Moral Reflections in Bad Traffic

What do you think of when you are in bad traffic?

Sometimes, "Aaaargh!"

Sometimes I thank the Lord for delaying me in one way or another so that it is not me up there in the accident. (Not that I'm happy with anyone's suffering.)

Sometimes, apparently, I think of what a better person and citizen I'm becoming through the patience I am learning...if I happen to be learning patience at the time. 

This was the case when I was on vacation earlier this month in Falmouth on Cape Cod. So I wrote, "Bad Traffic Forms Good Citizens" (Worldsmag.com, July 13, 2011).

That column got a record low of 2 comments. But it was worth saying (someone had to say it!), and now it's off my chest.

The final reflections anticipate why column this week on the mysteries of child rearing.

"When children learn that they are not little gods or little tyrants, i.e., that the world is not their private highway between private toy boxes, they learn self-restraint and consideration for others. They may even learn, as the Bible teaches, to consider others better than themselves (Philippians 2:3). That is, they may learn that people are more important than things and one’s private ambitions.

"Many adults these days continue to act like children who have never learned these lessons. You see them on the road. You see them most places. They have failed to grow up. They may have passports and they may vote, but they have failed to become citizens in the moral sense. Perhaps a few more graciously allowed left-hand turns in difficult traffic would change that. But change or not, you still let them in. It’s what decent, grown-up people and good citizens do."

Here Comes LGBTQIP Marriage

Here are some stunning developments in the culture. Gallop reports that 53% of the population now supports same-sex marriage. Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, told Marvin Olasky that the battle against same-sex marriage in this country is "probably lost." Bottom line: "I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture."

This prompted a number of reflections in me. One, however, was that it is not just same-sex marriage. That opens the floodgates. Hence my Worldmag column this week: "Marriage Equality Floodgates."

The argument from the innovators gos this way:

...there are these marriages out there, but some are legally recognized while others are not. It’s just baseless discrimination, they say. As a consequence, some get inheritance advantages, tax breaks, employer benefits, and visitation rights in the emergency room, whereas others do not. So let’s just treat all marriages the same way.

Here is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo making the case:

Watch live streaming video from newyorkstateofficeofthegovernor at livestream.com

To which I respond:

“all marriages” is an expandable concept limited only by the imagination. If Americans make their peace with same-sex marriage, there is no logical reason that marriage should not include any combination of people in any number. Incest? Polygamy? A cultic, free-love commune? Why not? People who are presently in incestuous and polygamous relationships are waiting in the wings, eager to get in on this “marriage equality.”

One cheeky commenter on the column quipped: "LGBTQ marriage is discriminatory. It blatantly discriminates against LGBPTQSI marriage, not to mention LGBPTQASIF civil unions," and "Let’s sanction LBBTQENGUFDNSRIJSD#$&%@RZXPWV+SOI@#$! marriage and civil unions too, at public school expense!!! How would that hurt YOUR marriage, anyway? We are all equal or not."

The left-wing Slate magazine back in 2003 saw the logic as clear as a bright day in San Francisco (“Incest repellent? If gay sex is private, why isn’t incest?). And polygamy? The lobbying effort in popular culture is already operating full tilt on HBO’s Big Love, a successful show that concluded its last of five seasons in March.

Of course, children will suffer the most, as they always do in liberal social experiments. Read Freedom's Orphans by my colleague David Tubbs. But aside from that, Daly is right: "I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture."

Save Our Souls. Repeal ObamaCare.

ObamaCare is back on the front burner. That's what happens when you pass an historic and revolutionary piece of social legislation by the barest majority and against strong popular opposition. People are not tired of the health care debate. They are tired of arrogant, liberal social engineers and wealth redistributors.

In "The Moral Dividend of Replacing ObamaCare" (Worldmag.com), I argue that the 2010 health care reform will be a devastating blow not only to the nation's economy but also to our sense of personal responsibility (which is bad enough as it is).

I set up my closing argument with this reductio ad absurdum scenario.

Democratic lawmakers argue that healthcare is too important to leave to individual responsibility. Because some people cannot afford it, the right thing to do morally is to socialize the costs so that everyone has this basic good at public expense. But that claims a rationale for ever-greater government takeover of people’s private affairs that has no limiting principle. Food is important. So are clothes. People can’t get to work without a car. Why should some people have free access to these basic goods and with Cadillac-quality (literally, in the case of cars) while others go without them or get by with shoddy quality? When it comes to food, clothing, housing, and transportation, they will complain that we have a two-tier society. Ban the private car or give everyone a functional government-made, government-issued car. Why shouldn’t everyone live in worker housing? Let’s nationalize Nike and Tommy Hilfiger. Style for everyone!

I close by saying that, morally, this approach to government,

...leads to infantile dependency. People lose the inclination to provide for themselves as responsible, self-governing, adult people. “I have this need! Why does the government not provide for it! It’s important!” The government becomes a benevolent zookeeper, and the people are all nicely preserved. But, like the lions sunning themselves on the rocks behind the fence, no one resembles what a human being is supposed to be.

This column provoked a long string of comments in which people debate (I use a polite term) back and forth about the merits of ObamaCare. They also debate what I'm saying, and who is being rational and polite about it, and who is not. Someone calls me a "political hack" for joining God and mammon in the phrase "moral dividend." Sheesh! Another condemns me for, he says, callously just wishing someone with cancer or MS a boost in character. Someone comes to my defense, pointing out that I clearly state: "There are better ways of helping people in need." That's all I say because the substance of what should replace ObamaCare is not the subject of the column, and we only have 400-700 words to work with anyway. My defender also rebukes the fellow for rudeness and indifference to understanding the arguments of others. Unrepentant and undaunted, the curmudgeon gripes on.

