Kudos to Rep. Christopher Smith

A New Jersey representative was on the floor of the House last night clearly and passionately articulating the connection between state-funded health care and state-funded abortions. Sure, the House was empty and he was talking to two other Representatives. His arguments were no less compelling.

The number of abortions will dramatically increase under the coming state-controlled health care plan. This is something we need to amplify for public consideration; especially to those of a religious mindset who may be inclined to favor state-enforced health care.

I hope to find a video soon; let me know if you do!

the unique genius of the American political Constitution

A former Professor of mine is currently contributing to a blog which seems to be an effort to recover the uniqueness and greatness of American republicanism in the minds of its readers. It comes highly recommended. Click here to check it out.

Here is a taste:

For Machiavelli, and those won over by his lively political philosophy, politics was and always has been a struggle for importance between the haves and the have nots. Moving forward, the haves would be granted a higher designation as long as they kept the have nots “satisfied and stupefied” with bread and circuses. The have nots should not expect to rule but should happily accept a pleasant form of mediocrity in which their patrimony was made secure. In essence, everyone was a have and a have not in Machiavelli’s schema.

If one accepts the premise that the American founders understood the creation of the American republic as simply another chapter in this Machiavellian novel on politics, than it is possible to imagine that we are as republican now as we were then, that leaders and led have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship at the expense of liberty.

But part of what we are attempting to show on this blog is that American republicanism (referenced in Tuesday’s posting in John Adams’ definition of a political body in which leaders and led ascribe to an empire of laws rather than an empire of men) is a different species of republicanism than Machiavellian republicanism. While American republicanism is challenged by the lingering effect of Machiavelli’s reformulation of politics, it is not beyond our reach as Americans to re-acquire the knowledge and sentiments that first gave it life. We’re not where we need to be because these timeless principles are covered in muck and mire. Yet we’re not completely lost because these timeless principles are.

Firing Line Reflections, Pt. 1 - Malcom Muggeridge

Thank you all for your well wishes! My new wife and I have returned from our Caribbean excursion and have settled into our new apartment.

We received as a Wedding gift episodes of William F. Buckley's the Firing Line. And within the first episode we watched we have already been able to extract something immensely useful. WFB is talking to Malcolm Muggeridge, a rather confused European intellectual who calls himself a man of the left. Within the course of the episode, they begin discussing the usefulness of the Christian gospels, and of the appeal of religion without dogma. In this context, Muggeridge brings up an interesting proposition for WFB to consider. He asks him to recall Christ's temptation in the wilderness, when the Devil offers him the Kingdoms of the Earth.

The point Muggleridge is making is actually quite profound, despite his total incoherence in almost everything else. I will let him speak for himself:

"Let's take what is the most fascinating thing: that temptation in the wilderness, when the Devil offered Christ the kingdoms of the earth. He wouldn't take them, of course (interestingly enough the kingdoms of the earth should be the Devil's gift, which I cordially approve of, cordially agree with.) Now you see from the point of view of the sort of Anglicans, other clergyman, and so on, that I am talking about, that was an act of madness. Christ should have accepted the kingdoms of the Earth, and he should have set up excellent socialist, egalitarian, forward-looking, welfare-creating, governments in them - and then mankind would have lived happily ever after. That's the view of the clergy today.

It seems to me that Mr. Muggeridge quite accurately describes the position of many Christians today who favor "immanetizing the Eschaton", so to speak. Our world is a fallen one; it will not be not so until it has all passed.

In other less somber tones, if you get a chance to see this episode of the Firing Line, titled "The Culture of the Left", I highly recommend it. Dissecting the muddled ideas of Mr. Muggeridge is worth many hours of entertainment.

not an occasion for condolences

I am getting married this Saturday!

I am very blessed and privileged to be marrying a virtuous and beautiful woman.

Pray for us.

note

The world has a lot to learn from Charles Kesler. That's right. The whole world.

on the evil that God permits

Ralph McInery reflects on evil:

Moral theologians concentrate on the evil we bring about, on ourselves and others, and which thus has a remedy in moral conversion. But it is misfortune that takes center stage when people complain that God is not doing his job properly.

Misfortune may be an unintended consequence of what we do, but it is not unintended by God. Like physical pain, it can be essential to the good. No bleeding, no bandage, no healing. Stepping for the elevator and getting the shaft, as it were, does not cease to be a rough experience when we ask why God permitted it. What is he trying to tell us through the misfortunes that befall us?

