Month: May 2010

Choose your own Jesus

Ross Douthat takes a detour and frolic from politics to diss the interminable “search for the historic Jesus.” The proximate cause of his ire is a religion professor reportedly much smitten with the “well attested” notion of Jesus ben Pantera, the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier:

Now of course what Gopnik means by “well attested” is “well attested and non-miraculous,” which is fair enough so far as it goes. But this no-miracles criterion is why the historical Jesus project is such a spectacular dead end — because what would ordinarily be the most historically-credible sources for the life and times of Jesus Christ are absolutely soaked in supernaturalism, and if you throw them out you’re left with essentially idle speculations about Jesus ben Pantera and other phantoms that have no real historical grounding whatsoever.

Think about it this way: If the letters of Saint Paul (the earliest surviving Christian texts, by general consensus) and the synoptic gospels (the second-earliest) didn’t make such extraordinary claims about Jesus’s resurrection, his divinity, and so forth, no credible historian would waste much time parsing second-century apocrypha for clues about the “real” Jesus.

…

[T]he synoptic gospels and Saint Paul’s epistles do make absolutely extraordinary claims, and so modern scholars have every right to read them with a skeptical eye, and question their factual reliability. But if you downgrade the earliest Christian documents or try to bracket them entirely, the documentary evidence that’s left is so intensely unreliable (dated, fragmentary, obviously mythological, etc.) that scholars can scavenge through it to build whatever Jesus they prefer — and then say, with Gopnik, that their interpretation of the life of Christ is “as well attested” as any other. Was Jesus a wandering sage? Maybe so. A failed revolutionary? Sure, why not. A lunatic who fancied himself divine? Perhaps. An apocalyptic prophet? There’s an app for that …But this isn’t history: It’s “choose your own Jesus,” and it’s become an enormous waste of time. Again, there’s nothing wrong with saying that the supernaturalism of the Christian canon makes it an unreliable guide to who Jesus really was. But if we’re honest with ourselves, then we need to acknowledge what this means: Not the beginning of a fruitful quest for the Jesus of history, but the end of it.

Ross is good when he’s carrying forward the New York Times’ mission, but this is better than good. Bullseye! All thumbs up!

Right diagnosis, wrong prescription

I often like Dennis Prager’s syndicated columns, and there’s some things to like about a recent one titled “The World is a Cruel Place and if America Weakens, It Will Get Crueler.”

Prager first, and pretty fairly, defends Christianity against today’s common calumnies. Then he realistically rehearses the woes of much of the world today, including the oddity that Russia, while remaining fiercely Orthodox in many ways, nevertheless lost its moral compass during 70 years of Communist tyranny and hasn’t regained it, functioning today as a nihilistic thugocracy.

Then he proposes that Lincoln’s America — “The Last Best Hope of Earth” — is the balm for the world’s woes — if only we can get the left out of power,  because the left thinks of America in post-Christian, Christendom-hating ways that render America impotent.

But there’s an odd asymmetry to that argument. It seems to presume that if we only get rid of left-leaning leaders, America will resume its role as the modern realization of Christendom rather than another nation rapidly becoming post-Christian. Although we’re lagging Europe in explicit secularization, we are implicitly secular right down to the pews of most Churches (see here for a long and evocative essay by Father Stephen, and here for a shorter piece explaining that “The default position of America is secular protestantism”).

Our foreign policy as carried out by both parties promotes our imperial goals, not Christianity, and muscular Krustian foreign policy will only make us more odious in the eyes of the world.

Sorry, Dennis: I’m not sure even you believe this one. If you want to make a case for voting out the Democrats and voting in Republicans, you’ll need to do better.

“Hostess Twinkie Market” – no nutritional value

A very important but taciturn investor (that explains why I hadn’t heard of him) speaks to the Wall Street Journal, and his prognosis ain’t pretty:

  • He compared the financial markets to a Hostess Twinkie. “There is no nutritional value,” he said. “There is nothing natural in the markets. Everything is being manipulated by the government.”
  • “The government is now in the business of giving bad advice … By holding interest rates at zero, the government is basically tricking the population into going long on just about every kind of security except cash, at the price of almost certainly not getting an adequate return for the risks they are running. People can’t stand earning 0% on their money, so the government is forcing everyone in the investing public to speculate….”
  • “[I]t was in some ways helpful to carry a Depression mentality throughout their later lives, because it meant they were thrifty with their money and prudent in their investment decisions … All we got out of this crisis was a Really Bad Couple of Weeks mentality.”
  • He is buying “way out-of-the-money puts on bonds”—options that have no value unless Treasury bonds plummet. “It’s cheap disaster insurance for five years out,” he said.
  • “All the obvious hedges”—commodities and foreign currencies, for example—”are already extremely expensive,” he warned.

