The Least American Thing We Do

For many years, the Czar didn’t think much about abortion; pregnancy was not a position he was likely to be in, after all. We certainly knew that a male could have any opinion on it he wanted, but ultimately only a pregnant woman—complete with physical, emotional, and hormonal changes that come with pregnancy—would ever really understand all the ramifications.

Curiously, this is the opinion of many liberals; these folks advocate pro-choice, eschew the government putting its “hands on women,” and that a woman should be in control over her own body. Beyond that, you never want to think past this superficial point. But this, of course, is a crock—there are two other people involved: the father, to some degree, is affected by the decision, but most critically, the baby is affected by the decision unlike no other.

There is an old story about the chicken and the pig, discussing breakfast. The chicken complains that she has to lay an egg every day for the farmer’s breakfast, and that she has no say in this. She would appreciate having some choice in the matter. The pig laughs and says he has the worse end of the deal. “After all, you’re involved,” agrees the pig, “but I’m committed.”

The point of this parable is to remind listeners that the hardest working person in a situation may not be as important as the one most affected. In business, this is a vital lesson. In discussions of abortions, this reality is denied by the Left. The mother may request a choice, but what about the baby?

If you are an American, you likely grew up in a culture that continually pushed for the underdog. As an American, you were told time and again to stick up for the little guy; protect those who cannot help themselves; help the helpless. This theme repeats itself throughout our history, our popular stories, our etiquette, and even our sports—not many folks around the world applaud when an injured member of the opposing team gets up and signals he’s okay, yet fall eerily silent when the injury occurred. Being an American means protecting the ones who need protection.

Turn that idea back to abortion, and you see why so many people have a hard time talking about it. Abortion is the least American thing we do: you can draw a smiley face on it and call it pro-choice, and say it is all about the mother protecting her body (from what, by the way?). But ultimately it is a violent, abhorrent murder against the absolute most defenseless people in our society—the sleeping fetus.

The Czar expresses some satisfaction that a growing number of conservatives and anti-abortion liberals are changing the terminology away from pro-choice, since the term is meaningless when the fetus has no choice. Instead, the terms pro-life and pro-infanticide are gaining currency. This has a powerful psychological effect in the discussion because it kicks away the crutch that this is only about women.

Calling this a pro-infanticide position names it exactly what it is, and makes the superficial thinker realize the reach of the conversation. The Czar suspects that most people who tolerate abortion do so only because they limit their thinking to what they can accept: a medical procedure done to a woman. But get them to realize the impact to the fetus, and you jar their thinking along more responsible lines.

Does it work? Right now, Americans are statistically moving away from abortion: the margin is too slim for our tastes, but currently more Americans reject infanticide than accept it. The shift has begun, and that means there is momentum.

- The “Czar of Muscovy” on The Gormogons blog

Dear Czar,

Normally I would use your blog post as a jumping off point for criticism or commentary. But I’ve been lazy lately and quite frankly, this is one of the best and most original arguments I have read in a long time defending the rights of the unborn. Just an abolutely perfect post — God bless America!

The Obama administration’s ruling requiring certain Catholic institutions like hospitals and universities to offer health insurance covering birth control prompted a furious response from the Catholic bishops. The bishops argued that this was a violation of conscience since birth control is contrary to teachings of the Catholic Church, as expressed in Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae.”

What interests me as a philosopher — and a Catholic — is that virtually all parties to this often acrimonious debate have assumed that the bishops are right about this, that birth control is contrary to “the teachings of the Catholic Church.” The only issue is how, if at all, the government should “respect” this teaching.

As critics repeatedly point out, 98 percent of sexually active American Catholic women practice birth control, and 78 percent of Catholics think a “good Catholic” can reject the bishops’ teaching on birth control. The response from the church, however, has been that, regardless of what the majority of Catholics do and think, the church’s teaching is that birth control is morally wrong. The church, in the inevitable phrase, “is not a democracy.” What the church teaches is what the bishops (and, ultimately, the pope, as head of the bishops) say it does.