He’s got the whole world in his hand. Every little movement has a meaning all its own. Discovering what it is, approximating that discovery, and profiting from it, could be a description of the spiritual life. Not that anyone can have theoretical certainty that he has grasped God’s reason. The point of the inquiry is doing, not knowing.

(my emphasis)

Line of the Day

Those of us foolish enough to call ourselves “conservative” are forced to admit that culturally and politically at least we live amidst less and less worth conserving.

- Katherine Dalton

Although, I suppose I'd prefer the "traditionalist" appellation, if I must choose one.

Ratzinger on progress

In Salt of the Earth, Joseph Ratzinger remarked: “Christianity, in fact, does not have such a notion that history necessarily always progresses, that, in other words, things are always getting better for mankind.” The reason for this caution is that “history” is not independent of the choices of actual human persons who must decide whether or not to live a Christian life.

haha! Angelo Codevilla is such a jerk and it's awesome

Here he is on the Obama speech in Cairo:

Just imagine: After a thousand years during which Islam and Western civilization have trod opposite paths in philosophy, science, and the most basic attitudes toward relations between the sexes and the role of work in life — and after a half-century during which Muslims have murdered Western ambassadors and Olympians, to the cheers of millions of their own — suddenly a young American seems to believe he can conjure up a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” How could anyone imagine he possesses such a “reset button”? The answer only starts with Yuppie hubris.

It is all too clear that Obama and his followers share one of the postmodern world’s most dangerous intellectual habits, indeed a habit that mainstream Islamic civilization adopted circa 1000 AD and that has so lowered its quality of life, namely disregard for the relationship between ends and means, cause and effect. Hence Obama told the Muslim world, “This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.” Must? Who will make it stop? How? He went on to say, “So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace,” True enough. But at the same time he preached those differences, especially regarding women. In his piece de resistence he urged his audience to “abandon violence,” because “resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed.” But his audience knew perfectly well that the U.S. government had given billions of dollars to to the Muslim world precisely because so many Muslims had succeeded in killing so many Americans. Of course they had succeeded.

Americans have only begun to suffer for having empowered a leadership class so intellectually crippled.

"Someone who finds no fascination in watching games is probably much farther away from what is highest in our human experience than someone who does, because games, like ourselves, exist for their own sakes." - James Schall

what's left out of the debate on marriage

A smart analysis of marriage at an excellent new website called Front Porch Republic:

This last observation points to a basic feature of marriage that has largely been left out of contemporary debates over marriage (whether gay marriage or heterosexual marriage). Marriage is but one part of a larger set of cultural conditions. Marriage is a condition in which individuality is subsumed to the larger considerations, demands, and obligations of culture and commonweal. At the most basic level, we sacrifice our autonomy on behalf of the good of a “unit” now defined as a couple, not two individuals. At a basic level, that unit is the source of future generations - the very source and conduit for the conveyance of human life and particular cultures. But the unit is itself an expression of, and draws from, the community as a whole. Thus (as I’ve written elsewhere), marriage is entered into through the blessing of and in the presence of community, not (as Las Vegas versions would suggest) as a contract of individuals. Marriages derive from, exist for, and are legitimized by the community and culture from which they derive. Thus, in their earliest instantiation marriages had nothing to do with the wishes of the individuals who composed them. They were the arrangements by families who looked to the continuity of a way of life (and, yes, family status) rather than the individual wishes of the partners.

Even when the consent of the individuals became a central feature of marriage - an innovation of Christianity, as Remi Brague reminds us (see the last paragraph of the interview that Mark Shiffman kindly linked for us) - it was still understood by all parties that marriage was most fully a union by and for the greater community. Blessings of parents and the publication of “the banns” was a necessary precondition for a wedding. This was especially because the married couple - by committing to marriage - was not merely joining to each other in an official capacity, but was in fact becoming a constitutive unit of the community and the conduit for the continuation of culture. Marriage was thus essential to the life and future of culture, and could not be permitted to take place between two individuals who happened to love each other but who were culturally unrelated. Rather, and necessarily, marriage was the union not simply between individuals, but between two people who would convey the lived traditions of a culture - most obviously (for instance), a man and woman of the same religious faith (this is one of the main points of Fiddler on the Roof, where Tevye can brook the choices of his two older daughters - even marriage to a communist - because they are both Jews. It is only when his youngest daughter proposes to marry a Christian that he withholds consent). Marriage was most essentially a commitment to a community, not the sum of personal choices of individuals.

