Where is Pope Pius XI When You Need Him?

I am a long time admirer of the British Distributists, notably Hilaire Belloc and GK Chesterton (who is, incidentally, my hero). Recently, I decided to slog through the encyclicals that inspired the Distributist movement — Rerum novarum (published in 1891) and Quadragesimo anno (published in 1931). The latter reiterates and refines the former within a post-war, depression-era context.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, it is remarkable how strongly Pius XI’s remarks on free market individualism resonate today (though in other respects, the encyclical seems worlds apart):

109. The ultimate consequences of the individualist spirit in economic life are those which you yourselves, Venerable Brethren and Beloved Children, see and deplore: Free competition has destroyed itself; economic dictatorship has supplanted the free market; unbridled ambition for power has likewise succeeded greed for gain; all economic life has become tragically hard, inexorable, and cruel. To these are to be added the grave evils that have resulted from an intermingling and shameful confusion of the functions and duties of public authority with those of the economic sphere—such as, one of the worst, the virtual degradation of the majesty of the State, which although it ought to sit on high like a queen and supreme arbitress, free from all partiality and intent upon the one common good and justice, is become a slave, surrendered and delivered to the passions and greed of men. And as to international relations, two different streams have issued from the one fountain-head: On the one hand, economic nationalism or even economic imperialism; on the other, a no less deadly and accursed internationalism of finance or international imperialism whose country is where profit is.

Some things never change, I guess.

Bogus Numbers, but a Legitimate Point

Trolling the blogosphere this morning, I came across an Andrew Sullivan post featuring the following poster:

Were this statistic true, it would be a great boon to health care reform advocates such as myself. No sense in allocating $708 billion in the 2011 budget for defense spending, I would be inclined to argue, when lack of health insurance poses a threat to the population dramatically greater than that of terrorism.

Unfortunately, however, the 58-to-1 number is factually inaccurate. From the footnotes at the bottom of the image (in fine print of course), we learn that the statistic was obtained by pairing two sources: a Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance study linking 45,000 deaths annually to lack of health coverage, and a US Department of State statistic attributing 774.7 deaths annually to global terrorism. The first statistic, it turns out, is correct. Yet, averaging the Department of State numbers for “people worldwide killed as a result of terrorism” between 2005 and 2008, I come up with a much larger number: 18,325.25. Taking the first number and dividing it by the second, I then come up with 2.45 health care related deaths in the US per every person killed as a result of worldwide terrorism. Which is considerably fewer than the 58 deaths cited in the poster.

The revised number is nevertheless significant, given that it compares US apples to worldwide oranges and still manages to discover more apples than oranges. Moreover, if we compare apples to apples, there are 45,000 annual deaths in the US due to lack of health care, and not a single fatality due to a terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11. (The State Department tells us that 75% of the 235 high-casuality terrorist attacks in 2008 occurred in the Near East and South Asia.) Surely, Dick Cheney would argue that the US has George Bush to thank for this absence of post-9/11 terrorist attacks. Yet the Iraq War seems to have inspired, rather than quelled, Islamic extremism — that, at least, is what a declassified government intelligence report claimed in 2006.

There is, in short, still very good reason to invest more US dollars on health care and fewer dollars on defense spending. The “Invade a Hospital” poster is a bizarre breed of propaganda: using bogus numbers, it makes a legitimate point.

Fixing Congress

Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig makes the case that Congress will not achieve meaningful reform — whether conservative or liberal — until we rid it of moneyed interests:

No one, Republican or Democratic, who doesn’t currently depend upon this system should accept it. No president, Republican or Democratic, who doesn’t change this system could possibly hope for any substantive reform. For small-government Republicans, the existing system will always block progress. There will be no end to extensive and complicated taxation and regulation until this system changes (for the struggle over endless and complicated taxation and regulation is just a revenue opportunity for the Fundraising Congress). For reform-focused Democrats, the existing system will always block progress. There will be no change in fundamental aspects of the existing economy, however inefficient, from healthcare to energy to food production, until this political economy is changed (for the reward from the status quo to stop reform is always irresistible to the Fundraising Congress). In a single line: there will be no change until we change Congress.

