Gene C. Fant Jr.'s Blog

How Language Influences Math

Michael Brooks, New Statesman

My Parents Arranged My Marriage, and I’m Cool with That

Judilee King, Religion News Service

Hollow Men and the Search for a Workable Pluralism

Geoffrey Kabaservice, University Bookman

America’s Image Abroad

Sam Schulman, Weekly Standard

Why Pittsburgh Didn’t Become Detroit

Glenn Thrush, Politico Magazine

My friend Stephen Barr misunderstands me, I’m afraid. He writes, in defense of Charles Krauthammer, that

it is a truth accessible to reason unaided by divine revelation that human beings have a spiritual nature, in the sense of being rational and free and having a soul that is not reducible to matter. So that Krauthammer is precisely correct when he says that the question of whether some being is a person can be “restated in theological terms” as whether he has a spiritual soul.  The theology in question is natural theology.

There is nothing in what Steve says here with which I disagree—except the part about Krauthammer being “precisely correct.” Yes, human beings have souls. Unlike other creatures (who might be said to have souls too, albeit of a different order), we have a spiritual nature. But Krauthammer was not making the point Steve thinks he was, nor was I disputing it. Neither did I mean to sneer at the very idea of “ensoulment” as “magical,” though I am properly chastened if Steve or other readers took my meaning that way.

Krauthammer was claiming that there is a “debate,” and a “theological” one at that (and I doubt very much that he meant “natural theology,” for reasons discussed below), not about whether human beings have souls, but about when they acquire them. He claims—as he did a dozen years ago—that a disagreement about this subject, and indeed a kind of radical uncertainty about it that cannot be settled by reason (that is what he means by “theological”—the irrational), is why there is no “consensus” on whether the early-stage embryo or the pre-viable fetus in the womb deserves legal protection.

But there is, as I pointed out, no such debate. On one side of the abortion controversy, the Catholic Church—and every pro-lifer I have ever encountered, including pro-lifers with no religious faith who are capable of natural theology—believes that our “ensoulment,” or whatever is unique about our humanity and makes us bearers of the right to life, is coterminous with our coming into being. And modern science, with which Dr. Krauthammer is surely well acquainted, knows perfectly well when that happens. On the other side are people who either deny the factual dispensations of science, or want to place a “personhood” marker on some arbitrary development of the human person, before or even after birth. But they do not make arguments about “ensoulment,” indeed they avoid all talk of souls altogether.

Dr. Krauthammer, however, persists in believing there is a debate about the “when” of ensoulment. Here, from his 2002 statement in the Bioethics Council’s report on cloning, is a fuller version of the confusion he gave us in his column last week:

For some people, life begins at conception. And not just life—if life is understood to mean a biologically functioning organism, even a single cell is obviously alive—but personhood. If the first zygotic cell is owed all the legal and moral respect due a person, then there is nothing to talk about. Ensoulment starts with Day One and Cell One, and the idea of taking that cell or its successor cells apart to serve someone else’s needs is abhorrent.

This is an argument of great moral force but little intellectual interest. Not because it may not be right. But because it is unprovable. It rests on metaphysics. Either you believe it or you don’t. The discussion ends there.

I happen not to share this view. I do not believe personhood begins at conception. I do not believe a single cell has the moral or legal standing of a child. This is not to say that I do not stand in awe of the developing embryo, a creation of majestic beauty and mystery. But I stand in equal awe of the Grand Canyon, the spider’s web, and quantum mechanics. Awe commands wonder, humility, appreciation. It does not command inviolability. I am quite prepared to shatter an atom, take down a spider’s web, or dam a canyon for electricity. (Though we’d have to be very short on electricity before I’d dam the Grand.)

