I cannot recall, from my days as a conservative evangelical, anyone holding to the belief that women who are raped are unlikely to get pregnant. But it wouldn't surprise me if it were widely held, and undiscussed even amongst those who the people holding the belief live and work with. People aren't dumb, in two ways:

1. People recognize they need to have some sort of empirical justification for the (normative) views they hold. Mostly due to a lack of imagination, these explanations have to be scientific, or 'scientific.' (I.e. there are other ways to assert empirical truth other than concocting a biological explanation, but these are out of vogue for a number of reasons.) Scratch any strange-seeming political or social belief for long enough, and there's an explanation to be found.

2. People recognize these explanations are crazy, or will seem crazy, and so greatly restrict the sphere in which they're discussed. It's entirely possible to have a discussion of what's wrong with abortion amongst a evangelical crowd without having recourse to biology; it's possible to discuss it as part of a policy debate without ever referencing these beliefs.

This approach isn't limited to evangelicals or abortion. The Catholic traditionalists I used to know would eventually admit that one of the reasons birth control was (morally) wrong is because it is a dangerous drug that can kill women, but that belief is unlikely to come up unless really pressed on the matter. Nor is this restricted to the right, or religious people: instructors (who have generally not taken economics of any kind) tend to decry the empirical ignorance of their students (who generally have) if that ignorance leads them to want to put Marx aside as irrelevant: Marx asserts a truth that's truer than standard economic explanations of what's wrong with his theory. (Granted, I also think this, but one has to let Marx take his lumps on those things about which he's wrong.)

The usual response to these beliefs cropping up is to mock them. However, as J.S. Mill would tell you, that's the wrong thing to do. People who are mocked are not going to change their minds; they will learn to hide their beliefs better. Changing beliefs requires patient explanation without condescension. Of course, people have difficulty managing this, and it takes a lot of time, which is why it rarely happens. But it's the only way it can happen.

I was reading (re-reading) Irving Howe yesterday and came across his essay on Richard Wright and James Baldwin, which is a great example of a perceptive critic saying incredibly stupid things, especially about Baldwin.

The one that stuck out to me had to do with religion. I used to joke that political theorists on the whole had three categories of (Christian) religious belief, which appeared to be exhaustive and mutually exclusive: Catholic, Calvinist, and atheist. Howe describes Go Tell It On the Mountain as a book about the experience of black Calvinism, which... not even close. It's about black Pentecostalism (I mean, goodness, the church is "The Temple of the Fire Baptized Church," which is not any kind of Calvinist), which was emerging as a religious option at the time Baldwin's book was set, and is about as far from Calvinism as one can get. But if your theological categories are limited, and you already have an axe to grind about 'Calvinism," well...

On vocation, moral responsibility, and a few other things:

This:

I mean, think about that. Taxpayer-paid employees of the Justice Department had direct and exclusive knowledge that there may be hundreds of innocent people in prison, they knew that flawed forensics in these cases needed to be reviewed, and their justification for not doing more as these people continued to rot in prison was, Hey, we did the bare minimum required of us by law...

But even beyond the problematic ethical requirements, I'm having a hard time fathoming how no one on this task force felt morally compelled to go beyond those requirements -- to, you know, actually reach out to defense attorneys, or attempt to actually reach the convicts or their families. How in the world can you possess this sort of information, then still sleep at night, year after year, knowing that (a) the information obviously isn't reaching the people who have an incentive to actually put it to use, (b) you're one of the few people who could make that happen, and (c) because the information was only available to a select group of people, if you or one of your colleagues doesn't act, no one else will?

 Made me think of this:

Like Spark, Waugh attacks the Protestant and, by extension, secular - conception of vocation. Spark focuses more on vocation's over-reach - very few of us are equipped to single-mindedly devote ourselves to our work, and almost no secular work can merit such devotion in the first place, so in the end vocation is shown to be only sustainable in its Catholic sense of a calling to religious orders. Waugh, by contrast, points out its insufficiency - because it transfers the devotion that was to be reserved for God into worldly devotions - to war, or scholarship, or art - secular vocation is too thin for those who have a real vocation, which is to say, a vocation to the priesthood.

