The Long View 2008-04-27 to 2008-05-04: Obama is Right; The Pope and the Parliament of Man; The Hanging of Tariq Aziz; Benedict XVI on Liturgical Music and Immigration; Steyn on Hate-Crime laws
In this weeklong collation of shorter blog posts, John manages to slip in the kind of analysis he is best remembered for: finding the thread of historical processes in quotidian events.
Here is a comment by John on liturgical music that manages to bring in Jungian psychology and the value of modernity:
It is unlikely that Cardinal Ratzinger was thinking of the Grateful Dead when he said that, but that is what it calls to mind. The Dionysian bliss that he condemns in a liturgical context is precisely what much of the art of the modern era was supposed to create, and which, unfortunately, is often taken to be the highest spiritual state. I might add that there is a place for the Dionysian, as there is for a turn to the immanent in other contexts. Jungian psychology, for instance, seems to do more good than harm, provided that its adepts understand that the Collective Unconscious is not God; indeed, that for some purposes it is in the opposite direction from God. When we make the immanent an object of worship, we risk calling up archaic ideas and practices that it had been the great glory of modernity to suppress.
And another of John’s favorite topics: the difference between economic “rights” and the properly political things that term used to refer to:
We should remember that "hate-crime law" can mean simply an instruction to a court to consider racial animus in calculating the sentence for a violent crime. That makes some sense, though the principle can be abused: it is usually a miscarriage of justice if the use of a derogatory epithet during the commission of a misdemeanor turns it into a felony; or worse, a felony for the federal courts. What Steyn is talking about, however, has many points of contact with the deformation of modern political practice that we find in "economic rights." Such rights are particularly dear to despotic states, because they permit the despots to say in international forums: "Well, yes, we shoot people who keep unregistered typewriters, but on the other hand there is a right to dental care in Article 37 of the People's Constitution. We can do only so much at once." The fact that people who live in such states usually have few teeth and have to gum their food has in no way diminished the attractiveness of economic rights to enlightened opinion. What the right to be free of hateful speech and the right to root canal, for instance, have in common is that they are both essentially regulatory schemes that are seeking to appropriate the historical prestige of the right to habeas corpus or the right to petition the state for redress of grievances.
Many of the things people call rights now are simply public goods, but that category has been lost for almost everyone.
Wednesday, April 30
Obama is right.
It is unlikely I would vote for Senator Obama. Nonetheless, I'm sure he means well, so I am pleased to point to one issue about which he is absolutely right:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton lined up with Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, in endorsing a plan to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for the summer travel season. But Senator Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic rival, spoke out firmly against the proposal, saying it would save consumers little and do nothing to curtail oil consumption and imports.
There are few measures that would simultaneously swell the federal deficit and the trade deficit. Suspending the gas tax in order to lower consumer prices is one of them, and it speaks ill of John McCain, for whom I am going to vote, that he would endorse such a measure.
These high prices are a market signal. You ignore red lights and market signals at your peril.
The Pope and the Parliament of Man
Several people have noted that Benedict XVI's recent address to the UN sounded almost as if he were addressing the Parliament of Man and urging it to reform itself. Douglas A. Sylva at First Things will have none of this. In a recent posting on the First Things website, he sets us straight on The Pope's Plan for the U.N.
And so the real debate he seeks to foster is not between two competing conceptions of political organization, between national sovereignty and multination cooperation (or a kind of global state), but between a state, any type of state, that is bereft of transcendent meaning and a state informed by religious belief.... The question then becomes, in a world of undeniable pluralism, how do we bring religion into the political sphere? This is where the vision of church and state as practiced in the United States becomes central. According to Benedict, The full guarantee of religious liberty cannot be limited to the free exercise of worship, but has to give due consideration to the public dimension of religion, and hence to the possibility of believers playing their part in building the social order.
This is the U.S. model of church-state relations...
All good points. Actually, the papacy has been holding up the American model to a secularizing Europe for more than 100 years. Nonetheless, I have remarked at length, we should not elide the fact that the Church's social teaching posits a universal polity as point of reference for a moral global order, in rather the way that Kant posits God as a necessity for a moral private life. Passages from Benedict's address show that he assumes this model, too:
Discernment, then, shows that entrusting exclusively to individual States, with their laws and institutions, the final responsibility to meet the aspirations of persons, communities and entire peoples, can sometimes have consequences that exclude the possibility of a social order respectful of the dignity and rights of the person..."