But is this true? The answer requires some thought about the nature and basis of religious authority. Ultimately the claim is that this authority derives from God. But since we live in a human world in which God does not directly speak to us, we need to ask, Who decides that God has given, say, the Catholic bishops his authority?

It makes no sense to say that the bishops themselves can decide this, that we should accept their religious authority because they say God has given it to them. If this were so, anyone proclaiming himself a religious authority would have to be recognized as one. From where, then, in our democratic, secular society does such recognition properly come?

[...]

In our democratic society the ultimate arbiter of religious authority is the conscience of the individual believer. It follows that there is no alternative to accepting the members of a religious group as themselves the only legitimate source of the decision to accept their leaders as authorized by God. They may be wrong, but their judgment is answerable to no one but God. In this sense, even the Catholic Church is a democracy.

But, even so, haven’t the members of the Catholic Church recognized their bishops as having full and sole authority to determine the teachings of the Church? By no means. There was, perhaps, a time when the vast majority of Catholics accepted the bishops as having an absolute right to define theological and ethical doctrines. Those days, if they ever existed, are long gone. Most Catholics — meaning, to be more precise, people who were raised Catholic or converted as adults and continue to take church teachings and practices seriously — now reserve the right to reject doctrines insisted on by their bishops and to interpret in their own way the doctrines that they do accept.

The bishops’ claim to authority in this matter has been undermined because Catholics have decisively rejected it. The immorality of birth control is no longer a teaching of the Catholic Church. Pope Paul VI meant his 1968 encyclical, “Humanae Vitae,” to settle the issue in the manner of the famous tag, “Roma locuta est, causa finita est.” In fact the issue has been settled by the voice of the Catholic people.

- Professor Gary Gutting in the NYT, February 15, 2012

Dear Professor Gutting,

A quick Google search discovers you are a professor of philosophy at the ostensibly Catholic institution of Notre Dame. I will say this about your editorial — you are right about one thing — the bishops’ claim to authority will continue to be ignored by the Catholic faithful if they continue to allow Catholic institutions like Notre Dame to employ so-called philosophers like you. Of course, given the reasoning on display in this atrocious opinion piece, if I was running a secular philosophy department I would run into your office and demand your resignation letter.

Here’s the deal — just because folks choose to ignore or disobey a particular rule or teaching of an institution like the Catholic Church doesn’t mean those rules suddenly don’t exist or that the teaching is no longer valid. It just means…hmmm…how do I say this tactfully…it means that folks simply choose to ignore or disobey a particular rule or teaching of the institution. To put this in the Catholic context, here are the wonderful words of my own Bishop, Cardinal George: “What isn’t always understood is that the Bishops of the Church make no attempt to speak for all Catholics; they never have. The Bishops speak for the Catholic and apostolic faith, and those who hold that faith gather around them. Others disperse.” Now apparently you really want to disperse — that’s fine, but don’t claim in a NYT column that you are Catholic and implicitly suggest (using your authoritative position at Notre Dame) that you know anything about basic Catholic doctrine. Otherwise, you wouldn’t write howlers like “since we live in a human world in which God does not directly speak to us, we need to ask, Who decides that God has given, say, the Catholic bishops his authority?” I mean really, couldn’t you go visit a basic Catholic apologetic website for a primer before sitting down at your computer and beginning to type? You don’t have to agree with the arguments, but you don’t, in fact, “need to ask” who has decided that God has given the Catholic bishops (and the Pope) final and authentic teaching authority when it comes to questions of Biblical morality.

This is obviously inconvenient for many Catholics, but then so is the Lord’s command to forgo lust and to love your enemies — but that is why the Church in her wisdom established the Sacrament of confession and why Christ died on the cross for our sins in the first place — we all fall short of God’s commands. I also like the bit about “in our democratic society”. What silliness — as if the Church’s moral teachings shift from one nation-state to another depending on its form of government (‘well, back in the day in England, when we lived under Kings, it was O.K. to listen to the Pope, but now we have to listen to our ill-formed consciences!’) It is an oxymoron to say that Catholic who are serious about their faith (“people who were raised Catholic or converted as adults and continue to take church teachings and practices seriously”) can simultaneously “reserve the right to reject doctrines insisted on by their bishops and to interpret in their own way the doctrines that they do accept.” We have a different word for those people (who “reserve the right to reject…”) — they are known as Protestants or more formally in the Catholic Church as heretics.

