Category: Culture

The French way with words

The local paper Tuesday picked up a Fort Wayne News Sentinel column that made an interesting point about the Culture Wars.

The author, a “conservative with strong libertarian leanings — or a libertarian with strong conservative underpinnings,” noted that despite the rumored moratorium on social issues, he’s not feeling the love as he sees movement on:

• Women in combat.
• Gays in the Boy Scouts.
• Gun control.
• Immigration reform.
• Guaranteed sports access for the handicapped.

That would not be my list. Others would be. But the the author’s point is valid:

But it annoys me no end that most of the commentariat on one side feel perfectly free to browbeat the other side about polluting the body politic with divisive wedge issues — shut up about abortion and traditional marriage! — to the point where even some conservatives cave.

Oh, yes, let’s have a moratorium on social issues, urged then-Gov. Mitch Daniels. At the same time, they go about merrily pursuing their own wedge issues. And they feel absolutely no shame about it. Why should they, when they hardly ever get called on it?

This takes me back to one of my favorite remarks on the bigotry of the bien pensants:

One suspects that the bashing of the religious right amounts to little more than that right-thinking people find the religious right distasteful.  The logic is “We are good, true and beautiful.  But we find you repulsive.  Therefore there must be something very wrong with you.”  The reasoning is impeccable given the first premise, but perhaps the first premise is false.    The French have a witticism: “Cet animal est tres mechant; quand on l’attaque, il se defend.”  (This animal is very wicked; when you attack it, it defends itself.)  The religious right did not start the fight.  For more than a quarter century, elite, privileged, sophisticated, and “right-thinking” Americans have exhibited contempt for some fundamental values, and have exhibited even greater contempt for the religious traditionalists who hold them.

David Carlin, Right Thinking About the Religious Right, First Things, November 1994.

1994. Note that. It reminds me of another French saying: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Moving the gay conversion cheese

Joshua Gonnerman is a “chaste” gay Christian whose writings I look forward to. I put “chaste” in scare quotes only because some use it as a synonym for “sexually abstinent,” whereas I think chastity, one of the virtues, is much more than mere abstinence.

False Hope and Gay Conversion Therapy is an adaptation of something Gonnerman wrote elsewhere. From everything I know or think I know, his guarded assessment of reparative therapy is more than warranted. The whole piece is worth digesting.

But buried within it, something in particular caught my attention that I hadn’t noticed about reparative therapy claims before:

Out of ninety-eight original subjects, sixty-one were able to be categorized at the end of the study. The other thirty-seven either explicitly refused or were regarded by Jones and Yarhouse as passively refusing through non-communication to continue. Of the final sixty-one, just eleven subjects (18 percent of completing subjects, 11 percent of beginning subjects) were registered as “Success: Conversion,” while seventeen (28 percent of completing subjects, 17 percent of beginning subjects) were registered as “Success: Chastity.” (As a chaste man who is also gay, I am inclined to dispute categorizing chastity as a success for orientation change.)

(Emphasis added)

I hesitate to call it “paraphrase,” but here’s my take on the “Success: Chastity” notion:

If you’re promoting your techniques (1) as secular and (2) as intended to produce a change of orientation, then counting the behavioral change of sexual abstinence, without a change of orientation, is cheating. Only if your techniques were acknowledged as religious (What secular interest is there in abstinence of consenting adults? Few at best, no?) and pastoral would abstinence count as any kind of success at all, and if the abstinence were only technical (e.g., only gay porn, no gay partner), it would be dubious to count even such abstinence as “success: chastity.”

I think “success” from an authentically Christian standpoint need not include change of orientation, but requires more than mere technical abstinence. The same is true for unmarried Christian heterosexuals, for whom chastity is not attained by limiting non-marital activity to “heavy petting.” It requires guarding the imagination as well. I’m an equal opportunity blue nose.

And [Begin preemptive strike] it’s certainly possible to cast out the demons of fornication and sodomy and end up possessed by seven worse, starting with pride. [End preemptive strike]

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Property tax death march

I’m not going to waste time speculating about motives, except that it’s hard to imagine that nobody was aware of engaging in sophistry when they sold towns on the need for big-box stores. Nathaniel Hood looks at a microcosm of the larger pattern in WalMart vs. Local Pub.

The WalMart in question pays the equivalent of $23,284 per acre in property taxes. Since it’s at the edge of town, it required a lot of new roads and other infrastructure from the city.

Pub 500 pays the equivalent of $82,125 per acre. It sits on a streetcorner that’s been there since at least 1870. A few new pipes were required from the city when it built (I don’t know what happened to the building that was there before).

