Charles Péguy on the Failure of a Culture

The French poet Charles Péguy in 1910 wrote a lengthy essay Notre Jeunesse (Memories of Youth) in defense of the actions of the party of Dreyfusards, those who defended Captain Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer of Jewish descent. Dreyfus was falsely accused of selling military secrets to the German embassy in Paris. Later exonerated, his case deeply divided the nation along conservative and republican lines, and became a symbol not only for the issue of French antisemiticism, but also for broad political and religious questions, and effected important changes in the official status of the Roman Catholic Church in the country.

Péguy, a Catholic convert and a committed socialist, was also an ardent nationalist, and he wrote Notre Jeunesse to defend the patriotism of his convictions when many saw him as a betrayer of country and of religion. Conservative Catholics on the right were to charge him with disloyalty to the Church, while republicans often held that Catholics could not be true Frenchmen. Yet Péguy also ending up writing an essay that set out his own theory of social and political authenticity.

Péguy held that authentic action for a community arose out of a mystique, a word that can be translated as a faith, a mystery, a tradition, and an operation or action. A mystique is not held by a people consciously, at least not in a way that one debates and studies. It is a more settled way of life and set of convictions that come naturally to a community. The problem is that its mystique could over time become a politique, a political party or theory, an institution imposed from without, a set of values that are debated and proven or disproven but that no longer have a grasp on the community's heart. "Everything begins as a mystique and ends as a politique," he lamented.

As a Catholic and political progressive, Péguy took the radical step of arguing that "the derepublicanization of France is essentially the same movement as the de-Christianization of France. Both together are one and the same movement, a profound demystification." Both are a kind of idolatrous and yet sterile modernization that substitutes profound belief and action for cynical theorization and manipulation of an older language.

Péguy goes on to point out that mystiques treat each other in different ways that politiques even when they are in disagreement. The former are far less violent and oppressive, and when they are enemies, the distinction is "at a much deeper, more essential level, and with an infinitely nobler profundity." It is as simple as the distinction between rival virtue and rival malice. Péguy insists, then, that it is a mistake to compare the mystique of one position with the politique of another. The worst sin of all, however, is to pretend to be of a mystique while actually playing the game of the politique: "To steal from the poor is to steal twice. To deceive the simple is to deceive twice over. To steal the most precious thing of all, belief. Confidence."

A true mystique is marked by ardent loyalty, by love. Only what one is prepared to die for can reveal what one truly believes. "The only strength, the only dignity that exists, is to be loved. . . . Puns will not restore a culture." Péguy's formulation raises a profound and important question for social and political change: how do you know when a people, tradition, culture, or community is truly possessed by a faith rather than theoretical language alone that can be easily adopted without conviction? Moreover, once that mystique is lost, can it be recovered, and it political action useful unless it is?

Emmanuel Mounier and Realities of Personalism

Emmanuel Mounier's 1949 volume Personalism represents his mature thought on the ideological and political position by that name that he helped promote in France during the first half of the twentieth century. While Mounier's career as a writer and social critic had been dedicated to a criticism of bourgeois liberal society, the Second World War forced him to recognize the potential for totalitarian abuse in both communist and fascist governments. Unlike his Catholic counterpart Jacques Maritain who came to support something like Wilsonian democracy, Mounier in his remaining few years was more drawn to a socialist vision. Nonetheless, Personalism,as Mounier himself admitted, did not necessarily obligate its adherents to one political platform. Indeed, one wonders that if Mounier had lived, might he have developed a personalist critique of socialism as well?

Mounier begins his slim volume by observing how the Christian notion of the person challenged ancient Greco-Roman notions:

1. Christianity counters the classic distrust of multiplicity with a notion of God's unity working itself out in the diversity of human actions of love.
2. The human being is increasingly understood as "an indissoluble whole" rather than a conglomerate of various elements.
3. God is personal and offers a personal relationship of intimacy and participation to each person.
4. The kingdom of God is not an abstract ideal but a promise of a transformed world and a changed inner heart.
5. God created persons as free creatures to grow and mature.
6. The Incarnation brings together heaven and earth, the mystical and the physical into a complex and affirming unity.

Personalism, Mounier insisted, is not Hegelian idealism, but a recognition of the embodied nature of human beings who in transforming the material, natural world are to "liberate things as well as humanity" (12). Wisdom, in its industry, does not exploit material existence but humanizes the natural world, a world "red in tooth and claw" (to recall Tennyson) which so often seems against us. Thus, we are possessed of a "tragic optimism," even in the face of struggle and effort.

