The Humanistic Argument Against the Welfare State

I've just finished reading Mark Steyn's new book, After America: Get Ready for Armageddon, and it is simultaneously hilarious and frightening. His previous book, America Alone, argued that the West, with the sole exception of the US, was in serious decline and that the last battle for the humanistic ideals of the West would be fought in the US. His prophecies of the semi-Islamization of Europe were at first dismissed, then laughed at, then said to be true but further off than he claimed. Now they are simply coming true before our eyes.

And his argument that it is Western weakness, lack of cultural self-confidence and multiculturalism, rather than any external force, that is causing the West's decline appears more obviously true every day. The message of this new book is that the US is joining in the general Western decline and going downhill much faster than Canada or Europe.

Despite his hysterical critics on the left, Steyn is no national socialist (or any other kind of socialist), but rather a humanistic liberal who simply declined to evolve into a social democrat as almost all liberals have done in the twentieth century.

As it happens, I don't think he actually has any answers to offer those who accept the main premises of his cultural analysis. The real engine of humanism is Christianity and the whole reason most liberals became some sort of cultural Marxist or neo-Marxist or democratic socialist is that secularized liberalism is unsustainable. It contains a contradictory notion of freedom and so the idea of freedom gradually recedes and the idea of equality takes its place. Liberalism has no basis for actual humanism and therefore it must necessarily decline into the will to power. We see this decline everywhere today. But until Steyn is willing to admit that nothing short of a revival of Christian faith will save Western civilization, he is fated to be a critic with no alternative except his own brand of stoic decency.

But the most important idea Steyn has latched onto is a very big one: the most important critique of the welfare state is the humanistic one. The welfare state was and is justified by appeals to compassion and care for the poor and needy. But, in fact, it is the poor and the needy who suffer the most from the welfare state.

In his column yesterday in the Orange County Register, Steyn puts it this way:

This is the logical dead end of the Nanny State. When William Beveridge laid out his blueprint for the British welfare regime in 1942, his goal was the "abolition of want" to be accomplished by "co-operation between the State and the individual." In attempting to insulate the citizenry from life's vicissitudes, Sir William succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. As I write in my book: "Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity." The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays and Muslims. From page 204: "For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ's Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population."

I believe it is regarded as a sign of insanity to start quoting oneself, but at the risk of trying your patience I'll try one more, because it's the link between America's downgraded debt and Britain's downgraded citizenry:

"The evil of such a system is not the waste of money but the waste of people."

Big Government means small citizens: it corrodes the integrity of a people, catastrophically. Within living memory, the city in flames on our TV screens every night governed a fifth of the Earth's surface and a quarter of its population. When you're imperialists on that scale, there are bound to be a few mishaps along the way. But nothing the British Empire did to its subject peoples has been as total and catastrophic as what a post-great Britain did to its own.

A system which brings you the highest rate of single mother families, the highest abortion rate, the highest rate of sexually transmitted disease and the highest rate of drug use can not, except by the most Orwellian misuse of language imaginable, be described as "liberating." It is precisely the opposite; it is enslaving and demeaning. It is not good for the poor and bad for the rich; it is bad for everybody, but especially the poor.

There are many reasons why the welfare state is bad, but the most serious one is that it wastes people. This is the humanistic argument against the welfare state.

The Spider's Web of Deceit That Paralyzes the Spirit

In Richard Reinsch's excellent article on Whittaker Chambers "Still Witnessing: The Enduring Relevance of Whittaker Chambers" he highlights this paragraph from Chambers' autobiography Witness, p. 83.

"What I had been fell from me like dirty rags. The rags that fell from me were not only Communism. What fell was the whole web of the materialist modern mind—the luminous shroud which it has spun about the spirit of man, paralyzing in the name of rationalism the instinct of his soul for God, denying in the name of knowledge the reality of the soul and its birthright in that mystery on which mere knowledge falters and shatters at every step. If I had rejected only Communism, I would have rejected only one political expression of the modern mind, the most logical because the most brutal in enforcing the myth of man’s material perfectibility."

Chambers' is exposing the spiritual roots of the rebellion called "Modernity," which go deeper than the rational, historical, philosophical or political roots.

Freedom and Equality: Contested Ideas in the Modern World

I find that in talking to people about ethics and politics, there is a lot of fuzzy thinking about certain key concepts. Many people have a vague idea that socialism is about sharing and capitalism is about the strong exploiting the weak and that is about it. Cultural Marxism has so infiltrated our institutions in the contemporary Western world that our Western intellectual heritage is in the process of being overwhelmed. Freedom and equality are two key ideas in modernity that need close definitions.

Freedom #1: There are two very different ideas of freedom abroad today. First, there is the classical/Christian definition of freedom as the ability to realize one's telos, to actualize one's true nature, to attain one's potential. This idea of freedom requires that the rational part of one's being control the appetites so as to direct us toward the goal of becoming all that we can be. Self-discipline, the cultivation of the virtues and practical wisdom are necessary here and, in a Christian perspective, heeding Divine revelation is necessary as well.

Freedom #2: The second idea of freedom is the late-modern degenerate concept of freedom as the ability to do whatever I feel I want to do at the moment: freedom from constraint. This idea of freedom is what is left when political liberalism is practiced in a totally secularized context by a post-Christian culture. Freedom from constraint is highly individualistic and practically indistinguishable from slavery to one's irrational appetites. It is a self-contradictory notion of freedom because it tries to expand personal freedom in such a way as to destroy freedom by allowing the strong to prey upon the weak with no moral constraints.

