Because I have a bunch of things on my list that I should be doing, I have (of course!) spent some time today reading old MOJ posts, and also catching up on some (broadly speaking) Catholic blogs. Maybe it's just because there's an election coming up -- one that committed citizens on both sides think (a) is really important and (b) just has to go their way, or else -- but this post, from a few months ago (which I called, at the time, a "gloomy observation"), seemed worth re-posting:
Over the course of the last few days and weeks, consuming lots of (and contributing some) commentary in various forms about, e.g., the preventive-services mandate, the Bishops' religious-freedom statement, the Ryan budget and Catholic Social Thought, the Supreme Court arguments in the ACA and SB 1070, the presidential campaign and election, etc., I was struck by what seem to me to be some characteristics of our (and by "our" I'm thinking mainly of "reasonably engaged, informed, and formed Christian citizens) conversations about law, politics, policy, and faith.
It seems to me that, generally speaking, the following are true:
(1) People object indignantly to tu quoque, "so's your mother!", and "if only you were consistent . . ." arguments and charges, and to double-standards, and also deploy, and apply, them often.
(2) People assume that those who disagree with them are, at least in part, motivated by something undisclosed, or by ideological precommitments that overdetermine the content of their claims, while they themselves are candid and transparent, and able to transcend ideology in order to identify what the right answer really is.
(3) People object to pronouncements by religious authorities about "political" matters selectively and strategically / tactically.
(4) People are clear-eyed about the weakness of guilt-by-association arguments, and also entirely happy to press them.
(5) People are sensitive to the important truth that there is (this side of Heaven) almost always room for reasonable disagreement among intelligent, faithful, reasonable people about how best to apply principles, standards, and rules to those facts that are known; and also to the reality that such people will also often disagree about what the "facts" (which include, I suppose, predictions about the effects of particular interventions or omissions) . . . except when they aren't.
(6) People say that we should assume the best of others and their arguments, and avoid a "hermeneutic of suspicion", but don't.
To be clear: I am, I am sure, among these "people." I am not claiming innocence. Sure, the merits matter, and I tend to think (as we all do) that, basically, I'm right about those matters about which I disagree with other people (assuming we are talking about matters about which it's possible to be right). But still -- I'm not pretending to have entirely clean hands. (I guess I'm overcompensating, in anticipation of (1)).
So, a serious question: Given (1)-(6), is there really any hope for productive, charitable, and enlightening conversation and argument (about these matters), among people who don't already (pretty much) agree, outside the context of close personal relationships where trust (and even love) can reduce the incidence of the phenomena described in (1)-(6)?
I very much want the answer to be "yes", but it strikes me that it might be "no." Hence, the gloominess of my observation.
I have to believe the answer is "yes", but pre-election blog-reading (especially blogs that touch on the relationships among religion, law, policy, and politics) can make it hard -- again, outside the context of "close personal relationships where trust (and even love) can reduce the incidence of the phenomena described" above. Thank God for such relationships.
On August 9, 2007, the posts here at MOJ had to do with the question whether the Bush Administration was "politicizing science" (here); the sad goings-on at Ave Maria School of Law (here); Harvey Mansfield's spot-on critique of the "new atheists" (here); and what I was even back then characterizing as my broken-record obsession with the misuse of the term, and idea, "discrimination" (here). In the latter post, I wrote:
I've objected, a number of times, on this blog to the use of the term "discrimination" to describe what it is that religious institutions do when they hire-for-mission. Sure, the word has a meaning which fits. But, in our public debate, "discrimination" is always "unjustified" or "unwarranted" or "unfair" or "prejudiced" discrimination. In my view, that which makes "discrimination" wrong is simply not present when authentically religious institutions hire-for-mission.
That said, here's an article in USA Today, "Case Involves a Collision of Rights: Calif. Doctors Accused of Using Faith to Violate Law Against Anti-Gay Bias" ("using" faith?) which asks, "When does the freedom to practice religion become discrimination?" I guess the "freedom to practice religion" never "become[s] discrimination", but put that aside. Why isn't the answer, "the freedom to practice religion necessarily involves, sometimes, what could be characterized -- but is not helpfully characterized -- as 'discrimination.'" (I realize that the case discussed in the story is not really a hiring-for-mission case, but more of a conscience-based-exemption case, of the kind Rob Vischer knows a lot more about than I do.)
Hmmmm. It's as if I keep saying the same thing over and over . . .
