Sport is Not Great: How Sports Poison Everything

An op-ed at the New York Times argues that West Point and Annapolis have sacrificed military excellence for success at big-time sports, and have become anachronisms that need to be fixed or abolished:

Yes, we still produce some Rhodes, Marshall and Truman Scholars. But mediocrity is the norm.

Meanwhile, the academy’s former pursuit of excellence seems to have been pushed aside by the all-consuming desire to beat Notre Dame at football (as Navy did last year). To keep our teams in the top divisions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, we fill officer-candidate slots with students who have been recruited primarily for their skills at big-time sports. That means we reject candidates with much higher predictors of military success (and, yes, athletic skills that are more pertinent to military service) in favor of players who, according to many midshipmen who speak candidly to me, often have little commitment to the military itself.

George C. Scott, in the opening scene of Patton, tells his troops that when their grandchildren sit on their knee in 50 years and ask “what did you do in the War, Grandpa,” “you won’t have to say I shoveled shit in Louisiana.” Well, in my generation’s war, I emptied bedpans in Peoria, so I try not to pontificate on what makes for a strong military.

But passing over applicants with indicia of future military success in favor of guys with Heisman trophy potential is a serious mistake.

Yeah: fix ’em or close ’em.

Atheist Delusions I

I recently read David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (Yale, 2009). Although Hart is Orthodox, a world-class philosopher, and not half bad at popularizing, I hesitated to buy it.

For one thing, I’ve read plenty of books on the supposed historical conflict between “religion” and science, and my views have been pretty settled for rather a long time now. (Were I a scientist, I’d share them, but I’m not — and can’t imagine that they’re of keen interest to others.) I’m unfazed when I read some “New Atheist” screed. “Been there, done that, and other atheists do it better,” is my attitude in a yawn.

For another, I bogged down on Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth.

But people I respect kept recommending it, and it sounded as if he might take a different tack on The New Atheists. They were right.

I may be posting some more on this book over the next few days or weeks. What I post now is just some select thought.

First of all, Hart doesn’t make the mistake of arguing, in effect, that Christianity is safe and harmless and perfectly compatible with modernity, as if modernity were the measure of truth:

It is not difficult, for instance, to demonstrate the absurdity of the claim that the rise of Christianity impeded the progress of science; but if one thereby seems to concede that scientific progress is an absolute value, upon which Christianity “respectability” somehow depends, one grants far too much … That Christendom fostered rather than hindered the development of early modern science, and that modern empiricism was born not in the so-called Age of Enlightenment but during the late Middle Ages, are simply facts of history, which I record in response to certain popular legends, but not in order somehow to “justify” Christianity. And I would say very much in the same regard to any of the other distinctly modern presuppositions — political, ethical, economic, or cultural — by which we now live. My purpose in these pages is not (I must emphasize) to argue that Christianity is essentially a “benign” historical phenomenon that need not be feared because it is “compatible with” or was a necessary “preparation for” the modern world of its most cherished values … Above all, I am anxious to grant no credence whatsoever to the special mythology of “the Enlightenment.” Nothing strikes me as more tiresomely vapid than the notion that there is some sort of inherent opposition — or impermeable partition, between faith and reason, or that the modern period is marked by its unique devotion to the latter. One can believe that faith is mere credulous assent to unfounded premises, while reason consists in pure obedience to empirical fact, only if one is largely ignorant of both.

Second, Hart isn’t trying to spark a religious revival, and a war against the New Atheist featherweights, on some utilitarian grounds that we need “religion” even if it’s false. For a few examples:

To be honest, my affection for institutional Christianity as a whole is rarely more than tepid; and there are numerous forms of Christian belief and practice for which I would be hard-pressed to muster a kind word from the depths of my heart, and the rejection of which by the atheist or skeptic strikes me as perfectly laudable.
…
I can honestly say that their many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general.
…
I should note here — not in order to strike a mournful note on departing, but only to clarify my intentions — that I have not written this book as some sort of frantic exhortation to an improbable general religious renewal. Such a renewal may in fact take place, I imagine, as the spirit moves, and as a result of social and political forces I cannot hope to foresee. I have operated throughout from the presupposition that in the modern West, the situation of Christianity and culture at large is at least somewhat analogous to the condition of paganism in the days of Julian, though Christianity may not necessarily be quite as moribund. I do not, at any rate, anticipate a recovery under current circumstances, and I cannot at the moment envisage how those circumstances might change. Even in America, I assume, despite its special hospitality to transcendental ecstasies and enduring pieties, the intellectual and moral habits of materialism will ultimately prevail to an even greater degree than they have in Europe. And neither a person nor a people can will belief simply out of dread of the consequences of its absence. In one sense, Christianity permeates everything we are, but in another it is disappearing, and we are changing as a result; and something new is in the centuries-long process of being born.

