What’s Wrong with the World

Some interesting things are afoot in the conservative movement, including something about which I was made aware just last week, The Culture Project. Here's its press release:
(cross-posted)

Here we have Liberalism concentrated into its barest essence: Men shall be coerced (softly coerced, but coerced nonetheless) to expose themselves to great risk of life and limb in order to satisfy an abstraction and a consumer passion.

Neighborhoods in this city can change as fast as the weather: stately Victorians sliding rapidly into forlorn hovels, well-tended flower beds giving way to weeds and refuse. No one knows this better than pizza deliverers, who have been threatened, robbed, assaulted and even killed in the line of duty.

Such incidents are why many restaurants and other businesses refuse to deliver to some parts of town. To these companies, it is just common sense. To the people who live in these areas, it is discrimination.

The Board of Supervisors here has agreed with residents and passed the first ordinance in the country making it illegal for businesses to single out parts of their normal service area for no deliveries.

So pizza delivery companies shall be directed to put their employees at risk, because failure to do this is discrimination, a crime uglier and wickeder than murder.

Two years ago, for example, Samuel Reyes, 22, an employee for Domino's, delivered a pizza to an apartment in the Excelsior district in the south part of the city and was accosted on the way back to his car by a man with a gun. A scuffle ensued, and Mr. Reyes was shot to death.

Here in this madness, in this heart of darkness, we see the unmistakable tyrannical impulses of Liberalism: its hatred and falsification of any meaningful notion of liberty.

Rod Dreher has penned some good observations on the latest dust-up in the race contest for the presidency. You can read it here. I published these comments in the combox:

Jeff Culbreath has up a brilliant and elegiac essay on "playgrounds" as a metaphor for civilization. The author of the original metaphor is also the author of the title of this blog. Mr. Culbreath draws out some Chestertonian intimations, and adds a few of his own. Go read it.

Just saw this on Lucieanne.com:

Barack Obama's campaign responded sharply to a new McCain webad depicting Obama as a parody of a biblical prophet. "It’s downright sad that on a day when we learned that 51,000 Americans lost their jobs, a candidate for the presidency is spending all of his time and the powerful platform he has on these sorts of juvenile antics," said spokesman Hari Sevugan. (Snip) The ad, released only on the Internet, is the latest in a series mocking the Democratic nominee.

C'mon, you don't fight humor by sounding like the Church Chat Lady or Aunt Esther. You fight humor with humor. Here are some lines that I thought of on the way home from the gym today:

I had never heard of Cathleen Falsani until this evening while surfing the internet. I came across her forthcoming book on the Zondervan website. She seemed like a nice enough lady, the sort of person with which I could have easily imagined myself becoming friends. But then I read these comments of hers, published on the Huffington Post, on the occasion of Jerry Falwell's death:

I don't post much on immigration. It is a messy subject, and I'm not informed enough on the reams of statistics and standard apologetical moves to be able to add much to the discussion; though every now and then I get the conceit that I may have something unique to say on the subject.

However, I do quite often take an interest in the various ways in which our politics degenerates into unreason. You can think of it as a lazy man's activity in a target-rich environment. So, motivated by a recent thread of Maximos', I wanted to point out a particular way in which our discussion of immigration degenerates into unreason.

...has died.

Rest in peace, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

You can read the whole thing here. Or you can stay right here and read it below. From the vantage point of the present, it is both prophecy and prescription:

On the occasion of celebrating the life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, let us not forget that at the core of his critique of both West and East is the prevalence of a fanatical "Godlessness" that its present-day proponents (aka, "the New Atheists") claim is "Reason." Thus, it should not surprise us that there are those among us--the Godless, if you will--who presently suggest, however modestly, a permanent sequestering of the religious citizen, from the realms of cultural influence and power, on the grounds that he or she is dangerous and/or unfit for the "rationality" that the public square requires.

We need not look further than Professor P. Z. Myers and Professor Daniel Dennett. The former believes that nothing is sacred, except his incorrigible right to say that nothing is sacred. (Narcissism, by the way, is not a political philosophy). The latter, author of Breaking the Spell, apparently has suggested that certain Baptists be placed in zoos, which, for Professor Peter Singer is just a Gulag for non-human animals.

From Time Magazine, February 28, 2005

(cross-posted)

This is a great little dialogue. I have trouble picking my favorite line, but I suspect it will come from the woman in the discussion, not because she is a woman, but because they have given her several of the best lines. For example, "Why do we need 2,000 civil servants to funnel money from A to B?" "Two thousand private schools deal with these sorts of problems every day of the week."

