RedStateEclectic

Tradition

Never underestimate the dynamism of the tradition-bound. After all, there are traditions of critiquing traditions. There are traditions of maintaining traditions, and traditions of getting rid of traditions.

We are all traditionalists. Try to look at things that way, and you will be surprised ...

The below clip plays out some of the tensions that the "conservative-libertarian" Edmund Burke tried to come to grips with - as explained in Edmund Burke and the Woman on the A-Train.

The movie "Catholics" is based on one of the many great novels by Brian Moore.

 

Edmund Burke and the Woman on the A-Train

"The cloudy sky is more grand than the blue," said Edmund Burke, according to the image source.

Following up on Laura's post Conservatives and Libertarians: Uneasy Cousins, I offer the lucid - and to me highly inspiring - below lecture on the great "conservative-libertarian" thinker and politician Edmund Burke, delivered by Ian Shapiro, Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

I have always neglected "my Burke". Though, I once had a go at Conor Cruise O'Brien's magisterial biography. At the time, however, I was insufficiently prepared to cope with the onslaught of historic ideas and circumstances jumping at me from the tome.

Shapiro's presentation certainly is a paragon of clarity and concentration.

 

Christians Ferreting Their Fair Share

The Greens have made civil disobedience a hobby:

Today Hobby Lobby announced that they will not comply with this mandate to become complicit in abortion, which the Greens believe ends an innocent human life. Given Hobby Lobby’s size (it has 572 stores employing more than 13,000 people), by violating the HHS Mandate, it will be subject to over $1.3 million in fines per day.

Full Story.

This reminds me of a dialogue from the movie “You Can’t Take It With You”. Grandpa Martin is haggling with Mr. Henderson, the “friendly” IRS agent, over the right price of government:

Henderson: According to our records, Mr. Vanderhof, you have never paid an income tax.
Grandpa: That's right.
Henderson: Why not?
Grandpa: I don't believe in it.
Grandpa: Look, Mr. Henderson, let me ask you something.
Henderson: Well?
Grandpa: Suppose I pay you this money--mind you, I don't say I'm going to pay it--but just for the sake of argument--what's the Government going to do with it?
Henderson: How do you mean?
Grandpa: Well, what do I get for my money? If I go into Macy's and buy something, there it is--I see it. What's the Government going to give me?
Henderson: Why, the Government gives you everything. It protects you.
Grandpa: What from?
Henderson: Well--invasion. Foreigners that might come over here and take everything you've got.
Grandpa: Oh, I don't think they're going to do that.
Henderson: If you didn't pay an income tax, they would. How do you think the Government keeps up the Army and Navy? All those battleships...
Grandpa: Last time we used battleships was in the Spanish-American War, and what did we get out of it? Cuba--and we gave that back! I wouldn't mind paying if it were something sensible.
Henderson: Sensible? Well, what about Congress, and the Supreme Court, and the President? We've got to pay them, don't we?
Grandpa: Not with my money--no sir.
Henderson: Now wait a minute! I'm not here to argue with you. All I know is that you haven't paid an income tax and you've got to pay it!
Grandpa: They've got to show me.
Henderson: We don't have to show you! I just told you! All those buildings down in Washington and Interstate Commerce and the Constitution!
Grandpa: The Constitution was paid for long ago. And Interstate Commerce--what is Interstate Commerce anyhow?
Henderson: There are forty-eight states--see? And if there weren't Interstate Commerce, nothing could go from one state to another. See?
Grandpa: Why not? They got fences?
Henderson: No, they haven't got fences. They've got laws! My God, I never came across anything like this before!
Grandpa: Well, I might pay about seventy-five dollars, but that's all it's worth.

I wish the Greens well, but it’s not how the government does things. One can not safely apply his or her own subjective value to government. Democracy goes along with the biggest mob. If your mob doesn’t like being out-mobbed, then you have to grow in numbers.

The GOP grew, at one point and in part, because of the abortion issue then reneged when empowered. They started wars, stripped rights, and spent tons of other-people’s-money domestically. When the power shifted, the other socialists passed Obummercare. Now we’re hearing it from Christians who waved the flag all through the aught years of Bush 43.

Like abortion, these wars are anathema to me. They end innocent human lives. Yet, I can’t call up the IRS and refuse to pay for them without an end to MY way of life. During the Bush years, my Christian brethren would quickly dismiss my concerns by referring me to the Old Testament whenever the subject was brought up. Certainly, the New Testament wouldn’t do much for their side of the argument.

I now offer them some Old Testament, too. Lamentations 1:9

Behold, O Jehovah, my affliction; for the enemy hath magnified himself.

