Assorted Links: September 24, 2006

Sex and the Married Evangelical

Those fearful that the American Christian Right, and its less influential Canadian cousin, are poised to establish a puritanical theocracy, should read the below:

About 100 evangelical Christian couples stand in the convention hall of a Four Points Sheraton, bow their heads and thank God for their lives and the new day. Then they sing the old-timey hymn “There’s Not a Friend Like the Lowly Jesus.”

I have come here expecting exactly this scene. The occasion is a seminar called “Love, Sex and Marriage,” being given by Joe Beam, a Southern preacher out of the old school, a self-described “book-chapter-and-verse guy,” who runs an outfit based in Franklin, Tenn., called Family Dynamics. So I’m anticipating condemnation of American culture — especially America’s sexual culture — that has made conservative Christians feel besieged.

But then Beam, a portly, silver-haired basso profundo dressed in khaki slacks, a sweater vest and brown tasseled loafers that make him look like a retired country-club golf pro, walks to the front of the room and proceeds to tell the men in the audience how to make their semen taste better.

Sweet stuff works, he says, which provides a built-in excuse because "then you can say, 'I'm eating this cake for you, baby!'"

Welcome to the world of hot Christian love.

The San Diego Church of Christ is Beam’s sponsoring group today, but as far as he is concerned it could be any conservative Christian denomination. The message would be the same: Married Christians ought to be having more — and hotter — sex.

I'm sure all the Mullahs in Esfahan say much the same to their respective flocks.  As Tony Montana advised so many years ago:  "In this country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women."  In that spirit we observe that some modern Christians have a rather - dare we use the word? - liberal attitude toward money.

Generations of churchgoers have understood that being Christian means being ready to sacrifice. But for a growing number of Christians, the question is better restated, "Why not gain the whole world plus my soul?"

For several decades, a philosophy has been percolating in the 10 million-strong Pentecostal wing of Christianity that seems to turn the Gospels' passage on its head. Certainly, it allows, Christians should keep one eye on heaven. But the new good news is that God doesn't want us to wait.

Known (or vilified) under a variety of names -- Word of Faith, Health and Wealth, Name It and Claim It, Prosperity Theology -- its emphasis is on God's promised generosity in this life. In a nutshell, it suggests that a God who loves you does not want you to be broke.

Its signature verse could be John 10:10: "I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly." In a Time poll, 17 percent of Christians surveyed said they considered themselves part of such a movement, while a full 61 percent believed that God wants people to be prosperous.

Advocates note Prosperity's racial diversity -- a welcome exception to the American norm -- and point out that some Prosperity churches engage in significant charity. And they see in it a happy corrective for Christians who are more used to being chastened for their sins than celebrated as God's children.

"Who would want to get in on something where you're miserable, poor, broke and ugly and you just have to muddle through until you get to heaven?" asks Joyce Meyer, a popular television preacher and author often lumped in the Prosperity Lite camp. "I believe God wants to give us nice things."

How that squares with the Sermon on the Mount, I'll leave to the theologians to sort out.  Still, it underlines a frequent point of mine, modern North American Christianity has precious little in common with modern Islam anywhere.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

As Newswatch related this week, the CBC has an in-house radio orchestra.  I bet you thought all the radio orchestras were upstairs swingin' with St. Pete and Guy Lombardo.  All that is, except the CBC's radio orchestra.

Alain Trudel will make his first public appearance Wednesday as the new conductor of the CBC Radio Orchestra, the last surviving radio orchestra in North America.

Trudel says he plans to take the orchestra in new directions, expanding its audience with podcasts and a wider range of programming, and asking his musicians to play everything from Middle Eastern music to hip hop.

"To play in an orchestra like this you need to be able to play all different kinds of style," he told CBC Radio.

"We're not just talking playing about Mozart compared to Mahler compared to Beethoven — no, we're talking classical music, new world music. Last year they did a record with [rapper] K-Os. I mean, you really need to be able to get around the instrument, get around different styles of music."

I recently heard a military band play Barry Manilow's Copacabana.  It reminded me of the story about the first performance of Stravinsky's Rites of Spring sparking riots.  It was only on hearing a French horn, trying to spit out Manilow's off tempo notes, that I understood what it felt like to be one of the rioters.  When Mr. Trudel talks about an orchestra getting around "different styles of music" on the taxpayers dime, Old Publius gets quite riotous.

