Month: August 2010

“Why Think When You Can Just Feel?”

"Where to start with this part-pathetic and part-sinister appeal to demagogy? To begin with, it borrows straight from the playbook of Muslim cultural blackmail. Claim that something is "offensive," and it is as if the assertion itself has automatically become an argument. You are even allowed to admit, as does Foxman, that the ground for taking offense is "irrational and bigoted." But, hey — why think when you can just feel? The supposed "feelings" of the 9/11 relatives have already deprived us all of the opportunity to see the real-time footage of the attacks—a huge concession to the general dulling of what ought to be a sober and continuous memory of genuine outrage. Now extra privileges have to be awarded to an instant opinion-poll majority. Not only that, the president is urged to use his high office to decide questions of religious architecture!" – Hitch.

Meanwhile, National Review has a blog post that is actually titled thus:

The Government Confiscates Your Money To Build Mosques

No, you can't parody it. You can just weep at it.

At The Hour Of Our Death

DOVEJohnMoore:Getty

Damon Linker is, in my view, one of the most arresting and honest writers of his generation on the subjects of faith and politics. And now he takes the extraordinary composure and rational grace of Hitch facing his own mortality and compares it with Primo Levi’s refusal to succumb to religious temptation at the hour of his death. Levi wrote about the concentration camp he survived:

I must nevertheless admit that I experienced (and again only once) the temptation to yield, to seek refuge in prayer. This happened in October 1944, in the one moment in which I lucidly perceived the imminence of death . . . naked and compressed among my naked companions with my personal index card in hand, I was waiting to file past the “commission” that with one glance would decide whether I should go immediately into the gas chamber or was instead strong enough to go on working. For one instance I felt the need to ask for help and asylum; then, despite my anguish, equanimity prevailed; one does not change the rules of the game at the end of the match, nor when you are losing.

Damon respects this composure, as I do. And, I think the great failing of today’s atheists is a lack of respect for the alternative: which is, as Damon writes, not the use of faith as some kind of crutch for less anxious living and dying, but the belief that being human is not simply about our rationality, that

a Christian believes that the experience of suffering discloses essential truths that cannot be discovered or known in any other way. What are these truths? That we are fundamentally weak and needy creatures. That we are anxious animals, longing for someone or something to soothe us, to protect us from and relieve us of our worries.

Christianity’s radical claim is that it is in suffering alone that we approach the truth about our ultimate condition, just as Jesus’ intense suffering on the Cross makes sense only as an act of God’s solidarity with us in this mortal, existential panic. The position you take on this cannot be reduced to an argument. It is much deeper than that.

I revere reason and respect atheism. (And I think the writer who most taught me about the need for mutual respect between atheists and believers was an atheist, Albert Camus.) Watching my friend die in this remarkable fashion is as persuasive an argument for atheism as I can imagine. Hitch is dying as he lives – with integrity and passion. But for me, it is the fear too that informs us, the dread and the pain and the loneliness of dying and suffering. The moments I have felt closest to God have been when I have been stripped of every security, the moments when I have felt no love, known no safe home, witnessed unspeakable cruelty – and was rescued by nothing but his ineffable, boundless and yet intimate Love.

This is not an argument, I know. It can easily be dismissed as wish-fulfillment. I beg of you only to respect that this is not how I experienced these moments. They were real. In suffering, I have felt and known God reach into my life and grab me by the scruff of my neck and shake me with the brusque affection of a father’s compassion. “Andrew, Andrew … you fret and are anxious about so many things. But only one thing is necessary.”

Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
 Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.

(Photo: John Moore/Getty.)

Quote For The Day II

MIRWAISPaulaBronstein:Getty

“We are happy to have [the Americans] here now. But if they kill a single civilian, people will turn against them,” – an Afghan villager to a New York Times reporter, in a fascinating dispatch from the front.

And there you have the excruciating dilemma of a neo-imperial presence designed to save nations from their own internal pathologies and the rise and rise of Jihadist, violent, medieval Islam. Even when you make no mistakes, there is no gratitude – because you are still a foreign occupier in a country you have been deployed in for close to a decade – the longest foreign war in US history. But, of course, you cannot not make mistakes. Every civilian these medieval terrorists kill is a point toward intimidation and victory. Every civilian the protecting Coalition kills undermines the legitimacy of the entire thing.

This is not something even the most brilliant general or most talented and courageous soldiers can rectify. It's endemic to empire, whether that empire is constructed out of self-defense, moral responsibility or vainglory.

