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Explaining America's New Place in the World

There has been a near constant stream of commentary from right-wing pundits claiming that America is in a headlong retreat from the world and that it is all President Obama's fault.  If the President only stood taller, if he only spoke louder, if he only rolled up his sleeves and flexed his biceps, then the world would fall into line.  Just like in the good old days.

Rhetoric like this might have made sense in the 1980's or even in the 1990's, but I think it is clear that such language no longer usefully contributes to America's standing in the world.  From the close of World War II through the twilight of the George W. Bush Administration, America defined its place in the world essentially by means of its military superiority, if not its supremacy.  Yes, America exercised "soft power."  Yes, America was generous with its peace-building initiatives, and the American volunteer spirit was -- and is -- alive and well in service organizations like the Peace Corps.  But the world was always aware that behind these ventures stood an American military that was ready to act in clearly defined ways.

Unquestionably, the Obama Administration has changed the ways the United States projects force.  The United States cautiously aided the British and the French in Libya; it threatened force in Syria after President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons, but then sheathed its sword when it seemed diplomacy might resolve the crisis; it negotiated with Iran over its emerging nuclear capability rather than blustered. To be sure, the United States still knows how to use lethal force -- principally, however, this force is used in precisely-executed drone strikes or the lightning attacks of America's special forces.

So, America does not casually threaten war the way it once did and the world is not of a mind to pay heed anyway.  Why?  What is causing this tectonic shift in the way American force is asserted and perceived around the globe?  I think that the confluence of two larger phenomena are at work here:  The first is a sea-change in the way the American public views military engagement.  And the second is an equally dramatic shift in the nature of global confrontation itself.

Let's begin with the war-weariness of the American public.  Absent a compelling threat to the United States, there is substantial evidence that the American public would reject military involvement nearly everywhere.  Consider the polling on Syria from last August and September, after it became known that Assad had gassed his people.  While Americans were appalled at Assad's crimes, they were unwilling to commit to a military response.  A CNN poll released the first week of September indicated 59 percent opposition to military intervention.  A USA Today/Pew Research poll released in the same time frame revealed 63 percent opposition.

This war-weariness (war-wariness might be an even better term) is traceable in significant part to America's ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan.  The Iraq invasion was sold as saving America from mushroom clouds, anthrax, and sarin gas.  And then no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq.  Then what was sold as a brief war of liberation transmuted into a grueling, grinding guerrilla war against an unwelcome American presence.  Even Afghanistan devolved into an ambiguous conflict -- yes, al-Qaeda attacked us from bases in Afghanistan, but al-Qaeda is a murky entity, present in small cells throughout the Islamic World.  Indeed, when al-Qaeda's guiding spirit, Osama bin-Laden, was finally tracked down, he was in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

A second factor contributing this shift in public sentiment is the rise of the millenial generation as a political force.  The millenials are the first American generation in nearly a century to come of age in a world not shaped by binary global confrontation.  There is no Hitler rising in Germany.  There are no Axis powers overrunning the world.  We are not fighting small wars in Korea or Vietnam that are sold and explained as adjuncts of that vast morality play known as the Cold War.  To the extent that there has been international conflict in the last fifteen years, it has been of a limited and morally ambiguous kind.

Indeed, what colors the experience of millenials is not global conflict but the tenuous nature of the American economy.  Late-stage capitalism, with its relentless cost-shifting onto those with the least power of resistance, has hollowed out the hopes and dreams of the millenial generation.  You need a college education or a professional degree to get ahead, they are told.  And, thanks to right-wing economists who have undermined the American belief in education as a public good, this has become an increasingly pricey proposition.  So millenials are forced to borrow.  And then they enter a job market that devours its young.  For entirely understandable reasons, this is not a generation much inclined to pay heed to the old-fashioned saber-rattling that right wingers find so appealing and that once had the power to stir American hearts.

Immigration has also played a role in reshaping public mood.    The United States has been refreshed from its beginning by immigrants, and we are now welcoming new arrivals from throughout the world -- Africa, Asia, Latin America.  The United States is becoming a microcosm of the world, and this is a very good thing.  Like millenials, however, America's new immigrant communities have no memory of the Cold War. And that truly matters.  The Cold War was sold to the American people as a moral confrontation, a show-down between good and evil.  Soviet Russia was dictatorial, expansionist, subversive, bent on global domination by fair means or foul.  Several generations of Americans came of age ardently believing in this account.  It echoes still in the ears of many people over the age of forty.