It is interesting to see how many nasty and unreasonable leftists--both professing Christian and clearly non--spend their time tussling with conservative World readers on the commentary pages of the website. Are they unemployed? Are they employed by George Soros? That leftists would occupy themselves with this constant sparring in a conservative forum is one thing, but how ungracious the professedly Christian ones are is another.
__________________

*Save Our Souls: of course, I mean souls in the classical sense.

War Hero, Salvatore Giunta

The New York Times has done the unexpected: reported on a war hero ("Iowa Man to Receive First Non-Posthumous Medal of Honor Since Vietnam," Tom Shanker, Sept. 10, 2010).

In the most dangerous valley of the most rugged corner of eastern Afghanistan, a small rifle team of airborne soldiers fell into an insurgent ambush, a coordinated attack from three sides.

A young Army specialist, Salvatore A. Giunta, took a bullet to the chest, but was saved by the heavy plates of his body armor. Shaking off the punch from the round, he jumped up and pulled two wounded soldiers to safety, grabbed hand grenades and ran up the trail to where his squad mates had been patrolling.

There, he saw a chilling image: Two fighters hauling one of his American comrades into the forest. Specialist Giunta hurled his grenades and emptied the clip in his automatic rifle, forcing the enemy to drop the wounded soldier. Still taking fire, he provided cover and comfort to his mortally wounded teammate until help arrived.

Sergeant Giunta has a humble hero's perspective of the matter.

“I entered the Army when I was 18, and I’m 25 now. I became a man in the Army,” he said. “That night I learned a lot — and after that night I learned even more. This respect that people are giving to me? This was one moment. In my battalion, I am mediocre at best. This shows how great the rest of them are.” 

He is from Hiawatha, Iowa. He is married and presently stationed in Italy.

Park the Baby While You Shop

Annette Sorensen, a young actress, was visiting New York from Denmark with her 14-month old baby, Liv, and stopped to catch some lunch. She parked baby and stroller outside the restaurant’s plate-glass window amidst the café tables, and withdrew inside to dine. She managed to sit just three tables from the window, so was actually just six feet from the child. Not long afterwards, however, she was under arrest for child endangerment. The story was a nationwide scandal. Janie Bennett, 41, a teacher from Queens, told the press, "You can't leave your kids unattended in New York City. You aren't in Denmark…you're in New York." (for photo of Annette Sorensen with daughter, Liv, see BAX LINDHARDT, AP (May 22, 1997)

That was 1997, but it is still common throughout Scandinavia for a mother to leave her baby sleeping in a carriage outside a store while she does her shopping or drinks her coffee. You might see a line of babies parked on the sidewalk while mothers go about their business indoors without a care. And the babies are safe.

Here is a scene from outside a Copenhagen café. The woman who posted this picture explained the calm with which Danish mothers entrust their children to the community when they shop.

Nobody here would ever take a baby...oh, yes it actually happend in 1967- a women wanted a child so very much that she stole the small infant...and it was a story so unheard of that I know it, although it was many years ago! ((This winter a guy stole a cargo bike in front of a shop...and he didn't know that there were children sleeping in it...and as he found out he returned the children and the bike to the parents feeling very sorry....)).

Parents also go shopping with their children outside in the prams...and they can not always see the prams. That's okay...then they will go to the door from time to time to see if the baby still is sleeping . You don't have to watch your child ALL the time...nobody will hurt or take them...but you'll have to check if they wake up...several times I've seen people 'pop into a shop' saying: 'There's a baby crying out here...'...and a mother/father hurries outside. And people also place the prams with their children sleeping in them outside their houses etc.

So all in all Denmark is (still) a safe place in that respect. (A Polar Bears Tale)

It is quite common in Iceland, even at subzero temperatures. (See Reykjavik Daily Photo Blog.)

The practice is not limited to Scandanavia, but is also the way in France. Here the babies are unmistakably in the strollers. (Chez Thompson, someone's travel weblog)

I remember when a French woman got in trouble in Toronto for this same cultural faux pas, my mother told me that women used to it all the time in Scotland in the 1950s when she was young. Here is an old photo from England.

But lest you develop too much sympathy for the disoriented Danish mom, you should know that customers and waiters alike urged her to take her baby inside the restaurant, but she brushed them off. She had fair warning. Also, she was not on a five day sightseeing tour. She was in the city for a month, so she was more aclimated to New York ways that one would at first suspect. If that seems to be asking alot, it is not asking too much of her companion at the time to fill her in on what's done here and what's not. She was with her husband (actually, he was only "the baby's father"), Exavier Wardlaw, "a movie production assistant, who lives in New York," according to the news story. The fuller picture presents them as quite a pair. But that's their business.

Our business is to wonder how it is that these European societies have cultural norms that govern so widely and so effectively that mothers can leave their babies unattended in public in this way, whereas we cannot. My wife and I would not even put an "It's a girl" sign in front of our house when our eldest was born for fear that a local, childless, crazy woman might somehow sneak in and steal her. New parents. But we decided based on what we knew was happening. Is it the strength of their families that produces lawful people? What would account for that strength? Does their social democracy and pervasive statism account for people keeping their hands to themselves? Is there a low crime rate generally? Canada and Britain are more statist than America, but less so than Scandinavia. Does their social trust mirror that middling position?

Our society used to be a lot safer than it is now. In Georgetown, Ontario, I used to walk to school across town in the second grade with my fourth grade sister unattended. I won't let my kids, the eldest of whom is ten, walk two blocks on their own to a small park here in this nice Long Island neighborhood. Yes, it was Canada, but things have changed up there as well. What has changed? Can we restore what we have lost?

Why America Needs Baseball

I think it was Ronald Reagan who once complained that there are not more happy, edifying stories in the news. Of course, generally, those stories don't attract readers. Murders, corruption, and earthquakes do.

But this is one the Gipper would have liked. Trust baseball to provide it. I thank my friend Warren Smith at World magazine for having the spiritual discernment to see it and write it.

