Year: 2005

Michael Novak’s attempt to buttress the notion that one either has to agree with Joseph Ratzinger or endorse complete moral relativism is less than persuasive. I won’t address all its flaws. But here’s an interesting digression. Novak wants to posit communism as a triumph of the post-Nietzschean relativism that Ratzinger is horrified by. Money quote:

Ratzinger experienced another set of loud shouters in the 1968 student revolution at Tubingen University, this time in the name of Marxist rather than Nazi will. Marxism as much as Nazism (though in a different way) depended on the relativization of all previous notions of ethics and morality and truth – “bourgeois” ideas, these were called. People who were called upon by the party to kill in the party’s name had to develop a relativist’s conscience.

This is a big stretch. The philosophical appeal of Marxism was and is, for the handful of fools who still cling to it, its claim to absolute, scientific truth. Similarly, Nazism asserted as a scientific fact the superiority or inferiority of certain races. These totalitarian ideologies allowed for no dissent because the truth had been proven. You see precious little relativism in Communist or fascist regimes. They created absolute leaders to embody and enforce the maintenance of their truths. And they believed in the conflation of such truths with all political life, the abolition of autonomy and conscience. In structure, they were and are very close to the structure of a decayed version of Catholicism that asserts one version of the truth, suppresses any and all open discussion of such truths within its power, and elevates a cult-like leader and mass demonstrations to reinforce its propaganda. Querulous, brave and ornery dissent – dissent designed not to obscure the truth but to understand it better – is quashed.

FAITH VERSUS REASON? Now who in the current religious debate reminds you of that? Of course, the Church is not a state; it’s a private, voluntary organization. So the analogy is not literal. The Pope does not have a police power. Ratzinger does not order his opponents murdered or imprisoned; he simply silences them or forces them out of the Church (and record numbers of theologians were silenced by the late Pope and record numbers of Catholics left the pews). But the structure of a blind, authoritarian and rigid Ratzingerian faith is very close to the blind, authoritarian and rigid secular totalitarianisms of the recent past. Which is why some former communists have now become the firmest supporters of a Ratzingerian-style faith. They have swapped public political totalitarianism for a private religious one. And like their totalist fellows, their inability to persuade others merely convinces them further of their own truth. Their references are never outside their own thought-system, and all fall conveniently back on the pronouncements of the supreme leader, who alone controls truth and thought. When pressed, they assert that history and nature will prove them right. “We will out-breed you!” they proclaim, in a horrifying echo of a eugenic mandate. Novak, I think, therefore gets things exactly the wrong way round. The alternative to relativism is the difficult process of reason, informed by faith. But that process cannot take place in Ratzinger’s Catholic church, because free thought is forbidden. When the conclusions are already dictated, how can you inquire freely? And if you cannot inquire freely, how can Catholics actually believe their own faith with the aid of their own reason? We are, after all, told to understand our faith, not merely swallow it unthinkingly. But how can we understand if we cannot question? And how can we fully believe if even asking the questions is forbidden?

FIGHTING BACK AGAINST FUNDAMENTALISM: Conservatives who believe in a strict separation of religion and politics and Christians who are saddened by the ascent of extremism and fundamentalism within their faith communities have options other than passivity. They have the blogosphere. Cardinal Ratzinger cannot silence us and the capitulation of the conservative media to fundamentalism also opens a space in the blogosphere for dissent. Here’s a great response to Eric Cohen’s attack on living wills in the Weekly Standard; and here’s a liberal Catholic’s responses to challenges from the Ratzingerian magazine Crisis. I should also recommend Bruce Bawer’s classic case against the fundamentalist attack on the core priorities of the Gospel message. The book is called “Stealing Jesus.” And how they have.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I think you are off ther mark on the attitude of social conservatives towards gays. The last thing they want is for gays to disappear; they desparately need them.
As long as these folks can point to ‘those others’ they are safe from confronting what they, themselves, have done to marriage and other social institutions. With gays available, they don’t have to look at their own divorce rates. With gays available they don’t have to look at the mess they make of their kids. And those who are Catholic don’t even have to look at the corrupt and incompetent bishops at the heart off the abuse scandal.
Gays fill the scapegoat role for these people, and that is even more of a danger than a policy of wishing they would disappear. the Nazis didn’t just wake up one day, decide they needed some scapegoats, and randomly choose Jews. The way was paved for them by hundreds of years of social conditioning. Anyone who doubts the social conditioning regarding gays need only look at the record of state constitutional amendments.
We should analyze these folks, not by what they say, but by what they do and what they avoid.”

