This may come as a surprise

Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.

As a claim about the limits of natural history, this is conventional enough. But the author may come as a surprise: Thomas Henry Huxley, in the second Romanes lecture, in Oxford, 1893. H/T Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Evolution and Ethics, Revisited,” The New Atlantis, Number 42, Spring 2014, pp. 81–87.

Death, life, choice, and cost

It sounds paradoxical to link the desire for unlimited medical treatment to the desire for physician-assisted suicide. But the idea that there’s a right to the most expensive health care while you want to be alive isn’t all that different, in a sense, from the idea that there’s a right to swiftly die once life doesn’t seem worth living.

In each case, the goal is perfect autonomy, perfect control, and absolute freedom of choice. And in each case, the alternative approach — one that emphasizes the limits of human agency, and the importance of humility in the face of death’s mysteries — doesn’t mesh with our national DNA.

Ross Douthat on physician-assisted suicide and the American polity.

There have been a string of good articles in the last month on such cases, where deeply-held but ultimately untenable positions come up against life's conditions and boundaries:

Tim Kreider on not pursuing happiness.

Eric Zencey on GDP as an instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

Douthat again, on on the conservatism of Judd Apatow movies:

More than most Westerners, Americans believe — deeply, madly, truly — in the sanctity of marriage. But we also have some of the most liberal divorce laws in the developed world, and one of the highest divorce rates. We sentimentalize the family, but boast one of the highest rates of unwed births. We’re more pro-life than Europeans, but we tolerate a much more permissive abortion regime than countries like Germany or France. We wring our hands over stem cell research, but our fertility clinics are among the least regulated in the world.

In other words, we’re conservative right up until the moment that it costs us...

Concerning that permissive abortion regime, there's this over at First Things:

Prior to the legalization of abortion in the United States, it was commonly understood that a man should offer a woman marriage in case of pregnancy, and many did so. But with the legalization of abortion, men started to feel that they were not responsible for the birth of children and consequently not under any obligation to marry. In gaining the option of abortion, many women have lost the option of marriage. Liberal abortion laws have thus considerably increased the number of families headed by a single mother, resulting in what some economists call the “feminization of poverty.”

(From Richard Stith's Her Choice, Her Problem: How Abortion Empowers Men.) Back at the Times, RD muses on how the issue might have played differently, if Ted Kennedy had shared some of his sister Eunice's qualms about the practice.

On a happier note, a couple of books reflect, forty years on, on what was special about Woodstock. The answers may surprise you.

Jim Webb, on holding one's nose and getting real

Second, the United States needs to develop clearly articulated standards for its relations with the nondemocratic world. Our distinct policies toward different countries amount to a form of situational ethics that does not translate well into clear-headed diplomacy. We must talk to Myanmar’s leaders. This does not mean that we should abandon our aspirations for a free and open Burmese society, but that our goal will be achieved only through a different course of action...

Third, our government leaders should call on China to end its silence about the situation in Myanmar, and to act responsibly, in keeping with its role as an ascending world power. Americans should not hold their collective breaths that China will give up the huge strategic advantage it has gained as a result of our current policies. But such a gesture from our government would hold far more sway in world opinion than has the repeated but predictable condemnation of Myanmar’s military government...

US Senator Jim Webb, following his return from Burma, in an op-ed entitled “We Can’t Afford to Ignore Myanmar”. I suspect this is right as far as it goes, but our public discourse on democracy and rights has become so strident, and so little thought-through — while in many other respects, business goes on as usual — that's it's become hard to imagine what a more consistent approach would actually look like.

On becoming a politician

The question — and I have struggled with this myself — is where do you have the most impact, where do you drive most effectively. It is always changing as the world changes. I used to humiliate CEOs, and one needed to be sufficiently emotionally unaware to live with that ethical contradiction — of making leaders look bad in order to get your point across.

So Paul Gilding, former Greenpeace director, as quoted in an article about the Australian singer-turned-politician Peter Garrett [in the SMH's Good Weekend, apparently not online]. It's worth a read, although it's not always so ethically aware: the journalist wants to have his cake and eat it too, issuing cheap shots against Garrett at one remove, or maybe half a remove. The smarmiest of Garrett's critics is Bob Brown, head of the Greens, who has quite a line in moral one-upmanship. Here's a hint, Bob: if you have a former colleage, whom (as you say) you like a great deal, and feel empathy for, and yet you find yourself feeling "a great deal of anxiety for him as a person", pick up the phone, or walk down the corridor to his office, and talk to him personally. Keep your pious concerns out of the press. Or, you know, we might think it had more to do with establishing your own brand by trashing a professional rival.

Garrett on his own situation:

And I think that's the crux of this, you know, `Peter Garrett is not the person he was before. He's become a politician.' Well, yeah, that's right. I did become a politician and I made that step into the discipline of party politics.

Garrett, currently Minister for the Environment, Arts and Heritage, is — and I didn't know this — the second-oldest member of cabinet, which is a disorienting thought. And how he has ever been able to make it through the song Beds Are Burning, given his personal history, boggles the mind.

