What Me, Worry??

This article provides excellent historical context to presidential approval ratings in general and President Obama's predicament in particular. While the author poohs poohs any concern over the president's political fortunes at this stage, I found one of his disclaimers/footnotes to be very interesting:

Let me add a bit more nuance here: I think you can make a good (although probably not rock-solid) case that the idea of a substantially progressive Obama presidency is on the line right now. But there are a lot of scenarios where the combination of voters getting a little something out of their system in 2010, combined with (eventually) an improving economy and perhaps a foreign policy success or two, could leave Obama personally in fairly good shape in 2012

In essence, Silver sees no cause for the White House to have immediate concern that they will be looking for new jobs come 2013. However, the change liberals hoped for may be DOA.

Before Republican types rejoice, never forget the lessons of Bill Clinton. His pivot to the center salvaged his administration.

William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed; Economics and Christian Desire: Review Part 1

Jekabs Bikis and I reviewed together Cavanaugh's Being Consumed. We've both agreed to post our reviews and our responses to each other here. Below is the first section of mine:

William T. Cavanaugh’s book is a slim volume on a broad topic. Just under a hundred pages, Being Consumed brings to our attention the impact of consumerism, commodification, and globalization on personhood, free markets, multinational corporations, marketing, shopping, tourism, self-identity, and human freedom. Yet despite such a wide range of concerns, Cavanaugh’s target is much more defined. As “a contribution to a kind of theological microeconomics,” he desires above all to help Christians “to discern and create economic practices, spaces, and transactions that are truly free” (viii). To do this, requires a theological critique of the spiritual and moral temptations of global capitalism. So rather than mount a macro-level reform of multinational markets, Cavanaugh is more concerned with how Christians might live differently at the local and particular level, and how by living in such a way they might further incarnate the eschatological promises that God has extended in the Lord’s Supper.

In chapter 1, “Freedom and Unfreedom,” Cavanaugh asserts that “true freedom requires an account of the end (telos) of human life and the destination of creation” (2), which for the Christian is to desire and participate in God. We need to keep this end in view because otherwise we cannot distinguish true and false desires. A model that judges the freedom of economic exchange as simply equal to the exchange itself is not truly free, for it has no standard by which to judge human flourishing. A model that values exchange in itself doesn’t care whether that exchange is about bread and beans or pornography and breast augmentation. Christians, on the other hand, are called to cultivate true desires, and we must do this in the face of marketing that seeks to create imprudent yearning in us and to addict us to the constant stimulation of those desires. We also have to work against large-scale organizations which ignore the needs of their employees. Charges Cavanaugh, we delude ourselves if we think that late capitalism is truly free for all its participants. Multinational corporations may choose to relocate their operations from one cheap source of labor to the next, quickly abandoning their workers, who after all, cannot easily move without disrupting their lives and communities. The ownership of property, Cavanuagh insists, is intended by God to serve the common good, not to pursue the maximization of profits at the expense of people. Christians then should work to create companies which keep this as one of their preeminent purposes.

What the Numbers Tell Us

Probably the best way to track the effectiveness of the speech is via approval ratings and surveys that ask voters whether they approve of the Obama plan or the way he is handling health care reform.

Did we see any movement one way or the other when comparing the numbers for today versus the numbers for yesterday.

Rasmussen tracks presidential approval by comparing Obama's strongly approve ratings with his strongly disapprove numbers. According to the Rasmussen, 33% of all voters survey strongly approve of the president's job Performance while 41% disapprove. This means his overall rating for September 10Th is -8 which is unchanged from September 9Th.

Additionally, 44% of all voters surveyed approve of his health care reform package while 53% disapprove.

At this point, the speech appears to have made little impact with voters. Of course, Democratic members of Congress were a target group of the speech as well. The speech may have swayed them. Also, it is important to note that opinions may change as the media forms a consensus message of failure or success. This could take a few days to crystallize

Rasmussen

Can There Be a Christian Culture?--Part 2

As I examined in the last post, the question of whether twentieth-century Europe could still be considered a Christian culture occurred amidst the violence of World War I and II. The second world war itself left many with serious questions as to why it had happened and what this revealed about the course of humanity in general. Writing in 1949, E. Harris Harbison observed a hunger for meaning among the young veterans returning to American universities after the war: "[They] made it clear to advisers and teachers that they were looking for answers. . . . Somewhere in history, many of them thought, the answer to how it all came about was to be found." The same year in Britain, historian Herbert Butterfield's six BBC radio lectures on Christianity and history made him a public celebrity, becoming some of the most listened to broadcasts in BBC history. Clearly the public on both sides of the Atlantic was hungry for some sense of what history as a discipline could reveal about Christianity, the West, and civilization. Did the twentieth century invalidate Occidental values and beliefs, and could history give a needed perspective on the past and the future?

