Category: Old Dish

JELL-O WRESTLING WITH ROSS

Well, far be it from me to dissapoint Matt Yglesias if he’s looking for a catfight. I suggested that pushing for a more Christianized public sphere was a risky proposition, likely to dilute and secularize the shared symbols Christians prize. That, Ross ripostes, is a “counsel of despair,” and ultimately just evidence of the need to Christianize even harder. And that makes sense insofar as it goes—the risk of dilution presupposes that there’s a broader commercial and secular mass culture to do the diluting. If you could change mass culture wholesale, you’d avoid that problem. I don’t think that strategy is likely to succeed—and, from my perspective, so much the better—but it’s worth considering why.

The kind of deep change Ross is contemplating fairly requires the deployment of semiotically “thicker” stuff than a few creches or an “In God We Trust.” Their suitability for that sort of transformative work is limited by people’s ability to interpret them in a wide variety of ways. But if thin symbols are too blunt for the task at hand, thicker ones are likely to bump up against as much dissent from other Christians as from the secularist boogeymen. Consider Abington v. Schempp, one of the seminal Supreme Court cases on religion in school. Respondent Ed Schempp (who won on an 8-1 decision) wasn’t a wild-eyed atheist, but a Unitarian who objected to morning Bible readings in public schools on the grounds that he wanted his son exposed to scripture in the context of his own interpretations of it. As your buddies at Americans United like to point out, even with relatively “thin” symbols like the Decalogue, you’ve got multiple competing versions of the Big Ten to contend with. If the Narnian Final Battle with the secularists were won—or before it came to the forefront—how many of your evangelical allies would show the level of enthusiasm they did for Mel Gibson’s distinctly Catholic vision of the Passion?

That points, I think, to a more general problem: There’s increasingly not all that much of a “mass culture” to capture anyway. There was a New York Times op-ed about a year back (on another topic) noting that “Plain-vanilla Top 40, once the chief vehicle for hit songs, is now the format for only 5 percent of the nation’s 10,000-plus stations.” So if Christian families’ cultural consumption increasingly consists of Christian radio stations and Veggie Tales videos ordered online, it’s not because they’re retreating into quietism out of despair; it’s because the rain of cultural fragmentation falls on the just and unjust alike.

—posted by Julian

THE BENEFITS OF REPRESSION?

Earlier this week, I was listening to a debate on the BBC World Service on Britain’s new civil partnerships, and found myself nodding happily along at the nice Millian rhetoric trotted out by the spokesman for one of the gay rights groups there—good familiar classical liberal red meat about formal equality and social tolerance of self-regarding acts. But I also found myself wondering: Could moral progress in some sense help to undermine this kind of liberalism?

As political theorist Michael Sandel has pointed out, there are two ways you can defend (among other things) gay rights: The first is the liberal or formal way, by arguing that society (or at any rate, the law) need not concern itself with private morality or immorality, should maintain a scrupulous neutrality between different modes of life insofar as they don’t directly injure others. That sort of argument leaves open whether there is, in fact, anything more broadly wrong with gay relationships.

The other option is to offer a substantive or comprehensive argument: You can point out that the core values realized by heterosexual relationships are present in gay ones as well, and argue that they should not just be formally tolerated, but that there’s nothing morally bad about them. (Many people—such as our esteemed host—routinely make both sorts of arguments.)

Sandel’s concern is that the primacy of the first sort of argument in the public sphere gives short shrift to the second type. I find myself wondering whether a move toward agreement on questions of the second sort—which generational surveys suggest is happening, and which is in itself surely a good thing—won’t weaken the appeal of those nice Millian principles.

Liberalism was born of the anguish of Europe’s wars of religion—and by and by, what had begun as a détente of exhaustion came to be seen as a moral good in itself. But what happens when the big ticket injustices are, if not eradicated, then in retreat? In short: How much will we care about toleration and neutrality when we’re less worried that state power will be exercised in substantively wrong ways?

You can already see the drift to some extent in the ways the rights of women and racial minorities have been defended. In both cases, you initially saw the argument advanced in the classical liberal language of formal equality. Now at least some advocates of both causes have come to regard “formal equality” as a screen for white male privilege. (Recall Al Gore’s remarks about how opponents of affirmative action “use their color blind the way duck hunters use their duck blind.”) You see the potential for the same sort of drift in some defenses of civil liberties: Defenders of free expression would often rather invoke pyres outside libraries than make the case that even genuinely execrable speech deserves an opportunity to be heard, whether or not censorship would put us on a slippery slope to the suppression of speech we find substantively valuable.

