Politics

bls has been concerned lately about what the purpose of blogging could be if one has no opinions. I understand the feeling. And then I thought about it and realized I have a lot of opinions but I'm not sure they matter very much.

In both the earthly and heavenly city, the city has an analogy with a human. In the case of the earthly city, we go round about with who among us is what part. In antiquity, the elite were said to be the head of the society and so consumed by the mouth and let the lower classes be the hands to work to feed them. In modern times, the same analogy holds in practice, but the hands and feet now are permitted to send nerve impulses to the brain on occasion and serious doses of neurotransmitters every six years. In the heavenly city, whose only described building is the sanctuary, the analogy is between the city and the God made man, Jesus Christ, who has resurrected the temple of his Body that the whole creation be at peace therein.

Some concern with the heavenly city has seemed appropriate lately. Recall the Collect for Proper 20:

Grant us, Lord, not to be anxious about earthly things, but to love things heavenly; and even now, while we are placed among things which are passing away, to hold fast to those that shall endure; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

It helped to think on this this week. The Collect dates from the uneasiness during the era of the barbarian invasions of the 5th century AD. But as Will Durand reminds us, the invasions from without only have the power when we are corrupt within. The good person is neither buoyed up by joy nor brought down by misfortune saith Augustine. But I find it hard to cultivate ataxia, so how can it be for a Wall Street trader?

So given this analogy between the city and the human being, I wonder what is the point of the occasional nerve impulses to our legislators and seratonin shots to them in the voting booth. Why not simply externalize each and every listing of the state to the organs to which our constitution has externalized that function (ignoring our rights of suffrage and petition). If I feel myself as a scientist to be a communal externality of our individual curiosities, why not let the politicians be a similar communal externality of our individual deliberative functions?

The answer, of course, is that this brain is on drugs, in particular Special K (Street). And like a human being, the state has the potential to act extremely stupidly when intoxicated and panicked. Indeed, all of us acting extremely stupidly is infinitely more dangerously than one of us acting extremely stupidly.

I think I might have looked at this bailout plan a bit differently if I hadn't just read North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell, a Victorian novel of Non-Conformity, mutiny, romance, early industrial capitalism, and labor agitation. It's amazing how much globalization shapes a novel written in 1855. But that's the idea. England had advantages in the early Industrial Revolution, but now it faces competition from a growing United States with better soil, cheaper food, easier access to raw materials, and more favorable conditions for immigration. In other words, the United States was the developing country capable of undercutting English textile manufacturers in the world market in a world of much more expensive transportation. Gaskell took a lot of flack from her husband's mill owner parishioners, but she portrays mid 19th century capitalists in a sympathetic light. What's interesting is how Gaskell notices how comfortable the industrial working class is relative to the rural working class. They have furniture, reasonably comfortable lodging, and generally are better fed. Many of them even have substantial savings, completely unthinkable from the rural poor, who seem dependent on the trickle down of ecclesiastical charity. But they are more prone to illness, working in dangerous and unhealthy conditions, and often live just as marginally.

The amazing thing about this novel is that it represents a middle period in the relation between the capitalist manager and the working class man and woman of production. In the early stage, industrial capitalism began in the context of the artisanal workshop emerging from the collective and conservative force of the medieval guild. In this middle stage, the worker has been demoted from a potential master but still remains in intimate contact with the manager whose capital is embodied by the factory, who lives next to the factory, and runs the operations of the factory himself. The increasing globalization of capital (as opposed to the globalization of the market, which is distinct) has eliminated these kinds of relations. If someone in some other city or country manages your factory and "funds" own the capital, the social controls that allow labor and management to have a mutual interest fall away. The capitalism seen in Gaskell is attractive because it is mutualistic. Modern capitalism is feared because of the instances in which it is parasitic.

Many would ask why is it important that capitalism be mutualistic. That's often inefficient. Well, capitalism in a democratic world is only justifiable on two grounds: one is in its aesthetic. In its purest form, capitalism is the self-sufficient and self-defensible person using his or her excess to do or make things that others find "useful" and will gladly provide their excess to obtain. Its eventual end, however, lies in the perpetual excrescence of human existence beyond sufficiency. The pure capitalist exchange requires a weighing of desire, not a weighing of need. The choice of sale or starvation makes a transactional party unfree. Most critiques of capitalism are of its impure form. But in a world of self-defensible and self-sufficient people with desires in proportion to their resource base, capitalism is a beautiful thing and fine director of human curiosity and innovation.
The other value of capitalism lies in its purity hopefully being its aim. In a world of uncertainty and scarcity, capitalism brings technology and a global marketplace, allowing a sort of half-sufficiency, in which the market hopefully compensates for the limitations of our individual economic lives.