(I heartily agree with Hart about lacking any deep commitment to “institutional Christianity as a whole,” and my appreciation for the superiority of some honest atheism to some Christian traditions.)

Third, Hart not only mocks the poseurs of the New Atheism, but mounts a systematic attack on myths about Christian history. He’s no Polyanna, but he ably defends Christianity (not “religion” generally, and he explains why) as a social and cultural revolution that is innocent of much of what it routinely and insouciantly stands accused of:

Special Irrationality
Destruction of sources of pagan wisdom and philosophy
Constraint on human freedom
Misogyny
Opposition to science or any special promotion of bad science
Persecution
Provocation of war — including “The Wars of Religion”

I would send one caution, however. I’m reminded as I read Hart, of the late Francis Schaeffer (not the mouthy, living Frank Schaeffer). Like some of Schaeffer’s polymath musings, I suspect that Hart’s history wouldn’t 100% hold up as history in a room full of historians, and that his social psychology (I think that’s probably the best phrase for his speculations about why the New Atheists have caught on better than their arguments merit) wouldn’t fare perfectly well in a room of whatever academics are expert about that.

But that’s a risk of writing of writing a broad book on a multi-faceted (or is it Hydra-headed?) phenomenon. Hart’s book overall strikes me as solid and moderately important.

Just don’t expect the push-back to cease. Hart doesn’t expect it and neither do I.

I’ve seen more straight talk and balance in Viagra commercials

“I’ve seen more straight talk and balance in Viagra commercials.” Theron Bowers, M.D., on a 60 Minutes story about Adderal and Ritalin use among college students that began with perky Katie Couric asking “If there were a drug that would make you smarter, would you take it?”

I may be influenced in this by Errol Beumel, whose mental problems, exacerbated by Adderal addiction, ended with him systematically unloading a clip into his school teacher father.

Amo, Amas, I love a lass …

I could call it “Haikuly yours III,” but I’ll save that because (a) this one’s public domain now and (b) I know this poem and can sing it rousingly:

Amo, Amas

by John O’Keefe

Amo, Amas, I love a lass
As a cedar tall and slender;
Sweet cowslip’s grace is her nominative case,
And she’s of the feminine gender.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.

Can I decline a Nymph divine?
Her voice as a flute is dulcis.
Her oculus bright, her manus white,
And soft, when I tacto, her pulse is.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.

Oh, how bella my puella,
I’ll kiss secula seculorum.
If I’ve luck, sir, she’s my uxor,
O dies benedictorum.

Rorum, Corum, sunt divorum,
Harum, Scarum divo;
Tag-rag, merry-derry, periwig and hat-band
Hic hoc horum genitivo.

(“Amo, Amas” by John O’Keefe. Public domain.)

For what it’s worth, I can still sing the Portugese national anthem from memory, 42 years after the Wheaton College Men’s Glee Club learned it for our European tour. Rote memorization is odd.

Easily explainable, but impossible

Michael Gerson challenges not only libertarianism (which I’ve never been able to embrace), but constitutional conservatism, which I have embraced:

The Tea Party movement, being resistant to systemization, is resistant to characterization. But in its simplest form (and there seems to be no other form), it might be called “constitutional conservatism.” It adopts a rigorous hermeneutic: If the Constitution does not specifically mention it, the federal government isn’t allowed to do it. This represents a kind of 10th Amendment fundamentalism — a muscular form of states’ rights that would undo much of the federal role since Franklin Roosevelt, perhaps since Abraham Lincoln.

This philosophy has the virtue of being easily explainable — and the drawback of being impossible. The current federal role did not grow primarily because of the statist ambitions of liberals; it grew in response to democratic choices and global challenges. Federal power advanced to rescue the elderly from penury, to enforce civil rights laws, to establish a stable regulatory framework for a modern economy, to conduct a global Cold War. The “establishment” that advanced and maintained this federal role included Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. In many areas, the federal government has gone too far, becoming bloated and burdensome. But the federal role cannot be abandoned.

So I guess the principle is “if it’s ‘necessary,’ tough luck that the constitution doesn’t allow it.”

Easily explainable, possible – and to my ears, still intolerable.

