What’s Wrong with the World

I'll admit that I didn't (and don't) understand the article's first line: "For Christians--and many Muslims--the main reason to celebrate this Christmas is, of course, Jesus' birth." I wasn't aware that Muslims did that. If so, I feel confident that they're not celebrating the same Jesus as the rest of us, but I mention it only because it seems an odd preface to the persecution of Christians, which the adherents of Islam in certain places are eager to inflict.

The Weekly Standard can be a mixed bag of varying conservatisms, but in this season of Merry Christmas and happy New Year, of personal resolutions and of hope for increased prosperity, the reminder that Paul Marshall offers in the current issue - that Christmas is not, for everyone everywhere, an event of unblemished joy, but one fraught with peril - should for us be salutary.

...for probably hundreds of millions, Christmas is shadowed by pain and fear, since this is usually the peak season for anti-Christian attacks in Pakistan, India, Sudan, Nigeria, and beyond. It is also a time when the Chinese and Vietnamese governments are prone to arrest their unregistered believers.

Wither the Republican party in the aftermath of the Iowa caucuses? The party mandarins are aghast at the success of Huckabee, and talk radio personalities are excoriating their own listeners, on the grounds that, by supporting Huckabee, they have ceased to actually vote conservatively. While I am not predisposed to political prognostication, I believe that it would be instructive to spend a few moments analyzing the background to this apoplectic reaction to moderate doses of quite possibly toothless - as I have argued previously - populism. The issues implicated in the controversy, though superficially insubstantial (Huckabee appears to be a compassionate conservative in the mould of Bush, his deviations from GOP orthodoxy are marginal matters of emphasis in most instances, and those rhetorical tropes which have drawn criticism are too slight to merit the weight of the opprobrium they have elicited.), have precipitated a tipping of hands on the part of the custodians of Republican orthodoxy.

Consider the following contributions to National Review's Symposium on the Iowa Caucuses:

According to the Club for Growth, Huckabee takes “profoundly anti-growth positions on taxes, spending, and government regulation.” For Huckabee to succeed where Robertson and Buchanan failed, one of two things must happen. Either he must mislead GOP voters into thinking that he is an economic conservative, or those voters must stop caring. Either way, a Huckabee victory would be very bad news for conservatism as we know it. (John J. Pitney, Jr.)

Huckabee is a fringe Republican, and does not represent the conservative movement on economic policy, domestic programs, law and order, and foreign policy. It is hard to imagine a candidate so out of step with most in the conservative movement assuming the stage in Minnesota in eight months as its leader. (Pat Toomey, of the Club for Growth)

From last night's debate:

Translation: Hillary Clinton has remained the same unchanging agent of change since 1973.

I admit to not having a precise and snappy definition of "equality before the law" in the sense in which I think equality before the law a good thing. For example, it seems to me legitimate that a child should receive a lesser sentence for some actions than an adult.

But I have a rough and ready notion of what is not equality before the law and what is, on those grounds, unjust. If I commit a crime and the evidence is excellent, but my cousin is a good friend of the judge, and if I get off with a light sentence because of that friendship, that is not equality before the law. If I commit vandalism and the police refuse to prosecute because I come from an influential family, that is not equality before the law.

Now most of us, myself included, would like to believe that this sort of equality before the law is part of what the American legal system is all about. We don't have aristocratic titles in America, and our ideal, our goal, is that people who commit crimes for which there is good evidence will be prosecuted regardless of their parentage, their profession, or their "pull" by way of friendship with people in high places.

The reality is rather different from the ideal. Reality usually is. And this seems to me to be a rather egregious example of inequality before the law. Or would have been, were it not for the blogosphere.

A Pentagon analyst specializing in Islamic law has been removed from his position after coming into conflict with associates involved in outreach to the Usual Suspects, according to Bill Gertz. Andrew Bostom elaborates, and discusses an historical parallel, observing that the analyst, Stephen Coughlin, has demonstrated

...that “Jihad fi Sabil Allah”—“Jihad in the cause of Allah,” is the animating principle which underlies the threat of global jihad terrorism, and how this understanding should form the basis for rational, effective threat development assessment, and war planning.

