ReligiousLeftLaw.com

Did Christianity Make Liberalism Possible?

Larry Siedentop’s new book, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism is the subject of a provocative review by Samuel Moyn, a Professor of Law and History at Harvard University in the current issue of Boston Review. If much discussion of Anglo American liberalism has focused on some version of the social contract to provide a normative justification and to motivate allegiance to liberalism, Siedentop has been interested in French liberalism which has tried to provide an account of how liberalism came to the fore. So, as Moyn puts it, Siedentop treats “modern individualism as a historical product rather than a natural fact.”  And here comes the heart of Siedentop’s claim: He argues that Christianity played a decisive role in making liberalism possible and that historians have wrongly downplayed the roots of liberalism in the Christianity that flourished in the Middle Ages.

Moyn’s reaction to this claim is quite skeptical and no one would describe his review as generous. But the question of how Christianity relates to liberalism is still quite fascinating. At the outset, it would strike many as counterintuitive that the liberalism which grew out of an animosity to Church corruption and to Church doctrines that flew in the face of rational science was in fact inspired, rather than repulsed by Christianity.  In addition, Moyn argues that Christianity was not motivated by worldly concerns, let alone a political philosophy. As Moyn reads scripture, Jesus and Paul expected the world to end soon.  On this account, Christianity is concerned with the next world, not with this one: “If the founders of Christianity made individuals matter, and matter equally, it was not for the sake of a new set of beliefs about the social order, let alone a new liberal politics.”

Of course, the world did not end, and Moyn accepts Siedentop’s view that Christianity influenced by Augustine had to give up hopes for “imminent redemption . . .  in exchange for indefinite redemption.” More to the point, Christians had to determine what the Gospel message told them about how to live in the world, and it is hard to read the Gospel as supportive of the status quo. It is not just that all are made in the image of God and loved by God; the Gospel is resolutely anti-hierarchical, exalting the poor and making the “least of these” (not just equal as Moyn states), favored over the rich and powerful.

Of course, the Gospel, so interpreted, has not been lived by most Christians, and the message has been twisted by many. But the message is fundamental to Christianity (not to say it is unique to Christianity), and it is even more radical than the liberal tradition. This is not to say that Christianity created liberalism. I have no idea how much truth resides in Siedentop’s claims. But I would say this. The Enlightenment philosophers in Europe (but not in the United States) were motivated by animosity to religion, but Europe at the time was filled with Christians who embraced liberalism while retaining their religion. In the U.S. liberalism was adopted in a society that was saturated with Protestant Christianity.  Religion, no doubt, played a complicated role in the rise of liberalism. To my mind, it is counterintuitive to suppose that liberalism was simply repulsed by Christianity; concern about corrupt institutions and fundamentalist rejection of science is not the same as rejecting Christian values. Indeed, Europeans who by and large have rejected religion or at least religious institutions maintain a strong belief in supporting the poor that I believe is a carryover from the Church teachings upon which they were raised and which Pope Francis emphasizes today.

Still the role Christianity played in the formation of liberalism has yet to be fully explored, and I expect that Siedentop’s book is well worth the read despite Moyn’s agitated criticisms, many of which seem quite plausible.

Jon Elster on the Emotions

 

Yet more vintage Elster:

“…[W]ith respect to an important subset of the emotions we can learn more from moralists, novelists, and playwrights than from the cumulative findings of scientific psychology. These emotions include regret, relief, hope, disappointment, shame, guilt, pridefulness, pride,* hybris, envy, jealousy, malice, pity, indignation, wrath, hatred, contempt, joy, grief, and romantic love. By contrast, the scientific study of the emotions can teach us a great deal about anger, fear, disgust, parental love, and sexual desire (if we count the last two as emotions). [….]

I believe…that prescientific insights into the emotion are not simply superseded by modern psychology in the way that natural philosophy has been superseded by physics. Some men and women in the past have been superb students of human nature, with more wide-ranging personal experience, better powers of observation, and deeper intuitions than almost any psychologist I can think of. This is only what we should expect: There is no reason why one century out of twenty-five should have a privilege in wisdom an understanding. In the case of physics, this argument does not apply.”—Jon Elster, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999): 48-50

* Elster defines “pride” as an emotion triggered by a belief about one’s own action and “pridefulness” as triggered by a belief about another’s character. 

Sundry Stuff

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Panel No. 1 (1940–41)

—“In an article on the organization of leisure, Harold Wilensky traces what he calls ‘the compensatory leisure hypothesis’ and ‘the spillover leisure hypothesis’ back to Engels’ work The Conditions of the Working-Class in England in 1844.* The first states that the worker who is alienated at work compensates by active and energetic leisure activities; the second that ‘he develops a spillover leisure routine in which alienation from work becomes alienation from life; the mental stultification produced by his labour permeates his leisure.’ …[W]e may ask whether a conjunction of the two mechanisms might not offer a more satisfactory account than either of them taken separately.”—Jon Elster (Indeed!)