Even if you don’t follow baseball, you may have heard the story.

On Wednesday, Detroit Tigers journeyman pitcher Armando Galarraga—whose 21-18 career record is hardly spectacular—was one out away from that rarest of baseball achievements: the so-called “perfect game.” Twenty-seven batters up and 27 down. It has been done only 20 times in major league baseball history.

Galarraga had retired 26 batters when the Cleveland Indians’ Jason Donald stepped into the batter’s box. Donald then sliced a grounder to the right side of the infield, forcing first baseman Miguel Cabrera to field the ball. Cabrera threw the ball to Galarraga, who ran over to cover first. Everyone in the ballpark knew Donald was out by a half step.

Everyone except umpire Jim Joyce. Joyce called Donald safe. The blown call ended Galarraga’s bid for major league baseball’s 21st perfect game.

What follows is a story of what Smith calls "character and grace." Right there on national display. "[T]he story of Galarraga and Joyce will, I predict, be told as long as the game is played, perhaps even as long as we imperfect human beings strive for and occasionally achieve moments of transcendence. And that’s why I love baseball."

Read Warren Cole Smith's story at WORLDmag.com, "Baseball's Transcendent Moment."

NYC is Not Where the Wild Things Are

They say that New York is a city where anything goes. You could dress like a giraffe, and no one would bat an eye. A man could likely even wear a kilt without causing a stir. But apparently, wearing a bowtie goes beyond even what New Yorkers will tolerate, at least in midtown.

At The King's College, men in the House of Churchill distinguish themselves with various forms of greatness, but also by sporting the Churchill bowtie on Tuesdays. As faculty adviser to the House, I occasionally join them in this.

On my way toward Penn Station this past Tuesday evening, as I waited for the light at Broadway and 33rd, a pedicab driver pulled away from the intersection and said loudly in a mock Brahman accept, "That's why I wear my bowtie!" I thought to myself, "Oh my! I've just been gratuitously mocked by a pedicab driver. By a pedicab driver of all people!"

Perhaps I should have thrown a coffee at him, or even a garbage can. No. It would not have been in keeping with the bowtie. Besides, I remembered this video of a brawl in the street between a pedicab driver and a cabbie. (Go on. How can you not watch it?)



For those of you who are from out of town, "That's New York for ya" is a gross mischaracterization. New Yorkers, even New York cabbies, are a whole lot more civil and friendly than this. In my more than four years here, I have never seen anything even remotely like this. In fact, I have found New Yorkers to be remarkably polite and considerate of one another. (Read my earlier post, "New York--City of Marvels and Manners.")

But it seems that Gotham is also a lot more conventional than it's reputation would lead you to think it is. You can play a guitar in your underwear in Times Square and call yourself the Naked Cowboy, but if you walk down 34th Street dressed that way, you'll make people uncomfortable. (I have not tried this.) I'm not even sure that a man could wear a kilt without getting jeered. And even a distinguished looking bowtie is a step outside the acceptable, inviting cultural punishment from the street.

I'm not complaining, mind you. All of this just confirms my belief that a sustainable, livable political community--which New York City is--requires a degree of mutual consideration and fellow feeling, but also a healthy level of outwardly expressed mutual censorship...some, but not too much.

I love New York. And New York loves me, but not always.

Justice

I teach Introduction to Politics. The topic of ultimate concern in political life is, of course, justice. The morally serious students at The King's College are eager to know what this is.

This is justice.



Now you know what justice is.

Bush, the Law, and the Truth

This week's cover of Time magazine features a close-up of George W. Bush and a sinister Dick Cheney (what else would he be?) peering out from behind him. "Special Report: The Final Days of Bush and Cheney." The title evokes memories of Richard Nixon and the corruption that brought his presidency to a premature end. But what we read about W. in the article itself shows us a man of high moral integrity. It's story of Dick Cheney's campaign in the closing weeks, and even hours, of the Bush years to secure a full pardon for Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby. It's the story of Bush's morally and legally conscientious dealing with the repeated requests from his close friend, the due process he followed, and his principled decisions to decline the request.

Libby was convicted of obstructing justice, perjury, and lying to investigators. He was sentenced to 30 months in prison and fined $250,000. Bush did not pardon Libby, but in June 2007 commuted his sentence, arguing that the prison sentence was an excessive punishment given the fine, the disbarment, and the disgrace were sufficient.

Bush not only noted his "respect for the jury verdict" and the prosecutor, he also emphasized the "harsh punishment" Libby still faced, including a "forever damaged" professional reputation and the "long-lasting" consequences of a felony conviction.
And there were these two sentences: "Our entire system of justice relies on people telling the truth," Bush said. "And if a person does not tell the truth, particularly if he serves in government and holds the public trust, he must be held accountable." Particularly if he serves in government. Bush's allies would say later that the language was intended to send an unmistakable message, internally as well as externally: No one is above the law.

We did not see such concern for the rule of law in the previous administration. I doubt that we will see it under the former Chicago politician and friend of ACORN who currently serves in the White House. But I'm happy to be surprised.

Even as governor of Texas, Bush had been generally suspicious of the pardon system, though he was not opposed to it in principle. "His reluctance stemmed not from a lack of mercy but from his sense that pardons were a rigged game, tilted in favor of offenders with political connections. 'He thought the whole pardon system was completely corrupt,' says a top Bush adviser."

The article supplies an illustration:

On Dec. 23, 2008, Bush announced 19 pardons. No big names. No apparent political sponsors. But one planned pardon went to a Brooklyn, N.Y., developer who had pleaded guilty in the early 2000s to lying to federal housing authorities. After news accounts surfaced that his father had given nearly $30,000 to the Republican Party earlier that year, the White House backpedaled. It didn't help that one of the lawyers who had sought the pardon had once worked in Bush's own counsel's office — exactly the kind of inside favoritism Bush despised. Bush, who had retreated to Camp David for a last family holiday, spent Christmas Eve fielding phone calls about the case. By day's end, he decided to kill the developer's pardon. The experience left him, aides say, even more wary of the process than he was before.

