Time Immortal

A lot of Catholic opinion I’ve been reading has tended toward being rather glum at the victory of Barack Hussein Obama in the recent American presidential race…and with good reason, given Obama’s strong support for abortion…even for its most vile methods.

This is, after all, the man who promised to make FOCA into law if at all possible, and then as one of his first acts upon taking office. Not only would this legislation make partial-birth abortion legal again and remove the need for parental notification in the case of minors attempting to procure an abortion; there’s a very good chance that FOCA would also abolish freedom of conscience protection for doctors and nurses who want nothing to do with abortion.

For Catholics, that’s pretty much the definition of “problematic.”

But in spite of that, the general approach that I’ve seen on Catholic blogs and news sites has been to look on President-elect Obama with an air of charity and prayer. John C. Wright’s reflection that this is a time to set factions aside, in particular, resonated with me:

Let us reflect on the duties enjoined upon a free man under a republican form of government in these times; and next on the duties of a philosopher; and finally on the duties of a Christian.

First, our duty as citizens of a democratic republic is to affirm our loyalty to the will of the majority. The losers form rank and file behind the winners in a democracy. Everyone had a chance to vote; but the bargain is that you agree to abide by the outcome, and that agreement is implicit in the act of voting. That is the price you pay for democracy, my fellow sovereign citizens.¹ Anything less erodes the sovereignty of the people. We are at war, and we have a new Commander-in-Chief. During wartime is not the time to diminish the authority of the leadership. It is better, for the sake of obedience and cohesion, to obey a bad leader than to follow the fractures of party faction.

Second, the duty of a philosopher is to regard adversity with Olympian detachment, if not stoicism, and to offer that obedience to the laws that logic and right reason commands. Socrates drank hemlock rather than disobey the laws placed above him, and died with the dignity of a philosopher, the courage of a soldier. Do you wish to live a life free from the misery folly brings? Then you must study philosophy and temper your passions. Can no modern man follow the ancient models? Are we to be found wanting in such virtue, when the yoke of the laws under which we labor are so much lighter than this?

Third, the duty of Christian men is to obey the authorities placed above us. “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation” (Romans 13:2).

My brothers in Christ, do we take these words of Holy Scripture seriously? As far as I know, there was no revised version of the Bible printed up during the Enlightenment that left out the inconvenient passage after the fashion of Luther scuttling the inconvenient the Book of the Maccabees. This verse was written in a century which also saw Imperial Rome persecuting Christians in the bloodiest fashion the ancient world knew — the faithful being torn to pieces by wild beasts as a popular entertainment, or tied to stakes covered in pitch and ignited as screaming torches for the amusement of the Emperor’s court. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s was the command of Our Lord, who submitted to a kangaroo court, and who was handed to the tormentors appease popular tumult. Obama is not the Messiah, but neither is he Nero.

No less poignant than the above is the response of the Church herself, as Archbishop Donald Wuerl called upon Catholics to offer their prayers for the upcoming presidency of Mr. Obama, and that his eyes might be opened and his mind given wisdom as he takes on his role as leader.

And this is especially true of Obama’s pro-abortion stance; may his eyes be opened in Christ Jesus, the better to perceive the necessity of preserving the unborn — the most precious, fragile, and vulnerable of all people — from harm.

The point, I guess, is to do all things with grace, and if not with grace then at least with charity. As Obama’s fans and zealots denigrate and insult all those over whom they have emerged triumphant, our response must be to humbly submit to the guidance and wisdom of the Lord; if an unjust time is upon us, then we must confront it prayerfully.

I speak here in a tone which implies that I am thinking about this issue as though I were American, as though Obama were about to become my head of state. I am not, and he is not. But I am thinking in an air of unity with my brothers and sisters in the Church in the U.S., who must confront what is to come.

And for them, my prayer is charity, and grace.

(P.S. don’t miss Wright’s commentary on St. Barbara!)

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

1) in this, good Reader, conservatives must succeed, and then in a way that puts to shame, by way of demonstration, the raving madmen and madwomen on the Left whose very existence hinged — or seemed to hinge — upon casting Bush and Cheney as incarnations of pure evil and malice.

Translated: Men are more decisive than women, but fail on every other leadership metric. For this reason (apparently), we prefer men as leaders.

Democracy: the government the people deserve.

I seem to be entering another “atheist” phase on the blog here; the poor dears seem to come in waves.

Case in point: Samuel Skinner writes in to complain about something I said in this article.