* The article (which one can find online): H. Wilensky, “Work, Careers, and Social Integration,” International Social Science Journal 12 (1960): 543-560. 

—Among the individuals I’ve come to rely on for an understanding of “Liberalism” generally (as a political philosophy that provided essential philosophical premises for contemporary democratic theory and praxis) are Stephen Holmes, Ian Shapiro, Gerald Gaus...and Alan Ryan. Today I picked up the latter’s new book, which I look forward to with relish: Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton University Press, 2014). Incidentally, I've read a few wholesale critiques of Liberalism from both the Right and Left that fail to appreciate the progressive, emancipatory dimensions of this political philosophy, not a small part of which should be integral to any meaningful articulation of democratic socialism.

—While at one of our local and independent bookstores this morning, I came across this work, which looks quite good: Christian Welzel, Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

—Inspired by and in debt to Jon Elster, I rely on several proverbs in the following:

Conservatives assume capitalism provides even the poor with ample opportunity along the lines of the proverb, “necessity is the mother of invention,” yet this is best viewed in the light of the notion that one might (should?) pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, which refers to what is literally an impossible task. With regard to workers and capitalists, as Jon Elster explains, “the freedom to move into the capitalist class…can only be realized by the worker who is [to quote Marx] an ‘exceedingly clever and shrewd fellow.’ Any worker ‘can’ do it, in the sense of having the formal freedom to do so, but only a few are really able to,” hence it’s the case that, in the words of Marx, “every workman, if he is an exceedingly clever fellow…can possibly be converted into an exploiteur du travail d’autrui.” Exits from the working class (or poverty) may exist, but for sundry reasons, they do not take the form of a generalizable opportunity for most workers, most of the time. So the more applicable proverb (Norwegian in origin) in the case of both the poor and the working class states, “it is expensive to be poor.” In other words, even if one is motivated to “innovate,” or to become a member of the capitalist class (or, say, a member of the petite bourgeoisie) the desire is not matched by the requisite opportunity, for one is deprived of the necessary “resources:”— one’s formal freedom is paired with absence of capacity to realize same. Exits from the state of poverty or (more likely) the working class “exist,” but there are sundry reasons (e.g., one lacks the time and money to discover them or, even if one finds them, the cost or risk is inordinate) most workers will never be able to take advantage of them. This bears directly upon the theory of revolution as well for, as Elster reminds us, “Revolutions are rarely caused by extreme hardship, because people living at subsistence conditions have to spend all their time simply staying alive. They may have the desire for change, but no opportunity to effect it. Conversely, the well-off may have the opportunities but not the desire. In between, there may be a range of incomes that have a positive net effect—mediated by desires and opportunities—on the propensity to engage in revolutionary behavior.” In a future post, again prompted by Elster, I hope to discuss one compelling theory of revolution that more or less stems from what Elster terms the “Tocqueville effect” wherein an increase in opportunities finds aspiration levels increasing even faster, generating more discontent with the status quo (we also learn this account is a bit more complex than it first appears, as one might tell ‘different fine-grained stories’ to explain this dynamic that need not result in revolutionary discontent, hence ‘if A, then sometimes C, D, and B,’ with only one of these being collective action in the form of revolutionary behavior).

—I’ve updated my bibliography on emotions, found here.

—Another delightful essay by Pico Iyer. (In the brief biographical identification of Pico it states that ‘his latest book, The Man Within My Head, circles around Graham Greene and hauntedness,’ although I would say it rather circles around Graham Greene and Pico’s late father, Raghavan Iyer.)

—This is very important: Jed S. Rakoff, “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty,” The New York Review of Books, November 20, 2014. The subsequent exchange of letters, particularly the most recent (Jan. 8 issue), are worth reading as well.

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series, Panel No. 3 (1940–41)

—Please see Kenan Malik’s post on “Jacob Lawrence and the Great Migration” over at his blog, Pandaemonium. Malik notes that “over the next few weeks,” he “will publish on Pandaemonium the complete sequence of 60 panels, ten at a time, together with Lawrence’s original captions, that are as much part of the series as are the paintings themselves.”