Immigrants, however, like millenials have no direct experience of this decades-long confrontation.  It does not form part of their collective unconscious.  Their experience of the world is shaped, quite understandably, by the politics of their old homelands and the exigencies of making a living in their new abode.

For a President to threaten force, that President must have the backing of the American people. And the dominant trope used to obtain that support, from Inchon to Baghdad, was the Cold War's "good versus evil."  Millenials and immigrants, for entirely praiseworthy reasons, are no longer convinced by explanations that rely on this outdated narrative.  Many older Americans, soured by Iraq and Afghanistan, also have their suspicions.

The other large phenomenon reshaping America's place in the world, then, is the nature of global confrontation itself.  The Cold War was never truly reducible to "good versus evil."  Too many other factors were always at work -- nationalism, anti-colonialism, competing economic interests, the ambitions of regional players.  But policy-makers were generally able to make use of "us-versus-them" morality to rally the public.

But how do you do that in Syria?  Assad is a brutal, murderous human being.  He needs to be removed from office.  All civilized women and men agree on that.  But how?  You don't want to empower al-Qaeda, which is steadily building a foothold in that battered land.  They are every bit as wicked as Assad.  The world agrees on the end result, but it is the means to get there that is the challenge.  Prudence is the virtue that world leaders must exercise.

Consider also Iran.  No one wants a nuclear Iran.  But is confrontation the best policy? The Iranian theocracy is doddering.  It has lost the support of the people and struggles to win even the elections it fixes.  The imams who govern Iran may be gerontological marvels, but even gerontocracies finally run out of time.  Patience serves our interests well.

In other words, I believe that President Obama is probably handling world events about as well as they can be handled.  He seems to have a good feel for American public opinion.  And he appreciates the complexity of the global order.  He has finally the right blend of virtues -- prudence, patience, and real decisiveness, exercised quietly.  We may not yet be able to speak of an Obama Doctrine, but when we do, I suspect it will take account of the points I've raised above.

Cross-posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/explaining-americas-new-p_b_4849676.html 

Nullification: The Shame of Missouri

White supremacists and slave owners invented the doctrine of nullification -- the idea that the States possess the right to defy federal law where a State has concluded that the law in question was unconstitutional. Most Americans, I am sure, were confident that this idea died a well-deserved death at the time of the Civil War.

Regrettably, this is not the case. It seems that just days ago, on February 20, the Republican-controlled State Senate of Missouri revived that odious doctrine by passing a bill known as the "Second Amendment Preservation Act."  People who believe in the rule of law and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution must speak out to denounce this dangerous gambit.

Let us consider the legislation in question. It declares support for an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment's right to bear arms. It goes on to "make it a misdemeanor for federal officers to enforce federal gun-control measures within Missouri's borders if those measures are found to violate Missourians' right to 'keep and bear arms.'"  In other words, it makes state legislators and state police the interpreters and enforcers of federal constitutional law and subjects federal officials to arrest at the whim of Second Amendment absolutists.

The radicalism embodied in this particular piece of legislation is breath-taking. It has its direct antecedents, however, in the debates over slavery that began in earnest in the 1820s and 1830s and that continued up to the advent of Civil War in 1861.

White Southerners from the earliest days of the American Republic had a consciousness of being different and isolated from other parts of American life. This sense of difference arose from the awareness that the Southern way of life depended upon the ownership of slaves.

By the 1820s, this sense of difference hardened into a perpetual state of grievance. White Southerners not only were not like other Americans. They saw themselves as the victims of the massed political power of the Northeast and the "West" (a broad category embracing in particular Ohio, Indiana and new settlements in places like the territory of Michigan).

In the late 1820s, White Southerners were especially upset with tariff legislation enacted by the Northern and Western states. This legislation had the effect of protecting domestic manufacturing and commercial interests even while it weakened foreign markets for Southern agricultural commodities.

It was opposition to the tariff that was the proximate cause for the invention of the doctrine of nullification. But the deeper cause, of course, was slavery. Slavery was the backbone of the Southern plantation economy and anything that weakened markets for its produce weakened the institution.