That’s not—needless to say—an argument in favor of keeping some big substantive injustices around to remind us of the value of liberalism. But it is something to think about: Will we readily accept in droplets what we’ve refused to countenance in torrents?

—posted by Julian

FIGHTING WORDS

Since Julian and I probably don’t see eye to eye about . . . well, a lot of things, Matt Yglesias asks us for more brutal, no-holds-barred debating on the great issues of the day. Unfortunately, my co-blogger hasn’t said anything I radically disagree with (I’m agnostic on the great wiretapping debate), so I’m reduced to nitpicking. But I’ll take a stab at it. Here’s something Julian wrote, on Monday:

Let me suggest as a final point, though, that there may be a connection between “the real de-Christianization of Christmas” via “the frenetic pace of modern life, and the crassifying tendencies of commerce,” which bothers Ross, and an insistence on a faith-saturated public sphere. It is utterly mysterious to me when people of faith exult that some sectarian symbol-a Ten Commandments momument or an invocation of “one nation under God” in a schoolchild’s morning fealty oath-survives judicial scrutiny as mere “ceremonial deism.” Isn’t that precisely an acknowledgement that, by a kind of inverted transubstantiation, those symbols have been stripped of their meaning? The problem with pushing to embed your favored symbols in the mass culture is that you cede control of them to the mass culture-which I rather doubt is what the activists would want, on reflection.

I think the thing to recognize here is that serious Christians who worry about the naked public square don’t rejoice when a Ten Commandments display or the Pledge passes muster as “ceremonial deism.” Ceremonial deism is the last refuge of the lukewarm – the theory that lets Supreme Court Justices square their “wall of separation” notions with the pervasiveness of religious language and symbolism in American history, public architecture and public rhetoric. It’s what Stephen Breyer will sign on to, not what Antonin Scalia wants.

More generally, Julian’s certainly right that when Christians cede control of their symbols to the mass culture, it’s only a short jog to ceding control of Christianity itself to what you might call the American heresy – the gospel of success that’s made Joel Osteen the country’s bestselling “Christian” theologian, and threatens to make religious devotion just another cog in the commercial machine. This could be an argument for withdrawal and quietism – for Christians to abandon the public square entirely, and focus on cultivating an orthodox subculture in a more materialist sea. But that’s the counsel of despair. If the mass culture is really so bad for Christianity, maybe Christians ought to be doing more to change it, instead of letting it change them – which is what that whole “salt of the earth” thing was supposed to be about, I think.

Changing the culture is hard to do, of course – a lot harder than winning Pledge of Allegiance battles, or even elections. But people (right or left, but the left has understood this better for some time) who think that culture wars are mainly about politics are kidding themselves. I’ve argued this before, and Mark Helprin – one of the rare, rare American artists who leans right – made a similar point in NR’s fiftieth anniversary issue:

Conservatives have yet to approach culture as William F. Buckley approached political philosophy half a century ago. The theses of our culture are almost universally propounded by the Left – in education at all levels; publishing of all types; film and television; what used to be the fine arts; music; and in the libraries and museums, where history can be altered with an unnoticed deaccession or the flick of a caption. Looking upon all this as if silent upon a peak in Darien, Connecticut, are armies of conservatives who mainly react. There below them, stretching to the horizon, is the Pacific, and because they hesitate to swim in it, they are reduced to criticizing it. What will prevail in man’s life or imagination, the ocean or those who – even if rightly – take exception to it?

That the antitheses are usually just is irrelevant to the outcome, for here as almost everywhere the initiative rules. Consider the relative impacts of film and of film criticism; music and music criticism; education and criticism of educational fashion. Cultural abominations thrive not because they are insufficiently criticized but for lack of adequately supported competition.

Although not a few conservatives with a self-sacrificial bent are at work in the belles lettres and beaux arts, the conservative masses (what a delightful phrase) have largely ceded these fields or have been frozen in or out of them in the reactive position from which conservatives must be freed if their enterprise is to succeed and their principles are to thrive.

Conservatives and Christians are by no means perfectly overlapping categories, but Helprin’s point applies equally well to both. Julian’s right that religious believers risk a great deal when they take on the mass culture – but they risk even more when they don’t.

