Unpolitical political reflections

A lot of things I am brooding about, requiring to be spoken about all at once, but hard to be kept within the bounds of a post.

Things that happen. Europe in shambles. The failing American leadership at home and abroad.

Here it is a good summary of the European  crisis by an Italian journalist:

Crises have this of grand and terrible: unveil simulacra, rags flying all over. In few month this one dissolved the illusion of a unique money without government, without politics, without a common soul. All the elites appear worn out and peoples come back on the scene. With their memory and passion, their diffidence and grudge. Cultural and anthropological prejudices came back, and with them hatred. Come back national characters, to which global economy and the universal drive to consumption didn’t make a scratch.

 

Vainly POTUS complains for the repercussions the European crisis can have on American recovery (which one?), and urges European leaders to put their sheets together, so to say. Funny: the European crisis is undoubtedly endogenous, due to a common currency created without adequate institutional support in the ECB; but it was triggered from the United States, and it can't be said, in all honesty, that sheets there have been properly put together.

Out of metaphor, as far as the economy goes, POTUS doesn’t seems to know better than the European leaders. Moreover, he was elected as the harbinger of new hope, but it looks like he forgot that you can’t have hope without faith (and charity). So, once in office, he behaved like a father who knows best and is irritated when the children question his doings. Let the grownups work, he seemed to say, and have faith that they know what is good for you, and what to do about it. But people are not children, and, even with children in their process of growing up, it isn’t this the way that faith functions. It rather functions by inspiring people in knowing what is good by themselves, and empowering them to act on their own. It’s such an empowering that makes us speak of leadership.

*****

There are, besides, books I’m reading, somehow bearing on what happens.

It has been sitting in my shelves for decades a book by the famous German writer Thomas Mann, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, written in the last years of the First World War. I hadn’t picked it up again since I bought it and made a cursory reading of it. Not much remained in me from this reading, but when I was recently invited to speak about the “crisis of civilization”, I remembered it made a distinction between “civilization” and “culture”. So I took it, I dusted it, and read it again. And I was amazed by what I found.

Mann defended in that book the cause of Germany, over against other German writers and publicists who sided for France and England. It is ironic that the Germany of which Mann made the apology was at the end defeated with the help of Woodrow Wilson’s America, while later that same internal opposition which he lamented was to reproduce itself just the same precisely in America. A lot has happened in the meantime, circumstances have somewhat changed, but it remains the same opposition of two Europes, by now more evident in the USA than in the EU, with artists writers and publicists – today we should add TV and movie stars – blaming their country for all kind of evils, doing harm to an innocent  world. Mann called them literati of civilization

Amazing how the reasons of that old war in Mann’s account are the same of the angry partisanship that pervades our society, to the point (as I have often stressed in my posts) of a creeping civil war. Unvarying is the character of the parties involved, today like then. Mann put in evidence a different attitude toward the humanity common to all people. The literati of civilization criticize the traditional culture of their country for its discriminations, opposing to it an immediate claim of universal humanity to be implemented by political action: if people left to themselves tend to discriminate, so goes their reasoning, their human equality should be enforced by law. On the other side the same claim of universality is not immediate, but mediated by the appeal to that very culture in which the equal dignity of all men was affirmed.

Do I need to say on which side I stand, because true to the human condition? Without a cultural inheritance, we wouldn’t know how to discriminate what is equal and in what, as well as what is different and in what. Discriminating by itself is not a bad thing, it’s nothing else than judgment, the only difficulty being how to judge right. Indiscriminately opposing discrimination engenders a reign of confusion: tyrannically enhanced by the way of laws that confuse equality and justice, to ensure equality among… can I say men, or should I say people?

Another book I am reading came here to the fore as a possible description of the present situation: the Apokalypse of John. But on this I won’t add more.