 ...and we can lump in the Joe Paterno/Penn State case as well to develop something like a theory. The idea is this: what Protestants (and the secular) correctly derive from the New Testament precept of the moral equality of all people is the equal moral responsibility of all people. Vocation, for Calvin and others, is a category that spreads itself wide because every person is obligated to act in a responsible manner at every moment, and the failure to do so is a moral failure; it may be common or human, but no less a failure for that. What the Protestant concept of vocation gets us is a specific account of the wrong being done in all these cases, where people believe fulfilling their legal or professional obligations renders any additional action supererogatory and therefore not required. In more theological terms: if everything is to be redeemed, then everything is properly a subject of vocation to the person who finds himself there. To do the minimum--or to expect someone else to do it--is a gross violation of duty. The difficulty with this idea is not that it's theologically incorrect but that--as almost everyone notes--it requires a lot from each person, and people don't like to have that kind of obligation (see also the Grand Inquisitor). But these people who failed and made the world worse because of their failure had it, and we have it, too.

At the end of this term, which included Plato and Aristotle, I had my students read John Calvin. This was for a few reasons, one of which is that the division of terms at my present university usually means that the first ends with Machiavelli and the second begins with Hobbes, between which were a few events of significance in European and world history that would otherwise be neglected: the Reformation, the Peace of Augsburg, the Thirty Years War, etc. I also am of the opinion that Calvin is the interpretive key for the next term: Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau are all working in a world defined by, and reacting to, the concept of government espoused by Calvin.

Calvin does have a bad reputation, though, so I wasn't certain how the class would respond to it. Someone brought up the following passage, in particular:

This feeling of reverence, and even of piety, we owe to the utmost to all our rulers, be their characters what they may. This I repeat the oftener, that we may learn not to consider the individuals themselves, but hold it to be enough that by the will of the Lord they sustain a character on which he has impressed and engraven inviolable majesty. But rulers, you will say, owe mutual duties to those under them. This I have already confessed. But if from this you conclude that obedience is to be returned to none but just governors, you reason absurdly. Husbands are bound by mutual duties to their wives, and parents to their children. Should husbands and parents neglect their duty; should the latter be harsh and severe to the children whom they are enjoined not to provoke to anger, and by their severity harass them beyond measure; should the former treat with the greatest contumely the wives whom they are enjoined to love and to spare as the weaker vessels; would children be less bound in duty to their parents, and wives to their husbands? They are made subject to the froward and undutiful. Nay, since the duty of all is not to look behind them, that is, not to inquire into the duties of one another, but to submit each to his own duty, this ought especially to be exemplified in the case of those who are placed under the power of others.

To my surprise, the students found this to be reasonable: assuming away the worst possibilities of violence, it is generally true that duties don't (and cannot) depend on others first exercising their duties toward you. I think that's correct, but I was (erroneously, it seems) under the impression that it takes a greater amount of life experience to get to that point.

As I've thought about this passage more, though, there's something else that jumps out at me: it requires imaginative identification by Calvin and his reader with the role and station of women, and requires normalizing the complaints of the wife in this circumstance. It displays, in its way, a significantly more progressive attitude toward women than the other major figures of the term (who are, it must be said, a sorry lot, on the woman question). Normalizing the complaint of the wife: the role of the unhappy citizen is equated to the role of the unhappy wife. Calvin doesn't excuse or accept the bad behavior of the ruler; he considers the ruler to have a duty to act well, and thus the subject to have a right to expect that behavior; the citizen has been wronged in this process and the ruler stands under the judgment of God for having done so. It's merely that this wrong does not release the subject from their own obligations, so far as they go. Which means, for the analogy to work, that Calvin and his reader must think all the same things of the wife in this situation: if her husband fails to meet his husbandly duties she has been identifiably wronged, and he stands under the judgment of God for his failure. Moreover, the primarily male readership must admit the force of the wifely complaint in order for their own to have any merit. It's not feminism by any stretch, but it is a recognition that women are subjects in the social life of the polity and not merely objects to be acted upon (because men as citizens are subjects and not simply objects). Considering the last thing my students read before this was Machiavelli's suggestion that fortune is a promiscuous woman who must be beaten to give you what you want, Calvin is surprisingly enlightened.