It puts us in permanent servility to court judgments of whether something “goes too far” or is “bloated and burdensome.” I’d really like a brighter line than that.

Faces, Burquas and Decolletage

There’s a bill in France proposing that “no one can wear a garment intended to hide the face in the public space”.

Unless it’s a fashion show, I guess:

The good folks over at Mercator.net ask if what’s going on really has to do the dignity of women as persons:

[I]t is difficult to escape the impression that the real issue at stake for the French is not the oppression of Muslim women but the visibility of Muslim culture and the way it challenges feminist and secularist assumptions.

Those assumptions also produce blind spots when it comes to the dignity of women. A person who takes that dignity seriously is more likely to be offended by the dress sense of the crowd rather than of an isolated Muslim in a burqa, for the typical European/American/Australian woman today also goes about with something that obscures her face: the exposed breast cleavage just below it.

As western women cling to fashions that aim to reveal everything about the body, they too are depersonalised. The stranger’s eye is not drawn to the face where they might encounter the person, but to the body as a sexual object. And this leads also to oppression, even if the woman, just like the one in the burqa, does not understand that she is oppressed.

Oppressed or not, Muslim women are fighting back. Some who wear the face veil told a group of reporters in France this week that they would not obey the ban (which is expected to come into force next year) and they would not leave the country. They say it is tantamount to denying freedom to practice one’s religion. They talked about having recourse to the European Court of Human Rights if arrested.

As for their dignity, they say it cannot be dictated by the state. The secularism of the state should guarantee religious freedom, they argue. Also, they ask, if the French are such feminists, why do women make up less than 20 per cent of the 577 members of the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament?

Good points, ladies. But the truth that human dignity is not defined by decrees of the state does not mean it is defined by the customs of any particular group, either. For all that some women embrace it willingly, there is something very undignified about hiding the face. The dignity of a woman is the dignity of a person, and the face veil suggests, quite simply, that the wearer is not a person — for her husband and children, maybe, but not for you and me.

This is a sad state of affairs but not one that governments can solve with bans. If anything, these will provoke resentment among Muslims at large and rebellion among the young (watch for more veils appearing, not less). As Muslim leaders themselves say, the answer lies with the education and empowerment of Muslim women.

What would help a lot is a decision by European women to dress and conduct themselves in a style consistent with feminine dignity. Half-bared bosoms and burqa rage are definitely not the way to persuade our Muslim sisters to give up the veil.

Despite all our surface feminism, we really don’t treat women with dignity.

(But do we treat men with dignity, either?)

Finding salvation outside the monastery

St John of the Ladder writes (1:21):

Some people living carelessly in the world have asked me: “We have wives and are beset with social cares, and how can we lead the solitary life?” I replied to them: “Do all the good you can; do not speak evil of anyone; do not steal from anyone; do not hate anyone; do not be absent from the divine services; be compassionate to the needy; do not offend anyone; do not wreck another man’s domestic happiness, and be content with what you own wives can give you. If you behave in this way, you will not be far from the Kingdom of Heaven.’

HT: Felix Culpa.

The beheading of Anne Boleyn

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

It was on this day in 1536 that Anne Boleyn was beheaded for the charge of adultery, only a few years after she had inspired King Henry VIII to create an entirely new church just so that he could marry her.

When she met Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn was an 18-year-old girl who had plenty of admirers. She was beautiful, but she was also smart. She could debate theology and discuss literature.

Henry wanted Anne as a mistress, but she was an extremely ambitious young woman. And so she told the king that she couldn’t give herself to him unless they were married. He was genuinely smitten with this young woman, and he was also desperate for a male heir. So he decided to break with his wife of more than 20 years, and asked the pope for an annulment of his first marriage. The Pope refused, for both political and religious reasons. Henry had spent his life as a devout Catholic, and took very seriously his role as a defender of the faith. But when the Pope stood in the way of his love, Henry declared himself the head of the new Church of England, and granted himself an annulment in his own matrimonial suit.

Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn in 1533. It was only the second time in English history that a king had married for love, and it was possibly the only time in history that a new church has been founded just to facilitate a marriage. And yet, that marriage didn’t last long. He didn’t like that their first child was a girl. The one thing that might have saved Anne would have been a male child. Historians think she may have had several miscarriages or stillborn children, and it is certain that she miscarried in 1536, a stillborn male four months into her pregnancy. A few months later, she was arrested on charges of adultery and was set to be executed. Most historians believe the charges were false.

