Month: December 2009

Religion Dispatches interviews filmmaker Lisa Dargen, who pressured the evangelical leader to condemn the Uganda bill:

Darden believes that Warren’s noncommittal statement [to Newsweek] revealed that the evangelical Christian community didn’t believe that the Uganda story would be such big news in the United States and that they would not be asked to address it. Darden said she tried to impress upon [Warren's publicist and Darden friend Larry] Ross just how serious this story was, and with Maddow pushing it nightly on her show, how important it would become for Warren to speak out boldly against the measure, rather than dodge the question.

“I gave them a heads up. They didn’t have a clue what was coming down the pike, but I hoped that my call would be a catalyst for them to finally respond,” she said, noting that Ross has subsequently sent her a thank-you note for her involvement.

A reader writes:

I still can't quite get over the fact that, in front of that audience, Obama defended coercion and force in world politics. He could have soft-peddled that speech in so many different ways, but didn't. He took it to the "children of light." I think it will be one of his most important addresses as president — not because of the short term political impact it might have (say, inducing a kind word from Pete Wehner) but because of how it illuminates his cast of mind and his approach to politics. Its as "telling" as Bush's utopian second inaugural.

One other Niebuhr quote:

"Thus wisdom about our destiny is dependent upon a humble recognition of the limits of our knowledge and our power. Our most reliable understanding is the fruit of 'grace' in which faith completes our ignorance without pretending to possess its certainties as knowledge; and in which contrition mitigates our pride without destroying our hope."

Those are the final words to The Nature and Destiny of Man. So literally the last word of Niebuhr's greatest work is "hope."

Interestingly, during Niebuhr's Gifford Lectures (which Nature and Destiny is based on) in Edinburgh, that city was bombed by the Nazis. The Germans hit a naval base not far from where Niebuhr was lecturing, and you could hear anti-aircraft guns firing in return. This was during an actual lecture of his. Niebuhr spoke a word of hope, and held onto a Christian understanding of our destiny, as the city he was lecturing in was attacked by Nazis. I always found that detail remarkable!

The two greatest works of Christian hope that I know of during that period are Eliot's Four Quartets and Messiaen's Quartet For The End Of Time. I had the chance of dramatizing the former and combining it with the latter in a production I directed at Harvard a quarter century ago. Sometimes, the extremity of evil allows the purity of good to break through. Messiaen composed his masterwork in a prison camp; Eliot wrote his as the Blitz continued.

De profundis …

CatGyver?

Original version here.

(Hat tip: TWD)

She always had it in her; now she’s embracing it on video.

DiA takes the time to counter Eschenbach's anti-climate change "smoking gun":

[A]fter hours of research, I can dismiss Mr Eschenbach. But what am I supposed to do the next time I wake up and someone whose name I don't know has produced another plausible-seeming account of bias in the climate-change science? Am I supposed to invest another couple of hours in it? Do I have to waste the time of the readers of this blog with yet another long post on the subject? Why? Why do these people keep bugging us like this? Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong? At what point am I allowed to simply say, look, I've seen these kind of claims before, they always turns out to be wrong, and it's not worth my time to look into it?

Greenwald rounds-up those on the left and the right who enjoyed Obama's Nobel speech. Greenwald is predictably upset by this consensus, but Obama's foreign policy positions should have been clear to anyone playing attention during the campaign. Greenwald:

Obama puts a pretty, intellectual, liberal face on some ugly and decidedly illiberal polices.  Just as George Bush's Christian-based moralizing let conservatives feel good about America regardless of what it does, Obama's complex and elegiac rhetoric lets many liberals do the same.  To red state Republicans, war and its accompanying instruments (secrecy, executive power, indefinite detention) felt so good and right when justified by swaggering, unapologetic toughness and divinely-mandated purpose; to blue state Democrats, all of that feels just as good when justified by academic meditations on "just war" doctrine and when accompanied by poetic expressions of sorrow and reluctance.  When you combine the two rhetorical approaches, what you get is what you saw yesterday:  a bipartisan embrace of the same policies and ideologies among people with supposedly irreconcilable views of the world.

Some of us have long understood Obama's defense of war from the left. And why it might not be as tragic as Greenwald implies.

San Francisco, California, 11 am

A reader writes:

I disagree with the reader who wrote to recommend against using the term denialist for those who do not accept anthropogenic global warming. The term is accurate. The consensus view on climate science is supported by an immense body of research that is genuinely being denied.

But more importantly and in a way your reader might view as less "arrogant,” just look carefully at the arguments the denialists make. They simple do not stand up to scrutiny. There is no there, there. To anyone familiar with the variety of denialists in existence these days, the term brings to mind a particular method of argumentation designed to create an impression of controversy, not Nazi gas chambers. There are those who deny that we went to the moon, deny that evolution occurred, deny that AIDS is caused by HIV, and yes deny that the holocaust occurred. All of them share qualities with the AGW denialist: they deny the best supported explanation in favor of one that is determined in advance by an ideology. They fall into conspiracy theory mode, wave away evidence with special pleading, cherry pick their data and “experts” and will not change their mind no matter what the evidence shows. This methodology is essentially the opposite of skepticism by the way, a term you and the media have also used. Skepticism as a method advocated by the modern scientific skeptical movement, essentially encourages proportioning one’s beliefs to the evidence which is precisely what George Will, James Inhofe, Sarah Palin, et al are not willing to do.

A great discussion with Jonathan Safran Foer on his arresting new book.