P.S. By now hasn’t everyone who has an ounce of common sense read Lydia McGrew on the 98% ‘statistic’? So the next time you write about this subject, make sure you avoid quoting that figure.

Consider the following thought experiment: Moved by the
plight of desperate earthquake victims, you volunteer to work as a
relief worker in Haiti. After two weeks, you’re ready to go home.
Unfortunately, when you arrive at the airport, customs officials tell
you that you’re forbidden to enter the United States. You go to the
American consulate to demand an explanation. But the official
response is simply, “The United States does not have to explain
itself to you.”

You don’t have to be a libertarian to admit that this seems like a
monstrous injustice. The entire ideological menagerie—liberals, conservatives, moderates, socialists, and libertarians—would defend
your right to move from Haiti to the United States. What’s so bad
about restricting your migration? Most obviously, because life in
Haiti is terrible. If the American government denies you permission
to return, you’ll live in dire poverty, die sooner, live under a brutal, corrupt regime, and be cut off from most of the people you want to associate with. Hunger, danger, oppression, isolation: condemning you to even one seems wrong. Which raises a serious question: if you had been born in Haiti, would denying you permission to enter the United States be any less wrong?1

This thought experiment hardly proves that people have an
absolute right of free migration. After all, many things that seem
wrong on the surface turn out to be morally justified. Suppose you
knock me unconscious, then slice me open with a knife. This is
normally wrong. But if you’re performing surgery required to save
my life, and I gave my informed consent, then your action is
not just morally permissible, but praiseworthy. Nevertheless, my
thought experiment does establish one weak conclusion: immigration
restrictions seem wrong on the surface. To justifiably restrict
migration, you need to overcome the moral presumption in favor
of open borders (Huemer 2010).

- from Why Should We Restrict Immigration?, Cato Journal, Winter 2012

Dear Foseti,

I really, really like your blog. In a post last year that made me laugh out loud, you commented on the liberal blogger Matt Yglesias (you and Sailer read him so I don’t have to bother!), who noticed, apparently with some surprise, that “Marion Barry has bad policy ideas!”

I have now decided that I have found the post, or rather the online Cato Journal article, that suggests to me the internet is ready to shut down. Otherwise, how do you explain how someone who is apparently as smart as Bryan Caplan (the guy has a PhD in Economics from Princeton!) getting all his friends to read his paper (including Larry Caplan, Michael Clemens, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, Michael Huemer, Garett Jones, John Nye, and Alex Tabarrok) not to mention the editors at the Cato Journal, without anyone saying to him this paper is ridiculous. Just plain ridiculous. Let’s begin with your opening premise — why does the U.S. government deny re-entry into the country of one of its own citizens! The entire setup is an injustice not because you’ll end up living in Haiti (where due to your native intelligence and resourcefulness, compared to the average Haitian, you’ll do just fine) — it is an injustice because you were denied your rights as a U.S. citizen! Bryan might have just as well started the paper by saying the following: “imagine aliens invaded the U.S. and deported all citizens into camps on the moon; sort of like a reverse “District 9″, but on the moon, and they made Newt Gingrich the Moon leader and he won’t let you go back to the U.S. Everyone would agree on the political spectrum that this is a monstrous injustice because there is nothing on the moon and you’ll live “in dire poverty, die sooner, live under a brutal, corrupt regime, (remember, Newt is in charge) and be cut off from most of the people you want to associate with (except for the Haitians — at least they won’t be on the moon!)”