As developed by John C. Calhoun, Robert Y. Hayne and others, nullification was premised on the belief that the Constitution created a compact among the States. After all, it was the States that sent delegates to the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and it was the States that met in ratifying conventions to approve the finished text. The Constitution, furthermore, seemed to reflect this origin when it empowered presidential electors to vote by state and gave states equal representation in the United States Senate. All of this, the Southern theorists argued, meant the Constitution was an agreement among free and equal sovereign States.

And if the States were free, and equal, and sovereign, and if they had really joined together in voluntary compact, that meant that they could judge for themselves the constitutional soundness of federal legislation. If legislation was unconstitutional, States had not only the right, but the solemn duty to object and, in the final analysis, to disobey.

Daniel Webster answered this line of reasoning brilliantly in 1830.  The Constitution could only be understood not as creating a compact, but as forming a Union among the States. It aimed to unite disparate peoples into a single nation, a single People, under a single set of laws. The People -- Webster consistently capitalized the term -- ratified the Constitution and gave it continuing force and power. It was the People who made their will known through their representatives in Congress. And it was the Supremacy Clause, Webster reasoned, that gave effect to the People's will by declaring that where conflict arose, federal law always superseded the particular laws of the States.

Webster had a grim foreboding of what might occur if the doctrine of nullification were ever taken seriously. Suppose, he said, South Carolina (then the chief exponent of nullification) were to decide that the tariff was unconstitutional. And suppose further that it concluded that therefore it could freely refuse payment of the tariff.

The Port Collector at Charleston might try to enforce federal law but, Webster predicted ominously, South Carolina would call up the militia to resist. The Commander-in-Chief, the President, would then be left with no choice, but to send troops to South Carolina. Webster had a name for South Carolina's contumaciousness: "Treason."  At that point, South Carolina would be guilty of treason.

For a century-and-a-half, these dangerous ideas seemed safely consigned to the dustbin of history. The State Senate of Missouri, however, has chosen to arouse this beast from its slumber. And Americans must speak out. These ideas are discredited and have no place in modern society.

It is, furthermore, in the special interest of Republicans everywhere to denounce this action.  For what we see in Missouri is the radicalization of a once-proud political party (the Act passed with the near-unanimous support of the Republican members of the State Senate). America needs a healthy two-party system. And when one of those two parties gives cover to a state legislature that plays games with dynamite, then our system is far from healthy.

Cross-posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/nullification-the-shame-o_b_4834205.html 

What We Mean When We Speak of Tradition in the Church

Tradition is of great significance to Catholics.  The Catholic Catechism distinguishes among several types of tradition, all of which must be taken seriously. The first and most important kind is Sacred Tradition. It is the awareness and transmission of the Word of God from generation to generation. It was the means by which knowledge of Jesus was transmitted to the earliest Church communities before there was a Bible or an agreed-upon New Testament canon. It is this Sacred Tradition which is deepened and strengthened by the great Church Councils -- from Nicaea to the Second Vatican Council. But there are other forms of tradition also -- devotional traditions, which might attach to a saint or a pilgrimage site, or ecclesial traditions which might shape the liturgy or the Church calendar.

But what is meant by "Tradition" in a Church that is now 2000-years-old? When we speak of Tradition, we must speak of historical process. Tradition, after all, has significance only where the passage of time is concerned. But the historical process is not a phenomenon of nature. It is always the product of conscious choice and reflection.

Let us unpack this reasoning. The world and all that is in it is irreducibly historical. Every act we engage in, every word we utter, every thought that races unbidden through our minds, is historical. Consider a conversation I might have with a student: The instant I utter my first sentence, that sentence becomes a part of history and can only be retrieved through an historical process. Its exact wording, its intonation, its connotation, none of this can ever be precisely recovered. So, what is my student to do?  She must process that sentence, make it her own, interpret it, and formulate a response. She must, in other words, interpret the past. And then, when I formulate my reply, I must go through the same process, now interpreting not only my first statement, but my student's understanding of it and her response to me.

This is a process that normally occurs so fluidly, so subconsciously, that we are unaware of its existence. Still, it is worth knowing that everything we say, everything we understand or apprehend, is a remembrance of things past. And not only is it a memory, it is necessarily a reinterpretation, an editing of what has gone before.