Further interpretative efforts will be eschewed, inasmuch as this contributor already believes that he has entered the Twilight Zone, or some parallel universe or strange dimension hidden within a 'fold' of space-time, within which the law of non-contradiction no longer obtains, such that it is possible for jihad to be both jihad and not-jihad simultaneously.

Presented without commentary or emendation:

I assure the reader that I use words in quite a definite sense, but it is possible that he may use them in a different sense; and a muddle and misunderstanding of that sort does not even rise to the dignity of a difference of opinion.

Treating people as things is where most evil starts, and employees are real people not things. As real people employees have human natures, and human nature isn't Kantian universalism or Nietzschean will-to-power or whatever: human nature is social, human beings are raised by mothers and fathers in families, and not everyone is a father at all let alone is everyone equally a father all at the same time. To hire a father is to hire a person who has primary responsibility for materially providing for his family; such a hiring is a different kind of thing from hiring a teenager to mow the lawn or hiring an older mother with an empty nest looking for some extra cash to spend on the grandkids.

Employment as an institution which treats a father of five as a fungible productivity unit equivalent to a bachelor, or a single woman, or even a wife and mother, is a deliberate institutionalization of inhumanity. Deliberate institutionalization of inhumanity is a moral evil, so the institutionalization of equal pay for equal work is immoral.

That doesn't imply that in every case a woman should make less money than a man, or any such risible extrapolation. It doesn't mean that a family-man slacker should draw more pay than a diligent spinster. Human beings being what they are, exceptional circumstances are common and varied, judgement of individual circumstances is always required, and few things are more inhuman than "zero tolerance" categorical rules about the nuts and bolts of everyday life as actually lived.

But as some kind of categorical employment imperative backed by the force of law, the concept of equal pay for equal work is fundamentally inhuman and immoral. There is a basic difference between treating people as human beings with inherent dignity and treating them as interchangeable fungible productivity units, despite how amusing it is to say "fungible productivity unit".

I understand the objections: it is presently illegal to hire and set pay based on marital status and children, it is difficult to get employers to do the right thing, if fathers are morally entitled to greater pay - a living wage - than those who do not have the garnering of a living wage as their natural duty, well, capitalism as presently consitituted is going to lock fathers out of the workplace, fragment jobs into contract work and piecemeal jobs, and hire the cheapest workers. I get all that.

So much the worse for how things are presently constituted.

My purpose in posting the following is not to endorse what many might be tempted to surmise, namely, the forcible recreation of some hypothetical ideal peasant society, for such an objective, in any case, would be wholly infeasible. Rather, my purpose is twofold: first, to encourage a re-evaluation of a particular myth of inevitability, a notion which owes more to a forgetting of the historical contingency of a tradition of political economy, now assumed as the unalterable backdrop of our world-order, than to any actual necessity; and second, to observe that the threat, so often urged against even the faintest suggestions of distributism, of an augmentation of state power over society, is omnipresent and has many causes. In point of historical fact, such a growth of governmental power has occurred in tandem with the expansion of corporate power, both as a facilitator and a competitor. The matter is not so much one of eschewing certain objectives for reason of the fear of state power, for this threat is coextensive with political society itself, but of the prudent and judicious means by which the ownership of productive property can be made more widespread. It is a question, in other words, of what one might call an 'ownership society'.
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About fifteen years ago a few of us began to preach, in the old New Age and New Witness, a policy of small distributed property (which has since assumed the awkward but accurate name of Distributism), as we should have said then, against the two extremes of Capitalism and Communism. The first criticism we received was from the most brilliant Fabians, especially Mr. Bernard Shaw. And the form which that first criticism took was simply to tell us that our ideal was impossible. It was only a case of Catholic credulity about fairy-tales. The Law of Rent, and other economic laws, made it inevitable that the little rivulets of property should run down into the pool of plutocracy. In truth, it was the Fabian wit, and not merely the Tory fool, who confronted our vision with that venerable verbal opening, "If it were all divided up to-morrow —"