Mind you, I'm not advocating publically funded education--not in an ideal world. But you have to walk before you can run, and lampooning stuffy people who think parents are not qualified even to choose their child's school is a good way to start.

What's perhaps a tad frightening is the thought that there are people (British people, especially?) who actually believe that parents are not qualified to raise their children. I notice that at one point where Humphrey says that, there is no laugh track. Let's hope it was an oversight.

I know nothing about this show and had never heard of it until I received this link by e-mail. Perhaps my readers are better informed.

Our silent partner at his very best:

Here, and here.

She promises a country with no hanging chads!

HT: Al in the combox

My copy of the Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann seems to have vanished into the ether as a result of my move last November, so I am unable to consult it to determine the context of the observations quoted by Rod Dreher, to the effect that Solzhenitsyn was a Russian romantic, a maximalist who minimized the faults of his nation, loved it above all earthly - and perhaps heavenly - things, confabulated a romantic ideology of Russian messianism, and was consumed by a passionate detestation of all things Western. Honestly, the entire line of critique rings false. That Schmemann, ordinarily possessed of a penetrating discernment, could so egregiously misunderstand Solzhenitsyn, both as an artist and intellectual, only demonstrates the fallibility and partiality that besets each of us. If I had to venture a critical interpretation of Schmemann's incomprehension of Solzhenitsyn, it would center on the disjunction between the former's conviction that modernity posed a serious challenge to the credibility of the inherited forms of Orthodoxy, and that the latter regarded the philosophical underpinnings of modernity as a load of twaddle, the proper response to which was asceticism, self-limitation. Schmemann, I think, regarded the challenges of modernity perhaps too seriously, as something with which we would have to wrestle indefinitely; Solzhenitsyn, having endured Applied High Modernity, perceived it - more profoundly - as a serious challenge proceeding from all the wrong questions. Dismiss the questions, and challenges lose much of their salience; they are no longer properly existential, but more manageably practical.

The accusations of Russian romanticism and utopianism are so preposterous, so utterly at variance with the tenor of Solzhenitsyn's work, that I will pass over them - I trust that anyone who has so much as lightly skimmed one of his works will grasp how he associates the horrors of Soviet communism with the failings of his people, albeit not in the essentialist manner common in the West - and proceed directly to the question of Solzhenitsyn's apprehension of the West. The fundamentals of that critique are found in the celebrated Harvard commencement address: the West is no model for the world, sunken as it is in a vulgar materialism born of Enlightenment rationalism, a despiritualized world-image in which we strive to satisfy our desires to the uttermost, brooking no limitation upon our appetites, which profane every humane, moral, and spiritual good. This theme is revisited in the September 14, 1993 address to the International Academy of Philosophy:

"Unitary Executive Theory" is perhaps a term of art, but it is one that captures a school of constitutional thought, according to which the vesting clause of Article II, section I - which declares that the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America - confers vast unenumerated powers upon the executive branch, and, according to certain of its theoreticians, plenary powers, such that the Constitution is read to impose strictures upon the courts, and upon the Congress, yet none upon the executive. It is the ideology of the President as the Decider, the mystagogue who, by invocation of 'national security', or 'emergency powers', decrees exceptions to the law - himself as an exception, to whom the law does not apply, as the invocation renders him the sole judge of his own determinations, and exceptions to the process of law, by which persons become simultaneously entitled and not entitled to legal protections and procedures, at his discretion. It is the legal philosophy undergirding the infamous torture memorandums of John Yoo, war criminal, in defense of which he averred that the president could order a child's testicles to be crushed, if by doing so, a terrorist might be 'encouraged' to divulge information.

Alas, for such sibyls hymning the imperium and its pretenses of unlimited power, the foundation of this doctrine in the Constitution is negligible. According to Gene Healy, author of The Cult of the Presidency,

...That the presence of Muslims in any non-Islamic society is the condition of the inevitability of their attempt to establish sharia as normative:

Manifestly, this fellow is deluded as to the intentions of Europeans; the publication of the cartoons that served as the pretext for riots and protests was not a calculated strategy on the part of Europeans, an attempt to provoke the Muslims to such wrath that there would obtain a pretext for the mass expulsion of 30 million followers of Mahomet. Nevertheless, his advice to Muslims in Europe - keep on the down low, pursue respectable careers and lives, so as to better propagate Islam - is shrewd counsel indeed.

(HT: Evan McLaren)

It turns out, friends, that this here website — yes indeed none other than What’s Wrong with the World itself —, has a connection to Paul Butterfield of the eponymous band which backed Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s. ‘Tis true. The man of whom Dylan later said he knew no better guitarist, whose band played with Dylan during the first disillusionment of the modern sans culottes, in their belief that they could claim this great American troubadour for their own, is first cousin once-removed to one of our Contributors.