That’s What Christmas is All About, CB

Forget the toys and the decorations. Forget those retailers everywhere who are hoping you won’t forget about the toys and the decorations. Forget that Santa now bears an uncanny resemblance to Karl Marx. And remember what Linus said:

Thank you, Mr. Schulz, for that memorable classic.

2 Weeks and 2 Days ‘til Christmas

My advice? Start making merry now.

"Maybe Christmas, the Grinch thought, doesn't come from a store. Maybe Christmas… perhaps… means a little bit more." - Dr. Seuss

Natural Ends and Prudential Judgement

Lately I have been surrounded by what appeared to me large doses of dogmatism; and dogmatism never fails to torment me with a sense of suffocation. As an almost inadvertent backlash, I have developed a voracious appetite for criticism, for diverging assessments and different perspectives on a number of topics that are foremost among my intellectual interests. In the process, I have come across a certain Edward Feser (see also here), who strikes me as one of the finest minds I have met in quite some time.

I recommend wholeheartedly full perusal of Feser's clear and fascinating juxtaposition of the Catholic natural law tradition with the thought of Friedrich Hayek and Murray Rothbard.

Writes Edward Feser:

The natural law theory associated with Aquinas and the Scholastic tradition in general is committed to the idea that human beings have a natural end or purpose and that their particular natural capacities (whether intellectual, procreative, or whatever) have natural ends or functions as well.  These various natural ends determine the content of the moral law, including (for those Scholastic natural law thinkers who are also natural rights theorists) the rights we possess.  By contrast, Locke, who is also usually classified as a natural law theorist, denies that we can know the real essences or natures of things, and thus rejects any appeal to natural ends or purposes as a basis for determining the content of the natural law.  Locke instead grounds his natural law theory directly on God’s ownership of each human being, and derives our rights from the idea that to harm anyone in his life, liberty, or property is to damage God’s property.

 

 

Locke’s approach, rejecting as it does the traditional Scholastic grounding of natural law in natural ends and functions, is notoriously problematic.  Without any appeal to such natural ends or purposes, it is hard to see how to give natural law any detailed content.  Merely referring to God’s ownership of us may suffice to show that we cannot do just anything we want to each other, but deriving specific moral principles is much harder.  Yet Rothbard’s position seems if anything in worse shape.  For if Lockean natural law is a watering down of the traditional Scholastic conception of natural law, Rothbardian natural law theory seems itself little more than a watering down of Locke. 

 

To be sure, Rothbard does pay lip service to the Scholastic tradition, and even endorses the general idea that human beings have natural purposes.  But there the similarity to the Scholastic tradition ends, for Rothbard appears to accept none of the distinctive ends or purposes that that particular tradition would attribute to us.  Instead, he formulates the content of the natural law in terms of the thesis of self-ownership, which he borrows from Locke.  Now for Locke, talk of self-ownership is really just a shorthand way of talking about the lease God has given each of us on our own lives.  Locke’s view is that it is, strictly speaking, really God who owns us and that we are merely stewards of His property.  If we “own” ourselves at all, it is only in a loose sense and only relative to other human beings.  But Rothbard rejects any such theological foundation for self-ownership.  His aim is to give it a purely secular basis.

 

That basis seems to me to be severely inadequate, however.  Rothbard’s defense of self-ownership is stated in the form of a dilemma: if a person A does not own himself, then either some other person B owns him or A and B have joint ownership of A; and either alternative to self-ownership, Rothbard goes on to argue, will have absurd consequences.  I will not bother discussing those consequences here, though, because I think Rothbard’s argument has gone wrong already insofar as the dichotomy he describes is a false one.  There is a third alternative he fails to consider, namely that no one at all owns either himself or anyone else.  To own oneself, after all, is just to have certain rights over oneself, and there are certainly philosophers who would deny that we have any rights, or at least any natural rights, at all.  So before Rothbard can establish that a person A owns himself rather than being owned by B or sharing ownership of himself with B, he first has to establish that anyone owns anything at all, and thus that anyone has any rights at all. 