Nevertheless, we had an answer even in those days, and though we have since found many others, it will clarify the question if I repeat this point of principle. It is true that I believe in fairy-tales — in the sense that I marvel so much at what does exist that I am the readier to admit what might. I understand the man who believes in the Sea Serpent on the ground that there are more fish in the sea than ever came out of it. But I do it the more because the other man, in his ardour for disproving the Sea Serpent, always argues that there are not only no snakes in Iceland, but none in the world. Suppose Mr. Bernard Shaw, commenting on this credulity, were to blame me for believing (on the word of some lying priest) that stones could be thrown up into the air and hang there suspended like a rainbow. Suppose he told me tenderly that I should not believe this Popish fable of the magic stones, if I had ever had the Law of Gravity scientifically explained to me. And suppose, after all this, I found he was only talking about the impossibility of building an arch. I think most of us would form two main conclusions about him and his school. First, we should think them very ill-informed about what is really meant by recognizing a law of nature. A law of nature can be recognized by resisting it, or out-manoeuvring it, or even using it against itself, as in the case of the arch. And second, and much more strongly, we should think them astonishingly ill-informed about what has already been done upon this earth.

Reihan Salam, of the American Scene, a blog I consider essential reading, on account of the eclecticism and erudition of the contributors, is interested in what might be termed 'applied neoconservatism'. Someone else, though I cannot recall who, has employed that term, and though Salam would understandably wish to distance himself from much of contemporary neoconservatism, it is probably not too far wide of the mark. Salam, after all, does count David Brooks as a mentor. In any event, Salam and Ross Douthat have been collaborating on the development of a policy programme, initially termed Sam's Club Republicanism, and since elaborated into a forthcoming book, Grand New Party, the burden of which is to articulate a vision by which the Republican party can recapture the allegiances of the working middle class. I look forward to reading the book, though I've no inclination towards neoconservatism, inasmuch as it behooves one to ponder how the present 'adminstrative state' - which, alas, will be with us for a while - could be made more hospitable to ordinary folks.

Nevertheless, in the comments section of Salam's discussion of the divergence of Republican and Democratic populisms, with the optimism/pessimism divide being a critical psychological factor, there is enacted a confusion of categories with great bearing on some of the pressing political and economic issues of the moment.

An 82-year-old child molester, Tommy George, has been given a sentence of PROBATION by a jury here in Waco, Texas. (Read all about it here). How can this happen? A friend and colleague at Baylor offers an answer: "This is a Texas-Jury: `This is a guy we all like from the community; we know his kids; we can't lock him up.'"

Here's what one courtroom witness wrote online after the sentence of probation was handed down last October:

I was in the courtroom when the jury handed down the sentence of probation for Tommy George. After the decision was read, all of the lawyers and Tommy George went into the judges chambers for a few minutes. As he strolled out of the judges chambers, Tommy grinned and gave his family an energetic two thumbs up.

No jail time. Just a little money, a few days in court, and one night a year with the other perverts at the Halloween Pervert Party. Unbelievable.

Bill O'Reilly should know about this.

And now, for something completely different: Courtesy of the Lighten Up Brigade (aka my friend Eric V.), I give you the following grammatically correct English sentence:

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

This is properly paraphrased as

Bison from the city of Buffalo who are bullied by other bison from the city of Buffalo in turn bully yet other bison from the city of Buffalo.

Mentally supplying the word 'whom' or 'that' between the second and third occurrences of 'buffalo' helps a lot. Yet the sentence is correct without that word, as when the word 'that' is left out of the phrase "games people play."

Now, didn't you always want to know that?

Cross-posted at Extra Thoughts

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution recently calculated the total percentage of all federal taxes (payroll, corporate & excise) paid by various income groups, according to the CBO.

Here are the results:

...for these who die as cattle?