There have been many moments of shattering disillusionment for our poor sans culottes, our dear hippies and hipsters, in the drama of Dylan’s career — moments of forced realization that this the troubadour did not, in fact, share their project, their dreams, their Utopia. “It wasn’t better world a-coming, you know. It just wasn’t that,” says someone in Martin Scorsese’s fine documentary No Direction Home. He is speaking of Dylan performance at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965, when Bob Dylan stood on stage before thousands of folk fans and sold out, right there, in front of their eyes.

He went electric, horror of horrors, and (over some considerable booing and heckling) delivered some of the greatest performances of some of his greatest songs.

He began with “Maggie’s Farm,” in its hard-blues variation, a song of marvelously infectious defiance and provocation which only the dullest, most inebriated could have mistaken for anything else. (Watch and listen here.) He played “Like a Rolling Stone” (watch and listen here), and I do wonder if it has ever been played better. Later he played “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” (watch and listen) and for many of the leftists, who wanted “topical songs,” i.e., leftist propaganda, it was indeed.

Of course he did not “sell out,” then or ever: Certainly not a few years later when he answered the Vietnam protest movement with simple country songs about loss and regret. Certainly not a dozen or so years later when he converted to the Cross of Christ, the most radical thing a man may ever do. Certainly not two years ago when he solidified beyond most doubt his mastery of his art, above all (in my view) with a song which is named after, and begins with an adaptation of the second verse of the first chapter of Genesis.

Read about it here. Two comments by Edwards stand out as particularly loathsome:

In an interview for broadcast tonight on Nightline, Edwards told ABC News correspondent Bob Woodruff he did have an affair with 44-year old Rielle Hunter, but said that he did not love her.... [emphasis added]

Edwards made a point of telling Woodruff that his wife's cancer was in remission when he began the affair with Hunter. Elizabeth Edwards has since been diagnosed with an incurable form of the disease.

Am I the only one that is bewildered by these statements? Why tell the world that you did not love a woman with whom you had an affair? Why inflict more public shame on your former mistress by announcing through the media that you in fact used her as a means to facilitate your orgasms and nothing more?

And what of his second statement, that he had this loveless recreational sexfest when his wife had regained her health? What sort of mind thinks that this caveat--his wife's recovery--somehow diminishes the wickedness of his act? If anything, it increases it. For if we juxtapose Edwards' two assertions, he is in fact claiming that he engaged in loveless sex during a juncture in time when his beloved wife was no longer burdened by an illness. So, rather than celebrating his wife's recovery by renewing their intimacy, he elected to objectify another woman, who was under his employ, for the primary purpose of facilitating his own pleasure.

Being a person with some sympathies for some aspects of libertarianism in economics, I have always been prone to resist the application of the word 'exploitation'. For years I probably would have said that I didn't believe there was such a thing as exploitation as some separate natural kind of wrong, that whenever there was a real wrong done that got labeled in that way, it could be analyzed into some other category--trying to induce someone to do something wrong, for example, exercising coercion, or engaging in fraud. And I am still unlikely to agree with a lot of people who use the word frequently, especially about wages. I'm probably going to say that some of the things they want to label with that word are not even wrong, much less instances of exploitation.

But I now do believe that there is such a thing as exploitation.

Via Jeff Culbreath's blog comes a bit of good news: The same California court that earlier declared home schooling illegal for parents without teaching credentials has reversed its ruling on this point entirely.

Clearly, the court reads What's Wrong with the World, as it expressly referred to the fingerprinting exemption for parents passed by the CA legislature. Well, okay, no. I got that bit of info. from HSLDA, and HSLDA filed an amicus brief that brought it to the court's attention.

I write shortly after rolling out of bed, awakened at far too unripe an hour by my children. Nonetheless, we will soon be readying ourselves for Liturgy. As our parish includes both a decent contingent of Russians, and a sizable contingent of Georgians from the wider area, given the intensifying conflict between the two nations, I anticipate two possible scenarios in addition to the proper one of everyone attending to the transcendent proceedings of the Liturgy and minding his own political business otherwise: either there will be some tension between the contingents, conditioned by the relative cosmopolitanism of the Russians, most of whom are American citizens grateful in most respects for the opportunity to depart the uncertainties of the Motherland, and the fervent patriotism/nationalism of the Georgians - or the Georgians will all remain home, endeavouring to receive news from home and to establish contact with relatives. My prayers, with those of the Orthodox Patriarchs of Georgia and Russia, are for a speedy resolution of the conflict.

