Chronicles from the Front

The Morals of a Republic

2012-02-09T14:20:00.003+01:00

Make no mistake: the national crisis upon which the policy of our President has forced our people is (at least) every bit as grave and momentous as the most hysterical criers of the chattering classes have suggested. The HHS regulation requiring non-profit employers to provide, at no cost to the insured employee, the "full range" of "reproductive health options", and classifying Catholic schools, hospitals, hospices, charities, etc., as non-profit employers, sic et simpliciter, directly and immediately and basically threatens our liberty - the liberty of all Americans.

The question whether we are really able to be free together is not a new one in America:

[I]t seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind. (Federalist #1)

The terms in which the question is couched and debated have changed, though they are still recognizable in the original formulation:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another. (Federalist #55)

It is necessary, now as yesterday, that all citizens, and in this hour, Catholic citizens especially, should behave in a way that proves we are capable of the liberty which we claim as a right.

Nota bene: the present threat to our liberty does not consist in a ham-fisted attempt to bend a religious organization to the government's will. The real danger appears when we consider the surreptitious presupposition upon which the rationale behind the policy rests, i.e. that the line between sacred and secular is absolute and impermeable, and thus, that religious groups and institutions are 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.

The danger, in other words, is that 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, because 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).

We may take some comfort in noting that the Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States recently were unanimous in rejecting roughly this view of the matter as "remarkable" and "untenable" (Cf. Hosannah-Tabor v. EEOC - slip opinion @14).

Nevertheless, we must be vigilant. We must recognize, moreover, that the perennially present enemies of the Church militant have begun, once again and now all but explicitly, to attack both Church and our political liberty simultaneously, by first insinuating, then suggesting, and now all but openly asserting, in essence, that the Christian religion is not capable of sustaining the morals of a republic.

St. Augustine of Hippo gave the first systematic response to the assertion that Christian religion is not suitable to the morals of a republic, arguing instead that Pagan religion cannot (nor could it ever) sustain the morals of the Roman republic (by which he meant also the vast empire accrued to the city through the centuries), and that Christianity could do so for Rome or any republic worth sustaining, insofar as it is verus cultus veri Dei, the true worship of the true God.

Whatever one may think of his arguments in the concrete (all twenty-two books-full of them), Augustine seems to have convinced enough people of the contrary, to make the next thousand years (at least) of history in the West an effort to order society according to his vision. Perhaps more often than not, this effort took the concrete form of adapting the vision to social circumstances without warping either the vision or the concrete society into something unrecognizable. Augustine, in other words, gave us something between an artist's impression of and a blueprint for what came to be called Western Civilization, the principal unit of which was the res publica christiana - an intellectual, cultic and spiritual union of the Christian principalities in the world.

The Peace of Westphalia is generally given as the death knell of the res publica christiana as a coherent civilizational idea, though it is important to note that it is in no wise necessary to receive this wisdom absolutely and without qualification. Indeed, wherever cultural notions of catholicity, i.e. ideas of universal validity and transcendently grounded and ordered authority, continued to exist, the anthropological elements of the res publica christiana survived and even thrived, even as the institutional political trappings of it withered. Eric Voegelin has written:

The corrosion of Western civilization…is a slow process extending over a thousand years. The several Western political societies, now, have a different relation to this slow process according to the time at which their national revolutions occurred… The American Revolution [emphasis mine - LD], though its debate was already strongly affected by the psychology of enlightenment, also had the good fortune of coming to its close within the institutional and Christian climate of the ancien régime. Western society as a whole…is a deeply stratified civilization in which the American and English democracies represent the oldest, most firmly consolidated stratum of civilizational tradition. - The New Science of Politics: an introduction

In the United States of America, we are perpetually at risk of losing sight of the older anthropological vision out of which our particular political institutions grew and for which they were peculiarly built to suit. We tend in this day to think that we derive our freedom from our institutions, and we forget that those institutions were given for a certain kind of men - men such as those we just heard Publius describe. The passages from the Federalist serve to show that there was - built into our very foundation, as it were - a general discussion of “the human character” underway in America.

In other words, while the Founding Fathers had not miraculously arrived at the gangway of St. Peter’s Barque, the very writing of the Federalist papers (i.e. that those arguments - their general thrust - in favor of the proposed Constitution were plausible) shows that the experience of life in America from the time of the first colonization to the time of the ratification debate, had effected what John Adams called, “A change in the religious sentiments of the people,” from a doctrinaire Calvinist one of total depravity to one that, though certainly not Catholic in the confessional sense, was (at least) not prima facie inimical to the Catholic understanding of human nature.

This change in sentiment was "religious" in the old, etymological sense of the word. It was, that is to say, a change in the consciousness of concord regarding the principles of society, that is, a change in the understanding of the experiences that bound Americans together in society. We are once again joined at a point in which we shall have to recover the principles that have bound us together for two centuries and more, or leave them as lost forever.

Though this challenge falls to us all together, it is one that Catholic citizens have an especial duty to embrace - and I believe we Catholic laity are capable of meeting the challenge. I welcome the marvelous new spirit of militancy that has taken our bishops of late. Nevertheless, our own ability to reason has not become so truncated, nor our quintessentially Catholic confidence in reason so attenuated, that we require pronouncements from purpled highness in order to know how to act in the public square. We need only to think, and speak: it has fallen to us to discover whether there is still an America to speak of.

LD

Christmas spirit for the whole year

2012-01-09T18:50:00.002+01:00

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.

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.

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 fid of fides, faith and trust together.

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.

Here you have the Christmas spirit: it’s a spirit of hope, the hope coming from a birth. In Italian it is called Natale, in Spanish, Natividad: a birthday, that we celebrate.

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.

A beautiful Hollywood movie of 1946 by Frank Capra, It’s a wonderful life, 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 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.

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.

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 private – 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 through others’ eyes, makes him feel his being born a worthy thing.

When the good reaches the whole community, we have the kind of person traditionally called king. 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.

Hence despair and partisanship. Over against which it stands the Christmas spirit of celebration of birth.

Finding as founding

2011-12-13T16:49:00.003+01:00

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.

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.

I hope the reader sees the problem in keeping these two statements together. If not, I’ll try to clarify it for him.

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?

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?

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?

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.

I like to call it my experience of the “discovery of America”. A prominent American philosophy professor, nowhere less than at Harvard (actually a philosopher 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Perhaps the reader will see now the answer to the questions asked at the beginning.

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.

Anybody can come through this discovery in America: the finding that in ordinary experience founds everywhere human relations.

A need of philosophy

2011-11-06T19:55:00.005+01:00

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 magisterium?

On the site www.chiesa.espressonline.it (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.

Benedict’s position on this regard is well known, he made it clear little after his election: renewal in continuity.

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.

To state offhand my thought: the issue concerning the Vatican II documents is not theological but philosophical.

(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.)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (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.

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.

Now, Benedict addresses that need with his philosophical speeches, thus exercising with them his papal magisterium.

What is representation

2011-10-07T12:07:00.001+01:00

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.

By the way, what does this change of name means?

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.

In short, names tell who we are in relation to others, or, in other words, what we represent for them.

Here we are to the theme raised by the LD, and tossed to me.

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.

With great finesse, after the official greetings, Benedict recalls it:

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

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.

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”.

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: Vertretung and Vorstellung. The Pope represents the Church, because he is, we’d say, her “representative”, in German her Vertreter: 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 Vorstellung.

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 Vorstellungen, like a spectacles “put before” one’s eyes.

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.

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. Racial conflicts have been rekindled, and partisanship is more scorching than ever.

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 ad extra 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.

The threefold synthesis: the idea of Europe

2011-10-01T09:08:00.004+01:00

As is the HP's wont, he cut right to the heart of the matter with his post of earlier this week, "A higher law." 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:

[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.

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 Eric Voegelin 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 De civitate Dei 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 pars destruens 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.

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 sic et simpliciter - 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.

What do you say, HP? Do you agree?

LD

PSA - The Crescat has moved...

2011-09-30T22:55:00.003+01:00

The reader will note that our dear and highly esteemed Crescat has moved to the following address: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thecrescat/

Make note, and do go visit her at her new place.

Whatever else you might be there, you won't be bored!

A higher law.

2011-09-24T23:16:00.006+01:00

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”.

Here we have it! we agreed. We should comment on this grand speech.

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.

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.

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 pro tempore is, it makes the other party feel oppressed. The trouble is that the different parties are in disagreement precisely about what democracy is.

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.

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.

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.

Thus the Pope ends his speech. Thus - si parva licet componere magnis - 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 apart from the other two, accounting for an event that allowed to recognize in them the rational truth everywhere represented in human affairs.

The Berlin Manifesto

2011-09-23T20:29:00.002+01:00

Through the course of the coming days and weeks, the authors of these Chronicles from the Front 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.

Please find the full text of Pope Benedict XVI's remarks to the German Federal Parliament, as published by Vatican Radio, below:

Mr President of the Federal Republic,
Mr President of the Bundestag,
Madam Chancellor,
Mr President of the Bundesrat,
Ladies and Gentlemen Members of the House,

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.
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.
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.”
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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!"

Independence forever!

2011-07-04T18:04:00.003+01:00

"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!

Reductio ad absurdum

2011-06-28T22:21:00.001+01:00

There is a kind of argument, admitted of old, that is called reductio ad absurdum: to bring a position to the ultimate, patently absurd consequences.

The difficulty, though, is to make the interlocutor to see that his positions lead to those consequences.

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.

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.

Really? The law (trough the legislator who makes it) can do that: turn different things into the same?

Again you don’t understand: the law doesn’t turn different things into the same. See how gross you are: we are not 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.

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?

You just don’t want to understand. It isn’t the law making them the same, because love relationships are the same.

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 homo sum, nihil humanum a me alienum puto), 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 so to speak from sex. What else could in fact mean a sexual relationship in which sexes (always male and female) are made irrelevant.

Oh come on…

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.

Did I claim otherwise? I just don’t see what the law has to do with it.

Well, you know… No, I don’t know.

Hmm, the law should guarantee everybody’s right to realize his desires in love matters.

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.

Oh, you always exaggerate. Incest is forbidden and repels.

Of course it is. But up to some time ago even homosexuality was so forbidden, and now…

At this point my reduxio ad absurdum 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.

I could pursue the reduction ad absurdum also on other sides of the matter. But this perhaps another time.

Courage

2011-06-14T22:31:00.001+01:00

A couple of thoughts about Pentecost, suggested to me by a priest’s homely and a conversation with the LD.

We all know the story: tongues of fire descended on the apostles gathered, together with Mary, in the last supper hall.

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.

They announced the “word made flesh”. So, men made dumb could speak again.

Without fear. Better, full of courage for the fights ahead.

That’s what the priest stressed at the mass I attended, addressing a little group of children who had recently taken first communion.

Out without fear at the fight for the good, which might take our life.

Why not to have fear? I thus paraphrase the priest's answer: because the King is with us, and nourishes us with life eternal.

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.

Let me quote St. Paul, from the Letter to the Ephesians:

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.

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.

While relating the homily to the LD, we realized what a good comment it makes to his last post for Memorial Day.

For Memorial Day: on the soul of the American soldier

2011-05-30T08:35:00.004+01:00

"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

For more than a dozen generations, from even before the day broke fatefully over Lexington Green 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.

God bless and keep you all: GOD BLESS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!

General Westmoreland, General Grove, distinguished guests, and gentlemen of the Corps!

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?"

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

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.

Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The soldier, above all other men, is required to practice the greatest act of religious training -- sacrifice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And through all this welter of change and development, your mission remains fixed, determined, inviolable: it is to win our wars.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This does not mean that you are war mongers.

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.

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."

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.

But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point.

Always there echoes and re-echoes: Duty, Honor, Country.

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.

I bid you farewell.

Audio available at American Rhetoric

Faith and marriage

2011-05-26T23:04:00.002+01:00

In Italian the wedding ring is simply called faith.

I'm not quite sure yet why this phrase came to my mind as a kind of synthetic comment to the LD's remarks in the last posts on the state of today marriage legislation.

Sharp remarks, that left little room for current arguing in defense of "traditional marriage": given the way that legislation is made, there is no reason why marriage should be denied to same sex people.

No piecemeal argument.

Rightly then he ended his second intervention with a criticism of Justice Marshall's marauding sentence: it makes shreds of the law, in a way worthy of a tyrannical state.

