around to reading it yet. I’d read a couple of his columns on the concept two years ago (and wrote a post about them); the basic idea seemed pretty clear to me at the time. However, intelligent people like Dr. John Zmirak and Austin Ruse showed quite clearly that they didn’t get it. Nevertheless, I read the book before reading Mundy’s piece.

Build an Ark? Right!

Reading the book was kind of a let-down. I agreed with everything Dreher wrote. In fact, I had written about many of the things he discusses and drawn pretty much the same conclusions. It was like I had paid $16.00 for the privilege of reading my opinions in someone else’s book. (Mind you, I’m not accusing Dreher of plagiarism!) The difference is, Dreher is a more experienced writer who uses fewer twenty-dollar words than I do, so his style is more accessible to the average reader. So it was like reading my opinions the way I should have written them. The Benedict Option concept is just not that hard to understand; it’s not Plato’s Republic or Cicero’s On Public Duties.

Having forearmed myself with the assurance that I indeed knew what Dreher was talking about, I then plunged into Mundy’s article to see where Dreher lost her. It turns out that her problem is with a simile Dreher conjured up in passing: “I believe that Christians now have got to realize that we’re living in a post-Christian civilization and take measures to build a kind of ark for ourselves with which to ride out the dark ages, to hold onto our faith, and tender the faith for such a time as light returns and civilization wants to hear the gospel again.”

Rebuts Mundy: “Here’s the problem: from a Catholic point of view, we already have a metaphorical Ark: The Church. We don’t need to build a new, more isolated ark to ride out what Dreher sees as a coming dark age. We can continue to live in the Ark we already have, as members of the body of Christ.” The rest of the article discusses ideas that Dreher covers in his book, but they’re written as if she’s contradicting him instead of agreeing with him. Sigh; some more hay litters the pavement of the public square as another straw man has the stuffing beaten out of it.

… What’s an Ark?

Dreher’s only real mistake, I’ve come to conclude, was in trying to give his main conception a catchy name. By invoking St. Benedict of Nursia, Dreher practically invites people to assume that “BenOp” requires monks, monasteries, and the saint’s Rule. Don’t get me wrong; Dreher uses the Benedictines, especially the monks who reside in modern-day Norcia, as a framing device for talking about various approaches to the coming storm. But monasteries as such aren’t required for BenOp strategies. Neither are monks. Neither is the Rule. Neither is agriculture, though Dreher believes that orthodox Christians eventually will be forced out of the professions and into low-paying blue-collar or manual labor.

Whence comes the “ark” imagery, then?

From at least the early nineteenth century onward, as each country or region sent a wave of immigrants to the U.S., they settled in rural “colonies” or were forced into ethnically and religiously homogeneous ghettoes. Anyone who grew up in a major city between 1945 and 1980 will probably know of a section of the city called “Little Italy” or “Little Bohemia” or “Little Poland”; my uncle once cracked that my mother’s family, the Cronins, were “related by marriage to half the Irishmen in North Omaha.” In such circumstances, maintaining strong religious practices was much easier, and often bloomed in ethnic religious festivals like Omaha’s annual Santa Lucia celebration.

But the neighborhood boundaries and ties of ethnic and religious solidarity could not keep the external culture from affecting, even infecting, the sons and daughters of immigrants. So when the post-World War II economic boom and the G.I. Bill allowed more Catholics to go on to college and into the professions, they took advantage of their newfound prosperity to flee for the suburbs, where they tried very hard to resemble their WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) neighbors. By the 1980s, many such neighborhoods were dead or moribund. Nevertheless, while they were strong, these neighborhoods were “arks” in which ethnic Catholicism rode out the discrimination of the surrounding culture for almost a century and a half.

The Church and the BenOp

Now, the Benedict Option is not “about” rebuilding the ethnic neighborhoods or planting new colonies. “If it is going to bring about a genuine renewal of Christian culture,” writes Dreher, “the Benedict Option will have to be centered on the life of the church. Everything else follows” (p. 101). Later, he continues the thought: “… the church can’t just be the place you go on Sundays — it must become the center of your life. … we should strive to be like [monks] in erasing as much as possible the false distinction between church and life” (p. 131).

One aspect that Dreher emphasizes early on is hospitality. One of Mundy’s arguments against Dreher is that “... we must recognize that the blessing of a ‘good well’ comes with great responsibility, because we are required to share. As Catholic communities, that means welcoming wanderers and strangers and letting them drink with us. ... Instead of withdrawing and keeping our water to ourselves, we can go out into the world and share it with crazy generosity, whether it comes in the form of our time, our companionship, or our prayers.”

But “keeping the water to ourselves” is not part of the Benedict Option. Discussing St. Benedict’s Rule as practiced by the monks of Norcia, Dreher states quite clearly, “A church or other Benedict Option community must be open to the world, to share the bounty of God’s love with those who lack it” (p. 72). And Dreher uses the example of a young woman driven to atheism by a strict family who was part of a very controlling community that lived in radical isolation and a near-paranoid suspicion of outsiders to illustrate the danger of idolizing family and community (cf. pp. 129, 138-9).

No Walls, No Hiding

Mundy’s mistake, I believe, is a mental conflation of monks with hermits. Eremitical orders such as the Carthusians barely have a community life as such. Most of their days are spent in isolation, even to the point of eating their meals separately, coming together only to pray and, every once in a while, have some kind of communal celebration. They rarely allow visitors. Cenobitic monastics such as the Benedictines live and work in community, and regularly admit visitors and pilgrims seeking spiritual counsel. The monks of the Middle Ages regularly tended to the spiritual needs of the communities that sprang up around them, including Masses and running schools.

In fairness, Mundy is not the only one to make such a mistake. I recall running across the headline of an atheist blog that gave a mocking subtitle to The Benedict Option: “Behind Walls and Hiding From Queer People”. However, Dreher not only denies that BenOp involves “hiding” in any sense but even predicts that most people sooner or later will face the choice of either “offering a pinch of incense to Caesar” or being impoverished and marginalized. The point of the BenOp, in any event, is to become a counterculture, and a counterculture can’t do its job properly if it’s completely disengaged from the dominant culture.

Why, oh why is this so hard to understand? What is it about the Benedict Option that has so many people, Catholic and non-Catholic alike, thrashing the bejaysus out of so many straw men?

The Coming of the Dark Ages

I believe the sticking point is not the concept itself but rather its central premiss — that we have lost the culture wars (for now, at least) and must prepare for an ugly, anti-Christian future. Dreher, after all, was the one who recognized the Law of Merited Impossibility: “It’s a complete absurdity to believe that Christians will suffer a single thing from the expansion of gay rights, and boy, do they deserve what they’re going to get.” It’s easier to shoot Dreher’s idea down than it is to debate whether or not his central premiss is flawed.

No one wants to admit that the Dark Ages are upon us. I believe the personality cult now sustaining Pres. Trump is the last, hysterical attempt of some to convince themselves that the fading twilight is really the first glimmer of dawn and that everything that has gone wrong in the last sixty years can be reversed with one gigantic tug at the levers of power. But it’s already too late; nothing Trump or the Republicans can accomplish in this next 3½ years will prevent the cascade failure of the West. The barbarians are already among us.

NYT: Trump Stole the Left’s License to BS

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Sat, 22 Apr 2017 03:00:00 +0000

I must apologize — I thought I’d written my last political commentary. But when I read Casey William’s April 17 New York Times think piece, “Has Trump Stolen Philosophy’s Critical Tools?”, my first impression was, “This is either very subtle satire or the most blatant exposition of cognitive dissonance ever.” The problem: Williams desperately wants to call Pres. Donald Trump a liar.

We’re used to this pattern by now: The president dresses up useful lies as “alternative facts” and decries uncomfortable realities as “fake news.” Stoking conservative passion and liberal fury, Trump stirs up confusion about the veracity of settled knowledge and, through sheer assertion, elevates belief to the status of truth.

Trump’s playbook should be familiar to any student of critical theory and philosophy. It often feels like Trump has stolen our ideas and weaponized them.

However, the very critical tools upon which the academic left has become dependent for intellectual life-support forbids appealing to objective reality to back the claim that Trump lies. After all, if there is such a thing as an objective reality, we can’t know it for certain. The left has their facts, and Trump has his. Under postmodern critique, pace Daniel P. Moynihan,[*] the right to one’s own opinion is the right to one’s own facts.

If You Can't Dazzle ’Em with Brilliance ...

Concludes Williams:

Even if we felt comfortable asserting the existence of something like “truth,” there’s no going back to the days when Americans agreed on matters of fact — when debates about policy were guided by a commitment to truth and reason. Indeed, critique shows us that it’s doubtful that those days, like Trump’s “great” America, ever existed. [Besides, those grapes are probably sour.]

For this very reason, these strategies remain useful, however much something like them may be misused, and however carelessly some critical theorists and philosophers have deployed them. Even in a “post-truth era,” a critical attitude allows us to question dominant systems of thought, whether they derive authority from an appearance of neutrality, objectivity or inevitability or from a more Trumpian appeal to alternative facts that dispense with empirical evidence. In a world where lawmakers still appeal to common sense to promote regressive policies, critique remains an important tool for anyone seeking to move past the status quo. [Bold font mine.—ASL]

Let’s take a moment to fully grasp Williams’ contention:

Although there is no such thing as “truth” (nice scare quotes, Williams), we must continue to falsify the opposition’s arguments so we can “move past the status quo” — although, by critique’s own basis, we can’t really know what the “status quo” is. Oh, wait a sec; it is whatever we say it is, isn’t it? No, wait — it’s whatever the evidence says it is … but what is the evidence measuring, reality or our perception of it? Is there a reality to measure? In the end, isn’t “empirical evidence” simply a device for rubber-stamping socially constructed truths? Isn’t reality itself a social construct? In the absence of truth, how can anything be “false”?

Never mind; in any event, critique is useful, if only because it baffles the hell out of the opposition.

“BS in the Service of the Cause”

Conservatives, particularly Catholic thinkers of the Aristotelian/Thomist school, have been pointing out for decades that postmodern critique is internally inconsistent and self-referentially incoherent. Philosophy qua philosophy has been sliding into blithering, prolix irrationality and voluntarism ever since Descartes’ Cogito; it’s hard to blame scientists for calling it “a waste of time.” That Williams cites Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Derrida as his philosophical authorities is hardly impressive since these authors are simply a few of those who have contributed to postmodern philosophy’s intellectual bankruptcy.

All of which criticisms the postmodern left airily dismisses with a wave of their subjectivist hand. The reason the progressive loves postmodern critique is that it allows them to use or discard empirical evidence, to adopt or discard arguments, and to use or abuse the rules of logic according to any criteria they decide is relevant, so long as the agenda triumphs. “What’s true for you isn’t necessarily true for me,” the postmodern leftist says with no hint of irony, “but what’s true for me had better damn well be true for you as well.” Short and sweet: postmodern critique is the leftists’ license to bullshit in the service of the Cause.

Moreover, so long as the right was dominated by Buckley-style conservatives, the left could hoist the Religious Right on their own moral and philosophical petards. To point out the obvious (to which Rush Limbaugh and Jack Davis at Western Journalism are oblivious), the left has held Christian conservatives to a higher standard precisely because Christian conservatives themselves demand that higher standard from others. “If the standard can’t be 100% achieved,” the left shouts, “it shouldn’t be attempted, let alone imposed.” (Yes, this is a perfect-solution fallacy. However, as Gloria Steinem smugly opined, “Logic is in the eye of the logician.”)

Now I Have a Machine Gun, Ho Ho Ho

But note my qualifier: so long as the right was dominated by Buckley-style conservatives. The right wing is now post-Christian and post-conservative. The Republican Party is now dominated by right-wing libertarians, populists, and ethno-nationalists, many of them secularists or at best cultural (that is, nominal) Christians. Such thinkers as the alt-right has also sat at the metaphorical feet of Kant and Nietzsche rather than Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas; to them, natural law is more akin to the law of the jungle than St. Paul’s “law written on the heart” (cf. Romans 2:12-16). Some are convinced that traditional Christian sexual morality is as utopian as anything the left asserts, and are quite willing to leave it behind for the sake of other agenda points.

Likewise, while alt-right thinkers may never have studied the deconstructionists, they managed to deconstruct critical social theory and adopt its essence, which Williams himself stated: “Fact is fiction, and anything goes.” What’s more, they managed to get at it without the necessity of writing insanely long and impenetrable journal articles to justify their bullshit. The ends are the only justification they need for the means.

Does that make them racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, or speciesists? So what? It’s just name-calling; you might as well call them big, fat poopyheads. Some are even proud of being “deplorables”. “Grow up, snowflakes,” they say; “we’re done with your emotional manipulation.”

Postmodern criticism has been weaponized for several decades. The left simply didn’t expect anyone to turn the weapon on them. Academic leftists have a curious, almost charming naïveté: for all their certainty that right-wingers are evil, unscrupulous bastards, they somehow assume the right is still moral enough to stop short of using their own tactics against them, and are shocked and dismayed when that assumption is proved wrong. For some reason, they think they’re exempt from the law of unintended consequences, and that nothing they do will ever come back to haunt them.

For example, judicial activism was meant to be a liberal ratchet, and so it was — until the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts came into full power. Only with the Hobby Lobby decision did the left stop praising the Court as a countermajoritarian force and start damning it as a threat to democracy. Liberals and atheists were perfectly content to chip away at the Judeo-Christian status quo little by little. It wasn’t until conservatives and Christians began winning small victories that incrementalism became foul play.

No One Has to Believe the Left

If Clausewitz’s dictum “War is politics carried out by other means” is true, then (being an identity) the reverse is also true: Politics is war by other means. And in a war, the one thing you don’t want is a level playing field; you want it tilted in your favor. The postmodern left especially fears a level playing field because, according to their dogma, the victim classes will always lose when the fight is on even terms. And that’s why they hate neutral principles and neutral definitions: nothing must threaten the simplistic one-sidedness of identity politics. Nevertheless, as the right becomes impervious to postmodern critique, the playing field will level naturally.

Why? Stated bluntly, no one has to believe anything the left says. Not now; not ever; not on any subject; not with any amount of evidence. You can’t simultaneously declare truth subjective and demand everyone recognize it; what’s by definition personal can’t by that same definition be general. Once you declare all truths to be socially constructed, you can’t prevent an opposition group from constructing truths you don’t like. You can only bullshit people for so long before they realize you’re bullshitting them and stop paying attention to you. You cannot wreck the temple of Objective Truth on Monday and expect us to still worship at the altar of Empirical Evidence on Tuesday.

The left doesn’t want to bring back objective truth, not because “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube,” but because there would be no way to shield the left’s dogma and agenda from its harsh, uncompromising light. Williams may insist that “critical ways of thinking demand that we approach knowledge with attention and humility.” However, the postmodern left isn’t humble enough to admit that they could be wrong, even wrong-headed, about anything — especially not about postmodern critique. But now the right doesn’t have to admit they’re wrong about anything, either. Objective truth is dead, and intellectual honesty is buried with it.

[*] The ascription to Pat Moynihan of the dictum, “You have a right to your own opinion, but you don’t have a right to your own facts,” is apocryphal. Too bad; I like to think he would have said it, and he probably agreed with it. Bernard Baruch did say something similar: “You have a right to your own opinion, but you do not have the right to be wrong in your facts.”

La Civiltà Cattolica and the “Spirit of the Age”

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Sat, 11 Feb 2017 15:00:00 +0000

Rev. Antonio Spadaro, SJ. (Photo: Magyar Kurír.)

Brace yourselves. Once again, someone in the Vatican has challenged Church doctrine in a way that implicates Pope Francis, on an issue about which he has already spoken — women’s ordination to the priesthood. (Surprise, surprise, the culprit is a Jesuit.) Arguably, the last pope to have total control over his staff was St. Gregory the Great. Certainly, it’s dubious whether any pope since Pius XII has had a curia and bureaucracy that were all striving to the same end. But even the most doughty of papal defenders must occasionally find himself irritated by Francis’ seeming unwillingness to ride herd on the Vatican administration.

This is Where We Came In …

On Tuesday, February 7, Sandro Magister reported on an article published in the Italian Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica, written by Fr. Giancarlo Pani, SJ. Titled “La Donna e il Diacono,” Magister claims that in the article, “Fr. Pani calmly rips to shreds the ‘last clear word’ — meaning the flat no — that John Paul II spoke against women’s priesthood.”

Yawn, you say; haven’t we seen this movie before, during the reigns of Benedict XVI and St. John Paul himself? Ah, says Magister, but this is different! You see, the Holy See inspects and authorizes every line it publishes! Plus, the editor is none other than papal confidant Fr. Antonio Spadaro, and Fr. Pani is not only a deputy editor but his closest colleague!

And Francis is the first “not to limit himself to what is already known, but wants to delve into a complex and relevant field, so that it may be the Spirit who guides the Church,” concludes La Civiltà Cattolica, evidently with the pope’s imprimatur.

The first rule in dealing with news from the Vatican: Not everybody in the Vatican is on the same page. In fact, going off-script is almost an intramural sport. Most bureaucracies have functionaries whose agendas differ from the person supposedly in charge of the mess. The Vatican differs only in that the subversion is more rampant and sometimes more blatant. Since Pius XII, the popes have as often had to work against the bureaucracy as with it. Nobody should assume that anybody in the Holy See does anything unusual with the full knowledge of the Pope, or even with the minimum knowledge of the next person up the food chain.

Causa Finita Est

To say that “the Holy See” inspects every line of La Civiltà Cattolica is not the same as to say Pope Francis reads a single word of it. In fact, the inspecting authority is the Secretariat of State’s Substitute for General Affairs, Abp. Giovanni Angelo Becciu, a Benedict appointee. But whatever inspection takes place is more likely done by the Assessor for General Affairs, Msgr. Paolo Borgia (no kidding!), or the Assessor’s subordinate. Either of these functionaries could have signed off on Pani’s piece without Francis’ knowledge, or even without having fully read it themselves.

“But … but Spadaro! Papal confidante!” you sputter angrily. Shrug; so what? It doesn’t follow that the confidences are mutual. Pani’s article could be a Franciscan trial balloon. However, La Civiltà Cattolica wasn’t completely orthodox even when Benedict sat in the Fisherman’s chair; the Secretariat hasn’t been a diligent censor of the magazine for many years. Magister wants to believe Francis is behind it because, like many people on both sides of the divide, Magister wants to believe the Pope is more progressive than he admits to. Francis said that Ordinatio Sacerdotalis “holds”, and said it without even an implicit “for now”. Why not take him at his word?