Equality #1: The first concept of equality is equality before the law, the idea that there is not one law for the rich and another law for the poor, but one law over all. This is the idea of the rule of law, which is seen as more objective than merely the will of the strong. This idea has deep roots in Western culture: in the Old Testament where even the king was under Torah and in republican Rome where all were under the law. The rule of law is incompatible with absolute monarchy or dictatorship.

Equality #2: The second concept of equality is the animating principle of the French Revolution and was formulated by the theoretician of the French Revolution, J. J. Rousseau. This concept of equality sees equality as equality, not of opportunity, but of outcome. It is equality not under the law, but equality of income under the administration of the bureaucratic state. This kind of equality is not found in nature; it must be created by rational, bureaucratic state.

In order to understand modern politics, it is necessary to distinguish clearly between these two sets of ideas. Freedom #1 and Equality #1 are rooted deep within Western culture and are held by conservatives. But Freedom #2 and Equality #2 are held by progressives, the heirs of the French Revolution. Extreme individualism (in the name of Freedom #2) and extreme statism (in the name of Equality) go together. The all-powerful State becomes the only limitation on the social Darwinism in which the strong prey on the weak. Intermediate institutions like the family are seen as ineffective and the State becomes that Protector of the Individual and Guarantor of Freedom and Equality.

What is confusing is that the progressive agenda is often pushed in the name of freedom and equality and Christians rightly believe that equality and freedom are good ideals, so they do not oppose the progressive agenda. But Freedom #2 and Equality #2 lead to statism, slavery and the loss of personhood, whereas Freedom #1 and Equality #2 lead to democratic governance, personal freedom, the rule of law, limited government and free enterprise.

Christians should seek a politics in which Freedom #1 and Equality #1 are the basis of public law. This is not to impose a theocracy, but merely to cultivate a humane and just politics.

Sex and the iWorld: A Brief Review

A new book by Dale S. Kuehne called Sex and the iWorld: Rethinking Relationships beyond an Age of Individualism (Baker, 2009) is worth reading for several reasons. The author is a professor of politics at a Catholic liberal arts college and a pastor of Emmanuel Covenant Church in Nashua, NH. So he writes from unique position on a highly controversial topic.

1. Modern Individualism Warps Our Sexuality: One notable feature of this book is his critique of modern individualism. He is perceptive in his analysis of the morality of the world of modernity. He identifies what he calls "three taboos," which seem to me to function analogously to the way the Ten Commandments functioned in the pre-modern world and continue to function in the Church. The three taboos are:

1. One may not criticize someone else's life choices or behavior.
2. One may not behave in a manner that coerces or causes harm to others.
3. On may not engage in a sexual relationship with someone without his or her consent. (p. 71)

When you lay it out this way it is amazing how thin and weak the sexual morality of modernity actually is (and how it corresponds to the thinness of the modern concept of the self). And it is amazing how many sexual perversions can be seen as morally acceptable under this scheme. For example, there is no real reason to ban incest, homosexuality, polygamy, polyamory, bestiality or swinging. And when it comes to pedophilia, there is a lot of wiggle room with regard to the age of consent and re-definition of "harm," "coercion," and "consent." But this is the morality of modernity. Keuhne is right to trace all this back to the individualism of modernity and to thus show that the problem is much bigger than just sexual morality itself.

2. Sex is Only One Way to Express Love: Another interesting feature of this book that I found very encouraging is the more modest estimate of sexuality that Kuehne exhibits. He does not think that having sexual relations is necessary to human fulfillment. Full stop. Period. Now, that is a radical thought in the modern world and very politically incorrect. He thinks one can have a full and meaningful life with close friendship, emotional intimacy and deep satisfaction without sexual intercourse. He writes:

"The more intimacy we have with God, the more we are able to receive his love and then share that love with others. We receive love spiritually when we are intimately connected with God, and as we grow in the ability to be intimate with him and enjoy his love, we also can grow in our ability to be intimate with and love others. The greater our capacity for intimacy, the greater our capacity to receive love and share love.

Sexuality is not an important part of this equation, not because sex is a bad thing but simply because sex is not an essential aspect of the deepest and most fulfilling relational life that is found in a spiritual connection with God and others. Since we are physical beings, it is not surprising that love and intimacy have a reflection in our physical experience. Neither is it surprising that love and intimacy trigger many drives within us, including our sexual drive. Yet it is important to realize that the thing for which we ultimately yearn is not sexual and sex is not the means to find it . . . Engaging in sexual intercourse but never developing our capacity to love and be truly spiritually intimate with anyone, including our sexual partner, is a danger for all sexual relationships, including marriage." (169-70)

I find this approach to be very compassionate toward those with disordered drives (i.e. what is called a homosexual orientation) because it is saying to such people that the world lies when it says that you are doomed to loneliness and a non-fulfilling life because you cannot marry. Celibacy is not worse than death because sex is not the meaning of life.

Viewing sex as not essential for intimacy means that we do not need to leave marriages in which our needs for intimacy are not being met. For millennia people have found intimacy in friendship, the extended family and in the church. Marriage can be permanent because it does not bear the full responsibility for meeting all our needs. And yet nothing in this book could be taken to imply that marriage is not a wonderful thing that is rooted in creation and affected by redemption as part of God's plan.

