#288 A Theory of Justice and Freedom

A certain news outlet had a summary of just some of the notable details of the new health care reform law.  One in particular stood out to me.  It said that insurance companies can no longer charge women higher premiums than men.  Presumably they had been charged higher premiums in the past due to their increased risk of needing special services such as for pregnancy and related issues.  That sounds like a good change, but I don't know how to give a good answer.

Sometime this year I'm going to be reading a few things and maybe they'll help me formulate an answer, if only a tentative one, in my own mind.  These were already on my reading list, but in light of the new bill, these books just got a whole lot more interesting.  First I'm going to read Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom (or should I read Hayek?) to get an intelligent answer from one side of the spectrum.  Then I'm going to read John Rawls' A Theory of Justice (or should I read Milbank?) to get an intelligent answer from the other side of the spectrum.

But I'd actually be most interested to hear Phillip Blond's take, who I've only recently heard of.  Jonathan Derbyshire calls him conservatism's next philosopher-king, which is something we desperately need.  After all, we've sunk from a high point of Reagan, Thatcher, Friedman, and Buckley, to all-time low of Palin and Prejean.  The reason I'd like to hear from Blond is that a year or two ago, I read the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII.  Through several commentaries on the same, I became aware of the Catholic social teachings of subsidiarity and distributism which are a couple of so-called "third-way" economic concepts.

The ideas excited me, but I thought the philosophy, and any practical hope for its implementation, was dead in the water, due to the fact that its main proponents were early 20th Catholic writers and thus, since it is the 21st century, dead themselves.  These writers included G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.  But what excites me now is that Phillip Blond seems to be taking up the torch of the distributists, the torch of subsidiarity.

Just recently, in an op-ed for Britain's The Guardian entitled Let's Get Local, Blond connects globalism to the economic crisis and proposes a more sustainable way forward.  Read his article here, it is pretty short.  In it, he illustrates subsidiarity as follows:

"Traditionally, subsidiarity means that no function should be performed at any level that could be performed by a level below it. So in a dramatic reverse of the trend towards centralisation, bureaucracy and monopoly, subsidiarity insists on a radical decentralisation, and delegation to the level below it. In practice this means that the state defers to civil society, civil society to institutions and institutions to individuals. Its political correlate is federalism and localism and its political outcome is a dramatic increase in the power and potency of individuals and communities."

Doesn't that sound an awful lot like the way the U.S. Constitution was written?  Doesn't that sound like something libertarians can cheer?  Doesn't that sound like something FLDS members, homeschoolers and gun owners can get behind?  I sure can.  Blond continues,

"The net effect of this doctrine is radical empowerment of what normally suffers under modern political settlements – individual sovereignty and communal autonomy."

Now distributism sounds eerily like a nicer word for communism.  But as Blond illustrates above, here we are not talking about a distribution of wealth, but rather a just distribution of power.  Subsidiarity and distributism are goals worth striving towards, for reasons of justice alone.  But the economic crisis has revealed so many more good reasons for radical empowerment.  His next book is coming out in April.  It is entitled Red Tory: How Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It.  He's got a chance to as any as he is an acknowledged adviser to British leader David Cameron.

#287 Interesting Links XXXIV

A study by the Brookings Institution has estimated that 85% of people who received the $8,000 home buyer tax credit would've bought a house anyway.  Additionally, they estimate that 82% of people who participated in the Cash for Clunkers car buying program would've bought cars anyway.  We already knew that these were giveaways.  Now we know they were for the most part ineffective.

Twelve Angry Men with Henry Fonda and Lee Cobb is one of my favorite films of all time.  Here is a chart which graphs the interactions of the characters throughout the course of the film.  Apparently someone had a lot of time on their hands because they also graphed the original Star Wars trilogy, Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, and something called Primer.  If you look at the chart, you'll see part of why Twelve Angry Men was such a creative movie, and why it was especially apt for charting in such a way.

It's good to be the King!  At least in Connecticut.

James Surowiecki points out the obvious, that the current tax code encourages debt and quotes John Kenneth Galbraith who once said that out-of-proportion debt is the cause of every major financial crisis.  But I'm glad he does, because it's not so obvious to people.  Here's Surowiecki: "The second thing about these breaks is that their social benefits are pretty much nonexistent. Advocates of the mortgage-interest deduction, for instance, claim that it increases homeownership rates. But it doesn’t: in countries where mortgage deductions have been eliminated, homeownership rates haven’t dropped. Instead, the deduction simply inflates house prices."  I think this is where Paul Ryan's plan to reduce the deficit could be a useful starting point.