As a passing but fitting example of the sort of reflexive anti-Calvinist bias that shows up amongst people who (should) know better, there's this:

There was the idea that a particular state, a particular geographically-bounded and law-governed entity, should permit full citizenship to only some religious convictions. This was the solution adopted eventually by the English and the Swiss. John Calvin's Geneva forms something like an ideal example of this solution, yielding the convenient slogan cuius regio eius religio - which is to say, your place determines your religion. If you live in Geneva, you're a Calvinist; if you live in London, you're an Anglican.

cuius regio eius religio was language from the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, and one of the purposes of the language was to de-legitimate non-Catholic non-Lutheran churches, of which Calvin's Geneva is a perfect example: because it was not attached to a noble--the 'eius' whose 'religio' was in question, and which determined the religion of his people--its status as an independent political and religious unit was always under threat. Also, Augsburg gave no freedom to individual churches or the beliefs or conscience of individuals, so it couldn't possibly be the origin of 'religion' Griffiths claims to be discussing: it's not permitting "full citizenship" to "only some religious convictions": it allows one religious conviction, enforced on you whether you want it or not, and that religious conviction implies nothing at all about "citizenship."

Sentences I'd never thought I'd write: Pussy Riot are right. There is no right not to be offended, nor should there be. Neither is offending someone--even really, really offending them--the sort of thing that should be punishable by the state. Moreover, implicating the state in defending the legitimacy of speech restrictions against non-state groups is exactly the sort of thing is inherently problematic. Defenders of Putin and the Orthodox Church seem unable to imagine contexts in which this exact combination of elements would be unacceptable, from restrictions of exactly the same kind involving other religions (the treatment of Christians in Egypt, for example) to lesser levels of social prohibition that limits speech (campus speech codes, 'political correctness'). See also Alex Massie:

Sewell suggests the trio are not serious dissidents. Their lack of seriousness, naturally, means that while what has happened to them is regrettable (even unjust!) it is hardly either surprising or something anyone else should find too bothersome. Or something like that, anyway. ...

Perhaps you think she protests too much. Perhaps you think her punk protest misguided. I’m not sure, however, that you can really doubt her seriousness. Note too the desire to live without politics and with it the implied question: how can you live without politics in a state that outlaws politics? I’d suggest that’s a serious question and a moral one of the kind you won’t find from many people in other, happier countries.

Had an interesting discussion today with an old grad school friend about Michael Walzer's new book, In God's Shadow, where Walzer interprets and discusses the political implications of the Hebrew Bible. Surprisingly, given his work on social criticism, on the politics of Exodus, and his general political leanings, he mostly rejects the idea that there is any discernible political vision embodied in the text. We pondered the strangeness of this view, especially coming from one committed to the project of Israel, and eventually segued into the strange idea that the New Testament, of all things, is the decisively political portion of the Christian Bible. The evidence is straightforward:

1. Paul and Peter both feel it necessary to enjoin Christians to follow the political authorities (Romans 13 was once memorably summarized to me as "pay your taxes"), which implies that it was unclear whether Christians had to follow any political authority at all. Obviously, Christianity's roots in Second Temple Jewish messianism are relevant here: Paul et al are mostly reminding Christians that they are not to be the Essenes or other radical/revolutionary Jewish sects.

2. On the other hand, the central insistence of the New Testament is that "Jesus is Lord," which has been helpfully glossed by Oliver O'Donovan, N.T. Wright and others as "...and therefore, Caesar is not." Christianity is incompatible with empire, and anti-imperial in its most basic essence.

3. Paul saves himself from execution in the book of Acts by announcing himself as a Roman citizen. The idea that citizenship could possibly matter is as foreign to the Hebrew Bible as the idea that following the political authorities is something that a person might choose to not do.

It was #3 in particular that led us to wonder whether the heightened political nature of the New Testament had to do with the very different circumstances of politics under Roman as opposed to Near Eastern empires. Hebrew Bible politics are limited in part because there are very few potential outcomes for the average person: you fight or you don't; if you fight, you win or you lose; if you lose, you're enslaved or killed. Roman politics, for however autocratic it was, opened up ever-so-slight a space for individual-level political action.

(We also discussed the possibility that the date of canonization in the Hebrew Bible had something to do with this: post-biblical works like the Wisdom of Ben Sira mention, with admiration, the Senate, but Biblical politics have already been decisively settled by the failure of the monarchy and the experience of exile. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, which include the post-Biblical books and those denoted by Protestants as 'Apocrypha' have a smaller margin to close in this regard.)

So, the claim here about freedom of religion and international law/human rights is incorrect, and points out something that has troubled me about the recent concern over freedom of religion:

..Article 18 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) provides:

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

That’s unequivocal. Freedom of religion means the right to live according to one’s own faith, that is, to “manifest” our religion or belief in practice, both “in public or private,” without interference from the state.