Nothing comes to us pre-thematically, furthermore, but is interpreted through prisms we have constructed for ourselves. We have categories of thought, into which we fit our memories, out of which we explain them. The past does not simply sit out there, in a pre-digested state. We mull it over, we meditate upon it, we reflect upon it. And the prisms we construct for ourselves, they constitute our value system, which in turn is formed from the communities of which we are a part.  The world, in other words, is not only a remembrance of things past, but a continuing, shifting conversation about the meaning of those memories.

Now, what does this have to do with Tradition in the Catholic Church?  It means at least this much, that Tradition is something we select, we make our own, we reinterpret.  Indeed, this is the only way in which we can make Tradition come alive. For if we did not do this, Tradition would be nothing more than a meaningless inert text, mere letters on a page.

Let's think about how this has worked in the historical Church. Consider first the "Acts of Paul and Thecla."  There is little in the way of devotion to St. Thecla today, so it is good to refresh our memories about this text.  It is not canonical, it is not found in the New Testament, but it was nevertheless a text the early Church took very seriously.

The "Acts of Paul and Thecla," likely composed in stages over the course of the second century, recounts the tale of St. Thecla, purportedly the female traveling companion of the Apostle Paul.  She was a virgin from a well-to-do pagan family in Asia Minor who heard Paul preaching and promptly abandoned her privileged life to follow him. She preached with Paul and embarked on a series of remarkable adventures.  She survived an attack by lions in the arena, was adopted by the Queen of Thrace (whom she converted), and worked a steady stream of miraculous healings.

Her saintly deeds were the object of great devotion in the early Church. There is a Catacomb of St. Thecla in Rome.  St. John Chrysostom preached on her merits and St. Ambrose governed the Diocese of Milan from the Cathedral of Holy Thecla. Clearly, her life is part of the deep and rich Tradition of the Church. That she is barely remembered today is the product, alas, of centuries of unfortunate choice.

Now, let's take a second example, the invention of the modern practice of repeatable confession by the Irish monks of the early middle ages. The early second- and third-century Mediterranean Church certainly had confession.  But it would be very foreign to us today. Confession in the early Church was public, non-repeatable, and involved lengthy penances of ten or twenty years. A relapse into grave sin could result in near-permanent banishment from the Church, though deathbed reconciliation remained possible.

The monks who converted Ireland in the early middle ages, however, developed a very different process for the forgiveness of sins. Confession was to be private. It was understood as medicine for the soul and, by analogy to medicine, could be repeated as often as needed. Penances might be severe, but, at least by Mediterranean standards, were not that long. The aim was to effect a spiritual cure and thereby bring about the healing of the sinner's soul.

This was a living, adaptable, fundamental reshaping of Tradition. The New Testament taught the forgiveness of sins, but the shape it took might be dramatically different based on the felt necessities of the age.

What does this mean for Catholics today? Tradition is not a prison-house. It is, rather, the dialogue we have with the past. This dialogue must be conducted with a preference for stability.  If we love the great historical figures of the past -- and, as Christians, we are called to love everyone -- then a preference for stability is merely the respect that we owe to them.  Even the word "tradition," derived from the Latin traditio, means something that is handed down, something that is bequeathed to us from the past.

But Tradition is not blind obedience to the past nor the rote repetition of past acts. Indeed, if we accept the reality of the historical process -- that every moment is necessarily a conscious reinterpretation of what has happened to us up to then - then eve blind obedience and rote repetition must be understand as entailing the conscious choice that this is the best means by which we follow what we believe to be Tradition today.

Tradition therefore is open-ended. The Irish monks who invented confession knew this, as indeed, have Christians of every age. To say this validates Jaroslav Pelikan's brilliant insight that Tradition is the living faith of the dead.  We retrieve the past, but if it is to have any meaning, if it is to make any sense, then we must reinterpret it according to our experience, our needs, our reflective thought on where we stand today. As we approach what is increasingly looking like a turning point in Church history, it is good to bear these lessons in mind.

Cross-posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/what-we-mean-when-tradition_b_4810837.html 

Capital Punishment, Same-Sex Marriage, and the Constitution: What Role for the Courts?

