On being proud to be an American

CNN writes about a Gallup poll asking Americans how proud they are to be American.

According to the poll, 57% of adult Americans are "extremely proud" and 28% are "very proud." In addition, 10% say they are "moderately proud," with 3% saying they are "only a little proud" and a mere 1% saying they are "not at all proud."

I suppose it's a bit like asking people how often they go to church, or if they believe in God. It's a way to track something about the national pulse.

The comparison really isn't far off, if you think about it historically. Peoples and nations have always been tied to their religions, whether they had one or many gods. The Roman Empire sought to unite a whole host of peoples with their many different religions. That was fine, so long as they bowed the emperor; thus God was replaced by Caesar.

We do the same thing today. Every nation is basically a religion, complete with its own mythology. I've become especially aware of this living in Europe, where national identity is a rather touchy issue, and constructing a European identity seems to be happening slowly with lots of bumps in the road. Each country needs a national mythology if they're going to unite the people together. You can't teach American history in American schools unless there's such a thing as the American people. Sure, you can always acknowledge division where it existed, as long as you don't break the basic rhythm of the story: one nation, one people.

America is unique in that we created a nation. Our creation myth is one in which our founding fathers--mere mortals!--are the creators. It's a little bit like Rome. You can worship whatever you want, as long as you're happy with what those guys built.

Still, I'm happy we don't have to bow to anyone. That is a real difference. Americans may have a cult of presidential worship, and we may often be patriotic to a fault, but we know we're not supposed to bow before another human being. I think that's a good thing.

I'm happy to be an American. If I had to answer one of those silly Gallup questions, I would even say I'm "very proud." But I rest very certain that nationalism should be taken with a grain of salt. In particular, we need to recognize that "I am proud to be an American" has many traits in common with a religious refrain: we are taught to repeat it regularly, we feel joy because of it, it instills confidence, it unites us in a common purpose, and so on. And I guess all of that is okay, I'm just not quite ready to sing, "Praise America from whom all blessings flow."

Americans probably need to be reminded more than anyone else that the value of a nation is all relative. Nations continue to come and go, or at the very least evolve. Ours isn't any different. Perhaps what makes American nationalism so strong is that from an occidental perspective, we are perhaps the oldest "modern republic." There's something to be said for that. Then again, maybe the age of the modern republic won't last forever.

I'm thinking very, very long term, of course. Still, in the short run, it would probably help us to act more morally if we toned down some of our national pride. I think in particular about our foreign policy and some of the immigration issues we have, and I think a lot could be fixed by changing our stance toward politics from one of trying to save America (or the world through America) to a simple, humble search for justice. Whether it's our respect for individuals rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" or the belief in "liberté, égalité, fraternité," every nation knows deep down what are the basic principles of justice. Perserving the United States of America at all costs is not one of those fundamental principles common to all humankind.

Happy Independence Day.

Why I think Obama and Romney are essentially the same

There are many reasons why libertarians disapprove equally of Romney and Obama. One could note policies on the war on terror, drone strikes, the NDAA and related national security policies, Guantanamo Bay, etc. Or one could even point to the fundamental similarities in their economic philosophy, which always requires the government to "steer the ship," and which always focuses on the middle class in an obvious attempt to strike a populist chord with America's voting population.

But I wanted to provide a very pithy evaluation of these two candidates, in anticipation of the upcoming Election Day in the US, in order to explain why a Romney presidency will most likely have a very similar effect on American society as an Obama presidency.

Both candidates share this fundamental trait on common: they really want to be good politicians. Each promises to bring but one ingredient to the White House: competence. This "competence" is expressed in all sorts of ways: the ability to run a business, pass laws, or finally "put aside politics" and do "what's best for the country." This latter phrase is never actually explained: it is a way of merely summarizing current prejudices among political elites, whose position in society renders them incapable of philosophical self-criticism.

This desire to appear above all competent to "run the country" is, sadly, a manifestation of how most Americans view politics. Modern people seem to view the government, not as a source of justice, but rather as a source of progress. Thus elections have become about which candidate has the best "vision" for the country, rather than about which candidate would be most true to the principles of our Constitution. We want our president to not simply govern, but rather "run the country."

I am hardly optimistic about the potential results of this trend.