Abu Ghraib, porn, and Mark Sanford: thinking again about images and openness

In a fascinating article, a military man has described how conversation with Iraqis led him to change his mind about the publication of photographs from Abu Ghraib. It's a good—perhaps even over-neat—example of how listening to a different perspective can lead one not so much to discard one's own perspective as flawed, but to see something that was actually in view all along, but being missed.

It is peculiar, isn't it, the ability of images to obscure and to distract, and the difficulty of thinking clearly about them? It's scarcely a new theme in human thought, but topical at the moment given what seems to be our lack of balance and the weakness of our culture in this area.

A propos of which, I recently ran into Naomi Wolf's oft-quoted article from earlier this decade, The Porn Myth, in which she tried to pinpoint the ways in which the normalisation (and ubiquity) of pornography has damaged the culture. There are insights in it, but this doesn't stop her from being dense, as it were, in passing, such as here:

The reason to turn off the porn might become, to thoughtful people, not a moral one but, in a way, a physical- and emotional-health one; you might want to rethink your constant access to porn in the same way that, if you want to be an athlete, you rethink your smoking. The evidence is in: Greater supply of the stimulant equals diminished capacity.

After all, pornography works in the most basic of ways on the brain: It is Pavlovian...

The tacit assumption here is that moral arguments, and physical- and emotional-health arguments, are separate: that the proposition, “that porn damages people's ability to form and sustain healthy relationships”, is somehow irrelevant to the moral status of the thing. But this is unreal. Moral thought, amongst other things, is about integration; and it is most certainly about the real world.

Our culture doesn't seem to be able to keep these categories in perspective: they're either made completely separate or they're collapsed, so that on the one hand learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all, and one forgives for the sake of one's own emotional health; and on the other hand, calling an argument “moral” is a way of dismissing it as mediaevalising or prurient, even at the hands of people with concerns of their own that are evidently moral in nature.

Along these lines—if some slippage between “moral” and “religious” may be allowed—the New York Times' Room for Debate site has a list of reflections, alternately interesting and obtuse, on God-talk and the Mark Sanford scandal. The inimitable Eve Tushnet has a fun commentary on the reaction to the whole thing. (The link listed under “good people” is also worth a look.)

O'Donovan on decision, and creeping non-choice

Professor, you've chosen the metaphor of wakefulness, and of the future that presents itself to you for you for your action or decision, rather than the metaphor of “making decisions”. Which made me think about making decisions. There's this lovely phrase about “creeping non-choice”: how did you come to be in this situation, did you choose it? Well no, it was a kind of creeping non-choice. So, reflecting on the past, for ten years I was never aware of making any particular choice, but I look back on where I was and where I stand, and I find that I have made a choice, I have made a decision. So, given that you're speaking in terms of the future that presents itself to you for action, do you want to say something about discerning what the choices for action actually are, and how you see that?

Yes, yes. And I will say more — this gives me an opportunity to offer a trailer for the third lecture, which I'm very content to do, because this is a matter to which I want to attend more fully on Thursday night. I will consider there a model of making decisions and what they are, which is, as it were, the apple-and-pear model: in my left hand I have an apple, in my right hand I have a pear, and I am in a dilemma because I don't know which to bite into. And there is one understanding of moral decision which understands it always in terms of a kind of “either-or”. I always stand before two ways: two commendable paths, and I have to choose one or the other. I don't think that's a very good model for making decisions, and I want to suggest that our process in reaching decisions is one of increasing clarification: increasing understanding of ourselves, which is far more like bringing something more and more into focus. So, we start with a very blurred picture, a very vague large-scale map of what it is that lies before us, and as we go we are constantly trying to sharpen the focus, to see more detail, until the picture of what is before us and what we can do becomes sharp.

I think that when we make a decision, and particularly our very best decisions, is the moment in which we realise we don't any longer have an alternative. It's not the moment in which we realise that we have two absolutely equal alternatives, and it's absolutely up to our choice as to which we take.

To take an example of this—as I don't include this in the third lecture, I might as well include it now—I remember one occasion, in which I was on one of those committees that universities throw up from time to time, with the duty of appointing a professor to a post. And before the committee had met, a colleague met me in the street and said, “I hear you're on that committee to appoint the chair of such-and-such: You will, of course, appoint Professor Jones.” And I said, “Well, will we?”. “Well, yes,” he said, “you will.” Several months later we appointed Professor Jones. The process had been a very long one. We had naturally looked at some excellent CVs. We had considered a wide variety of alternatives. But what got borne in on us in that whole process, was what was obvious to my colleague from the beginning, namely that Professor Jones was the person who ought to be appointed to that chair.

One doesn't regret that situation, one doesn't say, “Oh this is a terrible situation, here is an outstanding candidate, I have no choice, I have no decision to make.” The decision is recognising the outstanding candidate, hmm? That's what deciding is. Now I think that's a better model for most of our decisions than apples and pears: shall I eat an apple or shall I eat a pear, there's nothing to choose, I'm going to toss a coin, and so on.

This from Oliver O'Donovan's 2007 New College Lectures, in response to my question. Of course I was invoking (not particularly clearly) the famous saying re involuntary childlessness in our culture: something that outsiders may consider a “choice”, but that the person concerned does not experience that way.