 

The only hint Rothbard gives of how this might be done is to suggest that a person has by nature and in general a need to use his body and its parts in order to interact with the world in a way that will allow him to survive, and in particular a need to use his cognitive faculties, vocal chords, and the like in order even to argue about whether or not there are any natural rights.  He seems to think that this shows that a person does in fact have rights over his body, cognitive faculties, vocal chords, etc., otherwise he wouldn’t be able to survive or do so much as consider the question of whether he has rights.  But in fact it shows no such thing.  To have a mere need is not to have a right: a maggot might need rotting tissue to consume if it is to survive, but it does not follow that maggots are self-owners or have rights.  Nor does the pragmatic self-contradiction Rothbard seems to think is entailed by using your vocal chords, etc. to deny the existence of rights establish what he seems to think it does.  The most this argument would prove, if it really proves anything, is that we have to act as if we have rights over our body parts; it does not show that we really do have them.  Moreover, even if Rothbard’s argument succeeded in proving that we have any rights at all, it would at most show that we have rights to the use of our body parts to the extent required to stay alive.  It would not establish that we have full ownership of ourselves in the sense Rothbard thinks we do.  After all, a person might have a right to use something for certain purposes without having full ownership of that thing, or any ownership at all for that matter.

 

Now the Catholic natural law tradition would argue that the fountainhead of all rights is the natural end human beings have.  And by “end” it means purpose or aim, not mere need.  The Catholic natural law tradition, that is to say, is teleological through and through, committed to the objective existence of final causes or purposes in nature.  This is one reason why even though Catholic natural law thinking, unlike Locke’s natural law theory, does not appeal directly to God’s will in order to determine the content of natural law, it nevertheless does insist on the existence of God as a precondition of the intelligibility of natural law, because without God there can be no objective ends or purposes in nature.  There can at most be, perhaps, certain naturalistic/evolutionary analogues to ends or purposes, but without God these can only be ersatz, “as if” purposes, not real ones, and thus they cannot be the source of genuine moral obligation. 

 

Given that we do have an objective end or purpose, however, and that we have moral obligations that follow from this end or purpose, it follows according to the Catholic natural law tradition that we have certain natural rights.  But the ground of these natural rights is nothing other than the fact that the recognition of certain rights is necessary if we are to be able to follow our moral obligations and fulfill our natural end.  The natural rights we have just are, and can only be, the rights that we require in order to fulfill those obligations and realize that end.

The source.

Roman Church - Pioneer of Liberty and Free Markets

 

Image credit.

During the course of my research concerning the conditions of freedom, I keep reverting to the question why liberty emerged uniquely in Europe. I have recently chanced upon two fascinating accounts that go a long way towards explaining the special European path.

One account is contained in Jack Goody's path-breaking The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, and the other is Harold Berman's equally seminal Law and Revolution.

Both deal with "papal revolutions" that have changed the course of history. Both provide evidence that the Roman Church acted as the perhaps most decisive pioneer of liberty and capitalism, by effecting the breakthrough of individualism in Europe and introducing the foundational institutions of a market-based society.

Around 300 A.D. European patterns of marriage and kinship were turned on their head. What had previously been the norm - marriage to close kin - became the new taboo. The same applied to adoption, the obligation of a man to marry his brother's widow and a number of other central practices. With these changes Christian Europe broke radically from its own past and established practices which diverged markedly from those of the Middle East, North Africa and Asia. In this highly original and far-reaching work Jack Goody argues that from the fourth century there developed in the northern Mediterranean a distinctive but not undifferentiated kinship system, whose growth can be attributed to the role of the Church in acquiring property formerly held by domestic groups. He suggests that the early Church, faced with the need to provide for people who had left their kin to devote themselves to the life of the Church, regulated the rules of marriage so that wealth could be channelled away from the family and into the Church. Thus the Church became an 'interitor', acquiring vast tracts of property through the alienation of familial rights. At the same time, the structure of domestic life was changed dramatically, the Church placing more emphasis on individual wishes, on conjugality, and on spiritual rather than natural kinship.

(Source: book description at Amazon, Germany)

On page 7 of his Reviving the Invisible Hand, Deepak Lal concludes:

Most Eurasian civilizations ... had similar family values, for agrarian civilizations required stable settled families to operate their settled agriculture. To maintain this stability all these cultures sought to limit the common human but ephemeral passion of love as the basis of marriage. Their values were communalist. It was the first papal revolution of Gregory the Great in the sixth century which changed these hitherto communalist values to the individualist ones which have come to characterize and distinguish the West from the Rest. This papal revolution, by promoting love as the basis of marriage and advocating the independence of the young, led to the rise of individualism in the West.

The first papal revolution made the Church rich and powerful to such an extent that it dared to challenge the secular powers-that-be in a second papal revolution instigated in 1075 by Pope Gregory VII, when he proclaimed: "Let the terrestrial kingdom serve - or be the slave of -the celestial," which inaugurated the church-state.

Deepak Lal summarises on page 6 of his Reviving the Invisible Hand:

Berman has shown how the whole Western legal tradition derives from the development of both canon and secular law during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries under the aegis of the Roman church. For the rise of the market economy the most important was the development of the "law of the merchant" - the lex mercatoria. "The church state set an example for the city-state, and church law set an example for city law and for commercial law."