3. The Theology of the Body: This is the first (or maybe the second) book written by a Protestant that actually quotes approvingly from John Paul II's wonderful writings on the theology of the body. I taught this material to my marriage class this Fall and it was very well received by Evangelical students who found it biblical, deep and convincing - unlike the shallow and tentative teaching they had received so far in the Evangelical church context. I predict that more and more conservative Protestants will discover this deeply spiritual and authentically biblical teaching in the coming years. Kuehne's emphasis on relationships as the alternative to modern individualism likely derives at least in part from the theology of the body.

All in all, I would highly recommend this book for anyone interested in coming to a deeper understanding of human sexuality in a Christian perspective and to anyone interested in understanding the modern world better. It is a fairly accessible work for students, laity and pastors.

What Happened to Craig Carter?

All over the internet the buzz is "What happened to Craig Carter?" Well, OK, that is a slight exaggeration. Would you believe an obscure blog ranted at me last week and one or two others said "Yah!"? Adam Steward is disappointed in me and Halden Doerge notes it but is waiting to see "how it plays out," though he has tended to be quite critical of my recent writing.

Adam hurls the ultimate "hipster" insult my way - "He's gone all First Things." Nothing is more calculated to hurt a guy in certain regions of the blogosphere than to associate him with that magazine. First Things is the most intelligent and interesting read of any magazine I know, but it has one fatal flaw that more than compensates for all its wit, insight and humour, not to mention poetry and cultural criticism, in the eyes of some. It endorsed George Bush and his modern, liberal war against Iraq in the name of Enlightenment values like liberty, equality and democracy. And that is the unpardonable sin - except I can't figure out if it is really Bush's Enlightenment beliefs or his waging of an unjust war that is the real problem for some people. But everything gets tarred with one gigantic brush - like this:

1. It was an unjust war according to just war theory (not last resort, aggressive).
2. It was launched by a Republican president who allowed the American Empire, neo-conservative, cabal (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, etc.) within the party to have their way.
3. Social conservatives and the Religious right vote Republican because it is the only party that opposes abortion.
4. In this case, both the social conservative and the Religious Right (AND the Democratic Party, including most of its current leadership), chose to close ranks behind the President and supported the war. First Things, (along with just about every other magazine and newspaper in the US), did the same.
5. Therefore the social conservatives/Religious Right (symbolized by First Things) are completely discredited forever on all issues including abortion, euthanasia, marriage & family, etc.
6. Therefore, for Craig Carter to criticize the left from a conservative perspective is for him to align himself with a discredited neo-conservativism.

I think the Iraq War was wrong. I opposed it from the time it was first suggested until today. I opposed it on the basis that it was unjust and the perpetrators professed to believe in the Just War Theory and were not practicing it.

But I do not think it is fair or reasonable to assign blame to the soc. con./RR for initiating the war or pressuring Bush to go ahead; i. e., point 5 does not logically follow from points 1-4. Another wing of the Rep. Party should be blamed for pushing for that war. What the soc. con./RR group can justly be blamed for is putting party unity ahead of principle and not opposing it. But this can also be said about the Democrats who voted for the war as well. So there is no moral high ground in either party on this issue; there is plenty of disgrace to go around. I do not think that the issues that the the soc. con/RR caucus in the Rep. Party stand for (sanctity of life, marriage, etc.) are unimportant or rendered somehow obsolete by the Iraq fiasco. In other words, to be clear: I am not defending anyone's support for an unjust war, but I am saying that to write off all that First Things stands for, because of its failure on this point, is unreasonable and no one would do it unless they had other reasons for doing so and the war was just the excuse.

During the last election campaign, Jim Wallis, Tony Campolo, Brian McLaren, and others formed a new Religious Left (the original one embeded in liberal Protestantism having fallen on rather hard times) to rally Evangelical support for Obama and the Dem. Party. They thought it was all right to compromise on the life and marriage issues in order to get the Dem. Party into power so it could expand the welfare state. For them to continue to use the Iraq War to beat the soc. con./RR over the head is disingenuous. Sure they are politicans and they know when they have a sure-fire winner of a sound bite, but that is all they are. They are gigantic hypocrites for doing themselves exactly what they blamed the soc. con./RR people for doing: compromising their basic Christian principles for the sake of gaining influence in a political party - all for the noblest of causes, from their point of view, of course. But if it is wrong for one, it is wrong for both - and it is.

The fact that First Things has become a sort of symbol of compromise in certain quarters means that it now takes its place alongside Focus on the Family, the Moral Majority and other such symbols of - something - the question is what? What exactly is being rejected? I would suggest that what is at stake here is a conflict between two positions that Christians take in contemporary politics.

On the one hand is an economic left-wing committment to social equality through re-distribution of income. For those on this side, equality requires some (or a lot of) levelling out of income and a great deal of social engineering to achieve ideologically-motivated goals (such as that women should be economically independent of men and so must be in the workforce and competitive with men in income). This philosophy tends to think in terms of the individual and the state and is not much concerned with civil society or the family, both of which it often frankly regards as oppressive because they place limits on the autonomous individual. I will refer to this philosophy below as left liberal thought (even though it incorporates much of the Marxist critique of capitalism into itself.)