It was fascinating to get an answer that put positive things—our very best choices, as OO'D has it—into the same basket. This tends to set the whole issue in a new light. One reason why the description of someone “choosing” childlessness, or singleness, or some other less-than-satisfactory situation—one reason why this description feels wrong, is not that the situation has not been chosen in some sense, but that our typical way of thinking about choice is wrong. Even our “best” or most satisfactory choices are not like that. We speak of choices, good or bad, as if they were acts of a disembodied will, apart from setting and constraint and progress of understanding: but this is unreal. It's no wonder that we struggle to understand choices under constraint, or under lack of viable alternative, because even the happy ideal choice of OO'D's example just isn't an untrammeled act of will like the picture we carry around in our heads.

[This (unpublished) excerpt from the question time at the lectures is reprinted with permission from New College: the college at all times retains ownership of the intellectual property rights to all New College Lecture material (in printed or electronic form). The lectures themselves are available in PDF and MP3 form at the College website for personal review and study, but may not be retransmitted without express permission.]

O'Donovan on compromise

You gave a fairly prominent place to compromise in this evening's lecture—twinned together, I thought very helpfully, with ideals. On my reading, compromise enjoys a dreadful reputation in the Christian community at the moment. And you're also emphasising the need to act together, or with one mind—whereas I picture myself in a room with my brothers and sisters, recommending some course of action, that could be described as a compromise, let alone myself describing it as a compromise, and this seems like the political equivalent of suicide within the community. Are these just the times that we live in? Do you agree with that reading, or is there some way forward from this? Because, as I say, I think compromise has a very bad name, but I agree with you it's necessary, so ...

Thank you for that question, which is rather searching. I'm not sure that I can do more than kind of feel after an answer to it...

I think we distrust compromise because we associate it with a certain kind of temptation, which is a temptation to fall in with what everybody else is doing. To being conformed to this world, as St Paul puts it. That seems to me to be, as a phrase, perfect for summing up the nature of the bad compromise. [We are] rightly concerned about that: rightly on guard against any such concession, and of course, as we all know, it's ferociously easy, even for the most serious-minded of us, simply to fall in with the way other people do things, because it takes so much less effort, and our effort is being seriously required for other tasks ...

We fail to see ... as it were, the other kind of compromise, which perhaps ... perhaps it's a bad thing that we end up with the same word to describe two things, except when words are ambiguous, they warn us against certain very easy mistakes, and the fact that "compromise" is used both, as it were for the good [compromise, the] trying-to-focus-on-the-sheerly-practical-in-the-situation, the actually-bringing-into-shape of what it is that we really can do that will bear witness to God's command and to the object set before us, and [also for the bad compromise:] failing to do this because we fall in with everyone else, warns us that it's easy to mistake the one for the other, and it's easy to mistake the one for the other because discerning what is actually practicable is difficult. And we may think that because everybody disagrees with a course of action that we think right, therefore that course of action is not practicable. And that's one reason why the two types of compromise are so necessary to keep clear.

The question we have to ask is what is the best course of action that is actually available. And both sides of that equation have to be brought together. If we do that, and if we regularly did that, then compromise could lose its bad reputation perhaps.

This from Oliver O'Donovan's 2007 New College Lectures, Morally awake? Admiration and resolution in the light of Christian faith, in response to my question.

[This (unpublished) excerpt from the question time at the lectures is reprinted with permission from New College: the college at all times retains ownership of the intellectual property rights to all New College Lecture material (in printed or electronic form). The lectures themselves are available in PDF and MP3 form at the College website for personal review and study, but may not be retransmitted without express permission.]

“We were wrong”

An object lesson in the value and the limitations of intelligence, management disciplines, and analytical skill, Robert S. McNamara, died on Monday in Washington. The New York Times' obituary makes salutary reading, but if one is going to look at only one thing about McNamara, it should be Errol Morris' wonderful documentary The Fog of War.

I have never understood people describing McNamara as unrepentant and cold. To see him in Fog—apparently, if you were in the right meetings, to see him even in 1968—was to see a man haunted by the hubris, miscalculation, folly ... by the sheer wrongness of so much of what America did in Vietnam; of what he did, as Secretary of Defense, first for Kennedy and then for Johnson, in prosecuting the war; even for aspects of his service during WWII, including what he freely describes as war crimes (he was involved in the fire-bombing of Japanese cities).

Apart from the general cultural anger about Vietnam, and against its symbols—the NYT's most reliably angry columnist has predictably chosen to vent on this occasion—I suspect McNamara's reflections attracted such opprobium because they didn't conform to American norms of repentance. There was no religiosity. There was no talk of transformation or renewal. What there was, was a will to understand, and to draw lessons from past failings.

Lord knows, those lessons were painful enough.

There's also an unpleasant piece of generational conflict at work here: a lack of sympathy with the way McNamara's loyalty to his masters stands in conflict with the all-telling, all-denouncing ethic of younger men. Pensioned off from the DoD for losing faith in the war and urging the President to rethink it, McNamara didn't become an anti-war activist. He got on with running the World Bank as best he knew. And when he did turn again to Vietnam, he did it as a civil servant: asking, what did we do wrong; what can we learn from it. There was a dispassion to the analysis, as there should be. It doesn't mean the countless dead didn't keep him awake at night.