In other words, yes, yawn, because we have seen this movie before. At least once every one or two years, some Frightfully Important Theologian “rips [Ordinatio Sacerdotalis] to shreds,” along with the CDF’s ad dubium declaring its teaching infallible. This isn’t the only question on which Rome’s last word is treated as merely the latest, nor is it a recent phenomenon. On an issue involving grace, St. Augustine griped, “Two councils have been sent on this question to the Apostolic See, and rescripts have come from there as well. The matter is at an end; would that error too might sometime come to an end!” (Sermon 131, 10)

Recycled Garbage

Unfortunately, Magister doesn’t give us Pani’s full argument; even if the La Civiltà Cattolica article weren’t behind a paywall, I’m not conversant in Italian, let alone fluent. However, the points Pani brings up in Magister’s extract, the passage Magister believes is crucial, are hardly original or unanswerable: This is the twenty-first century. Everything has changed; everything old has been challenged and questioned; and we twenty-first-century theologians are certainly better informed than the nineteen centuries’ worth of saints, bishops, and popes who preceded us. They only appear to be stronger now because of the appearance of Vatican approval, which may or may not be only a matter of Vatican inattention.

But OS isn’t the only target in Pani’s sights. “Difficulties with the answer’s reception have created ‘tensions’ in relations between magisterium and theology over the connected problems. These are pertinent to the fundamental theology on infallibility.” Pani doesn’t explain himself further — or at least Magister’s extract doesn’t — except to say the ad dubium appealed to Lumen Gentium 25 for “the first time in history,” as if whether the appeal were the first or the forty-first made a difference in LG’s authoritative weight. The implication is that, unless an apostolic declaration passes muster with the ruck of academic theologians, it renders the Church’s doctrine on infallibility untenable.

Of course, the Catholic Church’s argument against ordaining women isn’t simply that she has never done so before. Read the CDF document Inter Insigniores, to which St. John Paul II referred in OS, for a fuller explanation. To the accusation that the refusal of ordination lowers women’s dignity, the pope countered with the example of the Blessed Virgin Mother, who “received neither the mission proper to the Apostles nor the ministerial priesthood” yet who bears dignity and reverence above all angels and saints (OS 3). Indeed, to tie women’s dignity and worth to their ability to be ordained is to give a left-handed tribute to clericalism.

The “Spirit of the Age”

Call it the appeal to novelty, or call it chronological snobbery. They’re two sides of the same coin: the fallacious assumption that what’s old is false or bad by dint of being old and what’s new is true and good for being new. Under such an assumption, any challenge is presumed prima faciae evidence that the old needs to be junked and the new installed in its place. And no such challenge is complete without the assertion that the Holy Spirit is leading the charge, often under the guise of the “spirit of the age”.

“One cannot always resort to the past,” Pani declaims, “as if only in the past are there indications of the Spirit.” But the point of tradition is the vital continuity between the teachings of today and the teachings of the apostles, not merely a blind reverence for bygone ways. We’re committed to preaching Christ’s gospel, not the latest fads and fashions of the academic world, and especially not those premised on a false anthropology in which the dignity of persons is contingent upon their access to political or economic power. If anything, the gospel proclaims the dignity of the powerless.

The “spirit of the age” is always trying to substitute the Conventional Wisdom for the apostolic tradition because it always finds in the Church’s doctrine and discipline a sign to be spoken against (cf. Luke 2:34). But going against the grain of the Conventional Wisdom is an essential part of spreading the gospel. “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles …. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:22-25).

Sign of Contradiction

The Catholic Church’s idea of the priest is intimately connected with her understanding of the Eucharist, the center of Catholic sacramental and liturgical life, and of the role of signs in the sacramental economy. If that understanding doesn’t square with current notions of truth about men and women, what of it? It’s part of the Church’s mission on earth to be a sign of contradiction and not to seek the world’s approval. The Church reserves her worship for God; she doesn’t need to sacrifice at the altars of Conventional Wisdom and Scholarly Opinion.

Candidly, my impression of Pope Francis is that, whatever his deficiencies are, he strives too hard for personal transparency to take deliberate advantage of the plausible deniability offered by Vatican internal politics. But I also question his judgment about the people with which he surrounds himself; particularly, Fr. Spadaro. Because if “La Donna e il Diacono” isn’t Francis’ own trial balloon, then we must question Spadaro’s agenda, as well as those of Abp. Becciu and Msgr. Borgia. The Pope needs a confidante who is on the same page as he is, not striving to undermine his papacy.

The Chittister Challenge 2: Supply, Demand, and the “Culture of Life”

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Wed, 01 Feb 2017 15:00:00 +0000

On Saturday, January 28, Joe Heschmeyer published an essay, “Seven Answers to the ‘Pro-Lifers are just Pro-Birth’ Argument,” in his blog Shameless Popery. The essay offers rebuttals to a meme featuring the quote from Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB, that I wrote of a couple of years ago. I have a lot of respect and admiration for Joe, who is a student at the Pontifical American College in Vatican City (and, I believe, should be coming up on his transitional diaconate this year). I earnestly commend the essay to your attention; it’s very well balanced in its treatment of the argument.

Supply and Demand

However, Joe’s essay did prompt me to do a little more drilling on the subject, to embrace a little more of the political context in which the argument arises. The recent elections brought to the surface a long-standing tension between two different camps within the pro-life movement, camps which I will for brevity’s sake call the supply-side and demand-side branches. While the meme Joe dissects arose in a pro-abortion context, the quote has also had currency among demand-side pro-lifers.

The supply-side pro-life camp, which we could also call the first-wave movement, is mostly concerned with the legality of abortion and euthanasia, along with some related issues such as assisted suicide, cloning, IVF, and contraception. Politically, they tend to be older and more conservative or right-wing libertarian. As Joe rightly points out, conservatives are more likely to donate time and money to support charitable causes than are liberals, so it’s not like they’re stingy. However, precisely because their politics are more conservative, their view of the scope of “pro-life” is, for want of a more charitable word, narrower. They highly resist the importation of other issues, such as Syrian refugees or undocumented immigrants, into the pro-life purview and refuse the creation of government intervention programs. Because their concern is mostly with the legal and political mechanisms permitting the “death industry” to exist, one can say they seek to shut off the supply.

By contrast, the demand-side camp or second-wave movement tends to be younger, as well as more moderate to liberal in their politics though less willing to affiliate with either party or identify with either ideology. The demand-siders recognize that economic and social issues often drive the choice for death; by addressing those issues, they seek to reduce the demand. For this reason, they’re more likely to support government intervention and more willing to pay the taxes required to support the efforts. The pro-life movement as a whole is concerned with what Vice-President Mike Pence called “[society’s] most vulnerable, the aged, the infirm, the disabled, and the unborn.” The second-wave movement, influenced by the consistent life ethic articulated most notably by Cdl. Joseph Bernardin and in St. John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae, extends its recognition of vulnerability to immigrants, refugees, the homeless, and other socially marginalized people.[*]

Baby-Feet Pins and Kitchen Sinks

Now, it should be obvious that, while demand is arguably the more important factor in economics, the presence of supply activates hidden (or potential) demand; as a consequence, both supply and demand must be treated to end the legal and cultural shelters of the “death industry”. And I’m afraid I may have given the false impression that the first wave doesn’t care about the demand while the second wave isn’t fussed about the supply.

However, the second wave’s extension of the pro-life scope to other vulnerabilities has led first-wavers to accuse them of being covert pro-choicers out to “kitchen sink” the movement to death by overloading it with “extraneous” issues. In response, the first-wavers’ refusal to acknowledge other vulnerabilities as legitimate pro-life issues has led second-wavers to accuse them of giving Republican politicians a pass on other legitimate concerns so long as said politicians wear the baby-feet pin on their lapels — they are “pro-birth but not pro-life”.

Which accusation came first, the kitchen sink or the pass? The answer to that chicken-and-egg question is irrelevant and unproductive. What is relevant is that the last election cycle intensified the disagreement between the supply- and demand-siders, particularly after the formal movement endorsed Donald Trump as its champion. And if there’s anything I disagree with in Joe’s analysis, it’s his contention that “the real debate is about the means, not the ends.” All too often, debates about the means reveal divergent views of the ends.

Differing on Means and Ends

For instance, let’s take education: Both liberal and conservative agree in principle that children should be educated. However:

The conservative tends to consider education the responsibility of the parents as their personal investment in the child’s future, and therefore not a legitimate government interest. By contrast, the liberal considers education the responsibility of society as an investment in the society’s future and regards the government as society’s proxy.
Moreover, the conservative tends to consider education a good, but not a right or an entitlement, and doesn’t consider equality of education outcomes a practical goal. The liberal holds children equally entitled to the same quality education and will support policies that boost the outcomes of the economically disadvantaged.
In addition, despite their personal generosity in donating time and money to charities, conservatives tend to regard the right to own property as absolute and any tax increase as an encroachment of that right — even as a kind of theft. Liberals, on the other hand, don’t regard the right of property as absolute and tend to use the government to socialize the costs of their altruism; they tend to regard their willingness to pay higher taxes as a kind of self-sacrifice.
Above all, both sides recognize that formal education reinforces desired community values. Liberals, therefore, push for programs that benefit public education, where they control the values agenda, while conservatives push for programs that benefit private education and homeschooling, where their values hold sway.

This is just a sample of how conservatives and liberals disagree not only about means but also about ends, particularly the telos, or final cause, of government. While demand-siders tend to avoid the “liberal” label, in many respects they’re alienated from the conservative viewpoint. Complicating the matter: while the second-wavers fully adopt the consistent life ethic and talk about building a “culture of life”, a handful of policy preferences and a handy catchphrase do not a coherent philosophy make.

Moreover, while the second wave is leaving old political alignments behind, it isn’t clear that they’ve shaken off the assumptions of classical liberalism — i.e., the autonomous individual making temporary “social contracts” based on self-interest and requiring laws enforced by a strong State to check his more destructive impulses. If not, then the consistent life ethic — indeed, the pro-life movement as a whole — is a healthy branch trying to graft itself onto a sick and dying tree. (See Patrick J. Deneen’s “Unsustainable Liberalism” for the full argument behind this.)

Sr. Joan’s Challenge

In summary: Most of Joe Heschmeyer’s rebuttal to the “‘pro-life’ is just ‘pro-birth’” argument is sane, logical, and charitable, and is as well directed at demand-side pro-lifers as it is against pro-aborts. However, his final argument — that the differences are over means rather than ends — is erroneous. Conservatives and liberals may hold a couple of premisses in common from classical liberalism; however, in many if not most respects, their world-views and value systems are as radically different as are charity and altruism. More importantly, because the liberal premisses they hold in common lead to a fatal contradiction and conflict — in Deneen’s words, “a future in which extreme license invites extreme oppression” — it is beyond the ability of either ideology to produce a “culture of life”.

At the root of it, while Sr. Joan’s words are unfair, uncharitable, fallacious, and inflammatory, the challenge they pose to the pro-life movement is undeniable: to be “pro-life” has to mean something more than that we want to prevent (some of) the vulnerable from being killed. For the “culture of life” to be more than a catchphrase, we must think through all the implications of what it means, how it would affect our social and economic lives, how it would be promoted, enacted, and sustained as a reality. In other words, the “culture of life” needs more than a few preferred policies dictated by one or the other of our ideologies — it must become an ideology in itself, with an articulated philosophical blueprint by which we can make it real.

And we need it quickly, before the internal logic of classical liberalism drives us through the gates of Dystopia.

[*] In a sense, to call demand-siders a “second wave” is a little misleading, as the consistent life ethic has had its advocates since Roe v. Wade. However, it’s the most significant difference between younger and older members of the pro-life movement.

The Absurdity of “Values-Free” Economics

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Sat, 21 Jan 2017 15:00:00 +0000

Image source: marketoracle.co.uk.

While reading John C. Médaille’s Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Healthcare, Deficits, and More (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2010), I couldn’t help thinking of Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry’s admission three years ago that “economists actually know very, very little, and that a lot of what we thought we knew [prior to the last recession] turned out to be wrong.” Yet the defenders of what Gobry calls “the Washington consensus” still talk and think as though their economic dicta were enshrouded in papal infallibility. Toward a Truly Free Market helped me to realize that the economists were wrong because the entire discipline is not (and never could be) “values-free”; the very notion is inherently absurd. And the values enshrined in modern economic theory not only blind economists to impending market failures but make them inevitable.

What is Distributism?

Distributism holds that a community’s economic health is better secured when the ownership of capital — the means of production, including everything from office ball-point pens to factories, especially land — is spread out (distributed) widely among the population. It champions smaller, more localized businesses, especially cooperatives and employee-owned corporations, and considers globalism and the huge multinational conglomerates positive evils.

Distributism is not, however, a form of socialism. It rejects state ownership of property and demands a reordering of government power to prioritize the community over the nation. Nor does distributism necessarily require a forced redistribution of capital by the government, though Médaille doesn’t rule it out (see pp. 243-245).

The theory began with the critiques of both capitalism and socialism by G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. In its modern form, though, it also owes much to the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, beginning with Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum.

Having said that, I need to make two further points: 1) One need not be a Catholic to appreciate the theory, nor does the theory require a Catholic nation-state or theocracy. 2) Distributist theory may have begun with what George Bernard Shaw called “the Chesterbelloc”, but it didn’t stop there; critiques of distributism can’t be pertinent if all the critic reads is The Servile State or What’s Wrong with the World.

Positive or Normative?

Now, to say that Médaille adopts the language of economists is not to say he fully adopts the methods or rationale of the profession. Indeed, a good third of the pages are devoted to criticizing economists’ assumptions and definitions. And to say he has adopted the language is not to say he’s cast the moral arguments aside.

In discussing economics as a science, Médaille discards the question of whether economics is positive or normative as meaningless because the sciences are responsible to their own methodology (positive) and to the higher sciences (normative). “Every science, insofar as it really is a science, is both positive and normative” (p. 24).

As for sticking to the facts and avoiding values, Médaille asserts, “A realm of pure ‘facticity’ in human affairs is doubtful. … The theoretical framework always involves some values” (pp. 30-31). In particular, the framework assumes a telos, a final cause or purpose for economic activity, and can’t describe a dysfunction without assuming a proper function:

The major division of the sciences, then, is not the normative-positive duality, but a division based on the object of the sciences, whether they are merely physical or fully human. For the physical sciences, we need only examine the physical world to note the relationships and regularities, and we have, in most cases, ample room for discovering laws and testing them empirically. But when we deal with the humane sciences, the task becomes more complex, for a simple examination of persons cannot be undertaken without first determining what a “right” state of affairs ought to be. For example, if we practice medicine, we must have some idea of what good health is; we must have some normative state the departure from which constitutes disease. (pp. 31-32)

“Values-Free” or “Values-Hidden”?

We are moral, social, and relational beings. Necessarily, then, our economic transactions will reflect our values and relationships with each other. Moreover, we can make choices and change our behavior because that’s how we adapt to different environments.

It will not do, then, to pretend the laws of economics are as rigidly deterministic as the laws of physics or chemistry. They may describe what we do now, at least on average (though this assertion loses some credibility as Médaille dissects certain economic principles). But it doesn’t follow that they describe what we can’t help doing, or what we must necessarily do.

Thus, we can’t avoid the moral debate by invoking the shield of a Values-Free Science, since it invariably means a Values-Hidden Science. In reality, the so-called “is-ought problem” is a sham, a Trojan horse by which the empiricist, consciously or not, imposes his values on the discussion by smuggling them in under the cover of his facts and theories. The sham is particularly irritating when it’s foisted on us by conservative Christians, such as in the Acton Institute blog or First Things, who assert voluntarism in the bedroom but hide behind determinism in the market. You either believe in free will or you don’t.

Distributive Justice and Economics

But to assert that we do have the capacity to make independent choices isn’t to deny that we can be conditioned into different patterns of behavior. For example, mass marketing has effectively “engineered” us into the lazy, self-centered, materialistic slobs we are today. Without the capability to change our behavior, “social engineering” would be an exercise in futility.

Because our values, attitudes, and beliefs impact our economic decisions, creating a healthy economy would necessarily require “engineering” our society into holding and acting on those values that support the healthy economy. But it also follows that if the values we choose don’t lead to a healthy economy, then the values themselves are to blame because they don’t reflect the full truth of the human person.

The question then becomes, “What would be the premier sign of an economy in a healthy, normative state, and what value would it reflect?” The most obvious candidate is distributive justice: What I get for what I give is what I ought to get.

If we stick to our Humean guns and insist that we can’t import values into an essentially descriptive discipline, then a normative description of economic health is completely irrelevant and out of court. Implicitly, what we do get is always what we ought to get. There can be no such thing as economic rent, or usury, or predatory pricing, let alone a just wage, because everyone in the economy is always doing what they ought to be doing. There can be no positive dysfunction without a normative concept of proper function. A truly “values-free” economics couldn’t tell us whether the economy is serving its telos well or badly because it couldn’t tell us what that final purpose is or why it should be served at all.

Beyond the Transactions

Whatever the economist’s vision of an ideal economy is — whether it’s a Randian Laissez-Faire 2.0 or a Western European-style democratic socialism — the economist has to have an operational definition of distributive justice in economic transactions that the ideal economy would meet. He would also have to have operational definitions of the values and mores that would support such an economy so it fulfills its telos. But the economist must be more ambitious than this and look beyond the confines of mere transactions because the human person doesn’t exist solely to produce and consume.

For instance, Médaille points out that modern economic theory doesn’t know where labor comes from, what it costs to “produce” and “maintain”, or whether it “depreciates”, while it would account for all these factors in any other commodity. “Therefore,” Médaille scathingly concludes, “labor — and the family — does not even gain the dignity of a bar of pig iron in modern economic theory” (pp. 39-41; see also pp. 98-99).

As well, economists are dimly aware that consumers don’t have ever-full purses and that you can’t pay workers once for all time but hasn’t quite connected the dots to recognize the effect of stagnant wages on demand. To paraphrase Chesterton, if you cut down what the employee earns, you cut down what the customer can spend.

Distributism, by contrast, posits the family as the fundamental social unit (and therefore the fundamental economic unit), and recognizes that they too have an impact on the economy, not simply as consumers but as producers of labor. The distributist concept of the just wage reflects that primacy. Defined by Leo XIII, it is “an amount sufficient to support a ‘thrifty and upright’ worker and his family without having to put his wife and children out as paid labor. Furthermore, the wage must be sufficient to allow a thrifty worker to save and acquire some property of his own” (Médaille, p. 127; cf. RN 63, 65). A just wage would provide workers more comfort and support the total distributist economy better than does the paltry dresser change mandated by law under the present system.

Conclusion

In mathematics, a state of distributive justice is a state of balance represented by an “equals” sign, such as the point where demand at a given price equals supply at the same price. However, the hidden values of modern economic theory treat some transactions as inherently balanced (e.g., wages, interest-bearing loans), in effect refusing to recognize that imbalance can not only occur but even be baked into all transactions of the type. Furthermore, it treats some social detriments arising from imbalance as not only inevitable but necessary prices to pay for the benefits the system does provide. At the same time, it allows for — and even mandates — policies that increase imbalance.