—Toward delineating the contours of economic democracy as part of the struggle for socialism:

• Bayat, Assaf. Work, Politics and Power: An International Perspective on Workers’ Control and Self-Management. Monthly Review Press, 1991.
• Case, John and Rosemary C. R. Taylor, eds. Co-ops, Communes and Collectives: Experiments in Social Change in the 1960s and 1970s. Pantheon Books, 1979.
• Cheney, George. Values at Work: Employee Participation Meets Market Pressures at Mondragon. ILR Press, 1999.
• Curl, John. For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America. PM Press, 2^nd ed., 2009.
• Dahl, Robert A. A Preface to Economic Democracy. University of California Press, 1985.
• Dolgoff, Sam, ed. The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939. Free Life Editions, 1974.
• Elster, Jon and Karl Ove Moene, eds. Alternatives to Capitalism. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Jackall, Robert and Henry M. Levin, eds. Worker Cooperatives in America. University of California Press, 1984.
• MacLeod, Greg. From Mondragon to America: Experiments in Community Economic Development. University College of Cape Breton Press, 1997.
• Malleson, Tom. After Occupy: Economic Democracy for the 21^st Century. Oxford University Press, 2014.
• Morrison, Roy. We Build the Road as We Travel. New Society Publishers, 1991. [on the Mondragon cooperative experience up until 1987]
• Nembhard, Jessica Gordon. Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014.
• Ness, Immanuel, ed. New Forms of Worker Organization: The Syndicalist and Autonomist Restoration of Class-Struggle Unionism. PM Press, 2014.
• Ness, Immanuel and Dario Azzellini, eds. Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present. Haymarket Books, 2011.
• Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, ed. Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon. Verso, 2007.
• Thomas H. and C. Logan. Mondragon: An Economic Analysis. Allen and Unwin, 1982.
• Whyte, William Foote and Kathleen King Whyte. Making Mondragon: The Growth and Dynamics of the Worker Cooperative Complex. Cornell University Press, 1988.
• Wolff, Richard. Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism. Haymarket Books, 2012.
• Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias. Verso, 2010.

—Finally, a new compilation from yours truly: Nonviolent Resistance in the Middle East (with an emphasis on the Palestinian struggle): A Basic Bibliography

Should D.A.'s Give Way to Special Prosecutors in all Cases Involving Alleged Police Criminality?

The Ferguson prosecutor now admits that he presented a witness he knew was lying to the grand jury, but maintains the witness was not taken seriously. Of course, what he did was a breach of professional conduct and it could open the way for the appointment of a special prosecutor. "Under Missouri law (MO Rev Stat § 56.110) the presiding judge of the court with criminal jurisdiction — in this case Judge McShane — can appoint another prosecutor if the prosecuting attorney demonstrates a conflict of interest or bias. Courts have interpreted this provision broadly to include 'conflicts that reveal themselves through the prosecutor’s conduct in the case.'" See here.

It seems to me this rule is too narrow. District Attorneys have a daily working relationship with the police. Their failure to aggressively pursue cases against police almost automatically gives rise to the appearance of impropriety. Moreover, there is a conflict from the start. District Attorneys need to have a good working relationship with the police and prosecuting a member of a group that rallies around each other in times of crisis is almost certain to disrupt that relationship. The best response to this inherent conflict of interest is the appointment of an independent special prosecutor. Their is no good reason to wait until the prosecutor's conduct in the case reveals the obvious conflict of interest. Whether or not the conflict is "revealed" through the prosecutor's conduct, the conflict is there, and the rules should take the conflict into account.

 

Thanks to Tamara Piety for posting the above link on facebook.

 

Pope for the Holidays

The holiday season is always a good time to take stock of the year just past and see what we might anticipate in the 12 months to come. In the case of Pope Francis, it is fair to say that a great deal went well. And not only Catholics but all women and men of good will should feel grateful about that.

Let's start with papal diplomacy. One of Pope Francis' first personnel changes, in October 2013, was to appoint a new Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin.  Parolin's predecessor, the catastrophic Tarcisio Bertone, had mishandled things badly. Parolin's quite formidable job was to repair the Holy See's international standing.

Has he ever! The big success story, of course, is the normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba, announced Dec. 16. The American refusal to deal with Cuba had lost all meaning with the end of the Cold War a quarter-century ago. Yet this outdated relic lingered, propped up by an irrational fear of angering an aging, wealthy Cuban ex-pat community in South Florida.  Thanks to Pope Francis' far-sightedness, thanks also to his Secretary of State's diplomatic skill, the United States and Cuba are on the path to normalizing relations.

Pope Francis has yet to enjoy similar success with his bold attempt to resolve the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. In June, he invited Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the Vatican to pray for peace.

The three men earnestly prayed together and, one might hope, gained new respect for one another.  But while peace has yet to result, signs of progress have been spotted. Thus President Peres proposed in September that he and Pope Francis establish a United Nations of World Religions to help resolve religious conflicts around the world.

