A Continuing Survey of Religion and Public
Life
Richard John Neuhaus
Copyright (c) 1995
First Things 58 (December 1995): 65-76.
This Month:
The Uses of Envy
There is no end to efforts to define what makes a book a classic.
Inevitably, there is a strongly subjective element here. A book that one
engages at a formative stage of his thinking may not be the greatest
book on the subject, but it is the book that forever shapes one's
thinking about that subject. Numerous other books and articles appear on
the same subject, some of them very good, but they immediately call to
mind, and are overshadowed by, that earlier work that one begins to call
a classic. At least that has been my experience.
A case in point is Helmut Schoeck's Envy: A Theory of Social
Behavior (1969). In this instance, the experience is shared by many
others who deem this study a classic. Schoeck, then a professor of
sociology at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, provides a
fascinating account of the myriad ways in which thinkers have through
the years devised elaborate theories of equality that frequently
disguise the passion that motors such theories, namely, the vice of
envy. From Roman and medieval "sumptuary laws" to this century's
socialist schemes for the redistribution of wealth and the abolition of
private property, envy has been a powerful but little acknowledged force
in political and economic thought.
Schoeck once more comes to mind because of what appears to be a growing
number of articles these days lamenting what we are told is an alarming
concentration of wealth of America. Particularly in religious circles,
this development is routinely condemned as unjust, obscene, and so
forth. Such concentration, it is asserted (also by some of our readers),
demonstrates once again the morally intolerable circumstance in which
the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, and so forth. Such rhetoric
is employed to barely concealed partisan purposes, aiming to demonstrate
that periods of economic growth and perceived prosperity only exacerbate
the injustice of the rich getting richer, and so forth.
Except for ideologues on the marginal left, writers today are hesitant
to advocate the more nakedly socialist proposals for creating a more
egalitarian, i.e., more "just," distribution of wealth. The more common
proposal is that dramatic inequalities of wealth pose the danger of
generating socially destabilizing resentments of inherited class
privilege. Now in fact, and much to the distress of economic
egalitarians, the American people have proven themselves to be
stubbornly unresentful of the rich. In the view of many, this is a chief
reason why more candidly socialist proposals have never gained much of a
popular constituency in this country, in sharp contrast to, for example,
developed societies in Europe. Americans, rightly or wrongly, have this
idea that the future is open and the rich of today represent the success
that they or their children may achieve tomorrow. In addition, and
equally frustrating to the practitioners of the politics of resentment,
study after study suggests that most Americans do not think wealth is
anywhere near being the main measure of a successful life. Although he
does not make a point of it, Schoeck's analysis of the politics of envy
highlights yet another dimension of what is commonly called American
exceptionalism.
This is written upon my return from our fourth annual seminar in Poland
on Christian teaching regarding the free and virtuous society. (We call
it the Centesimus Annus Seminar, referring to the 1991 encyclical on
these questions.) The students from Central and Eastern Europe, while
recognizing that the virtues (as well as the vices) of the free economy
are beginning to take hold in their countries, are almost unanimous in
saying that people who are getting rich are thought to be crooks. One
reason for that is that many of them are crooks, especially former
Communist officials who use their connections to turn state-owned
enterprises and regulatory powers into private wealth, with the help of
economic mafias that are not restrained by the legal and cultural
systems essential to a genuinely free economy. Too often in these
countries, property is, as a matter of simple fact, theft. Perhaps it
takes several generations of experience in which people are seen to be
producing and accumulating wealth in a morally legitimate manner in
order to build up a social immunity to the politics of envy and
resentment. We can only hope that the formerly Communist societies are
given time for that.
Fifteen Minute Aristocrats
American exceptionalism does not necessarily betoken our moral
superiority as a people. Numerous circumstances conspired to create our
relative freedom from the politics of economic envy, not least among
them being the absence of an established aristocracy of inherited
wealth. Our aristocracies of "the rich and famous" have more to do with
the celebritydom of Andy Warhol's famous fifteen minutes than with great
families of inherited privilege. There are, of course, the Rockefellers,
DuPonts, and Kennedys, but in terms of wealth beyond the dreams of
avarice, they are put in the shade by the Wall Street artists of junk
bonds, leveraged buyouts, and other devices that reward individuals with
annual incomes of many millions.
For such people money is typically not for extravagant spending nor for
establishing dynasties but mainly a way of keeping score in the games of
economic combat. And, no doubt with some exceptions, the millions of
Americans who follow their goings-on in the celebrity magazines resent
them no more than they resent athletes with multimillion-dollar
contracts. Which is not to say that there are not a substantial number
of Americans who are ideologically tutored in the vice of envy,
embracing it as a virtue when it is dressed up as commitment to
equality. Once again we are hearing calls for higher taxes on
inheritances to prevent a widening of class divisions. Such calls are up
against the current political enthusiasm for tax cutting, and so are not
likely to be enacted, but they fuel the morally satisfying feelings of
those given to a high state of indignation at the supposed injustice of
the system.
As it happens, inheritance plays a very small role in the distribution
of wealth. For instance, a new study released by Rand, a research group
based in Santa Monica, California, indicates that the main determinants
of wealth are health, marital status, and income. "More than 90 percent
of current wealth inequalities have nothing to do with financial
inheritances," says the study, based on research done in cooperation
with economists at the University of Michigan. Actually it is much more
than 90 percent, since, according to Robert D. Reischauer of the
Brookings Institution, inherited wealth is a major factor for perhaps
less than 1 percent of the population, a sector so small that it is hard
to generalize about the people in it. For the top 5 percent of
households with someone fifty-one to sixty years old, assets total
$843,598. Take away inheritances, and the figure is $780,641, not much
of a difference.
Health is a big factor, for the obvious reason that healthy people can
work longer and have lower medical bills. More interesting is the
marriage factor. Married respondents had four times the median assets of
divorced respondents. Is it because married people tend to accumulate
wealth, or because savers tend to be married? Nobody knows, but it
appears that the old song about love and marriage applies also to wealth
and marriage-they go together like horse and carriage.