Laban Tall is a brilliant English blogger who specializes in chronicling the descent of his nation, once famous for civility, into violence and depravity, under the aegis of a criminal justice system that consistently puts the rights of offenders before those of victims.

Here is a recent report (he is quoting others):

(Note: Linked Website Contains Profanity)

While there is some justice to the observation that Chesterton romanticized the medieval peasantry - though even this observation can be, and has been, overstated - the notion that economic decentralization and its logical correlate, political decentralization, (whether one wishes to refer to this as old-fashioned American federalism, or, more philosophically, subsidiarity) are exercises in wild-eyed, Jacobinical romanticism is - to put a blunt point on the matter - nonsensical. While I've scant interest in unfolding a lengthy disquisition on the inviability of proposed energy alternatives, suffice it to state that the beginning of the end of the Era of Cheap Energy, with all that cheap energy has made possible, is nigh upon us, if it has not yet dawned. Globalization itself, though it manifestly presupposes cheap energy, promises a steady increase in the costs of energy, and has already occasioned the weakening of Big Oil as a geopolitical force; declining reserves, and the strategic nature of such resources, have precipitated a renewed movement to declare such resources 'strategic', and to shepherd them as forms of sovereign wealth, as opposed to commodities to be auctioned off to multinationals. Even, that is to state, if Peak Oil has not yet come to pass - though it must, in time, if it has not already - there will be exerted a steady upward pressure on energy prices; recessions may develop, but the economies of the world are predicated upon ceaseless expansion, meaning that anything necessary will be undertaken to stimulate Growth, that god of the age. And Growth demands energy; and energy is finite, and certainly only renewable at levels far below the plenitude to which we have become accustomed, and on the presupposition of which our societies constructed.

Herewith, therefore, James Kunstler on the absurdity of our growth-economy and its consequences:

A reader sent me a passle of recent clippings last week from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. It contained one story after another about the perceived need to build more highways in order to maintain "economic growth" (and incidentally about the "foolishness" of public transit). I understood that to mean the need to keep the suburban development system going, since that has been the real main source of the Sunbelt's prosperity the past 60-odd years. They cannot imagine an economy that is based on anything besides new subdivisions, freeway extensions, new car sales, and Nascar spectacles. The Sunbelt, therefore, will be ground-zero for all the disappointment emanating from this cultural disaster, and probably also ground-zero for the political mischief that will ensue from lost fortunes and crushed hopes.

It is my firm view that the most vital problem of American national security, the question upon which hinges our fortune in the war that came to our shores on September 11, in short, nothing less than the most pressing issue before the Republic, is whether or not we will comprehend the ineradicably Islamic character of the enemy.

Are we or are we not a people capable of embracing hard truth about the war that is made against us — the hard truth that the enemy finds his motivation, his inspiration, his justification, his rhetoric, even his strategy and tactics, in the authentic and primitive traditions of the religion of Muhammad? Are we or are we not a people possessed of the fortitude equal to this challenge? As the cliché goes, can we handle the truth?

It is an open question, I’m afraid; and I am convinced that it is one whose answer will tell for or against this Republic for generations for come.

It is in this context that we ought to read with alarm and indignation of the dismissal of Major Stephen Coughlin from the Pentagon. Coughlin worked as a counterterrorism analyst, and took an unsparing view of the Jihad. The document he authored concludes that a “working threat model” of the enemy must begin with “an unconstrained, undelegated, systematic, factual analysis of the threat doctrine that the enemy self-identifies as being driven by Islamic law.” The pulverizing fact is that our current model begins with an unthinking rejection of such analysis: it begins with a deliberate closing of the mind, enforced by the standard methods of intimidation and vilification. Coughlin, for instance, has been publicly castigated as a “Christian zealot with a pen.”

Elizabeth Goudge is a novelist I wish to recommend without exaggerating in either direction. While her novels vary widely, almost wildly, in literary quality, I have found several of them to be not only enjoyable but also spiritually valuable. They are no longer in print, but I stumbled upon her on the shelves of my local public library and was able to get the rest of her books through interlibrary loan. Of course, now I own my favorites as well as Goudge's autobiography.