*****

At risk of sounding presumptuous, I think that our Western world, so called, is collapsing under utter intellectual confusion. Things that should be unifying – religion, law, science – are divisive, divided in themselves and set one against the other. Should I make a total description of the situation? Even this would fall under the effect of division. Books are there like on the stands of a super bookstore, to be picked up at will by different people to appeal to them in their claims. They make so different sets of “scriptures”, which some maintain as such, others mention just as harbingers of evidences.

The result? The vanishing of any public understanding of human affairs for which it could be claimed the name of science. Thus, because of this lack of a scientific understanding of things human, we are even incapable of agreement on what is that makes really “scientific” those human affairs that are the disciplines undoubtedly accredited as such, i.e. physics chemistry and biology.

An example? Well, the easiest one is that of evolution, which some oppose on the basis of the traditional creation doctrine drawn from the Bible, while for others it doesn’t even seem in need of defending. So if one – like myself – asks the latter for demonstrations of how evolution explains the present state of things, risks to obtain a spurning answer, and be branded as a backward denier of the scientific progress brought about by Darwin and his neo-Darwinian followers, with their books.

I could multiply the examples, so to cover the whole of the contemporary cultural positions in their confusion. But perhaps I can do without it, and limit myself to the core problem I recognize in that one example, as representative of the general question afflicting us: to fill the gap between our present subjective experience and the objective discourses we make to account for it, i.e. the gap between what we call “physical anthropology” and “cultural anthropology”. The latter speaks about men’s experience of coming to light and being educated in society; the first of men as biological organisms, identified as such independently from any social belonging. The theory of evolution should fill this gap, by accounting for how men passed from one state (called of “nature”) to the other (of “society” or “culture”). But it does no more than state what we knew already, that somehow it happened. That’s why I think that it is utterly unscientific – by whatever criterion of science we take.  

To say it bluntly, evolutionism hasn’t represented an evolution from myth to science, but, if anything, a return from science to myth. I know well that by saying so I have alienated possible readers who think otherwise, but, if they have counterarguments to propose, I am, however skeptical, available to listen to their reasons. I am afraid though that they wouldn’t be available in the same way, and would simply scorn me for refusing to recognize established scientific evidence: which is a way not to take into consideration the possibility that it might not be such. Because of this I speak of a return to myth. Like with the myths of old (otherwise a very respectable thing), a story is told to account for “us”, in the way “we” are today: in Mann’s words, all literati of civilization.

The point of contention remains hidden: i.e. the authority claimed in the name of “scriptures”, and by which “scriptures” themselves are inspired, being left out of reflection. The result is that the decision among different authorities is not reached through civil discourse, but it is left to the voting mechanism. By which are expressed preferences, variously determined by a rhetoric of an essentially sentimental appeal.

Funny, if we think that the idea of science was introduced by Plato precisely by submitting to a rational discrimination the different opinions on the right way of living. 

HP

Choosing a king: science and politics

Well, it looks like the challenger for November to the incumbent president is pretty much decided. He can be found more or less exciting, but now this is irrelevant. I have another question for you, and whoever wants may venture an answer.

Are there scientific reasons for wishing the election as president of a candidate instead of another?

What the heck are you talking about? you may ask. What has the election of a president to do with science?

Should I say everything? Ok, perhaps “everything” is too much. There are interests at stake, concrete worries of people, like the state of the economy, by which it depends having work, with all that follows: salary, home, a decent life to live, in short the “pursuit of happiness”. Even ancient Aristotle recognized that it’s hard, as a matter of fact, to pursue the good life, fully consonant to a complete man (like himself, I might say, or his teacher Plato, devoted to theory, the fulfilling contemplation of the order of things, in which one might forget himself), rather it is impossible if one has to worry about the chores of life. Over against an aristocratic ethos, as this, that disdained busying oneself in work, today it might be enough for us having work, such, though, to leave us time free from worries: like the Christian Sunday.