On the other hand are those who see human equality in terms of equal value and worth, but who have less concern for re-distribution of income and more concern for equality of opportunity. For those on this side, social engineering is highly suspect and the emphasis is on protecting human dignity through the rule of law - this, rather than income redistribution, is the primary function of government. This philosophy tends to focus on how best to strengthen the family and civil society so as to make continual expansion of bureaucratic management of daily life uncecessary. I will refer to this philosophy as conservative thought (even though it often makes common cause with neo-conservativism, which is too smitten with capitialism to be true conservatism).

Now, I suggest that First Things, has become a symbol of all things conservative, the primary fault of which is the rejection of left liberal philosophy. But I distinguish between neo-conservativism and true conservativism. What I call true conservativism is a political philosophy that historically and logically precedes modernity and calls into question all the nominalism, individualism, rationalism and materialism that flows from the Enlightenment and is expressed in the two great Enlightenment religions: Capitalism & Marxism. True conservatism emphasises the family, localism, agrarianism, tradition, religion, duty & natural law. Both neo-conservatism and true conservatism are represented in First Things and I contend that it is wrong to reject both because true conservativism, unlike neo-conservatism, is a genuine alternative to modernity and the Enlightenment. So it is not logical to derive point 6 above from points 1-4.

Now in the process of trying to reject the Enlightenment, a group of people, (most of whom are currently unhappy with me) has been attracted to Yoder as a way out of what they see as the trap of having to choose between the secular left and the secular right. They embrace postmodernism and pacifism in an attempt to extricate themselves from the modern dialectics between equality & freedom, left & right and empire & revolution. Through their reading of postmodern philosophy they encounter neo-Marxist critiques of global capitalism and they embrace these eagerly. They see themselves as at once hovering above the left-right political battles and, at the same time, are utterly convinced that some sort of left liberal economic redistribution of wealth is necessary for a just society, which means that the right must be defeated. Thus they see themselves as simultaneously detatched and engaged - but they fail to detect any contradiction in such a stance. Well, I do.

What has happened to Craig Carter? It is really very simple. For the past 20 years I have described myself as left-wing on social issues and conservative in theology, although my pro-life and pro-marriage postion has always made me uneasy in left-wing circles. But in the past few years, I have lost my faith in liberal progressivism altogether. I no longer would call myself left wing on any issue. I have come to realize that to claim to be a Christian who is neither left wing or right wing is one thing, but to think that one can embrace left liberalism and still remain untainted by modernity is just not logically possible. In fact, I think that most of the Yoder-loving, neo-Marxist quoting, pacifist/anarchist, postmodern philosopher-reading crowd are just upscale liberal progressivists at heart. They are not "fundamentalists with Ph.D.'s," as the early Evangelicals were described, they are "community organizers with Ph.D.'s" - Jim Wallis dressed up in pastmodern jargon.

The great hero of this crowd is Mr. Bushy Eyebrows himself, Rowan Williams, also known as "the Great Undecided One" (the perfect foil to G. W. Bush, the self-proclaimed "Decider-in-Chief.") R. Williams is a nice man and by all accounts an excellent professor who embodies the Peter Principle, which says that in any organization employees will be promoted to the level of their incompetence. As Archbishop, he has displayed a talent only for making the ecclesiastical train wreck that is the Anglican Communion happen in slow motion. But that is not what I want to point out about him here. Williams embodies a common type in modern theology. He embodies the intellectual who is characterized by fair-mindedness, wide scholarly acumen and a talent for self promotion that combines more than a dollop of commendable orthodoxy with a standard, left liberal ideology. This endears him to the "upper class with a social conscience" types who facilitate his social promotion and it compensates in their eyes for his orthodoxy. One of his articles of faith is the Trinity; another is socialism. Redistribution of income is the sine qua non of social justice. The problem with the Labour Pary is that it is too right-wing. (N. T. Wright is another one of this type.)

The fact that the same people simultaneously like Yoder (the ultimate outsider) and Williams (the consumate insider) and think of themselves as radical in so doing is an incongruity that causes the oneness and threeness of the persons to pale in comparison as a source of wonder. What am I trying to say? Simply that I understand why I'm being excommunicated from this circle, but I'm not sure the excommunicators understand what they are doing.

What has happened to Craig Carter? I have come to believe that the only truly radical (getting to the roots) way of being a Christian in late modernity is to embrace a pre-modern conservatism that challenges all forms of liberalism (left liberalism & neo-conservativism alike) by challenging the fundamental, bedrock assumption of modernity common to all strands of modernity and postmodernity, which is the priority of the autonomous self. True conservativism hearkens back to a time before the priority of the autonomous self, a time when family was fundamental, civil society was robust, tradition was sacred and the state was limited. It does not want to go back to that time (which is impossible), but it does want to mine that tradition for resources that can help us rebuild a church that has been decimated by modernity.

What resources does it offer? It offers such treasures as a metaphysics of a universe in motion moved by the love of God (C. S. Lewis, John Milbank), virtue ethics (A. MacIntyre, S. Pinckears), proper confidence in reason's ability to know truth (St. Thomas Aquinas, Benedict XVI) and a way of reading Scripture for its spiritual meaning (H. de Lubac). These are just the examples that come to mind first.