At the risk of an obvious statement, McNamara didn't publicly atone for his sins because he couldn't. (Where would one even start?) An unvarnished “we were wrong” should be respected for what it is. Beyond that is between him and God.

UPDATE: Errol Morris has written a fine piece on McNamara in context

Engaging with difficulty

A.O. Scott has been making a plea for maturity and engagement, in the form of a moral protest against a recent film:

Really, “Away We Go” is about the flight from adulthood, from engagement, from responsibility, even as it cleverly disguises itself as a search for all those things. But the dream of being left alone in a world of your own making, far from anything sad or icky or difficult, is a child’s fantasy.

Stirring stuff. Likewise concerning topics on which it is difficult to talk sensibly, or well, consider the following:

an insightful and sane essay on the Wikipedia revolution;

a meditation on work and thought in the trades, versus the office;

and a report on the frontline of a change of medical practice in the States.

Concerning health care, one of the avowed goals of the Obama presidency, it is good to see that there has been at least some attempt to learn from past mistakes:

It has been 16 years, in fact, since another young, freshly inaugurated Democratic president with a Democratic Congress tried to remake the architecture of health care, and the catastrophe that followed is generally cited as the main deterrent to thinking big about anything in the capital. The plan Bill Clinton took to Congress then, running to more than 1,000 pages of impenetrable new regulations, wasn’t what you’d call politically savvy, but the strategy used to sell it was even worse. Having been elected as the latest in a series of outsider presidents after Watergate, ex-Governor Clinton seemed to believe he had been sent by the voters to purify the fetid culture of Washington; he installed a boyhood friend as his chief of staff and stocked his White House with loyal Arkansans and campaign aides ready to overrun a fossilized Congress. His wife, the current secretary of state, developed the health care plan largely without taking House and Senate leaders into her confidence, instead dropping it at the doorstep of the Capitol as a fait accompli. Ever jealous of its prerogative, Congress took a long look, yawned and kicked the whole plan to the gutter, where it soon washed away for good — along with much of Clinton’s ambition for his presidency.

The first senator elected directly to the Oval Office since 1960, Obama has an entirely different theory of how to exercise presidential power, and he has consciously designed his administration to avoid Clinton’s fate. After winning the office with the same kind of outsider appeal as his predecessors, he has quietly but methodically assembled the most Congress-centric administration in modern history ... Obama seems to think that the dysfunction in Washington isn’t only about the heightened enmity between the parties; it’s also about the longstanding mistrust between the two branches of government that stare each other down from twin peaks on either end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

How people continue to regard Obama as a pushover and a mere talker escapes me.

I have also been enjoying, together with the occasional cringe-moment, the president's Cairo address. A well-taken Middle Eastern appreciation, along the lines of “Yes, but ...”, can be found here. David Brooks also has some characteristically tendentious but insightful comments on the tensions in Obama's approach.

Several bloggers, fellow fans of the Archbishop of Canterbury, have been reminding me of his Cairo speech five years ago, on the different but related topic of respectful dialogue between Christians and Muslims on the nature of God: on what is agreed, as well as on the disagreements, and on being careful to distinguish the two.

Second thoughts

Work trips put one behind on reading, and on blogging. Here are some things I've been looking at in the last six weeks or so, concerning, in some way, re-thinking a received position.

From the New York Times:
Mary Beard, on Roman book trade and culture
Looking back on decisions about prisoner interrogation
When “bad advice” is the best advice
On the off-brand presidency
On a recognition Israel doesn't need
On the decline of Christian communities in the Middle East

Web comics:
xkcd on changing the rules
PhD Comics on research topics guaranteed to be picked up by the news media

Blogs:
Byron Smith on dying with dignity
Scot McKnight on justification and the New Perspective on Paul: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and ... [one needs to be patient to do anything more than skim these]

Food for thought:
From an NYT op-ed opposed to the drone-war being fought in Pakistan, a comment with resonance for anyone opposed to extremist behaviour, including myself (let the reader understand):

Governments typically make several mistakes when attempting to separate violent extremists from populations in which they hide. First, they often overestimate the degree to which a population harboring an armed actor can influence that actor’s behavior. People don’t tolerate extremists in their midst because they like them, but rather because the extremists intimidate them. Breaking the power of extremists means removing their power to intimidate — something that strikes cannot do...

And from the LRB, Jenny Diski, in a (subscription-required) article on schooling, reflecting on teaching as a young idealist in the early 70s, in an inner-city comprehensive:

The lack of oversight, and of targets, must send a chill of horror through any modern manager of a school, and with some reason: it was pretty haphazard, and who was to say that only good teaching would or did come of the laissez-faire system? The line between liberty and libertarianism is very indistinct, and the desire to dismantle bureaucracy and social inequity leaves open the possibility of chaos, and creates endless opportunities for individual self-aggrandisement. But it seems to me that the risks were worth taking, now that we've seen the dismal results of our 20-year-long experiments with centralised targets, management echelons and paper-based accountability.

