The Execution of the Beltway Sniper

I suppose this should be a separate post, commenting on part of the last one.

As a committed, faithful Catholic who takes Catholic social thought seriously, and as a professional theologian well-read in the Catholic tradition, I fully approve of the execution of John Allen Muhammad.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, it is true, states, "If . . . bloodless means are sufficient to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons, public authority should limit itself to such means, because they better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good . . . ."

But this is intentionally vague language: what is meant by "the concrete conditions"? Does that phrase not specifically distinguish the problems of a particular time and place as against the more general demands of justice? Thus the conclusion begins, not "always," but "Re vera nostris diebus": Today, in fact . . . .

But the Catechism begins its treatment of capital punishment by stating:

"Legitimate public authority has the right and duty to inflict penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime. The primary scope of the penalty is to redress the disorder caused by the offense. When his punishment is voluntarily accepted by the offender, it takes on the value of expiation. Moreover, punishment, in addition to preserving public order and the safety of persons, has a medicinal scope: as far as possible it should contribute to the correction of the offender. [Thus] the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude, presupposing full ascertaiment of the identity and responsibility of the offender, recourse to the death penalty . . . ."

We thus have an odd -- perhaps deliberately odd -- disjunction. On the one hand, the death penalty is unnecessary now because it is not necessary to protect other people. On the other hand, the death penalty is sanctioned by tradition not just, not even primarily, to protect other people, but for the sake of the offender.

And the tradition is full of stories of people converting precisely in the shadow of the gallows. Punishment is medicinal because it manifests the gravity of the crime and allows the criminal to make expiation, to redress the disorder caused by his offense. It is no coincidence, in light of this traditional teaching, endorsed by the Catechism, that the man to whom Jesus says, "Today you will be with me in paradise" is a criminal who "voluntarily accepts" his cross as just "expiation" for his crimes.

In this light, we might say it is the height of self-centeredness and injustice for liberals in our society -- who, along with their culture of death, have lost all conception of justice and virtue -- to try to deny a mass murderer the opportunity to suffer the just penalty of his offense. The true "correction of the offender" is not served by letting someone sit in jail for the rest of his life while society tells him we're afraid to think about the gravity of his crime. Ironically, Dead Man Walking, a film intended to be anti-death penalty, is a beautiful (if awful) depiction of precisely how the death penalty is society's way of expressing love for the criminal. Sean Penn's character, a reasonable depiction of many characters who have fallen to the depths of murderous depravity, is able to convert only in the shadow of the gallows.

I submit that it is a profoundly important aspect of social justice and serious Christian political philosophy that we value the conversion of the sinner over our own fears of getting our hands dirty. The political order exists to make people better, and to help them get to heaven.

I also submit that the key phrase in the John Paul II/Catechism concern about the death penalty might be "legitimate authority." John Paul II lived under the totalitarianism of the Soviets, with its absolute unconcern for the person -- including, certainly, for the "correction"and conversion of criminal offenders -- and then under the regime of liberal Old Europe, with its utter "loss of the sense of sin" (see John Paul's beautiful discussion of this at the end of Chapter Two in Dominum et Vivificantem). In these cases, capital punishment could never be approached as a kind of "redress," "expiation," and "medicine." But I simply assert: Virginia is a profoundly different culture from Soviet Russia.

Finally, I submit that Benedict XVI has intentionally made no mention whatsoever of John Paul's concerns about the death penalty, perhaps in light of a different cultural experience and a recognition that Soviet Russia does not define the modern world. In the 1950's, when these two great men were coming of age, the Soviet jackboots were crushing John Paul's Poland while the genuinely saintly Konrad Adenauer was prime minister of Benedict's West Germany; John Paul only emerged from behind the Iron Curtain when he was already an old man, in 1978, by which time all of Catholic Europe had fallen to secular liberalism. It does make for a different estimation of legitimate authority.

The Beltway Sniper and the Safety of Cities

On Tuesday of this week, John Allen Muhammed, the Beltway sniper, was executed.* I lived through the horror of those three weeks, when thirteen people were shot, ten of them killed, at random, in parking lots, gas stations, and other harmless places around the DC metro area.

Here's an interesting fact: it all happened in the suburbs. (Here's a list.) Okay, one shooting was on Georgia Ave., yards from the Maryland border. But it's interesting: urban folks were not the victims.

Why not? Because the sniper had to hide where no one could see him. There was one shooting very close to where we lived. The sniper sat in a vacant parking lot across a freeway from the Home Depot parking lot where his victim was getting into the car.

Here's where he sat:

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And here's where he shot:

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I really don't think is rocket science: the sniper needed vacant places. He found them in the suburbs; they are much harder to find in the city, and do not exist in truly urban neighborhoods.

We hear much of violent crime in the city, and are made to believe that every city dweller is likely to be the victim of stray bullets. My boss has warned me to lock my car doors and drive through red lights in Newark, since it's so likely that one of those scary black people will tear me from my car. But, I'm sorry folks, those incidents of random violence, though they happen, are extremely rare.

Think about this: South Orange Ave. in Newark (where my boss fears to tread) is about seventy feet across (from store front to store front). My body is (rounding up) maybe two feet across. Thus if I am standing directly perpendicular to a random gun shot flying down the street, my chances are less than one in thirty-five that it will hit any part of my person. That's if I happen to be standing where there is random gun fire. And of course if the gun is not pointed perfectly level, the shot will go over my head or his the ground before it gets me.

