The Free Thinker

Lately I'm torn about blogging.  I've started to feel it as more a vice than anything, at best a distraction, at worst a temptation to get angry and polemical.  And yet it's a social outlet of sorts, too, a way of being a presence, of keeping in touch with people... it's remarkable how easily one can publish online and be, in a way, everywhere: in every corner in the world one's thoughts are only a click away (albeit most people don't know it).  I hardly ever go back and read my old posts, though I like the fact that they're there, just in case I do think about one of them and want to read it.  Apparently a few other people do find them worth reading.  But writing is probably better when it follows the Golden Rule: write what you want to read.

The authors to whom I owe the most are intellectual apologists for Christianity: C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, Dostoyevsky.  It's partly in imitation of these intellectual heroes that I've begun to do more religious blogging lately, taking my cue from the Bible.  I would like to do more than that someday, to write religious novels or histories or a simple apologia for the faith...  I was in a conversation some time ago (about a year) in which I explained that I'd left the Mormon church because it wasn't rationally tenable, and this led to an exchange in which there was an element of mutual surprise that I've remembered ever since.  The surprise was evoked, on my interlocutor's side, by my evident belief that Orthodoxy was rationally defensible, and, on my side, by the fact that my interlocutor could have supposed, as her questions seemed to suggest, that it wasn't.  She is a devout believer herself, and from this exchange I got the feeling-- but I might have misunderstood her-- that she is one who has accepted that faith and reason are at odds (which I would deny).  Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised.  Lots of educated people think the same thing.  And of course it wouldn't have surprised me coming from an agnostic or atheist, but in that case I would have pigeonholed it as a function, ultimately, of some combination of ignorance and self-interest.  Christianity is full of things that are superficially paradoxical or absurd, and there are a thousand sophisms which can be used to dismiss it if one wishes to do so, e.g., if God is omnipotent, can He make a rocky so heavy that He cannot lift it?  Maybe the word "sophisms": that's what they look like, once one has seen through them, but they can look like serious questions to a novice in inquiry about God.  Certainly a person might honestly be turned aside from the faith by the problem of evil or the problem of how prayers can be efficacious.  But of course, Christians have answers to such objections.  I could certainly understand someone, at the end of an argument, remaining unconvinced by Christian claims, in the sense of withholding judgment, as opposed to regarding it as refuted.  And of course there are a lot of people who feel perfectly justified in dismissing Christianity for superficial reasons because they mistakenly believe they have some other firm ground to stand on which an intelligent Christian-- a C.S. Lewis, say-- can easily expose as hollow by a skeptical attack.  Since people with such prejudices and complacencies dominate many university faculties and to some extent mainstream liberal culture, I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that a college-educated Christian might have picked up the idea that Christianity was at a disadvantage on the plane of argument.  But I was surprised.  It made me think, in a way, of how much work there is to do.

When one shifts from the negative defense of Christianity-- showing that arguments purporting to refute Christianity fail-- to the positive defense of Christianity, there's an element in Christian writing that I have sometimes wondered at myself, and about the psychological reaction to which, on the part of atheist readers, I am very curious.  That is the confidence of Christian writers.  How does C.S. Lewis, say, although in this case most other Christian writers, St. John of Kronstadt or Thomas a Kempis or John Chrysostom, exhibit the trait still more strongly, dare to write so boldly about God and virtue and salvation, and on the other hand about devils?  Even if one cannot disprove them, even if one finds oneself tentatively in sympathy with their claims, how do they know?  I think I've begun to understand this better with time.  If one begins seriously to approach God, one starts to understand a little of His nature and His plan; more than that, one starts to understand much more of oneself; and one starts to perceive the sources of resistance to our approach to God, both our own fear and frailty and attachment to earthly goods (which are good, please note, though they can become evil if we prefer them to higher things), but also something else, the tugging of other wills towards pride and discontent and darkness...

But here's where I come up short.  For as soon as I start to write about holy things, I immediately feel that I am such an unworthy messenger that I can achieve only the opposite of my intent.  No, I'm not a murderer, I don't plot seductions or go to prostitutes, I am not a rich miser or a thief or a corrupt politician, I am not insanely cruel or a compulsive liar or a drunkard.  But my life is a mess, and through my own fault, I relentlessly pursuit of obscure ambitions from pride and anxiety for the future, I lose my temper, I am prone to ennui and despondency, I'm addicted to petty pleasures, hot baths and chocolate and probably half again as much food as I need, and I have done so few good works...  If I were to stand up and preach the Gospel, a just rejoinder might be, "If you believe it, why don't you practice it?"  (To which my answer could only be: "Partly because I can't figure out how, and partly because even when I do realize something about how I ought to live, I forget all my resolutions within an hour...")  And: "Who are you to teach us?"  