After all, one could ask, do the events of history mean anything? Are they, as Elbert Hubbard once remarked, just "one damn thing after another"? Can there be a philosophy, science, or theology of history that speaks in any way to the historical particulars? "Can the thinker who utilizes the empirically achieved data of historical study stand, as it were, outside the historical process and see pattern or meaning in the whole historical process itself?" (Connolly 41) If not, can the historical thinker still offer some intimation of the whole from a more limited vantage point? Likewise, what does the theology of the Christian Church have to say to how history has unfolded? Can the gospel, for example, explain the twentieth century?

Typically, a Christian understanding of history had been understood to be linear as opposed to the wide cycles of history in Greek, Chinese, or Hindu thought, and twentieth-century Christian thinkers mostly rejected the cyclical view of Oswald Spengler’s infamous The Decline of the West, which traced eight “high cultures” through the cycle of birth-development-fulfillment-decay-death, as well as the view of Arnold Toynbee that civilizations arise, grow strong, fall, and die in reaction to cultural problems. Did civilizations, cultures, or societies have life cycles, or was it permissible to divide history into periods, such as ancient, medieval, and modern?

Particularly in response to the fascist claims of historical destiny, Christian thinkers of the period were quite divided on these questions. Jacques Maritain, William Albright, and Eric Voegelin, for example, all held that some order or process was observable in history, though each was cautious as to how much could be predicted or exhaustively understood. For Maritain, historical laws cannot explain history entirely or predict it, but they can help interpret it: axiomatic laws can point to general characteristics of history, while typological laws can suggest various periods in history: a growth is observable, so some periods are better than others. He held that history possessed "two faces."

1. Axiomatic laws included the law of two-fold contrasting progress; the ambivalence of history; the law of the historical fructifications of good and evil ; the law of the world-significance of history-making events; the law of prise de conscience ; and the law of the hierarchy of means.
2. Typological laws included the law of the passage from the "magical" to the "rational" regime or state; the law of the progress of moral conscience; the law of the passage from "sacral" to "secular" or "lay" civilizations; the law of the political and social coming-of-age of the people.

Maritain in general, then, held that one could predict that good and evil would bear results in certain ways, that certain means tend to overshadow others, and that in general history was moving to more secular and rationalistic expressions of culture. (Of course, this is a variation of the secularization thesis that has in the last two decades been called seriously into question.)

Albright, too, held the search for laws was not fruitless, but the larger the scope of observation, the less certain, “until we reach a plane where the number of variables makes prediction impossible.” Albright's simple point was that smaller local changes are more predictable than wide-spread national, continental, and global shifts. These later ones were better observed in hindsight.

Voegelin, not an entirely unrepentant Hegelian, nonetheless broke with Hegel in holding that one cannot predict the outcome of history even if one can understand some of its laws. Humans are too sinful to hold to anything like the ideal, divine plan: “The truth of order has to be gained and regained in the perpetual struggle against the fall from it.” For each of these, some observation of order and direction did not suggest total predictability. The fascist doctrines of an unopposable direction to the spirit of history were to be treated agnostically at best.

Others were even more cautious. Butterfield and Kenneth Scott Latourette stationed themselves in a middle ground. Only general principles and observations are possible from a Christian perspective, though these can still offer much. Though Butterfield himself condemned easy judgments on human actions, he did feel that in the broadest sense one could obviously conclude that human beings were sinful, that the personal nature of historical lives included sinful effects, and that general, historical judgments on evil actions, such as the militarism of Nazi Germany, were conclusive from history itself.

For Butterfield, broadly speaking there are three ways of looking at history:

1. biographically, which offers the meaningful life of individuals;
2. technically, in the study of the law-like social forces of larger history;
   
3. holistically, attempting to view the providence of God in broad strokes.
   

It is significant that while Isaiah Berlin praised Butterfield's position as a "prima facie very humane and convincing thesis," that he finally dismissed it as one in which "individual responsibility is made to melt away" because we declare ourselves never fit to judge, be that by virtue of ignorance or sinful ineffectiveness .