As a result, the economy described and driven by modern economic theory can never produce a state of total systemic equilibrium and therefore must eventually fail, even on its own terms. Call the equilibrium balance and no one bats an eye; call it justice and everyone loses their minds. But economic theorists treat some injustices as laudable, some as inevitable, and some as invisible precisely because they’ve dismissed distributive justice as an irrelevant moral value. “… [An] unjust act by which a man has profited is not attributed to any vice except Injustice” (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1130a). There can be no economic equilibrium so long as economic injustices are permitted, even encouraged, to flourish.

Distributism, then, seeks to return balance to the whole system by returning balance to the individual parts, by making distributive justice the telos of the system. Moreover, it properly situates its economic theory within the broader context of a social theory, because economic justice can’t be understood apart from social justice. Above all, distributists rid themselves of the absurd pretense that transactions take place in a moral vacuum, driven by a preter-real Hegelian force called “the market”, and explicitly declare the values which support their economic ideal.

Until the defenders of the present system do the same, they will never understand why they can’t predict market failures.

About Those Participation Trophies …

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 15:00:00 +0000

Dear Cody,

I’ve seen the message you left for “People Older Than Me” on behalf of “People Younger Than Me”, which has had over 331,000 views at this writing [11/19/16]. For the benefit of everyone else, let me repeat it:

Dear People Older Than Me:

Shut up about the f**king participation trophies. We didn’t ask for them. We didn’t want them. We didn’t cherish them and polish them while thinking about what special, gifted children we are. They were annoying clutter on our shelves that we had to throw out in secret so we wouldn’t hurt YOUR feelings. And if we knew back then that you were gonna bring it up every time you disagreed with someone under 40 for the rest of f**king time, we would have told you where to shove that cheap plastic statue.

Sincerely,
People Younger Than Me

Mass Immaturity

Cody, I’m sure you’re sick of the references to the participation trophies. As a friend of mine pointed out, only the really little kids just starting Little League got participation trophies. Eventually, they went out with the ball tee, and you had to learn to play to win just as you had to learn how to hit a pitch. Which is to say, you had to learn to risk losing just as you learned to risk getting hit by a pitch. Participating is a minimum requirement; getting a trophy for it is like receiving an award for putting on your pants.

Just to show I get the larger point, I’m sure you’re also tired of the sneering references to “safe spaces” and trigger warnings and being called “delicate snowflakes”. I suppose it’s also our fault that many people of your generation come to adulthood ill-equipped, lacking confidence, self-esteem, and the normal skills to cope with adversity, unprepared to accept the risks that are part of life in an unsafe world. And if your cohort has shown some rotten behavior as a result of the recent election, I must admit many adults haven’t shown mature behavior either before or after the election.

But in case you missed it, Cody, that was the real point of the “participation trophy” reference — not that your cohort thinks of themselves as special, gifted people, but rather that they throw temper tantrums or break out in noisy tears like spoiled, entitled brats at the least sign of opposition. You’re angry, sad, or afraid? So what; it’s still unacceptable. When you have these episodes of mass immaturity, that’s when we start talking about participation trophies. We don’t simply disagree with you; we find your manner of disagreement absurd and contemptible. No one has to take you seriously just because you do.

Welcome to Adult Life

So you resent having the participation trophies shoved in your faces. You can stew in your resentment at the unfairness of it all for the rest of your lives, or you can learn to live with the fact that life won’t be fair just because you want it to be. There are times when fairness is simply irrelevant as a standard. And there are other times when the definition of justice depends on whether you’re the accuser or the accused. There will be times when you’ll want to scream, “I shouldn’t have to be/do/suffer this!” — but you will have to be/do/suffer it, like it or not, no matter what kind of fit you throw. That’s what we adults mean by the phrase, “It is what it is.” You’re not the only person who’s ever had to eat a crapburger; odds are, you’ll have to eat a few more before you die.

Welcome to adult life, Cody, where no one has to empathize with you, no one has to agree with you, no one has to like you, and no one has to particularly care that you exist. Welcome to adult life, where your peers give you respect and trust only on the condition that you continue to earn them. Welcome to adult life, where discussions are two-way streets, and you have to persuade others to see things your way. Welcome to adult life, where no one has to fix anything for you to make your life better, and where an inability to cope with stress, opposition, disappointment, or failure is detrimental to survival.

Welcome to the real world, Cody, where you can’t win without risking defeat, you can’t love others without risking hurt feelings, and you can’t fight without risking injury to yourself. Participation is only the beginning, not an end in itself.

Don’t ask for help, you’re all alone
Pressure!
You’ll have to listen to your own
Pressure!
I’m sure you’ll have some cosmic rationale
But here you are in the ninth
Two men out and three men on
Nowhere to look but inside
Where we all respond to
Pressure!
(Billy Joel, “Pressure” [1982])

What Are You Going to Do About It?

So okay, we older folk are to blame for coddling you when we should have been training you for adulthood. The question is, what are you going to do about it?

Whether you’ve got the adult skill set or not, Cody, you and your age-peers are adults now, and people will expect adult behavior from you even when they themselves aren’t good at adulting. You’re beyond the point where your parents, your teachers, your bosses, or your mentors can “fix” you. As for the government — is there anything they can fix? Whatever the age of majority is in your state, if you’re past it, you will be held responsible for your acts. And you won’t be able to evade that responsibility by blaming others for your behavior.

By no means am I saying you shouldn’t care about social problems, or that you should give up trying to make the world a better place. But you won’t make the world better by stamping your feet and demanding we do things your way. Our opinions and votes didn’t stop mattering simply because you crossed the legal border between childhood and adulthood.

And, believe it or not, your opinions aren’t infallible just because you’ve been to school. There are many intelligent, educated adults who are certain the schools have indoctrinated your generation in a highly-flawed worldview while denying you training in critical thinking skills. (Coincidence? Perhaps.) Whether that’s true or not, the fact remains that you’ll have to deal with our disagreement with you for so long as we live … which won’t be “for the rest of f**king time”.

You are Our Worst Legacy

Because the fact also remains that eventually we’ll be forced by our mortality to hand over responsibility for the world to you. That’s the fact that scares us most of all, the fear that lies behind the scathing, mocking references to participation trophies. Of all the things we’ve done to leave this world a worse place than we found it, the worst legacy we’ll leave the world is you — a generation of “delicate snowflakes and manipulative narcissists”, a generation of narrow-minded, culturally ignorant androids ready to destroy Western civilization but not possessing the emotional or intellectual tools to build anything positive and enduring upon its ruins.

And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more ‘drive’, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or ‘creativity’. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests [i.e., magnanimity] and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. (C.S. Lewis, “Men Without Chests”, The Abolition of Man)

Cody, I’m sorry we older people dealt you and your generation such a crappy hand. I’m sorry the adults in your young life were so busy trying to protect you from the ugliness of the world that they failed to teach you the skills to cope with it. I’m sorry they were so concerned about maintaining your childhood innocence for as long as possible that they failed to prepare you for adult challenges and responsibilities. And I’m sorry that after 1,360 or so words I can only offer you what could have been said less sympathetically in four: “Sucks to be you.”

Life Isn’t Fair

But there it is: if you want us to take you seriously as adults, you’ll have to learn to behave like adults. In fact, if you really want to leave a better world behind you, you’ll have to learn to behave better than us Older People. And you’ll have to do it without our help. After all, we’re the ones who gave you those participation trophies you hated so much in the first place.

No, it isn’t fair. That’s what makes adult life such a bitch — it’s full of imperfect people like you and me who create obstacles for others to deal with. Participation, however, is not an option. It’s a minimum requirement.

Sincerely,

An Older Person

Trump’s Plan: “Make America an Oligarchy”

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Mon, 14 Nov 2016 15:00:00 +0000

I published Friday’s post a couple days later than I wanted to because my home Internet connection was down. In that post, I reflected on the degree to which elite arrogance had led to Donald Trump’s astonishing victory. But for anyone who thought voting for Trump was a vote for reform, I have news for you: We’re about to enshrine an oligarchy in power, where they can finish the wrecking of the American economic base. And We the People made it happen.

The Triumph of Neoliberalism

While liberals were wrecking windows and cars in a heartwarming display of love and inclusiveness, wearing safety pins for solidarity (because they don’t need them to hold their diapers together), and boomers and Gen-Xers were displaying their contrasting maturity and level-headedness by abusing Hispanics and committing hate crimes, the President-elect was putting a team together of the very people he promised to kick out of Washington to help him plan out the pillaging of the American economy and environment on behalf of the 1%. Speaking of promises, Trump is thinking of keeping some of Obamacare in place — most likely, the parts that keep your rates jacked up, while disposing of those parts that impose costs on the rich.

While you all were fretting over whether Trump would turn SCOTUS to the far right or Hillary would turn it to the far left, whether Christians would be herded into re-education camps or undocumenteds into deportation camps, whether we’d build a wall between us and Mexico or tear down the walls between “gendered” bathrooms, you missed the elements of Trump’s platform which signaled that he really is as much a member of the Establishment as Clinton … and that he really doesn’t empathize with the lower classes. All Trump’s race-baiting, rabble-rousing rhetoric was to distract you from the least appealing feature of his platform — his tax plan.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, it’s by no means unfair or unreasonable for those who own 89% of the nation’s assets and 95% of our financial wealth to pay 2/3rds or more of the government’s expenses. Those who rape — er, reap — more of the benefit of the laws should pay more for the establishment which guarantees those benefits. But Trump’s tax plan ignores all that. As Paul Waldman explains, “Trump’s tax plan would give 47 percent of its benefits to the richest one percent of taxpayers. Paul Ryan’s tax plan is even purer — it gives 76 percent of its cuts to the richest one percent in its first year, and by 2025 would feed 99.6 percent of its benefits to the top 1 percent.” Dodd-Frank is slated to be axed, freeing the financial industry to make risky gambles with other people’s money once more. And while there won’t exactly be an “energy-regulation bonfire”, expect clean-energy initiatives to be cut.

More Money to Buy Competitors

But giving the 1% all that money will create a lot of jobs, won’t it? Actually, no; investors will be under no obligation to put that money in fixed assets or infrastructure improvements. Economist Jordan Brennan points out that, since 1980, investment has been increasingly devoted to stock repurchases, mergers, and acquisitions rather than capital investments — i.e., investments that would actually create a significant number of jobs.

Unlike investment in fixed assets, which is linked with job creation, M&A [mergers and acquisitions] merely redistributes corporate ownership claims between proprietors. The motivation for M&A is straightforward: large firms absorb the income stream of the firms they acquire while reducing competitive pressure, which increases their market power.

In the century spanning 1895 through 1990, for every dollar spent on fixed asset investment, American business spent an average of just 18 cents on M&A. In the period since 1990, for every dollar spent on fixed asset investment an average of 68 cents was spent on M&A — a four-fold increase. …

At the same time, the 100 largest firms have spent more repurchasing their own stock than they have on machinery and equipment. And because many executives have stock options in their contracts, the share price inflation associated with stock repurchase has led to soaring executive compensation.

“Well, Raise My Economic Rent!”

Remember that the Republicans are looking to get rid of green regulations and initiatives? Economist Didier Jacobs found that “American industries that produce more billionaire wealth than average relative to their size share one of three characteristics:

“They depend heavily on the state whether through government procurement, licenses, or subsidies, and are therefore prone to rent-seeking [see below]. This category includes for instance oil, gas and mining, gambling, or forestry [italics mine.—ASL].
“They are plagued by market failures such as imperfect information, like finance,[*] or by the combination of intellectual property and so-called “network externalities”, which create monopolies like those that pervade the IT industry and industries prone to fads like fashion and music.
“The billionaire wealth they have generated is largely inherited.”

Economic rent is unearned income. In the strict sense, it’s money paid in excess of the market value of the goods and services offered; in a looser sense, it refers to any exchange in which what the recipient gives in exchange is substantially of lesser value than what they receive.[†] It’s the closest phenomenon in economics to the free lunch people claim there’s no such thing as. Rent-seeking (behavior), then, is “the use of the resources of a company, an organization or an individual to obtain economic gain from others without reciprocating any benefits to society through wealth creation.”

In case you missed the point of this economics lesson, let me spell it out for you: Economic rent doesn’t create wealth; it simply transfers wealth from the many to the few. An outstanding example of economic rent is the increasing price of several drugs out of proportion to the actual costs of manufacture, due at least in part to government-protected market exclusivities which effectively create mini-monopolies. Subsidies are direct rent; tax breaks are indirect, but economic rent nevertheless. Economic rent transforms capitalists from job creators to rentiers, upper-class leeches who take far more from the commonwealth than they give.

Wealth Concentration Kills Economic Growth

Understand, Trump, Ryan et al. really do believe what they’re doing will work for the economy as a whole; the fact that it will benefit their buddies in the 1% is merely gravy. And, as Michael Hudson notes, there’s a cottage industry within the economist community dedicated to upholding the rentier class’ claims. But neoliberal economics doesn’t work, except as a means for sucking wealth out of the middle classes and increasing inequality. Wealth concentration kills economic growth because it reduces the ability of the lower 80% to consume, and consumption drives the economy.

However, as economist Sally Goerner observes, “What we’re now facing is a combination of: 1) people who still believe [in neoliberal economic theory]; and 2) people who doubt, but: a) would have to sacrifice their livelihood to act on it; or, b) are willing to leave the system but don’t necessarily know what comes next.”

Scientifically speaking, oligarchies always collapse because they are designed to extract wealth from the lower levels of society, concentrate it at the top, and block adaptation by concentrating oligarchic power as well. Though it may take some time, extraction eventually eviscerates the productive levels of society, and the system becomes increasingly brittle.

The Cycle of Oligarchic Corruption

According to Goerner, oligarchic corruption follows a cycle:

Economic Royalists infiltrate critical institutions and rig political and economic systems to favor elites.
Rigged systems erode the health of the larger society, and signs of crisis proliferate:

Elite power and well-being increase and is manifested in displays of wealth;
Elites become heavily focused on maintaining a monopoly on power inside the society; laws become more advantageous to elites, and penalties for the larger public become more draconian;
The middle class evaporates;
The “misery index” mushrooms, witnessed by increasing rates of homicide, suicide, illness, homelessness, and drug/alcohol abuse;
Ecological disasters increase as short-term focus pushes ravenous exploitation of resources;
There’s a resurgence of conservatism and fundamentalist religion as once golden theories are brought back to counter decay, but these are usually in a corrupted form that accelerates decline.

The crisis reaches a breaking point, and seemingly small events trigger popular frustration into a transformative change. If the society enacts effective reforms, it enters a new stage of development. If it fails to enact reforms, crisis leads to regression and possibly collapse.
Over time, transformed societies forget why they implemented reforms; Economic Royalists creep back and the cycle starts anew.

So yes, Trump and the Republicans are planning the completion of our conversion from a democratic republic to an oligarchy. But don’t get the idea that Hillary Clinton would have stopped it. Neoliberalism is distinct from our usual understanding of liberalism because it’s closer to the classic economic liberalism of the 18th and 19th centuries; it’s laissez-faire capitalism with more complex mathematical models and has no reference to culture wars. The Fabian socialism of the Democrat Part doesn’t truly address the market failures or the rent-seeking of the wealthy; the Democrat elite is almost as economically neoliberal as is the Republican elite. Clinton, an Establishment robot to the bottom of her soul-facsimile, would have applied some brakes but not halted the oligarchic extraction of wealth.

You’ve Been Conned

Trump is not a real reformer. He’s no Hitler, either. Hitler at least had a complete (albeit irrational) motivating ideology; “Make America Great Again” is a catchphrase, nothing more. Much of what Trump has said he’ll do in his first 100 days either has little to no support among the Republicans or is impractical under existing laws and conditions. For all his Nietzschean scorn for the weak and admiration of power, Trump is clearly out of his element and is about to find out how little real control the President has over the way the system is rigged.

That’s not to say Trump can’t do any damage while he’s at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Nor is it to say that the fears many people have for the future aren’t well-founded. But don’t expect Roe v. Wade or Obergefell v. Hodges to be overturned anytime within the next two decades, let alone within Trump’s Administration. Even if Trump gets two or more SCOTUS picks, expect those justices to help quash any attempt to base immigration restrictions on religion.

But also don’t expect your wallet to become fatter any time soon. You may see a small benefit from the tax cuts. But don’t expect well-paying factory jobs to come back like the buffalo. Don’t expect health care or post-secondary education to become more affordable. Don’t expect your insurance or medication costs to dwindle. And don’t expect to be able to afford to live on Social Security when you qualify for whatever chump change “full benefits” will mean. In fact, if some Republicans have their way, when you send your children off to work, it won’t be for their personal development but for the family’s survival.

That’s what the Trumpsters voted for — the complete loss of everything gained for the middle class since the end of World War II. You wanted 1959; you’ll get 1929. And by the time you figure out that you’ve been conned, it’ll be too late.

[*] Jacobs lists health care services as an industry prone to “asymmetries of information”.

[†] Yes, interest qualifies as economic rent, though few people will admit to it. It’s a drain on disposable income that’s neither consumption nor savings, and as such isn’t reflected in the most basic economic equations.

Message to the Elite: “You’re Running the Country Wrong”

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Sat, 12 Nov 2016 01:22:00 +0000

As I watched ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and his crew of talking heads begin the autopsy on the election late Tuesday night, I felt some dark satisfaction. I hadn’t been the only self-appointed expert caught flat-footed by Donald Trump’s and the Republicans’ victory. Most of the elite, the Only People Whose Opinions Count, were humiliated by an over-glorified carnival huckster who (in our wise estimation) did just about everything wrong that could be done wrong and still pulled the upset of the century.

Andrew Sullivan Throws a Nutty

And the funny thing is, having been so spectacularly wrong about this election, we, the chatterati of America who have been polluting your television screens and social media feeds for months with our hive-mind wisdom, still think you should take our social forecasts seriously. Case in point: Andrew Sullivan, who threw a classic spittle-flecked nutty on the Daily Intelligencer.

This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward. He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything. He has destroyed the GOP and remade it in his image. He has humiliated the elites and the elite media. He has embarrassed every pollster and naysayer. He has avenged Obama. And in the coming weeks, Trump will not likely be content to bask in vindication. He will seek unforgiving revenge on those who dared to oppose him. The party apparatus will be remade in his image. The House and Senate will fail to resist anything he proposes — and those who speak up will be primaried into oblivion. The Supreme Court may well be shifted to the far right for more than a generation to come — with this massive victory, he can pick a new Supreme Court justice who will make Antonin Scalia seem like a milquetoast. He will have a docile, fawning Congress for at least four years. We will not have an administration so much as a court.