After her death, portraits of her were destroyed, along with her books and correspondence, and poems and songs she wrote. Her rivals spread rumors and made up stories about her, to defame her reputation in the history books, claiming that she’d been ugly and deformed, with a sixth finger on one hand and a huge hump on her neck. But despite all that, her daughter Elizabeth, the daughter who had so disappointed Henry VIII, grew up to become one of the most influential queens in history.

The ECUSA, part of the “entirely new church” Henry VIII created “just so that he could marry her,” still isn’t letting anything stand in the way of sexual desire.

Paradigm Busters

My crystal ball has never worked very well, but the part of me that longs, that aches, for something better than our Ponzi-scheme economy refuses to give up on dreams of a humane future.

This sort of thing – rumored for weeks – could be it:

PITTSBURGH – The United Steelworkers (USW) and MONDRAGON Internacional, S.A. today announced a framework agreement for collaboration in establishing MONDRAGON cooperatives in the manufacturing sector within the United States and Canada. The USW and MONDRAGON will work to establish manufacturing cooperatives that adapt collective bargaining principles to the MONDRAGON worker ownership model of “one worker, one vote.”

“We see today’s agreement as a historic first step towards making union co-ops a viable business model that can create good jobs, empower workers, and support communities in the United States and Canada,” said USW International President Leo W. Gerard. “Too often we have seen Wall Street hollow out companies by draining their cash and assets and hollowing out communities by shedding jobs and shuttering plants. We need a new business model that invests in workers and invests in communities.”

Josu Ugarte, President of MONDGRAGON Internacional added: “What we are announcing today represents a historic first – combining the world’s largest industrial worker cooperative with one of the world’s most progressive and forward-thinking manufacturing unions to work together so that our combined know-how and complimentary visions can transform manufacturing practices in North America.”

Highlighting the differences between Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and union co-ops, Gerard said, “We have lots of experience with ESOPs, but have found that it doesn’t take long for the Wall Street types to push workers aside and take back control. We see Mondragon’s cooperative model with ‘one worker, one vote’ ownership as a means to re-empower workers and make business accountable to Main Street instead of Wall Street.”

Both the USW and MONDRAGON emphasized the shared values that will drive this collaboration. Mr. Ugarte commented, “We feel inspired to take this step based on our common set of values with the Steelworkers who have proved time and again that the future belongs to those who connect vision and values to people and put all three first. We are excited about working with Mondragon because of our shared values, that work should empower workers and sustain families and communities,” Gerard added.

In the coming months, the USW and MONDRAGON will seek opportunities to implement this union co-op hybrid approach by sharing the common values put forward by the USW and MONDGRAGON and by operating in similar manufacturing segments in which both the USW and MONDRAGON already participate.

…

About MONDRAGON:

The MONDRAGON Corporation mission is to produce and sell goods and provide services and distribution using democratic methods in its organizational structure and distributing the assets generated for the benefit of its members and the community, as a measure of solidarity. MONDRAGON began its activities in 1956 in the Basque town of Mondragon by a rural village priest with a transformative vision who believed in the values of worker collaboration and working hard to reach for and realize the common good.

Today, with approximately 100,000 cooperative members in over 260 cooperative enterprises present in more than forty countries; MONDRAGON Corporation is committed to the creation of greater social wealth through customer satisfaction, job creation, technological and business development, continuous improvement, the promotion of education, and respect for the environment. In 2008, MONDRAGON Corporation reached annual sales of more than sixteen billion euros with its own cooperative university, cooperative bank, and cooperative social security mutual and is ranked as the top Basque business group, the seventh largest in Spain, and the world’s largest industrial workers cooperative.

About the USW:

The USW is North America’s largest industrial union representing 1.2 million active and retired members in a diverse range of industries.

Here’s the Ocholphobist – a guy who’s experienced at making beautiful objects with his hands, but who seldom writes on such things any more – weighing and balancing the workers’ cooperative model:

I recently spoke with an old Catholic Worker friend of mine who told me of a talk given recently in which he heard that Mondragón is worried that an EU style bailout of Spain along the lines of what happened in Greece would actually hurt the cooperatives (Mondragón is not the only one) in Spain. Large financiers generally do not like cooperatives like Mondragón because they do not run with the sort of debt load and constant large debt shifting that a typical corporation does, and the debt they have tends to be decentralized – spread out over a number of smaller financial institutions (note that one of the “four areas of activity” Mondragón is engaged in is finance – this is common among worker cooperatives in Europe — just as many communities and groups of workers in America have local credit unions and many large corporations have their own finance divisions) . And these EU bailouts, like the American bailouts, buttress large finance, with the de facto result that midsize, small, and micro finance options are left in a less competitive position than they would be were there no bailouts, or less centralized bailouts.