Personalism is also not individualism, which Mounier dismissed as "a system of morals, feelings, ideas, and institutions in which individuals can be organized by their mutual isolation and defense" (18). Personalism is instead fueled by the drive to "decentralize" the human self, to give of oneself, donate oneself to others. Without communication comes madness; without giving comes destruction. We become fully persons as we embrace "an economic of donation, not of compensation nor of calculation," as we give ourselves to others in self-bestowal. This also requires a stability of faithful relations with persons across time and space. We can best be faithful to those we remain with long-term.

Mounier had little patience with romanticizing a communal past of small villages, and he upheld not only the notion of human equality but human rights as that which protects and makes human freedom possible. Yet he also stressed the need for people to divest themselves of property and wealth in giving to others, thereby achieving their own personal and spiritual maturity. He imagined this affirmation of love as one requiring struggle both inwardly and outwardly, for the virtue of fortitude was absolutely necessary for personal growth.

Mournier also rejected notions of freedom either as indifference to the physical world or as pure spontaneity of action. Freedom is instead human love working its way out in responsibility. "Our liberties can be no more than opportunities offered to the spirit of freedom" (62). Freedom and personality fulfill themselves in the higher transcendence of a divine purpose: "My freedom itself comes to me as something given: its supreme moments are not those in which I exercise most will-power; they are moments rather of giving-way, or of offering myself to freedom newly encountered or to a value that I love" (66).

Still, Mounier the activist realized that political responses were inevitably compromised. He held that the political and prophetic voices must listen to each other, as well as other kinds of gestures and movements, such as those of industry and contemplation. "Nevertheless, though to 'engage' oneself is to consent to make-shift, to something impure, . . .and to accept one's limitations," he observed; "it does not sanctify one's abdication of personality to any abandonment of the values that it serves. . . . The troubled and sometimes agonized conscience caused by the impurities of our cause should keep us far from fanaticism, in a state of vigilant criticism. . . . The risks we have to run, and the partial obscurity in which we have to take decisions, put us in the state of dispossession, insecurity and hardihood which is the climate of all great action" (92-3).

Mourier held out hope that the slow death of Christendom promised a Christianity "slowly returning to it first position; renouncing government upon earth and outward appearance of sanctification to achieve the unique work of the Church, the community of Christians in Christ, mingles among all men in the secular work,--neither theocracy nor liberalism, but a return to the double rigours of transcendence and incarnation" (122).

Christopher Lasch on the Need for a 3rd Way

The late Christopher Lasch is perhaps best known for his classic work of cultural critique The Culture of Narcissism in which he examines how the turn to a therapeutic culture set American society on an inward course that undercuts the basic civic structure necessary for healthy and fulfilling social life. The danger is that of the "Promethean self" that evaluates all of life's goods by its own self-centered calculus. In his sequel, The Minimal Self, Lasch examines how amidst an environment of threat and danger (e.g. escalating crime, terrorism, arms races, etc.) people turn from the Promethean self to a reduced minimal narcissism that seems to combine both self-sufficiency and self-renunciation. Survival and pessimism become the centers of such selves. Both options are fianlly deeply inward and selfish.

Lasch's last important work was The True and Only Heaven, a history of the populist movement in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its criticism both of the unfettered market system and of the liberal state and the planned economy. In the last few pages of his groundbreaking history, Lasch offers his own opinion that any new populism would learn from the old populism in its critiques but it would have to offer an entirely different vision of wealth and community.

Lasch was something of a pundit, hated by both the Left and the Right, and was even a measured critic of the communitarianism of those like Amitai Etzioni, which he criticized as being concerned with political agendas without being concerned with moral life and personal change. Here's an example of his basic analysis:

"On the one hand, the market appears to be the ideal embodiment of the principle--the cardinal principle of liberalism--that individuals are the best judges of their own interests and that they must therefore be allowed to speak for themselves in matters that concern their own happiness and well-being. But individuals cannot learn to speal for themselves at all, much less come to an intelligent understanding of their happiness and well-being, in a world in which there are no values except that of the market. Even liberal individuals require the character-forming discipline of the family, the neighborhood, the school, and the church--all of which (not just the family) have been weakened by the encroachments of the market. The market notoriously tends to universalize itself. It does not easily coexist with institutions that operate according to principles antithetical to itself--schools and universities, newspapers and magazines, charities, families. Sooner or later the market tends to absorb them all. It puts an almost irresistible pressure on every activity to justify itself in the only terms it recognizes--to become a business proposition, to pay its way, to show black print on the bottom line. . . .