The entire premise of his paper is flawed and makes no sense. He simply assumes the crucial moral premise — that there is “a moral presumption in favor of open borders.” Says who? Professor Huemer? Forgive me if I don’t have time to go look up his authoritative paper on the matter, but something tells me he doesn’t overcome the moral presumption in favor of a group of people with a common language, land and culture — let’s call them a nation — who use their government to decide to protect their language, land, and culture by restricting who can come and live and work in their country. Now I certainly agree that in so doing the people of this nation will be restricting some of their neighbors (like Professor Caplan) who want foreigners to come to live and work in the nation from doing so. That’s why in a democratic country we have a debate about immigration policy and we generally allow some form of immigration if our neighbors are interested. But here’s a newsflash to libertarians — there is no moral presumption that you can do whatever you want with your life (and property) when it will have an impact on your neighbors and assume your neighbors get no say in the matter. At least not in a democracy (and not in most authoritarian countries as well — unless you are the one in charge).

In the rest of the paper Caplan then proceeds to, surprise, surprise, take a biased walk through the social science literature on the positive and negative effects of immigration for the host country. I won’t bore you with all the details, suffice to say that the good Professor seems to ignore how poor Latin American immigrants to this country seem to be assimilating just fine — to underclass norms, nicely summarized here by Heather MacDonald:

“In many areas, the costs associated with illegal immigration go up in the second and third generation, as the American-born children and grandchildren of illegals get sucked into underclass culture. Illegal aliens make up 22 percent of the felony defendants in Arizona’s largest county, Maricopa, and more than 17 percent of the state’s prison population, though they are roughly 10 percent of Maricopa County’s population and a lower percentage of the state’s population. Their children’s crime rates are undoubtedly higher—the incarceration rate of Mexican immigrants jumps more than eightfold between the first and second generations, resulting in a prison rate for Mexican-Americans that is 3.45 times higher than that of whites, according to an analysis of 2000 census data by the Migration Policy Institute. But even in the first generation, the Mexican incarceration rate—1.8 percent of all 12- to 24-year-olds—is higher than the incarceration rate for that same age group in the overall American population—1.4 percent—according to a Manhattan Institute study of assimilation.

The Hispanic teen pregnancy rate is the highest of any ethnic group in the country—three times that of whites, and 27 percent higher than that of blacks. The Hispanic illegitimacy rate—53 percent—is growing faster than that of any other ethnic group. Children raised by teen and single mothers experience high levels of poverty, school failure, and juvenile delinquency.

The long-term consequences of illegal immigration for American competitiveness cannot be captured in a month’s worth of local sales receipts. The Educational Testing Service foresees the country’s first drop in literacy and numeracy by 2030 if the current mix of low-skilled immigrants remains unchanged. California remains the bellwether for all things pertaining to illegal immigration: thanks to immigration, the state has dropped from the seventh-most-educated state in the nation in 1970 to the least-educated state today, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. Large numbers of California’s Hispanic students continue to be classified as non-native “English language learners” through much of their school years, even though they speak English and were either born here or taught here through most of their lives, because their academic and formal linguistic skills are so deficient. The National Center for Higher Education Management Systems has predicted that California’s per-capita income will drop by 11 percent from 2000 to 2020 because of the poor academic performance of Latino students, many of whom are the progeny of illegal immigrants. In Arizona, the federal government has been contributing at least $600 million a year in an effort to bring the state’s underperforming students, the vast majority of whom are the children and grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants, up to par, without a massive positive effect.”

He also doesn’t mention one word in his whole piece about crime. How strange.

So Caplan is wrong about his basic facts and he’s confused about his moral philosophy; as I said, it is time to shut down the internet.

One morning last February, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker called his staff into his office. “Guys,” he warned, “it’s going to be a tough week.” Walker had recently sent a letter to state employees proposing steps—ranging from restricting collective bargaining to requiring workers to start contributing to their own pension accounts—to eliminate the state’s $3.6 billion deficit. That day in February was when Walker would announce his plan publicly.

