Not Everything Should Have A Price

Michael Ignatieff, professor of politics at the University of Toronto, makes an important case in The New Republic for why we should begin to see our society not exclusively as a market for consumers, but as a political community for citizens called a republic, that uses markets when appropriate.  This allows for an appropriate division between private and public goods, something that is becoming increasingly obscured by our new world of wealth and money.

A liberal theory of public goods, backed up by a morally persuasive rationale for progressive taxation, also needs a story about generating growth through public and private investment in the skills and the capabilities of citizens. Without a theory of growth, a politics of virtue runs into the objections that Adam Smith leveled against Rousseau two hundred years ago. Virtue without growth equals stagnation and autarchy. All told, this looks like the minimum program for Sandel’s politics of virtue, but none of it is remotely practical as long as there are no effective limits on money in politics. As long as money is moralized as speech, and not understood as power, there is little chance that the republic can put money in its proper place.

Without a politics—of redistributive taxation, public goods investment for growth, and rules controlling money in politics—any critique of what money has done to American life is just moralizing. We did not drift into this new world of money or arrive here by accident. Powerful interests have carried us here, and it is up to the people acting together to take their republic back. A society is not a market. It is a political community. Restoring the virtue of its citizens demands a politics equal to the challenge of virtue’s enemies.

Some great time-lapse photography of Yosemite National Park!

The Real Lenin

Having just finished a 633 page biography of Lenin by the writer Robert Payne, let me summarize this man's life by quoting from pages 630-632:

Lenin had many sins, but the gravest was a supreme contempt for the human race.  Like Marx he possessed an overwhelming contempt for the peasants....But Lenin went beyond Marx.  Not only the peasants, but all classes of society were anathema to him--except the proletariat [workers], with which he had almost no contact.  He surrounded himself with intellectuals and theoreticians, and he despised them as much as he despised the peasants, for he never found one who was his intellectual equal....

Lenin was the great simplifier, but there are no simple solutions.  He wanted to bring about the ideal state--and there is no doubt about the genuineness of his passion for the ideal state--but the ideal eluded him, as it has eluded everyone else.  Toward the end of his life he realized that after the Russian people had suffered and submitted to intolerable sacrifices under his dictatorship, he had led them along the wrong path.  "I am, it seems, strongly guilty before the workers of Russia," he declared; and those words were his genuine epitaph.  There are few rulers in history who have uttered so clear a mea culpa.

That Stalin should have been his successor was a fearful irony.  That course, brutal and paranoid dictator possessed none of Lenin's intellectual gifts and could scarcely write a sentence which was not a mockery of the Russian language.  Under him Communism became a tyranny of such vast proportions that it exceeded all the tyrannies the world had known up to his time.  Lenin, with his harsh intellect, his egotism, his phenomenal vigor, his always flawed yet ever impressive achievement, remained oddly human; Stalin was a monster.  Yet it is important to observe that there could have been no Stalin without Lenin.  Stalin was Lenin's child; and Lenin, who hated and despised and feared him, must bear sole responsibility for bringing Stalin to power.

Once Lenin had decided that all means were permissible to bring about the dictatorship of the proletariat, with himself ruling in the name of the proletariat, he had commited Russia to intolerable deprivations of human freedom.  His power was naked power; his weapon was extermination; his aim the prolongation of his own dictatorship....He could decree the deaths of thousands upon thousands of men, and their deaths were immaterial, because they were only statistics impeding the progress of his theory.  The butchery in the cellars of the Lubyanka [Prison] did not concern him.  He captured the Russian Revolution and then betrayed it, and at that moment he made Stalin inevitable.

The lawlessness of Communist rule was of Lenin's own making.  Ordinary human morality never concerned him; from the beginning he was using words like "extermination" and "merciless" as though they were counters in a game.  Whatever he decreed was law, and whoever opposed his decree was outside the law, and therefore possessing no rights, not even the right to breathe....

