Jason Peters on the Krustian sell-a-bration of Eester

Item 983 on my growing list of reasons I’m blessed to have stumbled onto Orthodox Christianity.

This kind of stuff, I’m afraid, is the entropic eventuality of Protestantism. We experienced it as “Worship Wars” in my Protestant church before I left, eventually giving one group reluctant leave to “plant” a new church to its tastes. “Church planting” was the lipstick we put on the pig of splitting up.

I look back now and think neither side knew what real worship looked like, but one was more clueless than the other.

I hesitate to use the term “entropy” with Roman Catholicism, which has endured for a rather long time now. But they’ve got some boundary-setting to do, as in this (I shudder to use the term) Liturgy in Los Angeles:

Cigarettes, terror, and Barack Obama: Glamour is Serious Stuff

So many insights, so little time!

Virginia Postrel at the Weekly Standard writes of “the deeper meaning of glamour,” opening with an anecdote about a C-Span Booknotes watcher who was disappointed that she was involved with the website “DeepGlamour” instead of something serious.

Boy, what a moron! What could be more serious than Deep Glamour? (C-Span’s founder, Brian Lamb, by the way, is a local boy made good.)

Postrel names and reminds readers of a very important pervasive, perhaps even fundamental, human reality: our ability to be persuaded by a bit of mystery – even taken in as suckers (though she doesn’t say that).

As critics who denounce movies that “glamorize violence” or “glamorize smoking” understand, glamour is much more than style. It is a potent tool of persuasion, a form of nonverbal rhetoric that heightens and focuses desire, particularly the longing for transformation (an ideal self) and escape (in a new setting). Glamour is all about hope and change. It lifts us out of everyday experience and makes our desires seem attainable. …

Glamour can, of course, sell evening gowns, vacation packages, and luxury kitchens. But it can also promote moon shots and “green jobs,” urban renewal schemes and military action. (The “glamour of battle” long preceded the glamour of Hollywood.) Californians once found freeways glamorous; today they thrill to promises of high-speed rail. “Terror is glamour,” said Salman Rushdie in a 2006 interview, identifying the inspiration of jihadi terrorists. New Soviet Man was a glamorous concept. So is the American Dream.

Barack Obama was elected partly because his “campaign’s iconography employed classically glamorous themes, with its stylized portraits of the candidate gazing into the distance and its logo of a road stretching toward the horizon.”

Glamour is Serious Stuff. Serious enough that I’m adding it as a category.

My grandmother used to recoil as we watched circus performers in tight or skimpy (by the day’s standards) outfit on black and white television: “Does your mother let you to look at that?” (That’s not a typo; that was one of her speech mannerisms unless my memory is fooling me and she really did say “allow you to look”.) She probably was dimly aware (she of humble origins, widowed at 29 years and for 65 years beyond, worker of fingers-to-the-bone) that this contraption, popularized after her 50th year on earth, was somehow subversive and potentially transformative by bringing glamour into the home in a new way.

It occurs to me that one of the implications of Postrel’s insight is that parents – if they allow their children to watch television at all – need to begin early and age-appropriately to point out the manipulativeness of so much of it, and not just the commercials. The trouble is, identifying the manipulativeness of the shows themselves requires some real work. When smoking was already accepted, who’d have thought that smoking characters were committing glamourization? When consumerism is already accepted ….

I highly commend the article.

14 years on death row

I wrote about my position on the death penalty a few weeks ago. I won’t even say “coincidentally” because stories like this are so common (I do not go looking for them), but conservative columnist Jacob Sullum writes about a man on Louisiana’s death row for 14 years through serious prosecutorial misconduct – withholding proof that a murderer had Type B blood while the defendant had Type O.

And if you are so inclined, don’t tell me the story proves that “the system works.” The system worked only because two dogged lawyers, God bless ’em, were working the case for free.

A Myth in the Making

Because Shelby Steele is a scholar instead of a pundit, he usually has something worth saying when he speaks up. Just so this column, Barack the Good, from tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal.

Teasers:

Mr. Obama wants to be—above all else—a profoundly transformative president … Mr. Obama … remains rather undefined—a president happy to have others write his “transformative” legislation … As the health-care bill and the stimulus package illustrate, scale is functioning as vision … “if I don’t know what to do, I’ll do big things” …

For me, the big insight was that the President may “literally experience [him]self as a myth in the making.” That rings true.