I see that I am letting myself be taken astray by the thread of discourse. Back to the point, then. The practical matters which are of president’s concern, do not exhaust who he is. The president is also a representative figure: as Michael Novak aptly said, a chosen king. Chosen, because he’s able to represent something people recognize themselves in. But representation may be effective for some, and fail for others. Here politics takes me to epistemology: theory of knowledge, which, when it appears to us well grounded, we consider deserving the Latin name for what is indeed knowing, i.e. scientia.

Why so?

Because someone, say a president (chosen king), represents people in something else. Should we say, not just their interests, but the knowledgeable understanding of the nature of things they may think (feel?) theirs?

Ok, let’s talk about epistemology then.

I wish it were possible. But we need to take it in an roundabout way. We can’t rush to epistemology. See how people take a stance on science and an usually corresponding stance on politics. How come?

Oh, come on. You must be kidding us. Before you say one thing, and next moment you say the opposite. You had almost convinced us: we must go from politics to epistemology. We may grant it: after all, what else do we have to go about but science? And now you turn things around, asking to look at politics first. Either you don’t know what you are talking about, or you want to play some trick on us.

No trick. Just an invitation to look at the way the epistemological question of science plays in politics.

Speaking of this, I’d like to recollect that when I came for a doctorate to the United States in 1971, and stayed there for a few years feigning myself as a sort of field anthropologist, I was hit by the difference in American politics with respect to Italy, my home country, or, let’s say more generally, to Europe. It still seemed then, at least to my at the time rather naïve eye, that political discussions in the States turned primarily around those practical matters and morality. Nothing like what we used to call “political” at home: meaning something that involved the overall understanding of the nature of society. One could translate that impression, by saying that politics in the States appeared to me much less ideological than at home. Or perhaps the fact is that ideology took a different garb. 

However it was then, I should add now that the difference has vanished.

Some authors have indulged in saying that we had in the meantime the “end of ideology”, but it is more right to say that the garb of ideology was changed by what happened in the last forty years along similar lines: on both sides of the Atlantic, it became a matter of conforming or not conforming to that funny kind of moral stance which has been called, starting from the States, political correctness. What this is, could be briefly described as the assumption of a biological and psychological standard, presumed scientific, in assessing human affairs, with the exclusion of everything that smacks of cultural (or, worse, religious), presumed non scientific. But, are we speaking here of science, or of ideology?

Here you are! This is because you promised not to play tricks! And what is it that you are doing, with that presumed of yours? We were to talk about science and politics, but it looks like that you want to smuggle back in religion.

No, I can’t smuggle on you something I don’t know what it is; or, to be plain about it, of which I think that simply doesn’t exist. But you are right, by saying so I am playing some kind of trick, the one represented by the quotation marks with which “religion” is here to be taken, to mean that we so currently call something we’d like to keep separate from “science”, and thus from “politics”. Well, I know nothing of the kind. I only know different people who claim to have a knowledgeable understanding of the world, in the name of which they claim to be authorized to govern the world. Call advancing this second claim politics, then you have that it is advanced through the first, you may call it a claim to science. Here you have what is at stake in the pro o con the political correctness so called, in America as well as in Europe.

The previous POTUS, George W. Bush, was loathed by the American intelligentsia, made of university professors, main stream media operators, Hollywood actors, etc.. By the time of the end of his second mandate, his popularity was measured by polls down to a scanty 30% or thereabout, being charged for all the dissatisfaction that the course of events (internal and foreign) was creating in the country. That’s why the son of an American caucasian woman and of a Kenya man was hailed by many as a kind of savior, come to free the country from the oppressive Bush atmosphere. But actually it wasn’t what he did that made Bush loathsome to them.