Unfortunately, since its inception, capitalism has been perverted by force. The earliest industrial workers were those driven off by enclosure, which took land in which the peasantry had interest through the mixture of their labor with the ground and the aristocracy had interest through their defense of that ground and announced that the capital in that ground would belong to the sword alone. So all of this is to say that I understand the beauty and benefits of libertarianism, especially for Christians, in that there are certain aspects of ancient Israel that seem anarchocapitalist. Unfortunately, we are fallen people who pervert all things with force. And so I lean to the social democratic approach of supporting a variety of strategies to use the force of popular sovereignty and scientific curiosity to encourage local sufficiency and various checks on the activity of capital to ensure that property rights not easily apportioned in a flawed capitalist system become reserved to the people.

Mainly, I take the American approach pioneered by Chief Justice Roger Taney, "While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and well-being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation." In Taney's case, he was merely arguing that the government could modify exclusive monopolies in the public detriment. I feel free to extend this to any government interference with enterprise tending to the good of the public at large, but generally restricted to "public goods." Public health care management, public utilities, and public transit generally work for me. In World War II, the United States Government had nearly communistic control of factories. They ensured they paid well, though, and directed the excess salary into buying into the war debt. Considering the way defense contractors work now, why can't we have wartime control of those industries all the time? Well, maybe not.

The key is that the left generally likes to repeat the mistake of Marx, which insists that capitalism and private property are so deeply flawed as to be worthy of destruction. Yet private property at least is rather basic to humankind. We are social and political animals but do much better than ants on our own. Adam and Eve chose their downfalls on an individual basis after all.
I think it's much better to think of capitalism as something beautiful and flawed, like a lover with a substance abuse problem. If our love is true, we neither enable them, nor cast them away. We try to get them help when they fall down, but we do let them hit bottom. Both the right and the left like drag us toward class warfare. Bernie Sanders of Vermont wants to tax $500,000 income individuals and $1,000,000 income couples with a special surtax for ten years to help pay for the bailout. California has a similar surtax. I find these kinds of measures punitive, because it only measures economic activity in terms of income, and it equally punishes and rewards the best and the worst of a capitalist economy. Unfortunately, it would be nearly impossible to implement my perfect tax system (based on ecological economics). Instead, I favor progressive tax rates similar to the 1960s and spending and debt reservice in fixed proportions of GDP, possibly delineated in broad categories. I wish I could do things to bring back the middle phase of capitalism and the conscientious class unity possible between "master and man." But I think the energy issue will take care of that soon enough.

So in the end, I remain opposed to a bailout of the financial system at this stage. Let the toxic debt crash upon the relevant ears and let those unaffected climb to the top of the financial heap. The government seems like it can find buyers for the distressed. And if not, the government should buy them at lower prices in the coming year. I don't imagine it's going to be easy. Bond issues will slow. Credit will be tighter. 20% down payments generally may be required. But this crisis is a crisis of lust and overreaching. Easier credit and lower taxes encouraged irresponsibility of both government and people. In some, it led to desperation. As credit tightens, certain goods will return to reasonable prices. Other goods will seem necessary. From what I can tell, lending to industrial expansion continues apace. If you are willing to change your ways, a new structure of the American economy is coming. But as this economy develops, we are going need a little bit of cash to pay down government debt and create a less energy-intensive infrastructure. And some of that money should go into restructuring housing. I'd like to see the government offering benefits to mortgaged properties that are insulated, put to agricultural use, or divided into multiple family dwellings.

So I have opinions. And if you read carefully enough, you may realize that I am in favor of one drug addict letting another drug addict potentially overdose in order to allow another drug addict to go into treatment, which is often the consequence of analogies in this vale of tears.

So what about our presidential candidates? I'm at least voting for one of them, though I have to admit they're increasingly ridiculous. Just listening to them talk about Russia tonight made me want to scream. No consideration of Russia's strategic position at all. Instead, anyone who opposes people we support hates freedom. No mention of how we're going to be pointing missiles at them from Poland and want all their neighbors to join their military alliance. And I really want someone to ask why we're defending borders drawn by Joseph Stalin.

Things Anglicans Like: Iberian Fortified Wines

One usually does not associate Episcopalians with temperance. As the old joke goes, "Whenever two or three are gathered together, there is a fifth." And while there is something to be said for the divine favor that smiles on "wine that gladdens the heart of man," our fallen natures and imperfect bodies lead us to excess and genuine illness and addiction. Many of our last generation of priests were alcoholics. Many of our present generation are the children of alcoholics.