My Country Tis'

Andrew Coyne calls us to a higher purpose.

Why were Canadian ships sent thousands of miles across the sea to pluck another country's citizens out of harm's way? Because, as you well know, they are also Canadian citizens. That is, they are dual citizens, beneficiaries of a 1977 change in immigration legislation, and as such, though many have not lived or paid taxes in this country for several years, are entitled to all the protections the Canadian state affords.

Despite the public outrage this aroused at the time, the Harper government wisely decided the middle of a war was not the time to revisit the principle of dual citizenship: They were Canadian citizens, and that was that. But the war being now ended, the government is said to be considering whether to abolish this strangely ambivalent status, to which at least four million foreign-born Canadians, plus an uncounted number of native-born, lay claim.

If so, this would be an event of enormous symbolic importance. Moreover, it would fit this Prime Minister's broader aim, which is nothing less than to recast the meaning of Canadian nationhood -- as a moral project, in which we are collectively and individually engaged, rather than a simple dispenser of services; something that lays claims upon us, as much as it confers entitlements. And the very least claim it can make upon us is that we commit ourselves to it, to the exclusion of all others.

This asks no more of us than that we make a choice. It does not bind us permanently, nor does it impose any barrier to entry. We can be citizens of Lebanon first and then of Canada, or of Canada and then Lebanon. The only thing we can't do is be a citizen of both countries at the same time.

What's wrong with that? Nothing, if your view of nationhood is essentially service-based -- just as you can belong to two frequent-flier programs at the same time. But if you incline to a view of the nation as moral project, as a moral order we are in the process of constructing, then a higher degree of commitment is implied.

I will, and can, say only this in defense of dual citizenship.  The current labyrinth of regulations, exemptions and codes that decide who gets into most Western nations, and how long they stay, sometimes necessitates dual citizenship.  While these restrictions are nominally to exclude the undesirables. they rarely do.  The ease with which Islamist militants have entered and left Canada, before and after 9/11, and the recent deportations of Portuguese construction workers who had outstayed their tourists visas, at least suggests the limitations of such red tape. 

If Canada was the only nation to have such an abysmal immigration system, then the indictment might be laid only at Ottawa's door.  Yet virtually every Western nation has a similar track record. The principle common to all is the same which guides our mixed economy; a combination of controls and freedom.  People are allowed to come and go, but only as deemed appropriate by the authorities.  What guides the authorities in their decisions?  A combination of political whim and bureaucratic second-sight about the kind of people that Canada wants or needs.  Before the 1960s non-whites were largely excluded from coming to Canada, to keep us a White Man's Country.  After the 1970s immigrants from some European countries were discriminated against, in hopes of creating a multicultural society. 

Even when our immigration authorities confine themselves to economic considerations for admittance, they become no more rational.  It was the Department of Immigration, and its political masters, that divined the need for thousands of foreign engineers, then failed to divine the difficulties these foreign trained engineers would have in obtaining equivalent Canadian designations.  Simply following the opportunities that present themselves in a globalized economy can easily make a hapless emigre an Alice falling through the looking glass.  A mere century ago passports were largely unneeded to travel between most Western nations.  That age too had its terrorists, the various anarchist and anti-capitalists movements that murdered monarchs, politicians and ordinary folk.  The police, despite the technological limitations of the time, seem to have coped.  That threat was, like our own, international in scope and ideological in nature.  That our age uses, and to little effect, authoritarian tactics is just another symptom of our decline.

Only the Dead Vote Liberal

First there was Tykes for Volpe, now even the deceased have jumped onto the former minister's bandwagon.

Dozens of people in Montreal, including the dead, have been improperly signed up as federal Liberal party members.

A Toronto Star investigation has found unsuspecting Quebecers — some surprised to find out they were instant Liberals — were sent membership cards and letters urging them to vote next weekend at all-important meetings to elect delegates to the Liberal convention to choose a new leader.

Using membership lists from the Quebec wing of the federal Liberal party, the Star talked to more than 70 families who reported significant problems in their own case, or in that of other family members. Most often, they hadn't paid the membership fee which party rules stipulate must be paid by the actual member.