Conservative commentators have always lamented the double standard of the left in assessing facts, e.g. actions by man in power. Actually, there might be some reasons for assessing differently the same acts: after all, their meaning depends on the circumstances (let’s think, now days, of a caress given to a child). The trouble is, though, that such difference is passed under silence, which justifies scathing remarks as these of Victor Davies Hanson:

“In my dumber days, between 2001-2008, I used to wonder why the Left relentlessly hammered the war on terror (e.g., renditions, tribunals, predators, preventative detention, Patriot Act, intercepts, wiretaps, Guantanamo Bay) when these measures had not only proven quite useful in preventing another 9/11-like attack, but had been sanctioned by both the Congress and the courts. In those ancient times, I was not as cynical as I am now. So I assumed that Harold Koh and MoveOn.org, though mistaken, were worried about civil liberties, or measures that they felt were both illegal and without utility. But, of course, the Obama (who attacked each and every element of the war on terror as a legislator and senator) Left never had any principled objection at all. Instead, whatever Bush was for, they were in Pavlovian fashion against. I can say that without a charge of cynicism, because after January 2009, Obama embraced or expanded every Bush-Cheney protocol that he inherited. In response, the anti-war Left simply kept silent, or indeed vanished, or went to work extending the anti-terrorism agenda. Guantanamo Bay, in other words, was a national sin until the mid-morning of January 20, 2009.”

Those actions were denounced as evil because done by Bush. Why? is my question. To which I expect an answer that, in whatever fashion, would essentially mean this: Bush wasn’t one of us.

You see? You are biased. I also expect to be told. You take sides with conservatives. No, I reply; or yes, if you like, but for a reason: that I want a reason given for the difference of assessment.

Who is then the “us” who resounded to me as excluding Bush from their rank? This question takes us back to the original question: the capability of giving reasons for whatever it is stated should be the mark of what we call “science”. Instead of reasons, though, if I ask what is science, I receive replies that take the answer for granted; like: “science” is what scientists do, and it excludes any God talk, which belongs to “religion”.

Really? I say. Then the great Isaac Newton wasn’t a scientist.

Of course not! We mean, of course he was a scientist, of the greatest. It’s is enough to keep distinct in his work science and religion, as we do.

There is the point. We should judge a president by his capability of representing a knowledgeable understanding of the world. This in turn is to be judged, by giving reasons. But these cannot consist in appealing to the current distinctions – of science, religion, culture, etcetera. Taken for granted, they become no more than factors of identification, defining the “us” to which one has to belong to be politically correct.

I know that with this I haven’t said much about what is science. But perhaps I have suggested that, whatever it is, it cannot be an affirmation of unreasoned tribal superiority. Whichever tribe has its knowledgeable understanding of the world – call it, if you like, culture and religion – and science, to be such, cannot explain it away, without accounting for the experience anywhere so represented, lest it becomes itself a tribal manifestation. 

You may surmize, however, which party on the public scene I judge less tribal.

 

HP

A president against the constitution?

I was planning to comment on the two excerpts from Pope Benedict’s Mexican and Cuban homilies, when I run into a piece of news that made me jump.

Some Mr. President must be quite desperate to belie the whole Constitution of the United States. Perhaps because he is afraid that he already did it. I read in fact that Barack Obama made a scathing remark against the possibility that a “non elected group” of people might revoke a law legitimately made and voted by a solid majority of the Congress “democratically elected”.

It looks like that he was thus expressing his worry about the possible destiny of his much debated Obamacare. Or was he warning the Supreme Court from erasing it?

However we interpret it, this remark shows how little such Mr. President understands the ground of the USA constitution as defined by the Constitution.

The only excuse for him is that the same mistake is widespread: the belief that democracy essentially consists in determining governance by way of elections. Well, elections are undoubtedly important to decide who in turn enjoys the favor of the majority, to govern and make laws. But it isn’t enough the rule of the majority to make democracy – if we want to keep to the name an acceptable meaning!

What is needed is the rule of law: a law that no majority can make or change. That’s why sovereign is the Supreme Court, the non elected Justices in charge of reviewing the laws the Congress makes. Neither it is them, however, who by their decisions make the law: above them is the Constitution, before the Constitution the Declaration of Independence, and still before this a tradition of natural law that informed it.