"Banks are special"

Everyone interested in finance is now talking about the recent announcement by JP Morgan that it somehow managed to lose $2 billion in the past six weeks. In a recent opinion article, Paul Krugman asserts that this is precisely why we need more government regulation:

Just to be clear, businessmen are human — although the lords of finance have a tendency to forget that — and they make money-losing mistakes all the time. That in itself is no reason for the government to get involved. But banks are special, because the risks they take are borne, in large part, by taxpayers and the economy as a whole. And what JPMorgan has just demonstrated is that even supposedly smart bankers must be sharply limited in the kinds of risk they’re allowed to take on. [emphasis added]

So do you now understand? Banks are special.

The beef I have with Krugman is not that I think businessmen are superior to government; far from it. No, the beef I have is that I believe, as a hopeful believer in the classical liberal tradition, that our ultimate political goal should be to create a society which is less dependent on people with power, not more dependent. Krugman either thinks there is nothing wrong with a system in which we are forced to pay for the mistakes of cocky financiers, or else he simply thinks such a system is inevitable. I refuse to accept either premise.

As libertarians constantly remind us, if big businesses will at some point inevitably screw us all over, then isn't the same true of big government?

How do we liberate ourselves from a power structure which forces the many to pay for the mistakes of a few? It seems to me we need to reexamine the purpose of law. Almost everyone in contemporary political discourse assumes that one of the major purposes of law is to prevent bad things from happening. So confident are we in our ability to control the world around us, using the incredible technological and political tools developed in the modern era, that we feel certain that someone ought to be able to steer this monstrous ship away from those icebergs. (You'd think we'd actually learn something from the Titanic.)

We need a more chastened approach to law. The purpose of the law is to administer justice. This concept is still not lost on most people. We understand that if we have been wronged, the person who has done the wrong ought to compensate us. It is not possible to change a person's motives, but we can punish bad behavior.

Sometimes, however, the question is not so much whether a person has committed any wrong, but rather who should be responsible for what happened. A man who risks his own money in a business venture has not done any wrong to anyone, and probably has good intentions. However, if the venture goes bad, then justice does not provide him any claim on anyone else's money to reimburse him. He may ask others to be merciful, of course. But is stealing from someone else in order to help this man really an act of mercy? That, in effect, is what the government does whenever it bails out failed businesses. And how much more insulting is this practice, since the businessmen being shown "mercy" hardly deserve our pity!

For this reason, the best way to constrain government is to demand from it only justice, not mercy. The purpose of government is not to "steer the boat," as it were. Its sole purpose is to arbitrate between individuals who will sometimes fall into irreconcilable conflict. Its purpose is to decide the boundaries of responsibility so that individuals aren't forced to pay for the consequences of actions to which they had no prior connection, and then to enforce those boundaries. This is clearly not a trivial task, but it is a fundamentally different task than the one demanded by a majority of the American public today. It has nothing to do with control, but only with justice.

Doubtless someone will say that mercy triumphs over justice. A fine Christian sentiment that is, but mercy can only be shown by someone with power. The vision proposed by America's founders is one in which the government is not an institution of power, but of service to the people. God can have mercy on us because he has some rightful claim on us. If we admit that the government can have mercy on us, we give government a place which only properly belongs to God! Nothing belongs to the government other than what we have given it, or what has been taken from us. What an act of mercy for government to steal from the many in order to give to the few!

Like Krugman, I believe that if government is to insure the banks against all possible failures, it ought to demand that these banks act within the bounds of reason, so that they don't harm the public. But the question is whether the government has the authority to insure the banks in this way. The question is whether anyone has the right to claim a position in society that is "too big to fail," or too important not to be supported by the public. Such a position is what used to be called privilege, before the term came to be abused in modern discourse. The American dream, in my view, was to have a society in which the notion of privilege in this sense was all but totally destroyed.

It is not possible to prevent mistakes. It is not possible to prevent evil. Regulations will only slow down the conscientious. Those who have respect for what is right and prudent will either work around such regulations or ignore them. When people speak of the need to "regulate," they have already assumed that there is such a thing as privilege. And that is a tragedy.

Rather than regulations, we simply need law. "A government of laws, and not of men," as Madison said. In the short run, laws do not prevent evil men from doing evil things, but they do give the common man the power to stand up and be compensated for the wrong done to him. One hopes that in the long run, this has the tendency to prevent evil, since at least people will seek to avoid bad consequences. But what is there to prevent a man from doing as he pleases, when he knows that he has a place of privilege in society, and someone will always pick up after his mistakes?

I don't know how to successfully reform the power structure we have mistakenly built in this great civilization of ours. All I know is what kind of direction we ought to move in. It seems to me that so-called "liberals" like Krugman have abandoned the classical liberal vision of a world without privilege. My only guess is that they have all but abandoned thinking about the long run in favor of using their technocratic abilities to help as many people as they can in the short run. We shall see what is the fruit of their bias.