Like “theological,” the word “metaphysics” is an epithet in Krauthammer’s vocabulary, referring to “stuff serious people don’t seriously debate.” It’s rather like the view of natural law taken by Oliver Wendell Holmes, who referred to moral principles as every person’s “can’t helps,” as in “I can’t help thinking so and so.” For Holmes a “can’t help” just is, but it’s rationally indefensible. Charles Krauthammer’s “can’t helps” do not include an “unprovable” belief in the equal dignity of every member of the human species—not, that is, in the case of the very tiniest of us. This is why, as a member of the Bush administration’s Council on Bioethics, he said in the same statement that he could “support stem-cell research (using leftover embryos from fertility clinics),” and added that he “might support research cloning were it not” for the fact that it could lead to the commodification of the embryo—a frankly consequentialist line of reasoning that seemed to rest chiefly on a “can’t help” squeamishness about the prospect, and nothing more.

From Dr. Krauthammer’s own inability or unwillingness to think this through clearly, he concludes that for the rest of the world there is a “debate” going on about when “ensoulment” occurs. But as I said the other day, that debate is entirely interior to himself.

Can Marriage Cure Poverty?

Anne Lowrey, New York Times

How the U.N. Could Hurt Vatican Reform

John L. Allen, Jr., Boston Globe

A New Constitutional Convention?

James Poulos, Daily Beast

On Dithering and Vocations

James Chastek, Just Thomism

The Quantified Life: Self-Knowledge Through Numbers

Josh Cohen, Prospect

I come from a family that is neck-deep in preachers,
politicians, and lady wrestlers, which in my home state of Mississippi are
basically three sides of the same coin. Okay, I’m making up the lady wrestler
part, but my fascination with all things related to faith and politics came
honestly, at the knee of my late paternal grandfather Thomas Edison Fant, who was a
protégé of Ted Bilbo, the Magnolia State’s version of Huey P. Long. When Grandfather was fed up
with politics (repudiating the bulk of Bilbo’s agenda) and had converted to
Christ, he became a hellfire and brimstone preacher, the first of four
generations of my family to graduate from the Baptist seminary in New Orleans.

Grandfather’s stories about Gov. Bilbo were ripping yarns
about intrigue, back room harangues, and forced compromise that bordered on
blackmail. Grandfather always said “compromise” with a sneer, as along with
salvation he had gained a sense of principle that made compromise difficult for
him. Of course, it might have been his stubbornness that made it hard, but when
he gained a rock solid belief in the Gospel, it changed how he saw the world. He
once told me that he knew that his conversion made him ill-fit for office because
he was now predictable. People knew what he believed and what he would or would
not do. Principle, he observed, was a death sentence for a politician. In
the end, his activities were limited to talking and voting.

Last year Hunter Baker got me hooked on the Netflix series House of Cards, which is a raw depiction of a rising political couple, Francis and Claire
Underwood, with a brutal thirst for power. Christianity
Today has an insightful review in this month’s issue, though it doesn’t , perhaps, warn potential viewers strongly enough that the series is a hard “R” on the movie scale (TV-MA), with language and some scenes of
sensuality that had me fast-forwarding in places. I watched the original BBC
series too, which is a bit campy by comparison, but the Netflix version, which
will debut season two on February 14 (the trailer has seriously salty language), captured my attention precisely because it reminded me so much of those
conversations with Grandfather.

When I teach Machiavelli’s The Prince, my students typically are horrified by the advice that
eschews absolute ideals in favor of power and its retention. When I tell them
that Machiavelli is pretty accurate in his depictions of what happens fairly
often in the halls of power, they
are mortified. My first introduction to this world on a personal level was at
Virginia’s Boys State program, when one of my closest friends ran for governor
and was stabbed in the back by a last-minute, back-hallway deal that shifted
support to another candidate in exchange for supporting someone else’s election
as Lieutenant Governor. It had nothing to do with platform or personality; it
was power, plain and simple: who would win.
The rancid odor of the brokered outcome lingered in my nostrils for a very
long time.

House of Cards is
engrossing because it is so utterly believable. It preys on all of our worst
fears about politics, especially as it occurs at the national level. The deal
making is engrossing (especially as the politicians lubricate conflicts with
other people’s money). The power couple is shrewd and pragmatic. In the middle
of the series, I sort of felt like Abraham in Genesis 18, wondering if there
could be any righteous men in Washington: Where is the light? Where is the redemption? Could Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith go
to this Washington and assert determined principle against this kind of
malignant power? At times, I mumbled under my breath the words of Romeo and Juliet’s Mercutio: “A plague
on both your houses!”

