What’s Wrong with the World

Lydia's recent post about how the pro-life movement is corrupting itself through compromise has generated quite a bit of interest. A fundamental dividing line in the discussion seems to be between those who are sometimes willing to compromise on who to vote for, and those who are always willing to compromise on who to vote for: between those who are willing to draw a line beyond which one will not support a candidate, irrespective of how bad other viable candidates may be in the current election, and those unwilling to draw such a line.

I have a hypothesis about why some appear unwilling to admit even the abstract possibility of such a line. My hypothesis is that this unwillingness is related to the actual facts of the actual current presidential election: that it is obvious that if one were willing to draw a line beyond which one is unwilling to compromise, one would be forced to draw that line in a way which excludes the possibility of supporting either of the two viable candidates for President in the current election cycle. The least bad of the two candidates - whichever one of the two you may think that is - has a long history of supporting the federally funded wholesale slaughter of tiny but real and fully human children.

And if one isn't willing to draw a line there, then how could one possibly concede the validity of drawing lines at all?

(Cross-posted)

ISI has released another gem of a book. Its flagship publication The Intercollegiate Review has been appearing for 40 years and more, and now finally has a compilation of its rich content equal its stature. Hardly a Conservative luminary has failed to appear in this journal, and in this volume the editor gives us an excellent sample, evidencing the breadth and depth of subjects assayed. Highly recommended.

From the promotional material:

"With a circulation in the tens of thousands, and featuring foundational essays ranging across the disciplines — from political theory, philosophy, and economics to strategic studies, cultural criticism, and belles lettres — the Intercollegiate Review has been since 1965 one of the central organs of American conservative intellectual life. Many of the most serious thinkers on the right have appeared in the IR, and some of the most important theoretical debates in American conservatism have played out in its pages. At once sophisticated, penetrating, profound, and humane, the IR has consistently reflected the American conservative mind at its most thoughtful. From the Cold War and the Woodstock generation to the war on terror and the revolution in biotechnology, this collection of the IR's best essays from its first four decades constitutes a chronicle of contemporary American history as seen from the right. Arguing Conservatism includes essays by dozens of eminent thinkers, including Robert Bork, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Conquest, Ludwig von Mises, Robert Nisbet, Roger Scruton, Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, and Robert Penn Warren."

From Hugh Hewitt's blog:

Now the full weight of the Catholic Church is coming down on Nancy Pelosi.  Bravo to Cardinal Rigali and Bishop Lori who join Archbishop Chaput in setting an example for their fellow Church leaders.  Now, how about the Bishop of San Francisco?  The story:

Continue reading "Speaker Pelosi Wrong About Catholic Doctrine - Promptly Catechized" »

I want to tell you a story. You may draw your own moral.

Some of you may be old enough to remember that a ban on federal funding for research using tissue taken from aborted fetuses was a big deal in the Reagan and Bush, Sr., administrations. Then came William Jefferson Clinton and, with the cooperation of Congress, that ban on federal funding was lifted in 1993. The NIH could fund research using tissue from aborted children. At the time the big hype was for treatment of Parkinson's disease. That promise has turned out to be a complete dud.

The National Right to Life Committee reported faithfully on this subject and consistently opposed such funding, contending that it normalized abortion and made women think that perhaps they could "do some good" by having their child killed. In fact, NRLC continued to voice such opposition even after 1993.

Continue reading "Corruption and the cost of compromise" »

That is the title of the latest essay by the inestimable Hadley Arkes at The Catholic Thing. As Peter Wehner points out at National Review Online, the federal Born-Alive Infant Protection Act is the brain-child of Professor Arkes. You can read about the Act and its history in Professor Arkes' wonderful book, Natural Rights and the Right to Choose (Cambridge University Press, 2002). Here are some excerpts from The Catholic Thing piece:

Continue reading "The Born-Alive Act and the Undoing of Obama" »

Apparently, for the Matthew 25 Christian, it is not above his pay grade to offer an account of the reasons why he led the charge to defeat an Illinois bill that would have required that medical personnel provide assistance to children who survive abortions:

Obama reminds me of a very bright doctoral student in a graduate seminar who thinks that his well-articulated string of verbal obfuscations accompanied by pondering facial expressions is the same as thoughtful reflection.

Via Wesley J. Smith's Secondhand Smoke comes a story that some of you may already have seen:

Organ procurement physicians in Denver have now done heart transplants from babies using the non-heart-beating donation method after waiting only 75 seconds from the time that the infants' hearts stopped beating.