Article 18 definitely says that, and it is certainly absolute. It is also not legally binding, part of the reason it is able to be absolute. The very critically different language in the legally-binding International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights:

1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching. 
2. No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.
3. Freedom to manifest one's religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.
4. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.

Paragraph 3 clearly envisions that freedom of religion does not serve as a end-all trump against claims by the state. It is not surprising that it does so, since some of the rights in the ICCPR are qualified in this way, and all the rights in the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights are qualified under Article 2(1). The question is then whether a particular law enacts a policy that is "necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others." It does no good, in this case, to assert 'freedom of religion' as a defense against a law that seeks to abridge religious freedom, because the question is not whether there can be an abridgement (there can) but whether the abridgement can be justified on the grounds given.

(Via Alan Jacobs, who I imagine might disagree with my point.)

Somewhere I have a list of claims a speaker can make that will cause me to instantly suspect the veracity of their argument. Prominent on this list is any thesis that covers over a hundred years: a carefully-written book might be able to connect all the relevant threads: a hour-long talk will not. Similarly, any claim that involves a sufficiently large-scale abstract noun: for example, 'religion.'

Does religion cause violence? Only if you have no idea what qualifies as religion, as apparently many academics who study the question do not. As someone who a. knows a decent amount about the development of theology, Christian and otherwise, in Europe and b. studies the late-medieval and early modern period, when people were constantly fighting about 'religion,' this seems obvious to me. All possible cases are sufficiently complex that I'm not sure I could say what is 'really' driving decision-making: does Ferdinand II, during the Thirty Years War, honestly believe in the correctness of his Jesuit Catholic view and consider converting Protestants and other strands of Catholic to his point of view to be a good thing for their souls? Probably. Is he also a political leader who is attempting to control most of Europe and weaken his adversaries, Protestant or Catholic? Certainly. Which is 'actually' determining his policies? Both, or some combination thereof, which I am not certain one could specify apart from inspection of his soul. So any large-ish claims will be close to unprovable.

Adventures in Cultural Consumption:

Bring Up the Bodies, Hilary Mantel

At the church I attended last year in central New Jersey, I had the good fortune to have an exceptionally talented pastor who did a good job of leavening a serious dose of theology in with her usual more cheery disposition. One sermon I remember in particular concerned the Jacob and Esau story wherein Jacob tricks Esau and God seems to be cool with that. Being a sensible sort, she wondered along with most of us why God would favor Jacob even though he was prepared to lie and cheat to get what he wanted. Well, she asked, who exactly was the favor supposed to go to? Esau agreed to sell his birthright, after all, and expected someone else to go and get it back for him after he'd lost it. Rebekah was not a model mother, plotting with Jacob. And Isaac showed just how little he cared about who would get the birthright by the casual way in which he granted it. So, surprise: nobody actually deserves the birthright. They're all kind of bad people.

And I suspect this is why Hilary Mantel has been ruffling so many feathers with her series of books on Thomas Cromwell: everyone in them is kind of a bad person. Katharine of Aragon is stubborn and insensitive, Anne Boleyn conniving; Henry VIII mercurial; Cardinal Wolsey unwilling to accept the facts of the case; Thomas More cruel and contemptuous of everyone. In Bring Up the Bodies, the old English families (secretly or not so secretly Catholic) too caught up in their own sense of offended honor; the men who are killed for having an affair with Anne too stupid to realize how dangerous their game has been, etc etc. It's true that Cromwell gets a more sympathetic portrait than some of these other figures, but it's a portrait that should be familiar: he's Don Draper meets Tony Soprano. He's a bad person with many fascinating and charming qualities. But still a bad person.

This is what rankles: history and realism get set against hagiography, and people are reluctant to admit that those they put a lot of store in are not such great people. I've long been of the belief that A Man for All Seasons is a kind of historical malfeasance, making a virtue out of More's stubbornness, reading it as conscience, when it is in fact mostly a product of his own arrogant belief no one could outsmart him. I think the case is rather more like Bring Up the Bodies puts it: there is hardly a man who more deservedly sent himself to his own death and, I might add, few for whom the irony is richer (though Thomas Cromwell is up there himself). But the man's a saint, and a great champion of 'conscience,' and no one will ever lose betting on the willingness of people to believe whatever happens to be convenient for them.

Joe Carter is a nice guy, and a long-time internet-friend, so I will address his question on what might make for a Christian libertarian, where "Christian" is seriously meant and "libertarian" isn't just another way of saying "conservative."