"In the attempt to restrict the scope of the market, liberals have therefore turned to the state. But the remedy often proves to be worse than the disease. The replacement of informal types of association by formal systems of socialization and control weakens social trust; undermines the willingness both to assume responsiblity for oneself and to hold others accountable for their actions; destroys respect for authority; and thus turns out to be self-defeating. Consider the fate of neighborhoods that serve so effectively, at their best, as intermediaries between family and the larger world. Neighborhoods have been destroyed not only by the market. . . but also by enlightened social engineering. . . .

"Communitarians regret the collapse of social trust but often fail to see that, in a democracy, trust can only be grounded in mutual respect. They properly insist that rights have to be balance by responsibility, but they seem to be more interested in the responsibility of the community as a whole--its responsibility, say, to its least fortunate members--than in the responsibility of individuals. We have become far too accommodating and tolerant for our own good." ("Communitarianism or Populism? 60-1, 64)

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow -- Part 3

The Humanities as Salvific Culture

From here on I would like to focus more on the literary side of this debate and the history that undergirds it.

Snow himself rightly understood that Trilling's "freedom from society" was at odds with his own social collective project (96). From whence comes this salvific mission for the teaching, indeed, the politics of the humanities? The mid-to-late 19th century was an important shift in pedagogy from the study of classics for language, logic, rhetoric, and general "mental toughness" to the study of the humanities as cultivating refinement and nobility of mind and eventually as new specialized academic disciplines. "One wonders how much Milton's prominence in literature classes after 1860 owes to his earlier ubiquity in rhetoric courses:" observe historians John Robert and James Turner, "if you could parse Paradise Lost, you could parse anything" (77).

This shift away from classical studies was due in part to the growing loss of a Protestant Christian cohesive vision of education before the Darwinian onslaught, but it was as much due to the in-flux of the German research model, The specialization that Snow would come to partially lament in the next century was required by the new sciences. The humanities ironically first arose in response to this division of knowledge. President Charles W. Eliot, for example, most noted for Harvard's move to the elective system, felt that the students needed some sort of civilizing influence to replace the old Protestant hegemony and looked to the humanities to provide it (81). Specialization at the time was an academic novelty because the classic, old-time college could not conceive equipping one student in a different fashion from another. Despite its adaptation at Harvard and the rise of Brown as the first American research university, the new practice was resisted at many colleges well until after 1900 precisely because it conceived of professorial loyalty as beholding to national and disciplinary organizations rather than to the local college and its surrounding community (Roberts and Turner chapter 5).

And it was precisely non-specialization that the humanities seemed to require. The realm of "culture" was handed the civilizing mission once accorded the senior capstone study of moral philosophy in the old colleges. In the place of its synthesis of Scottish Common Sense Realist philosophy, republican democratic political theory, and broadly evangelical piety, stood sympathy and feeling through an exposure to culture. Humanities instructors and scholars, like Charles Eliot Norton, held that cultural items--art, architecture, music, literature--revealed the spirit of a people; this had both objective and subjective qualities--it could be taught and it could be observed. Norton saw in the rise of the humanities three elements to replace the fading of Christian conviction:

1. the nurture aesthetic sensibilities through literary and artistic works;
2. the professorial linkages across cultural eras and times;
3. and the praise of European civilization as a kind of supercultural whole, though in all fairness Norton did not see Europe as the sole bearer of "civilization" (102-103).

Culture, however understood, became encoded with secular soteriological claims. Its purpose was to provide a comprehensive set of values, meanwhile leaving the physical condition of life to the natural (and eventually social) sciences.

As Turner points out, Norton substituted the vertical connection of humanity to God with a horizontal one of people to people (380). For Norton, the intuition of beauty was a product of human cultural progress. He understood beauty to be tied to moral desires, so that to cultivate one was to nurture the other. Imagination was at the heart of perceiving beauty; he saw this as an intellectual faculty obtained through "reflection, comparison, and remininscence" of images and other sense impressions (Liberal Education 382). In this sense, Norton's project represented the transition between other common sense realist claims for the moral sympathies and the eventually move to moral pragmatism. Turner claims that "Norton invented Western civilization" (384) in the sense that he put together a pedagogical and ideological program out of what others were suggesting piecemeal (384).