The labor movement in the U.S. has little leverage against corporations and its impotence is increasingly pathetic. Often in the American context, when a union does manage to maintain some real power it uses it in as corrupt and abusive a manner (often abusive toward their own, these days) as corportatist power brokers do. But usually American unions are in the business of losing what power they have had so this is less and less a concern. It seems to me that if there is to be any future in workers organizing for their own protection and aid in the United States it will primarily be along the lines of models such as the one Mondragón provides. But I rather doubt that will happen beyond a few small scale efforts and the occasional lipservice. Worker cooperatives do not really fit into the destructive plutocratic order in which we find ourselves today.

It should be noted that in most worker cooperatives (I daresay nearly all of them that last for more than a few years) there is not a utopian vision of financial egalitarianism. There is still a meritocracy at play, arguably more so than in current corporatist models. A worker (or a small worker owned business seeking membership in the cooperative) is not guaranteed to be vested in the cooperative, but must earn it over years and invest himself or herself in a manner which shows to others competence and seriousness and follows well established protocols, with a system in place to curb abuses and address complaints. One will see in a worker cooperative, however, more money staying within the communities where the cooperative is found, and nothing like the radical disparity between the wages of workers and the salaries of executives such as we see in most U.S. corporations, in which execs are paid for their skills in social networking and an ability to manipulate government and lying to the public with that perfected air of banality we routinely see from our suits.

All that said, the ethos of Mondragón Corp has undergone something of a change since EU integration and taken something of a more EU character. The EU is a sly dog. Within the EU constitution there is a mandate which requires the EU to follow the principle of subsidiarity, but as we see with the recent bailout of Greece (along with a host of other moves), the EU is often the furthest thing from an institution which follows the principle of subsidiarity. There is the possibility of a convenient use of subsidiarity rhetoric whilst actually following centralized, top-down, corporo-statist models. It is quite conceivable that cooperatives could be formed which, on paper, look like cooperatives, but which actually function more like corporations.

It is now not uncommon for American Orthodox to argue how neo-con, paleo-con, or libertarian political and/or economic orders are somehow in keeping with Orthodoxy. I suppose an Orthodox embracing subsidiarity would simply be another act in that circus. The chief fault of subsidiarity, as I see it, is that the notion is too vague to be of serious use when applied to any macro-economic vision. One finds both Leftists and those on the Right espousing the ‘true’ version of subsidiarity. Subsidiarity works best as a flexible guiding model in particular micro-economic environments, a part of an economic order with a wide array of labor structures, such as we see with Mondragón Corp in the context of Spain. I have a friend who says he would never fly Distributivist Air, were there such a company. I am not sure that a well run worker cooperative airline would be any less safe than the typical corporate airline, but I have worked for a family owned business of which the thought of the coworkers I had at said business owning that business sends shivers down my spine. Another business I once worked for did go for a varient of the subsidiarity model, and is now in dire straights with half of the staff let go, instead of being sold to a friend of mine who could have actually kept the business thriving, seeing as how he had run it successfully for some years. The original owner, instead of selling to my friend, decided to follow a hasty subsidiarity minded scheme presented by an employee with many ideals and little actual experience in the business and now, out of desperation, the company mimics corporate stores more than it ever did. I suppose that in business, as in most of life, there is a charism to doing things well and any economic order can get in the way of a given charism at a given time.

I was unaware of this book until the Ochlophobist linked it. It’s on my wish list now. And here’s more about Mondragon (in a Wikipedia article that the Wikipedia poobahs would like to see rewritten for greater objectivity).

What’s a “Tea Partier”?

I’m starting to think that ‘Tea Partier” has become a largely brain-dead epithet for mainstream media, much as “fundamentalist” has long been.

Jim DeMint is “The hero of the tea partiers” and believes that “the market is freedom incarnate; an institution of superhuman goodness.”

Rand Paul’s primary win is a “Tea Party Victory,” but he conspicuously believes in austerity and peace – a very Front Porch Republic kind of guy. I read that about him and felt very friendly, though I have no association with the Tea Party (beyond being fed up with both major parties, as they are rumored to be as well).

I have no idea what the Tea Party is supposed to stand for and how one can reliably be indicted for being a Tea Party kinda guy.