To begin: a libertarian or classical liberal is going to be concerned with what are called "threats to liberty"--anything that might impinge on someone's ability to do what they want. Since Christians do have a moral code which places some limitations on the ability to do whatever one wants, there might seem to be an obvious contradiction here. But there need not be.

Threats to liberty come from one of two sources: government ("coercion") and non-governmental social organizations ("domination"). Protestants with a sense of history should be very much on board the non-domination project, whether that's the domination of the Catholic Church against rival forms of Christianity, or something that first pricked the consciences of evangelical Protestants like the slave trade. Even if one is not particularly concerned about either of those in the present day, it doesn't require much imagination to see how similar issues might pose a problem. As for coercion, I presume anyone who objects to limitations on religious liberty can see how that will be an issue.

At this point I think the minimum bar for libertarianism has been cleared. One may skew out of libertarianism and into liberalism or conservatism by deciding that in certain instances domination or coercion may be justified if the goods in question are important enough; without leaving the camp of classical liberalism broadly considered one might lean left or right (it's a big tent).

What of that moral code? I think the answer here has to be something like: the process of change in the world, if it's going to happen at all, is the long-term mission of the church through the action of individuals, whose purpose is to work towards the eventual changing of the world, but freely, and primarily on the individual level. The state is such a blunt force that its use has to be reserved only for cases that won't ever change otherwise.

This is not a camp I'm entirely within, myself. But I know people who are in it and are seriously committed to both libertarianism and Christianity, and I do hope they succeed.

I am going to give some nonsense a better hearing than it deserves, because I think doing so will put some worthwhile points on the table. The nonsense: is liberalism as a secret (or not so secret) Protestant plot to undermine Catholicism?

The response:
1. The original post, and Dreher as well, conflate liberalism's origins and its present status as a political theory. The two are very different. Early modern liberalism is a response to a complex mix of historical and political (and, true, religious) facts. Whether or not it's an appropriate response to those facts is one question. But the attempt to draw a genealogy is a complicated one, not least because the average present-day liberal does not share the religious assumptions of a Grotius, Hobbes or Locke. Let's say at the very least that Locke's reasons might not be anyone else's.

2. Present-day liberalism is marked by a turn to political liberalism, which may be most easily thought of as an attempt to enact policy and find compromise amongst societies that are composed of many different groups, each of which might adamantly oppose the goods and policies desired by other groups. This difference is taken to be a fixed feature of political life, and with good reason. Now, this creates two problems: it creates a difference of opinion over what the right policy outcomes are supposed to be, and it creates a problem of language, because each of those groups tends to describe their ideal policy goals via different language, concepts, etc. On the view of John Rawls, among others, the goal is to have this conversation about policy in such a way as to minimize these differences of language. Hence the creation of what he calls "public reason," or a language that is intended to be accessible to and used by all, that captures the essential features of different moral and political visions without being reducible to any of them.

3. Public reason is supposed to create a problem for people of faith, because it encourages them to use a language other than their own to articulate support for their principles--a neutral language of rights and duties, rather than a fuller language of God's commands and the structure of the world. At best, this is a burdensome doubling--figure out your own reasons for advocating a policy, then 'translate'. At worst, it's disingenuous, or looks that way--use language you don't believe in to attempt to convince others to support you.

4. The original objection, I take it, is that this practice is especially burdensome for Roman Catholicism. Yet I must confess: I can't think of a Christian denomination for whom this should be less burdensome. The RC Christian who is fully appreciative of the arguments of Thomas Aquinas knows that he already possesses a language that is fully appropriate in political liberal circles: the language of natural law. Natural law doubles, with very few exceptions, the teaching of the Magisterium, and does so in language that makes no particular reference to the Catholic conception of truth. Robbie George can give a talk--I've seen him do it--when he talks about abortion as a policy issue and makes no reference to his religious beliefs, just the facts of conception and the reasonable moral conclusions that can be drawn from those facts. The same also applies, in spades, for 20th century figures like John Courtney Murray or Jacques Maritain, who used the language of natural law to argue that Catholicism and liberalism were compatible (at a time when the RC Church itself denied the possibility).