Latourette, the great historian of world missions, in different fashion, sought to provide for the Christian claims for history the sense that these truths, though they cannot be "proved" by history itself, nonetheless have "strong probability for the truth of Christian understanding.”

Still others felt even this went too far, such as Henri-Irénée Marrou and Mircea Eliade who rejected any philosophy of history, though each conceded a theology of history was still possible. Eliade sniffed that attempts at "scientific" laws of history were but the “decomposition product of Christianity,” seeking the sense of history’s meaning while denying “a transhistorical, soteriological intent.” Marrou, in turn, warned against “the sin of immoderation” so tempting to philosophies of history; history is always a subjective reconstruction of the past by the historian, and “[e]very problem in history, no matter how small, gradually and eventually demands a knowledge of universal history in its entirety,” which is impossible for any but God. Marrou, however, did not see this as a counsel of despair, rather humility.

Finally, not all would agree with even this claim. Gerhard Ebeling observed, "Wherever historicity is not taken seriously, there is also a failure to take really seriously either the text of the Scriptures or the man to whom this text must be interpreted." Likewise, voices like Yves Congar and J. P. Mackey insisted that without tradition no Christian dogma existed. Any large meaning in history was rightly obtainable only through God's revelation.

This wide-spread continuum suggests perhaps why no single Christian answer was available at the time to those in search of spiritual and theological insights into the twentieth-century ideological wars. We can still ask today, what did they hope to find in the study of history that might explain their political and social dilemmas? Likewise, what might we hope to find, if anything, in the midst of our own?

Tocqueville on Materialism

To answer one of my own questions from my last post on Tocqueville, in Democracy in America, he condemns excessive materialism (consumerism?) as leading to civic weakness in a people and even to the eventual loss of humanity. He argues that the prosperity that comes with democratic freedoms may eventually undercut them because its people will not longer possess the virtues to use that freedom wisely:

"There is, indeed, a most dangerous passage in the history of a democratic people. When the taste for physical gratifications among them has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away and lose all self-restraint at the sight of the new possessions they are about to obtain. In their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune they lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all. It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold. The discharge of political duties appears to them to be a troublesome impediment which diverts them from their occupations and business. If they are required to elect representatives, to support the government by personal service, to meet on public business, they think they have no time, they cannot waste their precious hours in useless engagements; such idle amusements are unsuited to serious men who are engaged with the more important interests of life. These people think they are following the principle of self-interest, but the idea they entertain of that principle is a very crude one; and the better to look after what they call their own business, they neglect their chief business, which is to remain their own masters.

"As the citizens who labor do not care to attend to public affairs, and as the class which might devote its leisure to these duties has ceased to exist, the place of the government is, as it were, unfilled. If at that critical moment some able and ambitious man grasps the supreme power, he will find the road to every kind of usurpation open before him. If he attends for some time only to the material prosperity of the country, no more will be demanded of him. . . . A nation that asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart, the slave of its own well-being, awaiting only the hand that will bind it." (474-5)

"Whatever elevates, enlarges, and expands the soul renders it more capable of succeeding in those very undertakings which do not concern it. Whatever, on the other hand, enervates or lowers it weakens it for all purposes, the chief as well as the least, and threatens to render it almost equally impotent for both. Hence the soul must remain great and strong, though it were only to devote its strength and greatness from time to time to the service of the body. If men were ever to content themselves with material objects, it is probable that they would lose by degrees the art of producing them; and they would enjoy them in the end, like the brutes, without discernment and without improvement." (480)

Have we reached this point in the United States?

Tocqueville on Egoism vs. Individualism

Alexia de Tocqueville in the second book of his justly famous Democracy in America proposed to differentiate simple egoism (or selfishness) from the more seemingly benign motive of individualism. Tocqueville feared that democracy in its positive promotion of individuals and their freedom, as left to itself led to a society that eventually discouraged its people from civic participation and virtuous action:

"Our fathers were only acquainted with egotism. Egotism is a passionate and exaggerated love of self, which leads a man to connect everything with himself and to prefer himself to everything in the world. Individualism is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apart with his family and his friends, so that after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself. Egotism originates in blind instinct; individualism proceeds from erroneous judgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as much in deficiencies of mind as in perversity of heart.