Ironically, an ethics committee recommended that the time period be moved back to seventy-five seconds from five minutes (another time period that is sometimes used in such procurements) on the grounds that this would be more "ethical." Why? Because otherwise the hearts might not be as fresh for the recipients.

Continue reading "Rushing organ donation for the sake of "ethics"" »

Tomorrow my wife, Frankie, and I begin our trek to the University of Notre, where I will serve on its faculty for the 2008-2009 school year as the Mary Ann Remick Senior Visiting Fellow in Notre Dame's Center for Faith & Culture. My home institution, Baylor University, was more than generous in providing me research leave. My department chair, Michael Beaty, deservers particular thanks for his support of my work.

During my time at Notre Dame I will be working on a book critically evaluating the modern Supreme Court's epistemological assessment of religious and moral beliefs. I will bring to bear in that analysis much of what has gone on in Anglo-American philosophy of religion over the past 4 decades. Another problem I will address--something to which I alluded in my blog entry on Andrew Sullivan--is the a priori denigration of religious and moral claims by those who proudly assert that they are the guardians of liberal democracy.

(Cross-posted)

Andrew Sullivan writes:

It's perhaps the most depressing fact of this campaign so far that the first major encounter between McCain and Obama will be presided over by a mega-pastor and in a church. Here's Jeffrey Goldberg's interview with the man who is taking American politics one step further away from the vision of the Founding Fathers. Take this particular piece of blather:

I believe in the separation of church and state, but I do not believe in the separation of politics from religion. Faith is simply a worldview. A person who says he puts his faith on the shelf when he's making decisions is either an idiot or a liar. It's entirely appropriate for me to ask what is their frame of reference.

The entire basis for Western secular government, which rests on the capacity of people to distance absolute truth from political affairs, is based on idiocy or lies? I wonder if Warren has ever read Locke, or Hobbes, or Machiavelli or would even understand the term secularism if it knocked him square off his pedestal.

Continue reading "The Purpose-Driven Rant: Andrew Sullivan Does Not Understand Rick Warren" »

From today's National Review Online.

Continue reading ""Life Lies: Barack Obama and Born-Alive." By David Freddoso" »

Senator Barack Obama, from last night's Saddleback Valley Civil Forum on the Presidency:

"We still don't abide by that basic precept of Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me."

First, it's not Matthew's precept. It's Jesus' precept, which appears in the Gospel of Matthew (25: 40). Second, the context of Matthew 25 is the Last Judgment at which the Son of Man separates the sheep from the goats, with the latter going to eternal punishment and the former to eternal life. Third, it is telling what Christ in fact says about the goats (v. 41-43 - NIV):

"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

When Senator Obama, while in the Illinois senate, had the opportunity to require by law that medical professionals provide nutrition (something to eat), hydration (drink), protection (clothes), and shelter (inviting them in) to the smallest and most vulnerable strangers of all, the true "least of these," newborns who had survived abortions, Senator Obama stood with the goats.

(Cross-posted)

It is a commonplace observation concerning the American character, and American political culture and statecraft, that Americans are bereft of a tragic sensibility. Most probably, this is a consequence of a profound psychological association between what was once the newness and remoteness of the New World, and its geographic and social openness, and the opportunities this afforded those intent upon forging new lives away from older societies which dissatisfied them in various respects. Americans seem to lack, on the whole, and in the mainstream of thought, a capacity to enter into the tragic consciousness of other peoples, or to assume a tragic posture even temporarily, as a heuristic for the evaluation of their own condition. For example, all such circumstances as that of Georgia are assimilated to a narrative of a plucky people attempting to escape the dead dominion of the Past, represented here by Russia, here assimilated and reduced to its Soviet incarnation. The complexity and, indeed, tragedy of the intercommunal relations and tensions of diverse peoples and their histories and aspirations is compressed into a quintessentially American narrative - the attempt of one people to forge for themselves a version of the New World, a Novus Ordo Seculorum. This, of course, holds true when Americans either have an interest in some foreign region, or are stirred by the press into a state of interest in some region, or are told by their superiors that they must manifest concern for some foreign region; when Americans have no interest in a conflicted region of the world, as was the case during the Balkan Wars, they dismiss its tensions and tragedies, blithely, as just so many ancient, senseless, and incomprehensible tribal feuds. In doing so, Americans ratify their native view of the world: that is the Old World, the old way, in which people continuously reference the past; we Americans, by contrast, are optimistic and forward-lookinig, willing to jettison such atavisms for a prosperous future.

