Assorted Links: February 10, 2008

Who Will Rid Us of This Turbulent Priest?

God may have been an Englishman, but there is serious doubt about the current Primate of the Church of England.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was facing demands to quit last night as the row over sharia law intensified.

Lord George Carey, Dr Williams' predecessor, criticised his comments on sharia law and said that accepting the Islamic code would be a disaster for Britain.

Other leading bishops publicly contradicted Dr Rowan Williams's call for Islamic law to be brought into the British legal system.

With the Church of England plunged into crisis, senior figures were said to be discussing the archbishop's future.

One member of the church's "Cabinet", the Archbishop's Council, was reported as saying: "There have been a lot of calls for him to resign. I don't suppose he will take any notice, but, yes, he should resign."

Officials at Lambeth Palace told the BBC Dr Williams was in a "state of shock" and "completely overwhelmed" by the scale of the row.

It was said that he could not believe the fury of the reaction. The most damaging attack came from the Pakistan-born Bishop of Rochester, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali.

He said it would be "simply impossible" to bring sharia law into British law "without fundamentally affecting its integrity".

Sharia "would be in tension with the English legal tradition on questions like monogamy, provisions for divorce, the rights of women, custody of children, laws of inheritance and of evidence.

"This is not to mention the relation of freedom of belief and of expression to provisions for blasphemy and apostasy."

As an infidel in good standing indifference might be my expected course.  A pox on both their temples and all that.  Modern Christianity, however, is a far different creature from modern Islam.  Every religion is, to a greater or lesser extent, a balance between reason and faith in its teachings and day to day practices.  The great fault of modern Islam is not its having missed the sexual or industrial revolutions, but having missed the epistemological revolution of the thirteenth century.  The Islamic world seems medieval in its attitudes and outlook because it is medieval, or more accurately early medieval, in its thinking. 

The Thomistic Revolution reintroduced reason and logic into western philosophy and eventually into everyday life.  That description will seem absurd to many, don't human beings use reason everyday just to survive?  Well yes and no.  In the everyday business of life, the tending of crops, the manufacturing of goods and the shuffling of paper, whether one is the citizen of a modern liberal democracy or medieval peasant or modern day Cairo slum dweller, reason is essential to life.  More precisely it is reason codified (sometimes ossified) into habit.  One acquires new skills by reasoning, by trial and error, by the use of the information of one's senses.  Overtime this knowledge becomes automatized into skills and habits.

What separates the citizen of a liberal democracy and his medieval ancestor, and the Cario slum dweller, is how they go about solving the bigger problems of life.  How do I decide something is true in ethics, politics or science?  The dictum of the Thomists was "Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu." (Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses).  Evidence and rational thought are the ideal of modern life, even of post modern life.  It is an ideal we fall short of but the alternative is the life of the modern medievalists.  The Islamists and so many of the actual "moderate" Muslims - moderate in the sense they occupy the intellectual middle ground between liberal democracy and theocracy - act upon faith.  What that means in practice is not living according to the teachings of an ancient holy book, but the interpretations of the holy book. 

If one's interpretations are based on reason, on an attempt to rationally analyze the text and compare and contrast with the evidence of one's senses, one admits that religious teachings are a matter of debate and even disagreement.  If one's interpretations are based solely on faith, not merely faith in accepting a certain set of assumptions as true, but faith in applying those principles as well, how does one debate with others?  I say this is the truth.  Why?  Because it is.  What are your reasons?  There are not reasons, only faith.  The only way to resolve the conflict is to follow or fight.  For a modern Christian faith extends as far as accepting certain assumptions as true without evidence, their application and mitigation with empirical evidence is done - or at least striven to be done - by reason.

What the Reverend Doctor has missed, is that the failure of Muslim immigrants to assimilate is not because of our failure to accommodate, but their failure to grasp a rational epistemology.  His treason, however, is far worse than betraying English values or the dogmas of his creed, he has betrayed what made both possible, a culture of reason.  The English Common Law, nor the Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith, was not the product of men who thought the best way to win an argument was to blow themselves up.

Non-Threatening Boys

Until recently I had missed something very important about Senator Obama's candidacy.  His appeal to white liberals lies not simply in his being a charming black man, whose support is also a new credential of Left-wing enlightenment, it's also that he is essentially non-threatening.  He is not a Richard Wright, a Nina Simone or a gangsta rapter; he's Sidney Poitier and many modern white liberals are the audience being smug about how much more liberal they are than Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracey (now played by Bill and Hillary Clinton). 