But houses of cards are, really, just an updated version of
the houses built on sand that Christ spoke of in Matt. 7:24-27. It is
a patently present-tense understanding of power that pursues the moment because
the future is either irrelevant or menacing. It cannot last, and from the preview of next season, the clock may be ticking on the Underwood’s house. I
hope that their demise is couched in terms of a warning about one’s sins finding
one out rather than just another drummer’s cadence toward political oblivion. Our
hope as believers is that the houses of this world will all crumble at some
point, bowing to the weight of this world and to the ultimate sovereignty of
Christ.

House of Cards is
not, however, merely about national politics. Political intrigue infuses every
human realm. The microcosm of the series gives insight to the pastor who is
trying to understand why that particular leader is so mean. It gives light to
the job applicant who is shocked to find that she did not land the position. It
makes sense of all sorts of bullying that prospers anywhere, from elementary
school to nursing homes as the essence of the series is bullying with higher
stakes and greater leverage.

Underwood’s Washington is ‘red in tooth and claw,’ where the motto is, “Hunt, or be hunted.” In Matt. 16:10,
Christ himself warned us about this and said, “I’m sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be
as shrewd as serpents and as harmless as doves.” Understanding how the serpents
of the other side operate is an important part of being shrewd; knowing how to
be in that world but not of it is a key to survival, especially for those who
stand on principle.

My
sense is that voting in our democracy can sometimes be merely a balm to a
coward’s conscience. In my conversations with Grandfather, I sometimes wondered
if he ever regretted allowing principle to get in the way of his involvement. I wish I could ask him what might happen if principled men
and women ever decided to overwhelm the system with citizen activists (see
William Wilberforce or Martin Luther King, Jr.) who could bring torches to
illumine the darkest recesses and corruptions of the world’s system. What if Edmund Burke was right, and “the only
thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”? House of Cards depicts Sodom without the
righteous men; our Christian imperative is to bring the light of Christ to any
place that lacks righteousness.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to critics of American higher education. The best ones are from a “disruptive” or libertarian point of view, a kind of libertarianism that’s found in Democratic Silicon Valley as much as among economists and  Republican governors. Those criticisms are all about “bubbles.” There’s the higher educational bubble in cost, which is very similar to the bubble that burst not so long ago in the housing market. Tuitions and total costs are rising much more rapidly than the rate of inflation;  meanwhile, the product, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, is getting increasingly shoddy.

Then there’s the bubble that insulates colleges students from the “real life” rigors of the twenty-first century competitive marketplace. Residential colleges are rife with aristocratic privileges divorced from the corresponding responsibilities. Students and faculty inhabit a bubble (like the bubble boy on Seinfeld) of self-indulgence that does the opposite of prepare them for the responsibilities and opportunities they will encounter.  

Faculty are shamelessly overpaid and underworked. They use tenure as a way of resisting being  held accountable for their productivity in any sense of the word. They play let’s make a deal with the students: I’ll give you a give a good grade even if you learn and accomplish nothing, and you’ll give me a good student evaluation even I don’t even try to teach you anything. Not only that, colleges are turning into luxury resorts: gourmet food in the cafeterias, gyms that are more like health clubs, dorms that are more like hotels, and students affairs staffs that are really “concierges” working tirelessly to keep students from being bored or lacking in self-esteem. Who can deny that an important cause of soaring college cost is the bloating staffs that administer the residential college’s participation in what amount to an amenities arms race?

So, the disruptive critics say, the only alternative is to burst both bubbles. Costs have to be driven down by making colleges as efficient and productive as possible in helping students acquire the skills and competencies to assume a place in the twenty-first century marketplace. Everything else has to be regarded as a useless luxury, as an amenity that’s really not worth what colleges are charging for it. As the libertarians say, no real human standard trumps productivity; everything else is just a preference or hobby.