But when Anglicans aren't dealing with addiction and broken family systems, they probably need a drink, and not just a beer, despite Mother England's reputation as a land of beers and ciders. If we're talking Anglican booze, we're talking Iberian fortified wines: port, Madeira, and sherry. I don't know who first thought to mix brandy with red wine, but the English clearly loved it. And let's not forget the white version: the sack that Shakespeare writes about. Just the other day, I was buying a bottle of port as a gift for a non-Anglican Kiwi friend when I see my Anglo-Baptist Rector just behind me in line. He asks in his Cotton Kingdom accent, "Have a night of drinking ahead of you?" Not a bad guess, just a wrong one. After all, I'm a cradle Episcopalian. I've been a member of one parish where we'll serve sherry to you after Eucharist every Sunday of the year. And let's not forget how many parishes we'll do so at Eucharist as well. All during college, the Chaplain consecrated tawny port. I was fairly vexed he never mixed it with water, but don't most other catholic churches insist on "pure, fermented juice of the grape—good and wholesome," including the Church of England? Does wine mixed with grape distillate count?

Christianity and the Children of Her Handmaid

Derek of Haligweorc just reposted an old essay of his on the intellectual collision of Christianity and the natural sciences with the preface that he tires of the collision being reconciled by two options: either the rejection of doctrinal orthodoxy or the rejection of the most basic and well-tested hypotheses of the natural sciences. Casual readers might think he was arguing for something on the lines of Gould's much vaunted and much critiqued Non-Overlapping Magisteria, but I think it's fairer to say that he expects Christian doctrine to inform how Christians put science and technology to use. As a reading of Job 38-41 might indicate, God syrely considers natural science and technology to constitute a gradual encroachment on his dominion. Christians understandably might think that there are doctrinal limitations on the extent of that dominion, especially with respect to the dominion of action (as opposed to knowledge unless the act of investigation is itself encroachment). For instance, some of my present research is covered by Job 38:35 (and some of it by other verses), but I'm far more interested in lightning telling me about itself rather than putting it to use myself. I'm rather wary of weather modification, both on practical and theological grounds.

Thus, Derek, I think, expects Christian doctrine and the natural sciences to be complementary magisteria and not merely in morals. It is C.S. Lewis' observation that the miracles of Christ involve the slowing and speeding up of the natural order rather than its distortion or destruction. Water under the proper conditions can become wine. Olive oil not so much. Doctrine and science are at least complementary in this sense. Without "the rules that govern the heavens or [those] that determine the laws of nature on the earth" (Job 38:33), which are the same rules, there would be no room for signs and wonders, for we would have no null hypotheses when faced with a personal and self-revelatory God. There would be no distinction between reproducible and irreproducible phenomena nor between falsifiable and unfalsifiable hypotheses. In addition, Christian theology long has recognized analogy or even homology between the Divine Word in Christ, in Scripture, and in Creation. This pseudohypostatic union presupposes a harmony between them. The question of Christian theology at this point in history is not the substance of this proposition but its details.

In some sense, the conflict between Christianity and the natural sciences should not be unexpected. Natural science, as we know it, comes out of two great intellectual stirrings in western Europe: the post-Reformation Enlightenment (Newtonian physics, non-alchemical chemistry, and Linnaean biology) and the post-Revolutionary era (modern physics and evolutionary biology). Newton was one of great early Unitarians and Einstein was a major socialist activist. Their religious and political beliefs integrated well with their physical hypotheses. Newton argued stenuously with Leibniz against the importance of relationship and harmony in physical systems and instead stressed deterministic cause and effect to the extent that the close of Book III of the Principia was one of the great Deist manifestoes. Newton's physics allows a world not continually held in being by "the Love that moves, the sun, the stars" as Dante puts it but one that starts like a pinball machine without any love being required. Einstein's inclination toward socialism familiarized him with egalitarian thinking that suggested there were no privileged reference frames in physics.

Thus, when Christianity subsumed Greco-Roman philosophy by late antiquity, it sowed the seeds of a new philosophy that spurred a great number of viable physical hypotheses and axiomatic principles that shape modern natural science. The so-called central dogma of physics, which my more moderate agnostic and atheist friends will admit is an act of faith, states that the laws of physics are the same everywhere. While generally treated as axiomatic, it is so far a very well-proven hypothesis. Yet its initial success depended on another act of faith: one in a God who guaranteed natural law by His almighty power, who had made both the heavens and the earth. This wasn't exactly the majority report in Christian doctrine before Newton, but when presented with evidence of corruption and change in the deep heavens, adaptation was inevitable. And the central dogma of physics is far more harmonious with Christian doctrine than the Aristotelian gradient theories about natural law. The progressive nature of sacred history surely inspired 19th century thermodynamics with its heat death of the universe and forward arrow of time.