So I mentioned that I'd really like to see a website where I can key in my zip code, click together a grocery list, and have it spit out the total cost with tax for the five closest stores to me.  When someone takes me up on the offer and invents this, I imagine that the following will occur in grocery stores across America:





Tim Lynch debunks John Yoo regarding terrorism trials in civil courts similar to the way Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, the Shoe Bomber, John Walker Lindh, the Lackawanna Six, and Zacarias Mussaoui were convicted.  All I have to say is that we have a PERFECT record convicting terrorists in court, and it has the added benefit of showing them up for who they really are (worthless criminals) rather than martyrs in some heroic war.  Former Bush justice department officials Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith also defend Holder's decision against ignorant political rhetoric.  While Lynch is at it, he also points to how Radley Balko's journalism on violent, no-knock drug raids has taken a man from death row to the possibility of being freed altogether.

Count me as not at all surprised that Bill O'Reilly would exclaim, "I don't care about the Constitution!" live on his show.  He and many of his ilk started shredding it on September 12th, 2001, even as they decry the shredding that continues to occur under the new administration.  Luckily Andrew Napolitano is a regular sane voice of reason on his program.

Mark Shea is snarky as usual when he says, "Success!  Iraq is being liberated ...from its Christian population! Fortunately, they're just Chaldean Christians which means a) American Evangelicals don't much care since they aren't *real* Christians and b) secular Americans don't care because hey! they're just Christians. That's why the persecution of the Iraqi Church is *so* dominating the headlines and has for so long.  Mission accomplished!"

Andrew Sullivan with a musical/visual demonstration of our occupation of Afghanistan over the past 9/10 years.  Wow, has it really been that long!  We will never escape the morass.  The final lyrics of the song demonstrate our entanglement in The Graveyard of Empires: "You put your whole self in and you shake it all about.  You do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around.  That's what it's all about!"  To quote Eric Bogle's reflection on seeing the grave of a 19-year old victim of WWI, "Did you really believe that this war would end wars?"


There are plenty of classical just war arguments available if a Christian is seeking mental justification before going to war.  But Ben Myers can only laugh at Gene Edward Veith's failure to employ any of these traditional methods, and instead employ his own twisted logic.

#286 Tradition as Barrier and Shroud

I think I've come to realize that it's not Catholic theology that I object to; it's Catholic practice.  As I've posted before, theology is not what divides the universal church; it's the husk of tradition that does it and what is needed for unity is creative co-existence.  Peter Leithart, in an article published by First Things in 1995 entitled Why Protestants Still Protest asked why so many former RCC members indicate that when they left the church they became Christians.

I have my own questions.  Why so often does official church doctrine not get filtered down to the masses?  Why are Catholics so woefully ignorant of what their own church believes?  Why are Catholics not up to the task of speaking for their church, of giving voice to its teachings?  Why has Catholicism become increasingly a term to denote cultural background rather than a religious affiliation much like Judaism has in modern times?  Why does the proclamation so often not fit with the practice?

Leithart suggests that the problem is pastoral, rather than theological,

"..the Word and Sacraments [has] been so shrouded by layers of tradition and distracting ceremony that Christ could be perceived only with difficulty."

That's my fundamental problem as well.  Why do we have to peel back so many layers of pomp and ceremony to get the heart of the gospel?  Tradition is well and good.  But where it obscures the gospel uneccesarily, it should be done away with.  As importantly, where it impairs the unity of the universal church, it should be reconsidered.  For example, I get that you want to venerate Mary.  I get that you have a list of saints that you think have unique abilities to intercede for you in various situations.  That's all fine.  Do that in your own home, on your own time, and maybe even in your own local church if all of the members are comfortable with that.  But it's not necessary in the life of the church universal, it's a barrier to ecumenical dialogue, and a veil over the gospel.

Leithart quotes Calvin's An Inventory of Relics to illustrate that, while modern-day Catholics may no longer require bones, teeth, and copious amounts breast-milk of the Virgin Mary for their practice as they did in his day, the mindset is the same in the 21st century,

"'The first abuse,' Calvin wrote, 'and, as it were, the beginning of the evil, was that when Christ ought to have been sought in his Word, sacraments, and spiritual influences, the world, after its wont, clung to his garments, vests, and swaddling clothes; and thus overlooking the principal matter, followed only its accessory.' In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin offered a similar critique of the liturgical tradition of the medieval Church. Formally, Calvin's argument is that many medieval ceremonies were human inventions, unwarranted by Scripture. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce his argument to a trivial quarrel over the warrant for this vestment or that gesture. Calvin's principal concern was evangelical and pastoral; he wished to direct sinners to that 'place' where they could encounter the living God. Ceremonies, he argued, 'to be exercises of piety, ought to lead us straight to Christ.' Ceremonies and devotional practices that fail this test are best removed from the Church."

