I just recently got the book The History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, by English historian Andrew Roberts, which self-consciously updates Churchill's monumental work. It looks like an interesting read, advancing, according to one jacket blurb, "the faith of Winston Churchill that the English-speaking peoples [UK, US, Australia, New Zealand] are 'the last best hope of mankind.'" For this thesis to be convincing -- insofar as a nation state could ever be that kind of hope -- it would have to be asserted in quite a qualified, measured manner. So we'll see.
I flipped first to Roberts's discussion of the Versailles Treaty, where he attacks the "received wisdom" that the Treaty's undue harshness on Germany ended up bringing on the next world war. I'm no historian, so his attack could be right, but the following argument of his struck me as seriously fallacious: "Adolf Hitler had plans of conquest and dreams of scourging the Bolsheviks and Jews that would have led him far beyond the frontiers that any peacemakers could have possibly agreed for Germany at Versailles." Of course he did, but the question is whether Hitler would have been able to take power in a Germany that had not been subjected to Versailles: the received wisdom, obviously, claims that the treaty's harshness contributed to the chaos in Germany that led many people to turn to Hitler for salvation. You could question that claim factually (e.g. maybe the treaty itself didn't have such a harsh effect), but the quoted passage from Roberts seems simply to dodge the argument.
It's hard not to see a parallel in today's debates about how to deal with Bin Laden and "Islamo-fascists." Since their demands are entirely unacceptable, and since no compromise can be brooked with evil, does that mean -- as is sometimes argued -- that there are no prudential limits on what should be done to fight them? Only if you look at the violent radicals in isolation, and disregard the fight for the hearts and minds of millions of Muslims who might or might not be attracted to the radical wing -- who might either strengthen it or instead be helpful in our fight against it -- depending in part on how America acts. To say this, of course, is decidedy not to advocate "blaming America first" or hamstringing ourselves from action against terrorists. It is simply to say that we must consider the effects of our actions on both groups, "Islamo-fascists" and "Muslims in the middle." People can differ on how precisely to balance those two considerations. But when Roberts in the above-quoted passage about Versailles talks about only one -- the unmanageable Hitler, and not the larger group of Germans -- I wonder if he's driven by some of the perceived exigencies of today's fights?
(In defending the relevance of this post to Catholic legal theory, I'll plead that we've spent a fair amount of time on the blog talking about the theological/moral/prudential issues involved in "the war against terror" ...)
Tom
UPDATE: There's a debate at the The New Republic between Roberts and a critic over whether his book minimizes or apologizes for atrocities committed in the past by the British (e.g. the Amritsar massacre of Indians in 1919, the killing of Kenyans in the Mau-Mau uprisings in the 1950s, and the Boer-War concentration camps). Again, the strong subtext is whether "the English-speaking peoples" (today, mostly the Americans) can generally be trusted to keep their use of force within acceptable bounds. Sounds to me like the critic wins the debate over Roberts' passages, but I'll read the book.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
The Auth cartoon made it to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune today. Of course, when pro-choice senators opposed pro-life Catholic Bill Pryor's nomination for the court of appeals a few years ago and were accused (wrongly) of anti-Catholicism for doing so, pro-choicers were aghast. The issue, they correctly argued, was not Pryor's Catholicism, it was his position on whether the Constitution protects abortion rights. (They were quick to point out, of course, that some Catholic senators opposed him.) The five justices in the Gonzales v. Carhart majority, on the other hand, are obviously simply acting out their Catholicism, not their judicial philosophy about when the Constitution overrides democratic majorities. As Rick observes, it's only deemed an unacceptable "religious position" if you vote against the abortion-rights side.
Tom
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Christianity Today defends incrementalism on abortion by reference to today's decision and the recent episode in South Dakota, where after the proposed abortion ban with only a "life of the mother" exception failed by referendum,
pro-life leaders reintroduced the ban, this time [adding rape and incest] exceptions. Though the state House approved it 45-25, the measure died in a Senate committee. Even the head of South Dakota Right to Life, a state senator, declined to support the new ban with the three exceptions.