If Lessig is correct, we “reform-focused” Democrats may have something in common with “small-government” Republicans after all: a desire to limit the influence of special interests. I am beginning to wonder if the current right-left political fault line might eventually give way to a populist earthquake.

I do wonder, however, how serious the Republican base is about fixing Congress. Right-wing denunciations of the bank and auto bailouts are familiar enough — yet few on the right have acknowledged that no-strings-attached bailouts are the logical outcome of allowing corporations to finance elections (since Congress is necessarily beholden to its largest donors).

Remember the base’s disapproval of McCain? During the Republican primaries, Dennis Prager went so far as to identify campaign finance reform as the decisive factor in his inability to vote for the senator:

I could support politicians with whom I differ on taxation (I support a consumption tax), on education (I support vouchers and think the Department of Education should be disbanded), on a flag-burning amendment (I’m against), on an amendment defining marriage as a man-woman institution (I’m for), and on many more divisive issues.

But there are a few positions that are either so immoral or so destructive or so foolish that a politician who holds them cannot be considered a viable candidate. Campaign finance reform, such as the McCain-Feingold bill, falls into the latter two categories.

Why, exactly, does Prager have such strong feelings about campaign finance reform? Because it undermines “freedom” of course. Prager continues:

Who is the government to tell an American whom he can give his money to? So long as the giving is completely transparent — i.e., the public knows exactly who has given any candidate money and exactly how much — people should be allowed to spend as much on another person as on themselves.

Lessig may be correct that corporate influence undermines even the Republican agenda. It seems clear, however, that the GOP base (of which Prager’s remarks are typical) doesn’t get this. Moreover, so long as FreedomWorks funds and FoxNews televises the Tea Party protests, even the GOP’s right-wing fringe will collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

The New Localists

Forget about the pseudo-radicals in literary studies: these days, the most ardent localists are conservatives. Here’s Douthat following up on his latest column:

The data on [sex ed] are necessarily deeply particular, and partisans on both sides will probably always be able to find studies that “prove” the superiority of their preferred approach . . . Which suggests, to my mind, the virtues of both widespread experimentation and local control, rather than an inevitably polarizing quest for a one-size-fits-all solution.

See also Patrick J. Deneen on the Supreme Court’s recent decision to let corporations fund political campaigns directly (Deenan goes on to express agreement with Douthat):

. . . more often than not, our principled arguments actually shroud particular and partisan interests. The language of rights, and the judicialization of politics, totalize our partial claims. It’s a most pernicious of outcomes, and one we live with daily (does anyone really think that “conservatives” are happy with the Court’s corporate finance decision on First Amendment grounds? Might it not have something to do with the assumption that such funding stands to more greatly benefit candidates in the corporation-friendly Republican party?).

The resemblence between Douthat, Deenan, and postmodernist critical theory is striking. (As is the similarity between the title of Deenan’s post, “The Problem with Principled Argument,” and the title of one of Stanley Fish’s books, “The Trouble with Principle.”) Oddly, the localist argument that truth is necessarily partisan, culturally constructed, and fleeting is itself accessible to all — regardless of ideology. Thus, while Foucault and his disciple Stephen Greenblatt used it to undercut traditional morality, Douthat uses it to clear the way for abstinence-only sex education.

I’m tempted to think that localism has some merit, given that it is generally invoked by partisans for partisan purposes (which is what the theory would predict). On the other hand, its usefulness to such divergent political aims suggests a certain universality.

For further discussion of the ground shared between critical theory and the Douthat-Deenan strand of conservatism, see my review of Christopher Caldwell’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe.