You should read it. Sullivan is so hysterical over Trump’s forthcoming fascist state that he didn’t pay attention to what he himself wrote: Trump can’t keep all his promises. In fact, we ought to be wondering which promises, if any, he really meant. For instance, his website’s policies page doesn’t have a link to pro-life policies. Various press releases had mentioned his pro-life position; but hey! those press releases are gone now. And frankly, I don’t trust the GOP to hold his feet to the fire on the matter.

David Remnick’s Faulty Crystal Ball

David Remnick’s piece in the New Yorker is in some of the same vein:

There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event — and it’s a stretch — is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.

Remnick doesn’t quite give us Sullivan’s tin-soldiers-and-Nixon-coming hyperventilation. However, like Sullivan, he hasn’t quite twigged to the fact that his crystal ball has already been proven defective. Don’t get me wrong — I still think Trump was a horrible choice, one we all will come to regret in the next four years. But don’t count your dystopian nightmares until they hatch. We were wrong about Clinton’s likelihood of election; what else are we wrong about?

American Policy a “Fetid Morass”

Probably more than you’d care to process just now. For instance, our Middle East policy. Just prior to the election, Asia Times’ “Spengler” (economist David P. Goldman) argued that Trump should be elected because “America’s policy elites are sleepwalkers, in the way that historian Christopher Clark described Europe’s leaders in August 1914 on the eve of the First World War.”

American policy has become a fetid morass in which ideology and influence-peddling jointly serve to insulate its leaders from the real world. It is not simply that America’s leaders are out of touch, but that they are in continuous touch with a fictitious construct of the world that excludes the possibility of policy course correction.

... Five years and 500,000 corpses after the disastrous “Arab Spring” and the Libyan coup of 2011, the American elite still does not understand that today’s chaos in the Middle East is borne [sic] of American meddling. President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and the McCain mainstream of the Republican Party passionately believed that the Arab world had broken free of its tyrannical past and was en route to democracy. By destroying the old dictatorships, the United States simply opened the field to ethnic and sectarian war. Syria is in civil war, Iraq is close to it, and even Turkey is at risk.

“The Insufferably Smug Hatred From the Elite”

But it’s not just that the Only People Whose Opinions Matter have likely been wrong about a lot of things. It’s also that they’ve been so damned arrogant, so proud of their superior knowledge, that they’ve yet to recognize how wrong they’ve been.

For instance, Roxane Gay, an associate professor at Purdue and the author of Bad Feminist, wrote in the New York Times, “I was confident [about Hillary Clinton’s likelihood of election] because I thought there were more Americans who believe in progress and equality than there were Americans who were racist, xenophobic, misogynistic and homophobic.” Noted Wonderful Things’ Thomas L. McDonald on Facebook, “[Gay] compresses into one sentence the insufferably smug hatred from the self-styled elite that led to Trump. ... This attitude towards ordinary Americans is what created this moment.”

Writing in the left-leaning Vox, Dylan Mathews gives us a perfect example of what Emmet Rensin (ironically, writing in the same venue) called “the smug style in American liberalism”:

But the call for Trump is painful, too, because we were supposed to be past this — and for the last eight years we were past it.

... [Little] by little, some great inequities were being chipped away at. Hell, economic inequality even started to fall as Obama raised taxes on the rich and, through Obamacare, launched a major new redistribution program for the lower and lower middle classes.

Moreover, the demographic future of America held the promise of keeping this momentum going. The coalition that elected Obama, underpinned by massive support from black and Latino communities, was only going to keep growing. Even as the white share of the population fell, college attainment would continue to rise, so more Democratic-leaning college grads would be around.

This wouldn’t guarantee endless wins, but it would, many hoped, force the Republican party to seriously compete for Hispanic and black votes so that the parties could again reach equilibrium with roughly equal bases. If they didn’t do that, their white base would continue to fade and the party would be obsolete.

The Low-Information Deplorables

The only possible explanation for this misread is that Mathews, like the rest of The Only People Whose Opinions Matter, discounted the “White Christian America” that the Washington Post proclaimed was dying (but apparently not dying fast enough). Racists, misogynists, homophobes, and xenophobes — every one of us low-information deplorables who really don’t deserve representation or consideration and who are slowly being marginalized by the Forward March of Progress. Somewhere Mathews got it into his head that, having been beaten twice by Barack Obama’s votership, white Christians would no longer play a significant role in American politics; we’d simply crawl back into our caves and die, unnoticed and unlamented.

“Oh, the irony of observers denouncing Middle America as a seething hotbed of hatred even as they hatefully libel it a dumb and ugly mob,” chortles Brendan O’Neill in The Spectator. “Having turned America’s ‘left behind’ into the butt of every clever East Coast joke, and the target of every handwringing newspaper article about America’s dark heart and its strange, Bible-toting inhabitants, the political and cultural establishment can’t now be surprised that so many of those people have turned around and said … well, it begins with F and ends with U.”

Or, to paraphrase the Trump clip repeated endlessly in Clinton commercials, they said, “Go stuff yourselves.”

Anyone But Hillary

Of course, the assumption that Clinton would walk all over Trump with cleats was itself a telling clue that The Only People Whose Opinion Matters were too complacent in their superior knowledge and wisdom. For the last year and a half, the elite of both parties treated Clinton’s bid as not so much a democratic election campaign as the anointment and crowning of the heir apparent. This was despite evidence of resistance from the hoi polloi, such as Bernie Sanders’ unexpectedly successful campaign.

One matter that came up in Stephanopoulos’ panel was that Trump had decided on his slogan, “Make America Great Again”, as far back as 2013; Clinton’s campaign did nothing to “brand” itself, simply assuming that Hillary’s name was enough. As much attention as people paid to the #NeverTrump faction much less was given to the #NeverHillary crowd — again, we all assumed women and Hispanics would flock to the polls to usher her into the Oval Office. The Clinton-haters didn’t matter … because, of course, they were all white male Christian homophobes.

And when Hillary lost, of course, feminists wasted no time in blaming it on “misogyny”. They couldn’t even process the possibility that a woman other than Hillary Clinton might have won. It wasn’t because Hillary was a woman; it was because the woman was Hillary.

Summary: “The Government Belongs to Us”

The election of Donald Trump, in the final analysis, wasn’t a victory of hate over love, or bigotry over tolerance, or fear over compassion. It was a message from the hoi polloi to the elite, The Only People Whose Opinions Matter: “You’re running the country wrong.” The slogan “Make America Great Again” caught the voters’ imaginations because, from their perspective, America isn’t great now — it’s in bad shape and getting worse. Yes, there was a lot of anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim sentiment there. Yes, many of the regular people sided with Clinton because they believe their interests are best served by the Establishment, while others simply voted against Trump despite Clinton’s personal and political baggage. But for many people,[1] Hillary Clinton was just one more example of the elite trying to impose their will on a reluctant population, just one more Establishment robot whose superior wisdom would keep us on the path to destruction.

In writing this post, I remembered a point in the third debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney where the president said over and over, “You belong to a government that ….” On November 8, four years later, the people finally replied, “No, we don’t belong to the government; the government belongs to us.” The demographic trends are in place, so the elite will be able to resume the Forward March to Systemic Cascade Failure in four to eight years. But for at least a little while, government of the people, by the people, and for the people hasn’t yet perished from the earth.

[1] Not me; I voted for Mike Maturen of the American Solidarity Party.

Doing Wrong By the Country: The “Lesser Evil” Vote

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Mon, 31 Oct 2016 14:00:00 +0000

I’m sick to death of this election. The most distressing aspect of this election cycle is that it’s revealed the extent to which American Catholics, particularly those of a conservative bent, have embraced utilitarianism. For some, it’s a half-hearted utilitarianism — “Oh, we have a lot of qualms about our candidate, but we’ll manfully swallow them to prevent The Evil Candidate from being elected” — but it’s utilitarianism nonetheless.

A Priest Endorses Utilitarianism

Nothing so forcefully illustrates this as the final paragraph of this op-ed from the Wall Street Journal by James Freeman, “Doesn’t Clinton Embarrass the Democrats?”:

Voters who wish to reject the Clintonization of America’s governing institutions have a choice on Nov. 8. They can feel good about themselves by writing in the name of a third-party candidate. Or they can do right by the country by selecting the only person who can stop the Clintons: a very flawed candidate named Donald Trump.

Not only is the argument utilitarian, it sneers at third-party/write-in voters as vain fools voting their self-images. Ad hominem much? The kicker: the paragraph had been posted on Facebook by a priest whose name I shall not mention … and who ought to know better than that.

That Freeman and the WSJ would be for Trump is no surprise. Remarking on the last debate, Freeman comments, “Mr. Trump, for his part, deviates from many Republicans on trade and immigration but has otherwise embraced a growth agenda of lower taxes and regulatory relief for an economy that sorely needs it.” In other words, Freeman and (by extension) the Journal believe the only cure for our current economic doldrums is a hair of the dog that bit us in 2007.

The Proper Ordering of Your Vote

But the point I’ve been struggling to make is that the individual voter is not responsible for who wins. Voters are only responsible for their own choices and the reasons for them. How the rest of the country votes is beyond their control. However, the act of election is properly ordered towards putting the best candidates in office, not keeping the worst candidates out. A party that puts forward an absolutely horrible candidate for The Most Important Office in the Land and expects the non-partisan to vote for him/her because “s/he’s not That Other Person” is a party that deserves to lose.

And when the democratic process throws up two candidates so visibly unfit for office and demands we choose “the lesser of two evils” instead of seeking a good third person, it’s irrefutable evidence that neither the system nor the people who uphold it are working towards the common weal. It may be unrealistic to expect perfection. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t demand better, that we must settle for whatever mess of pottage the two-party system in all its human brokenness offers us. We Americans take it as articles of faith that choice is good and the more choices, the better. Why, then, do we put up with a two-party system when we don’t have to by law?

In Catholic moral teaching, the morality of the act matters as much as the morality of the result. We may not intentionally do evil that good may come of it (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, § 1789). Occasionally, doing the right thing will put you in some kind of danger, or at least will discomfit you. Occasionally, evil will occur that we can’t reasonably prevent, and it will sometimes come from something good we’ve done. And sometimes, all foreseeable outcomes suck. Catholicism is no escape from moral ambiguity.

Man is sometimes confronted by situations that make moral judgments less assured and decision difficult. But he must always seriously seek what is right and good and discern the will of God expressed in divine law. (CCC § 1787)

Conscience and Voting

Nevertheless, at the end of the day, people must act in accord with their consciences, even though their consciences be ill-equipped for the decision (cf. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-I, Q. 19 A. 5). And if your conscience really can’t let you vote third-party, I understand. (No, really, I do; this election is the ultimate trolley problem.) But it bothers me that Freeman — and, implicitly, the priest who endorses his opinion — has the chutzpah to pat himself on the back for voting according to his principles and patronize me for voting according to mine. —Yes, I personalize Freeman’s ad hominem, because I’m part of the group which he belittles; ad hominem attacks are by definition and nature personal.

Conscience frequently errs from invincible ignorance without losing its dignity. The same cannot be said for a man who cares but little for truth and goodness, or for a conscience which by degrees grows practically sightless as a result of habitual sin. (Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, § 16)

Freeman’s sneer can be restated by a maxim from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.” No phrase better encapsulates the self-referential incoherence of utilitarianism: How can our sense of morals simultaneously discern the right thing to do and tell us it’s wrong to do it? Utilitarianism tries to overcome this difficulty by making the morality of the act contingent on the social utility of the consequence. But if the subjective conscience can err about the objective morality of an act, it can also err concerning the objective social utility of the consequence — we’re on no firmer ground than before.

Dystopia by Little Steps

“[In] order for the will to be good ..., it must will the good for the sake of the good” (STh II-I, Q. 19 A. 7 ad 3). It isn’t sufficient merely to wish to do less harm or slow down the progress of degeneration; it’s meretricious to vote for Barabbas One on the grounds that s/he’s marginally less debased than Barabbas Two when you need not vote for either one. When you settle for the lesser of two evils, evil still wins. You must will the good for the sake of the good.

No, voting for the lesser of two evils is not “doing right by the country”; it’s doing your country a grave injustice. It’s voting for Dystopia by little steps; it’s voting for national death by a thousand cuts. Vote for Trump, if you must; vote for Clinton, if you can do so and sleep at night. But don’t pat yourself on the back for your pragmatism. Weep for your country; because if this is the best we can do, then we’re doomed as a nation, as a society, and as a culture.

Christian and Pro-Life Leaders: DUMP TRUMP! (UPDATED)

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Mon, 10 Oct 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Paul Combs, Tribune.org

[ADDED NOV. 9, 2016: Obviously, my crystal ball is working as well as it usually does come election time. I deserve to have the lede carved on my headstone to shame me even after death. Nevertheless, I’m still convinced Pres. Trump will eventually jilt the pro-life movement, and that the leaders of the “official” movement — especially Fr. Frank Pavone — did us no favors by hitching us onto the Trump train.]

I am no longer concerned about the prospect of Donald Trump as President of the United States. It was never a strong likelihood, despite his sense-defying victory in the Republican primaries. In fact, over the last year, The Donald has done just about everything in his power to ensure Hillary Clinton’s election save drop-kick a beagle puppy from the 58th floor of the Manhattan Trump Tower. The revelation of his “grab them by the p***y” remark simply put the final nail in the coffin. What does concern me is the failure of some visible Christian leaders, especially in the pro-life camp, to admit their error in supporting Trump.

Assessing the Damage

As of this writing [4:00pm CDT, Oct. 8], the most recent political post on the Priests for Life site is an action alert item: “Help Us Tell Tim Kaine to Stop Insulting Catholicism!” The latest news from Susan B. Anthony List is Oct. 5’s “Pence Goes on Offense to Expose Clinton-Kaine Abortion Extremism”. Ralph Reed of the Faith & Freedom Coalition thinks that “A ten-year-old tape of a private conversation with a talk show host ranks low on [people of faith’s] hierarchy of concerns.” And Gary Bauer of the Campaign for Working Families stated, “The ten-year-old tape of a private conversation in which Donald Trump uses grossly inappropriate language does not change the reality of the choice facing this country.”

In a sense, Bauer does hit the right nail: in reality, Trump is no worse a candidate than he was a week ago. The only difference is, Republican leaders are finally waking up to the full shambling horror, albeit too late to do anything meaningful about it. And neither Gary Johnson nor Jill Stein presents a better choice on religious and pro-life issues. Johnson has called religious freedom a “black hole”, while Stein has called it a code for “patriarchal domination”. If you eliminate fringe candidacies, such as the American Solidarity Party’s Michael Maturen and (sadly) the independent Joe Schriner, that leaves Christian and pro-life leaders with a Hobson’s choice: either Trump or nobody.

The choice should have been nobody.

The smart Republicans started to abandon ship even before Trump’s nomination was a done deal. Republican strategist Doug Heye called the decision to nominate Trump “a stain on the GOP’s soul,” nor is he the first. Back in August, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson asked Republicans, “If you tell us such a man should be president, why should the nation ever believe anything else you say?” Just a few days earlier, Kathleen Parker of MySanAntonio.com noted, “For many Republicans, the question is: ‘Who’d want to be a member of a party that would have Donald Trump as its leader?’” As for those who are only now trying to distance themselves from this dumpster fire, the cliché “a day late and a dollar short” doesn’t begin to describe their failure of foresight.

Why the Warnings Were Ignored

The truth is, they were warned. Back in March, several prominent Catholic conservatives, led by Robert P. George and George Weigel, published “An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics” in the National Review warning that Trump was “manifestly unfit to be president of the United States,” and that his record and campaign “promise only the further degradation of our politics and our culture.” Six months prior to that, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, wrote in the New York Times:

Jesus taught his disciples to “count the cost” of following him. We should know, he said, where we’re going and what we’re leaving behind. We should also count the cost of following Donald Trump. To do so would mean that we’ve decided to join the other side of the culture war, that image and celebrity and money and power and social Darwinist “winning” trump [heh-heh] the conservation of moral principles and a just society.

However, over the last thirty-six years, what few victories Christians and the pro-life movement have been able to obtain in the public square have been through the efforts of conservative politicians, whose presence among the Democrats has been decreasing steadily. The disappearance of conservative Democrats, fueled by the leftward shift of Generation X and the millennials, has, in turn, forced orthodox and conservative Christians into a closer alliance with the GOP, particularly as protection of the traditional family and religious freedom have become more stridently contested issues. And there’s simply no denying that, with a Democrat-controlled Congress and Hillary in the White House to nominate the next few SCOTUS justices, the next 2 – 4 years will be disastrous for Christian political rights and the success of the pro-life movement. Small wonder, then, that Christian and pro-life leaders cling on to Trump’s sinking ship with the tenacity due a better cause.

“The Extreme of Folly”

In the Christian Post, American Values Network executive director Eric Sapp asks the tough questions Christians and the pro-life movement should have been asking themselves six or seven months ago:

It profits a man nothing to give his soul in exchange for the entire world ... how can we possibly consider doing so in exchange for Trump’s empty promise of Supreme Court nominees?

It can’t be because of abortion. When George W. Bush was President, 2/3 of the Supreme Court were Republican appointees, and Republicans controlled the White House and all of Congress. Yet Roe [v. Wade; italics added] remains. We cannot possibly be so naïve as to believe Donald Trump — who until he decided to run as a Republican supported partial birth abortion without restriction — would do more.

I sure hope it’s not because of “religious freedom” or the fear I’ve heard that if we get a liberal Court, Christianity will decline in America. I absolutely reject the fear that underlies the Supreme Court idolatry taking hold in some of our churches. If the Church needs the Court to save souls and empower a faithful witness — both spoken and lived — then we are truly lost. Christ promised us a cross and the Holy Spirit as our advocate, not tax breaks for our business and a worldly Court to defend our beliefs.

It would be the extreme of folly to place our hope of religious freedom in a man who says he’ll use the government to spy on houses of worship, deny sanctuary to families fleeing ISIS and disqualify judges based on their faith, and who the Christian Post editors said would silence Christian leaders who oppose him like Russell Moore and Max Lucado. What would it say about us to accept this deal of Trump’s on the condition that we turn a blind eye to his taking religious freedom from others and persecuting some of our most faithful Christian leaders?