Yet at the project's heart were the conditions for its demise. Philology as the study, reconstruction, and interpretation of ancient texts formed the backbone of 18th and 19th century German university research and formed the basis for Norton's project. Philology was guided by cultural context and historicism (Roberts and Turner 97ff.); the first demanded a sense of the ancient culture's differences, while the second taught the constant change and evolution of cultures over time. In the end philological historicism within the humanities worked against anything like holism and eventually opened the way for a non-Christian soteriology to take its seat at the heart of university education, dismissing a unified or normative knowledge. It created a religion of cultivation, but one increasingly subject to emotivist ethics and relativistic truth claims.

By positioning ultimate meaning within the social and artistic milieu alone, it opened the door for William James' judgment of religion as capacity of supernatural feeling, but one without any final truth claims. For James, "Christianity makes sense only as disguised humanism" (Hauerwas 64). Prayer is only subjective authenticity and theological claims are only "over-beliefs" arising from religious feeling (66-68). There can be no final adjudication of what is true. Theologian Ernst Troeltsch would come to label this phenomena the "crisis of historicism" (119), one in which human culture could make only an agnostic gesture to the possibility of something beyond.

And this is what is at the heart of the Snow-Leavis debate. The two were, ironically, more in agreement than one might first think: both see the individual as primary and the conditions of life as finally oppressive and needing to be mitigated. Both also put something like an implicit trust in the humanities as offering the individual some surfeit from societal and biological meaninglessness. For Snow, however, only science can offer physical prosperity, which must be approached collectively while for Leavis and Trilling, the "criticism of life" offers a chance for freedom from the technopoly's oppression and operative conformity. Yet neither can reach a common basis for their pedagogical platforms. It is also highly questionable whether Trilling's attempt to adjudicate the two is any more successful.

Compare their assumptions with contemporary definitions of culture that Trilling recommended to his fellow Liberals in the 1940 Parisian Review, not for their "allegiance" but for their serious "consideration" (22). Historian Christopher Dawson and T.S. Eliot, whom Dawson influenced as part of The Moot and The Sword of the Spirit intellectual and ecumenical circles, held that culture and religion could not separated; indeed, a culture's without a religion was in the process of dying. Dawson held, "We cannot separate culture from religion any more than we can separate our life from our faith. As a living faith must change the life of the believer, so a living religion must influence and transform the social way of life" (Historic Reality 68). Religion, even if observed sociologically, is not one more sociological section of culture; it is not a sign system giving ritual meaning to otherwise material and psychological insufficiencies. Dawson charged that the material reading of history is not wrong to judge some "spiritual aspects of culture as conditioned by its material elements, but in the assertion of an absolute casual dependence of the former on the latter" (Enquiries vii). For Eliot, a people's religion and their culture are intertwined, perhaps really two aspects of the same thing, "culture being, essentially, the incarnation (so to speak) of the religion of a people" (101). Culture is "a whole way of life" (103) and a "lived religion" (104). But no people ever have a perfectly pure religion. Europe, thinks Eliot, has always been more or less Christian but not totally so. By incarnation, the, he means neither a simple relation nor an absolute identification (105ff.). Instead, he sees the two as operating in something like a tandem:

An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian could have reproduced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche. I do not believe that the culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian Faith. And I am convinced of that, not merely because I am a Christian myself, but as a student of social biology. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. (200)

As we move into what many see as a post-Christian Europe, the jury remains out as to whether Eliot is correct.

What Trilling found attractive in Eliot's position was the promise of something beyond dialectical materialism of the Left: "What is meant negatively is that man cannot be comprehended in a formula; what is meant positively is the sense of complication and possibility, of surprise, intensification, variety, unfoldment, worth" (29-30). Trilling found in Eliot's politics the hope of a humanity not reducible to the Soviet overman nor the capitalist consumer. He approved in Eliot that "politics is to be judged by what it does for moral perfection, rather than the physical easement of man" (27). Trilling longed for something like a spiritual component to the human culture, even if was unable to conclude that "supernaturalism can aid us" (32).