I find Adam Steward's critique of me as being characterized by "resentment" to be hilarious. He thinks I am a fundamentalist who secretly believes that the powers of the world are ultimate (although how a true fundamentalist could believe that is difficult to understand) and he dismisses my critique of liberalism as envy. Adam, on the other hand, hovers serenely above the fray "content to let the world go by, to know no gain nor loss" while smiling knowingly about my preoccupation with "the things of this world." Who is the real fundamentalist here? The really funny part is that he quotes a neo-Marxist in his critique of me! So I'm pre-occupied with the powers of this world and a neo-Marxist analysis proves it! Stop the irony - I can't stand it!

What I observe about the Yoder-Williams crowd is that the only way they know to overcome or at least mitigate the incipient gnosticism to which they are tempted (the perennial Protestant temptation) is to declare their indifference to party politics, political issues & this-worldly debate until at last they can take it no longer and they succumb to a fit of liberal progressivism, after which they immediately go back to pretending to be so different from the Religious Right because they know that all that political stuff is irrelevant in the context of the great cosmic drama of redemption through the crucified Messiah. Finally, then, my rejoinder to Adam and Halden and co. is clear: I think the way of embodied discipleship in this world is true conservativism and I think the reason they find that distasteful is that they have bought into a typical Protestant attempt to marry a gnostic streak with a liberal progressive default position. That is why you never find them marching against abortion, but always ready to mock those who are.

The Welfare State and Secularization

This article by W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia offers an explanation for why secularism is rising in America. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123690880933515111.html

The last bastion of high church attendance and influence of Christianity on public life, America has, for the last century or so, resisted the trends toward secularization in the rest of Western culture, especially Europe. However, he quotes a new study that shows that the number of Americans who claim no religion now stands at 15%, up from 8% in 1990 and 2% in 1962. Religious service attendance in the 25-41 age group is now about 25%, down from 33% in the early 1970's, according to Robert Wuthrow.

Wilcox names two explanations for the decline and why it is likely to accelerate. First, he mentions the decline in marriage. Increasing numbers of young adults are postponing or avoiding marriage and childbearing and nothing gets people out to church like having a family.

The other factor that he thinks will accelarate the trend in future is the drastic expansion of the welfare state under Obama. The 2010 budget will bring government spending to about 40% of the GNP, within hailing distance of the European average of 46%. According to Wilcox, "The European experience suggests that the growth of the welfare state goes hand in hand with declines in personal religiosity." Wilcox then explains:

"A recent study of 33 countries by Anthony Gill and Erik Lundsgaarde found an inverse relationship between religious observance and welfare spending. Countries with larger welfare states, such as Sweden, Norway and Denmark, had markedly lower levels of religious attendance, affiliation and trust in God than countries with a history of limited government, such as the U.S., the Philippines and Brazil. Public spending amounts to more than one half of the GDP in Sweden, where only 4% of the population regularly attends church. By contrast, public spending amounts to 18% of the Philippines' GDP, and 68% of Filipinos regularly attend church."

I think this is an accurate statement of the empirical facts. Although Wilcox does not mention the North versus South disparity in rates of secularization, the general model holds. The question is why is this the case? Wilcox proposes the following explanation:

"A successful Obama revolution providing cradle-to-career education and cradle-to-grave health care would reduce the odds that Americans would turn to their local religious congregations and fellow believers for economic, social, emotional and spiritual aid. Fewer Americans would also be likely to feel obliged to help their fellow citizens through local churches and charities."

Now there is something in this assessment, but I think it is too pragmatic and rational. It portrays people as attending church as a rational, economic calculation and that seems much too reductionistic as an explanation for a complex human behaviour like religious observance. Yet, this explanation, it seems to me, does go at least part way to explaining the decline of civil society in general in the welfare state, insofar as altruism is one of the prime motivating factors for participation in civil society. There is something to the "Let the government do it" attitude, especially if people perceive that they are being taxed heavily.

But we could also look at it from a slightly different angle and say that the welfare state cultivates in individuals a sense of entitlement and security that makes for self-sufficiency. This self-sufficiency is highly prized in liberal individualist society and is often called "empowerment." It is seen as a good, even though it leads to selfishness and a loss of community.

What I'm wondering is if this sense of security fostered by the welfare state could be viewed as a personal attitude similar to what the Bible means by riches or wealth. I know that there are many people in Canada or the US who are much richer than those on government assistance of one form or another, yet in comparison to over two billion global neighbours these people are extremely rich. The question is whether or not this kind of economic security qualifies as being rich in biblical terms. If so, consider the following verses:

"The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life's worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature." (Lk. 8:14)

"No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money." (Lk. 16:13)

"For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. " (I Tim. 6:10)

"Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you." (Heb. 13:5)

Now, I realize that we are used to applying these verese to the wealthiest segment of any given society and implicit in that move is the covert denial that most of us are, ourselves, wealthy. This seems to be to be a rather pernicious little self-deception. I can imagine a memo from Screwtape instructing his protege to attempt to convince as many people in modern Western culture that they are, in fact, poor. At first, he might advise, get them to think they are "relatively" poor and then later quietly drop the "relatively."

It seems to me that we were not placed on this earth to vegetate, fornicate and prevaricate, but rather to struggle to earn an honest living, marry and raise children and be truthful about our financial status. It is a temptation to believe that we are poor, when we actually are rich. And it is a temptation to put our trust in the State for the provision of our needs instead of praying "Our Father . . give us this day our daily bread."