Later, Cheney pressed his boss again for the pardon. Bush set up a meeting at which Cheney could make his case and White House counsel Fred Fielding could make his case against it. Cheney made political arguments about Iraq War opponents targeting Libby because they couldn't get at Bush. He made emotional appeals to not leaving any soldiers on the battlefield. "But Bush pushed past the political dimension. 'Did the jury get it right or wrong?' he asked."

In conversations that followed, two considerations kept coming up: repentance and the truth. "Bush would decide alone. In private, he was bothered by Libby's lack of repentance. But he seemed more riveted by the central issue of the trial: truthfulness. Did Libby lie to prosecutors?"

For President George W. Bush, pardoning someone convicted of a crime by due process of law in the American judicial system was a matter of awesome weight. It carried implications for the rule of law on which our system of liberty rested, and still rests. Thus, what was of ultimate concern to him was the question of truth. Those who are currently in power at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would serve us and themselves better by trembling more sincerely before that consideration.

Life Under the Regime of Science

Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

The conquest of nature, first proposed by Francis Bacon 400 years ago, has opened up marvelous possibilities. Here is what I gleaned from some recent breakfast reading.

From the Economist:

"The National Ignition Facility: On Target, Finally" (May 28, 2009) opens with the question, "What do you get when you focus 192 lasers onto a pellet [frozen hydrogen] the size of a match head and press the “fire” button?" The National Ignition Facility at the Livermore Labs "is designed to create conditions like those found in stars." For "three thousandths of a second...it has a power of 500 trillion watts, about 3,000 times the average electricity consumption of the whole of planet Earth."

Each laser pulse will begin as a weak infra-red beam. This is split into 48 daughter beams that are then fed into preamplifiers which increase their power 20 billion times. Each of the daughters is split further, into four, and passed repeatedly through the main amplifiers. These increase the beams’ power 15,000 times and push their wavelengths into the ultraviolet.

The pellet itself contains a sphere of deuterium (a heavy form of hydrogen, with nuclei consisting of a proton and a neutron) and tritium (even heavier hydrogen, with a proton and two neutrons) that is chilled to just a degree or so above absolute zero. The beams should compress the sphere so rapidly that it implodes, squeezing deuterium and tritium nuclei together until they overcome their mutual repulsion and fuse to form helium (two protons and two neutrons) together with a surplus neutron and a lot of heat. If enough heat is generated it will sustain the process of fusion without laser input, until most of the nuclear fuel has been used up.

From the conquest of nature "out there," the editors of the Economist turn to the conquest of nature "in here," that is, human nature, as though it's really just all the same thing.

"The Behavioural Effects of Video Games: Good Game?" is a report on two studies, one from Iowa State University and the other from Ludwig-Maximilian University in Germany, that examined the relationship between playing video games and either violent or helpful thoughts and behavior depending on whether the games were themselves violent or "pro-social." We are told, "There is a body of research suggesting that violent games can lead to aggressive thoughts, if not to violence itself." In one Iowa State experiment, "those who spent the longest playing games which involved helping others were most likely to help, share, co-operate and empathise with others. They also had lower scores in tests for hostile thoughts and the acceptance of violence as normal." In another experiment by the same researcher involving games with helping others as their theme, "three to four months later, those who played these types of games the most were also rated as more helpful to those around them in real life."

The idea behind these studies is that if you can get children to play socially cooperative games, they will grow up to be socially cooperative people. Well, yes, but there are broad limits. Human nature is not so malleable as these researchers may hope. But you don't need expensive university research to tell you that if you occupy most young people's attention with violent video games, especially if the games are realistic, and even moreso if they put the player in the place of a criminal as hero, you will inherit a generally more lawless and criminally violent society.

Once the science of manipulating children for political ends advances sufficiently, they can be used to help control their unreconstructed parents.

In The National Review, Jonah Goldberg draws attention to this MasterCard "Priceless" commercial in which a child tries to make his father "a better man" ("The Littlest Totalitarian," June 8, 2009--not available online; buy the magazine).



It presents the child as wiser than and morally superior to his father who is unshaven and looks rather thoughtless and irresponsible. Of course, as MasterCard presents it, human virtue consists in living in an environmentally responsible way and leaving as small a so-called carbon footprint as possible (or at least making fashionable gestures in that direction). If children are for the most part more virtuous than their parents, it is because they learn the cutting edge of enlightened morality from their public school teachers and their Saturday morning cartoons.

Goldberg's political warning is this:

The idea of enlisting children to the Cause is as fashionable today as it was under Robespierre. To crack the bunker walls of the family and seduce the children has always been a top priority of totalitarians, hard and soft. Progressives love to elevate the sagacity of children...because doing so gives children all the more authority when they parrot the talking points of the latest progressive fad.

Goldberg evokes unrehabilitated common sense in his closing remark: "If the man in the ad were a better father, he would have scolded his kid for the disrespect and demanded to know who was teaching him such crap."

That's not science, but it's full of wisdom nonetheless. Perhaps science has its limitations and "it's place."

Following Evolution Into the Abyss

This is where godless, evolutionary thinking gets you.

David Brooks, reflecting on the role of empathy in jurisprudence, and Nicholas Kristof, sharing research on why liberals and conservatives take the positions they do, both offer teachings from evolutionary psychology as thrillingly helpful advances in our self-understanding.

David Brooks, "The Empathy Issue," (New York Times, May 29, 2009).

Nicholas Kristof, "Would You Slap Your Father? If So, You’re a Liberal," (New York Times, May 28, 2009).