Happy Easter

Lucky playing with his parents.

Happy Easter to our readers and all my co-blogging friends at RedStateEclectic. Enjoy the music.

 

Incidentally, for some paschal contemplation, you might want to read this post from a very good blog.

Guest Post: Prince of Peace, or God of War?

By Doug Newman

Someone I like and respect made the following comment on Facebook the other evening:

“I’m fairly silent about religion. Why? Because I’m not interested in taking the … liberties and lives, of drug dealers and pornographers. And, I’m not interested in making war on people who didn’t first make war on me. I’m not interested in religions that enlist me to start violent fights.”

It is very sad that the common perception of Christians and Christianity has come to this. Several years ago, I heard a preacher say that “you are the only sermon many people will ever hear.” He was talking about the examples Christians set with our daily lives.

Jesus is the Prince of Peace – Isaiah 9:6. He said “Blessed are the peacemakers” – Matthew 5:9. (No, He is not a pacifist as He preaches self-defense – Luke 11:21, 22 and 22:36.)

He is not a God of power, conquest, aggression and war. He only initiates force one time, when He kicks the moneychangers out of the Temple – Matthew 21:12, 13. Even then, this is not a show of worldly power over Rome, much less the rest of the world.

His “kingdom is not of this world” – John 18:36. Whereas the state exerts power from the top down and from the outside in, Jesus’ Power is exerted from the bottom up and from the inside out – Hebrews 4:12, 13. The King of the Universe came into the world as a helpless baby and washed the feet of the apostles – John 13:5. (I challenge you to contact your town councilperson and ask them to wash your feet.)

She was just re-elected with 72 percent of the vote. Tomorrow, after the gym, I will stop by her house and ask her to wash my feet.

Jesus will not force His way into anyone’s life. He enters by invitation only – Revelation 3:20. How, then, did so many people who profess to follow Jesus become such aggressive promoters of taking the liberties and lives of others, both at home and abroad? True followers of Christ do not do this.

“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge.” – Hosea 4:6

The answer is simple: they do not read the Bible like they used to. Hence, they are devoid of any biblical discernment or worldview – II Timothy 4:3-4. They become easy prey for the likes of James Dobson, John Hagee, Sarah Palin and Rick Santorum. So many churches have devolved into political tools for those who would have you think Christianity was a tool for social micromanagement at home and endless war abroad.

Note the cross on her wrist. Could anything be more grotesque and blasphemous?

But aren’t we fighting all these wars as a blessing to Israel? Would Jesus promote the killing of innocents in the name of a political state? Indeed, He gives us a timetable for when “his angels … shall gather together his elect from the four winds”. This comes afterthe Tribulation – Matthew 24:29-31. As I have devoted most of my intellectual energy this week to the scandals at Penn State, I confess I may have missed something. However, I don’t think the Tribulation has happened quite yet.

The world in Jesus time was probably much like ours: full of evil people, evil religions and evil rulers. However, He never initiates force in response to this. Nor does He ever instruct His followers to do so. Instead of being rulers, He would have us influence the world by being servants – Matthew 20:25-28 – and evangelists – Matthew 28:18-20.

So many who claim to follow Christ have drunk the Kool-Aid of force and violence. The tragic result is that so many secular people have a false view of Christianity as a religion of tyranny and war. This is why we must look to the Gospels for the words and deeds of Christ rather than to the example set by so many who claim to follow Him.
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Thunder and Lightening Staying up in the Clouds

Above is a map of Leipzig at the time of Bach. I had the good luck to live and work for a while in Leipzig, which is one of my favourite German cities.

We have had sun, rain, thunder and lightning, and sun again over here in the past two days. This afternoon I was listening to the below on the radio for the first time with a full awareness of composer and storyline:

An Irish blogger explains:

I love this performance they sing it with authority, commitment, and yes passion, watch the boys’ faces as they put everything they’ve got into "Sind Blitze, Sind Donner in Wolken Verschwunden". [Have bolts, has thunder disappeared into the clouds, G.T.] and This is a very active chorus — Jesus has been betrayed by Judas and the chorus is the disciples wondering aloud why the thunder and lightening are staying up in the clouds instead of doing some vengeful smiting. As you watch and listen notice how at 34 seconds into the piece there’s a dramatic pause of a couple of seconds, God however doesn’t take the hint, the thunder and lightening stay in the heavens, and the disciples are not even slightly shy in expressing their displeasure:

The source.