And so to the indignant reader who is outraged by economic inequalities,
no, I can't work up much interest in hiking taxes on inheritances. I am
simply not offended by the report that Ross Perot, for example, has
assets of $2.5 billion. Presumably he's not stuffing it in a mattress
but has it invested where it is, in the language of Centesimus
Annus, expanding the circle of productivity and exchange. Studies
tell us that if we had a one-time redistribution of all the wealth in
America in an absolutely equal manner, the result would be about $20,000
for every man, woman, and child. It's the kind of thing that could only
be done once, and would deprive economic egalitarians of a "social
justice" agenda for next year.
If I sound insouciant about economic inequality, it's not because of
ideological enthusiasm for capitalism but because I believe with Dr.
Johnson that a man is seldom so innocently employed as in the making of
money. It should be strongly encouraged among the poor, a suggestion
that only offends those who assume that the poor are humanly
incompetent, or who despise the lowly beginnings of making money by, for
instance, holding a steady job. To be sure, it's not all innocence. We
are told that it's near impossible for a rich man to enter the Kingdom
of God, and we must be concerned for the souls of the very rich-and for
the souls of the slothful, the indignantly judgmental, and the envious.
And for our own souls, of course. Prompted by the current discussion of
economic inequality, and by letters from readers who are worried about
our neglect of the subject, I revisited Envy: A Theory of Social
Behavior. It's status as a classic again seems secure. It is highly
recommended Schoeck therapy, so to speak, for those who confuse envy and
resentment with a passion for justice.
The Triumph of Imagology
Milan Kundera has served up some delightful, and sometimes d
isturbing, entertainments, such as The Joke, The Book of Laughter
and Forgetting, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
Born in what was Czechoslovakia, and now living in France, Kundera
relentlessly and often hilariously exposed "the lie" of Communism and
proposed the alternative of what Vaclav Havel called "living in truth."
Kundera's more recent Immortality is less a novel than a
collage of cultural and philosophical commentary strung out on the bare
bones of a story. But it has marvelous moments more than worth the
reading.
He notes, for instance, the triumph of "imagology" over ideology. Toward
the end, he says, it was obvious that Marxism was no longer a logical
system of ideas, "but only a series of suggestive images and slogans (a
smiling worker with a hammer; black, white, and yellow men fraternally
holding hands; the dove of peace rising to the sky; and so on and so
on)." Not only with Marxism but much more generally, we were witnessing
a "planetary transformation of ideology into imagology," and he suspects
that there is no turning back.
"Of course, imagologues existed long before they created the powerful
institutions we know today. Even Hitler had his personal imagologue, who
used to stand in front of him and patiently demonstrate the gestures to
be made during speeches so as to fascinate the crowds. But if that
imagologue, in an interview with the press, had amused the Germans by
describing Hitler as incapable of moving his hands, he would not have
survived his indiscretion by more than a few hours. Nowadays, however,
the imagologue not only does not try to hide his activity, but often
even speaks for his politician clients, explains to the public what he
taught them to do or not to do, how he told them to behave, what formula
they are likely to use, and what tie they are likely to wear. We needn't
be surprised by this self-confidence: in the last few decades, imagology
has gained a historic victory over ideology."
The triumph of imagology is a kind of "virtual reality" that has
displaced reality. "All ideologies have been defeated: in the end their
dogmas were unmasked as illusions and people stopped taking them
seriously. For example, Communists used to believe that in the course of
capitalist development the proletariat would gradually grow poorer and
poorer, but when it finally became clear that all over Europe workers
were driving to work in their own cars, they felt like shouting that
reality was deceiving them. Reality was stronger than ideology. And it
is in this sense that imagology surpassed it: imagology is stronger than
reality, which has anyway long ceased to be what it was for my
grandmother, who lived in a Moravian village and still knew everything
through her own experience: how bread is baked, how a house is built,
how a pig is slaughtered and the meat smoked, what quilts are made of,
what the priest and the schoolteacher think about the world; she met the
whole village every day and knew how many murders were committed in the
country over the last ten years; she had, so to speak, personal control
over reality, and nobody could fool her by maintaining that Moravian
agriculture was thriving when people at home had nothing to eat. My
Paris neighbor spends his time in an office, where he sits for eight
hours facing an office colleague, then he sits in his car and drives
home, turns on the TV, and when the announcer informs him that in the
latest public opinion poll the majority of Frenchmen voted their country
the safest in Europe (I recently read such a report), he is overjoyed
and opens a bottle of champagne without ever learning that three thefts
and two murders were committed on his street that very day."
Although he does not mention the encyclical Veritatis Splendor,
Kundera offers a nice explanation of what John Paul II deplores as "the
democratization of truth." Kundera writes: "Public opinion polls are the
critical instrument of imagology's power, because they enable imagology
to live in absolute harmony with the people. The imagologue bombards
people with questions: how is the French economy prospering? is there
racism in France? is racism good or bad? who is the greatest writer of
all time? is Hungary in Europe or in Polynesia? which world politician
is the sexiest? And since for contemporary man reality is a continent
visited less and less often and, besides, justifiably disliked, the
findings of polls have become a kind of higher reality, or to put it
differently: they have become the truth. Public opinion polls are a
parliament in permanent session, whose function it is to create truth,
the most democratic truth that has ever existed. Because it will never
be at variance with the parliament of truth, the power of imagologues
will always live in truth, and although I know that everything human is
mortal, I cannot imagine anything that could break this power."
One must hope that that is an excessively bleak assessment. So long as
there are people like Kundera around to point out what is happening, the
spell of imagology is not complete.
A Lutheran Valedictory
Remembering all and learning nothing, or at least very little. The
thought comes to mind upon reading a valedictory interview with Herbert
W. Chilstrom, recently retired head of the Evangelical Lutheran Church
in America (ELCA). Few who know him will dispute that Bishop Chilstrom
is a gentleman of earnest purpose and modest demeanor. Few who know the
ELCA will dispute that his leadership was lackluster at best and
disastrous at worst. During his eight years at the helm, the ELCA,
formed in 1987, sailed into waters that were alternately tumultuously
stormy or becalmed in institutional stasis, but without evident
destination. There is that old question about what do you get when you
cross a Unitarian and a Jehovah's Witness. Answer: Someone who goes
around knocking on doors with nothing in particular in mind.