"Egotism blights the germ of all virtue; individualism, at first, only saps the virtues of public life; but in the long run it attacks and destroys all others and is at length absorbed in downright selfishness. Egotism is a vice as old as the world, which does not belong to one form of society more than to another; individualism is of democratic origin, and it threatens to spread in the same ratio as the equality of condition. (446-7)

"Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart." (448)

Tocqueville's thought here raises some important questions:

1. How does a society that sets its people free to pursue their own ends hold together any notion of the common good?
2. Does democratic individualism naturally lead to a breakdown in community and tradition?
3. How would Tocqueville account for modern consumerism and technologies?
   

Jacques Maritain, Materiality, and Personhood

Jacques Maritain, the important neo-Scholastic philosopher of the mid-twentieth century, also contributed to the conversation on Christian Personalism. His most important book on the subject was his 1946 The Person and the Common Good. In this work, Maritain distinguishes individuality and personality:

"As an individual, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of the universe, a unique point in the immense web of cosmic, ethnical, historical forces and influences-and bound by their laws. Each of us is subject to the determinism of the physical world. Nonetheless, each of us is also a person and, as such, is not controlled by the stars. Our whole being subsists in virtue of the subsistence of the spiritual soul which is in us a principle of creative unity, independence and liberty" (38).

Maritian is invoking and answering the Kantian distinction between the physical and moral universes. For Maritain it is important that we recognize that we are both material and spiritual:

1. We are each individual. We exist separately in a material manner from other material organisms and objects. We each occupy distinct places in space. Our material existence receives a particular form-a particular shape and identity which is an expression of a more general type. We are each members of and particular examples of a species. Our bodily lives are grounded in our senses and desires.
   
2. Yet we are also persons. We have particular personalities. "Personality is the subsistence of the spiritual soul communicated to the human composite" (41), and because of this, persons communicate with other persons; they commune with them to a greater or lesser degree. Persons are oriented to each other by love and faithfulness, by recognizing the innate dignity in another who is made in the image of God.
   

For Maritain, our orientation to one of these has all to do with what we become. If we are dominated by our material selves, our higher personalities become debased and wanton. If we are dominated by our spiritual call and direction, our selves take on admirable and truly human expansiveness:

"If the development occurs in the direction of material individuality, it will be oriented towards the detestable ego whose law is to grasp or absorb for itself. At the same time personality, as such, will tend to be adulterated and to dissolve. But if the development occurs in the direction of spiritual personality, man will be oriented towards the generous self of the heroes and saints. Thus, man will be truly a person only so far as the life of the spirit and of liberty reigns over that of the senses and passions" (44-5).

Thus, true personhood points to the shape of the political society. Human beings are innately political because they are innately social. Will our common polis then be a society of individuals each tearing at the other in demands and negotiations, or will our common life be orientated to a common good? "The common good is common because it is received in persons, each one of whom is as a mirror of the whole" (49). Maritain is quick to stress that if we misunderstand the common good to be a collective goal other than the good of each person, we end with a totalitarian collective. If however, there is no common good, we end with radical individualism and no higher vision of human life.

The common good should be the development of the good life, the life of virtue, friendship, happiness, family, and so on. When this is the case, then the common good flows back to the benefit of each member, helping him or her to develop true liberty and freedom. But even this will eventually go wrong if it is not oriented to the greater end of the love of God and the beatific vision: "The common good of the city or the civilization . . . does not preserve its true nature unless it respects that which surpasses it, unless it is subordinated, not as a pure means, but as an infravalent end, to the order of eternal goods and the supra-temporal values from which human life is suspended" (62).

Any good political society will consider that the goods it imparts to its persons will ultimately recognize that as persons they are oriented to the eternal: "the common good by its essence must favor their progress toward the absolute goods which transcend politcal society" (76). Persons are created to serve their communities, but communities/societies that treat persons as material individuals will enslave most of them for the profit of a few. The Church is thus a society that models for other political societies God's best. Maritian sums it up this way:

"If we consider this grand City as living in its entirety upon the common good which is the very life of God, communicated to the multitude of the just and seeking out the errant, then each stone is for the city. But if we consider each stone as living itself, in its personal participation in this common good, upon the very life of God that is communicated, or as sought after personally by God, who wills to communicate His own life to it, then, it it toward each one that all the goods of the city converge to receive of their plenitude. In this sense, the city is for each stone" (86-7).

The Image of God in Education--Part 4

Pentecost in Acts 2 is about the restoration of Babel. It is a bringing together of diverse, Spirit-inspired voices, no longer as a curse on the hubris of humanity, but as blessings of communication and fire. The Pentecostal, ecumenical catholicity of the Church reminds us that cultures are not completely incommensurable to each other. They can communicate across diverse languages and practices. Yet at that same, our particular denominational experience keeps in view the hard work of that communication. Cultural exchange is difficult not because translation is impossible but because languages favor certain economies of expression; they privilege certain words and their referents. The terms and vocabulary we favor shape the ease with which we discuss and debate certain ideas. Thus, learning calls for a "multi-lingual" attempt at learnign the language of other tribes.