The origins of this madness go deeper than the pedestrian corruption the Grits are so well known for.  Blame lies ultimately with that usual suspect of twentieth century Canadian history, William Lyon Mackenzie King.  It was W.L.M.K., though of course not alone, who established and then won the first modern leadership convention.  Previously party leaders were elected by their caucuses and consequently responsible to them.  This system was scrapped on the reasoning that such a process was undemocratic.  Its replacement is the current membership buying, delegate schmoozing fest that blights the political landscape.  Aside from being easily corrupted such a system has the added drawback of helping to transform backbenchers, and even party critics / ministers, into trained seals.  Modern media has compounded the process, by centralizing the distribution of information and images.  As recently as the 1950s a local MP or MPP would have been a well known member of the community.  Today our notables are at best regional, often only national in recognition.

If Only We'd Thought of That

The Hungarians show us the way.

The clashes happened following a rally demanding the resignation of PM Ferenc Gyurcsany, after it was revealed his government had lied during an election.

The worst fighting came when protesters stormed the state television building.

Dozens of people were hurt, including many police officers. The city is now said to be calm.

It was the first such unrest to take place in Hungary since the fall of communism and the establishment of democracy in the late 1980s.

An emergency meeting of the national security cabinet was called for Tuesday morning. The main opposition party, the centre-right Fidesz, says it will boycott parliament.

Mr Gyurcsany's comments, which sparked the violence, were heard in a tape of a meeting he had with his MPs a few weeks after April's election, and leaked to local media on Sunday.

In excerpts broadcast on state radio, Mr Gyurcsany says harsh economic reforms are needed.

"There is not much choice. There is not, because we screwed up. Not a little, a lot. No European country has done something as boneheaded as we have.

"Evidently, we lied throughout the last year-and-a-half, two years... You cannot quote any significant government measure we can be proud of, other than at the end we managed to bring the government back from the brink. Nothing."

In a speech sprinkled with obscenities, Mr Gyurcsany says: "We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening."

In some alternate universe I imagine Bob Rae saying much the same to his caucus in 1993. 

Arrivederci Roma

Arrivederci Papa.

Pope Benedict XVI has invited envoys of Muslim nations for talks on Monday to try to smooth relations following a speech that offended the Islamic world.
The talks at his summer residence near Rome will be aimed at explaining that the pontiff's recent speech in Germany was misunderstood, the Vatican said.

The Pope has said three times that he regrets the offence caused, expressing "deep respect" for Islam.

Muslim leaders have been demanding an unequivocal apology from the Pope.

Iran's deputy ambassador to the Vatican, Ahmad Faihma, described the Pope's invitation as "a positive signal".

"I know that this [the talks] will improve relations with the Islamic world," Mr Faihma told Reuters news agency.

I had few hopes for the current pontificate.  Admittedly my standards were a wee high. It was probably fanciful for me to imagine that the until recently Cardinal Ratzinger, would appear on the balcony above St. Peter's Square with a "Who is John Galt?"  T-shirt and tell everyone it was all a huge misunderstanding and to go home.  Still I had expected the Pope to be a little more, well, Catholic.  Amidst the near universal kow-towing to the bromide that Islam is a religion of peace,  I had hoped the world's most famous living Christian would start attacking the Islamists with the same gusto he was giving to his denunciations of modern culture.  Sadly, this seems not to be the case, as seen above.  The speech in question was only tangentially related to Islam, B 16's real target was modern epistemology.  The only writer to have actually picked up on this, unless I missed something in the National Review, or something upcoming in The New Criterion, is Burkean Canuck:

Benedict took Modernity to task for limiting reason to scientific verificationism (logical positivism) or falsificationism (Popperian epistemology). In verificationaism, something is only really, er, scientifically true if it can be verified. In Popper's falsificationism, something can only qualify as "certain knowledge" if it is open to being tested and, therefore, falsified. Benedict suggested this tends to hobble the human mind from reasoning about the full range of questions and about all of reality.

The late evangelical philosopher Francis Schaeffer called this limitation Modernity's "nothing buttery." That say, the beauty of a rainbow is "nothing but" the splitting (diffraction) of the sun's rays by tiny droplets of water. "But," you say, "a rainbow IS the diffraction of the sun's rays." And Schaeffer would reply, "Is a rainbow nothing but that?" Or, that music is nothing but sound waves arranged in a particular way. But is a Bach fugue or a Mozart symphony or a brilliant jazz improvisation or a lead guitar solo nothing but that? Modernity might well insist that the human mind is nothing but the firing of synapses under certain electro-chemical conditions . . .

