Civis

The Managerial Revolution

2012-02-11T12:12:00.002-05:00

My wife says I try to say too much in one blog post. This will not be an exception.

Nelson Rockefeller

I’ve been thinking about this post for awhile, and wasoriginally going to call it “The New Rockefeller Republicans.” After serving as Governor of New York, NelsonRockefeller ran for every presidential election in the 1960s, and waseventually Gerald Ford’s vice president. He had crazy amounts of money, and a kind of WASP-y (see my post fouryears ago on John McCain) noblesse oblige. He supported the arts, achieved real progressin environmental conservation, greatly increased transportation and publichousing, was tough on crime, especially drugs, but also fought valiantly againstracial discrimination, while taking a decidedly moderate approach onabortion. He was an enemy of ideology,ignoring the growing concerns in the 1960s and ‘70s that would become socialconservatism, taking a friendly, accomodationist stance on foreign policy, andhaving a tin ear for questions of limited government. He worked (at least in his mind) pragmaticallyfor a better society.

But he was only at the center of a major mid-centurymovement. Thomas Dewey, also governor ofNew York, ran for the presidency all through the 1940s, battling against theconservative wing of the Republican party, led by Robert Taft. Put simply, Taft articulated a philosophy inopposition to FDR, Dewey did not. Responsibility, pragmatism.

Dewey helped Eisenhower defeat Taft for control of the partyin the 1950s. Eisenhower was a prettydecent president – but thoroughly middle-of-the-road. Central to Eisenhower’s presidency was therising civil rights movement, in which Eisenhower fought hard for tolerance(not a bad goal) by sending federal troops into the states, while conservativesworried whether this goal was being achieved through destructively un-Constitutionalmeans and an ever creeping federal State.

And Rockefeller passed the baton to George H.W. Bush, whocondemned conservative philosophy as “voodoo economics,” ignored socialconcerns, and, for example with the Americans with Disabilities Act, continuedto fight for a more pleasant easy-going world while ignoring concerns about thelimits of government and the danger of perverse incentives. (As the father of a wheelchair-bound child, Ican tell you all about the glories and follies of the ADA – another time.)

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is surely in this class,with his truly ridiculous crusades for public health, his general fight to makeNew York more pleasant – like a luxury hotel, he says – mixed with his general insoucianceabout economics and the limits of govenrment

Mitt Romney, with his maneuvering on abortion, unwillingnessto take a strong stand on economics, and defense of a health care policy thatignored the dangers of creeping government – not to mention his apparentsupport from a class of “responsible,” non-ideological, “establishment” types,and even his Northeastern pedigree – has been labeled as the inheritor of theRockefeller tradition. But perhaps thisnew generation of Rockefeller Republicans has an important difference.

Please be clear: what follows is not intended as anendorsement (or rejection) of Romney, or of the movement of which he may bepart. It is simply an observation. We must understand before making judgments.

Consider some of Romney’s peers. Example One: Chris Christie, the fabulousgovernor of our great state of New Jersey. Christie ran as a moderate; he was frankly dishonest with the people ofNew Jersey. Once in office he led acharge to get the books in order, cutting spending especially by standingferociously against the spend-thriftiness of the unions. He has refused to raise taxes, but unlike theReagan generation, who made tax cutting the prime concern and didn’t reallyworry about spending, Christie and his peers have refused tax hikes as anillegitimate excuse for runaway spending, but have kept their eyes on thebottom line, not on the philosophical goods of tax cuts. Christie appears to be a Catholic in goodstanding and a pro-life social conservative, and he is one of America's most exciting politicians when it comes to dealing with urban problems – but that is not his focus. He is just doing the responsible thing. New Jersey has been living beyond its meansfor way too long, and it has to be stopped. If Christie had to lie (or at least not tell the truth) to the voters inorder to get elected, and if he has to ignore other good causes while fightingfor these goals, so be it.

Rep. Paul Ryan

The same is true at the federal level. Consider Paul Ryan, the great congressmanfrom my home state of Wisconsin, and the de facto leader of the Republicans inCongress. Ryan is a budget geek. Again, he seems to be a pro-life Catholic,and I think he is in favor of lower taxes, but that isn’t his focus. Ryan is worried about entitlement spendingand how to get our books in order.

One of Christie’s closest friends is the governor of Indiana(and still my dearest desire from a contested convention), Mitch Daniels. Daniels is a Presbyterian, but alsoapparently very pro-life and otherwise generally a social conservative. But when contemplating a run for presidentlast Spring (he decided not to run for personal reasons) he infamously calledfor a “truce” on social issues while we focus on the budget. Many conservatives have responded that therecan be no truce – witness the last week’s events, with Planned Parenthoodwhipping a breast cancer research organization into line, the Obama administrationdemanding that people with moral qualms about contraception, sterilization, andabortifacient drugs must pay for other people to get them, and the West Coast’sNinth Circuit court ruling that there is a Constitutional right to define marriagehowever feels comfortable to social liberals. But obviously Daniels had a point: we can focus more or less on theseissues, and use more or less firey rhetoric even when taking a firm stand onactual policies. Meanwhile, Daniels says, we face a new “red menace” – not Communism, but debt. As governor of Indiana, Daniels is famous forcutting spending, finding new ways to finance freeways, battling theever-voracious unions, and (everyone’s favorite!) making the DMV moreefficient.

The list goes on. Scott Walker, governor of Wisconsin, is a pro-life Evangelical focusedon fighting the irresponsibility of the unions (both the educational policiesof the teachers and the general spend-thriftiness of all the public unions). So is John Kasich, the governor of Ohio.

Mitt Romney can be read as part of this crowd. Of course (perhaps) he is pro-life,pro-marriage, socially conservative, etc. He has, after all, an exemplary family life, and is a leader in one ofAmerica’s most conservative churches. But like Chris Christie, his biggest political booster, he has seteverything else aside to fight the Red Menace. Perhaps – I don’t know, but perhaps – he decided in Massachusetts thathe would ignore all else, even lying about his position on abortion, in orderto get the budget in order. He was notgreat (though not bad) on taxes, not great on jobs (though he helped), and hisdecision on health care reform was not the best (though, I have to say, it isdefensible, was the majority-conservative position before Obamacare – note thatthis was a non-issue when Romney ran in 2008 – and may have been the best thatcould be done in uber-liberal Massachusetts). But he did balance the budget, taking Massachusetts from deep in red inkto a big rainy day fund.

Romney explains his position on abortion

Perhaps Romney is actually the Chris Christie running forPresident. Not running like ChrisChristie was after the election, but running like Chris Christie was before theelection. Keep the focus on the otherguy (Christie was also up against an unpopular mis-managing liberal), just tellpeople you’re responsible, don’t tell them just how radical you want to be, getwhat mandate you can, and then kick butt once you’re in office, hoping that youcan accomplish enough in your first term to help the country, and maybe evenwin people’s affection (as Christie has in super-liberal New Jersey) when theycan support what you’ve accomplished, and not what you’re threatening toaccomplish. Christie’s show-downs withthe unions look a lot better in hindsight than in foresight.

Gov. Chris Christie

I’m not saying Romney has Christie’s skills – surely he doesnot have his pugnacity, for example. Butperhaps these new Rockefellers are of a different type. Whereas Dewey, Eisenhower, Rockefeller, andBush-41 just vaguely fought for a better, more welcoming world, without anysense of social or political philosophy, the new Rockefellers – Romney,Christie, Daniels, Ryan, Walker, Kasich, etc. – have a very strong social andpolitical philosophy, but believe that this Red Menace is so dangerous that allelse needs to be made secondary while we battle it.

One interesting corollary of this belief is the way theyrelate to politics. The old Rockefellersjumped on FDR’s bandwagon in thinking the way to get elected was to pleaseeveryone. The new Rockefellers – hardly fairto even call them by his name, given their important differences – agree thatyou need the support of the masses: How else to get elected in the states withthe biggest problems, like Massachusetts and New Jersey, or, as Daniels hassaid, to get a big enough mandate to do the enormous heavy lifting required forentitlement reform at the federal level? But profoundly unlike the Rockefellers, these guys are not handing outgoodies. In fact, the only thing theyare handing out is the bitter medicine of fiscal discipline. The Rockefellers were popular for popularity’ssake. The Christie-Daniels Republicansare trying to appease enough people that they can whip us into order.

To close – and lest my wife relinquish her claim that I tryto say too much in one post – I would like to make a wild prediction about thetwenty-first century. I have previouslyargued a cockamamie theory that each century has its peculiar revolution andcharacter – typically with foreshocks at the end of the previous century andthe real avalanche in the second decade of the century. The eighteenth century had its somewhatunreasonable hopes for reason. Thenineteenth century (focusing here on America) began with the Constitution, butsettled in with the Virginia dynasty, and then especially General Jackson’selection in 1828. It was a century of “republicanism”:a belief that, rightly ordered, the common man could be defended by a properconstitution.

I recently attended a political science conference in whichnineteenth-century-Americanists pointed out that the idea of democracy wasanathema to the nineteenth century. Democracy is mob-rule. Everythingin the Constitution – read the Federalist Papers! – is organized to preventdemocracy, to make sure that the 51% cannot inflict their prejudices andself-interest on minorities of various sorts.

The twentieth century, with tremors in the late-nineteenth-centurypopulism of William Jennings Bryan and real victory in the ConstitutionalAmendments of the 1910s, turned that consensus upside down. Now (yes, still now, for the twenty-first hashardly begun) most Americans cannot even conceive of someone being opposed tomajority rule and direct votes. But weare beginning to wake up to the damage done by this way of thinking. The ravages of consumerism, to be sure -- of, for example, supposing that if everyone's enjoying the Super Bowl halftime show, it must be okay. But even more, the ravages of governmentgive-aways, where pandering politicians sell the good of the nation short inexchange for a few more votes. Populismhas had its day, and its successes and failures. (A post for another day: how rich are wereally – when the bill comes due?)

And so, perhaps, the twenty-first century will be the age ofthe managers. Men like Chris Christieand Mitt Romney, Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan, who set aside populistrhetoric, set aside even a true portrayal of themselves to the voters, in orderto better manage the country. Romney isportrayed by his opponents as wanting to “manage the decline.” But the belief of these new managers is thatmanagement is the only way to avoid decline.

The same kind of people have taken over my university – thisis anecdotal, but perhaps significant. Our new president and provost have very little to say about education, but lots to say about management, including, above all, getting our books in order. (Even in the university, "books" now means finances.) As I recall, even when I was a grad studentat the Catholic University of America – which was undergoing a profoundrediscovery of its religious and intellectual mission – we got a new Provostinterested not so much in education as in management. Consider the irony of schools changing thisjob’s title to “Chief Educational Officer”: on one level, it claims to be abouteducation, but in fact, it’s a title out of management theory.

Good or bad? Well, abit of both. It’s not my point toendorse it or condemn it, but to say, watch it come. These guys are right. The twentieth-century’s obsession withdemocracy left a major deficit of serious management. Perhaps the next century will see us give upon cult-of-personality populists trading handouts for votes, in favor of boringtechnocrats who let us ignore the grime of politics while they fix theproblems. I think there are ways ofdefending this way of life – far from Big Brother, most of these technocratsseem also to realize, for example, the importance of the family, the localcommunity, and personal responsibility, and might be expected to overrule the ever-expandingif-it-feels-good-do-it-ism of the twentieth-century. Super-manager Mitch Daniels insists that the goal is not more power for him, but less; his book is subtitled, "Saving America by Trusting Americans." There are abundant economic and social corollaries to a shift from mob-rule to management. But for now, I’ll leave it here.

Mitch Daniels

Bartleby

2012-01-12T10:55:00.000-05:00

I have just finished Herman Melville’s short novel Bartleby the Scrivener. My reasons forreading it were two: I know nothing about Melville, nothing even about hisperiod, except that he is supposed to be very good. And the book was free and short on Libra Vox,so I could listen to it in the car.

Bartleby iswritten in the first person, describing the consternation of a Wall St. lawyerwho hires a very strange secretary, for whom the book is named. Bartleby is passionless—he is contrasted withother, colorful characters, the secretaries Turkey and Nippers and the officeboy Ginger Nut, precisely to show how colorless he is.

He falls into ever deeper depondency. Increasingly, when asked to do various partsof his job, he responds with the book’s refrain, “I prefer not to.” The narrator discovers that Bartleby isliving in the office, apparently without friends, without anywhere to go, andwithout much food.

A scrivener who “prefers not to”—not even to talk abouthimself—is pretty annoying, and upon pressure from other business people whopass through, the narrator decides to get rid of him. The book reaches a peak of absurdity when thenarrator, who cannot bring himself to call the police, moves offices so as toescape from a Bartleby who prefers not to leave—only to have his formerlandlord hunt him down and demand that he find a way to get Bartleby out of thebuilding.

The narrator can never quite bring himself to do Bartlebyharm. In fact, he repeatedly offers himmoney, one time putting it in his hand, only to watch it fall to thefloor. But when Bartleby prefers not toengage any other opportunities, even an offer to come home with thenarrator(!), the landlord finally has him taken to jail. Despite the narrator’s arrangements with theprison grub man, Mr. Cutlets, to provide Bartleby with the best of food,Bartleby prefers not to eat. Thenarrator finds him dead, as if asleep, in the prison yard.

I know nothing of this period in American literature, whichperhaps strengthened the effect of the book on me. Even as Bartleby died, it was still unclearto me whether this was a work of black irony or of Christian compassion. The story is certainly absurd. But it closes with the narrator hearing arumor that Bartleby used to work in Washington at the “dead letter office,”processing undeliverable mail.

His job was to remove valuables—rings or money, perhaps—fromletters that never reached their intended recipients: a long meditation onfutility and unbreachable distances between those who would profess theirlove. The narrator surmises it is thismeditation that led Bartleby to despondency. And so, on the last page of the book (or last minute of the recording),we are overwhelmed with the sadness of a man who has so deeply felt the pain ofthis world that he is finally judged by others to be unworthy to live in it.

I happened to listen to the last section of Bartleby while running errands with myseven-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. They of course couldn’t follow all of the story—I had listened to thewhole thing, and understood the language, and still wasn’t sure what was goingon until the very end—but my daughter, especially, thought the refrain “Iprefer not to” pretty humorous. And Ithink they, too, were caught up, as I and the narrator himself were, in theriddle of Bartleby.

Perhaps ten minutes before the end of the book, we weredriving through an especially rough part of Newark. On a desolate corner stood a black man inragged clothing, with an odd assortment of bags around him. It wasn’t clear what he was up to, but mydaughter proposed, after we’d gone past, “Daddy, I think I just saw one ofthose men who is too poor to have any home to go to.”

This, I think, is not the least of the virtues of cityliving. My children know about, andrecognize homelessness. It is familiarenough to them that they do not cringe—I was recently in a better part ofNewark with a suburban friend, who professes to hate cities, and was shockedwhen my wife failed to notice a somewhat derelict looking crowd of black men asshe was proclaiming the safety of our neighborhood.

To be a Christian, to be even human, I think, is above allto have compassion for the riddle of Bartleby.

Land of Sorrows

2011-09-23T13:45:00.001-04:00

New Jersey. We've lived here for a little over two years now, in Newark, which has long been the biggest city, in a neighborhood that was, not all that long ago -- 150 years? -- a swamp, but has been filled with poor immigrants ever since, and is the one part of the city spared from the destruction that has come upon so many of America's cities.

What do you think when you think New Jersey? Brash. Fast driving. Nasty lawyers. (Yes, they're here!) Guido's and Guidette's on the beach. Unpleasant people.

But let's go a little deeper.

Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin famously called New Jersey a "beer keg, tapped at both ends." That may seem to sum up New Jersey as a place of swill and hangovers, smelling like an "arm pit" (one of the more pleasant evocations of our state - there is actually a campaign that feels the need to cry out "New Jersey doesn't stink!"). But Benjamin Franklin was also the one who said, "beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

Early reports of New Jersey are of a paradise, a garden state, a place of rich farms and, yes, great breweries. I don't know much about the Channel Islands, between England and France, but when I think of old Jersey, I think of a farming paradise -- and that's what this state was like. It was a keg you wanted to get into.

But it was also a keg tapped at both ends. New Jersey has always been the land between Philadelphia and New York. Today we have no media markets of our own -- part of the reason our politics are so screwed up -- because most of the state is part of metropolitan areas centered in other states. On the one hand, that means money has always flowed in from Philadelphia and New York. On the other hands, it means we have always been serving someone else.

Today, the state is divided according to which city you commute to, and traversed by I-95, which literally runs across the state from Philadelphia to New York City; the New Jersey Turnpike, which extends from 95 to bypass Philadelphia on the way to Wilmington, Baltimore, and Washington, DC; and the Garden State Parkway, which reaches down the Shore, bringing tourists in and out. Originally, the primary road was the the old Post Road, authorized by the Constitution, and formerly the King's Highway, running from Philadelphia to New York. We are a state rich in natural resources, but fundamentally In Between.

New Jersey was born of compromise and division. The Swedes were actually the first to settle, in the southern part of the state. Then we were part of New Netherlands, along with what is now New York and the western half of Connecticut. Even then, the Dutch milked this land for resources, without really investing. New Jersey proper was born of protest. England's King Charles II -- himself the victor of a Civil War -- purchased the country from Holland, and gave it over to his brother, the Duke of York and the future King James II. James, of course, was the one deposed by (ironically, the Dutch) William of Orange and Mary. He was deposed because he was Catholic. New York was named for this man who might have returned England to the faith of her fathers. New Jersey split off in protest. Thus Princeton, the original College of New Jersey, has always been a center of Calvinist Presbyterianism precisely because New Jersey was the land to which all the pious Dutch fled when it appeared that New York might go papist. I teach in a town called Orange; it is not named after fruit.

New Jersey was the crossroads of the Revolutionary War. Our city of Newark was founded in 1666. By 1776 -- not that much later -- George Washington was stopping here as he fled from the massacres that were the British capture of New York City, on his way down to the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, from which he would run various raids back into New Jersey. Trenton eventually got to be our capital in large part because of the glorious battle fought there -- after Washington's famous Christmas crossing of the Delaware, from Pennyslvania into New Jersey, to slaughter the Hessians. Washington's earlier stop at Newark is famous in large part because it was apparently here that Thomas Paine wrote those famous words (I will quote beyond the famous part, to give the flavor):

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.

Consoling words, I suppose--but consolation only in the face of desolation. For seven-odd years, the armies tramped back and forth over New Jersey, burning farms, raping civilians (the Hessians were especially known for that, though the British were pretty proud of themselves too), devastating towns -- anyone who could, sure got out of Trenton. If New Jersey was a place of victory, it was only because it was a land of continual slaughter.

The army battles of the Civil War did not hit New Jersey. But the civil battle certainly did. Southern Jersey extends south of the Mason-Dixon line, and even up here in Newark, there were very strong business connections to the South. New Jersey was torn apart.

In the later nineteenth century, New Jersey was at the heart of the Industrial Revolution. Thomas Edison was here, Paterson was the home of the silk industry and the original manufacturers of Colt rifles, and a huge proportion of America's leather products were made in Newark. Newark also produced the first plastics, had and produced the first electric lights, and, because it was so ahead on these manufacturing things, hosted the birth of the insurance industry in the late nineteenth century. A rich and prosperous state.

But you cannot understand New Jersey -- or New York City, or probably any of the Northeast -- without understanding immigration. Wave after wave of Europe's poorest people poured into our cities. They came here to work, and they did work, and rose from poverty. But it wasn't easy, and it wasn't comfortable. More on that, perhaps, in another post.

Eventually the blacks came, too, in the two Great Migrations (first from 1910-1930, then from 1941-1970). They came here, like all the other immigrants, because New Jersey was a land of opportunity. But they were not always respected, and the political classes did not treat them well. The destruction of the cities is a topic I have covered elsewhere; suffice it to say that it was devastating to the millions of blacks who had come to work in New Jersey. It was somewhat less devastating to the European immigrants, but their communities, too, were destroyed. Newark's old First Ward, once a truly vibrant, and truly Italian community, was razed to the ground, replaced by government housing projects full of blacks, many of them without much hope of advancement. Weequahic, the southern most part of the city, went from having at least as much claim to be a true homeland for the Jews as Israel itself, to a place where this past summer a police officer was accidentally killed after two girls -- black, and hopeless -- got in a fight, and one of them sent her boyfriends to gun down the other one's boyfriends in a pizza place. Newark, and New Jersey, is a place of scars.

The riots were both cause and effect. To live in Newark is to hear constantly of those July days in 1967 -- and to see the physical scars that remain across the city, the blocks piled with rubble, the boarded up houses and buildings, the ancient billboards advertising a glamourous city that it strains one's imagination to believe could ever have been Newark. The Italians who stayed, and those who left, remain in shock and terror at what happened to their home, their city. But the riots were not the beginning - they hardly could have been.

New Jersey, this garden state, this industrial masterwork, this place of opportunity and beauty, has always been bleeding. It is a true crossroads of America, and like Belgium, that means it has been crossed by every kind of army in every kind of war. For a hundred and fifty years now wave after wave of impoverished immigrant has come, bringing with them the pathologies and desperations of their home countries, the clash of cultures that have never met before, the desperate effort to get ahead. New Jersey, I sometimes feel, is like we're still on the boat, with everyone gasping for air, stepping on one another to try to survive, and to get to where the land of riches must surely be. In New Jersey, the rich themselves came from the poverty of the docks of Naples, and continue to act like it. And meanwhile, every generation looks down on, and does their best to take from, the generation after it: the WASPs have always tried to hold their power, and to get rich off of the immigrants, and each generation of immigrants follows that pattern. It is a frightful place, because it is a bleeding place.

Please don't misunderstand me. I love the immigrants, including those black immigrants from America's South -- I choose to live in an immigrant neighborhood, in a black city. I write not to condemn, but to compassionate. I feel the terror, the frustration, the scars. And I believe this is America, at its deepest, and richest, and most difficult.

Today is the feast of St. Pio of Pietrelcina, "Padre Pio," a Franciscan friar in Italy in the early- to mid-twentieth century. He was a man of compassion and of suffering, and for his compassion he was made to suffer, cast out of his community, silenced, abused. I heard a priest say Mass today who in many ways embodies my understanding of New Jersey. He talks like a man born and raised here -- but he also says the Italian Mass at our parish, reminding us that he is the son of immigrants, who grew up in a home where they didn't speak English. He grew up in Newark -- and not our part of Newark, which was spared. His parish has been bulldozed, his community is gone; the center of the riots was walking distance from his home. When he comes to say the Italian Mass, we know it is with a suffering nostalgia. After the riots, his parents moved out to the very borders of Newark, to a kind of hiding place, but still within this beloved, bleeding city.

I don't know the rest of his story. I know that he had a mental breakdown after his mother died, that he is a man whose holiness -- if I am right in thinking it is holiness -- is precisely in his utter forsakenness, his complete loss of interest in amounting to anything. Recently we were chatting, somehow, about Monsigniori. He said, "not for me. 'Monsignor' is for mothers. My mother is dead." His preaching, like the way he says Mass and hears confessions, always carries the resignation of a shrug: he does things right, but makes no effort to do them particularly well.

But today he spoke with unaccustomed eloquence about St. Pio. A man he said he identifies with -- I have NEVER heard this priest say he identifies with anything related to sanctity! -- though he then tried to cover it up, saying we all probably feel some kinship with Padre Pio. And then he talked about how Padre Pio got nothing but suffering, nothing but rejection, for all the good he did.

A land of sorrows. New Jersey.

Nature and Aesthetics in Brideshead

2011-09-08T14:06:00.002-04:00

I am teaching Evelyn Waugh's wonderful novel Brideshead Revisited right now. I'd like to share some thoughts about aesthetics.

Early on at Oxford, Charles, the future landscape painter, learns something critical:

It was not until Sebastian, idly turning the pages of Clive Bell's Art, read: "'Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a butterfly or a flower that he feels for a cathedral or a picture?' Yes. I do," that my eyes were opened.

Modernity claims a radical divide between nature and man. Indeed, in modern parlance, nature is almost defined as "untouched by man" -- and thus man defined as "not nature." That isn't true, on a variety of levels. Sebastian teaches Charles that it isn't true on the aesthetic level. Art is beautiful precisely because it is an extension, a further development, of nature.

Anthony Blanche was the first to go . . . . The others left soon after him. I rose to go with them, but Sebastian said: "Have some more Cointreau," so I stayed and later he said, "I must go to the Botanical Gardens."

"Why?"

"To see the ivy."

It seemed a good enough reason and I went with him. He took my arm as we walked under the walls of Merton.

"I've never been to the Botanical Gardens," I said.

"Oh, Charles, what a lot you have to learn! There's a beautiful arch there and more different kinds of ivy than I knew existed. I don't know where I should be without the Botanical Gardens."

A beautiful arch, and more kinds of ivy than I knew existed. Does anyone feel the same kind of emotion for a man-made arch as for the brilliant natural variety of ivy? Yes. Sebastian does. And really, it's not hard to see it. Of course there is a beautiful arch among the ivy.

Then they go to Brideshead.

It was an aesthetic education to live within those walls . . . to sit, hour after hour, in the pillared shade looking out on the terrace.

This terrace was the final consummation of the house's plan; it stood on massive stone ramparts above the lakes, so that from the hall steps it seemed to overhang them, as though, standing by the balustrade, one could have dropped a pebble into the first of them immediately below one's feet. It was embraced by the two arms of the colonnade; beyond the pavilions groves of lime led to the wooded hillsides. Part of the terrace was paved, part planted with flower-beds and arabesques of dwarf box; taller box grew in a dense hedge, making a wide oval, cut into niches and interspersed with statuary, and, in the centre, dominating the whole splendid space, rose the fountain; such a fountain as one might expect to find in a piazza of Southern Italy, such a fountain as was, indeed, found there a century ago by one of Sebastian's ancestors; found, purchased, imported and re-erected in an alien but welcoming climate.

Sebastian set me to draw it. It was an ambitious subject for an amateur -- an oval basin with an island of formal rocks at its centre; on the rocks grew, in stone, formal tropical vegetation and wild English fern in its natural fronds; through them ran a dozen streams of counterfeited springs, and round them sported fantastic tropical animals, camels and camelopards and an ebullient lion all vomiting water; on the rocks, to the height of the pediment, stood an Egyptian obelisk of red sandstone -- but, by some odd chance, for the thing was far beyond me, I brought it off and by judicious omissions and some stylish tricks, produced a very passable echo of Piranesi . . . .

Since the days when, as a school-boy, I used to bicycle round the neighbouring parishes, rubbing brasses and photographing fonts, I have nursed a love of architecture, but though in opinion I had made that easy leap, characteristic of my generation, from the puritanism of Ruskin to the puritanism of Roger Fry, my sentiments at heart were insular and mediaeval.

This was my conversion to the baroque. Here under that high and insolent dome, under those tricky ceilings; here, as I passed through those arches and broken pediments to the pillared shade beyond and sat, hour by hour, before the fountain, probing its shadows, tracing its lingering echoes, rejoicing in all its clustered feats of daring and invention, I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me, as though the water that spurted and bubbled among its stones was indeed a life-giving spring.

Where does nature leave off and art begin? Of course on some level there's a distinction -- but true art springs right out of nature, and ties it together.

Indeed, sometimes nature itself becomes art. Here is Charles returning to Brideshead in war time:

Beyond and about us, more familiar still, lay an exquisite man-made landscape. It was a sequestered place, enclosed and embraced in a single, winding valley. Our camp lay along one gentle slope; opposite us the ground led, still unravished, to the neighbourly horizon, and between us flowed a stream -- it was named the Bride and rose not two miles away at a farm called Bridesprings, where we used sometimes to walk to tea; it became a considerable river lower down before it joined the Avon -- which had been dammed here to form three lakes, one no more than a wet slate among the reeds, but the others more spacious, reflecting the clouds and the mighty beeches at their margin. The woods were full of oak and beech, the oak grey and bare, the beech faintly dusted with green by the breaking buds; they made a simple, carefully designed pattern with the green glades and the wide green spaces -- Did the fallow deer graze here still? -- and, lest the eye wander aimlessly, a Doric temple stood by the water's edge, and an ivy-grown arch spanned the lowest of the connecting weirs. All this had been planned and planted a century and a half ago so that, at about this date, it might be seen in its maturity. From where I stood the house was hidden by a green spur, but I knew well how and where it lay, couched among the lime trees like a hind in the bracken.

A "man-made landscape." What can it mean? Well, this. Where does nature leave off and man begin? How can it be that the Doric temple (with its ivy-grown arch!) ties together the play of landscape, that the house itself is like a deer, grazing among the woods?

Note, also, before we move on, the play of political life: the fountain has been brought to this rural setting, but it immediately evokes the piazza in Southern Italy that was its natural home, while Brideshead ties in a farm up river, and indeed a whole community of farmers, while leading the mind down river toward Bristol, a major city, at the mouth of the Avon. To see this natural place is to see its connections to the human world around it.

But now it is time to talk of food. Who could forget that dinner with Rex at Paillard's. Like Charles, let us tune out Rex's awful noise, and attend to the beautiful:

I was there twenty minutes before Rex. If I had to spend an evening with him, it should, at any rate, be in my own way. I remember the dinner well -- soup of oseille [the herb sorrel], a sole quite simply cooked in a white wine sauce, a caneton a la presse [duckling pressed, then cooked in its own juices], a lemon souffle. At the last minute, fearing that the whole thing was too simple for Rex, I added caviare aux blinis. And for wine I let him give me a bottle of 1906 Montrachet, then at its prime, and, with the duck, a Clos de Bere of 1904.

Living was easy in France then; with the exchange as it was, my allowance went a long way and I did not live frugally. It was very seldom, however, that I had a dinner like this, and I felt well disposed to Rex, when at last he arrived and gave up his hat and coat with the air of not expecting to see them again. He looked round the sombre little place with suspicion, as though hoping to see apaches or a drinking party of students. All he saw was four senators with napkins tucked under their beards eating in absolute silence. I could imagine him telling his commercial friends later: ". . . interesting fellow I know; an art student living in Paris. Took me to a funny little restaurant -- sort of place you'd pass without looking at -- where there was some of the best food I ever ate. There were half a dozen senators there, too, which shows you it was the right place. Wasn't at all cheap, either."