When it was claimed in 2004 that Teresa Heinz-Kerry would be the first African-American First Lady, this was only in the literal sense correct.  She was born in Africa, but in colonial Mozambique to a wealthy Portuguese doctor.  In every sense of the word she lead a far more privileged life than the overwhelming majority of white American born women.  While Obama is physiologically black his life thus far is well removed from the experiences of an average American black.  He is the black man liberal whites feel comfortable with.  Bill Clinton's bragging about being the first black American President was in fact closer to the truth, he has culturally more in common with a southern American black of his age than Obama does.  Just as multiculturalism is a form of left-wing intellectual imperialism, projecting their values onto other cultures, missing the very real gulfs that exist between the West and the Rest, so white liberals support for Obama is a domestic version of the same world view.  This is how they want black America to be, bright, optimistic and without a trace of anger or bitterness.  In an early episode of the Simpsons, Lisa becomes infatuated with the pop sensation Corey.  She is, at one point, seen reading a magazine, with Corey's picture, titled "Non-Threatening Boys."  Obama is Corey.

Mitt for Governor

There are plenty of second acts in American life.  Perhaps Mitt Romney will have one too.

What do Mitt Romney and Sam Houston have in common? Okay; not much…yet. But with his departure from the 2008 presidential contest, the former Massachusetts governor could pull a Houston and become the second American to serve as governor of two states. (It can’t be done, some might claim – it is too unorthodox. Like, for instance, a former First Lady of one state heading to another state than running for Senate? Or president?)

By returning to his home state of Michigan and running to succeed term-limited Democrat Jennifer Granholm in 2010, Romney has the chance to be elected and govern as a solid conservative in a state in which conservatives have excelled. The electorate remembers the 1990s as one of low and falling taxes, economic growth, and conservative leadership under three-term Governor John Engler, who left office in 2003.

One of Romney’s principal obstacles during his presidential run was the time it took for him to develop sufficient conviction — first within himself, and then within his party — that he is a conservative leader. By the time he left the race at the CPAC convention, he had clearly become a favorite of the movement, and consequently, he left the stage with the audience wanting more.

The principal reason Romney's campaign failed is that conservatives simply could not take a centrist Massachusetts governor seriously.  It didn't help, as the Steyn has pointed out, that Romney was not "tonally" conservative, whereas John McCain, who is a hair's breadth away from the Democrats on most issues, sounds very much like a conservative straight shooter.  Perhaps in Michigan the real Mitt Romney would finally stand up.

The Museum of American Finance

The Real Greatest Show on Earth.

So while opening the Museum of American Finance on Wall Street last month might at first have seemed like bad timing — like buying a stock at its top, or selling at its bottom — there was actually no better moment to mount this tribute to the “forces that have made New York City the financial capital of the world” (as one of the museum’s displays puts it). And if our city’s status and the currency that backs it are more contested than they once were, that only makes the enterprise more urgently intriguing.

In fact, the museum was founded just after the 1987 market crash, because John Herzog, chairman of a trading firm that has since become part of Merrill Lynch, said he felt that there was no “institutional memory” on Wall Street. Moments of crisis require that expanded perspective, and, as the museum’s founding shows, they also inspire it.

Once housed in a much smaller space at the United States Customs House (where it also had the more ponderous title of Museum of American Financial History), the institution has now come into its own, leasing 30,000 square feet of the former Bank of New York building. And since the nearby New York Stock Exchange has been closed to the public since Sept. 11, this museum may also become a de facto visitors’ center.

After $9 million in costs (and with a $3 million annual budget), the museum, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, now has a library and an auditorium, along with 10,000 square feet of exhibition space on what was once the imposing “private banking” mezzanine. It is a magisterial space, its grand murals celebrating American industrial achievements — powered, presumably, by the investments of many who once banked here.

Crystal Palace Rises Again

The great symbol of Victorian ingenuity and optimism maybe staging a comeback, thanks to some London businessmen.

The original building was built by Sir Joseph Paxton in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, under the patronage of Prince Albert.

After being moved to a location in Sydenham, now known as Crystal Palace Park, it was destroyed by fire in 1936.

The plans for a new building, estimated to cost £220million, incorporate galleries, a snow slope, music auditorium, leisure facilities and a hotel.

They have been drawn up by the New Crystal Palace company, a consortium of local businessmen. It expects to submit the plans to Bromley council "in the next six to eight months". Company spokesman Patrick Goff said: "We want to put the Crystal Palace back and give the park a heart again. Our plan could be entirely funded through the commercial elements, with no money needed from the public purse."

Just like the original.