Free Lunch

Imagine that Western Europe had socialized the restaurant sector shortly after WWII.  What would the British, French, and Italian restaurant industries look like?  What share of GDP would be spent on restaurant food?  What criticisms of the US system would Western Europeans make?

I suspect the Western European restaurants would be notably cheaper than American ones, in terms of the share of GDP they absorb.  And nutrition surveys would probably find that Western European restaurants supplied a larger percentage of the recommended daily intake of most nutrients and vitamins.  These facts would be summarized as "empirical" evidence that socialized restaurateering works.

The same would probably be said about the Western European university system if it weren't that demand for education is so international, and there is such an industry of ranking educational institutions.

The Powerful vs. the People

Mickey Kaus, a supporter of health care reform, wonders "Why are the Health Care Polls Going South?":

Another seemingly grim health care poll--49/39 against, compared with 42/40 earlier in the month by the same pollster (Ipsos/McClatchy). The new poll eerily resonates with Rasmussen's increased margin of 54/42 against. But, again, part of the drop in support could come from erstwhile reform supporters worried about the status of the "public option." I'd be interested in the breakout of independents and Democrats--but I can't open the file. If you can, feel free to let me know. Mickey_Kaus at msn dot com. ... Mickey's Assignment Desk: Mark Blumenthal--maybe you can help. Why are the health care polls going south? Unaffiliated voters worried about the deficit? Libs worried about the public option? Seniors worried about death panels overzealous cost containment measures? Everyone worried about rising premiums? ... Or any combination of the above (including voters betraying their stereotypes--e.g. liberals worried about overzealous cost controls or deficits?) ...

Update: Thanks to all who sent the numbers. Opposition to reform appears to have held steady among GOPs. but risen among independents by 15 percentage points (from 38% opposed to 53%) and also among Democrats by 7 percentage points (from 18% to 25%). Less clear is what could have provoked these drops. It's hard to say "lack of a public option," given that the public option seems to be in better shape today than early in October--though the poll was taken immediately following Sen. Lieberman's filibuster threat.

In spite of growing opposition, the Democrats have just passed Pelosicare, 220-215. The narrow margin is striking: 39 Blue Dogs voted against the bill. Last Tuesday's elections, many public opinion polls, redistricting due to the census, and the historical pattern by which the president's party tends to lose seats in mid-term elections, suggest that the Democrats are likely to lose seats in 2010. The Wall Street Journal reports:

The House narrowly passed its sweeping health bill late Saturday, marking the biggest victory yet for Democrats in their drive to create near-universal health insurance.

The bill passed by a 220-215 margin after fractious debate and garnered the unexpected backing of only one Republican, Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao of Louisiana. Thirty-nine Democrats voted against the measure.

The narrow passage in the House, where the Democrats have a large majority, underscores the divisiveness of the legislation. It faces a tougher fight in the Senate where Republicans and some Democrats argue that the bill is too costly and won't achieve its goals.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I., Conn.) on Sunday reiterated his plans to oppose any legislation that includes a government-run health-insurance plan like the one in the House bill. "If the public option plan is in there, as a matter of conscience, I will not" support the legislation, Mr. Lieberman said on Fox News Sunday.

The House vote was too close to call heading into Saturday's day-long debate that stretched late into the evening. House leaders made a surprise last-minute concession that prevents federally subsidized insurance plans from covering abortion in order to win over wavering Democrats.

The vote was a victory for President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), and moved them toward a goal that has eluded presidents for decades.

On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Obama hailed the bill's passage, saying it was "a courageous vote" for many lawmakers, the Associated Press reported. In brief remarks from the White House, the president said it is now up to the Senate to take the baton from the House and pass a health-care bill.

Mr. Obama came to the Capitol on Saturday morning and assured Democrats they would remember the vote as their finest moment in politics should he sign it into law. "Opportunities like this come around maybe once in a generation," he said.

Its passage pushes Congress closer to the largest social safety net expansion since 1965, when the government created the Medicare insurance program for the elderly. The measure spends slightly more than $1 trillion over a decade to provide health insurance to an additional 36 million Americans and creates a new public insurance plan to compete with private insurers by 2013. It requires most Americans to carry insurance, creates a new exchange where they can shop for it and gives the lowest earners tax credits to help them pay for it.