In the new year, I expect further diplomatic breakthroughs. I strongly suspect that by next Christmas we may see the Catholic Church enjoying normalized relations with the Chinese government. I was in China this summer, lecturing at one of the universities. I took time to visit the Beijing Cathedral. It was a warm Saturday afternoon in July. I met with a couple of priests and got to see a youth group. The priests struck me as genuinely devout men, both anxious and very pleased to be speaking with a visiting American Catholic. The youth group was amazing. Around fifty or so teen-aged boys, dressed in bright blue t-shirts proclaiming "God Is Love" in English, I watched them sing hymns and pay their respects at the Cathedral.

The Chinese State has its concerns with religious movements and Francis and his Secretary of State will find it difficult to navigate these issues.  Still, I think it can be done and it will be done.

More difficult still for Francis will be healing internal divisions in the Chinese Catholic Church.  The Chinese Church is presently divided between a Patriotic Church, whose bishops are appointed and supervised by the government, and an "underground" Church that subsists outside of approved circles. Both groups have produced genuinely holy women and men. Both groups have suffered under the regime, although the underground Church has borne the lion's share of persecution.  Merging the clergies of these two churches, smoothing over the all-too-human resentments that percolate just beneath the surface -- these tasks will require real diplomacy.

Will Pope Francis experience any other diplomatic successes in 2015?  In the "I-can-dream" category, maybe he can broker a normalization of relations between the United States and Iran.  Or finally achieve that all-so-elusive peace between Israelis and Palestinians.  For sure, these suggestions are little more than wishful thinking, but again, who knows?

I count October's Synod on the Family among Pope Francis' accomplishments. He did not win approval for his reform agenda, but he succeeded in doing something nearly as important. He managed to provoke genuine debate in the Church.

The 25 years from the election of Pope John Paul II to Benedict XVI's abdication will be seen by future Church historians as the age of "boundary police" Catholicism.  John Paul II and Benedict  XVI understood their role to be the guardians and enforcers of orthodoxy. They silenced theologians. They hunted for heretics. They removed bishops. The Church of the 1970's was vibrant, vivid, argumentative, and real. John Paul II and Benedict took that Church and transformed it into "fortress ecclesia," a repository and bastion of Truth standing tall against the rising tides of the secular world, but at the price of draining it of its vitality.

Pope Francis' vision of Church is not defensive. It is clear, furthermore, that he wishes to reignite a culture of debate within a Church where the whole idea of debate had been off-limits for a generation. Seen in these terms, the Synod was a success. Bishops who spent their entire careers reciting from approved scripts were suddenly made to think for themselves.

We will have another Synod on the Family in October, 2015. And I expect that we will see real progress on the question of admitting divorced and remarried Catholics to Communion.  Pope Francis has made clear in various ways that that is his preference.  He has observed that divorced and remarried Catholics are not excommunicated.  They remain part of the body of the Church and obliged by its laws.  He views the Eucharist as medicine for the soul.  He has expressed high regard for the practice of the Greek Orthodox, and that includes the admission of the divorced and remarried to Communion.

On the other hand, I don't expect similar rapid progress on the acceptances of gays.  We will not see the recognition of sacramental same-sex marriage any time soon.  On the other hand, there is a growing recognition that such relationships can be a source of spiritual and emotional support and sustenance for those involved. Such a suggestion would have been impossible just two years ago.  And as this realization gains ground, I think we can expect to see the Church curtail its legal and political objections to civil same-sex unions.

And, finally, let us not forget the American Catholic nuns.  At the instigation, it seems, of well-placed anonymous Catholic conservatives, a campaign was initiated in 2007 and 2008 to discredit and discipline the nuns.  Nobody, right now, it must be said, are better representatives of American Catholicism than our nuns.  And yet they were made the subject of vicious hierarchical attack.  No less than Cardinal Raymond Burke declared that the Leadership Conference of Women's Religious had no right to exist.  Thank God Burke is now a fringe figure.

The nuns never should have been attacked as they were.  And now, as we near the end of the year, the Vatican's investigation is reaching a provisional yet largely favorable conclusion.  One Vatican Congregation -- the Congregation on Religious -- issued a report that amounted to a qualified exoneration of the nuns. Another investigation -- by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith -- still lingers. A full and complete exoneration would be a great way to conclude the year.

If Pope Francis has shown a blind spot so far in his pontificate, it has been with respect to women.  He is a man of spontaneity, but his spontaneous comments on women have sometimes been cringe-inducing.  Still, there is no question that he is a man who listens, who is attentive, and whose mind does not come with  a rigid, pre-determined agenda.  I think we can expect growth.

Catholics have much to be grateful for as they wish Pope Francis a blessed and merry Christmas.  Indeed, he is a joy to the world.