Of course, if all our notions of good and evil, right and wrong, beautiful and vile, are simply the products of evolution, and are thus not true in themselves and as they present themselves, but are merely useful for the preservation of our species as a whole, then morally serious people are dupes and romantics, and the cruelly ambitious, megalomaniacal Machiavellian is the only sensible human being.

What Allan Bloom called "Nihilism with a happy ending" requires not looking at your nihilism too closely.

Harold adds:

David,
I've been amazed to watch as the influence of evolutionary psychology has seeped through the humanities and social sciences like effluent from a leaking sewer pipe through stacks of cardboard in a basement. There is now nothing that cannot be explained by way of survival value, especially now that we have the concept of group survival value, a transparent and illegitimate move around the problems of empathy, altruism, love, and self consciousness existing in creatures competing in the survival of the fittest sweepstakes. Humans are superior because we evolved superior characteristics, ergo, evolution is true. It is a circular argument, no? Affirming the antecedent? Oh, and this little bit: Darwinism good, social Darwinism not good. Why not?

Tell me if I'm wrong about the development here: evolution is posited as establish fact, based on 1) the analogy (illegitimate) of superior, hereditary traits within species, to transmogrification between species. White moths become black moths to survive, etc. 2), "Phylogeny recapitulates ontogeny"--human fetuses appear to look like other species while gestating, and this proves humans developed historically from other species. 3) A drawerful of pieces/parts of fossilized bones give the barest outline of a suggestion of a penumbra emanating from a dream of Wallace and Darwin that all species have a common ancestor. A dream come true! 4) A fair amount of DNA is shared by all living things, with chimpanzees and humans somewhere north of 98%. We are superior to chimpanzees, therefore we evolved from them, since we are so close genetically. QED.

From these hints is raised a grand theory of auto-genesis; at some point in the history of the boiling cauldron of chemical soup that was the early earth, one of those inorganic molecules learned how to replicate itself, and viola! information began to exist along side of, and exclusive of, energy and matter, all by itself. Not only did the incredible protein carrier for information appear by itself (DNA), but also the information to be carried to the next generations, with increasing complexity--all this in the face of iron law # 2 of thermodynamics, which has the universe running down, I believe. Evolving complexity from a cosmos-sized explosion, the very definition of chaos and disorder, culminating in a self-conscious being able to speculate about the one thing that does not exist--telos, or the purpose of it all. A little joke played on us by that original self-life-giving molecule perhaps. What a card! And what an opening for those darn Machiavellians--they're barely more than self-replicating carriers of accidental DNA, but they're having all the fun!

Boys Must Be Boys, But a Man's Gotta Do What a Man's Gotta Do

In "The Sportsman and the Well Lived Life," I question the worth of sports that don't point in any way to a productive life of some sort. "Much of modern athletic competition combines the awesome and the trivial--rare human ability combined with fruitless endeavor. But it has not always been so." Here is the video that got me thinking about it.



But these amazing basketball shots are something else entirely. (The song is really good too, but I don't know what it is. Well chosen. Suitable to the spirit of young men.)



I share the joy of these boys. I'm happy for them. And I'm impressed. But they're just boys. When boys become men, they put aside childish things and apply what they've learned as boys to serious adult pursuits.

This Danny MacAskill fellow, for example, is amazingly good on a bicycle, but unless he can find a military application for this skill he needs to stop wasting his life and turn to philosophy or business or something else that's not just goofing around impressively.



We have given far too much praise in the last half century to people who have never grown up, to adults who act like children. What does that say about us?

Monsters Among Us

Last Friday, an 11-year-old boy in western Pennsylvania shot his father's fiancee in the head with a youth model 20-gauge shotgun while she was sleeping, killing her, and leaving her two daughters, ages 7 and 11, motherless. The victim, 26-year-old Kenzie Marie Houk, was eight months pregnant. As monstrous as it is for a boy of that age to kill someone so close in relationship to him, and at point blank range, having no concern even for her baby, and with no doubt bloody and horrible results, what is even even more monstrous is that he was able then to put away his gun, get on the school bus, and head off to school as though nothing unusual had happened.

Though most people have heard this story, I find it remarkable that two stories I have read report this monstrous act while revealing the monstrosity of their own moral attitudes.

The original AP story I read added this comment concerning the baby: "Houk's fetus died within minutes due to a lack of oxygen, Lawrence County Coroner Russell Noga said." It is at least ironic that while reporting on what is clearly a monstrous act by a child, the reporter uses language which is intended to preserve our emotional comfort with acting monstrously toward our unborn children. No unindoctrinated woman suffering this kind of loss would say that she lost her "fetus" eight months into her pregnancy. Unless you want to kill it, convince someone else to kill it, or speak of it with cold, scientific abstraction for some other reason, it's a baby.

Then the psychologist adds an opinion, and the moral understanding takes a nosedive from its already lamentable depths.

The Washington Post quotes psychologist Patricia Papernow, an expert on blended families, saying, "It looks awful from the outside and sort of unspeakable, but these are the kinds of feelings that are pretty normal in a new stepfamily. You just hope there's not a loaded gun around."

You see, from the point of view of the most advanced thinking in social science, there's nothing wrong with the boy. He's perfectly normal. The problem is the prevalence of guns in that part of the country.

Notice that from her enlightened vantage point, this particular slaying is only "sort of" unspeakable.

It seems that when one monster emerges from the woods, he draws out a few more. When that happens, it's wise to make a note of where they're coming from.

The Last Knight of Christendom

My friend Stephen Clark reflects on Richard John Neuhaus's character and contribution to our political discourse. Neuhaus's funeral is today.

Richard John Neuhaus has gone to his reward, and with him the Christian practice of chivalry has come to its uttermost end.

I met Fr. Neuhaus once, a little over a year ago. I requested a meeting with him, not for any particular reason other than my avid reading of "First Things". Two things struck me about his office: first, that it had not been renovated in several years, and second, that it had a spacious sitting area where the smoking of cigars was obviously practiced.