The Black Wedge

Here is a pie chart of the Obama administration’s proposed 2011 budget (lifted from a Krugman post):

Obama says he’s going to limit the size of the “Non-Security Discretionary” wedge on the left (via a three-year spending freeze). I’ve got my eye on the black one.

Conservatism’s Last Best Hope

Ross Douthat is possibly the last of a dying breed: the conservative intellectual. There are, of course, intellectuals at the margins of conservatism. These include your libertarian Nick Gillespies, and your religiously conservative, back-to-the-land Rod Drehers. (I am somewhat enamored with the latter breed.) But among mainstream neocons, even the intellectually gifted (e.g. Michael Medved) must sacrifice their insights at the altar of the Republican party’s corrupt leadership.

Having just read a Mother Jones piece on Douthat, I admire him, a voice crying out in the wilderness of militarism and capitalistic excess, all the more. True, he continues to oppose gay marriage — a position that no one has, to my knowledge, managed to coherently defend. But, unlike conservatives content to merely affirm the “I believe marriage is between a man and a woman” tautology, Douthat exercises restraint amidst doubt:

One way to think about this is, I am not comfortable making arguments against gay marriage to my gay friends,” he says. “And if you’re not comfortable making arguments against gay marriage to your gay friends, you shouldn’t be comfortable making them to anybody, probably, so I don’t tend to make them.”

As a Catholic, I understand Douthat’s insistence on fidelity to a Church that possesses, in so many other respects, such penetrating and enduring wisdom. But he seems to sense what I also sense: that the Church’s position on contraception and gay marriage is simply untenable.

Douthat also gets that it’s not pro-life to ban abortion without addressing its underlying conditions. Douthat tells Mother Jones that he would favor a blanket ban on abortion, but adds that such a ban would require “radical experimentation with the welfare state” and likely “a lot of new welfare agencies of one kind or another,” plus orphanages and an expanded “network of crisis pregnancy centers.” Ditto that.

Douthat may be conservatism’s last best hope. If it can keep him.

The Content of His Character

Obama, it turns out, is not the progressive many of his supporters — that includes me — had hoped for. He did not put up much of a fight when the Senate dropped the public option from its reform bill. He is sending 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. Most recently, in what Paul Krugman describes as a “complete concession to Reaganism,” Obama has proposed a discretionary spending freeze for the next three years. None of this is change I can believe in.

When Obama took office, many progressives were hoping for another FDR; what we’re getting, it seems, is another Clinton — a centrist, in other words. (Certainly, McCain’s portrayal of Obama as a radical of the Bill Ayers-Jeremiah Wright ilk has proven wildly inaccurate.)

The issues are, of course, more important than the man. Yet, a recent Q and A between Obama and Republican lawmakers (see the full video here) reminded me of why I supported him in 2008 and why I continue to support the president. Specifically, the Q and A reminded me, once again, of Obama’s willingness to carefully consider proposals from the opposing side; his calm, respectful demeanor; his insistence that claims that “just aren’t true” be thrown out of debate; and, above all, his desire to overcome partisan wrangling and actually solve real problems. (I was also reminded of how utterly unfounded GOP rhetoric has become, but that’s another post.)

Obama may be another Clinton, but — if we are to judge him by the content of his character and not just by the color of his ideology — it looks like he is going to be a much, much better Clinton.

Anti-Theism and Fundamentalism in Symbiosis

Fundamentalism begets anti-theism begets more fundamentalism. Ross Douthat is exactly right:

So is it reasonable to believe that [the Gospels] “speak more clearly” than, say, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah to the question of whether Christians should interpret the events in Haiti as God’s punishment for some (spurious) 18th-century sin? I think it is. So do many theologians, ancient as well as modern, Protestant as well as Catholic, And the fact that Richard Dawkins and Pat Robertson both disagree tells us something, important, I think, about the symbiosis between the new atheism and fundamentalism — how deeply the new atheists are invested in the idea that a mad literalism is the truest form of any faith, and how completely they depend on outbursts from fools and fanatics to confirm their view that religion must, of necessity, be cruel, literal-minded, and above all, stupid.