Danger and Opportunity

In one sense, it may already be too late: the “Religious Right” is a spent force in American politics. For one thing, as Gen-Xers and millennials have aged into the voting pool, they’ve gradually shifted the American center of political gravity leftward. For another, these same two generations show increasing reluctance to affiliate with either a formal religious body or a political party, reporting themselves more and more as “nones” (not necessarily atheists or agnostics) and as “independents”. The “Religious Right” of the Reagan and Bush eras is part of the “White Christian America” that’s literally dying, aging into political irrelevance with the boomers and the few remaining members of the Greatest Generation.[*]

However, times of impending danger can also be times of great opportunity. If the Republican Party is ever to stand a chance of nominating a winning presidential candidate, it must completely reinvent itself, not simply spray a fresh coat of paint on the same old pile of s**t. In this light, the opportunity is there for Christians, particularly those thinkers Patrick J. Deneen has described as “radical Catholics”, to question and challenge the current Republican orthodoxy in ways that allow the GOP to shift leftward while retaining a distinct difference. (“America already has one liberal party,” Bobby Jindal remarked on this issue; “she doesn’t need another one.”) For the pro-life movement, the association with the GOP has been a marriage of convenience; now they have a chance to help transform the Republicans from “half an anti-abortion party” into a party that recognizes and proactively addresses all life and family issues.

In any event, there’s nothing more to be gained by clinging to the wreckage of the Trump campaign; at this point, only death or divine intervention can prevent Hillary Clinton from being sworn in on January 20. What will happen after that, we don’t really know, as I’ve pointed out before, and is in any case in God’s hands. But every day that Christian and pro-life leaders remain Trump supporters strengthens the feminist narrative that they condone Trump’s behavior, the rape culture, and the oppression of women. It’s past time to accept the debacle for what it is and save as much as possible from it.

It’s past time for Christian and pro-life leaders to dump Trump.

[*] It recently struck me that people will be voting in this election cycle who have little to no conscious memory of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

UPDATE: Same day, 9:00pm CDT

Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life finally released a statement:

The lewd comments, made over a decade ago and for which Mr. Trump has apologized, and which I, like everyone else, find repulsive, do not in the least change my intentions of voting for him, of urging others to do so, and of advising his campaign. The reason is simple: this presidential election is not about a choice between him and someone better; it’s between him and someone far worse.

Responding to Fr. Pavone’s arguments would add on too much to this post. So I will post a follow-up on The Other Blog.

Book Review: Particles of Faith, by Stacy A. Trasancos

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 14:00:00 +0000

One challenge Christians face, particularly millennials, is the apparent challenge Science poses to articles of faith. To be brutally blunt, most of this appearance of challenge stems from the inability of believers and nonbelievers alike to respect the limits of both Science and Religion. An impoverished “progressive” education, neglecting even the most rudimentary instruction in philosophy and leading to rampant neo-philistinism, contributes heavily to the confusion. Many Catholics can benefit from a guide that clarifies those limits and defangs the “hermeneutic of conflict” which decrees the challenge. This is what Stacy A. Trasancos, Ph.D., M.A., offers us in Particles of Faith: A Catholic Guide to Navigating Science (Notre Dame, Ind.: Ave Maria Press, 2016; $15.95).

Walking in “No-Man’s Land”

Particles of Faith is not an apologetical work. That’s to say, Dr. Trasancos doesn’t explicitly seek to make converts of atheists, but rather to steer Catholics along a path that will help them comprehend the current state of the sciences that form the “no-man’s land” between belief and unbelief. To this task, she brings an impressive array of education and experience — industrial chemist, theologian, teacher, and mother of seven.

One small complaint: every once in a while, the chemistry talk goes beyond the average layman’s comprehension despite Dr. Trasancos’ obvious attempt to simplify it. I say this as one whose last physical-science course was twenty-three years ago (for what it’s worth, it was organic chemistry, and I got a 4.0). But that’s what Google’s for, right? [Full disclosure: Stacy is not only a friend but the co-publisher and editor emeritus at Catholic Stand; she and Tito Edwards brought me on board there.]

The book is set up in three parts. Part I, “Science in the Light of Faith”, discusses the limitations of science and its necessarily transient state. Part II, “Questions in the Physical Sciences”, delves into the “Big Bang” theory, the relationship of atoms to reality, and the question of whether quantum mechanics explains free will. Part III, “Questions in the Biological Sciences”, discusses evolution from three different angles; particularly useful is the discussion of polygenism versus monogenism (that is, whether humans evolved from a single Adam-and-Eve pair or from a group of independently-evolved individuals).

The Ginkgo Tree

The first chapter concerns Dr. Trasancos’ years in science, first as a student, then as a graduate researcher, finally as an industrial chemist. It’s not a conversion story; rather, it’s a kind of intellectual romance with a bittersweet (if abrupt) ending. The heartbreak occurs during her time as a graduate researcher at Chandlee Laboratory at Penn State, as she was trying to artificially replicate photosynthesis:

I had just spent hours trying to make sense of piles of data that took six months to collect; I had consulted a biochemistry text in case reviewing the chemical reactions of photosynthesis might shed some light on the jagged lines I was trying to interpret. My data looked like a kindergarten art project. I was starting to panic at the thought that my graduation would be delayed or, worse, not granted. As I stood at the window, gripping the ledge and trying to get a grip on myself, my eye fell on an old Ginkgo biloba tree peeking around the corner at th end of the building, a big tree I had never really noticed before. With trepidation, I fixated on the funny-shaped leaves. There were so many. And they flapped in the wind carelessly, mindlessly achieving what I never would. ...

In that moment, I felt a great anxiety, or pain, or something. The best way I can describe the feeling is to compare it to the way I feel at orchestra concerts. As a child, I had the privilege of playing the violin with professional musicians in a university orchestra because my teacher was the lead violinist and instructor at the university. I once enjoyed music, but I became overly focused on technical details in my studies and overly stressed sitting on stage, always in proper concert full black, trying to keep up. I knew that every single instrument makes every note precisely tuned and timed. I knew there are nuances in the way lips have to be formed and lungs have to expand and exhale, in the way hands have to be held and feet have to be placed. ... To this day, I do not know how anyone is supposed to relax as the music plays faster than a human can fully appreciate it. Maybe sadness is what I feel rather than pain or anxiety — in my limits, I cannot stop time and appreciate the music fully, for to stop time would end the music. (pp. 21-22)

Facing the Chasm

This insight Dr. Trasancos calls “the chasm”, the same knowledge I’ve tried to describe in the Laws of Ignorance: that, no matter how much we think we know, the sum of that knowledge is insignificant compared to the sum of the things we don’t know, the things we don’t know that we don’t know, and the things we can’t know. She also calls it a moment of metanoia, a term which denotes a paradigm shift of one’s mental and emotional universe, one which subtly yet fundamentally changes us and sends us down a road we could never have envisioned.

For Dr. Trasancos, who describes her religion at the time as “none” (not agnostic so much as uninterested), the road eventually led away from her chemistry career into full-time motherhood and acceptance of the Faith. “If a scientist is aware of the chasm,” she writes, “he or she must choose either to ignore it or to face it in the light of faith” (p. 29). She also sees the bright side of the chasm: “Life is exciting when you realize that you can spend all your days learning new things.”

I’ve said that Particles of Faith isn’t addressed to nonbelievers. However, Dr. Trasancos does address scientism, “the belief that only knowledge obtained from scientific research is valid” (p.37), as it affects the believer. Her concern is that, while we do encounter and have to occasionally defend ourselves against anti-religious bigotry, we shouldn’t treat science as if faith depends on its findings: “We hold religious truths in faith and certainty because they are revealed by God, not because scientists give them the nod” (p. 39).

Different Approaches

It wouldn’t be correct to say that Dr. Trasancos enforces a strict and thorough separation between science and faith. In particular, she does quote the work of Catholics who have crossed the “no-man’s land” between the two, particularly the late Fr. Stanley L. Jaki, OSB (on whose work she wrote her master’s thesis, Science Was Born of Christianity) and Fr. Robert J. Spitzer, SJ (New Proofs for the Existence of God), both physicists. Here Dr. Trasancos explains the matter:

I am inclined to agree ... that severe limits should be put on drawing theological insights from science. As a scientist, when philosophers or theologians get too excited about science, I find myself thinking, “Leave the science alone, and do not try to make science do more than it can do!” You will not see me cite any single scientific discovery or prediction as proof of God’s existence, not even inductively, because I do not know what will be discovered tomorrow or next year. I do not want to give the impression that science demonstrates the existence of God because I already believe God exists before I ever get to science. ...

On the other hand, I have learned what philosophy and metaphysics seeks to do, and I have come to appreciate Fr. Spitzer’s approach as well. While his volume is generally received as a modern expression of the classical proofs of God’s existence, I see it as valuable in a different way. He shows how sound reasoning ought to lead scientific questioning. Fr. Spitzer’s book offers the kind of guidance a scientist not trained in philosophy needs. If a scientist understood from the outset what conclusions were metaphysically unlikely, then the scientist would have more tools to make research decisions. The right answer to the wrong question is not much use.

Science is Incomplete

Science does not make atheists; rejection of God makes atheists. Ultimately the “God debate” is a philosophical debate, not a scientific issue. We bring into that debate assumptions both true and false that often sit at the back of our minds, unexamined, unconscious, even forgotten. However, as with Scripture, it’s those assumptions which will force the scientific evidence into one model or the other … sometimes with ease, sometimes with great howls of laughter from the opposition.

Science is incomplete, and is in a state of almost constant flux. Even now, some scientists are abandoning the determinism of David Hume for the Werner Heisenberg-inspired indeterminism — the belief that all events are probabilistic in nature. Here we can take one more passage from Dr. Trasancos:

In his intellectual autobiography, A Mind’s Matter, [Fr.] Jaki writes of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory that the misstep is a jump from the operational to the ontological, the presumption that “an interaction that cannot be measured exactly, cannot take place exactly.” By this he meant (and elaborated on in his books) that the theoretical models should be accepted as useful tools but not taken as the full reality. He was very much against extracting philosophical and theological conclusions from incomplete scientific theories. [Fr.] Jaki also taught that a Catholic should be the “most thorough materialist” because it should be obvious that a personal Creator, “the ground of all existence,” can create a “matter which is capable of carrying out every material process.”

Fr. Jaki got Erwin Schrödinger’s joke about the cat, while many physicists took (and still take) it seriously. Dr. Trasancos gets it, too. The moon is still there when no one is looking at it. Science doesn’t pose a threat to Catholicism. Catholicism, however, may save science from taking itself too seriously.

The Twin Towers of Siloam

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Mon, 12 Sep 2016 04:44:00 +0000

The one memory that will stay with me, when all other memories of September 11, 2001 have faded, is how obscenely beautiful the weather was. There really should have been more portents. Fierce, fiery warriors battling in the clouds. Graves yawning and yielding up their dead. At least a two-headed cow, or the ghost of William McKinley.

But no, the New York sky was barely touched with clouds when the Twin Towers crumbled to the ground. Just as clear was the Arlington, Virginia sky as American Airlines flight 77 slammed into the western side of the Pentagon, and over Stoney Creek Township, Pennsylvania, as the hijackers of United 93 plowed their Boeing 757 into the ground to prevent the passengers from taking over. And it was just as beautiful in Omaha, Nebraska, where I listened to my cab’s FM radio in horror, knowing exactly why Peter Jennings quietly said, “Oh, my God,” as soon as he said it. Satan had apparently decided not to overdo it.

The Loss of Faith

Inevitably, anniversaries such as this will produce analyses in gross lots, rewriting as growing out of the evil stem of the 9/11 attacks trends that were already in place the day before. We need no “truther” conspiracy theories to explain the nadir of our trust in our government; it had been declining for three decades and more. Anti-Moslem sentiment didn’t begin with the collapse of the World Trade Center; it was present during the OPEC oil crisis in the late 1970s, a natural outgrowth of American nativism. We don’t need al-Qaida to explain our interventionism; it was already implicit in complaints that Operation Desert Storm didn’t “finish the job” by going to Baghdad and ousting Saddam Hussein.

Of course we became more afraid. For the sake of security, we permitted the federal government unprecedented powers of investigation and almost casually dispensed with habeas corpus rights for suspected terrorists. In the meantime, we created a new Cabinet-level department whose name carries perhaps-unintended echoes of totalitarian police states. And we also built a cheap, absurd wall along our border with Mexico, as we flailed around to find solutions that would keep terrorists out without going so far as to completely imprison ourselves or stop tourists and imports from coming.

I can’t help but think, though, that in the last fifteen years we became more aware of the fact that America is rotting from within, that both the dream and the reality of America have been corrupted. That’s a broad and vague charge, one not easily specified or documented. However, as much as has been written about the loss of faith in God, I believe that we’ve lost faith in everything — faith in ourselves, in each other, in our social institutions, in our government, in our founding principles.

The Disunited States

The fleeting feeling of having been brought closer together by the tragedy of 9/11 merely highlighted the absence of authentic communitas in our quotidian experience. In the fifteen years since, social media has provided a number of poor second-bests in platforms like Twitter and Facebook, coincidentally fostering social division and political tribalism, as well as providing a convenient method for the culture-wide dispersal of lies, hoaxes, and slander. Far from being more united than before 9/11, we are more disunited, more balkanized by tribal loyalties and tribal dogma that, thanks to social media, now cross lines on the map.

Replacing our sense of community is an increasing emphasis on autonomy — an assertion of freedom that recognizes no social obligation or reasonable limit to individual action, an ideal that replaces the “tyranny of the majority” with the tyranny of the autonomous self. Social cohesion has been replaced by a false, sexually amoral “inclusiveness” that has destroyed the biological family, the foundation of civilization, in the names of equality and progress. The Righteous Judge of traditional Judeo-Christian morality has been replaced by the Heavenly Grandfather of moralistic therapeutic deism, a God Who places no moral constraints on us and exists only to confirm us in our unique, special goodness.

We’ve lost our sense of what truth is. Truth is necessary for a robust and reasonable sense of justice. As St. Thomas Aquinas said, it’s impossible for people to live in community unless they can trust one another to tell the truth; truth is something we owe not only ourselves but one another (cf. Summa Theologiae II-II; Q. 109 A. 3 ad 1). Without a robust sense of objective truth, science loses its ground, and our “knowledge” becomes an illusion, a mere manufactured product of our subjective appetites.

A New Crisis of Confidence

The next generation is less prepared for the future than we were. One hundred-plus years of educational “reforms” have left us smarter in a limited number of areas, beset by neo-philistinism in others, and less rational overall. Several decades of increasing concern for children’s safety and self-esteem have resulted in the increasing presence on college campuses of “fragile snowflakes and manipulative narcissists”: young people unable to cope with the risks and challenges of adult life. Meanwhile, the spiraling costs of post-secondary education have put college degrees beyond the reach of many people unless they’re willing to take on crushing debts in student loans. As physicist Dr. Michio Kaku put it, “Without the H1B [visa allowing non-immigrants to work in American jobs], the scientific establishment in this country would collapse.”

As I said before, many of these trends were already in place prior to September 11, 2001. What has happened since is that, like the Twin Towers, our blindness to these trends has slowly crumbled, revealing a fatally compromised culture ready to collapse on itself. 9/11 stripped us of confidence in the future, a confidence that had only a mere twenty years to recover from the chaotic darkness of the Vietnam era and the economic doldrums that had followed in its wake. Since then, we have become increasingly angry, increasingly distrustful, increasingly corrupt, increasingly irrational, and increasingly fearful.

There were some present at that very time who told [Jesus] of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:1-5)

A Call to Repentance

In one sense, 9/11 was America’s Middle East policy chickens coming home to roost. But in another sense, it was a portent in itself, a signal that the American Era is coming to an end, as all things must. Only God is eternal.

Come November 9, there will be citizens voting for the first time who have little to no memory of that obscenely beautiful day. To them, 9/11 is something remote, as was John F. Kennedy’s assassination to those of us born in the 1960s. But for many of the rest of us, graying slowly as we shuffle toward our common mortal destiny, we still stand in the rubble of the World Trade Center, overwhelmed with grief, pity, anger, and fear … fear that God has finally turned His back on the U.S., abandoned us to our pride and our folly.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Though they know God’s decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them. (Romans 1:28-32)

September 11 is officially the Day of Service and Remembrance. But it is not enough for us to remember. We must also repent.

Libsplaining “The Star-Spangled Banner”

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Wed, 31 Aug 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Colin Kaepernick. (Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images.)

“Mansplaining”, originally defined as the tendency of men to explain the frickin’ obvious to women in a patronizing tone, lost its unique vitality and appropriateness by being applied to any situation where men dared contradict feminist dogma. Eventually it met its conservative matches in “femsplaining” and “libsplaining”. Any portmanteau word which includes -splaining can pretty much be taken to mean “ideologically-motivated bulls**t”. While libsplaining is often employed to defend visible-from-space liberal hypocrisies, like George Takei’s labeling Clarence Thomas “a clown in blackface”, it has a more subtle use: rewriting history.

Kaepernick Sits It Out

On Saturday, August 27, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick refused to stand for the National Anthem at the beginning of an exhibition game against the Green Bay Packers. Explaining his refusal, the biracial Kaepernick, who is a supporter of #BlackLivesMatter, said, “There is police brutality. People of color have been targeted by police. So that’s a large part, and they’re government officials. They’re put in place by the government. That’s something this country has to change. There are things that we can do to hold them more accountable, make those standards higher.”

Predictably, there was outrage, and it wasn’t confined to white conservatives. Many NFL players admitted Kaepernick’s right to not stand, but felt his decision was wrong. Said New York Giants wide receiver Victor Cruz, “Regardless of how you feel about the things that are going on in America today and the things that are going on across the world with gun violence and things of that nature, you’ve got to respect the flag.” Retired Army lieutenant colonel and former Florida congressman Allen B. West chided Kaepernick:

Mr. Kaepernick, a biracial young man adopted and raised by white parents, claims America is oppressing blacks at a time when we have a black, biracial president who was twice elected. We’ve had two black attorneys general and currently have a black secretary of homeland security, along with a black national security advisor. Here in Dallas our police chief, whom I know, is an outstanding black leader. The officer in Milwaukee who shot the armed assailant after issuing an order to drop his weapon was black. Is Mr. Kaepernick following suit and cherry-picking what he terms “oppression?”

Star-Spangled Bigotry?

Although most people concede Kaepernick’s right to sit out the anthem, a few Social Justice Warriors have used his act as pretext to attack “The Star-Spangled Banner”. The Intercept’s Jon Schwartz writes, “Almost no one seems to be aware that even if the U.S. were a perfect country today, it would be bizarre to expect African-American players to stand for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ Why? Because it literally celebrates the murder of African-Americans.” Shaun King, writing in the New York Daily News, repeats the trope slightly differently: “Most of us have no true idea what in the hell we’ve been hearing or singing all these years, but as it turns out, Key’s full poem actually has a third stanza which few of us have ever heard. In it, he openly celebrates the murder of slaves. Yes, really.”