A friend of mine accompanied me on my pilgrimage, and the two of us proceeded to stumble through the interview like a couple of star-struck teenagers. Nothing in Fr. Neuhaus’ demeanor caused this; he was a smallish man, balding and grey, and as unpretentiously gracious as a mortal can be.

At the end of the interview, Fr. Neuhaus offered my friend and me each an autographed copy of The Naked Public Square, which of course we eagerly accepted.

In the title of this well-known volume lies one of Fr. Neuhaus’ great contributions. Orwell noted in “Politics and the English Language” that public speech typically is littered with dead or dying metaphors. In the half-century since Orwell’s indictment, public discourse has deteriorated yet further into a sloganized slush of referentless meaninglessness: the audacity of tripe.

Into this milieu, Fr. Neuhaus introduced a straightforwardly mixed metaphor: “The Naked Public Square.” This proved to be not only a living and powerful figure of speech, but one whose life-force reached to the farthest corners of Christendom. Where has it not become fashionable to speak of “the public square”? Within his metaphor lies implicit the wrongness of many things that are currently being done in our civic life, and also a positive indication for correcting them.

However, for me the manner rather than the matter of Fr. Neuhaus’ work was his greatest contribution. The deeply cultivated civility of his approach—even to controversial topics about which he had strong convictions—can only be described as chivalrous.

There is a profoundly cultured graciousness in the writings of Fr. Neuhaus that I have found nowhere else in the contemporary scene, either in Christian or non-Christian writers. And this mellifluousness is most surprising because it mainly flowed in a journal of current affairs.

If I may rob from Tolkien, the last of the High Elves has sailed for Valinor; and we shall never again see his like in Middle Earth.

May he rest from his labors. And may his works not only follow him, but may their lingering forms illumine our way in his absence.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine;
et lux perpetua luceat eis ;
cum Sanctis tuis in aeternum,
quia pius es.

We Need More Than A Little Christmas

We and our journalists, when faced with a crisis, have a tendency to focus on its immediate causes, and then tinker with them while attempting to affix blame in the partisan debate. Thus, in what may become known as the Financial Crisis of 2008, we focus on better regulation and troublesome government intrusion into the market while mustering arguments for the culpability of either the Bush years or the ideological and self-serving liberal Democratic Congress. Of course, there is helpful truth to be found in those investigations. But there are more important truths, and ultimately more helpful ones, to be found in pulling back to look at the bigger human picture and see the deeper problems embedded in our souls, or if you will, the contemporary American character.

Daniel Henninger takes this broader approach in his little newspaper essay, "Mad Max and the Meltdown" (Wall Street Journal, Nov. 20, 2008). He states his thesis metaphorically, saying, "A nation whose people can't say "Merry Christmas" is a nation capable of ruining its own economy."

Skipping his step by step summary of how this crisis unfolded, we come to his conclusion. The problem has been fundamentally not one of inadequate regulation, though there certainly was that. The problem was one of inadequate moral restraint on the part of many of the people involved, from the greatest to the least of them. This widespread moral wandering was made possible by a larger society that is aggressively discouraging religion among its citizens.

What really went missing through the subprime mortgage years were the three Rs: responsibility, restraint and remorse. They are the ballast that stabilizes two better-known Rs from the world of free markets: risk and reward. Responsibility and restraint are moral sentiments. Remorse is a product of conscience. None of these grow on trees. Each must be learned, taught, passed down. And so we come back to the disappearance of "Merry Christmas." It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. ... Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.

John Adams tells us, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." He said this not because he lived in a religious society and was so immersed in that point of view that he could not imagine the liberating possibilities of atheistic secularism. Late eighteenth century moral, political, and religious thought gave him a vivid awareness of the alternative. His claim on this point is based instead on his understanding of liberty and the human soul. Our constitution oversees a system of political and economic liberty. That system is not self-sufficient. It cannot govern what Immanuel Kant called "a nation of devils." Such a people, unable to govern themselves from within, would need a very powerful, active, and omnipresent state to restrain them.

C.S. Lewis saw this problem in his day. In The Abolition of Man, he argues that the Enlightenment project to refound all knowledge on an amoral, or "value-neutral," scientific basis, together with its philosophic collapse into nihilism or what we are calling post-modernism, have landed us in an inhuman and unsustainable situation by debunking the very means by which we make moral judgments or even recognize their possibility. "In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and we expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful" (Harper edition, p.26).

People want to be free of religion, especially Christianity, but they want to retain the morality that derives from and requires that religion for it to make any sense and to give it force in the human heart.

We see this vain hope expressed in a recent atheist ad campaign in London that has migrated to Washington DC in time for the Christmas season. It asks, "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake." It is yet another effort not only to take Christ out of Christmas, but also to remove Christ from Christian character.

Mere exhortations of this sort are notoriously ineffective, however, because people, left to themselves, are incorrigibily self-centered. They must be governed from above by the looming consequences of violating the divinely established moral order. It was the irreligious Thomas Jefferson who confessed, "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that His justice cannot sleep forever."

Even better, however, is when people are governed from within by a heart transforming spiritual grace that restrains selfishness and inclines the heart in charity toward not only one's family and neighbors, but also to strangers--both seen and unseen--and, yes, even to one's enemies. If we sow the wind, we can expect to reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7).

Moral-Political Lessons From Dubai

A South African drive-time disc jockey in Dubai has been fired for imitating God as part of his morning banter. (AP story here.)

He was not fired for violating Sharia Law. Dubai, one of the principal cities and one of several semi-autonomous states in the United Arab Emirates, is a diverse international community. He was fired because his irreverence, that is, his careless treatment of this divine subject matter, offended the religious sensibilities of the people who live in Dubai. He was responding to someone's failed attempt to sue God in a U.S. court. (See my post on that: "The Audacity of Suing God.") "He intended to be funny, not to offend anybody," said Arabian Radio Network Chief Operating Officer Steve Smith. "However, what he did was highly offensive to the Muslim and Christian community in the UAE."