Come down, O Love Divine

Come down, O Love Divine,
Seek thou this soul of mine,
And visit it with thine own ardour glowing.
O Comforter, draw near,
Within my heart appear,
And kindle it, thy holy flame bestowing.

As Luke tells the story, the Spirit of God fell on Jesus' disciples on the day of Pentecost in Jerusalem, and they went out praising God in many languages, drawing a large, curious, and somewhat sceptical crowd. Peter announced that this was nothing other than the promised renewal of the nation: that Jesus, handed over to the Romans for execution but vindicated by God --- raised from death --- had now been “exalted to the right hand of God” and had commissioned them to be his witnesses. He called on those in the crowd to repent, and to be baptized into Jesus' name for the forgiveness of their sins. Three thousand people were initiated in this way; that day is traditionally understood as the beginning of the church, and has been celebrated ever since.

Lest this all be thought somewhat in-house, Peter's other great task (again, as Luke has it) was to reach beyond the Jewish community and --- in the face of his own customs and purity concerns --- to open the Christian fellowship to people from other nations. The struggle to understand what true unity of differing people meant, and exactly what God's agenda was in the matter, was a huge one for that generation, and the bulk of the occasional letters that comprise the New Testament (together with the Gospels, Acts, and Revelation) engage with the issue in some degree. The particular expression is bound up with concerns of that time and place, and the people involved, but in more abstract terms the questions are perennial: how are background, identity, and behaviour related; what are our obligations; what do we make of human difference?

The basic Christian answer is that one should be baptised into the name of Jesus Christ: but what then follows? The knotted complexity of parts of the New Testament shows that the answers may not be simple, let alone obvious. A classic example from another age is the abolition movement at the end of the eighteenth century: the realisation that slavery had to be renounced --- already implicitly understood in the first century --- tore up lives and institutions and economies over decades. We say we “change our minds” but the process of changing one's mind is messy, and by no means merely mental. Our society makes “Amazing Grace” a song of sentiment, but it was the sentiment of a man converted slowly --- slowly, in fits and starts --- from traffic in human lives.

The favourite Pentecost hymn in my tradition is Come down, O Love Divine by Bianco da Siena (d:1434), as translated by Richard F. Littledale in the 1860s, and most famously set to Ralph Vaughn Williams' tune Down Ampney. The hymn is of a more mystical bent, its perspective that of the inner life before God, compared to what one might call the community focus of the New Testament writers. Of course, the two are related, as the “Amazing Grace” example also shows. But the relationship is not simple.

(It's easy to find cheesy versions of the tune and the hymn on the web, and hard to find good ones. An embellished but dignified rendition is free as an MP3 from Selah Publishing.)

O let it freely burn,
'Til earthly passions turn
To dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
And let thy glorious light
Shine ever on my sight,
And clothe me round, the while my path illuming.

Let holy charity
Mine outward vesture be,
And lowliness become mine inner clothing.
True lowliness of heart
Which takes the humbler part
And o'er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.

And so the yearning strong
With which the soul will long
Shall far outpass the power of human telling;
For none can guess its grace,
'Til he become the place
Wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.

Beyond consent

Through gritted teeth, and firmly holding my nose, I would like to express some limited sympathy for Matthew Johns, who has been hung out to dry by Channel Nine (and just about everyone) after a years-old group-sex scandal was so thoroughly aired on national television this week.

His pathetic, but I suspect sincere, clinging to the mantra “but she consented”, is the point here. Well yes, maybe she did. If one thinks about the situation, this doesn't really cut it, but our society has spent a few decades pretending that consent (perhaps glossed to mean “informed consent”) provides a sufficient handle on the morality of sexual encounters. (Even some of Johns' critics, as quoted on the TV, are still trying to cut their disgust to fit the Procrustean bed of “consent”.) That pretence has helped blight this decade for the unfortunate girl in the story (one prays, not her whole life); but it has also betrayed Johns and people like him, by making it easier for them to lose moral perspective, and by indulging their boorishness.

Earlier generations of thought approached this problem via honour, an approach rich in double standards, and modern commentators have been quick and strident in their criticism. Accepting all of that criticism, one has to say that older approaches are realistic at one point --- the plain fact that “consent”, meaning what-the-woman-wants-or-says-at-the-time, is not necessarily the main question, and by no means the only question --- on which our society has been systematically stupid. Without mercy, we have pilloried our ancestors for the deficiencies in their thinking ... and yet people in future societies looking back on ours, or people in different societies looking across at us, will probably ask how we could be so blind. The cheap answer will be that we handed over our thinking in this matter to people without daughters, and to people who furthermore did not care about the moral lives of their sons. Doubtless there's more to it than that, but will anyone have enough patience with us to give a more merciful answer?

On Eve Tushnet and The Gathering Storm

The unclassifiable Eve Tushnet has a couple of posts on the notorious Gathering Storm advertisement on her blog.^[1] I'd heard about the ad being objectionable --- and indeed, it is --- so I was surprised to learn that Ms Tushnet actually does some work for NOM, the organisation that produced it. On the one hand I couldn't see how that could work out; on the other, I was fascinated, given my own situation.^[2]

Here she is speaking, from a position opposed to gay marriage, about criticisms of that position:

The best counterargument is the same as the best counterargument on all gay-marriage topics: “This isn’t just about gay marriage but about a whole panoply of prior changes, most of which have obvious good qualities as well, so you’re not seeking status quo so much as rollback.” ...