Because there is considerable truth and even more persuasiveness in these criticisms, we conservatives have to rally to defend the diversity that is the saving grace of American higher education. By diversity, of course, I mean the devotion to moral, religious, and educational missions that are about much more than productivity. We have to articulate a persuasive case for the continuing relevance of liberal education, call the disruptive critics on  their shameless exaggerations concerning how decadent American education has become, and work hard to keep our pockets of excellence from sucked into the whirlpool of holding everything accountable according to standards of measurable productivity.

All this is an introduction to a conservative defense (against the libertarians) of higher education that I wrote for Modern Age.

Dale, I appreciate your unfolding these concerns at greater length. I understand your concerns more fully now.

Before I come to the heart of this discussion, which is the Catholic-Protestant issue, let me address what I think is another problem lurking in the background of intra-Protestant disputes over charismata. Your difference with Hoekema points to it. Yes, I’m going to become even more harsh on my Reformed friends here! I’ll follow up next week (Lord willing) with a post on the Protestant-Catholic issue.

Note the word “mainline” in Hoekema’s statement “it has been the almost unanimous conviction of the mainline Protestant churches that these miraculous gifts ceased at the close of the Apostolic Age.” If that word means what I think it means, isn’t he right? Hoekema’s mistake is not that he gets the history wrong but that he sabotages our side of the argument by associating us with the mainline. Talk about infections of paganism spoiling the purity of the church!

His statement “the Reformers and most of the Protestant tradition until the 20th century believed the gifts had ceased” is more problematic, but can be at least conditionally defended. The word “Protestant” is being used as an adjective to modify “tradition,” so the question is, what is a tradition, and what is “the” “Protestant” “tradition”? If you take the view, which prevails in Reformed circles, that “the Protestant tradition” is embodied in confessions of Protestant systematic theology that have been socially organized and institutionalized (e.g. in the drafting of formal confessions and the formation of denominational structures dedicated to them) then I think Hoekema’s statement is formally correct. However, this definition of “the Protestant tradition” is obviously contestable.

You and Hoekstra start with different views of what kind of history—which subset of the total set of historical facts—is most relevant. This points to what I think is “the other gorilla in the room” in these discussions.

Reformed theology is self-consciously a product of the Magisterial Reformation. Part of our identity is an understanding of the role of tradition and institutions in the formation of theology—a view that is not at home in an Evangelical world dominated by a very different sociology of belief. To be blunt, many people in the Reformed world have not yet gotten over our expulsion from the mainline; they have not yet accepted our new identity as Evangelicals in the socio-cultural use of that term. And so they develop a compensatory disdain for non-Reformed Evangelicals, and an equally compensatory anxiety to preserve (like Noah in the ark) the last remaining shreds of the Magisterial Tradition against what they view as the fragmenting, disintegrative sociology of Evangelicalism. And this lies behind a lot of the response to charismatic Protestantism, as I think Hoekstra’s appeals to the history of the “mainline” and “tradition” show.

In this regard, Gresham Machen is a hero to me. His friends were absolutely scandalized when he started going around giving speeches and writing newsletter articles for “fundamentalists.” What’s wrong with you? Don’t you see that these people are the enemy? They’re dispensationalists, they’re teetotalers, they have altar calls—this is legalism and Pelagianism! was the unspoken import of their response to Machen’s activities. Machen wasn’t comfortable with the fundamentalists, either, but he saw that after the apostasy of the mainline, the fundamentalists had become “we” to him - that these were his people now.

I’m a proud magisterial myself and share all the concerns about the fragmentary, subjective sociology that predominates in Evangelicalism. But we have to let go of our sense of identity as exiles from the mainline. In fact, the starting point for our more magisterial sociology is precisely that we do not get to decide our cultural or sociological identity entirely for ourselves. Choice plays a crucial role, but to some degree the social structures that define our choices, and the limits of our choices, are simply handed to us by circumstance (which is another way of saying “by Providence”). The social conditions that would allow us to continue acting as a sort of Noah’s Ark of the mainline are not present. We have to deal with that.