Subsidiarity, Sphere Sovereignty and the 10th Amendment

As I continue my autodidacticism, I encounter startling ideas that might prompt those with formal education in the discipline to yawn.

Any yawners out there at the thought that Roman Catholic social teaching on subsidiarity is congruent with Calvinist teaching on sphere sovereignty? That Pope Leo XIII was, figuratively speaking, in bed with Abraham Kuyper? Or that the 10th Amendment (“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”) was allegedly an application of the principle before it was articulated by these two figures from two traditions 100+ years ago (more on “allegedly” later)?

Since Wikipedia has separate articles on “Subsidiarity” and “Subsidiarity (Catholicism),” I’m betting there would be yawners out there from political science departments at least. Whether they’re raptly following this blog is an extremely different matter.

Although Lew Daly doesn’t mention the 10th Amendment, he does connect Kuyper and Leo XIII in his precis of his new book God’s Economy at Front Porch Republic:

In tracing the social-pluralist lineage of today’s faith-based initiatives, I pick up the story as it enters its distinctive confessional-political phase in the second half of the nineteenth century, marked by the rise of Catholic parties in Central Europe and (perhaps most dramatically) by the rise of the orthodox Calvinist Anti-Revolutionary Party in the Netherlands, led by Abraham Kuyper. Both Catholic and Reformed confessional traditions were strongly influenced by French counter-revolutionary thinkers as they sought to defend religious schooling and social welfare programs from being swept away by disestablishment and by the rise of public welfare systems. What emerged in this struggle between confessional institutions and the liberal state—understatedly described in the name it was given in Germany, Kulturkampf or “conflict of worldviews”–was a concept of plural sovereignty. Political order, in this view, was comprised of a plurality of sovereign group-domains, each ordered to its own distinctive nature and purposes and all held in balance across society by a limited but supportive public authority.

As you should have noted, Daly’s main task in the book is “tracing the social-pluralist lineage of today’s faith-based initiatives,” but his precis is more of interest to me because it reinforces, from yet another perspective, the idea (I’m tempted to call it a “reality,” but that perhaps would be premature for me) that liberal, Rousseauian individualism leads to destruction of institutions between the state and the individual – and a consequent disempowering of individuals, contrary to the promise of liberalism. Some of the French revolutionaries were quite explicit about it:

In August of 1789, after the Parisian insurrection and the taking of the Bastille on July 14, the National Assembly (created the previous June) set about abolishing the elaborate system of privileges upholding the First and Second Estates, from feudal dues and services, to proprietary offices, manorial courts, and tithes and plural benefices, to the aristocracy’s exemption from taxation. The annihilation of such privileges was famously the vision of Abbé Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès in What is the Third Estate? But for Sieyès and other republican theorists, abolishing aristocratic privilege was part of a much deeper vision of political transformation. It was a vision of a state-centered “dissociative democracy,” a totalistic politics in which the nation and the state become unified by dissolving all other orders of lawful existence outside of the selfhood and property of individual citizens. By the early 1790s, with decrees against the cloistered orders and secular congregations, and the famous d’Allarde and Le Chapelier laws abolishing trade unions and other corporations, revolutionary liberalism pressed further and further into the corporate and communal structures of French society and its producingclasses, the artisans and peasants.

I don’t think Daly’s omission of the 10th Amendment is a defect, however, because subsidiarity/sphere sovereignty is conceptually different than federalism/state’s rights, and I think it’s a defect of the Wikipedia article on subsidiarity to link them uncritically.

The 10th Amendment came from the reality (not “idea;” I know whereof I speak in this topic at least) that the national government was being constituted by 13 sovereign colonies, to become states in the new regime. They were retaining all their sovereignty except that ceded to the new national government or prohibited by the Bill of Rights – the preceding 9 amendments. This is a point widely missed even among educated people.

20 years or more ago, I argued with a Rabbi at the health club as we worked our way through the circuit of machines in sync. We had butted heads in public fora on a topic or two. Basically, I would characterize our conflict as being between his preference for secularism in contrast to my conviction that religion is not entirely banished from appearing in public. That conflict framed this vignette. I asked him “How did we ever got from ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m surprised you’re reading this at all) to ‘there shall be no prayer in public schools run by local communities’?” He answered, fairly confidently, that the states and communities were subsidiaries of the national government. Wrong answer.