Even if one finds aspects of Dawson and Eliot's historiography wanting, nonetheless, their insights leave those of us who teach literature in a confessional setting with a particular dilemma that I can only sketch in outline here: Can Trilling and Leavis' answer to Snow be our own? In light of the soteriological substitution each is making, should we be seeking to liberate our students from their cultural parameters? Likewise, what is the relationship between the cultures we study and the faith culture we consciously or unconsciously cultivate in our students' educations?

Are We Really Paying You for This?

I like sports. College football is one of my favorite things. Most college football fans suffer constant frustration regarding the inability of the college football power brokers to develop a playoff system. I know it frustrates me.

However, I personally do not believe this issue possesses enough significance for Congress to call two hearings! So, Joe Barton and Orrin Hatch cannot find enough to do with the economy, Iraq, Iran and Honduras on the table? Really!!

Here are some of my thoughts. First, stop wasting your time and my tax dollars grand standing!! Second, this article ably lays out why Congress does not have the ability to enact meaningful reform. So, why hold hearings unless you need yet another opportunity to look tough with your fake bravado and anger!

Finally, the BCS is a prime example of the haves getting their way while the have-nots get in line with the hope of securing a top tier bowl. In a battle of the haves vs. the have-nots, which side do politicians generally take?

The Fog of War

One of the more famous and controversial figures of the 20Th century passed away recently. I am referring of course to Robert Strange McNamara. You were thinking of someone else?

McNamara was famous because he was appointed president of Ford Motors and Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy Administration before his 45Th birthday. In fact, he was the first Ford president outside of the Ford family.

McNamara possessed a rigid and rational mind honed by statistical analysis. His belief in rational policy analysis transformed both the Ford Motor Company and America's military structure.

However, rational analysis does not work for every issue or challenge. War serves as a prime example. McNamara believed he could manage war like he managed an assembly line or a budget. He was wrong and the Vietnam War serves as a constant reminder.

Additionally, another issue with McNamara was his relationship with the truth. He has a way of remembering decisions that absolved him of failure and criticism.

Interesting person. Interesting life.

Bridging the Two Cultures of C.P Snow-- Part 1

Over the next week or so, I want to indulge in a little intellectual history. I want to explore a debate from the 1950s and 60s about the nature of culture, science, and the humanities. What I want to show is how even "secular" debates often mask religious desires. I hope you'll find this interesting.
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"We accordingly rejoice in the fact of the increased popularity of the university in both of its functions--that of culture and that of specialization"
--William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education (1898)

In his 1959 Rede Lectures, the scientist-novelist C.P. Snow argued that the intellectual world of the West had become bifurcated between the culture of scientists and that of literary intellectuals. While Snow purported to seek a détente between the literary academy and the scientific one, his sympathies were clearly with the later. "Industrialisation is the only hope of the poor," he charged,

It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialisation-- do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of you aesthetic revulsion. But I don't respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose. (25-26)

In Snow's view, the literati who wanted to naysay a world of industrial progress are pampered and naïve at best. They exist in isolation from the world's need, living off the prosperity that science has brought their own nations. In his 1963, "A Second Look," Snow went further, painting the modernist school of Lawrence, Eliot and Pound as Luddite and Fascist all at once. He expressed incredulity and contempt, charging that those who dream of a pre-industrial world, really are ignorant as to what makes their own ease possible:

What is a machine-tool? I once asked a literary party; and they looked shifty. Unless one knows, industrial production is as mysterious as witch-doctoring. Or take buttons. Buttons aren't very complicated things: they are being made in millions every day: one has to be a reasonably ferocious Luddite not to think that that is, on the whole, an estimable activity. Yet I would bet that out of men getting first in arts subject at Cambridge this year, not one in ten could give the loosest analysis of the human organisation which it needs. (30)

Snow put much of the blame for this on an educational system arising out of Oxford and Cambridge that stressed over-specialization. The literary types simply never had enough mathematical training. Snow admitted that dangers could lie with natural science, as well, especially of the applied sort, but he felt the greater problem was with a culture of literature that denied applied science's promise for ending global poverty: "Literary intellectuals represent, vocalize, and to some extent shape and predict the mood of the non-scientific culture: they do not make the decisions, but their words seep into the minds of those who do" (61).