A free state doesn't make the law, it just promulgate it. To remind that simple fact John Adams, if I am not going wrong, wrote the constitution of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Back to the wedding ring. There is a law immanent to things – meaning human relations – and what its Italian name suggests to me is what that law is all about, which the state should just promulgate: articulating faith – fides, i.e. trust – among people.

Does this allow some argument in defense of "traditional marriage". Well, I'd say yes.

To put it rather bluntly: who gives a shit about the sentiment two persons feel toward each other so that the state should give to it an official ratification? Or, to put it better, of course we do care, because, as I just suggested, all laws should promote faith among people. But the word marriage evokes a feeling among people leading to some kind of sexual intercourse among them. And then again I repeat my question: why should the state ratify it?

The only reason is the one hinted to by the LD: because by way of sexual intercourse between people of different gender a society perpetuates itself. Now, society is articulated into a certain status rei publicae, and the institutions – like the presidency, the legislative body and the judiciary – that make that state of things should promote the perpetuation of its life.

This leads to still larger questions. I summarize them by this statement: if the state sanctions the separation of sex and reproduction, and assures the perpetuation of society by any other way than the establishment of family relations, it means that it is sucking in itself all of social life – in short, that it is becoming not simply tyrannical, but totalitarian.

What the Same-Sex Marriage Debate Is Really (not) All About PART II

2011-05-24T14:42:00.008+01:00

My initial post in this series contained an assertion to the effect that marriage is no more than official state recognition of a public declaration of personal sentiment.

Almost immediately, I subtly but importantly modified the expression "no more than" to read "little more than" in another formulation.

"What real difference is there between no more and little more?" you ask: less, I confess, than an iota's worth, though still significant.

We might avoid the discussion altogether if we simply say that certain benefits are part and parcel of the official recognition. To name a few of the chief ones: rights of entail, inheritance and visitation; spousal privilege; powers of attorney and proxy; participation in a spouse's health plan.

These are not indifferent benefits.

If marriage is merely a temporary mutual ratification of sentiment, and yet one to which the state has attached and conditioned certain benefits, then the state's refusal to ratify the sentiments of a whole class of people is real discrimination - and real discrimination of a kind for which it is hard for this author to see a justification.

Yes, some discrimination is necessary and proper: we do not issue driver's licenses to blind people - and while sexual complementarity is a perfectly rational ground for discrimination when society holds that marriage is for the stability of society from generation to generation through the regulation and rearing of children within established and legitimate households, it simply will not do when marriage is a ratification of sentiment; then, it were tantamount to saying, "You shouldn't feel that way about each other."

Indeed, this was the ground the Massachusetts SJC discovered in Goodridge.

Against this, it can only be urged: that courts should show great deference to legislatures when dealing with questions of social policy; that the legislature's modification of much traditional marriage law was not meant and in any case cannot be construed - in the absence of explicit declarations in statute or as part of the legislative history of an act or body of acts - to have constituted abandonment or destruction of the rationale behind the legislation, i.e. the understanding of the basic structure and purpose of the institution for and about which they were legislating; that (in the Massachusetts case), the court mistakenly conflates marriage with the benefits accorded by the state to married couples.

More to this:

When Chief Justice Catherine Marshall writes, "Simply put, the state creates civil marriage," she makes a crucial error. Marriage, even on a positivistic, radical empiricist reading, pre-exists what passes for “civil society” in those schools. Native Americans, for example, who were considered not to live in civil or political society by the 17th and 18th and early 19th Century devotees of those schools (not to mention most Europeans in North America), entered into marital unions. Consider the following hypothesis: a Native American woman appealed to the spousal privilege in refusing to offer testimony against her husband, who was on trial for murder in a Massachusetts court, and the court ruled that the solicitor could not compel her testimony, on the grounds that she was married to the accused. I believe, though I am not sure, that the hypothesis is confirmed by case-law precedent. More to this, the Commonwealth does not require married couples to contract their marriage anew, when no record of their marriage exists, because the country in which they contracted the marriage does not keep such records. It is sufficient in such a case to swear an affidavit.

Still, Justice Marshall argues, the state creates the benefits of civil marriage, and places as condition of acceding to those benefits, the necessity of obtaining a marriage license. Justice Marshall cites Commonwealth v. Manson to the effect that, "'[T]he requisites of a valid marriage have been regulated by statutes of the Colony, Province and Commonwealth,' and surveying marriage statutes from 1639 through 1834." In 1639, however, there were no such benefits as those which Justice Marshall conflates with the institution of marriage, itself. Her conclusion of law is based in an erroneous finding of fact.

Her conclusion of law to the effect that, "In Massachusetts, civil marriage is, and since pre-colonial days has been just what its name implies: a wholly secular institution," is based in an erroneous finding of fact. Justice Marshall fails to consider that Massachusetts does not, nor has it ever required a separate civil marriage ceremony, but has always recognized that the religious minister of a marriage, in receiving the vows of the spouses, acts as an agent of the state. More to this, the fact that a religious minister legitimately acts as an agent of the state in receiving spouses’ vows implies that the religious ceremony does not contain anything explicitly contrary to the civil requirements. Further, For a good deal of the period mentioned by Justice Marshall, Catholics were not permitted to live in Massachusetts; it is reasonable to assume that Catholics were not permitted to contract marriages during that time; even after some relaxation of the anti-Catholic laws, for many years a citizen of Massachusetts who was not a Catholic was not permitted under Massachusetts law to enter into marriage with a Catholic person. In Massachusetts, then, marriage has not always been a wholly secular institution, except in the tautological sense that, granted the court’s premise according to which the state creates civil marriage by creating the benefits that constitute marriage and granting the license that allows couples to accede thereto, the benefits the state has seen fit to grant to married couples are granted to married couples by the secular power, or the irrelevant sense that a citizen who is a religious minister can and does also sometimes act as an agent of the state.

Such a response could continue at great length, though it is quite specific, and its usefulness will be mostly confined to cases of judicial impostion, i.e., when courts impose or try to impose same-sex marriage.

It says little about how a body politic ought to behave, when it has the question of same-sex marriage before it in the present day.

What the Same-Sex Marriage Debate Is Really (not) All About

2011-05-24T07:25:00.011+01:00

Though it were to risk making a fault of frankness, I must say: the more I hear from people on the "no" side of the same-sex marriage debate, the more sympathetic I become to people on the "yes" side of it.

This is not to say that I think same-sex marriage advocates are in the right.

I do not.

Nevertheless, I cannot say that I am "for" something we might call "traditional marriage" sic et simpliciter - without qualification.

You see, I simply cannot get my head around what it might mean to be "for" something called "traditional" marriage. It sounds to me like being "for" gravity, which is what it is, regardless of my disposition toward it (for the record: I am generally well-disposed to gravity).

Let me put it this way: marriage is what it is, quite apart from how I or anyone else might feel about it - and marriage, prior to the state and before all constituted political or civil authority, is between one man and one woman (yes, even where polygamy and polyandry are practiced, each marriage is an iteration of the one man, one woman model: King Solomon's wives were not married to each other); it is for the stability of society in time from generation to generation, through the regulation and rearing of children within established and legitimate households.

This is obvious to me, though it is so only because I have read too much of world history and literature not to be so convicted. Had I looked merely at the state of society today - or had I taken the measure of things as they have developed over the past generation or so (by the biblical reckoning, for which a generation is a 40-year interval), I believe things would indeed appear very differently.

Over the past four decades or so, we have seen a series of social changes regarding marriage: fewer couples entering into marriage and at ever greater age; exponential increase in the number of children born out of wedlock (and in many jurisdictions, tendentially erosive change in laws governing legitimacy); the introduction of "no fault" divorce, with the subsequent increase in numbers and rates of divorce, re-marriage and the increasing prevalence of "blended" families. It is for sociologists to debate and perhaps to decide whether, how and to what extent these phenomena are related to one another. What is certain, and pertinent to present purposes, is that society has come to understand marriage not as a commitment to a way of life, but rather as a sort of official seal of approval on a statement two people make about how they feel toward one another in a given moment.

In several important senses, chief among them the legal, marriage today is no more than this.

Quae cum ita sint, it is more than merely reasonable to ask why society should withhold its official recognition from any two persons who wish to make such a declaration.

In other words: political communities in the United States have decided to understand marriage as little more than a temporary mutual ratification of sentiment, and this does as a matter of fact make it difficult to understand why persons of the same sex cannot have such ratification - why the state ought to withhold its seal of approval.

The debate over "gay marriage" is only symptomatic of a broader sickness in the body politic.

Until we recognize this state of affairs for what it is, and for so long as we continue in our obstinate refusal to recognize that the position of our interlocutors on the other side of this issue is reasonable and (in enough cases to admit of a generality) held in good faith, we will make no headway in a contest for which the prize is neither more nor less than a chance to restore and recover the basic integrity of our entire civilizational project.

A killing and a beatification, with electoral considerations

2011-05-04T22:32:00.004+01:00

I often mentioned the fact of there being a creeping civil war going on in the West. But the USA are in a somewhat better shape than Europe. It is that A that follows the US: an idea of America, that still makes for a civil religion of Christian matrix. So, it doesn't matter whether the POTUS is liberal or conservative, in certain junctures he can deliver a speech that is simply presidential, as Obama did when he announced Osama bin Laden's execution.

Too bad that it is the only time since Obama won the elections, on the promise to be a post partisan president, that he really spoke post partisan.

I'd like to enclose a little e-mail exchange I had with an American friend of mine. I change the name with our pseudonyms. I wrote:

"They killed the bastard", was the comment of my young friend the LD. And I must recognize that for once Obama gave a presidential speech. But I hope this will not take away the dissatisfaction with his leadership. Obama is and remains a fraud. He hasn't been able to stimulate American economy, that means Americans, in the least. But I couldn't understand, from the conservative sites I follow, whether there is a strong republican candidate emerging, and who he, or she, is.

Here is the answer:

Dear HP--yes, justice has been served--and although the Book of Proverbs tells not to rejoice in the fall of our enemies--we may be forgiven for a sense of satisfaction seeing justice served--and although Obama deserves some credit--more and more people are talking about the fact that it wasBush's policies (like waterboarding, Guantanamo etc.) which Obama opposed, ultimately proved successful in bringing the bastard to justice--now of course Obama and his minions in the press are waxing overmuch about how the "great one'' led us to this victory--this euphoria will be short lived-since Americans have such short attention spans--and the economy is in such disrepair--as one analyst put it: "Americans have not been disappointed in Obama's handling of the Bin Laden situation"--it's the economy that will bring him down along with his foolish so-called foreign policy of letting others lead--if gas prices and food prices continue to rise--along with high unemployment Obama will be defeated in 2012--as for Republican candidates--there are two midwestern governors (Pawlenty of Minnesota and Daniels of Indiana) who are popular successful Republican politicians and while they might not be so charismatic as Obama is supposed to be--I think Americans are longing for competence and substance instead of superficial glitz which is what Obama is all about--there are also two very interesting potential black Republicans who may run--Herman Cain is a very successful businessman (millionaire) who is very articulate and dedicated to conservative principles (check him out on the internet)--the other is a recently elected member of the House from Florida--a retired colonel--Alan West--who is also very articulate and very conservative--kind of the anti-Obama (except he is black)--these two are very interesting and appealing--if the economy continues in the desperate straits as now--Obama can be defeated by a competent alternative--it should be interesting--besides, it will be interesting to see how Obama's media toadies react to these two black men--it will be difficult to accuse them of racism--the usual response to any criticism of Obama--I am delighted with the beatification of John Paul II--a truly saintly person--my love to your lovely.

Just as a curiosity, meaningful for what is America: my friend is a Jew.

Death, descent into hell, resurrection

2011-04-25T23:04:00.002+01:00

Christ is risen from the dead. The Easter day is passed, but not our celebration, which is extended to every week of the year, starting all over again from the dies dominica, vulgarly called in English "day of the sun", Sunday.

What is the meaning of Easter, and its announcement of the resurrection? Does it exempt us from thinking of the days before, of the death and descent into hell that preceded it? Surely not.

I'd say, the meaning of that announcement is: don't be afraid of facing death. But to face death we have.

How about if I reformulated it in: don't be afraid of loving?

I could legitimately asked what fear of loving has to do with fear of death.