When FDR passed Social Security in 1935, he had won the election in a landslide and enjoyed strong (though misguided) public support. When Medicare passed in 1965, the Democrats enjoyed a similarly dominant position in Congress, and Medicare enjoyed strong public supprot. When Bush added the prescription drug plan to Medicare, he was implementing an idea borrowed from Gore, with bipartisan support. So this is something new: a major change in the social contract, to be rammed through with only the narrowest margin of support in the House, at a time when the political pendulum is swinging the other way. Is this any way to run a democracy? Does this enjoy the legitimacy of real consent of the governed?  Concerning the impact on the budget:

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2019, the bill would leave about 96% of legal residents with health insurance, up from 83% now. To pay for expanding insurance coverage, the bill calls for hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare aimed at eliminating its wasteful spending. It levies a 5.4% tax on the wealthy that targets individuals earning more than $500,000 a year and couples earning more than $1 million a year. All but the smallest employers would be required to provide insurance and pay for most of the premium, or they would face a fine of up to 8% of their payroll.

Look at the sentence in boldface carefully. Are there really hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of wasteful spending in Medicare? Either answer to that question is a strike against the bill. If there are, are we really supposed to believe that this new $1 trillion or more won't be spent wastefully? If, as seems more likely, there are not, then either someone will have to take real pain here as their Medicare gets cut, or else this is an illusory gesture, and the Medicare cuts will be quietly reversed in low-profile, bipartisan, piecemeal fashion under pressure from the seniors lobby. Of course, I hope the Medicare cuts are real. Our fiscal outlook is so desperate that every spending cut is good and every spending increase is bad. The last sentence is an ominous one. Employers required to provide insurance. Or pay a fine of 8% of payroll. That's a tax on employment. If you tax something you get less of it. In other words, this is a job killer bill at the worst possible time:

"U.S. Economy: Unemployment Rate Jumps to 26-Year High" (Bloomberg)

The unemployment rate in the U.S. jumped to 10.2 percent in October, the highest level since 1983, casting a pall over the prospects for a sustained recovery and risking further erosion of President Barack Obama’s popularity.

Payrolls fell by 190,000 last month, more than forecast by economists, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington. The jobless rate rose from 9.8 percent in September. Factory payrolls dropped by the most in four months, and the average workweek held at a record low.

Treasury two-year notes rose on bets the Federal Reserve is more likely to maintain its pledge to keep interest rates near zero. The figures prompted Obama, who signed a bill today extending jobless benefits, to promise fresh measures to help put some of the 15.7 million unemployed Americans back to work.

“We will certainly have very bad payroll numbers in November and December,” said Harm Bandholz, an economist at UniCredit Global Research in New York, whose forecast for a 10.1 percent unemployment rate matched the highest among economists surveyed by Bloomberg. “We don’t foresee businesses going on a hiring spree anytime soon.”

Especially not if businesses are saddled with a big new tax on employing people. The good news, if you can call it that, is that some of the job killing has probably already been done. Employers probably have been anticipating this blow and avoiding the cost of health care for marginal employees has likely been one of the motives for lay-offs in the past year. Another obvious job killer was the minimum wage hike in July.

When Bush was president it was possible to argue that America's fiscal course was sustainable. I don't see how that can possibly be done now:

What is $1.42 trillion? It's more than the total national debt for the first 200 years of the Republic, more than the entire economy of India, almost as much as Canada's, and more than $4,700 for every man, woman and child in the United States.

It's the federal budget deficit for 2009, more than three times the most red ink ever amassed in a single year.

And, some economists warn, unless the government makes hard decisions to cut spending or raise taxes, it could be the seeds of another economic crisis.

Treasury figures released Friday showed that the government spent $46.6 billion more in September than it took in, a month that normally records a surplus. That boosted the shortfall for the full fiscal year ending Sept. 30 to $1.42 trillion. The previous year's deficit was $459 billion.

As a percentage of U.S. economic output, it's the biggest deficit since World War II.

"The rudderless U.S. fiscal policy is the biggest long-term risk to the U.S. economy," says Kenneth Rogoff, a Harvard professor and former chief economist for the International Monetary Fund. "As we accumulate more and more debt, we leave ourselves very vulnerable."