Many other numbers cut in favor of small business when you look at them. Maybe the only ones that don’t are “does it have in-house sophists to sell itself to local officials desperate enough for renewal of their cities that they’ll drink the Growth KoolAid?”

Unless you’re affiliated with the WCTU and think Pub 500 should pay disproportionately because it’s evil, what justification can you give for what amounts to a whopping subsidy to WalMart? 

A pretty strong case can be made that we cannot afford to maintain a lot of the infrastructure we’ve been enticed to build by the growth sophists and the lure of “free” federal money to help. A rude wake-up call is coming.

A number of my sidebar “sustainability” links deal with these issues, as does the Congress for the New Urbanism, from a more professional and less activist angle.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Becoming Magnetic

Rod Dreher, with the excuse of a David Brooks column to frame the question, returns to one of his perennial Front Porchy type themes: the importance of place. I didn’t read it initially, probably because of the uninspired title: The Geographical Aristocracy Of Meritocracy.

The basic question is “why do young people flee their hometowns, and why do the educated elite among them congregate in a just a few magnet places?” If you immediately answer “Well, duh! Their hometowns are boring while San Francisco is exciting,” then you’re part of (what I think is) a problem. Why should people want excitement above anything else?

Richard Florida has made a career of valorizing of this phenomenon, and telling places in flyover country how they, too, can become magnetic. I’ve always taken him with a grain of salt, not because I doubt that certain creative things may multiply exponentially when a bunch of highly-educated and energetic people cluster in a place, but because

  • I’m cursed with an awareness that exponentially multiplying certain creative things may not be the only thing, or even in the top ten most important things, we should want to do.
  • It has the whiff of opportunism about it: find some troubling thing that’s happening and the people who profit from it may be willing to pay big bucks for you to explain why it’s really wonderful and only a fuddy-duddy could disagree.

Dreher offers an alternate good, that of roots, fully aware of the complications of realizing it in many cases. 

In ages past, the smart kid from a small town may have returned to his hometown and opened a business, or a law or medical practice, and so on. He would have put his talents to use building up his community, not as an act of charity, but because it wouldn’t have occurred to him to do anything but that — or if it had, there were powerful cultural forces pushing against it …

The point here, though, is that nobody these days feels an obligation to anything larger than their own ambition and desire — and that has real-world consequences for places you can find on the map. We are all implicated in this. If you are living in one of these towns, and you are raising your kids with the expectation that they will leave, and should want to leave for the sake of their career, you’re implicated in it too.

On a personal note, I don’t know if I’d have ended up back in my hometown had I not become concerned about whether greening america in the mountains of Arizona was a good long-term plan for a man who wanted a family, and thus decided to return to school to become an attorney, at which profession I’d shown some aptitude and knew reasonably well from having grown up in an attorney’s home. Having done that, and joined my father’s law firm, I’ve probably made significantly more money as an attorney because my hometown’s economic devolopment mucky-mucks have paid guys like Richard Florida, including the guru himself, to come give us some larnin’ on how to be more magnetic.

As a consequence (or maybe just coincidentally, driven by a the presence of a prominent Big Ten-or-however-many-it’s-up-to-now University) we have a downtown that’s relatively teeming with college-age and young adults, a lively arts scene for a city our size, and other features that make it a pretty exciting and remunerative place to live. A single cineplex where a drive-in theater used to be has more movie screens than all surrounding counties combined.  Our Big-Box Stores have replaced all the boring little mom-and-pop shops for those hick counties, too. Our legislators work together effectively across party lines in the state capital. And we’re the envy, along with Bloomington and Indianapolis, of the rest of the state, which I’m told calls us “the Golden Triangle.”

In other words, we’ve won the meritocratic geographic lottery and become aristocratic. Ain’t life great?! C’mon up and over, Indiana. To hell with your boring little hometowns!

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

My Evil Twin and “deluded evangelical evildoers”

I alluded briefly to Frank Schaeffer’s fatwa (calling for “a way to expose and stop deluded evangelical evildoers”) in Thursday’s potpourri, which was released in RSS at 4 am. By the time I rose at 5:30, concerned that I had let my chronic irritation with my evil twin Franky get the better of me, I revisited and edited my characterization.

In any event, the story he was getting the vapors over is one in a loosely-related series of similar charges, and deserves more than brief allusion.

The story is about the alleged nexus between American Evangelicals and African anti-homosexual legislation and violence. My Evil Twin and I both have concerns about the Evangelicalism from which we came. Mine results in pointed barbs, intending to induce repentance. His results in vicious slander, intending to produce suppression. But then, Schaeffer has always had issues with anger and with scapegoating. Only the identity of the scapegoat varies.