I keep on seeing this “Christianity provide moral capital” argument. I don’t know where Christians get this idea from. We have had things like democracy, free speech and atheism invented by the Greeks (yeah, they were very busy).

Saying “moral capital” and referancing Christianity seems to be a covert way of implying that atheists are immoral and that only theists can have morality. It also implies that atheists are only moral when they borrow from Christianity. This happens to be false.

I can go into greater detail or you can use google and hit daylight atheism- or any other atheist blog. It turns out almost all of them have a critique of that idea.

Other Google searches will reveal critiques of almost any idea, including evolution. I trust that the Reader can agree with the Author that the mere fact that rebuttals to an idea exist somewhere on the internet does not mean that the idea being rebutted is actually false?

While I appreciate the mild ad hominem attempt to paint me as a historical ignoramus (I’m well aware of all the various things which the Greeks gifted to us in terms of philosophy and political methodology, O Reader), I can’t help but get the sense that Sam is grasping at straws. He feels that I am being unfair in arguing about the existence of Christian moral capital in society, and yet he has no idea what the term even means (as is evidenced by his straw-man argument in the second paragraph).

As it happens, I am implying nothing about how moral/immoral atheists and theists are relative to each other; everyone is a sinner, whether one believes in God or not. I’m fully aware that atheists can be every bit as moral as theists can, which is as it should be since the call to morality is written first and foremost on the human heart; if a person doesn’t heed the call to live morally that is inherent in his or her being, no amount of words in a book will do anything to change that.

Not that saying that discounts, in any way, the value of the Word.

When I speak of moral capital, and in particular Christian moral capital, I am in a way acknowledging the contributions of the Greek philosophers, among many others, and I am further acknowledging a rather large portion of history that happened in the interim between the heyday of the Ancient Greeks and the modern era — that is, I am being mindful of the moral and philosophical developments of early Christendom, which Sam seems to be discounting wholesale. The fact is, our social reasoning did not jump directly out of Greek philosophical tradition; it emerged out of that philosophical tradition by way of the Church and the unique shaping that nearly two thousand years of Christianity, and in particular Catholicism has applied to it.

It is this willful ignorance of Christian philosophical history that blinds Sam, I think, to the fact that Thomas Aquinas more or less addressed this specific objection several hundred years ago. Fundamentally, the argument can be distilled to something I myself observed above: what could be termed “natural law” should be innate and known by each and every person. To the atheist, this would seem to be the basis to argue that God had anything to do with natural law, or that Religion and faith have anything substantial to do with being moral.

And following his suggestion to Google around for additional commentary on this issue will enable one to discover evidence of that phenomenon in action.

That’s all very well and good, but ultimately incorrect. For the role that religion plays is not to introduce us to morality itself, but that by way of natural law we are called to be moral. Yes, everyone has (or should have) a sense of right and wrong, and yes, there are definite rights and definite wrongs. We should understand that wholly apart from any religious faith (or lack thereof) that we hold. The purpose of religion is not to teach us to be moral, but to teach us whence comes morality, which is the more important question.

Why is understanding the purpose important? Well, we can look around and note that despite the fact that morality is written in to the being of every single person, many people do not act in a particularly moral fashion. Simply knowing, then, that morality exists and that men and women should be moral is insufficient.

By way of example, I observe that Mark Shea notes “that Jesus’s Golden Rule was, in fact, often *not* understood in even the most rudimentary of societies long before it was enunciated by Jesus. That’s because the Golden Rule requires grace in order to be understood, much less lived. Judaism articulated the basic norm that all pagan societies, at their best, could attain: love your neighbor, hate your enemy. It’s the norm we still basically live by today. Jesus’ Golden rule implied love for enemies because it included enemies in the term “neighbor”. It remains, apart from grace, an impossible and (for the worldly) ridiculous standard. The notion that anybody — especially an atheist — would aspire to it is a classic example of the way in which atheists live off Christian capital.”

When I speak of moral capital, then, I am merely echoing Chesterton: “The fact is this: that the modern world, with its modern movements, is living on its Catholic capital. It is using, and using up, the truths that remain to it out of the old treasury of Christendom; including, of course, many truths known to pagan antiquity but crystallized in Christendom. But it is NOT really starting new enthusiasms of its own. The novelty is a matter of names and labels, like modern advertisement; in almost every other way the novelty is merely negative. It is not starting fresh things that it can really carry on far into the future. On the contrary, it is picking up old things that it cannot carry on at all. For these are the two marks of modern moral ideals. First, that they were borrowed or snatched out of ancient or mediaeval hands. Second, that they wither very quickly in modern hands.”