As RLL readers know, the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church is morally opposed both to capital punishment and to granting access to civil marriage to same-sex couples.  I have recently argued, in my new book and elsewhere, that the two practices—capital punishment and excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage—violate the constitutional law of the United States (here, here, and here).  Of course, any argument about the constitutionality of capital punishment or of excluding same-sex couples from civil marriage (or of any other law or public policy) necessarily relies on a particular understanding of how the judiciary should go about determining (1) whether a right claimed to be a constitutional right has constitutional status and, if so, (2) whether the challenged government action violates the right.  What understanding do my arguments rely on—my arguments about capital punishment and same-sex marriage?  I address that question in a new paper—a “working paper”—that I have just posted to SSRN.  Some RLL readers may be interested.  The abstract of and a link to the paper are available here.

The Catholic Church and Same-Sex Marriage: How Might Doctrine Develop?

I was in New York City the first week of February, where I was hosted by David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values.  David, who was a prominent opponent of same-sex unions for several years, had a change of heart on the subject in 2012, writing in The New York Times "that the time for denigrating or stigmatizing same-sex relationships is over."

As part of his own continuing exploration of the subject, David brought me and another guest to his Institute to discuss the future of gay marriage.  In the course of our conversation, I developed the lines of an argument that might help to advance the cause of gay marriage, even within the Catholic Church.

I began with the premise that Catholic moral theology ultimately rests on the foundation of an accurate understanding of the human person. In this sense, same-sex marriage is a question for the field known as "Christian anthropology." The norms and rules we live by must at a minimum not be contrary to human nature and must ideally promote a genuine understanding of human flourishing.

The prevailing anthropology of the person is grounded on a system of thought known as the "theology of the body."  Insofar as it pertains to marriage, Pope John Paul developed this theology in a series of weekly reflections between September 1979 and April 1980. These reflections were later gathered into a small book and have conditioned Catholic understanding of the human personality for the last 30 years.

In this set of reflections, John Paul II proposed to study the Gospel of Matthew, 19: 4, the verse in which Jesus says to the Pharisees, "Have you not read that the Creator from the beginning made them male and female?"  Seeking to understand this passage, John Paul II quickly turned his attention to the opening chapters of Genesis, where this text originally appeared.  In explaining creation, the Pontiff  was concerned especially with the physicality of our bodies. It is through the body that we realize our humanity. We are not disembodied. We are not bloodless abstractions. Rather, we are physical, flesh-and-blood beings.

And if it is through our bodies that we know and express our humanness, then, John Paul II continued, it is through our bodily design that we must understand our moral purpose.  And, since we are mortal beings cognizant of the brevity of our lives, we must keep in mind the requirement of sexual reproduction. Maleness and femaleness -- complementarity, John Paul II called it -- thus becomes essential to marriage.

Such reasoning precluded the possibility of same-sex marriage as inconsistent with the divine purpose of creation.  Indeed, the Catechism of the Catholic Church makes this conclusion explicit when it denounces even same-sex inclination as "objectively disordered" because of this perceived inconsistency with the divine plan.

I proposed in my conversation that the theology of the body need not be our starting point when analyzing marriage. There are different foundational premises we might use and still remain faithful Catholics. Thus we might begin our analysis with human reason and human psychology. There are deep and strong traditions within the Catholic Church supporting each of these as starting points for reasoning about sex and marriage.

For Thomas Aquinas, the morality of human action commences with human reason. For sure, our reason is imperfect. It is not divine reason, though it shares in some measure with it since we are made in the image and likeness of God. Original sin, however, warped our intellects.  Even so, Thomas insists, we might reach a progressively clearer understanding of what it means to be moral through the steady exercise of our reason. Reason is open-ended and open-minded. It never assumes the conclusions it wishes to prove. Observation, investigation, ordered, disciplined curiosity about the world and all within it -- these are legitimate methods of inquiring about our moral duties. If our scientific understanding of the person evolves, then so must our moral expectations.

And if reason offers one starting point, psychological insight provides another. Within the Catholic Church, there are few areas where psychology has come to play a more significant role than in marriage. This is especially true in cases of matrimonial dissolution -- marriage annulments, to use the familiar term.

Contemporary annulment practice rests on the premise that only persons with authentic human freedom can marry. And freedom can be impaired by any number of psychological causes. The lessons of modern psychology are then brought to bear by tribunal personnel in assessing the maturity and psychological readiness of the parties for marriage. But the question naturally arises: If psychology can be used to assess the sacramental quality of marriage, if it can be employed to deepen and enrich our understanding of human freedom, can it also be used to expand the field of those eligible for marriage?