Cross-posted: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/pope-for-the-holidays_b_6350578.html

POPE FRANCIS, PAPAL DIPLOMACY AND US-CUBAN RELATIONS

Pope Francis is clearly making a name for himself as a world-historical figure. He has gained great respect for his efforts to reform the Catholic Church internally -- by cleaning up the Vatican Bank, by restructuring the Curia, by opening up debates over divorced and gay Catholics. These accomplishments alone are significant. He is changing the direction of the Catholic Church from a self-enclosed shell fearful of the world and towards a confident Church not afraid of arguing with itself.
But just as profoundly, he is beginning to reshape the world. This is the clear impact of the role Pope Francis has apparently played in the thawing of U.S. -- Cuban relations.
The news is still breaking as I write this, but it seems that Pope Francis began efforts last March to draw the United States and Cuba into dialogue. He raised the issue when he met with President Barack Obama that month. He followed up on this conversation over the summer by writing personal letters both to President Obama and to President Raul Castro of Cuba. We do not know the contents of these letters, but we do know that the impact made on both men must have been significant.
Pope Francis is not the first modern Pope to play an important role on the world stage. In the early 1960s, John XXIII was instrumental in reconciling Jews and Catholics and was honored by the Israeli Knesset at the time of his canonization for his accomplishments. Pope Paul VI famously addressed the United Nations in 1965 -- the first Pope to have done so. "War never again!" he exclaimed, fearful of the carnage thermonuclear conflict would cause. And John Paul II is, of course, highly regarded for his role in ending the Cold War.
What else could Pope Francis and his obviously talented and energetic Scretary of State, Pietro Parolin be contemplating? I suspect we might see, within a few months, a major breakthrough between the Catholic Church and the Chinese government. And, who knows, Pope Francis might even help to thaw the very frosty relations that presently prevail between the United States and Iran! Now, that might be dreaming, but we are allowed to dream.

Peggy Noonan on Torture

In her Saturday Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan insists that the Senate torture report should not have been published, but reserved for public officials. She apparently regrets that the world will think less of us. In support of this, she recounts a story in which she and pollster Bob Teeter were puzzled by the fact that Americans do not like the Japanese even more than they do not like the Germans. Then in what apparently was a eureka moment they arrived at the conclusion that the Japanese resort to torture in WWII could account for the distinction between the Japanese and the Germans. But wait, the Germans perpetuated the Holocaust. Is there a moral distinction that makes Japanese torture worse than the Holocaust?

It apparently does not occur to Noonan that race might have something to do with the dislike for the Japanese. This is not to deny that the Japanese torture of World War II continues to harm respect for their culture as tensions with Koreans continue to attest. Nonetheless, Noonan is right that the U.S. image will be tarnished throughout the world. She recognizes that the report rightly speaks of torture, not merely harsh methods. Somehow though she is able to think that “torture is not like us. It is not in the American DNA.”

In fact there is no “us.” Many Americans favor torture and they stand in a long tradition of barbarism that would be tedious to recite at length. We might tiptoe past our treatment of Native Americans and African Americans to mention that with respect to the Japanese we were a little careless with (nuclear) fire.

Many Americans, of course, have opposed this barbaric tradition. Noonan herself thinks torture is wrong, but thinks that those involved should not be judged. She quotes former Senator Bob Kerry for the notion that there was no operating manual to guide those in charge of protecting us. Really? Perhaps the United Nations Convention Against Torture might have helped even with the reservations adopted by the United States. See here. Perhaps the Christian leaders involved might have noticed that Jesus Christ was tortured, and the Biblical message is hardly an endorsement.

Nonetheless, Noonan is ultimately right to maintain that the Senate document is partisan. She faults the Democratic staff for not interviewing the responsible Republicans, but they were unwilling to cooperate in any event. She complains that the report fails to make recommendations. How about no more torture as a recommendation. Oddly, she does not point to what seems to be the clearest flaw of the report. It is massively counterintuitive to suppose that all that torture produced no helpful intelligence even recognizing that a lot of deception from the victims was mixed in.

David Ignatius points to the same flaw in the report, but says in Monday’s Ithaca Journal, “That’s why banning torture is a moral choice. Because in doing so, we may indeed lose useful information. That’s the risk we take in doing the right thing.”

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney goes from show to show saying that he would do it again in a minute. Of course he would.

Pope Francis and the Catholic Crisis

There is a growing crisis haunting the Catholic Church.  And it is a crisis larger than the events that have so greatly afflicted the American Catholic Church.  The pedophilia scandals are a horrifying element of this crisis.  So, too, are the bishops who covered up and excused these outrages.  And so, also, the more general loss of confidence Catholics have in a hierarchy that seems oddly concerned with rank and privilege and with fighting yesterday's culture wars.  Yes, these are all elements of the crisis, but the crisis is larger than this.