This takes me back to the excerpts from Pope Benedict’s homilies I wanted to comment upon.

The freedom of which Benedict spoke in Cuba is now at danger: in America, as well as in Europe, where it might be already gone.

In Europe we are playing ostrich, and hide our head under the sand, feigning that religion does not concern the public space. The sand I speak of is that of willful ignorance, not wanting to know the facts of history, which show that religion always defined the public space, so that people recognized themselves as true men by belonging to a certain kingdom. Only a King who declared that his kingdom was not of this world, made them free to recognize their same humanity beyond all borders.

By choosing to ignore that King, we tend to idolatrize the kingdom that, literally, de-fines our humanity: call it, if you like, EU, or USA – if these were to be plied to the desires of the intellectual class that made the President. For all its pretence to be utterly open to anybody, whichever his/hers religion and culture and sexual preferences, it fails to understand anybody who declares that such things do actually make a difference with regard to the recognition of a common humanity. So, we could even have laws made (against, say, “omophobia” or “islamophobia”, or deciding what is good for you) to silence people who don’t agree with the undifferentiated view of man held as normative for democracy.

HP

Benedict XVI in Mexico and Cuba

I’d like to relate these two passages, the first from the homily Pope Benedict gave in Mexico, the second from the one in Cuba:

Dear brothers and sisters, by coming here I have been able to visit the monument to Christ the King situated on top of the Cubilete. My venerable predecessor, Blessed Pope John Paul II, although he ardently desired to do so, was unable on his several journeys to this beloved land to visit this site of such significance for the faith of the Mexican people. I am sure that in heaven he is happy that the Lord has granted me the grace to be here with you and that he has blessed the millions of Mexicans who have venerated his relics in every corner of the country. This monument represents Christ the King. But his crowns, one of a sovereign, the other of thorns, indicate that his royal status does not correspond to how it has been or is understood by many. His kingdom does not stand on the power of his armies subduing others through force or violence. It rests on a higher power than wins over hearts: the love of God that he brought into the world with his sacrifice and the truth to which he bore witness. This is his sovereignty which no one can take from him and which no one should forget. Hence it is right that this shrine should be above all a place of pilgrimage, of fervent prayer, of conversion, of reconciliation, of the search for truth and the acceptance of grace. We ask Christ, to reign in our hearts, making them pure, docile, filled with hope and courageous in humility.

Furthermore, the truth which stands above humanity is an unavoidable condition for attaining freedom, since in it we discover the foundation of an ethics on which all can converge and which contains clear and precise indications concerning life and death, duties and rights, marriage, family and society, in short, regarding the inviolable dignity of the human person. This ethical patrimony can bring together different cultures, peoples and religions, authorities and citizens, citizens among themselves, and believers in Christ and non-believers.

Is it clear enough why I relate them? If not, perhaps a look at our last posts should do.

HD

The latest from the editors of America

The editors of America magazine have revised and extended their remarks in consideration of the HHS mandate. In an editorial dated March 12th (appearing in their Newsletter dated March 26th), America's editors write:

Government’s Task

In our March 5 editorial “Policy, Not Liberty,” we commented on the objections of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to President Obama’s accommodation on the health insurance mandate. We identified, by way of example, “the needs of self-insured institutions” as an obvious problem needing correction. In the weeks since that editorial appeared, the bishops have raised anew serious issues that need attention. A key issue, which we regret we failed to identify in that editorial, is the narrowness of the underlying Department of Health and Human Services regulation maintaining a limited definition of religious institutions, a formula to which the bishops, as well as America in an earlier editorial (“Taking Liberties,” 2/13), objected.
This is not an issue for the United States alone. Archbishop [Silvano] Tomasi, representing the Holy See, observed when speaking to the U.N. Human Rights Council on March 1 on the issue of religious liberty worldwide: “The task of government is not to define religion...but to confer upon faith communities a juridical personality so they can function peacefully within a legal framework.” The church cannot function peacefully in the United States under the current regulatory framework. The existing regulation demands reworking.
There are conflicting reports about how seriously the two sides are engaged with one another at this time. We hope that in the weeks ahead, as the bishops and the administration attempt to resolve their differences over the H.H.S. mandate, the legal definition of religious institutions will take a top priority. We trust that, with good faith efforts, this potentially explosive issue will be defused, and we support the bishops in that effort. — March 12, 2012