These two starting points might be used to build an alternate ground for understanding same-sex attraction. If we rely on our reason, if our reason is open to developing scientific insight, if we look to the  recent findings of psychology, then we know that same-sex attraction is part of the natural variability of human sexuality.  What it means to be human, in other words, not only embraces male and female, but it may also, in some cases, include same-sex attraction.  If Catholics take this line of reasoning seriously, then it becomes impossible to speak of same-sex attraction as "objectively disordered."

But what of marriage?  Here, one might turn to St. Augustine's Treatise on the Goods of Marriage. In the opening sentence of this work, St. Augustine defines marriage as "friendship" -- amicitia.  The human person, St. Augustine asserts, is a "social being" made that way by our "human nature" (humana natura).

To be sure, St. Augustine argues that marriage serves three great goods: procreation, unity, and fidelity. But procreation is not marriage's highest purpose. Indeed, at points St. Augustine seems positively indifferent to procreation. He counsels couples to consider voluntary abstinence from sexual intercourse. 

"The better the couple are," he said, "the earlier" they will have done this. 

St. Augustine answered the objection, "What if everyone sought to abstain from intercourse?" with the response that then the City of God would be at hand "and the end of the world would be hastened." 

For Augustine, the true significance of marriage was not procreation, but the enduring friendship of two human beings who are innately social creatures.

If this is so, then can the meaning of marriage be widened to include same-sex unions?  I think so. Still, there is a large objection that arises from within the Augustinian tradition. All intercourse, St. Augustine maintained, had to be at least theoretically open to the possibility of procreation. It is this proposition that continues to form the core of the Catholic Church's teaching on contraception.

Recognition of same-sex marriage would thus require the Catholic Church to rethink the foundations of its sexual ethics, not only where same-sex attraction is concerned, but generally. And this is a very large undertaking indeed. There are some possible avenues for development, but I am afraid that I should save those explorations for another time.

Cross-posted at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/catholic-church-same-sex-marriage_b_4775831.html 

States Rights, SCOTUS, Medicaid, and the Politics of Greed

4.8 million people do not make enough money to qualify for Federal health care subsidies. Under the Affordable Care Act they were supposed to qualify for Medicaid. But the Republicans have conspired to exclude them from coverage. The Supreme Court declared that this portion of the Act passed by both houses of the Congress and signed by the President violated states’ rights, and 24 Republican states exercised their “rights” by assuring that these 4.8 million people would not be provided care.

And so, the Wall Street Journal in a broad ranging front page article reported on Monday, for example, that a diabetic hair stylist in Alabama earning $800 per month does not qualify for Medicaid under state standards. He, therefore, must “choose between paying the bills and buying medicine.” It is not clear that Chief Justice Roberts and his enabled Alabama Republicans take pride in this despicable result.

As the Journal reports, it is clear, however, that some Republican states including are reeling from the political repercussions in part fueled by hospitals who are losing money because of the state’s decisions. In particular, Utah and Florida are reconsidering.

Republicans believe that Obama Care is their ticket to political victory. But as the newly enrolled patients who do qualify for subsidies grow and the consequences of Republican callous greed in the Medicaid context become clearer, the ticket they grasp may turn out to be fool’s gold.

 

 

Dharma Enshrined in Karuṇā

From the exquisitely produced Kyoto Journal, a brief review of Bruce Rich’s To Uphold the World: A Call for a New Global Ethic from Ancient India  (Beacon Press, 2010). Some readers may recall my post from several years ago: Aśoka, Buddhist Emperor of India.

At the risk of sounding cynical, I’m not sure what value or purpose such declarations of a “global ethic” (or ‘ethics’) have for us, at least insofar as they take the form of preaching to the choir. But I refuse to grant this uncertainty a power sufficient to crowd out or diminish my ethical idealism!

Robert A. Dahl (1915 – 2014): “a political scientist who was widely regarded as his profession’s most distinguished student of democratic government”

 

“What about the ownership and control of economic enterprises as a source of political inequality? Ownership and control of firms affects political inequality in two ways that are closely related but rather different. First, ownership and control contribute to the great differences among citizens in wealth, income, status, skills, information, control over information and propaganda, access to political leaders, and, on the average, predictable life chances, not only for mature adults but also for the unborn, infants, and children. After all due qualifications have been made, differences like these help in turn to generate significant inequalities among citizens in their capacities and opportunities for participating as political equals in governing the state.