I’d tell you how I’m hedging, but since I have an audience of dozens, some with money in the bank, I don’t want to risk driving up the price before I’m more fully invested. 😉

HT: Patrick Deneen at Front Porch Republic.

Meanwhile, Ross Douthat says the demographic crunch every sentient creature knew was coming has arrived way early – now instead of the late 2010s: a “lost decade.” I’m not sure he’s right blaming Bush (he at least is clear that he’s talking hindsight) except that Bush had what tort lawyers call the “last clear chance” to avert catastrophe.

Rand Paul Civil Rights Act retrospective

Townhall.com has a pretty interesting set of reactions to the kefuffle over Rand Paul’s initial equivocation on the public accommodations portions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act:

They’re interesting partly because they are better than the usual charges of media bias that follow a conservative embarrassment in “gotcha moment.”

For my money, Goldberg is the funniest (not surprisingly) and closest to my view of the deepest meaning of this pretty shallow episode:

[T]he only people who are really jazzed to reopen the argument about the Civil Rights Act are liberals.

And they have good reason: They won that argument, politically and morally. This is a fact liberals never stop reminding us, and themselves, about. Like a paunchy middle-aged man who scored the winning touchdown in the high school championship, nostalgic liberals don’t need an excuse to bring up their glory days (which were not the Democratic Party’s glory days, by the way). Give them a living, breathing politician who suggests, no matter how imprecisely or grudgingly, that the Civil Rights Act wasn’t perfect, and they’ll talk your ear off like a drunk uncle at a wedding.

How many activist groups insist that their plight is sublimely analogous to the civil rights struggle? How many times did the Democrats try to make health-care reform a continuation of civil rights? …

What really makes this debate remarkable is that someone has volunteered to be the straw man liberals are always creating.

But Harsanyi’s opener is good, too:

Isn’t it time we started querying our political candidates on issues that really matter?

Let’s start with this one: If you were a convention delegate in 1778, would you have voted to ratify the Constitution of the United States?

If the answer is yes — and you don’t hate America, do you?! — it’s only fair we conclude that you support restricting voting rights to male landowners exclusively. Surely, from your position, we can also deduce that you support slavery.

Bare breasts good, burqas bad

The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson explains, in terms I 95% agree with, why Europe’s burqa bans are a bad idea:

Belgium is moving toward a total ban on face-covering veils in public. Italian police recently fined a woman for wearing a burqa. In France, a law banning garments “designed to hide the face” is likely to be introduced in July. “The burqa is not a sign of religion,” says French President Nicolas Sarkozy, “it is a sign of subservience. It will not be welcome on the territory of the French Republic.”

…

The motives of European leaders in this controversy are [un]sympathetic. Some speak deceptively (and absurdly) of a security motive for banning Islamic covering. Who knows what they are hiding? But by this standard, the war on terrorism would mandate the wearing of bikinis. The real purpose of burqa bans is to assert European cultural identity — secular, liberal and individualistic — at the expense of a visible, traditional religious minority. A nation such as France, proudly relativistic on most issues, is convinced of its cultural superiority when it comes to sexual freedom. A country of topless beaches considers a ban on excessive modesty. The capital of the fashion world, where women are often overexposed and objectified, lectures others on the dignity of women.

For what the opinion of an outsider is worth, I do think the burqa is oppressive. It seems designed to restrict movement, leaving women clumsy, helpless, dependent and anonymous. The vast majority of Muslim women do not wear complete covering because the Koran mandates only modesty, not sartorial imprisonment.

But at issue in Europe is not social disapproval; it is criminalization. In matters of religious liberty, there are no easy or rigid rules … Some rights are so fundamental that they must be defended in every case. But if a democratic majority can impose its will on a religious minority for any reason, religious freedom has no meaning. The state must have strong, public justifications to compel conformity, especially on an issue such as the clothes that citizens wear.

In France — where only a few thousand women out of 5 million Muslims wear the burqa — a ban is merely a symbolic expression of disdain for an unpopular minority. It would achieve little but resentment.