. . . The public, apparently spooked by the more comprehensive measure, turned decidedly chilly toward bans of any kind. Ed Olson, a state senator who said last year he would vote for a less restrictive ban, eventually declined to support even the ban with exceptions.
Conclusion: "[A]n incremental strategy gives us the best way to get there [to overturning Roe] while discouraging abortions right now. Wednesday's Supreme Court ruling confirms the prudence and promise of this tactic."
Tom
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
I'm in France this month on a visiting professorship -- I'll try to offer something substantive soon, but for right now I can only report that Rob's fears about MOJ's naughty image appear to be coming true. While on a trip this past weekend, I tried to read the blog from the hotel computer, and the filter program blocked MOJ as a site containing "education sexuelle/notions avancées." And this in Paris no less!
Tom
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
Over at First Things, Peter Leithart offers a diagnosis of why Barack Obama promises a larger-minded politics and comes up with nothing newer or more radical than improving the health-care system:
In his bracing little book on Secularization
, Edward Norman, chancellor of York Minster, describes the conflict between Christianity and what he calls Secular Humanism by contrasting their attitudes toward suffering. Christianity “was founded in an act of expiatory pain, has regarded human suffering as not only inseparable from the nature of life on earth, as a matter of observable fact, but also as a necessary condition in spiritual formation.” Christians seek, of course, to alleviate suffering, but God, not human suffering, is the center of the moral universe.
Secular Humanism, by contrast, does not believe in sin and cannot see how any good could emerge from human suffering. Humanity is perfectible, and if we will only work together we will be able to remove “anything that can be represented as an affront or an impediment to the painless existence of men and women.” . . .
This is a box outside of which Senator Obama cannot think, and this is why his agenda looks so thoroughly Clintonesque. Here’s a suggestion: If he wants to transform American politics, perhaps his next fund-raising letter should say something along the lines of “Pain may be good for you.”
There's a salutary reminder in this post about suffering and the human condition before God. However, I find the one-sided political jibes off-putting --though they're surely inadvertent -- since I don't see the other side ever saying "Pain may be good for you" either. Health saving accounts and medical-malpractice reforms are still an effort to do something about health-care costs. More, I assume that Rev. Leithart would equally condemn the administration's failure to call for any economic sacrifice from Americans, especially the wealthiest, during the last few years of war? That kind of sacrifice might be even more deeply grounded in Christian theology because it would be sacrifice for the purpose of service (solidifying the next generation's financial future), rather than suffering merely from the circumstances that fall down upon one's life. I agree that the latter is something all of us need to be more willing to accept --as training in accepting God's will -- but a significant part of that is training for accepting God's command, when it comes, that we sacrifice or suffer in the service of others.
I also don't know where Rev. Leithart draws the line between proper Christian efforts "to alleviate suffering," which he acknowledges, and "secular humanist" efforts to escape pain altogether. (I don't think that saying "God is the moral center" is quite enough.) Without that line, it's hard to evaluate his argument about efforts to reform health care. All this focus on health care may indeed reflect an idolatry of the body to some extent. But it also reflects to a significant extent a recognition of the costs that untreated or poorly-treated sickness can impose on mind, spirit, and vocation as well as body. Concerning the uninsured, consider John Paul II's focus on "those who do not succeed in realizing their basic human vocation because they are deprived of essential goods" including health care, Sollicitudo rei Socialis para. 28. And concerning even the middle class, consider Elizabeth Warren's findings about the contribution of medical costs to bankruptcies, with all the personal and family stresses and dislocations (including divorces) that financial catastrophes cause.
Tom
... (here), and about affirmative action, his own life development, and (briefly, near the end) Catholic higher education. He gave the unusual interview to a Business Week reporter working on a story about Rev. John Brooks, former Holy Cross president, who as a dean then was a mentor to Thomas.
