Chickens may be better at math than toddlers. They don’t deserve to be tortured.
(Teaser for Nicholas Kristoff’s New York Times Op Ed Are Chicks Brighter Than Babies?) The column is more moving, but no more logical, than the teaser.
I guess it’s toddlers that deserve to be tortured then? Or, judging from the rest of column, stupid people and philanderers (Kristoff is very impressed by monogamous geese)?
Sorry to sound like a deracinated intellectual, but as arguments against eating factory-farmed poultry goes, I’ll pass on cognitive testing, or monogamous instincts, of birds, and stick with salmonella and the inhumanity of the factory farms (related topic).
But Kristoff probably know his readers better than I do, and there does seem to be a sadly human historic failing of despising those, human and animal, we’re determined to subjugate.
Like the Bush administration in Iraq, the White House seems to have invaded the health insurance marketplace with woefully inadequate postinvasion planning, and let the occupation turn into a disaster of hack work and incompetence. Right now, the problems with the exchange Web site appear to be systemic — a mess on the front end, where people are supposed to shop for plans, and also a thicket at the back end, where insurers are supposed to process applications.
(Ross Douthat, Obamacare, Failing Ahead of Schedule) Douthat fears the effect of Obamacare’s failure by website and health exchange mis-design rather than by skyrocketing exchange insurance costs due to young people not enrolling:
If this happens, there will be a lot of schadenfreude on the right at the spectacle of technocratic failure. But the wreck of the exchanges may actually be worse for conservative policy objectives than a more successful rollout would have been.
That’s because while conservatives think the Obamacare exchanges are overregulated and oversubsidized, they are actually closer to the right-of-center vision for health care reform than the Obamacare Medicaid expansion, which is happening no matter what transpires with Healthcare.gov. So if the exchanges fail and the Medicaid expansion takes effect (and, inevitably, becomes difficult to roll back), we’ll be left with an individual market that’s completely dysfunctional and a more socialized system over all.
I quoted Mark Mitchell in my prior blog on truth and beauty in, for lack of a better term, “politics.” On a related topic, Rod Dreher reflects on Art as a Mean of Religious Conversion:
- “[T]he chief reason I am a Christian at all is because I stumbled into the Chartres cathedral and was staggered by the wonder of it all.”
- “Being struck and overcome by the beauty of Christ is a more real, more profound knowledge than mere rational deduction.” (Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI)
- “The encounter with the beautiful can become the wound of the arrow that strikes the heart and in this way opens our eyes, so that later, from this experience, we take the criteria for judgment and can correctly evaluate the arguments. For me an unforgettable experience was the Bach concert that Leonard Bernstein conducted in Munich after the sudden death of Karl Richter. I was sitting next to the Lutheran Bishop Hanselmann. When the last note of one of the great Thomas-Kantor-Cantatas triumphantly faded away, we looked at each other spontaneously and right then we said: ‘Anyone who has heard this, knows that the faith is true.’” (Cardinal Ratzinger again)
- The great iconographer “can see what the senses as such do not see, and what actually appears in what can be perceived: the splendor of the glory of God, the ‘glory of God shining on the face of Christ.’” (Ratzinger yet again.)
One of the reasons for the decline of well-formed Christian faith in our land, I suspect, is our sheer vulgarity and “practicality.” We rarely look up from our money-counting tables for long enough to see beauty, or stop admiring the totals long enough to think.
It is not difficult to discern that the Practical Man in social reform is exactly the same animal as the Practical Man in every other department of human energy, and may be discovered suffering from the same twin disabilities which stamp the Practical Man where ever found: these twin disabilities are an inability to define his own first principles and an inability to follow the consequences proceeding from his own action. Both these disabilities proceed from one simple and deplorable form of impotence, the inability to think.
(Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, Kindle location 1444; I don’t think I’ve pinpoint cited a Kindle edition before, by the way.)
I suspect that my own faith would be better-formed were I not such a “practical” intellectualoid, but instead better integrated my love of music and my religious convictions. If there’s a disabling legacy of my Evangelical (i.e., fundamentalist writ small) youth and young adulthood, it’s likely that our art was banal, I knew it even then, so beauty and faith were very separate domains. Despite neuroplasticity, cortical remapping to achieve better integration may be a lost cause (though perhaps I should try dipping into Dante with Dreher).
There’s an interesting case out of Louisiana, now final as the U.S. Supreme Court has declined to hear further appeal.