Well, Rex understands some things.

He plainly wished to talk of his own affairs; they could wait, I thought, for the house of tolerance and repletion, for the cognac; they could wait until the attention was blunted and one would listen with half the mind only; now in the keen moment when the maitre d'hotel was turning the blinis over in the pan, and, in the background, two humbler men were preparing the press, we would talk of myself . . . .

"Ah." The cream and hot butter mingled and overflowed separating each glaucose bead of caviar from its fellows, capping it in white and gold.

"I like a bit of chopped onion with mine," said Rex. "Chap-who-new told me it brought out the flavour."

"Try it without first," I said. "And tell me more news of myself."

Glaucose is a shade of grey. Cream, butter, caviare, thin blini pancakes. Good cooking begins and ends with natural ingredients, gentle shades of flavor and color, gently brought together, so that each complements and nothing overpowers.

The soup was delicious after the rich blinis -- hot, thin, bitter, frothy.

But Rex is still talking.

"It's the kind of thing I hear . . . . But Ma Marchmain won't do anything about it. I suppose it's something to do with her crack-brain religion, not to take care of the body."

The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it. We ate to the music of the press -- the crunch of the bones, the drip of blood and marrow, the tap of the spoon basting the thin slices of breast

The sole was so simple and unobtrusive that Rex failed to notice it. The pun is exquisite. Rex criticizes Lady Marchmain for a religion that, by his calculation, does not sufficiently care for the body. That seems "crack-brain" to him because -- well, because the soul is so simple and unobtrusive that Rex fails to notice it. He is bodily in a gross way, in a way that cannot appreciate the soul. But ironically, his grossness also cannot appreciate the body, for just as he overlooks the soul, so too does he overlook the fish, the sole.

The true contrast is not between body and soul, but between gross and fine. Nothing could be more physical than the crunch of bones as they prepare that delicate caneton. But it is a music Rex cannot hear.

Who can fail to think of that lovely dinner with Cordelia at the Ritz Grille in London, after a day of painting poor doomed Marchmain House, some eighteen months later.

"I hope I've got a vocation."

"I don't know what that means."

"It means you can be a nun. If you haven't a vocation it's no good however much you want to be; and if you have a vocation, you can't get away from it, however much you hate it. Bridey thinks he has a vocation and hasn't. I used to think Sebastian had and hated it -- but I don't know now. Everything has changed so much suddenly."

But I had no patience with this convent chatter. I had felt the brush take life in my hand that afternoon; I had had my finger in the great, succulent pie of creation. I was a man of the Renaissance that evening -- of Browning's Renaissance. I, who had walked the streets of Rome in Genoa velvet and had seen the stars through Galileo's tube, spurned the friars with their dusty tomes and their sunken, jealous eyes and their crabbed hair-splitting speech.

"You'll fall in love," I said.

"Oh, I pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?"

Who has their finger in the succulent pie of creation? Still-secular Charles has seen something extraordinary in his painting. But so has Cordelia. A page before we read:

Presently on the last afternoon I heard a voice behind me say: "May I stay here and watch?"

I turned and found Cordelia.

"Yes," I said, "if you don't talk," and I worked on, oblivious of her, until the failing sun made me put up my brushes.

"It must be lovely to be able to do that."

I had forgotten she was there.

"It is."

So here's this fifteen-year-old girl who can sit in absolute silence and enjoy all the glories of the Renaissance man. He thinks her religion of friars stands between her and the joy of creation. She wants to be a nun and finds meringues scrumptious.

But let us return to Paillard's:

Those were the kind of things he heard, mortal illness and debt, I thought.

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St. James's Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime and, that day, as at Paillard's with Rex Mottram years before, it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.

Another wisdom than his. The fabulous thing about viniculture is how it mingles man's wisdom with the wisdom of nature. Like the designer of English parks, the vintner gently harvests the fruit of the earth, pared through generations into subtly different grapes, and allows the yeasts that already inhabit the skins to gently work their magic, sometimes over decades (the wines that night at Paillard's were about twenty years old), in barrels themselves carefully cultivated from just the right oak. Where does nature leave off and art begin? The wisdom of the vintner is an ancient wisdom, slowly gleaned from the wisdom already built into the earth itself by its wise creator. It is a kind of contemplation, and it speaks words of hope that the world is an older and better place than Rex ever knew.

After the duck came a salad of watercress and chicory in a faint mist of chives. I tried to think only of the salad. I succeeded for a time in thinking only of the souffle. Then came the cognac and the proper hour for these confidences . . . .

The cognac was not to Rex's taste. It was clear and pale and it came to us in a bottle free from grime and Napoleonic cyphers. It was only a year or two older than Rex and lately bottled. They gave it to us in very thin tulip-shaped glasses of modest size.

"Brandy's one of the things I do know a bit about," said Rex. "This is a bad colour. What's more, I can't taste it in this thimble."

They brought him a balloon the size of his head. He made them warm it over the spirit lamp. Then he rolled the splendid spirit round, buried his face in the fumes, and pronounced it the sort of stuff he put soda in at home.

So, shamefacedly, they wheeled out of its hiding place the vast and mouldy bottle they kept for people of Rex's sort.

"That's the stuff," he said, tilting the treacly concoction till it left dark rings round the sides of his glass. "They've always got some tucked away, but they won't bring it out unless you make a fuss. Have some."

"I'm quite happy with this."

"Well, it's a crime to drink it, if you don't really appreciate it."

He lit his cigar and sat back at peace with the world; I, too, was at peace in another world than his. We both were happy. He talked of Julia and I heard his voice, unintelligible at a great distance, like a dog's barking miles away on a still night.

A fine coup de grace: even antiquity is not a think to be sought for its own sake, just because a bottle has Napoleonic cyphers on it. Indeed, the truer antiquity is the wisdom that knows when to bottle and when to drink, and how to appreciate the subtler stuff. Antiquity itself is a heroic deed of man -- Napoleonic indeed -- but beauty is a knowledge of something beyond man, the cultivation of a wisdom that does not start with us.

The Declaration of Independence

2011-07-04T15:13:00.001-04:00

We all know the opening salvo (after a brief preface, “When in the Course of human events”), of the document we celebrate on the Fourth of July:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Etc.

Although Jefferson’s words have something of inspiration about them, the subsequent two centuries and more of the Republic – and of much of world history – have largely been a debate about what these things mean. What are Rights? What do Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness mean? How does Government “secure” rights? What does “Government” even mean?

One example, that I happened upon this morning. James Madison, surely one of the more important

founding thinkers, wrote in that seminal Federalist no. 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

Now, coming from a Thomistic perspective, I find myself constrained, in order to give a philosophically coherent account of this business about “angels,” to make some points that may more properly belong to theology. And I preface this by saying that, as a means of interpreting what James Madison meant, I think the following resort to Thomistic angelology is highly dubious. But perhaps his insight was better than his explicit understanding.

“If men were angels” is typically taken, I think, to mean “if men were saints,” or at least “if men weren’t sinners.” I was recently in a debate with someone (an American Orthodox libertarian with a Harvard Ph.D. in political science: i.e., someone who knows Madison but whose thinking on nature and grace may be a little cavalier). Paraphrasing this line from Madison, I think, he claimed that government would be unnecessary if not for the Fall.

But that, says Thomas, following Aristotle, is not true. Government is necessary if we live in community. Government needs to use force only if people wickedly resist it – and my interlocutor tells me that since Max Weber, it has become typical to define Government as force. But common life demands decisions: what side of the road will we drive on? When shall we celebrate our festivals? How shall we raise money for the common fund? Where should we build roads, and public buildings, and how shall we adjudicate legitimate disputes among private citizens? What causes shall we pursue, and when? As the great Thomist Aristotelian Yves Simon argues, in A General Theory of Authority, the common life demands authority, whether it be the authority of a king or that of a congress or even that of a majority.

The key point, then, in saving Madison’s claim that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary,” is that angels differ essentially from men not in being good, but in being immaterial (and, Thomas takes it to a deeper metaphysical level, each of a separate species). Good men would need government, even though the government would never have to force compliance with its decisions. “Men” without bodies –angels – would not need government, because they would not live in a common world.

But government must have limits – unless the governors themselves were angels: “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Well, if “controls” means threats of violence against the governors, then I suppose saints would not need controls. But if it means, in the classic American sense, just a clear sense of limits, then the essential difference is again one of materiality.

Government must be limited, it is true, because governors are always in a certain sense corrupt. But as the founding fathers never tired of saying, there is no way to control a society of vicious people— as Madison put it, at the Virginia ratifying convention, “Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks – no form of government can render us secure.”

The genius of the American scheme of limited government, however, is to realize that even virtuous men have limits on their competence. Why? Because no man knows all. No distant bureaucrat, no matter how good or ingenious, can know enough to decide how best to educate my particular children, to manage my health, to bring my neighborhood to life. For us mortals, knowledge begins in the senses: there can be no knowledge, and thus no practical wisdom, without feet on the ground in the relevant place.

So the goal is not to find “angels” of men – that is, saints – who can govern us without limits. We do need good men, but that is not enough. We also need to define the limits of what government at different levels can do. That is the genius of Article One, Section Nine of the American Constitution. On a deeper level, it is the genius of the division of powers, Articles One-Three, and so the bulk of the American idea.

(And so, in one of the more brilliant lines of American jurisprudence, now-Chief Justice John Roberts, in a decision overturning the intrusions of the EPA, wrote, “a hapless toad, for reasons of its own, lives its entire life in California” – and is thus not subject to the federal government’s oversight of interstate commerce.)

The point of this little diversion on James Madison’s quote about angels is just to say that the ideas of our founding fathers, though containing truly extraordinary wisdom, remain to be understood. It takes some philosophical acumen to know the difference between men and angels. Sometimes the founders themselves may have hit on insights that they wouldn’t have been able to fully articulate.

Let us return to Jefferson’s lines in the Declaration of Independence. Having established that there is much to be, not replaced, but interpreted – especially phrases such as “certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness . . . to secure these rights, governments are instituted” – let us move on to a point of textual history.

On June 11, 1776, Congress created a Committee of Five (Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, and Robert Livingston of New York). The Committee quickly selected Jefferson to write a first draft; within seventeen busy days he had written and they had reviewed a text mostly identical to the one we now know. Those were busy days, by the way: there was considerable debate as to whether a Declaration should be made before Articles of Confederation (the first Constitution) were agreed upon; which is to say, Jefferson and his committee wrote this immortal document in two and a half weeks in which they were also debating the constitution of the new nation. My take away: it was a hurried document.

Moreover, the Congress was anything but unanimous in its way of thinking. We know, of course, that Jefferson was vastly farther from Christianity than all but maybe Franklin. And we know that there was a world of difference between Massachusetts and South Carolina – indeed, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia were very different from one another, the Quakers of Pennsylvania had almost nothing in common with the hard-headed New Englanders, Rhode Island and Connecticut were founded (just a couple lifetimes previous) as protests against Massachusetts, New Jersey as a protest against New York, etc.

The differences come out in the debate. The drafting Committee was asked to work during a period of three weeks in which discussion of independence was tabled due to lack of agreement. In the end, New York didn’t vote for independence until a week after the famous Fourth of July.

When Congress set out to debate the text of the document, they made only two changes – but they are significant. One paragraph, apparently dear to the ever contradictory and tortured Jefferson, condemned Britain for its approval of slavery. Here it is, so you can see how strong it was – and how it differed from the final draft not only of the Declaration, but of the Articles of Confederation and the eventual Constitution, which treat slavery as more or less compatible with the American ideal:

“He [that is, the King of England] has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incure [sic] miserable death in their transportation hither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative [sic] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce; and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he had deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”

(Yes, Jefferson seems, at the end, to try to get Southern support by blaming the King for encouraging slave uprisings as well as slavery.)

In short, the draft, with its sometimes convoluted language, shows Jefferson and his drafting committee to hold very strong ideas out of step with the Congress that would approve and publish the actual Declaration.

The other passage eliminated by the united Congress went on, at length, to condemn the British people themselves, saying, inter alia, that they “have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity, and when occasions have been given them, by the regular course of their laws, of removing from their councils the disturbers of our harmony, they have by their free election re-established them in power.”

My point here is that the Declaration is a document published, not by Thomas Jefferson, but by the representatives of thirteen very different colonies, with very different ideas about crucial issues in political philosophy – issues like slavery, how we relate to our cousins in other lands, and how much a people is to blame for the choices of its governors, as well as questions of political expediency.

I think, then, that the key to understanding the Declaration is to realize that it is a committee document, a consensus document. When we read “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” we must not, I think, read in Jefferson’s philosophy, but recognize that this is language, perhaps intentionally vague, meant to appeal to a very diverse audience.

Indeed (and this is my final point), the Declaration should be read to have two obvious parts. The first is a somewhat breezy and vague prologue. It contains an opening paragraph (“When in the Course of human events”) which simply states that it will give the reasons for breaking with England, and a second paragraph (“We hold these truths”) meant, not to give the definitive treatment of political philosophy – the Constitution is surely far better considered, though it too opens with a rather breezy, vague passage about “the general welfare,” etc. – but to say, more broadly, that we are acting on principle, even if we’re not yet ready to define it.

This, I think, is the context in which to read John Adams’s famous lines to Abigail in which he predicts that July 2, not July 4, would be the celebrated day. He, perhaps second after Jefferson in responsibility for the text, thought that the vote for independence in general was of far greater significance than the hurried, consensus document that would publish that vote. He undervalued the importance of physical symbols – it’s nice to have a piece of paper, and actual words, that symbolize independence – but his opinion seems reasonable. The point was independence, not the world’s final statement on political philosophy. On Independence Day (not Declaration Day), we honor an act, not a book.

The second, and much larger part of the Declaration, gives the concrete reasons for breaking with England. The point, I think, is that we didn’t break over theory but over the way it plays out in particular issues: “He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures;” “He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.” Etc.

Now, a couple points seem significant to me. First, the general Congress was perfectly willing to strike down accusations that were not universally agreed upon – so these accusations are generally agreed upon. And these things are much more concrete, and thus give much more substance to the vagaries of the “self-evident truths.” As a reflection of the thinking of the Founders as a whole, I don’t think we should disregard the preamble, hurried and vague though it may be – but we should interpret it through the concrete things that the consensus of the Founders considered to contradict what “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” mean.

And the most interesting thing is that, over and over again, what the Founders demand is good laws. The very first accusation, which more or less contains them all, states, “He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.” The second begins, “He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance.”

Now, they obviously were annoyed by too much government, as well. “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.” “For imposing Taxes without our Consent.”

But it seems to me that the real thing to take away from this great document is that for the Founders, America was established not as a license for lawlessness, for “individual liberties,” but as a way to seek “liberty and the pursuit of happiness” precisely through good laws. They found happiness not in unbridled individualism, but in good government.

“Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”

Professors and Political Prudence

2011-05-25T14:40:00.005-04:00

I am a professor at a marginally Catholic college in New Jersey. Here's an interesting story about the weakness of professorial, and liberal, thinking about politics.

At a recent Faculty Senate meeting the following was proposed:

"Be it resolved that the members of the Seton Hall University Faculty Senate strenuously object to having Governor Chris Christie as the University's 2011 commencement speaker. The Governor's educational policies, which have resulted in the firing of teachers and closing down of both enrichment and basic skills programs, make his appearance at an event celebrating academic achievement singularly inappropriate."

I was one of the leaders of the opposition. I stated that I might be willing to support a statement that said we wanted to avoid political speakers at graduation -- because there will obviously be division, which is a distraction -- but that I certainly couldn't support the second sentence, which claims as indisputable that Gov. Christie is opposed to education. I noted that I am a homeowner and father of small children in Newark, where our liberal Democrat mayor, Corey Booker, also a political rock star (Christie and Booker were the only governor and mayor named to Time's admittedly stupid list of 100 most influential people in the world) has stood together with Gov. Christie as a champion of desperately-needed reform for our urban schools.

I should have added, but was behind on my news reading and afraid to speak out too much against the liberals in our faculty, that Christie has also recently been applauded for his work on urban schools reform by Oprah, Pres. Obama's Secretary of Education (who said Christie and Booker have made Newark the cutting edge of urban school reform), the head of Facebook (who gave our city an enormous amount of money for schools, saying it was entirely because of his respect for Christie and Booker on this issue), Bill and Melinda Gates (who also have given us a lot of money), and the Harvard Graduate School of Education (where, according to our generally anti-Christie local newspaper, Christie was applauded loudly for his willingness to take on the teachers' unions in favor of urban kids). He is speaking soon at the Princeton Graduate School of Education, though beyond the invite, we don't yet know how much applause he'll get.

Others faculty members jumped in with a standard, though somewhat weak, conservative argument: we need to distinguish between truly black-and-white moral issues (read: abortion) vs. prudential things, about which honest people can disagree (read: almost anything but abortion). More on that in a moment.

One leader among the liberals proclaimed that she was going to protest by not going to graduation. I guess that's her way of "celebrating academic achievement."

We won the vote decisively: the Faculty Senate did not censure Gov. Christie.

I was at a lunch earlier this week in which the woman who proposed the censure, an enthusiastic though not very well-formed Catholic, discussed the issue with another senator sitting across the table from me, in a voice I was sure to hear.

Their argument was, in itself, worthy. They said they get frustrated about the "prudential" distinction, because it seems to cover too much. I think their argument was that prudence is so infused with principle that at some point, you have to say that making concretely bad decisions indicates not only bad prudence, but also bad intent. They applied this so as to say that if conservatives don't agree with them on *how* to care for the poor, it must ultimately indicate a disagreement on *whether* to care for the poor. Gov. Christie, for example, has been battling he state Supreme Court on whether he can take away a lot of state money from urban schools. Surely, their argument goes, this is not just a matter of prudence, but of principle: he doesn't care about those schools.

I agree with the basic premise about prudence and principle, though I would handle it with a light touch. And, of course, I would draw the opposite conclusion: liberal policies have been so disastrous for our cities, the black community, our schools, our families, the poor, and, to a lesser extent, immigrants that at some point we have to question whether they really care about these things at all. I would argue (as Amity Shlaes gently argues in her marvelous history The Forgotten Man) that since FDR, liberals have been more interested in getting votes -- from cities, blacks, the poor, and immigrants -- than in doing anything to really help: ultimate cynicism.

But let us keep our touch light: because I do not think my colleagues at the table feel that way at all. They really do care about the poor. However misguided, they really do think that being liberal and caring for the poor are one and the same. Ultimately, there's something corrupt in their principles; but let us not be too quick to impugn motives.

And so let us turn the tables back again, to where liberals are on the attack and conservatives appear to hate the poor. The two colleagues I was talking to were reasonable, gentle, fair people -- even if I think they are a bit shallow in their thinking about politics. But another colleague roared in with something about Paul Ryan's "death vouchers." He was incoherent, but I think he's claiming that since the conservative hero in the House is proposing that, several years down the road, we replace Medicare with vouchers, so that seniors would buy their own private insurance; and since this colleague thinks that private insurance obviously means they won't get adequate care; and since, let's face it, liberals are stung by the rhetorical power of conservative claims about Obama's "death panels," in which government bureaucrats decide which life-saving treatments people can get (in a parallel way, I couldn't help but notice how much the liberals in the Senate were desperately trying to create a mirror-image of conservative furor over the militantly pro-abortion Pres. Obama speaking at Notre Dame: how they wish they had an issue like abortion!); for all these reasons, this professor believes that Paul Ryan actually wants to throw Grandma off a cliff.

A liberal ad shows Paul Ryan pushing Grandma off a cliff.

Now here's my point, and it's a point that conservatives should also take to heart.

Alright, fine, I agree with the argument for my colleagues' main premise: yes, it's true that principle suffuses prudence such that bad political decisions may reflect not only bad prudence but also ill intent. At some point, if a policy throws people off a cliff, you begin to wonder whether the policy-maker is trying to do that.

But on the minor premise, I must urge caution. My colleagues, who only speak to liberal professors who agree with them, are so insulated as to think that their friends in the teachers' unions, who vehemently oppose Gov. Christie, are the only voices worth hearing. The teachers' unions think Christie is throwing -- well, let us not say "the children," but more vaguely, "the schools" off a cliff; therefore Christie must be doing that; therefore he must want to do that. Lots of suppressed premises here. The key point is, in our little postmodern echo chambers, it can sometimes seem like everyone agrees on a prudential point, and so we assume that when people disagree with us on prudence, there must be issues of principle. What's fascinating is that these academics, who are basically intelligent, informed people, are utterly unaware that Harvard, Princeton, Oprah, Bill Gates, Pres. Obama, and Corey Booker all disagree with them on the prudential point. My colleagues assume Christie is alone in his thinking.

Once you see that he is not alone, you have to at least appreciate that, whether or not you ultimately agree with his proposals (which, for example, say that funding is SO completely not part of the problem that he'll radically cut funding while he pursues other possibly beneficial policies), you have to acknowledge that people of good will can disagree on prudential applications. Ditto with Paul Ryan throwing Grandma off a cliff: some of us really do care about grandmothers, and also support Paul Ryan.

So of course it's true -- conservatives beware! -- that prudential disagreements cannot cover all sins. Bad prudence can be an indication of bad principle, and we cannot simply say that it's a matter of personal opinion when we see radically bad decisions. Nevertheless, we must be careful -- conservatives again beware! -- to recognize that sometimes people whose motives we really can't impugn may actually disagree with us on prudential matters. We can't hide behind prudence, but neither can we make it into a crystal-clear indication of what's in people's hearts.

I will add a postscript: The liberals of course become passionate defenders of Church teaching when it comes to economic issues. Every time something involves paying us or our friends more, liberal academics at Catholic colleges (at least this one) suddenly forget all their fears about the separation of Church and state and the illegitimacy of Church teaching impinging on academic freedom, and suddenly proclaim that this is a Catholic college, and we need to obey Catholic social teaching.

What they mean, of course, is that they have a vague idea that Pius XI's 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, rightly seen as the Magna Carta of Catholic economic policy, says something about a living wage: that we need to make sure the poor have enough money to live on. The liberal who boycotted graduation has said that it's a matter of Catholic social teaching that professors should be paid enough to live close to campus in incredibly expensive Northeast New Jersey (by which, of course, she does not mean that they should be paid enough to live near us in Newark, which she abhors as a hell-hole).

What they don't know is that in that very section -- a very key section -- of Quadragesimo Anno, the Pope (a) repudiates any notion of a minimum wage as being vastly too reductive; (b) says that wages must take into account the needs of the workers along with the viability of the business, which provides jobs, and the ultimate price of the goods that business provides for society, which it would be wrong to make too expensive through unreasonably high wages; and (c) defines the living wage as a key issue precisely because of what Pius XI and other popes prior to John Paul II (who liberals hate, but who was quiet on this point) perceived as the radical importance of making sure that women stay home with their children instead of going to work! I don't think the liberals really want to defend that idea of the living wage!

Quadragesimo Anno also, of course, is militant in its opposition to the growing powers of the state, over-taxation, and the loss of local autonomy through the encroachment of higher levels of government. And concludes that what's most important is that workers are cared for spiritually, go on spiritual retreats, and see their Catholic identity as entirely defining their sense of community. Liberals really shouldn't quote Catholic social thought.

Conservatism for the Black Community

2010-10-13T22:38:00.000-04:00

Well, since my friend Brett is plugging me as the answer to Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson's demand that Republicans give a damn about blacks, I'll dust off the blog, which has been too much neglected of late, and throw together a policy agenda.

As long-time readers know, this is a topic I've been thinking hard about for several years. But tonight I only have time to slap some things on line, without supporting my recommendations with my wonted statistics.

My purpose is, on the one hand, to show that conservatism has much to offer the black community, especially the urban black community. (I think about 60% of black Americans live in cities, and a large part of the other 40% have those black urban communities as their center of gravity.)

On the other hand, I'd like to show that conservatism has nothing to fear from outreach to blacks. There is an unfortunate perception that outreach to blacks means giving up on conservative principles: pandering, etc. But one of the points of the following policy agenda is that outreach to blacks is a matter of applying conservative principles to forgotten issues, not a matter of giving up on conservative principles. Thus these arguments attempt to be thoroughly conservative, not only because I believe that conservatism is true, but also in order to show that conservatives need not abandon principles to reach out to blacks.

Blacks left the Republican party of Lincoln, to which they were beholden for about seventy years, in response to outreach by FDR in the 1930s. FDR drew their attention to the fact that the GOP took their votes for granted, and won for his party eighty years of 90+% majorities among a population that forms some 14% of the country. Were the GOP to reclaim even a significant part of this population, I think liberalism would be politically finished in this country.

So, without further ado, a preliminary Conservative Policy Agenda for the Black Community:

1. Public transit. Buses are a big deal for urban folk, especially for poor urban folk. And in my experience riding buses in many cities, even very white cities like St. Paul, Minnesota, bus ridership is overwhelmingly black.

Almost everywhere, buses are a government-run monopoly, and (not surprising to conservatives) a lousy one. Riding the bus means paying too much, for a crowded, bumpy ride, with unpredictable schedules that make life very hard for the urban poor. And, by the way, for us urban middle-class folks, a good bus system would be an awfully welcome alternative to driving and parking in the city. Moreover, the government monopolies have been directly used in some places -- New York, for example -- to put out of business bus companies directly started by blacks for blacks in underserved communities. This is intolerable.

De-monopolize the buses. Maybe -- maybe -- provide some government oversight to make sure people don't get fleeced. But otherwise, unleash private enterprise to create better buses, better routes, and better schedules, and let people so inclined run buses to serve underserved communities. Government buses are bad for blacks.

2. Legal reform. I recently got a mistaken traffic ticket in Newark. It took me no fewer than three three-hour court appearances before the judge dismissed me, without a trial. If I had had a lawyer, I could have gotten it done in fifteen minutes. If I had had money, I could have just paid the ticket. And if I hadn't had a white collar job, I would have lost a lot of money sitting there in court. This is an unfair burden on the poor, and there is nothing conservative about mismanaged courts.

Follow the lead of Gov. Mitch Daniels in Indiana (who, by the way, got 20% of the black vote in a year when Indiana's blacks voted over 90% for Obama) and streamline all public offices. Waiting in line at the DMV hurts poor people more than rich people. Waiting in line at the court hurts poor people more than rich people. Figure it out. I don't know how, but figure it out.

3. Decentralized policing. Urban black communities have two police problems. One is that there's too much crime, and the police aren't successfully stopping it. The other is that the police feel like foreign forces. No wonder, when even cities like Newark, NJ (53% black) and Washington, DC (56% black) have white police commissioners. Even where police commissioners are black, residents can be forgiven for feeling hopeless when all crime-fighting is put in the hands of a distant bureaucracy. When a community cannot police itself, it feels, on the one hand, helpless, and on the other hand, occupied. People are less inclined to police their own communities when they are treated as outsiders by the police. And, let us not fail to mention, police officers routinely speed through our communities in a way that makes very clear how they feel about local populations.

Here's a right-wing answer: arm the people. Condi Rice once said, of course she supports the Second Amendment: she grew up in Montgomery, where her father and the other men of their community guarded their block against white supremacists. People should have the right to defend their community. Fathers who want to defend their families should not be left defenseless against lawless drug dealers.

While we're at it, let's restore the old system of private detectives, where individuals can decide for themselves what crimes to investigate, instead of leaving all policing in the hands of a centralized bureaucracy.

4. Forget drugs. Drugs are a symptom, not a cause. Socially, they are a symptom of hopeless communities. Economically, they can seem like the only option for young men who can't get better employment. I don't think we should legalize drugs; they are really bad for young men, and disproportionately hurt black men. But neither should we make prosecuting drug dealers a main focus; this is just whack-a-mole. Benign neglect.

5. Cut taxes for the poor. Conservatives like to talk about how high taxes discourage work. I agree, but this applies to the poor, as well as to the rich. The Payroll Tax, a silly device designed to make it look like Social Security is a private investment, not social welfare, amounts to a 15% tax on income under $104,000. Higher income doesn't have this tax at all. (Oh sure, half the tax is "paid" by the employer -- but it comes out of his payroll, and thus means less money for workers: either lower pay, or fewer jobs.) What that 15% means is that, for example, income between $8,375 and $34,000 is taxed at 30% (15% income tax + 15% payroll) while income between $104,000 and $171,850 is taxed at only 28%. Income between $34,000 and $82,400 is taxed at 40%, while the very highest tax bracket pays only 35%. In other words, because of the payroll tax, lower-income brackets actually pay higher marginal tax rates. That's insane. And it kills jobs.

Let us not fail to notice, also, the effect of benefit phase-out. The Earned Income Tax Credit, which supposedly helps lower-income workers, plateaus at $5,657, then phases out as a person's income rises from $16,420-$43,279. This amounts to an additional 21% tax on earners in that bracket, because for every dollar earned, they lose 21 cents of benefits -- bringing them to 61% taxes. I have been in this position, and calculated whether it's worth it to work the extra hours. And I have heard black youths discussing the same thing on the street of Washington, DC. Insane. A similar thing happens as welfare and SSI benefits are phased out for even lower-income earners.

I have proposed a system in which these benefits are not phased out, but are matched by a high flat tax, a combination which amounts to a graduated income tax without benefit phase-out. Anyway, something's gotta give. If it's bad for the rich to pay 35% income tax -- and it is -- it's far worse for the poor to pay 61%.

6. Abolish the property tax. In Newark, where my wife and I are presently trying to buy a home, property taxes are so high that, with a typical 30-year mortgage, taxes are half as much as your mortgage payment. For example, if I pay $1,000/mo to the bank, I also pay $500/mo to the city. That means fully 1/3 of my buying power is killed with property taxes. What's most asinine about this policy is that it kills property values. Buyers are worried about their final payment, not about what portion goes to taxes: I'm going to buy a $1,500/mo house, whether that $1,500 goes to the bank or to the city. So, even more than with income tax, property tax just ends up eating itself: every time you raise property taxes, home values plummet to adjust.