No doubt this shocks many American readers who see it as an example of religious fundamentalism in the benighted Arab world.

But this was our world not so long ago, and I think that in that respect it was a better world. People were more self-controlled and respectful of one another when we inhabited that world.

In 1966, John Lennon had to apologize publicly for saying that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus." The remark made no impression on the British when it was first published in London's Evening Standard. But when DATEbook published the Maureen Cleave interview in America it was a huge scandal.

Lennon's full statement from the interview was this:

'Christianity will go,' he said. 'It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first-rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.'

In some ways, of course, we are a better society now than we were. We're more accepting of racial differences among us, for example. But that improvement has not grown out of our rejection of God. Indeed, the civil rights movement was, in significant measure, motivated by Christian faith.

When people turn away from God and focus on themselves, they actually dehumanize themselves and each other.


Consider this post from November 7, 2007: "An Atheist Ally of Religion? Sounds Reasonable."

Dalrymple, noting the rarity of religiously motivated cruelty, draws attention to the decency that the eternal perspective engenders in by far most people who genuinely embrace it. After quoting from a meditation by Bishop Joseph Hall (1574-1656) on contentment and self-control, Dalrymple concludes that, “moderation comes more naturally to the man who believes in something not merely higher than himself, but higher than mankind. After all, the greatest enjoyment of the usages of this world, even to excess, might seem rational when the usages of this world are all that there is.” It is at least arguable that unsentimental, atheistic rationalism leads logically to debauchery and ultimately to tyranny.

He drives home this connection between piety and moderation by comparing the genuine fruit of Christian faith with what these grumpy anti-theists have to offer:

“Let us compare Hall’s meditation “Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted” with Harris’s statement that some people ought perhaps to be killed for their beliefs:

With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this sin punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than clamours. Every one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by some token of revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less: but, in the mean time, no man looks home to himself. It is no uncharity to say, that too many insult in this just punishment, who have deserved more. . . . Public sins have more shame; private may have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me of those, it is enough, that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others rejoice, in these public executions: let me pity the sins of others, and be humbled under the sense of my own.

“Who sounds more charitable, more generous, more just, more profound, more honest, more humane: Sam Harris or Joseph Hall, D.D., late lord bishop of Exeter and of Norwich?”

Moral Legislation in a Free Society

Whereas on many college campuses, the chief political debate is between liberty and Marxism, here at The King’s College it is between libertarianism and a more traditional conservative position. In other words, the King’s College student body is generally in disagreement between a strictly economic view of life and a more fully political view.

The question pertains to the distinction between economic and moral decision-making. When we fail to recognize this distinction, we reduce all decisions to economic ones and see people as simply rational actors making simply rational judgments in their choices. But it is not so.

In economic life, when human nature is left to follow its course, the result is widespread prosperity, not only for those who intend it for themselves by their selfish choices, but also for others. Shared prosperity is the unintended consequence of economically selfish decisions. Because I want to make as much money as I can, I produce the best bread that I can bake while keeping my costs as low as possible. People prefer my product over that of my competitor, and as a result most people get inexpensive but nutritious bread. Furthermore, my prosperity means higher employment in the area, which in turn means higher spending, which then allows businesses to expand in order to supply the increased demand for goods and services. One person’s selfish pursuit of his own prosperity results in general prosperity. This is traditionally known as "the hidden hand" of capitalism. It does require, however, public protection from various “externalities” such as pollution.

The moral life is inherently different, however. When left to follow its course, human nature does not tend toward moral virtue and community well-being. What results instead is not moral prosperity, but moral poverty, or the brutalization of one another and of oneself; we get New York City rather than Mayberry.

Consider the notion of "taking advantage." When people take advantage of others economically, they meet one another’s economic needs, material and otherwise. Taking advantage of others in economic activity may involve actions we generally consider uncharitable, such as price gouging. But a proprietor who charges four times the normal room rate for someone who is clearly stranded is nonetheless providing a service. The customer does not suffer the discomfort of sleeping in his car, and secures himself against various other imaginable evils (thugs, freezing temperatures, etc.). The situation is admittedly not an entirely happy one, but there are real benefits on both side of the transaction. Moral exploitation, by contrast, provides no service at all, except imaginary ones to the morally confused and vulnerable, for example what a pimp provides to the scared young runaway.

Pawn shops, check cashing stores, high interest rates on credit cards, loan sharks, profiteering during wartime—these are all examples of some people economically exploiting the difficult circumstances in which other people find themselves. But in each case the exploited is free to choose whether to use the exploiters’ services, and benefits in some way if he chooses to use them.

Taking advantage of others morally is called seduction. It involves exploiting their ignorance, their weakness, or their immaturity. In moral matters, “to take advantage of” is to harm. It’s what we mean by the phrase. It is always either a confession or an accusation. The equivalent exploitation in economic activity would be fraud, for example the “lemon” automobile or the adulterated food.

Fraud is a form of theft or even assault, and it calls for protective and punitive action by the government. For the same reason, morally exploitative action calls for the same government protection.

An excellent book not only on what political men need to learn from economists, but also on what economists need to understand about politics and the nature of the political as distinguished from the economic is Steven Rhoads' The Economist's View of the World (Cambridge, 1985). Rhoads teaches political science at the University of Virginia.

Market Identifies Which States are "Christian"

The free market cannot do everything, but it can supply us with some information quite accurately. Is America a Christian nation? Well, some states are more Christian in character and sentiment than others, and the market may have identified which of the fifty states are "Christian."

A film about Billy Graham, Billy: the Early Years of Billy Graham, opens on October 10 in select states, not necessarily near you. They are: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. That is 12 out of 50 states.

So much for "Jesusland."