The state he brought into being proved to be more unjust and incomparably more tyrannical than the state he overthrew.  He announced that everything would be new, but in fact there was nothing new except the names; for all tyrannies are alike, differing only in their degree of tyranny.  The Cheka was only the tsarist Okhrana under another name:  more unpitying, more terrifying, and effective only when it exterminated opposed groups to the last man.  Under Stalin, the Cheka, more murderous than ever, became the real ruler of the country; and one by one its leaders died in the same manner as the victims.

When the rule of a country is given over to the secret police, then by the very nature of things it loses its humanity, places itself outside the frontiers of civilization, and possesses no history; for the repetition of crimes is not history.  The government which Lenin introduced, believing it to be new, was as old as man, for there is nothing new about tyranny....

Private Equity Industry Upset With Obama

Don Gogel, CEO of a leading private equity firm and moderate Democrat, was interviewed on Charlie Rose over the weekend.  In the course of the interview, Gogel made what I consider to be a strong defense of the private equity industry (which of course includes Romney's Bain Capitol).  Gogel also voted for Obama in 2008, and considers to have been a good President in many ways.  But because of the recent Democratic attacks on the record of Bain Capitol, Gogel is considering voting for Romney.

This is the kind of person whose loss may handicap the President in his effort to be reelected.  I'm not sure that he's totally defected yet, since it is clear that he's uncomfortable with much of the conservativism represented in the Republican Party.  But he will clearly be a bellwether as to whether Obama will succeed or not.

You can watch the interview with Gogel here.

Ps.  Here's another take of private equity from Rolling Stone that isn't quite so positive.

There's only one problem with Romney's story: It doesn’t describe most of what private equity firms actually do. The companies Romney holds up as successes – Staples, Sports Authority et al. – were not Bain private equity deals; they were venture capital investments in companies that Bain neither owned nor ran. All well and good: Venture capital is a good thing – essential for funding the growth of new and developing companies. But Romney didn't make his fortune through venture capital­; he made it through private equity – and private equity, as President Obama pointed out this week, is a very different proposition. "Their priority is to maximize profits," the president said of PE firms, and "that’s not always going to be good for businesses or communities or workers."

Here’s what private equity is really about: A firm like Bain obtains cheap credit and uses it to acquire a company in a "leveraged buyout." "Leverage" refers to the fact that the company being purchased is forced to pay for about 70 percent of its own acquisition, by taking out loans. If this sounds like an odd arrangement, that's because it is. Imagine a homebuyer purchasing a house and making the bank responsible for repaying its own loan, and you start to get the picture.

American Politics as Pro-Wrestling: The Legacy of Andrew Breitbart

I didn't know much about Andrew Breitbart, but after his recent death, I saw how important he was to many on the rabid Right.  And then I read an article this morning about him in Harper's by Thomas Frank.  Frank may be a little harsh and obviously one-sided about Breitbart, but the larger point that is important is the condition of our political debate these days, and how Breitbart seemed to exemplify what is wrong.

He started out as a man who loved to puncture Hollywood vanity, then became a VIP himself.  "Media is everything," he used to say, and by the end it was all he was—a caricature, as he reportedly confided in his final days to Sixties radical Bill Ayers. His articles and books, like the Supreme Court decisions of Clarence Thomas, were secondary and are now largely forgotten. What will be remembered is the ranting collection of pixels he leaves behind, those images of a stout man with graying hair and a snarling lip, saying something mean to someone.

As for Breitbart’s relationship with his one true love, the Internet, I think it is best demonstrated by recalling the way he once quarreled with a Gawker editor via instant message for three days. On and on the mighty champions fought, ultimately generating some 10,000 words between them while trying to hash out whether neo-Nazis could be described as right-wing. Here was an endless Iron Butterfly drum solo of pointless speculation and wandering rage, with no pauses to acknowledge things that are obvious to everyone or to check history books that might have cleared matters up quickly. Just two voices screaming at each other in the ether, their petty insults and accusations preserved for future generations.