Tom
Friday, March 2, 2007
I've posted on SSRN this paper, arising out of Villanova's fine conference last fall on The Meaning of the Preferential Option for the Poor for Law and Policy. Here's part of the the abstract:
IP lies at the heart of debates over globalization and whether it is working to help poor nations or to impose new costs on them while increasing the wealthy nations' relative advantages. The Catholic Church has weighed in on these issues, most clearly in favor of limiting patent rights over essential medicines for combating AIDS and other epidemics. . . .
. . . Intellectual property, like other forms of property, serves important purposes related to human dignity, productivity, and (especially) creativity, and Catholic teaching therefore affirms it. But for a variety of reasons, limits on intellectual property are equally important: the full extension of IP rights may harm the poor, and certain limits on those rights are important to benefiting and empowering the poor. In particular, certain existing or proposed limits on IP rights can resonate with Catholic concepts such as maintenance of the common good and the importance of subsidiary organizations defined neither by the state nor by the market. And expressions of skepticism in Catholic thought about bureaucratic approaches to the poor reflected in the social assistance state have relatively little application to the kind of limits on IP rights that may be adopted to empower the poor.
Tom
Monday, February 26, 2007
The Lexington, Mass. case that Fr. Araujo recently discussed has been decided against parental rights. The federal district court dismissed the parents' complaint that they had a constitutional right to receive notice and an opportunity to remove their kindergarten and first-grade children from sessions reading books that presented same-sex sexual relationships or marriage as morally positive. Parker v. Hurley, 2007 WL 543017 (D. Mass. Feb. 23, 2007).
Although the age of the children is quite young here, the decision seems unfortunately consistent with most of the recent precedent -- including this from the Ninth Circuit --holding that once parents send their children to public school, they have no constitutional rights whatsoever to opt them out of any objectionable curriculum. A prominent rationale in these decisions is that if the parents wanted a curriculum congenial to their moral views, they could have chosen a private school -- an argument, of course, that in its disregard for the economic realities of modest-income families, ought to appeal more to anti-tax libertarians than to the politically left-ish people who typically make it.
As I understood the situation around the country, opt-outs from sex-education programs have been widely granted by school districts over the years. Massachusetts has such a provision requiring notice and an opportunity to opt out of curriculum that "primarily involves human sexual education or human sexuality issues." Mass. Gen. Laws c. 71, section 32A. On the issue of homosexual conduct, the Lexington school district (and likely others as well) sought to avoid this duty to accommodate by claiming that the issue is one of teaching tolerance rather than teaching about sexuality. The district court did not decide this state-law dispute; having dismissed the parents' claims, it also dismissed the claim under the state statute without prejudice to the plaintiffs suing in state court. This was proper under the law of federal jurisdiction, but it does of course leave the parents objecting to same-sex marriage to the tender mercies of the Massachusetts state court system that (in the Goodridge ruling) has declared such objections irrational and hateful.
Not a bright picture for parental rights, in other words, except for a thin silver lining. The parents objected that their children were being "indoctrinated" into approval of the morality of same-sex sexual relationships. The district court answered that this was nothing more than an "epithe[t]": "'Indoctrination' is a pejorative term for teaching," and "[i]t is, obviously, the duty of the schools to teach." Some of you will remember the several Supreme Court opinions (most notably Lemon v. Kurtzman) that forbade state aid to Catholic and other religious schools on ground that they engaged in "indoctrination" of students. Critics of the Court sometimes pointed out that this was simply a nasty word for teaching, which all schools do -- public and private -- and should admit to doing. Now, in the cases that we know are still upcoming about the permissibility of aid programs (i.e. school choice) under state constitutions, there's at least a district court opinion to cite and quote to support this argument for school choice.
So this decision continues the unfortunate trend of denying parents any option of partial exit from state controlled education. But at least it provides a small bit of authority to help defend the broader exit option of school choice -- to bolster the case for permitting modest-income parents who choose religiously grounded "teaching (not indoctrination)" to receive the same state assistance in educating their children as parents who choose secular "teaching (not indoctrination)."
Tom