- from City Journal, Winter 2012

Dear Mr. Schneider,

Doesn’t it amaze you that Governor Walker isn’t the most popular State executive in the country right now?! Within a year he has erased a the State’s $3.6 billion deficit (that’s real money) and his reforms have put local governments on a sound financial footing for years to come. It is quite literally insane that public sector workers contribute nothing toward their retirement. And the extra money toward their medical expenses won’t kill them either. Yet Walker remains unpopular — have the people of Wisconsin become so accustomed to lavish public-sector benefits (that really only serve public-sector workers*) they are unwilling to implement tough but needed reforms? If Walker loses the recall election, I will suddenly start sounding a lot more like Derbyshire and Steyn. In some ways, I think his recall election is more important than the Presidential election — if Obama is relected (God forbid) he still has to deal with Congress and the courts. If Walker and other reform-minded Governors cannot implement these structural reforms, I’m afraid we’ll have States going bankrupt soon, led by my own pathetic State, and I’m not convinced that the process will be better for all involved.

*One fact that is particularly disturbing about the story above is that both the author of the story and Governor Walker apparently never bother to question the assumption that it is always a good thing that schools are spending more and more taxpayer money on “education”. Never mind that the link between educaton spending and results is non-existant from a statistical analysis — you would think that a conservative Republican would remind voters that the government is not good at spending money, period. That’s why, even with Walker’s reforms, we still need some form of educational choice when all is said and done. But that is a blog post for another day.

UPDATE: This is good news, even though it is early in the recall process. Go Walker go!

For those of us who lived through the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, there is a bit of fun to be had in revisiting the clichés of second-wave feminism, with which Gilligan’s memoir is overstuffed. There are remonstrances about resisting “false authority” and “gender binaries and hierarchies” and breathless statements about how “the seeds of transformation lie within ourselves” that seem better suited to the corporate-inspirational rhetoric of a Successories poster than a rigorous theory of ethics. Readers are treated to anecdotes about students who, upon confronting patriarchy in the classroom “registered their distress in their bodies”; one woman, “a Native American lesbian (called by the Cree ‘two-spirited’) went home and threw up.”

- Christine Rosen reviewing Carol Gilligan’s (doyenne of “difference” feminism) memoir Joining the Resistance

Dear Ms. Rosen,

My only objection to your otherwise thorough demolition of this waste of good pulp and ink is that I wish you had given us more tasty anecdotes. My readers can’t read your entire review unless they are already Commentary subscribers, which they should become right away if they aren’t already. Podhoretz Jr. has spruced up the joint, with robust economic articles to go along with their traditional strength in foreign affairs, regular Joseph Epstein fiction (he’s so damn good and a local boy too!), an awesome Andy Ferguson column on our screwed up liberal media, and their usual excellent book reviews (like your piece!)

What stake did nonslaveholding whites have in this crusade for the freedom of planters to own slaves? Some secessionists worried a great deal about this question…

- pages 242-244 of Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson

Dear Mr. McPherson,

I had wanted to finish your wonderful one-volume Pulitzer Prize winning Civil War history (part of the Oxford History of the United States series — next up for me will be the well-reviewed What Hath God Wrought covering the period right before the Civil War) book last year during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, but I’m still not done as I keep getting side-tracked with other books and reading material. But I always return to your excellent history as it is a story well told and you have a lot of wonderful quotes from the original source material — which should leave anyone who is serious about the War, even those who admire Lee and Southern military valor, without a doubt that the South went to war for one reason and one reason only — to preserve (and hopefully expand) the institution of slavery. Slavery had become such a crazed part of southern life that, as the quotes above show, an elaborate mythology was erected to justify and defend the institution from the righteous attacks of the abolitionists (which, sadly, did not include many Catholic clergy — in fact, the Catholic position on slavery and the South would make for a fascinating study all by itself). As I wrap up your history, I’m sure I’ll share some more thoughts, if only to counter the silly narrative advanced by the brilliant but misguided Mencius Moldbug.

The ONE great idea

In the Aretae mind, there is a single uber-idea that suffuses every aspect of life…that explains not only how things are, but how things should be.

In one word: Feedback.
In a sentence: reality gives information awful cheap when you try stuff.