And that something larger is both sad and profound: a  loss of faith in the institutions of the Church.  Pope Francis, in his remarkable interview with La nacion, published the weekend of December 6 and 7, made it clear that he recognized the gravity of the moment.  He was asked why so many people were leaving the Church.  As posed, the question addressed Latin America.  By implication, it looked to the world.

Pope Francis could have directed his answer at factors external to the Church.  Indeed, one can imagine his predecessors alternatively blaming culture, or relativism, or the forces of secularism.  Pope Francis, however, is different.  His was a more introspective answer.  We must look within, he advised, to what Catholics are themselves doing wrong.

At the root of the crisis, he proposed, was the problem of clericalism.  Clericalism is strangling true Christianity.  Pope Francis has spoken often about clericalism during his brief pontificate.  It was the reason, early in his tenure, that he ceased granting applications by priests to be raised to the rank of monsignor. Being called monsignor adds little to a priest's life.  But the quest for this title led, in Francis's judgment, to careerism and a preoccupation with title and honor that had little to do with the Gospels.

Well, it seems that in taking this step, Pope Francis was merely warming up.  In recent speeches, he began to explore how deep the crisis of clericalism extends.  It has poisoned the relationship between priests and lay Catholics.  It can serve, for the laity, as heedless abdication of responsibility, and on the part of the clergy a dangerous concentration of power.

Thus Pope Francis declared in March, 2014:  "Clericalism is one of the evils of the Church. ...   Priests take pleasure in the temptation to clericalize the laity, but many of the laity are on their knees asking to be clericalized, because it is more comfortable! ...   This is a double sin!"

So how should lay and clergy interact?  The Pope sees a wide latitude here.  It is an intersection that must be governed principally by a respect for the power of prophecy.  The prophet, Pope Francis has stated, is someone with a sense of the historical moment.  The prophet must appreciate the confluence of "past, present, and future."  The prophet knows the past promise of God's word, but knows how to interpret this word in her or his life and "to speak a word [to others] that will lift them up."

Again, what is noticeable is what is omitted.  The prophet is not someone who listens patiently for instructions from others, or is someone who is fond of restating that perennial objection to growth and development -- "but we've done anything like that before!" No, the prophet is someone who sees things fresh, in context, and knows how to take creative action appropriate to the moment.

The clergy must come to terms with this dimension of the lay vocation and be supportive of it.  "The priest's suggestion is immediately to clericalize," the Pope warns. This temptation must be resisted. The priest has a spiritual role, a pastoral role, and a sacramental role, but the priest must not subsume the role of the laity. Harmony between the two orders is what Catholics should strive for. It should never become a situation in which "the big fish swallows the little one."

Pope Francis, in other words, expects an active and engaged laity, a laity that can think for itself, and is not fearful of its own independence. But how shall this Church, of harmonious yet different orders, address the Catholic crisis?

It must not preach. It must not proselytize. It must not condemn, or throw tantrums, or engage in theatrics. Rather, the Church -- the People of God, lay and clergy alike -- must set a good example. They must know that the world is filled with human suffering and that they are called to go about relieving in some small quantum this great misery in ways adapted to need and circumstance.

Only a leader with a great sense of faith could propose such a radical agenda for the Church.  And Pope Francis' interview with La nacion makes plain his great faith. Only a confident and faithful leader would have opened the Synod on the Family to the kind of free discussions that occurred last October. Other popes have hosted synods on the family. They were entirely forgettable affairs. The script was written well in advance, everyone recited their assigned lines, and nothing of significance occurred. Pope Francis, on the other hand, opened the Synod up to prophecy, and a consideration of the needs of the moment.

It is fair to describe Pope Francis's summons as a call to Christian adulthood, but not in some superficial or trite sense.  Rather he expects all Catholics to show a spirit of leadership,  independence, and good judgment. The Church, he has warned, must not be obsessed with the self-referential.  It must instead do as Jesus did -- minister to the afflicted and the marginal.  It is truly a bold vision of renewal.

Cross-posted: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/pope-francis-and-the-cath_b_6317936.html 

Randy Newman, political satire and the Senate Torture Report

This morning I woke up and saw this NY Times article about the doctors and psychologists involved in and justifying the horrific use of torture by the C.I.A. Because I have been listening to a lot of political satire for my academic work of late, I immediately thought of Randy Newman's classic and scathing satire, I Just want you to hurt like I do, available on youtube here. Originally written, I believe,  to be a satire on the plethora of  "We Are the World" type Hollywood charity programs, here Newman speaks as a father singing with a rising power ballad crescendo about how his abuse of his family is his way of 'helping' them to experience his own suffering. Its about as biting a political satire in just four minutes as I am aware of. 