Attorneys with the Institute of Justice, a libertarian legal firm that represented the abbey, called the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear the appeal a final victory for the monks, affirming their right to earn a living without interference from unreasonable government regulations.
“The U.S. Supreme Court’s denial of review puts the final nail in the coffin for the state board’s protectionist and outrageous campaign against the monks,” said Scott Bullock, a senior attorney with the group, in a statement.
“The abbey’s victory in this case will not only protect their right to sell caskets, but the rights of entrepreneurs throughout the country.”
The Institute of Justice said the monks’ victory is one of only a handful of cases since the 1930s where a federal court has enforced a constitutional right to economic liberty.
I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when the Louisiana funeral industry tried to sell the “consumer protection” angle to support a ban on monks selling wooden coffins. But don’t be too credulous about “a constitutional right to economic liberty,” though. I think the Institute of Justice is spinning the 5th Circuit opinion pretty hard to come up with that:
The great deference due state economic regulation does not demand judicial blindness to the history of a challenged rule or the context of its adoption nor does it require courts to accept nonsensical explanations for regulation. The deference we owe expresses mighty principles of federalism and judicial roles. The principle we protect from the hand of the State today protects an equally vital core principle – the taking of wealth and handing it to others when it comes not as economic protectionism in service of the public good but as “economic” protection of the rulemakers’ pockets. Nor is the ghost of Lochner lurking about. We deploy no economic theory of social statics or draw upon a judicial vision of free enterprise. Nor do we doom state regulation of casket sales. We insist only that Louisiana’s regulation not be irrational – the outer-most limits of due process and equal protection….
The funeral directors have offered no rational basis for their challenged rule and, try as we are required to do, we can suppose none…
(Quote from opinion and H/T Religion Clause; emphasis added)
There really is something special about Louisiana. I’m not sure there’s another state in the nation with politics so corrupt that the funeral cabal would think they could get away with thievery so audacious. Still, I’ll take a pass on the Benedictines of Lousiana in favor of Daniel in North Carolina.
Leave it to one of the bright legal minds at the Volokh Conspiracy, Stewart Baker, to come up with the perfect generic blog title: “Dubious news hook lets me confirm and blog my pre-existing views.” Just don’t tell anyone that’s all blogging really is: sometimes it isn’t.
I wonder if the Brits bullied into Islam by Muslim fellow-prisoners know there’s a death penalty attached to leaving Islam? (H/T Religion Clause).
This kind of crap combined with the Nairobi Mall terrorists, the bombing of Christian Churches in Pakistan, and the silence of supposedly more pacific Muslims may just turn me, against my wishes, into a full-blown Islamophobe.
(I was surprised when Googling “death penalty for leaving Islam” to find Google suggesting “death penalty for leaving christianity.” I paid a visit and found one semi-literate Muslim taking some Bible texts, including two from the New Testament, as proof that the penalty for apostasy from Christianity is death. Not surprisingly, he found no instance where that penalty has been imposed. See here and here. This, too, pisses me off at “the religion of peace.”)
* * * * *
“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)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 
Tipsy,
You’re too hard on your upbringing. The literature of the Bible and secular writers, the music you sang and performed, and more, no doubt, certainly fed your aesthetic senses at a high level when you were in high school. And the Artist Series at Wheaton College was second to none in the entire country. Credit where credit is due.
I was exposed to good music by my parents, and the Church of my childhood in the 1950s sang some of the “great” Protestant hymns – real hymns, addressed to, of all people, God.
But remember that my big formative life experience was Wheaton Academy, not Wheaton College. I was exposed to good music academically, in choir, at Wheaton Academy. I seem to recall encountering some especially good literature Senior year (where’s the winky-face icon?). And the artist series (the one and only year I attended Wheaton College) was excellent.
But “our music” (e.g., in Wheaton Academy Chapel services, youth meetings and such) so far as I can recall was the caliber of John W. Peterson, every one of whose greatest hits was addressed, so far as I can recall, to one another or to the “unsaved.” I think I picked the Wheaton Bible Church as “my church” partly because their music was a cut or two above that; I could have picked a Wheaton church much fluffier.
Maybe my memory is tainted. Maybe we sang good stuff in Chapel at Wheaton Academy. But so help me, I can’t recall it. Our visual arts that I recall were the Warner Sallman head of Christ and chalk talks landscapes that turned into colorful sunsets when you put them under ultraviolet light. In lex orandi, lex credendi terms, the music and art through which we worshiped, not what we studied, marked “our art” for me.