In this way, secularization is surely aided and abetted by the welfare state. But it is not merely a matter of not going to church for selfish motivations that were less than admirable reasons to go in the first place. It is far more serious than that. It is a matter of letting the Welfare State replace God and imagining ourselves as poor and hard done by when in reality we are greatly blessed. The irony is that the more we are blessed economically, the easier it is to be damned spiritually. Is it any wonder that the Bible as a whole is profoundly ambivalent about money and riches?

Judgment, Force and Violence: Some Crucial Distinctions

If I were to re-write my book, Rethinking Christ and Culture, I would employ some careful distinctions between the concepts of judgment, force and violence. Having seen what people like J. Denny Weaver do with the idea of violence (eg. in his The Nonviolent Atonement) I think that a great deal of mischief arises from the failure to distinguish adequately between the three concepts.

Judgment is properly and primarily applied to God alone, although there is such a thing as a pale imitation of it among humans. The paleness of the imitation is the result of original sin; we may try to judge righteously, but we often fail completely and never get it perfectly right. God, on the other hand, is presented in Scripture as "the righteous Judge" (eg. Ps. 96) who judges in a perfectly eqitable, just and fair manner at all times. God is holy, so he hates sin and God is righteous, so he must punish sin. Therefore: "The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who supress the truth by their wickedness" (Rom. 1:18 NIV) There is nothing in the teaching of Jesus or the New Testament as a whole that contradicts this essentially Jewish, Old Testament teaching about the nature of God. The whole concept of human government, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, is built, as Oliver O'Donovan points out, on the function of right judgment.

Force is the use of disciplinary, police or military means to make laws effective and stop evil. It can also be used to shape character. Force is different from violence in that it is 1) constrained by law, 2) limited in scope and 3) rationally deployed. Force consists of various grades up to and including lethal force. But force always operates within rationally determined limits; if it exceeds those limits it turns into violence and this is a constant threat. The difference between God's wrath and human force is that God's wrath is always an exact reflection of his perfectly righteous judgment, whereas human force is, at best, an approximation and, at worst, a demonic mockery of God's perfectly righteous judgment. An example of disciplinary force would be parental punishment of children or expulsion from school by the school authorities. An example of police force would be policemen arresting murderers or thieves. An example of military force would be just war, but not total war, crusades or nuclear holocaust.

Violence then can be defined as the human use of force when it is unconstrained by law, unlimited in scope and irrational. Force may turn into violence at any moment; it lives on the boundary between law and lawlessness. Parental discipline can become violent if parents are not self-controlled. In certain situations, large scale use of force almost inevitably morphs into violence, as for example in a large scale war in which irrational powers such as nationalism or racism come into play and take over the whole enterprise. This is one of the most troubling problems with the actualy deployment of just war theory in the real world, yet it is inescapable in the fallen human condition.

In liberal Protestant theology, Divine judgment, divine wrath, human force and violence are all collapsed into one category and rejected as a package. The resulting nonviolent stance then becomes a rational principle by which all ethics and theology are revised. Most of the 16th century Anabaptists did collapse force and violence into each other, (with the exception of people like Hubmaier), but many contemporary Mennonites are going further in collapsing Divine judgment into the same package as well. This is not really an Anabaptist move; it is a liberal Protestant one. Ironically, people like Ted Grimsrud and Denny Weaver often criticize Mennonites who follow the 16th century tradition for being influenced by Evangelical Protestantism, even as they themselves embrace liberal Protestantism and re-interpret their Anabaptist heritage in terms of it. To deny Dvine judgment is to embrace Pelagianism and to reject the whole idea of salvation from the penalty of sin. It is to turn the Gospel into a message that God already accepts; all we have to do is accept our acceptance. We are fine just we are; no repentance is required and ammendment of life is unnecessary so long as we become non-judgmental of others.

To regard God's judgment of sin as violence and to redefine God as nonviolent is to reject the God of the Bible and to fashion an idol in His place. This idol is a mythical symbol of the rational principle of nonviolence, which is derived from modern liberal political philosophy, from which also comes the notion of freedom from constraint and tolerance as the highest goods. To be nonviolent means essentiallly to be tolerant and to exalt individual freedom as the absolute.

This philosophy is incoherent and impossible to implement in the real world, but it destroys the rational morality of the Enlightenment out of which it sprang and the revealed morality of biblical law against which the Enlightenment rebelled. The end result is that when tolerance and individualism break down in the face of a challenge from determined enemies, for example in the event of 9/11, liberals find it difficult to distinguish between responding with force and responding with violence. This explains why civil rights and prohibitions of torture crumbled so quickly in the panic of 9/11. It also explains why Pope Benedict XVI was right in his Regensburg Address to suggest that our dilemma is that certain strains of both Islam and the modern West have cut themselves off from rational traditions of metaphysics which could provide the basis for fruitful dialogue between cultures and have embraced a voluntarism that can lead only to nihilistic violence. As Benedict XVI said, God is rational and His judgments are not violence; the world is governed by the Logos and we humans are created in God's image. Theology and philosophy that fail to recognize these truths are leading us off the cliff of nihilism and are dangerous to the future of world peace.

Western political philosophy and liberal theology are dead ends for the future of world civilization because they teach individualism in politics, relativism in ethics and atheism/idolatry in theology, i.e. a false view of freedom rooted in a false anthropology and a false doctrine of God. Only a revival of Christian metaphysics rooted in revelation has a hope of beginning a dialogue with the rational and religious elements of Islam, which would have the potential to lead to peaceful co-existence on the basis of a shared moral foundation. Crucial to such a metaphysics are fundamental distinctions between judgment, force and violence.

Sunday urged to be ‘day of fervent prayer’ for Pope Benedict

In the last few weeks, the aging, decadent liberals of the Roman Catholic Church have risen up once again in a spasm of ugliness to attack everything orthodox and biblical in the Church in the name of "the spirit of Vatican II," which really means "the spirit of '68," that is, the spirit of the leftist revolution, the sexual revolution and the culture of death. Notice that RC liberals never talk about the "texts" of Vatican II as Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI endlessly do. That is because the spirit of rebellion against the Bible and Tradition that the liberals promote cannot be found in the actual texts of Vatican II. To hear them tell it, Vatican II was an attack on Vatican I and an admission that modernity has been right all along and the Church wrong. In the perception of the liberals, Vatican II was the surrender of the Roman Catholic Church to the theological and ethical liberalism that had already come to dominate the formerly "mainline," now "sideline," Protestant denominations.

If all that Hans Kung and the other liberals could wish for were to come true, the Roman Catholic Church would resemble nothing so much as the Episcopal Church in the US with rabid support for abortion, utter capitulation to the sexual revolution, Unitarian theology, bishops riding in Gay Pride Parades and 1,000 members per week leaving the denomination. Liberal Protestantism is on a fast slide to irrelevancy and close to degenerating into a heretical cult like the Unitarian-Universalist Association.

Pope John Paul II and now Benedict XVI are courageous, saintly and intellectually brilliant bulwarks against the anti-humanism of the culture of death and all that liberal modernity has wrought. Protestants need not agree with them on every doctrine in order to appreciate that thier witness has been a crucial one in upholding the reality of God, the glory and deity of Jesus Christ and the truth of the Gospel in this world. All those who take the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds seriously should be grateful for their rock-solid witness. Right now, Pope Benedict XVI needs the prayers of not only Catholics, but all Christians of good will around the world. As a recent article on the Cathoic News Agency says:

"Saying Pope Benedict XVI has been “unjustly attacked,” the head of the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need has called for this Sunday, the Feast of the Chair of Peter, to be a day of fervent prayer for the Holy Father."

“The dignity of the papacy and the person of Benedict XVI himself have been crudely insulted. Many people have manipulated the facts, while others have frivolously abandoned the important fundamentals of our humanist tradition.

“This unworthy dealing with the truth does grave damage to the dialogue between civil society and the great religions. It is a sign of cultural degeneration.”

Read it all here: http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=15159

"May God bless and protect Pope Benedict XVI and keep him faithful to the truth of Scripture and the orthodox teaching of the doctors of the Church, the great saints and the mystics down through the ages. May he know the power and comfort of the Holy Spirit bearing him up in the face of adversity. May he continue to shine the light of reason and faith on a world that desperately need to embrace the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

The Brothers Karamazov and Liberal Modernity

The Brothers Karamazov is (rightly, in my opinion) regarded by many as not only the culmination of Dostoevsky's artistic vision, but also as a genuine work of prophecy. Dostoevsky writes as a Christian to warn, predict, instruct and declare.

In the next few posts, I want to discuss the interpretation of the Grand Inquisitor's vision and how it contrasts to the vision articulated by the Elder Zosima in Book VI, which immediately following Book V, which contains the key chapters (4. Rebellion and 5. The Grand Inquisitor). Page references will be the the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (1990).

I will also refer frequently to the stunningly insightful book by P. Travis Kroeker and Bruce K. Ward entitled: Remembering the End: Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity (Westview, 2001).
Much of my understanding of Dostoevsky is indebted to their fine work, although I also find that my understanding of Augustine and Yoder also helps to appreciate Dostoevsky's art. I find it astonishing and highly significant that such a high degree of unity exists between the 4th century church father, the 19th century Russian Orthodox and the 20th century Mennonite. I leave the reader to figure out how they fit together; I merely point out the fact.


The Grand Inquisitor

The Grand Inquisitor has been interpreted, wrongly in my view, as representing Roman Catholicism as a whole over against Orthodoxy. He has also be misinterpreted as standing for the totalitarian movements of National Socialism and Soviet Communism that occured in the 20th century.


The Grand Inquisitor actually represents, not a pathological offshoot of modernity, but modernity itself. The GI represents, ironically, not only political religion (i.e. the church siezing control of the levers of political power and using coercion to enforce its views on an unwilling population), but the GI also represents religious politics (i.e. the State assuming God-like proportions and implementing a soft totalitarianism that not only takes away the freedom of people in the name of equality, but which does so in such a way that the people beg the State to relieve them of the burden of freedom). So Hitler and Stalin were only crude prototypes of the GI, who relied on external coercion to rule. The GI, by contrast, will rule by popular acclamation and will assume the burden of freedom for people so that they can rely on the GI (the State) to meet their material needs and allow them to sin.