(I recently stated a new appreciation of the seeming preference of Jews in this country for secularism in the course of a longer piece. I still think religion must be “allowed to appear in public,” but I’m far less apt to pooh-pooh talk of looming theocracy.)

Anyway, back to the 10th Amendment as distinct from subsidiarity or sphere sovereignty. As Daly puts it:

I needn’t explain here the tendency among American conservatives to interpret subsidiarity as a Catholic version of the Republican Party’s libertarian agenda of dismantling government agencies and privatizing entitlements and services. Of course it means nothing of the kind: subsidiarity is not a theory of local control or minimal government; it is a theory delineating precisely the critical role of central government in assisting natural social structures, beginning with the family, when they are weakened in the order of society. The properly subsidiary role of the state is to support, for example, the family, without distorting or usurping its place in the order of creation or its purposes as given by God. Unlike the liberal welfare state, a subsidiary state recognizes the prior ground of family and other natural spheres and does not encroach on the legal and moral autonomy they derive from God; but unlike liberal anti-statism, the subsidiary state is responsible for protecting and supporting the natural spheres when they are violated within society or otherwise falter. For example, when wages fail to support workers and their families in their proper dignity, the sanctity of the family is violated and the state must intervene, either by strengthening the power of workers to extract higher wages from employers, or by compensating families directly out of the public purse. Against the moral anarchy created by “market laws” that push working families beneath their dignity, a properly subsidiary state delineates “justice” by strengthening the weaker spheres against the stronger, those given by God against those ordered by men. In upholding and protecting such “sphere sovereignty,” as the Kuyperians termed it, the state “brings stability to the land,” and this, Kuyper insists, is called “justice.”

In my words, less eloquent and erudite than Daly’s, it would be quite possible for a state (not just the national government) to violate the proper sphere of families, churches and other human-scale institutions by action or inaction contrary to its proper role. (I wish I’d thought of this 15 years ago when City and County Councils were debating a politically-correct infringement on the sphere sovereignty of small business. But then, our local authorities really don’t know a lot about small business, do they? They only mostly suck up to the biggies. It’s called “economic development” and my local officials are very, very good at it – and I acknowledge at least temporary benefit thereby.)

Phillip Blond, in authentic subsidiaritist fashion, proposes provocatively that sovereignty be devolved, on some matters, down to the block level – as in “city block.” And he floats the idea (I’m not prepared to say “reality,” though it may be) that the “multiplier effect” – you know: that fabulous wealth creation tool whereby if we suck tourists in to spend a buck, it’s like getting $11.36 (or whatever) because the event sponsor pays workers who buy groceries from people who buy new homes and yadda yadda – is much greater when you do business with a local merchant versus a national big box. Something to think about when you’re enticed by low prices and convenience at Wally World.

No wonder Blond is becoming beloved over at Front Porch Republic.

After the Market State: Phillip Blond on the Future of a Free Society

I must pass along an important lecture which summarizes the direction my thought has been heading in politically.

Society and the private sphere have become increasingly monopolized by the state and the market, which seem inadequate for dealing with increasing economic and social dysfunction. Phillip Blond, the influential Director of the London think-tank Respublica, argues for the necessity of the enduring bonds of family and local community, and the wide distribution of property and public responsibility that these require. Blond will outline the vision that has increasingly captured the attention of Britains Tory Party in his lecture, Red Toryism: What it means and why it is a genuinely radical alternative to the Market State.

I tried to embed the YouTube video here, but couldn’t get that to work.

I don’t mind singing in an empty Church

Well, technically, I’m not sure the Church is ever really empty. There’s always that great cloud of witnesses.

But apart from them, the Church is sometimes empty except for Priest and Cantor (me). We rarely have more than the “clergy” (Priest, Deacon, Cantor and maybe another Reader) at the very beginning of Matins. Occasionally that will happen in a weekday service, too. Usually one or two will arrive soon after the start, though. The inspired doodle above is (from Steve Robinson at Pithless Thoughts, shall we say, reality-based.