In fact, I have seen arguments against the conclusions of the IPCC Reports on a similar basis, that the notion of humans progressively bringing themselves to apocalyptic catastrophe through sin is a doctrinal one, not justified by scientific evidence, which for the authors in question primarily describes cyclical change. The fact that the first head of the IPCC was Sir John Houghton, one of the UK's leading public Evangelicals (Anglican) (and a fine scientist), lends the necessary credence to this particular conspiracy theory. Global warming thus is a Christian Tory plot, which would be funny except that the editorial pages of Britain's newspapers often contain garbled versions of this particular fairy story.

The point is here not that Jews, Muslims, and Hindus etc. have not or cannot contribute to the natural sciences or their general intellectual direction. They have and will. The natural sciences owes a debt to the mathematics of Baghdad and the mystics of the Kabbalah. And the originally Christian egalitarianism and ontological universality that consumes the West makes it impossible to say that there is a human being who cannot be a natural scientist. Science is as free and intrinsically human as salvation. But Christian doctrine, by positing a God-created reality and a pseudohypostatic union between the process rather than the substance of the real, was well positioned to create the natural science we know today. Indeed, we are obsessed with the physics of our sacred rites (q.v. transubstantiation) and their resultant chemistry (transubstantiation again, ontological change in Baptism, Holy Orders etc.) like no other religion on earth. Though, of course, some of us would prefer we stop obsessing about these subjects.

One intermediate word about quantum physics: the fundamental idea of quantum physics is the reduction of laws to probabilities at small scales. Derek is right that it is going to take some time for this idea to percolate into our general cognition. If it ever does. As I pointed out to two of my colleagues recently, though, quantum inflation satisfies creation ex nihilo , though creation by quantum inflation is highly troublesome to many because it does not imply God's love, omnipotence, intelligence, or coherence, only His randomness. But after all, this why we have Scripture and the Creeds. See what I mean about complimentary magisteria.

Now we come to how the pseudohypostatic union actually might work. The first solutions involve privileging one entity over the other. Most obvious is Fundamentalist Christianity and its backsliding cousins along the spectrum, which support young earth creationism. They are privileging a particular reading of the Book of Genesis over Creation, not only in attempt to maintain the inerrancy of Scripture but a very narrow soteriology (how does the Fall happen???). Neglecting arguments that scientists are godless frauds, their most interesting arguments posit inconsistencies in special relativity and atomic physics that suggest the central dogma of physics is historically invalid. The laws of physics 6,000 years ago were different than than today. Thus, young earth creationism is not merely a conflict between science and religion but really a complex panoply of doctrinal disputes within Christianity itself. And it would really be helpful if this were more public knowledge. Liberal Christianity often becomes the opposite extreme. I wonder what would happen if I told certain preachers, "I'm a very well-educated scientist, who finds the NT miracles quite plausible if and only if Jesus is the Son of God the Father, the creator of heaven and earth. Otherwise, I'm quite skeptical."

In the miscellaneous category, we have some conservative Catholics who think that Aristotle is still right, at least on special occasions. Yes, they exist. Or else this article makes no sense whatsoever .

Today, I mentioned in comments at Haligweorc that there were three Anglican options I knew of: John Donne, Joseph Butler, and Alister McGrath. I'm sure there are hints in other theologians of other or similar options, but these were the three that popped into my head. The key works are Donne's Essay on Divinity (note that this is not poetry but still quite poetic in places), Butler's Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (required reading for many 19th century American college students, which is why I read it as a student of philosophical curricula of that era), and McGrath's A Scientific Theology (whose epitome, The Science of God I have stuck amidst Bible, BCP, Hymnal, and Bede's Homilies on the Gospels). I don't have suitable access to the first two, though Analogy should be online.

Donne's harmony is a difficult one, possibly because the work seems addressed to particular viewpoints in early Jacobean London. On one hand, he quotes a very many chronologies for the world from a variety of sources (and clearly he hadn't heard of the 9 trillion year Hindu chronologies) but asserts that the Holy Scriptures are reliable in saying that the world began with creation by God. We are not in endless recurrence. But later it seems possible that he only can say there is uncertainty in the age of the Earth because there are inherent uncertainties in the interpretation of the Genesis chronology, for he says that if the numbers in the Bible are not right, we have no confidence in God's promises. My guess is that he is poking fun at an extreme Puritan position without directly angering the Puritans in question, whom he considered too obtuse to get the joke. But this passage appears to be an argument for non-literal interpretation. And if I am right, his general position is that apparent Biblical errancy relative to Creation (and history) must be considered to be of mystical significance.