This makes buying in the city kind of a stupid idea. And that is bad, above all, for urban black communities, because it means that anyone who has the money to buy is given huge financial incentives to leave the community. Driving out the middle class is not good for those communities. It's not good for the people who are driven out, either, because many people actually want to live in the communities where they grew up and where they have social and cultural ties. Property taxes disproportionately hurt black communities.

They hurt renters, too, by the way. We're looking at buying a two-family home. It's not like our high property taxes have nothing to do with how much we'll need to charge for rent. And the same is true for big-money big-apartment-building investors: in order to pay their mortgage, they need to charge higher rent. Not many people can get into the low-end market when taxes are going to drive them out of business.

7. Cut it out about integration. Integration is a genocidal word (genocide = cide/killing + geno/race or ethnicity). Black culture is not a bad thing. We should not be looking for it to go away, or for black people to act more like "white" people. (Long-time readers know I think "white" is a horrible, ethnicity-denying construction.)

But, by the way, integration isn't conservative, either. Conservatives believe in local culture, in the rights of individuals and communities to pursue their own ideals. For heaven's sake, we're the party of state's rights! Conservatives do not believe in a government that smoothes out all differences.

The marriage between conservatives and integrationists in the GOP is a marriage of convenience, not of principle -- and it isn't very convenient. Tell Tom Tancredo to climb back under the rock where we found him, and let's get back to conservative principle.

8. Culturally positive free speech. In our current free-speech regime, public expressions of religion are verboten, but pornography is an essential part of freedom. This hurts cities the most, because cities are where you most see and hear your neighbors. No one should have a right to post pornographic posters, play pornographic music, or show pornographic films in the neighborhoods where we read our children. And we should be able to practice our religion in public. This is what city life is all about. I think we underestimate how much the current idea of free speech undermines the cultural life of the city.

9. Support mothers. Everyone knows the black family is in trouble -- so is the white family, we're just a couple decades behind in our decline. How about policies that give money to mothers to help them raise their children? How about tying money to mothers, so that fathers have an economic incentive to stick around? How about giving up on the sickening rhetoric of "welfare queens," and the horrific idea that women have babies just to get money from the government, and realize that there is no stronger bond, and no more socially useful bond, than that between mothers and their children? If a poor mother wants to work less so that she can be at home with her children, society ought to make that possible.

10. Education! Obviously. Our schools are failing our children -- and they are, overwhelmingly, disproportionately, failing our black children. Burn down the teacher's unions. Never let them hurt our children again. Give parents choice about their children's education, because (as the teachers incessantly say, but never allow us to realize in policy) there can be no education where parents are not invested. And realize that, in the city above all, school choice make sense, because it's easy for kids to get to schools. And, for heaven's sake, quit the boloney where we think only secularist education is allowable: if parents want their children to be sent to schools that support their values, even their religious values, government has no place denying that right to poor parents.

Those are just a few ideas. The point is, conservatives have lots to offer the black community, but have been too afraid to think about issues that disproportionately affect the places where black people live.

More on Yeoman Farmers: Monticello

2010-03-12T14:26:00.007-05:00

Continuing in our critique of the so-called "yeoman farmer" -- that is, the virtuous independent farmer as the bulwark of our republic -- today let us consider Monticello, the home from which Thomas Jefferson so prominently theorized about the value of yeoman farmers.

The most obvious problem with Monticello is that it is built on the backs of slaves. I dare say this problem runs deeper in the agrarian movement than many would like to admit. Agrarianism often involves a romance with the South. Now let me say, I can feel some of that romance. I believe in the importance of "States' Rights" -- that is, preserving the autonomy of the local, and mediating institutions -- and I think the Civil War led to unfortunate losses in our form of republican government. As I have written before, I even think some civil-rights ideas of "integration" tend more to destroy our nation's wealth of ethnicity than to uplift anybody.

But chattel slavery -- the dehumanization of an entire class purely because of the color of their skin -- is an abomination. And, unfortunately, agrarianism's romance with the south is rooted as deeply in slavery itself as in states rights, local autonomy, or ethnic diversity. Let us consider Monticello.

Jefferson is the symbol of the gentleman farmer, a man given to the land, but high in ideals, a man who could read and write broadly and clearly because of his contemplative lifestyle. But his life was precisely not that of a farmer. Jefferson could afford his beautiful house, his great library (the foundation of our Library of Congress), his scientific experiments, his travel, and his leisure time, because he was supported by no fewer than 150 slaves. If anything, Jefferson proves that the life of the mind requires freedom from the farm.

I am not an expert on Thomas Jefferson, but in researching for this post, I found a great statement he wrote on the issue -- rich in irony:

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It [i.e., corruption of morals] is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

Let's consider this line by line.

Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.

Who? Thomas Jefferson did not "labour in the earth." The people who did labor in the earth of his home were brought and held there by force, and treated, not as God's "peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue" but as people incapable of making decisions for themselves.

Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example.

It is nice that he shifts from "those who labour in the earth" to "cultivators," since the latter could conceivably describe him. Need I point out the irony? We need look no further than Jefferson's own society to find an example of "corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators": an entire society built upon desperate injustice and often sustained by horrific violence. Jefferson himself thoroughly rejected Christianity, going so far as to cut-and-paste his own anti-Christian Bible. And he seems to have fathered children with his illicit, enslaved mistress.

But did "cultivating" help the slaves themselves? This is perhaps a delicate issue, but I don't think it should be controversial to say that their morals suffered from the desperation of their situation: including their lack of leisure for contemplation and religion, a problem inherent to the agrarian position. Again, Jefferson had leisure only because he wasn't "labouring in the earth."

Dependance begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.

On the one hand, let us note the monstrous individualism of this statement. Does any defender of the family really want to stand on a blanket condemnation of "dependence" of all sorts? And yet much of the myth of the yeoman farmer rests precisely on this supposed independence from every power outside of the family. To the contrary, as Aristotle so brilliantly describes in the first book of the Politics, the dependence of the family precisely opens out to the broader dependence of the clan and the polis. The man who appreciates family is the man who does not see independence as the highest good, and dependence on others as the source of all vice -- appreciating family and culture means appreciating, not vilifying, the profound interdependence that defines city life.

On the other hand, note that the supposed independence of the farmer is a myth. Jefferson was not self-supporting. Nor, even, were his slaves. Monticello was, in truth, a small city -- kept small only by the oppression of all but one of its "citizens." In order to keep itself going, Monticello needed not just gardeners, but full-time workers in the dairy and at the wash, carpenters, weavers, and even a nail factory. The "yeoman farmers" of America's West, who did not have slaves to do this work for them, could go only where roads and rivers, and later the railroad, connected them to parallel services in the city.

Given this inherent fact of human interdependence, perhaps the truer fount of virtue is in a recognition of this truth, and a seriousness about maintaining just relationships within it. Virtue is not in radical independence; to the contrary, virtue is radically undermined by the romantics who, following Jefferson, pretend they can live without other people, and then are forced to other expedients -- not always as wicked as chattel slavery -- in order to support themselves.

I think we have, in the end, two problems with Jefferson's model of the yeoman farmer. On the practical level, the problem is the sheer myth of it -- and the truth that the only people who could pursue Jefferson's model of leisure were those who enslaved others to support them. Without appreciating this truth, either leisure or work must be depreciated.

On the philosophical level, the problem is the myth of independence itself. Let Jefferson serve, not as the hero of radical atomized individualism, but of the profoundly contextualized situation of humanity. Monticello was a city (though a terribly unjust one); let it remind us that we can only live a truly human life in the city (at least in some sense) -- and that we can only live justly by making just those relationships that define the city.

Yeoman Farmers, Part One: Back-Porch Democracy

2010-02-06T13:16:00.005-05:00

It is a central purpose of this blog to put forth a vision of urban conservatism -- to argue, in fact, that true conservatism is truly urban, and vice versa. I am well aware, of course, that this goes directly contrary to a standard American legend, that of the Yeoman Farmer: rooted in the land, tradition, community, and republican institutions. So I propose, time and energy allowing, to publish a series of posts pointing out some problems in that narrative. I'll tell you the overall theme at the start: romanticism is pernicious. But hopefully I can spell that out in better detail in what follows.

Today my theme is the pernicious romanticism of the front porch, a central theme of the (I think pernicious) New Urbanism movement (which is more new than urban) and the driving image of the popular traditionalist-conservative blog Front Porch Republic. I will freely admit that I don't read that blog -- I don't have time for their romanticism -- but I did read a thoughtful post recently by Patrick Deneen, doyen of Georgetown's lone (traditionalist) conservative institution, The Tocqueville Institute, and from what I can tell, a very decent, thoughtful, good guy -- if sometimes victim to a pernicious romanticism.

Deneen writes thoughtfully about the image of the Front Porch. He says it evidences a kind of mediation between the public and the private, an interface. Sitting on the front porch, you are at home, but available to neighbors. A young couple -- notice the reverse here -- is in private, but within earshot of parents, so that they can court without withdrawing from the family and parental authority.

All of this, says Deneen, amounts to a fine image for what really constitutes a republic. Res publica means "a public kind of thing," something shared. It means that society, and life, isn't merely about individuals trading off private goods, but about a shared world, where my private good, my home, is defined by participation in common realities.

Deneen's ideal

All very beautiful, and I wholeheartedly endorse the central points here. (More on that at the end of this post.) The only problem is the front porch itself. I think a little history will manifest the problem.

First of all, note that the front porch has no place in traditional architecture. It was a fleeting fad in the United States, first getting popular after the Civil War (c. 1865) and disappearing after the Second World War (c. 1950). When America's republican institutions were being founded, there were no front porches. Traditional Christian society in Europe never had front porches. I'll include some lovely images in this post to jog your memory, and you can check out this Web page, where I found most of them, to see more of the American architectural tradition. (Let me acknowledge: the untraditionalism of the front porch does not make it bad -- but it should make us think.)

The front porch's decline casts an interesting light on its rise. A key cause of the decline of the front porch, front-porch historians agree, was air conditioning. Climate control made it nicer to stay indoors than sit outside. A second cause was cars, which, with their noise and exhaust, drove people away from the front of their houses. A third reason, perhaps, was conspicuous consumerism, and the sense that the front porch looked too humble and old-fashioned -- ironically complimented by the cheapness of modern architecture, with its haste to cut unnecessary corners. A fourth was surely television, which made the indoors more entertaining. And a fifth, at least according to Deneen, was the transitory nature of post-automobile culture, where it no longer seemed worth the effort to get to know the neighbors.

Ironically, these reasons for the decline of the front porch also describe its beginnings.

Air conditioning drove people indoors -- but it was the heat that had driven them outdoors in the first place. It is worth noting that the front porch is originally a Southern institution -- historians think it may have been introduced by African slaves. Why had no one thought of this before? Well, everyone I've read agrees that a central part of the nineteenth-century evolution of the front porch was the advent of cheap building: previously, homes had been built of stone, which is naturally cool, but when they started being built more cheaply, other ways had to be found to beat the heat. (This is not central to my argument, but I note that the front-porch folks are usually pretty down on cheapness.)

In automobile culture, it is said, people had to flee to the back of the house when they wanted to be outside. But again, this highlights a significant irony. Historians agree that porches were initially put on the front of houses, not to be friendly to neighbors, but to hide from the back of the house. In the nineteenth century, that's where you kept the stinky horses and the outhouse. What's significant here is the motive for building front porches: purely utilitarian and private, not social. That doesn't change the social value of sitting out front, of course, but it should give one pause.

Television drew people indoors. What drew them out in the first place? Again, historians are unanimous: it was not a desire to socialize, but a desire to commune with nature, consistent with the nineteenth-century romanticism that created the Hudson Valley school of art and other forms of American naturalism. This point deserves further reflection, but before we move on, let us note in passing the connection to Deneen's claim that front porches declined when society got mobile: the time of the front porch was a particularly mobile part of American history, and it flourished most, not in the more stable towns of the East Coast, but in the West, where people were always on the move. One only needs to pick up a copy of Laura Ingalls Wilder, or peruse personal histories (I recently looked over the history of my Midwestern family) to see that these people couldn't sit still and were remarkably unpersuaded by the value of living close to family and old friends.

What drove the popularity of the front porch more than anything, say the historians, was a love of nature -- in fact, a way of thinking that explicitly opposed the dirt of man to the beauty of uncorrupt nature. Front porches were built, not to put people in contact with neighbors, but to help them glory in a world without neighbors. The front porch was a proclamation of glorious isolation, not republican community. Thus it is ironically consistent with the later-twentieth century's back porch, or patio: it was a way to be outside without seeing other people.

Indeed, a remarkable aspect of the front porch is that it goes hand and hand with a yard. In dense urban places where people don't have yards, front porches are almost impossible. And, from what I have seen of city living, where there are lots of neighbors around, it seems less pleasant to build a whole porch. Republic or no republic, people want a place to sit where there is some boundary between us and the world: whether an urban fence, a higher stoop, a balcony, or a suburban yard.

Having recently done some field research -- driving around old towns on the Hudson River where Victorian neighborhoods are still intact (I've done the same on the Shenandoah) -- it seems to me that late-Victorian suburban front porches were designed not to interface with the community but to help almost-city dwellers pretend they're out on the range. That's why these Victorian homes are built so far from the street, usually at a different elevation, and with as much yard as possible. The front porch as interface with the neighborhood is a lovely idea, but in fact, it was always used as a way to enjoy the distance of neighbors, cloaked, more or less perniciously, in the idea of nature's unsullied (that is, un-neighbor-ed) beauty.

I very much like Patrick Deneen's reasons for promoting the front porch, his ideas about life in community, an interface between public and private goods. But historically, I think the front porch better fits in with what the Greek political philosophers called "democracy" than with the idea of the res publica. Democracy means "mob rule," and the classic distinction is that a republic is about a common good, where individuals find their happiness in communion, whereas a democracy is about the majority snatching up private goods as fast as possible.

The front porch -- like the back porch -- is, historically, democratic, not republican. It's about individuals seeking pleasure through withdrawal from community. Perhaps it's no coincidence that the Victorian era, when the front porch was really popular, also saw the rise of progressivism, with its emphasis on destroying tradition and community in favor of a new kind of mass consumerism.

In place of the Front Porch, I submit the Sidewalk. In her magisterial The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs lays out truly republican institutions. The chapter-headings of her first section make the point:

The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety

The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact

The Uses of Sidewalks: Assimilating Children

The Uses of Neighborhood Parks

The Uses of City Neighborhoods

City sidewalks are about people watching out for each other, people being in contact with one another, children getting to know the neighbors, and seeing fathers at work.

Mrs. Jacobs explicitly limits this discussion to big cities, but I've studied old small towns across the country -- from places like Pippen, Wisconsin (on the Mississippi, the town closest to Laura Ingalls Wilders's Little House in the Big Woods), to Putnam, Connecticut (a nineteenth-century mill town), to Staunton, Virginia, and Harper's Ferry, West Virginia (in the Shenandoah), to Bath, Pennsylvania (a farm town near the Applachians), to Newburgh, New York (on the Hudson) -- and one thing they all have in common is "urbanism." No matter how small, old towns are built around a dense core, where people give up their yards in order to live close together. Although it's a bit of an anachronism, we could say that what all old towns, small or big, have in common is the centrality of the sidewalk.

It is the sidewalk, not the front porch, that performs the republican functions Deneen so desires. It is the sidewalk, and the stoop, no matter how small, on front of the houses crowded against that sidewalk, that makes people neighbors.

The problem with the front porch is that it only exists where people are not crowded together. No yard, no porch -- and the yard, more than anything, shows a people who value privacy and separation from the neighborhood over communion and public life. Indeed, the problem with the yard is that it creates a world where no one walks. An urban environment, no matter the size, is defined by density and the close interface of work, leisure, and home -- so that people can walk from one place to another, and meet one another on the sidewalk.

Yards -- the almost-inseparable companions of front porches -- define neighborhoods where housing is separated from work and leisure (no one puts a yard in front of their store, or law office, or theater) and people define home by distance from other people. Yards add up quickly, killing the density that makes a neighborhood walkable and public.

And so the front porch, like the back porch, its successor, is not a republican institution, but a democratic one. However high-minded, the romanticism that fails to see this practical reality is the romanticism that has torn apart our vibrant urban neighborhoods.

Bumper Stickers

2010-01-25T15:50:00.003-05:00

On a family car trip over the holidays, we were passed by a car with a pleasant bumper sticker about Jesus: nothing crazy, but clear, something like, "Jesus is Lord!"

As long time readers may remember, I am concerned about the anonymity of cars. We're so used to it that we don't notice, but sometimes it strikes me how truly nightmarish the highway is: surrounded by metal and glass, the world flying by at such a speed that we can't focus on anything, and only huge metal objects standing in the place of people. Science fiction could hardly conjure up a more dehumanized world.

So it momentarily struck me: perhaps bumper stickers are a good effort. If we can't talk to people, at least we can make clear that we are more than "Hyundai Elantra." Maybe in that depersonalized world, it's good to at least say something positive, and something that points to the transcendent. A bumper sticker could be a small step in the right direction.

But then it occurred to me. Little as I get to interact with other people on the highway, I am not entirely depersonalized. People see me driving the speed limit, and I see some of them crane their necks to see whether I am a little old lady or a middle-aged Chinese man. As little as I get to interact with them, they do see that I am neither of those things, and at least, perhaps, I raise the momentary question whether being a normal looking American requires that one ignore the law.

In that brief moment as they flash by, I think they get enough time to see the three car seats lined up across the back of our little hatch back. And I hope it at least raises a question, at least reminds them that some people still believe in family -- even choose family when it means we won't be able to afford a gigantic SUV.

I don't know what we look like from behind, but I think, during that minute it takes to get by us, that some people can see through our hatchback window the little wheelchair with my son's name emblazoned on it.

And I think, even in those brief glimpses of our humanity, it is perfectly clear that we are Christians.

Of course, I think it's all a lot healthier when we are pedestrians. Everyone on our block knows that we attend daily Mass: they see us, and talk to each other. (I know, because they tell me, in the bakery, where I actually talk to my real live neighbors.) Even if they've never talked to us, they know that we live by a different set of values, and they can guess pretty clearly what those values are.

So there's my bumper sticker, my "Jesus is Lord" t-shirt: my family, and the way I travel. Nothing against the guy with the bumper sticker, but I think we say it a lot more loud and clear.

Ethnicity in America: A Couple of Songs

2009-12-18T16:53:00.003-05:00

In a post last May, I outlined a theory on how the Civil Rights movement was used to defeat ethnicity. Before Civil Rights, “race” described not the color of one’s skin or one’s genetic make-up – not anything merely physical – but culture: Italian, Irish, Polish, Russian, WASP. Civil Rights effectively eliminated all the immigrant ethnicities, collapsing American into Black and an amorphous White, WASP by default. Civil Rights killed off the ethnic neighborhoods.

Consider our new home, the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. Fifty years ago, our older neighbors tell us, our street was Italian: in language, in cuisine, in religion, in culture. Now most of the Italians have fled to the suburbs, where a few pasta dishes and a funny name are all that distinguish them from the WASP culture that they once threatened. I think that’s a loss. I think peculiar culture is healthy, human – and important for preserving the more profound aspects of culture, morality and religion. The ultra-individualism of post-ethnic America leaves little room for tradition, reverence, mystery. And it leaves us isolated, like our old Italian baker around the corner: sometimes his old buddies come in from the suburbs; much of the time he sits alone in his shop, his family’s religion, language, and culture left behind in the days when he had a community.

The death of ethnicity, I submit, hasn’t been good for race relations. Black culture remains different, as it always was: ethnic culture. But that difference, I think, is harder for a homogenous majority-white culture to accept than it was for the ethnics of yesteryear, who were used to difference, who knew how to be uncomfortable with something without thinking it should be eliminated, “assimilated.” But I digress.

Today I would like to address a problem with this ethnic narrative: it threatens to forever pigeonhole people as Portuguese, Italian, or German. I think my point may most clearly be made through two songs that reflect the ethnic background of my wife’s and my families.

AN IRISH LULLABY?

My wife’s grandfather is from old Irish Newport, Rhode Island. My wife isn't sure whether it was his parents or his grandparents who were the immigrants, but they certainly lived in old ethnic America, where the cops were all from the neighborhood, and where it was a bit of a scandal when he went after my wife’s Austrian-WASP grandmother.

Grandpa O’Connors is a good-old-fashioned Irish tenor, and at a recent family gathering he got everyone to join him in singing “an Irish lullaby.”

Over in Killarney
Many years ago,
Me Mither sang a song to me
In tones so sweet and low.
Just a simple little ditty,
In her good ould Irish way,
And I'd give the world if she could sing
That song to me this day.
"Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, hush now, don't you cry!
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, Too-ra-loo-ra-li,
Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, that's an Irish lullaby."

(Recording here.)

Very sweet. Here’s the problem: do you suppose anyone in Ireland ever sang “that’s an Irish lullaby”? Do you suppose they would have sung it in English? At first glance, this would appear to be, not a traditional song brought over from the home country, but a distinctly American glance backwards.

A small amount of research shows that it was written by a certain James Royce Shannon – birth name James Royce, “Shannon” added to make him sound Irish – of Michigan. He wrote it for a show in New York in 1913. Irish? Well, as near as I can tell, he was a Scottish-Rite Freemason – both ethnically and religiously committed to the destruction of Irish Catholicism.

Does that make it a bad song? Of course not. It’s lovely. Perhaps it’s even musically Irish. But this is hardly the survival of old-country traditions, hardly a bulwark of particularity and mysticism. With all due respect to Grandpa, it would seem to appeal to an Irish-ness that is Irish only in sentiment, but pretty well assimilated. An Irish-ness that doesn't remember Ireland.

And the song raises a further problem. Do you suppose back in County Kerry, they thought of themselves as “Irish”? I’m not sure. I’d guess they more often thought of themselves as being from Farranfore, Balleyheigue, or Lixnaw.

ON WISCONSIN

Enter another grandfather, this one mine. My family is thoroughly WASP. It’s been amusing for me, living now in New Jersey, with its heavily immigrant past, to try to explain to people that my family isn’t from anywhere – at least not anywhere overseas. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana. One set of my grandpa’s grandparents may (or may not) have come from Germany, and Grandma had a distant ancestor from Switzerland, but that isn’t too prominent in our family’s consciousness.

What’s important to Grandpa is that his parents met at the University of Wisconsin – where Grandpa and Grandma met, as did, incidentally, every one of Grandma and Grandpa's siblings and their spouses, my other grandparents, my step-father’s parents, my mom and dad, and later, my mom and step-father. I grew up an easy bike ride from UW. My grandfather somehow ended up with the copyright on a song you’ll surely never hear, entitled “My Home is in Madison” (“M-A-D-I-S-O-N, where the girls are the fairest the boys are the squarest of any home town I’ve been in”) – and it’s true, that’s our home. When my grandfather was getting ready to face death, he headed back to our “old country,” where his brothers were waiting for him.

My wife laughs that the fight song “On Wisconsin” (“plunge right through that line, run the ball clear down the field, boys, touchdown sure this time!”) along with its sequel, “If you want to be a Badger” (“just come along with me, by the bright shining light of the moon!”) are far more dear to my family, far more often used as bedtime songs and family-gathering rousers, than any “Irish lullaby” in her family. When I’m feeling nostalgic, I go to badgerband.com/music and click through all the old standards: “Varsity” (“U-rah-rah, Wisconsin! Praise to thee we sing!”), “You’ve Said It All” (“When you’ve said Wis-consin”), and “Songs to Thee, Wisconsin” (“Queen of all the West . . . May thy sons and daughters, in thy jubilee, See the dawn of greater, grander things to be”). When my grandfathers fought in World War II, I’m quite confident these were the songs that reminded them of their true homeland -- not anything about "purple mountain majesties."

THY SONS AND DAUGHTERS

I hope I’m not being prejudiced in favor of my family – though it is precisely such prejudice that I’m arguing for – when I say that I think this is about right. Ethnicity doesn’t mean wearing green on St. Patrick’s day, generations since the last person who knew what town in Ireland you came from – any more than my family’s culture is stuck endlessly in Danville, Illinois, or Duluth, Minnesota (the places my great-grandparents came from, before they met in Madison). It doesn’t mean allegiance to a vague nation like “Ireland”: a nation of four great provinces, thirty-two traditional counties, 32,000 square miles, and who knows how many thousands of little hometowns.

Ethnicity means being from somewhere in particular, with traditions, and roots. We don’t stay there forever – though it would do a lot for our culture if we could stay put for a few generations at a time. We should bring our traditions with us. My children, who have so far lived in Washington, D.C., and St. Paul, Minnesota, and who, I very much hope, will spend the rest of their childhoods – indeed, I hope, maybe much of their lives – in Newark, New Jersey, certainly know how to sing “On Wisconsin.” It’s where I’m from, who I am. But I doubt they’ll sing it to their children. They’ll root root root for the home team – Rutgers? Princeton? Seton Hall? – and, I pray, learn to think of themselves as from somewhere, with the traditions not only of our family but of our neighborhood.

An old definition (discussed in my May post) speaks of “A group of persons connected by common descent or origin; a family; a tribe or people; a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock.” Ethnicity means rootedness, knowing who you are and where you’re from, rejoicing in traditions, knowing that you are part of something bigger than yourself. The old immigrant populations give us a point of departure – but it is for our generations to live ethnicity in an American way, to be from Newark, or Madison, or Washington, just as our ancestors were not from Ireland, but Abbeydorney, Knocksnagoshel, or Derrynane, in County Kerry.

The Execution of the Beltway Sniper

2009-11-13T14:15:00.002-05:00

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

2009-11-13T11:52:00.006-05:00

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

2009-11-05T14:57:00.002-05:00

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

2009-10-23T13:11:00.002-04:00

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

2009-10-10T13:51:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-03T10:38:00.004-04:00

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

2009-07-17T20:49:00.002-04:00

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.

Person and Leadership

2009-06-24T17:50:00.002-04:00

This afternoon we learned that Mark Sanford, Republican governor of South Carolina and married father of four, took off over Fathers Day weekend to spend some time with his paramour in Argentina. It's unfortunate, because he was one of the more interesting up-and-coming conservatives who might run for President (though honestly, I always doubted his connection with the cultural side of conservatism -- the most important). But it is also an interesting case in point on the relationship between persons and leadership.

Over at National Review Online, ever more libertarian and neo-con than conservative, the conversation is ranging between two poles. Some are saying, gosh, who cares. We shouldn't worry about the personal lives of politicians. (Interestingly, this is often followed by, "and they shouldn't worry about ours": pure libertarianism, the very negation of conservatism.) Of course, even these people admit that Sanford's disappearing for five days with no contact information while he's supposed to be governing a state is probably disqualifying for higher office. But the initial argument stands: why do we care about a politician's personal life?

To which others at National Review respond (predictably echoing their editorial preference during last year's presidential primary), if we want squeaky-clean politicians, then go Mitt!

Both arguments show how far National Review has fallen from true conservatism. More on that another time: this post is about the importance of the personal, not National Review.

Personal things matter in our politicians for two reasons. First, as a measure of the man we are putting in charge of office. This event reveals a lot about Mark Sanford. Above all, that he is a creep: and we can expect that to inform his judgment on various issues. We can't determine everything about a leader based on his answers on an issues questionaire, both because politicians aren't always entirely forthcoming, and because we never know what issues will come up.

When George Bush was first elected, we had no idea there would be a terrorist attack; no idea when Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist would die and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor would step down, or who was available to replace them, or who would not step down, or what issues would be on the table; no idea what developments there would be in biotech, or in the development of the gay marriage debate; no idea that he would have majorities in both Houses of Congress, then lose them both in 2006 -- etc.

We use every datum we have to judge what kind of person we are considering for election, and whether we can trust their judgment. Will they be true to their promises? (Most politicians aren't: but in what ways?) What will be their priorities, and how hard and effectively will they work to advance them? And how does what we know extrapolate to all the issues that we haven't even considered yet? We do learn a lot about a guy when we find out he's flying to Argentina to ditch his wife and four school-aged children. We learn about his values and his character. Why should we ignore that information?

The other significant aspect of such lessons is not about how a leader will behave, but what he says about our nation. A president fooling around with interns in the Oval Office is not just unprofessional, it's gross. Symbols matter. It's not surprising that some of the people who say we shouldn't care about a politician's personal life also say we shouldn't care about our own. The kind of men we elect is a profound statement about how we think of ourselves as a nation. To elect someone who is personally corrupt is a very strong statement of moral relativism. It's not surprising that libertarians are okay with that -- but conservatives are not, cannot be.

And this figure-head aspect effects not only our own culture, but the culture of other countries as well. To send a philanderer to speak to the Muslim world, for example, does send a message about what kind of values back up our foreign policy. Muslims are rightly suspect of a country that so often presents itself as anti-moral. And people in socially liberal countries in Europe take the measure of our country based on the people we choose to represent us. Do we want to be a nation of perverts, or a nation of high moral values? What do we want to promote in the world? Those are of course matters of political debate. But there should be no question where conservatives stand in such debates.

So the morals of our leaders matters both with regard to their personal competence and their symbolic value. But unfortunately, this cuts against "squeaky-clean Mitt Romney," too. On a symbolic level, Christians are uncomfortable with electing a Mormon president. Why? Because it suggests a moral equivalence between Christianity and this made-up, anti-Trinitarian (honestly, anti-theistic), anti-Biblical religion. We would rather have a bad Christian than someone who is not a Christian at all -- because we believe this is a Christian nation, and we believe that matters.

It matters, not as a matter of intolerance -- such that we would drive Mormons, Muslims, and other non-Christians out of the country -- but, among other things, precisely as the reason for our tolerance. We believe we are tolerant because we are Christians. It's clear that many in the "conservative" press don't understand that argument. But for many Christians and conservatives, Christianity does actually matter, also on a social and political level.

Romney's Mormonism also cuts against him as a suggestion of his character. Mormonism is a perfectly respectable way to live one's life: clean, family-oriented, neighborly. Those are good things. But on a theological and philosophical level, Mormonism is loony. Is that judgmental? Of course it is. (Again: to say that people should not be judgmental about philosophical positions is a profound statement of philosophical and theological relativism. That relativism is central to American liberalism -- but it is antithetical to conservatism.) To live by a nonsensical religion says something about a person's philosophical coherence.