If it's all relative...

Usually the conclusion would be, "Then whom am I to judge?" A non-judgmental society is the goal of those who try to break down our traditional sense of black and white justice.

Then again, if there is no one to judge, then there's no one to judge me if I judge you. That is, if there is no such thing as justice, then there is no such thing as judging, and therefore I can say whatever I want about you, no matter how hateful.

Hence the online culture of hate speech.

Essence of human

Fascinating book review on the NYT (HT: Mockingbird blog) talking about the neurological roots of de-humanization, from genocide to slavery. In the book Less Than Human, philosopher David Livingstone Smith argues that we may be in some sense hard-wired to de-humanize people:

Smith clearly explains why many cognitive scientists believe this tendency is innate and then links it to another predisposition that seems “built in” to the human mind: our inclination to see living things in hierarchies, as in the “great chain of being” of medieval European Christians, with God at its perfect top, human beings above “higher” animals, and so on down to worms and plants. Because we feel that living things are defined by their essence, and because we feel that each creature has its rank in the world, Smith argues, dehumanization comes easily to the human mind: we accept that someone can look human but have a sub­human essence, and we accept that what is not human must be inferior. “When we dehumanize people,” he writes, “we think of them as counterfeit human beings.”

But reviewer David Berreby thinks this explanation doesn't match reality:

All these troubles arise because Smith’s insistence on immutable essences is only half right: people do categorize themselves and others using essences, but there’s nothing immutable about them. If, like trained philosophers, we could settle for good who is essentially human and who is a zombie vampire squid, we wouldn’t have, or need, this drama of dehumanization, rehumanization, then more dehumanization, and so on. Instead, the who-is-and-isn’t-human question is never truly settled. In fact, it is the dynamic, even mercurial nature of “real human” status that makes this mystery of our psychology so fascinating. What Amenemhet wants us to remember isn’t that he thought Asiatics were dogs, but that he made them act like dogs.

It's something worth thinking about: given dynamic conceptual frameworks, how do we become more just? Is it by taking the philosopher's approach, which is essentially to make our concepts more static, or is there a way to account for justice for an evolving human consciousness?

Divine Justice, Human Tyranny

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it; but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. John 3:8

Is God sovereign over history, or not? Is he sovereign over nature, or not?

It is common for people to cite the horrific events of history as reason either to doubt God's goodness or to doubt his sovereignty, with the result either way that we doubt his existence. It is now also fashionable these days to cite the very mechanism by which human beings came into existence--biological evolution--as evidence that God doesn't exist.

Christians, in response, are prone to answering with theological excuses connecting the fall of Adam with the taint of nature. I won't argue the biblical merits of these excuses one way or another. What I'm interested in is the underlying principle behind such arguments. The complaint is that God doesn't share a basic sense of justice with humans; the defense is that, "Well, yes he does, it's just hard to see it at first."

I question whether this is the proper response to such complaints. Not only does it undermine God's power, but it feeds the human presumption that his own sense of justice is necessarily correct. Yet the same experiences which cause us to question God's justice should perhaps more often cause us to question our own.

How "capitalism" works around here

The Freeman tipped me off to a story this week that has stirred in me an even deeper moral outrage against government interventionism. The headline reads:

McDonald's, 29 other firms get health care coverage waivers

Nearly a million workers won't get a consumer protection in the U.S. health reform law meant to cap insurance costs because the government exempted their employers.

Thirty companies and organizations, including McDonald's (MCD) and Jack in the Box (JACK), won't be required to raise the minimum annual benefit included in low-cost health plans, which are often used to cover part-time or low-wage employees.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which provided a list of exemptions, said it granted waivers in late September so workers with such plans wouldn't lose coverage from employers who might choose instead to drop health insurance altogether.

Without waivers, companies would have had to provide a minimum of $750,000 in coverage next year, increasing to $1.25 million in 2012, $2 million in 2013 and unlimited in 2014.

Justice and the natural order

A recent article in First Things by Stephen M. Barr entitled, "Fearful Symmetries" argues that scientific reductionism has been misapplied by scientific materialists. Barr decries the "diminished ontological status" of the fundamental "stuff" of the universe in the materialist view of things. In contrast, he expresses the belief that it is precisely by looking at the basic building blocks of the universe that we see its underlying order, and thus we see the Mind of God at work. Working "down" from the complex to the simple does not mean explaining away the beauty of the universe; on the contrary, it means discovering that beauty.