To return to the nautical metaphor, during eight years of drift and
storm, financial support fell off drastically. Chilstrom says it was
"excruciating" to deal with a $17 million budget deficit. "But, when it
was done and I realized, 'OK, we can live with this,' it was
satisfying." The captain was unflappable. He regrets that mission work
came to a standstill and other programs could not be funded. "I don't
know what the answer is," he says. "We just can't seem to move our
people to give more than 2 to 3 percent of their spendable income."
There is no mention of the fact that, as in most mainline Protestant
churches, the people continue to give generously, but funds are
increasingly withheld from national bureaucracies in which the lay
people-along with pastors and regional bishops-have lost confidence.
Asked about other disappointments, Chilstrom responds: "Then, the
church's discussion of human sexuality and especially the inability to
deal with the gay/lesbian question weighs heavily on me. I recognize, of
course, the centuries of attitudes about this subject. And I know that
not everyone has been forced to move through this question as I have
because of my position of leadership as a synod and churchwide bishop,
but I feel keenly disappointed that this church has not been able to
convey to our gay/lesbian members-brothers and sisters in Christ-that
they stand on level ground with us. It's almost a leprosy attitude that
many have toward gay and lesbian people. I've become reconciled to the
fact that the church can't deal with this in a formal way. We may have
to work through it in individual, personal, family, and workplace
settings before much progress is made."
The reference is to an ELCA proposal for radically changed teaching on
human sexuality that provoked a massive negative reaction from the
parishes. Chilstrom says he was shocked by the "vitriolic anger" in some
of those reactions, but nowhere does he recognize that there were
substantive arguments advanced against the proposed departure from
biblical and Lutheran tradition. The problem, in his view, is only that
"not everyone has been forced to move through this question as I have."
He adds, "While I think I have done a great deal to frame the questions
and move people along in this discussion, have I done enough? I don't
know." In his impenetrable insouciance, the question apparently does not
occur to him whether there are people every bit as thoughtful, informed,
experienced, and compassionate as he who have arrived at different
conclusions about what is normative in Christian sexual ethics.
And he has another disappointment: "We have not made as much progress in
multicultural changes as we hoped. Our commitment to the
representational principles is right . . . but I don't sense that at the
grass roots there's a vigorous commitment to becoming a multicultural
church. Quite the opposite." Quite the opposite indeed. From its
beginning as a self-declared "new church," the ELCA structured itself
along rigid lines of "representational principles" in the form of
quotas, which means that every question of faith, life, and mission is
decided not by reference to truth (e.g., the Bible, sixteenth-century
confessions, or theological reflection) but by the sensibilities and
ambitions of gender- and race-based interest groups. It is now widely
recognized in the ELCA that the original error, maybe the original
institutional sin, in forming the new church was the decision to order
its faith and life by representational principles. But it manifestly is
not manifest to Bishop Chilstrom.
The inescapable inference is that if there were what he calls
"disappointments" during his watch, they are attributable to the
ignorance and bad faith of those who did not see things his way. As for
retirement plans, the bishop says he enjoys golf, hunting, gardening,
and photography. One wishes him well in his new pursuits, in the hope
that they will provide greater warrant for his satisfactions.
. . . And New Beginning
I don't now where one finds the protocols for commenting on developments
in one's former ecclesial home. But, apart from being prompted by a
continuing personal interest, a "survey of religion and public life" can
hardly ignore the significant factor that is the Evangelical Lutheran
Church in America (ELCA). And it's nice to be able to comment on
something hopeful, such as the election of
H. George Anderson as the new bishop of the ELCA. The first and perhaps
most important thing to say is that Anderson, formerly president of
Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, is a theologian. It is generally
thought that Anderson could have been elected head of the Lutheran
Church in America, a predecessor body to the ELCA, and also the first
bishop of the ELCA. He declined both possibilities then, in large part
because of the sickness and subsequent death of his wife. Although he
has not said so publicly, one expects that his willingness to accept the
office now is related to his recognizing, along with almost everyone
else, that the ELCA is in crisis.
On a long list of Bishop Anderson's virtues is his solid track record of
ecumenical commitment. It no doubt comes much farther down on the list,
but we also like very much what he had to say about adoption in an
interview given on the day of his election. Long-time readers know our
concern about the current campaign against adoption, a campaign also
pushed among former leaders of the ELCA. Social work bureaucrats, race
politicians, advocates of a twisted version of children's rights, and
others have in recent years made it more and more difficult to adopt the
millions of children who need homes. A major force in this campaign is
also the pro-choice advocates (including almost everyone in the groups
mentioned) who are adamant that adoption not be encouraged as an
alternative to a woman's exercise of her "reproductive rights." One of
the most potent weapons of the campaign is the promotion of "open
adoption," which gives biological parents the opportunity to disrupt the
adoptive family by later asserting parental rights without accepting
parental responsibility.
In his statement, Anderson compared adoption with the unconditional love
of God. Adopted sixty-three years ago when he was six weeks old,
Anderson says, "Adoption has been a gift with me all my life; a feeling
of being appreciated and valued by someone." It is, he says, "a sense of
guiding and providence in my life." Key to his being adopted, he
pointedly noted, was a sense of security and confidence. Without such
security and confidence-without knowing that these really are your
parents and you are their child-adoption becomes a jerrybuilt expedient
ever vulnerable to psychological anxieties, outside intrusion, and legal
dissolution. "Open adoption" precludes security and confidence.
Adoption, if it is to work, is a decision made and a case closed. It is
indeed unconditional, as in the love of God.
Adoption is not the only nor the most important question that H. George
Anderson addressed upon becoming bishop of the ELCA, but it is
important. Addressing an August meeting in Pennsylvania, he declared
that the church has no message but "the gospel handed down to us. . . .
The Church must understand we can no longer be the voice of our culture,
but an alternative to our culture-to proclaim an alternative to what the
culture has found is so attractive, but so shallow and damaging." Given
my abiding affection for a former ecclesial home, an affection which, I
am glad to report, is for the most part generously reciprocated, and
given the duties attending a continuing survey of religion and public
life, I have no doubt whatever that there will be further occasions for
comment on the promising leadership of Bishop H. George Anderson.
Picture Perfect Babies
Since we ran Elizabeth Kristol's powerful article "Picture Perfect: The
Politics of Prenatal Testing" (April 1993), I've noticed more public
questioning of routine prenatal testing, done with an eye toward
aborting the defective. For instance, Dominic Lawson, a columnist for
the London Spectator. He and his wife recently had a Down's
syndrome child, and he wrote very affectingly about how this has
compelled him, a self-described atheist, to think more clearly about
"the sanctity of life."