I renew my gratitude to the editors for their leadership by example of civility in their engagement of the national discourse; I add praise for their earnest and forthrightness; I promise my continued prayerful best wishes for their work.

LD

True liberalism

I am sure I detest the man O as much as the liberal press and academicians and show biz detested the man B. But, if it is so, what sense there would be for me to speak? Just to express my irrational dislikes as they express theirs? They saw in the man B a sort of tyrannical figure, and because of this they promoted the man O with all the means possible, making themselves believe in the humbug of his messiah like act as liberator. Of course, this kind of liberation was perceived by the other side as tyranny.

The LD has done a good job in the previous posts in sketching the reasons why this is really the case. The questions unsolved of European history, to which America wanted to represent the solution, regurgitate again in America: I mean the questions concerning the relation of politics and religion, in which the man O, and the liberal press and academicians and show biz that created him as a public persona, want to realize a total return to Europe. As if there had never been an American experiment worthy of notice.

In the (quite vain) hope to establish a dialogue with the liberal friends, I could say that America has been an experiment in “liberalism”. But I would need immediately to make them notice that liberalism isn’t an univocal word.

I take, to explain what I mean, this line from an article by an Italian university professor, who ranged from his teaching of history of math to more general questions of education and politics:

“The United States are by now torn by the schizophrenia between liberal tradition and authoritarian social control.”

How did that schizophrenia between “liberal” and “authoritarian” came to be? asks himself the author of this line. Because, it is the answer he gives himself, of another factor, besides liberalism, determining American culture: the idea that everything can be dealt with scientifically, measuring it by quantifiable factors.

This might even be true, but, leaving aside the fact that it is not peculiar to American culture, because you find the same idea in Europe, it doesn’t take into account that, in the States, the will to ensure democracy by exercising a control from on high upon society it is precisely what has come to be identified by the name of liberalism.

So, in the European continental (or perhaps mainly Italian) use, it is called liberal someone who is against state invasiveness in people’s life, while in the American use it is so called someone who is favorable to state intervention in it. Which makes embarrassing any time I speak of liberalism to Americans, having to explain in which way I mean it. While talking of this with the LD, he remarked that the ambiguity is avoided by speaking in the continental sense of “classical liberalism”. If that was the classical, pristine sense of the word, what then needs to be accounted for, to explain the said schizophrenia, is how liberal aversion to state intervention turned into favoring it.

In the States, often those who refuse state invasiveness into people’s life also like to call themselves libertarian. Now, “libertarians”, over against “liberals”, are ranked among “conservatives”. But here again there is an ambiguity, because conservative embraces also communitarians. And libertarians and communitarians are not necessarily the same thing.

Liberal, libertarian, are cognate words, both having to do with liberty. Communitarian, instead, has to do with community. Beautiful things, community and liberty, together they make up what in the Christian inheritance we call love: that reciprocity of eros (the desire of the good that can only come from someone else’ graciousness) and agape (the disposition to be so gracious toward someone else) that represents the common law of society, prior to any state legislation.

I have to recall these things, be it in short strokes, because, even though they should be known to all, they are no longer part of our public education. Being hidden behind the all but clear distinction of politics and religion on which European as well as American public debate rests.

Of course Christianity didn’t invent love. Peculiar to it, when it enjoins to love one’s “enemies” as well as one’s “friends”, meaning the out-group as well as the in-group, it’s the extension it gave to it. In as far as it joins people together, within its bounds the body politic is in any case religious; by the commandment to love “enemies”, Christianity doesn’t actually tear down group boundaries, but makes them all permeable, universalizes the religious bond and potentially makes of humanity as such one body politic. As a matter of fact it introduces, by so doing, a distinction of church and state elsewhere absent: with the church, as representative of universal humanity, and the state of its local concretions. Following the modern crisis of Christendom culminating with the protestant reformation, the European states declared themselves sovereign, superiorem non recognoscens, absolute representative of the humanity of their people, more subjects than citizens. This meant that the states declared themselves the supreme legislators within their boundaries.

Liberals and sheer libertarians, as distinguished from communitarians, share then this common assumption: that it is the state to make the law. Once this is granted, the fact that the ones favor the law maker’s invasiveness into peoples’ lives and the others abhor it becomes secondary. The turning of classical liberalism into now days liberalism becomes then understandable. And the strife between the two a matter of taste. Unless we take from communitarians a rejection of that assumption, as inherently tyrannical.

To escape such a tyranny peoples emigrated to the new world, and the founding fathers made of America that experiment at which authors like Alexis de Toqueville could look at as a paradigm. If a risk De Toqueville saw in it was that of the tyranny of majority, but kept at bay by the religion of the people, that preserved the States from becoming a state in the absolute, totalitarian European way. But today the risk, in a European fashion, is rather the opposite, that of a self-declared enlightened elite, that despises the majority, when, with its culture and religion, doesn’t follow its lead. Thus putting an end to the experiment.

I called it an experiment in liberalism, to maintain the appeal to the “liberal tradition”, when it doesn’t succumb to the temptation of authoritarian control. If we recall that from the same root it comes also the word liberality (largess in giving), we can recognize in America an experiment in holding together community and liberty.
HP

A reply to the editors of America

In their opinion dated March 5, 2012, the editors of America magazine recall several elements that are basic to the Church's tradition of thinking about politics. Many of these same elements (not the least of which is the unstated though palpably present appreciation of reasonable civility as the necessary condition of any national discourse that would have reasonable hope of bearing fruit) are constitutively present to the American genius for ordering our lives together. I share the editors' concern lest we lose sight of the importance of civility, and I happily extend grateful praise for their efforts to lead by example in this regard.

Also quite praiseworthy is the construction of the editors' argument: complex and nuanced, its concern from first to last to remain within the great tradition of Catholic moral and political thinking and to apply the tools of that tradition to our present crisis, is evident.

It was especially refreshing to see the editors attempt to articulate a cardinal distinction in political thinking: namely, that between principle and prudential reasoning under the guidance thereof, in accord therewith and pursuant thereto. Refreshing indeed, for our many years' forgetfulness of this distinction has stagnated our whole national discourse and damaged our public conversation, generally. Unfortunately, their precise formulation of the distinction is rather exceptionable - and their specific application of it misplaced.

The editors opine, "The US Catholic bishops' religious liberty campaign seems to have abandoned a moral distinction that undergirded the conference’s public advocacy in past decades: the contrast between authoritative teaching on matters of principle and debatable applications of principle to public policy." By couching the distinction as a contrast, the editors call our attention to a fact of public thinking - that principle and prudential application of it shade into one another, and that the closer they are together, the more difficult it becomes to make real distinctions between them. Here matters begin to come into focus: there is a very bright line of distinction in the present case, and it is the editors - not the bishops - who fail to see it. The plain text of the US Constitution guarantees free exercise of religion: the issue is therefore one of Constitutional principle, directly and immediately. In treating the issue as such, the bishops are not abandoning the aforesaid distinction: they are judging according to it.