For those interested in commentary on the unfolding conflict, one can do no better than to peruse Daniel Larison's extensive coverage of the journalistic and political responses and apologetical maneuvers, all concerning a conflict which, despite the frothing of demented Russophobes, Cold War nostalgics, blinkered utopians, tendentious hegemonists, and selective enthusiasts for the Great Game of Petroleum Geopolitics, implicates no legitimate American interest.

America imprudently extended security assistance to a small nation with no connection to any vital American strategic interest, primarily as an element of a grand geopolitical strategy in which a non-prostrated Russia does not factor, and in which, as many current Western commentators are openly acknowledging, the control of Central Asian petroleum resources does factor, notwithstanding the manifest fact that Western dependence upon Russian petroleum reserves, and the reserves of Russian-allied states, cannot be mitigated substantially, let alone eliminated, so long as Russia remains an intact and functional state. American strategists cannot abide the commonsensical observation that patriotism means that citizens of other nations love their countries as much as we love ours, and labour under the delusions of exceptionalism and indispensability, not to mention the truly bizarre assumption that, if not for various false consciousnesses, citizens of other nations would be delighted to dwell under our tutelage and dominion.

Moreover, it is worth noting that the Russian campaign on behalf of South Ossetia is incontrovertibly the former's prophesied response to the West's world-historical blunder in facilitating the independence of Kosovo: the United States cannot logically traduce the international order of sovereign states at will, and then turn about to demand that other great powers respect that order where it both suits the declared interest of the U.S. for them to do so, but suits the interests of those powers to modify that order (It is worth mentioning, for what it is worth, that the status quo in South Ossetia simply was de facto autonomy from Georgia), and it is loathsome to listen to Bush administration officials, and John McCain, one of whose advisers was until recently a lobbyist for the Georgian government, prattle on about the sovereignty of Georgia. Yes, yes, we understand all of that. Now, hegemonists, heal yourselves!

Bottom line: shades of grey, and no legitimate and objective American interest. The outstanding questions concern how America, which has Georgia crawling with military, diplomatic, and intelligence officials, could have been caught unawares by the preparations, on the part of all involved parties, for the present hostilities. Perhaps they were simply so naive as to believe that they needn't have prioritized their geopolitical objectives, that they could indeed have their cake and eat it too, such that, regardless of 'transient' increases in regional tensions, the "logic of history" was on their side. That prospect is all too probable, and all too terrifying, signifying that our establishment is incapable of learning from history, even recent history; they learn nothing, but forget no grudges.

Courtesy of Keith Pavlischek at the First Things blog:

From the Westminster Shorter Catechism:
Q. 14. What is sin? A. Sin is any want of conformity unto, or transgression of, the law of God.

From the Baltimore Catechism:
Q. 278. What is actual sin? A. Actual sin is any willful thought, word, deed, or omission contrary to the law of God.

From Senator Obama:
Q. Do you believe in sin? OBAMA: Yes. Q. What is sin? OBAMA: Being out of alignment with my values.

Not that there is anything to the chatter about Senator Obama’s “Messiah complex,” mind you.

(Update: My response to the review can be found here)

Northeastern University political and legal theorist Eileen McDonagh, author of Breaking the Abortion Deadlock: From Choice to Consent (Oxford University Press, 1996), recently reviewed my book Defending Life: A Moral and Legal Case Against Abortion Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2007). The review was published online by the Law & Politics section of the American Political Science Association. You can find it here.

I will be working on a reply over the next couple of days. In the meantime, I'd like to get your take on Professor McDonagh's review.

Regular readers of my personal blog and my comments elsewhere no doubt realize that I am unsympathetic to appeals to "reasonable men can differ" when we are talking about, literally, a willful holocaust of millions of innocents.

No, reasonable men cannot differ. Unreasonable men will differ, of course, but that is a different matter.

In point of fact, I see this as another riff on the infamous Cuomo-riffic "personally opposed, but" reasoning. Some folks claim to be personally opposed to voting for Barack Obama, the most zealous pro-abortion Presidential candidate ever: that is, they won't be voting for him themselves. Yet these same people defend as reasonable the choice of others to vote for him. I'm not sure which is worse, frankly. At least the man who says he is going to vote for Obama has the courage of his (wrong) convictions. The "personally opposed" camp, though, is willing to scream for wiggle room for others to vote for the man who personally blocked passage of the Induced Infant Liability Act in the great state of Illinois, without having the courage to do so themselves.

Senator Barack Obama may have committed an "out of alignment with his values" when discussing his voting record on infanticide. See the stories here and here.

If only these newborns were Alaskan Caribou aborted at Gitmo...... A boy can dream, can't he?