The article elicited a number of striking letters to the editor,
including this from an Alison Davis: "I have severe spina bifida and am
a full-time wheelchair user. I also run the Handicap Division of the
Society for the Protection of Unborn Children-a group of disabled
people, their families, and carers who campaign for the equal right to
life of all disabled people. It is difficult for me to express my
appreciation of your positive, loving attitude towards your daughter,
since it means so much to me. I feel that your acceptance embraces all
disabled people, and it represents such a radically different view to
the one more commonly expressed. Every day I read in the press about
'exciting breakthroughs' which mean yet another way to kill people like
me before birth, and occasionally there are reports of doctors who
starve to death born babies with my degree of disability because they
think we are 'better off dead.' They never stop to think of the terrible
unhappiness they cause disabled people-ironically enough in the name of
'relieving suffering.'"
James Wood writes that his wife, who is over age thirty-five, has twice
undergone the amniocentesis test. While both children turned out to be
healthy, Lawson's column prompted him to reflect on how readily he and
his wife acquiesced in the doctor's insistence that they have the test.
He writes: "As a Roman Catholic (somewhat lapsed) I have always felt
that I had a sort of protective shield from moral dilemmas that might
involve the issue of abortion, as though being a Roman Catholic were
protection itself. I now realize that the sanctity in which I held the
Church has somehow mysteriously been transferred to doctors. Shamefully,
I believe that had I been told that either of my children would be born
with Down's syndrome and that respected medical opinion suggested an
abortion, I would have replied with, 'Well, if you say so, doctor.' Why
is the phrase 'I was only following orders' ringing in my head?"
Then there is this from E. Eyre: "Sir: I write to express the delight
all parents of a Down's syndrome child must feel over Dominic Lawson's
courageous account of his reactions to the birth of his new little
daughter, Domenica. He has only been the parent of a special child for
two weeks, yet he has got it all right. Down's syndrome children bring
extraordinary blessings to the families which they are permitted to
join. They are stars in an increasingly materialistic world. Those of us
with a Down's syndrome child (our son, Robert, is almost twenty-four)
often wish that all our children had this extraordinary syndrome which
deletes anger and malice, replacing them with humor, thoughtfulness, and
devotion to friends and family. We may start with aching hearts and the
sense of bereavement he describes so well, but, within a year, we begin
to realize that these children have so much to teach us about what
really matters. Thank heaven they are still somehow getting born in all
countries, in all levels of society, and to all ages of parents."
One reader takes strong issue with Lawson, contending that the national
health service should continue to offer free abortions when defects are
detected in the unborn. "The Chinese method, leaving babies in a 'dying
room,' because of defects or because the babies are simply not wanted,
is wholly repugnant to me, but is it therefore not preferable to abort
the fetus, if this is the mother's wish, because she could not cope? . .
. Mr. Lawson is talking from an enlightened point of view. He has
accepted his child for what she is and will ensure she will get the best
of everything, above all love. Would that all parents were like that.
Alas, they are not." Some parents may not love their children. Therefore
they should be killed. The children, that is. Earlier rather than later.
Anything else is wholly repugnant to the writer.
The Party of the Presumptive We
A regular source of amusement cum annoyance is the encounter with
contemporary thinkers who presume to tell us what "we" think. An example
of the type is Bernard Williams' Shame and Necessity
(University of California Press), in which the so-distinguished moral
philosopher of Oxford and Berkeley explains to us that our moral
circumstance is very much like that of the ancient Greeks before Plato,
Aristotle, and, most particularly, Christianity imposed their meanings
upon our meaningless universe.
The following paragraph sums up "our" problem: "We are in an ethical
condition that lies not only beyond Christianity, but beyond its Kantian
and its Hegelian legacies. We have an ambivalent sense of what human
beings have achieved, and have hopes for how they might live (in
particular, in the form of a still powerful ideal that they should live
without lies). We know that the world was not made for us, or we for the
world, that our history tells no purposive story, and that there is no
position outside the world or outside history from which we might hope
to authenticate our activities. We have to acknowledge the hideous costs
of many human achievements that we value, including this reflective
sense itself, and recognise that there is no redemptive Hegelian history
or universal Leibnizian cost-benefit analysis to show that it will come
out well enough in the end. In important ways, we are, in our ethical
situation, more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people
have been in the meantime. More particularly, we are like those who,
from the fifth century and earlier, have left us traces of a
consciousness that had not yet been touched by Plato's and Aristotle's
attempts to make our ethical relations to the world fully intelligible."
Fifteen times in one paragraph there is "we," "us," or "our." One
recalls Tonto's famous retort to the Lone Ranger as the Indians were
attacking. Obviously, the "we" does not include people who think
Aristotle makes pretty good sense of our ethical relations to the world,
or are persuaded that the Christian account of reality is, well, true.
For Mr. Williams, such people simply are not part of "our" universe of
discourse. As with John Rawls in Political Liberalism, people
who come with a comprehensive account of reality cannot be admitted to
the discussion. Mr. Rawls offers a very comprehensive account of the
reasons why comprehensive accounts must be excluded. In Shame and
Necessity, Bernard Williams evidences remarkably strong animus
toward what he calls the Judaic and Christian.
Christianity, he believes, is guilty of having led people to think that
morality is only a matter of guilt and not of shame. In the Christian
view, there is no transformation of the self in relationship to others;
"the truly moral self is characterless." It is simply a matter of
keeping the rules dictated by "religious illumination." Williams'
construal of Christianity owes more to St. Immanuel Kant than to St.
Paul. But his argument is really with anyone and everyone who challenges
what we all presumptively know, namely, "We know that the world was not
made for us, or we for the world, that our history tells no purposive
story, and that there is no position outside the world or outside
history from which we might hope to authenticate our activities."