And it explains everything:

The history of life…how did life get here, how did humans arrive? Trial and Error (death), usually called evolution.
The human mind…how did it get to be how it is? Trial and Error (death), AKA Evolutionary Psychology
The history of civilization…how did humans become prosperous? Trial and Error(bankruptcy), usually called free-market economics.
Invention, improving stuff? Iphone 4 vs. 1? Edison’s light bulb? Trial and Error, AKA Prototyping. Lean is the Trial and Error-generated mechanism for formalizing (harnessing) the prototyping process.
Learning, and in particular, becoming expert? Trial and Error. Doing is the core of learning, and the serious learning occurs at the point of identifying errors.

What is it you want to understand about the world? The feedback system is the universal explanatory feature? The question is just how it applies.

OR

PoTD

Bloody Shovel with a long bit reminding us that the #1 enemy of tradition (and authority) is capitalism and the free market. I’m pretty sure I come down on the opposite side of most of the questions raised than does the author. For instance…I hate (with a white hot passion) both drill and ritual. But the thought process is right. Now if only the rest of the reactionaries would catch up and realize that tradition and capitalism are incompatible…

- the blogger known as Aretae

Dear Aretae,

This really isn’t a proper Festschrift, since it’s only me singing your praises in this post (and finally adding you to my blogroll!), but I figured I’d introduce you and many of my readers to a fun German word. So why do I love your blog? Your short, pithy prose is often filled with lots of smart insights, especially related to education and how the brain works; you read and comment on reactionary bloggers without agreeing with their premises (in other words — you engage with the best of what your political opponents have to say); you link to a lot of good posts by other bloggers or academic studies* highlighted by other bloggers (your “Post of the Day”, abbreviated as PoTD); you accept HBD but at the same time believe biology and society are complex enough that IQ isn’t the only important biological trait associated with success; etc. On top of that, you and I seem to totally disagree on foundational issues of epistemology, not to mention our profound political disagreements when it comes to the proper role and scope of authority for the state (which came to a head in our kerfuffle over Senator Santorum). I also like the fact that you respond to your commenters — something I’ve tried to emulate at my blog. In short, you are a worthy intellectual opponent and sometimes political ally who I had the pleasure to meet with when you had business in Chicago and I hope, as I said before, we get to break bread again in 2012. Keep up the good work.

*This study you linked to last year blew me away — if the results hold up I would think the HBD community would become very interested in the subject of patience and how it can be cultivated and/or encouraged via public policy.

Mass Conversions and Liturgical Pluralism: A Path to Christian Reunification?
Wednesday, January 4, 2012, 9:00 AM
Matthew Cantirino

On January 1, Pope Benedict XVI formally announced the creation of a new personal orindariate for Anglican groups in the United States wishing to convert to Catholicism. The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, which is “juridically equivalent to a diocese” will bring both lay and clerical members of the Anglican church into full communion with the Bishop of Rome while permitting them a large degree of control over liturgical matters (especially allowing the retention of the Book of Common Prayer, the language of certain rites, and married priests).

Though this is only the second such ordinariate, following the creation of one for England and Wales in January 2011, media reports indicate that further ordinariates are under consideration for Canada, Australia, and other English-speaking nations.

The expected proliferation of these exceptional cases is remarkable for several reasons. First, their growth represents a new tack in evangelization that is simultaneously more accommodating of converts and more aggressive in outreach to them. It also indicates a deepened seriousness on the part of the Vatican to pursue Christian reunification, a project which has been of particular interest to Benedict XVI’s thought and papacy.

But perhaps the most intriguing facet of this project is the (re)newed Catholic willingness to accept entire groups of converts and allow them to retain significant hallmarks of their Christian traditions, even when these traditions are somewhat alien (though not in opposition to) what has traditionally characterized Latin-rite Catholicism. Recalling Lumen Gentium, the website of the new ordinariate notes the balance between pluralism and universality that the project aims for:

“[though] the one Church of Jesus Christ is said to subsist in the Catholic Church: [. . .] many elements of sanctification and of truth are found outside of its visible structure, [and] these elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces impelling toward catholic unity. There is an inner dynamic in the life and teaching of Anglicanism which continues to draw Anglicans to its source.”