    Second, and even more obvious, with very few exceptions the internal governments of economic enterprises are flatly undemocratic both de jure and de facto. Indeed, genuine political equality has been rejected by Americans as a proper principle of authority within firms. Hence the ownership and control of enterprises creates enormous inequalities among citizens in their capacities and opportunities for participation in governing economic enterprises.”—Robert A. Dahl, A Preface to Economic Democracy (University of California Press, 1985): 54-55

Further Reading:

• Cohen, Joshua and Joel Rogers. On Democracy (Penguin Books, 1983).
• Curl, John. For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America (PM Press, 2nd ed., 2012). 
• Elster, Jon and Karl Ove Moene. Alternatives to Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
• Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, ed. Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon (Verso, 2007).
• Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, ed. Democratizing Democracy: Beyond the Liberal Democratic Canon (Verso, 2007).
• Schweickart, David. Against Capitalism (Westview Press, 1996).

David Brooks and the Love of Tradition

It is not clear to me whether the self-satisfied pretentiousness of David Brooks bothers me more than his confident assertion of the moronic, but the combination is beyond irritating. Consider his ruminations yesterday concerning when you should defer to the views of others. One of the questions he asks is whether you should hide or change political or religious views that make you unpopular.

I agree with his general view that you should not sacrifice your convictions for immediate popularity, but his method of getting to this conclusion seems quite bizarre. Brooks argues that “most of our core beliefs originated from some great political figure from the distant past.” They are part of a “transcendent tradition,” he suggests. And then after this Burkean chamber music, he walks off into outer darkness. He asserts that “No sensible person would ever be happy betraying the approval of the admired dead just to win some passing approval in the here and now.”

I pass over the assumption that the approval of the present would be “passing.”   What could it mean to betray the approval of the admired dead? Are the dead looking down at us from heaven approving or disapproving of our conduct? Do we “betray” Aristotle if we depart from his views?

What is going on here is more than the gaffe of a regular columnist. Brooks wants us to assume that the customs, habits, and traditions of the past are to be revered because they are the product of accumulated wisdom. It is the rhetorical perspective that was invoked to defend slavery, racism, and sexism. It fails to recognize that the traditions of a society are often the product of indefensible power rather than disinterested deliberation. It is a view that honors Edmund Burke and ignores the wisdom of John Stuart Mill, let alone Michel Foucault. It is the perspective promoted by those in power cynically framed in a hypothetical which asks a person to hold on to unpopular views.

A Reflection on Catholic Legal Theory

(Crossposted from Mirror of Justice in honor of its 10th anniversary)

The role of the Church in law is dynamic. For the early Christian community, law was often a tool of oppression wielded by the state, though it was occasionally used to challenge arbitrary state power by leaders who had access to citizenship and education such as the Apostle Paul.  Once states (particularly the Roman Empire) formally endorsed Christianity, making it the official religion, the Church’s approach to law shifted from a posture of critique to one of power and justification.  Although states and the contexts in which they governed did not remain static, it is arguable that the Catholic Church generally continued to imagine law as a tool that it could legitimately use to encourage conformity with its teaching. The Reformation and the rise of modern nation states challenged this identification between states and the Catholic Church, gradually shifting the Church’s posture back to one of defense and critique.  However, this was not a reversion to the marginalization of the early Church.  Instead, it gave the Church the opportunity to consider and comment on the policy implications of its teaching, especially its social teaching, without the power to enforce its doctrine on states.  Ideally this gives Church institutions and Catholic scholars freedom, objectivity and moral authority to proffer arguments for the appropriate place of law in fostering the common good.  In this project, we rely on authoritative expressions of Church teaching, and we apply a variety of methods rooted in our tradition and the best of contemporary science and social science.  If the Mirror of Justice is a fair example of the development of Catholic legal theory, it is obvious that it represents a diversity of views, which are sometimes in opposition.  Even so, we rely on the same body of texts and traditions, and we endeavor to engage legal problems in ways that are faithful to our commitments to Christ and the Gospel. We strive to engage each other and the world in a spirit of humility, motivated by love.