Some of my best friends are ethicists, and some of them tell me there is
a great deal to be learned from Bernard Williams. Since this is, after
all, an intellectual journal, we must always remain open to that
possibility, recognizing the need to engage alternative arguments, to
enter into dialogue with the other, and so forth and so on. But I
confess a touch of impatience with the presumption of the masters of The
Presumptive We. Why should I respectfully engage thinkers who
contemptuously dismiss what they manifestly have not bothered to
understand, lest such understanding ruffle the smugness with which they
and those of like mind (i.e., members in good standing of The
Presumptive We) display their fashionable despairs? That's no more than
a question, of course. But I've noticed that the question does intrude
itself with some regularity when reading Bernard Williams, John Rawls,
Richard Rorty, and ideologically related dons of debonair nihilism.
While We're At It
- Prophets and Politics is a 193-page handbook put
together by Roy Howard Beck and offering a reliable guide to the many
lobbies of American churches in Washington. Leaders, sources of funding,
targets of influence, priority issues, and other facts that those who
keep an eye on the politics-and-religion game should know. Available
from Institute on Religion and Democracy, 1331 H Street N.W., Washington
D.C. 20005 for $8.95.
- Anyone who thinks religion is in decline, Warwick Collins suggests
in the Spectator, hasn't been listening to the more devout
Darwinists of late. "Over the last decade or so, the British reading
public has been entertained by the spectacle of the terrier-like Dr.
Richard Dawkins, that self-appointed guardian of the Darwinian flame,
pursuing elderly, bemused theologians through the columns of newspapers
because they dared to express their belief in God, not Darwin. But
Dawkins' own behavior to a considerable extent mirrors the less
attractive aspects of religious zealotry. In this sense, his
introduction to the 1989 edition of his work, The Selfish Gene, is
perhaps instructive: 'Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it
first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures
from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order
to assess the level of our civilization, is: "Have they discovered
evolution yet?" Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever
knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth
finally dawned on one man. His name was Charles Darwin.' Dawkins claims
that Darwin has answered, finally and comprehensively, the question
'What is man?' He proceeds to quote approvingly another Darwinist,
Professor G. G. Simpson, who, faced with the same question, wrote: 'All
attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless, and we will
be better off if we ignore them completely.'"
- They called it "The Woodstock of Bioethics." It was a large
gathering in Pittsburgh a few months ago at which the big names in that
undefined and perhaps undefinable field called bioethics turned their
minds to considering what new permission slips they might issue for the
doing of what only yesterday, or so it seems, was deemed unthinkable. As
one might expect, a particular favorite was physician-assisted suicide,
with respect to which participants offered sophisticated ruminations on
the perhaps antiquated distinction between voluntary and involuntary
euthanasia. Reporting on the meeting in that admirable quarterly,
the Human Life Review, Rita Marker says that speaker after
speaker assumed that it was not a question of whether doctors should
kill and help to kill but simply a matter of appropriate modalities.
Then this: "The line of people waiting to question or comment was still
long; the time for the session to end was only moments away when Joanne
Lynn, M.D., a professor of geriatrics from Dartmouth, reached the
microphone. Lynn is no ivory tower academic. She has spent years working
with the impoverished elderly and has gained the respect of health
professionals throughout the world. In an impassioned voice, she cut
through the rhetoric that had filled the room throughout the preceding
hour to say, 'The fact is that I, as a hospice physician, am going to be
asked to see to it that a person is not alive tomorrow because today
they're in awful circumstances.' She went on to describe just what type
of conditions many people face. As a hospice physician in Washington,
over and over again she has had to find ways to get someone out of a
rat-infested place to prevent their being eaten by the rodents. She has
seen horrible circumstances where there are no resources, no food, no
phones, conditions so bad that for some people it could be considered
reasonable to want to die. 'Hell's bells, of course it's rational,' Lynn
said. But she went on to declare that, rather than giving them drugs to
kill themselves, 'it seems that we must instead find a way to take that
pressure and move it to change the supportive care system so people can
count on having food and shelter.' Mincing no words, she said, 'I'm
being asked here to be the executioner so that those people are not
there as a drain on resources.' She asked that all of the discussion
about physician-assisted suicide be seen for what it is-an attempt to
find a quiet and complacent way of pushing people who are 'drains on
society' off the face of the earth. The audience was spellbound. 'They
aren't going to be young lawyers with AIDS,' she said, her voice
quivering with emotion. 'They're going to be us women when we get to be
eighty-five and have outlived our families. They're going to be people
who have no effective voice. And if we don't stand up for them, they're
going to be dead at our hands.' When she was finished speaking, the
audience erupted in applause. This was no polite acknowledgement of her
courage to confront a given and turn it on its ear. Looks were
exchanged, conveying the message that she had said for many what they'd
been too timid to express." Marker concludes her account with this
salutary reminder: "All it took was the gentle audacity of one person-
whose obvious compassion and concern for others outweighed what her
colleagues might think of her-to eloquently say what needed to be said-
and perceptions were changed. It is just this type of bravery that can
make a difference in conference rooms, board rooms, hospital rooms, and
school rooms across the country. If only we have the courage to do it."
- The new and ever indispensable Yearbook of American and
Canadian Churches is out ($29.95 from Abingdon). Flipping through
it, I was struck by one statistic. At a recent conference of theologians
and pastors a seminary professor complained that fewer and fewer
students are really taking theology. It is not because there are
significantly fewer students at the seminaries. According to the
Yearbook, in seminaries belonging to the Association of Theological
Schools, there were 63,618 students in 1993, down less than 1 percent
from 1992. But then this reflection of a long-term trend. In 1969,
students studying for the M.Div. (Master of Divinity) or B.D. (Bachelor
of Divinity) were 79.5 percent of the total. In 1993, they were 42
percent of the total. Almost a 50 percent drop in the number of students
taking a full theology course in preparation for lifetime ministry gives
credibility to the professor's complaint.
- No, no, Mrs. B., the fact that we have not mentioned Promise
Keepers does not mean that we disapprove of the phenomenon or think it
unimportant. It's nice of you to say that you depend on this section to
keep you informed about everything happening in the worlds of religion
and public life, but you really shouldn't. We cannot bear the burden of
responsibility. But, now that you've brought it up, Promise Keepers is a
remarkable movement launched by Bill McCartney, the former head football
coach at the University of Colorado. Started in 1990, last year the
movement brought almost three hundred thousand men to conferences in
seven cities, and this year it expects to double that number. In
Michigan an April conference packed Pontiac's Silverdome with seventy-
two thousand men taking the pledge. Promise Keepers promise to, inter
alia, honor Christ, practice spiritual and sexual purity, build strong
marriages, devote a definite part of each day to prayer, reach out
across racial boundaries, and pursue "vital relationships with a few
other men," because a Promise Keeper "needs brothers to help him keep
his promises." Of course the movement has been criticized by some for
its alleged male chauvinism, but the reality is, according to organizers
and participants, that it is typically the wives who pressure their
husbands to take part. Women perceive that they, too, have everything to
gain when the husband is confident about being "a real man," which
includes accepting his role as head of the family. Looking ahead to
1997, Promise Keepers hopes to bring one million men to Washington in a
national appeal for men to move beyond macho bravado and enfeebling
sensitivity toward the adulthood that they owe their sons and daughters-
and wives.