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Inspired by a conversation about Philip Rieff with one of the ablest and smartest lawyers I know, I pulled down The Triumph of the Therapeutic from my shelf this week and was reminded what an extraordinary (if highly peculiar) book it is. Amid the langour before the new academic year begins, consider this lengthy passage in light of the topics we frequently raise here at MOJ:
Historically, the rejection of sexual individualism (which divorces pleasure and procreation) was the consensual matrix of Christian culture. It was never the last line drawn. On the contrary, beyond that first restriction there were drawn others, establishing the Christian corporate identity within which the individual was to organize the range of his experience. Individuality was hedged round by the discipline of sexuality, challenging those rapidly fluctuating imperatives established in Rome’s remissive culture, from which a new order of deprivations was intended to release the faithful Christian believer. Every controlling symbolic contains such remissive functions. What is revolutionary in modern culture refers to releases from inherited doctrines of therapeutic deprivation; from a predicate of renunciatory control, enjoining releases from impulse need, our culture has shifted toward a predicate of impulse release, projecting controls unsteadily based upon an infinite variety of wants raised to the status of needs. Difficult as the modern cultural condition may be, I doubt that Western men can be persuaded again to the Greek opinion that the secret of happiness is to have as few needs as possible. The philosophers of therapeutic deprivation are disposed to eat well when they are not preaching. It is hard to take Schopenhauer at his ascetic word when we know what splendid dinners he had put on, day after day, at the Hotel Schwan in Frankfort.
....
The death of a culture begins when its normative institutions fail to communicate ideals in ways that remain inwardly compelling, first of all to the cultural elites themselves. Many spokesmen for our established normative institutions are aware of their failure and yet remain powerless to generate in themselves the necessary unwitting part of their culture that merits the name of faith. “Is not the very fact that so wretchedly little binding address is heard in the church,” asked Karl Barth, rhetorically, in 1939, “accountable for a goodly share of her misery—is it not perhaps the misery?” The misery of this culture is acutely stated by the special misery of its normative institutions. Our more general misery is that, having broken with those institutionalized credibilities from which its moral energy derived, new credibilities are not yet operationally effective and, perhaps, cannot become so in a culture constantly probing its own unwitting part.
It may be argued against this position that Western culture was never deeply believing—at least not in the Christian manner which, in a number of its most persuasive varieties, encouraged the seeking after individual salvations at the expense of a collective one. Even so, Christian culture survived because it superintended the organization of Western personality in ways that produced the necessary corporate identities, serving a larger communal purpose institutionalized in the churches themselves. Ernst Troeltsch was correct in his institutional title for the moral demand system preceding the one now emerging out of its complete ruin: a “church civilization,” an “authoritarian and coercive culture.” What binding address now describes our successor culture? In what does the self now try to find salvation, if not in the breaking of corporate identities and in an acute suspicion of all normative institutions?
Reading with sadness and almost incredulity the news of where many women religious in the United States see their future, I was reminded of this moving obituary -- of Anita Caspary Ph.D., formerly Mother Humiliata, IHM -- that shows, in remarkably short compass, something of how we got where we are today. I take particular interest in the decline of the IHM sisters, as two of my great-aunts who wore that habit later repudiated it under Mother Humiliata's strong leadership. Here is my great-aunt Sister Magdalen Mary, IHM, whom I was privileged to know in her old age, in a wonderful photo worthy of Brideshead Revisited and Mr. Samgrass. With all due respect to my great-aunts and other women religious of their generation, the future of women religious in the Church, in the U.S. as elsewhere, lies in this way of living, not in this one. I had the sense that Sister Magdalen Mary and Sister Mary Aloysius (whom I was also privileged to know late in her life) sensed as much in their last years, living, as they did, in diaspora, but I could be wrong about that. We never discussed it. They were impressive women -- intelligent and self-confident, but also humble and committed to serving,in the name of Jesus Christ, those in need. The wounds from the way Cardinal McIntyre treated the IHMs remained raw even decades later.
I enjoyed this essay, "The Hollow Republic", by Yuval Levin. In Catholic Social Thought, "mediating associations" are not, as some theorists have thought, "worms in the entrails of the body politic", nor are they merely vehicles for individuals' projects. They are real, they are appropriate subjects of rights, and they are essential to constitutionalism, correctly understood. As Levin notes, "[t]o ignore what stands between the state and the citizen is to disregard the essence of American life. To clear away what stands between the state and the citizen is to extinguish the sources of American freedom."