On the other hand, I-280 (an alternative route to work) has two lanes of traffic going each way; my car takes up one of those lanes. Thus my chances are 50/50 that an out-of-control car (such as a drunk driver) will hit me. And cars never go over your head, and are at least as deadly as bullets.

And honestly, what happens more often, random gun fire, or drunk drivers? I'm sorry to tell you that random gun fire is exceedingly uncommon, even in Newark.

At our very worst (and we are much improved) Newark had 161 murders among 280,000 residents; in an average year, New Jersey sees 771 traffic fatalities among its 8,700,000. Thus the average Newarker has a 1/1,700 chance of getting murder; the average Jerseyite has a 1/11,000 chance of dying on the freeway. If murders were as random as freeway accidents, you'd be 6.7 times safer living out of the city. But don't you think the randomness makes up for that small proportion? If nothing else, a freeway life is only marginally safer than a city life without freeways.

By the way, our working-class neighborhood of Newark (my family is well below the median income for the state of New Jersey) has a murder rate of about 1/12,000. Which makes you less likely to get killed in a decent neighborhood of Newark then on the freeway. And again, which is more random? Somebody has to point a gun at you to murder you; they only have to be playing with their cell phone or GPS to kill you on the freeway. I'll take my walkable neighborhood and my commute down South Orange Ave.

Perhaps the reason cities seem so much scarier than freeways is just the irony that what is less common sticks out in your mind more. When you hear that somebody's been killed on the freeway, you shrug: happens all the time. When someone gets murdered, it goes on the front page. That doesn't mean it's more common; quite the contrary.

*See the next post for a commentary on the execution of John Allen Muhammad.

A Safe Place to Raise Our Children

One of the most compelling arguments against city living, I think, is the argument about protecting our children. A couple neighborhoods ago, we literally watched drug deals out our front window, right next to where our children play. The language was foul. Our immediate neighborhood was relatively safe, but shootings were frequent a few blocks away (anyone unfamiliar with the intense localism of city living would have said the shootings were in our neighborhood).

We live in a much better neighborhood now, but still there is pornographic graffiti all over the park. A very nice, but not very solid, neighbor gave our kids a bunch of comic books that were, ahem, not up to our standards of purity for our children's eyes. They weren't especially bad -- but it wasn't what I want my children to read. And if they get that stuff when they're four, it certainly makes me wonder what they will encounter when they're teenagers.

City life subjects us to all sorts of bad influences. It's no surprise that many people flee to the suburbs and the country, to protect their children.

But a recent discussion highlights the fallacy of that solution. My wife participates in an on-line community of homeschooling Catholic mothers -- diverse in many ways, but all solid Catholic moms, serious about doing what's best for their children. Recently a conversation came up that has come up many times before.

A mom writes in to say, hey, our closest parish is forty-five minutes away, but the priest is terrible; I'm getting to where I really can't subject my children to his bad preaching (or worse). And then they discuss their two or three options. In the many iterations of this conversation, there is typically an okay parish, but it's two hours away, and they're not sure they can make it to Mass every week (let alone every day). And lots of moms write in to say how they deal with similar situations.

We sit in our dense urban community, where we presently have (I do not exaggerate) eight parishes within a one-mile walk of us, and think, what an odd situation. Sometimes we try to think through the options, but end up shrugging our shoulders: it's hard to imagine having so few. At more lucid (or aggressive) moments, we think, if you really care about your children, maybe you shouldn't be putting your family in that situation. A thought, I suppose, parallel to what our peers in the country would say about us, if we complained about drug dealers and inappropriate magazines and graffiti: why don't you just move.

It is very uncommon for a family in the country to be bound there by a job -- jobs usually aren't any closer than parishes. Typically, they have moved to the middle of nowhere because they think it's a healthier environment for their children. But is it?

Perhaps they should live somewhere else. But where? Of course the immediate standard aspiration is, if only we could live in a tiny community where everyone is perfect. We know people who have tried to form such communities, in various situations: a suburban sub-development of only solid Catholics; a small town with one great parish; even, on occasion, attempts at building a farming community.

My first, and most natural, objection to those plans is on grounds of fideism. It is good to have Catholic friends and neighbors, to be sure -- but it's also good to have a soccer team, music teachers, theater, bookstores. It's good to have a decent hospital nearby (and I know people in these situations who have had major hospital problems, because their little utopia can't provide its own health care).

Dare I say it? It's even good just to have pagan neighbors, both to witness to and to learn from. In my experience, faith means more especially for children when they can see the depravity of their neighbors, the weakness of secular arguments, and even the frustration of the world around them -- when they care about people who don't have faith. A completely sheltered faith is not always the strongest faith. Some sheltering is necessary, of course -- but total sheltering from the outside world?

To put the same objection differently, lay people are not monks. There is an important place for those who flee the world and live only for prayer. But the Church is very explicit that such is not the vocation of the laity. We live to sanctify the world, to engage in politics, and culture, and labor, to witness to those who do not already have the faith. Abandoning that secular vocation of the laity is not good for grown-ups, and I do not see how it is a good way to teach children. The monastic vocation is itself corrupted (at least according to the teaching of the Catholic Church) if the world is treated as entirely evil. The laity are not monks, and monks need the witness of the laity.