It’s notable to me that Schaeffer’s stridency was much greater than that of the documentary filmmaker whose video he embedded. But the video he embedded is disturbing on many levels, of which what follows are a few.

In the U.S. scenes, the “International House of Prayer” is disturbing because what they’re doing is not recognizably Christian worship in any historic sense. A Christian from anywhere in the world, from any portion of the first millenium-and-a-half, if time-transported to the International House of Prayer and given the gift of understanding foreign languages, simply would not know that he or she was in what purports to be Christian worship. I hope, but do not know, that this sort of contrived emotional frenzy – a sort of orgy with clothes still on – is not what has become of “mainstream” Evangelicalism.

We then are whisked away and invited by implication to consider some Ugandan assemblies a counterpart, if not an actual sister congregation, of the International House of Prayer. The Ugandan scenes are disturbing for the same bizarre worship style plus a literal call for a show of hands of those willing to kill homosexuals. That’s awfuller than the awful worship stateside.

Third, the video is disturbing because it alleges, but quite thoroughly fails to demonstrate, any nexus between the U.S. scenes and the African anti-homosexual extremism. The only demonstrated nexus is two-fold and very weak:

  1. The soft-spoken, clerical-collared African exile narrator. He claims that American Evangelicals, perceiving that they’ve lost the culture wars here, are seeking to establish Biblical Law™ as civil law in majority-Christian countries in Africa.
  2. A female American missionary. In a clip lacking any real context other than the filmmaker’s juxtaposition, she says she would support leaving some criminal penalties (penalties she did not specify) in a Bill that in fact included a mandatory death penalty for recidivist homosexual offenders. At least I’m supposed to think that’s the Bill she was referring to. I really don’t know.

Other scenes simply show no nexus in any sense.

The U.S. scenes included a man saying he doesn’t think homosexuality is consistent with God’s law and a young woman winsomely saying God’s law guides us to fulfilling lives. Nothing in those sentiments necessarily eventuates in criminalization of anything, and the filmmaker doesn’t even claim it does.

The U.S. scenes where people are trying to raise money for African missionary activity include no inducements whatever to give because the gifts will support establishment of Biblical Law™ in Africa, let alone the establishment of laws criminalizing homosexuality. They are pretty straightforward calls to support missions in areas where the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few.

What the filmmaker claims through the soft-spoken narrator is that historic Christian opposition to homosexual behavior can be turned into an ideology of violence and legal repression of homosexual persons. That true. Ideology can produce terrible distortions and excesses. But that does not warrant stopping American support of missionary activities.

When you let go of a dollar for any charitable cause, you lose control of it. You can be prudent. You can question just what version of “Christianity” the recipients are promoting. But nobody has the right to forbid you from giving without exercising such diligence.

Finally, lest I forget, the International House of Prayer looks to me like a charismatic or pentecostal assembly. That’s one kind of Evangelicalism. There are others.

But the supporters of Biblical Law™ that I have known – and I have known some who were trying 30 years ago to draw me into their circle – clearly were not mainstream Evangelicals at all. They were what I would call hyper-Calvinists. Their worship, if filmed, would be four boring bare walls and a Bible. There would be no musical instruments. The only singing would be somber Psalm settings, perhaps from the Genevan Psalter. Their guiding lights are not Pat Robertson or his ilk, but Rousas John Rushdoony.

So I remain very skeptical of the chorus of claims, almost as if orchestrated, that places like the charismatic International House of Prayer have become powerful proponents of hyper-Calvinist Reconstructionist ideas, or that anyone has picked up those ideas in numbers sufficient to constitute a real threat to freedom.

But I’m out of that whole world for more than 15 years now, so you may take with a grain of salt my skepticism — provided you take the video’s insinuations with equal skepticism.

What I ended up with about Schaeffer was “calling for ‘a way to expose and stop deluded [mainstream] evangelical evildoers’ from supporting Christian missions in countries where there has been violence toward, and efforts to criminalize, homosexual behavior.” The RSS version had ended with “sending money to Africa for missionary activities that may include some ugly surprises.”

The mountain labored and brought forth a mouse. And this blog entry.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Economic Stork Theory

I recently finished reading John Mêdaille’s Toward a Truly Free Market, and have been transcribing some notes from it. It was both a helpful review of economics (in which my formal education is minimal, much as I enjoyed it) and a fairly powerful brief for Distributism as a “Third Way” economics. A conservative temperament doesn’t rush into things, so I’m taking it slow, but I like Distributism more and more.