The mandate's original formulation is not only unconstitutional. It flies in the face of the "common sense" of the American people; ultimately, it is offensive to reason. That the original mandate is all three at once becomes clear when we consider that the HHS regulation is not simple in its operation, but does two things: it mandates that all employers, including non-profit employers, offer the "full range" of "preventative care" options (including sterilizations and abortifacients); it declares that Catholic schools, hospitals, charities, etc., are non-profit employers sic et simpliciter - which is to say that they are not religious enterprises at all. The surreptitious presupposition upon which the rationale behind the policy must rest, is that religious groups and institutions are naturaliter incapable of contributing to the common good - that when they do, they cease to exercise themselves in a way that the civil authority is bound to recognize as rooted in and internal to those institutions' essential character and ethos, and therefore subject to an especial or particular right, privilege or immunity. This is inconsistent with both the plain text of the Constitution and the understanding of the role of religion in building, sustaining and strengthening the civil society that has been the traditional pillar and bulwark of ordered liberty in America. In other words, the rationale behind the policy is based on a presupposition that, if correct, must lead us to conclude that clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, welcoming the stranger, visiting the prisoner, teaching the ignorant, healing the sick, caring for the dying, and burying the dead, are not and cannot be considered properly religious activities at all - and so, 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). This is not merely unreasonable: it is in principle at least as radical a "privatization" of religion as anything to be found in any Soviet constitution.

The President's proposed "accomodation" leaves all of this matter in place. The proposal adds insult to injury, saying essentially that, though the Church shall not be free to serve society except on such terms and in such a manner as the government shall prescribe - even and especially as regards the internal governance of her service institutions - Catholics shall nevertheless be required to believe, confess, and henceforth tamen impossibilis practice free lunch.

The editors say that the bishops have been most effective in influencing public policy when they have acted as pastors, trying to build consensus in church (sic) and society. I agree. What I fail to grasp is the pertinence of the observation, unless it be found in the implicit suggestion that the bishops, attempting to vindicate the rights of the Church, are somehow not behaving pastorally. One of the shepherd's chief duties is defense of the flock: this will mean fending off predators, and sometimes slaying them (cf. 1 Sam 17:34-35). Surely then, stern words with one who would encroach on the pastures will not be unseemly.

Singly and as a body, the bishops have written, spoken and assembled. Some of the bishops have issued statements more measured and thoughtful than others. In their joint address, the bishops have stated their case in the language of truth, and divested of those expressions of servility which would persuade the President that they are asking favors and not rights (cf. Thos. Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America). Far from wanting a conciliatory tone, the bishops have spoken corporately in the way free citizens speak to their rulers. Whether the American public is, as the editors say, "uncomfortable with an overt exercise of political muscle by the hierarchy," is beside the point. In petitioning the government for redress of grievance, the bishops are exercising one of the most basic rights guaranteed to all citizens under the Constitution.

The editors also accuse the bishops of, "fail[ing] to acknowledge that in the present instance, claims of religious liberty may collide with the right to health care, or that the religious rights of other denominations are in tension with those of Catholics." This pair of accusations confuse the issue in a pair of dangerous ways. First, the accusations suggest that the Catholic concern is merely for religious liberty, or worse, that our concern for religious liberty stands somehow over and against the right to healthcare - specifically, that is, that the Catholic position on artificial contraception is not concerned with the best interests of women especially and of human persons, generally. Second, the accusations are red herrings. The issue is not about women having a right to health care: it is about whether government can force the Catholic Church to pay for contraceptives, abortions and sterilizations. The "tension" between Catholic and other denominations is entirely imaginary - literally fantastic: the land where one group's vindication of its right to govern itself according to its moral convictions could possibly threaten the liberty of another group to do the same, or where government's attempt to infringe on one could possibly not threaten all others, were a land surely peopled by pixies, a land of unicorns, a land of square circles and free lunches, where all the men are king's men, and what matters is who is master.

LD

Christmas spirit for the whole year

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.

HD