But a second objection to the head-for-the-hills school of Christianity rests on the actual experience of monks. One cannot read far in monastic literature before one finds that even monasteries are not full of perfect people. St. Benedict, the founder of Western monasticism, was asked to lead more than one community that subsequently tried to kill him. That seems odd -- but it is the universal experience of monasticism. That has something to do with why monks are called monks -- from monos, alone: the monk submits to a rule, not because he thinks it will surround him with perfect people, but in order to seek God, as it were, on a single path. There are no communities of perfect people.

The experience of various Catholic communes makes this very concrete for the laity. I know quite well a small-town super-parish built almost entirely on the charisma of one man, a Ph.D. in theology. But that man is now senile, and dying. Now what? Is it good for a family to be in such need to one charismatic leader? And is that Catholic? To make things worse, the man's theology is not especially sound. He propounds many things as Church teaching which are not Church teaching, and which are sometimes directly contrary to Church teaching. My friends who are in this situation are not theologians; what can they do but submit to their hero's opinion? They are in good will: but they have put themselves in a situation where one man's error becomes their Gospel, because he is the only show in town.

Similarly, if we move to a perfect parish: what if the priest falls ill? What if he's weak on some points? Do these people realize that everyone has weaknesses, that the Church has never recommended that you submit yourself wholly to any mere mortal? (Even a monastic abbot is elected by the community, and hedged by many external authorities; and the classic understanding of monastic obedience is external not internal -- one always has the right to question the abbot's judgment, and so ultimately to leave, in extreme cases.)

A perfect suburban Catholic sub-development always runs the risk that one of the six families you've built your entire world around might turn out bad. There are no communities of perfect people.

That's not to say we shouldn't have friends. We should. We must. But friendship should lead us outward, into society. We should seek a place where we can make friends, not a place where we are left alone, whether to our own devices (in perfect rural isolation), or to fallible human pastors, charismatic leaders, and friends.

Living in the city subjects my family to certain risks, against which I must protect them. I might stay away from some graffiti, and from certain neighbors. I certainly need to train my children to discern right from wrong (though I submit that the drug dealers and playground graffiti really aren't all that tantalizing, especially to someone who has any life at all).

But in the city, I have resources. In the city, I don't have to be friends with everyone I see. In the city we can turn away from certain bad influences and towards others. In any form of commune, one can only flee from one bad influence by fleeing one's entire life. I just don't see how that makes for a safe place to raise our children.

The Nets, the Rock . . . and the Parking Lots

Things are looking good for bringing the NBA New Jersey Nets to Newark's Prudential Center (known locally as The Rock). The Nets currently play at the Meadowlands -- "meadow" being Northeastern New Jersey's euphemism for the broad swaths of swamp that have prevented serious urban development, for good or for ill, in much of an otherwise-dense area. In other words, the Meadowlands is a bunch of sports complexes surrounded by a beautiful expanse of not much of anything.

The Nets are planning to leave the Meadowlands for a new stadium in Brooklyn, but that stadium has yet to be built, and is currently mired in an eminent-domain court case; it might never happen. In the meantime, it looks like the Nets might come to Newark, at least for a couple years.

There would be considerable advantages for the city. The costs of the Prudential Center are already mostly in place, so almost all the tax revenue brought in by basketball tickets goes straight to the bank for the people of Newark. Last year over 620,000 people attended Nets home games, with tickets ranging from $10 to $500; that's a lot of tax revenue.

It's also a lot of potential business for Newark's downtown and the stadium area. Here's a satellite image of that area (sorry, I couldn't get googlemaps to get rid of the bubble):

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It's actually a little hard to make out the stadium itself; I think it's the longish shiny building to the left and slightly above the red 'A.' Just behind the "Map - Sat - Ter" buttons are some tall buildings: that's downtown. And a little further down the right side of the screen is Newark Penn Station; the train tracks come out beneath and slightly to the left, toward the bottom of the image. Newark Penn runs fast, cheap PATH trains to several stops in Manhattan, about half an hour away; it is also a hub of the vast NJ Transit system, with slightly less cheap trains arriving from all over the state.

Which is all to say, this site is very different from the Meadowlands. Here, the stadium is connected to a city, a city that could greatly benefit not only from ticket tax revenue, but also from people coming to bars, restaurants, and even shops around the Prudential Center. And here the stadium is two blocks away from a major transit hub.

And yet notice one other detail on that map: blocks and blocks of parking lots.

The parking lots change the stadium from an asset to a liability for Newark's downtown area. This stadium could potentially draw hundreds of thousands of basketball fans every year. It already brings in about 640,000 fans of the NHL New Jersey Devils hockey team (40 home games a year x almost 16,000 people per game), plus fans of a smalltime soccer team and a local college basketball team, and concerts such as (in the next couple weeks) a couple shows by teen-pop star Miley Cyrus and no fewer than eight performances of Disney on Ice. This place should be surrounded by businesses catering to all these literally millions of visitors to Newark.

But what they find is just what we who live in the city find: blocks and blocks of parking lots. I recently attended an evening event at Newark City Hall - just across one of those parking lots from the Rock and less than a mile from my home. I would gladly have walked, if I were walking through blocks of businesses, homes, and people. But I am not foolish enough to walk at night through empty blocks of parking lots. And we cannot expect Newark's visitors to be stupid enough to cross all those parking lots before getting to area businesses. It isn't interesting, and it isn't safe.

