Year: 2005

I sure hope this piece about comic genius, Dave Chappelle, is on the mark. It certainly seems so to me. The whole idea of a man who is on a direct flight to vast money and fame stopping to ask himself who he is and what he’s doing strikes me as a phenomenally fresh moment in the culture. No, I’m not going to defend his apparent failure to live out certain contractual responsibilities (although I’d see it as eminently within the usual rights of an artist of any kind). What I am going to praise is what appears to be his conscience – even, and perhaps especially, in comedy. His integrity means more to him than going ahead because the money is in control. If that means slowing down, escaping the headlights of fame, taking time, so be it. Here’s a beautiful quote:

I don’t normally talk about my religion publicly because I don’t want people to associate me and my flaws with this beautiful thing. And I believe it is a beautiful religion if you learn it the right way. It’s a lifelong effort. Your religion is your standard. Coming here I don’t have the distractions of fame. It quiets the ego down. I’m interested in the kind of person I’ve got to become. I want to be well rounded and the industry is a place of extremes. I want to be well balanced. I’ve got to check my intentions, man.

That first sentence – which combines great faith with great humility – is what we need so much more of. In Islam, it is currently close to priceless. Thank God, then, for Chappelle. Literally.

The debate in the blogosphere just went up a notch.

“The leading thinkers of the British and American Enlightenments hoped that life in a modern democratic order would shift the focus of Christianity from a faith-based reality to a reality-based faith. American religion is moving in the opposite direction today, back toward the ecstatic, literalist and credulous spirit of the Great Awakenings. Its most disturbing manifestations are not political, at least not yet. They are cultural. The fascination with the ‘end times,’ the belief in personal (and self-serving) miracles, the ignorance of basic science and history, the demonization of popular culture, the censoring of textbooks, the separatist instincts of the home-schooling movement – all these developments are far more worrying in the long term than the loss of a few Congressional seats.
No one can know how long this dumbing-down of American religion will persist. But so long as it does, citizens should probably be more vigilant about policing the public square, not less so. If there is anything David Hume and John Adams understood, it is that you cannot sustain liberal democracy without cultivating liberal habits of mind among religious believers. That remains true today, both in Baghdad and in Baton Rouge.” – Mark Lilla, one of the most discerning public intellectuals of our time. The Weimar analogy is particularly disturbing. The struggle for open minds within our churches is critical to the maintenance of a liberal democracy in an increasingly fundamentalist era.

QUOTE OF THE DAY II: “Our military authorities are investigating these allegations fully. If they are proven true, we will take appropriate action.” – secretary of state Condi Rice. I feel the same way about this statement as I did about the president’s recent reaffirmation that atheists are as patriotic as Christian citizens. To put it bluntly: has it come to this? It is perfectly conceivable, given the torture policies promoted and permitted by this president, that desecration of the Koran has taken place in Guantanamo. Many other insane and inhumane interrogation tactics have turned out to be true. Remember smearing fake menstrual blood? We are in a critical war for world opinion. A critical part of our message is that this is not a war against Islam as such, but against Islamo-fascism and terror. And yet we see the religious right co-opting air force academies, and we hear of incidents like the alleged toilet-flush of the Koran. Since no one is ever held responsible for anything in the Bush administration, we can be sure this incident will be lied about, covered up or blamed on some poor military grunt who can be easily scapegoated. But at some point, we will have to confront the severe damage this administration has done to American prestige and credibility in a critical global battle of ideas because of its interrogation policies. These are self-inflicted wounds. Even if this incident turns out to be false, our previous policies have made it perfectly plausible. That is the shame – and the terrible gift from this administration to Osama bin Laden.

WHAT PLAN B IS: Not as simple as my stern emailer yesterday. Here’s the FDA’s formal description:

Plan B works like other birth control pills to prevent pregnancy. Plan B acts primarily by stopping the release of an egg from the ovary (ovulation). It may prevent the union of sperm and egg (fertilization). If fertilization does occur, Plan B may prevent a fertilized egg from attaching to the womb (implantation). If a fertilized egg is implanted prior to taking Plan B, Plan B will not work.