The family is in some ways at the center of Distributist thought — unlike standard-issue modern economics:

If economics requires fully socialized participants, and if economics is about social provisioning, then the question of the family cannot be divorced from economic questions. For economic actors, producers, and consumers are “produced” and socialized within the confines of the family; without the family there will be  no next generation, and hence no future, for the economists to worry about. Therefore, it is the family that is the basic economic unit as well as the basic social unit. Modern economics tends to ignore the role of the family completely to focus on the individual. However, the individual, by himself, is sterile and not a self-sustaining entity. Neoclassical economics thus has no way to explain how new workers come into the economy, and hence it has no way to explain growth. John Mueller has characterized these shortcomings in economics as “The Economic Stork Theory.” In the stork theory, workers arrive in the economy fully grown, fully trained, and fully socialized. These storks born workers are a “given”; that is, there is no way to explain the growth in workers or their level of training and socialization, and hence little reason to support them with political or fiscal policies

…

It is an oddity of modern economics that it depends on treating the worker as just another commodity (labor) for purposes of pricing that labor, but treats the production cost of that “commodity” as something beyond the price system. If we take any other commodity, say a bar of pig iron, it is assumed that the price must cover the cost of production, maintenance,  and depreciation, or the product will be withdrawn from the market. But in regards to labor, this assumption is never examined. For labor has its own “production cost” (the family) and its own “maintenance” cost (subsistence and healthcare) and its own “depreciation” costs (sickness and old age). Labor cannot simply be withdrawn from the market when these requirements are not met. Therefore, labor – and the family – does not even gain the dignity of the bar of pig iron in modern economic theory.

(Pages 39-41)

In order to accomplish the material provisioning of society, the economy must provide for the material provision of the family, because the family is the basis of both the social and economic orders; it is the reason for having an economy and the indispensable condition of an economy.

(Page 43)

However, we need to note that that this [supply and demand] model applies only to commodities, that is, reproducible, elastic objects and services that are made mainly to be exchanged in the marketplace.

Obviously, many things do not fall under the category of a commodity in that sense. The supply  of rare wines and fine paintings is not affected by the price.  Even when a Monet fetches $30 million, Mr. Monet will not supply the market with any new pictures. Now the importance of Monet’s to the market is not very great, and we can ignore the impact, no matter how high the price. But there are three things of great importance to the market, which also have no equilibrium point; these things are money, nature, and man. Their price and quantity are not regulated by supply and demand, and they are not “manufactured” for the market …

(Page 72)

In chapter 4, we introduced John Mueller’s economic stork theory (EST), which demonstrated that economists have no way to account for arrival of workers in the economy. Even as they “commodify” the workers, economists have no way to account for the “production” of this “commodity”; the worker just  mysteriously “appears” in the economy. Economists are willing to talk about the production of other “commodities,” such as pigs or pig iron. They know that the price of these commodities must cover the cost of production, maintenance and depreciation, or the commodity will simply disappear from the market. When it comes to labor, however, they are reluctant to concede that this too is “produced” and has production, maintenance and depreciation costs. In other words, they can modify labor, and then refused to speak of it as they would any other commodity. Hence, even under its own terms, the neoclassical theory is incomplete; it cannot account for this rather basic “commodity” per se, but must accept its creation out of thin air.

Mueller’s economic stork theory has a rather curious corollary. Under the EST, The only useful work done in the economy is work done for wages or other economic rewards, and hence there are only two kinds of economic activity, work and leisure. Thus, there are only two kinds of individuals in this theory, what I call Partially Useful Individuals (PUIs) and  Totally Useless Individuals (TUIs). The PUIs are partially useful because they spend some of their time at “work” producing things in the exchange economy. The TUIs, However, don’t “work” at all. Rather, some of the TUIs,  otherwise known as “mothers,” spend their time in such leisure activities is taking care of household pets, some of these pets are called “cats” or “dogs,” and others are called “children,” another form of TUIs.

(Page 98)

Mêdaille, an economist, sticks fairly closely to his economic points. I, a curmudgeon (slightly younger than Mêdaille, actually), don’t need to. If Mêdaille is right, I don’t see how this standard market theory can engender enthusiastic support from any serious Christian believer to whom family also is central. (There are multiple ways in which our economy disrupts family. This only scratches the surface.)

In their appreciation of the importance of the family to children (future “labor” to economists, “human resources” to personnel departments), the French have shown themselves to be far more sophisticated than increasing numbers in the U.S. and than standard-issue “capitalist” economic theories.

The French! God works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform!

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.