Keys here for me:

  • The idea that we’re respecting the dignity of women by banning burqas is contemptible nonsense given how we treat women ourselves. Immodesty is not authentically liberating.
  • As intimated in Gerson’s opening (not quoted above), the ban is a kind of Western imperialism, only exercised over immigrants not “through colonialism but through migration.” As Gerson says, “Some rights are so fundamental that they must be defended in every case,” but burqa bans are not protecting fundamental rights.
  • I have long wanted to maintain a capacious middle ground between (1) crime and (2) legal right. I want to be able to disapprove and even, perhaps, to shun practitioners of bad behaviors (call them “(1.5) Vice”) that I wouldn’t want criminalized. As an Orthodox Christian, I would exercise that sparingly, but there are instances like excommunication where it is expected that arms-length will be maintained even as one prays for the repentance of the excommunicated one. And, yes, I willingly cede the same to others who disapprove of something I do; I’ve been wrong, and sometimes it was expressions of disapproval — not legal sanctions — that set me right again.

However, Gerson emphasizes the wrongness of burqas even on Islamic principle (“the Koran mandates only modesty, not sartorial imprisonment”). It strikes me as presumptuous for an outsider to hold much opinion about the teaching of another tradition’s holy books. Living religious traditions may well have interpretive traditions of some subtlety, or may have extratextual traditions that are considered legitimately binding. In that sense, Gerson himself applies his Protestant “Bible only” sensibility to Islam in an “imperialist” spirit that may differ from European secularists impositions of sexual freedom more in degree than in kind.

Situation hopeless, but not serious

The thoughtful Orthodoxen behind Notes from a Common-Place Book writes today his reflections on a “Country Wedding.”

The back roads drive down there and back was pleasant and gave my wife and I time to catch up on some things. We talked of a number of people who are close to us and whose current situations give cause for concern. (There’s the old joke: Southerners are not gossiping, they are just concerned.) But seriously, my wife and I were in complete agreement as to the particulars of the several problem situations. Of interest to me, however, was that we each arrived there following completely different paths.

The fact that I am Orthodox and she is Protestant is certainly part of it, but it really goes beyond that. I would say that my wife is perhaps too quick to resort to moralizing, just as she would likely say I am too quick to assert that morality has little or nothing to do with it. The older I get, the more I am convinced that morality, as currently defined, is only incidentally, or at most tangentially, connected to the Faith–and is certainly not the way one approaches Christianity. But I am equally guilty of overstating the case on most anything ….

We talked on, speculating about when everything changed and why. But here again, we were coming at it from different directions. First, I doubt that the past she misses was ever really all that grand, for I have never entertained any idealized image of my own childhood world. But beyond that, (and here is where the Orthodox view enters in) I find that things are only playing out much as one would expect them to, given the particulars of our society–our rampant materialism/consumerism, our notions of progress and technology, the inherent flaws within our Americanized Protestant/evangelical culture, and the adaptation of Americanism as a near religion itself. Why would we think that things would be any different? Events are taking their natural course. I am neither surprised nor alarmed at it—“situation hopeless, but not serious.” Between the two of us, I feel I got the better deal—she gets the angst, I settle for a “love among the ruins” resignation.

He then turns to some thoughts he had upon reading a review of George Barna’s The Seven Faith Tribes: Who They Are, What They Believe, and Why They Matter. The Seven Tribes?:

  • Casual Christians: Two-thirds of all adults, they profess to be Christian but it’s not a priority and not integrated into their lives.
  • Captive Christians: One-sixth of the population, they hold what Barna describes as “biblical beliefs” and live it out in their lives.
  • Skeptics: Nearly 11 percent of the population, it is the largest group of non-Christians. Includes atheists and agnostics.
  • Jewish: At two percent, he describes them as “more of a community with a shared history and culture than a group connected by a shared doctrine.”
  • Mormons: Less than two percent, Barna calls them the “Rodney Dangerfield of the Christian world.”
  • Pantheists: About 1.5 percent, includes Eastern religions and the hybrid of New Ageism.
  • Muslims: Barna says they are less than 1 percent of the population, but the most ethnically balanced.

Barna reportedly thinks these groups share some common values (forgiveness, respect for the elderly, generosity) that are the keys to America’s enduring success. Another reviewer concludes with “[Barna] believes that if the seven faith tribes assert themselves and promote their shared values, the United States will reverse the recent decades of ‘cultural chaos and disintegration.'”

I hope the leap doesn’t seem too bizarre, but I was struck by a comment of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, interviewed recently in the New York Times Magazine (their interviews are, by the way, some of the shallowest things in an otherwise serious newpaper). She apparently excludes Islam — or at least “radical Islam” — from Barna’s “shared values” reverie:

We who don’t want radical Islam to spread must compete with the agents of radical Islam. I want to see what would happen if Christians, feminists and Enlightenment thinkers were to start proselytizing in the Muslim community.