5. So the problem, I think, is not with the issue of language, for which I, as a Reformed Christian who doubts the truth or efficacy of natural law-talk, am in a far worse position than the average Roman Catholic. The problem, I suspect, is with the reality of compromise. Almost no one ever gets entirely what they want, and policy outcomes are usually driven by majority consensus over a long period of time. Slavery is as obvious as moral wrongs get, and it still took nearly a hundred years and a war in order to get rid of it; and even then its effects lingered for another hundred-plus years. I suspect the realistic time frame for any serious and extended moral change (that involves changing individual-level beliefs and behaviors) has a similar span.

6. The problem is not, in this respect, unlike the questions I regularly get from students about the merits of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, or the (non-legal, non-binding) Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Why make an agreement that is so obviously inadequate, so very likely to fail? Because it's the best deal available at the time: better to make that now and use it as a stepping stone to something else later than wait for the day the perfect deal arises, because that day will never come.

This induced a chortle:

At the heart of ethical theory are issues that seem inescapable, and that no other field of inquiry promises to answer. How ought we to act? What kinds of things are worth wanting? What type of person should you aspire to be? Many religious people suppose that there is an authoritative source of answers to these questions. They are not moved by Plato’s cogent proof that the will of a being, however powerful, could not ground any moral duty. Nor are they persuaded by Kant’s further development of the same theme: moral reliance on the commands of another presupposes that the commander is not only powerful but also good; hence those who obey must already have standards of goodness and be able to apply them to the commander. After the twentieth century, and the many who attempted to absolve themselves on the grounds that they were only following the Leader’s orders, this Kantian point would seem especially forceful. Still, even those who continue to rely on religious authority should at the very least concede that their preferred manual of ethical instruction is profoundly incomplete. They, too, need ways of guiding their conduct when their decisions lie beyond the scope of the commandments. They might benefit, as generations of religious scholars and teachers before them have done, from the insights of philosophy.

In the first place, it's not "Plato's cogent proof." It's the proof of a character named Socrates, whose purposes within the larger framework of the Platonic dialogues is left open to question. It is probably also worth noting that the 'cogent proof' was unpersuasive to the person it was directed at (I presume the Euthyphro is being referenced), and perhaps philosophy could learn something from this.

In the second place, this claim is left open to a particularly obvious rejoinder. Speculate that it is in fact the case that one is a religious believer of the kind who believes that the Bible (or other appropriate religious text) serves as a compendium of the rules for proper living--a point which, it must be noted, is far out of fashion in religious studies and popular religion.* But assume it anyway. On the one hand one has a text that is written by God, or approved by God, which enumerates at least some of the principles of how to live an ethical life. With what material does one fill in the gaps? It would seem preferable to attempt to discern the factors that drive those principles and apply them to uncertain cases. What it would not make sense to do is turn to authorities considerably less qualified to speak on ethics than the Divine is, who inter alia cannot agree on very basic facts like, e.g., how to best construct a system measuring utility, or which principles ought to function as moral absolutes. This is rather like saying that the best way to ensure my scholarly work is cogent and persuasive is to run it by a child of 10 or 11, who may after all be possessed of insights I am missing. In other words: just because a blind squirrel finds an acorn every once in awhile does not mean one should outsource the finding of acorns to blind squirrels.

To be clear: I have no problem with moral philosophy, and find it quite useful in thinking through some problems of political and social life. But if we're going to insist religion keep to its sphere, philosophy should keep to its sphere, too.


*In my own particular slice of Christianity, the popular view is of the Bible as narrative, which functions to explicit list of moral rules in exactly the same way that all narratives do: not very well. 

I am provisionally on board with almost all criticisms of Rick Santorum, but this one that ties into Santorum's rhetoric on suffering and its disturbing political implications hits home:

Santorum’s notion that suffering is just part of life, or even something to be valued, is problematic when asserted by a person of obvious wealth and privilege.  In other words:  it is easy for Santorum to talk about suffering when he and his family are manifestly not suffering (and, likewise, have the means to deal far better with potential suffering than do most in the society).  ...

However, Santorum only has a point if, in fact, the only people who die or suffer because of bad choices (goodness, how easy would policy making be if that were true? In such a universe, welfare would be nothing be altruism).  However, we know that it isn’t.  Many people make a plethora of good choices, and yet find themselves bankrupt over medical bills.  Likewise, some people make a host of really bad choices, and yet live to 90 in relative comfort.  The universe is not so simple as Santorum and his ilk make it out to be.  And even if we take his notion that suffering is a part of life (or ordained by the Heavens), there is the question of the degree to which the alleviation of that suffering is, in any way, a societal responsibility (btw, the Christian ethics that he supposedly lives by would say yes, it is).