By God’s grace the mainline may someday be reclaimed—“all things are possible” and all that—but that is not who we are any more. We are Evangelicals now, like it or not. Embracing that truth means accepting a theological identity that we share with charismatics and others whose views make us uncomfortable. We can establish ourselves as an influence within Evangelicalism for our distinctive concerns. Or we can go on shaking our cane at Evangelicals and yelling at them to get off our lawn.

I think Matt Franck is being too hard on Charles Krauthammer on the ensoulment point.

From a (Catholic) theological point of view, to say that a being is a “person” is actually the same thing as saying he (or she) has a “spiritual nature,” which, for embodied beings such as ourselves, is the same as saying that he (or she) has a “spiritual soul.” Dogs, precisely because they do not have spiritual souls, are not persons. A space alien who had a spiritual soul would be a person.

Moreover, it is a truth accessible to reason unaided by divine revelation that human beings have a spiritual nature, in the sense of being rational and free and having a soul that is not reducible to matter. So that Krauthammer is precisely correct when he says that the question of whether some being is a person can be “restated in theological terms” as whether he has a spiritual soul. The theology in question is natural theology.

Nor is it a good idea to sneer at the concept of ensoulment as “magical.” It is Catholic doctrine that every human being receives his or her spiritual soul immediately from God rather than the soul being simply generated by natural biological processes (the error of “traducianism”) precisely because the spiritual soul is not reducible to matter. In that sense, every human being is indeed “ensouled” at some point. Catholic theologians in modern times have generally said that ensoulment happens at conception. But the concept of ensoulment is not “magical” or something to be embarrassed about.

It is understandable that pro-lifers are sensitive to the (false) claim that opposition to abortion is based on revealed religion. But the idea of personhood and a rational (i.e. spiritual) nature that qualitatively distinguishes us from lower forms of life is, as I noted above, a truth accessible to “the natural light of reason.”

The Nordic Countries Are Not a Utopia

Michael Booth, Guardian

The Disciple’s Dilemma

Eamon Duffy, Times Literary Supplement

The Post-Wandering Jew

David Suissa, Jewish Journal

Ham-Nye Debate Offered Nothing New

Julie Borg, World

Whose Turkey Is It?
Suzy Hansen, New York Times

Greg
thank you for engaging my original
post with such charity. In many ways, you were harsher on your own tribe
than I would have been. Moreover, although I invoked Warfield my primary target
was not the Reformed tradition per se, which I agree is broad and deep and has
much to commend it. Instead, my primary concern was to exorcise a ghost behind
claims that the Protestant tradition in the main does not hold to the
continuation of the gifts.

Your generous response prompts me to clarify my own position
and raise some questions about your defense of Warfield.

First, I was not claiming that any contemporary Evangelical
holding to a cessationist position was somehow anti-Catholic. Instead, as you
rightly note, I was pointing toward a historical claim about Protestantism. The
scholar I have found most associated with the claim in more recent Evangelical literature
is Anthony Hoekema, an irenic Reformed scholar to be sure, but one who
nevertheless has said that “it has been the almost unanimous conviction of the
mainline Protestant churches that these miraculous gifts ceased at the close of
the Apostolic Age.” This was made in Holy Spirit Baptism and Hoekema then
proceeded to utilize Warfield as part of his argument. While the claim is not
original to Hoekema, his writings have been influential with Millard Erickson
and Carl F. H. Henry both citing him on this debate. When Thomas Shreiner
concluded his post
on cessationism at The Gospel Coalition with the statement that “the
Reformers and most of the Protestant tradition until the 20th century believed
the gifts had ceased,” I thought that this historical claim needed to be
discussed.

My point was that this claim is historically problematic
because Protestant rejections of the miraculous were bound up with an
anti-Catholic polemic. Thus any claim about the Protestant tradition not
holding to the continuation of the gifts must reckon with this part of the
history. It is this ghost lurking behind assertions about most of the
Protestant tradition being largely cessationist that I want to exorcise. I take
it as a historical claim about Protestantism as a whole, but you seem to
suggest that it is a theological claim about what is central to Protestantism,
which, if that were the case, would be a little more troubling.