No, not really. Both Schwartz and King are being dishonest. But before we drill into the historical context, we have to look at the third verse — the entire third verse, not just the four lines Schwartz and King trot out:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion,
A home and a country, should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

F. S. Key Writes a Diss Track

Here’s the libsplain:

Francis Scott Key, the lyricist who composed “The Defence of Fort M’Henry”, was a boilerplate antebellum Southern aristocrat — “about as pro-slavery, anti-black, and anti-abolitionist as you could get at the time,” according to Jason Johnson. When British forces under Maj. Gen. Robert Ross routed a larger American army under Brig. Gen. William H. Winder at the Battle of Bladensburg (August 24, 1814), Key was serving as a lieutenant in a militia unit.

Part of Ross’ brigade was a company of 200 Colonial Marines. Formed by British Rear Admiral Alexander Cochrane, the Colonial Marines were composed of black freedmen and slaves who had been offered the options of either emigrating as free settlers to British territories or fighting for the Royal Navy. As such, they received equal pay and equal training under their British officers. The Colonial Marines later participated in the Burning of Washington and the Battle of Baltimore.

Key penned “Defence of Fort M’Henry”, which later became “The Star-Spangled Banner”, after being inspired by the refusal of the fort to surrender during the Battle of Baltimore (September 13 – 14, 1814). “With Key still bitter that some black soldiers got the best of him a few weeks earlier,” claims Johnson, “‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is as much a patriotic song as it is a diss track to black people who had the audacity to fight for their freedom.”

These are the facts that, according to King, make Key “a really terrible person”. Except that a couple of the “facts” aren’t facts at all. And Johnson leaves out more than he puts in.

Key and the Colonial Marines

First, the Colonial Marines weren’t “fighting for their freedom”. Britain had only recently illegalized slave-trading, and wouldn’t abolish slavery in her empire until twenty years later. It was never part of Britain’s war goals to repossess the US or force her to end slavery, but rather to hold on to such North American possessions as she still had. Although the Marines did assist the emigration of almost 1,500 slaves from Georgia, the British leaders’ primary motive was economic disruption, not universal emancipation. The Colonial Marines weren’t a true liberating army, as were the U.S. Colored Troops of the Civil War.

Second, that Key was not an abolitionist, and died critical of the abolitionist movement, is true. However, he also manumitted his own slaves. While as a lawyer he worked with slave-owners in enforcing the hated Fugitive Slave Act, he also worked pro bono with several slaves who sought their freedom judicially. He was critical enough of “the peculiar institution” and of slavery’s cruelty that by the time he died, taken together with his efforts on behalf of slaves, Key had earned the sobriquet “the N****r Lawyer”. Even given the biases of the time, that’s not a reputation you’d reasonably expect of someone who was “about as anti-black as you could get” — unless, of course, you’re committed to an unreasonable if-you’re-not-100%-for-us-you’re-against-us mentality.

Third, the same liberal cognitive “blind spot” which overlooks the fact that Sylville K. Smith had a gun and was raising it to shoot the Milwaukee cop, and overlooks the fact that said cop is also black, also overlooks the fact that the Colonial Marines were a military unit belonging to a nation with which we were at war. Had the men of the Colonial Marines been citizens, they would have been accounted traitors (cf. U.S. Constitution, Article 3 Section 3). In fact, more Marines died of disease in the British camp on Tangier Island than died in combat, a not-uncommon phenomenon of the time. Nevertheless, only in situations where the rules of war are violated, none of which obtain here, can combat deaths be rightfully described as “murder”.

Fourth, the Colonial Marines were 200 soldiers among over 6,000 at Bladensburg. Of the 7,000 militia and 1,000 regulars on the American side, Key, a mere lieutenant, was nowhere near the top of the command tree. Bladensburg was never the personal mano-a-mano confrontation Johnson makes it out to be.

Not Nat Turner’s Rebellion

In sum, to make the case that the third verse “celebrates the murder of African-Americans”, the libsplain: 1) misrepresents the reason for the Colonial Marines’ existence; 2) exaggerates both Key’s and the Colonial Marines’ roles in the Bladensburg rout; 3) stereotypes Key as a black-hater; 4) treats the few Marine combat deaths like the Bataan Death March or the Katyn Forest Massacre; and 5) conveniently “forgets” that the Marines were playing on the other guys’ team.

But then, how do we explain the reference to “the hireling and slave”? In any context other than the liberal “cult of victimhood”, it would be considered a poetic reference to mercenary soldiers and conscripts (“draftees”). If anything, the fifth and sixth lines exaggerate the end of the battle. The Battle of Baltimore would have been another American defeat had not British Col. Arthur Brooke, who had taken over when Gen. Ross was killed, been stymied by the refusal of US Maj. George Armistead to surrender Ft. McHenry. The defense of Ft. McHenry was the one bright spot in an otherwise dismal American performance. When Brooke sent the ships back to the main British fleet, the American forces were too disordered to chase them. The libsplain makes too much of Key’s hyperbole.

The Colonial Marines weren’t innocent victims of a race-inspired slaughter. They were soldiers who occasionally met death on the battlefield, as other soldiers have done since before history. The War of 1812 was not a war to end slavery; it was an unnecessary and futile appendix to the Napoleonic Wars in Europe. By becoming soldiers, the Marines stopped being victims: in that transformation lies such dignity as does them honor. However, in becoming soldiers of an enemy nation, they lost any special protection due civilians under the laws of war. Their defection to the British was not morally equivalent to Nat Turner’s rebellion.

“The Highest of American Ideals”

Of all the reactions that are still rolling in on Kaepernick’s refusal to stand, the best in my opinion comes from a black Army Ranger veteran, Dorian Majied, who told the Independent Journal, “Kaepernick was wrong in his delivery and protested the wrong symbols of America. The American flag and National Anthem represent the highest of American ideals, not the lowest ideals.”

[Kaepernick] made valid points[;] I’m not ignoring that there are still issues with race in America. However, he is ignoring the positive ideals of America that every colored person who has ever served, fought — while some died — for, by refusing to stand. Proper action is exactly that, action, not the inaction of not standing because he couldn’t think of a better way to protest.

It seems silly to spend so much effort exposing a bogus interpretation of a verse few people know and nobody sings, especially an interpretation that was never necessary to justify Kaepernick’s decision. Yet Kaepernick’s protest shows how influential a deceptive and distractive narrative of African-American problems, such as that propounded by #BlackLivesMatter, can be. Libsplaining to justify the most obvious of liberal hypocrisies may seem silly. Distorting American history to libsplain a public figure’s disrespect for national symbols is serious business.

The Liberal Intelligence Premium is Oversold

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Mon, 29 Aug 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Image Source: Institute for Competitive Intelligence.

Over the last few years, liberals have had their egos stroked by studies which report that they are smarter than conservatives. For instance, a few months ago the Pew Center reported that people who had attended graduate school had more consistently liberal positions. These reports have fostered a “smart urban sophisticates vs. dumb rural hicks” mindset among liberals that, if you listen to some people, feeding and encouraging was the sole raison d’être for The Daily Show during Jon Stewart’s tenure. Finally, it got so egregious that even some liberals became uncomfortable with it.

Contemporary Liberalism “Lacks Humility”

Back in April 2016, Vox.com launched a 7,000-plus word essay by deputy First Person editor Emmett Rensin, titled “The smug style in American liberalism”. That liberals have tended to smug condescension has been a complaint of conservatives for some time now. Rensin’s article, however, drew a bigger impact because it came from a liberal writing on a liberal platform, one Kyle Smith of the New York Post described as “typically [combining] childlike oversimplification …, high-school-student-government-nerd idealism, just-arrived-on-campus humorcidal earnestness and the millennial generation’s pretend fealty to big data.” For conservatives like Smith, this was a liberal safety or an own-goal: a member of the opposition had finally scored their point for them.

Oddly enough — odd, because conservatives tend to take it for granted that postmodern liberals are incapable of substantive self-criticism — Rensin’s screed did provoke some internal agreement. Kevin Drum of MotherJones.com (mirabile dictu) commented, “We’re convinced that conservatives, especially working class conservatives, are just dumb. Smug suggests only a supreme confidence that we’re right — but conservative elites also believe they’re right, and they believe it as much as we do. The difference is that, generally speaking, they’re less condescending about it.” “The great virtue that contemporary liberalism lacks and needs,” lamented Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg.com, “is neither civility nor solidarity. It’s humility — and sadly, even some of liberalism’s most thoughtful internal critics can’t see it.”

Even more recently, lawyer-activist Nikki Johnson-Huston took a swipe at “... the cocktail party liberals, the elites, who wear the cloak of liberalism to protect themselves from criticism and so they can keep a clear conscious [sic]” … in Huffington Post, no less. Johnson-Huston’s criticism, however, was aimed at white liberals who used their leftist concern more to assert their moral superiority over conservatives than to actually get involved in problems like racism.

“Be Smug Where They Can’t Hear Us”

Stung, other liberals have fought back, mostly with tu quoque arguments. However, Drum replies, “…as plenty of people have pointed out, outrage sells on the right, but for some reason, not on the left. We prefer mockery. So they get Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, while we get Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart.” He continues:

So liberals and conservatives have different styles. No surprise there. The question is, do these styles work? Here, I think the answer is the same on both sides: they work on their own side, but not on the other. Outrage doesn’t persuade liberals and mockery doesn’t persuade conservatives. If you’re writing something for your own side, as I am here most of the time, there’s no harm done. The problem is that mass media — and the internet in particular — makes it very hard to tailor our messages. Conservative outrage and liberal snark are heard by everyone, including the persuadable centrist types that we might actually want to persuade.

Drum’s analysis doesn’t grasp a pertinent question: why would you want to “tailor the message” so that you’re speaking contemptuously of the other side only when the other side isn’t listening? The failure is not simply that sometimes liberal smugness and conservative outrage sometimes get over the barriers of the echo chambers, but rather that the echo chambers and the attitudes exist. “Hey, guys, we shouldn’t be smug/outraged in the public square. We should only be smug/outraged in our private little klatches, where those poor dumb hicks/immoral anarchists can’t overhear us.” Drum doesn’t want liberals to stop being condescending so much as he wants them to keep their poor opinion of conservatives between themselves.

“Intelligence Has Become Totemic”

But the “liberals are smarter” trope has more basic flaws which liberal critiques have failed to grasp. The first is that whether the person making a particular argument is smarter or dumber is completely irrelevant to whether the argument itself is right. To stop assessing the merits and demerits of a particular position and simply accept it because the person advocating it is a Really Clever Smartypants is hardly the mark of an independent or critical thinker, especially when the Really Clever Smartypants isn’t speaking within his area of expertise. The appeal to intelligence is really a kind of ad verecundiam (invalid authority) fallacy.

The second flaw goes beyond the expected “correlation isn’t causation” rebuttal: IQ tests stress raw knowledge and abstract reasoning. However, this kind of intelligence doesn’t defuse cognitive biases. Recent research indicates that, on political hot-button issues, education — particularly scientific literacy — actually helps people to explain away facts that contradict or undermine their position. In fact, IQ tests are at best only mild predictors of rational thinking skills. Says University of Toronto psychology professor Keith E. Stanovich:

Critics of intelligence tests have long pointed out that the tests ignore important parts of mental life, mainly non-cognitive domains such as socio-emotional abilities, empathy, and interpersonal skills. But intelligence tests are also radically incomplete as measures of cognitive functioning, which is evident from the simple fact that many people display a systematic inability to think or behave rationally despite having a more than adequate IQ. For a variety of reasons, we have come to overvalue the kinds of thinking skills that intelligence tests measure and undervalue other important cognitive skills, such as the ability to think rationally.

More telling is this criticism: “[Schools, businesses, and government] still devote far more attention and resources to intelligence than to teaching people how to think [emphasis mine.—ASL] in order to reach their goals. It is as if intelligence has become totemic in our culture. But what we should really be pursuing is development of the reasoning strategies that could substantially increase human well-being.”

Liberal Neo-Philistinism

Both Patrick J. Deneen and Joseph Pearce have asserted that, however more educated liberals are, it has come at the cost of a neo-philistinism, an arrogant ignorance of their cultural and intellectual roots. Says Pearce disgustedly, “To be ‘well-educated’ [today] is ... to believe that we have nothing to learn from the Great Conversation that has animated human discourse for three millennia.”

This neo-philistinism comes with a cost. Separated from our intellectual and cultural roots, emphasizing only one modality of thought, we’ve lost much of the cross-pollination between disciplines that classical liberal education once valued. James Kalb has argued that we’re not thinking smarter so much as we’re thinking differently, and in a way that may be worse:

[The new way of thinking] has some connection to the achievements of the modern natural sciences, but leaves out too much to apply to life in general. That principled rejection of essential aspects of human thought makes it radically defective. It explains why socialism and social engineering don’t work, sexual rationalism doesn’t make people happy, and most ordinary people find the arguments of libertarian purists deeply unconvincing: the ways of thought that lead to those things leave out half of reality.

Nor is a strict Techno [Kalb’s term] view — and the view tends strongly toward strictness — adequate for science itself, since the practice of science depends on common sense and an ability to size up situations that goes beyond formal reasoning. So it’s not surprising that the general triumph of the view among educated people has been followed by complaints that scientists have less theoretical acumen than in the past, their work is losing its vision and becoming agenda and money driven, and basic advances are becoming ever more rare.

Intelligence Nothing to be Smug About

In short, intelligence, particularly the liberal intelligence “premium”, is oversold. That many liberals believe it to be a validation of their worldview, their policy preferences, and their moral sense simply indicates the degree to which unreason has been allowed to prevail in our culture. As I’ve noted before, our school systems have abandoned teaching children how to think in favor of teaching them what to think, stunting their ability to engage in constructive criticism along the way.

I have no real hope that the liberal commentary Rensin’s post caused will provoke any further, more substantial self-criticism, let alone presage any meaningful dialogue between conservatives and liberals. To an extent, I prefer people who take principled stands, even when I find certain of their principles wrong if not morally deficient; it’s more morally courageous than to let oneself be blown about by the changing winds of intellectual fashion. To paraphrase Chesterton, the only real purpose of opening one’s mind is to shut it again on something solid.

But Rensin, Drum, and Ponnuru have simply agreed that liberal smugness is annoying. That’s not the same as to admit that intelligence is nothing to be smug about. Or that to be smarter as a group is not the same as to be right on any topic. That admission may take a while longer. Like a generation or so.

Four Life Issues and Catholic Social Doctrine

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 00:55:00 +0000

There are several political issues commonly wrapped in the social-justice banner that are also issues affecting life and the family. In theory, a Catholic ought to support those policies which support life and family regardless of which party proposes them. However, when the two parties split on abortion and (later) euthanasia, so did American Catholics. Now the nation is so polarized politically that, as Scott Eric Alt explains, any Catholic who demands we pay attention to life issues outside of abortion and euthanasia is accused of “trying to kill opposition to abortion”.

“A Catholic CANNOT Vote Democrat”

On August 23, my friend and Catholic Stand colleague Matthew Tyson published “Yes, You Can Be Catholic AND Vote Democrat” on his Patheos blog Mackerel Snapper. On the face of it, I can’t conceive a more quixotic and desperate cause than trying to convert the Democrat Party to a “whole life” position, as the Democrats for Life want to do. Besides, the demographics have been shifting leftward (and away from party labels) for the last three generations, and the Republican Party is shredded in two. There’s arguably as much hope for converting the Democrats to the “seamless garment” as there is for converting the Republicans. (Yes, I went there.) But, as GKC said, hope only begins to be really useful when things appear to be hopeless.

For the record: Though I probably agree with many if not most of Matthew’s positions (I don’t fully know what they are), I refuse the label liberal. Classical liberalism, as I recently pointed out, was and is premissed on a faulty anthropology; the postmodern left’s social liberalism is progressing towards an authoritarian statism, and the postmodern right’s economic liberalism enables crony capitalism. Precisely because I am a Catholic, I hold neither the Republicans’ nor the Democrats’ ideological biases and policy preferences to be above challenge or criticism.

The post’s title was guaranteed to attract a knee-jerk contradiction. Sure enough, a reader (whom I’ll call Cato) declared, “A Catholic CANNOT vote Democrat,” and that “being a [Catholic] Democrat is indistinguishable from being a pro-equality KKK member, a Catholic Nazi, or a Catholic Stalinist.” Why? Apparently, because Cato, bless his heart, believes the national platform makes all the party’s members co-conspirators, despite the fact that individual candidates are not and cannot be required to support every platform plank. It’s stupid sweeping generalizations like this which are driving Gen-Xers and millennials away from party identification.

Healthcare

Matthew’s a big boy who’s capable of defending himself and doesn’t need his quondam editor to shield him from the fray. However, Cato’s ill-tempered response provides us with a chance to look at some misunderstood issues of Catholic social doctrine (CSD). Yes, there is such a thing, right-wing foot-stomping to the contrary; and to deny it exists or has any serious theological weight is a prime example of conservative “cafeteria Catholicism”.

Putting Cato’s last point first: Matthew stated that his problem with the Affordable Care Act was that “it didn’t go far enough”. To be fair, I think he should have stated his preference for universal health care more directly. Nevertheless, in attacking him, Cato said, “ACA healthcare violates the bedrock Catholic principle of subsidiarity.”

No, it doesn’t. Subsidiarity, as important as it is to CSD, is not foundational or inviolable. Subsidiarity directs the effort to the lowest level social organization capable of addressing the problem; it doesn’t assume the lower levels can do everything, let alone do everything better. That private initiatives on the community level can even begin to effectively address the myriad issues presented by the burgeoning costs of healthcare is a dubious, if not laughable, proposition dictated by free-market utopianism. The common good takes precedence and determines the application of subsidiarity (cf. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church § 188). There are other issues, particularly those of conscience, with ACA; violating subsidiarity is not one of them.

Minimum Wage Increase

Concerning a minimum wage increase, Cato said, “Catholics are to support a just wage, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to a minimum wage, especially as a minimum wage may unjustly force employers to pay employees more than they are worth. Thus, the minimum wage can be seen as a form of theft. Even if it isn’t, it violates the bedrock Catholic principle of subsidiarity.” A “just wage”, then, is just what the employer is willing to pay and no more.

What does a just wage mean to the Church? “In order to protect this relationship between family and work, an element that must be appreciated and safeguarded is that of a family wage, a wage sufficient to maintain a family and allow it to live decently. Such a wage must also allow for savings that will permit the acquisition of property as a guarantee of freedom” (CSDC § 250).

Furthermore, “‘Remuneration for labour is to be such that man may be furnished the means to cultivate worthily his own material, social, cultural, and spiritual life and that of his dependents ...’ The simple agreement between employee and employer with regard to the amount of pay to be received is not sufficient for the agreed-upon salary to qualify as a ‘just wage’, because a just wage ‘must not be below the level of subsistence’ of the worker: natural justice precedes and is above the freedom of the contract” (CSDC § 302).