Ironically, a nation bereft of a tragic sensibility will usually manifest tragedy in its dealings with the world, and this is the case, I would argue, where America is concerned. Without intending to dwell at great length upon the theme, American foreign policy incarnates tragedy in at least three related senses.

First, because American grand strategy endeavours to unify material interests and ostensibly noble ideals, Americans tend to be blind to the ways in which the pursuit of either inhibits the realization of the other. The Iraq War represents an attempt to conduct American policy on a firmly idealistic basis, and yet it is proving materially ruinous along any number of metrics. American policy in the Caucasus aims to mitigate what is regarded as an excessive dependence upon Russian energy and energy transport routes, and clearly inhibits the promotion of ostensible American ideals, as the Alievs in Azerbaijan, and the mercurial Saakashvili in Georgia, are scarcely representatives of the ideals we openly proclaim, regardless of the press coverage of the latter, in particular. Moreover, Americans frequently indulge in a measure of self-delusion concerning their own motivations in the conduct of policy, as might be suggested by such examples. Are we promoting a set of political ideals, or rather a set of chess moves in a pointless Great Game? Even on the assumption that we have simply chosen to maintain a national friendship of sorts with Georgia, how credible is it to advance such claims when we apparently permitted enough strategic and diplomatic ambiguity to encourage the Georgians to pick a fight they could not win - ie., one unjust at least in that respect?

Second, Americans tend to envision ideal geopolitical scenarios, or, at a minimum, possible geopolitical worlds, which are objectively preferable to geopolitical reality, or subjectively preferable for some or other group we intend to shower with our favouritism. This is tragic in a double sense: first, there are always unintended consequences, which prompt anguished protests on the part of Americans, to the effect that an ungrateful world does not appreciate the purity and nobility of our intentions, or that we could not have anticipated the fallout; second, few of these entanglements are actually in the interest of the American people, the welfare of whom is the principal obligation of American statesmen. Even on the assumption that the world as a whole is better off, given the conduct of American policy X, the American people themselves are seldom better for it.

Third, American foreign policy is often a reflection of flaws in the American character, in the sense that its formulation and conduct reflects domestic defects with which we have failed to reckon. The two most obvious examples are, in my estimation, first, American involvement in the Middle East, motivated primarily by a concern for the regular and orderly flow of oil shipments to global markets - not "blood for oil", but an acknowledgment that America, uniquely dependent upon those resources for the perpetuation of the American way of life, must be uniquely concerned for the correlation of political forces in the Middle East, that is, with "stability", however differently the Bush administration has elected to define this. The second illustration would be the role of the military in both our foreign policy and in popular culture. Military force has become increasingly emblematic of our foreign policy, largely as an assertion of faith in American ideals, after the tumultuous years of the Vietnam war associated for many a skepticism of American ideals and opposition to war. A readiness to employ military power has become symbolic of an affirmation of Americanism at a profound, subconscious level of the American psyche. Not merely this, but among some quarters, gestures of support for American foreign policy, affirmations of the rectitude of American missions and intentions, have become so fervent - not a bad thing in itself, in abstraction - in inverse proportion to the concrete commitment of the American people to the policies themselves. Laying aside questions of the wisdom of American policy, while there have been many token demonstrations of support for the troops, such as the application of magnetic ribbons to the backs of automobiles, there has been no dramatic upsurge in enlistments, or a willingness on the part of the people to sacrifice materially by paying in taxes what would be required to finance American foreign policy, as opposed to borrowing from foreign creditors. In this, our leadership reflects our own character; we were told, after 9/11, to go shopping, not so much because this was simply the role our leaders felt appropriate for us, but because that was pretty much all we would be willing to do in connection with a war effort.

American foreign policy is occasionally malign in an obvious manner, as in Kosovo; but even in such instances, it is malign, not on account of some nefarious intention, but on account of the profound flaws and lacunae in our own understanding - of ourselves, and of the world. In criticizing American foreign policy, those of us on, or nearer, the paleo right are essentially summoning America to an heroic undertaking, that of self-examination.

Courtesy of Jay Anderson at Pro Ecclesia, Pro Familia, Pro Civitate (including a nice collection of links at the bottom):

Continue reading "The Most Recent on Doug Kmiec" »