Donne's position is unsatisfactory. Perhaps, AKMA's "Signifying Theology": the epilogue to his recent Faithful Interpretation is most convincing in this respect. AKMA sees harmony between theology and exegesis in Christ, who literally expounds God through every aspect of His life. AKMA has a variety of rather technical and particular things to draw from this insight but what concerns us is this passage:

...but it is the recollection of the unanimous teaching of Scripture, the saints, and reason itself that the Truth transforms lives that acknowledge its truth.

Finally, the signifying practices to which exegesis and theology lend complementary energies may arguably point to a consummation in the church's signifying practice par excellence: the Eucharist, which is 'an essential action,' not 'an isolated presence or merely illustrative symbol.'"

And indeed AKMA's primary inspirations, Maurice de la Taille and the Gospel of John, are good places to look to understand the deep importance of the pseudohypostatic union I keep positing. But the key point is that Donne's position logically might be taken to the extreme that the Gospels (particularly the miracles and the Great Acts of Resurrection and Ascension) are stories about what Jesus meant rather than stories about things that Jesus did that expound His life in God. But AKMA and de la Taille warn us otherwise. If we expect actual encounter with the Living God in our own lives through the conduit to Christ in the sanctuary not made with human hands, we must expect that Jesus' life was filled with genuine encounter between the world and God through mystery and miracle. This is a sentiment as old as the Apostle who warned us, "If Jesus is not risen, then we are most pitiable." But AKMA speaks even more deeply to me.

Butler, writing a hundred years later than Donne post Newton, argues that there is a religion that may be empirically inferred from nature that becomes corrupted by our fallen human nature to the religions outside of Judaism and Christianity. He even reasons out their basic principles such as the immortality of the soul and a future system of rewards and punishments. He then argues that Christianity is the revealed religion most consistent with these natural principles. Butler's general intellectual orientation may appear familiar. Not only is Butler a key part of the natural theological tradition that influenced Darwin and which he only rejected in part. (I have a lovely essay in college on the subject.), but the eventual goal of the Intelligent Design movement is a Butlerian argument, in which mankind is the culmination of a particular kind of designer, whose characteristics may be derived from biological and physical creation, and who is most likely the Christian God (and not Allah or an extraterrestrial or a Mouse and Disco Ball or an entity with Noodly Appendages). The basic argument itself may not be original to Butler. Alister McGrath cites a slightly earlier work of Thomas Tindal in the same vein. But it had many refiners and imitators, including early scientists of importance such as Joseph Priestley and William Whewell.

Butler's position is problematic in that it insists on an empirically derivable religion consistent with Christian truth. It puts too far to the side questions of why such a religion can be recovered in a fallen world, limited both by our own fallenness and the potential fallenness of nature and why Christianity should be harmonious with a religion meant for man before the Fall when the Fall and the Incarnation is generally assumed to change God's original plans for humanity. So far intelligent design has fallen on the central dogma of physics and an inherent notion of divine economy as William Whewell puts it in his Bridgewater Treatise and Darwin quotes,

"But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this-we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws."

Intelligent design still has a theological case to make, not just a scientific one. It must explain why and to what extent the world was punctuated by such insulated interpositions of Divine power before the Fall. It also must explain what role revelation plays in salvation history in this case and how design is maintained in a fallen world, but this juncture brings us to McGrath.

McGrath is a third option and much of the first paragraphs of this essay are shaped by his position, though I held much of it well before I read anything of his. A priest friend of mine in high school was McGrath's student at Wycliffe Hall, but I have had to infer this in later life from an offhand comment that the head of his theological college had two doctorates in theology and (bio)physics. McGrath observes the pseudohypostatic union, "the same divine rationality that that is embedded in creation is embodied in Jesus Christ, as God incarnate [emphasis his]" (q.v. Thomas F. Torrance...or Bonaventure, Augustine, Cappadocian Fathers) and concludes that Christian theology is by first principles required to be in dialogue with the natural sciences. Since he's at Wycliffe Hall, we can assume that the analogy/homology with Scripture is given. (He mentions it every once in a while). And the rest of the work is trying to explain how that dialogue might take place procedurally. Since I am quite exhausted, I'll leave those details to my next entry.

So until next time, the Holy Brothers leave you with U2:

You speak of signs and wonders
But I need something other
I would believe if I was able
But I'm waiting on the crumbs from your table