It is one thing that the papacy now promotes an element of American political theory as Catholic moral theology. It will be something else, however, when the Vatican takes on board the position of the United States in the global system as that system has actually evolved. The United States has become an international utility, in some ways more like the UN than the EU. The Vatican is going to have to stop treating the United States, on a theoretical level, as just another sovereign state.
But you say the unipolar American world is over? The post-World War II world is ending, clearly enough. Do not confuse these processes.
The Hanging of Tariq Aziz
I have no particular reason to like or dislike Saddam Hussein's old diplomatic spokesman, Tariq Aziz, but I was made uncomfortable by this report:
An Iraqi court on Tuesday began hearing the case against Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein's best-known lieutenants, who is accused of ordering the execution of dozens of merchants for profiteering.
Aziz, 72, a former deputy prime minister under Hussein... The charges stem from the execution of 42 merchants accused by Saddam's government of being behind a sharp increase in food prices when the country was under strict U.N. sanctions.... Aziz was being prosecuted because he signed the execution orders against the merchants as a member of Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council, a rubber stamp group that approved the dictator's decisions.
I am reminded of that other poor nitwit, Joachim von Ribbentrop, who was Hitler's second and last foreign minister. He was hanged at Nuremberg because his name was all over the documentation for the Holocaust. In fact, he seems to have had almost nothing to do with it, or with anything else that the German government did after the beginning of the war. He insisted on signing all those documents because large groups of foreign prisoners were being moved through German territory; he insisted on being at least nominally consulted.
This trial is a case of the settlement of Iraqi scores, I'm sure. Nonetheless, I don't like this business about executing all the major figures in a defeated regime. In the future, who in his right mind would surrender to a power that would do that?
Monday, April 28, 2008
Benedict XVI on Liturgical Music and Immigration
The invaluable Adoremus Bulletin this month reprinted an address delivered at Rome in 1985 by then-cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Liturgy and Sacred Music, to the Eighth International Church Music Congress. The piece is relevant to the continuing controversy about the multicultural musical dimension of the Mass the pope celebrated in Washington during his recent visit to the United States. The article was part of his critique of Liberation Theology, which he understood as the turn of religion from the transcendent to the immanent. This move, he explains, is the re-interpretation of God as the historical energy of the community, which the community then worships. With regard to the question of how sacred music should relate to its semantic content, I was particularly struck by this paragraph:
It would be a narrow and false interpretation if by this one wished to understand that all liturgical music must be strictly related to a text and to declare that its general condition lies in serving the understanding of a text. For “Word” in the biblical sense is more than “text”. “Understanding” extends further than the banal intelligibility of that which is immediately evident to everyone and can be pressed into the most superficial rationality. It is correct, however, that music, which serves worship in spirit and truth, cannot be rhythmic ecstasy, sensuous suggestion or anesthetization, bliss of feeling, or superficial entertainment, but is subordinated to a message, a comprehensive spiritual and, in this sense, rational declaration. It is also correct, to express it otherwise, that it must correspond to this “word”, indeed serve it, in a comprehensive sense.
It is unlikely that Cardinal Ratzinger was thinking of the Grateful Dead when he said that, but that is what it calls to mind. The Dionysian bliss that he condemns in a liturgical context is precisely what much of the art of the modern era was supposed to create, and which, unfortunately, is often taken to be the highest spiritual state. I might add that there is a place for the Dionysian, as there is for a turn to the immanent in other contexts. Jungian psychology, for instance, seems to do more good than harm, provided that its adepts understand that the Collective Unconscious is not God; indeed, that for some purposes it is in the opposite direction from God. When we make the immanent an object of worship, we risk calling up archaic ideas and practices that it had been the great glory of modernity to suppress.
Unfortunately, as late modernity gets later and later, archaic things are returning, among which are proletarianization, the creation of caste-polities and, in extreme cases, even the surreptitious reintroduction of slavery. In the developed world, the cutting edge of this development is persistent low-skill immigration; and on this subject, Benedict XVI is, objectively speaking, on the side of the return of the repressed. Indeed, last week he suffered the misfortune of being defended by the Wall Street Journal on this subject:
Pope Benedict XVI called on U.S. bishops last week to "continue to welcome the immigrants who join your ranks today, to share their joys and hopes, to support them in their sorrows and trials and to help them flourish in their new home." Mr. Tancredo's response was to accuse the pontiff of "faith-based marketing" and claim that "the pope's immigration comments may have less to do with spreading the gospel than they do about recruiting new members of the church."...You know the restrictionists have gone head-first into the fever swamps when they denounce a Christian religious leader for sounding like a Christian.