 

And then I read this passage in the NY Times article: 

In an article titled “Psychologists and Interrogation: What’s Torture Got to Do With It?” Kirk M. Hubbard, a psychologist formerly with the C.I.A., wrote, justifying the methods, “We no longer live in a world where people agree on what is ethical or even acceptable, and where concern for other humans transcends familial ties. When adolescents carry bombs on their bodies and plan suicides that will kill others, we know that shared values no longer exist.”

 

And now the power of Newman's satire really hits home. Dr. Hubbard is precisely wrong, shared values do indeed exist. In torturing Muslims suspected of terrorism or harboring terrorism, the U.S. government has been doing to others exactly what was done to it at 9/11, inflicting its own unacknowledged trauma on others. . Dr. Hubbard and others justifying torture are by their actions and justifications singing, then,   in full power ballad crescendo, whether they like it or not, whether they know it or not, the character is song's self-deluded and self-condemning conclusion. 

If I had one wish
One dream I knew would come true
I'd want to speak to all the people of the world
I'd get up there, I'd get up there on that platform
First I'd sing a song or two you know I would
Then I'll tell you what I'd do
I'd talk to the people and I'd say
"It's a rough rough world, it's a tough tough world
Well, you know
And things don't always, things don't always go the way we plan
But there's one thing, one thing we all have in common
And it's something everyone can understand
All over the world sing along

I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
I just want you to hurt like I do
Honest I do, honest I do, honest I do" 

 

By justifying and engaging in torture and acts of terror, the U.S. has hurt the world just like it has been hurt. One wonders when its leaders will realize the price that has been paid. 

Money and the Democrats

In her Saturday Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan purportedly writes about the prospects for Republican unity and purpose. In the end there is a lot of gloating about the divisions, handwringing, and skirmishes within the Democratic Party. Noonan believes the Democratic Party is hopelessly divided.

She is right, but the problem goes well beyond her focus on the unpopularity of Obama, Reid, and Pelosi, and it is a problem not likely to be discussed by Peggy Noonan.  The problem is of long standing. One its better discussions appears in Robert Kuttner’s almost thirty year old book, The Life of the Party.

As Kuttner then argued, for all their difficulties the Republicans have an important luxury: their underlying free market, low tax ideology is attractive to the wealthy who invest in election campaigns. On the other hand, the Democrats’ populist commitments (I will assume they have them though many may not) are generally alien to the business world. Consequently, Democrats are forced with a choice: (1) dampen their economic ideology, talk about social issues, and appeal to the business class generally or (2) stick to a popular populist, progressive message and hope that contributions from unions, the communications and entertainment industry, businesses that stand to gain from public investment, and small dollar contributions of citizens can keep them in the game.

Chuck Schumer, the representative from Wall Street, is a particularly craven example of the first money grubbing category. Hilary Clinton and Bill Clinton are more attractive practitioners of that category. Elizabeth Warren, of course, falls into the second category. Moreover, in this last election she has been a terrific national fund raiser. Still how well she could do from a fundraising perspective in a Presidential campaign remains to be seen.  And the majority of those from the second category come from safe liberal districts.

The Democratic Party will continue to be divided precisely because there will always be Democrats in both categories and those categories divide on issues that are vital to the country. Regrettably, taking the first route appears to be the only path to election for many Democrats. At least, so they think. No wonder, the Democrats’ message is fuzzy. 

Pope Francis Speaks to Europe -- and the World

Popes are not merely the head of a Church.  Because they are the spiritual leader of a billion people, popes also have a role to play in shaping and forming global order.  And historically, there have been popes who have used this position to change the direction of world events.  Such a pope was Leo XIII who defined the modern social teaching of the Church.  Workers, he insisted, had the right to organize.  The world must not be dominated by the primacy of capital.  Rather, there must be a balance between the rightful concerns of economic investment and human needs.  Another such pope was John Paul II, a native of Poland, who provided an important witness to human freedom in the latter stages of the Cold War.

Pope Francis may prove to be another pope like these two, someone who offers the possibility of redirecting the path of the world at large.  He certainly took an important step in that direction with his address to the European Parliament on November 25, 2014.

Let's concede upfront, Pope Francis used a really unfortunate metaphor when he compared Europe to a "grandmother, no longer fertile and vibrant."  He has been properly criticized for this word choice.

But let's take a look at the substantive vision he was setting forth.  It was a message directed at Europe but it is equally applicable to the entire developed world.

He proposed first that Europe must rededicate itself to the principles of human rights and human dignity.  He stressed that rights are intrinsic to the person and that they arise from our very being, our very status as human beings.  Persons should never, therefore, be seen as objects, as means to ends.  All of this has been said many times before -- by other popes and by secular philosophers going back into the 18th century.

