A Meeting over Life and Death

Pope Benedict reflects upon the Culture of Life, while Michelle dresses up for the Culture of Death.

Caritas in Veritate's Intro

On hearing the Pope has written another ‘Love’ encyclical, one is attempted to dismiss it out of hand. The term ‘Love’ is thrown around so much nowadays, by Catholics AND non-Catholics, the first thought which comes to mind is the encyclical could not have anything original to say. The Pope, aware you might be thinking this, addresses the matter head on: “…charity has been and continues to be misconstrued and emptied of meaning, with the consequent risk of being misinterpreted…” Yes, he says, everyone uses the term, but the term has been abused.

Now this IS interesting. How can such a popular term, one which everyone claims to understand, be abused? A brief look at the Culture Wars in the United States should answer that question. Abortion, Marriage, Stem Cell Research are all divisive issues and both sides in the debate articulate their views in terms of Love or Charity. Since both sides claim Love as their mantle, they must be providing different meanings to it. Being all things to all people, Love now means anything to anyone.

The emptiness of the term, the Pope argues, is the result of “a social and cultural context which relativizes truth…” We see here a reference to Relativism, a philosophical view which denies the absolute validity of any truth claim. Calling attention to the pervasiveness of this doctrine has been a reoccurring theme of the Benedict’s pontificate. Truth be told, it was a theme of his even before he became the Pontiff. Before he entered the Conclave which would elect him as Pope, Cardinal Ratzinger famously said, “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as definitive and has as its highest value one's own ego and one's own desires.”

Why should any of us care about such an abstract idea? Because ideas have consequences and in this case the consequences are dire. The Pope tells us that without truth “there is no social conscience and responsibility, and social action ends up serving private interests and the logic of power, resulting in social fragmentation, especially in a globalized society at difficult times like the present.” If Truth is a fiction, then might makes right. In light of these excerpts, one is given a prism to view current economic crisis. In a world where Relativism has run amok, do not be suprised to find speculators gambling, loan officers looking the other way, and borrowers lying on their applications. This Philosopher-Pope, far from having his head in the clouds, is addressing issues close to home.

“Without truth,” the Pope argues, “charity degenerates into sentimentality.” The Encyclical is titled Love IN TRUTH (Caritas in Veritate). Again, we can see the practicality of his point here. Love, without roots in objective truth, is reduced to mere feelings (what the Pope calls 'emotionalism'). And feelings can be fickle. Reliability is not the first thing which comes to mind when someone says he has “strong feelings” on the matter. When Caritas is simply a matter of the passions, then today’s “I love you” is tomorrow’s “I want a divorce.” Dealing with a person who is feeding off his emotions is like opening up Forrest Gump's box of chocolates-you never know what you’re gonna get.

Benedict XVI-not a GOP member

Pope Benedict’s new social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, came out this week and has caused quite a stir. Positive references to wealth redistribution, world political authority, and aid to Third World countries come across as leftist, in the economic sense, to many readers. E.J. Dionne, who is Catholic and a prominent supporter of the Democratic Party, is relishing the controversy it is has generated and has even suggested the Pope is to the left of President Obama. Dionne admits there are still the life issues, but he feels this at least eliminates the notion that being Catholic and Republican go hand in hand.

Dionne is certainly right about that, but he is wrong in his implicit suggestion that the life and economic issues have equal weight in Catholic social thought. The idea the two sets of issues have equal weight were popularized by views like a “Consistent Ethic of Life” or the “seamless garment” argument, but those views were never incorporated into Magisterial teaching.

On the other end of the spectrum, George Weigel, JPII’s biographer and a friend of the GOP, has called the encyclical ‘incoherent.’ Upset over the leftist passages in the text, Weigel argues they must have been forced upon Bendedict by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Weigel thinks it is inconceivable the Pope could hold such views.

Francis Beckwith has collected several responses to Wegel’s article. The reoccurring argument is maybe the Pope ACTUALLY believes this stuff. This makes sense to me since he spoke approvingly of leftist economics in First Things a few years ago: “In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of social consciousness.”

Federalists and Anti-Federalists on Sarah Palin

All the hullabaloo over Sarah Palin’s resignation reminded me of an interesting debate between David Brooks and Stephen Hayward on her ability to rule. Their debate is really a debate that goes back to terms of the Federalist/Anti-Federalist discussion: What is a representative’s role in a republic?