(Photo: Asan Bibi, 9, sits on a bench as burn cream is applied to her at Mirwais hospital October 13, 2009 Kandahar, Afghanistan. She, her sister and mother were badly burned when a helicopter fired into their tent in the middle of the night on October 3rd, according to their father. Three members of the family were killed in the incident. The family belongs to the Kuchi ethnic tribe, nomads living in tents out in the open desert whom are very vulnerable to a war they have little understanding of. Mirwais hospital in Kandahar city is the largest regional hospital in the area, supported by the ICRC and the Afghan government it caters to most of the war wounded in the most hostile part of the country. By the quite remarkable Paula Bronstein/Getty.)

The Unique Quality Of “Lifelong Heterosexual Monogamy” Ctd

The Good Wives Photo Gallery on truTV.com's Crime Library_1281512009893

Gingrich's second of three wives, Marianne, gives blockbuster access to Esquire's John H. Richardson in a 8,300-word profile of the former Speaker. The following passage is making the most waves:

"There's somebody else, isn't there?" She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?

She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. "'I can't handle a Jaguar right now.' He said that many times. 'All I want is a Chevrolet.'"

He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused. He'd just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he'd given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.  The next night, they sat talking out on their back patio in Georgia. She said, "How do you give that speech and do what you're doing?"

"It doesn't matter what I do," he answered. "People need to hear what I have to say. There's no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn't matter what I live."

Steve Benen reviews the rest of Newt's record on marriage:

[He] haggled over the terms of his divorce from his first wife while she was in the hospital, recovering from uterine cancer surgery. He had already proposed to his second wife before he was divorced from his first. In the '90s, this happened again. Gingrich had an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide — while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton — and asked his third wife to marry him before he was divorced from his second.

And Marianne had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In follow-up posts to his piece, Richardson reveals more from his interviews ("As a reporter, I've always believed that everyone has some kind of inner coherence. … Until Newt Gingrich") and ponders Newt's 2012 aspirations ("so bad, he can taste it").

It's a gruesome spectacle and best left private – all marriages fail in some respects because we are all human; what matters is struggling to make them succeed. What makes this different is Gingrich's alleged statement:

"It doesn't matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say."

This notion that the elite's responsibility is to preach values they do not believe in and do not practice is not the same as failing to live up to norms we all aspire to. It is not simply being human; it is cynicism. You see it in the neoconservative flattery of crude religious faith they quietly feel alienated from – and then the bashing of "liberals" for being more honest about it. Everyone who fails to live up to ideals deserves support. Those who lie about the ideals they actually hold, and use that as a cynical bludgeon in political warfare deserve no such thing.

(Getty images via TruTV.  Marianne is on the right.)

Ross Responds

Not to me, alas, but maybe that will come. But this point seems to me to be the crux of it. Ross concedes, as does Frum, that his Catholic conception of marriage is no longer even shared by most Catholics. Instead, our common assumption now is that:

marriage exists to celebrate romantic love and provide public recognition for mutually-supportive couples, with no inherent connection of any kind to gender difference and/or procreation, and with only a rhetorical connection to the ideal of permanence.

Since this is basically the theory that much of our society already holds, redefining marriage to include gay relationships is unlikely to have anything like the kind of impact on American life that, say, the divorce revolution of the 1960s and 1970s did. But again, I think it’s a little naive to assume that it will have no impact at all — that legal changes don’t beget further cultural changes, and that public definitions don’t influence private conduct. Maybe the potential consequences are so vanishingly minimal that they’re easily outweighed by the benefits to gay couples; that’s certainly a reasonable position. But looking out across America’ landscape of heterosexual dysfunction, it’s still a little hard for me to accept that what this moment demands of us is the legal formalization — indeed, the constitutionalization, if Judge Walker has his way — of the ideological conceit that marriage has no necessary connection to gender difference, procreation or childrearing.

What this means is that gay people's lives are to be used to buttress an ideology of marriage that straight people have already abandoned. Now, even if you make the worst assumptions about the impact of marriage equality as an idea in America, does it not strike you as, well, simply unfair to use gays as a way to lecture straights? Are we not ends in ourselves, rather than means to others' ends?

And the benefit of marriage is not just for gay couples. It is also for our straight families who want and need to be able to include us fully in their lives. The cost of the stigmatization of gay people is not just on gay people, just as anti-miscegenation laws hurt blacks and whites. We are all connected. Why would conservatives not want to bring a new minority into an existing institution, rather than, at best, balkanize them into a separate identity or, at worst, treat them as if they and their families didn't exist at all?