Goudge’s three best novels, in my opinion, are The Dean’s Watch, The White Witch, and The Scent of Water.

This just over the wire:

HENDERSON, Nev. (AP) - Democrat Barack Obama says he won't just be a president for the American people, but the animals too.

"What about animal rights?" a woman shouted out during the candidate's town hall meeting outside Las Vegas Wednesday after he discussed issues that relate more to humans, like war, health care and the economy.

Obama responded that he cares about animal rights very much, "not only because I have a 9-year-old and 6-year-old who want a dog." He said he sponsored a bill to prevent horse slaughter in the Illinois state Senate and has been repeatedly endorsed by the Humane Society.

"I think how we treat our animals reflects how we treat each other," he said. "And it's very important that we have a president who is mindful of the cruelty that is perpetrated on animals."

Contrast those words with Obama's comments about the Supreme Court's 2007 opinion upholding the federal partial-birth abortion ban:

On the 2nd of February, 2000, George W. Bush gave a speech at Bob Jones University.

According to Wikipedia, it was just "a standard stump speech making no specific reference to the University."

But, at that time, Bob Jones University banned interracial dating. So, because he gave a speech there, George W. Bush was widely denounced by his political opponents for, at the very least, racial "insensitivity" - if not for actual racism. To this day, the event is constantly brought up by people on the left as a prime example of the Republican Party's so-called "Southern strategy" - i.e., it's wicked and cynical attempt to appeal to white racists through symbolic gestures, without actually endorsing their views publicly and explicitly.

One of the interesting dialectical pivot points in recent discussions we've had about employment discrimination is charity. At some point our Christian culture degenerated to the point where "charity" started to mean "acts which are nice to do but always optional". Another thing which seems to have come along for the ride is that charity has become more abstract: the notion seems to be that charity is a marketplace selection of opportunities from which we can arbitrarily choose what we want.

In the discussion on natural obligations employers have toward the men providing for families who work for them, this has manifested in two ways.

The first way has been to treat the contingent obligation an employer has to provide for the basic dignity and needs of employees, and in turn the loyalty and diligence that an employee owes to his employer, as optional: as things not required as a matter of reciprocal justice, but rather as gratuitous and completely optional gifts.

The second way this notion has manifested itself is in the idea that charity (and therefore justice) is fungible: that there is no particular charitable obligation of employer to employee in justice but rather that the employer's obligation is just to some abstract charity-in-general, an obligation (to the extent it is one at all: see the previous point) which can be discharged by giving to one of any number of charitable opportunities in a marketplace of opportunities.

Update: Apparently Gov. Huckabee changed his mind two days ago on the smoking ban. (HT: M.Z. Forrest in the combox)

This just in: (HT: Crunchy Cons)

"You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag," Huckabee said at a Myrtle Beach campaign event. "In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole, that's what we'd do."

Later, in Florence, he repeated the remarks. "I know what would happen if somebody comes to my state in Arkansas and tells us what to do, it doesn't matter what it is, tell us how to run our schools, tell us how to raise our kids, tell us what to do with our flag — you want to come tell us what to do with the flag, we'd tell them what to do with the pole."

In August 2007, Governor Huckabee said he supported a nationwide smoking ban. Juxtaposing these two commitments, what would Huckabee do with someone who wants to smoke tobacco rolled in the Confederate Flag?

Those interested in the homeschooling movement - and everybody should be interested in the homeschooling movement! - will want to read this interesting post by Alan Jacobs at The American Scene: "Confessions of a Christian Homeschooler".

Jacobs comes across as very reluctant convert, who really wants to remain faithful to the public schools. But a convert he is. Here's a quote:

Since I have no TV channels (just a box that works with the VCR) and have never seen "American Idol," I may have little right to comment on this story, but I thought it a kind of interesting one.