Thus, he envisioned a literary culture committed to the promise of applied science's technology, taking their lead from those who knew better how to mitigate the suffering of the physical world. "Changes in education are not going to produce miracles," he observed, but specialized education was a roadblock to a sympathetic public committed to such an expansive social hope.

Between the Rede Lectures and A Second Look, Snow had had cause to stop and consider the other side. His 1960 Godkin Lectures at Harvard, later published as Science and Government examined the inflated scientific council F.A. Lindemann had given the British government during World War II in regards to bombing in Germany. Snow wondered, "Will they say . . . we were wolves with the minds of men? Will they think that we resigned our humanity?" (Shusterman 27-28). He understood that especially in applied science, ethical reflection was a necessity, and he seemed to hope that the artistic culture might offer some help, but clearly he conceived this as one that takes its lead form the inevitable industrial, technological revolution.

While Snow himself was more interested in the larger social mileu within which higher education played a role, his claims about education nonetheless touched a real cord in the nerves of many academicians. His lectures set off an angry public contest, what one writer called, "the Great debate of our age" (Shusterman 25). Literary critic F. R. Leavis' 1960 Richmond Lecture “Two Cultures? The Significance of Lord Snow,” being the most infamous moment, was more a diatribe and a rant than a reasoned answer, so much so that it outraged even the literary set. He accused Snow's culture of science being nothing but unthinking materialism, where "no one will long consent to be without abundant jam, salvation, and lasting felicity to mankind" (59). Leavis' attack was in fact a response to The Two Cultures being used as a secondary school text and was given before a private audience. He only released the text publicly once it had been leaked by one of the attendees and had made its way into the papers.

Unfortunately Leavis' most insightful questions were obscured by the bile and dismissal of Snow's own abilities as a novelist. Nor did it slow down the public's interest in the lectures. By 1961, Snow's original work had already gone through seven printings. Leavis followed in 1966 with "Luddites? Or There is Only One Culture," insisting that human understanding, language, and the university function "as a focus of consciousness and human responsibility" (96) in imparting Western civilization to the next generation, so the humanities should be at the core of a college education.

Part of what makes Snow's and Leavis' polemics still worth reading is that they exemplify fundamental disagreements as to the sciences and the humanities' educational roles within modern society, and yet I will charge when seen from the vantage point of theological conviction, they are curiously alike.

They are, as I will argue this week, two competing soteriologies, seeking to free the individual in some way from an oppressive world of biological or technological necessity. Both seek a reform in education as a way of creating a new class of persons able to work social and moral change, yet both are blind to the spiritual dimension of the polis they seek.

Hate Crimes Bill

Here is my blog post. Thanks!
Title - Hate Crimes Bill
A Hate Crimes bill was recently introduced to the Senate titled the Matthew
Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act while a similar bill was also passed in
the house. "The legislation is intended by its sponsors to protect
homosexuals and transgendered people from violent hate crimes by expanding a
list of federally protected groups to include sexual orientation, gender,
gender identity and disability". Coral Ridge Ministries is claiming that the
hate bill can have negative impacts on the Christian community and possibly
limit free speech for those speaking out against homosexuality. "Although
the Senate version contains provisions that appear to protect constitutional
speech and free expression, Parshall contended they are just "nice political
banter" for debate that are not substantial protection for free speech."
Many Christians have claimed that there has been an increase in backlash
towards Christians because of things like Prop 8 or even Miss California's
comments.
Having punishment against hate crimes is a good thing and as Christians we
should love everyone, but do you feel that this type of bill could limit
free speech?

Andrea Brooks
http://www.christianpost.com/Ministries/Culture/2009/05/ministry-hate-crimes-law-will-fuel-hostility-toward-traditional-morality-17/index.html

Jack Kemp, RIP

I have delayed a post on Jack Kemp's passing for too long. He was one of the most interesting members of Congress and the Republican Party. A creative thinker with a keen mind, he was more private regarding his Christian faith compared to other aspiring politicos which may be another way of saying he never leveraged his relationship with Christ for political gain.

Sadly, the Republican Party and George H.W. Bush chose Dan Quayle for the veep slot in 1988 when Kemp was ready to assume the mantle. Kemp did not realize his opportunity until 1996 with the DOA Dole campaign.

One of my favorite writers is Gregg Easterbrook. Easterbrook is one of the more interesting public policy authors on the web and in print. He is a fellow at the Brookings Institute.