What can it possibly mean to defend marriage when one cannot also defend or even conceive of a culture in which individualism is not the reigning basis for self-understanding? Our “debate over marriage” is emaciated and unsatisfying precisely because the contending parties - Left and Right alike - are not even capable of discerning the more fundamental issues at play, and are content to play out the drama in the most deracinated and culture-less venue imaginable - the legal brief. At the distant end of a broken connection, we debate over an institution - marriage - that carries ancient connotations but for which the cultural preconditions have ceased to exist. We debate over a dried and dead husk.

Kinda dark, but true. Check out the rest of the article if you have time.

What's with David Brooks?

And his burgeoning determinism?:

"Supreme Court justices, like all of us, are emotional intuitionists. They begin their decision-making processes with certain models in their heads. These are models of how the world works and should work, which have been idiosyncratically ingrained by genes, culture, education, parents and events. These models shape the way judges perceive the world. "

a must read

Professor Leon Kass delivers the 2009 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, (he follows the great Harvey Mansfield).

Peter Lawler comments:

Kass discovered through his personal experience that he was, from one view, more of a humanist than a scientist. He "found that I loved my patients and their stories more than I loved solving the puzzles of their diseases." His fellow scientists "found disease fascinating," but he found particular people fascinating, especially "how they struggled with suffering." Solving puzzles is the particular pleasure of the impersonal scientist and the philosopher; loving or even personally identifying with the tough personal struggles of patients or interlocutors was not even a characteristic of Socrates. Kass, the scientist, "tasted the great pleasures of independent discovery" during "the golden age of molecular biology," but those, it seems, were never his greatest pleasures or deepest concerns. Kass's distinctive concerns must have continued to owe something to the personal decency of his "saintly" and "moralist" parents, as much to his exposure to the questioning characteristic of Great Books Theirs, because of their quasi-religious community, was not the kind of quasi-socialism that abstracted from the greatness and misery of ordinary persons.

Kass adds that he "hated the autopsy room, not out of fear of death, but because the post mortem exam could never answer my question: What happened to my patient?" The medical explanation of the cause of death "was utterly incommensurable with the awesome massive fact" he could see with his own eyes. Death is "the extinction of this never-to-be repeated human being, for whom I had cared and for whom his survivors now grieve." Science is incapable of wondering properly about both the reality of and the utter disappearance of the unique and irreplaceable person. Our desire to know is not properly animated without some assistance from personal care and grief.

It would seem that, from the beginning, Kass was a humanistic dissenter from a scientific consensus about the true relationship between eros and logos. (I know I promised Rousseau and all that. Next time...)

we live by belief

There are in the life of a human being many more truths which are simply believed rather than truths which are acquired by the way of personal verification. Who, for instance, could assess critically the countless scientific findings upon which modern life is based? Who could personally examine the flow of information which comes day after day from all parts of the world and which is generally accepted as true? Who in the end could forge anew the paths of experience and thought which have yielded the treasures of human wisdom and religion? This means that the human being - the one who seeks the truth - is also the one who lives by belief. In believing, we entrust ourselves to the knowledge acquired by other people... Belief is often humanly richer than mere evidence, because it involves an interpersonal relationship and brings into play not only a person's capacity to know but also the deeper capacity to entrust oneself to others, to enter into a relationship with them which is intimate and enduring...

- Pope John Paul II

For Christians, belief in God is not blind. Like the many truths of science, belief in God is based on knowledge.

the jobs the government has created

Mark Steyn surveys them briefly in his latest column:

I was in Vermont the other day and made the mistake of picking up the local paper. Impressively, it contained a quarter-page ad, a rare sight these days. The rest of the page was made up by in-house promotions for the advertising department’s special offer on yard-sale announcements, etc. But the one real advertisement was from something called SEVCA. SEVCA is a “non-profit agency,” just like the New York Times, General Motors, and the State of California. And it stands for “South-Eastern Vermont Community Action.”

Why, they’re “community organizers,” just like the president! The designated “anti-poverty agency” is taking out quarter-page ads in every local paper is because they’re “seeking applicants for several positions funded in full or part by the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA)” — that’s the “stimulus” to you and me. Isn’t it great to see those bazillions of stimulus dollars already out there stimulating the economy? Creating lots of new jobs at SEVCA, in order to fulfill the president’s promise to “create or keep” 2.5 million jobs. At SEVCA, he’s not just keeping all the existing ones, but creating new ones, too. Of the eight new positions advertised, the first is:

“ARRA Projects Coordinator.”