It seems that a young man named Bruce Dickson, age 19, a home-schooled Christian who has promised not to kiss a girl until his wedding night, wants to be a singer. So he competed (or whatever it is you do) on "American Idol," and got himself mocked by the folks in charge there for "not being a man." There's no comment in the story on how good his singing was.

One day last week, while running a number of errands on a day away from the office - the state of PA neglected to send us a renewal form for my wife's driver's license, and, on top of that, her mobile phone was pilfered - I noticed a bumper sticker new to me, printed in that semi-florid script which usually distinguishes vacuous new-agey pseudo-profundities. The text, which I have not been able to locate on the internet, read, in what is at least a passable paraphrase, "The blessing of life lies in the consciousness of the blessing."

It has just been made accessible online on the website of the Journal of Law and Religion, which will publish the review in its forthcoming issue, vol. 23 (2007-08): 101-104. You can find the review here.

One exhibit among many in such an inquest might be James Bowman's American Spectator essay lambasting John McCain as a man lacking in the loyalty department. While I'm scarcely a fan of John McCain, the ambitious politician, questioning his loyalty and, by necessary implication, as loyalty is a component of honour, his integrity as well, strikes me as desperate and desperately misguided.

In context, the accusation is even worse:

But there are other parts of his record that bring him closer to the news media and (not, of course, coincidentally) the Democratic Party's presidential candidates in his understanding of honor. For such people, as Mr. Stephens says, "if it means anything at all to them, it seems to be mainly in the sense of the good opinion of America's traditional friends, many of whom opposed the Iraq venture from the start."

As an example, I would mention the countenance and the credibility that the senator's animadversions on "torture" by the Bush administration give to America's enemies, for whom the t-word is an invaluable propaganda tool. An essential element of honor has always been loyalty, and loyalty has never been Senator McCain's strongest suit. Rather, he has always been proud of being a "maverick" -- a man who likes to be thought of as one whose friends and comrades are less important to him than his own exquisite conscience.

Jonah Goldberg's recently-published tome, Liberal Fascism, has, as one might imagine given the incendiary title, generated much controversy, much of which can be digested, albeit from its author's perspective, over at the liberal fascism blog at National Review Online. Intrigued by the authorial intention of disclosing the affinities of certain strands of progressivism with darker ideological shades, not to mention the essential leftism of fascist ideology, a theme dear to the heart of every conservative who has ever assimilated Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's Leftism Revisited, I purchased a copy with every intention of settling in for a painstaking reading, provided only that initial impressions did not confirm my suspicions.

Alas, reading the dust jacket and perusing the contents and index, followed by a spell or two of unsystematic browsing, only confirmed my initial suspicions: Goldberg employs, not merely a generic typology of fascism, but a typology so diffuse, indistinct, and indiscriminate that the apparent operational logic associates things with fascism merely because real, historical fascists may have said/done/advocated/liked similar things. No end of analytical mischief results from such imprecision; illustrative of the dynamic might be the association of organic foods and vegetarianism with fascism, merely on the grounds that actual fascists occasionally manifested an interest in such things. That things possess a distinct essence or nature, and that these things can be situated in radically different social and theoretical contexts, depending upon the narrative framework within which they acquire collective meaning, are considerations altogether too nuanced for Goldberg's labours. Those labours indeed seem to involve piling together a veritable mountain of things of which the author disapproves, on the basis of a few superficial resemblances - not even family resemblances, necessarily - which suggests the conclusion that they are substantively similar - except that Goldberg often shrinks from this conclusion. He'll intimate that something is hinky, aver that he's not really saying that anything is hinky, and leave the reader with the nonrational sense that that something is just off. A shrewd rhetorical performance, to be certain, though not a style commensurate with the gravity of the subject matter.

Apropos of this methodological inadequacy, James Poulos, following upon Austin Bramwell's decimating review of Liberal Fascism, suggests that Goldberg is engaged in a thoroughly postmodern performance, one that threatens to evacuate authority from the conversation: