tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-373522872024-03-14T03:53:54.565+01:00Chronicles from the FrontLetters home from the Lazy Disciple and the Humbly Presumptuous...Lazy Disciplehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839410764981702225noreply@blogger.comBlogger522125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-24053718480175318152013-03-10T17:12:00.000+01:002013-03-10T17:12:42.025+01:00Pope Benedict's renuntiatio<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Benedict XVI is no longer Pope. It has been for me a
real bereavement. I loved, I can’t say the man, which is reductive, so let’s
say the person. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Persona</i>, in Latin,
meant originally the mask a man wears in society, the face by which he shows
who he is. Now he was the Pope, that was his person.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">What is to be a Pope? Pope is the bishop of Rome, as
successor of Saint Peter, and Peter was the man invested by Jesus, according to
the Gospels, to herd his sheep, the rock on which his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ecclesia</i>, the converging of all the people recognizing themselves
in him, was to be built.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">And again, who was He? Who was Jesus (the) Christ? The
king <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">par excellence</i>, the anointed one
(as it was the case with the Old Testament kings), through whom it shines forth
the glory of the Lord, real ultimate authority from whom all things come and on
whom all things rest. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Moreover, what does a king do? The answer is simple,
he represents the people. And don’t take this to mean that there is a people
already existing, and afterwards there is a king representing it. No, the
people exists only through him who represents all those belonging to it. This
makes the king a sacrificial figure. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To live as people we have to recognize each other as
men, i.e., conversely, reciprocally to represent each other in our common
humanity. A man, though, cannot represent another in what in he has, his
properties, which can differ (starting from being male and female, and
consequently sons and daughters of a man and a woman converging in marital
alliance), but only by giving, which means by stripping himself of the
properties he has. Sure, we identify each other by what we give. So, only he
who gives all can represent everybody. But to give all means to give one’s life:
in a giving exchange, though, in which life is renewed, being given back. This
is what the king does: effectively to represent with his person the reciprocal
life giving and receiving people are involved in. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I know I have been very short: these lines summarize in
fact the common sense of all kind of evidence, historical and ethnographical,
of human affairs, collected by some of the best cultural anthropologists and theologians.
Everywhere giving takes the ceremonial form of gift, in which the things given expressly
stand for the ones who give. And everywhere we find gifts turning decisively
into something like sacrifice, i.e. into rituals in which the person feigns a
dying and a coming out from death renewed. Even now days there are (in spite of
all denials and psychological reductions) actions of which we must say that by
them an older self dies and a new one is born. Such are the actions performed
by kings. But what is performed elsewhere as a ritual action, becomes full
reality with Jesus Christ. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Here is the universal meaning of the Cross, symbol of
a passage in which life is taken and given, of which every Christian is called
to share through the sacraments. Anointed with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">chrisma</i>, he becomes himself a “Christ”. But, for Catholics, the
anointment finds a special representations in the person of bishops, and, among
bishops, in the bishop of Rome.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Back then to Benedict’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">renuntiatio</i>. What was it its meaning? We were all stricken by it,
we who love him, and those who don’t love him. Some, mostly among these, have
seen in it a kind of surrender to the intrigue of the Curia, and/or to the
aggression on the Church by a totalitarian liberal (I prefer to say, instead of
the banal “secular”) world. It would be like saying that Jesus Christ didn’t
deliver himself voluntarily to his enemies, thus challenging them, but more or
less cowardly gave in to them not opposing any resistance. This, however, if
anything, is not the story the Gospels tell. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Losing strength – the strength necessary to govern the
Church – was the reason given by Benedict for his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">renuntiatio</i>. He choose with it to live his papal, Christian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">persona</i> to the very end. In a different
way, but meaning the same as his predecessor. With the Parkinson undermining
him, John Paul II, asked whether he meant to retire, replied in turn with a
question: «Can one descend from the Cross?». Obviously not. Aware that some
might have taken in this sense his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">renuntiatio</i>,
Benedict, in one of his last public words, said: «I am not descending from the
Cross.». Retiring in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">clausura</i>, disappearing
from the eyes of the world, he showed himself in that very passage symbolized
by the Cross, where through death shines forth life.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">These long overdue lines of comment on Benedict’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">renuntiatio</i> are meant, at the eve of the
conclave, as a prayer, to see come out of it a new Pope as saintly as he. Equally
endowed with the gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom and understanding, counsel
and strength, knowledge, fear of the Lord and justice.</span></div>
Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-20110214229597534152012-12-12T19:47:00.001+01:002012-12-12T19:47:34.510+01:00What about democracy?<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I should have commented on the November elections
right away. Or probably it wasn’t necessary. The few who read this blog should
know well that I don’t like Obama, not just a little, but a lot. As always,
though, expressing opinions, likes and dislikes, is less important than arguing
about “things themselves”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">At times like these I wonder about the destiny of
democracy. In the US and out of it there is talk about the decline of America.
I rather ask: is there in the US an apt understanding of America, and, with
America, of democracy? In short: what about democracy? In the US, I don’t know
whether they can still be called of America, as in Europe? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">As far as America is concerned, my friend the LD wrote
a beautiful book entitled <i>The soul of a
nation</i>, for which I am pressing him to find a publisher to make known his
enquiry, historical and philosophical, into her formative idea. As far as her
connection with democracy is concerned, well, who doesn’t know the brilliant <i>Democracy in America</i> by Alexis de
Tocqueville? Amazing how he was able to draw, just from a journey through the young
United States in the thirties of the Nineteenth Century, such essential an
insight into the kind of society that was taking shape in them! <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Mind me. I said that “society was taking shape” in the
united ex British colonies, meaning that a certain ordering of human affairs
found in the American constitution, wisely empowered by the Constitution, the
institutional setting that allowed it to flourish. I didn’t say that the state newly
formed by the ex colonies shaped society.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Let’s call, as it has been called, this ordering of
human affairs “democracy”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It had already started taking shape before the
independence in the colonial period, over against the modern European
experience of the absolute monarchies, by which it was the states that tended
to reshape society. The same tendency, though, was not overthrown but confirmed
and strengthened by the French Revolution. Again on this, de Tocqueville makes
an interesting reading, with his less famous but no less important <i>The ancient regime and the revolution</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Also to the ordering of society from on high, on the absolutist model confirmed by the
French Revolution, it has been given the name of “democracy”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It is legitimate then to ask: which is democracy, the
one or the other? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A widespread opinion identifies democracy with the
possibility to hold elections – or at least so it looks from the pressing in
this direction exercised by the US on countries where elections weren’t
previously held. What is happening for example in Egypt shows how illusory that
opinion is: an elected president took the first chance he found to make his
power absolute. But it’s not just this. To be elected implies the capability to
obtain consent, and to stay in power doesn’t require suspension of further
elections, it is enough to control the organization of consent. Moreover, the
idea of democracy thus expressed is that consent by itself is all that is
needed: nothing it is said in this way about the consent obtained, whether it
is for good or for bad. To maintain consent by itself as good, qualifications
are added on the way it is obtained that little have to do with elections. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I’m not saying that elections are not important. They are
quite so, mostly for the understanding of man they show, when by elections we
mean universal suffrage: one man (or woman), one vote. This implies that sense
of equality in which de Tocqueville rightly sees the main mark of democracy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Let’s not trust our democratic sensitivity, which
makes the affirmation of men’s equality almost a truism. It is not. Men are
different, starting from the most patent difference of sex and age, to all
other kind of differences, physical and moral, ethnic and cultural. If we still
hold their equality, this needs to be accounted for by saying in what it rests,
what is it that equalizes them. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">By the answer to these questions come the different conceptions
of democracy I spoke about, still at play in the partisan search for consensus in
our countries. We could call them, following what I said, the first “American”
and the second “European”, if we only remember that they are embattled both in
the USA, quite strongly, and, to a lesser degree, in Europe.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt; text-align: center;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">*****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I was wandering how to carry forth my argument, when I
run into an interview with Harvey Mansfield, and this interview prompted me to
look into his home site. Professor emeritus of Government and teacher of
political philosophy at Harvard University, he ironically declares himself to
be the “conservative mascot” in that
home of liberalism, the token dissenting voice necessary to show that liberals
tolerate criticism. Now, liberalism is the European way to democracy, which
threatens the American way – if threat it is. That such is the case, it is
precisely the point to argue. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Let’s hear Mansfield’s words, from the review of a
book on de Tocqueville entitled <i>Soft
despotism</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">Soft despotism (despotisme doux), according to him, is
a new despotism found only in democracy. It is not based on making the people
tremble with fear, as Montesquieu said of the usual despot, but on providing
benefits and offering good will to the people as individuals. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">"It does not break wills; it softens them, bends
them, and directs them," says Tocqueville. It even teaches you how to
improve your life. But the price of the benefits is to hinder and discourage
all political or associational activity in the people, leaving democracy in the
condition of a mass of dissociated individuals governed by an "immense being"
known today as Big Government. This new democratic despotism, rather than any
direct enemy of democracy, is the greatest danger in our democratic age.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">At danger, with democracy, is liberty, that freedom
with which we are used to associate it. Now, freedom is as hard to define as
democracy. But I don’t need to enter into all the disputes surrounding it. It is
enough to make explicit what is implicit in the dispute concerning “Big
Government” or “Small Government”. Classical Nineteenth Century liberalism
advocated the latter, Twentieth Century liberalism advocates in the US the
first. But they share a common assumption: that the State is <i>superiorem non ricognoscens</i>, doesn’t
recognize anything above, or for that matter below, itself. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This means that for liberalism there is no divine or
natural law ordering human relations in society; or, in other words, that there
is no order immanent to personal relations prior to their ordering by the
State. The famous separation of powers: legislative, executive and judiciary,
however important, doesn’t change the simple fact that the governing body of
society, made of the three corresponding branches, claims for itself the
absolute power of making laws. Granted this assumption, it can be disputed
about big or small government.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Let’s hear again Mansfield on de Tocqueville: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: IT;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: IT;">[…] he presents the idea of democratic liberty
in an account of the facts of American democracy, above all in the discussion
of the New England township with which he begins his presentation of American
government. Here one sees the natural, spontaneous association of free men to
address a need before their eyes, such as laying a road, that cannot be
satisfied by one individual alone. He goes on to describe and praise the
complex, artificial, theoretical Constitution that presides over the more spontaneous
"civil society" of American democracy. But he never mentions the
Declaration whose fundamental principles inspired the Constitution.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: IT;">[…] Tocqueville appears to have had an aversion
to abstract principles and to have considered them a menace to democratic
liberty. In a democracy, abstract principles, including the Declaration's statement
that "all men are created equal," will be democratic ones and will
accelerate the democratic revolution rather than guide it. Democratic citizens,
lacking any sense of hierarchy either in society or in their own souls, are
likely to reject demanding ideals and to prefer immediate, material enjoyments
that are easy, obvious, and palpable. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A government led by an abstract idea of men’s equality
to be implemented in society has an intrinsically despotic bent. Be it of a
soft despotism. Then a tendency toward conformity in the minimum common
denominator of desires is guaranteed by
the State, definer, as supreme legislator, of life and death. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">What was it then the worth, if this were to be the final
outcome, of having left absolutist Europe? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">HP<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-53117130804051575892012-11-02T19:23:00.000+01:002012-11-04T00:27:12.803+01:00Faith and natural lawNow we can't but wait for Wednesday 7 to know the result of the elections. Where my preference goes should be well known. Not because I am more "republican" than "democrat", but because of what I said in the last post of more than a month ago: the total failure of the incumbent president to be as he promised post-partisan and post-racial. Which also means his incapability to respect the nature of the USA, which is to be democratic because it is Christian: not meaning by this that everybody has to be Christian (Romney, strictly speaking, isn't), but that only to Christianity is due the extension of human representation to any single individual, which makes the only acceptable sense of democracy. While they plead to be for the poor, liberal democrats look at them with a sort of condescending benevolence, more as people needing help than as people to be promoted in their humanity. Because it waned from their outlook any normative notion of humanity: of what used to be called natural law.<br />
<br />
I'd like therefore to insert here this couple of pages on faith and natural law which I wrote for another occasion.<br />
<br />
*****<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">Pope Benedict opened the year of
faith together with the Synod of bishops dedicated to "the new evangelization". The
theme in both cases is <i>faith</i>, but the
Pope himself remarks that faith is in need to be explained again to people to whose
culture it has become alien.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">One reason of today’s difficulties
in speaking of faith is that we tend to identify it too directly with Christian
faith. By so doing we deprive ourselves of the universal cultural background to
which “faith” is natural. When saint Paul, for example, spoke to the Greeks of
faith (<i>pistis</i> in Greek), he didn’t
give to the word any special meaning different from the current one. So we need
to recover such a meaning.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">One way of doing it, is to notice
that the concept of faith had a role of mediation between “natural” and
“culture”. In other words it belongs to the realm of what we traditionally call
<i>natural law</i>. It is an ancient notion
originating in Greece and Rome to express the cosmic rooting of human things:
in the totality of all things that we still call in a generic sense <i>nature</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">Today’s “sciences of nature” don’t
give the sense of what nature was for ancient and non-modern people: to use the
Greek word, a <i>cosmos</i>, an ordered
whole, endowed with beauty (that’s why we call “cosmetics” the products for the
care of beauty). The word <i>cosmos</i>
refers then to the common human experience of knowing the world in such a way
to be able to orient ourselves in it. Thus, when we describe something, we also
prescribe what to do about it: how to do the right thing. Not so with the
modern descriptions of “nature”, to which the prescriptive sense of “culture”
is extraneous.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">This makes the notion of natural law
extraneous to the current understanding of law, as being essentially man made.
It makes us unable to see in the law the enunciation of a pre-legal right. What
is lacking is a nexus between the description of how things are and the
prescription of what to do about them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">What is lacking is essentially a
reflection on faith. A description is in any case included in a discourse by
which the speaker claims to be speaking for everybody. Let’s call it a claim of
authority. Before the distinction of sciences there is the ordinary experience
of language, even previous to our perfected adult capability of speaking. We
observe in the way children learn how to speak, how the world take shape for
them, thanks to their reliance on those who educate them. But reliance is
another word for confidence, confiding in somebody, having faith in him. Hence “faith”
has its correlation in “authority”.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">Therefore the blessed Antonio Rosmini
called faith “a voluntary assent given to the revealing authority of God, in
whatever way this authority be known”. Such is the root also of the tendency
immanent to human reason to fill the gaps of perception, like when I see
somebody as a friend by the signs he gives me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">In English we have a happy
distinction between “belief” and “faith”, even though we tend to confuse them.
It corresponds to the distinction theologians make in Latin between <i>fides quae creditur</i> e <i>fides qua creditur</i>. Belief (<i>fides quae</i>) concerns the doctrines or
theories we hold as true, faith (<i>fides
qua</i>) concerns the relation between listeners and speakers, teachers and
pupils, in general among people in their reciprocal doings. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">It would be a worthy effort to see
how different languages equally recognize and name what is peculiar of such relations,
making them possible. I spoke of “reliance”; another word in English is <i>trust</i>. However far it might be
etymologically from <i>faith</i>, the
meaning of the two words is very close. The sense of trust, in fact, is
embraced by the two words which have originally entered into the shaping of
Christian theology: the Greek <i>pistis </i> and the Latin <i>fides</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">In Greek <i>pistis</i> belongs to the vocabulary of “persuasion”: the corresponding
verb means “to be persuaded”, or, in an active form, “to persuade”. But the
first thing of which one has to be persuaded is the trustworthiness of the one
who addresses him and hence solicits his faith. This falls therefore in the
realm of what used to be called “rhetoric”, or “art of persuasion”. The
persuasion depends on the things said and on the quality of the speaker, both
included, at the same time, in the reflection which gives a theory of this art.
Such was ancient philosophy and also theology, in their dealing truth and
truthfulness. We recognize here the universal validity of the mentioned
distinction of <i>fides quae</i> and <i>fides qua</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">We come so now to the Latin <i>fides</i>, in which the personal sense of
faith is still more evident. The Latin construction of “to have faith” is such
that it takes us to the realm of human interrelations: it shows that the
original Latin meaning of the word is something like “credit”. So <i>fidem habere</i> (“to have faith”) didn’t
mean my subjective stance toward something or somebody, but rather that
somebody has or enjoys credit with me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">We say currently that faith is a
gift, “God’s gift”, that some have and some don’t: a way of saying that becomes
an alibi for those who negates their assent to God’ authority. Indeed, it is
right to say that faith is a gift, if we keep in mind the Latin construction of
the word <i>fides</i>. One has credit with
somebody else because of what he has given him. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">Everywhere, in all times and places,
we find witnessed a distinction of contractual exchange and gift exchange. In a
contractual exchange people have something that others might want, and for
which they are ready to pay. In gift exchange we define by what we give the relation
in which we stand with each other: if I give something to somebody who is a
friend or whose friendship I want to solicit, he feels obliged to reciprocate
if he does consider himself my friend or wants to accept my offer of friendship.
Such is the meaning of faith-credit: what is given is capability of
participation in friendship. Furthermore giving is a sign of authority enabling
us to enter in the friendship circle of exchange by giving in turn.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">With gift comparative anthropology
takes us onto the sense of justice universally present in human relation,
however articulated in different societies. Justice is the measure of things
immanent in human relations: let’s call it natural right. But the measure has
to be enunciated as a rule: let’s call it natural law. The great question which
differentiates societies is: what authorizes somebody to speak and act for all,
by enunciating the measure and the rule? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">The answer is: he who gives more,
everything, his own life. Such is ideally the figure of the king, actually
realized in Christ the king. It is Christ himself who enunciates this as the
criterion of authority: “whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever
loses his life for my sake will find it”. The “for my sake” concretizes what is
otherwise a wisdom maxim with reference to the one who represents in his own
life what the maxim says. In this way “Christian faith” meets the universal
natural law.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 6.0pt; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN-US">If such is the evidence witnessed by
anthropological comparison, we couldn’t recover by it the full meaning of
natural law, i.e. the cosmic rooting of human things, if we leave the sciences
of nature out of comparison. This means that we have to take also these
sciences for what they are: expressions of human understanding and knowledge,
i.e. human sciences. Not easy undertaking, on which it floundered and went
under great part of modern philosophical, and even theological, thought. I
cannot enter into it, except to remark that perhaps no one else, besides
Antonio Rosmini, offered suggestions able to integrate the witness of
contemporary natural sciences with that of history and anthropology: to account
for the universal experience in which the order of the world is given as
ordered, which is also the experience of faith in the Orderer. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-US"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-US">HP</span></div>
Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-23817404306620525952012-09-30T10:42:00.001+01:002012-09-30T10:42:59.450+01:00To be post-partisanAnybody, with the ambition to be like Obama in 2008 presented himself as being, i.e. post-partisan and post-racial, can't but hope for his defeat in November.<br />
<br />
I know of course that, to be elected, most of the time candidates show themselves to be better than they are, and promise more than they can maintain. Rarely, though, the way they present themselves has been as in the case of Obama so far from reality.<br />
<br />
He has revealed himself strongly partisan and racially biased toward the father side of his being.<br />
<br />
His supporters will object that it was his opponents' fault, forcing him into partisanship. And I will answer that this is a partisan way of reasoning.<br />
<br />
To be post-partisan means to be able to assuage partisan contrasts, and so it goes for being post-racial. It requires to be utterly partisan not to see that the failure to do so means a lack of capability, or, worse, of will. In one way or the other such a lack made Obama's self-presentation in 2008 a total lie.<br />
<br />
HPHumbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-37429686029274542612012-09-25T15:57:00.000+01:002012-09-27T14:35:21.964+01:00The Islamic dilemma<div style="text-align: left;">
<br />
<div class="PreformattedText" style="margin-bottom: 5.65pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The Islamic world
is afire. Off against America, and what it means in the mind of the rioters and
those who inspire them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="PreformattedText" style="margin-bottom: 5.65pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">We are told: these
are extremists, not really representing Islam. See how their own Islamic
governments try to keep them in check. Even the highest Saudi religious
authority denounced present day violence as un-Islamic. Besides, we offended
their feelings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="PreformattedText" style="margin-bottom: 5.65pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">What to think about
it? How to get around in order to judge who is right about the legitimacy, from
the Islamic point of view, of such violent reactions to the news of words and
images demeaning of the figure of the man held to be <i>the </i>Prophet? No
more than news, mind, for people who hardly have the chance to hear or see
them, rumors spread on purpose by those interested in making havoc against
America. Again, we might ask how proper this is from an Islamic point of view.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="PreformattedText" style="margin-bottom: 5.65pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I must say: don't
look for an answer by reading the Qur’an. You may doubt that, staying to it,
the so called extremists are right.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="PreformattedText" style="margin-bottom: 5.65pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In respect for
Islam, I must recognize that it is, after all, a widely spread civilizational
reality of about 1400 years, a span of time over which quite different claims
have been advanced in its name. For what I know, then, the Islamic world isn't
one coherent block, but it is a very diversified reality. Everywhere, it seems,
the Qur’an is read as God's word dictated to Mohammad, but according to the
time and the place different things have been read into it. I don't have the
competence to deny that they are there, but I have enough confidence in my own
capability of reading and understanding what is <i>prima facie</i> written (if
translations are granted validity). And before the Qur’an I am perplexed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="PreformattedText" style="margin-bottom: 5.65pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">First of all, the
chapters of the Qur’an, which bear the Arabic name of <i>sura</i>, are
assembled according to the utterly extrinsic criterion of their length. Which
is very confusing, especially if we consider the importance of chronology
according to the same Qur’an: so that, where they diverge, the later <i>suras</i>
supersede the early ones. But this is the least of problems, which can be
easily overcome with a textual guide informing on the chronological sequence.
The perplexity comes from elsewhere.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="PreformattedText" style="margin-bottom: 5.65pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">What I find,
starting from the earlier <i>suras</i>, is the witness of a man who has an
experience of the absolute sovereignty of God, or, in slightly different words,
a vision of an utterly transcendent Sovereign, who is speaking to him. Nothing
strange for me in this. I know it from all historical evidence, that everywhere
men experience in society the sense of a whole that transcends them, and that
someone among them represents it by referring beyond himself. I also know, from
experience, that in writing I have no control on words, which come or don't come
to me, are dictated, so to speak, from elsewhere. The same it is witnessed, for
example, in the Homeric poems with the invocation to the divine Muses, or also,
but without the Muses' mediation, when the inspiration is perceived as coming
immediately from the one source of all things, such as the divine Lord of the
Bible. Nothing peculiar in this, therefore, with the Qur’an. The claim of
“prophecy” any one advances is though open to controversy, and peculiar to the Qur’an
is the way the contrast arising from it is maintained absolutely raw.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="PreformattedText" style="margin-bottom: 5.65pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">From earlier to
later <i>suras</i>, it is a <i>crescendo</i>. The voice speaking in the Qur’an,
traditionally identified as that of Mohammad, while on one side presents the
speaker as being addressed by another voice, that speaks to him in sovereign
fashion, and at times merges with it, addresses on the other its audience with the authority coming from
that. The audience it addresses is at the beginning universal, and it remains
such, on the background, throughout. But it is addressed to determine a choice,
pro or against the message brought forth, and so at a certain pont the audience
is split, between those who have accepted the speaker's authority and those who
have rejected it. <i>Prima facie</i>, which is as far as my reading goes, the
theological message is pretty simple, somewhat like what remains of
Christianity by the hands of some modern philosophers: there is one God, only
sovereign to whom all men are subjected, to be judged by the end of time. Here
comes the division of the audience, between the deniers, who have refused
subjection (in Arabic <i>islam)</i>, and those who accepted it. To the firsts,
who are ironically made to speak in the moment of judgment as looking for
excuses, none is granted and are destined to the fire of hell, while the
expectation for the seconds is life in beautiful gardens. Hence the speaking
voice expands in giving a thorough vision of history, made with materials
widely drawn from the Jewish Bible, by which it is shown that to all people
have been continuously sent messengers to call them back on the right way of
“subjection”, whom they refused to listen to or did it just for a short time.
In addressing those who have accepted “subjection”, the voice becomes then that
of a lawgiver. A main law of purity appears to be given, and it is that of not
mingling with the deniers, who, by refusing subjection, have excluded
themselves from the common humanity of the universal audience to whom the
message is addressed. Killing them is therefore allowed, if not even, as in the
awful verse 5 of <i>sura </i>IX, prescribed.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="PreformattedText" style="margin-bottom: 5.65pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">What to think of
all this?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">That Muslims find themselves at
a crossroad. A big dilemma. I know, I said, that much more has been read in the
letter of the Qur’an than what I just referred. But this happened inside the <i>umma</i>,
as they call the community of the faithful, once it was established, history
teaches, by way of conquest. Done, it looks, following the prescription of the
founder. Now days, though, Muslims are no longer living within an <i>umma</i>
territorially severed from other people, literally or even when belonging to
Islamic countries, because of the wider world of planetary communications in
which we are all involved. Either then they interpret away that kind of prescriptions,
and learn how to promote the deeper universal content of their teaching in a
different way, out of the raw logic of contrasting claims with no other
solution than the subjection of one to the other; or they maintain it to the
ultimate consequences. But, to follow the first path, might mean simply to
cease to be Muslims in a traditional sense. So, while avoiding such a
conclusion, but seemingly not wanting to follow the second path either, easily
they engender a suspicion of
dissimulation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="PreformattedText" style="margin-bottom: 5.65pt; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12.0pt;">HP<o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-9051909224104697762012-08-11T08:03:00.000+01:002012-08-12T08:55:59.489+01:00The Scandal that Wasn't: thoughts on Cardinal Dolan's invitation to President Obama<br />
In inviting President Barack Obama to the Al Smith Dinner, NY Archbishop Timothy Cardinal Dolan has exposed himself to criticism on the
grounds of inconsistency: if Notre Dame made a "big mistake" - as <a href="http://www.todaystmj4.com/news/local/45773942.html">he was quoted as saying</a> at the time of that kerfuffle - then someone might
reasonably ask, "Why isn't it a 'big mistake' to invite the POTUS to the
Al Smith dinner?'" Several reasonable responses to such a query are
available, ranging from, "Well, I got it wrong the last time," to, "It's
really apples and oranges you're comparing...and here are ten reasons
why." In any case, I cannot bring myself to be bothered by the
invitation. The following is an outline of a few reasons why, try as I
might, I cannot be scandalized.<br />
<br />
Put aside, for just a moment, the following pair of facts:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Benedict
XVI is not only the Successor to Peter and Vicar of God on Earth; he is
also the greatest theologian of the post-Conciliar period.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<ul>
<li>Barack
Obama is not only the President of the United States; he is the
person with the most radically pro-abortion views ever to stand in, let
alone be elected to, the White House.</li>
</ul>
<br />
I ask you to
put these aside for the time being, not because they are unimportant, but
because they are of supreme importance and therefore need to come into
the discussion at just the right moment.<br />
<br />
Now, consider the following:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>There is a long tradition of inviting presidential candidates to the Al Smith Dinner in an election year.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<ul>
<li>There is an even longer tradition of making French Chiefs of State honorary Canons of the Basilica of St. John Lateran.</li>
</ul>
<br />
In order for the argument to continue, I must introduce a premise (one that, I hope, will not be too controversial):<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>The order of worship in Rome’s cathedral basilica is rather more important than the guest list at the Al Smith Dinner.</li>
</ul>
<br />
Now,
if Pope Benedict XVI could make former French president Nicholas
Sarkozy, who is not only a supporter of the permissive abortion status
quo in France, but also a public adulterer, an honorary canon of Rome's
cathedral basilica - <a href="http://ncronline.org/node/12092">and he did, on December 20th, 2007</a> - then the
Cardinal-Archbishop of New York can have US President Barack Obama over
to dinner.<br />
<br />
Now, just as it would arguably have been "bad
form" for the Pope not to make Sarkozy an honorary canon on his first
official visit to the Vatican, so would it have been for Cardinal Dolan
to refuse Obama the invitation.<br />
<br />
Questions of form aside, one may say the invitation was out of order.<br />
<br />
There
are concerns over the propriety of giving the most radically
pro-abortion President of the United States ever elected in the history
of the nation a platform from which to advance his pro-abortion agenda.
Anyone concerned about this has never been to (or YouTubed) the Al Smith
Dinner.<br />
<br />
I think back to the Notre Dame debacle. Many
Catholic bishops and public intellectuals were extremely vocal in their
criticism of ND's President, Fr. John Jenkins, C.S.C., who, in keeping
with tradition, invited the newly-elected POTUS to commencement. Much of
that criticism was in fact condemnation: of ND's president, of the
university over which he presides, and of the person he invited –
before, mind you, the POTUS had had a chance to do any of the awful
things he eventually did, in violation of his public promises.<br />
<br />
There
were in that case some interesting parallels with an earlier incident
involving a head of state, a prestigious university, and a controversial
invitation of the latter to the former.<br />
<br />
About a year
before the ND invitation in 2009, a small group of disgruntled
university professors led a somewhat larger, but still tiny (as a
portion of the whole student body) group of radical, ideologically
committed and agenda-driven students in raising cain over the invitation
of Pope Benedict XVI to give the celebratory lecture at the Solemn
Academic Act opening the academic year at Rome's <i>La Sapienza</i> university -
this is the rough cultural equivalent of Commencement Day.<br />
<br />
They
succeeded in making so much noise, that the Pope decided not to go, but
the overwhelming majority of public opinion in Italy and throughout
Europe was against them. The rector (president) of the university read
the Holy Father's entire lecture into the acts of the event, and the
radical anti-clerical presence in Italian political culture did itself
serious and lasting damage.<br />
<br />
In military parlance, they
rendered their strategic goals unreachable in a short-sighted attempt to
press a tactical advantage. They took the ground, as it were, but lost
the field as a result.<br />
<br />
In the case of the <i>La Sapienza</i> professors and students, the loss was in public sympathy and prestige.<br />
<br />
There are real lives at stake in the present US public contest, not just public sympathies - though, as we are about to see, public standing is intimately related to political effectiveness - and whatever else this contest is, it is political: indeed, it is political in the deepest sense of the term, for it seeks directly to answer in important part the basic political question of how we ought to order our lives together.<br />
<br />
In
the case of Catholic bishops and public intellectuals, the best they
could possibly have hoped for is that ND's president might have
disinvited the POTUS, or that the POTUS
would have voluntarily decided to withdraw his acceptance of the
invitation - but the losses were infinitely greater.<br />
<br />
They
did not succeed in embarrassing ND and her president, though they did
make the POTUS appear gracious in the face of rabid hatred and scorn.<br />
<br />
They
also burned all bridges with the White House. This is the loss of the
field, the result of which was a seriously diminished capacity on the
part of the bishops (whether singly or corporately) to press for
enforcement of conscience exemptions and institutional autonomy, for the
rights of Catholic schools to teach Catholic doctrine in social matters
and maintain hiring and disciplinary practices in line with the
Catholic vision of the human person and the true good of society.<br />
<br />
The
outcry never had more than the slimmest of chances to keep the President Obama
off the dais on ND's Commencement Day, 2009. It did, however, succeed in
placing Catholic health care facilities and schools at greater risk of
government intrusion and prevarication, while simultaneously reducing
the bishops' ability effectively to champion the rights and immunities
of the Church and her organs. Said shortly: the outcry succeeded only in
angering a vindictive Chicago pol, who happened at the time to be the
most powerful man in the world.<br />
<br />
In sum, the end result of
the public outcry over ND was a Church with a weakened ability to defend
human life from conception to natural death.<br />
<br />
The present outcry cannot reasonably expect to achieve even such a victory as that, for which those who raised their voices over the ND invitation might have hoped. At the same time, the outcry risks further diminishing the ability of the Church and Her leaders to engage in effective public action - and this is a consequence neither the Church nor the country can afford.<br />
<br />
So,
perhaps I am scandalized a bit...by my fellow Catholics who would throw
Cardinal Dolan under the bus in order to score a few sympathy points
with the "home crowd" while simultaneously giving ammunition to the
folks who think Christians generally and Catholics especially are unfit to participate in public
life.<br />
LDLazy Disciplehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839410764981702225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-24876655716683254582012-06-22T16:21:00.000+01:002012-06-22T16:27:57.144+01:00Unpolitical political reflections<br />
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">A lot of things I am brooding about, requiring to be
spoken about all at once, but hard to be kept within the bounds of a post.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Things that happen. Europe in shambles. The failing
American leadership at home and abroad.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Here it is a good summary of the European crisis by an Italian journalist:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">Crises have this of
grand and terrible: unveil simulacra, rags flying all over. In few month this
one dissolved the illusion of a unique money without government, without politics,
without a common soul. All the elites appear worn out and peoples come back on
the scene. With their memory and passion, their diffidence and grudge. Cultural
and anthropological prejudices came back, and with them hatred. Come back
national characters, to which global economy and the universal drive to
consumption didn’t make a scratch.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";"> </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Vainly POTUS complains for the repercussions the European
crisis can have on American recovery (which one?), and urges European leaders
to put their sheets together, so to say. Funny: the European crisis is
undoubtedly endogenous, due to a common currency created without adequate
institutional support in the ECB; but it was triggered from the United States,
and it can't be said, in all honesty, that sheets there have been properly put
together. </span></div>
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<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Out of metaphor, as far as the economy goes, POTUS
doesn’t seems to know better than the European leaders. Moreover, he was
elected as the harbinger of new hope, but it looks like he forgot that you
can’t have hope without faith (and charity). So, once in office, he behaved
like a father who knows best and is irritated when the children question his
doings. Let the grownups work, he seemed to say, and have faith that they know
what is good for you, and what to do about it. But people are not children, and,
even with children in their process of growing up, it isn’t this the way that
faith functions. It rather functions by inspiring people in knowing what is good by
themselves, and empowering them to act on their own. It’s such an empowering that
makes us speak of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">leadership</i>. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">*****</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">There are, besides, books I’m reading, somehow bearing
on what happens.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">It has been sitting in my shelves for decades a book
by the famous German writer Thomas Mann, <i>Reflections of an Unpolitical Man</i>, written in the last years of the First
World War. I hadn’t picked it up again since I bought it and made a cursory
reading of it. Not much remained in me from this reading, but when I was
recently invited to speak about the “crisis of civilization”, I remembered it
made a distinction between “civilization” and “culture”. So I took it, I dusted
it, and read it again. And I was amazed by what I found. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Mann defended in that book the cause of Germany, over
against other German writers and publicists who sided for France and England. It
is ironic that the Germany of which Mann made the apology was at the end
defeated with the help of Woodrow Wilson’s America, while later that same
internal opposition which he lamented was to reproduce itself just the same
precisely in America. A lot has happened in the meantime, circumstances have
somewhat changed, but it remains the same opposition of two Europes, by now
more evident in the USA than in the EU, with artists writers and publicists –
today we should add TV and movie stars – blaming their country for all kind of
evils, doing harm to an innocent world.
Mann called them <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">literati of civilization</i></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Amazing how the reasons of that old war in Mann’s
account are the same of the angry partisanship that pervades our society, to
the point (as I have often stressed in my posts) of a creeping civil war. Unvarying
is the character of the parties involved, today like then. Mann put in evidence
a different attitude toward the humanity common to all people. The literati of
civilization criticize the traditional culture of their country for its
discriminations, opposing to it an immediate claim of universal humanity to be
implemented by political action: if people left to themselves tend to
discriminate, so goes their reasoning, their human equality should be enforced by
law. On the other side the same claim of universality is not immediate, but mediated
by the appeal to that very culture in which the equal dignity of all men was
affirmed. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Do I need to say on which side I stand, because true
to the human condition? Without a cultural inheritance, we wouldn’t know how to
discriminate what is equal and in what, as well as what is different and in
what. Discriminating by itself is not a bad thing, it’s nothing else than judgment,
the only difficulty being how to judge right. Indiscriminately opposing
discrimination engenders a reign of confusion: tyrannically enhanced by the way
of laws that confuse equality and justice, to ensure equality among… can I say
men, or should I say people? </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Another book I am reading came here to the fore as a possible
description of the present situation: the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Apokalypse
of John</i>. But on this I won’t add more.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">*****</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">At risk of sounding presumptuous, I think that our
Western world, so called, is collapsing under utter intellectual confusion.
Things that should be unifying – religion, law, science – are divisive, divided
in themselves and set one against the other. Should I make a total description
of the situation? Even this would fall under the effect of division. Books are
there like on the stands of a super bookstore, to be picked up at will by different
people to appeal to them in their claims. They make so different sets of “scriptures”,
which some maintain as such, others mention just as harbingers of evidences. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The result? The vanishing of any public understanding
of human affairs for which it could be claimed the name of science. Thus,
because of this lack of a scientific understanding of things human, we are even
incapable of agreement on what is that makes really “scientific” those human
affairs that are the disciplines undoubtedly accredited as such, i.e. physics
chemistry and biology. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">An example? Well, the easiest one is that of
evolution, which some oppose on the basis of the traditional creation doctrine
drawn from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bible</i>, while for
others it doesn’t even seem in need of defending. So if one – like myself –
asks the latter for demonstrations of how evolution explains the present state
of things, risks to obtain a spurning answer, and be branded as a backward denier
of the scientific progress brought about by Darwin and his neo-Darwinian
followers, with their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">books</i>. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">I could multiply the examples, so to cover the whole
of the contemporary cultural positions in their confusion. But perhaps I can do
without it, and limit myself to the core problem I recognize in that one
example, as representative of the general question afflicting us: to fill the
gap between our present subjective experience and the objective discourses we
make to account for it, i.e. the gap between what we call “physical
anthropology” and “cultural anthropology”. The latter speaks about men’s
experience of coming to light and being educated in society; the first of men
as biological organisms, identified as such independently from any social
belonging. The theory of evolution should fill this gap, by accounting for how
men passed from one state (called of “nature”) to the other (of “society” or
“culture”). But it does no more than state what we knew already, that somehow
it happened. That’s why I think that it is utterly unscientific – by whatever
criterion of science we take. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">To say it bluntly, evolutionism hasn’t represented an
evolution from myth to science, but, if anything, a return from science to myth.
I know well that by saying so I have alienated possible readers who think
otherwise, but, if they have counterarguments to propose, I am, however
skeptical, available to listen to their reasons. I am afraid though that they
wouldn’t be available in the same way, and would simply scorn me for refusing
to recognize established scientific evidence: which is a way not to take into
consideration the possibility that it might not be such. Because of this I speak
of a return to myth. Like with the myths of old (otherwise a very respectable
thing), a story is told to account for “us”, in the way “we” are today: in Mann’s
words, all literati of civilization. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The point of contention remains hidden: i.e. the
authority claimed in the name of “scriptures”, and by which “scriptures”
themselves are inspired, being left out of reflection. The result is that the
decision among different authorities is not reached through civil discourse,
but it is left to the voting mechanism. By which are expressed preferences,
variously determined by a rhetoric of an essentially sentimental appeal.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Funny, if we think that the idea of science was
introduced by Plato precisely by submitting to a rational discrimination the
different opinions on the right way of living. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">HP </span></div>Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-47667122070317491012012-05-12T10:32:00.000+01:002012-05-13T01:30:58.930+01:00Choosing a king: science and politics<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Well, it looks like the challenger for November to the
incumbent president is pretty much decided. He can be found more or less
exciting, but now this is irrelevant. I have another question for you, and
whoever wants may venture an answer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Are there scientific reasons for wishing the election
as president of a candidate instead of another?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">What the heck are you talking about? you may ask. What
has the election of a president to do with science? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Should I say everything? Ok, perhaps “everything” is
too much. There are interests at stake, concrete worries of people, like the
state of the economy, by which it depends having work, with all that follows:
salary, home, a decent life to live, in short the “pursuit of happiness”. Even
ancient Aristotle recognized that it’s hard, as a matter of fact, to pursue the
good life, fully consonant to a complete man (like himself, I might say, or his
teacher Plato, devoted to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">theory</i>, the
fulfilling contemplation of the order of things, in which one might forget
himself), rather it is impossible if one has to worry about the chores of life.
Over against an aristocratic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ethos</i>,
as this, that disdained busying oneself in work, today it might be enough for
us having work, such, though, to leave us time free from worries: like the
Christian Sunday.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">I see that I am letting myself be taken astray by the
thread of discourse. Back to the point, then. The practical matters which are
of president’s concern, do not exhaust who he is. The president is also a
representative figure: as Michael Novak aptly said, a chosen king. Chosen,
because he’s able to represent something people recognize themselves in. But
representation may be effective for some, and fail for others. Here politics
takes me to epistemology: theory of knowledge, which, when it appears to us
well grounded, we consider deserving the Latin name for what is indeed knowing,
i.e. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">scientia</i>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Why so? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Because someone, say a president (chosen king),
represents people in something else. Should we say, not just their interests, but
the knowledgeable understanding of the nature of things they may think (feel?) theirs?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Ok, let’s talk about epistemology then.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">I wish it were possible. But we need to take it in an
roundabout way. We can’t rush to epistemology. See how people take a stance on
science and an usually corresponding stance on politics. How come?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Oh, come on. You must be kidding us. Before you say one
thing, and next moment you say the opposite. You had almost convinced us: we
must go from politics to epistemology. We may grant it: after all, what else do
we have to go about but science? And now you turn things around, asking to look
at politics first. Either you don’t know what you are talking about, or you
want to play some trick on us.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">No trick. Just an invitation to look at the way the
epistemological question of science plays in politics.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Speaking of this, I’d like to recollect that when I
came for a doctorate to the United States in 1971, and stayed there for a few
years feigning myself as a sort of field anthropologist, I was hit by the
difference in American politics with respect to Italy, my home country, or,
let’s say more generally, to Europe. It still seemed then, at least to my at
the time rather naïve eye, that political discussions in the States turned
primarily around those practical matters and morality. Nothing like what we
used to call “political” at home: meaning something that involved the overall
understanding of the nature of society. One could translate that impression, by
saying that politics in the States appeared to me much less ideological than at
home. Or perhaps the fact is that ideology took a different garb. </span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">However it
was then, I should add now that the difference has vanished. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Some authors have indulged in saying that we had in
the meantime the “end of ideology”, but it is more right to say that the garb
of ideology was changed by what happened in the last forty years along similar
lines: on both sides of the Atlantic, it became a matter of conforming or not
conforming to that funny kind of moral stance which has been called, starting
from the States, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">political correctness</i>.
What this is, could be briefly described as the assumption of a biological and
psychological standard, presumed scientific, in assessing human affairs, with
the exclusion of everything that smacks of cultural (or, worse, religious),
presumed non scientific. But, are we speaking here of science, or of ideology?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Here you are! This is because you promised not to play
tricks! And what is it that you are doing, with that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">presumed</i> of yours? We were to talk about science and politics, but
it looks like that you want to smuggle back in religion. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">No, I can’t smuggle on you something I don’t know what
it is; or, to be plain about it, of which I think that simply doesn’t exist.
But you are right, by saying so I am playing some kind of trick, the one represented
by the quotation marks with which “religion” is here to be taken, to mean that
we so currently call something we’d like to keep separate from “science”, and thus
from “politics”. Well, I know nothing of the kind. I only know different people
who claim to have a knowledgeable understanding of the world, in the name of
which they claim to be authorized to govern the world. Call advancing this second
claim politics, then you have that it is advanced through the first, you may
call it a claim to science. Here you have what is at stake in the pro o con the
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">political correctness</i> so called, in
America as well as in Europe. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The previous POTUS, George W. Bush, was loathed by the
American <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">intelligentsia</i>, made of
university professors, main stream media operators, Hollywood actors, etc.. By
the time of the end of his second mandate, his popularity was measured by polls
down to a scanty 30% or thereabout, being charged for all the dissatisfaction
that the course of events (internal and foreign) was creating in the country. That’s
why the son of an American caucasian woman and of a Kenya man was hailed by
many as a kind of savior, come to free the country from the oppressive Bush
atmosphere. But actually it wasn’t what he did that made Bush loathsome to
them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Conservative commentators have always lamented the
double standard of the left in assessing facts, e.g. actions by man in power. </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Actually, there might be some reasons for assessing
differently the same acts: after all, their meaning depends on the
circumstances (let’s think, now days, of a caress given to a child). The
trouble is, though, that such difference is passed under silence, which justifies
</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">scathing remarks as these of Victor Davies Hanson:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif";">“In my dumber days, between 2001-2008, I used to
wonder why the Left relentlessly hammered the war on terror (e.g., renditions,
tribunals, predators, preventative detention, Patriot Act, intercepts,
wiretaps, Guantanamo Bay) when these measures had not only proven quite useful in
preventing another 9/11-like attack, but had been sanctioned by both the
Congress and the courts. In those ancient times, I was not as cynical as I am
now. So I assumed that Harold Koh and MoveOn.org, though mistaken, were worried
about civil liberties, or measures that they felt were both illegal and without
utility. But, of course, the Obama (who attacked each and every element of the
war on terror as a legislator and senator) Left never had any principled
objection at all. Instead, whatever Bush was for, they were in Pavlovian
fashion against. I can say that without a charge of cynicism, because after
January 2009, Obama embraced or expanded every Bush-Cheney protocol that he
inherited. In response, the anti-war Left simply kept silent, or indeed vanished,
or went to work extending the anti-terrorism agenda. Guantanamo Bay, in other
words, was a national sin until the mid-morning of January 20, 2009.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Those actions were denounced as evil because done by
Bush. Why? is my question. To which I expect an answer that, in whatever
fashion, would essentially mean this: </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Bush wasn’t
one of us.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">You see? You are biased. I also expect to be told. You
take sides with conservatives. No, I reply; or yes, if you like, but for a
reason: that I want a reason given for the difference of assessment. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Who is then the “us” who resounded to me as excluding
Bush from their rank? This question takes us back to the original question: the
capability of giving reasons for whatever it is stated should be the mark of
what we call “science”. Instead of reasons, though, if I ask what is science, I
receive replies that take the answer for granted; like: “science” is what
scientists do, and it excludes any God talk, which belongs to “religion”. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Really? I say. Then the great Isaac Newton wasn’t a
scientist. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Of course not! We mean, of course he was a scientist, of
the greatest. It’s is enough to keep distinct in his work science and religion,
as we do. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">There is the point. We should judge a president by his
capability of representing a knowledgeable understanding of the world. This in
turn is to be judged, by giving reasons. But these cannot consist in appealing
to the current distinctions – of science, religion, culture, etcetera. Taken
for granted, they become no more than factors of identification, defining the “us”
to which one has to belong to be politically correct.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">I know that with this I haven’t said much about what
is science. But perhaps I have suggested that, whatever it is, it cannot be an
affirmation of unreasoned tribal superiority. Whichever tribe has its knowledgeable
understanding of the world – call it, if you like, culture and religion – and
science, to be such, cannot explain it away, without accounting for the
experience anywhere so represented, lest it becomes itself a tribal manifestation. </span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">You may surmize, however, which party on the public scene I judge less tribal.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Book Antiqua","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">HP</span></div>Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-13031923291540700562012-04-06T00:12:00.001+01:002012-04-06T01:02:35.137+01:00A president against the constitution?<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:hyphenationzone>14</w:HyphenationZone> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>IT</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> 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mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >I was planning to comment on the two excerpts from Pope Benedict’s Mexican and Cuban homilies, when I run into a piece of news that made me jump.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >Some Mr. President must be quite desperate to belie the whole Constitution of the United States. Perhaps because he is afraid that he already did it. I read in fact that Barack Obama made a scathing remark against the possibility that a “non elected group” of people might revoke a law legitimately made and voted by a solid majority of the Congress “democratically elected”. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >It looks like that he was thus expressing his worry about the possible destiny of his much debated Obamacare. Or was he warning the Supreme Court from erasing it? </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >However we interpret it, this remark shows how little such Mr. President understands the ground of the USA constitution as defined by the Constitution. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >The only excuse for him is that the same mistake is widespread: the belief that democracy essentially consists in determining governance by way of elections. Well, elections are undoubtedly important to decide who in turn enjoys the favor of the majority, to govern and make laws. But it isn’t enough the rule of the majority to make democracy – if we want to keep to the name an acceptable meaning!</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >What is needed is the rule of law: a law that no majority can make or change. That’s why sovereign is the Supreme Court, the non elected Justices in charge of reviewing the laws the Congress makes. Neither it is them, however, who by their decisions make the law: above them is the Constitution, before the Constitution the Declaration of Independence, and still before this a tradition of natural law that informed it.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >This takes me back to the excerpts from Pope Benedict’s homilies I wanted to comment upon. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >The freedom of which Benedict spoke in Cuba is now at danger: in America, as well as in Europe, <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>where it might be already gone.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >In Europe we are playing ostrich, and hide our head under the sand, feigning that religion does not concern the public space. The sand I speak of is that of willful ignorance, not wanting to know the facts of history, which show that religion always defined the public space, so that people recognized themselves as true men by belonging to a certain kingdom. Only a King who declared that his kingdom was not of this world, made them free to recognize their same humanity beyond all borders.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >By choosing to ignore that King, we tend to idolatrize the kingdom that, literally, de-fines our humanity: call it, if you like, EU, or USA – if these were to be plied to the desires of the intellectual class that made the President. For all its pretence to be utterly open to anybody, whichever his/hers religion and culture and sexual preferences, it fails to understand anybody who declares that such things </span><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >do </span><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >actually make a difference with regard to the recognition of a common humanity. So, we could even have laws made (against, say, “omophobia” or “islamophobia”, or deciding what is good for you) to silence people who don’t agree with the undifferentiated view of man held as normative for democracy.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >HP</span></p>Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-2663433542766127822012-03-30T22:44:00.003+01:002012-03-30T22:51:43.067+01:00Benedict XVI in Mexico and Cuba<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:hyphenationzone>14</w:HyphenationZone> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> 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<w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="63" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="64" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="65" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="66" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="67" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="68" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="69" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="70" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Dark List Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="71" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="72" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful List Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="73" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="19" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="21" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Emphasis"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="31" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Subtle Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="32" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Intense Reference"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabella normale"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="style1"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >I’d like to relate these two passages, the first from the homily Pope Benedict gave in Mexico, the second from the one in Cuba:</span></p> <p class="style1"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >Dear brothers and sisters, by coming here I have been able to visit the monument to Christ the King situated on top of the Cubilete. My venerable predecessor, </span><span style="font-size:85%;">Blessed Pope John Paul II, </span><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >although he ardently desired to do so, was unable on his several journeys to this beloved land to visit this site of such significance for the faith of the Mexican people. I am sure that in heaven he is happy that the Lord has granted me the grace to be here with you and that he has blessed the millions of Mexicans who have venerated his relics in every corner of the country. This monument represents Christ the King. But his crowns, one of a sovereign, the other of thorns, indicate that his royal status does not correspond to how it has been or is understood by many. His kingdom does not stand on the power of his armies subduing others through force or violence. It rests on a higher power than wins over hearts: the love of God that he brought into the world with his sacrifice and the truth to which he bore witness. This is his sovereignty which no one can take from him and which no one should forget. Hence it is right that this shrine should be above all a place of pilgrimage, of fervent prayer, of conversion, of reconciliation, of the search for truth and the acceptance of grace. We ask Christ, to reign in our hearts, making them pure, docile, filled with hope and courageous in humility.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi- Book Antiqua","serif";mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:85%;" lang="EN-US" >Furthermore, the truth which stands above humanity is an unavoidable condition for attaining freedom, since in it we discover the foundation of an ethics on which all can converge and which contains clear and precise indications concerning life and death, duties and rights, marriage, family and society, in short, regarding the inviolable dignity of the human person. This ethical patrimony can bring together different cultures, peoples and religions, authorities and citizens, citizens among themselves, and believers in Christ and non-believers.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >Is it clear enough why I relate them? If not, perhaps a look at our last posts should do. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >HD</span></p>Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-31336477880843318332012-03-16T15:59:00.000+01:002012-03-16T16:04:03.632+01:00The latest from the editors of AmericaThe editors of <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/index.cfm"><i>America</i></a> magazine have revised and extended their remarks in consideration of the HHS mandate. In an <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13326">editorial dated March 12th</a> (appearing in their Newsletter dated March 26th), <i>America</i>'s editors write:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<h3>
<b>Government’s Task</b></h3>
In our March 5 editorial <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13277" style="color: #0052a5;" target="_blank">“Policy, Not Liberty,”</a>
we commented on the objections of the U.S. Conference of Catholic
Bishops to President Obama’s accommodation on the health insurance
mandate. We identified, by way of example, “the needs of self-insured
institutions” as an obvious problem needing correction. In the weeks
since that editorial appeared, the bishops have raised anew serious
issues that need attention. A key issue, which we regret we failed to
identify in that editorial, is the narrowness of the underlying
Department of Health and Human Services regulation maintaining a limited
definition of religious institutions, a formula to which the bishops,
as well as <b>America</b> in an earlier editorial (<a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13238" style="color: #0052a5;" target="_blank">“Taking Liberties,” 2/13</a>), objected.<br />
This is not an issue for the United States alone. Archbishop [Silvano]
Tomasi, representing the Holy See, observed when speaking to the U.N.
Human Rights Council on March 1 on the issue of religious liberty
worldwide: “The task of government is not to define religion...but to
confer upon faith communities a juridical personality so they can
function peacefully within a legal framework.” The church cannot
function peacefully in the United States under the current regulatory
framework. The existing regulation demands reworking.<br />
There are conflicting reports about how seriously the two sides are
engaged with one another at this time. We hope that in the weeks ahead,
as the bishops and the administration attempt to resolve their
differences over the H.H.S. mandate, the legal definition of religious
institutions will take a top priority. We trust that, with good faith
efforts, this potentially explosive issue will be defused, and we
support the bishops in that effort. <i>— March 12, 2012</i></blockquote>
<br />
I renew my gratitude to the editors for their leadership by example of civility in their engagement of the national discourse; I add praise for their earnest and forthrightness; I promise my continued prayerful best wishes for their work.<br />
<br />
LDLazy Disciplehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839410764981702225noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-73346955247574609342012-02-28T16:07:00.002+01:002012-02-28T16:26:49.950+01:00True liberalismI am sure I detest the man O as much as the liberal press and academicians and show biz detested the man B. But, if it is so, what sense there would be for me to speak? Just to express my irrational dislikes as they express theirs? They saw in the man B a sort of tyrannical figure, and because of this they promoted the man O with all the means possible, making themselves believe in the humbug of his messiah like act as liberator. Of course, this kind of liberation was perceived by the other side as tyranny.<br /><br />The LD has done a good job in the previous posts in sketching the reasons why this is really the case. The questions unsolved of European history, to which America wanted to represent the solution, regurgitate again in America: I mean the questions concerning the relation of politics and religion, in which the man O, and the liberal press and academicians and show biz that created him as a public persona, want to realize a total return to Europe. As if there had never been an American experiment worthy of notice.<br /><br />In the (quite vain) hope to establish a dialogue with the liberal friends, I could say that America has been an experiment in “liberalism”. But I would need immediately to make them notice that liberalism isn’t an univocal word.<br /><br />I take, to explain what I mean, this line from an article by an Italian university professor, who ranged from his teaching of history of math to more general questions of education and politics:<br /><br />“The United States are by now torn by the schizophrenia between liberal tradition and authoritarian social control.”<br /><br />How did that schizophrenia between “liberal” and “authoritarian” came to be? asks himself the author of this line. Because, it is the answer he gives himself, of another factor, besides liberalism, determining American culture: the idea that everything can be dealt with scientifically, measuring it by quantifiable factors.<br /><br />This might even be true, but, leaving aside the fact that it is not peculiar to American culture, because you find the same idea in Europe, it doesn’t take into account that, in the States, the will to ensure democracy by exercising a control from on high upon society it is precisely what has come to be identified by the name of liberalism.<br /><br />So, in the European continental (or perhaps mainly Italian) use, it is called liberal someone who is against state invasiveness in people’s life, while in the American use it is so called someone who is favorable to state intervention in it. Which makes embarrassing any time I speak of liberalism to Americans, having to explain in which way I mean it. While talking of this with the LD, he remarked that the ambiguity is avoided by speaking in the continental sense of “classical liberalism”. If that was the classical, pristine sense of the word, what then needs to be accounted for, to explain the said schizophrenia, is how liberal aversion to state intervention turned into favoring it.<br /><br />In the States, often those who refuse state invasiveness into people’s life also like to call themselves libertarian. Now, “libertarians”, over against “liberals”, are ranked among “conservatives”. But here again there is an ambiguity, because <span style="font-style: italic;">conservative</span> embraces also communitarians. And libertarians and communitarians are not necessarily the same thing.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Liberal, libertarian</span>, are cognate words, both having to do with liberty. <span style="font-style: italic;">Communitarian</span>, instead, has to do with community. Beautiful things, community and liberty, together they make up what in the Christian inheritance we call love: that reciprocity of eros (the desire of the good that can only come from someone else’ graciousness) and agape (the disposition to be so gracious toward someone else) that represents the common law of society, prior to any state legislation.<br /><br />I have to recall these things, be it in short strokes, because, even though they should be known to all, they are no longer part of our public education. Being hidden behind the all but clear distinction of politics and religion on which European as well as American public debate rests.<br /><br />Of course Christianity didn’t invent love. Peculiar to it, when it enjoins to love one’s “enemies” as well as one’s “friends”, meaning the out-group as well as the in-group, it’s the extension it gave to it. In as far as it joins people together, within its bounds the body politic is in any case religious; by the commandment to love “enemies”, Christianity doesn’t actually tear down group boundaries, but makes them all permeable, universalizes the religious bond and potentially makes of humanity as such one body politic. As a matter of fact it introduces, by so doing, a distinction of church and state elsewhere absent: with the church, as representative of universal humanity, and the state of its local concretions. Following the modern crisis of Christendom culminating with the protestant reformation, the European states declared themselves sovereign, superiorem non recognoscens, absolute representative of the humanity of their people, more subjects than citizens. This meant that the states declared themselves the supreme legislators within their boundaries. <br /><br />Liberals and sheer libertarians, as distinguished from communitarians, share then this common assumption: that it is the state to make the law. Once this is granted, the fact that the ones favor the law maker’s invasiveness into peoples’ lives and the others abhor it becomes secondary. The turning of classical liberalism into now days liberalism becomes then understandable. And the strife between the two a matter of taste. Unless we take from communitarians a rejection of that assumption, as inherently tyrannical.<br /><br />To escape such a tyranny peoples emigrated to the new world, and the founding fathers made of America that experiment at which authors like Alexis de Toqueville could look at as a paradigm. If a risk De Toqueville saw in it was that of the tyranny of majority, but kept at bay by the religion of the people, that preserved the States from becoming a state in the absolute, totalitarian European way. But today the risk, in a European fashion, is rather the opposite, that of a self-declared enlightened elite, that despises the majority, when, with its culture and religion, doesn’t follow its lead. Thus putting an end to the experiment.<br /><br />I called it an experiment in liberalism, to maintain the appeal to the “liberal tradition”, when it doesn’t succumb to the temptation of authoritarian control. If we recall that from the same root it comes also the word <span style="font-style: italic;">liberality</span> (largess in giving), we can recognize in America an experiment in holding together community and liberty.<br />HPHumbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-27610736983160442042012-02-26T12:10:00.000+01:002012-02-26T20:03:14.917+01:00A reply to the editors of America<br />
In their <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=13277">opinion</a> dated March 5, 2012, the editors of <a href="http://www.americamagazine.org/index.cfm"><i>America</i></a> magazine recall several elements that are basic to the Church's tradition of thinking about politics. Many of these same elements (not the least of which is the unstated though palpably present appreciation of reasonable civility as the necessary condition of any national discourse that would have reasonable hope of bearing fruit) are constitutively present to the American genius for ordering our lives together. I share the editors' concern lest we lose sight of the importance of civility, and I happily extend grateful praise for their efforts to lead by example in this regard.<br />
<br />
Also quite praiseworthy is the construction of the editors' argument: complex and nuanced, its
concern from first to last to remain within the great tradition of
Catholic moral and political thinking and to apply the tools of that
tradition to our present crisis, is evident. <br />
<br />
It was especially refreshing to see the editors attempt to articulate a cardinal distinction in political thinking: namely, that between principle and prudential reasoning under the guidance thereof, in accord therewith and pursuant thereto. Refreshing indeed, for our many years' forgetfulness of this distinction has stagnated our whole national discourse and damaged our public conversation, generally. Unfortunately, their precise formulation of the distinction is rather exceptionable - and their specific application of it misplaced.<br />
<br />
The editors opine, "The US Catholic bishops' religious liberty campaign seems to have abandoned a moral
distinction that undergirded the conference’s public advocacy in past
decades: the contrast between authoritative teaching on matters of
principle and debatable applications of principle to public policy." By couching the distinction as a contrast, the editors call our attention to a fact of public thinking - that principle and prudential application of it shade into one another, and that the closer they are together, the more difficult it becomes to make real distinctions between them. Here matters begin to come into focus: there is a very bright line of distinction in the present case, and it is the editors - not the bishops - who fail to see it. The plain text of the US Constitution guarantees free exercise of religion: the issue is therefore one of Constitutional principle, directly and immediately. In treating the issue as such, the bishops are not abandoning the aforesaid distinction: they are judging according to it.<br />
<br />
The mandate's original formulation is not only unconstitutional. It flies in the face of the "common sense" of the American people; ultimately, it is offensive to reason. That the original mandate is all three at once becomes clear when we consider that the HHS regulation is not simple in its operation, but does two things: it mandates that all employers, including non-profit employers, offer the "full range" of "preventative care" options (including sterilizations and abortifacients); it declares that Catholic schools, hospitals, charities, etc., are non-profit employers <i>sic et simpliciter</i> - which is to say that they are <i>not</i> religious enterprises at all. The surreptitious presupposition upon which the rationale behind the policy must rest, is that religious groups and institutions are <i>naturaliter</i> incapable of contributing to the common good - that when they do, they cease to exercise themselves in a way that the civil authority is bound to recognize as rooted in and internal to those institutions' essential character and ethos, and therefore subject to an especial or particular right, privilege or immunity. This is inconsistent with both the plain text of the Constitution and the understanding of the role of religion in building, sustaining and strengthening the civil society that has been the traditional pillar and bulwark of ordered liberty in America. In other words, the rationale behind the policy is based on a presupposition that, if correct, must lead us to conclude that clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner, teaching the ignorant, healing the sick, caring for the dying, and burying the dead, are not and cannot be considered properly religious activities at all - and so, <i>because</i> they serve the common good (the which power to define and determine the civil authority has, in the same stroke, arrogated to itself, sole and entire). This is not merely unreasonable: it is in principle at least as radical a "privatization" of religion
as anything to be found in any Soviet constitution.<br />
<br />
The President's proposed "accomodation" leaves all of this matter in place. The proposal adds insult to injury, saying essentially that, though the Church shall not be free to serve society except on such terms and in such a manner as the government shall prescribe - even and especially as regards the internal governance of her service institutions - Catholics shall nevertheless be required to believe, confess, and henceforth <i>tamen impossibilis</i> practice free lunch.<br />
<br />
The editors say that the bishops have been most effective in influencing public policy when they have acted as pastors, trying to build consensus in church (<i>sic</i>) and society. I agree. What I fail to grasp is the pertinence of the observation, unless it be found in the implicit suggestion that the bishops, attempting to vindicate the rights of the Church, are somehow not behaving pastorally. One of the shepherd's chief duties is defense of the flock: this will mean fending off predators, and sometimes slaying them (cf. 1 Sam 17:34-35). Surely then, stern words with one who would encroach on the pastures will not be unseemly.<br />
<br />
Singly and as a body, the bishops have written, spoken and assembled. Some of the bishops have issued statements more measured and thoughtful than others. In their joint address, the bishops have stated their case in the language of truth, and divested of those expressions
of servility which would persuade the President that they are
asking favors and not rights (cf. Thos. Jefferson, <a href="http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch14s10.html"><i>A Summary View of the Rights of British America</i></a>). Far from wanting a conciliatory tone, the bishops have spoken corporately in the way free citizens speak to their rulers. Whether the American public is, as the editors say, "uncomfortable with an overt exercise of political muscle by the hierarchy," is beside the point. In petitioning the government for redress of grievance, the bishops are exercising one of the most basic rights guaranteed to all citizens under the Constitution.<br />
<br />
The editors also accuse the bishops of, "fail[ing] to acknowledge that in the present instance, claims of religious
liberty may collide with the right to health care, or that the religious
rights of other denominations are in tension with those of Catholics." This pair of accusations confuse the issue in a pair of dangerous ways. First, the accusations suggest that the Catholic concern is merely for religious liberty, or worse, that our concern for religious liberty stands somehow over and against the right to healthcare - specifically, that is, that the Catholic position on artificial contraception is not concerned with the best interests of women especially and of human persons, generally. Second, the accusations are red herrings. The issue is not about women having a right to health care: it is about whether government can force the Catholic Church to pay for contraceptives, abortions and sterilizations. The "tension" between Catholic and other denominations is entirely imaginary - literally fantastic: the land where one group's vindication of its right to govern itself according to its moral convictions could possibly threaten the liberty of another group to do the same, or where government's attempt to infringe on one could possibly not threaten all others, were a land surely peopled by pixies, a land of unicorns, a land of square circles and free lunches, where all the men are king's men, and what matters is who is master.<br />
<br />
LD <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Lazy Disciplehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839410764981702225noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-27708359284186221662012-01-09T18:50:00.002+01:002012-01-09T18:52:43.831+01:00Christmas spirit for the whole year<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:relyonvml/> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:hyphenationzone>14</w:HyphenationZone> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>IT</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> 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priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabella normale"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">I had an unfinished little Christmas meditation left in my draft page. Christmas is passed, and just started the new year. So, the best I can do is to wish that something of the Christmas spirit is going to endure in the new year, and to ask, to resume that meditation, what that spirit is.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">No much good to say about the past year. The financial crisis keeps on plaguing us, and an incompetent man sits in the White House, incapable of promoting in people that hope on which he based the campaign that led to his election (rarely the promises of the electoral campaign have been more belied by the reality of the person and of his administration: he presented himself as post partisan, and acted in a way that more partisan could hardly be; he presented himself as post racial, and with him racial tensions came back to the fore in America). Not many reasons of hope seem to be looming at the horizon. In this moment of lack of American leadership, exploded the so called “Arab spring”: the revolt against autocrats that appeared as a promise for democracy in Arab countries, but out of which are emerging to power the only organized groups, like the Muslim Brotherhood, which only promise an increase of the tension between the Islamic world and the rest of us. Not to speak of Iran.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">I won’t keep on going listing the evils that threaten our world, East and West so called. As far as the Western side of the world I’d number in the first place the failure of confidence: word that includes the root <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">fid</i> of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">fides</i>, faith and trust together. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">At the end of the Christmas and New Year holidays there is for the Catholic tradition the Epiphany: the manifestation of what happened at Christmas, when the Magi hail in a baby the “new born king”, which marks the turning into a new year. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">Here you have the Christmas spirit: it’s a spirit of hope, the hope coming from a birth. In Italian it is called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Natale</i>, in Spanish, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Natividad</i>: a birthday, that we celebrate. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">What is it then that we do celebrate when we remember somebody’s birthday, and may be throw a party for him or her? Pretty simple: the joy that he or she brought into our life. </span></p> <p><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">A beautiful Hollywood movie of 1946 by Frank Capra, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">It’s a wonderful life</i>, best illustrate this sense of the celebration represented by Christmas. Here is the story: on Christmas Eve a man meditates suicide, because of the bankrupt that threatens his life work, which makes him think that better were not to be born; the miraculous intervention of his guardian angel makes him see how things would have been if he really had not been born: that is, because of all the good that he did, much worse; he asks for his life back, and finds all the friends he made, knowing his difficulties, bringing in thanks more than<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>he needed to be saved from bankrupt. The moral is that the good one does is the difference that makes his being born worthy, for others to celebrate.</span></p> <p><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">The more the good done, the larger the circle of the people celebrating the birth. The good one does, however, doesn’t extent itself only in space, but also in time, and gives therefore to celebration its character of recurrence: the good brought of old to life by someone gives reason to celebrate, with his birth, birth itself as the coming to life.</span></p> <p><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">Should someone find what I just said not clear enough as illustration of the meaning of the Christmas epiphany, he might think of what happens today, when the reasons for celebrating are, if not erased, at least hidden. Birth is surrounded by expectations and recollections of renewal of life which make of it a social, public affair. Stripped, instead, of the expectations and recollections of communal life, it doesn’t remain but a biological event. Uselessly we confer to the newborn inherent rights, these are not enough to make of him a public person: one is and remains <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">private</i> – word coming from the same root of “deprived”, lacking of something essential, that makes him appear to others as a promise of good, and, by seeing himself <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>through others’ eyes, makes him feel his being born a worthy thing. </span></p> <p><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">When the good reaches the whole community, we have the kind of person traditionally called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">king</i>. But they are telling us that in our democratic society there are no longer kings, only experts, qualified as such by the mainstream culture passed over by universities and media, not to inspire us to the good, but to direct our lives in a way politically correct.</span></p> <p><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">Hence despair and partisanship. Over against which it stands the Christmas spirit of celebration of birth.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">HD</span></p>Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-34533133231286718682011-12-13T16:49:00.003+01:002011-12-14T10:59:25.194+01:00Finding as founding<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:relyonvml/> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:hyphenationzone>14</w:HyphenationZone> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> 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priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabella normale"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">Some days ago I started jotting down a few lines prompted by a statement the Pope made during his recent journey to Africa, saying that Christianity breaks all borders and so unifies all peoples. But I was taken by writing other things, and so those lines staid there unfinished.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">I want to come back to it, remarking that there are two sides in what the Pope says on this regard, which seems irreconcilable among them: the one I just mentioned about Christianity breaking all borders, and the other he so strongly stressed in the Reichstag speech we reported, that Christianity never appealed to a God revealed law, but developed the idea of natural law of the Greek and Romans.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">I hope the reader sees the problem in keeping these two statements together. If not, I’ll try to clarify it for him. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">To breaks all borders means to make people capable of living under one law. Now, if it is Christianity that does this breaking, how can it be said that it doesn’t bring the one law under which to live?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">Let’s take the case of the United States of America. I think I read somewhere –but I can’t be sure, because I don’t remember where – that the present POTUS said that America cannot be called a Christian nation. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that he said it, I’d like to ask him: If not, what is it then? </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">To which I could be retorted: if it is such, i.e. a Christian nation, how can it make so many peoples of different religion live in her peacefully? </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">The intelligent reader should see now that we have here the general question raised by the Pope’s statements set in a concrete case. And, being so concretely put, also the answer I’ll try to give will spring from the concreteness of my own personal experience. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">I like to call it my experience of the “discovery of America”. A prominent American philosophy professor, nowhere less than at Harvard (actually a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">philosopher</i> for real, but, being that such a qualification is given to dogs and pigs, I don’t want to insult him with it) gave some years ago two lectures by the general title of “This new yet unapproachable America”, one of which was: “Finding as founding”. How beautiful! America is something in whose founding anyone can share, if he just finds her. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">And it is not enough for that to be born in the United States. I recall, by the way, that there were some questions raised about the present POTUS being born in the US. Originally it was a way to exclude him from the race, and now to disqualify him as president. But it doesn’t work. There are plenty of people who are undoubtedly born in the US, who don’t sound as Americans at all: one could say the great part of the MSM. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">Why, what do they sound like then? Well, like today Europeans: people just born there, who don’t show signs of any discovery: as if there was nothing worthy of finding-founding.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">As far as myself is concerned, there is no question, I was not born in the Sates, and I lived there just a few years. But that real philosopher whom I mentioned, by the name of Stanley Cavell, authorizes me to consider myself a founder, because I did find something. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">When in my intellectual pursuit – of the true, the good and the beautiful – I came to study in the States, I made a discovery that turned studying into an experience of finding-founding. I realized that, except for the so called Indians, no one is native in America. Even the people who have been in the USA for generations, came in a traceable past from somewhere else. A discovery of hot water, one could say. But it is not so. To realize the obvious has a great import in the “search of the ordinary” – to say it again with Cavell –, which otherwise escapes our attention.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">If everybody in the States is an immigrant, it means that America is the place where we can converge in our “pursuit of happiness”. Where happiness can be found, and then America founded, is suggested by Cavell by taking that beautiful expression of the Declaration of Independence (a stroke of genius of the otherwise ambiguous Jefferson) as title for a book of his on the Hollywood comedies of the first decades of talkies, all turning around the theme of marriage: love broken and refounded.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">This means that coming to America makes a common story in which everyone can recognize himself. In a way no one is born in America, because, even if born in the US, still has to make that movement of convergence. Otherwise …: here, in the “otherwise” is another side of my discovery. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">I realized that either people communicate in a story they share, or, when such a story is lacking, nothing else is left through which to communicate but, speaking of the US, green paper notes: better known as dollars. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">Don’t take me wrong, I have no grudge against money. I only think that you cannot build just on it a political union, as it was tried in Europe, with what consequences we are now seeing. But, as I said, also the US is dangerously coming to resemble Europe, with a dropping therefore of the A. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">To be short in a very complex matter: without money, you have just small communities, closed in borders defined by an exclusive cultural consensus. Just with money, you have large societies of a multicultural kind, made by individuals having among other options that of the religion to which consent, all equally included in a financial empire that knows no borders.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">Perhaps the reader will see now the answer to the questions asked at the beginning. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">The US, if it doesn’t want to drop the A, is a Christian nation, which doesn’t run counter anybody’s cultural and religious tradition, as long as he obeys to the natural law that everywhere requires that crossing of borders universalized in Christianity. Because, to say that Christianity breaks all borders means that it allows to cross them all; but borders there must be to be crossed. Out of which , there aren’t but outlaws or tyranny.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">Anybody can come through this discovery in America: the finding that in ordinary experience founds everywhere human relations. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US">HP</span></p>Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-13109422179932613882011-11-06T19:55:00.005+01:002011-11-06T23:33:59.173+01:00A need of philosophy<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:relyonvml/> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:hyphenationzone>14</w:HyphenationZone> 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<w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabella normale"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >I was waiting for the LD to chip in, but he lingers. So, here I am, to raise for the reader the question of why among the most meaningful speeches given by the Pope is giving, there are those of a more philosophical than theological tenor. How does this fit with his specific <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">magisterium</i>? </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >On the site </span><a href="http://www.chiesa.espressonline.it/"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif";mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >www.chiesa.espressonline.it</span></a><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" > (also in English version), Sandro Magister has been recording a controversy going on among theologians and historians about the meaning of the Vatican II, with those of a more “traditionalist” bent denouncing its lack of continuity with the tradition, which for some makes it outright heretical, and those of a more “progressive” bent who extol that same lack of continuity, arguing that that is what the Council really meant. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Benedict’s position on this regard is well known, he made it clear little after his election: renewal in continuity.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >This seems, however, to leave everybody, so to say, unhappy. “Progressives” look at him as a staunch conservative, “traditionalists” ask for a clarification, e.g., to submit the Council’s documents to scrutiny by a theological committee, which should judge their adherence to the orthodox doctrine. Of course I am expressing rather bluntly positions which are, in the contributions to the controversy recorded by Magister, quite more nuanced. But here I am not interested in nuances, to go rather to what appears to me the core of the question. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >To state offhand my thought: the issue concerning the Vatican II documents is not theological but philosophical.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >(And who are you, I could be asked, to pass such a sentence. Well, let me say in a humbly presumptuous’ way: a man trained in philosophy and theology, and before them in jurisprudence and social sciences.)</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >There is an analogy between the reading of the Council’s documents and the reading of law. So, let me start from this, because the issue of the nature of law was raised in the Reichstag speech. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Benedict mentioned there a German law professor, by the name of Hans Kelsen, who exerted an enormous influence. His conception of law echoes that of one of the most famous, and infamous, political philosophers, Thomas Hobbes: known as a defender of absolute monarchy, he actually theorized in the Seventeenth Century the absoluteness of the State, that today we give for granted. Already for him the law isn’t but the will of the Sovereign, one or assembly: in our terms, democratic or not, it makes no difference. Thus Kelsen in the Twentieth Century maintained that all process of law is lawgiving: down from the highest legislative bodies, like Congress, to the least of judges. It’ll be the latter to say which is the will of the law; and this means as a consequence that he can make the law say whatever he wills. This consequence follows from the fact that the law needs to be interpreted, and, missing any other criterion of interpretation except the will, the judge can make it will whatever he wants. It doesn’t save from the arbitrariness of judgment the possibility of appeal to a higher court, thus making the process of law giving to re-ascend the ladder all the way up to the Supreme Court. The question stays the same: on what criterion will the law be interpreted? You can’t say the Constitution, because this is again a law to be interpreted.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >To say in other words, the judge will carry in his interpretation of the law his understanding of things: what we would call today his “philosophy”, meaning rather his opinion. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >As I said, the same is the question with the Council’s documents. They lack indications on how they want to be read, in the way of continuity with the tradition, or break from it. I’d say that what they lack is philosophical breath, if I were sure that the reader of these lines understood that I meant, by it, a truly theological one.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >The right ambition was to address non only Christians, but all people. But, unfortunately, this ambition was betrayed precisely in the “pastoral constitution” dedicated to “the Church in the contemporary world”, with the unhappy distinction of people in “believers and non believers”. It was meant to be the most philosophical of the Council’s constitutions, saying even to non believers what it means to be human, but it failed, because of that distinction <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>(which I think I already criticized in a previous post), to clarify that all man are “believers”, the only question being to discern the truth that can rightly demand our believing. Because of this, not only the Council was unable to address “non believers”, but also left “believers” on their own when it came to the interpretation of the other “dogmatic constitutions” (e.g. on Revelation or on the Church): it left them free do bring to bear on it whatever presumed “philosophy”, i. e. opinion, they had a penchant for.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Given my (trained) sensibility, those other constitutions have a strange effect on me: like when I hear certain homilies in which the preacher fills his mouth with plain God speech. It makes me uneasy, because those Vatican II documents, like that preacher, don’t seem to take into account that in today’s culture at large speaking of God doesn’t find many point of contact. Christians share – alas – of that culture, and even they like any other men of our time need to be reintroduced to it. To find and show the missing points of contact is what I mean with giving real philosophical breath to theological talk.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Now, Benedict addresses that need with his philosophical speeches, thus exercising with them his papal magisterium.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >HD</span></p>Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-62077251694908184982011-10-07T12:07:00.001+01:002011-10-07T12:09:15.526+01:00What is representation<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:relyonvml/> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> 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<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">The LD happily announced that he is working on a book on “the political thought of Pope Benedict XVI”, clearly going back to its ripening in Joseph Ratzinger. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">By the way, what does this change of name means? </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">We are not used to change names anymore. It was the case for women when they got married, or for people entering in religion. Often now days women are prone not to do it, preferring to keep their name as single, so authorizing also men not to feel invested by the meaning of that change, which actually meant a change for them too, the same name not covering now just him, a single one, but two. We rather stress this way the continuity of the “I”, that enables us to tell life stories as lived by us: the risk though, with this stress on continuity, is that, because nothing happens to break it, nothing really happens worthy telling, there is no true story. Change of names means just this, that something happened, so that I have a story to tell: of how the one I was before with the old name died, to be born again with the new name. So man and woman die as single to be born again as couple and family. So the man entering in religion dies to be born again with the new name. So a cardinal, say “Ratzinger” dies, and a Pope, say “Benedict XVI” is born.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">In short, names tell who we are in relation to others, or, in other words, what we represent for them. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Here we are to the theme raised by the LD, and tossed to me. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">What makes so remarkable the Reichstag speech, it isn’t just the intrinsic value of the arguments, by itself very high, but the fact that it wasn’t given by Ratzinger – the priest, university professor and in the end cardinal – but by Benedict: i.e., the Pope.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">With great finesse, after the official greetings, Benedict recalls it:</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">At this moment I turn to you, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, not least as your fellow-countryman who for all his life has been conscious of close links to his origins, and has followed the affairs of his native Germany with keen interest. But the invitation to give this address was extended to me as Pope, as the Bishop of Rome, who bears the highest responsibility for Catholic Christianity</span><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif";mso-ansi-language: EN-US" lang="EN-US"></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">This means that as Bishop of Rome he doesn’t speak in his own name, but in that of Catholic Christianity. However, who is the Bishop of Rome? The successor of saint Peter: he represents for Catholic Christianity the person put in charge by Jesus Christ “to feed his lambs”, and who, to do it, followed him all the way to the cross. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">The first lesson coming from the Reichstag speech concerns then the person of the one giving it. In more general terms, it regards the nature of what we call in English “representation”. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">We have just seen in the papal person two different meanings of the word, which, if we translate it into another language, let’s say German, become evident, because it gives us two different words: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Vertretung</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Vorstellung</i>. The Pope represents the Church, because he is, we’d say, her “representative”, in German her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Vertreter</i>: literally “someone who steps in (for someone else)”, meaning that he can take the place of another or others, acting in their name. At the same time, the Pope represents for the Church something that is not just himself as defined by the older name, meaning that he plays a part in a representation – in German <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Vorstellung</i>.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">It might seem then that German has gone further than English in differentiating meanings, actually also in English held separate in current use, by different words. But word differentiation is a tricky business, because we risk by it to lose sight of the connections which the use of same word makes perceptible. Acting and speaking in behalf of others can appear simply as a task of which one has been entrusted by them, independent by any ground that justifies such entrusting; while a common ground of trust is looked for in representations which are simply <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Vorstellungen</i>, like a spectacles “put before” one’s eyes. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">We can say, instead, of a person that is representative, because the representation works to ways: one can represent others in as far as they recognize themselves in what he represents. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">So electoral competitions are all plaid on persuading people that one really represents what they hold dear, which can then make him capable to represent them. Obama, for example, was elected as representative of the American people because of the persuasive claim to represent what had made them one, against all racial and partisan divisions. Too bad that rarely there has been a greater gap between the image given in election time by the presidential candidate and the action of the elected president. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Racial conflicts have been rekindled, and partisanship is more scorching than ever. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Now, back to the Pope’s speech, we could say that partisanship threatening democracy because of the majority rule is precisely the question addressed by it. Most remarkable then is that the Bishop of Rome, in speaking as representative <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">ad extra</i> of Catholic Christianity, addressed himself to the common ground of representation, not speaking of religion in a sectarian sense, but giving a great lesson of political and juridical theory.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">HD</span></p>Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-14722977406722822372011-10-01T09:08:00.004+01:002011-10-01T10:33:55.773+01:00The threefold synthesis: the idea of EuropeAs is the HP's wont, he cut right to the heart of the matter with his post of earlier this week, "<a href="http://fidetrat.blogspot.com/2011/09/higher-law.html">A higher law.</a>" There, he suggests that the lynchpin on which the Holy Father's vision of Europe turns - or, if you will, the lodestar from which it takes its bearings - is that Europe is essentially - arises from the "encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law." This is not the first time we have seen the Holy Father articulate this vision. In his Regensburg address (without doubt one of the three fundamental and most important public addresses of BXVI's pontificate), the Pope said:<br /><blockquote>[The] inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history - it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe. </blockquote>This idea is, therefore, a basic notion of what I would like to call, "the political thought of Pope Benedict XVI" - incidentally, the working title of a book I am currently writing. The two formulations, offered at five years' remove, tend also to suggest that the Holy Father's political thinking (I hope it is clear that I mean "political" in the ancient and original sense, recovered for political science by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Voegelin">Eric Voegelin</a> in the second half of the 20th century) is rather more systematic than a cursory consideration of his writings might suggest. Having written a licentiate dissertation arguing essentially that the program of St Augustine's <span style="font-style: italic;">De civitate Dei</span> is constructive and systematic right from the very first book (a view that opposes the general view of the matter, according to which the first ten books were a <span style="font-style: italic;">pars destruens</span> and the first five books, in the words of one recent translator, "little more than ham-fisted Pagan-bashing"), and having written a PhD dissertation in which - among other things - I argue that the question of America involves the question of Europe intrinsically, I am prepared to see system beneath the surface and recognize Benedict's public thinking as "political" in ways and under aspects that others perhaps would not.<br /><br />In order to make the task of parsing and exploring this speech manageable, we must have recourse to some analytical tools. Since The speech itself begins with the Holy Father's invocation of "representation", and since "representation" is the basic problem of political science (by which I mean, basically, philosophy <span style="font-style: italic;">sic et simpliciter</span> - but more on that later), I propose a discussion of the senses of representation, beginning with a discussion of the two German words that are both rendered into English as "representation", but which are not precisely synonymous.<br /><br />What do you say, HP? Do you agree?<br /><br />LDLazy Disciplehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839410764981702225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-88232314368920205552011-09-30T22:55:00.003+01:002011-09-30T22:59:26.783+01:00PSA - The Crescat has moved...The reader will note that our dear and highly esteemed Crescat has moved to the following address: <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thecrescat/">http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thecrescat/</a><br /><br />Make note, and do go visit her at her new place.<br /><br />Whatever else you might be there, you won't be bored!Lazy Disciplehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839410764981702225noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-5656264714217416362011-09-24T23:16:00.006+01:002011-09-25T08:48:28.086+01:00A higher law.<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:hyphenationzone>14</w:HyphenationZone> <w:punctuationkerning/> 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<w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="33" semihidden="false" unhidewhenused="false" qformat="true" name="Book Title"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="37" name="Bibliography"> <w:lsdexception locked="false" priority="39" qformat="true" name="TOC Heading"> </w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabella normale"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >The LD and I have been for some time absent from this web page, he being engaged with his family, his work and his ongoing e-dialogue with friends on topics of public concern, and I… well, I’ll tell you in a second. We were then planning to make a return of some weight, when it happened that Pope Benedict gave the speech just posted by the LD on “the foundations of a free state of law”. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >Here we have it! we agreed. We should comment on this grand speech.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >Funny, I had been away from the blog because all taken by bringing to completion a book I have been laboring on these last three years, and I found that Benedict confirmed what I had been writing in the conclusion of the book.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >I won’t go here into the theme of the book. It’s enough to say that my concern was double: to account for the truth of Christianity, and to find thus a way of defending democracy. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >Quite a hard thing to do, in a moment in which the meaning of democracy has restrained itself to sheer procedures to decide who should be in government, with the result that, whichever the majority <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">pro tempore</i> is, it makes the other party feel oppressed. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The trouble is that the different parties are in disagreement precisely about what democracy is.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >We boast about our democratic political regime by defining it as the rule of law. I always found this definition as being in contradiction with other things we equally maintain: that the laws are sovereignly made by the Parliament, and at the same time that defining the law rests entirely on the (supreme) courts. The so called “rule of law”, then, is nothing else than the rule of the legislative and/or the judiciary power. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >Now, the Pope recalled for us what is required for a rule to be really of law: that the law makers and interpreters are subject to a higher law. He also remarked, though, that according to the tradition he represents such a law needs not be straightway divine, because it is nothing else than the law of reason – divine then only as far as human reason can be recognized such.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >The recognition of a higher law through reason was made possible in Christianity by a “three-way encounter” that “has shaped the inner identity of Europe”: to say it with the name of three emblematic cities, of Jerusalem, Athens and Rome. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=";font-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >Thus the Pope ends his speech. Thus -<span style="font-style: italic;"> si parva licet componere magnis - </span>with this three-way encounter I open my book. The closing which held me these months is in the realization of how according to Christian teaching the biblical tradition stands someway </span><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >apart from the other two, accounting for an event that allowed to recognize in them the rational truth everywhere represented in human affairs. </span></p> <span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:100%;" lang="EN-US" >HP</span>Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-26626930083589236682011-09-23T20:29:00.002+01:002011-09-23T20:49:55.931+01:00The Berlin ManifestoThrough the course of the coming days and weeks, the authors of these <a href="http://fidetrat.blogspot.com/">Chronicles from the Front</a> will be commenting on and discussing the speech of Pope Benedict XVI to the Parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany. We believe that this discourse will come to be understood as a foundational text for the renewal of Western civilization, for the cause of truth, of justice, of beauty: in a word, for the cause of Christ's Holy Gospel and of all that is good in the culture to which that same gave most definitive shape - for men of good will everywhere at the dawn of this third millennium of Christianity.<br /><br />Please find the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's remarks to the German Federal Parliament, as published by <a href="http://www.radiovaticana.org/en1/index.asp">Vatican Radio</a>, below:<br /><br />Mr President of the Federal Republic,<br />Mr President of the Bundestag,<br />Madam Chancellor,<br />Mr President of the Bundesrat,<br />Ladies and Gentlemen Members of the House,<br /><br />It is an honour and a joy for me to speak before this distinguished house, before the Parliament of my native Germany, that meets here as a democratically elected representation of the people, in order to work for the good of the Federal Republic of Germany. I should like to thank the President of the Bundestag both for his invitation to deliver this address and for the kind words of greeting and appreciation with which he has welcomed me. At this moment I turn to you, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, not least as your fellow-countryman who for all his life has been conscious of close links to his origins, and has followed the affairs of his native Germany with keen interest. But the invitation to give this address was extended to me as Pope, as the Bishop of Rome, who bears the highest responsibility for Catholic Christianity. In issuing this invitation you are acknowledging the role that the Holy See plays as a partner within the community of peoples and states. Setting out from this international responsibility that I hold, I should like to propose to you some thoughts on the foundations of a free state of law.<br />Allow me to begin my reflections on the foundations of law [Recht] with a brief story from sacred Scripture. In the First Book of the Kings, it is recounted that God invited the young King Solomon, on his accession to the throne, to make a request. What will the young ruler ask for at this important moment? Success – wealth – long life – destruction of his enemies? He chooses none of these things. Instead, he asks for a listening heart so that he may govern God’s people, and discern between good and evil (cf. 1 Kg 3:9). Through this story, the Bible wants to tell us what should ultimately matter for a politician. His fundamental criterion and the motivation for his work as a politician must not be success, and certainly not material gain. Politics must be a striving for justice, and hence it has to establish the fundamental preconditions for peace. Naturally a politician will seek success, as this is what opens up for him the possibility of effective political action. Yet success is subordinated to the criterion of justice, to the will to do what is right, and to the understanding of what is right. Success can also be seductive and thus can open up the path towards the falsification of what is right, towards the destruction of justice. “Without justice – what else is the State but a great band of robbers?”, as Saint Augustine once said . We Germans know from our own experience that these words are no empty spectre. We have seen how power became divorced from right, how power opposed right and crushed it, so that the State became an instrument for destroying right – a highly organized band of robbers, capable of threatening the whole world and driving it to the edge of the abyss. To serve right and to fight against the dominion of wrong is and remains the fundamental task of the politician. At a moment in history when man has acquired previously inconceivable power, this task takes on a particular urgency. Man can destroy the world. He can manipulate himself. He can, so to speak, make human beings and he can deny them their humanity. How do we recognize what is right? How can we discern between good and evil, between what is truly right and what may appear right? Even now, Solomon’s request remains the decisive issue facing politicians and politics today.<br />For most of the matters that need to be regulated by law, the support of the majority can serve as a sufficient criterion. Yet it is evident that for the fundamental issues of law, in which the dignity of man and of humanity is at stake, the majority principle is not enough: everyone in a position of responsibility must personally seek out the criteria to be followed when framing laws. In the third century, the great theologian Origen provided the following explanation for the resistance of Christians to certain legal systems: “Suppose that a man were living among the Scythians, whose laws are contrary to the divine law, and was compelled to live among them ... such a man for the sake of the true law, though illegal among the Scythians, would rightly form associations with like-minded people contrary to the laws of the Scythians.”<br />This conviction was what motivated resistance movements to act against the Nazi regime and other totalitarian regimes, thereby doing a great service to justice and to humanity as a whole. For these people, it was indisputably evident that the law in force was actually unlawful. Yet when it comes to the decisions of a democratic politician, the question of what now corresponds to the law of truth, what is actually right and may be enacted as law, is less obvious. In terms of the underlying anthropological issues, what is right and may be given the force of law is in no way simply self-evident today. The question of how to recognize what is truly right and thus to serve justice when framing laws has never been simple, and today in view of the vast extent of our knowledge and our capacity, it has become still harder.<br />How do we recognize what is right? In history, systems of law have almost always been based on religion: decisions regarding what was to be lawful among men were taken with reference to the divinity. Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed body of law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law – and to the harmony of objective and subjective reason, which naturally presupposes that both spheres are rooted in the creative reason of God. Christian theologians thereby aligned themselves with a philosophical and juridical movement that began to take shape in the second century B.C. In the first half of that century, the social natural law developed by the Stoic philosophers came into contact with leading teachers of Roman Law. Through this encounter, the juridical culture of the West was born, which was and is of key significance for the juridical culture of mankind. This pre-Christian marriage between law and philosophy opened up the path that led via the Christian Middle Ages and the juridical developments of the Age of Enlightenment all the way to the Declaration of Human Rights and to our German Basic Law of 1949, with which our nation committed itself to “inviolable and inalienable human rights as the foundation of every human community, and of peace and justice in the world”.<br />For the development of law and for the development of humanity, it was highly significant that Christian theologians aligned themselves against the religious law associated with polytheism and on the side of philosophy, and that they acknowledged reason and nature in their interrelation as the universally valid source of law. This step had already been taken by Saint Paul in the Letter to the Romans, when he said: “When Gentiles who have not the Law [the Torah of Israel] do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves ... they show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness ...” (Rom 2:14f.). Here we see the two fundamental concepts of nature and conscience, where conscience is nothing other than Solomon’s listening heart, reason that is open to the language of being. If this seemed to offer a clear explanation of the foundations of legislation up to the time of the Enlightenment, up to the time of the Declaration on Human Rights after the Second World War and the framing of our Basic Law, there has been a dramatic shift in the situation in the last half-century. The idea of natural law is today viewed as a specifically Catholic doctrine, not worth bringing into the discussion in a non-Catholic environment, so that one feels almost ashamed even to mention the term. Let me outline briefly how this situation arose. Fundamentally it is because of the idea that an unbridgeable gulf exists between “is” and “ought”. An “ought” can never follow from an “is”, because the two are situated on completely different planes. The reason for this is that in the meantime, the positivist understanding of nature and reason has come to be almost universally accepted. If nature – in the words of Hans Kelsen – is viewed as “an aggregate of objective data linked together in terms of cause and effect”, then indeed no ethical indication of any kind can be derived from it. A positivist conception of nature as purely functional, in the way that the natural sciences explain it, is incapable of producing any bridge to ethics and law, but once again yields only functional answers. The same also applies to reason, according to the positivist understanding that is widely held to be the only genuinely scientific one. Anything that is not verifiable or falsifiable, according to this understanding, does not belong to the realm of reason strictly understood. Hence ethics and religion must be assigned to the subjective field, and they remain extraneous to the realm of reason in the strict sense of the word. Where positivist reason dominates the field to the exclusion of all else – and that is broadly the case in our public mindset – then the classical sources of knowledge for ethics and law are excluded. This is a dramatic situation which affects everyone, and on which a public debate is necessary. Indeed, an essential goal of this address is to issue an urgent invitation to launch one.<br />The positivist approach to nature and reason, the positivist world view in general, is a most important dimension of human knowledge and capacity that we may in no way dispense with. But in and of itself it is not a sufficient culture corresponding to the full breadth of the human condition. Where positivist reason considers itself the only sufficient culture and banishes all other cultural realities to the status of subcultures, it diminishes man, indeed it threatens his humanity. I say this with Europe specifically in mind, where there are concerted efforts to recognize only positivism as a common culture and a common basis for law-making, so that all the other insights and values of our culture are reduced to the level of subculture, with the result that Europe vis-à-vis other world cultures is left in a state of culturelessness and at the same time extremist and radical movements emerge to fill the vacuum. In its self-proclaimed exclusivity, the positivist reason which recognizes nothing beyond mere functionality resembles a concrete bunker with no windows, in which we ourselves provide lighting and atmospheric conditions, being no longer willing to obtain either from God’s wide world. And yet we cannot hide from ourselves the fact that even in this artificial world, we are still covertly drawing upon God’s raw materials, which we refashion into our own products. The windows must be flung open again, we must see the wide world, the sky and the earth once more and learn to make proper use of all this.<br />But how are we to do this? How do we find our way out into the wide world, into the big picture? How can reason rediscover its true greatness, without being sidetracked into irrationality? How can nature reassert itself in its true depth, with all its demands, with all its directives? I would like to recall one of the developments in recent political history, hoping that I will neither be misunderstood, nor provoke too many one-sided polemics. I would say that the emergence of the ecological movement in German politics since the 1970s, while it has not exactly flung open the windows, nevertheless was and continues to be a cry for fresh air which must not be ignored or pushed aside, just because too much of it is seen to be irrational. Young people had come to realize that something is wrong in our relationship with nature, that matter is not just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives. In saying this, I am clearly not promoting any particular political party – nothing could be further from my mind. If something is wrong in our relationship with reality, then we must all reflect seriously on the whole situation and we are all prompted to question the very foundations of our culture. Allow me to dwell a little longer on this point. The importance of ecology is no longer disputed. We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly. Yet I would like to underline a further point that is still largely disregarded, today as in the past: there is also an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he listens to his nature, respects it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled.<br />Let us come back to the fundamental concepts of nature and reason, from which we set out. The great proponent of legal positivism, Kelsen, at the age of 84 – in 1965 – abandoned the dualism of “is” and “ought”. He had said that norms can only come from the will. Nature therefore could only contain norms if a will had put them there. But this would presuppose a Creator God, whose will had entered into nature. “Any attempt to discuss the truth of this belief is utterly futile”, he observed. Is it really? – I find myself asking. Is it really pointless to wonder whether the objective reason that manifests itself in nature does not presuppose a creative reason, a Creator Spiritus?<br />At this point Europe’s cultural heritage ought to come to our assistance. The conviction that there is a Creator God is what gave rise to the idea of human rights, the idea of the equality of all people before the law, the recognition of the inviolability of human dignity in every single person and the awareness of people’s responsibility for their actions. Our cultural memory is shaped by these rational insights. To ignore it or dismiss it as a thing of the past would be to dismember our culture totally and to rob it of its completeness. The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome – from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history.<br />As he assumed the mantle of office, the young King Solomon was invited to make a request. How would it be if we, the law-makers of today, were invited to make a request? What would we ask for? I think that, even today, there is ultimately nothing else we could wish for but a listening heart – the capacity to discern between good and evil, and thus to establish true law, to serve justice and peace. Thank you for your attention!"Lazy Disciplehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839410764981702225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-34947474365087434742011-07-04T18:04:00.003+01:002011-07-04T18:07:33.775+01:00Independence forever!"Independence forever!" This was the toast John Adams offered from his death bed. It is better than any I can offer on this day, far from the only semblance of home I shall ever have, this side of the Heavenly Jerusalem. GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!Lazy Disciplehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839410764981702225noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-87393609304016406472011-06-28T22:21:00.001+01:002011-06-28T22:27:44.239+01:00Reductio ad absurdum<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <o:officedocumentsettings> <o:relyonvml/> <o:allowpng/> </o:OfficeDocumentSettings> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:hyphenationzone>14</w:HyphenationZone> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>IT</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> 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mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">There is a kind of argument, admitted of old, that is called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">reductio ad absurdum</i>: to bring a position to the ultimate, patently absurd consequences. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">The difficulty, though, is to make the interlocutor to see that his positions lead to those consequences.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">The New York State legislator passed a law that I don’t quite know how to define. It is commonly described as legalization of “gay marriage”. But I am not sure what that could mean. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Simple, I could be answered: that in the face of the law the union of a man with a man or a woman with a woman is the same thing as that of a man with a woman. No, I didn’t say it right: what is meant is that for the law the sexual union of a man with a man or a woman with a woman is no different from that of a man with a woman.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Really? The law (trough the legislator who makes it) can do that: turn different things into the same?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Again you don’t understand: the law doesn’t turn different things into the same. See how gross you are: we are not <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>dealing with raw sexual matters, but with the love bond that can tie a man with a man or a woman with a woman as well as a man with a woman into an enduring unity.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">I could still play dumb, and say: now I understand, I too have many male friends whom I really love and feel enduringly tied to – let’s say the LD. No, I know what my opponents mean: a love relationship implying sexual intercourse. But then, aren’t we back to the first case: that of the law making different things the same?</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">You just don’t want to understand. It isn’t the law making them the same, because love relationships <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">are</i> the same. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Well, I’d have my qualms with that, because I really have a hard time understanding what it means. I know what sexually involving love between a man and a woman is, and perhaps, with some effort of the imagination (working on the fact that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">homo sum</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"> nihil humanum a me alienum puto</i>), I could have a notion even of that between two men or two women. But I simply don’t understand what could a sexual love relationship be, making abstraction <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>so to speak from sex. What else could in fact mean a sexual relationship in which sexes (always male and female) are made irrelevant.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Oh come on… </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">At this point my interlocutor would probably hesitate. His answer could become tautological, in whatever way claiming that I know it, that love is… well, love. and whoever has the right to pursue it in the way it makes him happy.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Did I claim otherwise? I just don’t see what the law has to do with it.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Well, you know… No, I don’t know. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Hmm, the law should guarantee everybody’s right to realize his desires in love matters.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Should it? Imagine I am a mature man, having a daughter of age of whom I am taken: say, I love her. I should then have the right to pursue my happiness with her, and if I want to marry her. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Oh, you always exaggerate. Incest is forbidden and repels. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">Of course it is. But up to some time ago even homosexuality was so forbidden, and now…</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">At this point my <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">reduxio ad absurdum</i> is completed. But I am afraid that the only answer it would find is the one I said: to negate, always to negate the logical consequence it draws, by an appeal to the evidence of feelings that for the “gay marriage” has been excluded.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">I could pursue the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">reduction ad absurdum</i> also on other sides of the matter. But this perhaps another time.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-US" lang="EN-US">HP</span></p>Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-28304184455109394072011-06-14T22:31:00.001+01:002011-06-14T23:57:53.393+01:00Courage<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:hyphenationzone>14</w:HyphenationZone> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>IT</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> 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mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >A couple of thoughts about Pentecost, suggested to me by a priest’s homely and a conversation with the LD.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >We all know the story: tongues of fire descended on the apostles gathered, together with Mary, in the last supper hall.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Nice fable, like all the rest, one could say. But true, because people full of apprehension, doubtful of themselves, came out (should I say of the closet?) and started talking in a language that anybody could understand.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >They announced the “word made flesh”. So, men made dumb could speak again.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Without fear. Better, full of courage for the fights ahead.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >That’s what the priest stressed at the mass I attended, addressing a little group of children who had recently taken first communion.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Out without fear at the fight for the good, which might take our life.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Why not to have fear? I thus paraphrase the priest's answer: because the King is with us, and nourishes us with life eternal.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Here you are, always talking of fights and battles. Don’t you know that Christianity is essentially about peace? Of course I do, but I also know that only a man at peace with God and himself can honestly fight and defeat evil.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Let me quote St. Paul, from the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Letter to the Ephesians</i>:</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:11.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might. Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-top-alt:auto;mso-margin-bottom-alt:auto"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:11.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >Wherefore take unto you the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness; And your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith, wherewith ye shall be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. </span><span style="font-family:"Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";mso-bidi-Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" ></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >While relating the homily to the LD, we realized what a good comment it makes to his last post for Memorial Day.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="Book Antiqua","serif"; mso-ansi-language:EN-USfont-family:";font-size:12.0pt;" lang="EN-US" >HP</span></p>Humbly Presumptuoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07037571801579548055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37352287.post-78796304286580828632011-05-30T08:35:00.004+01:002011-05-30T09:12:35.562+01:00For Memorial Day: on the soul of the American soldier"I regarded him then as I regard him now -- as one of the world's noblest figures, not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless. His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give." - Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur<br /><br />For more than a dozen generations, from even before the day broke fatefully over <a href="http://www.wpi.edu/academics/Depts/MilSci/Resources/lexcon.html">Lexington Green</a> those many Aprils ago, America has been defended by men-at-arms who have learned from Mother's nurturing bosom those disciplines, those perfections and that excellence of character, which have made them both capable and deserving of victory; fighting men - and women, too - who have been at once the terror and the envy of tyrants and kings, the pride of their fellows, and - this side of Jerusalem - the last defenders of the hope of mankind.<br /><br />God bless and keep you all: GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!<br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lB9ZmBX_PJg" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="349" width="560"></iframe><br /><br />General Westmoreland, General Grove, distinguished guests, and gentlemen of the Corps!<br /><br />As I was leaving the hotel this morning, a doorman asked me, "Where are you bound for, General?" And when I replied, "West Point," he remarked, "Beautiful place. Have you ever been there before?"<br /><br />No human being could fail to be deeply moved by such a tribute as this [Thayer Award]. Coming from a profession I have served so long, and a people I have loved so well, it fills me with an emotion I cannot express. But this award is not intended primarily to honor a personality, but to symbolize a great moral code -- the code of conduct and chivalry of those who guard this beloved land of culture and ancient descent. That is the animation of this medallion. For all eyes and for all time, it is an expression of the ethics of the American soldier. That I should be integrated in this way with so noble an ideal arouses a sense of pride and yet of humility which will be with me always<br /><br />Duty, Honor, Country: Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn.<br /><br />Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.<br /><br />The unbelievers will say they are but words, but a slogan, but a flamboyant phrase. Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker, and I am sorry to say, some others of an entirely different character, will try to downgrade them even to the extent of mockery and ridicule.<br /><br />But these are some of the things they do. They build your basic character. They mold you for your future roles as the custodians of the nation's defense. They make you strong enough to know when you are weak, and brave enough to face yourself when you are afraid. They teach you to be proud and unbending in honest failure, but humble and gentle in success; not to substitute words for actions, not to seek the path of comfort, but to face the stress and spur of difficulty and challenge; to learn to stand up in the storm but to have compassion on those who fall; to master yourself before you seek to master others; to have a heart that is clean, a goal that is high; to learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; to reach into the future yet never neglect the past; to be serious yet never to take yourself too seriously; to be modest so that you will remember the simplicity of true greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength. They give you a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and the joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman.<br /><br />And what sort of soldiers are those you are to lead? Are they reliable? Are they brave? Are they capable of victory? Their story is known to all of you. It is the story of the American man-at-arms. My estimate of him was formed on the battlefield many, many years ago, and has never changed. I regarded him then as I regard him now -- as one of the world's noblest figures, not only as one of the finest military characters, but also as one of the most stainless. His name and fame are the birthright of every American citizen. In his youth and strength, his love and loyalty, he gave all that mortality can give.<br /><br />He needs no eulogy from me or from any other man. He has written his own history and written it in red on his enemy's breast. But when I think of his patience under adversity, of his courage under fire, and of his modesty in victory, I am filled with an emotion of admiration I cannot put into words. He belongs to history as furnishing one of the greatest examples of successful patriotism. He belongs to posterity as the instructor of future generations in the principles of liberty and freedom. He belongs to the present, to us, by his virtues and by his achievements. In 20 campaigns, on a hundred battlefields, around a thousand campfires, I have witnessed that enduring fortitude, that patriotic self-abnegation, and that invincible determination which have carved his statue in the hearts of his people. From one end of the world to the other he has drained deep the chalice of courage.<br /><br />As I listened to those songs [of the glee club], in memory's eye I could see those staggering columns of the First World War, bending under soggy packs, on many a weary march from dripping dusk to drizzling dawn, slogging ankle-deep through the mire of shell-shocked roads, to form grimly for the attack, blue-lipped, covered with sludge and mud, chilled by the wind and rain, driving home to their objective, and for many, to the judgment seat of God.<br /><br />I do not know the dignity of their birth, but I do know the glory of their death. They died unquestioning, uncomplaining, with faith in their hearts, and on their lips the hope that we would go on to victory. Always, for them: Duty, Honor, Country; always their blood and sweat and tears, as we sought the way and the light and the truth.<br /><br />And 20 years after, on the other side of the globe, again the filth of murky foxholes, the stench of ghostly trenches, the slime of dripping dugouts; those boiling suns of relentless heat, those torrential rains of devastating storms; the loneliness and utter desolation of jungle trails; the bitterness of long separation from those they loved and cherished; the deadly pestilence of tropical disease; the horror of stricken areas of war; their resolute and determined defense, their swift and sure attack, their indomitable purpose, their complete and decisive victory -- always victory. Always through the bloody haze of their last reverberating shot, the vision of gaunt, ghastly men reverently following your password of: Duty, Honor, Country.<br /><br />The code which those words perpetuate embraces the highest moral laws and will stand the test of any ethics or philosophies ever promulgated for the uplift of mankind. Its requirements are for the things that are right, and its restraints are from the things that are wrong.<br /><br />The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training -- sacrifice.<br /><br />In battle and in the face of danger and death, he discloses those divine attributes which his Maker gave when he created man in his own image. No physical courage and no brute instinct can take the place of the Divine help which alone can sustain him.<br /><br />However horrible the incidents of war may be, the soldier who is called upon to offer and to give his life for his country is the noblest development of mankind.<br /><br />You now face a new world -- a world of change. The thrust into outer space of the satellite, spheres, and missiles mark the beginning of another epoch in the long story of mankind. In the five or more billions of years the scientists tell us it has taken to form the earth, in the three or more billion years of development of the human race, there has never been a more abrupt or staggering evolution. We deal now not with things of this world alone, but with the illimitable distances and as yet unfathomed mysteries of the universe. We are reaching out for a new and boundless frontier.<br /><br />We speak in strange terms: of harnessing the cosmic energy; of making winds and tides work for us; of creating unheard synthetic materials to supplement or even replace our old standard basics; to purify sea water for our drink; of mining ocean floors for new fields of wealth and food; of disease preventatives to expand life into the hundreds of years; of controlling the weather for a more equitable distribution of heat and cold, of rain and shine; of space ships to the moon; of the primary target in war, no longer limited to the armed forces of an enemy, but instead to include his civil populations; of ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy; of such dreams and fantasies as to make life the most exciting of all time.<br /><br />And through all this welter of change and development, your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable: it is to win our wars.<br /><br />Everything else in your professional career is but corollary to this vital dedication. All other public purposes, all other public projects, all other public needs, great or small, will find others for their accomplishment. But you are the ones who are trained to fight. Yours is the profession of arms, the will to win, the sure knowledge that in war there is no substitute for victory; that if you lose, the nation will be destroyed; that the very obsession of your public service must be: Duty, Honor, Country.<br /><br />Others will debate the controversial issues, national and international, which divide men's minds; but serene, calm, aloof, you stand as the Nation's war-guardian, as its lifeguard from the raging tides of international conflict, as its gladiator in the arena of battle. For a century and a half you have defended, guarded, and protected its hallowed traditions of liberty and freedom, of right and justice.<br /><br />Let civilian voices argue the merits or demerits of our processes of government; whether our strength is being sapped by deficit financing, indulged in too long, by federal paternalism grown too mighty, by power groups grown too arrogant, by politics grown too corrupt, by crime grown too rampant, by morals grown too low, by taxes grown too high, by extremists grown too violent; whether our personal liberties are as thorough and complete as they should be. These great national problems are not for your professional participation or military solution. Your guidepost stands out like a ten-fold beacon in the night: Duty, Honor, Country.<br /><br />You are the leaven which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the nation's destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds. The Long Gray Line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses thundering those magic words: Duty, Honor, Country.<br /><br />This does not mean that you are war mongers.<br /><br />On the contrary, the soldier, above all other people, prays for peace, for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.<br /><br />But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: "Only the dead have seen the end of war."<br /><br />The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished, tone and tint. They have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly, but with thirsty ears, for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.<br /><br />But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point.<br /><br />Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.<br /><br />Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of The Corps, and The Corps, and The Corps.<br /><br />I bid you farewell.<br /><br />Audio available at <a href="http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurthayeraward.html">American Rhetoric</a>Lazy Disciplehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05839410764981702225noreply@blogger.com0