I am interested less in the YPIS question than the very obviously incorrect theological assertion that underlies the notion that suffering is good. Back when postmodern conservatism was a thing, the one part with which I was most uncomfortable concerned the relative disinterest in the suffering of others (or, the alternative, that suffering was beautiful and thus ennobling). The impulse to not give a fig about others is strong, and abetted by the notion that people receive approximately what they deserve in life.* In my experience it usually takes the form of dropping a premise from an otherwise valid argument: "the world is such that people often have to suffer" "suffering is bad" "good things can often come out of suffering," in which the middle premise is referred to in a cursory way or dropped, with the end result being the belief that suffering is somehow inherently virtuous, a test of God that you're meant to pass. But in purely theological terms, suffering is bad: better to have lived in a world without it, and one does well to remember that there will be no suffering after judgment. The Christian who can't tell the difference between a blow and a caress is in a bad way.


*Ironically, this sort of position is usually attributed to Calvinists, but it'll be a cold day in hell before you catch a present-day Calvinist asserting this. Or Calvin himself.

Very much looking forward to the Wolf Hall miniseries, if only to get the best accurate depiction of Thomas More out there (A Man for All Seasons makes of him a martyr for individual conscience, which is strange given his propensity to kill and torture people for adhering to their individual consciences*). He may have been a saint, but he was definitely a bad human being.


*And it's true to say that there were violations of this on all sides in the 16th century, but of people who had the power to persecute or refrain from persecuting, he was one of the worst. I would take Calvin (whose body count was one) and the other magisterial Reformers in a hot minute over More for reasons that have more to do with basic human decency than theology.

Day of Judgment update: gave the paper and the talk. The paper went over very well, with a few corrections suggested that are pretty easy fixes. The talk went over decently well, with an (unexpected) suggestion I attempt to publish it in the near term. I might be good at this political theory thing?

The past is a foreign country, 17th century edition:

One of the really remarkable things I've come across in my research on the Thirty Years War is that there were four major Catholic power sources, all of whom at least partially disliked and distrusted each other and, for that matter, couldn't even agree on theological questions: (Jesuit) Spain and the Holy Roman Empire were closest, but the Pope would occasionally play them off each other, and (Capuchin) France seemed content in the early part of the war to be unaligned but sympathetic to the Protestant cause. This makes the comparative willingness of Lutherans and Calvinists to put aside their differences in the name of opposing the Hapsburgs more impressive, but existential crises do have a way of focusing the mind.

More on Charles Taylor:

A history professor of my acquaintance, in my first semester of grad school, offered some scholarly advice that I've found helpful ever since. The class was reading some early 20th century German historian whose history of the western world ended with Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We should learn not to trust, this professor told the class, any historical account where the author of said account makes himself the pinnacle of history, the point toward which everything has been leading up, or the point after which no improving change can occur. Though this appears as an obvious enough point, it shifts and distorts in historical-philosophical work in ways not always apparent. This is how C.V. Wedgwood can appear to honestly believe that the principal task of the Thirty Years War was to prevent the rise of Nazism: we tend to overweigh our particular moment.

In one of my notebooks from the last year, I have a list of common rhetorical devices that make me suspect the veracity of a speaker's (or writer's) claims. Two of them are notably historical: making any claim about a period of over 100 years in length, and claiming that the world has irrevocably changed within the author's own lifetime. My own attempts to do careful historical work have indicated to me how difficult it is to do the first--can't keep those pesky human variables constant for long enough--and the second is the failure of imagining a golden age just outside one's own lifetime, or in one's childhood, which usually consists entirely of anecdata, and functions on the assumption that children have perfect memories of the way things were.

Which brings us to Taylor, who, it seems to me, violates all three of these. He's written a history in which his own blend of liberal Catholicism is the only way to reconcile oneself to modernity. He hints at the end of Sources of the Self that perhaps any form of Christianity could do the trick, but by the end of A Secular Age all of his examples are, like him, Catholic. Indeed, he appears at moments in that text to think the only thing that can re-enchant the world is what is sometimes referred to as a sacramental view of reality. I can assure you this provokes a from this liberal Protestant. I have no idea what people with other religious affiliations must think of it. But regardless of how you feel about the merits of the particular claim, it seems odd and suspicious to write a history of the last 500 years in which you serve as an excellent example of how to hold it all together.