Essentially, I am observing that Western notions about law, freedom, rights, and human dignity each draw heavily, in their own way, not only upon the pagan philosophy of the Greeks, but on the Christian philosophy that expanded upon in in later centuries, re-shaping and transforming it by grace into the very same principles which we draw upon today. I’m making no pronouncements as to who — theists or atheists — is the more moral, but instead am simply observing that all of us live today, in the West, in societies formed and shaped largely by Christian principles, or principles “once removed” from Christian philosophy.

And whenever anyone upholds values such as the equality of men and women, or the right to freedom of expression, or the notion of free will, one is unconciously (or perhaps conciously) drawing upon teleology in order to state one’s case; in a wholly secular framework, there is no basis on which to found the argument that men and women, or white men and black men, or Asian men and white men, are equal, because by all empirical measures they are not. In forming the concept of equality of persons, and equal dignity of persons, we are appealing to higher concepts above and beyond what mere senses can reveal — we are invoking telos, in essence.

And more to the point, we are invoking a very Christian notion of telos, whether we realize it or not. Yes, many of the concepts had their origin in Greek philosophy, but they ultimately arrived at the point they are at today through their sanctification in the philosophy of the Church (that is: through the fusion, essentially, of Christian concepts and ancient truths known to the great pagan religions of old). I do believe St. Paul addresses this in one of the books of the New Testament. Romans, I think.

That is Christian moral capital. One observes that in nations where Christianity was not a prominent feature of the nations’ formation, things tend not to be so pretty. Oh, a few exceptions exist, and that is to be expected — as has been observed, all people are called to be moral regardless of what faith they do or do not adhere to, and we ought not be surprised that others throughout history have “got it right.” But we do observe that they are in the minority. Japan might be one example…though not a very good one.

As to where we get the idea of societies banking on Christian moral capital from, I can’t say. History, perhaps? Reason and rational analysis of the facts? I suspect we think that because that’s just what happens.

This describes way too many progressive-minded people that I know:

Comrade Red Square’s list of Party-approved word proxies to frame the debate and foster a shift in public perception.

• economic boom -> recession (when a Republican is President)
• economic bubble -> golden age (when a Democrat is President)
• free country -> oppressive regime
• oppressive regime -> workers’ paradise
• electoral process -> failing democracy
• socialist dictatorship -> will of the people
• export of capitalist democracy -> imperialist war for oil
• export of communist revolution -> true democracy
• terrorists -> freedom fighters
• freedom fighters -> imperialist occupiers, rapists and murderers
• rambling communist thug -> idealistic romantic dreamer
• hard-working productive individual -> corporate fascist
• lowering standards -> raising awareness
• degeneracy -> striving urban culture
• human excrement -> thought-provoking art
• destruction of the family -> social progress
• clinical paranoia -> outstanding filmmaking
• failing government program -> need to increase funding
• destroying a perfectly good economy -> care for the downtrodden
• improving the lives of the downtrodden through innovation -> selfish greed
• truth telling -> hate speech
• hate speech -> sensitivity training
• targeting terrorists -> indiscriminate murder of civilians
• indiscriminate murder of civilians -> resistance to imperialism
• protecting the innocent -> racial profiling
• racial profiling -> affirmative action
• partisan lies -> unbiased news reporting
• unbiased news reporting -> fascist corporate media
• fascist stormtrooper tactics -> proactive approach to progress
• proactive approach to progress -> destruction of the planet with industries
• living human being -> carbon polluter
• dead human being -> Democrat voter

The mad geniuses at The People’s Cube are at it again.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

This shift to international regulation of various kinds was also rooted in a new social class, namely, the international extension of the New Class — international lawyers, officials in supra-national agencies, NGO organizers, senior managers in multi-national corporations, and those officials in domestic agencies whose career path included transfers to the international level. Though there are divisions of opinion between some of these groups, they tend to share a common outlook of global humanitarianism. John Fonte of the Hudson Institute, who has analyzed their ideology, describes them as transnational progressives, and the London lawyer David Carr has shortened this term to the catchier “Tranzis.” [�]

Insofar as the United States, Britain, and Western Europe now have rulers shaped by this outlook, they can be described as the first nations in history to have a dissident ruling class. Dissidence has consequences. A dissident ruling class, whether consciously or not, will tend to be suspicious of the nation it rules. [�]

[This] can be clearly seen in three highly important developments: the shift of power from legislatures to bureaucratic agencies and the courts in domestic politics; the shift of power from democratic nation states to largely unaccountable supra-national bodies from the UN to the European Union, etc; and the development of ideologies that, lagging behind events, serve to justify these relatively new political practices and institutions as legitimate. [�]