Tailoring the structure of the Catholic Church to make group conversion a feasible option represents something of a ‘grand experiment’ in recent ecclesiology. Yet it is not entirely novel, as it recalls some of the conversions in the early church recounted in Acts of the Apostles, when “many thousands” of individuals, including, sometimes, entire families or towns, were baptized at the same moment. And the longstanding inclusion of Eastern rite Catholics (as well as efforts at rapprochement with breakaway movements in Europe) suggests there is precedent for this emerging big tent strategy.

Representing both a numerically augmented and more communally sensitive approach in which individuals may not have to face down members of their family, friends, or former parish over their decision to enter the Catholic Church, the simultaneous conversion of entire groups, the pope seems to believe, will the one of the ways the Christian church moves down the road to eventual reunification, and is one of the ways the twenty-first century church’s evangelization will be both significantly different from its recent past and freshly in-touch with more ancient roots.

- from the blog “First Thoughts”

Dear Christian Brothers and Sisters,

I have to admit I’m excited by this news. As a member of the Holy Roman Catholic Church, it pains me that my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ are not in full union with the Church, for as the Encyclical Lumen Gentium (referenced above) says about our fellow Christians:

15. The Church recognizes that in many ways she is linked with those who, being baptized, are honored with the name of Christian, though they do not profess the faith in its entirety or do not preserve unity of communion with the successor of Peter. (14*) For there are many who honor Sacred Scripture, taking it as a norm of belief and a pattern of life, and who show a sincere zeal. They lovingly believe in God the Father Almighty and in Christ, the Son of God and Saviour. (15*) They are consecrated by baptism, in which they are united with Christ. They also recognize and accept other sacraments within their own Churches or ecclesiastical communities. Many of them rejoice in the episcopate, celebrate the Holy Eucharist and cultivate devotion toward the Virgin Mother of God.(16*) They also share with us in prayer and other spiritual benefits. Likewise we can say that in some real way they are joined with us in the Holy Spirit, for to them too He gives His gifts and graces whereby He is operative among them with His sanctifying power. Some indeed He has strengthened to the extent of the shedding of their blood. In all of Christ’s disciples the Spirit arouses the desire to be peacefully united, in the manner determined by Christ, as one flock under one shepherd, and He prompts them to pursue this end. (17*) Mother Church never ceases to pray, hope and work that this may come about. She exhorts her children to purification and renewal so that the sign of Christ may shine more brightly over the face of the earth.

However, as one of my good Protestant friends once suggested to me, I wonder if this new arrangement isn’t for the best? The reason being, she suggested, is that perhaps the Catholic Church needed some diversity in style and worship (ignoring for a moment the bigger questions of theological diversity) or it would fall into stagnation and torpor. Analogously, imagine a body never exposed to viruses or bacteria of any sort. The body would never properly develop anti-bodies and therefore never become properly healthy when attacked by an illness. Likewise, a Catholic Church that never had to deal with the Great Schism of 1054 or more famously the Protest Reformation of the 16th Century (including Henry VIII’s defiance of the Pope and the eventual creation of the Church of England) might never have developed certain liturgical and theological arguments, even if only in response to what they perceived as errors from their wayward friends. This is a big argument, too big for a short blog post, but an interesting idea to think about and perhaps some of my readers can contribute some of their preliminary thoughts in the comments section.

Get away from Christmas card sentimentality and some troubling questions come up. What kind of a God would get his own kid out of harm’s way while leaving so many other children so exposed? Why didn’t God give all the parents dreams? Or, more elegantly, why didn’t he send Herod a nice heart attack? On reflection, that turns out to be a new and very sharp way of asking one of the most basic questions that people quite justifiably ask about God: what kind of God could allow such evil and catastrophic things to happen? Why are innocents slaughtered and oppressed anywhere? If God is so powerful and he loves us so much, why are the historical records, and our daily newspapers, so full of violence, evil and oppression?