David Brooks took the Federalist view. Representatives should be grounded in “classical education, hard-earned knowledge, experience and prudence.” Prudence is acquired by “experience. The prudent leader possesses a repertoire of events, through personal involvement or the study of history, and can apply those models to current circumstances to judge what is important and what is not, who can be persuaded and who can’t, what has worked and what hasn’t.” Brooks tells us the word “experience” is in the Federalist Papers 91 times.

In the justly praised Federalist No. 10, James Madison argues that representatives should be ‘enlightened statesmen’ who will provide a check on the people by filtering their views. While the people are not a mob, they can be. This is not argument for aristocracy because the people will elect their leaders and can remove them from office. Madison’s idea of a filtering effect signifies the idea that the representatives should lead, not be led by, the people.

In opposition to the Brooks’ Federalist position, Stephen Hayward puts forward the Anti-Federalist position. He says Brooks and others are “affronted by the idea that an ordinary hockey mom--a mere citizen--might be just as capable of running the country as a long-time member of the Council on Foreign Relations.”

The Anti-Federalists espoused what I like to call the ‘sameness’ principle. Representatives should reflect the views of the people themselves. When I vote for a candidate, it is based on the belief that he or she will vote the way I would have if I had been in Washington. Representatives are the people’s proxies.

The debate between Brooks and Hayward occurred nearly a year ago, but it is still underlying the hostility over Palin today. Ross Douthat reiterated Hayward's argument in a recent column: “…Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.”

Reading to the end

Last weekend’s activities gave me another opportunity to ruminate about our country’s founding. I came across an interview with Lawler on the topic. Here is one way of reading our Declaration:

One way of looking at it is [as] a Lockean document, an
Enlightenment document, and a document of individualism, and the Declaration is
kind of a time bomb which over the decades transforms all of American life. And
so the history of America is a kind of creeping and a sort of creepy
individualism which is reflected in the Supreme Court opinions Planned
Parenthood v. Casey and Lawrence v. Texas and all that, which say that the
Constitution demands that every feature of life be reformed with the idea of the
contract between two individuals in mind. So Lawrence v. Texas implies that same-sex marriage is a Constitutional requirement,
because anything two individuals decide to do has dignity and comes from
autonomy and all that.

It is this reading, put forward by Louis Hartz, which is popular today. Russell Kirk, horrified by the implications of this view, downplayed the role of the Declaration in our American Political Tradition (one wonders how he spent his 4th of July). But there is another reading of the Declaration which could salvage it:

But the other view of the Declaration would be the Declaration was a legislative
compromise. The view of Jefferson was changed by the view of Congress. Nature’s
God, the God of Locke, was moderated with the addition of the Providential and
judgment God at the end of the Declaration. So if you take the Protestant
Christianity of some of the Founders and compromise it with the kind of Lockean
Deism, covert atheism, of some of the Founders, the compromise between the two
kind of accidentally produces Thomism. So there’s not one Thomist American
Founder, it goes without saying. They’re either a Deist or a Calvinist. But the
compromise between the two produces something that looks a lot like Thomism.

The Declaration’s opening, written by Jefferson, contains Deist language like “nature’s God.” The Creator, in this understanding, might endow us with “inalienable rights” but he leaves us to fend for ourselves, uninterested in how things will turn out. The famous analogy is a Clockmaker who winds up the clock and then lets it go.

The Declaration’s closing, which was added by Congress, clearly counteracts this Deist tendency. The Founders appeal to the “Supreme Judge” for the rectitude of their intentions and on “Divine Providence” for support of their cause. God is more than an Unmoved Mover here. He is personally involved in human history. My only revision of Lawler’s view is what we should mean by Thomism. What Lawler means by Thomism is the recognition that there is objective truth which we can know through unaided reason. What I would mean by the Declaration reflecting Thomism is it is open to Aquinas’s ‘thick’ conception of natural law as opposed to Locke’s ‘thin’ conception. Aquinas believes the natural law is a participation in the eternal law, which is God’s providence or plan for the universe. Human government is just a subset of divine government. Locke’s account of natural law drops any discussion of eternal law which is why his understanding of God is Deist. The Declaration’s closing paragraph is compatible with Aquinas’s account, but not Locke's.