I see the force of that argument, and of course I acknowledge that there’s no way we would be having this conversation without the prior cultural changes which led to e.g. laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation. For that matter, every single day I take advantage of the cultural changes which have made it possible for me to be an out lesbian while facing very limited explicit hostility.

But I still disagree that gay marriage is only a trivial turn of the ratchet (do ratchets turn?? I’m really not the home-improvement kind of dykey!), a mere formality, or something you can only worry about if you also reject all of the prior cultural moves which brought us here. I think prudence can allow you to draw a line, and frankly, gay marriage is a really obvious place for that line. Gay marriage is a big deal for the same reasons given by its supporters!--it is a real change in the culture, a deeply significant change, and a change with far-reaching public implications. I don’t think you can write paeans to marriage as a public and cultural status, then turn around and say that gay marriage will have very limited public effects. Marriage isn’t designed to have limited public effects.

Her other comments ad loc are incisive, quite wide-ranging, and well-taken; and some of the links are fascinating. At the end of the day, though, I'm still confused about how she can reconcile herself to a group running an ad that she herself describes as fearmongering, and as “really, really cheesy”.

Because belonging to a lobby group or a movement is not the same as belonging to a church. I've elsewhere posted in admiration of Ms Tushnet's Catholicism and the resources it gives her, and the home it provides her; and for another example, the USCCB's Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children, also cited by Tushnet, is a good advertisement for the Catholic Church: one could disagree with the position, and still respect the practical advice; one could disagree with the advice, and still admire the humanity and maturity of its conception. I understand how one could disapprove of the church in other ways, but value the tradition that makes this sort of thing possible: I understand that because it's pretty much my own position. A propos of this, a friend pointed out that a church is not meant to be admired from a safe distance ... which is a good point, so let me put it this way: I can see how, being a Catholic, one might choose to stay one; I can see how, having become a Catholic, one might judge it to have been a good choice, any drawbacks apart.

But a lobby group or a movement is not like that. Achieving an effect, pushing a point of view or policy, effecting a particular change in society, is the point of the endeavour. That's what a lobby is about: there is no other “there” there. So when a lobby comes up with a cheesy, fearmongering advertisement, it is reasonable to view it as essentially discrediting, in a way that it's not when a person does something wrong, or a country does something objectionable, or a church says something silly. If a lobby is in the business of saying silly things, or saying things in an objectionable way, isn't it Just Bad?

Which brings me back to my own local concerns. One of my criticisms of the evangelical church, at least in this town, is related: I think it's confused about whether it's a movement or a church --- even worse, whether it's an insurgent movement or The Church, simpliciter. This has all sorts of implications for how one views membership, duty, loyalty, and the ethical position of both individuals and officials: I take a rather different view, for example, of a minister on the one hand, and a cadre of a movement on the other; if they are the same person, there is potentially a serious problem. But that is really a matter for its own post, on another occasion.

^[1] I can't seem to link to individual posts there. The ones I mean are from April 2009: scroll down to Wednesday, April 15, and look for "POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE" and “'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'".

^[2] Short version: I am a conservative Christian, in the Anglican tradition (and happy to be so), I live in Sydney, and while it would be misleading to call me an evangelical I'm probably more like that than anything else; and I was taught and trained by evangelicals, and I have friends in that ministry. And yet I find the public stance of the Sydney Diocese, in particular its official media presence, absolutely unbearable.

“This was not just about greed”: Rowan Williams on trust, risk, and the material order

The Archbishop of Canterbury in a lecture on Ethics, Economics and Global Justice, takes a polite swipe at too-easy criticisms of contemporary capital, and ventures one or two criticisms of his own. Here he is on time and trust:

The loss of a sense of appropriate time is a major cultural development, which necessarily changes how we think about trust and relationship. Trust is learned gradually, rather than being automatically deliverable according to a set of static conditions laid down. It involves a degree of human judgement, which in turn involves a level of awareness of one's own human character and that of others – a degree of literacy about the signals of trustworthiness; a shared culture of understanding what is said and done in a human society. And this learning entails unavoidable insecurity... And the further away I get from these areas of learning by trial and error, the further away I get from the inevitable risks of living in a material and limited world, the more easily can I persuade myself that I am after all in control.

Although people have spoken of greed as the source of our current problems, I suspect that it goes deeper...

On risk and capitalism:

Ethical behaviour is behaviour that respects what is at risk in the life of another and works on behalf of the other's need. To be an ethical agent is thus to be aware of human frailty, material and mental; and so, by extension, it is to be aware of your own frailty. And for a specifically Christian ethic, the duty of care for the neighbour as for oneself is bound up with the injunction to forgive as one hopes to be forgiven; basic to this whole perspective is the recognition both that I may fail or be wounded and that I may be guilty of error and damage to another.