- Associated Press reporter Rita Beamish lays another old canard to
rest in the Boston Globe. "The often-alleged liberal bias of
the media was not borne out in self-descriptions obtained through the
poll. Twenty-two percent of journalists described themselves as liberal,
compared with 19 percent of the public surveyed. Only 5 percent of the
journalists called themselves conservative, compared with 39 percent of
the public." So there.
- One of the most decent and competent religion reporters of our
acquaintance was George Cornell of the Associated Press. The following
item concerning him appeared shortly before his death this past year:
"Americans' interest in religion is much greater than in sports. Cornell
noted that religious giving in 1992 totaled $56.7 billion, about
fourteen times the estimated $4 billion spent on professional baseball,
football, and basketball, the three largest sports. Using Gallup Poll
figures, Cornell placed cumulative attendance at houses of worship
during 1993 at 5.6 billion. This, he said, was fifty-five times greater
than the 103-million total attendance reported by the three main
professional sports leagues. Attendance at all U.S. sporting events
totaled 388 million in 1990, according to one publication's tally.
Religious services drew about thirteen times more people, Cornell said,
with attendance of 5.2 billion. . . . Full-time religion reporters are
rare at newspapers and major broadcast outlets. Only about fifty of
1,600 dailies and one TV network have even one full-time religion
reporter, although nearly all have multimember sports staffs." The
neglect of media attention to religion was an abiding concern of George
Cornell's, and an entirely legitimate concern. On the other hand, it is
hardly surprising that there are many more sports reporters than
religion reporters. Sports are the ideal subject matter for an industry
that is based upon the production of "the news." Every day something new
happens, and there are always clear winners and losers. In fact, almost
all news reporters are sports reporters in that everything-politics,
culture, medicine, business, and religion-is reported in the sports mode
of keeping score on contending sides. We used to join in the lament of
our friend George Cornell over the lack of media attention to religion.
That lack does reflect poorly on the news industry, and it does give
many people a distorted impression of what really matters to millions of
Americans, but, given the sorry and perhaps inevitable state of news
reporting, maybe it's not such a bad thing for religion.
- Jon D. Levenson of Harvard, no stranger to FT readers, reviews
in Commentary a volume of interviews with contemporary Jewish
thinkers, The God I Believe In by Joshua Haberman (Free Press).
Among those interviewed is theologian Emil Fackenheim, who challenges
the widespread claim that Jews are not concerned about the world to
come. Fackenheim reflects: "Now what if one were to say with Jewish
tradition that all people who had the chance, not only Jews, of course,
but others as well, to do something noble, worthwhile; it isn't just the
deed which will be forgotten, it's the deed plus the doer. All these
have a share in the world to come, but these six million have none? Now
that would be a victory for Hitler even beyond the grave. . . . If there
is no hereafter for such as these, then the hereafter does not exist. In
other words, for anyone thoughtful enough to say at a funeral, we
remember that his soul is with God and God remembers his good deeds-for
any such person to say that the six million victims of the Holocaust, or
the children starving to death in Africa, are forgotten as though they
had never been is a most shocking thought and contrary to everything in
Judaism." In words that might be applied as well to the current Catholic
or Protestant circumstance, Levenson indicates his skepticism about
assertions that we are witnessing a great spiritual renewal: "What these
examples and others like them suggest-albeit unscientifically-is that a
momentous shift has indeed taken place in Judaism in recent years, but
not the shift back to traditional faith which Haberman thinks he sees.
Instead, the movement has been away from Judaism as an all-embracing,
authoritative theological reality and legal order and toward a
reconception of it, and of all religion, as a set of options from which
the individual is free to draw selectively, in accordance with his pre-
established personal values and private preferences. In the new pattern,
'choice' becomes the highest good, and the choosing self replaces the
creating and commanding God as the source of ultimate authority,
substantively redefining while not necessary dislodging the older
theological vocabulary. As Haberman's interviews demonstrate, the nearly
anarchic fluidity that the new individualism promotes can result in some
moving accounts of a return to religious experience, faith, and
practice. But it is unlikely that a genuine and large-scale renewal of
belief in the God of Israel can take place before the extreme
individualism of contemporary American Jewish culture has subsided."
- Sensitivity to minorities (and the majority of us today belong to
one minority or another) has tightened the protocols of what can be said
in polite company. People who belong to minorities as they are more
traditionally defined, however, seem less inhibited by explicit or
implicit language codes. A survey conducted by the National Conference
of Christians and Jews found that 46 percent of Hispanic Americans and
42 percent of blacks agree that Asians are "unscrupulous, crafty, and
devious in business." Hispanics "tend to have bigger families than they
are able to support," say 68 percent of Asians and 49 percent of blacks,
while 31 percent of Asians and 26 percent of Hispanics agree that blacks
"want to live on welfare." Very few whites, on the other hand, are
prepared to express such stereotypes, even if they think them true. The
researchers note that college-educated folk voice the most tolerant
views of others, and more whites are college-educated. The researchers
are in a bind. To say that whites are more tolerant than minorities
might be thought insensitive. Perhaps it is the case that minorities are
more straightforward and whites more hypocritical in what they are
prepared to say about others. But that implies that a college education
increases hypocrisy, which is not what the researchers appear to have in
mind. As to our own view, we believe that surveyors claiming to measure
levels of tolerance tend to be crafty and devious, and are in a most
dubious business.
- Majoritarianism and individualism are at the heart of Robert H.