To sum up, Tranzi-ism is an ideology that extends regulation over the full range of human activity while exempting the regulators from democratic control by transferring governance from national democratic parliaments to unaccountable bureaucracies in independent agencies, the courts, and supra-national bodies. [�]

The first task for a serious conservatism is to de-mystify the unaccountable bureaucracies that are not only our enemies but also the enemies of the nation-state, religion, small independent businesses, aspiring entrepreneurs, families and married people, and patriotic and self-reliant citizens. [�] Our second task is to defend democracy at home and the nation-state abroad. [�] Our third general response should be to restrain and obstruct bureaucracies directly. [�]

[W]e should not be afraid of controversy. Persuading the nation, including the media, that such values as patriotism, self-reliance, and enterprise are admirable, and that such policies as choice, competition, and diversity in public services are practicable, is the first step to expressing and implementing them in office. Success is not guaranteed by the controversy; failure is ensured by shrinking from it.

O’Sullivan is a master not only of the English language and its use to the most devastating effect, but he’s also a spot-on researcher with a hunger for truth. If you haven’t checked out his book The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister, you have done yourself a grave disservice, O Reader.

And he makes an important point above: if, O Reader, we are conservatives, we should not be afraid to be controversial, even though we risk being shouted down by our progressive opposites as a result (”Let them shout us down,” I say…it will not be us who tramples on the rights of others). The truth is sometimes very controversial to speak, especially in a world which has wedded its thinking to a multitude of falsehoods.

The above takes courage to admit and to live.

Chesterton once noted that the soldier who desires life like water must be willing to drink death like wine; the soldier who cowers and waits for the battle to depart from him will almost certainly die (and then be not much more than a convoluted suicide). It is the soldier who is willing to cut his way out of the fracas that may yet live to see another day. That’s the mentality that conservatives, especially conservative bloggers, need to have when speaking about different issues ranging from Islam to abortion, from taxes to social programs, from the Military to the environment.

Because if we are to be defeated, it is better to be defeated having spoken what we hold to be the truth, rather than be defeated for having meekly held our tongue and let only our opponent’s voice be heard.

This is especially true in regard to conservative protestation against the emergence of the immense bureaucracies that plague Western society today. It has been jokingly said that bureaucracy has “no mass, only inertia”, and that certainly seems true enough. That bureaucracy and the mentality that drives it is a threat to Western society is also a fairly obvious thing — one need look no further than the human rights commissions to see that much.

Or, as Kathy notes:

Too many of my fellow “conservative” Canadian bloggers, being ambitious (would-be) careerist hacks, are obsessed with Party politics, with ridings and leaders and constituencies and so forth.

None. Of. This. Matters.

No matter who is in power, the Bureaucracy remains intact. The Bureaucracy is the “new boss, same as the old boss” we joke about, not this or that Prime Minister.

The Bureaucracy must be destroyed.

Just so. And to do so will take the courage to not only actually have the convictions one professes to hold, but to act on them and speak them without fear of what reprisals may result. After all, if it means someone is going to post a snitty note to my Facebook profile just because I cross-posted my most recent article on abortion there, that’s…well, that’s just that, isn’t it? What’s important is that what had to be said was said…the fallout is just a part of having spoken up that I necessarily accept.

“We recognize the conflict in Afghanistan as a liberation struggle, waged by the Afghan people and their allies, against oppression, against obscurantism, illiteracy, and the most brutal forms of misogyny. It is a fight for democracy, and for peace, order, and good government. It is also a struggle waged by the sovereign Government of Afghanistan, a member state of the United Nations, against illegal armed groups that seek to overturn the democratic will of the Afghan people. In Afghanistan, the great global struggle for the recognition and protection of basic human rights � universal rights - is being waged with a particular and necessary ferocity. We cannot and must not retreat from that struggle.”

And the Manley Commission recommends that Canada renew its commitment to Afghanistan and extend the mission deadline past Febrary 2009, possibly taking it into 2011 if needed.

“We often seek to define Canada’s role in the world. Well, for whatever reason, we have one in Afghanistan. Let’s not abandon it too easily,” Manley wrote last fall in a Canadian political journal following a return visit to Afghanistan in May 2007.

“But let’s use our hard-earned influence to make sure the job is done right.”

It’s really nice to hear this sort of level-headed honesty coming from a former of Canada cabinet minister (John Manley), although I imagine that is somewhere blowing a fuse over this.