To understand how this is so, we must listen to Ivan as he speaks throught the mouth of the GI. In Ivan's poem, the GI has arrested Jesus, who appeared unexpectedly in Seville in the late 16th century on the day after the GI has burnt 100 heretics in a grand auto de fe. The GI has arrested Jesus and is now speaking to him in Jesus' prison cell. Jesus remains silent throughout the poem. The GI says "The dread and intelligent spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-being . . . the great spirit spoke with you in the wilderness . . . Was it possible to say anything more true than what he proclaimed to you in his three questions? . . . For in these three questions all subsequent human history is as if brought together in a single whole and foretold." (BK, 252)

The Grand Inquisitor as a Hegelian

Kroeker and Ward point out that the 3 temptations correspond to the 3 stages of world history in Hegel's philosophy of history. The first stage is the temptation to rule the masses by giving them bread and corresponds to what Hegel called the Oriental World. In every civilization prior to Christianity there was a unity of the religous and the political power (along with the economic and judicial and other powers) in the person of the Emperor, who personifies the empire.

The second stage is introduced by Christianity and is the development of individual freedom. The individual comes to understand himself as distinct from the hive, the totality - as more than merely a cog in the State machinery. Jesus is tempted to throw himself down from the Temple, thus calling attention to his unique status as God's son and the miracle which God would do to save him. The GI admits that Jesus reacted magnificently in refusing to tempt God, but asks how many of the common herd could do the same? Here he doubts the feasiblility of freedom for common human beings.

The third stage is the reconciliation of equality (the unified State) and freedom (individual consciousness). Here Jesus is tempted to worship the Devil and refuses. The GI proudly asserts that he and his colleagues have corrected Jesus' mistake at this point: "we are not with you, but with him, that is our secret!" (BK, 257)

Liberal Democracy as the End of History?

Modern liberal democracy claims to be the reconciliation of equality (Rousseau, Marx) and freedom (Hobbes, Locke, Jefferson) in a synthesis that works (American Pragmatism). Francis Fukuyama, a contemporary populizer of Hegel, claims that liberal democracy has triumphed over its foes and so we now stand at the "end of history. But Fukuyama does not admit that contemporary liberal democracy actually is a synthesis of the Marxist impulse toward equality and the Capitalist faith in the wealth-creating Market. "Pure" 19th century Capitalism no longer exists. Since the "New Deal" Capitalism and the Welfare State have been fused together. The Market God and the State God are both worshipped equally for one creates the wealth and the other redistributes it in such a way as to leave incentive for wealth creation without allowing such exptremes of wealth and poverty so as to incite revolution. Liberal modernity has triumphed over Communism precisely by absorbing much of the Marxist emphasis on equality into itself without ceasing to be itself. The Capitalist Welfare State has triumphed, but not because Capitalism has obliterated Marxism, but rather because it has co-opted it. The two party system in liberal Western states (liberal socialist and neo-conservative) is necessary to maintain the delicate balance. Those who call for less government (neo-conservatives) and those who call for more government (liberal) are just emphasizing two sides of the same integrated system.

Dostoevsky's prophecy is of a state in which the many would gladly surrender their freedom to their rulers in exchange for 1) material well-being and 2) sexual freedom. The GI says: "in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us 'Better that you enslave us, but feed us.' They will finally understand that freedom and earthly bread in plenty for everyone are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share among themselves." (BK, 253) In other words, the equality of the first stage of history (the equlity of the hive) will characterize this State. But the GI also says: "We will tell them that every sin wil be redeemed if it is committed with our permission; and that we allow them to sin because we love them." (BK, 259) This tyranny is much more sophisticated than that of Hitler and Stalin because they had to rule by external coercion. People felt dominated and abused by them; this new tyranny will not feel that way. Instead, it will appeal to a real aspect of human nature: the sensuous desire for physical gratification common to all fallen humans. This is what makes it dangerous. Although Dostoevsky does not say it explicitly, we see his vision fulfilled in the sexual revolution. The State changes the law (allows us to sin) because it loves us. So infatuated with this "freedom" we gladly exchange our political freedom for it.

Dostoevsky is drawing a picture of a soft totalitariainism along the lines of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which promiscuity and drugs are what keeps the population quiet, while the State has taken over the business of human reproduction. The only ones who are unhappy in the GI's vision of the end of history are the rulers because they must govern on the basis of a lie. What is this lie?

The Grand Inquisitor: A Liar Like His Hero the Devil:

The lie is that freedom and equality have been reconciled and Hegel's synthesis has been achieved, that is, that the end of history is here. In actual fact it is more like a reversion to the pre-Christian Oriental World in which there is plenty of equality but no real freedom. The freedom of the subjects of liberal modernity is 'freedom to gratify one's physical desires here and now" but it pales beside the grandeur of the Augustinian definition of freedom as 'freedom to act toward the good for human nature,' which is true freedom. The freedom of liberal modernity is, from a Christian perspective, slavery to the lusts of the flesh and thus no freedom at all.

Yet, even if this version of history sounds less bad to you than other possibilities (eg. nuclear war that destroys civilization), you need to know that even this version is not feasible, as we shall see in the next post.

Tomorrow's Post: "The Nietzschean Correction of Hegel"
Third Post: "The Alternative Vision of the Elder Zosima"
Concluding Post: "Conservatism as the Rejection of Liberal Modernity"