For four decades now, the Breitbart model of political confrontation has been around in one form or another. The more I look back over its history, the more I am convinced that its closest evolutionary relative is pro wrestling. There are the same mock-feuds, the same posturing outrage, with the antagonists always avenging their vain selves or the wounded honor of their stage friends. The conflicts mean nothing.  There is nothing at stake. And in the end there is nothing to remember.

Romney: An Unprincipled Man of Wealth?

Elizabeth Drew is one of the more insightful political reporters in Washington, and she's been at it a long time.  In a short piece for the New York Review of Books blog, she writes exactly what I've been thinking about the prospects of Mitt Romney as President. 

The outcome of a presumably close election thus rides on how swing voters ultimately decide what they think about Mitt Romney; their views about Barack Obama are pretty well fixed, even though he remains somewhat opaque to many. The two most interesting questions about Romney are whether he can become a more steady candidate, and what is it that causes him to stumble and say oafish things. The frequency of Romney‘s displays of awkwardness is something rarely seen in a party’s nominee. The nature of Romney’s stumbles—his wife Ann has “a couple of Cadillacs”—is also unusual. The important thing about these slips is that they go beyond being the stuff of jokes and mockery, to raise questions about what kind of president Romney would be.

He just cannot help reminding audiences that he’s very wealthy, and often comes across as simply uncomfortable in dealing with those outside his own narrow world. It’s not just that both he and Ann were raised in plush circumstances—she perhaps even more so, with nannies and horses in the posh Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills—but that neither of them seems to understand how different their lives have been from that of all but a very few. This may explain why even going for the presidency he didn’t bother to pull out funds he’d stashed away in the Cayman Islands or Switzerland or hold off in expanding their home in La Jolla in a $12 million renovation, including an elevator for the four-car garage. The symbolism of such things goes well beyond the “tin ear,” and suggests a paralyzing inability to understand the circumstances of most others: What else can explain Romney’s look of disgust as he disdained the cookies the hostess had placed before him when he met with a middle class group around a picnic table in Bethel, Pennsylvania? ( “I don’t know about those cookies”—which in his narrow-vision he perhaps thought had come from a 7-11.) These stumbles go way beyond George H. W. Bush’s lack of familiarity with grocery store bar codes. How are the voters, and if he were to become president the citizens, going to react to this kind of talk?

In 2004, relating the young married couple’s hardship living a basement apartment while they completed their studies at Brigham Young University, Ann Romney said that if things got too difficult her husband sold some stocks his father had given him. The couple’s apparent sole interest in sports is horseback riding and their one sports passion is dressage horses (which cost an estimated $250,000-$300,000 a year to maintain). Being wealthy doesn’t automatically mean that a politician cannot connect with the middle class or the poor: Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F Kennedy, for example, were at ease about their good fortune, and both could see well beyond their manicured estates.

Romney thinks he is very funny—he and his wife say so—and he laughs a lot at his own jokes, but his jokes tend to be duds, and he lacks wit. He doesn’t get it that telling a group of waitresses that he’s unemployed wasn’t terribly funny. It got less so as it was revealed that he is being paid about $20 million by Bain Capital for doing nothing for the company. Romney is square—and a lot of the people prefer a square, especially if they feel there is something to fear or simply dislike about a more hip and flashy candidate. They might feel safer with a square. Especially one who looks like a Norman Rockwell President.

Romney’s problem is that even if he had compassionate instincts he’s trapped by the fact that he has been running for the nomination in a party that had moved so far to the right that any suggestion that he cares for the plight of others could have endangered his prospects. Thus, in February he told a large and powerful group of conservative Republicans that his record as Governor of Massachusetts was “severely” conservative—ad-libbing the adverb. Romney’s ease in revising the truth goes beyond even the norms of expediency and suggests an unusual absence of core guiding political principles. It also may reflect a discomfiting weakness. A politician in a position of great power without principles and weak is, well, alarming.