As neighbors, even as friends, fine. I know some perfectly lovely Mormons. But at the helm of my country, I want someone who is a clear thinker, especially in matters of philosophy. There are a lot of issues in politics that require much more sophisticated thinking than does running a bank. I'd love to have Mitt Romney as my banker -- or, perhaps, my Treasury Secretary. But thinking through matters of Constitutional Law, or foreign policy, or even tax policy? It makes me nervous.

Ultimately, all the issues questionaires are just one more contribution to the fundamental question for a democracy: what kind of man are we thinking about electing? The personal is not irrelevant. It is the most important of all.

Liberalism and the Pro-Life Movement

2009-06-22T16:25:00.004-04:00

This post is going to be critical of the recently deceased Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (priest of the Archdiocese of New York, best known for founding and editing First Things), so let me begin by saying: Fr. Neuhaus was a great man. He did an awful lot to help me understand conservatism and the connections between faith and politics -- in fact, between faith and all of life. He is responsible for all sorts of conversions of all sorts of people in all sorts of directions. And he was one of the most cultured voices of our time (which, unfortunately, is kind of a back-handed compliment). That said . . .

Fr. Neuhaus used to describe his movement from the Democratic Party of the 1960's to the Republican Party almost entirely in terms of abortion. As far as I can tell, he wasn't all that interested in economics, and though he had sympathies with and friends in the so-called "neo-conservative" (really, neo-Wilsonian) camp on foreign policy, I don't think he was that interested in foreign policy, either. Perhaps it would be fair to say that he was firmly agnostic about issues of foreign policy and economics, but very committed to what is now known as "conservatism" in social issues, and therefore thought there was no good reason to vote for the pro-choice party against the pro-life one. You might say he was a single-issue voter -- and one of the most eloquent voices for that position.

Before criticizing part of his argument, let me say that there is much to be said for this calculus. I am a convinced free-market economic conservative, but I must admit: the cultural issues are much more black and white. And we might say that making cultural issues (especially life and marriage) our "single issue" is not about dismissing the importance of other issues so much as dismissing the clarity of them. A politician who holds tight to murky economic and foreign-policy theories -- Keynsianism, pacificism, Wilsonianism, or whatever -- but can't see the gross injustice of murdering the unborn . . . well, I would not entrust that moral compass with babysitting my children, let alone running my country. Whatever may be going on in Ted Kennedy's heart . . . gosh, do you really want someone that screwed up to run your country? So I'm with Fr. Neuhaus so far.

But here's the critique. Fr. Neuhaus always (and frequently!) described the pro-life movement as just the next-step in civil rights. 1960's liberalism, he claimed, was about "expanding the circle of inclusion." First we recognize that blacks are people too, and deserve full respect, then we recognize that even the tiny unborn are people, and we extend the protection of law to include them, too. As Fr. Neuhaus sees it -- and I think a lot of other people see it this way too, even stripes of conservative Catholics who don't generally like Fr. Neuhaus -- opposing abortion is just about extending legal protection to ever broader circles of human persons.

A Critique
The first tip-off to what's wrong with this approach is historical. The civil rights movement was about universal suffrage, the right to vote. That idea was only dimly conceived even at the founding of the United States. Even the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, passed in 1868 to enforce the gains of the Civil War, did not demand that blacks be allowed to vote. It guarantees that due process of law will proceed any deprivation of "life, liberty, or property" (which are, by the way, called "privileges," not "rights"); it guarantees "the equal protection of the laws" -- but when it comes to voting, it just says that if a State deprives any class ("of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens" ) of "the right to vote," then the State will proportionately lose representation in Congress.

Another amendment, number Fifteen, was required to give suffrage to all (male citizens of the right age), regardless of race "or color." (Apparently the two words did not have the same meaning.) This was in the revolutionary fervor of 1870. But it is remarkable that, for all the power of the Fourteenth Amendment, it clearly did not extend universal suffrage.

Abortion, on the other hand, has been considered grossly immoral since the beginning of Christian civilization, including documents from the first and second centuries. (I can speak, perhaps, as the world expert on an issue of particular interest: Joe Biden noted some peculiarities in Thomas Aquinas's embryology, and on the technical question of why exactly abortion is wrong -- but Thomas nonetheless held that early abortion was "lustful cruelty or cruel lust;" those who commit very early abortions "directly will the death of their own child, even before it lives;" and thus they are rightly called, among other things, fornicators, prostitutes, or adulterers. And that is only for very early abortions: about forty days in -- not half way through the first trimester -- abortion becomes full blown murder, says St. Thomas. Sorry Mr. Vice President, not a partial-birth pro-choice ally.)

So here's the problem for Fr. Neuhaus's narrative: Christians have always, from the very beginning, opposed abortion, but the notion of univeral suffrage, civil rights of any kind, or even the wrongness of slavery are distinctly modern -- in some sense, even post-Christian, and certainly do not originate in the Catholic Church. All to say, we don't need to talk about "expanding the circle of inclusion" in order to explain why abortion is wrong.

If we believe (as Catholics do, though many Protestants don't) that the most important moral issues are included in the Deposit of Faith, given once for all by Our Lord himself, and maintained always by his Church, we have to conclude that abortion -- and, yes, marriage, and the right of parents to educate their own children -- are issues of a wholly different order, far more black-and-white than anything (except lynching) in the Civil Rights movement.

Similarly if we believe (as the Greeks did, and most of the Christian tradition), that moral truth is discovered by the insight of upright people, not by any kind of progressive "science," then there's no reason to think that new moral issues would be discovered only in the 20th century. Good people have always known right and wrong; Civil Rights is just a different kind of issue.

That's not to say, of course, that I oppose giving blacks the vote. I am very much in favor! Just to say, these are not part of the same story. The pro-life "movement" does not take its origin in the march to civil rights.

Indeed, the greater problem here is the very notion of a "march," or progress.

Liberalism
It is often noted -- especially by people like Fr. Neuhaus -- that the word "liberalism" has gone through at least three very distinct, seemingly contradictory phases. In the nineteenth century (and still, in some Eur0pean discourses) "liberalism" went with what we now call the Free Market. Liberals were laissez-faire in economics.

But by the time of Presidents Wilson and FDR, the word was reappropriated (apparently) by the very opposite movement: liberalism came to mean economic progressivism, government entering in to redistribute wealth and protect the poor through vigorous regulation.

And then about the time Nixon was clobbering George McGovern, in 1972, liberalism "suddenly" stopped being interested in the intense moralism of the FDR-LBJ years, and suddenly latched on to Woodstock, sexual libertinism, and all that.

How confusing! Fr. Neuhaus showed little interest in the 19th century incarnation, but was quite chagrined that the great social concern of mid-20th century liberalism had given way to the libertinism of late-20th century Democrat politics. Can't we just resurrect LBJ, and his march of individual rights?

Well, what Fr. Neuhaus's narrative fails to see is the driving coherence of liberalism through all three stages. Liberalism originally -- and still -- fundamentally means Progress, "liberty" from ancient prejudice. Conservatism is a very good name for the opposite of liberalism -- whatever it is that conservatives want to conserve (and that's a story for another day), they "stand athwart history yelling stop!" in the famous opening slogan of National Review. The fundamental disagreement is whether human history is fundamentally about progress or . . . not.

19th-century liberals originally thought that the free economy would be the best way to subvert the traditional order, disengage from traditional morality, and religion, and aesthetics, and move on to the New Age. That's ironic, because in the late-18th century Adam Smith and Edmund Burke had already been arguing precisely the opposite -- but this is a post about liberalism, not conservatism. In any case, late in the 19th century, the liberals -- that is, those who wanted to overthrow the old order -- shifted from the free market to the State economy. They could do this because liberalism was never about economics. It was about social change. That included some things we find good -- like the abolition of slavery, maybe universal suffrage (I'll discuss that another time), etc. -- but it also included the race to contraception and abortion (from early on!), the elimination of Christianity, etc.

Of course, many Christians came along for the ride. I know nothing about the thinking of Woodrow Wilson and FDR as men, though reliable sources claim they would be appalled at the crazies surrounding George McGovern. But look at the role of the Catholic Church. When the New Deal came along, the Church saw it as a way of caring for the poor. In that sense, it was not "liberal" at all: the Church has always believed in the obligation for the rich to take care of the poor.

For a couple decades -- roughly 1952-1968? -- liberalism's primary aim was "racial" justice: more social than economic. The Church's embrace of this movement involved idealism, to be sure: the Church has always taught that human nature is independent of skin color. In fact, for Thomas Aquinas, skin color, black or white, is one of his favorite examples of something "accidental," something that doesn't touch one's essential nature. He used it, not because skin color was a big issue in his day, but because it wasn't: medievals wouldn't think of depriving someone of the protection of law on account of skin color. It just wouldn't occur to them.

(The race issue did appear in the 16th century, when Spanish colonists debated whether American Indians had souls. But it is important to note that this debate pitted Thomists and the papacy, who were both militant defenders of the humanity of the Indians, against the nationalist and economic goals of the Spanish crown: tradition stood on the side of the Indians. Which is why even Foucault could say that racism is a distinctly modern phenomenon, only really taking off in the 19th century.)

So the Church's horse in the Civil Rights Movement was not liberal but conservative: they were fighting for a return to Christian civilization. And thus they sided with the liberals, who had distinctly different goals. But we have to be clear: very few people outside the Catholic Church -- and, honestly, not even that many people within the Catholic Church -- viewed this as tradition against modernity. For the majority, Civil Rights was about progress: liberalism.

(The states rights issue is distinct, but I can't get into that here.)

And, it really has to be said, Church leaders have always played Realpolitik, usually badly. There was idealism in Catholic support for the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement -- but there was also cynicism. Catholics supported economic justice: but in this country, they also took the side of the poor because they were poor. In the 1930s, Catholics were still a distinctly foreign, lower-class, labor population. And like many, they sided with the New Deal not just because they thought it was Right, but because they thought it was good for Number One. (I just heard a lecture about the biography of Fr. John Ryan, Catholic chaplain of the New Deal. Not exactly objective.)

A similar thing happened in the Civil Rights Movement. There was idealism, to be sure. But there was also positioning. On the one hand, Catholics weren't particularly conservative when it came to the United States. Although I think we've come to realize how good the US model is for the Catholic Church, the country has anti-Catholicism deep in its roots, from the religious establishments of the 18th century to the Know Nothings and public-school movements of the 19th century to the anti-immigration push throughout the 20th century. Subverting the old order seemed like a good thing -- kind of like President Bush ousted Saddam Hussein, figuring we must be able to do better than that guy. This kind of Catholic "liberalism" wasn't exactly idealistic: it just hoped it would come out ahead.

On the other hand, Catholics were also trying to become mainstream, and the Civil Rights Movement seemed like a good horse to ride into town. In 1928, Catholic Presidential candidate Al Smith was treated to burning crosses and electoral disaster. In 1960, JFK eked out a victory. World War II had provided a great way for Catholics to show that they were good Americans, too -- so after the war, Catholic leaders jumped on any bandwagon they could find, hoping to gain cultural tolerance. Again, this isn't exactly idealistic. It's more parallel to all the times in the middle ages when the Church sided with one king against another because they hoped to advance their own cause -- or to the Church's Ostpolitik in the mid-20th century, which agreed to be quiet about the evils of Communism, not out of any philosophical seriousness, but because they feared a Reagan/John Paul kind of opposition would result in reprisals. (It didn't.)

Of course, Father Neuhaus wasn't a Catholic when he was marching alongside Martin Luther King. But there was probably something of the same thinking. On the one hand, he honestly believed that racism was contrary to the Bible -- and thus, however poorly Fr. Neuhaus may describe his own thinking, it was conservative, not liberal, pushing for a restoration of ancient values, not "progress." And on the other hand, he wanted to hook Christianity's wagon to the best horse, and he thought this was a good way to make Christianity popular. More on that in a minute.

But we shouldn't be surprised that liberalism turned on us. Church Realpolitik is perennially unsuccessful. (In Catholic doctrine, infallibity extends only to faith and morals -- not to politics.) Marching alongside Fr. Neuhaus and other Christian Civil Rights folk were people who saw this as the latest battle in the March of History, the newest progress, yet another way to overthrow the Ancien Regime. When you look at it, I think it's intuitively obvious: LBJ's "Great Society" was not about perennial values, it was about progress. The youth of the '60s rose, not to work with their parents, but to overthrow them. They yearned for a new age. For Richard John Neuhaus and some people like him, Selma and Woodstock were polar opposites -- but for an awful lot of people, it was all part of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

It was all part of liberalism: a belief in unbridled progress, a belief that history moves from darkness to light. And in that project, the fact that marriage, parenthood, and the sanctity of life are ancient values is precisely an argument against them. To a true liberal, calling monogamous marriage "traditional" is argument enough for its abolition. Forward to a new age! At the very least, people infected with liberalism see no reason for deference to what is old.

Today's Pro-Life Movement
Today, the pro-life movement is crippled by the same mistakes as the mid-century Church. Fr. Neuhaus claims that opposing abortion is part of the march for Civil Rights, expanding the circle of inclusion. And the pro-life movement has swallowed that argument, hook, line, and sinker. We speak of abortion as a matter of individual rights.

This is, of course, utterly untraditional language -- because the tradition has never viewed persons primarily as Individuals, nor does it speak of people primarily in terms of "rights." Rights is a category of modern political discourse. It has a place in highly technical documents like the US Constitution. But traditional morality is about obligations, debts -- and relationships, not Individuals.

To speak of abortion as a matter of individual rights is also (I hate to say it) absurd -- because motherhood is not an individual thing. As long as the baby is in utero, those two individuals are inseparable; you can't pit one "person's" rights against the other's. "Leave that baby alone" is a ridiculous thing to say to the person whose womb it is inhabiting.

Why does the pro-life movement insist that abortion is a matter of individual rights? Perhaps because, like the mid-century Church, it thinks it can jump on the bandwagon of liberalism and seem less old fashioned. Oddly enough, we could criticize those old ladies holding up pictures of aborted fetuses for trying too hard to be liked. Opposing abortion is not like sticking up for the Tibetans -- or marching at Selma. It's not a matter of sticking up for the voiceless and powerless against the mean and powerful. (Though the abortion industry is mean and powerful.)

Because, above all, opposing abortion is not about the forward march of individual rights. It is, quite the contrary, a matter of standing athwart history yelling "stop!" It is a matter of voicing the timeless truth -- timeless, because written in Nature itself -- that mothers are inseparable from their babies, women inseparable from their motherhood, the person inseparable from her body. Abortion is violence against women.

Does it match liberal rhetoric to say we should prevent people from doing themselves harm? No. Is it dashingly modern to say that women should be bound by childbearing? No. Is it cutting edge to say that some things are just wrong? Of course not.

But what the pro-life movement has to realize -- what the Church has to realize -- is that we're not liberals. We're not about progress. There are places for progress: sewage, transportation, communication. But morality is not a place for progress: because human nature is always the same; because moderns are no more moral than the ancients; because the Deposit of Faith is once for all.

And we have to realize that we have something worth buying. What is ancient, traditional, perennial, and eternal is actually pretty attractive. We stand on the street corners shouting that we're the next great thing in Liberal Progress and Individual Rights, and we might even convince ourselves (as I think Fr. Neuhaus did), but ultimately, the reason people are pro-life is because they realize that abortion is not a matter of one person against another, but that it's just plain wrong, contrary to Nature, contrary to a woman's nature. It's not woman vs. baby. It's the abortionist against both.

And you know, I think people are interested in hearing perennial truths. Nature is actually a pretty attractive idea. We don't need to be liberals to win elections, or hearts.

Islam and Enlightenment

2009-06-11T14:48:00.002-04:00

The history of Islam's relationship to scholarship is an odd one -- with something to teach us about the West.

Islam and Scholarship: A Brief History
The oddity is this. In the middle ages, the Islamic world was a fountain of scholarship. Indeed, the great European renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, indeed, the birth of the university, though supported by numerous cultural and economic developments in Europe, took almost all of its intellectual inspiration from the reconquest of Muslim Spain. In Spain they found the works of the great philosophers Averroes (the Latinized form of ibn-Rushd, d. 1198) and Avicenna (ibn-Sina, d. 1037), who had kept alive the philosophy of Aristotle when he was totally lost to Europe. In fact, the first texts of Aristotle to reach medieval Europe -- the original stimulus for all subsequent intellectual development in the West -- were translated not from Greek but from Arabic.

Averroes and Avicenna, along with other greats like al-Ghazali (d. 1111), al-Farabi (d. 951), and many more, were the greatest philosophers of their time. And they came from the far reaches of the Muslim Empire: Avicenna, al-Ghazali, and al-Farabi were in Persia (modern-day Iran), while Averroes was in Cordoba (modern-day Spain). This period of the Muslim Empire also oversaw some great non-Muslim scholars, most notably the Jewish philosopher Maimonides (d. 1204), who was born in Cordoba, died in Egypt, and contributed enormously to the progress of philosophy throughout the Western world.

Yet within a few centuries, Muslim scholarship was dead. By the time of the 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance in Europe, scholars were fleeing the Islamic world; indeed, Muslim immigrants to Europe were a great stimulus to that flowering of letters and culture. Since that time, Europe has pulled far ahead of Islam, at least in political philosophy, economics, science, and technology, and arguably in art, literature, and philosophy.

The standard explanation for this decline in Muslim scholarship is that the religious authorities clamped down on philosophers when the philosophers started discussing political things, because Islam demands total control of the political realm. I think we can take that a step further.

The Nature of Islam
Theologically, Islam is defined above all by a radical monotheism, undergirded by a vigorous denial of any "association" with God. God is to be totally separated from creation, totally exalted. Islam rejects the Trinity as a kind of polytheism; they also reject the Incarnation as bringing God into too much contact with the world. God is not to be "associated" in any way with worldly things.

Thus the first pillar of Islam is the simple confession, "there is no God but God," and Islamic art, beautiful as it is, is confined to only calligraphy: no images, lest we associate anything with God. (Protestantism, of course, took up this same kind of anti-image anti-associationism; but Judaism and pre-1517 Christianity insisted, to the contrary, on God's connection to earthly realities, proclaimed specifically through the proper use of cultic materials, sacred spaces, and imagery.)

The word Islam (and its participial form, Muslim) means "submission" -- but this is only a correlate to the doctrine of God's absolute supremacy. The Muslim accepts and bows before God's absolute sovereignty. The other four "pillars" of Sunni Islam (only slightly modified in Shi'a Islam) are all aspects of submission. First, the five times of prayer, defined not by what is prayed but by the obligation to affirm God's sovereignty at each hinge of the day. Second, "alms-giving." Insofar as this is about giving to the poor, it is simply an affirmation of God's sovereignty over our material resources. But it is also an affirmation of the Muslim community, and is given for the spread of the religion as much as for the care of the poor. It is a sign that the Muslim is part of a political body -- more on that in a moment. Third, fasting. Unlike Christian fasting, which is fundamentally about the training of desires, this is simply a proclamation of Allah's lordship: thus it is accompanied by wild feasting after sunset. And fourth, the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, made once in a lifetime, to proclaim one's fidelity to the religion.

What is notable about these pillars is their externality. There are no Beatitudes in Islam (though there are small pockets of mystics). There is no virtuous transformation, no personal relationship with God. Islam is about God's sovereignty, not about friendship. And thus heaven is not a Beatific Vision, not an embrace with God, but simply acceptance into a happy place, marked by worldly delights: costly robes, bracelets, perfumes, exquisite banquets, strong drink (prohibited in this life), and yes, for men, carnal delights with untouched virgins.

Islam touches life in a different way from how Christianity and Judaism touch life. There is, of course, Sharia. But this governs public interactions, mostly relating to sex, politics, and property. It's not about personal transformation.

The Spread of Islam
Now, I think we can account for the rise and fall of Muslim scholarship based on the nature of Islam. Islam spread as it did -- conquering everything from France to India within a hundred years of the Prophet's death -- in part because it doesn't demand any internal transformation.

The Qur'an can never be translated: it is, in Muslim thinking, inherently an Arabic document. I think that's a good metaphor for Islam as a whole. Christianity demands inculturation -- translation -- and so Christianity conquered Rome from the inside out. Christianity brings every aspect of culture into contact with faith.

This makes it hard for Christians to raise armies. Though there certainly have been Christian armies, and various sorts of Crusades, they always run up against moral qualms. Within the bounds of Sharia, Islam has no fundamental problem with slaughter, rapine, etc. Christians have committed these crimes, but our religion prohibits them. Although most Muslims are not terrorists, it really isn't beyond the pale of Islamic theology to say that you can commit a horrible deed and then go to your eternal reward. That makes armies easier.

It also makes conquest easier. Christianity has to consolidate its gains, bring real conversion, of morals and manners and customs and ways of thinking. But once Islam has gained the upper hand, it can keep moving. The rejection of "association" fundamentally means that Islam doesn't care how people think, as long as they submit to the rule of Allah. It's an easy religion to convert to.

This explains the rapid spread of Islam, I think -- but it also explains the initial success of philosophers. In the first few centuries of Islam, philosophy flourished precisely because the religious authorities didn't care. Averroes, Avicenna, al-Farabi, al-Ghazali were able to pursue truth unfettered by religious demands, internal or external: their religion didn't really affect the way they thought, and the religious authorities didn't really care. This explains, also, the success of Maimonides: it really didn't bother the religious authorities if Maimonides wanted to pursue his quest for knowledge, so long as he paid his taxes and didn't cause revolution. Early Islam was a kind of paradise for philosophers, a place where they could be left alone to do their work.

But while Islam didn't threaten the philosophers, it also didn't support them. It's noteworthy that the great thinkers came from the borderlands: Cordoba (Spain) and Persia (Iran). On the one hand, these were the frontiers, the places where the authorities were a little less concerned with what the philosophers were doing. From the beginning, the heartland of Islam was a more rigid place, both because the authorities didn't have their attention focused on external concerns and because they were looking for ways to deepen Islam's hold on the local culture. Where Islam had time to consolidate its gains, philosophy suffered.

On the other hand, these were precisely the lands that weren't originally shaped by the Arabic, Muslim way of thinking. Cordoba was ancient Roman territory, thoroughly conquered by Christianity. Indeed, not a century before the Muslims came (711-718), it was home to St. Isidore of Seville (d. 636), one of the greatest scholars of the ancient world. We might say that Muslim philosophy in Spain was "coasting": the perdurance of something that predated the Islamic conquest.

The same could be said, of course, of Persia. Persia had been one of the greatest opponents of the Roman Empire -- indeed, the one civilization Rome could not conquer. It was a great crossroads of culture, keeping alive the splendors of ancient Greece, mixing them with those of China, and pursuing its own cultural greatness. Ultimately, the West rediscovered Plato and Aristotle only because they had never died in Persia. Muslim Persian scholarship continued because Islam left it alone -- indeed, it seems that Iran, despite its repressive government, retains one of the richest and most thoughtful cultures in the Islamic world.

But if Islam didn't threaten philosophy, it also didn't cultivate it. When strains of fundamentalism arise -- and they naturally do, for reasons both religious and political -- there is nothing to push back in affirmation of philosophy. Mostly, Islam leaves philosophy alone, but when, for one reason or another, it attacks the philosophers -- for being too politically active, for undermining the faith of the people, for befriending outsiders -- philosophy can only push back through non-Muslim means.

I am no expert on Iran, but I note that Iranian culture is divided among modernists, fundamentalists, and -- ready for this? -- "traditionalist humanists." What that means, I think, is that Iranian humanism, the strand in that society that supports art and culture and philosophy and science, takes its grounding in the long, pre-Muslim, Persian tradition. (Not unlike the 15th-century Renaissance in Italy harkened back to Ancient Rome as the fount of all human accomplishment.) But when Islam takes notice of such things, it is always a force against humanism.

The West
Now, I have written enough of an essay already, but at the end, I would like to add one plot twist, in order to make this say something about the West as well as Islam. I will assert: secularism is the Islam of Europe.

As early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a battle waged in Europe between the humanists and the fundamentalists. When the texts of Aristotle came to Europe -- from the Muslim lands -- there was a strain of Christianity that was deeply threatened. Indeed, Aristotle's philosophy was condemned over and over at the University of Paris through the thirteenth century. (The repetitions are interesting because they prove that they were ignored: if the first had worked, there wouldn't have been need for a second.) The role of St. Thomas Aquinas -- the inspiration for this blog -- was to argue that Aristotle and Christianity were not opposed. But the battle raged furious between fundamentalists and philosophers.

The battle continued through the 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance. European art took off precisely where the Church lost its hold on culture. But be careful of what this means. In fact, Christianity was the source of culture. That's a big argument, but note that the great artists were depicting Christian scenes; that the vivid naturalism of European art has never been touched by a culture unendowed with Christianity's doctrine of Creation and Incarnation; that the European artistic project, both visual and musical, collapsed precisely as Christianity passed out of our culture. Modern "secular" art is hardly art at all: because it no longer exalts in creation. Johann Sebastian Bach exalted in creation: precisely because of his passionate love for the Creator.

Nonetheless, the Church needed to take its hands off the wheel to let the artists do their thing. Where the Gospel was preached, but art was allowed to flourish on its own terms: there was art. But where Churchmen painted over the works of artists -- and where the Gospel was no longer preached -- art failed.

It happened again with technology, and economics, and political philosophy. The American Constitution owes much to Christian philosophy. Indeed, without the doctrine of "Nature and Nature's God," human equality, which is anything but self-evident, would never -- and indeed, has never -- been given serious consideration. And, only to assert -- because really, I have another essay on my hands here -- the modern world was most creative, both technologically and economically, when creators were allowed to create, but inspired by a greater love.

Secularism is like Islam. It supports philosophy precisely to the extent that it leaves it alone. When Churchmen get too close a handle on things, humanism tends to suffocate. We get more worried about usury than about providing for the poor, more into having moral rules for everything than seeing human flourishing. And so secularism has been a force for good. We might even say that a nation like Victorian England was more "Catholic" than was 18th-century Italy, precisely because it allowed Christians to pursue their loves.

Yet like Islam, secularism turns to an intolerance that cannot handle humanism. It does not support humanism, and gives us only the ugly "art" of the Soviets. It does not support excellence. And at times, in its fundamentalist zeal, it turns on those who are too creative, crushing them under a weight of "equality" and "liberty" (and yes, "fraternity" and "the common good") that ultimately destroys the very things it claims to exalt.

There's something to be learned from the experience of Iran.

Race and Ethnicity

2009-05-18T17:13:00.002-04:00

Across from our house in this historically black neighborhood is an old-fashioned black church. Twice on Sundays the congregants appear, dressed to the nines, men and women in fancy hats and flashy suits -- often white for men, purple or yellow or bright red for women -- that we would call out of style. Over the summer there are occasional tent revivals, with a week of preaching and, um, spirited singing out on the lawn, and even more often there are long evening prayer services, with lots and lots of music: drums, hollering, clapping.

But what we love best is the barbecue. All through the summer, they drag out a big smoker on a trailer every Saturday and cook ribs all day long. I don't know if it's a fundraiser or a membership drive or community service or what, but the ribs are sure good.

Last Saturday we had the good fortune to be walking home from a yard sale in mid-morning, and my gregarious, wheelchair-bound four-year-old struck up a conversation, across the four-lane street, with the barbecuer-in-chief. "Is that a real fire?" "What are you cooking?" He invited us back at lunch time for free ribs. (There are perks to being a kid in a wheelchair: people are always doing nice stuff for us!)

When we showed up to claim our prize, I was struck by how black the guy was. His skin was black, of course, but far more, his person. A middle-aged guy, he had a thick deep-south black accent (this is Minnesota), lots of big gold jewelry, a Randy Moss jersey, and an easy, laid-back charm.

And how black is barbecue. We all do it, of course, but I was struck by the primitiveness of this set-up: the big fire, with meat left all day in the smoke (apple wood and cherry wood, he told me). My four-year-old pointed out how "simple" the rib bones are: it's just meat. Barbecue is an African tradition -- and even more, a Black American tradition. It's not hard to imagine the plantations and share farms this barbecue comes from.

RACE?
"Race" didn't use to mean skin color. I have here The New Century Dictionary. (There's a lot to be learned from raiding your grandparents' library.) "The New Century" in question, of course, began in 1900, not 2000. I don't know the full publishing history; the last copyright on this one is 1940, though the first one is 1927. So perhaps these definitions were written as early as the '20s, but they were still considered current at the start of World War II.

For "race" we have: "a group of persons connected by common descent or origin; a family; a tribe or people; a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock." Yes, there's also reference, further down, to the "great divisions of mankind": Caucasian, Mongolian, and presumably Negro, "having certain physical peculiarities in common." But the examples are far more limited: even the sentence quoted that does include a "negro race" compares it to the "Jewish race" and the "English race."

This understanding of race was current in 1940 -- which is to say, up to when the Civil Rights Movement got going. Certainly in that eugenic period when Margaret Sanger was founding Planned Parenthood, the "inferior races" she was setting out to eliminate were not just blacks, but also the Irish, Italians, and Polish. The notion that "white" is a race is a product, not a cause, of the Civil Rights movement.

SOME HISTORY?
Here's a conspiracy theory -- it sounds crazy, but it does fit the facts, and the rhetoric of the first half of the 20th century. Certainly there were many people sincerely committed to the Civil Rights Movement -- the movement to give the black "race" full rights in the South, and full political rights in the whole American nation. But in the Northern cities, there were also people manipulating it for other purposes.

In early-20th-century America, the WASP establishment was pretty scared about the rise of what we'd call the urban ethnics -- what they called inferior races. Especially Irish, Italian, and Polish, but also some Bavarian, Russian, and Jewish communities were rising, with very different loyalties from the WASPs': different ideas of political power, different ideas of political argument. One part of this was religious: the Catholics in particular were terribly threatening, because they answered to a higher religious authority, undermining the right of the WASPs to determine right and wrong. Another part was merely cultural: WASPs didn't want these dirty ethnics, Catholic or otherwise, imposing their festivals and mores on "their" cities.