Wiebe's new book, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American
Democracy (University of Chicago Press). They are not necessarily
pitted against one another, he contends. "Here also a democratic group's
stake in pulling down hierarchies and a democratic individual's stake in
opening up opportunities mesh. That tradition certainly does not argue
for equalizing wealth or returns. It claims a popular right to access,
to a voice, to seizing the moment as an equal participant in a broad
range of social enterprises. It harkens back to an axiom in America's
original democracy: having rights means taking rights." The down side in
that axiom is that those who are not able to take rights have no rights.
For instance, and although Wiebe does not say so, the unborn child and
senile old person. He does touch on abortion in a way that obliquely,
and ever so gently, implies some uneasiness about the unlimited abortion
license in current law. "A woman's sovereignty over her own body may be
sufficiently absolute to render anything that resembles mandatory
childbearing 'involuntary servitude.' What the democrat asks is that
just as few as possible of those rights be sealed apart from political
life, just as many as possible embedded in a majoritarian process. The
rights themselves depend upon it. As recent events have demonstrated,
those champions of individual rights who live by the judiciary die by
the judiciary." That cannot be a comforting thought for the champions of
abortion on demand.
- An enthusiastic subscriber from Pennsylvania writes to encourage
us to keep up the good work, and we assured him that we would try to do
our best. But then this: "I became aware of First Things when I found a
discarded copy in a trash can in a men's room at St. Charles Seminary,
Philadelphia, where I was attending a retreat." A discarded copy? In a
trash can? In a men's room? Cardinal Bevilacqua, please call your
seminary rector.
- In a remarkable new book, The Election of Israel
(Cambridge University Press), Rabbi David Novak of the University of
Virginia writes: "All that can be known about the final redemption,
then, is that the estrangement between God and Israel and God and the
world will ultimately be overcome. And God's redemption of Israel will
be central to this cosmic redemption." To which Christians can say amen.
Both Christian and Jews might have difficulty with Novak's related
assertion: "We can only have faith that it will come; we cannot
have any knowledge of what it will be." But surely Jews believe
they have knowledge of the "what" in an anticipatory and provisional
way in the covenant with Israel, as Christians are confident that the
eschaton will be in continuity with that same covenant culminating in
Jesus the Christ. In fact, earlier in the book Novak insists upon that
continuity in asserting that the final redemption will be the
"Judaization" of universal history. At that earlier point, Novak is
taking issue with the great Franz Rosenzweig, who suggested that the End
Time would transcend both Judaism and Christianity. The Rosenzweig
argument, which is brilliantly and sympathetically summarized by Novak,
is the ground on which theologically serious Jews and Christians can, I
believe, most productively encounter one another. The great and abiding
disagreement, of course, is over the identity of Jesus the Christ. While
Christians might agree that the eschaton will transcend much that is the
historical phenomenon called Christianity, it cannot transcend Jesus the
Christ, since by definition it cannot transcend God, and he is the
second person of God-Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is to the great
credit of David Novak that he is a Jewish thinker with such a solid
grasp of Christian theology that he is able to compel Christians to come
to terms in a fresh way both with normative Judaism and with
Christianity's understanding of the covenant from which emerges our
common hope. The Election of Israel is a worthy successor to
Novak's earlier Jewish-Christian Dialogue (Oxford University
Press), giving further evidence that David Novak is one of the
commanding religious thinkers at the end of the twentieth century who
can be ignored by neither Jews nor Christians who would understand God's
saving ways in history.
- There are numerous angles from which to view, and attempt to
explain, the precipitous decline of the Protestant mainline. There is,
for instance, this report from the United Methodist Church. In 1957, 40
percent of its members were fifty years or older. In 1994 that figure
was 6l.4 percent. (In the general population, 25.5 percent are over
fifty.) Three percent of the United Methodist laity are younger than
twenty-five, while 32.8 percent are sixty-six to ninety-nine. The
largest denomination of the Protestant mainline is, quite literally,
dying.
- My goodness. President Al Barry of the Lutheran Church-Missouri
Synod recently wrote the Pope, addressing him as "Your Holiness" and
wishing him "God's blessings" in his work. Dr. Gregory Jackson, a
Lutheran pastor, writes in Christian News that "it is
inexcusable to wish the Antichrist 'God's blessing' in his work of
destroying faith, murdering souls, and sending people to Hell on the
basis of their works." Dr. Jackson goes on in this vein, at length,
including a swipe at this writer who "was recently a dinner guest of the
Antichrist and now serves as spin doctor for the newest encyclical [on
Christian unity]." Having dinner with the Antichrist, imagine that.
President Barry, says Jackson, is "helping to delude all those who think
the Pope is a nice guy who is pro-life." He is not a nice guy? He is not
pro-life? The confusions that afflict erring Lutherans and others, says
Jackson, "have their origin in Roman Catholicism and the infernal
regions below, where such plots are hatched to lure away weak
believers." Pastor Jackson's doctorate was received from the University
of Notre Dame, which at last report was still in communion with the
Bishop of Rome. Having dinner with the Antichrist is one thing. Being
instructed and certified by his minions is another. How crafty of Rome
to put Dr. Jackson forward as an anti-Catholic polemicist in order to
discredit anti-Catholicism. It hardly comes as a surprise, however, to
those who know all about the hatching of plots in the infernal regions
below.
- Complaining that Senator Jesse Helms lacks compassion, reporter
Nina Totenberg (National Public Radio and ABC) responds to his saying
that the government is spending too much on AIDS research: "I think he
ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind,
because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a
transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will get it." Be grateful that
the world is not in the charge of the ever so caring Nina Totenberg.
- The Rev. Bonnie Shullenberger of Ossining, New York writes in
response to a recent comment on the clergy glut in the Episcopal Church.
There is such a surplus in the major cities of the U.S., she allows, but
then provides evidence that in other regions of Anglicanism, from the
U.K. to Africa, there is a severe shortage of clergy. We should have
limited our comment to large urban dioceses in the U.S.
- A welcome paperback edition of Natural Law Theory, edited
by Robert P. George (Oxford University Press, 371pp., $18.95), has now
appeared. Our reviewer, David Solomon (May 1993), declared it to be "a
superb collection of original essays on natural law theory. For anyone
who might still believe that natural law theory is merely a relic of
bygone days, discussion of which is kept alive by aging seminary
professors and benighted religious traditions, Professor George's book
provides an indispensable antidote." As is always-well, almost always-
the case with our reviewers, he got it precisely right.