Romney in the Driver's Seat

I've just watched Mitt Romney's entire victory speech after last night's primary elections in five states. He gave what looks to be a summary of his entire forthcoming campaign. He definitely should win an award for the number of political cliches you can pack into eleven minutes! But that's what stump speechs are, and that aside it was an impressive presentation both in style and in content.
 
Here are just a few of the phrases he used: "One Nation Under God"; "Saving the Soul of America"; "Return to Founding Principles"; "Land of Opportunity"; "Restore American Greatness"; "We still believe in America as the land of opportunity and a beacon of freedom".

It seems to me that Mitt Romey will be doing his best to resurrect the spirit of Ronald Reagan: a spirit of optimism, hope, and conservative values. And of course in doing so, he will be painting Barack Obama and the Democrats in the worst possible light, even to the point of slanderous misrepresentation (ie. Obama's foreign policy is a 'strategy of appeasement'). But again, that seems to be fair in the game of politics, and he probably will be getting a good dose of it coming at him from the other side!

Will this work? To some extent, it will work, at least to unify the Republican Party and get them on board his campaign. As long as no Republican conservatives are hurling accusations at him, he should be able to make the conservative Party base forget about his flip-flopping or his being the 'Massachusetts Moderate'--see, you've forgotten it already--and unite in their distain and/or hatred for Barack Obama.

The question is where the independents of the nation end up. Once the campaign is in full-swing in the fall, once the heavy guns of the Obama campaign are trained squarely on Mitt Romney, once the two of them meet in their debates, then and only then will we see where those people in the middle end up. Going with the 'devil they know'--President Obama--or taking a chance on the new and fresh face from Massachusetts (or Michigan, or New Hampshire, or California, or Utah, or wherever he's from!).

The other big factor, of course, will be the economy and world events. If the economy sours between now and then--which it easily could, given the volatility of the European economy and dozens of other factors--then Obama is probably toast. If Israel attacks Iran and we're at war, then that could have an effect. And so on. Who would have guessed at this time in 2008, that the economy would have crashed, or that McCain would have picked Sarah Palin? You just never know.

So hang on for the ride...it's going to be a long and bumpy one, I'm afraid!

Back in the Saddle

Okay, I guess it's time to get back to my blog.  I've been away nearly two months now.  I guess I needed a break from it, although that's no excuse because I've been putting things on my Facebook wall that whole time.  But it's just a little easier to do that, it seems, plus it just seems more 'permanent' to post things to 'Rude Awakening' (though it's not really).  And, well, as the pictures shows, I've been doing some other things these nice spring days!

In any case, since I left in late February not too much has happened except that Mitt Romney has put away the Republican nomination.  So that bit of excitement is over, and now it's on to the general election.  Why does this thing take so long?!  It's not good for the country that it does, because not much actual governing gets done in the meantime.

Anyway, I'll be seeing you most days again.  Hope you are well!

Why Women Are Inferior

Of course they aren't, but I just wanted to get your attention!!

As this birth control episode continues to unfold in this political season, I've searched for the deeper reasons behind it all.  It can't just be that Catholic hospitals don't want to pay for some prescriptions of birth control pills for non-Catholic women.  That's not worth the hassle or politico-religious fallout and backlash.  There has to be a deeper logic here, a fundamental worldview at stake that, while perhaps unspoken, is still active and operative.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

So as I've looked around, reading this and that about the older Conservative/Catholic views on such things, it's become clear to me that the views of Rick Santorum and the Catholic bishops (all men, of course) represent a very old and ancient attitude that's been around for centuries, even millenia.  We saw it manifest some days ago very clearly in the Republican hearing on the issue, chaired by Congressman Darrel Issa, where there were no women allowed to speak.  It was all male religious leaders, talking about how being forced to provide women the choice of securing birth control pills with their insurance coverage was an aggressive oppression of religious freedom!