It's a bit of a paradox, then, to realise that aspects of capitalism are in their origin very profoundly ethical in the sense I've just outlined. The venture capitalism of the early modern period expressed something of the sense of risk by limiting liability and sharing profit ...

and on embodiment:

One of the things most fatal to the sustaining of an ethical perspective on any area of human life, not just economics, is the fantasy that we are not really part of a material order – that we are essentially will or craving, for which the body is a useful organ for fulfilling the purposes of the all-powerful will, rather than being the organ of our connection with the rest of the world. It's been said often enough but it bears repeating, that in some ways – so far from being a materialist culture, we are a culture that is resentful about material reality, hungry for anything and everything that distances us from the constraints of being a physical animal subject to temporal processes, to uncontrollable changes and to sheer accident.

A rather random list ...

... of things I've been reading while trying to stop obsessing about the change of government in the US.

The New York Times:
On why Big Pharma is not the only villain in the drugs business
On telling the Holocaust like it wasn’t
On one of our basic needs: Instruction in manners
On single-mothers-by-choice, and the second child
On the joys and pains of being an animal
On rude placenames in the United Kingdom
On the wording of the presidential oath

Stanley Fish:
On Barack Obama's prose style
On academic freedom: Finkin and Post's book, and an extreme case

On less serious subjects: you may have seen the news that Ricardo Montalbán died a few weeks ago; the NYT obituary reproduced my favourite quote about him, from a review of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan:

With his fierce profile, long white hair, manful décolletage and Space Age jewelry, Mr. Montalbán looks like either the world’s oldest rock star or its hippest Indian chief ... Either way, he looks terrific.

And in a bout of unashamed nostalgia, I looked up Willow Tree on YouTube: a 1990 song from the folk/acoustic/world/whatever band Not Drowning, Waving. The video is not much chop, but the song is superb: I don't remember anything quite like it, for capturing a certain kind of adult longing for childhood --- that part of childhood, at least, that you would want to revisit.

So we swing
On the big willow tree
We all glide through the air
On the branches that hang
We all know just where we want to be ...

Getting some perspective: (5) On bitterness

A friend recently reminded me of Jill Sobule's song Bitter, from the 1997 Happy Town album: it's been uploaded to YouTube in the original version (including lyrics), and as a live performance. It's one of those songs that sticks in the mind because it's smarter than it first appears. And because it's just fun.

Getting some perspective: (4) On the environment

From Earth, the Not-So-Lonely Planet, a NYT article offering a long-overdue correction to out-of-control language on the environment:

The living Earth is tough on scales it is hard to credit. Life has watched continents crash together and tear themselves apart; skies glowing like bright coals; tropical seas frozen into stillness: it has endured. Slaked in radiation from nearby supernovae, pummeled by asteroids, it has barely faltered and never stopped. Our civilization may be — is — out of balance with its environment; current human ways of life are frighteningly precarious. But to read the fragility of our way of life onto life itself is foolish.

The point of this article is staringly obvious to me, as a scientist, but I suspect it would be news to many people on the street. I wonder if there's enough cultural space to present this kind of argument. Because, like the author, I think it needs to be made.

In some sense, all misunderstanding is bad. Some misunderstandings are more consequential than others, but as a scientist I am committed to caring about understanding apart from consequence (although, not independent of it). Yet this very day, in an informed discussion of nuclear disarmament, I read a throwaway reference to the arsenals of America and Russia — incomparably larger than those of other nations — as being large enough to destroy the planet. This kind of talk may be time-honoured, and it may have some poetic or mythical grounding, but as a literal statement it is the purest nonsense. Do these people really want me to bore them with a description of what it would take to destroy life on earth, let alone the planet itself, in any meaningful sense?

Public discussion is becoming much better-informed on environmental issues and mechanisms: talk that used to be restricted to scientists and their groupies, in the Seventies and Eighties, has long gone mainstream. So aren't we in a position to call “Time” on the most lurid kind of disaster-talk?

Getting some perspective: (2) On teasing

From a New York Times article written In Defense [sic] of Teasing:

Today teasing has been all but banished from the lives of many children. In recent years, high-profile school shootings and teenage suicides have inspired a wave of “zero tolerance” movements in our schools... And we are phasing out teasing in many other corners of social life as well. Sexual-harassment courses advise work colleagues not to tease or joke... The reason teasing is viewed as inherently damaging is that it is too often confused with bullying. But bullying is something different; it’s aggression, pure and simple. By contrast, teasing is a mode of play, no doubt with a sharp edge, in which we provoke to negotiate life’s ambiguities and conflicts. And it is essential to making us fully human.

The centrality of teasing in our social evolution is suggested by just how pervasive teasing is in the animal world. Younger monkeys pull the tails of older monkeys. African hunting dogs jump all over one another, much like pad-slapping, joking football players moments before kickoff. In every corner of the world, human adults play peekaboo games to stir a sulking child, children (as early as age 1) mimic nearby adults and teenagers prod one another to gauge romantic interest. In rejecting teasing, we may be losing something vital and necessary to our identity as the most playful of species.

And, he might have said, the most social.

A very important point about human nature and wholeness is being made here. I was saddened to read the letter in response that the NYT published; a letter that, despite itself, rather proves the point of the article. Extreme and abusive, or merely dysfunctional forms of teasing, are indeed harmful and potentially crippling to their victims. OK. Yes. We get it. (Some of us already know this from experience ... although it would be unwise to enter into a contest on credentials here.) And to ask the victims to have a sense of humour about the wider phenomenon, may be to ask too much.