Odd as it may sound, his most widely read work is on ESPN.com. He writes a football column there covering the NFL as well as whatever he finds important at the moment. He penned a nice article that illuminates Kemp's legacy.

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/

Visual of the day - $100 mil savings in context!

Those of us worried about the size of the US Federal Government spending and the current and future Federal Debt listened carefully as President Obama explained how money will be saved. The above is a brief video that helps put Obama's proposed savings in the larger context of the actual size of the Federal Government spending.

I was perusing a report from a Federal Reserve Conference that Jekabs and I both attended last November. The topic was the state of the economy and how the fed planned on intervening in the future. In reality, this conference played more like a horror movie convention rife with gloom and doom.

Here is a little nugget filled to the brim with a dash of gloom and a heaping tablespoon of doom:

•75-year unfunded liabilities from entitlement programs sum to $40.3T.
–Social Security $4.3T
–Medicare Part A $12.4T
–Medicare Part B $15.7T
–Medicare Part D $7.9T
–Medicare represents almost 90% of the problem. Privatizing SSN will not work-reduce deficit.

To summarize, projected revenues for Social Security and Medicare falls short of expected budget needs by $40.3 trillion over the next 75 years. Again, that figure does not represent the total amount required to fund the programs through 2084. The programs will be in the red by that amount.

So, how do we as a country close the gap? Here are two viable options. I use the term "viable" very loosely:
•Total per-capita entitlement debt of $330K –to close gap.
•Could raise indiv. Income tax rates by 85%.– (Relative to current 8.9% of GDP)
–This is a static estimate•
could cut discretionary spending by 97%.– (Relative to current 7.8% of GDP)

•could make no tax or spending changes.

Your eyes do not deceive. We would need to either raise individual income tax rates by 85% or reduce discretionary government spending by 97%.

Have a good weekend!!

Huckabee Loves the Arts!!

One of the required projects in my American government course calls for students to create a piece of legislation based on an issue near and dear to their hearts. A student from one of my summer courses authored a bill that would increase federal funding for teaching students art and music in public schools.

You see, No Child Left Behind as well as the focus on standardized testing of academic "fundamentals" by the state of Texas frustrated this student. She had always dreamed of teaching art and music but was convinced that creativity was a luxury doomed to the low-priorities file.

However, my former student has a new champion in former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee. The former Republican presidential candidate calls for a renewed emphasis in the arts:


"I call it a weapon of mass instruction. It's a critical part of education," Huckabee said during a visit to Northern Virginia last weekend. "A lot of education today has become left-brain only. All we're doing is . . . nothing more than data download: taking data from the teacher and downloading it to kids. And we wonder why 6,000 kids drop out of school every day and why so many millions more kids sleep through the day with their heads down on the desk, taking the most expensive nap in America. The reason they're doing it is not that they're dumb but that they're bored."

He added: "If you don't stimulate both sides of a human's brain, you're simply generating half the capacity. This whole idea that music and art are great programs if you can afford them and have room for them -- that's utter nonsense. It's the stupidest thing we've done to education in the last two generations."

Huckabee, a former minister, speaks from personal interest: His parents bought him a $99 guitar when he was 11 years old, and he's played ever since, eventually becoming the bassist for a Little Rock band, Capitol Offense, that has played with Grand Funk Railroad, Willie Nelson and REO Speedwagon, among others. As governor, he pushed through a 2005 law requiring elementary schools to offer 40 minutes per week of music and art and requiring high school students to take at least a half-year of art, music or dance to graduate.


Good stuff!! I heartily concur that education exists to mold the entire person as opposed to creating a generation of technocrats. This is at the heart of higher education grounded in the liberal arts.

Here is a link to the article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/28/AR2007082801711.html

Graph of the day - uninsured

How big is the problem of the 'uninsured' in the US? Various numbers tell different stories. Typical number of people lacking health insurance is 45 million of those living in the US. The graph above (from keithhennesey.com) shows that the worrisome number is probably somewhat less than 45 million. As Keith Hennesey writes,