In other words, according to Catholic social doctrine, a laborer cannot be worth less than a living wage. Employers that refuse to pay their adult workers living wages foster the welfare system, using it to “socialize” labor expenses they would otherwise have to pay. Subsidiarity by no means prevents local, state, or federal authorities from setting a minimum wage as a pragmatic stand-in for a living wage; in fact, the activity of the government “must also be inspired by the principle of solidarity and establish limits for the autonomy of the parties in order to defend those who are weaker” (CSDC § 351).

Paid Paternity Leave

“Ditto paternity leave.” Matthew came out in favor of paid paternity leave, a plank in the DNC platform. By dittoing his minimum-wage argument, Cato betrays the fact that his understanding of CSD is pretty much limited to knowing the word subsidiarity; for him, it’s a wrecking ball that destroys all government intervention.

Again, we turn to the Compendium. “Family and work, so closely interdependent in the experience of the vast majority of people, deserve finally to be considered in a more realistic light, with an attention that seeks to understand them together, without the limits of a strictly private conception of the family or a strictly economic view of work. In this regard, it is necessary that businesses, professional organizations, labour unions and the State promote policies that, from an employment point of view, do not penalize but rather support the family nucleus. In fact, family life and work mutually affect one another in different ways. Travelling great distances to the workplace, working two jobs, physical and psychological fatigue all reduce the time devoted to the family.” (CSDC § 294)

It comes back to the “living wage” argument. Essentially, Cato wants us to take a view of employment where the employer dictates the working conditions as if he were grudgingly doing the laborer a favor by hiring him, and where the employee’s health, family life, and ability to survive are “not my problem”. But the employer is not giving the employee a job out of the goodness of his heart; he needs to fill the job to meet his business load. Healthy, happy employees produce more than tired, ill, stressed, and anxious employees. Also, as I’ve said before, employees are consumers; when employers drive down wages, they drive down consumers’ ability to consume. Cato’s argument is not only wrong but wrong-headed.

The Death Penalty

The last topic is capital punishment. Cato’s argument: “States have the right to implement the death penalty. While I’m not a fan of capital punishment for a myriad of technical reasons, the abolition of the death penalty is not ipso facto a Catholic position.”

The right of the state to implement the death penalty isn’t in question. “The traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude ... recourse to the death penalty, when this is the only practicable way to defend the lives of human beings effectively against the aggressor” (Catechism of the Catholic Church § 2267). Rather, the question is whether the state ought to implement the death penalty. And at least for the last twenty years, since St. John Paul II wrote Evangelium Vitae, the magisterium has been gravitating towards the answer, “No.” “Bloodless methods of deterrence and punishment are preferred as ‘they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person’” (CSDC § 405; cf. CCC § 2267)

Cato’s logic is faulty; any position which doesn’t run afoul of Catholic doctrine can be considered a legitimate Catholic position. However, as the New Mexico bishops recently pointed out in a joint statement, not only St. John Paul II but also Benedict XVI and Francis have spoken out against the death penalty. The end of the next twenty years may likely find that support for the death penalty will be the not-Catholic position.

Taking Life and Family Issues Seriously

“Solidarity without subsidiarity, in fact, can easily degenerate into a ‘Welfare State’, while subsidiarity without solidarity runs the risk of encouraging forms of self-centred localism” (CSDC § 351). Neither of these principles is an end in itself but is directed towards the common good. The arguments Cato advances encapsulate a contemptuous view of the worker as a burden on the employer — a false view since employees fulfill needed roles, directly contribute to the success of the enterprise, and power the economic engine of consumption with their wages. Although subsidiarity recognizes the logical and social priority of the family and community, it does not prohibit national intervention when it’s needed.

Healthcare, living wages, paid paternity leave, and the death penalty are all either life or family issues or both. One thing I’ve learned over time is that pro-abortion people don’t take pro-life people seriously when, out of adherence to free-market and small-government shibboleths, they oppose life and family policies, especially those that would make it easier for women to choose life. There’s no future in merely fighting abortion as a product of moral laxity — that’s the mindset that turns pregnancy into punishment. Opposition to government intervention on other life and family issues is the true “poison pill” which undermines pro-life and pro-family credibility.

I don’t vote for parties; I vote for persons. I would have no qualms voting for a pro-life, pro-family Democrat, especially if such a critter would run against Sen. Ted Cruz when his seat comes up for election again in 2018. If we want the left to start taking us seriously on abortion and euthanasia, we have to get serious about other life issues. Otherwise, they’ll continue to blow us off as hypocrites. And they won’t be wrong.

Mark Shea the Ephraimite

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Mon, 22 Aug 2016 18:13:00 +0000

Image Source: Mark P. Shea, I presume.

If you want an example of the damage done to the Catholic Church in America by the surrounding culture’s increasing hyperpartisanship and ideological tribalism, consider this: Mark Shea’s blog at the National Catholic Register has been dropped, and his even-Christians are happy about it. Rejoicing, even. Good riddance, Shea, you heretical librul (because, of course, to be a librul is to be a heretic and vice versa). The Circular Catholic Firing Squad has finally claimed a victory/defeat.

“Do Not Rejoice”

I have not found the official statement from NCRegister. Apologist Steve Ray posted it and linked back to a Fr. Peter West’s Facebook post. Who Fr. West is, where he got the statement, and whether he has a relationship with NCRegister, the deponent saith not.

Added Fr. West, “With this in mind, I ask you to pray for Mark Shea. Hopefully, this will be an opportunity for personal reflection for him. He has many gifts that he can use in the service of the Church and the pro-life movement. Recall the words from the Book of Proverbs: ‘Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and when they stumble, do not let your heart exult, Lest the Lord see it, be displeased with you, and withdraw his wrath from your enemies.’ (Proverbs 24:17[-18 NABRE])” I expect God to withdraw His wrath fairly soon.

Note that Mark wasn’t dismissed because of anything he wrote at NCRegister, but rather because of his social-media activity. I’ve watched with some concern as Mark’s Facebook posts became increasingly caustic, strident, and hyperbolic in his condemnations of the Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the pro-life PACs associated with them. If there’s anything we should have learned by now, it’s that our social-media activity isn’t private, that employers can and will fire people for their off-work behavior.

Furthermore, we who publicly proclaim and defend the Catholic faith have a special duty to be the same people in our bedrooms as we are in the public square — especially now that the line between public and private is thinning and blurry. I too have difficulty being charitable to critics, so I empathize with Mark’s frustration. However, to be anything more than a pose, charity must inform everything we do. To instruct the ignorant and admonish the sinner are spiritual works of mercy; the intent, however, doesn’t justify the manner.

Politics Makes Us Stupid

This is not to say that Mark’s criticisms of what some are calling (courtesy of Eye of the Tiber) “Republican-rite Catholics” were completely without merit. Exaggerated, yes. Without foundation, no. But they weren’t really listening to his scolding, to begin with; the more angrily he scolded, the more angrily they didn’t listen. And I suspect there were more than a few of his opponents who deliberately egged him on with their responses, to see just how over-the-top he could get. Anger is a weapon; who do you want holding the handle?

The first problem is that, because the vast majority of the doctrinal dissent and liturgical abuses of the last fifty years have been inspired by liberal politics, ideological conservativism has been equated, and even conflated, with doctrinal orthodoxy. Joe Heschmeyer reminds us that “our obsession with politics is unhealthy and unholy (in that it reflects our fixation on this life rather than the next, and on worldly power instead of true discipleship).” The second problem is that American politics have become hyperpartisan to the point that more people are disengaging from both parties to register “Independent”. Says the Pew Research Center’s Paul Taylor of the millennials, “No generation in history has ever been so allergic to a party label.”

The third problem: politics makes us stupid. The more a fact appears to threaten the tribe, or our position with it, the more likely we are to deny or explain away the fact. Education merely enhances this protective bias: the more educated you are, the more scientifically literate you are, the more resources you have to defend the tribal orthodoxy against the countervailing fact. This is true not just of the left but also of the right. The one thing everyone knows about cognitive biases is that everybody else suffers from them.

The more an issue is politicized, the less either side is willing to entertain the possibility of being wrong. This explains both why conservatives are such rock-skulled morons and liberals are such smug, self-satisfied jerks. Compounding the problem is the extreme degree to which we as a culture have lost our sense of truth and its value. Both sides regularly generate false facts, and regularly accuse each other of generating false facts. Both sides are guilty, but hey! That’s a tu quoque, so we can ignore it!

Since man is a social animal, one man naturally owes another whatever is necessary for the preservation of human society. Now it would be impossible for men to live together, unless they believed one another, as declaring the truth one to another. Hence the virtue of truth does, in a manner, regard something as being due. (Summa Theologiae II-II, Q. 109 A. 3 ad 1)

Two Strands of Liberalism

Summing the problems up, then, conservatives write Mark Shea off as a Hillary Clinton-lovin’, sodomite-huggin’, bleeding-heart librul-heretic because he’s so aggressively challenged and mocked Catholic conservatives for upholding various Republican shibboleths. But conservative ideology is not identical to Catholic orthodoxy. In fact, precisely because it is a political ideology, Catholics ought to question its assumptions and premisses. Shea is not the first nor the only Catholic writer to do so; nor will he be the last.

The meaning of both liberalism and conservativism have shifted in the last seventy years. Neo-conservativism, as Patrick Deneen points out, is “better designated market liberalism” for its laissez-faire approach to economic and social intervention, while the progressive left is liberal only so far as they still maintain “individual autonomy in … the social/personal sphere”.

Ironically, conservativism began in the 1950s as a movement to protect the sociopolitical order to which the classical liberalism of the Founding Fathers gave birth. Prior to then, the Republicans were the more liberal party, while the Democrats were more populist. After World War II, however, the Democrat élite began associating with more avant-garde philosophical and social movements hostile to the established order. Since thinkers like Russell Kirk and William F. Buckley, Jr. had chosen conservativism to distinguish their movement from what liberalism was becoming, liberalism was left to stand for an ideology that over time would become more statist and more authoritarian.

Classical liberalism, however, is premissed on a view of the human as an isolated, autonomous agent; that is, with no natural ties or obligations, making temporary agreements or “contracts” based on utility. This is fundamentally at odds with Catholicism, which holds that humans are born into and form relationships entailing natural mutual obligations and that certain institutions like family, community, and church are organic relationships rather than artificial constructs. Says Deneen, “Because America was founded as a liberal nation, ‘radical’ Catholicism [thinkers critical of First Things-style conservative Catholicism] tends to view America as a deeply flawed project, and fears that the anthropological falsehood at the heart of the American founding is leading inexorably to civilizational catastrophe.”

The Passing of the Cold Warriors

To call such critics “liberals” or “heretics” is a knee-jerk reaction, an ad hominem attack born of tribal allegiances that have stood for half a century. If you’re not with us, you must be one of them. It doesn’t try to refute, or even understand, the criticism so much as it seeks to smite the Ephraimites:

And the Gileadites took the fords of the Jordan against the Ephraimites. And when any of the fugitives of Ephraim said, “Let me go over,” the men of Gilead said to him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” When he said, “No,” they said to him, “Then say Shibboleth,” and he said, “Sibboleth,” for he could not pronounce it right; then they seized him and slew him at the fords of the Jordan. (Judges 12:5-6)

Both Deneen and (more recently) Fr. Dwight Longenecker have pointed out that the New Left’s attempts to corrupt the Church in America are at an end. “Liberal Catholicism,” says Deneen, “has no future — like liberal Protestantism, it is fated to become liberalism simpliciter within a generation.” But Fr. Longenecker also asserts that conservative Catholicism, as it’s understood right now, is also headed for extinction. “The young people who have kept the faith are, for the most part, simple, by the book, faithful Catholics. They view the church differently and don’t see it in such stark ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ terms.”

There’s more to it than the good padre’s ipse dixit. For one thing, the US’ center of political gravity has been shifting to the left for the last three generations. I am at the front edge of Generation X and get a lot if not all of the Boomer references. At the back edge of my group, and following us, are a new group who has no memory of Richard Nixon or Leonid Brezhnev, who don’t know what the Berlin Wall meant to us but are skeptical about the wall going up on the Mexican border, for whom the word socialism has no power to anger or terrify. This presidential cycle will be the first to have voters who have no real memory of 9/11, just as my group has no memory of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Trump’s voter base is part of the “White Christian America” that is dying. All of us who were formed by the Cold War and the tumult of the Vietnam years are passing, and with us will go the ideological bugbears and dog whistles of our time.

In Re Mark Shea

Frankly, in re Mark Shea, there’s enough blame to pass around. However, no one else, as far as I know, lost a source of income for their lack of charity; when you own the site you blog on, you can’t be kicked off it for gloating over someone else’s misfortune. If it’s true Mark was free to choose to tone down his rhetoric on Facebook, it’s true for everyone, even LifeSiteNews. No one gets a pass on this.

Enjoy your sordid, picayune victory, folks. Eat a nice, big helping of Schadenfreude. But remember that the clock is ticking on our generation, both strands of liberalism, and most likely the American Era.

We’ve done a shitty job of witnessing to the Faith; a little bit of prosperity and we lost our freakin’ minds. We lost the culture war because we forgot that the gospel message was about changing people’s hearts and minds, changing the way we treat each other, not changing the language of the liturgy or owning the levers of political power. Say what you will about St. John Paul II, thank God he came along to start us back on the road to recovering it. Thank God his witness and example started bringing in the converts you so condescendingly sneer at as “neo-Catholics”, like Mark Shea. We dropped the ball; they picked it back up.

See you in the catacombs.

POSTSCRIPT: Mark still has his blog at Patheos, “Catholic and Enjoying It!”, where he’s gracefully commented on his departure from NCRegister.

Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, and the Trump Campaign

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 02:04:00 +0000

Jesse Bernstein of Tablet blames Donald Trump on Jon Stewart. Well, partially, at least; he does admit upfront that there are plenty of factors in the matter. But apparently Stewart and his The Daily Show compatriot Stephen Colbert are partially to blame because they “helped to create the very specific type of internet-era liberal smugness (and, consequently, ignorance) that, though far from the sole cause by any means, has been a significant factor in both the rise of Trump and our current political fracturing.”

The Daily Show’s Liberal Smugness

Here’s the centerpiece of Bernstein’s argument:

[Stewart’s] show [The Daily Show] was a cultural touchstone that dealt in mockery and ridicule, as good political comedy should. It parsed the bluster to find the nugget of insincerity that drives selfish politics. But as the democratization of media made it easier and easier to hear only from the sources you wanted to hear from, those who counted The Daily Show and its even jokier spawn, The Colbert Report, as news sources slowly but surely created an echo chamber.

The process went something like this: Someone said something on Fox News that mainstream liberalism didn’t like; Stewart and/or Colbert aired a sustained critique of the idea and the thinking behind it; liberal internet publications hailed it as the greatest rhetorical victory since Darrow argued for Scopes; liberals’ Facebook feeds full of liberal friends filled up with clips of the takedown. No one learned anything, no one engaged with an idea, and nothing outside of a very specific set of ideas was given any real credence. As Emmet Rensin so perfectly put it:

Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. … Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style … and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that is opponents were, before anything else, stupid.

As Rensin deftly discerns, this sort of intellectual elitism is probably part of the reason that the Democratic Party went from getting 66 percent of the manual laborer vote in 1948 to outpolling the GOP by just 2 points in 2012. It’s the inevitable consequence of eight years of reducing George W. Bush and all of his supporters to dumbass hicks, and choosing to denigrate the poor and uneducated (if only they read The Atlantic!), rather than doing real outreach to them. But as Christopher Hitchens learned on Bill Maher’s show, people don’t want to consider that possibility[.]

Politics Makes People Stupid

The substance of Bernstein’s argument, then, is that The Daily Show wasn’t Firing Line or The McNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. But then, it never pretended to be anything than it was — a comedy show. In fairness to Messrs. Stewart and Colbert, they did occasionally skewer liberals, and their fans would laugh but not pass the replays around as they would when the dynamic comedy duo took on conservatives. Unfortunately, over the Stewart years, conservative politicians and talking heads provided more mock-worthy material than did liberals. But even granting a liberal bias, their show was primarily intended to entertain … although, as Rensin unintentionally pointed out, The Daily Show did a good job of instructing as well.

“There’s a simple theory underlying much of American politics,” explains Ezra Klein in the aptly-titled “How politics makes us stupid”. “… It’s what we might call the More Information Hypothesis: the belief that many of our most bitter political battles are mere misunderstandings. The cause of these misunderstandings? Too little information — be it about climate change, or taxes, or Iraq, or the budget deficit. If only the citizenry were more informed, the thinking goes, then there wouldn’t be all this fighting.” More to the point, MIH assumes that, if those other people were better informed, they’d abandon their foolish ideology and come join us clever folks. MIH is a feature of both liberal and conservative cultural assumptions.

But as the studies Klein discusses show, where controversial issues are concerned, more information increases disagreements. Scientific literacy proves no barrier to confirmation bias; if anything, it strengthens confirmation bias. Political orientation is a stronger predictor of one’s perception of fact than is education or raw-knowledge intelligence. Why? Because a person’s politics affects his social relationships, his public standing, and his self-perception.

[Yale Law professor Dan] Kahan [one of the researchers in the studies] is quick to note that, most of the time, people are perfectly capable of being convinced by the best evidence. There’s a lot of disagreement about climate change and gun control, for instance, but almost none over whether antibiotics work, or whether the H1N1 flu is a problem, or whether heavy drinking impairs people’s ability to drive. Rather, our reasoning becomes rationalizing when we’re dealing with questions where the answers could threaten our tribe — or at least our social standing in our tribe. And in those cases, Kahan says, we’re being perfectly sensible when we fool ourselves.

Bernstein’s assumption that more millennials would vote Republican if Stewart and Colbert actively engaged conservatives instead of mocking and dismissing them is simply another iteration of the More Information Hypothesis. Conservatives treat liberals like idiots, too. However, they’re not smug so much as they’re angry and fearful.

Jumping the Logical Gap

But the argument has a much more obvious flaw: Bernstein explains why millennials were attracted to The Daily Show — mostly by regurgitating Rensin — but gives us no clue why anyone put off by the smugness of liberals would choose Donald Trump over Mario Rubio, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum, or any of the other candidates. He simply crosses the logical gap like motorcycle stuntman Robbie Knievel jumping 21 Hummers.

Grant that liberals treat conservatives like idiots — sometimes like dangerous fools, more often like brain-damaged children. Grant that their assumption of moral and intellectual superiority is not only irritating but positively alienating. Grant that their masturbatory self-congratulation has driven an indeterminate number of voters into the arms of the GOP (has it? I don’t know, but let’s grant it causa argumenti). Grant all that, and you’re still a long way from explaining how so many members of the GOP came to embrace a boorish, profane, narcissistic huckster as their preferred candidate for POTUS … some willingly, some reluctantly.

