- What humans are for.
- Egalitarianism.
- Penn State.
- Baptist orthopathy.
- What’s wrong with this picture?
I continue to hear college degrees described as “worthless” if they don’t help people get better-paying jobs. You probably have read about Joe Therrien, who gave up his job, borrowed $35,000 to get Masters in Fine Arts in Puppetry, and now:
- Laments that “I’m working for half as much as I did four years ago, before grad school, and I don’t have health insurance…. It’s the best-paying job I could find.”
- Has become the butt of innumerable “conservative” jokes.
But let’s have some consistency here. As Michael Barone, notes, “That’s the sort of thing the late Steve Jobs told Stanford graduates that they ought to do.”
Will Wilkinson put me back onto this line of thinking at Bigthink.com. He had an arts degree, borrowed money to pursue graduate studies in Philosophy (which he did not finish), and neither regrets his decision nor resents how the market values his services. I think he’s right.
It particularly bothers me Christians dismiss the liberal arts or other degrees as “useless” because of their high cost and low dollar value, since it presumes a very “materialistic” view of what education is about, which in turn is founded on a pernicious premise about what human beings are.
We are not primarily cogs in the economic machine. We are bearers of the image of God. And some of us, God willing, may someday be knows as, say, “St. Tipsy of Indiana, Fool for Christ.”
It didn’t help that the Congressional Democrat inanities were uttered in opposition to DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, which I reluctantly support. The idea that “equality” is “what America is all about” is pernicious. (I also think it conceals vulgar premises, but that’s another topic.)
Our revolution was about liberty; it was about freedom …
…
Equality, egalite, was what the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao’s Revolution of 1949, Castro’s Revolution of 1959 and Pol Pot’s revolution of 1975 claimed to be about.
This was the Big Lie, for all those revolutions that triumphed in the name of equality were marked by mass murders of the old ruling class, the rise of a new ruling class more brutal and tyrannical, and the immiseration of the people in whose name the revolution was supposedly fought.
Invariably, Power to the people! winds up as power to the party and the dictator, who then act in the name of the people. The most egalitarian society of the 20th century was Mao’s China. And that regime murdered more of its own than Lenin and Stalin managed to do.
Inequality is the natural concomitant of freedom …
When they come preaching equality, what they want is power.
My scorn for the “equality is what America’s all about” meme is not to defend the inequality that comes from crony capitalism, for instance, but to defend the inequality that comes from freedom simpliciter or, as in the case of DOMA, from drawing non-invidious distinctions between things that are materially different.
3
Reflecting on the terrible Jerry Sandusky/Joe Paterno/Penn State scandal, I immediately grasped for a Dostoyevsky quote, which I could not find because I searched for “child” rather than “creature.” From The Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov:
Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature…and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on this condition?
I was unaware, however, of a modern piece that surely was inspired by The Grand Inquisitor,
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” which was written by Ursula K. LeGuin. The story posits a fantastic utopian city, where everything is beautiful, with one catch: In order for all this comfort and beauty to exist, one child must be kept in filth and misery. Every citizen of Omelas, when they come of age, is told about that one blameless child being put through hell. And they have a choice: Accept that is the price for their perfect lives in Omelas, or walk away from that paradise, into uncertainty and possibly chaos.
(John Scalzi; HT, as so often, Rod Dreher, and Dreher’s commenter Sheldon who hit the Dostoyevsky quote I’d been looking for.)
Draw your own analogies.
Terry Mattingly contrasts two Georgia Baptist Universities:
On Oct. 21, the trustees of Shorter University in Rome, Ga., approved a covenant requiring faculty and staff to support the “mission of Shorter University as a Christ-centered institution affiliated with the Georgia Baptist Convention.” Then they asked employees to “reject as acceptable all sexual activity not in agreement with the Bible, including, but not limited to, premarital sex, adultery and homosexuality.”
A fortnight later, Baptists learned about a “fall update” email from leaders at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., quietly announcing a policy extending health care and other benefits to the “domestic partners” of faculty and staff, regardless of sexual orientation.
…
The complication for many Baptist academics, stressed Benne, is that they place such a strong emphasis on “soul freedom” and the “priesthood of every believer” that they often struggle to find ways to separate themselves from the “lukewarm people in their midst who are not committed to the their school’s vision.”
It’s a perfect Baptist Catch-22.
“How do you defend specific doctrines and convictions,” he said, “without daring to list these specifics, which means you have committed the sin of having a creed?”
In government, “you must share a vision we will not identify” would be a due process violation. But in much of the Evangelical world (not just official “Baptists”), professing once to have had an intense experience involving Jesus, and singing the ditties-du jour with gusto, and preach-praying with earnest, faux-inarticulate “groanings” of “Father, we just [want, ask, etc.]” is what passes for born-again orthodoxy, which in reality, as one of their own noted, is really just orthopathy (right feeling).
What’s wrong with this picture?
Golly, what could possibly be wrong? It’s just perfect. A man, his children, and his trophy fiancé.
* * * * *
Bon appetit!
Having become tedious even to myself, I’m Tweeting more, blogging less. View this in a browser instead of an RSS feeder to see Tweets at upper right.
I also have some succinct standing advice on recurring themes. Maybe if I link to it, I’ll blog less obsessively about it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 