I don’t want to read too much into this, but Ali seems to me to be looking for concerted proselytizing by groups ostensibly at odds with each other on many points. But I’ve come to see over the past decade that “Enlightenment thinkers” is not at all a set with minimal overlap with the Christian set. The overlap is quite extensive. (I think that, insofar as it is true, represents a victory for the Enlightenment and a defeat for traditional Christianity, by the way.)

As the author of Country Wedding might say, those three can only get together to promote “materialism/consumerism, our notions of progress and technology, the inherent flaws within our Americanized Protestant/evangelical culture, and the adaptation of Americanism as a near religion itself.” Why would we think that this brew will entice Muslims? I suspect it’s near the heart of what offends them.


A City the Devil Built

If the Devil created an anti-city, a place where people would feel least human, Atlanta would surely be that place ….

So William Howard Kunstler opens his blog this week, but not so much to excoriate Atlanta as to introduce it as, ironically, the site of the 18th Congress of the New Urbanism. The blog is a pretty good 30,000-foot view of what’s most endearing about Kunstler’s thought. If you want an overview with spoken words and pictures, check here.

Or rummage through your own wetware if you’ve ever walked Boston’s Freedom Trail or Beacon Hill, or gawked at the dense cheek-by jowl homes of New York’s Greenwich Village, or ambled through Charleston’s Battery neighborhood, smelling the linseed oil of summer painting, or strolled, sweating, under the Live Oaks of Savannah’s old streets near the River (out in “Garden of Good and Evil” territory). There’s something human about those places, and it’s not just nostalgia — though nostalgia plays its part.

The New Urbanists, in my conviction, are advocating something — the only thing I know of — that makes sense for urban living, as opposed to the urban-suburban auto treadmill, waiting for the Oil Fairy to make peak oil go away. It needn’t be rank imitation of the places I just named, but they’ve got the scale right.

As my friend, Practicing Human, wrote this morning:

[W]e would be doing well to ask about consumption of energy resources on a micro-, meso- and macro-scale.  Managing our energy diet towards a sustainable rate means more than just changing our light bulbs.  We can think creatively about building and community design.  And we can adjust national priorities, which always proves to be incredibly difficult.

America is a country working foremost in a consumptive paradigm.  Until we can think differently about standards of living, then we are going to recreate the same problems.  But I think a different economic paradigm is still very far removed as it requires a significant leap in economic, political, and sociological thinking.

Sadly, the economic crisis is hurting the good guy developers along with the bad. Kunstler again:

I heard a lot of stories during the meeting in Atlanta last week but one really stood out. It was about the money and revealed a lot about what is going on in our banking system these days. A New Urbanist developer had gotten a small project going for a traditional neighborhood. Despite the global financial [crisis], the developer was able to meet the payments of his commercial loan.  But the FDIC sent bank examiners around America and they told the small regional banks that if they had more than twenty percent of their loans in commercial real estate (CRE) they would be put out of business. The banks were ordered to reduce their loads of CRE by calling in the loans and liquidating the assets. Ironically, the banks only called in their “performing” loans, the ones that were being regularly paid off, because they were ignoring and even concealing the ones that weren’t being paid.

The developer in question had his loan called in when the FDIC descended on his bank. He couldn’t pay off the $3 million in one lump, of course. The FDIC’s agents are going to seize and sell off his project if he can’t get it refinanced in short order.  He can’t get it refinanced because there is now such a shortage of capital in the banking system that no one can get a loan for anything. Also, since it is now well-known that the bank failed, the vultures are circling above his project hoping to buy it for a discount, so even the few private investors who have money won’t throw him a lifeline. By the way, the FDIC agents told him they are doing this because they now expect that virtually all commercial real estate loans in the USA will fail in the months ahead. Pretty scary story, huh?  And he was one of the good guys.

I suppose it was a tragic thing that the New Urbanists made themselves hostage to the same banking system that was behind suburban sprawl …

I have no great overarching point, but if people will read Kunstler, we are likelier to make the paradigm jump we need.

Ouch! That hurts!

Ross Douthat proves himself worthy of an op-ed slot at the nation’s still-number-one newspaper with The Principles of Rand Paul. Along the way, he mentions two of my old favorites who have been banished from polite society: Samuel Francis and Joseph Sobran.

I see myself at risk, or perhaps guilty, of some of the same things.

Is “polite society” a public accommodation? Should there be a law to protect guys like Francis, Sobran — and me — from ostracism if our autodidact imaginations wander too far?

UPDATE: And Daniel Larison, with a reply to Ross that I hadn’t noticed in my original post, proves himself worthy of a place at our best (only?) paleoconservative magazine.