Take out the parking lots. Sell them to whoever wants to be near the stadium. There might be a market for housing, there's surely a market for bars and restaurants, there might even be a market for retail. Let people park at one of the 163 other stations in the New Jersey Transit system, and take the train to Newark.

The Prudential Center ought to tie in with the neighborhoods around it. Businesses around the stadium ought to lure visitors out toward the neighborhoods -- downtown, the beautiful "Coast" to the South, the Ironbound -- and lure people from the neighborhoods in toward the stadium.

Our neighborhood, the Ironbound, just over those train tracks to the east, is one of the healthiest, most vibrant residential and restaurant neighborhoods in Newark. People from the neighborhood should be walking to events at the Pru, and frequenting the businesses that surround it. And businesses between the Pru and the train tracks ought to be encouraging visitors to venture east, until some of them start to cross the tracks and stimulate businesses in the Ironbound.

Instead, the parking lots serve as a "border vacuum," sucking life out of everything around them. The train tracks are a liability for the neighborhoods already: they make for a full block of walking with nothing to do, no decent people around, etc. If there was life on both sides, people would cross under. Instead, there are blocks and blocks of parking lots, sucking life even out of the train-track border of our neighborhood.

Here's the punchline: Cities need to cater to pedestrians. If you have public transportation, use it, to give people more access to the street. And be mindful of the negative effect of requiring pedestrians to cross blocks and blocks of nothing in order to get from one place to another. It isn't interesting, it isn't safe, and it sucks the life out of an urban environment.

Police and the Problem of Big Government

To my readers (if any are left), I apologize for the long absence. In August my family relocated to Newark, New Jersey (hopefully for good), and it's taken a couple months to get my feet back on the ground.

As in many American cities, one of the central issues here in Newark is policing. Newark has had a terrible history of violent crime, but in the last few years, since Cory Booker was elected mayor in 2006, we have consistently had the fastest drops in violent crime of any city in the nation -- a dubious distinction.

Cheers to Mayor Booker for that accomplishment. Crime, especially violent crime, is a scourge, on so many levels. It takes a brave man -- and Cory Booker is truly a brave man -- to take this fight seriously, to stand behind the police, to be willing to do things that might be unpopular in order to make a city where people can live ordinary lives. Booker has drawn the ire of the ACLU -- and cheers to him for having the courage and wear withal to do it.

It is often said that defending the physical safety of its citizens is a government's most fundamental task -- whether the fight is gang warfare, invasion by a foreign power, terrorism, abortion, or domestic violence. And truly, the fight against violence brings out with remarkable clarity the extent to which our life is essentially common. As much as we'd like to think of ourselves as individuals, without safe streets, which none of us can provide for ourselves, our life as individuals can never get started. We are truly political animals.

I note that Jane Jacobs begins her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, with the problem of safe streets. Begins -- but does not end there.

All this said, I'd like to highlight a problem with policing, a problem ironic, because it pits the core of limited-government conservatism against conservatism's love for law and order. I hope we can resolve this opposition -- but first we must recognize it.

As laid out by Friedrich Hayek, the central problem with big government is the limitations of its vision. On the most innocent level, this is simply a recognition that even the best people have blind spots. Give a New Englander authority over the nation, and he's unlikely to appreciate the unique circumstances of Arkansas. Give a medical doctor authority, and he will tend to preference medical issues over non-medical. He's likely to preference his own methods, too: perhaps the rule of experts over the common sense of the average man, the medical concerns he's dealt with over those he hasn't, the friends he knows over the obscure faces he's never seen. The best banker can't possibly know all the people who are deserving of loans; the best doctor can't possibly know about every new treatment, and what's best for every individual; and the most enlightened city planner can't foresee every little business that will flourish in his city, and every way that people will use a public space.

Military man John McCain -- not my favorite politician, but a more or less decent guy -- had a lot more to say about military issues than, say, economics. That's not because he's a bad person. It's because he's a limited human being. Human beings have limits. A well-ordered polis does not limit the common good to the limited view of any individual, but does its best to spread authority among as many actors as possible. This, in my opinion, is by far the strongest argument for devolution of power, limited government, a free market, the free press, etc.: not so that people can define their own universes, but so that the common good can be served in more ways than any individual or centralized committee could see.

This problem is greatly exacerbated by the problem of political corruption. Give the government the authority to distribute healthcare dollars, and the smart politician, the guy who wants to win elections, is going to put his emphasis on political winners in health care. Scapegoat smokers, because they don't have enough votes to stop you. Give lots of money to the trendiest treatment of the trendiest disease, and don't waste money on things that only serve a small group. The market turns out to be much more "public minded" than politicians, because politicians need only please 51%, whereas the market seeks out every little niche and corner where there are dollars to spend, and dollars appear in every niche and corner where people have needs. Beyond the problem of limited vision, government centralization creates the problem of limited will: the will to serve majority blocs, who can get you elected, at the expense of minority blocs, who can't stop you.

All of this, I'm afraid, applies also to centralized policing. I suspect the black community's allergy to Big Police owes something to this instinct, even if it may be mixed with certain aspects of corruption in their own community.