I've been struggling with some kind of flu and so was unable yesterday to give Obama's Nobel Acceptance speech its due. It's a remarkable address – Niebuhr made manifest. What strikes me about it most of all – and I do not mean this in any way as a sectarian or non-ecumenical statement – is that it was an address by a deeply serious Christian. It was not Christianist. It did not seek to take sacred text or papal diktat to insist on a public policy or to declare that the president of the United States is somehow the instrument of God or good or that America is somehow more divinely favored than any other nation. It was written and spoken in such a way to reach anyone of any faith or none. It translated a deeply Augustinian grasp of history into a secular and universal language. It was an expression of tragic hope.

And that's one aspect of Obama's now-famous-phrase, the "audacity of hope", that is often overlooked.

Why is hope audacious?

Because the world is inherently tragic. Because, in Camus' words, men die and they are not happy. Because in Obama's words,

We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes.  There will be times when nations — acting individually or in concert — will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified… For make no mistake:  Evil does exist in the world.  A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies.  Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms.  To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

When I have been asked why I, as a conservative, support this man the way I do, I can only answer: listen to him. What is the philosophy that most affirms "the imperfections of man and the limits of reason"? What philosophy sadly demurs when told that peace is possible on earth, that history is leading to utopia, that war is over, that "freedom is on the march"? And this is the critical distinction between Bush and Obama: Obama is far more conservative than his predecessor. He sees that the profound flaws in human nature affect us as well as them; that we "face the world as it is," not as we would like it to be; that the decision to go to war is a moral and a pragmatic one; that ends have to be balanced by a shrewd and sometimes cold-eyed assessment of means.

For peace to exist, there must sometimes be war. A statesman will sometimes have to bargain with evil men. A statesman will also sometimes have to let evil flourish because he simply does not have the proportionate means to counter it. Human nature is alloyed between good and evil, and evil often wins.

Hope is not optimism. We have little reason for optimism given the first decade of the twenty-first century. Hope is a choice. As much a choice as faith and love.

I am staggered that so many neoconservatives and conservatives seemed shocked and enthused by the address. This does not, it seems to me, reflect on the address's novelty for Obama. Nothing in it was very different from anything he has said before. Distilling it all in one 36 minute address may have clarified it for his opponents. But I have to say their welcome applause merely reveals that they have not been listening for so many months. They still do not grasp the president we have or the seriousness he has brought to the tragic dimension of a moral foreign policy in an immoral world at a perilous time. I asked Obama in the campaign about some of this. Here's a response worth recalling from more than two years ago:

Barack Obama: You know, reading Niebuhr, or Tillich or folks like that—those are the people that sustain me. What I believe in is overcoming – but not eliminating – doubt and questioning. I don't believe in an easy path to salvation. For myself or for the world. I think that it’s hard work, being moral. It's hard work being ethical. And I think that it requires a series of judgments and choices that we make every single day. And part of what I want to do as president is open up a conversation in which we are honestly considering our obligations – towards each other. And obligations towards the world.

Andrew Sullivan: But you don't think we're ever going to be saved on this earth do you?

Barack Obama: No. I think it's a … we're a constant work in progress. I think God put us here with the intention that we break a sweat trying to be a little better than we were yesterday.

"A little better than we were yesterday." Whatever that is, it is not utopian or liberal except in the deepest, Niebuhrian sense. Obama has never been a pacifist. Never. His opposition to the Iraq war, as he said at the time, was not because he was against all war, but because he was against a dumb war. He is, in so many ways, a Niebuhrian realist. And with Niebuhr, there is the deeper sense that even though there is no ultimate resolution in favor of good over evil on this earth in our lifetimes, we still have a duty to try. It is this effort in the full knowledge of ultimate failure on earth that is the moral calling. It is to do what we can, knowing that it will never be enough.

The problem with Bush's foreign policy was that it was based on a "doctrine" which is never a good thing to base any politics on; that it was far too sanguine about the power of good in the world; far too crude about the role of culture and history in limiting the universal appeal of Western freedom; far too reckless in deploying resources without any concern for their limits; and so convinced of its own righteousness that it could even authorize the absolute evil of torture in pursuit of the absolute good of freedom. Bush was riddled with all the hubris, arrogance, rationalism and utopianism of the worst kind of liberalism. Obama is not a Tory realist; he still believes in the slow, uncertain march of human enlightenment. But he sure isn't a Bush-style or Carter-style utopian. And he is such a deeper, calmer spirit than Clinton's always-maneuvring mind.

These are desperately dangerous times. They are dangerous primarily because religion has been abused by those seeking power and control over others – both in the mild version of Christianism at home and the much, much more pernicious and evil Islamism abroad. They are dangerous because the fusion of this kind of religious certainty with the sheer power of technological destruction now available could bring the planet to catastrophe if we are not very, very careful. Very few moments in history have required an Augustinian statesmanship as much as now.

This is why I have supported this unlikely man for several years now. Two quotes from Niebuhr help illuminate why. The first:

"The task of building a world community is man’s final necessity and possibility, but also his final impossibility. It is a necessity and possibility because history is a process which extends the freedom of man over natural process to the point where universality is reached. It is an impossibility because man is, despite his increasing freedom, a finite creature, wedded to time and place and incapable of building any structure of culture or civilization which does not have its foundations in a particular and dated locus."

That is our task now. How do we find the motivation to accomplish it? Niebuhr again:

Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; there we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; there we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint.

Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness."

(Photo: People cheer for US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama as they greet the Torch Parade from the Grand Hotel Balcony in Oslo on December 10, 2009. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images.)