- John Hockenberry is a regular on National People's Radio, and is
also a paraplegic, which is the main subject of his new book, Moving
Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of
Independence (Hyperion). Reviewing the book for the New York Times,
novelist Pico Iyer praises Hockenberry for his courage. "Thus," writes
Iyer, "he fearlessly likens Ronald Reagan to the Ayatollah Khomeini." In
the world of NPR and the New York Times, that takes an awesome
readiness to defy convention. In the book, Hockenberry tells about
struggling up the steps of a New York subway station. "Every white
person I had encountered had ignored me or pretended that I didn't
exist, while every black person who came upon me had offered to help
without being asked." White people bad. Black people good. Or maybe not,
since elsewhere Hockenberry rails against those who assume that people
in wheelchairs can't manage by themselves. You can't win for losing. For
all we know, Mr. Hockenberry may be admirable in the way he copes with
his disability, but for more instructive and affecting accounts of
living with a severe handicap we strongly recommend two others books
appearing this year, Reynolds Price's A Whole New Life
(Atheneum) and Wilfred Sheed's In Love With Daylight (Simon &
Schuster). Price, a novelist at Duke, has gone through years of horrific
battles with cancer that have left him severely crippled (he insists on
the term), and emerges with a wondrous tranquility sustained by
Christian faith, albeit a somewhat idiosyncratic Christian faith. Sheed
is particularly effective in his descriptions of his childhood polio,
long before the vaccine. What both do very persuasively is to make the
case that suffering and disability frequently (typically?) seem worse to
the beholder than to those going through the experience. Witness such as
theirs is important in a culture that is increasingly given to inflating
the horrors of disability, sickness, and dying in order to make the case
for relieving people of the burden of living. "Just to be is a blessing.
Just to live is holy." So said Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and so
testify Price and Sheed.
- Literature, in the past century and a half, has descended into a
"sustained sneer" toward bourgeois virtue, writes Donald McCloskey,
professor of economics and history at the University of Iowa, in the
American Scholar. "By the late nineteenth century economics had
dropped out of the conversation entirely. No intellectual since 1890 has
been ashamed to be ignorant about the economy or economics. Lawyers and
physicists sound off about economics without having cracked a book.
Historians study Marx as though he were not a minor Ricardian.
Biologists passionate about economic ecology could not pass the first
hour exam in Econ. 101. It is a rare English professor-David Lodge, for
example, in Nice Work-who can see the businessperson as
anything other than The Other, or The Enemy." One reason for the animus
toward the market economy, says McCloskey, is the widely accepted notion
that it is a recent vulgarity imposed upon the human story. "A myth of
recency has made the virtues arising from towns seem those of a shameful
parvenu, such as Franklin and America. In economic history dependent on
Marx, such as Max Weber's General Economic History or Karl
Polanyi's The Great Transformation, the market is seen as a
novelty. 'Market economy,' claimed Polanyi with little evidence, 'is an
institutional structure which, as we all too easily forget, has been
present at no time except our own.' From this Marxist historical mistake
arose the fairy tales of lost paradises for aristocrats or peasants and
a reason for ignoring the bourgeois virtues. It has taken a century of
professional history to correct the mistake. The late David Herlihy put
it this way in 1971: 'Research has all but wiped from the ledgers the
supposed gulf, once considered fundamental, between a medieval manorial
economy and the capitalism of the modern period.' Medieval men bought
and sold everything from grain to bishoprics. The Vikings were traders,
too. Greece and Rome were business empires. The city of Jericho dates to
8000 b.c. The emerging truth is that we have lived in a world market for
centuries, a market run by the bourgeoisie. Time to recognize the fact
and to cultivate a bourgeois virtue."
- The Christian Challenge calls itself the "worldwide voice
of traditional Anglicanism," and a recent issue gives an update on how
that movement is faring. There are five "continuing" Anglican churches-
churches professing to maintain the authentic Anglo-Catholic tradition
that others, including the Episcopal Church in this country, have
allegedly abandoned. The Traditional Anglican Communion, the Anglican
Catholic Church, the United Episcopal Church of North America, the
Province of Christ the King, and the Episcopal Missionary Church claim
to have a combined membership of 92,700. The Christian
Challenge lists four other bodies of "traditional Anglicanism": the
Reformed Episcopal Church, the Charismatic Episcopal Church, the Free
Church of England, and the Church of England in South Africa. (The
charismatic group protests that it is not a traditional body of
"continuing Anglicans" but is composed chiefly of Protestant
pentecostalists who have discovered the beauties of Anglican tradition.)
The total membership of all traditional bodies is 204,200. The Anglican
communion worldwide counts close to sixty million members, but that
includes populations where church attendance is in the single digits.
Presumably the traditional bodies are counting only the actively
affiliated, which suggests they are not an insubstantial portion of
active Anglicans in the world. Whether they have a future likely depends
on how many people can be persuaded that the right way to maintain the
catholic tradition is to start a new church.
- True story. An Irish fellow with a delightful brogue comes up
after a lecture. "Yes, Father, I've two brothers who are priests and a
sister who's a nun. My mother says that celibacy runs in the family."
- The lead editorial in last year's Christmas Day edition of the
New York Times was "A Christmas Reversal." It began like this: "In
December of 1883, forty years after Charles Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol'
was first published, this page may have sounded its most curmudgeonly
note ever. That was the year in which the Times approvingly
noted that there seemed to be a decline in the popularity of 'the German
Christmas Tree-a rootless and lifeless corpse.' " The editorial then
goes on to note the remarkable popularity of the Christmas tree in
subsequent years, and concludes: "It is now our pleasant duty, 111 years
after that first grumpy pronouncement, to declare officially that the
Christmas tree is not a passing fad." Hey, kids, it's okay for us to
have a tree this year. The Times has made it official.
- The Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism, Professor Paul
Kurtz founder and bishop, publishes Free Inquiry. A reader
sends us a promotional letter he received in which the magazine lists
all the important questions it covers in "preserving our freethought
heritage." Included is this, "The rise of Richard John Neuhaus and why
he bears close watching." I've been wondering about those people going
through my garbage pails. Imagine, sneaky Humanists disguising
themselves as the homeless. I can't wait until tomorrow. "Good morning,
Professor Kurtz. Looking for free thoughts?"