But that is not the question. The question is what the public policy should be. And I take the point of the article that it is improper, hubristic, and vain to try to bring annihilating force to bear against an entire dimension of human interaction; especially one so embedded in our nature, and so constitutive of positive and healthy development ... so constitutive of mature life.

Those of us who have suffered in this matter may find it hard to hear this argument: it reopens old wounds; and, more subtly, it torments us with a vision of functional relating which (we may feel) is inaccessible to us, and which others have achieved, in a way that excluded us. But this is a hurt that we should address in conversation with our counsellors, our friends, and our priests --- not with support for some utopian project.

The argument is still correct.

Four belated reassessments

From the New York Times:
On the Age of Neo-Remorse
On the unintended consequences of housing regulations

From the London Review of Books:
Ross McKibbin on the wider implications of the financial crisis:

The second inescapable obligation [on any responsible government] is the return of housing to its proper function: as providing places to live in rather than to speculate on. The relationship of housing to politics in both Britain and the United States is not fully understood even by those who transformed it. They don’t understand it because that would require confronting awkward facts about Anglo-American democracy. Fundamentally, private housing has become a compensation for the increasingly gross maldistribution of income. Inadequate incomes mean that large numbers of people don’t have access to the style of life that has always been the ultimate justification of neoliberalism and to which, reasonably enough, they now believe they have a right. What does give them access to it (in the short term) is credit. But credit has to be secured, and that’s what housing does. However, it works only if house prices keep rising and people have enough income to repay debt.

And from the cinema vault: I have finally seen Scent of a Woman. I missed the film when it came out, and despite my love of Al Pacino, I've avoided it since, believing the rumours about its over-the-topness and cornball. Well: it's better late than never. The worst part of the movie by far is the prep-school framing material --- the sub-Dead-Poets assembly scene is not only over-the-top, it's cheap --- but the body of the film is terrific. Pacino brings real charm and depth to the part, and over such a range ... it really does belie the idea of a one-note “Hoo-wah!” period. (The expression is a staple of his character here; perhaps this has fed the stereotype.) And the tango scene is delightful.

All this time, there's been a very strong NYT review of the film, too. Well, that review was right: and the conventional wisdom can go hang. OK, so Pacino should have got an Oscar for the Godfather films, rather than for this. But let's take the movie on its merits.

Giving credit where credit is due

One way or another the 43rd presidency will end today (and then really end again, on 20th January), with no true successor: a very different man will become, as they still say, the leader of the free world. Criticism of the president is a dime a dozen, and having a go at him became cheap a long time ago, so on this occasion it's appropriate to listen to six writers say what they will miss about President George W. Bush.

Because there are good things to say about him. GWB is by all accounts devoid of racial prejudice in his own dealings, and he showed a consistent will to generously resolve the problem of illegal (for which read: poor Hispanic) immigration to the United States, a token of real leadership and sensible priorities, and something that caused him no end of trouble with his own party. It is not much to your credit if you take a stand that causes you trouble with your enemies: if it causes you trouble with your friends, this is more to the point. (Shades here of PM John Howard and controls on assault weapons, a similarly principled stand for which I hope I have always given him full credit, my general disapproval of the man notwithstanding.) The Bush White House also showed a real commitment to opposing sex-trafficking --- what an earlier generation called “white slavery” --- an issue on which, until the last few years, so-called social progressives have been unacccountably silent.

On a related tack, there was a huge stink a while back when Representative John Lewis issued a warning to John McCain, invoking the name of segregationist Alabama governor George Wallace: everyone thought this was excessive because, well, McCain is pretty clearly no racist. However, there's a sense in which this was the whole point. There was an excellent NYT article the other week by Russ Rymer on “The George Wallace We Forgot”, explaining the relevance of the governor's tragic history, and why Lewis was speaking on good authority:

He [Wallace] might have carried a tolerant message into the Alabama governor’s mansion in 1958, but he lost the race after spurning the support of the Ku Klux Klan (which then backed his primary opponent, John Patterson) and being endorsed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Sadly for Wallace’s state, his region, his nation and himself, he did not respond as John Lewis did after his defeat by Carmichael. Mr. Lewis, whenever confronted with calls to divisiveness, chose to redouble his commitment to reason and tolerance. After his loss to Mr. Patterson, Wallace is said to have turned to an aide and declared, “I was out-niggered ... and I’ll never be out-niggered again.”

After Wallace finally won the governorship in 1962, his administration was never as race-hostile as his campaign appeals implied; black leaders found his office door open, and often his mind, too. But he would eternally pay the price for the methods he used to gain that office.

Albeit that politics is the art of the possible, there are some movements and tendencies with which no accomodation can be reached, and the writer paints an awful portrait of a reasonable man forced to retreat in dismay, and disarray, by a storm of race-hatred which he did not truly share, but which he had helped to unleash by his pandering. And now, his name is a byword. It's a sad fate, and something you might wish to be warned about: this, Rymer claims, is what Lewis was trying to do.