The website describes the film:

Most of us know Billy Graham as the self-assured and charismatic preacher who became one of the most important figures of 20th Century Christianity. Now, with the release of Billy: The Early Years, we meet Billy as the earnest and promising young man at the crossroads of faith and doubt, ultimately facing the moment of decision that launched one of history’s most powerful evangelistic careers.

Most compellingly, Billy: The Early Years paints its portrait of Graham against the backdrop of his relationship with Charles Templeton, another gifted young preacher who’s faith could not withstand the onslaught of scientific skepticism. He and Graham parted ways and in the film, Templeton comes to personify the rising tide of disbelief into which Graham launched his crusades.

Filmed in Tennessee, Billy: The Early Years captures the feel of the Depression-era tent revival where Graham heeded the altar call, and follows him through the doubt and resolution of the next decade. The film was directed by the versatile actor/director Robby Benson – the voice of The Beast in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. The movie’s power lays in its honest portrayal of Billy’s struggle with the ideas represented in Templeton’s eventual unbelief and shows how Billy’s faith, so dramatically portrayed in the film, goes on to change the face of modern evangelism.

Now that this movie is out, it strikes me as odd that Hollywood didn't get to it first. It is a compelling story that would draw a large audience and make a lot of money. Instead, they make Milk, the story of San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, the country's first openly homosexual elected official, starring Sean Penn and due for release in December. But, as Michael Medved has shown, the ideological left in America is moved less by the profit motive than by their moral priorities. Yes, aggressive moral agendas are not solely the province of the Christian political right.

Unfathomable Crime

In Austria, Josef Fritzl kept his daughter in his basement for 24 years and fathered seven children by her. From the time she was eighteen, for 24 years, he kept her locked in the basement with three of the children. One child died in infancy, and he and his unsuspecting wife, Rosemarie, adopted the other three as "foundlings."

Austria's interior minister, Günther Platter, said: "We are being confronted with an unfathomable crime."

Next week, I will be in Albania helping to lead a student group from The King's College in New York debate Albanian students on political, economic and spiritual liberty. These horrors will be fresh in everyone's minds.

It is fashionable for the sophisticates among us to say casually and liberally that there are no moral absolutes. Morality is at best culturally relative (we cannot make judgments). The closer to home you get, however, the more they revert to a more thoroughly nihilistic standard: every person is free to determine his or her own morality...provided of course that you respect the rights of others. (Don't ask them where they get that moral absolute. They pull it out of the air. They get it from their culture. But their culture got it from the natural right teachings of early modern political theory, which they don't accept. But never mind.)

You can live more or less comfortably with that moral theory. It's self-flattering and it protects one's vices from neighborly criticism and even from conscientious self-examination. It also requires a very selective application to life as lived and observed. But what does one do with Josef Fritzl and his unnatural family, or rather the domestic victims of his unnatural and monstrous deeds?

"Unfathomable crime." Oh? What is the crime? Simply that he violated someone's rights? Or her autonomy? Is that what makes the "crime" unfathomable? Anyone who does not share in the horror--yes horror--that a human being properly feels upon learning of this situation in a sense participates in the man's monstrosity. The modern doctrine of rights and the post-modern notions of self-realization are inadequate to account for the revulsion that is a healthy response to learning about Josef Fritzl, to say nothing of Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler and on and on.

The Austrian newspaper Der Standard said in an editorial: "The whole country must ask itself just what is really, fundamentally going wrong." Horror and unfathomable iniquity point to a natural standard of morality, a moral order that is part of a created order. They point to an intuitive grasp of teleology and transcendent reality. To deny these things in the face of this report can only be explained by blindness resulting from the filtering effects of ideological spectacles. Perhaps that is what is "fundamentally going wrong."

Creation Law, Moral Law and Economic Liberty

The Evangelical political left is coming into a prominence it has never seen before. A surprising number of Evangelicals are open to supporting Barack Obama in the coming election, and Democrats are open to returning the embrace. Consider Nicholas Kristof's recent column, "Evangelicals a Liberal Can Love" (New York Times, Feb. 3, 2008).

So it is timely to consider the relationship between Biblical principles and the political principles of the American political left and right, as one of my students is doing currently in his senior thesis. One of my earlier posts, "The Evangelical Left's Rejection of Reality," grew out of comments that I offered that student. In response to that post, not here but over on WORLD on the Web/Academy, Alisa asked this:

Maybe I’m not getting it, but this seems circular to me. Are we supposed to figure out what works based on our understanding of creation law, or are we supposed to deduce creation law based on what works?

I responded with this explanation. (I also refer to "RDean," an atheist who for some reason is a regular reader over there, but who does not trouble himself to understand what he criticizes.)

Alisa, good question. Of course economics is unlike chemistry in that it pertains essentially to human relations which are always moral in character. That is, it is governed by God's moral law. At the same time there is a strictly technical aspect to it. (I am a political scientist, not an economist, but I have had a healthy exposure to it.) When people do business, what are they doing? They are creating wealth, seeking prosperity. With a view to that end, some economic systems work better than others. In that respect, you can discern God's "creation law" by what "works" (i.e. creates wealth). Of course, as in all human decisions, the moral laws governs how we use those economic principles. We are stressed because we ignore God's command to rest on the Sabbath. We are stressed because people treat one another as "human resources" comparable to "mineral resources," i.e. as means rather than ends. These attitudes are entirely separable from the system of economic liberty called "capitalism." We are stressed because there are increasingly more people among us with RDean's understanding of reality [atheist materialism] (nothing personal RDean; perhaps your behavior is better than what your worldview justifies) than with the love-your-neighbor and walk-humbly-with-your-God Christian understanding that is our ever dwindling social heritage.

Of course, there is much more that needs to be said. I recommend again that anyone who is interested in the question reads Albert Wolters' book, Creation Regained. This is a book every Christian should read who wants to think Biblically and coherently about serving Christ in this world.