It sounds, to me, like a FoxNews or CNN “debate” between Robertson and Dawkins might be in the works here. Fundamentalist Christianity and the new atheism are, after all, the only conceivable alternatives — right?

Barbara Herrnstein Smith on Science and Religion

Alas! I have spent the past hour reading and responding to Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s post on science and religion only to discover that she is not taking comments. (Last week, Stanley Fish blogged about Smith’s recent book, Natural Reflections: Human Cognition at the Nexus of Science and Religion. Fish then invited Smith to respond to his readers’ comments.)

So here’s the gist. Fish’s remarks about the relationship between science and religion led many readers to conclude that he and Smith were endorsing Stephan Jay Gould’s idea of “nonoverlapping magisteria.” But they weren’t. You see, in the world of literary studies to which Fish and Smith belong, terms like “science” and “religion” could not possibly refer to a “body of authoritative teachings” that exist independently of the specific contexts in which each takes shape.

The observation that cultural forms vary is, of course, not at all unique to postmodernism. Yet, for postmodernists, the variance is all. There can be no universality; no transcendent remainder.

Here’s Smith:

I think that the idea of science and religion as counterpoised monoliths deepens prevailing misunderstandings of both. As I emphasize throughout the book, the kinds of things that can be assembled under the term “religion” are exceptionally diverse. They range from personal experiences and popular beliefs to formal doctrines, priestly institutions, ritual practices and devotional icons — Neanderthal burial rites to Vatican encyclicals. The same can be said of “science,” a term that embraces a wide range of quite different kinds of things — general pursuits and specialized practices, findings and theories, instruments and techniques, ideals and institutions (not to mention a share of devotional icons and ritual practices).

Assuredly, language by its very nature does violence to particularity. As Smith observes, the terms “religion” and “science” assemble together things that are “exceptionally diverse.” The same holds true, however, for each of the particularities Smith says she prefers to the science and religion monoliths. Lumping Rerum novarum and Humanae vitae together as “Vatican encyclicals,” for example, requires that we gloss over the unique features of each. Humanae vitae is itself heterogeneous.

Smith’s analysis points toward an infinite regression in which every “whole” is dissolved into various parts that themselves form new wholes. (Postmodernists typically avoid regress by taking “culture” to be the one indissoluble whole.) Does dividing and atomizing in this way give us a better picture of science or religion than do other modes of analysis? I’m not sure that it does.

From the postmodernist vantage point, we cannot even define “better.”

Little Did I Know

Yesterday, I insisted that America should keep the democracy and health care conversations separate. In the post, I urged Democrats to pass the health care reform bill because it is the right thing to do, concluding “let’s save the democracy conversation for another day — as in, tomorrow.” Little did I know that president Obama, in his weekly address, would in fact bring democracy to the nation’s attention the very next day!

Earlier this week, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court decided to allow corporations and unions to use their own money to create campaign ads supporting or opposing candidates for president and congress. (The decision can only mean one thing: corporate rule. We are already teetering on the precipice; this would put us over the edge.) Although Obama has not shown strong leadership on health care or the banks, his words this morning were a refreshing sign that he does get it ; that he does recognize the link between economic equality and democracy.

Here is a synopsis of Obama’s speech, courtesy of the Huffington Post (where video of the entire speech is also available):

“This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy,” the president said in his weekly radio and Internet message. “It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way — or to punish those who don’t.”

Obama said that means public servants who stand up to Wall Street banks, oil companies, health insurers and other powerful interests could find themselves under attack when election time rolls around.

“I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest,” he said. “The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections.”

There are some fine populist rhetorical flourishes here. Let’s hope, however, that this is more than rhetoric; that Obama is prepared to stand up to Wall Street and other moneyed interests — before it’s too late.

For more on the decision, see this highly informative and insightful post by John Medaille.