“I think that you’re incorrect in your take on Cass Sunstein’s stance in legal circles. Sunstein’s politics may very well be liberal, but his constitutional politics are far from your typical leftist with a socialist slant. In fact, Sunstein has long been an advocate of judicial minimalism, arguing that courts ought to provide “narrow and unambitious” rulings leaving the brunt of the politics, law, policy and work to elected assemblies and represented. Not convinced? Then read his book. Its called “One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court”.
This judicial philosophy has led Sunstein to take positions unheard of in left wing legal circles, such as criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade as harmful and overly broad (a critique that, ironically, Sullivan would likely support) or praising the Rehnquist Court as mainly minimalist. But don’t just take my word on it, read for yourself in his article, Judicial Minimalism: Constitution and Court at Century’s End.“
Now, compare this judicial philosophy with what I would consider a grand liberal judicial theorist – Ronald Dworkin, who has urged judges to “get real” and provide expansive constitutional findings for the sake of “integrity” and “fidelity” to the broad language of the constitution. Get the picture? Sunstein is no conservative of the originalist variety, but he certainly no raging liberal either. I have always taken his constitutional politics as being quite centrist and thus consistent with the self description Rosen cites.” I stand corrected on Sunstein’s judicial philosophy. His politics, however, remain partisan Democrat.

YOUNG ON THE RIGHT AND FEMINISM: Cathy Young wrote this interesting review a few years back. It’s on the same theme: how the social right and the far left have come to agree on the need to repress male sexuality and keep women in their rightful and subordinate place – under men, literally and figuratively.

I’m not surprised that so many on the social right liked Andrea Dworkin. Like Dworkin, their essential impulse when they see human beings living freely is to try and control or stop them – for their own good. Like Dworkin, they are horrified by male sexuality, and see men as such as a problem to be tamed. Like Dowkin, they believe in the power of the state to censor and coerce sexual feedom. Like Dworkin, they view the enormous new freedom that women and gay people have acquired since the 1960s as a terrible development for human culture. Cathy Young has a great blog item exploring these connections here. Dworkin, of course, was somewhat too frank in her hatred of sexual freedom to achieve any real political power. But the theocons … well, they’re helping frame big government conservatism as we speak.

More evidence that the Bush policy of encouraging democracy in the Middle East is beginning to bear fruit. My own take on the slow, but real, progress in Iraq can be read here. Yes, Bush deserves as much credit for his steadfastness as he deserves criticism for his mistakes.

THE EVANGELICAL TEMPTATION: No, I’m not referring to evangelical Christianity as a religious force. I’m referring to the conflation of such religion with conservative politics. Money quote from Jeffrey Hart, no sane person’s idea of a liberal:

The Bush presidency often is called conservative. That is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative… If we recall Leo Strauss’s formulation that “Athens and Jerusalem” — science and spiritual aspiration — are the core of Western civilization, American Evangelicalism is a threat to both, through ignorance of both.

Sooner or later, real conservatives will actually fight back against the damage this administration has done to conservatism.