The classic Christian answer to this question, and here again standard Christianity makes a lot of sense to me personally, has two parts. The first is that God made us free; he did not want a universe of sock puppets praising and obeying him. He wanted a world, not a computer simulation; he has given us the freedom to be co-creators with him of the world we live in. But having given us real freedom, he and we are stuck with the consequences. Our choices are real, and they have real consequences for ourselves and for those around us. If God is serious about our freedom, he must abide by the choices we make.

But if God must take our choices seriously, he did not and does not have to let it end there. God, Christians believe, did not abandon us to the consequences of the choices that we and other human beings have made. Instead he determined to engage with us even more deeply; to enter history himself and to transform it from within. Christians believe that God launched a complex, multi-generational rescue operation, one that is still going on today. He will not renege on his commitment to make us free and intelligent co-creators of the world, but he will not let evil and ignorance have the last word; he will not allow our mistakes and shortcomings to separate us from his love.

The Christmas story is the moment when the rescue operation shifts into high gear. God leaves his throne, leaves heaven, and enters the world as a baby, entering the historical process himself as a human being to be shaped by human culture with all its shortcomings and limits; to share the joys, sorrows and temptations of human life in all their bewildering complexity; and to share the vulnerability of humans to betrayal, injustice, torment and finally death.

God gave up everything that he had to rescue us. He ran into the burning building to pull us out. He gave up his seat in the lifeboat to make room for someone else. That is what we are celebrating at Christmas, and that is what this story is about.

From the very beginning Jesus was subject to the same kind of contingencies that affect us all. His parents traveled in a peak season; he was born in a manger. And if he was rescued from Herod, it wasn’t to live happily ever after. Years later, as an adult, Jesus would walk, purposefully and with full knowledge of what he did, toward a fate as bloody and as cruel as the one that overtook the babies of Bethlehem at Herod’s command.

God became man and dwelt among us in order that in the fullness of time we can become like gods ourselves and go live with him. This is the shock of Christmas; this idea is why, thousands of years after it first happened, people are still locked up and killed because they believe in it.

The first verse of the famous Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem” ends with these words: “The hopes and fears of all the years/Are met in thee tonight.”

The baby in the manger, the soldiers in the streets: hopes and fears clash in mysterious ways. That is what Christmas is about; in the next few posts we will try to think about what it means.

- Walter Russell Mead, “Yule Blog 2011-2012: The Hinge of Fate”

[HT: Ben Domenech]

Dear Mr. Mead,

What can I add to your Christmas season meditation other than bravo! Such a rare delight to read an old-fashioned liberal who takes religion seriously and also has such deep respect for history and common-sense social goods like middle-class values. You are a remarkable writer and every time I read your blog I learn something. Keep up the good work.

[...]

Without taking anything away from Hitchens’s native gifts as a polemicist, it is not difficult to pinpoint the source of many of his poisonous attitudes toward the Jews and Judaism. He has done so himself many times by naming the late Israel Shahak as his “beloved guide, in the superior sense of that term,” occupying a place in his pantheon of intellectual heroes next to Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke, and, of all people, Gore Vidal. “He was never interviewed by the New York Times,” Hitchens lamented after Shahak’s death, “and its obituary pages have let pass the death of a great and serious man.”

Unfortunately, the “great and serious man” was barking mad. This is made apparent by the merest glimpse into Shahak’s magnum opus, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, which Hitchens has recommended as a reliable guide on matters Jewish. It is, quite simply, a masterpiece of anti-Semitic literature, whose thesis is quickly summarized: Judaism is racist and evil; as a result, Zionism is racist and evil; as a result, Israel is racist and evil. For Jews to cease to be racist and evil, they must divest themselves of Judaism.

- Benjamin Kerstein, “The Trouble with Hitchens”, from Jewish Ideas Daily

Dear Christopher Hitchens Fans,

I used to consider myself as someone in your ranks, but when it became clear that the Hitch was foolishly wrong about God, it also became clear that his thinking was muddled about many issues, including Israel and the Jews. I still think he was right about Saddam, but I can’t say that I was glad to have him in my corner…he gave us hawks a bad name. I’ll stick with Peter, who understands God in a way his brother never could, and therefore writes on the subject beautifully.