Tom Wright has a good way of illustrating the same concept.  Francis Beckwith, among other, had suggested that the so-called New Perspective on Paul was a big step in the direction of Roman Catholicism.  Wright responded by pointing to the shortcomings of the Council of Trent,

"Trent, and much subsequent RC theology, has had a habit of never spring-cleaning, so you just live in a house with more and more clutter building up, lots of right answers to wrong questions... which then get in the way when you want to get something actually done... The best RCs I knoow... are great conversation partners mainly because they have found ways of pushing the accumulated clutter quietly to one side and creating space for real life."

I might add that Ratzinger, of all people, does this "pushing aside" quite well.  To imagine that a non-believer or a non-Catholic would find the quickest route to the gospel of Jesus Christ via Rome is to ignore the present situation.  Wright, never without a good illustration or analogy, draws the picture even clearer for us,

"[For non-believers or non-Catholics] to say “Wow, I want that stuff, I’d better go to Rome” is like someone suddenly discovering (as I’m told Americans occasionally do — sorry, cheap shot) that there are other countries in the world and so getting the first big boat he finds in New York to take him there... when there were plenty of planes lined up and waiting at JFK. Rome is a big, splendid, dusty old ocean liner, with lots of grand cabins, and, at present, quite a fine captain [referring to Ratzinger] and some excellent officers — but also quite a few rooms in need of repair. Yes, it may take you places, but it’s slow and you might get seasick from time to time. And the navigators have been told that they must never acknowledge when they’ve been going in the wrong direction."

I suggest, along with Leithart and Wright, that we clean out the rooms a bit, upgrade the ship, and meet somewhere between JFK and the harbor.  Leithart ends on a hopeful note,

"Though Protestants believe that Roman Catholic teaching continues to veil the Christ of the gospel, we know that God has a habit of rending veils."

#285 David Foster Wallace on Worship

I'm a little behind on my yearly Bible reading plan.  I'm at the tail end of Joshua.  If YHWH, and by extension, Moses and Joshua had one overarching message for the Israelites, it was don't worship anybody but him.  Idolatry was the chief of all sins and it was the only way that God's covenant with the nation could be broken.  Other sins seemed to happen within the context of the covenant.  This one was the entrance into and out of the covenant.

"Joshua warned the people, “You will not keep worshiping the Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God who will not forgive your rebellion or your sins. If you abandon the Lord and worship foreign gods, he will turn against you; he will bring disaster on you and destroy you, though he once treated you well.”

-- Joshua 24:19-20

It's as if Joshua believes that if you worship YHWH, you stay within the covenant and your other sins are forgiven.  But if you worship either the gods from across the Euphrates, the gods of Egypt, or the gods of Canaan, your exit the covenant and your other sins are not forgiven.  So again, sinning, per se, doesn't exclude or include.  Idolatry does.

Compare this with a quote from David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, who, regrettably, commited suicide by hanging on September 12, 2008:

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.


And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth.

Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you.

On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.  They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it.

But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day,"

Now compare that quote with Joshua, who essentially says, "Serve the Lord with integrity.  If you don't want to worhsip YHWH, fine, then pick someone now."  After all, as DFW points out, you do it unconsciously whether you like it or not.

"Now obey the Lord and worship him with integrity and loyalty. Put aside the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates and in Egypt and worship the Lord.  If you have no desire to worship the Lord, choose today whom you will worship, whether it be the gods whom your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living. But I and my family will worship the Lord!”

-- Joshua 24:14-15

Why?  Why worship YHWH?  Why devote our attention, awareness, and discipline to others continually in petty unrewarding ways?  Because everything else will eat you alive.

#284 Chariots with Iron Rims

Judges 1:19 is a strange verse:

"The Lord was with the men of Judah. They conquered the hill country, but they could not conquer the people living in the coastal plain, because they had chariots with iron-rimmed wheels."