Power and pacifism

I listened to an old emergent podcast featuring Brian McLaren called "Power, in ways we don't understand." Overall I thought it was wonderful, and much of what McLaren is saying resonates with me.

Not that this is the subject of my post, but I was really excited about how he explained what the gospel really is. I don't have a transcript of the whole thing in front of me, so I'll have to paraphrase something he said.

The gospel today is primarily personal, with the emphasis on saving souls. Then there's a rather large footnote on how to have a better life here on Earth before you get to heaven. Then there's a bit smaller footnote on how to improve our communities, and then a tiny little footnote on how the gospel impacts the whole world.

McLaren proposes thinking about it the other way around--start with what the gospel means to the whole world, then think about what that means for our communities, and then about what it means for our individual lives.

Along the way he stumbles onto this global issue of war and peace. As McLaren looks up to Stanley Hauerwas on many things, he also finds himself attracted to Hauerwas' pacifism.

McLaren says he is a "pacifist sympathizer." He also says pacifists are "ahead of their time." I'm paraphrasing a bit, but he says something like we need a "peace race" rather than an arms race. This kind of attitude seems pretty typical among the emergent strain of Christainity.

I'm not sure what I think. We live in an interesting time in which to formulate opinions about war and peace. A lot of liberals have been crying out for the past eight years that we failed to learn the lessons of Vietnam, and we're repeating our same mistakes.

But let's be honest, the lesson a lot of conservatives learned from Vietnam is that pacifism seems to come wrapped in a package of absurd liberal philosophy that simply doesn't work in real life. Vietnam didn't teach America to be pacifists; it taught us that pacifists are weird.

I say this as a 23 year-old inhereting the conversation that was going on decades before I was alive, but this is what I hear through the maze of opinions.

Iraq isn't exactly my generation's Vietnam. There has been no draft (and no draft dodging). Both the Hawks and the Doves have expressed their opinions from the comfort of their own blogs. Hardly any opinions of the war, good or bad, are forged out of any sort of practical experience.

That's all relative, of course. There are many brave men and women who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps their opinion contain something in them that the rest of our opinions don't. It's just hard to say. But we do have a volunteer military. I think the dynamics would be very different if everyone were called to serve.

Anyway, how do we as Christians think about war? I get disturbed often by people who are way too decided. Either the Bible clearly teaches that war can be justified--I mean, just look at all the slaughter that God commanded Joshua to carry out--or it clearly teaches pacifism.

The words of Jesus on this subject are minimal, and at best they are cryptic. He did say, "All who take the sword will perish by the sword," (Mt 26:52) but this does not immediately condemn soliders. After all, those who perish by the sword are often given great honor because of it.

My own opinion at this point is that I cannot accept either "just war theory" or pacifism. How can theory really justify anything to do with killing people? It's like the problem of evil--it doesn't have a truly good explanation because it isn't good.

I have already expressed on this blog my frustration with ethics that try to come up with hypotheticals and "solve" them. I think the desire to solve hypotheticals is culturally conditioned, and it's something I think we need to train our culture out of as much as possible.

The way I view ethics these days is this. We are like a pianist sitting down to play. The music is already there in the keys of the piano; they just have to be struck in the correct order, with the correct timing and dynamics.

But what shall I play? thinks the pianist. He has this notion of beauty deeply embedded in his heart, and he wants to make that become real. He ponders this for a moment, longing for some perfect melody to come to mind. At last he takes a deep breath, and starts to play.

Is there any perfect melody? Is there any piece of music or art that can ever fully express the idea of beauty that is embedded in all of our hearts? Perhaps not. But the fact that the pianist listened to that longing in his heart, and then started to play--that is what made him a musician.

We long to see heaven on earth. As a Christian, I believe we will see it. But the only way we can make ethical decisions is to both desire to see heaven unleashed and then to act. Theoretical concerns do not make an action ethical or not.

Who is the soldier to boast that he was perfectly justified in killing his opponents? And then again, who is the pacifist to judge a nation for defending itself? Why do we all see this big need to justify ourselves, as if anything in this dark, corrupt world could really be justified?

I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pacifist who plotted to kill Hitler. There was a man who understood ethics. There was a man who longed for heaven in his heart, and then tried with all of his might to somehow bridge the unbridgeable gap between heaven and hell.

To all the soldiers out there, I applaud your bravery. And to all the pacifists out there, I applaud your idealism.

We all have our cross to bear.