• "Of that amount, 6.4 million are the Medicaid undercount. These are people who are on one of two government health insurance programs, Medicaid or S-CHIP, but mistakenly (intentionally or not) tell the Census taker that they are uninsured. There is disagreement about the size of the Medicaid undercount. This figure is based on a 2005 analysis from the Department of Health and Human Services.
• Another 4.3 million are eligible for free or heavily subsidized government health insurance (again, either Medcaid or SCHIP), but have not yet signed up. While these people are not pre-enrolled in a health insurance program and are therefore counted as uninsured, if they were to go to an emergency room (or a free clinic), they would be automatically enrolled in that program by the provider after receiving medical care. There’s an interesting philosophical question that I will skip about whether they are, in fact, uninsured, if technically they are protected from risk.
• Another 9.3 million are non-citizens. I cannot break that down into documented vs. undocumented citizens.
• Another 10.1 million do not fit into any of the above categories, and they have incomes more than 3X the poverty level. For a single person that means their income exceeded $30,600 in 2007, when the median income for a single male was $33,200 and for a female, $21,000. For a family of four, if your income was more than 3X the poverty level in 2007, you had $62,000 of income or more, and you were above the national median.
• Of the remaining 15.6 million uninsured, 5 million are adults between ages 18 and 34 and without kids."

Here is more on the uninsured.

The "Forceful" Aquinas

Two interesting quotations from Thomas Aquinas that pertain to our present concerns:

"A law is imposed on others by way of a rule and measure. Now a rule or measure is imposed by being applied to those who are to be ruled and measured by it. Wherefore, in order that a law may obtain the binding force which is proper to a law, it must needs be applied to the men who have to be ruled by it. Such application is made by its being notified to them by promulgation. Wherefore promulgation is necessary for the law to obtain its force" (I-II, 90, 4).

"But since some are found to be depraved, and prone to vice, and not easily amenable to words, it was necessary for such to be restrained from evil by force and fear, in order that, at least, they might desist from evil-doing, and leave others in peace, and that they themselves, by being habituated in this way, might be brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear, and thus become virtuous. Now this kind of training, which compels through fear of punishment is the discipline of laws" (I-II, 95, 1).

Graph of the day - Tax burden in the US

From the Congressional Budget Office (CBO): it is interesting to see how much taxes people pay when the tax-payers are categorized in income quintiles. Here is the data for the above graph, and here are some more charts from CBO.

Preaching v. Policy

When discussing political economy from a Christian perspective, or even business goals from a Christian perspective, I frequently run into the problem of having long conversations, with each party talking about a subject from rather different perspective, without knowing it. Often I talk about issues from the "policy-making" perspective while the opponent addresses the issue from the "preaching perspective".

The "policy-making" perspective is chiefly concerned with questions such as

• How should a good nation be run?
• What kind of political system is consistent with Christian principles?
• Is there one political system that is better than others in allowing us to be good stewards of our resources?

Clearly, these are important questions. In today's inaugural interdisciplinary discussion, for example, a question was raised about how should we feel responsible to our fellow men. Is an ordinary person in a nation responsible for providing for an elderly stranger who is facing expensive medical treatments? I tend to immediately gravitate to answering this question from the "policy-making" perspective, and argue that a political system should respect a person's right to his own life first and foremost, thus ordinarily an inhabitant of the nation could not be forced to surrender her earnings on behalf of a stranger for the stranger's medical care or a stranger's farm subsidy. Certainly, there can be a disagreement on this issue, but at least I want to clarify that I am approaching this issue from a policy standpoint, not from the "preaching" standpoint.

Alternatively, one may address issues like this from a "preaching" standpoint. From this perspective one would be concerned with questions such as

• How does the Bible teach Christians to act?
• To live as a Christian with integrity, do I need to abide by a certain norm in this area

Again - these are important questions. But, interestingly, approaching an issue from this perspective will often lead to a seemingly different conclusion. Again - one might ask how should we feel responsible to our fellow men? Is an ordinary person in a nation responsible for providing for an elderly stranger who is facing expensive medical treatments? From the so called "preaching" perspective, I see that many might argue that there is only one response that is consistent with Christian living - Christians are called to feel responsible for those in need. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, Jesus calls his followers to be concerned for strangers.

Thus, it is entirely possible (as I have experienced on multiple occasions) to be talking about a certain (political economy) issue with an appearance of a disagreement, while in reality the two people are simply assuming a different perspective - either a preaching perspective or a policy perspective. So while one person says "We should NOT be made responsible for a stranger in need!" and the other says "Yes we should be responsible for a stranger in need!" perhaps there may be no disagreement at all, just a different perspective that is adopted without being spoken?