So Mayor Booker goes after murders, because that's a Big Statistic, drawing attention from the people who fund campaigns, giving you something you can hold onto in a stump speech, and a clear legacy. Of course it is good to have fewer murders. But at what cost?

That's the problem: there are costs. There is, first of all, a manpower cost. If all the police are chasing murderers, who will catch the shoplifters, the people who run stoplights (quite a pandemic in Newark), the people who put pornographic graffiti on the playground where my almost-reading children want to play? If all the government staff are backing the police, who will take care of the trash on the streets, the grossly out-of-date tax assessments, the new-business approvals?

Then there is the monetary cost. Mayor Booker is funding his police push by raising taxes, especially property taxes. Of course I want the police to have enough funding to catch every murderer on our streets, and to get guns off the streets. But raising property taxes just makes it that much harder for honest people to afford to live here. It's one more push for families like mine to leave for more affordable places. It's a very limited vision that thinks the police can stop crime if you drive responsible people out of town.

Finally, there's the problem of public trust. This plays out a little differently in Newark, because Mayor Booker is black, but there is a distinct feeling of racism in Big Policing -- and it's not surprising, because even here, the police chief is white, the police are disproportionately white, and the people who get arrested are disproportionately black. Even Mayor Booker has been accused of being "not really" black.

Of course there's some foolishness mixed into this racial issue. Folks like Al Sharpton seem to claim that black people can't be held accountable for crimes, that the only reason to prosecute a black murderer is racism, that racism is the only explanation for there being more black people convicted of violent crimes. That's all boloney. The legacy of slavery is terrible, and does put many black people in a much more desperate situation than the typical white American -- but having racism somewhere at crime's roots does not make the prosecution of crime racist. That thinking only perpetuates the evil legacy.

Nonetheless, Sharpton's rage points out a problem. Big centralized policing creates a feeling of us vs. them. When the folks in the West and South Wards of Newark see the white police rolling in, crime fighting seems like an imposition from the outside. Cooperating in the prosecution of crime looks like siding with the outsiders against your neighbors; it should be siding with your neighborhood against the people who tear it down. And by a perverse logic, if the police are from Outside, breaking the law comes to seem like a sign of being truly local.

This is all usually framed as black vs. white, and there's truth to that. But more fundamentally, it's the neighborhood (the 'hood) against City Hall, our community against people from outside our community, the local vs. the distant. And that's not an unreasonable way to feel.

The general conservative, limited-government arguments made above apply here, too. The guy in City Hall, for all his good will -- and let me say, I think Cory Booker has a heck of a lot of good will, and I really respect him as a truly public-spirited man -- just can't know all the issues in the community. The folks in Fairmount (a neighborhood where a woman was just shot crossing the street) know things about their violent crimes, and about other aspects of their community, that Cory Booker just can't know. It's not that he's a bad person. It's that he doesn't live there, and even the best man can't understand what he can't see.

Big Policing means taking away local initiative: by sometimes draconian police policies; by taxing away the money that would let people invest in what matters to their neighborhood, whether it be a community center, a church, or a new barbecue place or barber shop; by taking away a sense of local self-government and moving it to an authority trying to make decisions for 280,000 human beings across some twenty-five square miles.

And all of this at least creates the feeling that a minority -- our neighborhood -- is being sacrificed to the majority. It starts to feel like someone whose ultimate responsibility is 51% of the votes is looking at Fairmount, not as an organic community, but as "only" 10,000 votes, most of them not paying attention. Mayor Booker needs the backing of national figures (Hilary Clinton just came out as a fan) so he can get national money and national tv time. I believe he thinks he's doing the right thing -- but it's easy for the community to feel like the things that matter to the Mayor aren't the little things that help their neighborhood.

So if Big Policing isn't the solution, what is? This might sound liberal, but I'd back off policing a bit and focus on the "root causes" of crime. Our city has terrible education and a terrible economy. That creates desperation. Even worse, though, it creates an environment that people want to flee. We're home schoolers, so we're not worried about the schools, but a city that taxes the middle class out of existence in order to fund mandatory schools where children doesn't learn . . . that's not a city that attracts helpful people. If you want to stop crime, you'll be much better off with a community of strong neighborhood businesses and strong families than with twenty more police officers chasing murderers.

Of course, Mayor Booker believes that fighting crime serves this end as well: good people aren't going to come to, or stay in, a violent city. But he can fight crime all he wants, and the families and businesses still aren't going to come if taxes make it unaffordable and the schools make it unconscionable. The vast majority of crime isn't random; there are ways to avoid it, even in a violent city. But taxes and bad schools are much harder to avoid. Good people are never going to come if you raise taxes and make schools a distant second priority while you chase after violent criminals. And the violent criminals aren't going to go away if the city has nothing to offer but police chasing after them.

In addition to making good people a priority, a mayor might try a decentralized approach to fighting crime. Rather than City Hall vs. the neighborhood, it should be the neighborhood policing itself. How? If there are violent criminals on the street, citizens should have a right to defend themselves. They should have a (Constitutional) right to bear arms, at least to defend their own home against assault. And they should have the right to organize their own community police force. I'll save for another post some strategies for decentralized crime fighting, but suffice it to say that most motor-vehicle violations can be reported by citizens, rather than police chasing after citizens; so can littering, and graffiti; and the only way to stop the sale of drugs is to get the neighborhood involved. Distribute cameras (they're already distributed, in the form of cell phones), and let a centralized court sort out what neighbors report. Let neighborhoods -- the smaller the better -- elect their own police chiefs, rather than putting all the authority 280,000 people away.