The answer might go deeply into God's mystery. Because the question would turn with it into another, odd one: is there death in God?

Fear of death is the main cause of the fear of loving. Why? Because there is no true love without a dying. He who is afraid of dying, cannot really love. And is condemned to death.

We don't really know what death is. We watch people being born and dying, and we have been told that, as it happens to them, so it happened and will happen to us. But what is it that so happens is outside our experience.

As far as death is concerned, we should say that it is the future as an "x", the future as unknown. Isn't it this way with love? It doesn't depend on me, but on the beloved one, who can return it or not. If, then, to face the future is to face death, so it is also with love.

Let's call death without further ado fear of dying: to oppose our resistance to dying, wanting to make ourselves sure of what is going to come, by embracing past present and future in a knowledge that spares us the danger of loving.

Eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and you will be like God, said the serpent to tempt Adam and Eve. Indeed they acquired knowledge, but not of God. They were instead exiled from Him, and death entered into their lives.

Had they relied on God, they would have come to know him as he is, and as Jesus Christ showed him to be: a personal love exchange, perennial mutual giving of one's life to the beloved.

Hence that odd question I mentioned. I remember my surprise when I found it put in a most prominent Catholic theologian. Of course there is no death in God, in the way I defined. But surely there is dying for love.

By descending into hell, Christ could absorb human death into his love dying, and pull the dead out of it in his resurrection.

Surrexit Christus!

2011-04-24T20:10:00.002+01:00

Surrexit vere Christus, Alleluia!

HAPPY EASTER TO ONE AND ALL!

Christ’s sacrifice

2011-04-20T23:39:00.003+01:00

I'd like to add something to what the LD well said in the last post.

There are more sides to Christ's sacrifice, as in the Old Testament different kinds of sacrifice are prescribed by the book of Leviticus. Of these, I'll single out two.

Christ died for our sins.

In this way he enacts, as sacrifier and victim at the same time, the sacrifice called by Leviticus "for sins", prescribed to cleanse the priest or the people of the pollution left by the misdeeds we call sins.

What is after all a sin? Neither in Leviticus nor elsewhere in Scriptures we find a definition, only cases of it. I dare say that sin is a diabolic act in the etymological sense of the word: an act of self-indulgence that doesn't unite but divides.

Uniting, then, is Christ's sacrifice: said in strict theological terms, what it realizes is atonement (word recalling a reckoning, a settling of accounts, a drawing together of loose ends – and may finally evoke, in a wild sort of etymologizing, the "at-one-ness" of reconciliation). So He overcomes the divisiveness coming from our sins.

He does it, however, because that sacrifice is like the one Leviticus calls a burn offering, a holocaust, in which the whole victim is offered for no other reason than to pay the due homage to the Lord.

It is, in other words, the pure act of self giving that shows Jesus to be Christ, the anointed one, the King. It is because of that that it takes away our sins, i.e., it represents efficaciously for us the way that doesn't divide in hate, but unites in love.

"Think all the good you can!" (He pleads for me)

2011-04-19T07:48:00.004+01:00

Before I turn my thoughts to the HP's considerations, let me explain something: usually, I do something for Lent like go off the booze, or give up meat for the whole time, or put down my pipe.

This time, 'round, though, I did not do much in that way. I tried to be a little less indulgent in general, sure, but there was no one pleasure I decided to forego.

This year, my Lenten discipline was rather in the positive direction (I choose to say, "positive" with scientific exactness): I decided I would do my best to take seriously - really to live by - the Ignatian maxim: "Think all the good you can!" It is a maxim that I quote often, but too rarely take to heart. So, I decided to make a go of it.

Now we are in Holy Week, and the Passion is in my mind (and on TV, for that matter): there is a scene in the Gibson film, in which Christ calls out, "Father, they know not what they do. (cf. Lk 23:34)," a scene I happened to see just last night. It struck me that the portrayal of Christ's pleading with the Father on behalf of his torturers and murderers was full of all the urgency that knowledge of the Father's love and omnipotence - therefore appreciation of the mortal peril in which Christ's torturers and murderers found themselves - would have entailed: as if Christ were begging God not to exact His vengeance on them, as though God were preparing to do just that. Then I remembered the following lines from the homily delivered by the man who would become Pope Benedict XVI, during the missa pro eligendo Romano pontifice:

The day of vindication and the year of favour converge in the Paschal Mystery, in the dead and Risen Christ. This is the vengeance of God: he himself suffers for us, in the person of his Son.

So, as I consider taking up my cross, I wonder whether I could become God's vengeance by quiet and convicted advocacy for those who fulminate against me, who seem to hate reason and truth, who slander God the Father and malign Christ and His Holy Church. I certainly could not.

Then, I recall that Christ's pleading was for me: every sin I commit is a stripe on his body, a blow that drives the nail, a thorn that cuts his blessed brow.

He pleads for me.

He pleads for me.

LD

Criteria of judgment

2011-04-18T22:51:00.002+01:00

I talked with the LD about a possible post, on a recent dreadful event that saw the killing of a poor young Italian fellow, who thought of working for the good along lines I don't agree with. The LD dissuaded me, rightly arguing that it could sound like hitting a dead man. The purpose of our blog is not so much to pass judgments on things and people, as to reason on how we pass judgments. We humbly hope this might help to increase in a however minimal degree the awareness of what judging things requires.

We definitely have our ideas, hence our liking and disliking, which run against opposite liking and disliking. But what use would be to bang our head against those holding them? Not much, and therefore it isn't much the use of mentioning and discussing facts, if we don't agree about what kind of facts they are.

I give you as example an observation my mother made when, as school teacher, she realized that facts changed in the course of time with the changing of text books.

Everybody makes history as he likes, she observed. Take Robespierre. It used to be, in older text books, that they unequivocally spoke about him as having turned the French Revolution into terror. Now I read that he saved it, because he brought order in a country in disarray.

The very nature of the fact changes by the way we tell it.

The most necessary thing, therefore, is to promote the awareness of the criteria by which we judge facts. Without such an awareness it isn't possible to inquire into them, in order to see whether an agreement on them could be possible.

Things pressing my mind

2011-04-09T22:34:00.002+01:00

A lot of things are pressing my mind.

First of all the book I am writing, which kept me away from blogging. I am at a crucial point, where I am trying to explain to a possible reader, which means essentially to myself by putting myself in the place of a possible reader, the main tenet of Christianity: that funny doctrine which says that the divine ground of all things we call God is at the same time one and three. By a possible reader I don't mean a Christian believer, but any man who, if he just recognizes to be educated, should also recognize to be believer in some authority. Because of this I try to explain to myself through him why to believe in Christ leads us to that funny doctrine of three in one, which is the most translucent account of reality ever given (consonant with the best of science). And therefore that to believe in Christ is the most rational thing any man could do.

This leads me to the other things that press my mind, which on the contrary pull me toward blogging to get rid of the turmoil in which they keep it (I won't say how otherwise this turmoil risks to annoy my wife, forced to listen to me).

Europe, once the land of Christianity, in the last centuries has been progressively turning away from it, a turn which has taken in recent decades a sudden acceleration. The academic, media, and political elites not only act as if indifferent top Christianity, which isn't a novelty, but take a stance toward it that in the best of cases tends simply to erase it from history, in the worst they openly fight it as backward and oppressive.

Does this sound familiar to the American reader of this blog?

Christianity is a belief, a belief is an opinion, and opinions, however they may seems to motivate people's actions, are not fit for a scientific understanding of them. So the point goes. That's why people who think this way hardly will become readers of my book, even though I am writing it for them too. They feel exempt, in fact, from knowing what Christianity is about, and for that matter any other of those beliefs equally called religion. Deemed supernatural, they have no pertinence for those who want to attain themselves to nature. Because, lucky them, they look as if they knew what nature is. (Being so, I'd like to ask them what Einstein's theory of relativity says. As for me, not being a mathematician, I was helped to understand it by the study of the "savage mind", i. e. the thought of archaic or primitive peoples.)

In America, this way of thinking, let's call it "liberal", is also widespread in the "main stream" media, academia, and politics (let's think, alas, of the present administration). Luckily, though, there is in America a more powerful "conservative" resistance to it that in Europe.

Still another thing that presses my mind: the international situation. And to say this means largely the state of the Muslim world. It means Islam, with its home consequences in the Western world.

The peculiar thing that liberals don't seem to realize, is that their way of thinking involves them in an blatant contradiction.

It shows it well their loathing of the foreign policy doctrine of "exporting democracy". Odd thing, if one thinks that they wouldn't let go an inch of their right to do as they like, without an outcry of "oppression", "Nazism", or the like! But when other peoples live under oppressive and nazi-like regimes, they don't seem to be moved.

Perhaps they think that living under political-religious regimes of the Iranian kind is what people there like, and, because what anybody likes has to be granted, we shouldn't interfere. Or they rather think that democracy, while good for us, would be disruptive in other peoples' lives. So, while enjoying the benefits of democracy, they ask who are we to tell others how to live. Too bad that when it concerns us they are quite ready to do it.

We? How can you say that? To us, who are all for tolerance? There you have it. Tolerance. You decide what to tolerate and what not. I actually know that you find the Tea Party quite intolerable. Why don't you find equally intolerable Muslims?

The point worth to notice, with tolerance, is that if you grant a right to somebody, you obligate others. Who might not like it. But have to swallow it.

As for me, I always thought that, either democracy is good also for others, or that it is no good even for us. Of course, this means to find a notion of democracy that could be shared.

Of one thing I am sure: it can't be defined on the basis of tolerance. Should we do it, we would turn democracy into a most oppressive system.

Here I close, because the things that press my mind are so heavy loaded that they would require a book to exhaust them. Ah, I forgot, I am writing it.

Vatican Dicasteries to Meet with Catholic Bloggers

2011-04-08T09:44:00.004+01:00

Information on Vatican Meeting for Bloggers

A meeting for bloggers will take place in Rome on the afternoon of Monday 2 May 2011. The aim of the meeting, which is being organised by the Pontifical Councils for Culture and Social Communications, is to allow for a dialogue between bloggers and Church representatives, to listen to the experiences of those who are actively involved in this arena, and to achieve a greater understanding of the needs of that community. The meeting will also allow for a presentation of some of the initiatives to engage with new media practitioners being taken by the Church, both in Rome and at the local level.

In two panels, speakers will open up some of the key issues in order to set up a more general discussion open to all participants. The first panel will involve 5 bloggers – they will be chosen to represent different language groups and each will address a specific theme of general relevance. The second panel will draw on people involved in the Church’s communications outreach – they will speak of their experiences in working with new media and initiatives aimed at ensuring an effective engagement by the Church with bloggers.

Among those participating at the meeting will be Cardinal Ravasi of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Archbishop Celli of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications and Father Lombardi of the Vatican’s Press Office and Vatican Radio. An important dimension of the meeting is to allow an opportunity for informal exchange and contact between those attending with a view to opening further avenues of interaction.

The meeting is taking place on the day after the Beatification of Pope John Paul II in order to take advantage of the likely presence in Rome of many bloggers. The invitation is open to all, but bloggers who wish to attend need to apply by emailing blogmeet@pccs.it and sending a link to their blog. As space is limited to 150 seats and there is a desire to have a representation of the entire blogosphere, entrance passes and further details will be distributed with a view to the diversity of language and geography, typology of blogs (institutional or private, multivoice or personal), subjects of blogs, and timeliness of request.

Simultaneous translation will be provided for Italian, English, French, Polish and Spanish.

The venue is the Palazzo San Pio X, in via della Conciliazione, 5.

Vatican Radio has the story HERE.

My picks for Catholic Media Promotion Day

2011-03-16T08:48:00.003+01:00

Explanations will follow - for now, my picks, many of which will explain themselves, I think!

CATHOLIC BLOGS:

The Weight of Glory

Fallible Blogma

The Crescat

CATHOLIC PODCASTS:

Catholic Under the Hood

CATHOLIC MEDIA INITIATIVES:

Vatican Radio

Catholic Answers

EWTN

Holy Martyrs of Baghdad: a Lenten initiative

2011-03-11T12:48:00.005+01:00

Below, please find the English text of a letter explaining a special Lenten initiative.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

This Lenten season, please consider a private devotion in the form of (at least) one decade of the Rosary to be said each Friday, with the following intention: the official juridical recognition of the Holy Martyrs of Baghdad.

The suffering of Christians all across the Mideast region is very real, and truly terrible.

It is worthy, therefore, that we ask Almighty God to move His Church to recognize the victims of the Oct. 31st massacre in Baghdad's cathedral Church of Our Lady of Salvation, as true Christian martyrs, slain in hatred of the faith.

Please also consider, as part of this devotion, a prayer: for the conversion of all those who are now enemies of Christ and His Holy Church; that through their conversion, they obtain pardon; that by pardon, there be reconciliation, and in reconciliation, peace.

As this is a "grass roots" initiative, please help spread the word: especially by way of the new communications media, to prudent use of which our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, has called us in the service of the Gospel.

The 8th of March

2011-03-10T00:17:00.002+01:00

Even one day late, it is still worthy saying: I hate the 8^th of March.

It isn't that I don't love women and I don't want to celebrate them. But that is not the way.

Just to speak of "woman" doesn't say anything about what is there to celebrate. Nothing archetypical in it. There are good women and bad women, angels and bitches. Or normal women: but according to what a criterion defined?

You could answer: well, according to no criterion whatsoever. Because it doesn't matter. The 8^th of March is for women as such.

Too bad that this "as such" is questionable.

Ancient Greek mythology knew at least four archetypes of women: Hera (in Latin, Juno), Aphrodite (Venus), Athena (Minerva), Artemis (Diana), etcetera. Each one of them personified some aspects of womanhood: like maternity, sex appeal, wisdom, virginal strength, or whatever. When that same mythology tells the story of Paris being called to choose among three of them (Hera, Aphrodite and Athena) thus unchaining the events that led to the war of Troy, it is as if it was telling us that we too have to make a choice:

To decide which traits of womanhood we want to celebrate. Because there is no celebration that isn't of archetypes.

Woman par excellence in the Christian tradition was Mary: embracing all the power of a virgin and all the realization of a mother. So, it would seem, we don't have to make a choice. And we could celebrate all women in her.

But still, her archetype was felt too strict a model. Because we wanted to add another type of woman: the active single, not virgin and only accidentally mother.

And I ask myself: what peculiarly feminine remains in the active single? And why should I celebrate it?

The answer is close to: nothing, and for no reason.

That's why I hate the 8^th of March. Because I love women, and I'd like to celebrate them without having to make a disastrous choice (guess then where it goes my pick).

Colonialism and multiculturalism

2011-03-09T01:26:00.002+01:00

Internal affairs and international affairs intermingle with each other. Let's look at what is happening now: part of the world afire, and we not knowing which way to go and what action to take. More: divided, we don't know who are our friends and our enemies, and fear reactions inside and outside.

Powerful, we are impotent, with the USA aligning themselves on this regard with Europe. Once colonialist, Western Europe demised any claim to tell others how to be and what to do. Actually it even gave up telling it to itself.

Should I go over the history of colonialism, mainly in its Nineteenth Century version? It is easier to go over its end of the Twentieth Century version.

The newest version sprung from bad conscience over what went on previously. This raises the question: what did actually go wrong? Here the mainstream answer is summarized by the word imperialism (which embraces colonialism).

"Imperialist" are labeled people who want to impose themselves on others. Which now looks as a no-no, absolutely to be avoided. Hitler did it (actually also Stalin, but he is less talked about), but he was defeated, and we, the winners, don't want to hear of anybody wanting to implement a policy that runs against our grain. So anybody who trying to do it is likened to him (as it shows the mob of public servants parading in the streets of Madison).

On a larger scale, it is no longer a question of the Hitlers of the situation, but of "us": in the new era of blatant globalization, in which peoples seem to want to emulate us, or turn against us in hatred, "we" see ourselves as a kind of cancer of the earth, that bought about the ruin of all the pretty local realities everywhere existing before our arrival. It looks like "we" have imposed on others our life style – whose comforts, however, "we" are rarely ready to give up.

Hence, the heinous idea of multiculturalism: it looks open, for as much as it is closed: on "ourselves", incapable of understanding that what is culture for "us" it is simply the world for others.

Actually, colonialism is the history of mankind: all along a story of peoples' movements, their superimposing, mingling, or erasing each other. Never was there anything we could call "nativism". That local realities appear such is just another manifestation of the mystique of western domination.

Neither old days colonialists, nor to days multiculturalists, give sign of an idea of man, nature, society, and – last but not least – of God, such to convince and attract other peoples.

So the answer given to the question of what went wrong, turns out to be just another version of the same cultural disease, which led to colonialism and two world wars. The trouble, finally, is that arguing to convince others is confused with imposing, and any talk about truth becomes suspicious.

Of no great relevance

2011-02-24T00:33:00.001+01:00

I could be asked why I dislike so much the present POTUS.

I could mention many ideological reasons. But the simplest answer is this:

I love America, as she was. Now he is trying to change her into a kind Western Europe.

Whatever one may think of Western Europe, by resembling to it America would no longer be America.

A doubtful foreboding of democracy

2011-02-23T22:16:00.002+01:00

I know I am at fault. I should be more diligent and prompt in coming to this page. Otherwise the five readers of this blog might get discouraged and forget to click it.

Important things are happening of a very complex character which should require some comments.

In Egypt and Tunisia, autocratic leaders of long standing have been overthrown by popular protest, also extending to other Arabic and Berber countries, from Algeria to Yemen.

Is it a good thing? A foreboding of democracy? Hard to say.

To add trouble to trouble, I ain’t sure there is much of a clear view of the situation with those who, on our side, should be governing it.

I wrote to a friend of mine living near Boston about the troublers we are having in Italy, where the left wing opposition and non elected officers in the administration of justice are trying to overthrow the legitimately elected government, on the excuse that our rich Prime Minister from time to time enjoys evenings at his mansion with friends and beautiful girls. Things perhaps made known by the NYT.

It is the usual double standard of the left, he remarked. And who are we to judge others, he added, if “a man of no accomplishments--not too much intelligence and no skills in foreign diplomacy (Egypt)--is (still) deemed by the left media as the messiah” (too bad, I say, that he is unable to restore the kingdom, and instead works at its demise). “What a joke – my friend adds – I live in hopes that he is a one-term president”.

In the meantime such a man stumbles along.

When he could have made pressures on Mubarak for more democracy in Egypt, he instead delivered the Cairo speech, where he stated that democracy can’t be imposed from outside. And now it looks like it was him who wanted Mubarak’s head, so to pass himself as the defender of democracy, being though the same man who a couple of years ago stayed silent before popular protests in Iran.

Better our women loving PM, than that man and his wife, so insensible to the American people’s demands. Poor man in the White House, who looks confused by a reality he doesn’t understand.

Not easy to understand as a matter of fact for any of us – but we aren’t presidents of the United States.

It looks to me we are living under his (non)guidance the Munich syndrome (you remember, when Chamberlain gave in to the Nazis, thus preparing the Second World War?).

In Egypt, the same populace that seemed to be fighting for democracy, sexually aggressed the American journalist Lara Logan at the cry of “Jewish, Jewish”.

On the background of the so called Egyptian “revolution” looms the shadow of the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, there are pundits in the MSM and in academia who think of it as a kind of moderate group. It would be as if in the French Revolution one thought the Jacobins were moderates.

I know I didn’t write anything particularly original. Such could only be a reflection on revolution, and what it could be in the life of different peoples, coming from different traditions. The irony, for example, in the 1978 Iranian revolution, is that while opposing the West it made its own precisely a most Western category of political thought such as revolution.

The trouble is that we haven’t been able to make instead the notion of democracy penetrate the Muslim world.

Perhaps because not even we do know what it is – as it shows the division of right and left, up in arms one against the other, about which I discussed with my friend.

Thoughts on LiveAction

2011-02-21T14:27:00.026+01:00

I had hoped to avoid the debate surrounding the moral status of the Live Action investigators' behavior toward Planned Parenthood.

In private correspondence I have to the best of my ability answered a series of questions touching basic principles of moral theology, as well as their general and specific applications.

Rather than abating, however, requests for a more public engagement have increased, as have the attacks on the moral character of Live Action and the LA Actors, who have a right to their good name.

Then, there is the matter of the POTUS, who, apropos the uproar over PP's MO in a central NJ office, has praised PP as, "[Having] done good work in the past," and dismissed the concern as "manufactured."

I wonder whether the President knows that, in the past, Planned Parenthood was founded by a racist eugenicist (links to NYU's Sanger Papers Project page - let Sanger's damnatio memoriae come by her own words, as sympathetically presented as possible) for the express purpose of making it as unlikely as possible that people who look like the POTUS ever make it to the world.

That question will have to wait.

The real issue arising out of the President's remarks is whether there be anything to the charge of "manufacturing" outrage.

There are, therefore, three broad areas of conern in the following reflections:

The question whether Live Action's tactics are morally licit;
The question whether the accusations against Live Action, which come from sources opposed to Planned Parenthood, are founded;
The question whether the claims against Live Action, which come from certain of Planned Parenthood's supporters are meritorious.

Before engaging directly, allow me to engage in a little throat clearing.

I) Is lying always wrong?

Yes, lying is always wrong.

Nevertheless, not every deception is a lie.

Dissembling, equivocation, obfuscation, obtuseness, and many other forms of communicative dexterity are available to the person who would either keep the truth from one who would have it for sinful purposes, or to obtain the truth from one who would unrightfully conceal it.

The question is, therefore, whether LiveAction's was a morally licit use of deception.

II) Was LiveAction's deception morally licit?

General concerns: broadly and generally, moral science recognizes that the use of deception (dissembling, equivocation, obfuscation, obtuseness, inter alia -and even on to subterfuge), if it is to be licit, must be (1) accomplished with a view to protecting or achieving some important good; (2) practiced on someone whose rights to the truth (again, to have it or to conceal it) are attenuated.

Because deceptions like that of LiveAction can be licit in principle, the present analysis is specific: it concerns the moral quality of the project that exposed the Perth Amboy center of Planned Parenthood Central New Jersey (you can see the unedited footage here; transcript here).

The first thing to do is determine what kind(s) of deception is (are) being employed. There are two broad categories of deception: deceptions that use the truth or parts of the truth; deceptions that involve the telling of untruth. While moral scientists disagree about whether cases falling under the second category are ever licit, it is generally true that the more complex cases arise under the first category. On the surface, it would perhaps seem that the Live Action investigators tell untruths.
Having read the transcript carefully, however, I cannot find any utterance of the LA "pimp" and "prostitute" that could not have been, in some sense, true. NB, I do not mean that their statements could be rendered true, should they have availed themselves of the (sometimes, at least) morally problematic practize of mental reservation. With the exception of their claim, "we're involved in sex work," which is a classic case of equivocation, most of the other statements were simply too vague to be false. Only the circumstances and the expectations/assumptions of the PP office manager led this last to attach specific (and in the event, erroneous) significance to, and draw the conclusions from the statments of the Live Action investigators.
Their statements are definitely misleading. Similar deception could be - and often is - illegal, as when one deliberately misleads an agent of the civil authority who is conducting a legitimate investigation by legitimate means. Such behavior in such circumstances is often also sinful, for the duty owed such an agent in such circumstances is often one of transparent and fulsome (even if not necessarily cheerful) cooperation. Such a duty, however, is not comparable to the duty owed those who engage, under the aegis of law and with public financial support, in morally reprehensible practices, some of which are quite possibly illegal.
The citizenry have a right to know whether those who receive public money in support of their activities are really serving the common good in a manner consistent with the purposes for which they were awarded public money, in the first place; it were absurd to think that those, who receive public funding, should receive it in order that they break the law. Citizens certainly have the right to inquire into such organizations.The idea that either Planned Parenthood, or PP's employees should have a right to privacy while conducting business in public, is absurd.
Indeed, the LA actors relied on the PP employee's readiness to draw precisely the conclusions she did, in order to expose practices about which the larger public has an undoubted and invincible right to know.

The proper moral register in which to account for LA's conduct is therefore that of Socratic eironeia, for which, regrettably no adequate term in current, non-technical English is available, but which may nevertheless be sufficiently described as the wiley employment of one's own superior material knowledge, mental and verbal dexterity, in order to further the cause of truth.

In that register, the conduct of LA is most praiseworthy.

III) Manufacturing moral outrage

We must admit that the President's charge has some degree of merit, and so on its face: the public outrage - which must be sufficient to encourage even Planned Parenthood's staunchest supporters in the Federal legislature to put a freeze on PP's funding pending an investigation into their business practices - is the result of a dramatic contrivance.

The dramatizing of injustice will always involve some art. The question is whether the injustice is real, whether it is worth the cost in time and energy of the drama.

The question remaining is whether those, who oppose Planned Parenthood and hate abortion as they hate hell, can also bring themselves to think all the good they can about Planned Parenthood and the Planned Parenthood employees.

We are not called only to "think all the good [we] can" about the people with whom we agree. Indeed, it is most important that we follow the maxim in our dealings with people who do not share our opinions, our views, our basic understanding of fundamental moral principle.

This being the case, are we not - all of us - a little to quick to think the worst about the Planned Parenthood people in the video, and about Planned Parenthood in general? Do we want the terrible things exposed in the LA video to be generally true of the whole organization? Is not their mere involvement in the terrible sin of abortion enough to condemn them? Would you breathe a sigh of relief, if you were to discover that Planned Parenthood does not allow its branch offices to act as accessories to underage sex slavery, that PP conducts responsible oversight (I do not know that they don't in the first case, or that they do in the second. This is a hypothetical)?

Finally, are you willing to consider that the office manager, who has lost her job as a result of the Live Action exposure (she deserved to be fired, at least), might have been genuinely concerned for the health of the poor girls her prospective client was putatively pimping? Might she not have thought herself in a condition not unlike that of the bystander required to bind the guard and the bank teller, so the robber might commit his crime without adding to it the crime of murder? In short, might she not have been seeking to do what she understood to be the best she could for the girls supposedly enslaved by the putative pimp?

I am not saying this would make the erstwhile PP office manager's behavior less sinful, or less illegal. It would not. Nevertheless, it does speak to a discipline both moral and a spiritual, which those who would engage in and/or benefit from such behavior as Live Action has recently exhibited would do well to cultivate.

Believers and non believers

2011-02-04T19:55:00.002+01:00

I join in – pray forgive me if a little belatedly – a point discussed in two previous post by the LD.

Since I started studying philosophy and theology about forty years ago, I felt ill at ease with the notion of "faith". I landed, coming from Italy, into an American university which was also a Methodist seminar: Drew University in Madison NJ. Which means that I found myself, Catholic, amidst Protestants, and I found them wavering between a notion of faith as something hanging on the air (a direct gift to you from the Holy Spirit, I suppose, for which you have no way to account) on one side, and blatant rationalism on the other.

I wasn't able to tell why, but I knew that it couldn't be was I had been taught since I was a child, when I heard speaking of faith.

I had to realize with my discomfort, as my studies went on, that faith talk among Catholic philosophers and theologians didn't differ so much from that which I found at Drew University.

Once a colleague in the school where I taught, un comunistone (blatant communist) I'd say in Italian, told me, well, faith is a gift, either you have it or you don't. I suppose that saying so was on his part a way to open a conversation with me, who should have agreed with him that he unfortunately hadn't received such a gift, so accepting that there was no way for me to talk about matters of faith in a reasonably acceptable way.

He tried, in other words, to bring me on his ground: of a world divided in "believers and non believers", in which believing is a kind of optional, to be excluded from the basic model conversation. But I refused to play his game, and pointedly remarked that this thing that he called "faith" I didn't have it, and neither had it, say, a Thomas Aquinas or an Augustine of Hippo.

I had to find, though, that this contraposition of believers and non believers was largely accepted even in the Church. While priests didn't show a real awareness of the confusion tied to the use of the word faith: that may be they said it meaning something, while their interlocutors would probably understand something totally different. To my making, or better trying to make them priest remark this, they usually answered with a countenance that said, we don't know what are you talking about.

In the meantime the archbishop of Milan instituted in his dioceses a "chair of the non believers", to give voice to people extraneous or estranged from the Church – as if they needed such a favor.

I was confirmed unfortunately of the insensitiveness of qualified Catholics on this regard, when I read recently the pastoral constitution of Vatican II Gaudium and spes.

There it was, the heinous expression, "believers and non believers", by which believers accepted to let non believers define them. As if faith were simply a belief that one may hold or not.

Belief is opposed to knowledge, that everyone should hold. But knowledge is thus understood as nothing more than technical competence. For example in building an atomic bomb, or manipulating genes. Independently of what we otherwise thought of nature at large, or of life. This would be a matter of belief, i.e. of opinion.

Hence the remarks that aroused the LD's protest: that abortion is against Catholic faith. Well, of course it is, but just because Catholicism is what the name says, universal, and sets no limits to the universal recognition of human life, refusing to make it depend on acceptance, personal and social – as the pro choice claim it to be when they defend the right to abort.

I was liberated from my perplexity concerning faith by the reading of s. Augustine's De vera religione, where he said that two things are necessary for man's salvation: authority and reason, the one bringing to faith, the other bringing to the intelligence of things.

This brought me back to my earliest study of law, before the aporias I found in it brought me to philosophy and theology. I remembered that, in the tradition of roman jurisprudence still pervading our treatment of legal matters, I already run into faith.

In the analysis of the elements of the contract, it was in fact included, besides the object and capable partners with valid motives, also the bona fides on their part. I remember that the book explained it as the attitude of the good father of the family – presumably knowing what that is. I take it now to mean the reliability of a man, the lack of cheating intentions that makes anyone a trustworthy person.

There I had already the true meaning of faith:
the trust that makes one believe what others say, or at least enter into conversation with them.

The simple conclusion to be drawn from such an understanding of faith, is that it makes no sense to oppose those who have it and those who don't: believers and non believers. Nobody can live without trusting others, believing what they say and holding it true. Only remains, then, the difference between believers, whom they trust and for which reason.

Let me add, to close, that exemplary reason for trust is a liberal way of being: meaning with this nothing political in the current sense of the word, but a magnanimous and generous personality, ready to give and receive from others – ready, in the most heroic case, to self-sacrifice.

I take this to be the core of what the LD called Adamsian conservatism.

The Right to Marry

2011-01-26T09:43:00.005+01:00

His Hermeneuticalness, Fr. Tim Finigan, pastor of souls in the parish of Our Lady of the Rosary, Blackfen, and proprietor of the blogosphere's Hermeneutic of Continuity has done a great service in parsing what Pope Benedict XVI really said in his remarks to the Roman Rota last week.

Background: in case you missed it, the MSM got it wrong - badly wrong - when the Pope spoke to the Church's supreme appellate tribunal on Saturday of last week. Many headlines procalimed variations on the theme of "Pope denies Right to Marriage" - which is not true, while others said "Marriage is not an Absolute Right" - which is true as far as it goes, but quite beside the point of the Holy Father's remarks.

If you would have the benefit of Fr. Finigan's labors in this regard (and I really do think you ought to), click here.

LD

The Language of Life: speaking of opposition to abortion

2011-01-25T11:29:00.004+01:00

One of the most familiar refrains of the past week or so, i.e., during the run-up to the anniversary of Roe v. Wade and Monday's March for Life, was that we as Catholics, know that abortion is wrong.

I submit that this formulation is in all cases harmful to the cause of life, and in most cases indicative of a faulty understanding of how the Church teaches what She teaches.

It is most emphatically not as Catholics that we know abortion is wrong.

If real assent to the truth of revelation were necessary in order to recognize the intrinsic evil of procured abortion, then the pro-aborts would be right.

The data of revelation provide us with more information about human dignity (about its contents, about its source and about its end).

That, however, is entirely beside the point: human reason dictates that abortion is wrong. Not only: reason also shows that positive legal sanctioning of the practice is contrary to the essential ends of political power.

Said differently: there are some things that we know are true because the Church teaches them.

Examples are: that God is one Being in Three Persons; that He created the universe and all that is ex nihilo; that He took on human nature in order to redeem it and to save the whole world.

There are other things that the Church teaches because they are true.

Examples are: that the universe has an intelligible structure; that human reason is capable of penetrating that structure and arriving at true and certain knowledge of the source of all that is; that the moral order is an integral part of the stucture of the universe; that the direct, deliberate destruction of innocent human life violates the moral order that is built into the universe.

If it were otherwise, i.e., if it were rather the case that human reason is incapable of knowing that the direct and deliberate destruction of innocent human life violates the moral order that is built into the universe, then one of a series of alternatives would necessarily obtain: either the universe would be lacking in an intelligible structure, or human reason would be - on principle - incapable of understanding the structure of the universe.

If the former, i.e., if there were no intelligible structure to the universe, then there would literally be no universe (no cosmos, as the Greeks so neautifully called it). If the latter, then every society of human beings would be nothing more than an external power structure, in which the strong lord it forever over the weak.

As things stand, however, there is an intelligible structure to the universe, and we know it: when human beings first turned their gaze to the heavens, they found something wondrous in their ability to measure the stars in their courses. They found community between Earth and Heaven, where they expected only vacuous infiinity between God and man.

This discovery had consequences: people who made it could no longer pretend that their attempts at ordering their lives together on Earth were a matter of indifference to the universe, or to the author of the order they had begun to discover.

So, they began to study the heavens, to search for the ultimate reason behind the movements of the heavenly bodies - and this, with a view to ordering their own lives together in concert with the heavenly order.

The attempt to measure the movement of the heavens is physics, and the attempt to penetrate the source of order behind the movement is metaphysics - but the attempt to order our lives together is politics, and the attempt to understand how best to do so according to measure and reason is political science (episteme politike).

In other words, our political (social) life - remember that Cicero translated Aristotle's zoon politicon as animal socialis - is governed ultimately not by force, but by reason, and this is a fact of history, empirically verifiable: not a conjecture.

So, we are left with an alternative: either abortion is wrong, or nothing is.

But, if abortion is wrong, then it is wrong by the same reason that gives birth to stars: one can know this reason without knowing that the author of it was a Jewish carpenter born during the reign of Caesar Augustus in the Roman province of Palestine.

It is our ability to know the reason, which makes us capable of living together in society.

Adamsian Conservatism

2011-01-24T08:18:00.009+01:00

Between changing diapers and servizi giornalistici this weekend, I had an exchange on Facebook with an old friend (and a new one) over the impossibly far-fetched proposal (so stipulated during the course of our conversation) to amend the Constitution so as to reinstate the McCain-Feingold campaign reform law.

In a nutshell, my friends argued that something is better than nothing.

I argued that McCain-Feingold was unconstitutional and that the SCOTUS had therefore done well in declaring it so.

At stake was a basic disagreement, I think, about the nature of law.

I think that law is a determinate expression of the inherent juridical ties that bind us together and govern our conduct in society.

My friends seem to consider that law is merely a tool for implementing social policy.

I must admit that empirically, they have recent history, at least, on their side.

A broader view of history would, I believe, confirm a sneaking suspicion I have: that when legislatures begin using law as a mere tool for the implementation of social policy, social foundering (or the threat of it) is present and inevitable.

I do not deny that law is an effective tool for implementing social policy. I only say that law is not, and cannot without courting disaster be considered a mere tool for such an end.

These thoughts crystallized for me as I watched the following video (H/t to Donald R. McLarey at The American Catholic):

McLarey's post has some great commentary, as well as some exquisitely useful and entertaining links: go to be edifited and delighted.

But I titled this post, "Adamsian Conservatism" and I have not explained why.

Well, the causa proxima was an observation I made to that effect during the course of the aforementioned FB exchange, in response to a suggestion that I am somehow...in thrall...to big business, because I think McCain-Feingold was unconstitutional.

I responded, roughly, that the rule of law is central to free society, that tolerating a patently unconstitutional law in light of a few of its effects is deleterious, and that, no, I am not in thrall to big business, but that I am an "Adamsian" conservative who therefore has one eye on Hamilton at all times.

What do I mean by this?

Essentially, that ordered liberty is possible only for people who 1) love good and hate evil; 2) have sense (wisdom) enough to tell them apart.

Liberty, in the minimal sense of freedom from external coercion, may be had by any group numerous, motivated, talented and well-armed enough to get it.

The same group that wins its liberty in this sense may and in fact does often turn around and quickly deny liberty to some other group or faction within society.

The very Constitutional Convention was called - at least in part - because of Americans’ intimate experience with this fact.

So, the Framers submitted that the people ordain and establish the Constitution in order to secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity.

The blessings of liberty are, in short, the conditions for general flourishing of fully human life.

As John Adams noted in his Thoughts on Government:

The foundation of every government is some principle or passion in the minds of the people. The noblest principles and most generous affections in our nature then, have the fairest chance to support the noblest and most generous models of government.… A Constitution, founded on these principles, introduces knowledge among the People, and inspires them with a conscious dignity, becoming Freemen. A general emulation takes place, which causes good humour, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment, inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprizing. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious and frugal. You will find among them some elegance, perhaps, but more solidity; a little pleasure, but a great deal of business—some politeness, but more civility. If you compare such a country with the regions of domination, whether Monarchial or Aristocratical, you will fancy yourself in Arcadia or Elisium [sic].

Without the blessings of liberty, thusly conceived, no free republic can long remain in existence.

The Declaration of Independence states that the purpose of government is, among other things, the protection of liberty.

If liberty, improperly exercised, must inevitably decay into anarchy (from which arises despotism), then government is interested in - and must therefore be rendered capable of enforcing the proper exercise of liberty, i.e. to secure the blessings thereof.

This is a paradox - the paradox of free society: how to resolve it?

America offers a way toward a solution.

If Adams is correct when he says that the foundation of every government is some principle or passion in the minds of the people, then the decision to ratify the Constitution was necessarily an expression of the American people’s self-understanding.

If the Constitution depends on the people’s attachment to the noblest principles and most generous affections of human nature, then the success of the society formed under the new representative framework will depend upon the people’s ability to live up to their estimation of themselves, that is, to prove their professed attachment.

Thus, when Adams said that a government founded on the noblest sentiments and most generous affections of our nature will introduce knowledge among the people and inspire them with a conscious dignity, he was not saying that a republican form of government automatically does these things.

Adams was rather recommending such a course of action, since no government that fails to introduce knowledge, inspire the people with conscious dignity, etc., can hope to ensure what the Preamble to the Constitution called, “The Blessings of Liberty.”

There is a further point, involving the relation of virtue to morality.

This is a basic problem in politics, the theoretical treatment of which we could trace at least as far back as 4th century BC Athens.

One of the salient points in the history of the treatment of the problem occured in the waning days of Rome’s Empire, when the great Roman rhetor and philosopher, St. Augustine of Hippo, wrote a treatise establishing the aptness of Christian religion to inform and perfect human beings for Roman citizenship, during the course of which he found himself asking what the mores of the Romans were, that God should have deigned to help them in the expansion of their rule (De civitate Dei V.xii.1-2).

In short, the mores of a society are those things that the members of society love or desire in general. The difficulty, however, is that good mores - while necessary - are not sufficient.

In order for society to thrive, in order for the blessings of liberty to be preserved, society’s members must actually possess the characteristics generally esteemed as good and worthy - they must have virtue.

The political haggling over the charter of the Bank of The United States is apt to illustrate the principle.

In 1790, the financial position of the United States was not exactly rosy.

Alexander Hamilton proposed a scheme for the salvation of the young republic’s financial solvency and the foundation of its economic future. Congress was persuaded, and passed Hamilton’s proposal. Only the President’s signature was outstanding.

In those days, Presidents would refuse to sign a bill only if they had specific Constitutional qualms about it.

The question therefore turned on the constitutionality of Hamilton’s plan.

The new Constitution vested in the Congress of the United States with power:

To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

The POTUS, George Washington, asked his Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, to share his opinion of the constitutionality of Hamilton’s plan.

Jefferson responded in a letter, in which he refused to reduce the sense of the Constitutional term, “necessary” to synonymy with “expedience” and concluded that Congress had not power therefore to erect a bank (the cornerstone of Hamilton’s proposal), because the Constitution did not grant that power explicitly to Congress, and a Bank were not, stricto sensu, necessary.

The President also asked Hamilton, who was his Secretary of the Treasury, to make a case for the plan.

Hamilton responded:

Every power vested in a Government is in its nature sovereign, and includes by force of the term, a right to employ all the means requisite, and fairly applicable to the attainment of the ends of such power.

The limits of sovereign power are only that the action countenanced by a legislature be, “…not immoral, nor contrary to the essential ends of political power.”

The upshot of all this is that Jefferson recognizes no limit to the power of government other than the textual or structural limits of its constitution, while in practice, he would have made the whole financial future of the United States to depend on his opinion of the meaning of a word.

Hamilton, on the other hand (who is popularly reputed a conniving, wrangling, haggler, with neither moral sense, nor the restraint that ought to accompany it), here shows us the depth of his political thought and reflection on human nature.

Hamilton sees, where Jefferson either does not, or does not care, that no government will serve the good, unless the people for whom the government is given love good and hate evil.

The essence of Hamilton's argument is that government can function only when no officer or agent of government could dare, for fear of public outrage, to do evil in the light of day, and only when public officials are terrified of public wrath in the event that they should fail publicly to prosecute and punish evil-doers according to the law.

The shared notion of right and wrong, and not the constitutional structure of a government, is the last bulwark against tyranny.

Without good government, order in social life will decay, for there is, as Publius has noted:

[A] degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust.

Nevertheless, as there are these:

So there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.

Publius' point is that:

Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be, that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another. (Federalist #55)

Let the blessings of liberty be something called the good life.

The good life requires liberty - and liberty, if it is to guarantee and not destroy the good life, requires virtue, and virtue does not come easy.

Some forms of government subvert virtue, though no government can provide it.

All good government requires virtue, and republican government requires more of it, and in more members of society, than any other form of government.

This is what I meant by "Adamsian conservatism" with an eye on (an eye toward) Hamilton at all times.

LD

Who can play Shylock to Antonio president

2011-01-24T01:21:00.003+01:00

I am not entitled to play Shylock and claim a pound of flesh from the president, for the very simple reason that I am not en elector. Which means that in this affair the one with whom the president made a contract, and who only can claim it, is the electorate.

But a Porzia can always argue, yes, a pound of flesh, but the blood was not included in the contract.

What could this mean in the analogy of the present situation with the Merchant of Venice?

Perhaps that the elected monarch, once found ineffective in assuring the welfare of his community, is not put to death, as in certain old African kingdoms, but just kicked out of office?

Alright, I'll play, HP...

2011-01-23T16:26:00.003+01:00

But HP, it was not an episode or an affair of "politics as usual" - it was a national tragedy.

The President is not supposed to "pacify" the lunatic fringe: he is to hold the center: gubernare.

He did a good job this time, by which I only mean that he said the right things and sounded like he meant them.

Am I wrong, or do you want the pound of flesh on this one?

I hope not: the role of Shylock does not suit you, and I will not play Portia to the President's Antonio (and who would be Bassanio in this analogy, anyway?).

Just two words

2011-01-23T01:26:00.001+01:00

Not to keep the discussion open, but the president's behavior in this whole affair was simply sly.

It didn't pacify anybody of those who needed pacifying.

I don't add more!

Giving Credit where Credit is Due

2011-01-22T14:02:00.004+01:00

The HP and I have been back and forth over President Obama's speech in Arizona.

I have been sidelined with a flu-like bug for several days, and have not responded to the HP's latest on the subject.

First, let me say that I think that to some extent, we are talking at cross purposes: I merely wish to give credit where credit is due, while the HP wants to raise more general questions regarding democracy and the President's fitness to lead the nation.

I think those are legitimate questions.

I do not think they need to be raised in connection with the President's admirable conduct in the face of national tragedy.

Still, they do need to be raised.

So, let this be my final word on the President's speech: well done, Mr. President.

Nevertheless, I will not be voting for him in the next election - unless the GOP decides to run the Prince of Darkness (or Sarah Palin).

Why not?

I'll tell you when I feel better.

Being and playing president

2011-01-19T00:11:00.002+01:00

POTUS is an elected monarch. In the previous posts the LD and I examined mostly the reigning and the governing sides of his office. Or, better, just to these two sides the LD answered me, also pointing out that they can never be totally separated, as he noticed by recalling the example of a president whom we love, Theodor Roosevelt, who knew how to reign by governing and to govern by reigning.

Correct. But we need to take into consideration a third side, pertaining to the fact that he is an elected monarch: i.e. campaigning.

Obama, during the 2008 campaign, played at being presidential, which he failed to be while in office. How about the Tucson speech? Was that a playing president too?

There isn't a one way answer: because he is the president.

Therefore, by delivering a speech addressed to everybody, all molded in a pacifying mode, he was presidential, up to his role.

However, he also needs to be reelected. Returning to the style of his old candidate speeches is clearly aimed then at recovering consensus for election. And it couldn't be otherwise.

We live in a democracy, after all, where it is elected he who knows how to touch the right chords in the public audience: is rhetorically effective. But here we need to make distinctions. If rhetoric is unavoidable, it doesn't mean that we can't discern whether one is in his whole person consonant to what he says, or this appears dissonant with respect to what he otherwise shows to be.

The second I think is the case with Obama. His speech was indeed presidential, and still he was playing president.

I tend to agree with the comment to my post: that speech doesn't show a change of heart.

I don't applaud at Sen. McCain's applauding at the Tucson speech. To my view, as I often repeated in this blog, the cleavage that divides Americans is deeper than he seems to suggest. Sweet pacifying words avail to nothing if they don't go with some account of what divides, and possibly with a hint of what can heal the division. Or better, they amount in the end to no more than an electoral devise.

Our Elected King: being a reply to the HP with regard to the Tucson speech

2011-01-18T13:43:00.003+01:00

The President of the United States is essentially an elected monarch.

This is true whether one considers the powers of his office, or the symbolic role the office-holder is called to play as the efficacious sign of national unity.

Let these two aspects of consideration correspond roughly and respectively to the tasks of governing and reigning.

NB, I say, "roughly," for a reason: sometimes, official presidential authority is used to reign, as when the POTUS issues a Thanksgiving Day proclamation; at other times, such as the Coal Strike of 1902, when Theodore Roosevelt used the prestige of the office to bring what had become an ungovernable situation back under control, the powerful symbolism attached to or inherent in the office of POTUS is used to govern.

In other words: when you have a monarchy, elected or otherwise, and not a diarchy, the king (call him the POTUS) will sometimes govern by reigning and sometimes he will reign by governing.

President Obama was reigning in Tucson as the nation's "mourner-in-chief" - and he acquitted himself admirably.

He was also, and contemporaneously, governing.

Our nation is now like a ship, the crew of which is on the verge of mutiny: the officers (Congress) are incompetent at best, venal at worst; the crew is divided over whether to trust the captain, whose past service is storied, but whose recent performance has been aloof, retiring, and when present, heavy-handed.

The POTUS seized a moment of national shock and suffering, and called the crew to order, not by scolding, not by blaming, but by reminding them of their past glories, and calling on them - on us - to believe ourselves yet capable of that authentic national greatness, which is grounded in prudent regard for basic human goodness.

Senator McCain put the matter thusly:

The president appropriately disputed the injurious suggestion that some participants in our political debates were responsible for a depraved man's inhumanity. He asked us all to conduct ourselves in those debates in a manner that would not disillusion an innocent child's hopeful patriotism. I agree wholeheartedly with these sentiments. We should respect the sincerity of the convictions that enliven our debates but also the mutual purpose that we and all preceding generations of Americans serve: a better country; stronger, more prosperous and just than the one we inherited.

We Americans have different opinions on how best to serve that noble purpose. We need not pretend otherwise or be timid in our advocacy of the means we believe will achieve it. But we should be mindful as we argue about our differences that so much more unites than divides us. We should also note that our differences, when compared with those in many, if not most, other countries, are smaller than we sometimes imagine them to be.

I disagree with many of the president's policies, but I believe he is a patriot sincerely intent on using his time in office to advance our country's cause. I reject accusations that his policies and beliefs make him unworthy to lead America or opposed to its founding ideals. And I reject accusations that Americans who vigorously oppose his policies are less intelligent, compassionate or just than those who support them.

In other words, POTUS was reminding the nation of (even as he wrestled with) a profoundly patriotic and quintessentially American idea: that America (the conceptual space that informs our nationhood) is at once good, and in its embodiment, not (yet) good enough - not (yet) as good as it should be - so he was calling us to the kind of moral improvement in which the possibility of America is proved.

LD

The Tucson speech

2011-01-16T23:22:00.002+01:00

Ok, I perceive a certain approving consensus, right and left, about Obama's Tucson speech. Also the LD didn't hesitate to say that it was great, really presidential, he even perceived in it a touch of sincerity.

And though, I am diffident. I'll try to explain you why.

There was an old book by Michael Novak entitled "choosing our king". That's what the President of the United States is: an elected king. My diffidence comes from here.

In England it affirmed itself since the late eighteenth century a sort of diarchy between king and prime minister: the first reigns but doesn't govern, the second governs but doesn't reign. In spite of the fact that monarchy has disappeared almost everywhere else in Europe, something of the kind still holds true. In Italy, for example, after the defeat in WWII the king was substituted by a president, about whom, though, it can be said the same it is said of the king: he reigns but doesn't govern.

Not so in the US, where the president reigns and governs.

The present POTUS was great during the electoral campaign, making inspiring speeches, with people swooning of excitement. Those speeches were all about what would mean his reigning. Almost not a word about his governing, which actually turned disastrous. So on the whole also his reining failed: he had promised as a king to unite, once in govern he actually divided. And all those great speeches appeared to be mere electoral mockery.

We have now this new great speech. Is it a presidential speech? Or isn't it just an electoral speech in view of the second mandate, to regain the consensus that his disastrous governing made him lose?

More on hate words and inflammatory rhetoric

2011-01-12T01:44:00.002+01:00

I'm afraid that my previous post wasn't very clear, so I'll try to say what I meant in a more direct way.

The establishment – in the academic world, the media, finance and politics – has lost touch with the people. Let's remember, for example, the scorning words of the presidential candidate Obama about those back country folks holding to their religion and their guns to fight their sense of insecurity. He presented himself as the bearer of new tidings, but actually he was the topmost exponent of that establishment. So he paid lip service to religion, and even presented himself as a kind of savior of the country… from whom? Well, it is easy, from itself.

What does the establishment hold against the people? Well, Obama said it: not to give up guns and religion.

And why should they? It could be asked. Guns are dangerous, you could say, but religion? Why does it offend the establishment? Tough question, hard to answer.

Let me try to do it by recalling the peculiarity of American experience compared to Europe.

The United States of America were formed by affirming the primacy of society over against the state, which had taken in Europe a sovereign character. This implied the power of the state to make laws, as an absolute power, not tied to any superior sense of justice and the law; not tied, most of all, to ancient customs grounded on Christian religion. Getting rid of this had been in Europe the way for the new bourgeois establishment to supersede the old monarchical and aristocratic one, which had rather made of religion an instrumentum regni. Not so in America, where religion was free from the state, so that Protestant Catholic and Jews all contributed to the making of "the American way of life" as a kind of civil religion (as used to say an old professor of mine: Will Herberg).

Since many decades, though, a europeanizing new establishment has grown in America, tending, as in Europe, to dissolve religious ties to subordinate society to the state: an establishment that considered itself enlightened, because it substituted to the alleged divisiveness coming from differences of religion, culture, race and sex, the equality of all people (no longer, mind me, men and women) before the law made by the state. Substituting the God of the old religion, this becomes then the great equalizer.

So, holding to their equality in God, and just in God, the people offend the establishment, as being ungrateful for all the benefices it brought to them.

Ok, you could legitimately ask, what does all this have to do with what you spoke about in the previous post?

Well, religion contributed to keep people passably virtuous, held families together, made for good neighborhood, etcetera. Sure, there has been in America the problem of slavery, with its aftermath of racial discrimination. But also this seemed to be on the way to be solved, in a religious way, thanks to leaders like the reverend Martin Luther King.

Making religion irrelevant, the establishment followed another way: exclusively that of law. Or of a law like etiquette that prohibited the use of certain words. To the point of wanting to expurgate classics. And it doesn't matter that Mark Twain, while using the word nigger, showed niggers to be people just as the whites!

Not teaching virtue, but erasing words from the vocabulary is for the establishment, self styled liberal, the way to keep people good.

This has made on the opposite side the word liberal to become itself a slandering one. That's why, as I said, I'd rather not use it. Even though I consider the establishment I am speaking about tyrannical. Also because it kills, with other virtues, that which makes people capable of rational conversation.

Instead of conversation, such an establishment only knows outrage, before whatever popular use of language it disapproves, or it finds convenient to disapprove.

If I said that all liberals should be shot, it is a metaphoric hyperbole. If someone else singled them out through the sight of a rifle, again it is a metaphor for wanting them kicked out of office, and as such all sane people take it.

Should we then think that banning words and metaphors would save us from prejudice and crazies? I don't believe it.

Besides, let the man without sins throw the first stone. I mean, liberals have not refrained from slandering conservatives, or abstained from bellicose metaphors.

Hate words and inflammatory rhetoric

2011-01-11T01:06:00.002+01:00

Two news of a quite different kind keep on whirling together in my mind:

of a new edition of Huckleberry Finn expurgated of the word nigger;

of the shooting in Tucson, where Rep. Gabrielle Gifford got a bullet in the head and six other people died.

To bring them forward so naked, it's like playing one of those quiz games in which, given two words, one has to guess what they have in common.

Well, I'll give you the answer: a question of elocution.

The forced avoidance of hate or despise words investing one of the masterpieces of American literature seems to come from the same source that unleashed a squabble about inflammatory rhetoric in political disputes: the "liberal" left, I'd say, if I weren't afraid of falling into using that same kind of branding words, expressing political animosity.

If I called them so, someone might think that I want all of them liberals shot. I actually advocated some times in playful conversations with friends the Renaissance notion of tyrannicide, which even some theologians considered at the time legitimate, even though, I argued, today it would be quite hard to practice because it would involve the mass killing of university professors, journalists, etcetera, all of the people making up in Europe as well as in America the dominant educated class: too many, should I have said it publicly, to fear that my words could be taken on face value.

To speak of a mass tyrannicide was just a kind of joke to point out the harshness of a situation, in which we appear to have a hard time to find common grounds of conversation. Which would be what I rather do, instead of calling names.

Some commentators have blamed inflammatory rhetoric for the Tucson shooting. Appearing to want to sedate the tone of political squabbling. Actually keeping it alive. Providing further reason to argue.

All that matters is to ban the public use of hate and despise words, seems to suggest the Huckleberry case; and banning in the same way inflammatory rhetoric.

The hope appears to be that in such a way people would be conditioned into avoiding hatred and political warfare; but I am afraid, instead, that this would result in the institution of a police state, in charge of having that avoidance respected.

Where conversations ends, tyranny is around the corner, ready to set in.

Epiphany

2011-01-05T10:04:00.001+01:00

I'd like to start the new year on a positive mode, and, in order to do it, I recollect that it just was Christmas and soon it will be Epiphany.

Nice promising word epiphany: the showing forth, sensory manifestation of something glorious, an event of beauty that leaves you ecstatic.

Thing for theologians, you will say, people of faith.

Nay, thing for everybody, without which the world becomes a rather sad place.

Which lover hasn't experienced a moment of contemplative looking at the beloved, in full marvel for the sheer grace of his or hers existence? A moment, let's say, of ecstasy, being out of oneself before a manifestation – again an epiphany – of another, better world?

I correct myself, it isn't the vision of another world, but of this very world we live in, transfigured in the full light of its perfection, showing forth in the person of the beloved. Who ceases to be just that bodily individual. Forgetting ourselves, in that woman we see all women, in that man all men, in that child all children.

A new born baby can draw from us a smile or even a laughter of joy, because of the renewal of life that shows in him: in two words, life eternal.

I think there isn't anybody who has never experienced such a moment of joy. Even if he doesn't consciously remember it. Its total lack would make him, I suspect, quite deranged.

Ok, after Epiphany we get back to the ordinary, imperfect world. In which love can end, and the once beloved person become estranged from us.

So we get back to the topics of human contrasts to which the LD and I referred in the last posts. With regard to which the LD expressed the suspicion of a cultural derangement afflicting our world. I agree, such is the effect of the lack of recognition of epiphany. But about this in another post.

To be positive for now, let's notice that without the recollection of love we couldn't even lament its absence.

Another New Year's Wish (being something of a reply to the HP)

2011-01-02T08:15:00.004+01:00

When Whoopie Goldberg and Bill O'Reilly are our cultural standard-bearers; when the POTUS takes pandering to its apotheosis in positively Orwellian revision; when, to paraphrase Eric Voegelin, pneumopathological delusion trumps reality and realism (he means both metaphysical and the political) is insanity, then what hope is there for civilization?

Thankfully, WG and BO'R are not our cultural standard-bearers, and King Barack must stand for re-election.

Still, the problem you raise is, as you say, a "mighty" one. You will recall this entry of mine, in which I treat of Mosques and Men?

I object to the use of terms like "Islamist" and "Muslim extremist" on the grounds that they are ill-informed, chauvinistic, and (in the case of "extremist") dangerously misapplied (dangerous, that is - does it not go without saying? - to language). Words have no meaning if reading the Qur'an and taking what it has to say seriously makes one an extremist.

The Islamist is one who would see the absolute rule of Shari'a, and the disintegration of infidel political modes and orders. This is what Qur'an calls for explicitly. Anyone, who submits to its dictates as God's perfect revelation, which is to say, any Muslim, is bound to work toward precisely such ends. So, Islamist is a critically useless neologism.

Ave crux, spes unica!

A New Year’s wish

2011-01-02T00:14:00.001+01:00

It happened again. In New year's Eve 21 Christians were killed in Egypt by… whom:

Radical Muslims, or simply Muslims?

Mighty question, which would require an accurate, i.e., lengthy answer – for which I hope to find time.

For now I just want to express a wish for the New Year: that the MSM will start to take notice of this regular dripping of Christian blood in Islamic countries, with deaths counting now by the thousands.

Perhaps then POTUS will be more careful in praising the (null) Islamic contribution to America.

And Whoopie Goldberg won't get up angry and walk out on Bill O'Reilly because he dared to express doubts about the peacefulness of Muslims. If anything, she could have stayed to show him wrong.

At Christmas with an eye toward Easter

2010-12-29T01:37:00.001+01:00

At Christmas, we celebrate the birth of a baby, born, as everybody, do die. But, differently from everybody else, with him going toward death was thoroughly a gift of love.

Some time ago, in a class where I was teaching, I asked this question: is it possible to love without dying? Useless to say that my students were rather baffled. Why, if I die, how can I ever love? was the question stamped in all their eyes, that someone also tried to voice.

No, I stated, it's not possible. And I so explained myself:

Let's think about it, what do we really know about death? Or, for that matter, about birth. Should I say nothing? We actually don't remember our birth, so we have no direct experience and knowledge of what it is to be born. On the other side, we can't in any way imagine our death. However hard we try, "I" am always there imagining someone like "me" dead.

This disqualifies all those who think themselves rational by stating that after death there isn't anything. How do they know? I ask. But this is not the point I wanted to make.

The point is that death is like what mathematicians call an unknown. And though, we know that death is there in our future. This means that death is the future as unknown.

Ok, that is the point of your observation about birth and death. So what?

Think about it: any time we meet somebody new, we actually don't know what there is in store for us. How much more when we enter into a love relationship, dealing with persons in whom we came to see our good, with the hope that the same would be with them toward us. We can't know it, if we don't declare ourselves, but we can't be sure of what the answer would be. We have to face the unknown. Our life is at stake, and we might be afraid.

Now, back to that baby who was born to make of his life a gift of love. The witness of the Church, in an uninterrupted tradition of love, is that because of it the life he gave was not hold from him, but he received it back in its fullness.

With the Christmas celebrations, therefore, already eyeing toward Easter, we are told: don't be afraid to love. Life is stronger than death.

Slaughtering Christians

2010-12-27T01:32:00.001+01:00

At the Angelus, the Pope expressed his sorrow for the persecution of Christians throughout the world.

One of the Italian TV news granted some space to his speech, giving for example as evidence the slaughtering of 30 something Christians in Nigeria, reported as the nth incident of an intertribal conflict, the same that few years ago brought to the killing of 400 Christians.

This way the importance of the religious factor was belittled, not to say made irrelevant: it would be an epiphenomenon of the ethnic factor.

I ask, though, to the author of that report: if the religious factor is of no real import, why is it that over again the killing is done by Muslims tribesmen and not vice versa by Christian ones; or that it isn't at least a fifty-fifty?

I could have addressed the same question to the many sympathizers amidst the Western intelligentsia for the Muslim cause: why do they avoid taking into account such simple facts?