But it doesn’t bother me, at least not in the sense of “why do I bother?” I may regret that many who could be present don’t bother, and miss out (missing out on what is the point of this posting – read on). But many really can’t come, and that’s okay. We’re a small Parish, with lots of young families with children. I’d think there was something seriously wrong if those families dragged their young ones to Matins, which combined with Liturgy routinely runs almost 3 hours. Others commute as much as an hour each way. So I don’t expect them to come.

But by coming and singing, I myself – hard of hearing and heart – steep in the teaching and mind of the Church. Slowly, I’m absorbing it. That counts for quite a lot since I’m serious about my faith but have nearly 5 decades of baggage from other Christian traditions, each misguided about many things, to unload.

One of those pieces of baggage is how to approach scripture. I had already begun to write this when Father Stephen posted on “the hearing of the word.” It illustrates beautifully how the Church approaches scripture:

I am convinced after years of preaching and listening to preaching that the bulk of Scripture has become lost to our ears. We hear it, but fail to “hear” it ….

Much of my conviction on this matter has come in the last 12 years or more and my immersion into the services of the Orthodox Church. These services, long and with ample “hymnography” that is but a poetic commentary on the Scriptures and doctrines that surround any particular feast, are probably the richest surviving engagement with the Word of God to be found in a 21st century Church. Here no Reformation has occurred and reduced all Scripture to a “riff” on Justification by Faith, or a subset of Calvin’s paradigms. Here no Enlightenment has shown with its darkness of doubt and obfuscation.

Instead, there is a constant wonderment at the Scriptures themselves, as if the hymnographer were discovering something for the first time or had found a rare gem to share to any willing to listen – and all in the form of praise and thanksgiving to God.

It is true to say that in Orthodoxy, “Theology sings.” ….

…In our modern context most people have either been shaped by fundamentalist literalism; by modernist historical criticism; or by nearly nothing at all. In each case the Scriptures will not sing – they will not yield up their treasures.

I was struck by a particular case this evening – at the Vigil for Palm Sunday. The gospel account in question was the Matthean version of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem:

“And when they drew near to Jerusalem and came to Bethphage, to the Mount of Olives, then Jesus sent two disciples, saying to them, “Go into the village opposite you, and immediately you will find an ass tied, and a colt with her; untie them and bring them to me. If any one says anything to you, you shall say, `The Lord has need of them,’ and he will send them immediately.” This took place to fulfil what was spoken by the prophet, saying, “Tell the daughter of Zion, Behold, your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass.” The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them; they brought the ass and the colt, and put their garments on them, and he sat thereon.”

Modern historical criticism hears in this only the “foolishness” of Matthew. Matthew has cited the prophecy in Zechariah that “your king is coming to you…mounted on an ass, and on a colt, the foal of an ass,” and has crafted his story in precisely that manner, placing Jesus astride two animals. The same critics will note that in other gospel accounts Christ is only on a “foal of an ass,” i.e., one animal. Historical Critics have a field day with such problems (I was first confronted with this “discrepancy” in my sophomore year of college – it was presented as if the professor had noticed something no one had ever seen before). Modern fundamentalists will rush to defend the integrity of the gospel accounts, “Two different eye-witnesses reported on the same thing and one emphasized one thing and the other emphasized another.”

Both explanations lack imagination and are precisely the sort of blindness that afflicts so much modern reading of Scripture. Listening to the hymnody for the Vigil of Palm Sunday, the hymnographer, without apology for the discrepancy, races to it and declares:

“O gracious Lord, who ridest upon the cherubim, who art praised by the seraphim, now Thou dost ride like David on the foal of an ass, The children sing hymns worthy of God, while the priests and scribes blaspheme against Thee. By riding an untamed colt, Thou hast prefigured the salvation of the Gentiles, those wild beasts, who will be brought from unbelief to faith! Glory to Thee, O merciful Christ. Our King and the Lover of man!”

… the ancient hymnographer has come closer to the heart of Scripture than either the modern sceptic or the modern literalist will ever know.

… The writers of the New Testament believed that everything in the Old, when read rightly would yield insight into the Messiah and the mystery of our salvation. But their creative insight (again, I believe it is inspired) is far removed from the flat-footed nonsense that we hear out of modern fundamentalist “prophetic” scholars, whose reading of the Old Testament is almost as poorly constructed as the 19th century false prophecies of the book of Mormon! Neither bear any resemblance to the treatment of prophecy found in the New Testament.