The ‘legislative compromise’ reading of the Declaration holds great promise and hopefully it will become the more popular reading. If only more people would read to the end.

There's no place like home-maybe

James Matthew Wilson gave a thoughtful response to my previous post (I had placed it as a comment to Caleb Stegall’s Place as Gift, Freedom on Front Porch Republic).

His reply to my question whether D’Souza was better off leaving his traditional, localized community is interesing:

Rather than leaving India to escape the “awful fate” of the professions, D’Souza
would have been better served either to submit to that discipline or to
remaining in his native community to cultivate it so that it too might find a
place for the intellectual, contemplative, life. A hard fate, but a human one.

After reading Wilson’s comment, I recalled an essay by Front Porcher Patrick Deneen titled "Patriotic Vision: At Home in a World Made Strange." In that essay, Deneen looks at ancient city-states, which were rooted in memory and place, and how they functioned. It turns out they had an official office for the ‘Theorist’. Deneen writes:

[they]were charged with the task of visiting other cities, to “see” special
events such as religious or theatrical or athletic festivals, and to return to
their home city where they would then give an account of what they had seen. To
“theorize” was to take part in a sacred journey, an encounter with the “other”
in which the theorist would attempt to comprehend, assess, compare and then in
idiom of his own city, explain what had been seen to fellow citizens. This
encounter would inevitably raise questions about customs or practices of the
theorist’s own city – why do we do things this way? Might there be a better way
of organizing the regime? Might there be a best way of life?

The Theorist’s role places him in tension with his city. Deneen continues:

By this estimation, a theorist is in some respects defined by a kind of
“outsideness,” an alienation originally induced by the experience of
physically
moving from one place to another in order to assess the virtues
and vices of
one’s own particular cultural practices.

Deneen’s essay sheds light on the fact the cave cannot be closed because the images on the wall are not all there is. The very existence of the Theorist’s office reveals to the citizens that they should not hold on to the traditions of their place too strongly. But if they do that, then how is the FP vision going to come about? Wilson tells us the citizen must “submit to the discipline” of tradition and place. Is provisional submission sufficient? Or should the citizen be permanently loyal to traditions which are mutable?

One way out of this dilemma could be to remove the Theorist’s office. I have not read anything on the Front Porch which suggests the philosopher has to have a role in their city (Tolkien, who I think would have been a Front Porcher, had no philosophers in Middle Earth either). My only concern is whether D’Souza could “cultivate it [his native community] so that it too might find a place for the intellectual, contemplative, life.” My hunch is he couldn’t because questions like “What is the best regime?” and “Why do we do things this way?” come about through an encounter with foreign practices and customs.

None of this proves the POMO Con contention that we should affirm large chunks of the modern project; however, I am suggesting that values like memory and place should not be given top billing.

Stuck on the Porch

The debate between POMO Cons and Front Porchers has moved into Phase II, a discussion on the merits of localism. Reading the posts reminded me of Dinesh D’Souza’s views on the merits of Western modernity. He is a celebrant of contemporary America and links its success to three (modern) factors: democracy, science, and capitalism.

Now Front Porchers want a return to a pre-modern way of life, what Lawler derisively calls the “It takes a medieval village” outlook. D’Souza is very interested in the debate over pre-modern v. modern ways of life, but he takes a different perspective on the former. When D’Souza usually discusses pre-modern views, he is looking at Eastern (Middle East and India) and not Western practices.

Having grown up in India, D’Souza is well acquainted with Front Porch values like localism and tradition. But he is not sanguine about it:

If I had remained in India, I would probably have lived my entire existence
within a one-mile radius of where I was born. I would undoubtedly have
married a woman of my identical religious, socioeconomic, and cultural
background. I would almost certainly have become a medical doctor, an
engineer, or software programmer….I would have a whole set of opinions that
could be predicted in advance; indeed, they would not be very different from
what my father believed, or his father before him. In sum, my destiny
would to a large degree have been given to me.
-What’s So Great About America
p. 80

It was only in Modern America that D’Souza could have discovered his interest in ideas. And even if Front Porchers disagree with his ideas, surely they can agree the world is a better off with D’Souza as a pundit rather than a programmer.

The downside about all pre-modern living, Eastern or Western, is how stifling they all are. Porches have their place, but they can become prisons.