Gotcha. So the first new job created by the stimulus is a job “coordinating” other programs funded by the stimulus. What’s next?

“Grantwriter.”

That’s how they spell it. Like in Star Wars — Luke Grantwriter waving his hope saber as instructed by his mentor Obi-Bam Baracki (“May the Funds be with you!”). The Grantwriter will be responsible for writing grant applications “to augment ARRA funds.” So the second new job created by stimulus funding funds someone to petition for additional funding for projects funded by the stimulus.

The third job is a “Marketing Specialist” to increase “public awareness of ARRA-funded services.” Rural Vermont’s economy is set for a serious big-time boom: The critical stimulus-promotion industry, stimulus-coordination industry, and stimulus-supplementary-funding industry are growing at an unprecedented rate. The way things are going we’ll soon need a Stimulus-Coordination Industry Task Force and Impact Study Group. By the way, these jobs aren’t for everyone. “Knowledge of ARRA” is required. So if, say, you’re the average United States senator who voted for ARRA without bothering to read it, you’re not qualified for a job as an ARRA Grantwriter.

This must be what Americans want the government to do?

Notre Dame canonizes Barack Obama

Father Jenkins presiding.

Peter Lawler says:

Larry Arnhart explains that a Darwinian conservative believes that religious belief can be socially useful and, for that reason, salutary. A metaphysical conservative, such as ME, believes that religious belief can actually be true. He adds that Hume and Tocqueville agree with him and not ME by understanding all religion as basically civil religion. But Tocqueville actually agrees with ME. Alexis does understand religion, in part, as the foundation of a politically beneficial common morality. But he goes further: He says that the individual’s soul has needs which can be denied or distorted but not destroyed. He adds that, in democratic times, Christianity is the carrier of what’s true about aristocracy: Human beings are hardwired to have thoughts and produce deeds that point in the direction of immortality, and that materialism–or the denial of personal, immaterial greatness–is pernicious as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. If we believe everything we do is ephemeral, then in fact it will be. Tocqueville goes even further: He explains that people are restless in the midst of prosperity because they’re particularly haunted by and disgusted with the prospect of personal mortality, and the effort to satisfy spiritual needs through materialistic or just mundane pursuits produces a kind of constant effort at diversion that can approach madness. So Tocqueville agrees with ME that human greatness soars far beyond anything experienced by the other animals. And that’s, in part, because we’re the animal with metaphysical needs: We experience ourselves as particular beings caught for a moment between two abysses, and our pursuit of greatness is intertwined with a fundamental anxiety about who we are. Tocqueville opposes pantheism on behalf of personal religion–religion that addresses the needs of individuals and can account for the irreducible greatness of human individuality.

Tocqueville, I think, was not actually a Christian believer. But he follows the Christians in refusing to reduce religion to merely impersonal NATURAL or CIVIL theology And that’s, in part, because of Tocqueville’s irreducible debt to Pascal. Locke, as Paul Rahe has recently showed, had a somewhat similar debt, which is why he and Tocqueville understood the fundamental human condition to be UNEASINESS.

the POTUS

Great article on the mind of Barack Obama here.

I think I will read his book, "The Audacity of Hope". It's not all that often we have a President who has authored two autobiographies before the age of 50.

“The Happiness of the People”

Charles Murray gave the Irving Kristol lecture several weeks ago at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual dinner.

"To become a source of deep satisfaction, a human activity has to meet some stringent requirements. It has to have been important (we don't get deep satisfaction from trivial things). You have to have put a lot of effort into it (hence the cliché "nothing worth having comes easily"). And you have to have been responsible for the consequences...There aren't many activities in life that can satisfy those three requirements. Having been a good parent. That qualifies. A good marriage. That qualifies. Having been a good neighbor and good friend to those whose lives intersected with yours. That qualifies. And having been really good at something--good at something that drew the most from your abilities. That qualifies...Let me put it formally: If we ask what are the institutions through which human beings achieve deep satisfactions in life, the answer is that there are just four: family, community, vocation, and faith…It is not necessary for any individual to make use of all four institutions, nor do I array them in a hierarchy. I merely assert that these four are all there are...The stuff of life--the elemental events surrounding birth, death, raising children, fulfilling one's personal potential, dealing with adversity, intimate relationships--coping with life as it exists around us in all its richness--occurs within those four institutions...Seen in this light, the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions are robust and vital. And that's what's wrong with the European model. It doesn't do that. It enfeebles every single one of them."

Greg Forster has posted an excellence response/critique. Which resonates more?