More than anything, let people know that law and order is the jurisdiction of neighbors, not a distant authority.

The Instruments of Worship

The purpose of this blog is to explore the complimentary relationship between the Christian religion and human flourishing, to show that this world makes greater sense in light of heaven, and vice versa. I spend a lot of time trying to establish a realist politics and economics in order to show that social flourishing, one of the highest forms of human life, is rooted in an objective creation. But this isn't meant to be an exclusively political blog. The life of the citizen, political life, social life, human life, is not just politics and economics.

So today, a bit about church music.

The opening question is this: are some musical instruments more appropriate to worship than others? The Church -- especially in Vatican II's decree on liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium -- while making undefined allowance for other forms of music, says that the organ and Gregorian chant have "pride of place" in Catholic worship. Why? What is so special about the organ?

Years ago, I came across an interesting clue flipping through a book of old Church pronouncements. Sometime in the early middle ages (I don't remember when) it was decreed that rhythmic music is inappropriate to worship. I think the reasoning had to do with texts. Chant -- that is, non-rhythmic music -- takes a pre-established text and adds music. But rhythmic music has to fit the text to the rhythm, as every would-be poet has discovered.

Take an example, from my background in the Catholic charismatic renewal. I should point out, in the course of this argument, that I first discovered Catholic doctrine and real worship in the context of "praise-and-worship" speaking-in-tongues guitar music. There are good solid Catholics on the side I'm arguing against.

The community I was a part of was atypical among guitar-music communities because they really used solid texts, mostly Scriptural, focused on God, not on the singer. We sang a setting of the Te Deum, for example. When my wife, whose sensibilities are far more traditional, first encounterd this community, in the context of a wedding Mass, she was amazed at how well liturgical guitar music could be done.

Romans 12

But take this example. One song we sang quoted the latter chapters of Romans at length, and mostly pretty literally. One line quoted this verse of Scripture (in the NAB translation):

Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind.

Except in the song it said

Do not allow your minds to be conformed to this age, but let your hearts be ruled by his Spirit.

The difference, I'm afraid, is not insignificant. The "mind" has been moved. In Paul's text, "conformity to the age" is a problem that afflicts the whole of our "selves" (in the Greek, it's the verb suschematizesthe, a passive verb -- "yourselves" -- saying, let not your "schema," your shape, go "with," or be like, this age). We are rescued from this problem by the "transformation of our minds" (here, it's metamorphousthe, an interesting switch from "schema" to "morphe": both words about shape, though I think morphe is a more radical sort of "form"). Our minds should be transformed "that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect."

But in the song, the problem of conformity seems specifically limited to the "mind," while liberation has nothing to do with the mind; indeed, rather than learning to discern what is good, we are just to be ruled by the Spirit. I have nothing against being ruled by the Spirit(!), but this is not the Biblical text. And if you only knew the song, you'd be inclined to think that the real opposition is mind (bad) vs. a more "spiritual" way of life that gets our mind out of the way -- there's no more "discernment" in the song. That, in fact, is directly contrary to the Biblical text.

Now, it could be that the author of the song was directly trying to contradict the Bible. But honestly, the song tries to quote the Bible. The problem is that the rhythm of the song demands a change in the text. The "selves" vs. "minds" thing could have fit the rhythm, but "let your minds be ruled by the Spirit" fits the song, whereas "transform yourselves by the renewal of your mind" just doesn't. And honestly, once you get to a blunt statement of the Spirit "ruling," renewal of the mind so that you can discern what is good seems sort of irrelevant. Who needs minds and discernment when you are "ruled"?

I hope I'm not being too convoluted if I say that the way this text gets transformed is actually a pretty neat summary of the problem of rhythmic music. Christianity is a textual religion. We are transformed -- ruled by the Spirit! -- precisely through the words of the sacred text, which renew our mind. The problem of rhythmic music is that we "conform" to a beat that, if not necessarily wicked in itself, is simply not the beat of Scripture. Our minds cannot be transformed (and ruled!) by the Scripture if we demand that everything conform to the beat.

That, I think, is why the Church at one time banned rhythmic music in the liturgy. Whether or not rhythm is inherently bad, the liturgy is meant to be about Biblical texts. To be a Christian is to refuse to change the text to match the beat.

Ratzinger's Take

In A New Song for the Lord, I think, Josef Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) gives another take, more general, on the same idea. He says that worship, and indeed all of human fulfillment, has to do with moving upward, into the realm of intelligibility. The difference between "good" and "bad" music is precisely whether it brings the mind down into the realm of the emotions or whether it elevates the emotions into the realm of the mind.

Music, by its nature, is emotional. But -- to make a strong assertion -- I think the music of Bach especially, and most classical music, brings one into a contemplation of form. The brilliant thing about good classical music is that there is an overarching form, a global vision in which each part plays a role. You can't listen to a snippet of Beethoven's Seventh, or Ninth, and really understand what it's about. The Ninth is a great example: the famous chorus at the end requires an entire symphony to ascend to its climax. Beethoven's greatest hits is, frankly, not: it's no longer Beethoven's vision. Contemplation of the form descends into a catchy melody.