The pope welcomes immigrants because he's Catholic, not because they are. He isn't "marketing" his faith. He's practicing it.
I am as sure that Benedict means well as I am sure that the WSJ does not. Nonetheless, I think that the Church is making a grievous mistake, for which the Church will pay grievously.
Well, as St. Augustine used to say: "Just another tricky day..."
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Steyn on Hate-Crime laws.
Mark Steyn is making such mincemeat of the Canadian Human Rights Commissions that we must wonder whether ambitious journalists may soon adopt the promotional strategy of rap artists: an arraignment before the proper tribunal could be essential to one's career. Be that as it may, his column in Macleans last week is the best argument I have seen against the class of hate-crime laws that seek to control the content of speech:
Last week's letters page included a missive from Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., chief commissioner of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, defending her employees from the accusation of "improper investigative techniques" by yours truly..."Because words are important. Steyn would have us believe that words, however hateful, should be given free rein. History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes." [But Steyn notes] pre-Nazi Germany had such "reasonable limits." Indeed, the Weimar Republic was a veritable proto-Trudeaupia. As Alan Borovoy, Canada's leading civil libertarian, put it:
"Remarkably, pre-Hitler Germany had laws very much like the Canadian anti-hate law. Moreover, those laws were enforced with some vigour. During the 15 years before Hitler came to power, there were more than 200 prosecutions based on anti-Semitic speech..."
'Tween-wars Europe was awash in prototype hate-crimes legislation....The problem the Jews found themselves up against in Germany and elsewhere was not the lack of hate-speech laws but the lack of protection of the common or garden laws — against vandalism and property appropriation and suchlike...[Hitler]...merely invoked Article 48 of the Weimar Republic's constitution, allowing the state, in the interests of the greater good, to set — what's the phrase? — "reasonable limits"...The Nazis didn't invent a dictatorship out of whole cloth. They merely took advantage of the illiberal provisions of a supposedly liberal constitution.
We should remember that "hate-crime law" can mean simply an instruction to a court to consider racial animus in calculating the sentence for a violent crime. That makes some sense, though the principle can be abused: it is usually a miscarriage of justice if the use of a derogatory epithet during the commission of a misdemeanor turns it into a felony; or worse, a felony for the federal courts. What Steyn is talking about, however, has many points of contact with the deformation of modern political practice that we find in "economic rights." Such rights are particularly dear to despotic states, because they permit the despots to say in international forums: "Well, yes, we shoot people who keep unregistered typewriters, but on the other hand there is a right to dental care in Article 37 of the People's Constitution. We can do only so much at once." The fact that people who live in such states usually have few teeth and have to gum their food has in no way diminished the attractiveness of economic rights to enlightened opinion. What the right to be free of hateful speech and the right to root canal, for instance, have in common is that they are both essentially regulatory schemes that are seeking to appropriate the historical prestige of the right to habeas corpus or the right to petition the state for redress of grievances.
State action need not be limited to what a government must do. There is no reason why a constitution may not include goals and policies. The US Constitution is filled with general language urging Congress to promote "Commerce," encourage "the Arts and Sciences," and generally to "Promote the General Welfare." The Supreme Court, in its more expansive moods, has usually been willing to view such language as authority for Congress to do any damn-fool thing it pleases. This need not be troubling. It is not the function of the basic law to prevent the state from acting imprudently; that is what politics is for. The function of the basic law is to ensure that the government acts predictably in circumstances where life and liberty are at issue. That is usually done through pure procedure, procedure that really describes how government acts if it can act at all. That is the proper meaning of "rights." Rights in this sense differ from the pseudo-rights that Steyn is accused of violating in that the state is certain to be able to honor them.
If a judge and a jury are available for a trial, then the right of the defendant to confront his accuser is just part of the procedure; there is no excuse for the confrontation not to happen. In contrast, one's "right" to health care would always be contingent on the availability of medical personnel and equipment; and I say this as someone who thinks that medical insurance should be a public function. As for the hate-crimes that Steyn has been accused of committing, the rights that are violated seem to be defined by the willingness of someone, somewhere, to claim to be offended by a statement that a hate-crime commission also dislikes.
John Rawls's theory of "justice as fairness" is empirically false: cross-cultural and psychological studies show that people the world over just do not equate pure procedural fairness with justice; "justice" always includes a substantive element of "balance" or "desert." To use Rawls's idea of justice to define the whole function of the state is to invite catastrophe. However, Rawls's model may be adequate for the construction of property, criminal and political rights, narrowly construed.
Copyright © 2008 by John J. Reilly
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