The Civil Rights Movement was a useful, and successful, weapon in the WASP arsenal. On the one hand, it was a way to discredit the urban ethnics -- the inferior races. WASP authorities set the ethnics against the blacks, mostly through forced integration, moving black families into Irish, or Italian (or whatever) neighborhoods. The ethnics responded with racial animosity -- but again, note the ambiguity of "race." In the context of the Civil Rights Movement, the Irish seemed to be "racists," anti-black, and thus presumably pro-white. But in the context of the ethnic cities, the Irish were no more opposed to the black "race" than to the Italians, Jews, Russians, Germans, or WASPs. It had nothing to do with skin color, everything to do with ethnicity. They just didn't want to lose control of their neighborhood.

Still, to the WASP majority, it looked bad, because the WASP authorities framed the debate as black vs. white, instead of ethnicities defending their communities. The Catholic (and other) ethnics looked like "racists" -- and this accusation legitimated forcible destruction of ethnic neighborhoods. Legitimate concerns for the Civil Rights of blacks were used as a cover for attacks on undesirable ethnics -- inferior races. The real "racists" were the white WASPs baiting the white Catholics, not the Irish fighting the blacks.

The second prong of this attack was to push the Catholics themselves to re-identify. Through the excessive use of race -- that is, black vs. white -- rhetoric, the powers that be pushed the Irish, Italians, and Poles to re-identify themselves, not as Catholics or ethnics, but as whites, fleeing the blacks. "White flight" -- one of the most profound tools in building suburuban America -- was not just whites fleeing blacks, but ethnics leaving their ethnic neighborhoods for neighborhoods defined instead by generic whiteness and socio-economic status.

Again, whether you buy into the power narrative or not, the effects are clear. People used to define themselves by the thick bonds of ethnicity -- what The New Century Dictionary called "common descent or origin; a family; a tribe or people; a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock." Now, it's just the effort to move up the socio-economic ladder. Whether or not this suburbia has to be this way, it is certainly a dominant feature of it today.

RACE TODAY
To a large extent, Martin Luther King has triumphed in America. It's no longer acceptable to judge a man by his race -- or rather, "by the color of his skin." All we're allowed to care about is "the content of his character."

Of course, there is still discussion of race, but it's mostly in terms of what is (abusively) called "affirmative action." (The word is abused, because affirmative action ought to mean much more than quotas.) Liberals think it's right to advance someone based on the color of his skin -- but only because they think it helps undermine the importance of skin color. More black lawyers means we recognize that what really matters is "what's inside," not race. More radical liberals think that only a black man can empathize with the plight of another black man -- but the concern is still to find ways to use race to overcome race: only a black man can see that the blackness of the other man doesn't matter.

Most conservatives respond that instead of working for color blindness, through affirmative action, we should just apply it, now. Thus the black conservative Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas says affirmative action made people assume that he was dumb, advancing because of the color of his skin instead of the content of his character. On the death of William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of National Review, and thus one of the most important voices in American conservatism, many of his closest associates said his best book was The Unmaking of a Mayor, about his unsuccessful attempt to spoil the New York mayoral election of 1965. The real theme of the book is Buckley's incomprehension that urban voters take ethnicity seriously, instead of just thinking of themselves as individuals.

Note the similarity of liberal and conservative: in the modern conversation (as early as 1965) race is irrelevant to a person. And, of course, there's something to that -- skin color is a pretty shallow criterion for judging a person.

THE PROBLEM
But to see the problem, consider the newspeak term "African American." It's an odd way to describe a community who has been here since the very beginning -- indeed, a community whose immigration ended in 1808, long before the wave of other non-WASP ethnicities even began.

And it's an odd conflation, since there are real African Americans, people who have recently come to these shores from, you know, Africa, and who have very little in common, culturally, with Americans descended from the slaves. Indeed, we can well imagine the frustration of parents whose children grew up as French Catholics and are now lumped together with a totally different, and grossly abused, culture. Whom do we serve by using language that denies the difference?

Certainly not American blacks themselves. (I wish there were a term to distinguish them from African blacks, but I am not the one to coin it.) What is gained by denying the very existence of the culture that produced the church, and the barbecue, across the street? What is gained by denying the struggles unique to this community, the challenges of a heritage that includes a share-cropper grandfather who couldn't vote; a flight to Northern climes and the attendant effort to preserve a unique culture, with its ways of relating, its foods, its religion; the frustrations of the 1968 riots and the effort to perdure as a community when the majority treats "integration" as the highest goal?

Ethnicities -- races -- need to interact. They need to get along, without violence. They need to be accorded basic civil rights. But I do not see what is gained by throwing the baby out with the bath water, by making culture an irrelevant part of an "individual's" make-up. "Integration" is a genocidal word, an effort to erase ethnicity and culture, leaving us with nothing but naked individuals. It has not served us well. We worry about the loss of community, the loss of values, the loss of identity, the loss of quality. Then we proclaim race the enemy.

A good society would accord everyone civil rights -- would be color blind when it comes to who can vote. But it would not try to enforce color blindness to the detriment of culture. There's a lot to be said for those old ethnic enclaves, so long as we are bound to them by culture, not law.

"A group of persons connected by common descent or origin; a family; a tribe or people; a group of tribes or peoples forming an ethnic stock." Doesn't sound so bad to me.

Private Public Transportation

2009-04-30T17:37:00.002-04:00

Our cities need to make a strong and clear distinction: transportation that serves the public does not need to be provided by the public. We should encourage “private public transportation.”

Nationwide, the current regime penalizes private providers of public transportation services. “Medallion” systems strictly limit the number of taxis in our cities while charging a massive tax on taxi ownership. Bus companies face even stricter limitations: most cities prohibit private bus services unless they serve a strictly private function (such as university transportation).

Sometimes such restrictions are directly discriminatory. In the 1950s (I think) there was a black-owned and operated bus company serving black residents of Harlem and Brooklyn. In the name of “efficiency,” the city outlawed this company. Its services were not replaced; those communities were simply not deemed worthy of “public” transportation.

But even in the absence of such civil-rights violations, limiting public transportation to public companies is a disaster for our cities.

Public transportation is an enormous good for cities. For those who cannot afford a car, it provides the only means of travel: for work, shopping, entertainment, visiting, and more. The freedom of those without cars is strictly limited by the provision of public transportation.

But even for those who can afford a car, public transportation is a great good. Consider this: we would pity anyone who spends more than two and a half hours a day – 10% of their time – in the car. But that means that every car spends 90% of its time sitting unused. What would our neighborhoods, our workplaces, our shopping areas look like if we did not have to provide parking for cars that spend most of their time idle? What would our cities look like if we could eliminate even half of our traffic, with its noise, pollution, and above all, roads?

How would our cost of living change – especially the cost of rent – if most of our parking and half of our roads were made available for other uses? How would our quality of living change if there were half as many lanes of traffic every time we crossed the street? Yet that would require only two people in every car that now carries one.

If anything, we should be subsidizing public transportation—private buses and taxis—rather than taxing them and limiting their numbers. At the least, we should facilitate them.

Here is a proposal. For public safety, private taxis and buses (and any other form of private public transportation) should only be required to register, carrying a clearly visible sign that they have passed a background check. (The background check should be provided free of charge, as a minimal form of subsidy for this public service.)

For the convenience of riders, public-transport vehicles should carry a clearly visible explanation of fares. The city might register a few standardized fare charts: a red badge, for example, might mean $1.50 for unlimited travel (a bus fare); a yellow badge, $2/person, plus .20/mile(taxi fare) —or whatever. But there is no reason that providers should not determine what fare system works best for them, so long as it is clearly visible. If the goal is to get more providers involved, city governments should not dictate terms.

Current bus routes could be maintained – and expanded. Publically operated buses could even continue to run on current schedules, until proven unnecessary. The addition of new providers, however, would greatly improve service. Rather than waiting 20 minutes for the next bus, one might find another provider coming along the desired route in 2 minutes. If the provider is a car rather than a bus, one might even go direct to one’s stop instead of waiting for other people to be picked up and dropped off.

The city could allow private drivers to purchase fare-card readers, for a reasonable charge. Some drivers might prefer to be cash-only, as taxis now are. But others might offer their customers the option to pay by credit card or fare card. I know I would prefer that option – though there are times I would take the fastest car available.

This proposal would cost cities little. If the new system takes business away from the old buses – by providing cheaper, faster service – publically-operated bus companies would lose fares, but could run fewer buses. Since publically-operated buses currently run at a net loss, the city would come out ahead. The city would lose the revenue from the sale of taxi medallions. But if taxis became more widely available, and cheaper, cities could sell off some parking facilities, which are inevitably located in places where people want to be, and thus where real estate prices are high.

Above all, such a system would benefit the people of a city, providing greater mobility, lower costs of living, and higher quality of life. These things are worth the loss of taxi-medallion revenue.

Of course, such a system might not work. Perhaps there is no one who wants to get into this business. But if that is so, there is no reason to outlaw private public buses. If taxi driving was not a good business, there would be no need to limit the number of medallions, and no way to explain the astronomical prices paid for them. Cities would do well to put people first, and give private public transportation a chance.

Liberal Fascism?

2009-04-20T12:20:00.003-04:00

Jonah Goldberg has a popular book out right now -- I think it was the number-one non-fiction seller on Amazon -- called Liberal Fascism. I like Jonah Goldberg a lot, so I'm interested in his point of view (though I'm concerned there's some human solidity missing: Buckley minus any religious or high-cultural sensibility is not Buckley).

And there is clearly a very important point here, made strongly in Paul Johnson's classic Modern Times. (I haven't read Goldberg's book, but I've read enough to be pretty sure it's the same idea.) The point is basically this: standard wisdom says socialism and fascism are opposite ends of the spectrum. Therefore (since, I guess, there must be a simple spectrum) the farther one gets from socialism, the closer one gets to fascism. Particularly, anyone who is opposed to Big Government must be more or less a fascist.

But wait! Nazi is short for National Socialist. Fascists are socialists. And not only in name. Fascism is not anti-government -- that couldn't be farther from the truth. Fascism is about big government, about everything-inside-the-state, nothing-outside-the-state. Hitler had a lot more in common with FDR than with Barry Goldwater.

Now, this is a really important point. Hitler is unthinkable apart from statism. One of the greatest arguments for limited government -- made especially in Hayek's classic The Road to Serfdom -- is precisely that as the state grows, in tends to demand more and more, and be less and less tolerant of outliers. Big government is always bad for minorities; it may be coming for the rich and the Mormons now, but it will come for you eventually, as you fail to participate (be assimilated!) in the ways the state wants you too. Compulsory public education, for example, is a lovely tool for the Hitlers of the world, who cannot tolerate minority opinions. So is a state-dominated economy: they come for the CO2 now; what will they find intolerabe tomorrow?

So fine, fascism is a kind of socialism.

Nonetheless, Goldberg's Liberal Fascism argument has a crucial flaw. The flaw is essentially this: he tries to tarnish liberalism -- which is a kind of socialism -- with what's bad about fascism. But what's centrally hated about fascism is precisely the way it is different from liberalism. It's like saying, "Jacob and Esau are the same, because they're from the same family!" But the problem is, they relate to that family in opposite ways. What makes Esau reprobate (wish I could think of a non-theological example!) is not that he's Isaac's son, but that he's a bad son. What's bad about fascism (in the popular estimation) is not that it's socialist, but that it's national socialism.

I'm reading the first volume of Churchill's history of World War II -- that's the volume about the political lead-up; I'll read the military-history volumes another time, maybe. I just got to Churchill's summary of Hitler's philosophy; very nicely done.

Hitler was first and foremost, not a socialist, but a nationalist. Hitler believed in the German people. He hated everything that was internationalist. His hatred of both the Jews and Communism was precisely because they were international, not bound to the genius of a particular people -- specifically, the German people. He was a socialist, concentrating power in the state, precisely to strengthen the nation, the Volk. He believed the nation's strength was in struggle (Kampf), in fighting against other nations. He wanted war to make his nation strong.

Hitler is hated, not because he was for big government, not because he was a socialist, but because he was a racist, killing the Jews, and a war-monger, conquering his neighbors. I'm sorry, Mr. Goldberg, but it is simply absurd to try to smear this on liberals -- as much as I hate liberalism! It is like saying, oh, look at those chess pieces, they're both kings, they're just the same. No. One is black, one is white. They are opposed. Someday I'll study logic and know the technical name for this fallacy, but let's call it a smear: you say that because A is like B in one respect, it must be alike in all respects. Not so fast! Especially when the critical respect is precisely the one where A and B are opposite.

Liberalism is internationalist. Liberalism denies the genius of the American people. And you know, conservatism exalts the genius of the American people. "American exceptionalism," by itself, bears much more resemblance to the critical aspect of fascism, nationalism, than do liberal desires to be liked by Europe and the Middle East, to abandon the American Constitution for international law, to give up on our language and heritage and political philosophy in favor of what everyone else is doing.

And of course, the whole movement of "conservatives" (I don't think it is genuinely conservative) against immigration is much more akin to fascist concerns about racial and cultural purity than it is to liberal desires to water down anything distinctive about America. (Anti-immigration "conservatives" claim to be worried about illegal immigration, but if that were the case, the simplest answer would be to liberalize our immigration laws; instead, most of this clique wants to tighten the laws, and explicitly appeals to arguments about cultural purity, as well as the economic danger of outsiders; the latter argument is so manifestly anti-market that it seems clear these folks are really driven by the cultural argument.) Unfortunately, that's where the immigration argument is being played out: on cultural purity.

Conservatives are right to want legality; conservatives are right to oppose more-or-less open liberal efforts to water down American distinctiveness by promoting non-assimilating immigration. But when conservatives take the side of Big Government (fences, crack-downs on businesses, more militarization, stricter scrutiny of who deserves to be part of America, based especially on central-planning economic criteria) in order to maintain cultural purity, they have no right to claim that the liberals are fascists. Nationalist socialism: big government used to preserve the Volk: that is fascism.

The rest of conservatism, however, is at least as unlike National Socialism as liberalism is, because fascism needs the State in order to pursue its kind of nationalism. The irony of calling conservatives facists (apart from the immigration debate) is that conservatives appeal to a Constitution that rejects racial purity in favor of liberty. Conservatives want a country in which the government can't crack down on minorities, in which minorities of every kind flourish. Conservatism is based on this idea of limited government; and nothing more undermines the purposes of fascism than limited government. Hitler would never accept limited government. Limited government can't invade its neighbors and gas its minorities.

There is a very strong argument to be made that Unlimited Government tends toward fascism. Even Stalin, the great Internationalist leader, ended up a fascist, killing more Jews than Hitler, cracking down on dissenters, limiting travel and free speech and universities. This is the real Liberal Fascism argument: not that the essence of Nazism is socialism -- it isn't; the essence of Nazism is nationalism -- but that socialism, Unlimited Government, inevitably contradicts internationalism, because it inevitably ends by stifling dissent, the free movement of peoples and goods (notice that our Big Government folks are terrified of free trade), and the creativity of the people. Liberalism intends to use Big Government to make the world more tolerant; but the lessons of Stalin -- and Mao, and everyone else who has tried, even our homegrown anti-marriage,* public-education liberals -- is that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat ends up being more and more Dictatorship and less and less Proletariat; the attempt to eradicate intolerance ends in the greatest intolerance; the move to make the world fair and happy through force makes things more arbitrary and dreary than ever before.

International Socialism is, at its root, as opposed to the Nationalist part of National Socialism as Black Queen to White Queen. But by seeking its internationalist ends through socialist/Unlimited Government means, it ends up as intolerant as Hitler. The question, however, is not whether Internationalists and Nationalists are essentially the same -- they aren't! -- but whether the means, Unlimited Government, tends to pervert the ends to which it is directed. That is an argument better made, I think, by Hayek than by Goldberg.

*Is the defense of marriage Limited Government? Liberals -- genuinely confused on this, I think -- believe that marriage laws are an attempt to impose a particular culture, Christianity, on others. The association of Christianity with particular culture is already odd, from a historical perspective, pretty dumb. And of course it's worth noting that at this stage of the game, a central part of the argument is about self-determination, about whether courts can overrule the overwhelming voice of the people and a couple states can overrule the opinions of other states. Nonetheless, the key point is whether liberals are right that heterosexual marriage is merely the preference of a particular culture.

In brief, the response is no. First, heterosexual marriage is a product of nature, evolution: children need parents, both biologically and, therefore, socially. This has nothing to do with culture, everything to do with reason. And since heterosexual unions are universally the cause of new citizens, it does have to do with securing the rights of every single individual (we all begin as children) against those who would treat those individuals themselves as someone else's "right": the right to adopt, to call yourself a mommy when you aren't, to deprive a child of a parent, etc.

Second, and maybe more important, marriage is just a Thing. There is, simply, something out there that is Marriage: the commitment of the two biological partners in procreation to create an environment in which procreation can reach its natural end, adulthood. The real argument against gay marriage is not anti-gay, but pro-marriage.

The equality argument here is really upside down. Gays say they want the same rights everyone else has. But they have the same rights: they can enter into a heterosexual marriage if they want; the fact that they don't want to do that is not a deprivation of their rights (at least not in the political order). What they, in fact, want is to take away the rights of others to enter into marriage; what they are asking for is an elimination of a particular Office in the polis, not its expansion. They want to deny that there is any such thing as Marriage, by replacing the definition of that Thing, in politics, with a new one.

The proponents of "traditional marriage" don't always speak this clearly -- though democracy should not require you to speak clearly -- but in fact, heterosexual marriage is simply the right of citizens to enter into the most fundamental contract in the political order and to have that contract recognized by law. Eliminating the right of people to make that contract is a usurpation: Government stepping in where it doesn't belong; as in many things, it abandons one of the necessary functions of Limited Government in favor of a new intrusion of Government into life: in this case, Government redefining the pre-existing office of Marriage. Marriage law is a matter of Limited Government, not fascism.

A Twenty-First Century Idyll

2009-04-01T14:59:00.002-04:00

Here's the bad news:

Our country is living beyond its means. It has been for a long time, though it spiraled out of control in the last decade. There is a sense of magic, as if the government can keep taking more debt and, since it hasn't failed yet, it never can. But of course that is silly. "Too big to fail" is a moralism, not a statement of fact: we may desperately want big things not to fail, but ultimately the only way to save them is to appeal to something bigger. Unfortunately, the buck stops with Uncle Sam: who can bail out the bailer?

Without someone to bail him out, an individual (or an institution) eventually has to pay his debts. At some point, even the most bogus credit card will no longer lend me money. I will have no more to spend, and those to whom I am obligated will want to be paid back. Without someone to bail me out, I will certainly never have money of my own again -- the lenders will make me pay back the last cent. And perhaps I will suffer violence, from those who are frustrated.

Yet the lenders themselves face the same predicament. If the bank keeps lending money to people who cannot pay it back, the bank itself will not be able to pay back legitimate investors. The bank itself will fail. The investors will lose their money, the bank will lose its good name -- and perhaps there will be violence, from those who are frustrated.

This is the truth in the bail-out mentality: bad debt is a social disease, because it always involves a lender. If I cannot pay back my debts, that hurts me -- but it also hurts everyone who loaned money to me. And if it gets out of control, and even my lenders are bankrupted, it hurts everyone who loaned to them, too. We have to do something!

But there is a lie in the bail-out mentality, too. That lie is that government evades the logic. Government lends money to bail out bad debt. Uncle Sam is giving money to those who made bad mortgages, to those who invested in those who made bad mortgages, etc. But where does Uncle Sam get the money? One source is investors: Uncle Sam just acts like another bank. But when a bank lends to debtors who can't pay back, the bank fails. The US can sell a lot of Treasury Bonds, but ultimately, people want to get their money back, with interest. Whether it is down the street or in Washington, if a bank borrows money from Tom, lends it to Harry, and then cannot get it back from Harry, then Tom will not get his money back. Tom suffers -- and he stops putting his money in the bank. The flow of Treasury-Bond revenue may be fine for now (maybe), but it will not last forever. We have to do something about our debt problem, that is true -- but taking more debt, or passing the debt around, does not fix the problem. Lending money to people who can't pay it back is the problem.

Of course, the difference between Uncle Sam and any other bank is that Uncle Sam can just print more money. But this is purely a ruse. Printing more money devalues money. If I get my $200 back, but now it doesn't buy a week's groceries, I'm in trouble. Investors know this: when it becomes apparent that Treasury Bond yields will be paid back only with massive inflation, people will stop buying Treasury Bonds. But more to the point, all the people who have bought Treasury Bonds will be in need of a bail-out themselves. If I think I can fund my retirement on funny-money inflationary Treasury Bonds, I'm going to be in big trouble when I retire.

We have a debt problem. We are living beyond our means. There is a limit to how many times Daddy can bail us out -- and there is a limit to how many people can bail Daddy out. At some point, bail-out ceases to be an option. At some point, we run out of money. At some point, we lose the house, and the SUV, and we have to work instead of retiring. The only solution to living beyond our means -- the only solution to bad debt -- is to work more and cut spending. I am not talking about only at the federal level. Uncle Sam will have to cut spending, sure -- but so will we.

Being a recent Ph.D., I have no investments, no savings, no assets, so all of this doesn't affect me. Except that it affects my employers. Bad debt is a social disease. I was just hired at a university -- and I need that income! But if all the parents who pay for kids to go to college -- and pay my salary -- have to cut back, it may be me who gets cut. If Uncle Sam no longer has money to hand out for scholarships and financial aid, my salary dries up. Bad debt is a social disease. Eventually we all have to cut back our life styles, and learn to live a more meager existence. We can't just keep taking loans we can't pay back.

If I make $50k a year, but spend $75k, eventually people are going to stop lending me that extra $25k. First, I will have to cut back, and start living at $50k. But then I will have to pay back my debts, and live on less than $50k. Government doesn't evade this logic. Shell games make it all complicated, so that the debt gets shoveled around so quickly that we think it's disappeared: but it hasn't. Everyone eventually wants their investments back, and if they don't get them back, they will stop investing. And if it turns out that, in a great shell game, everyone has loaned everyone else money they didn't have -- why, we all end up in a big mess.

That's the bad news. Eventually we will have to cut back.

But here's an idyllic possibility -- not necessarily likely, but possible, and hopeful. Perhaps when the reckoning comes, when the debt bubble bursts, and we all have to come to terms, perhaps we will take stock of what's really important. Hitting rock bottom can do a person a lot of good. When the debt-collectors come for the McMansion, and the big screen tv, and the SUV, there's always the possibility that we'll say, you know, what really matters is my dog, my kids, and the softball league. (Or whatever.) You move to a much smaller house, sell the SUV, make the kids share a bedroom, and focus on what really matters.

What would this look like on a social level? Here's a trivial example. Right now, our society spends an awful lot of money on food. There's the whole organic movement -- leave that aside for a moment -- but there's also things like grapes from Chile. Now, I like grapes, and I'm glad to have them year round. And in current circumstances, they aren't expensive at all. But it isn't easy to get grapes from Chile to Minnesota. On the most basic level, they have to get on a plane and fly, with refrigeration. But it is far more complicated than that. Thousands of people are employed by the airline, making reservations, fixing planes, fixing runways, making sure that the airplane travels to where a commodity is wanted from where it's available. We do that very efficiently now, so Chilean grapes are cheap -- but only because there is a huge system in place.

This transaction is maintained, moreover, by a massive financial sector. People are busily shuffling money around, from investors to firms, from grocery stores to Chilean-grape middlemen to farmers to farmworkers, etc. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Grapes are cheap now, because there's an enormous industry, countless people working hard, to keep this whole system lubricated. But what happens if the financial system collapses?

For example, the grocery store has to buy the grapes before it can sell them. It does that through investment: I lend money to the grocery store (probably through some Wall St. firm), trusting that a month from now, the grocery store will have used that money to buy grapes, then sold those grapes at a big enough profit to pay me back with interest. But it's a lot of work to figure out where to invest, what airline is profitable, how much interest to expect. Imagine if the manager of the grocery store had to meet with each individual potential investor, personally process each investment, no matter how big or small, keep track of it all himself, make payments, etc. And imagine if he had to call the guy in Chile, and the airline, and promise them money based on all these individual transactions? This is a lot of work. And it can work only because there is a massive financial sector dedicated full-time to handling these transactions, and guaranteeing that each month the grocer has enough money to buy grapes.

And it is all based on trust. I give my money to the financial sector because I trust they will pay me back. The grocer and the airline and the Chilean grape dealer all trust that contracts will be fulfilled, that the financial guys will put up the money, etc. Imagine if every one of these people demanded cash? It would be impossible. It all relies on trust.

We may be coming to the end of that trust. We may be coming to the end of Chilean grapes. And that is, in itself, bad news.

The good news is, that doesn't mean we have to starve. We put all these people to work so that we can have the specific kind of grapes we want, when we want them, even out of season. But if we ate locally -- I'm not trying to be crunchy here, just economical -- we could cut out an awful lot of middlemen. We could pay cash, and deal with individuals that we really did trust.

We'd lose a lot of processed foods, because they require an enormous network of trust: trust that we'll get what we're supposed to, trust that the factory in Arkansas will actually deliver food to Minnesota, trust that the grocery store will pay back its debts after it sells the frozen lasagna, trust that the financier will come through. We would replace that with a much more local trust: I ask the farmer to deliver me potatoes in the winter, and we trust each other to seal the deal. We would lose a tremendous lot of choice. But we gain more personal business relationships, a more thoughtful consideration of what we value (sell the tv, or the dog? are those Cheetos worth more than the steak?), and more tangible contact with our world.

This would put a lot of people out of work, of course. But here is a central fallacy in many discussions of the free market. It is often said that the free market depends on consumerism, greed, lavish spending. But quite the opposite is the case. The free market is, rather, a way of delegating resources to those activities that are valued. It says nothing whatsoever about what those activities are.

Imagine this: the financial sector falls apart, as do many systems of national trust; the nation as a whole is much poorer, and people radically cut back their spending, to live at, or even below, their means, since debt is no longer an option -- and Hollywood goes out of business. Film, of course, requires a massive financial sector, to invest money before the film starts selling tickets, to get goods, and people, from point a to point b, to distribute the film to where it will be watched, etc. And -- is this too optimistic? -- it's one of the first expenses to be cut. We watch too much television as a nation, but if movies cost $50 a ticket, and all tv was pay-per-view, and expensive, would people really pay? I think not.

So Hollywood goes out of business. Lots of people lose their jobs. But that frees up a lot of hands. Brad Pitt seems to be making between 10 and 30 million dollars per movie. That is an awful lot of work that our society puts into supporting this one man's lavish lifestyle, and pet interests (he recently spent $100,000 fighting for gay marriage in California). Eliminating his job does not hurt the economy as a whole. If he went to work, say, on a local farm, we could all save money not paying for his movies, and he could actually contribute to the local economy. It's not a zero-sum game, even for the minimum-wage stage hand: if he starts making hand-crafted boots, then more hand-crafted boots are available for all of us -- and we have more money to spend on those boots, since we're not paying for stage hands or big-shot actors.

We could spin this out in many ways. But here's my point: first, a reckoning is coming. Our debt problem can only end by all of us spending less money. But the more it flies out of control, the more national systems of trust will collapse: trust in the federal government, in the financial sector, in the grocery industry, etc. That will hurt. But it could mean a positive readjustment, as we shift resources from lavish lifestyles to more basic, and perhaps more human, investments. Perhaps we could eat locally-grown potatoes instead of Chilean grapes or Cheetos, and walk the dog instead of watching Brad Pitt. I don't think that would be such a bad thing.

A Reasonable Measure

2009-03-23T18:54:00.005-04:00

The French Revolution set out to replace tradition with pure reason. One of the most concrete things they bequeathed to us is the famously rational metric system. There are a hundred (rationally named) centigrams in a gram, 1,000 grams in a kilogram (cent = 100, kilo = 1,000) -- certainly more logical than 12 ounces in a pound. Centigrade temperature places freezing at 0, boiling at 100, instead of the unthinkable 32 and 212. And there are a hundred centimeters to the meter, 1,000 meters to the kilometer, as opposed to the ungainly twelve inches to the foot, three feet to the yard, and -- horrors -- 5,280 feet to the mile.

Money has been standardized, too. Most modern countries are similar to the U.S. The dollar is divided by 100; coins come in 1, 5, 10, or 25; dollars in 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100. Reasonable. Compare the old British system. A farthing was 1/4 of a penny; 12 pennies to a shilling; 5 shillings to the pound; 21 shillings to a guinea. Who can make sense of such things?

The one rationalization that did not survive the Revolution was the calendar: 365 days = ten months, each with three ten-day weeks ("decades"), plus five holidays at the end, and a sixth for leap year. The day was divided into ten hours, each consisting of 100 minutes of 100 seconds. Rational. Orderly.

And all the new systems are based on modern science. The meter is 1/10,000,000 of the distance from one pole of the earth to the equator (though it has subsequently been given a more obscure definition in terms of the wave length of light, since the earth itself isn't perfectly rational or consistent). A gram is 1/1,000,000 of the weight of a cubic meter of water (and mass, of course, does not vary, as weight does, depending on the force of gravitation). Only money avoids any scientific grounding -- on the perfectly rational realization that money is merely a means of exchange, with no fixed value.

The problem is, none of these things are all that reasonable. Begin with the idea of 10s in the first place. It looks very nice on paper, until you realize that if we didn't have ten fingers, ten is the last number we would choose to orient our counting around. We are used to it, to be sure, but five is an awfully clumsy number, stretching the limits of simple math; 100 is so big as to be beyond visualization.

It makes far more sense to orient things around threes and fours, both of which are far more intuitive. Consider the day. The 24-hour system actually consists of 12 hours before noon, 12 after. 12 divides easily by 3 and 4. 6 is half way, 3 and 9 a quarter of the way. 7 and 8 are decent divisions between 6 and 9 (whether morning or night): to further subdivide by 2's would either make the hours too long (only one division between 6/the evening and 9/night?) or too short (my head begins to spin when I consider half of half of half). Once you divide the day into quarters -- 12, 3, 6, 9 -- three is a manageable way to break things down further.