Then I found a book at the library by one of my favorite writers, Garry Wills.  Wills is a Catholic historian and intellectual, who in his youth was a Catholic seminarian, then writer for William F. Buckley's National Review magazine, the fountainhead of the current Conservative movement in America.  Then he changed his mind.  The book I found is entitled Papal Sin and is a recent study (and critique) of the modern Catholic papacy.

After a long explanation of how the Catholic Church was poised to change the traditional position on birth control in the 60s (but then was prevented from doing so by a few übertraditional Vatican insiders), Professional Wills goes on to get to the heart of the matter in a discussion of women's ordination on pp. 107-108 (not birth control, but I think it covers both issues really).

There were, over the centuries, only two reasons given for excluding women from the priesthood--that they were inferior beings unworthy to hold that dignity, and that their ritual impurity kept them from the altar. The first argument came mainly from pagan antiquity, the second from Jewish temple practice....

Thomas Aquinas was not a lone voice but the articulator of a consensus, when he gave the primary motive for refusing ordination to women: "Since any supremacy of rank cannot be expressed in the female sex, which has the status of an inferior, that sex cannot receive ordination." Saint Bonaventure agreed: since only the male was made in the image of God, only the male can receive the godlike office of priest.

Why were these men so sure that women are inferior?  Aquinas had Aristotle's assurance:  'In terms of nature's own operation, a woman is inferior and a mistake.  The agent cause that is in the male seed tries to produce something complete in itself, a male in gender.  But when the female is produced, this is because the agent cause is thwarted, either because of the unsuitability of the receiving matter [of the mother] itself or bcause of deforming interference, as from south winds, that are too wet as we read in [Aristotle's] Animal Conception.'

In Aristotle's physiology, the male seed is the formal cause of conception; it is active, with the noble elements prevailing (fire and air).  Woman is only the material cause of conception, passive, with the lower elements prevailing (water and earth).  When the formal cause succeeds, it produces a male that looks like the father.  When it flounders in the passive receiving muck (which Aristotle associates with menstrual blood), it produces (in descending order) either a male looks like the mother, a female that looks like the father, or a female that looks like the mother.  Since the female, when she is conceived, is actually a failed male, a deformity, it takes longer for her to be formed in the womb, yet she emerges from this longer process smaller and weaker than the male....Her very makeup makes her less capable of reason and virtue and discipline than the male--in Aristotle's words, "more shamless, lying and deceptive"--leaving her unstable and inconstant, a prey to the passions, less able to control herself and others.  Saint John Chrysostom said women are just not smart enough to be priests.

Aristotle's was not the only classical form of misogynism that Christianity inherited, but was a pervasive one because it was so impressively argued.  It was based on scientific experiments like the dissection of pregnant animals.  This led to its being echoed, implicitly if not expressly, in part if not in whole, by a vast range of ancient authors.  It was passed to the Eastern church through Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-c. 215) and to the Western church through Tertullian (c. 155-c. 220).   Clement wrote that "A woman, considered what her nature is, must be ashamed of it."  Tertullian said that women, continuing the role of Eve the temptress, are "the gateway through which the devil comes."

This is what we don't understand or remember these days: that the older view of women, which denied them cultural/political/legal/religious equality with men in all kinds of ways, and left them powerless and oppressed in their lives, existed because, a long time ago, Western civilization had become convinced that women were truly inferior.  (Though, as you can see if you read the gospels carefully, Jesus himself treated women in a powerfully equitable way.) And it is only the recent feminist movement of the last 150 years that has convinced us otherwise.

Except that some people aren't really convinced yet.

Why Did Traditional Christianity Oppose Birth Control?

In my last post on the origins of birth control, I sketched out how birth control became common in America, including in the life and marriage of yours truly.

Pope Paul VI, author of 'Humanae Vitae'

Now I want to try and explain why it was that, prior to the 20th century, birth control was opposed by most churches and most societies around the world, and why the Roman Catholic Church in particular still remains a ferocious enemy of most forms of contraception.