– posted by Ross

BROKEBACK

I saw it last night. Maybe my hopes were too high, but the movie didn’t quite sustain itself for the time it took, I felt. The short story accomplished it all with more concision and thereby with more punch. But the movie, as you’d expect with Ang Lee, had enormous integrity. Heath Ledger was magnificent in his indirection – this was a rare movie in which the anguish of the outwardly conforming, “straight-acting” gay man was exposed in all its raw pain. Three scenes remain in my mind. There’s a shot after the two men leave each other for the first time when Ennis [Ledger] stays upright and walks nonchalantly as his lover drives away. But then, as soon as his beloved is out of sight, he collapses in emotional pain, punching a wall in agony, even then having to deflect the suspicion of a stranger. The moment when they reunite – its passion, its need, its depth – ravishes with insight into what love truly is. Then there’s the scene when Ennis’ wife finally confronts him – and you can see the damage done to so many lives by the powerful, suffocating evil of homophobia. So many lives. Sometimes I start to imagine how much accumulated human pain has been inflicted for so many centuries on so many gay hearts and souls, and then I stop. It’s too much. We are slowly healing; but some wounds will never heal; and they are inscribed on the souls of millions in the past – the ones who persecuted, the ones who suffered, the ones who never let themselves be loved – or saw it briefly once, feared it and lived their lives in the lengthening shadow of their regrets. Yes, these were souls whose backs were broken. And now a new generation stands up.

– posted by Andrew

BUT THEY WERE REALLY COSMOPOLITAN CONVERSATIONS

Yesterday, I suggested that it might be difficult in this wacky, interconnected world to know which communications are really “international” ones. Apparently the NSA has the same trouble, and for something pretty close to the reason I hypothesized:

[In] at least one instance, someone using an international cellphone was thought to be outside the United States when in fact both people in the conversation were in the country. Officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified, would not discuss the number of accidental intercepts, but the total is thought to represent a very small fraction of the total number of wiretaps that Mr. Bush has authorized without getting warrants.

—posted by Julian

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE BOLIVIA?

It’s been easy to miss amid all the commotion over illegal wiretaps, transit strikes, and courts taking the trouble to define what is and is not science, but Bolivia just overwhelmingly elected an Indian-nationalist president who might just be Hugo Chavez’s new best friend in the region. How should we react? I don’t have a clue, but Noah Millman offers some characteristically interesting thoughts.

– posted by Ross

I’M ABOUT TO FALL VICTIM TO ONE OF THE CLASSIC BLUNDERS!

Most famous, of course, is “never get into a land war in Mesopotamia.” But only slightly less well known is: “Never get into a Fourth Amendment argument with the guy who literally wrote the book on government seizure of electronic evidence.” Still, I want to take a quick look at Orin Kerr’s analysis at Volokh Conspiracy of the NSA eavesdropping program.

Kerr offers two arguments for why the program might pass Fourth Amendment muster. First, he suggests that wiretaps of communications between persons in the U.S. and interlocutors abroad might fall under the “border search” exception that permits the government to inspect, without a warrant, persons and packages entering or leaving the country. I have no idea whether the courts would rule as Kerr suggests—intuitively the primary border-search rationale of preventing contraband from entering the country doesn’t apply straightforwardly to communications surveillance, though, of course, there is such a thing as digital contraband. But the logic of the Fourth Circuit case Kerr cites certainly seems to leave that door open—hell, it stands in the doorframe beckoning—and the prospect that a court might rule this way is a little disturbing. In the physical world, crossing a border is a relatively clear-cut proposition—you don’t, as a rule, do it by accident, so you at least know when you’re going to be potentially subject to a search. But do you know where every packet of e-mail or VoIP conversation you exchange goes? I sure don’t. But if I send an e-mail to my aunt, who’s in New York for the holidays, there’s a pretty good chance that it makes a stopover on a server in Madrid somewhere. Online, our private communications are routinely crossing borders, at least sometimes without our knowledge. And never mind the “we’re at war here” jazz; the border-search rationale would apply any time.

Next, Kerr turns to a potential “national security” exemption, citing a case that denied the executive domestic warrantless surveillance powers, but explicitly refrained from ruling “on the scope of the President’s surveillance power with respect to the activities of foreign powers, within or without this country.” Now, declining to deny a power is not the same thing as granting it, but leave that for the moment. A footnote in the same case observes:

No doubt there are cases where it will be difficult to distinguish between “domestic” and “foreign” unlawful activities directed against the Government of the United States where there is collaboration in varying degrees between domestic groups or organizations and agents or agencies of foreign powers. But this is not such a case.