The Pentecostal experience is always a diverse one, for while something like Jürgen Habermas' ideal speech situation arises within it, it need not be accomplished by a liberal public sphere that actually elevates modern individualism and the state’s best interests. We may desire in education to be guided by the dictates of a common reason and common rules of dialogue; however, each moment of contact, of understanding or confusion, is unique though not as an atomic solitary. We should be in education always striving toward a dialogue bounded by faith, hope, and love. This requires a more intuitive, flexible learning, not one subject to predetermined limits as to how conversation will advance.

It does have in mind a certain character of learning. Like any good drama, there are some expected qualitative outcomes to the performance. The Church advances in understanding together with mutual discipleship and holy agape. Our education should have both sides of this cautious truth-seeking at its center. There is, then, an ethic of multi-cultural education, but I would argue that it is not to be found in relativism nor in a supposed neutral secular marketplace of ideas. Instead, a particular practice of incarnational learning must undergird our cultural negotiations, and this calls for humility of learning, even while eschewing a relativism of “equal regard” that hides from itself its worldview. In short, we come to the conversation with a particular set of stories already in place. The language, views, and assumptions of each culture are not left at the door; they are not artifically shifted out by the "rationality" of modern Western Enlightenment. They are each partners in education, even as one tradition acts as the host to the conversation.

Sonya Sotomayor

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_obama_supreme_court
Today, President Obama announced his pick for the replacement of David Souter in the United States Supreme Court. He chose federal appeals judge Sonia Sotomayor. She would be the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice and only the third woman to serve in the Supreme Court. The GOP has been reserved about this announcement stating that we should not “pre-judge” her until the confirmation hearings. Both sides are eagerly reviewing her record to decide if they approve of the President’s nomination.

Delinda White

That was Real?

One of the famous examples of Cold War paranoia inspired cinema is Dr. Strangelove. Strangelove was a dark comedy driven by the legendary performances of George C. Scott and Peter Sellers of Pink Panther fame. Sellers played three roles including the president and an insane scientist who who developed a fail-safe measure that averted a full blown nuclear war while only killing 4o-50 million people.

What a wonderful work of fiction!! The only problem is that the plan was very real!!

More Americans are Pro-Life

This post discusses the latest Gallup Poll result that indicates 51% of all Americans are now pro-life. The author makes the interesting point that this will actually hurt the Republican Party.

So, this story is interesting in that it reports the polling results while providing a compelling example of media "logic" to analyze.

http://www.usnews.com/blogs/erbe/2009/05/15/growing-anti-abortion-ranks-will-keep-republicans-marginalized/comments/

Back to the discussion of democracy and socialism

To hearken back to our discussion on Thursday about democracy and the role of the government - I think Frederic Bastiat's thought can be rather clarifying in this arena.

From Paul A Cleveland's The Life and Work of Frederic Bastiat: One Man's Call for Liberty:

"...Given this understanding of the proper function of the law [the purpose of government is to punish wrongdoers; that is, it is the collective use of force to protect the endowed natural rights of each individual] Bastiat explored the reasons why unconstrained democracy tended toward socialistic policies, as was the case in France during his life. He gave two reasons for this situation: greed and false philanthropy. The first reason is easy to understand. Greed is a powerful passion in the human heart. It leads people bound by its grip to participate in the act of stealing the property of others. Using the power of government to plunder one's neighbor is a very effective means of theft. When an individual is successful at gaining political power so that the collective force is used to seize his neighbor's property he no longer need fear retribution. That is, the thief no longer need worry about being punished for his crime for it has been artificially legitimized. As a result, stealing goes on with impunity. Unfortunately, this situation tends to blur people's vision of the true meaning of justice.

The second reason for the rise of democratic socialism is more subtle. It flows from the individual's desire to have compassion on others. As such, there is an abiding temptation to use the resources one voluntarily controls to lobby legislatures so as to tap into the larger means available in the public treasury. If the efforts are successful, then the individual will be able to control the flow of far more resources for his "good" cause. Ruinously though, such efforts will be at the expense of justice since it perverts the very basis and purpose of the law and allows people to seize property from others by the use of force."