BROOKS’ PARADOX: David Brooks, in another smart column, points out that from the beginning of the 1990s, we have seen a sharp decline in all sorts of anti-social behavior: crime, abortion rates, teen pregnancy, and so on. At the same time, the last fifteen years have been marked by the high watermark of gay visibility and activism. If the assumptions of many social conservatives are true – that there is a direct relationship between culture and society, and that gay visibility is a sign of moral decline – then none of this should have happened. But it did. In fact, I think the two phenomena are linked. At the same time that teen pregnancies and abortion rates were falling, the gay rights movement moved toward the goals of social responsibility, i.e. the right to serve one’s country and the right to marry the person you love, with all the responsibility that entails. If any other formerly liberal minority group had embraced those goals, conservatives would have rejoiced. But gays cannot win. If we embrace counter-cultural leftism, we are a threat to society and the family. If we embrace conservative social values, like marriage and military service, we are a threat to society and the family. The bottom line social policy toward gay people embraced by social conservatives is that gay people simply shouldn’t exist. And if they do exist, society has to pretend they don’t. When was the last time you read an essay in, say, the Weekly Standard or National Review, making a case for how gays actually should fit in to society? Or how gay culture could be improved? David Brooks is one of those conservatives who actually asks himself what a sane conservative social policy should be toward homosexual citizens and family members. (The obvious, glaring, simple answer is: encourage stable relationships.) That’s why Brooks is a real conservative. And why those who want simply no social policy toward gays – except a vague disdain and loathing – are better understood as reactionaries and soft bigots rather than as actual conservatives.

Why hadn’t they thought of that one before? Here’s a classic neologism in Jeff Rosen’s NYT Magazine piece today: “Cass Sunstein, who describes himself as a moderate …” Maybe this was the interpolation of a fact-checker or copy-editor. Sunstein is a big liberal (which is his right), an anyone-but-Bush partisan Democrat, and, in Tom Palmer’s words, “about as radical an advocate of unlimited government as you could find in America.” I wonder if the NYT will expand this practice: “George W. Bush, who describes himself as a fiscal conservative. Joseph Ratzinger, who describes himself as a centrist. Michael Moore, who calls himself objective…” Oh, and those photographs! Several friends who know the men personally say they could not recognize them from the images. So Sunstein gets to describe himself as a moderate; while Epstein gets to see himself portrayed as a mob boss in a horror movie. Next time, the NYT magazine should just doodle in a couple of horns, forked tongue and some hooves. We get the idea. Why not be honest about it? An actual critique of the substance of the piece can be read here.

Camilla wears the same dress three occasions in a row. Diana Not.

A few of you have had the temerity, the chutzpah, the salty chocolate balls, to ask if I’ve given up on my decision to drastically reduce my blogging commitments. Er, well, the thing is … Actually, I have. In deference to my relationship (and my sanity), I’m not blogging in the early hours any more. I’m spooning. I blog when I feel like it, which is mainly post-coffee in the morning (and I get up earlier too). The pressure to promise something every day first thing no longer haunts me like a recalcitrant, recurring zit. Traffic is down (though less so than I expected), so pressure is off. Maybe it’s all a self-psych-out. But I’m making progress on the book and writing longer stuff. It’s all about balance, no?

Perhaps the least appreciated potential shift in global politics is happening in … France. The polls there are showing that it’s perfectly possible – maybe even likely – that voters will reject the new, cumbersome and unnecessary E.U. constitution. The NYT today reports on Chirac’s latest lame attempt to shift public opinion in his favor. A good read on why this could force a seismic change in Europe is the following piece by Anatole Kaletsky in the Times of London:

The alternatives offered to the people of France are not between the idealistic European multiculturalism of the 21st century and the xenophobic nationalism of the 19th. Rather they face a choice between two approaches: on one hand the liberal ideology of free markets and small governments that seems to be sweeping the world after its relaunch in Britain and America in the 1980s. The alternative is the 1970s belief that a centralised, protectionist and bureaucratically managed state could gradually be extended to the whole of Europe, preserving and enhancing the traditions of Gaullism in its glory days, when Chirac and Giscard were rising to power.

The EU isn’t all bad. It has acted as a democratic magnet for many other countries on its periphery; its democratic values have helped goad national governments into adopting more liberal economies and more inclusive societies. But the French dream of a rival to the U.S. is both reactionary – why should Europe and America be in competition? – and doomed to economic failure. In fact, the obsession with political union has acted as a diversion from the vital reforms needed in continental Europe’s economy. It would be a lovely irony if the French helped kick-start a more reasonable and diverse collection of cooperative nation states as the real future of Europe. In that country, the people are often wiser than the elites.