But this, surely, is. And The New York Times‘ description of who was targeted leaves some doubt that the surveilled parties were all “agents of foreign powers”:

In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers [captured from terrorists’ cell phones] and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said.

We don’t know what the criteria were for “expanding” that “chain,” but it does begin to sound a bit like a massive game of Six Degrees of Qevin al-Baiken. Maybe evidence for some sort of connection to a “foreign power” in each case was sufficient that the targets all would’ve passed muster before a FISA court. But if so—if ther NSA wasn’t just lowering an electronic dragnet into the bitstream—then, as others have observed, it becomes mysterious why they wouldn’t just do that (at least retroactively, as FISA allows). Assume we think executive wiretaps of agents of foreign powers are per se reasonable. Don’t we still want some kind of oversight to ensure that those who’re eavesdropped upon are at least justifiably suspected of being such agents? Of course, if we add oversight, then (Catch 22), it’s not really an “executive” search anymore.

Now, fortunately (as Kerr observes), even if these arguments were to fly, we have statutory restrictions on wiretaps that go further than the Fourth Amendment might require. Still, at a time when the statues are in flux, it’d be nice to have a little constitutional double-bagging.

If you’re looking for views from people with actual qualifications to talk about this, by the by, Dan Solove has a good roundup of analysis.

—posted by Julian

DARWIN AND DESIGN

Just in time for the Intelligent Design decision to be handed down, Cardinal Christoph Schonborn – who penned a New York Times op-ed earlier this year that was widely criticized (by Andrew, for instance, and by Stephen Barr in this First Things essay) as an unwarranted attack on evolutionary science, and possibly a brief for ID – has a longer piece in First Things clarifying his take on Darwinism. It turns out, as far as I can tell, to be roughly the same take that the Church has held for the last century or so – namely, that that “a metaphysically modest version of neo-Darwinism could potentially be compatible” with Catholicism, but that there is “a difference between a modest science of Darwinism and the broader metaphysical claims frequently made on its behalf,” and that the Church must necessarily reject a Darwinism that insists, as Schonborn quotes an American scientist putting it, that “the world is organized strictly in accordance with deterministic principles or chance” and that “there are no purposive principles whatsoever in nature.”

It seems as though much of the confusion resulted from Schonborn using the term “neo-Darwinism” in his original op-ed to characterize the militant philosophical atheism of – well, of nearly every prominent defender of Darwinism, from Dawkins and Dennett to Wilson and Watson, all of whom insist that reasoning about nature, biology, and so forth leads inexorably to a disbelief in divine design. This was interpreted to mean that Schonborn was attacking the science of “neo-Darwinism” – the mainstream consensus among biologists concerning evolution through natural selection and how it works. In fact, Schonborn says in his FT essay, the original op-ed was about our “philosophical knowledge of reality,” not our scientific knowledge of the same. The Cardinal wasn’t critiquing evolutionary biology’s ability to explain how homo sapiens evolved from an australopithicene ancestor; he was critiquing modern science’s claim to be an all-encompassing explanation of existence:

Let us return to the heart of the problem: positivism. Modern science first excludes a priori final and formal causes, then investigates nature under the reductive mode of mechanism (efficient and material causes), and then turns around to claim both final and formal causes are obviously unreal, and also that its mode of knowing the corporeal world takes priority over all other forms of human knowledge. Being mechanistic, modern science is also historicist: It argues that a complete description of the efficient and material causal history of an entity is a complete explanation of the entity itself-in other words, that an understanding of how something came to be is the same as understanding what it is. But Catholic thinking rejects the genetic fallacy applied to the natural world and contains instead a holistic understanding of reality based on all the faculties of reason and all the causes evident in nature-including the “vertical” causation of formality and finality.

This is obviously not a way of approaching the study of the world, and man’s place in it, that many evolutionary biologists would be inclined to accept – but neither does it represent a significant change in the Catholic approach to evolution, or to science generally. Indeed, it’s hard to see how Catholicism could approach science in any way other than this – that is, treating it as a valid approach to knowledge that goes a long way toward explaining the world, without going nearly far enough.

– posted by Ross