And you’re even further from explaining how The Daily Show bears any responsibility for that embrace. Is Bernstein suggesting that Messrs. Stewart and Colbert managed to drain the Republican brain pool of some intelligence through their wickedly smart burns of the GOP establishment? That Republicans didn’t become hysterical, xenophobic morons until Stewbert started lampooning them as hysterical, xenophobic morons? That, through the magic of television and internet memes, the smug liberal satire of The Daily Show short-circuited the critical thinking apparati of a large swath of GOP voters?

Bernstein does such a bad job of connecting the dots that you’re forced to wonder why he even tries; it’s like trying to blame the emergence of Westboro Baptist on Dan Savage. He gives no credit at all to the emergence of conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, and Ann Coulter: men and women who specialized in enraging their audience in the service of a dumbed-down neo-conservativism that would have horrified Russell Kirk. He doesn’t even allude to conservative memes, despite the fact that they’re the single biggest reason Dr. Ben Carson was a viable candidate for a month or so. No, Stewart and Colbert are to blame because … well, because Bernstein says so.

They Were Always There

The sad fact is, most if not all of the people to whom Donald Trump appeals were part of the Republican Party years, probably decades, before Stewart took over the desk from Craig Kilborn (do you remember him?). The sad fact is, these people are part of the conservative base. The sad fact is, “Trump says what people are thinking” means that Trump says what they want to hear; Trump has given them not only a voice but public validation. The saddest fact of all is that whether Trump is lying or even knows what he’s talking about doesn’t matter, so long as he says what enough people want to hear.

The most obvious explanation is that conservative pundits and analysts have simply ignored or marginalized this uglier element of the Republican Party, comforting themselves with educated, intellectual rationalizations of their own motives and persuading themselves that the “better sort”, the Optimates, are the only Republicans that matter. Unlike Democrats, though, Republicans have no mechanism for sabotaging the candidacy of one candidate in favor of a “more suitable” choice. Moreover, the vote of the Republican Optimates was split until almost the very end, when Mario Rubio dropped out to make Ted Cruz the day-late-dollar-short last hope of stopping the Trump juggernaut. Trump could not have chosen a better time for shredding the Optimates’ veil of illusion.

And what the parting of the veil reveals is that the Republicans’ conservative base is made up in significant part by racists, nativists, sexists, and homophobes — angry, aging, white blue-collar workers, whom America is slowly leaving behind to die. Jesse Bernstein’s pathetic attempt to attribute their presence to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show is simply shooting the messenger for the message. It’s time for Republicans to own the suck, to take responsibility for the monster in their midst, instead of blaming it on others.

Why We Can’t “Do Something” About the Gun Problem

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Sat, 18 Jun 2016 22:00:00 +0000

Sig Sauer MCX, similar to rifle used at Pulse massacre.
(Image source: newweaponsandmore.blogspot.com)

In the wake of the horrific massacre in Orlando, people are once again demanding we “do something” about the massive number of guns in American hands — an estimated 357 million privately-owned guns as of 2013, or about 112 guns per 100 citizens. Some demand we get rid of guns altogether; others demand we loosen the legislation to put guns in the hands of more people. And both sides are churning out bogus “facts” to support their positions.

To be clear about my own biases: I believe the Second Amendment as written is outdated and needs revision. I favor reasonable legislation which includes mandatory training and certification as well as reasonable restrictions on carrying and purchasing. However, the research and statistical analysis I’ve done over the last couple of days highlighted for me both the drama and the intractability of the problem. To put it concisely, there’s plenty we can do about the American gun problem … most of which will do little if anything to solve it.

By the Numbers

To give you an idea of the legislative mess:

Only 17 states[*] require some form of permit or license to purchase a weapon; in many cases, the requirement only obtains for pistols.
Only 9 states require registration, mostly of handguns, sometimes only under certain circumstances.
Only 6 states require a license to own a handgun.
The concealed-carry laws of 42 states vary from very strict may-issue conditions to non-mandatory permits issued on request for the sake of reciprocity with other states.
Open-carry is permitted to some degree in 30 states.
There are only 8 states in which local ordinances can do more than limit discharge of weapons; in 22 states, state pre-emption is total.
Eleven states have no magazine capacity restrictions; 8 have no “assault weapon” restrictions.
Nineteen states require no background checks for private sales.
Only one state, California, imposes a mandatory waiting period as well as requiring a purchase permit.
Thirty-three states have some version of “castle doctrine” or “stand your ground” law, either on the books or through case law.

In the year 2013, there were a total of 33,636 firearms death in the USA. Of those deaths, 63% were suicides, 33.3% were homicides, 1.5% were accidents, and 1.4% were due to legal intervention or war. Of all the homicides, only about 9% fell in the category of “justifiable”.[†] The age-adjusted death rate overall was 10.6/100k, or about 1.4% of the total death rate (731.9/100k), with black males the most heavily affected racial group (33.5/100k, mostly by homicide). The highest cause of death that year was heart disease, carrying off 169.8/100k; self-harm, the highest cause of firearms death, ranked 10th, while homicide didn’t make the top 15.

To put these figures into a different perspective: The total number of firearms deaths was just over 0.01% of the 2103 US population, approximately 321,773,000. By comparison, the United Kingdom has about 1/5th the population of the US; if their firearms-death rate were proportional, they would have suffered 6,605 losses in 2011, the latest year I had available. However, their real total was a mere 146 — a death rate of about 0.2/100k, or about 2.31 × 10^-6% of the population. Even if the UK had a 2011 population equal to the US in 2013, about 45.2 Americans would have died by firearms for every UK resident who suffered the same fate.

The Analysis

Using the legislative information I gathered, I constructed a rough matrix by which I could calculate a relative score of gun-control strength for each state (0 – 15). Then, using data from the Center for Disease Control supplemented by other information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and census data for 2010, I performed a series of “quick ’n dirty” statistical analyses, comparing the effect of the legislation on homicides, suicides, and deaths overall, as well as their effect on two forms of violent crime (armed assault and armed robbery). Again, these analyses are provisional; I offer them as a sociology major’s version of an educated guess.

The results were disturbing. So far as stronger gun-control measures seem to have any impact at all, it is on suicide rates: the harder it is to own and carry a gun, the less likely one is to commit suicide. The urbanization of a state correlated positively with the strength of the gun laws: the more urbanized the state, the stronger the gun laws. However, the strength of the gun laws had no significant correlation to either homicide or armed assault; there was a positive correlation between the strength of the gun laws and armed robbery, but its significance is questionable. And there was no significant correlation between the urbanization of a state and homicide, armed assault, or robbery.

The lack of correlations works both ways. If relatively stronger gun laws appear to have little impact on gun crimes, so do relatively lax gun laws. The difficulty of obtaining and possessing a gun legally in one jurisdiction is probably offset by the ease with which gun-runners can obtain them in a different jurisdiction and transport them for illegal sale and possession. Over 1.4 million guns were stolen between 2005 and 2010; 182,901 were reported stolen in 2012. There’s little doubt these hot guns ended up in the hands of crooks and thugs. In sum, the relatively lax gun laws of some states appear to have no effect on crime other than to undermine the stronger gun laws in other states.

Resurrecting the Assault Weapons Ban

Much of the current talk revolves around resurrecting the assault weapons ban that obtained from 1994 to 2004. However, there are some serious misunderstandings that need clarification.

First, assault weapons, as generally defined, are not true assault rifles. The distinction is in assault rifles’ capacity to switch between single-shot and full automatic (or multiple-round bursts, on many models). Assault weapons look like assault rifles because they’re usually civilian versions of a rifle marketed to military and law-enforcement units. However, they can only fire in single-shot mode; models built since 1986 have had crucial redesigns of the firing components that make conversion to automatic fire very difficult, if not impossible, for anyone not trained as an armorer, machinist, or gunsmith.

Second, the weapon of choice for most mass shootings since 1982, according to data gathered by Mother Jones, has been the semiautomatic pistol. Semiautomatic rifles only figure in just over 1 in 5 mass shootings, just slightly more than other rifles or shotguns, while semiautomatic pistols appear in almost 3 out of 4 mass public shootings.[‡] Pistols are less expensive and lighter to carry. Extra magazines are inexpensive, making capacity restrictions moot. The larger, heavier bullets fired by the most popular pistols have sufficient stopping power at close range to make the smaller yet higher-energy rounds of semiautomatic rifles unnecessary. Above all, pistols are easier to conceal than are rifles, even assault weapons. Carrying an “assault weapon” into a school or nightclub is more important for its psychological effect than anything else: it makes the shooter look even more like a Barney Badass, and enhances the fear of his intended victims.

The 1994 assault-weapons ban had mixed results. For one thing, it did nothing about the semiautomatic rifles already in the hands of citizens. For another, it did nothing about high-capacity magazines. For example on the latter point, you can purchase a Glock G17 pistol with two 17-round magazines for $599 at Bass Pro Shops; you can purchase aftermarket 31-round magazines for just $39.95, giving you one round more than the 30-round magazine that comes standard with the Bushmaster AR-15 Optics Ready Carbine sold at ProGuns for $1,249.99. For $25 more, you can go with a 50-round drum. Those are the economics of mass murder.

What Do We Do?

“Do something!” But do what?

For one thing, further research is needed on the effects of individual pieces of gun-control legislation, to see what really works, what doesn’t, and what’s counterproductive. Second, we need to rethink the necessity of the Second Amendment as currently written; it was written not out of distrust of the federal government, but rather out of necessities of the time that no longer obtain. Third, semiautomatic rifles are not only unnecessary for hunting, they work against the “one-shot drop” that is “the goal of every responsible hunter,” as Brian Mccombie put it in Outdoor Life. Fourth, semiautomatic pistols are not required for self-protection; as this post explains, revolvers have their offsetting benefits and are more easily mastered. Fifth, the various states need to get together to find means of shutting down the illegal gun trade without involving the federal government more than is absolutely necessary.

Taking semiautomatic weapons, including pistols, completely off the civilian market would do away with the need for legislation restricting the purchase and possession of high-capacity magazines. However, its effectiveness would be dubious if the federal government made no effort to buy back the weapons currently held by civilians, or require their registration under NFA Title II. A buy-back program could easily stretch into the billions of dollars, even when strung out over the course of several years; but that by itself doesn’t make such a proposal impractical.

But the problem won’t be solved by stamping our feet, shouting “Do something!”, and blindly shaming the religious with stupid #dontpray hashtags. (Prayer is much more useful than hashtag campaigns.) Nor will it be solved by fake facts and cliché expressions. (“An armed society is a polite society”? The facts say otherwise.) In fact, so long as we hang on to a Constitutional amendment written in a different time to meet needs that no longer exist, it’s likely that doing anything will be the same in effect as doing nothing.

[*] Here, states includes Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia.

[†] While the rest of the information in this paragraph is taken from the CDC source, the justifiable homicide information is taken from the FBI sources, which has some different numbers due to different definitions and methodology.

[‡] A report by the Congressional Research Service puts the number of “assault weapons” used in mass public shootings at 18/66 between 1999 and 2013, or about 27.3%. (Krouse, W. J.; Richardson, D. J. (2015, July 30). Mass Murder with Firearms: Incidents and Victims, 1999 – 2013. Retrieved June 18, 2016 from Federation of American Scientists: http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44126.pdf.)

Justice for Harambe … or Revenge?

noreply@blogger.com (Anthony S. Layne) — Wed, 01 Jun 2016 14:00:00 +0000

Photo source: Nature World News.

A recent petition on Change.org, titled “Justice for Harambe”, makes me wonder if anyone really knows what justice is anymore.

Harambe’s Death

On Saturday, May 28, a four-year-old boy managed to slip out of his mother’s sight at the Cincinnati Zoo. Nothing new or surprising in that. However, this four-year-old boy made short work of a series of barriers separating visitors from the gorillas at the zoo’s Gorilla World, and fell fifteen feet into the moat surrounding the habitat. Harambe, a 17-year-old western lowland gorilla, found the boy and — well, the boy survived, and has all his limbs. Harambe, on the other hand, was shot to keep the boy from further harm.

Strange to say, very little public concern has been devoted to questioning the design of the barriers. No, most of what can with some stretch of the imagination be called concern has been devoted to punishing the boy’s mother for the death of the gorilla (and, incidentally, for letting the kid out of her sight).

The Change.org petition is demanding, based on eyewitness claims for which it offers no source, “an investigation of the child’s home environment in the interests of protecting the child and his siblings from further incidents of parental negligence that may result in serious bodily harm or even death.” Note the words “further incidents of parental negligence”; that the parents are already guilty of one count is a verdict immune to challenge or contradiction. The Court of Public Opinion has already spoken.

The “Monday Morning Quarterbacks”

Four-year-old boys getting away from their parents, as I’ve said, is hardly an unheard-of event, and
ought not incur a presumption of negligence. It’s just not humanly possible to watch your children every second of every day, regardless of where you are or what you’re doing. Silly me, I think the mother had a reasonable presumption that the barriers were sufficient to keep a four-year-old out of the gorilla habitat. Despite their earlier protestations that the barriers had sufficed for thirty-eight years, the zoo management has promised upgrades. As they should; the fact that a weakness went undiscovered for nearly four decades doesn’t mean it should be left in place.

But the petition isn’t labeled “Protection for Zoo Visitors”, or “End Child Endangerment”, but “Justice for Harambe”. The tags aren’t “Child Welfare” or “Child Neglect”, but rather “Animals”, “Animal Cruelty” (?), and “Harambe”. Whatever else the child means to Sheila Hurt, the author of the petition, it’s hard to escape the implication that the child is not uppermost in her mind, except as a stick with which to beat the parents: “If you can’t take proper care of your toys, I’ll just have to give them to someone else.”

Hurt’s petition isn’t the only sign of such imbalance. Another petition on Change.org demands a law creating legal consequences when an animal must be killed “due to the negligence of visitors”. A scandal-mongering site, RadarOnline, claims that the boy’s father has an extensive criminal past. (Shaun King of the New York Daily News points out that the father wasn’t even present at the zoo, and calls the Daily Mail source piece “despicable”, a judgment with which I heartily concur.) They also print tweets screaming about “the stupid and [sic] their irresponsible parenting,” the “LAZY people who do not WATCH THEIR CHILDREN.”

Many people have questioned the necessity of killing Harambe. The strongest tranquilizer the zoo had would not have taken effect for around ten minutes. The keepers couldn’t risk Harambe’s reaction to the tranquilizer; his “protection” had already caused the tyke severe injuries. However, on the Cincinnati Zoo’s Facebook page, according to the Independent, one commenter reacted to the announcement’s statement that the zoo was “in mourning” over Harambe’s death by shrieking, “In mourning? You all killed him for protecting a child whose parents couldn’t contain their own children!!” The zoo held a press conference in which the director, Thayne Maynard, “forcefully rejected the second-guessing of what he called ‘Monday morning quarterbacks’ over the decision to kill the gorilla.”

“We Are All Afraid”

In all this rage and turmoil there’s more than a hint that the boy’s well-being is of less moment than the death of Harambe. Grant that the gorilla didn’t understand or intend the harm he was doing to the child, and that his death was regrettable. Such concessions still don’t justify the attempts to portray his actions as less than dangerous, or to argue that the fear of further harm to the child was unwarranted. Nor do the concessions serve to explain activists’ eagerness to crucify the parents, an eagerness that exculpates by silence the zoo for the embarrassing vulnerability of their visitor protection. Or the bizarre, overwrought description of Harambe’s death as “animal cruelty”, surely an unjust description of the keepers’ acts and intents.

Remember, this is not about the boy’s best interests or about visitor safety, but rather about “justice for Harambe”. In the name of “justice for Harambe”, the same “Monday morning quarterbacks”, acting on incomplete and arguably distorted information, second-guess the behavior of the mother, treating speculation as fact, demanding punishment where culpability has yet to be established, and demanding law to criminalize ex post facto a freak occurrence.

A comment I saw about this subject on Facebook really struck me: a woman confessed, “I’m a ‘helicopter parent’ because my neighbors would accuse me of child endangerment if I let my kids do the things I did growing up.” Says Simcha Fisher:

Understandably, we are all afraid — especially we parents. We love our kids so much, and the world is so fraught with peril. We want to believe that a horror like this could never happen to us. When we turn on the news, and we picture it happening to our own little, sweet ones, we always imagine what we would have done instead — conveniently forgetting that each of us, including sinless Mary and perfect Jesus, will eventually fall into improbable, dangerous situations with kids.

We would have held on tighter, we tell ourselves. We would have trained the kid better. We would have reacted sooner. We never would have been in what we would have recognized as an obviously dangerous situation in the first place, because we’re not like that. We’re good parents, and good parents have safe kids. So my kid will be safe as soon as I figure out how this mom was at fault.

We do parents an injustice and set an unreasonably high expectation when we holler “recklessness”, “negligence”, and “child endangerment” every time a child comes to grief by evading his parents’ supervision. Sometimes, nobody is to blame. Parents deserve, if not a “safe harbor”, then at least a wider, more tolerant margin of error in raising their children. Parents shouldn’t have to suffer the constant nitpicking and second-guessing of (more or less) well-intentioned nosy parkers — to worry about accusations of abuse if their daughter falls off her bike and breaks her arm, or neglect if their son wanders off to explore the neighborhood and gets hit by a car. At the very least, negligence should be proven beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law before the kids can be taken away.

“Someone’s Gotta Be Punished”

That the zookeepers were right to shoot Harambe shouldn’t even be a question, let alone a subject for debate. However, many animal activists, especially those who are most adamant about punishing the parents of the boy, seem to have less feeling for other humans than they do for animals. There are some who have signed the petition who would willingly abort their own unborn children but who wouldn’t eat an unfertilized chicken ovum. That rank amateurs should criticize the experts for their actions is in my opinion a clear signal of disordered priorities.

It’s not that I object to concern for animals. Indeed not; care for animals is part of caring for the environment, which is one of the obligations of stewardship over the earth as taught in Catholic social doctrine. However, the Church’s social doctrine rejects an environmentalism which denies the ontological and axiological differences between humans and other living creatures (cf. Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church 463 § 2). The very act of assuming responsibility for the environment — indeed, the mere contemplation of equality among creatures — renders such a pseudo-egalitarianism absurd and incoherent. Natural kinship affinity demands that, just as I set my family before others, I also set my species before others. I might reconsider my position the day I see a protest gathering of sharks demanding the ethical treatment of humans — but not a single day before.

What the activists seek isn’t “justice” for Harambe, because that would assume that his death was not simply regrettable but wrongful. It was not; even many of those who initially criticized the shoot have conceded its necessity and absolved the zoo. What the activists seek is revenge: they seek to punish the mother because someone’s gotta be punished for Harambe’s death. There’s no justice without truth or mercy; and I can’t discern among the mother’s critics the slightest bit of concern for either.