What is fresh about the Pope's teaching is the way in which he used this concept of rights to call upon Europe -- and by extension, the world -- to a renewed respect for each and every person.  That respect comes from recognizing that rights do not exist in isolation.  Human beings are not "monads," in the Pope's words, isolated, autonomous, purely private economic decision-makers.  Rather we act, in all we do, in relationship with others.  Rights are, in other words, not strictly speaking individual, but relational.

Pope Francis then applied this insight to the dangers inherent in a purely economic approach to the human condition.  Society, he asserted, can at present only see the economic dimension of persons.  Everything is reducible, in the modern analysis, to cost vs. benefit.  "To our dismay," he declared, "we see technical and economic questions dominating political debate, to the detriment of genuine concern for human beings."

As a result, human beings have become disposable -- the old, the infirm, the enfeebled, the terminally ill -- they are "abandoned and uncared for." They are "discarded with few qualms." No one has any time or use for them.  They do not produce, they do not have bargaining power, they are not economic players, and so they are shunned and mistreated.  Pope Francis has often used the expression "throwaway" society to describe the modern western condition, and in these passages he spelled out the roots of this malady.

This insight, then, brought him around to his criticism of European society.  It seems, he pointed out, that Europe no longer has the energy or desire to welcome immigrants in its midst.  "We cannot allow the Mediterranean to become a vast cemetery!"  Europe must once again open its doors and, furthermore, must extend itself generously to "assist the countries of origin in their own social and economic development." Again, this is a message that should reverberate in the ears of Americans, as our own country contends with its nativist right-wing.

Even more ominously, Pope Francis warned that Europe must reduce growing human alienation within its borders.  Its institutions have lost the capacity to sympathize with individuals. And as populations lose confidence in their fundamental institutions -- of governance, of education, of commerce -- there is the risk that they may turn "to the many forms of extremism spreading in the world today."

Democracy must be revitalized, he urged, through an appreciation that unity is not uniformity.  The great risk to democracy, he explained, is that economics will telescope different and diverse human societies into an oppressive and homogeneous whole: 

The true strength of our democracies -- understood as expressions of the political will of the people -- must not be allowed to collapse under the pressure of multinational interests which are not universal, which weaken them and turn them into uniform systems of economic power at the service of unseen empires.

 

 

Politics, in other words, must take priority over economic efficiency.  It is the role of citizens to tame economic forces and subject them to human values.  A more profound criticism of contemporary American politics has yet to be uttered.

Humanity itself must be renewed, the Pope declared, and that is done through a renewal of education.  "Education cannot be limited to providing technical expertise alone."  The Pope thus confronted the pervasive but wrong-headed mantra of career counselors everywhere to pursue only those degrees that lead directly and tangibly to economic pay-offs.  But the Pope is no enemy of scientific or technical training.  In practically the next breath he encouraged European governments to provide further support for education in fields such as "alternative sources of energy."  But, he stressed, only through knowledge of the humanities can "young people today... look to the future with hope instead of disenchantment."

He made two other points worth noting.  Why, he asked, has the economic malaise, the downtown, the recession persisted so long?  Again, he lays the blame at the feet of economic policies that destabilize the working class.  Workers can only flourish, they can only raise families, provide for loved ones and contribute to the building of a better, more just society if they have "stability and security" in their own lives.  "The time has come," he announced, "to restore dignity to labor by ensuring proper working conditions."

Yes, this was said to the European Parliament. But it deserves repeating in the halls of the incoming Congress.  Economic recovery does not come through increased shareholder value, or the financialization of the marketplace, or give-backs to the one percent, but through worker confidence.  Restore prosperity and stability to the working class, the Pope as much as pronounced, and you restore a healthy economy.

Finally, the Pope insisted, the world itself needs renewal.  We have not been given the world to use and exploit as we wish.  Rather, we have been charged to serve as good stewards of a world that is not ours to ruin and destroy.  "We need to love and respect nature," he emphasized.  This means, of course, the gentle and modest use of natural resources.  But for Pope Francis, regard for the world means that we must never lose sight of the human dimension.  Human beings are part of nature, he stressed, and the allocation of resources at the present moment violates that nature:  "It is intolerable that millions of people around the world are dying of hunger while tons of food are discarded each day from our tables."

Sometimes there are religious leaders who can step beyond confessional boundaries and become a voice for the improvement of the world.  And in this speech, Pope Francis took an important step in that direction.  (But, your Holiness,a word of advice, don't pick on grandmothers the next time out).

Cross-posted: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-j-reid-jr/pope-francis-speaks-to-europe-and-the-world_b_6269958.html