Of course every rock music song also has a form. The lyrics, the repetitions, the hooks are usually part of some bigger picture, so that Sting sings "don't stand, don't stand so, don't stand so close to me" as part of a longer song. But let's be honest: it isn't rocket science. Churning out a "good" song just doesn't take the kind of concentration, meditation, and care that a great symphony requires, nor does listening to it. You listen to the Police because it's easy and fun. You listen to Bach because it isn't. You listen to rock music because you like the way it makes you feel. You listen to Beethoven, if you ever learn to listen to him, because it raises your feelings into the realm of your mind.

This puts an important new spin, of course, on the old argument that jazz, or even heavy metal, or whatever, is great music because it takes a lot of work. I don't doubt that some of these musicians have worked very hard to learn their skills. But I do doubt that the end result is intellectual the way that great classical music is. In the end, the primary draw of heavy metal is not the contemplative exaltation it creates but, I think, the opposite. Jazz? I don't know, but I think it's closer to drawing you into the rhythm than to drawing your emotions up into your mind. To the extent that's true, all the work that goes into it is just a further degradation of the mind.

Instruments

As a classically trained pianist, I was surprised years ago to learn that the piano is classified as a "percussive" instrument. Drums -- percussion -- demand a lot of skill and can be fascinating, but they are not harmonic. The piano, on the other hand, is the most harmonic single instrument of all. You can play up to 88 notes, in any combination, limited only by the number of fingers you're using (and it's not uncommon to play two notes simultaneously with the thumb). Piano can be a great classical instrument, I think, precisely because of this harmonic complexity.

Nonetheless, the piano is played by hitting keys that cause hammers to hit strings. It is therefore percussion -- a fact especially notable when the piano is used as an accompanying instrument. In order to make noise, the piano has to keep pounding away: it is inherently rhythmic.

I discovered just how significant this is singing hymns accompanied by an especially good organist at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, in Washington. Where the piano beats, the organ sings. Even though most modern hymnody is metrical and rhythmic, a fine organist is able to phrase the hymns the way the human voice does. The piano makes you keep moving. The organ helps you sing. The organ is capable even of arhythmic chant. I think this is fundamentally the reason the Church gives the organ "pride of place." And it is the reason churches with piano accompanists seem necessarily to end up doing bad church music: it becomes a matter of rhythm, of the music dominating the text and the musicians dominating the singers, instead of vice versa. Much as I love the piano, it is not a hymn instrument.

All the more the guitar. Now, I have experienced the guitar being used like a psaltery -- one of the most ancient and exalted instruments of worship. But in this use, the guitar strums a few chords in order to accompany chant. The rhythmic strumming that defines guitar music as we know it is eliminated. (And of course there is no tradition of rhythmic music for the psaltery.) Again, the question is what direction the music leads. Does the text disappear into the rhythm, the singer into the music, or vice versa?

It is no coincidence that where rhythmic instruments are used for worship, the texts tend -- though not always -- not only to depart from Scripture and tradition, but to depart from thoughtfulness and a focus on God, and to descend into a focus on ourselves. Contemplation is about seeing the other; emotion for its own sake is about me me me. There's not a lot of room for uncomfortable things, not a lot of interest in seeing the face of God.

Music engages the emotions. An ancient proverb (wrongly, I think, attributed to St. Augustine) says "he who sings, prays twice," probably because the body and the emotions are brought up into the mind's worship. But it ain't necessarily so. When music is drawn into prayer, we pray twice. When prayer is drowned by music, we pray not at all.

Precisely because it engages us, music drills a text into us. Many of us still have to sing the ABCs to remember the order of the alphabet, or the Salve Regina to remember that great (arhythmic) Marian hymn. In such contexts, the music supports the text. But what text? If the text is theologically sloppy, or misquotes the Scripture, we remember the misquotation better than the Scripture.

Music can exalt, but it can also depress. Here too there is an objective order, to be learned and discerned, and only through this discernment can we be freed from this age's demands of conformity.

Income Inequality and Culture

Pieper famously argued that leisure is the basis of culture. Though his argument is rich, the fundamental point is obvious enough. Culture needs space for its creation. Without time, real time, apart from immediate concerns, the many facets of culture have no room to thrive: whether the fine arts or folk music, conversation, writing, or religion. Culture needs space.

I was reflecting today on the lovely way the Latin language treats this. What we call business the Latins called negotium (from which, obviously, we get negotiation: business dealing). But negotium is actually a compound word: it is the neg-ation of otium, leisure. So in Latin, business is literally "no time for leisure"; nice, above all, because it presents leisure as the activity, the fullness to be negated, whereas we too often think of leisure as just vacant space. Of course, our language contains a similar point, though less obvious to our etymology-deaf ears. Business (say it, maybe, with a British accent?) is just busy-ness, not having time for other stuff.

Of course, I don't want to take this too far. I think business is a lovely thing in and of itself. But the point remains: culture needs space.

Culture and Wealth
I'd like to suggest a new twist on this: in order to have space, culture needs income inequality. I think the more obvious (though not obvious enough) aspect of this is that culture requires the rich. Great cultural figures -- most great authors, almost all great musicians and artists -- typically have patrons. Without the Medicis -- gross bankers! -- there is no Florence, almost no Renaissance (though, of course, they got a lot of help from the merchants in Venice). Michalengelo, da Vinci, and Botticelli are nothing without Florence, both to give them their daily bread and to give them their materials. Writers don't need materials, but they still need to eat. And it is only too obvious that living on the popular sales of your work produces Danielle Steele and Time Magazine, not Dante and Petrarch.