MUST-READ ON AFGHANISTAN: A concise, on-the-ground, revelatory report on what’s really happening in that country. Apart from the Gonzales Gulag (“news reports claiming that the US has set up a network of secret and lawless prisons in Afghanistan are dreadful, if accurate”), the picture is relatively promising. Money quote:

[T]he power of the gunmen and the chaos of the war years have diminished greatly, and people believe they will continue to diminish. This bears emphasis, in contrast to the unwarranted hysteria of some of the commentary I read on Afghanistan (“an electoral-narco-gulag-permanent-base dependency,” passim). Many people still don’t understand just how bad things were in Afghanistan, or how hard it is to find the traction to begin rebuilding a country from such a low base. Look at the stats on where Afghanistan is now (poverty, infant mortality, kidnappings, repression of women, impunity for murderers), and of course it’s appalling, of course it’s a dependency — four years ago it was a textbook failed state. Look at the trajectory of the place, and there’s reason for much hope.

Patrick Belton is doing great and good work – as an aid worker and as a journalist.

CONNECTICUT’S CHALLENGE: Two days ago, Connecticut became the second state to grant marriage rights in all but name to same-sex couples without any court prompting. California was the first. The new legislation emerged from the usual political process, with no judicial intervention. A bill was also passed reserving the name “marriage” for heterosexual couples. It seems to me that this shifts the debate on marriage rights in America. Many opponents of equality between gay and straight couples have insisted that what they are primarily opposed to is the judicial imposition of equality, not necessarily equality itself. Connecticut shows that the procedural argument is insufficient. The legislators framed this reform, not the courts. Something not completely dissimilar, by the way, is happening in Massachusetts. In the Bay State, the process for a constituional amendment is under way. That process is difficult but it is democratic. Elected representatives have to take a stand; they face re-election difficulties if they fly in the face of the democratic will. After almost a year of equality, Massachusetts voters have rewarded pro-equality legislators and penalized those who backed the amendment. There’s a good chance that the legislature will let the amendment die before too long. Again: this is a democratic process. Such democratic processes have led to constitutional amendments against marriage rights and civil unions in many states. In my view, federalism means those decisions, however regrettable, should be respected. But so too should Connecticut’s. And that is where the anti-federalist import of the proposed federal amendment is most clearly revealed. It seems to me that such an amendment would revoke Connecticut’s new civil unions, since they provide almost all the legal benefits of civil marriage. The co-author of the amendment, Robert P. George, has been quite clear in saying that the amendment is designed to invalidate civil unions that are the equivalent of civil marriage as well as civil marriage itself. So again we have two conservative principles in conflict: the procedural conservatism that respects states’ rights, and the theocratic conservatism that holds that a “sacred” meaning for civil marriage must be imposed nationally regardless of any state’s decision. It’s time that opponents of equal rights for gay couples acknowledge that this is now the choice: between a diverse, federalist country, and an explicitly Christian definition of a civil institution to be imposed on everyone.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “I am literally sitting in the hospital room with my dying father as I read your comments on Eric Cohen’s commentary. He is dying of Pulmonary Fibrosis, a disease from which there is no chance of recovery. He has specified in a living will, and thru multiple discussions with family and the hospital staff, that he does not wish to be placed on life support when the rapidly approaching (within days) time comes.
The thought of having the state, in the name of someone else’s beliefs, defy my father’s wishes for a natural death with dignity, fills me with rage. If we can not maintain a simple right to die when nature itself would have us do so, what rights do we maintain? Who is playing God here?” The Republican party is playing God, that’s who.

The whole idea of “super-AIDS” was a punch-line on South Park last night. Congrats to New York City’s Health Department. Their credibility is now even lower than it was before their hysterical photo-op in February. The generation they need to reach has tuned them out. They’re not reading the Health Department’s p.r. department, i.e. the NYT, either.