A second Advent thought

2010-12-20T01:40:00.002+01:00

It's time to ask ourselves: what is Christmas?

The answer is easy: Noel, i.e. a birthday.

Whose birthday? Well, the answer to this is a bit more complex: one man's and everybody's.

I'll try to explain what I mean.

What do we do at birthdays? Here it is easy again: we throw a party and bring gifts to the person whose birth day it is. Why? To say that we are glad that he or she was born. With the birth, we celebrate the joy it brought into our lives. No matter how much we care for that person, that remains ideally the truth.

Is that all? I could be asked. At Christmas we exchange gifts: does that mean that we don't do anything more than to celebrate each other's birth?

No, we do more, for the very fact that we do it in that same day, in spite of the fact that it isn't our birthday.

Many people today might think that it is just a convention, tied to old beliefs of our society that they don't hold anymore, and don't care to know about.

It's a pity. Because if they did, they could learn something about human nature that they prefer to ignore: i.e., that conventions have a reason.

If we bring gifts to each other, it is because we have been graced with gifts before. That's why not all birthdays are equal. Think of what is in a large family the birthday of a grandparent. I remember my mother's and my mother in law's eightieth birthday: it was a great family celebration – like saying: thank to you we are all here, alive and loving each other.

In the life of a state some personage's birthday might be remembered and celebrated even after his death: just think of Washington birthday.

So, if we all exchange gifts in that same day we still call noel, even though it isn't actually our birthday, it is because we celebrate, by doing it, the very capacity of finding joy in each other's existence. And we celebrate with it, whether we acknowledge it or not, the birth of someone, the one to whom we owe this capacity, for which we give therefore thanks.

He is born anew anytime that we love our neighbors, engendering in each other the joy of life.

Now is the time of his coming, to sing, at Christmas, the new born king.

A little Advent thought

2010-12-08T18:50:00.002+01:00

When I want to talk about politics, I am pulled to talk about science. When I talk about science, I am pulled to talk about politics.

And, one way or another I always end by talking about theology.

Let's see why.

I was rather elated by the results of November 2 elections.

Of course, I could be said, you are a damn hothead conservative, with no understanding of the progressive agenda. In one word, you are democratophobic.

Well, I confess that I don't particularly like to days democrats. As so many other people. But do democrats ever stop asking why? See these interesting lines by a well known "conservative" author and commentator:

"I grew up in a Democratic household. The talk at the family dinner table in the early sixties, to the degree it touched on politics, concerned the minimum wage, 40-hour work week, overtime pay, civil rights, disability insurance, or bond money for school construction and teacher training. In other words, it was a sort of "level the playing field" to ensure equality of opportunity.

I don't recall discussions about the evils of American foreign policy, racial quotas, drug legalization, open borders and amnesty, the need for gay marriage, or abortion on demand. I do remember the national spokesmen whom we were supposed to admire — Pat Brown, Harry Truman, Hubert Humphrey — did not look or act like John Edwards or John Kerry.

Now one can argue that the seeds of the present Democratic desire for an imposed equality of result, embraced by a Howard Dean or Nancy Pelosi [not to speak, I add, of present POTUS], is but the logical evolution from the old Democratic square deal."

I say, definitely, no: there is no following from those old democrats to the new ones.

Why?

Because in the early sixties there was still a shared understanding of man's nature.

If this meaning of the word were known to my reader, I'd say that they all shared a "liberal" view of man, in the continental sense of the word, that, in stressing the primacy of the individual person, is of Christian origin.

Afterwards the current Anglo-American understanding of "liberalism", already strongly denounced by the blessed John Henry Newman during the Nineteenth Century, won the way: people are not for it individual persons, but just individuals of the homo sapiens sapiens species. It follows that whatever they otherwise think of themselves – we call it culture and religion – is nothing more than opinion, so that only the state can keep in check their individual or group egoisms.

Here we are at: opinion is opposed to science.

Assumed that we know what science is.

I was involved during the month of October, in a long spawn dialogue with another blogger, ended because at a certain point I dropped my arms in despair.

He claimed to be speaking for pure science, by making a primary appeal to biology and scientific method. I made the same claim, and my primary appeal went to mathematics and Einsteinian physics. By his way science leads to stark atheism, by my way it leads to see the world as an epiphany of God's glory.

So, who is right? Let's recognize it: what is science is a matter of opinion, not distinguishable therefore from culture and religion.

I know that people working in disciplines like biology as well as their sympathizers, holding a very definite opinion about what science is, will never grant it.

Neither do I think that opinion and science are the same thing, but, by qualifying as opinion the meaning of the word science, I ask to recognize that it is open to discussion.

Which leads me back to politics: i.e., to raise the question of what motivates people to hold the opinions they hold.

To clear things out, I have my good doubts that it could be our genes. In this case, given the difference of opinions concerning science, it should be proved the existence of a gene whose presence or absence would make us bend one way or another. But, should it be provable and proved the existence of such a genetic difference, it wouldn't prove anything, because it would remain to be argued why it is one bent or the other that deserves to be qualified as scientific. Neither it would work an appeal to evolution, to explain how we have become what we are by selecting certain ideas and rejecting others, because it doesn't overcome the fact that in this dispute nobody will accept to view himself, with the ideas he holds, as having been selected out rather than selected in. So we would be back to the starting point.

I look for it then in the cultural bias people show in connection with their sense of societal belonging. This means that I prefer to look at what people do, recurring in the evidence of all times and places, rather than letting some self declared scientist, with his naïve ideas about the ordinary life of men, instruct me about them.

We need a science of science, or, if you prefer, a political science. Conservatives might be naïve in the view they hold, but so are liberals, with all their apparent sophistication. I side with the first because their naïvité is richer than that of the others, whose sophistication consists in not allowing them to look at what people really do: their being always engaged in communication, for all kind of purposes, not last that of stating how things really are, so to instruct each other what to do about it

Science is the name for a claim, made for what one thinks to know. To grant this should enable us to dispute on the concept of science: otherwise there is no science but only the opposing claims, with each party convinced to be in the right while pitying the insipience of the other.

Old Aristotle indicated in the fourth century BC how to find the way out of such sterile opposition: like that, today, between conservatives, whose claim is in knowing the truth, and liberals, who thing there is no truth to be known.

To the skeptic – said Aristotle – I can't reply anything, as long as he remains in silence. But, if he just speaks, I can pin him down, finding him in contradiction with himself. Not so much because he says things that can't be true at once, but because what he says runs against what he does by saying it. Like in this classical example:

"The Cretan Epimenides said: all Cretans are liars." Question: true or false? If you say true, then it is false, if you say false, then it is true.

This means that the criterion for discussing claims is the logical consistency between what one says and what he does in the very act of saying it.

Of course, the skeptic has to speak. Unfortunately there are many ways of not speaking: not only by remaining silent, but also by the use made of language. The one made by today intellos strangely resembles such a contradictory speaking: more a sort of subtle violence on the listener than saying anything.

Funny business is logic, when it is applied to human affairs, like people talking to each other. But then it points to the way out of the dilemma: the truth to which I claim must be such, as in mathematics, to transcend you and me.

It must be theological.

Take all this as a little Advent thought.

Mary's Ultrasound

2010-11-14T08:57:00.003+01:00

Tip of the hat to Fr. Zuhlsdorf:

Mental and political sanity

2010-11-05T22:57:00.004+01:00

Well, I am bound to say that the result of elections makes me, as patriot of a certain Europe present in America, happy.

As a friend of mine from Scituate Mass. wrote me: "it was a good night for America – but here in Massachusetts the results were dismal – we remain a backwater of extreme liberalism – fortunately the rest of the country (excluding California) seem to be heading on the right track toward political sanity."

The only reservation which, in the face of any victory of the party I favor, leaves me with a somewhat sour mouth is: it was a party victory.

I ask myself: shall we ever be able to move toward an overcoming of the creeping civil war that plagues Europe and America? My friend speaks of "political sanity", and I agree with him. But what way do we have to define what "sanity " is?

In these days I have been reading and writing about the Grammar of Assent of the blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman. He indicates there a way toward an answer. Which can confirm us in our positions, with just the wish that the opposing party would take time to read him and to answer to what he says.

He distinguishes two kinds of assents we can give to statements: a notional one and a real one. Ha calls notional all kinds of assents which stay in the realm of generality, from simple acceptance of current opinions to scientific theories based on probability. Only real is the assent we give to the concrete, the individual instance that touches us intimately.

I remember, to illustrate what he means, an observation for an uncle of mine, great university professor of hydraulics. Speaking of another nephew of his, also professor in the same field, he said of him as of his generation of scientists: "They want to be scientific, and to study rivers build mathematical models based on statistics (i.e., on probability), expecting them to behave accordingly, feeling almost outraged if rivers dare not to conform to what they say. No, if you want to know about rivers, you must have spent many an hour with your feet in them."

Here you have it: mental sanity is not to take one's models for reality. The way to reach a firm, certain understanding of reality, is to avoid confusing them: to recognize that ordinary knowledge, more or less tamed in science, works as a law action, according to the logic of circumstantial evidence. Each item of evidence, however probable, is incapable of engendering certainty by itself. But if all evidence points consistently in the same direction, one can finally come to a sentence of how things are in the concrete case to be judged, being sure of it.

Taking one's models for reality means at the same time to misrepresent to oneself what one is really assenting to: i.e., the political motivations behind the preference for those models. Recognizing them is the first step toward political sanity.

Which is my great wish for the future. My daily prayer.

A cry of liberation

2010-10-29T00:16:00.002+01:00

I eagerly follow what is going on in the States from my Roman home place – the place, I mean, where is my home, but where I don't feel entirely at home. I side, in fact, with those people in the States who use the name Europe in a derogatory fashion, to mean a lost land. Luckily, beyond the Tiber river from where I stay, there is a man in white who gives me hope.

I follow, then, American things on internet, and on a little Italian opinion newspaper, Il Foglio, run by a man married to an Italian-American women, used to spend at least part of the year in New York. He had a very good correspondent there, capable of speaking of American things as from inside, but unfortunately he recently left, having received a better offer from another newspaper. His place has been taken from another guy whom I don't like: however well informed, he sounds like an external observer, in particular as an European observer, incapable as such of grasping what is peculiarly American.

I take as example an article published yesterday, by the title (I translate) "Clash of elites – the fake plain folks of Tea Party versus Obama the snob". Nothing wrong with it, save the general tone. Wherefrom did he get this image of the Tea Party folks as plain countrymen in flannel shirts over against the slick and haughty city men in Washington? Perhaps from an old movie with Gary Cooper, Cowboy and the lady?

It wasn't so that an American friend of mine spoke about them, describing them rather as "middle class, educated, concerned people". Things don't change if some of them are rich people, in the rank of hundreds of millions.

Does this make them an elite opposed to another elite? Even if it were so, it's not this that counts. What counts (I said it already, but repetita iuvant) is that we have here two ideas of America in competition. And, with them, two ideas of Europe.

One is that of the official Europe of today, utterly liberal, with no other notion of human relations than the one of which unsurpassed teacher remains Thomas Hobbes, who thought and taught that only the State, through the king as in his time, or through elected representatives as today, can restrain individual egoism, making norms for people to obey – to which we should add today its providing for the redistribution of riches. This Europe is no less hobbesian for its preoccupation of guaranteeing to all individuals the freest possible range for their whim (I don't say the greatest "freedom" or "liberty", which are too noble words). It's the Europe the present administration and Congress are trying to make the American people swallow.

There is though also the other Europe, that today seems to find its strongest representation in the America that refuses the europeanizing of the present administration. Hair of the Christian tradition, it knows that there is an inherent rule of justice in human relations, and it is therefore made of people who think to have no need for Government and Congress to teach them how to behave, people who actually see in them the responsibility for unleashing the egoism of human rights without duties that after they want to keep in check by correcting the economic evils of capitalism.

What the Italian observer does not notice is the appeal from the Tea Party folks to the Constitution, in which they see sanctioned their right to be left alone by Government and Congress. To pay less taxes, be free to enterprise and, why not, make money, is certainly a large part of their demand, but it is not the whole thing. To understand it, it is necessary to look at the name they gave themselves, taken from the first action of American rebellion to the British oppressor.

I might be wrong in my interpretation of what is now happening in America, but whatever the case be I see in it something archetypical: a cry of liberation for Europe.