The rise of high music makes it even more clear. Without the Esterhazy's, there's no Haydn, without King George, no Handel. Bach had a series of patrons -- the Duke of Weimar, the city of Muelhausen, the Prince of Anhalt-Coethen, the great merchant city of Leipzig, and finally Frederick II -- but his career almost proves the point. No one of these patrons was sufficient to create the man who is perhaps the pinnacle of western music. He could not be discovered by the King until he had been recognized by the Duke -- and several others. This is precisely the argument for riches: however limited the oligarchy may be, it at least diffuses judgment more than centralized government does, so that there are dozens of possible patrons, dozens of opportunities for a genius to be discovered. But most of them will overlook the genius; and if there is only one centralized authority, the genius's career will be over.

Culture needs riches because oligarchy multiplies opportunities for patronage, and minimizes the ability of one tin ear to end a great man's career.

(In case you're wondering: Mozart started under the patronage of his local prince-archbishop, then got his big break when another oligarch archbishop brought him to Vienna. Beethoven was discovered by the Elector of Bonn, then managed his career in Vienna through a host of noblemen: the Count von Waldstein, Prince Joseph Franz Lobkowitz of Bohemia, Prince Karl Alois Lichnowsky of Prussia, and King Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia, among others. Dvorak came to America under the patronage of the New York philanthropist Jeannette Thurber, and even Copland got his start through the very first Guggenheim fellowships -- funded by money made in the mining industry. Etc.)

So art, culture, needs wealth. But interestingly enough, I think art needs poverty, as well. Copland, to take but one example, lived on the Upper West Side in the 1920's -- a neighborhood rough enough that liberals subsequently plowed it under to build their art park. He'd spent the beginning of the decade in gay Paris. Paris was gay, of course, because it was cheap, and poor. That great flood of 1920's American writers and artists went there because it was a place they could afford to be writers and artists: even with Guggenheim fellowships, etc., creating culture rarely pays, especially when you're getting started.

Plow it Under?
Apparently there's a move about to plow certain derelict urban neighborhoods under. The theory is that these places are ultimate dives, never going to recover, and we'd do better just to return them to wilderness. There are a lot of problems with this idea, but one of them is cultural.

I lived in such a neighborhood a couple years ago. H St. NE was once one of the great thoroughfares of black DC, a thriving area of shops and night life. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., these neighborhoods suffered riots roughly proportionate to their importance to the black community; H St. was one of the most devastated neighborhoods in the country. In 2007, when we moved there, most of the businesses were still burned-out shells, the surrounding neighborhood filled with derelicts, drugs, litter, and more burned-down properties than you'd ever want to see. But it was coming back. H St. has recently become a place for alternative Washington nightlife: a couple of experimental theaters, some odd-ball performance bars, some great new restaurants. (Really great!)

Now, most of this stuff wasn't super positive -- I wasn't real tempted to check out the Rock and Roll Hotel or the Palace of Wonders -- but for one thing, it is an essential part of cultural activity that many things be tried and most fail, and for another thing, that's more a reflection on the sorry state of our culture in general. Rome wasn't built in a day, and if the new architects of culture have only rock and roll and camp to build upon, well, that isn't their fault.

But anyway H St. wasn't rich even in its heyday. That's what made it H St. I don't know of any great H St. cultural icons, but U St., the other great black thoroughfare of old Washington, was home to Duke Ellington, and both these places were echoes of the Harlem Renaissance. 1920's Harlem, of course, like 1920's Paris, was a cheap place -- the end of the New York subway lines, the least desirable place in urban New York City -- where people could go to experiment. (Copland's part of the Upper West Side was close by.) Harlem thrived because poor populations, in this case black ones, could go there and survive, and even find some great community, despite their lack of means. Jazz thrived there in large part because musicians could afford the rent. And though Jazz might not be the highest of high culture, it's really the best America did in the 20th century: apart from writing (which is always cheaper for the artist, for a couple reasons), the only real living school of art in its time.

Middle Class Art?
Income inequality sounds like a bad thing. (I haven't gotten to read the new encyclical, which proportedly makes that argument -- but I will tantalize you by saying that Rerum Novarum, the opening salvo of modern Catholic social thought, whatever anyone may tell you, explicitly argues that income inequality is a good thing and that anyone arguing to the contrary is betraying the Gospel.) But I don't think art, real culture of any kind, can survive without it.

Imagine a perfectly middle class society. Where, first, would you go to find funding for your art? There are only two options: the government, or the mass market. Frankly, I think both of these are more likely to give us pats on the head and demagogery than real art. They are not designed to discover artistic genius or appreciate real quality. Hoping that a centralized committee will give the good posts to good people is not hope I can believe in.

But equally problematic, if we really waged war on poverty, where would the artists go? I chose to live in the H St. neighborhood because I could afford to live there and pursue my idealistic dreams of writing and the intellectual life. Plow down these neighborhoods -- literally or metaphorically -- and I'm stuck, along with greater men like Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington, Ernest Hemingway, Ella Fitzgerald, Mozart, and J.S. Bach, having to give up on making culture and get a job that will pay the rent somewhere respectable.