As you no doubt understand, my selection of Warfield was
quite intentional. He casts a rather long shadow in Evangelicalism within the
U.S., especially in its Reformed and Baptist wings where this debate has been
the most vigorous. Richard Gaffin, one of the architects of the contemporary
Reformed position on cessationism has said that his own position “stands
squarely in the tradition of Warfield.”

Second, I should also clarify that the Patristic and Medieval understanding of the miraculous included what today falls under the
label charismatic. Most Patristic and Medieval writers preferred to talk about
miracles and miracle workers rather than charismatic gifts for a number of
reasons such as the dominant gift list being Isaiah 11, not 1 Corinthians 12
and Jerome’s translating charismata
as “graces” (gratiae). Even though
the contemporary debate within Evangelicalism concerns charismatic gifts, it
corresponds to the Patristic and Medieval understanding of miracles and miracle
workers through whom these “graces” flowed. Warfield understood this quite well
because his opening chapter in Counterfeit Miracles is “On the
Cessation of the Charismata.”

Now, to my questions about your defense of Warfield.

1. Is it really the case that Warfield’s discussion of the Patristic and Medieval periods is not about Catholicism? I ask this for three
reasons: 1) Warfield begins the chapter with Edward Gibbon’s conversion to
Catholicism, which was related to Gibbon’s belief in the continuation of the
miraculous; 2) he spends several pages in the same chapter critiquing another
famous convert to Catholicism, John Henry Newman, noting what he sees as
Newman’s shift toward the miraculous; 3) even though he knows that Gregory of
Nyssa, Athanasius, and Jerome all wrote about saints in which the miraculous
was prominent, he still makes the claim that these “saints’ lives” follow other
Christian romances and thus represent an infusion of Heathenism into the
church. Augustine escapes only because Warfield traces his embrace of the miraculous
to his time at Milan and speculates that Augustine, along with
other Fathers, betrays a subtle awareness that these miracles had ceased even
though he reports them.

As an aside, I find it fascinating that Warfield rejects the
longer ending of Mark, first in the chapter on Patristic and Medieval miracles
and then more extensively in his criticism of A. J. Gordon. Part of his
reasoning is that the longer ending has Jesus claiming that miraculous signs
shall follow believers, which, for Warfield, “bear an apocryphal appearance.”
Apparently the longer ending of Mark is akin to a Christian romance too.

2. If Warfield is not concerned with Catholicism, then why
in his discussion of the kind of “faith healing” promoted by men like A. J.
Gordon does he claim that it creates a class of “professionals” who stand
between the soul and God and that “from this germ the whole sacerdotal evil has
grown”? It sure seems like Warfield is concerned about an encroachment of
Catholic ideas of the priesthood.

3. Your points about Warfield’s use of “class of men” and
“permanent endowment” are suggestive, but is that what he means? I confess I am
unsure. Does Warfield mean to say that Protestants do not have saints in the
Catholic sense? He certainly spent a lot of time talking about saints and
saints’ lives in the previous chapters. If so, I would agree, but then not even Catholic saints are canonized because they are viewed as
possessing a permanent endowment of miracle-working power during their earthly
sojourn. At least this is not the case in the Middle Ages in which prophecy,
healing, miracles, etc., tended to be viewed as graces at work in the
individual, some of which may be permanent and some of which may not be
(depending on the theologian discussing the matter). This is no doubt related
to Jerome’s translation of “graces” for charismata.

You suggest that Warfield might intend to highlight a
difference between Protestant and Catholic understandings of holy orders. If this
is the case, then, given what Warfield says about professionalization and faith
healing, it seems he does think that it introduces a Catholic view of the priesthood
into Protestantism.

My questions cause me to think that Warfield still operates
with the idea that embracing the miraculous leads one dangerously close to
Catholicism as it did Gibbon and Newman, and this is part of the reason why the
Protestant position has been and should be that all miracles have ceased. As I
said before, I think this debate is healthy for Evangelicalism and I deeply
appreciate the generous spirit with which you engaged my post. My concern
remains that we exorcise this ghost of anti-Catholicism from the debate by
recognizing that historically the claim that “the Protestant tradition as a
whole was cessationist” is bound up with anti-Catholic polemics. 

