Month: April 2013

Declaration of Dependence

Holy smokes! I wasn’t going to stop to blog today, the Monday of Holy Week in Orthodoxy, when there will be too little time for professional duties. But this is too good not do share.

Scott Galupon on The Blind Spot of Conservatism, quoting Yuval Levin:

We are all dependent on others. The question is whether we are dependent on people we know, and they on us—in ways that foster family and community, build habits of restraint and dignity, and instill in us responsibility and a sense of obligation—or we are dependent on distant, neutral, universal systems of benefits that help provide for our material wants without connecting us to any local and immediate nexus of care and obligation. It is not dependence per se, which is a universal fact of human life, but dependence without mutual obligation, that corrupts the soul. Such technocratic provision enables precisely the illusion of independence from the people around us and from the requirements of any moral code they might uphold. It is corrosive not because it instills a true sense of dependence but because it inspires a false sense of independence and so frees us from the sorts of moral habits of mutual obligation that alone can make us free.

Galupo, though, thinks there are other false senses of independence, such as

a desire to escape the stifling atmosphere of rural America and discover the wider world; to pursue a life of the mind; to experience, as the British playwright David Hare put it in his screenplay for The Hours, the “violent jolt” of life in the metropolis.

Our culture stokes this desire, and in no small way our economy depends on it. When politicians tirelessly invoke the “American Dream,” when we celebrate social mobility and “churn,” we are encouraging millions of young Rod Drehers to leave their Starhills and become “boomers,” as the poet Wendell Berry (via Wallace Stegner) describes those whose ambition compels them to leave home.

To make the point in the context of our ongoing clash over immigration, do we not at least unwittingly celebrate the dilution of communities when we hold up as heroes those who leave behind their friends and extended families to pursue employment in America? To borrow the simple phraseology of Rod’s mother, a young man who leaves a village in Latin America or South Asia is no longer there.

This is not to dispute Levin’s point about a large and active state “pulverizing” civil society; the phenomenon is real and, as I’ve written before, a purportedly morally neutral state will always and inevitably tip its hand about what it believes to be positive goods.

My point is that big government is not the lone, or lately even the chief, pulverizer of civil society.

(Emphasis added)

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Theologians

Paraphrasing Fr. Patrick Henry Reardon, nobody reads monk Peter Abelard’s theology today, though he was “the keenest thinker and boldest theologian of the 12th Century” and people flocked to him and, so to speak, threw money at him to teach them theology. We read him, if at all, for his love letters to Héloïse, with whom he had an affair.

Still today, one can style oneself a theologian and it will pass without objection — especially if one has an academic degree in the branch of philosophy that has co-opted that title, and even if one is an atheist (I leave it to them to reach modus vivendi with their mirrors in the morning).

That’s a caveat for any sincere Christian apt to be taken in by self-descriptions like “a public and political theologian.” Academic reputations are made by breaking new ground (e.g., in “theology,” clever speculation and inventing or refurbishing heresy). Public reputations are made by calculated provocations (for instance, “Catholic” historian Garry Wills arguing for abolition of the priesthood and demoting the eucharist; mercifully, he doesn’t claim to be a theologian).

That’s not just some renewed snarkiness toward an Orthodox man who has been getting his second 15 minutes of fame lately by reprise of his calculated provocation. I feel the same way when I hear Vigen Guroian or David Bentley Hart described as “theologians.” Maybe. Maybe not. I once heard Billy Graham described as a theologian, too.

However, Orthodoxy has privileged the meaning of the term given by Evagrius Ponticus when he wrote that “If you are a theologian, you will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian.” (Treatise On Prayer, 61).

(OrthodoxWiki) Theology of the baser sort (the academic) is one of my besetting temptations, maybe because it’s far easier than true prayer.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Manufactured Outrage

There is a manufactured outrage circulating at Purdue University.

Perhaps it was an hysterical personality, rather than actual malice, that started it. The words “White Power” were found on a mirror in the Black Cultural Center. This led to major outrage and a march on the Administration building demanding action against racism.

When it turned out that the words on the mirror were left over from a class in which they were written for some didactic purpose, another outrage conveniently appeared. “[P]olice are investigating an incident in which a racial slur was written on one of the posters left behind by the group,” today’s newspaper reports. It’s being treated as a hate crime “since property was altered or destroyed and the conduct was apparently motivated by bias.”

I’d bet a modest amount – say, lunch at a downtown eatery – that if they find who wrote the stick figure, it will prove to have been a person of color, not some cracker.

I’d bet a larger amount that there will be no criminal prosecution because the posters left behind by the demonstrators were abandoned property. You cannot steal (or vandalize) abandoned property, as the publishers of a “conservative” free paper discovered  on another campus when “liberal” students methodically appropriated and destroyed every copy of one issue. When they put the free paper in the kiosk, they were abandoning it, so the reasoning went. When the demonstrators left their posters behind, they were abandoning them (and violating an anti-littering part of the student code?).

I would not bet you anything that if a white person is identified as the writer, he (or less likely, she) will not be expelled, though there’s no crime. That’s how hysteria a victimology works.

But I would again bet a modest amount that if the writer is found to be a person of color, he or she will not be expelled for the hoax, even though that, too, should be a serious violation of the student code of conduct.

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Wash, rinse, repeat

  1. Big corporations misbehave.
  2. Government responds with Byzantine regulations.
  3. Small businesses can’t afford to comply and are driven out of business.
  4. Big corporations get even bigger – obscenely big, too big to fail, even.
  5. Obscenely big corporations misbehave.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Is this a great country or what?

Bust them up, fer cryin’ out loud!

(My muse for this was Jeffrey Polet. How I free-associated off his benign remarks is my own doing.)

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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.