The current argument of the Roman Catholic Church against contraception is easier to understand, so let me begin there.  You can actually read their explanation in about 30 minutes or less in the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which Pope Paul VI promulgated in 1968.  Let me quote the crucial sentences:

The Church...in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.

This particular doctrine, often expounded by the magisterium of the Church, is based on the inseparable connection, established by God, which man on his own initiative may not break, between the unitive significance and the procreative significance which are both inherent to the marriage act....The fundamental nature of the marriage act, while uniting husband and wife in the closest intimacy, also renders them capable of generating new life—and this as a result of laws written into the actual nature of man and of woman. We believe that our contemporaries are particularly capable of seeing that this teaching is in harmony with human reason.

Marital sex--and there should be no other kind, from the church's point of view--must always be open to conception and new life, because of the 'law of nature'.  Therefore, as another Catholic website put it,

Christians have always condemned contraceptive sex. The early Fathers recognized that the purpose of sexual intercourse in natural law is procreation; contraceptive sex, which deliberately blocks that purpose, is a violation of natural law.

It's pretty much as simple as that, as least for Catholic bishops.  Because it opposes God's will as expressed and known through natural law, any form of contraception (with the exception of the rhythm method) is 'intrinsically evil', both inside and outside of marriage.  The church has no alternative but to oppose by all its means--including legal means and the use of the state power--the use of contraception by everyone at all times.

While most Catholics today are probably familiar with this argument, they probably don't agree with it--studies show that the vast majority of Catholics (anywhere from 75-98%, depending on the study) approve of and use contraception.  Non-Catholics however, especially in non-Catholic countries like the US, are probably no longer familiar with this Catholic teaching and need to be reminded of its 'severity'.

For most non-Catholic Christians, the third decade of the 20th Century seems to have been the turning point when it comes to their view of the morality of contraception.  Before that time, most Protestant denominations opposed contraception.  After that time, most Protestant churches left the issue of contraception up to their members to decide on an individual basis, with their personal conscience being their moral guide.  Why this huge shift?  Well, it's difficult to know for sure, but here are a few possibilities.

First, since the traditional Christian opposition to contraception had very little direct basis in Scripture, and since Protestantism is particularly reliant upon Scripture for its theological and moral views, the foundation for Protestant opposition to 'contraceptive sex' was actually quite weak.  If it wasn't stated forthrightly in the Bible, then it became much more of an optional issue.

Second, traditional cultural opposition to contraception was closely connected to the status of women in traditional society.  As long as women were seen as subordinate to men, as long as women's place was understood to be in the home as wives and mothers, and as long as women did not have political equality, then it was easy to ignore the issue of contraception and 'reproductive rights'.  But as soon as women began to struggle to free themselves from these traditional roles and understandings, then the contraception issue would naturally arise as a part of the struggle for women's rights.  As the last post showed clearly, Margaret Sanger--the founder of the birth control movement--was also a part of the larger feminist movement.

Third, liberal Protestant theology, which came to dominate most of Protestantism in the first half of the 20th Century, was basically an attempt to reconcile traditional Christian thought and action with the forces of modernity, such as science, reason, and progress.  What could be more modern than the struggle for women's right, including access to contraception?  It was natural, then, that Protestant Liberalism would seek to accommodate itself to feminism and contraceptive freedom.

Finally, prior to the 20th Century, contraception was difficult and crude, so it wasn't so much an issue for most people.  Many people didn't really even understand how sexuality worked, so they didn't know how to prevent pregnancy.  Condoms were primitive, largely ineffective, and hardly available.  But once new forms of contraception became readily available and inexpensive, with the advent of rubber condoms, effective diaphrams, and in particular, oral contraceptives in the early 60s, it was a far different story.  Traditional taboos, and hoary theological doctrines put forward by celibate men in red hats, couldn't contain the flood of interest in, and demand for, contraceptive protection against unwanted pregnancy.  In particular, the always pragmatic American Protestant tradition quickly caved in the face of this overwhelming flood.