In other words, how do you rationally account for the human soul?  The positivist and Popperian approaches are both post-Enlightenment epistemological.  The first approach is that if I can't touch or see it, it ain't real.  The second approach is that we can only know when something isn't true or real, not if it is.  The first approach is concrete bound, the latter skepticism to an absurd degree.  If one takes the logical positivist approach to its inevitable extreme we cannot say that love, hate or the United States of America are real.  They are merely feelings or sentiments.  The Popperian falsification approach says that the United States may exist but we can never prove it.  We might prove that it never existed, but not that it does or did.  B 16 rightly sees both as intellectual and spiritual dead ends, as well as progenitors of much of the rot of modernity. 

Take a minor example from this blog's own history.  About a year and a half ago I debated a supporter of socialized health care (I can't find the post).  After taking great pains in explaining why socialism can never work, basing myself on Mises' arguments about the impossibility of economic calculation without market prices, and then citing specific instances in health care and other industries, my arguments were casually dismissed.  Why?  Because I had not provided specific numbers and figures proving mathematically that socialism does not work.  I was derided for being dogmatic and too theoretical.  When I asked for an explanation as to why Canada had far longer waiting lists than the United States, that Canada had fewer doctors per capita than virtually any other western nation, I was given no answer.  My opponent insisted on specific facts and figures that proved my point and to stop "theorizing."  I countered that facts without theory are meaningless data, to no avail.  My opponent couldn't touch or feel the "failure" of socialism, so it hadn't really failed.  The corpses notwithstanding.

Go Long

An epistemology that can't think above discrete bits of data, or denies anything is really real, must by necessity be short-range.  Only a conceptual mind can think long-term; be able to grasp essential principles that subsume a myriad of concrete events, personalities and things.  Burkean, again, on the "Short-Termism" of the modern world.

In it Mr. Wellum particulary takes to task money managers, the markets, and decision-makers of public stock companies for their preoccupation with short-term gains and gratification at the expense of long-term, corporate investments, wealth creation, and stewardship of the next generation's wealth. He particularly singles out the derivatives market, hedge funds, and the drive to privatize the stock markets as a "casino-ization" of trading.

Wellum also takes to task a generation that puts so little emphasis on the bearing and rearing of children that several countries' birth rates are at the point of depopulation -- that Germany's birth rate, for example, could see its population reduced by one third. He singles out governments' building casinos instead of investing in the infrastructure of roads, bridges, sewers, and the grid, and for instituting social programs that discourage the incentives for work and productivity. I want to focus on this last, for it's in government that we have seen some early efforts to address "short-termism."

There is only one point in Burkean's fine post that I want to take up.

And if we're really serious about 'thinking long-term,' we will take steps to strengthen the institution of marriage as a legal union of one man and one woman for the procreation and rearing of children. We will return to parenthood the esteem it deserves, and frame public policy with a view to encouraging healthy families for the bearing and rearing of children.

After all, every human civilization is one generation from extinction.

Being conscious of that, every previous generation has understood that education is about more than merely imparting narrow technical skills.  The development of the Whole-Man has been the central goal of Western education from Thales to Matthew Arnold.  It was only concrete-bound mentalities like John Dewey, one of the chief architects of "progressive education," that obsesses over "socialization," ensuring adjustment to whatever social circumstances the child might encounter, whether they be saints, sinners or sociopaths.  The Whole-Man approach begs for a broad conceptual framework, a religion or a philosophy.  It is little coincidence that Greek philosophy emerged from thinkers who were some of the earliest professional teachers.  When philosophy or religion collapse, admitting they can't answer the " Big Questions," the Whole Man approach collapses too, having no frame of reference. 

Marriage is a derivative in all this.  Fundamental though marriage is to the continued existence of society, it is not philosophically fundamental.  The concept of marriage Prue-supposes understandings of love, society and some sketch of what it means to be human.  For savage man marriage is a matter of survival, much as attachment to a tribe or group.  The loner in primitive societies is soon enough a goner.  With the advent of civilization marriage, like tribal loyalties, must fit within a wider intellectual framework. 