There’s a
joke that circulates among evangelical circles about Presbyterians. The joke
asks why Presbyterians don’t raise their hands during worship. The answer: because
they’re afraid God will call on them. There
appears to be a similar rule when it comes to blogs which is that if you enjoy
spending your time among the discussion threads throwing ripe fruit at the talent,
eventually the management is going to get annoyed and ask you to get up on
stage and prove you can do better. In this particular case Professor Lawler
with the aid of some nudging by Robert Cheeks constitutes the management. So my
sincere thanks goes to both Peter and Mr. Cheeks for their generosity, and if
there are any here who find anything I write in anyway questionable, please feel
free to forward all complaints to those two gentleman.

It seems
serendipitous to be, at this of all times, entering the ranks of contributors
to First Thoughts (Postmodern Conservative Division). One of the greatest
projects of liberal statist religion has been in the process of a slow motion
mugging by reality and, as the president might say, it offers us all an
opportunity for “a teaching moment”. This is a good thing, but certainly
shouldn’t be taken lightly. Discerning critics need to be precise, even
surgical, in how they speak to the failures on display right now in the world,
not just with respect to policy, but more importantly to culture. To this end,
a lot of great stuff is being written here speaking precisely to that need. For
my part, I look at the last few decades and find the sustaining appeal of statism
to be the most interesting feature. Fascinatingly, despite the evidence, the
western world came out of the 20th century with the lesson that
bigger and more intrusive government is better. Granted this is never how it is
advertised, and disingenuous messaging mixed with a dose of intellectual conceit
appears to be a big part of its political success. But regardless, the attraction
seems to stick despite the practical historical circumstances.

As we are
learning now, despite events like the Obamacare rollout, there remains to be made
to the public a compelling positive case for thoughtful conservative
alternatives, and I submit that an important part of making that argument is to
better understand the nature of the appeal of these grandiose public programs
that seem to punctuate our political history every generation or so (or every
eight years depending on your interpretation of the previous Bush
administration). My suspicion is that this appeal has little to do with the
typical American’s notion of what is good policy.

There are
some who see the liberal statist project as a kind of culmination of the
Christian ideals of compassion and social justice. For those of us on the other
side of the policy aisle it’s difficult not to instead think of the spectacle once
on display before Moses, of Hebrews dancing around a golden calf thought to be
Yahweh. To be sure there are idols on both sides of the aisle and we Postmodern
Conservatives have, I think, been distinguished as among those whose contributions
have helped navigate through the various clichés and talking points that typify
the political idols of our time, both left and right. If this country is ever
going to achieve a view of policy and culture in light of their actual, rather
than deified, purposes it will be because of contributors like those on this
blog.

I’ll add here
that a helpful touchstone for my thinking has been the conviction that
Augustine was ultimately right that human beings live with a God-sized lack in
their souls. One consequence of this is that much of the absurdity that characterizes
human behavior suddenly becomes explicable when understood as the
characteristic symptoms of a creature attempting to find a remedy by means
other than acknowledging the true nature of that absence. Much of what passes
today for ideological visions of a better future, as well as the vindictiveness
directed at believers of different political stripes, I view as like those
passionate disputes between spouses about whose turn it is to do the dishes.
Ultimately, the argument has nothing to do with the dishes. There are passions
at work that go far deeper than the subjects the various parties believe
themselves to be arguing about.

To this end it
seems to me what may be helpful is a kind of anthropology of ideology - an
investigation into why the public appears to gravitate so readily to theories
of government as a meta-placebo for the problems of existence. And here I hope
to add to the very important discussions occurring on this blog and look
forward with great enthusiasm to engaging with my fellow threaders in the
discussion threads.

Hopefully
I’ll also learn to duck when appropriate as well.

* In a
Solomonic gesture, the author has chosen to forgo his first name, Michael, and
replace it with his middle name, Forfare, in an effort to preempt any further
confusion with the prestigious professor from Sarah Lawrence College, Michael
Davis, or for that matter the socialist writer from Southern California by the
same name, or any other members of the large Michael Davis demographic that may
be out there. We are legion …