And thus I return to my original point. We have become deaf. We listen with ears either hardened by modernist scepticism, or by a false literalism that has substituted Darbyite nonsense for the Apostolic faith, or reduced Scripture to delicate harmonizations. None of them have the boldness and audacity of the patristic hymnographers who stood in the proper line of succession, proclaiming the faith as it had been taught and received and continuing to expound its mysteries. Thank God that somewhere in this modern world, you can still stand and listen to the wonders of our salvation, sung and unraveled before the unbelieving heart of man. Glory to God who has so loved mankind!

So, whether there’s a single soul besides me in church, I’m singing theology. I’m singing poetry. I’m expounding the mysteries of the faith. I’m unraveling the wonders of our salvation before my own unbelieving heart, made dull by 48 years of desparate harmonizations – “flat-footed nonsense.”

[If this sampling from Father Stephen has whetted your appetite, probably the most target-rich zone of audacious expounding of the Old Testament is the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, sung in segments during the first week of Lent and then sung in its entirety Thursday of the 5th week. Download and savor.]

And in a sense that I’m slowly and dimly beginning to apprehend, we are doing the reconciling work of God. This gets into a sacramental view of the world, which I am unqualified to address and would surely botch if I tried. Perhaps another day.

Although I’m occasionally bone-weary when I go to sing, it’s always a very great privilege, and I benefit as much as anyone.

America at 2050 – and 400 millionsub

Another voice of economic optimism for the U.S. to counter my pessimism, Joel Kotkin thinks the next hundred million Americans, mostly immigrants, will be our economic salvation. But he thinks these folks – who won’t necessarily be very upwardly-mobile – will live in the suburbs, “the best, most practical choice for raising their families and enjoying the benefits of community.”

Huh!? I’ll grant the the faux estate in the auto-dependent suburbs has become the American dream since World War II, but is it really a community-promoter? And how will they afford the $10/gallon gas to get to their jobs?

The rosy picture doesn’t work for me at that level if nothing else.

Is economics really a science at all?

David Brooks at the New York Times describes the history of modern economics as a 5-act play. We’re in act IV currently.

In The Wall Street Journal, Russ Roberts of George Mason University wondered why economics is even considered a science. Real sciences make progress. But in economics, old thinkers cycle in and out of fashion. In real sciences, evidence solves problems. Roberts asked his colleagues if they could think of any econometric study so well done that it had definitively settled a dispute. Nobody could think of one.

“The bottom line is that we should expect less of economists,” Roberts wrote.

Consider my recommendation of the column as a contribution to iconoclasm.

Tiger Amadeus Woods: A Lenten Meditation

It started with Jason Peters rewriting William Blake. Then John Willson performed a dental colostomy* on Tiger, with FPR contributor Jeffrey Polet, I and at least a few others taking exception to what we thought was an extremely harsh tone. Now at last Polet has published his own promised thoughts on L’Affaire Tiger.

It was timely for me. I have avoided the details of Tiger’s transgressions, but moments before clicking on a link to Polet’s piece, I stumbled across a reproduction of some of Tiger’s text messages to a porn star mistress, and they were pretty shocking. I won’t link to them. I don’t think there’s a shortage of ways to track down the salacious detail.

I don’t recall who said “to understand all is to forgive all.” A quick Googling suggests that it’s probably a French proverb – proof again that the French are more than “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (as Jonah Goldberg called them. I can’t help but laugh at many French jokes, as the French in my experience deserve a reputation for haughtiness. There’s a reason why one Wall Street Journal columnist always refers to John Kerry as “the haughty, French looking Senator from Massachusetts who, by the way, served in Vietnam.”). But Polet’s analogy between Tiger and a tempestuous genius of an earlier century puts things in an edifying perspective. It helps to understand, and to me “feels right,” as I try to empathize with the temptations of superstardom.

I could meander off into some personal reflections about how easy it is to condemn X immediately after condemning Y’s condemnation of Z, but I won’t.

* “Dental colostomy” is a euphemism for the slang phrase “chewing him a new [body part omitted].” I think I coined it.