Why do we do it this way? Because it's manageable. Because it's easy to think about. 2's and 3's, even 4's, are easy to think about. 10 is too big: you have to subdivide to get a picture of it. But it only subdivides into 5's, which are still just too clumsy. Imagine, in the Revolutionary system, dividing all the time from midday to midnight into 5 parts. It's just clumsy; there's no midway, no easy parts. 100 minutes certainly doesn't help. 60 breaks into 4 fifteens -- and it's awfully nice to talk of quarter-hours. And that breaks down into 3 x 5. All right, so we have 5-minute intervals -- but notice that we really can't think in much smaller units than that; we all joke about how absurd it is to say 6:03; we rarely even break the hour down to less than quarters. In any case, those 5-minute intervals just divide 60 into 12 parts: 12 is a manageable amount, because we can visualize 4 groups of 3. Imagine asking the time and being told, "it's 2/5ths past the hour." "??"

I see this with my little boy, who's just getting into numbers. "So, 8 is four and four?" he asked the other day. Yes, Joseph. But how did he get there? Then he tells me, "8 is two squares?!" Yes. He gets there because he can see it, because four is a manageable number. Apart from fingers, 5 is just too much. A base-10 number system forces us into nothing but 2's and 5's. Pentagons are weird.

Imagine how convenient the old British system was. A penny breaks into two (hay penny) or four (farthing). A shilling is 12 pennies -- and the standard coins were 3 and 6 pennies (three pence and six pence). Yeah. I can think about that. A pound, I'll grant you, was 5 shillings. But how delightful that a guinea was 21 shillings: 4 pounds-and-a-bit. This is a coin system designed for people to think about and do math in their head, not to look nice (with lots of 0's) on paper.

Apart from the lovely 3's and 4's, the old system is based on our senses. There are 12 inches to a foot -- partly because that makes it easy to think of a quarter-foot. But how perfect that an inch is the size of a man's first knuckle, a foot the size of a man's foot. Now that's useful. 1/10,000,000 of the quarter-circumference of the Earth might sound "scientific," but who knows how big a centimeter is? It's not based on anything.

A yard is one big stride. A mile -- did you know this? -- is from the Latin "mille," a thousand; a 1,000 big steps would be 3,000 feet, a 1,000 with each foot is 6,000 feet -- and a 1,000 slightly shorter steps, the kind you take when you're walking a long distance, comes to roughly 5,280 feet. Precise? No. But workable. How much less precise is it to use the kilometer, a distance, the kilometer with no reference to anything in our experience? How would you even approximate a kilometer? Anyway, if you want to be precise, you use a machine, which doesn't need the numbers to be nice. When the numbers matter is when you're using a rule of thumb: a thousand right-foot steps.

(Note, by the way, that here, 1,000 is a decent number, since you'll end up using your fingers.)

Fahrenheit? When do you want to know temperatures? When you're boiling water, you just wait for the water to boil. When you're going higher than that, or need to be more precise than that, you use a thermometer. (Though every candy chef knows the real signs are hard crack, soft crack, etc.) But when you want a number you can look at is when you're going outside. And you know, 0 - 100 F. is actually a pretty good range for outside temperatures. Here, we use base-10 numbers, because yeah, it's just a number to look at. Centigrade may seem real scientific, but your entire range of outdoor temperatures is significantly cut down. How useful is that?

And the Revolutionary Calendar might look very neat, but isn't a seven-day work week a little easier to think about? And when was the last time you complained that May has more days in it than February?

Here's the point I'm trying to make. Rationalism isn't rational -- certainly not reasonable. Rationalism means trying to make everything fit into a system. On the way, it throws out the data. It throws out tradition, which includes both some smart systems that have been worked out over time (like the utility of the number 12, and measures based on body parts) and all our historical documents (do you really want to have to convert every date before 1793?) It throws out the senses, so that you're more interested in things like 1/10,000,000 of the quarter-circumference of the earth than the length of your own foot. Rationalism turns Reason into a creator, instead of a receiver, a way to overrule the world around you instead of understanding it. And in the end, that isn't rational at all.

Conversely, there's nothing rationalistic about being reasonable. We who keep company with St. Thomas often get dismissed for thinking too much about syllogisms, definitions, and logical consequences. But these are the things our minds can get ahold of. Working with reasonable measures, with things we can actually wrap our brains around, is not rationalism -- it is the ultimate way to prevent rationalism.

Just like knowing how long an inch is keeps the fabric merchant from ripping you off.

Can We?

2009-03-13T13:08:00.002-04:00

I recently spent some time in a children's hospital emergency room. While my four-year-old was getting stitches, we were introduced to Bob the Builder, a popular claymation children's show. The theme song is catchy, and within an hour of our coming home, even the two-year-old, who hadn't come to the emergency room, was singing along: "Bob the Builder -- Can We Fix It? -- Bob the Builder -- Yes We Can!" It's got that kind of pep that is both annoying and, from a child's perspective, sort of uplifting.

But I couldn't help notice the parallel to another pop-culture phenomenon. The night of Hillary Clinton's primary-election victory in New Hampshire, Barack Obama gave one of his more memorable speeches. The culmination is as follows:

when we have faced down impossible odds; when we've been told we're not ready, or that we shouldn't try, or that we can't, generations of Americans have responded with a simple creed that sums up the spirit of a people.
Yes we can. (break for cheering) Yes we can. (break for cheering) Yes we can.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.

Yes we can.

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights.

Yes we can.

It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.

Yes we can.

It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.

Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can.

I'm told that Obama was evoking the 1970's labor organizer Cesar Chavez. (There's an interesting commentary there on Obama's target demographic: people who recognize Cesar Chavez, but not Bob the Builder.) I have no idea how central this speech is to Obama's mystique, though I know LA made a fancy music video out of it, blending the very catchy with the utterly pretentious. So in critiquing this theme, I do not mean to criticize Obama as a whole -- I don't know enough about him to do that. I do mean to criticize what I take to be a central theme in modern liberalism.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation: Yes we can.

Except actually, it wasn't. The Declaration of Independence opens with questions of necessity: "it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands . . . decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires . . . ." These are matters, not of "yes we can," but of "yes we must." The necessity derives from "must nots." The rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not, of course, "inalienable" in the sense that they cannot be taken away, but that they must not.

"Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it." The fundamental theme of the Declaration is "no, you can't." No, government does not have the right to overstep its bounds; and the Declaration is a long list of abuses. The first of our "founding documents" has nothing of "hope" and everything of anger at governments doing what they must not. "A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people." What "we can" do is not yet even asked.

Eleven years later, our next founding document was published, the Constitution. (It took two more years for it to be ratified.) It would be delightfully ironic to describe the Constitution as a document of "yes we can." The Constitution is fundamentally an enumeration of powers. It says "yes we can" do x, y, and z, precisely to say "no, we cannot do anything else." There are several explicit "no you can't's" offered to the states:

No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.
No state shall, without the consent of the Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it's inspection laws: and the net produce of all duties and imposts, laid by any state on imports or exports, shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States; and all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of the Congress.
No state shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops, or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.

And several direct "no you can't's" aimed at the Federal Government:

The migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person.
The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.
No capitation, or other direct, tax shall be laid, unless in proportion to the census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.
No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state.
No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one state over those of another: nor shall vessels bound to, or from, one state, be obliged to enter, clear or pay duties in another.
No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.
No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.

But more to the point, the Bill of Rights (which is, of course, nothing but a list of "no you can't's" for the federal government: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech," etc.; "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed;" etc.) is sealed with the Tenth Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Anything not specifically listed as "yes we can" is thereby construed as "no we can't."

Of course, there is much hope in this document. But there is a difference between true "hope" and "yes we can": hope merely expresses a possibility. On leaving the Constitutional Convention, Ben Franklin is reputed to have responded to the question, "what have you given us?" with the answer "a republic, if you can keep it." True hope is always "if." Perhaps what so grates about Obama's invocation of hope is that it seems strong on the "yes we can" and weak on the "if." Does he ask anything of us, or just tell us we can do whatever we want?

It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights.

Now, I do not deny that what I am describing as a fundamentally liberal attitude did exist among some of the more radical abolitionists. It is fair to put the unrestricted "yes we can" in their mouths, and indeed to root much of the rise of modern liberalism in the unrestrained desires of the radical Republicans in the years following Abraham Lincoln's death.

But I think it is pretty well understood, by those who actually study Lincoln, that his was an attitude of restraint. The one who actually freed the slaves, the one who brought the obscure Republican party to national strength, and maintained the Union so that their abolitionist ideas could apply to the slave states: Lincoln's attitude was hardly "yes we can."

In that marvelous Gettysburg Address, Lincoln describes the precarious situation of republican government:

Our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. . . .
It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us . . . that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Yes, this is hope. But "yes we can"? No, I think Lincoln's attitude is, "perhaps we can." Perhaps, if we are righteous, there is a possibility. I am no expert on Barack Obama, but his hope feels a little cheap.

In the Second Inaugural, Lincoln proclaimed:

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

"We hope -- if."

There are two fundamental weaknesses in the slogans "hope," and "yes we can." One is grammatical. These are transitive ideas. You have to hope in something. Even Bob the Builder knows this: "yes we can" is only a response to "can we fix it." "Yes we can" do this particular task. To proclaim hope and "yes we can" without proclaiming what we can is grammatically unintelligible. (Just as "change" is unintelligible without defining from what to what, and "choice" is unintelligible without saying what you're choosing: choose infanticide?)

The second weakness is metaphysical. Ability is limited. Our founding documents hope that maybe "yes we can" have a republican government, but only if we are clear what we cannot do. The Great Emancipator hopes that perhaps "we can" end the war and save the union, with its republican government: but he knows that we must ultimately submit to the judgments of the Lord of history.

It seems to me that this empty "can," "hope," "change," and "choice" are fundamental to Obama's philosophy. In any case, they define a particular liberal worldview, a view that refuses all limits, that defines its worldview by going to the moon: set any goal, and "just do it." The conservative is he who says, perhaps, but there are costs, in moral (and fiscal) discipline, there are limits to what can be achieved. A republic, like individuals, cannot stand by just "shooting for the moon." We must be careful to hope in what can be achieved, and take seriously what will be required of us to achieve it.

An Exhausted Age (Part II)

2009-02-28T12:08:00.002-05:00

In the last post, I argued that the turning of centuries does mark a turning of the ages, a new epoch, but that it takes time. Previous centuries didn't get under way for a good fifteen years: 1517, 1610 or '25, 1715, 1815, 1917. All the talk about President Obama marking a new age is appropriate, but perhaps premature. But the biggest weakness of this talk is that it so seldom considers what defined the 20th century. How can we know a new age is dawning if we don't know what the last age was?

I'd like to offer the argument that the 20th century was an age of exhaustion. In 1920, Warren Harding's winning campaign theme -- and it won him 60% of the popular vote, 73% of the electoral vote, and every state outside the South, plus Tennessee -- was "a return to normalcy." The Harding-Coolidge decade is best known for its free-market economics (for which it should be commended), and these too were a repudiation of Wilson's progressivism (including amending the Constitution to create a federal income tax), but in fact, the free-market part was the one vestige of 19th century thinking.

Meanwhile, the '20s were marked by the imposition of massive tarrifs and America's first -- and drastic -- laws against immigration. In other words, a key part of "normalcy" was isolationism. The '20s are also known, of course, for a massive coarsening of social mores. Not for nothing does Russell Kirk see this decade less in terms of the free market than in terms of selfishness and hedonism. The free market connected the '20s to the past, but everything else set the stage for the century to come. "Normalcy" may have included a return to old-fashioned economics, but it was not about tradition. 1920's normalcy meant a retreat into the self.

The reason is obvious. In 1920, normalcy meant getting away from the horrors of the Great War, the war to end all wars. The bloodshed was atrocious, the economic cost catastrophic. Normalcy meant shutting out the terror of the old world. As a campaign theme, it is significant not that people wanted normalcy, but that they defined it in this way. Normalcy was a cry of exhaustion.

The War to End All Wars. One of the most interesting trends of the 20th century was the desire for finality. This would be the last war. Then, we would found a League of Nations, to simply outlaw war -- forever. Then came another war, and a somewhat more successful version of the League of Nations, that did more or less outlaw war -- at least while the world was run by people exhausted in World War II.

Consider the way we talk about the Holocaust. Don't get me wrong: I do not deny that it was one of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity. I have been to Auschwitz, and to the museum in Washington, many times. But consider the slogan, "never again." Never? Of course we never want it to happen again. Of course we will do what we can. But never? Is that within our grasp? The remarkable thing about the 20th century was that Hitler was not alone in seeking a "final solution," a cure-all that would end our problems "forever," the end of history, and a reign that would last a thousand years.

Economic trends moved in the same direction. Russia's great revolution, of course, was supposed to provide a final solution for the problems of the proletariat. Once you got things set up right, poverty would be over forever: never again! We were more balanced in America, but our own socialist revolution aimed at the same goal. First the New Deal, then the Great Society, are almost defined by their opposition to Jesus's maxim, "the poor you will always have with you." No! Never again! We will eliminate the need for charity, eliminate the need for competition, and hard work, and scraping to get ahead, and establish a just "system," with a safety net that no one can fall through. A system in which no one ever fails. Never again.

So too the Civil Rights movement. Again, don't get me wrong. I think it was a great thing to make sure everyone could vote, and get a fair trial. These are "civil rights," properly defined: but where you eat lunch is a more complicated issue. The Civil Rights movement quickly shifted from a concern about actual civil rights, that is, rights proper to citizens, into an attempt to abolish race and ethnicity.

I can't possibly do this justice in a little corner of this post, but look, ethnic tensions, too, will always be with us. There are different groups in society. The attempt, beginning mid-way through the 20th century, to eliminate these things is destined to fail, since "prejudice" (that is, judging the present in light of the past), recognition of difference, and the presence of different groups within the broader society, are all as natural as natural can be.

But in the '60s, we were all about homogeneity, about permanently eliminating difference, so that we would no longer have to struggle to understand each other. Never again! We are tired of these challenges, so we will abolish ethnicity forever. Whether or not you agree with me that this is a bad thing, do you see the exhaustion behind it, the frustration with the inherent challenges of life?

In the 20th century, the highest virtue was tolerance. Tolerance is a good thing: in its proper context. St. Peter says, "love covers a multitude of sins." Where there is love, there is tolerance. But the 20th century isn't about love. It was, in fact, about eliminating loves, eliminating anything that sets people apart as different, or causes them to think too critically. Love is about drawing people together. Without love, tolerance is about leaving people alone.

The sexual revolutions of the 1920's and 1960's are part of this dynamic. Old sexual mores were about society taking care of people, protecting them against bad decisions, calling them to greatness. The Sexual Revolution banished greatness in favor of leave me alone. Just as the 20th century increasingly tried to banish religion, with its normative claims, its concern to help people attain some higher ideal. This is the replacement of love with tolerance. And indeed, this plays a part in modern social welfare: the goal of the welfare state is not to "care" about people, but to make care irrelevant, so that people don't need families anymore, or communities, or ideals. Social welfare is not about economic responibility; it is about replacing the challenge of personal charity with a system.

The 20th century was an age of exhaustion. True, there was energy to fight big fights: to eliminate poverty, and racism, and sexual inhibitions. People fought hard for these things. But they fought no harder than people had previously fought: the people who had fought to eliminate poverty and racism on a personal level, through personal charity; the people who fought to reform the laws of society in accord with moral truth; and the people who fought to get themselves out of poverty, to get themselves past unfair stereotypes, to live an upright life. I dare say Al Smith fought a lot harder as a kid working in the Fulton Fish Market than FDR fought sitting in the White House outlawing poverty. The difference of the 20th century was not fighting hard, but fighting for permanent solutions, fighting to make these fights not matter anymore, fighting to make life easy from here on out. In the 1920's Americans fought hard to get foreigners out of their country -- so they wouldn't have to worry about the outside world anymore.

And then, of course, there's that great cord that connects Woodrow Wilson and George W(ilson) Bush: making the world safe for democracy. I am sympathetic to the concern to liberate others from tyranny, and also to the argument that tyranny in foreign lands can be a threat to us at home. What concerns me is the naive belief that if we just get the right system in place -- in Germany and Japan, in Russia, or in the Middle East -- than democracy will replace tyranny forever. There's some truth to the claim that "freedom is on the march," but beware cries of "never again." Democracy is a muddling through, not a permanent solution, and it gives us Putin at least as often as Lincoln.

The exhaustion of the 20th century is most evident in Europe. There has not been war there for sixty years, and that is a great thing. But is there life? Germany doesn't fight because Germany doesn't have the will to fight. I'm glad to be done with Hitler, but the Germans don't even love themselves anymore. Is that a good thing? The exhaustion of the last century, in foreign policy, in morals, in economics, is anything but a permanent solution.

Economically, the 20th century saw us take loan upon loan. Notice the irony: we tried to find permanent, bureaucratic ways to solve our problems. We wanted never again to face economic difficulties. And we only dug ourselves deeper into the dirt. Nothing could be less permanent than the 20th century's desire to outlaw poverty. Meanwhile, Europe has finally lost the will to stand up to the Moslem onslaught; their rejection of conflict prevented them from attacking each other, but it will not keep them from being attacked. And throughout the western world, our hopes to banish the need for sexual morals has only left us with a cultural wasteland. Perhaps we would find better solutions if they didn't have to be final.

The 20th century was an age of exhaustion; today we face the exhaustion of that age. Obama claims to bring a "new" politics, in which we no longer have to worry about ideas, we can spend our way out of problems while claiming fiscal responsibility, and we can "agree to disagree" about moral issues. The rhetoric is new, but the exhaustion, the refusal to face decisions, the hope that we can just wish away the things that scare us: all of this is oh-so-20th-century.

What does the age ahead hold? Who can say?! But I predict an end to claims that ideas don't matter, an end of tolerance, and more vigorous conflict, both at home and abroad, as we face the debts of our parent's irresponsibility. The generation that is now dying fought a horrible war, saw awful things, and hoped they could just retire to the suburbs, where everything would be nice and we wouldn't have to fight anymore. They let their children go crazy in the '60s, because they couldn't bear any more conflict. They let their government spend their country into the ground, because they couldn't bear to face any more sacrifices. But that generation is all but gone, and the generation raised in their homes is slowly fading from power. The next century must pay the debts. And so many of us are tired of the exhaustion, ready for something new.

An Exhausted Age (Part I)

2009-02-25T18:52:00.005-05:00

There has been an awful lot of talk about how Obama's election marks the turning point to a new era. I am sympathetic to the basic idea. Not every age is the same. The verities of the twentieth century, the things that defined public life and culture, are not eternal verities. History does not go in a straight line.

I have been reading the multi-volume history of the Church by the great French Catholic historian Henri Daniel-Rops. I was struck by a comment he made, in the volume on the seventeenth century, about the turning of centuries. He notes that ages typically turn over, not at the year '00, but usually some twenty years later. The Victorian Age, for example, did not really come to a close until World War I; TR stood at the cusp, but lived in a world more like the 19th century than the 20th.

The 19th century itself didn't start until around Waterloo, in 1815. Again, Napoleon and Jefferson were certainly turning a new page, but they were only the beginning. The struggles that defined the nineteenth century -- industrialism, the American civil war, the migrations of people, the hegemony of the middle class, etc. -- did not start till later. (Paul Johnson's exquisite The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 makes this case brilliantly.)

Until Louis XIV died in 1715, France, and all of Europe, was still deep in the grand siecle. The Enlightenment, and the 18th century, didn't really start till later. William and Mary's "glorious revolution" of 1688 was a harbinger of things to come -- but also profoundly enmeshed in the struggles of the English 17th century, symbolized by the bloody transition from the absolute monarchy of James I (who lived till 1625), through the revolution of Cromwell's Parliament, to the balance begun with William and Mary (whom Parliament brought in to boot the legitimate king, Mary's older brother James II). The Hanoverian Georges, who really mark the English century, didn't come to the throne till 1714.

But can we really think of the 17th century without Richelieu (beginning in 1624), the Thirty Years War (began 1618), and the English new world (Massachusetts founded 1630)? Henri IV didn't die till 1610. And in the realm of culture, Vincent de Paul began the Mission in 1625, Bacon published the Novum Organum in 1620, and the Galileo controversy began in 1616.

And though Henry VII (reigned 1485-1509), the victor of the Wars of the Roses, certainly marked a new stage in the history of England, it's hard to deny that the 16th century begins with Henry VIII, Luther at Wittenberg (1517), and the intellectual accendancy of Erasmus (In Praise of Folly: 1511). Michaelangelo and Titian came onto the scene around 1508, Raphael about 1513. And Holy Roman Emperor Charles V wasn't crowned till 1519.

There's a prima facie absurdity about thinking in terms of centuries. How much does the year '00 really matter? And of course, it matters nothing in itself -- but much in the way it affects our thinking. Rome has been celebrating epoch-marking jubilees since way back in the Middle Ages, driving home to leaders and commoners alike that the ages are turning. And though it's true that the Middle Ages had no "historical consciousness" in the sense of thinking through the historical context of past authors, they were quite fond of referring to themselves as moderni, in contradistinction to the ancients. Seeing ourselves as part of a new age is nothing new.

And surely the turning over of a new century contributes much to this thinking. Henry Adams is famous for contemplating the new age dawning in the year 1900, but surely he was not alone. It's easy to imagine Napoleon thinking he marked a new age -- the despotic version of "change you can believe in" -- that updated things for the new century; probably the French revolutionaries had the same epochal mind. Did Jefferson know that he was the first president of the 1800s? Yes.

Nor is this anything new. I don't think it's hard to imagine Henry VIII and his father thinking that the 16th century was going to be something new. The turning of the centuries, so profoundly celebrated by the Catholic Church, encourages men of every age to rethink what it means to be modern. The generation coming of age today knows very well that their parents grew up in a different century. I don't think there's anything new about that awareness. Barrack Obama, Peggy Noonan, and all the rest of them talk so incessantly about this being a new century -- and they stand in a long tradition.

This contemporary awareness of the turning of ages is, no doubt, self-fulfilling. In any case, it's a good way of explaining what seems to be a fact of history: the 1300's were not at all like the 13th century, was not like the 12th, was not like the 11th. And all the more so in the ages closer to us. There is truth in the conflation of the French word siecle, and the Latin saeculum: words meaning both "century" (100 years) and "age." Each century is a new age.

But the birth of a new age takes time. Looking back, it's hard to miss the number 15: 1917 (height of World War I, fall of the Romanovs), 1815 (Waterloo), 1715 (death of Louis XIV -- George I came to England the year before), 1618 (the Thirty Years War), 1517 (the 95 theses). Sure, 15 itself is a coincidence, but perhaps fifteen years represents about the length of time it takes for a new generation to come of age. In 2009, the millenial generation is just coming to self-consciousness; Peggy Noonan's columns are probably more like birth pangs -- the old generation telling us that something new is coming -- than the real thing. The seventeenth century couldn't start till Henri IV (1610) and James I (1625) were dead, the eighteenth till the death of Louis XIV (1715) and good Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts (1714) .

And that dying, that passing of the old guard, has nothing to do with modern media or technology. If anything, we'd expect the Media Age, with its excessive conformity, its intrusion of the elites into our every thought, to make the birth of a new age take longer.

Which is all to say, talk about a new age dawning is historically warranted. The 21st century will not be like the 20th. But reports of the old age's demise may still be premature.

What's most lacking in many of these reports -- and in the rhetoric of the President -- is any serious consideration of what marked the 20th century. ("Partisanship" is about as shallow as you can get.) In the next post, I'll give one take on the spirit of that age. I can't predict what the next age will be like, but maybe knowing what is passing will help us to guess.

Plastics

2009-02-04T16:31:00.002-05:00

The central thing to know about technology, I guess, is that technology should aid us in living a traditional life, rather than fundamentally remaking our life. That principle, however, needs a lot of working out. For now, I will just discuss one corner of the technological revolution, ubiquitous but not quite world-shaping the way cars, television, or the Pill are: that is, plastics.

Plastic was a word, of course, long before there were plastics. Plastic is an adjective, meaning moldable (from the Greek plassein, to mold or shape). The plastic arts, for example, are things like sculpture or pottery. One modern dictionary defines plastics as "any of a group of synthetic or natural organic materials that may be shaped when soft and then hardened." Ironically, this part of the definition also covers metal and glass.

But, by a common linguistic device, the word plastics has come to refer exclusively to the subset of substances synthesized entirely for their plasticity; metal and glass may be "plastic," but they retain too much of their own nature to be properly "plastics." And that, I think, nicely sets out a corner of the technology question: it is one thing to use naturally occurring substances, and even to refine or synthesize them (as metals are smelted for purity and combined for strength, and we imitate the natural processes by which heat makes glass from sand), but it is quite another thing to create something totally new, purely for its moldability to our purposes. It is akin to the difference between hiring a free man to work for us on his terms, on the one hand, and cloning slaves, on the other. Plastics are designed to have no nature of their own, but to do as we tell them.

That is a little apocalyptic, so let me take a moment to sing the praises of plastics. It is hard for me to miss a central instance in the life of our family. My first son was born with what amounts to a catastrophic plumbing problem in his head. The day after his birth, a surgeon installed a plastic hose that allows fluid to drain from his cervical ventricles into the rest of his body the way it drains from yours and mine. Without this little hose his head would swell until his brain collapsed under the pressure. With the hose, his brain is fine. A little plastic can do a lot of good. My son's ventricular shunt is not the only reason I say this, but it is the most dramatic: technology is a fabulous servant of life, and I do not think we can rail against technology without expressing a callousness about human life itself.

Nor is the role of plastics in medicine confined to limit cases. My third child was recently born, at home, with midwives, in the most traditional way imaginable, and one of the easiest, healthiest births imaginable (literally forty-five minutes of labor). There came a moment not long after birth, however, when little William was having trouble breathing. Our midwives, who mostly wield herbs and common sense, quickly grabbed their oxygen tank and revived our precious child. The hose and mask, of course, were plastic. (And the synthetic process by which oxygen is isolated and compressed in a metal tank is analogous to the production of plastics.) I do not know what would have become of William without the oxygen; I do know that our midwives are quite radical in their preference for traditional methods. It seems to me that that makes two of my three children who owe their life to plastic medical equipment deployed within twenty-four hours of their birth.

Other deployments of plastic are less urgent, but nonetheless salutary. I think computers, televisions, and the like are dangerous -- they run the risk of defining our lives, rather than helping them. Nonetheless, they can help us get information and stay in touch in ways we otherwise could not. I type, of course, upon a keyboard made of plastic, as I look at a plastic screen.

The wires that carry my signal are all covered in plastic -- and, let it be noted, some of the first ground-breaking discoveries in plastics were made in trying to find a way to insulate wires for more humdrum concerns like heat and lighting. Proclaim that you hate computers, and even electric lights, those banes of traditional living, but on a Minnesota day that has dipped well below zero Fahrenheit, I cannot help being thankful for the electricity that keeps us warm. (Actually, our house is heated with natural gas -- but the process by which the gas comes to us is analogous to the ultra-synthesis of plastics; the spark that lights the gas is electric; our thermostat uses plastic-insulated wires; and my mother's new gas furnace delivers steam to the radiators using pvc piping, which is far more efficient than the eighty-year-old insulated pipes in our old house -- and thus lets her devote far less of her life to earning money for heating. About two days of my Ph.D. income this month will go entirely to heating our tiny apartment.)

To appreciate the goodness of plastics, let's imagine life without them. I, an intellectual, could throw out not only my computer, but even my plastic pens, and work with ink and quill, as indeed did my forefathers in the intellectual life. Perhaps I would only read books similarly printed. My intellectual master, Thomas Aquinas, did as much -- though he had to tramp all over Europe to find even the monuments of his own tradition. The point I would like to make about such a life is that it revolves around "technology" -- or rather, it's lack -- more than mine does. The intellectual life must keep contact with the world of flesh-and-blood. But to be constrained by one's ability to hunt down a quill, and keep it sharpened and inked, to be constrained to only the books that are so written and delivered, is to make the intellectual life the slave of the material -- which, it seems to me, is precisely what we want to avoid. We should be careful not to let technology rule us. But rejecting technology takes us deeper into the same problem.

The same goes for family life. Surely family life is much destroyed when it revolves around a plastic screen. (I am pretty sure televisions no longer have glass screens, but in any case, the thing is mostly plastic, and all technology.) But the opposite is just as true. To let our children die so we can oppose plastics, technology, and the over-complicated modern life, is insanity. To give up heat, or the synthetic blankets that wrap our newborn infant, is to become the servant of technology. To never call Grandma because we would have to use a plastic phone: insanity.

This is not to encourage insouciance. The danger of plastics is that the over-synthesized life comes to be denatured. I recall countless times lying on the floor, or the couch, of my grandparents' living room, pondering the wooden ceiling (stained and preserved, of course, with utterly synthetic materials). Wood is alive. It is something to work with, more a partner than a slave. Even the cheap Ikea desk at which I now sit has its knots and its grain. Glued together and mass-produced it may be, but the thickness of the shelves, the very construction of the glued joints, is determined by the material, not by the human creator.

There is, I believe, no more important lesson in life than this: we are not our own makers; we do not make our own world; we are coworkers, working with natures, whether material, personal, or social, that are given to us, and that will assert their own character if we fight against it. A beautiful wooden ceiling is alive with its own life, a dance between the carpenter and his materials. So too our own life, and our communal life, is about working with creation, entering in, indeed, to the very work of God who made it. A too-thin wooden shelf will snap under the weight -- as will a psyche or a community.

The danger of plastics is that we come to think we alone are the creators. Plastics are our slaves. They still have their own natures, to be sure -- any engineer will tell you that you have to work with them, and accept their limits. Nonetheless, my wife and I are cautious about surrounding our children with too many plastic toys. The world of Mickey Mouse -- and now far beyond -- is a world defined by our whimsies. Wile E. Coyote can fall off a cliff and suffer no ill effects, of body or soul. The plastic world is too much like that. A wooden train, tin soldiers: these maintain a character of themselves. Our plastic Thomas the Tank Engine is ready-made, a personality dreamed up by Central Marketing and mass-produced so that our children can plug into that man-made fantasy world.