The opening chapter of Judges is just recapping the events of the last chapters of Joshua where widespread conquest is occurring within a short span of narrative.  This was a generation whose fathers had been the cause of Israel's wandering in the wilderness for the very reason that they had sinned against God by not trusting his ability to overcome any kind of military might.  But the author of Judges seems to indicate here that Judah's lack of total victory was due to the enemy's superior weapons technology one sentence after he says that the Lord was with them.  So which one is it?  Is it only helpful to have the Lord with you if the enemy doesn't have chariots with iron rims?

On my reading of the Exodus through Joshua, faith is the only reliable precursor of Israel's survival.  But you hit Judges and that seems to change.  Back in Joshua 17, Joshua had encouraged the tribes that the enemies superiour weaponry was no matter.  Why does the author of Judges see this as the reason for Judah's failure?

Joshua is a hopeful book for the protagonists (not for the Canaanites of course).  In the late chapters the promise made to Abraham is specifically mentioned as having been completely fulfilled.  But even then we know that the Israelites have failed in their mission to ethnically cleanse the land.  In Judges, we see the ramifications of this failure.  Both books may have the same author or at least the same editor.  So it seems odd that Judges 1:19 would be worded the way it is.

#283 March Modified Protestant Chronological Practical Bible Reading Plan

Mar 2-4: Ruth, I Sam 1-8
Mar 5-7: I Sam 9-20
Mar 8-10: I Sam 21-31
Mar 11-13: II Sam 1-8
Mar 14-16: II Sam 9-16
Mar 17-19: II Sam 17-24
Mar 20-22: I Kings 1-11:43
Mar 23-25: I Kings 12-16
Mar 26-28: I Kings 17-II Kings 13
Mar 29-31: Jonah 1-4

#282 McKnight Critiques McLaren

In the latest issue of Christianity Today, Scot McKnight reviews Brian McLaren's latest offering, A New Kind of Christianity.  McClaren believes that those parts of the Bible which show God to be other than the loving image of Jesus we have come to believe in do not represent the one true God.  Instead, as the Bible marches on, it's grasp of God matures, or evolves, from the horrific story of Noah's ark through the genocidal god of the conquest narratives to the loving God incarnate in Jesus Christ.  In other words, God doesn't change, mankind just got better at depicting him as the years went by.  This particular paragraph in the review stood out to me:

"In particular, the evolutionary theory of God contains another fatal flaw. It's not the fact that it was tried out in the 19th-century Religionsgeschichtliche Schule ('history of religion school') of Germany and has been shown inadequate (though it finds an occasional admirer in folks like Karen Armstrong). And it's not the fact that the category of 'evolution' is about as modernistic and imperialistic of a category I can think of.

No, the singular flaw is this: The flow of the Bible is not neat. It doesn't fit into an evolutionary scheme. There are as many mercy passages in the Old Testament as there are grace-and-love passages in the New. What's more, passages about God's grace stand side-by-side with passages about God's wrath (e.g., Hosea 1-3; Matt. 23-25). The evolutionary approach doesn't work because that's not how Scripture's narrative works. There is wrath in Revelation and there is covenant love in Genesis. And Jesus talks more about Abba and hell than does the rest of the Bible combined."

As I see it, McLaren's problem is that he lets the god of the Bible off the hook too easily.  The narrative is simply too messy for him, so he posits an evolution of humanity's concept of God.  He basically pulls a Thomas Jefferson on the Bible.  If there's tension, if it's uncomfortable, if it's irreconcilable, take it out.  Jefferson was doing this way before Religionsgeschichtliche Schule was cool, even before Baur or Harnack (pictured) were doing their thing.  As I've posted before regarding Ernst Kasemann here and here, I think redacting the narrative at this late stage is a category mistake.

His orthodox interlocutors are often guilty of the opposite error.  They cannot stand the mess and come up with clever ways to justify the ways of God to man.  Here is one example from Justin Taylor.  I won't try and summarize him.  Suffice it to say, it leaves me unsatisfied.

And I think that's the problem that both sides share.  They can't stand to be unsatisfied on the hard questions of the Bible.  They must either cut them out (McLaren, Jefferson, Kasemann), or fit them awkwardly into a system (Taylor and his ilk).  They can't handle a healthy sense of doubt, wonder, and narrative tension.  But as McKnight points out, the Bible is not neat.  Honestly, I don't have a fucking clue why God ordered his enemies killed, (men, women, children, and livestock) about a millenia before he said to love them.  I'm not ok with that.  I can't create a systematic theory or theology as they have and then let it go that easily.  I don't feel like I can do what they've done and maintain integrity.  Instead, I'll live with that tension.