Loyalty to the primitive tribe, for instance, is absolute and blind.  A similar approach to the modern nation state has pr oven itself repeatedly in the last two centuries to be dangerous.  Think of the Good German who followed orders.  With the wider concept of nation, different from that merely of tribe, so a different understanding of loyalty was needed.  That many still clung to a tribal understanding of loyalty is a bani of modernity.  Marriage and family too follows this pattern.  Family matters to primitive man because of survival.  There are other reasons for family, of course, but this is the central one.  Once economic individualism becomes possible then family and marriage must justify themselves anew.  The process is gradual, usually quite Burkean, the non-Burkean approaches almost always being disastrous, but they evolve nonetheless.  In other words, the new understanding of family has to answer the ancient questions: "Why do I have to put up with these people?" 

Whether homosexual relationships are entitled to legal recognition - which I believe they should be - and what that recognition should be called - which is not symbolic but irrelevant - is a derivative of a derivative.  Legal redefinitions of marriage have not gravely weakened the institution, nor can they explain the collapse of western birth rates.  What has caused our current crisis is a botched reform of the institution of marriage. 

The twentieth century was the age when economic individualism first reached its full height.  Industrialization and urbanization rendered the family, past the formative years, unnecessary for survival.  The new ties that would have to bind could not be simply materialistic.  Marriage and the family needed new definitions, evolving from the best traditions of the old.  Even before the rise of economic individualism philosophers and ordinary men, being men, had understood that marriage and family had to be about more than mere survival.  This evolutionary process entered, as just mentioned, a crucial period in the twentieth century.  Now more than ever it needed philosophical guidance, answers to big questions to help answer the smaller ones, though still vital ones.  What it got was modern philosophy and its product modern culture.  Skepticism mixed with nihilism.  The new marriage and the new family followed correspondingly.  If life is meaningless, why bother staying married past the point were the other person becomes mildly annoying?  Bothering with something as bothersome as children is simply beyond the pale.  Despite protestations that the family was a middle class institution devised for economic or political purposes, the subtext was a confession of defeat.  It is no co-incidence that the Left, products of modern philosophy, have lower birth rates than those on the Right.

The Right's response to all this has been flawed. however.  The secular right is too materialistic.  Tax cuts and free trade seem to stretch the limits of their imaginations.  Bring social issues into the conversation and you might as well be dragging a life-sized crucifix on your back.  Conversely, the religious right is often too traditional, too reactionary.  The better elements in the religious right are usually quite good about not being reactionary, about not being narrow traditionalists deriding all change.  They understand that the past is a repository of wisdom and guidance, it is not an absolute authority.  Even the past must be judged by a deeper criteria.  Liberal democracy, capitalism and abolitionism are all Enlightenment concepts adopted, and developed, by both the secular and religious.  The approach to marriage, perhaps because it is so personal, has not always been so objective.  Any change often seems suspect, until well past the point of doing anything about it either way.  Digging in your heels about gay marriage is the wrong place to fight a battle about the future of marriage and family. 

Landfill City

From those professional radicals of the Forest City, the Foggers, specifically one Mapmaster, esquire.

The very moment people pay for someone to haul away their garbage, it becomes a commodity subject to all the costs and opportunities of any other commodity in the market. Although this is a simple and irrefutable observation, it escapes general notice because the opportunities are mostly distributed by single monopolistic government purveyors who in turn hide the artifically elevated costs in taxes and exert tight regulatory powers over the negative externalities, imposing strict or often impossible restrictions on locations or methods of garbage disposal. As with any commodity that is so effectively dominated by government, commerce in garbage is become a political issue — which means that, far from being governed by rational policy, garbage is a political commodity traded in spurious debates, imaginary moral imperatives and populist clamourings. And whenever rational policy might threaten to intrude, political self-interest overwhelms it with an avalanche of hysteria.

The division of political labour is determined by the extent of the market for political bafflegaffe.  More than a century and a half ago, people conceded to the state the task of garbage disposal.  About thirty years ago the job of environmental guardian was added to the laundry lists of government responsibilities.  As the admirable Mapmaster points out, government involvement means politicization.  Activities that most people would never have been aware or concerned about, become major issues because politicians need to put their faces in front of a television camera every so often.