The problem of the scope of his historical account I mentioned previously. About it I can only say what Czeslaw Milosz said about Pablo Neruda: when he speaks of the things he knows well, I find him moving and convincing. When he speaks of what I know well, I cease to believe him.

The one problem that leaped out at me when I read A Secular Age was that its points of historical inflection are poorly chosen. There's the Reformation and the Enlightenment and... 1968? I'm aware of the culture warrior reasons for thinking that The 1960s Changed Everything; I'm aware of the liberal Catholic reasons for thinking so. What I'm not aware of is anyone who was born after, say, 1980 who thinks that The 1960s Changed Everything. I'm sure it was a big deal when it happened, but if your consciousness dawns sometime in the 1980s, you are probably aware that the 70s were more like the 50s (and vice versa) than is usually suspected. And while I don't deny that it was in some important respects an inflection point, to put it on par with the Reformation or Enlightenment seems, at best, premature. (And this is to say nothing of the valid criticisms in the linked article that Taylor pays little attention to how religious belief works in the lives of ordinary citizens, and that he fails to even consider the world outside of western Europe and America)

Finally, I will say that though I believe all the above reasons are valid, I do have a taste in academic work that will naturally find books along this line suspect. Caveat lector.

Oh goodness, will have much to say about this essay on Charles Taylor, as a recovered Taylor-phile. A taste:

What Taylor cannot accept is how many ordinary people lived with very little religion at all, neither as believers nor as active skeptics. Some were unbelievers—apostates, heretics—while many were simple disbelievers, the religiously indifferent. In 1584 a third of Antwerp adults failed to claim any religion. This diversity is now an article of faith among social historians, but not among philosophers interested in the lettered elite. “Medieval Christians (and non-Christians and partial Christians),” Butler writes, “were almost devastatingly accustomed to huge doubts about faith. They lived through them and, perhaps more to the point, died through them. How many lives were consumed by the Albigensian crusade to rid Languedoc of the Cathar heresy in the early thirteenth century? Medieval Christians knew that faith was not axiomatic, if only because so many needed to be killed to make it so.” Butler charges Taylor with bad faith, of writing a tendentious prequel to the age he wants us to imagine.

Suffice it to say what finally broke my confidence in his work were the many problems with Taylor's historical accounts, which I found compelling when I knew nothing of the history he was writing on, but deeply flawed and misleading whenever I did. But more later.

Thinking Through the Thirty Years War:

I've been re-reading C.V. Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War, in part for my own scholarly purposes, but inspired by Ta-Nehisi Coates' reading of the same (e.g.). With all respect to Wedgwood and Coates, I'd like to disagree with their assessment of whether the war was 'worth it.' Wedgwood's argument is that the best thing for Germany would have been to have the war end in 1630, at the peak of HRE Ferdinand's military successes, as he was the last person who had a realistic opportunity to unite Germany. At the very least, there would have been peace, and several million lives would've been spared. All Wedgwood can see that would be lost is the "German liberties," whose value she finds dubious for reasons that are probably contextually specific to her (they probably didn't seem worthwhile in the 1930s, not that I can blame her for thinking so), and though she gestures at issues of religion, she doesn't seem to grasp why denominational differences might be important.

From where I sit, though, the longer portion of the war served two important aims: first and foremost, it ensured freedom of conscience and practice for Protestants in Germany and the rest of Europe. Ferdinand was engaged in an active program of persecution and forced conversion in the 1620s, and it was only the intervention of Sweden in 1630 that prevented him from being successful. To Wedgwood, this appears to be trivial or unimportant.* For those of us who are Protestant and, more importantly, value freedom of conscience, it's absolutely a cause worth fighting for.

In the second place, Wedgwood sees the German liberties as one part hand-waving and one part so retrograde as compared to liberal values as to not be worth saving. No one who spends time on the 17th century will be of the opinion that anyone was particularly liberal (Locke and Spinoza as exceptions to the rule), but in the long and complicated history by which concepts develop, one can't have the later form without the earlier imperfect form. Like Wedgwood, I am not going to argue that the moral calculus of the war was positive; like Peter Wilson's account, I am sufficiently uninterested in the glory of war in general, or the specifics of grand personality, to find anything admirable in the War on those terms. But waste though it was, it seems to have been impetus for an important step forward in European politics and political thought.


*N.B. that she appears to believe Ferdinand could've united Germany, but Gustavus Adolphus could not have done so.