Which is all to say, a world without nature is dangerous. I am glad for something that can be shaped into a ventricular shunt, or an oxygen mask, or even a computer, a pen, or a wire insulator. These things serve our life (or at least, the computer can serve our life), and they can only be at all if we have materials that bend to our will. But life itself does not bend to our will. It is given. And a life that makes use of plastics for its own ends should not become a plastic life, in which all seems to be merely our own creation.

The History of Paris, part II

2009-01-23T17:17:00.002-05:00

The faubourgs of Paris formed around four centers: the market, the palace, the churches, and the vineyards. A market is a coming together of people to exchange goods. It is necessary. Subsistence farming is an interesting idea, but it is probably less common than we think. (Can you think of a culture with supposedly subsistence farming but no cities? I think you'll find only cultures with cities and cultures with no farming.) To be sure, there have been farmers in every age who worked primarily to feed their family, and made most of the things their family used. But farm implements -- plows, shovels, axes, barrels, carts, even shoes -- are pretty important, and there are not too many farmers who can make these things by themselves. I have been reading Laura Ingalls Wilder with my kids; certainly in her time there is not the slightest hint that a farmer would consider making these things himself -- or surviving without them. Indeed, the Ingalls family always farmed close to the railroad precisely because farming without tools is impossible. And the markets of Paris -- les Halles -- grew up because farmers needed places to exchange what they could produce themselves for what they needed but could not produce.

The market is also a place of luxury goods. Housewives have always wanted things like salt and spices and sweeteners, and pretty fabric. Children (and their fathers) have always wanted toys. If the modern agrarian wants to condemn these things as petty, he might remember that books, by their very nature, must come from elsewhere, not only because a farmer hasn't the resources to print or copy his own books, but also because books convey other people's ideas. The same is true of art. A family can make its own music, but not its own musical instruments. The market is necessary both for subsistence and for leisure.

It is noteworthy that in Paris, les Halles was its own faubourg. That is, it was not just an empty space where farmers got together, but a place where people lived. A market town obviously must support the barrel makers, cobblers, ironworkers, and trinket makers. It would take another post to justify them, but a market also supports market staff: the much-maligned "middlemen" who help get things from the people who produce them to the people who want them. And a thriving market town also includes those who make a career of providing leisure: professional musicians, inn keepers, artists, actors. To scorn the market town, and the city of which it forms a central part, is to scorn both subsistence and culture.

Surprisingly, other faubourgs grew up around the dozen abbeys that surrounded Paris. It is noteworthy, already, that the abbeys surrounded Paris. We think of places like Citeaux, out in the wilderness, but during times of unrest -- times before St. Bernard's lovely twelfth century -- the monks also needed a fortress, and the Christian monastic culture has always participated in the world of culture, and even of trade. Monks need tools and books, too, and only a monastery that is itself a city can produce these.

But even more interesting, the abbeys were not only themselves in the orbit of the city, but they created their own faubourgs: lay Christian communities have always grown up around the monasteries, and indeed, much of Paris owes its origin to them. Modern neighborhoods like St.-Germaine-des-Pr és (St. Germaine in the meadows), Temple (of the Templars), St. Paul, and Cluny are just old abbey faubourgs.

And here is another truth about cities. Traditionally, a parish is not just the church that best suits you; it is your neighborhood, your community, the people you live with, work with, play with, your extended family. In past ages, Christians came together by force of necessity: before the advent of modern transportation, a country parish was something of an impossibility. Now, it seems normal enough to drive thirty miles to get to your community. But how different a parish community is when you only see them at church. The urban parish remains a place of neighbors, bound together for better or for worse, sharing the texture of life. How beautiful that Christians once thought it normal to create a town together, instead of seeking isolation. And I don't know, but I would guess that a medieval faubourg was somewhat less exclusive than the modern gated community: the towns in question were not just the people who rubbed you the right way; because they were intergenerational, they surely included many people you wouldn't chose as subdevelopment neighbors.

Along with les Halles and the churches, another great stimulant to Right Bank development was the palace. (Later, the Louvre, but that was not the first.) Romantic versions of anarchy are always tempting; agrarians like to imagine we can all be Jeffersonian farmers, with an occasional meeting or muster, but otherwise self-sufficient. And modern government has certainly impinged on life in ways it should not. Nonetheless, government is natural, and necessary. Indeed, in the middle ages, the governments of Europe grew out of the necessity of self-defense and basic public management. I write a lot about ways to devolve power away from government, but please do not misunderstand me: without an army, a power to enforce contracts, and some infrastructure, including some common coin, life is nothing but brutality and rapine. It is unfortunate that our schools do not teach the history of the dark ages, especially the Norman invasions. Anarchy is a terrifying thing.

Government requires personel, and a place to work. The palace may seem parasitic on society, a bunch of rich nobles living on the sweat of another man's brow. And indeed, it is ever subject to abuse. But in another sense, the other man can live by the sweat of his own brow only because the government provides him the space to do it: above all, the safety, both from marauders and from cheats. And government is a creature of the city. All those lawyers and bureaucrats produce the very space within which we live. The Louvre, and the city which contains and sustains it, is nothing to shake a stick at.

The Louvre, les Halles, and even many of the churches, were on the Right Bank. On the Left, along with more abbeys, there grew the vineyards. This is one of the most pleasant parts of Paris. Without the city, there can be no wine, because wine is labor intensive. The vintners could survive only where there was a market, to sell their most precious commodity and to buy the food and the tools that sustain them.

Wine is a symbol of leisure, and the Left Bank also gave rise to that greatest of all leisure activities, the University, the last stop on our tour of Parisian history. The University is perhaps the most obvious city creature of all. Students and teachers are not self-sustaining. Innkeepers and artists survive from another man's work, but they are as nothing to academics. The University needs the safety of Paris's walls, the market to buy food, the stationers to make paper, the churches in which to pray and discuss, builders to provide houses, a government to regulate relations (the early history of the University of Paris is more rowdy than you may know) -- and of course the vintners, to make wine! In turn, the University gives us books, and the ideas by which to govern our society, and it gives some men the opportunity to pursue the life of the mind, too little valued in our post-modern times. Such a thing can only happen in the city.

(Incidentally, Oxford -- one of the three original universities, with Paris and Bologna, and in that early constellation that included Padua, Constantinople, and Cambridge, Toledo and Salamanca, Montpelier and Toulouse -- is no exception. It is now no small town, with 150,000 residents. It was at its founding one of the great cities of England, a fort built to defend a river crossing, with special privileges from the King. The notion of scholars gathered in the contemplative countryside is nothing but romance.)

So there is Paris: a fortress, a network of villages, a market, a palace, parishes, vineyards, and a university. And there is the true nature of the city, a place of human flourishing, on a human scale.

The History of Paris, part I

2009-01-19T14:47:00.006-05:00

I have been reading old Encyclopedia Brittanica articles on the history of great cities. The good old 11th edition, from just before World War I, is a scholarly monument (I have a 14th edition, 1939, which is a modification of the 11th), but this is not exactly serious research. Just getting the lay of the land.

History gives a lot of help to thinking through principles. I will just mention in passing now (though I should lay it out in full sometime) the Copernican first chapter of The Economy of Cities, in which Jane Jacobs lays out the anthropological evidence that in the first great agricultural revolution, about 10,000 BC, farming could only begin because of a preexisting network of trading-post cities: you cannot farm, cannot even get the seed you need for farming, without dense centers of trade. Urban life predates the farms, and, contrary to popular assumptions, it is the farms that are parisitic on cities, not vice versa -- right from the beginning.

We will have to save that agronomical argument for another time. Today I'd like to show how the history of one great city illuminates a parallel theme.

Like most cities, Paris was founded at a crossing of great roads. At its heart, Paris is an island, still called the île de la cité. Here is an aerial photograph, almost too rich:
This is a view from the Northeast. At the center you can see the two islands in the Seine. The larger one, to the right, is the original île de la cité. The smaller one, the île St. Louis, was constructed from two uninhabited islands during the reign of Louis XIV (the seventeenth century). I believe the large park on the near side of the river, at the right edge, is the Louvre and environs. The rest is a bit hard to make out at this resolution.

The city was founded on an island because islands are easy to defend--and therein lies Paris's first lesson about the relation of city to countryside. Agrarians, distributists, and country enthusiasts of all stripes paint a romantic picture of rural peace as against the crime of the city. And surely, in our current political situation, there is reason for that picture: through terrible liberal mismanagement during the last century, our cities have been allowed to fall, at times, into chaos. (Though again I point out that in Philadelphia, known as "Murder City," the homicide rate per hundred thousand persons is 11.8 -- and far lower for white people. In the US as a whole, the traffic fatality rate per hundred thousand is over 14. If you are worried about your safety, avoid cars, not the city.)

But historically, the first reason for cities is precisely safety. Nowhere is as unsafe -- from robbers, from forces of nature, including animals, and especially from marauders -- as a farm. Cities around the world were built as fortresses, places for even the rural population to hide during times of invasion. We are fortunate to be free from such invasions now. But the rise of cities reminds us that strength is in numbers: we are safe now because we watch out for one another. There is no safety in isolation, no life at all without safety. (And indeed, it is now well established that the greatest danger in cities is precisely bone-headed efforts to keep people "off the street," thereby making cities places of darkness and isolation, rather than places where your neighbors are always watching out for you.)

(Full disclosure: The most dangerous city in the country is Detroit, where the murder rate is about 45/100,000. That is far more dangerous than Philadelphia, or the freeway. But even in Detroit, experts say upwards of 65% of murders surround drug dealing. If drug policy were better managed -- more on that another time -- the murder rate would be about equal to the national traffic-fatality rate. And it is easier to avoid drugs in the city than to avoid crazies on the freeway.)

So Paris was intially a fortress, a place of safety in numbers against the dangers of the world. Once that fortress was established on the island, however, the faubourgs began to spring up. Faubourg roughly translates as suburb, but we need to be careful about the parallel. In all of history prior to about World War II, a suburb was not what we think of, a huge tract of houses with yards, but itself a small urban center, where work, leisure, and home were within walking distance, and where people were physically close enough to watch out for one another: a tight little community. Pre-modern "suburbs" were also very close to the urbs itself. Reading about the original faubourgs of Paris is almost humorous, for in modern Paris these would hardly even be considered separate neighborhoods from the city center. On one afternoon's walk on the Right Bank (the bottom of the picture above), I walked through four or five of these old faubourgs.

And here is Paris's second lesson for us about the nature of cities. I live today in a neighborhood called Rondo, in the city of St. Paul, Minnesota. Today, there is nothing to distinguish Rondo from the neighborhoods around it, except titles on a couple public buildings and parks. To call it a neighborhood seems almost arbitrary.

But it is not so in traditional urban development. What are now considered neighborhoods in Paris were originally their own separate towns, with public buildings, public spaces, shops, and a local culture. This perdures. I have only ever spent a few weeks in France. But take the example of New York. What is now called Greenwich Village was once . . . a village, outside of the a small settlement on the southern tip of Manhattan called New York City. To the north of today's village is the neighborhood of Chelsea, which grew up, and eventually replaced, Thomas Clarke's old estate of that name. Next north is Hell's Kitchen, which was once an Irish shantytown. Etc.

The point is, these neighborhoods are not arbitrary little divisions of an otherwise undifferentiated metropolis. Rather, the divisions -- the villages, the neighborhoods -- predate the city itself. To the outsider, cities seem like an endless crowd. But real life in the city is far more local than even an old-fashioned small town. Indeed, part of what makes places like New York and Paris intimidating to modern tourists is their intensely local culture, indeed, their provincialism. A person who lives in Greenwich Village hardly needs to leave those sixty-some blocks bordered by 14th St., Washington Square Park, Houston St., and the river, where the farthest you can walk, from one edge to the other, is one mile. What further maddens visitors to a true urban environment is that, unlike the suburbs, where a strip mall clearly displays a full range of national chains, the visitor to an urban neighborhood -- even a relatively recent occupant of the neighborhood -- has to learn the grocery stores, the pizza places, the parks, etc. Life in the city is intensely local; it is on a far smaller scale than life outside the city.

And this is because a true city is in fact not a vast, undifferentiated expanse of interchangeable parts, but a network of villages. The old cities grew up this way: Paris did not just gradually expand outwards, but gradually extended its borders around self-contained communities in its orbit. And this remains the very nature of a city. Even our poor Rondo, subject as it is to a freeway -- not built for us! -- and countless efforts to stamp out individuality under the guise of making things more "rational" and "fair," continues to be its own reality, with a history and memory, a local culture of fairs, ways of relating, socio-economic class (Rondo is lower-middle-class black), and establishments. Other neighborhoods in our city, with stronger clout, have retained this reality even more. Neighborhoods like Saint Anthony Park, Summit Hill, and especially Highland Village (can't escape that last word!), but even including poor Frogtown, are distinct units, villages within the city, even though modern politics does its best to ignore them.

In the next post, we will look at the specific factors that gave birth to these village-neighborhoods.

Country Music and the Cultural Rear Guard

2009-01-15T14:45:00.002-05:00

Country Music and the Cultural Rear Guard

My family is pretty careful to stay away from pop culture, but we do occasionally turn on the country radio station. Most country music, so it seems to us, has a less overtly aggressive, sexual beat, and tends to have a bit more positive a tone. Not coincidentally, this sound tends to go with more positive lyrics.

The stereotype is that country music is about your dog getting killed, but that's only one example of the bigger theme in country lyrics: attachment to enduring things. If country singers talk about their dog getting killed, the point is that ordinary things like loving your dog are Real. Country music is, roughly, about what's normal. There's a sense of humor, a chuckling sort of, "yeah, that is what really matters, after all."

I don't know a lot of songs, but here's the chorus of one I've enjoyed lately:

Come on in boy sit on down
And tell me about yourself
So you like my daughter do you now?
Yeah we think she's something else
She's her daddy's girl
Her momma's world
She deserves respect
That’s what she'll get
Ain’t it son?
Hey y'all run along and have some fun
I'll see you when you get back
Bet I’ll be up all night
Still cleanin' this gun

I don't know if this bears explaining, but the point is: finally, family grounds us, makes us more real. And, even more, that after all our carousing and foolishness, being parents helps us understand what we missed when we were younger. We turn into our parents, and that's not such a bad thing. Now I see from a bigger perspective, and I'm that crusty old dad.

Here's a much dumber one:

Too old to be wild and free still
Too young to be over the hill
Should I try to grow up
But who knows where to start
So I just sit right here and have another beer in Mexico
Do my best to waste another day
Sit right here and have another beer in Mexico
Let the warm air melt these blues away

Nothing profound -- and honestly, without the fun horn line, I doubt anyone would listen to it -- but there is something captured here about reaching middle age and just trying to figure out who the heck you are. I can't help but think of my wife's step-father, an overweight, bald, bearded, steel worker in a depressed town in rural America, who spends what money he has on his camper and his truck. I bet Paul chuckles when he hears this song, because, yeah, there I am!

By contrast, even the "nicest" rock music is pretty nihilist. I'll date myself by quoting the lyrics from an old song, but I think this band is still really popular:

I want you to notice
when I'm not around
You're so very special
I wish I was special
But I'm a creep
I'm a weirdo
What the hell am I doin' here?
I don't belong here, ohhhh, ohhhh

Well . . . I guess there's something nice in there about our disproportion before goodness? But compared to the realism of country music, this is a world with nothing but Me and my desires. This isn't something a dad -- at least a healthy dad -- sings, or chuckles at. It's the music of a kid who watches too much tv.

That's a pretty strong example. But, to pick the most lame thing I can think of, here's Don Henley:

and i can tell you
my love for you will still be strong
after the boys of summer have gone.

Oh, great. Not that love isn't a nice thing, but again, this is the world of tv, the world of no context, a world without family, without consequences, just me and my desires. (Looking up the lyrics, I found that the verses are much worse.) The invocation of "love" is, perhaps, the darkest part: as if summer flings have anything to do with the meaning of love. This is someone who doesn't know what it means to be human.

This is the world of Seinfeld, and Friends, and far worse, where everything's fun and laid back precisely because actions don't have consequences; where having sex with your friends is just a funny background joke; where children might appear as props, but nothing else. It is the world Decontextualized, the world of Nihilism, the world of nothing but me and my desires. Country music, perhaps, stands for waking up and realizing that Jerry's apartment is not real life, and at the end of the day, there are richer things to think about, things bigger than ourselves and having fun.

The purpose of this post, however, is not to exalt country music, but just the opposite. What I find most remarkable, and disappointing, about country music, is that you can have ten songs that would make my wife's step-father chuckle, and evoke something real -- and then up comes one almost as tawdry as the rock station, about decontextualized sex, and moving from partner to partner, and all the rest.

So my question is, what's going on here? How is it that a genre with such good instincts can totally drop the ball?

There's a parallel, I think, in talk radio. I know smart people aren't supposed to say this, but I think Rush Limbaugh is very insightful. He really understands politics, and political theory, and economics. He's a bit crude some times, but that doesn't surprise me: lots of insightful people are less than perfect as human beings.

But the next most popular talk radio show host is the nominally Catholic Sean Hannity, who talks all day about traditional values, but scoffs at his Church's teaching on contraception -- actually says he doesn't care what the Church says. Talks all day about law and order, but now and then speeding comes up, and it's not that he has a principled distinction, he just says, oh, I don't care, I just like going really fast. Okay.

I think what's happening here is a cultural rear guard. A rear guard, I think, is the part of the army that covers your tail when you're in full retreat. A cultural rear guard is not the sign of health. It's the last stand of a culture in full retreat. Country music -- and Sean Hannity -- is not going to make our world a better place. It shows that people vaguely remember better things. But it's not sufficient.

There is a difference between good instincts and good judgment. The country music demographic has good instincts. They don't want to live in the world of Jerry's apartment. They knows there's something bigger, and richer, and they can chuckle, half thoughtfully, when a good song reminds them that life is more than Me and My Feelings and good nihilist fun. And that's a good thing. But they do not have what it takes to stand up to the onslaught of modern nihilism. They are no more than a rearguard, in full retreat.

I'm finishing up Rusell Kirk's 1953 classic The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Through a study of English and American thinkers, he lays out a political philosophy. He calls it "conservatism," and that's a good word for it, except that the word has different connotations now. "Traditionalism" might be better, because Kirk proposes that the only way to maintain good values is through staunch opposition to progress. There's much to be said for this: for moving slowly, for carefully considering the wisdom of our ancestors, for the value of custom, and letting people live their lives without having to rethink things every ten years, and the general inability of humanity to think it all through clearly. Indeed, these ideas are meant to be a central theme of this blog.

But tradition is insufficient. The modern world is there, confronting us. Small town folks like my wife's mom and step-father can avoid the world to some extent, but the tv is in their home, the radio is in their truck, and the magazines are in their grocery store. And anyway, tradition itself is not just instinct, but the internalization of discernment. The greatness of tradition is precisely its discovery of better ways; true tradition and true progress go hand in hand.

And anyway, it takes some discernment to figure out what constitutes "the tradition." Our forefathers rarely had access to books; more of their children died than survived. Our modern medicine creates a new world, but it is a new world that our forefathers, in some sense, longed to see. The same is true of modern travel, despite the ways it has ravaged our culture (as I have often noted). Is it more traditional to be poor, or to fight against poverty? To be ignorant, or to seek learning? In the realm of culture what does tradition teach us to love, and what does it teach us to abhor?

These are not easy questions. And that's precisely my point. Tradition is very important. I value the thinking of Friedrich Hayek above all because he shows how tradition can be maintained only be decentralization (since even benevolent tyrants inevitably trod on custom). But tradition is insufficient without discernment. Simply being "conservative," in Kirk's sense, too often leaves us with country music: upholding some traditional values, but without the clarity of vision to turn the onslaught of modernity.

And let me add: Kirk is a great hero of the country against the city. The country is the place of tradition, of puttering on, the way things have always been. That is fair. (Though I think those who have never lived in the city fail to realize the ways that true urban living is also very small, and local, and custom-bound.)

But hiding in the country is no more of a strategy than hiding in country music. The country, I would like to suggest -- at least the American small town -- is not so much traditional as behind the times. When the times are moving in a bad direction, as they are, that's not such a bad thing. But it is not a winning strategy, it is a rearguard action. Being a decade behind on fashions does not protect you from them.

Those who truly want to conserve what is best in the human tradition (and the Western tradition, and the Catholic tradition) need discernment. They need to rely, not only on custom (though custom is essential), but also on the ability to tell right from wrong, to discern the spirits, to read the signs of the times. The country is the place of the rearguard, but the city is where the battle is engaged. Until we retake the heights of culture -- the marketplace, the school, the palace: the city -- the country can only be a hiding place, while we wait for the slaughter. True traditionalism must reclaim the city, through custom mingled with discernment. That is real Christian humanism.

The Kind of Problem Transportation Is

2008-12-21T16:33:00.002-05:00

It is ironic, in discussions of transportation, that liberals have seized upon fuel as the primary issue: from public transportation to energy policy to Detroit bailouts, they calculate everything in terms of how to limit the use of gas, and how to limit emissions.

But fuel and emissions are fungible: they can be moved from place to place, so that I can get from place to place using dozens of different fuel sources from thousands of different sources; and someone else can use the same fuel that I might use. Ditto with emissions: we do indeed need to worry about how many pollutants we put into our atmosphere (for the health of the air we breathe, if not more stratospheric concerns), but we don't need to worry who pollutes. We just need to limit the overall amount. Emissions are fungible.

And fungible resources are precisely what the market is designed to deal with. If we're worried about a limited amount of petroleum, the answer is very simple: supply and demand. As petroleum runs out, it will become more expensive, and people will limit their use of it, either by limiting their fuel consumption overall, or by shifting to other fuels. The cost mechanism is designed for precisely this problem; there is nothing it does better than allocate limited resources, and nothing handles this problem better than simple supply and demand.

There are, of course, a couple side issues here. There's the very silly idea of peak oil, which, in case you're worried, I will simply dismiss thus: there are various sources of oil (the ocean bottom, shale, etc.) each increasingly expensive, so it's not as if we'll "run out" all of a sudden; there are other kinds of fuel (nuclear, solar, wind, water, biofuels, etc.), which are more expensive, but which can incrementally replace petroleum (for example, natural-gas heat, nuclear electricity, electric cars, without wholesale replacing petroleum all at once); and in any case, this is what the price mechanism is all about. The Arabs (and Canadians, and Mexicans, and all the others who control oil) want as much money as they can get out of those wells, and will incrementally raise prices as oil supplies diminish. Peak oil is not the problem.

Nor is economic inequality the problem. If you're concerned about people being priced out of the gas market, give them money, either through largesse or through job creation. Economic inequality is a problem, but it isn't solved by rationing fuel.

Finally, emissions are more complicated than fuel, since they are not something people purchase. But because they are nonetheless fungible, the solution is not to dictate individual decisions (through mandated forms of transportation, or whatever), but to put a surcharge on emissions. This is not rocket science: do an emissions check, and tax the vehicle accordingly (perhaps with a multiplier for mileage). Emissions are a problem, but they are not solved by rationing fuel. Liberals have it all wrong when they focus on fuel as the problem in transportation.

But it is similarly ironic that conservatives focus only on freedom. They say people should be able to go where they please, so we should build roads wherever people want to go. What this answer misses, however, is a bedrock of conservative thought: property rights.

Transportation is a property issue, because it fundamentally involves passing through someone else's yard -- if you don't need to traverse a third-party territory to get where you're going, you are not involved in transportation. To go from St. Paul to Chicago means going through Wisconsin. To go from my house to the mall means getting past what is in between; if I didn't have to pass through anything, it wouldn't be transportation.

Conservatives notice this problem when it's used as a criticism of public transportation. The city is building a light-rail line here in St. Paul. Supposedly it's going to be great for business along the Midway. But it will take five years to build, during which time traffic on University Ave. will be blocked. What happens to the businesses there in the meantime -- the Target and the Walmart, the used bookstore and the little Vietnamese bakery? For five long years it will be easier for customers to go somewhere else.

The government recognizes this, and is planning to subsidize these businesses for the duration of the project, as part of the cost of building. Of course, the question remains open whether the light rail itself will help or hurt traffic. We all hope it will just add more customer flow. But if it blocks car traffic and doesn't attract train traffic, these five years are the beginning of many years of much worse. Conservatives notice this.

They notice, too, when the President of Minnesota Public Radio comes on the air and says, "we support the light rail, but as planned it will pass too close to our studies, making our business impossible." I support the light rail -- in someone else's front yard. Because trains are very noisy, and transportation effects the neighbors.

Conservatives see this. But do they see the parallel with roads? St. Paul's University Ave.-Midway has long been blighted. From storefront to storefront, it is about 170 feet across the street; at a normal walking pace, that's almost a minute. At best -- when there's no traffic -- that means pedestrians (that is, people) have a pretty long walk, across empty concrete, to get between adjacent businesses. At worst -- when there is traffic -- it means that there are only businesses on one side of the street: half as many places for people to go, after they've parked their automobile, and thus half as many reasons for people to visit University Ave. businesses. (Light rail is not going to help this.) That used bookstore is a lot less attractive when you can't get a cup of coffee next door.

But even worse, because things are so spread apart, people must drive to get places, and that means parking lots. To get from the sidewalk in front of Target to the door is 375 feet: a minute and a half. (I'm using Google maps.) To get to the store on the other side of the street is two and a half minutes. The effect on business is perfectly obvious: no one walks from business to business on University Ave. That may be aesthetically displeasing, and aesthetics do matter, but even more important, it impacts the choices people make: the likelihood that they will visit other businesses on the street, the likelihood that they will visit that area at all, the safety of people walking in the neighborhood, who are vulnerable not only to cars, but to criminals, who prefer to do what they do where there are fewer bystanders. Target's 375- x 465-foot parking lot is not just a matter of personal liberty, but also of neighborhood effects. It changes the world around it. It effects business at the Vietnamese bakery, and it changes who wants to live in the apartment building around the block.

Four blocks away is I-94, the lifeline of the Twin Cities. To get from a storefront or home on one side of the freeway to one on the other side is about 500 feet: two minutes on foot. If you're lucky, there's a bridge every quarter mile (five minutes). Does this effect the neighborhoods on either side? Of course.

A home in a neighborhood without freeways is surrounded by other homes and businesses -- places to go; people to watch, and to watch out for you; room to wander, and to be outside, and to be in your neighborhood. A home abutting a freeway has effectively nothing in 50% of its environs. And then there's the noise. There's a reason that the neighborhoods abutting freeways are almost always slums. It isn't a nice place to live, or even to do business.

All of this is simply to say: transportation is a property-rights issue. If I want to get from a house in the suburbs to a business downtown, the question is not only where I want to go, how I want to get there, and who will pay. (Though those are important issues, and must also be considered.) But in every act of transportation there is also the property being traversed: transportation always goes past something.

There are good reasons for people to demand a freeway through my neighborhood. It is important for people and things to be able to get from a to b, and they have to go somewhere. But the noise and the interference with pedestrian travel -- that is, travel by human beings, since we can't drive our cars into stores, or into houses, and we can't talk to people in other cars: we always end up on foot -- these things also affect the neighborhood.

In the classic libertarian formulations of Milton Friedman, the primary reason for government intervention is what he calls "neighborhood effects": when people outside a transaction benefit or pay from the result. If I burn tires in my backyard, my neighbors pay. If I build a public park across the street, my neighbors benefit. There is a fundamental injustice -- indeed, a violation of individual freedom, and of contract -- if the neighbors aren't involved in these decisions.

But transportation always has a neighborhood effect, because transportation always, necessarily, goes past someone else's property. (Even airplanes: they make noise, especially on takeoff; they release pollution; they go through the airspace we all look at.) That's not to say the neighborhood effect is always bad, or significant: I really don't mind seeing airplanes in the sky, at least when they are high up. It is to say that we can never have an honest discussion about transportation without considering the people we're driving past.

It is reasonable for conservatives to demand liberty in transportation. The economy, and human relations, depend on the ability of people to get from a to b based on their own intelligence, not based on the "plan" of a bureaucrat (or special interest). Conservatives are therefore right to be wary of public-transportation schemes that involve a bureaucrat's intelligence being substituted for the intelligence of the people he claims to serve. They are right to insist on the market.

But conservatives must recognize that there is no free lunch on transportation. They must consider the neighborhoods effected by cars: the noise, the physical separation, the parking. These are not matters of individual choice, but of neighborhoods, and this is the kind of problem that transcends the market. They are matters that essentially depend on governmental involvement.

I am not proposing a simple solution. I am, rather, denying the overly simple solution of pretending cars and roads are simply issues of individual choice. Transportation is always a neighborhood issue.

Renaissance, Part II

2008-12-02T20:56:00.001-05:00

In the previous post I treated of renaissance, of moving forward through rediscovering the past, and through the example of Biblical revelation, I introduced the problem of privilege: the Bible is more important than any other historical text, because it comes from God. In this post, however, we will explore how privileged texts are at the heart of the issue of renaissance.

Here's the problem: many people say, who cares about Thomas Aquinas, or Aristotle? They were so long ago! In fact, estimates claim that at least 6% of all the people who have ever lived are alive right now. Certainly an even larger proportion of all people have lived in the last couple centuries. And we have the advantage of all the ages that have gone before, and of so much new technology. Doesn't it seem (many people say) that there ought to be better guides in modernity? Why on earth would we look for guidance to Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century -- or even worse, to some Greek from 2300 years ago?! In fact, those of us who still read these ancient characters are often accused of denying human reason. Haven't we come a long way since 1274?

Well, yes and no. But the point is, there are privileged periods in history. Why was it that, in the Quatrocento, the place to look for great sculpture was thirteen hundred years back, instead of just the last generation? The answer is that ancient Rome was a great time for sculpture, for a variety of reasons, including the advanced state of their culture (lots was lost with the collapse of Rome in the fifth century), the prolonged peace in which they lived, and even the philosophical climate, which was frankly more open to the exaltation of human beauty than was, say, eighth century Byzantium. When Michaelangelo, around the year 1500, was looking for guides in the way of sculpture, there was more to learn from in the second century -- and even fourth-century B.C. Greece -- than in the thirteenth century (great though it was). Those were privileged times. The greatest examples were not from the time immediately before him.