What is the law of the People of God? It is the law of love, love for God and love for neighbour according to the new commandment that the Lord left to us. It is a love, however, that is not sterile sentimentality or something vague, but the acknowledgment of God as the one Lord of life and, at the same time, the acceptance of the other as my true brother, overcoming division, rivalry, misunderstanding, selfishness; these two things go together. Oh how much more of the journey do we have to make in order to actually live the new law — the law of the Holy Spirit who acts in us, the law of charity, of love! Looking in newspapers or on television we see so many wars between Christians: how does this happen?[ …] We must ask the Lord to make us correctly understand this law of love. How beautiful it is to love one another as true brothers and sisters. How beautiful! Let’s do something today. (Pope Francis I, 6/12/13)

An open and urgent letter to all Buddhists, would-be Buddhists, students & teachers of Indic philosophies and traditions…and all individuals who fancy themselves Stoic-like cosmopolitan citizens

What follows is a copy of a letter I sent out to a bunch of folks and posted on FB as well.

Image found here.

Dear friends,

You may or may not know about the dire situation for Rohingya Muslims in Burma, including acts of violence, lethal and otherwise, directed against them by (ostensible, self-identified…) Buddhists in the country. Attempts at ethnic cleansing are increasingly successful and the threat of genocide is very real. I’ve posted links (thanks to Michael J. Perry) to two recent pieces below by Graeme Wood from the New Republic that strike me as helpful in this regard: providing the relevant information with a keen sense of the possibility that matters might quickly and precipitously get even more reprehensible (I’m not an expert on Burma/Myanmar, so I happily defer to anyone better informed and more knowledgeable on this topic*).

I write to ask what we might do, individually and/or collectively, to voice our pleas and concerns to the relevant actors involved, as well as government officials and bodies charged with oversight and responsibility for affairs in matters of this kind (or perhaps there is some existing organization or action we can support or join). I well realize that our “action-at-a-distance” as it were may fall far short of what’s needed to quickly alleviate the suffering of the Rohingya and stop the acts of intimidation and violence. Nonetheless, it seems unconscionable to remain passive and thus coordinated action of some kind: letters, a petition, what have you, is a moral and political necessity. While I have experience in political activism on the ground in local fora, I’m not at all experienced as to what to do in response to a global situation of this sort, so I’m hoping others can proffer suggestions and concrete help. [See “update” below.]

Thanks for your time and attention.

Best wishes,

Patrick

* The extent of my knowledge is found in this recent post on Buddhists and violence.

Please read: “A Countryside of Concentration Camps” and “Ethnic Cleansing Just Went from Bad to Worse in Burma,” by Graeme Wood in the New Republic.

Update: Here is a link to a page at the U.S. Campaign for Burma (thanks to Mark Lance) to contact President Obama. And here is a link for contacting your Congressional representative regarding proposed legislation. Finally, here is the page on the Rohingya and ethnic cleansing.

Black History Month: The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964

As February is Black History Month, I’ve decided to select a particular theme from the civil rights movement to highlight throughout the month with powerful images: The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964. I chose this in part because I discovered a wonderful online source for information on Freedom Summer at the Wisconsin Historical Society’s website. Time permitting, I’ll add additional material to the images, which will be posted with basic citation information and a link to the original page from where I find them. Below is my first post for the month. Image above is found here. (There are exquisite photos on that page as well.)

Title: Civil Rights Volunteers in Mississippi

Folder Description: In the summer of 1964, Freedom Summer volunteers pose in front of a campaign poster for Victoria Jackson Gray, Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party candidate for Congress representing the 5th District. Photo is likely taken outside of the Victoria Jackson Gray’s MFDP headquarters.

Subject: Mississippi Freedom Schools; Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party; volunteers; women

Wisconsin Historical Society

Victoria Gray Adams provides a brief account of her transformation into a full-time activist in Faith S. Holsaert, et al., eds. Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010): 230-239.

Philosophy as more or less incarnate in sundry forms of conversation and dialogue

Some readers may be interested in my contribution to Catarina Dutilh Novaes’ post, “Philosophy as Conversation,” at the New APPS blog. I hope to develop these somewhat ad hoc and disconnected comments into more coherent and consistent reflections at a later date. Below: Tibetan Buddhist monks engaged in debate at Sera Monastery.