And here:

How does Plan B work (mechanism of action)? Plan B is believed to act as an emergency contraceptive principally by preventing ovulation or fertilization (by altering tubal transport of sperm and/or ova). In addition, it may inhibit implantation by altering the endometrium.

Here’s a broader account of the issues involved. I don’t think “abortifacient” is therefore an accurate description, unless the female body itself is an abortifacient as well.

THE FUNDAMENTALIST AS NARCISSIST: Here’s an email worth pondering:

“What you define as doubt would be better thought of as humility, a recognition of one’s own fallibility, a genuine modesty in one’s own power to know and understand truths both empirical and inferential. And the converse of the virtue of humility is the sin of pride, an overestimation of the value of one’s thought and being. In modern psycho-speak we refer to pride as narcissism or egotism and that gets to the root of the flaw of the fundamentalist – it is a fault of character, not conclusion. The supreme being they honor is the one staring back in the mirror and it’s the word and law of that being they seek to uphold. While they cite the primacy of the individual as part of the damaging heritage of liberalism, the current variety of fundamentalist is, ironically, very much a product of a lifetime of liberal overvaluation of their personal beliefs for no reason other than it is their personal beliefs. Somewhere along the line, mommy should have told them that, yes, they’re special but not that special.”

I wouldn’t be quite that harsh. But some fundamentalist certainty about political matters in which no certainty is possible is, to my mind, a form of spiritual arrogance and intolerance.

“Your description of the real faultline in American politics is right on the money. What’s troubling is that so many people on the left have lined up with the Theocrats on the same side of the faultline without even realizing it. By deeming empirical and inferential truth as ultimately subjective, the postmoderns and multiculturalists have essentially conceded that all values constitute a leap of faith. Logic and reason have been effectively removed from public debate. This plays right into the hands of fundamentalists, who are perfectly willing to wage the battle on these grounds: If the left is only willing to offer a kind of watery faith in a secular welfare state, the religious right is happy to rebutt them with a profound faith in Judeo-Christian tradition. Individual freedom then becomes a kind of collateral damage: In arguments of faith, neither side brooks heretical points of view. The real key, as you suggest, is a return to the healthy skepticism of liberal democracy. Damned if I know how to accomplish that, however. There are so few of us on this side of faultline. Every time I try to steer discussions over to skeptical ground, the two faith camps accuse me of spying for the other side.”

“I believe in family values,” – a Florida county Republican chair, complaining about a slander that he had married six times. It was only five. Hey, but as long as the gays are kept in their place, who’s counting?

“I am trying not to let it affect my love for you that you use the term ‘morning-after contraceptive,’ which is used by nobody with any basic knowledge of biology, with the exception of those who rely on talking points from Planned Parenthood. It’s morning-after, alright. But it’s post-conception, which makes it an abortifacient, not a contraceptive. Don’t quibble over implantation; it’s fertilization that matters. And so what if lots of fertilized eggs are “spontaneously aborted,” naturally failing to implant? There’s a difference between letting someone die and killing her, you know. Long and short: support Plan B, if you like; insist that it be airlifted to Africa even. But don’t call it contraception.”

Some leading theoconservatives have been peddling the notion that Thomas Reese was not actually fired by then-Cardinal Ratzinger, but was removed for other reasons. They’re misinformed, to be polite about it. John Allen reports:

Here I can only clarify one point that has been a bit fuzzy in some of the public discussion.
Everyone acknowledges that over the last five years, concerns about certain articles published by America on topics as diverse as condoms, gay priests, the 2000 Vatican document Dominus Iesus, and pro-choice Catholic politicians have reached the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and that the congregation in turn raised these concerns with the superior general of the Jesuit order, Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach.
What has confused some observers, however, is whether or not the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith actually sent a letter demanding that Reese resign, and to what extent then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, was personally involved in these discussions.
Based on conversations with senior Jesuit sources in Rome May 11, I can confirm that a letter was indeed sent by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the early months of 2005, before Ratzinger’s election as pope, to Kolvenbach. I have not seen the letter, and therefore I do not know if it contained a direct order to remove Reese, or if it was a more vague expression of a desire to see a change in direction at America. The Jesuit sources said, however, that the thrust of the letter was clear — that Reese’s position was no longer tenable.
I also do not know if that letter was signed by Ratzinger. What I can report with certainty is that over the past five years, Ratzinger personally raised the concerns about America in his conversations with Kolvenbach. Like other religious superiors, Kolvenbach meets with the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to discuss cases involving members of his order, and it was in the context of those routine conversations that America arose.

Don’t buy the Neuhaus spin, in other words. No moderate or centrist Catholic is safe in Benedict’s church.

“From the perspective of society, the tendency to ‘privatize’ the moral dimension, so common to America with its slogan ‘separation of church and state,’ can potentially have disastrous consequences.” – Archbishop William J. Levada, just appointed to be pope Benedict XVI’s guardian of orthodoxy. Even back in 1995, Levada was singling out one political party, the Democrats, for censure. And, for Levada, church-state separation is now merely a “slogan,” not a fundamental principle of a free society? Another sign of where Benedict is going.

They’re coming. And they will be much more severe than his father’s. Sure, the president may have managed to forestall them until he is out of office – but he will have made them inevitable by his fiscal profligacy; and he will bear primary responsibility for them. Bruce Bartlett is one of the few conservatives to say this out loud. Money quote:

I now believe that the best we can hope to do is make incremental improvements to the existing tax system and hopefully prevent it from getting worse. Unfortunately, because the current President Bush and the Republican Congress have allowed spending to get totally out of control, I believe that higher taxes are inevitable. In particular, the enactment of a massive new Medicare drug benefit absolutely guarantees that taxes will be sharply raised in the future even if Social Security is successfully reformed.
Too many conservatives delude themselves that all we have to do is cut foreign aid and pork-barrel spending and the budget will be balanced. But unless Republican lawmakers are willing to seriously confront Medicare, they cannot do more than nibble around the edges. With Republicans having recently added massively to that problem, and with a Republican president who won’t veto anything, I have concluded that meaningful spending control is a hopeless cause.
Therefore, we must face the reality that taxes are going to rise a lot in coming years.

I fear he’s right.

FUNDAMENTALISM WATCH: When the FDA advisory committee votes 23 – 4 to allow over-the-counter sales of Plan B, a morning-after contraceptive, it is very, very rare for the FDA to ignore it. But when it comes to science, this administration tends to listen to religious voices as much as scientific ones. David Hager is one of those voices, an unreconstructed fundamentalist who believes that women should submit to men in private and public life. He wrote a memo to the FDA head opposing over-the-counter use and bragged that it had made the difference. I don’t know. But it wouldn’t surprise me.

DOUBTING DOUBT: Ross Douthat adds more nuance to our conversation about doubt, truth and politics. I’m grateful. Nevertheless, I still disagree; and I think our disagreement stems from a slightly different take on what we mean by truth. My worry about fundamentalism in politics is not so much that it posits things as true, but how it does so. A large swathe of fundamentalist conservative politics rests its arguments on simple appeals to Biblical truth, or revelation, or notions of nature that cannot be subjected to skeptical inquiry (i.e. “natural law” that is uninterested in contemporary scientific research and seeks merely to embellish Aquinas with ever subtler forms of ornament). The truth I’m talking about – whose prerequisite is doubt – is an empirical, inferential kind, the kind that arises both from science and human experience and historical reflection; and is always held provisionally. The first kind of ‘truth’ is the kind liberals seek and fundamentalists have found; the second kind of truth is one conservatives are happy to stumble across and hold until a more persuasive account comes along. And in this distinction, I’d argue, lies the real faultline in American politics. Not truth versus relativism; but skepticism versus those claiming to know what heaven is – in order to impose it on earth.

This is hilarious. And, yeah, I get skewered too.