Aristotle was not just some smart guy, to be matched by another smart guy in twentieth-century Seattle. Aristotle lived in a privileged time. I am no historian of ancient Greece, but it's clear there was a ferment there that is very rare in human history. Aristotle did not appear out of nowhere, but was himself the student of Plato, who was himself the student of Socrates, who was himself born into a fruitful time without parallel for philosophy, in a republic that allowed him to last a lot longer before getting killed off than has happened almost any other time in history. Aristotle was very smart himself. But his real significance is not as an individual, but as the culmination of a privileged time.

The same is true of Thomas Aquinas. He can seem to stand out as just a brilliant individual. But Thomas stood at the culmination of a couple centuries of unparalleled peace, in a culture permeated by Christian faith as has never happened before or since, at an ideal point in relation to the rediscovery of Aristotle, long enough after to give Thomas great teachers (such as Albert the Great and Alexander of Hales, both of whom Thomas knew personally, as well as many others), but not long enough that the study of Aristotle had grown stale. Meanwhile, Thomas was a member of the Dominican order at the height of its first blossoming, still drawing from the brilliant sanctity of St. Dominic, just at the point when the Dominicans were fully discovering the unity of Scriptural and philosophic knowledge. Much more could be said -- indeed, books have been and should be written on the perfect historical circumstances of St. Thomas. Thomas is important not only because of his own personal brilliance -- though he was uncommonly sharp -- but also because he is the fruit of a privileged time.

Men like Hobbes and Kant, meanwhile, were born at the wrong time. They are tainted by polemics that are quite destructive. To some extent that is the fault of their own lack of virtue, and intellectual failure to see beyond the petty debates of their own times. But it is also a product of their circumstances. They did not have the intellectual space, so to speak, in which to do great philosophy -- any more than a brilliant mind could achieve much philosophically during the barbarian invasions of the tenth century, or a sculptor could do what Michaelangelo did without ever having seen the products of ancient Rome, or a stained-glass artist could create Chartres in a cathedral with solid walls.

In fact, the importance of privileged times is part and parcel of the nature of renaissance in the first place. Renaissance means the human mind works not in pure individuality, but makes greatest progress in good environments. We can think more clearly ourselves when we have good guides -- we can see further, as they used to say, sitting on the shoulders of giants. That means, for one thing, that the true way to progress includes study of the past. But it also means that not all periods in the past are the same. There are privileged times, and some authors who are more helpful than others.

Renaissance does not, of course, mean that we simply parrot what previous authors have said, or previous artists have made. It does not mean that Aristotle, Thomas, or Roman art is the last word. It does mean that if we wish to make real progress, we do well to seek out the greatest minds of the past.

Renaissance, Part I

2008-12-02T16:04:00.003-05:00

There's a standard line of argument in our culture that opposes tradition to progress. There's obvious truth to that opposition. Surely those who are unwilling to try new things can't make things better. But the opposition is generally clumsily made, and cuts off far more than it should.

Consider the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century. The very term "renaissance" (though only popularized centuries later) describes very well what happened. Renaissance, of course, means "re-birth." And the Renaissance -- any renaissance -- was in part a new birth, a new beginning, a great step forward. But it was also a return, a "re"-awakening of things that had long laid dormant.

The Quattrocento itself was in part a restoration of Roman art. It really is striking, in the study of art, to see the beautiful human images, especially in sculpture, of ancient Rome -- and the sudden reappearance of these images in the 1400s. The Italian Renaissance rediscovered both Roman techniques (an especially fun one is the technique required to sculpt a horse, with its massive weight supported by four, or usually three, spindly legs) as well as Roman subjects: for over a millenium, the human figure itself was not taken as an object of art. Suddenly it reappears! And it reappears, not through a coincidence, but precisely through the Italians taking notice of the ruins that lay around them.

The Quattrocento is not the only Renaissance. There's a classic book of pre-Conciliar Catholicism entitled "13th, Greatest of Centuries," and any Catholic who knows his history knows that the 12th and 13th centuries saw their own fantastic renaissance. Gothic architecture, that fabulous new creation of the high middle ages -- dubbed "gothic" by a later age that wanted to cast off that supposedly barbaric period -- is in fact rooted in Roman technique.

The heart of Gothic archtiecture is the ogive (OH-jive). As medieval architects worked to build bigger churches, they moved from flat ceilings to archs -- rediscovering, through study of the past, the structural strength of the arch. Romanesque architecture (roughly 11th-12th centuries) created the barrel vault: essentialy a long, drawn-out arch. But Gothic begins when arches are made to intersect, forming x's on the ceiling. These intersecting arches -- ogives, or groins -- carry thin webbing in between. Thus, whereas in the Romanesque barrel vault every part of the ceiling is held up by the walls directly outside of it, in the Gothic groin vault, an entire section of ceiling is held up by only four pillars. The result is the structural characteristics of Gothic architecture: enormous height and breadth, since the ceiling can now weigh far less; and lots of light: since the weight is carried by just a few pillars, the space between them can now be filled with glass. (The flying buttress only extends this dynamic to the outside: on the one hand, the buttresses are holding up only the pillars, not the rest of the wall; and on the other hand, the flying buttresses are themselves arches, holding the walls up with a minimum of material.) The rest of Gothic art develops from the ability to now decorate pillars and glass, and to paint, as it were, on a far greater canvas. But the ogive itself was a gift from Roman antiquity.

Meanwhile, the 12th and 13th centuries saw a parallel renaissance on the intellectual level, progressing through the greatness of Anselm, through Bernard, and up to the high scholasticism of Bonaventure and Thomas (both died 1274), with parallels in philosophy, law, and medicine. Partly, this was the result of greater leisure, allowed by a sounder economy. But it also arose from study of the past. The signal intellectual stimulus was the rediscovery of Aristotle. His works had been lost to the West (for reasons that need not detain us now) for over a thousand years, but were rediscovered through the military reconquest of part of Muslim Spain. Thomas advanced, not through casting off the past, but by digging into it. Aristotle was a master both of logic and of observation. Learning from this master gave Thomas the leisure, in a sense, to take a step further. He didn't have to rediscover all that Aristotle had discovered, but could build on previous genius.

The gothic ogive gives us a good metaphor for the nature of renaissance. The structural achievement of the intersecting archs creates a space in which to play. Only when the roof is safely held up can you begin to experiment with light and sculpture. Aristotle does for Thomas something parallel to those arches. Thomas can think through new topics, and think better through old topics, because Aristotle gives him a solid foundation, holds the roof high above his head so he can fill in the little details. (This goes, incidentally, both for the economic achievements, which gave Thomas time to work, and the rediscovery of the past, which gave Thomas the intellectual tools.)

The same thing happens with the great St. Bernard of Clairvaux. On one side, Bernard was a great student of the classics of Roman rhetoric, especially (if memory serves me) Cicero. That might seem trifling. But Cicero taught Bernard to express himself. Bernard has the freedom to plumb the poetic depths of theology precisely because he has mastered his language. A dim parallel for us might be Strunk and White: rather than recreating language, I can move on to explore other topics better when I let Professor Strunk and his loyal disciple remind me how to keep things clear. I don't need to recreate the wheel -- or the arch. By using what the past provides me, I can move forward.

Even more important, on the other side, Bernard leans on Scripture. Now, here we step into a new realm, the realm of Revelation. Scripture is different, because whereas Aristotle just used a mind like mine to discover things that I (in theory) could discover myself, St. John receives wisdom from above that I can only receive through contact with the source -- and, in fact, through the mediation of John and his fellows.

But setting that aside for a minute, Bernard -- like Thomas, Anselm, and all the Christian greats -- can reach into the heights precisely because his feet are on the solid ground of Scripture. Learning what God has revealed does not constrain him, but gives him the leisure to press deeper into human wisdom. In fact, theology, rightly construed, is an achievement of human reason -- doing what human reason can do -- beginning with the revelation of things that reason could not attain on its own (and some things that it could attain on its own, but only rarely, after great study, and with considerable admixture of error). Theology, in a sense, is like the stained-glass artist, who does his job well, but can only do it when the architect has given him space in which to play.

I bring theology into this consideration of renaissance for two reasons. First, because we do indeed live within a dispensation of revelation. The Bible is there -- and the Church's mediation of its authentic interpretation -- and we would be foolish to try to understand the world without its aid. Renaissance means moving forward through a return to the sources. It means there is no opposition between learning from others and discovering new things ourselves. And for us, it means above all that we will be most truly men of the future by being deeply imbued with the infallible teaching of the past, in God's revelation.

But I bring the element of revelation into my consideration of renaissance even for the human level, because it highlights the problem of privilege. The next post will explain how the problem of privilege is not unique to revelation. In fact, privileged authors are at the heart of the issue of renaissance.

Why I Oppose Government Health Care

2008-11-10T13:06:00.003-05:00

As the father of a special-needs child -- my four-year-old son was born with Spina Bifida, requiring not only wheelchairs and physical therapy, but also considerable urological support (the greatest danger of paraplegia is kidney failure), potential orthopedic surgery, and emergency neurosurgery -- you might expect me to support government health care, at least for those with chronic conditions like my son's. Indeed, all of his health care so far has been paid for by the federal government, both because we have been too poor (as a grad student and a full-time mother) to afford any health insurance at all and because his health care has been extraordinarily expensive.

Readers of this blog will be aware of my general reason for opposing government health insurance: government is wasteful, because it makes prudential decisions far from the facts on the ground, and crooked, because politicians are more interested in looking good in the short term than in doing what's best in the long-term. Government health care would shovel lots of money into the pockets of special interests, while making it harder for the rest of us to get normal care.

Health care, however, is different from other issues, because the body is a more, um, personal concern than say the cost of fuel or even housing. You can ditch a broken car, and even go without; you can change your driving habits or downsize your house. But without health care, you lose your life. When the Founders enumerated life before liberty and the pursuit of happiness among the most central inalienable rights, their point was that without your body, nothing else in politics matters. The right to live is the most precious right of all. And yes, this includes the right to safety -- safety from war and crime -- just as much as the right not to be torn from your mother's womb. (Though when "seamless garment" types claim that war is a life issue too, they should realize that their argument cuts both ways: we are at war to try to prevent ourselves from being slaughtered on our way to work Tuesday morning; we pointed nukes at the USSR, not so we could kill, but as part of a strategy to keep them from nuking us; it did work.)

So securing good health care really is a central concern of government. But how?

A central part of the argument against government health care concerns rationing. In a market system (and we don't exactly have a health care market now, because of massive government intrusion and perverse incentives), rationing happens through price. At some point you say we just can't afford to keep this person going -- or you say that we will have to make other sacrifices, losing the house or working a second job. It is a great myth that government health care would elminate the need for rationing. Government resources are not infinite, and someone needs to decide what care is reasonable. Are we going to pay for nose jobs? Sex changes? Hair implants? Liposuction? If we do, the money -- that is, the resources to pay the doctors and all the people who support them, including the people who build lipo-suckers -- will have to come from somewhere. Government health care means we can coerce Peter to pay for Paul's vasectomy; it doesn't mean that the money comes from nowhere.

And government can use coercion to drive down prices, but if they're paying neurosurgeons less than neurosurgeons want to be payed for the joy of being woken at two in the morning to care for a six-month-old whose brain hardware is broken -- as we woke our neurosurgeon a few years ago -- then we're either going to have to give up neurosurgeons, or coerce them. Do we want a health care system in which our doctors are coerced to care for us?

At least there will be limits to the public's interest in coercion -- limits to how much money we want to pay for other people's new eyelids, limits to how much we want to be coerced to be doctors, or served by coerced doctors. The only other solution is rationing.

What will we ration? My son was born with Spina Bifida, the most common survivable birth defect. In the United States today, 90% of children like him are killed in utero; the same is true of Down's Syndrome kids. A neurosurgeon tells me that in Europe, there is no Spina Bifida: all such children are killed. Now, since these things strike more or less at random -- or at least, they're not caused by people's ideological commitments -- that means that 90% of this country would rather have an abortion than a kid with special needs. 90% of people in the United States -- one of the most pro-life countries in the developed world -- wouldn't even want to put such a child up for adoption. Of course, part of this is medical misinformation: people are not told what joy these kids can be.

But the point is, if we have government healthcare, are we going to find a political majority that is willing to pay for the kind of children that 90% would abort from their own wombs? Spina Bifida and Down's are expensive. If you would kill your own child, are you going to give up your nose job or vasectomy; are you going to choose to have coerced doctors; are you going to accept a tax hike that might keep you from shopping at Whole Foods, so that my son can have a wheelchair, regular urology consults, and emergency neurosurgery?

Maybe we kill these children because of medical misinformation. But is that misinformation going to change if we have government health care? Will there not be an even greater incentive to provide that misinformation, since my nose job -- or my good night's sleep, as a neurosurgeon -- depends on it? Why would my son not be the first one voted off the island?

By contrast, in a decentralized health industry, individuals can make the choice to put up that money. In fact, at present there exists an entire organization, the Shriners, who exist entirely to give health care, with private money, to kids with special needs. (The Shriners are Masons, and that makes me nervous, but that's beside the point.) Would the Shriners survive Obama's tax hikes on "the rich" -- that is, people who can afford to pay for my child's health care? (Their 22 hospitals are paid for by a $10.2 billion endowment; I'm guessing that didn't all come from circus tickets.) Would the Shriners survive a system in which all doctors are in the coercive employ of Uncle Sam -- and Uncle Sam is just a friendly euphemism for Nancy Pelosi?

I bring this up apropos of an article in The Australian. (The Australian, by the way, is the best-selling newspaper in Australia; this is not a kook fringe religious right scandal monger.)

THE Rudd Government is under pressure from all fronts, even Labor colleagues, to overturn a decision denying German doctor Bernhard Moeller permanent residency in Australia because his son Lukas has Down syndrome.

The Immigration Department this week rejected Dr Moeller's application for permanent residency, saying the potential cost to the taxpayer of 13-year-old Lukas's condition was too great.
. . .
"It is sad that in this modern day we are still viewing people with a disability, such as Dr Moeller's son, as a burden," Senator Bernardi said. "They can and do make significant contributions to our society."

More here.

I wonder who will decide whether my son, and children like him, makes a "significant contribution to our society." I wonder who makes that decision in Europe, where such children are not born. I wonder what would happen if the kid's dad wasn't viewed as "productive member of society." I wonder, if it comes down to it, whether American tax payers will choose a tax hike when told that kooky Christians want to bring children into the world with "massive genetic abnormalities." I wonder why they abort those children now.

A Little Electoral History

2008-11-06T10:59:00.002-05:00

This post will diverge a little from the standard themes of this blog, but I guess we can say Civis supports always viewing things in light of history, and taking a clear sight of the real.

The election on Tuesday had a historic turnout. I think they're saying it was the highest since 1960 -- and given that 1960 was the year of notorious fraud, where Kennedy-Johnson beat Nixon through impossibly high turnouts in Daley's Chicago and Johnson's Texas, 1908 seems to stand as the last time this high a percentage of the electorate turned out to vote. That is interesting, but what does it signify?

Far more important for questions of mandate and "landslides" is what percentage of the vote Obama actually got. The Wall Street Journal has a nice chart on popular and electoral votes for every election since 1900.

Popular Vote
In the popular vote, Obama got 51.6% -- despite 96% of the black vote, overwhelming urban and college support, and lots of new voters. That puts him even or behind (ready for this?) TR I and II, Taft, Harding-Coolidge-Hoover (Hoover!)-FDR, Eisenhower I and II, Johnson, Nixon II, Reagan II, and H.W. Bush. It has been said that Obama got the highest percentage of the popular vote since 1988 -- but the last four elections have had strong third parties: Perot got 19% of the popular vote in '92 and 8% in '96; Nader got 3% in the ultra-close 2000. All we really see is that Obama beat Bush '04.

In fact, looking back, other than 2004, for every election in which the winner got a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Obama 2008, there was a much stronger explanation than Obama has. In 1912, TR ran against the incumbent Taft, splitting the Republican vote. In 1916, Wilson barely won reelection in light of the Great War in Europe. In '48 there were four candidates: not only Truman and Dewey, but also Strom Thurmond sweeping the South and Henry Wallace, whom Truman had fired for being too soft on Communism, picking off about 2.5% on account of his popularity in the Northeast -- and still the papers said Truman had lost. Kennedy lost the popular vote and cheated to win the electoral college. Nixon won in 1968 because George Wallace took the South and Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June. I won't even begin with comparisons to Carter's 50.1% victory. And in 1980 Reagan won 50.8% of the popular vote and a 489-vote landslide in the electoral college despite John Anderson, whom Reagan had defeated in the Republican primaries, getting 6.6% as a moderate-Republican Independent.

In short, historically Obama's 51.6% running against an unpopular incumbent party with no significant third party is one of the weakest popular-vote victories on record -- with the one exception of Bush in 2004. What he won is not a landslide but a very close election. The high turnout is nothing in his favor; it suggests that people are more concerned than ever, yet very divided. Combined with his low score in the popular vote, the high turnout means not that Obama has a strong mandate, but that he will rule a very divided nation. Indeed, low turnout would be a much stronger sign that people felt confident about what was coming.

Electoral Vote
This is all the more important in the electoral vote. I should write a whole post on the importance of the Electoral College, but in sum, the Electoral College recognizes that there is no such thing as a single coast-to-coast national culture; the United States is a union of many different cultures, and the federal government must bring together, not just one or two, but all of the parts. To reject the Electoral College and let someone get elected president just by running up strong majorities in a couple coastal cities would create an even more divided country.

Obama won 349 electoral votes, a comfortable margin of victory (he only needed 270), but again, far from a landslide. 349 is more than George W. Bush got in either election. But it is less than any election through Reagan-Bush I-Clinton. It is less than Nixon II (a true landslide, against McGovern), Johnson, Eisenhower, Harding-Coolidge-Hoover-FDR, or Wilson I -- an election in which, as we saw, he got only 41.8% of the popular vote, but won because TR split the vote with Taft. Obama got more electoral votes than TR or Taft had in 1900, 1904, and 1908 -- but in 1908 there were only 487 electoral votes (there are 538 now), so that's not very impressive! In fact, his percentage of the College was comparable. Nothing historic.

Again, the electoral victories Obama exceeded were only Truman's (against Thurmond in the South), Kennedy's (a close race), Nixon I (against Wallace in the South), Carter (Carter!), and George W. Bush. Obama did not break 350 electoral votes. In the 28 elections since 1900, fully half broke 400, and three ('36, '72, and '84) broke 500. If we exclude those early elections, with a much smaller College, Obama's victory puts him at the 32nd percentile for Electoral College wins (the best measure of cross-the-country support). Since 1900, he is at about the 40th percentile for the popular vote, despite no significant third party.

And, to put it into perspective, the first George Bush did far better in the electoral and popular vote than Obama, but got thwapped in 1992, while Truman, whom history has judged very well, and Kennedy, whom Obama claims to emulate, both got less than 50% of the popular vote.

Where does this get us? The historic turnout in 2008 only indicates that people care about the election. But Obama's low margin of victory shows that the people of the United States are deeply divided, as they were in 2000 and 2004. Obama has not a mandate, but a very tenuous hold on a very fractured nation.

Let us hope that he does not abuse his power. And, as cultural and political conservatives, let us pray that reform in the Church helps the balance of the culture to tip our direction in the next decade.

Moralism and the Sense of God

2008-11-03T14:55:00.003-05:00

My family recently happened to attend a school Mass at one of our local parishes. The pastor, a pretty good preacher, and a good priest, addressed kids aged kindergarten through high school. I can't recall what the readings were (not a good sign), but he preached on responsibility, how we can't just leave things for others to do, but have to take charge ourselves. The theme was decent in itself, and well preached, but it exemplified a danger for preachers, and indeed for all Christians: Christianity is not a moralism.

It is easy, in trying to make the faith "accessible" (as when preaching to kids), to speak in terms of putting the faith into practice -- and to reduce practice to moralism. (It is striking how "putting it into practice" has come to exclude praying, studying the faith, or frequenting the sacraments.) But as St. Thomas says, in practical things, the end is first: that is, if you do not know why you are doing something, do not know the goal you are trying to attain, you will never take the first step. When preaching excludes the reality of God in our lives, as if Christianity were primarily about "being a good person," goodness becomes pointless, and ultimately emasculated. Who cares about treating kindergartners nicely, or cleaning up the school yard, unless you know why these things matter?

I bring this up not to scourge preachers, or dear Fr. Mike, who really is a good priest, but to try to explain, again, the purpose of this blog. In my mind at least, this blog is about the intersection of faith and life. But I know I focus more on politics, economics, and urbanism, than on any religious themes. Has my blog fallen into the same kind of moralism?

To try to exculpate myself from that accusation, I need to introduce a distinction--and it is really the central distinction on which this blog rests. We might lable the distinction as the difference between a "practical" morality and a "contemplative" morality. (I am trying to side with the latter.)

An excessively practical morality is interested in "being a good person," in a purely earthly sense. Subjectively, there is something of keeping a clean conscience, and keeping clear of bad entanglements. In relation to the world, it is a matter of results: caring for the weak, making other people happy, etc. Let me stress: these are good things, and I do not mean to disparage them, any more than I want to disparage telling the big kids to watch out for the kindergartners and clean up messes.

But a truly Christian morality is above all contemplative. Which is to say, first, that it is directed to God: the purpose of being good is not goodness in itself, but the contemplative embrace, unitive prayer. Mother Teresa expressed this one way when she said she saw the poor as "Christ in his most distressing disguise." Dragging the poorest of the poor out of the streets of Calcutta was not about social work or "making the world a better place." It was about embracing Christ. And thus her hours of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament was not a means of attaining energy for her apostolate, but was the goal of her apostolate: she did what she did in order to embrace her God, and to be embraced by him. Such a worldview can only be maintained by a robust life of prayer: not just for divine assistance, but to train the heart to penetrate to the one thing necessary.

A corollary to this contemplative goal of morality is that it changes the norms of morality. Our care for the created world can be an embrace of the Creator only when we embrace it precisely as creation. Which is to say, truly Christian morality -- contemplative morality -- is not a matter of following rules, or seeking results, but of receiving the created world as a gift. And that means truly receiving the world as what it is, the way the Creator made it.

The purpose of this blog -- the purpose of my writings about urbanism, economics, political philosophy, and occasionally culture -- is to nourish this kind of contemplative, receptive view of man in the world. In this view, the question for morality is not "how ought things to be," or "how would we like the world to be," but "how did God make us? What has God given us?" To see God in politics is to embrace the world as he made it. The question is not what city would be prettiest, or most fun, but what nature did God give us, what is the nature of cities, what is the nature of human relations, and economies, and polities. We should see the world as something real: not just a blob to be shaped according to our visions, but a reality to be embraced; a norm for us, not just something on which we impose our moral norms.

Though it is receptive, this is not a passive view of politics. Abortion, for example, is not wrong just because we don't like it, or because it imposes on another persons rights, or because it threatens the rights of the rest of us (though all those things are true).

Rather, the Christian opposes abortion because it is contrary to nature. It is contrary to the nature of the mother, who is most herself in nourishing her child, and the nature of doctors, who are most themselves, who fulfill their nature, in healing, not killing. And it is contrary to the nature of neighbors to idly watch self-destruction: I can only be myself, be the social being I was created to be, by withholding the implement with which the troubled woman threatens to maim herself. And it is contrary to the nature of society to be heedless of its very foundation, the love of parents for children and the love that binds families together. I cannot be a citizen and not care for the right ordering of society. It's not just that I should or shouldn't. It's that I already am, by nature, a citizen. My task is to live like one, to embrace the task I have been given by what I am.

And that I am a citizen is not a choice, not a preference, not even a prudential decision, but a fact of my creation. I fight against abortion -- and against all the other things that threaten the nature of man -- not just because it's mean, or ugly, not only because God tells me to, but because so doing fulfills my nature. It is a matter of receiving the world God gave me, embracing him -- learning to embrace him, practicing to embrace him, receiving his embrace -- by treating Nature, the world and human nature as he choose it to be, as a gift from him, a place of encounter with Nature's God, the Creator.

This, I suppose, was the heart of Fr. Mike's preaching about taking care of kindergartners. It is the heart of my pontificating about how a life built around the automobile is not an authentically human life. But two things need to be said, again and again. First, the purpose of embracing our nature is to embrace the God who made it so. And second, because of this, morality is not about obligations or being kind, but about contemplating how the world is, and living accordingly. The purpose of this blog is to present a view of politics based on receiving the world as it is -- receiving the nature of economics, culture, cities, and polities -- not just fashioning them according to our better lights.

Auto Culture

2008-10-06T16:25:00.002-04:00

It has become standard for social commentators to decry the way modern entertainment technology begets individualism. The movies let you witness events second-hand, sitting in a dark room, instead of out on the street with real people. (At least reading is easy to interrupt, and requires some imagination.) TV moves those images into the home, so that you can tune out of the real world and sink into your easy chair. But at least at the beginning your options were limited, so that you were watching the same thing as millions of other viewers. Cable let you choose just what you wanted, the VCR let you watch whenever you wanted, and now modern gizmos like tivo and internet movies give you greater selection, so that your media fix can be perfectly individualized.

Meanwhile, music moved from a social activity, in a concert hall or a saloon, to a phonograph in the living room, to headphones out on the street. Many commentators think the iPod is a new low, so that you don't even have to listen to an artist's whole album, but can pick and choose the program that exactly fits you. Reality becomes something not received, but created. We'll call it auto-culture: it's all about my individualized desires.

I'll acknowledge these critiques, with two hedges. First (and I won't try to work this out) I think there's a negative force as well. Take, for example, classical music. Anyone who has been to a concert knows that live music is much much more enjoyable than the radio, or even the iPod. If people come to prefer tuning out through technology, it has something to do with a lack of other options. Technological entertainment feeds individualism, but I think it's more a symptom of social breakdown than a cause. If kids had something better to do or somewhere better to go, they'd be less inclined to plug into their devices.

Second, individualism isn't all bad, because it is, in a certain sense, true. We are individuals. Society should come together as an organism, to be sure, but an organism composed of individual units, each knowing and learning and loving at their own pace. I can enjoy the social experience of an opera more if I can study it on my own time, too. The anti-technology zealots sometimes fail to appreciate the great boone that technology can be. It's not good to be tuned out all the time, but when I'm sitting alone in my office cataloging books, it's pretty nice that I can turn on a cd. There is, in fact, something socializing, and enculturating, about being able to do some things on my own time -- as long as I also plug into the world around me: go to concerts, talk to human beings, listen to birds, etc.

In any case, I think those who decry entertainment technology fail (as far as I have seen) to recognize the greatest force of auto-culture: the automobile. My daily commute has made me more aware than ever of the profound solipsism of the car. In Washington, I commuted by foot and by train. I stopped to talk to people. I looked at people, had time to observe them, and look them in the eye. I stopped to watch the construction in my neighborhood, to identify a new bird, to sort through books left on the curb by my neighbors.

In the car, everything flies by at 55mph. Every day I watch the pond where the heron lives -- but I fly by so fast that there's no time to look. It's like fleeting images on the television. But most bizarre of all, all I see of the thousands of other people on the road is the back end of their cars. At stop signs sometimes you see a face -- but it's of somebody trying to get past you as fast as possible, and trying not to crash into anything. (I think we under-appreciate how dangerous cars are, and how much of our energy has to go into not killing ourselves.) The freeway is almost like a nightmare, where all the people have been turned into machines.

Meanwhile, the car allows us to create a culture based entirely on our own desires. iPods let you choose what music you want to listen to. But a car lets you choose what landscape you live in, what people you come in contact with, what territory you experience. The ability of suburbanites to fly past poor "inner city" neighborhoods without even seeing the people who live there is truly amazing. The ability to choose a neighborhood where only people like you live. The ability to limit your contact with other people, so that an automobile life can leave the house and get to work or social activities without ever seeing a neighborhood, without ever seeing anyone one hasn't directly chosen. This is auto-culture taken to its limit.

To be sure, the hedges I noted above apply to cars as well. If people had a greater awareness of the riches of a pedestrian lifestyle, perhaps they would be less inclined to whiz past it. Politically, I am certainly more in favor of carrots than sticks in this regard: better to improve our cities than to drive people out of the suburbs. On the other hand, cars have created our social breakdown in a way that entertainment technology has not. People did not move out of their neighborhoods just because they had a tv. Entertainment is only an accoutrement; automobiles shape an entire lifestyle, so that the average American's home, work, and social life are all fundamentally conditioned by their abstraction from the neighborhood around them.

And individualism isn't all bad. Those who attack cars -- especially in favor of trains -- sometimes fail to appreciate the magic of individualized transportation. For example, later this week my family is going on vacation to New England, where we will rent a car. That car allows us to get to New Hampshire to see family and friends, then drive down to Connecticut, then over to Rhode Island. We will spend nights in three different towns and visit people in at least seven different cities over the course of a week -- all while dragging around two little kids, a wheelchair, and a bunch of luggage. Our travel itenerary is highly individualized, because our friends and family are in different places than yours. No mass transit could get us to the door of each of these houses. Travel would be difficult without cars.

Even city life is greatly improved by the automobile. It is probably not necessary for each person to drive a separate car to the grocery store. But to get the groceries from the store to each individual house (not to mention getting it to the store in the first place) it's a heck of a lot easier if there are at least delivery trucks. It makes sense for groceries to be individualized -- it is, in fact, a necessity of culture -- and that requires a more individualized system of transportation. And sometimes it's nice to have a ride home -- if someone gets hurt, or if someone isn't able to walk far, or if you're going to an event across town. I rather doubt we all need to own our own cars for that, but it certainly helps to have taxis and buses, with the individualized itinerary these vehicles allow.

In short, automobiles -- and auto-technology in general -- makes a great servant, but a terrible master. To make our lives revolve around ultra-individualism is to kill what is most human in us. But to deny the individuality that gives me an interest in Renaissance music while I work, or in getting to a concert across town, or in visiting relatives across the country, is also to deny our humanity: both our individuality and our social nature, since social things happen only when individuals can get to them. Autos, yes. Auto culture, no.