One of the resources we... no, forget the "we," it might be a good for Americans to stop letting the casual use of the first-person plural pronoun serve to lump us together with the crazed governing elite... one of the resources the government had with which to pay that debt-- not that it had a moral right to, I mean, but that the government possessed as a brute physical fact-- was the power to tax wealthy Americans. Pelosicare uses up some of that resource without reducing the debt slightly. Greg Mankiw's wonkish worry about the effect of Pelosicare on "marginal tax rates," i.e., on whether people actually have an incentive to work and be productive given how much the government is taking from them, highlight the worst side of this bill:

The bottom line: The implicit marginal tax rates are even higher in the House bill.

If you are interested in a more specific comparison, here is what I wrote about the Senate Finance bill on Sunday, with the new numbers for the House bill added in brackets:

A family of four with an income, say, of $54,000 would pay $9,900 [$6,200] for healthcare. That covers only about half [a third] the actual cost. Uncle Sam would pick up the rest.

Now suppose that the same family earns an additional $12,000 by, for example, having the primary earner work overtime or sending a secondary worker into the labor force. In that case, the federal subsidy shrinks, so the family’s cost of health care rises to $12,700 [$10,000].

In other words, $2,800 [$3,800] of the $12,000 of extra income, or 23 [32] percent, would be effectively taxed away by the government’s new health care system.

And remember: This implicit marginal tax hike of 32 percent is added on top of the explicit marginal tax rate the family already faces from income and payroll taxes.

For all that, I see two good sides to the bill. The first is that it might be possible for the GOP to gut the spending side of it if Americans come to their senses in 2010 and throw the Democrats out of Congress. From David Freddoso and Mark Hemingway:

Democrats have engaged in some shady counting to claim that health care reform is deficit neutral. The Congressional Budget Office only tallies a bill's cost over an immediate ten year horizon. The Senate bill begins collecting taxes immediately but the major spending provisions don't kick in until 2014. That makes the $800 billion bill appear deficit neutral through 2019, but in fact it will cost as much as $1.8 trillion in its first ten years of operation, according to some estimates.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists that the House Health Care bill will cost a mere $894 million over the next ten years, but a recent reports put the House bill's cost at $1.2 trillion and rising. Nobody knows what the final price tag will be, but it's more than likely the House bill will add to the deficit.

If the sentence in boldface is true, can the GOP stop the 'major spending provisions' before 2014?  If so, maybe the upshot really would reduce the deficit.  Second, the bill might make the government so desperate for revenue that it will tap into the ultimate revenue source:

Every day, migrants leave their homelands behind for new lives in other countries. Reflecting this desire, rather than the reality of the numbers that actually migrate, Gallup finds about 16% of the world's adults would like to move to another country permanently if they had the chance. This translates to roughly 700 million worldwide -- more than the entire adult population of North and South America combined.

From its surveys in 135 countries between 2007 and 2009, Gallup finds residents of sub-Saharan African countries are most likely to express a desire to move abroad permanently. Thirty-eight percent of the adult population in the region -- or an estimated 165 million -- say they would like to do this if the opportunity arises. Residents in Asian countries are the least likely to say they would like to move -- with 10% of the adult population, or roughly 250 million, expressing a desire to migrate permanently.

The United States has the advantage of being able to expand the tax base as much as it wants by just letting more people in. I'd rather that humanity and justice rather than desperate fiscal profligacy brought this about, but still.

How to Reform Health Care

Here's my suggestion.  Declare that anyone who goes into a hospital and needs emergency care will be treated at the public expense.  Thereafter, however, the government will reimburse itself by garnishing the wages or Social Security payments of the patient, or if necessary confiscating assets, up to the value of the treatments paid for.  That should fix it.

First Time Tragedy, Second Time Farce

The elections yesterday show that Americans are waking up after the crisis-numbed sleepwalking into the polls in November 2008. Christie's and McDonnell's victories are a tangible sign of what the polls have been showing for months: the ideological dominance of conservatism (whatever that means), the shifting of independents from the Democrats towards the GOP, the unpopularity of Obama's policies and of the Democratic Congress (and a rapid fall in Obama's own approval rating, which I expect will be lower than Bush's at every corresponding stage of his presidency). The American people are probably not such idiots as to fail to return fewer Dems and more GOPs in 2010, and a GOP takeover of Congress, as in 1994, seems likely. This should really be a no-brainer. It was the formula of the famous 1990s: as Brothers Judd slyly put it, the ideal might be a Democratic resident and a GOP Congress. Of course this is one of the thousand reasons why Americans were such idiots to vote for Obama in 2008: there was obviously going to be a Democratic Congress, and a President McCain was needed to check it, even aside from his superior judgment, experience, integrity, and intelligence. But the sheeple were in shock from the crisis, and did what CNN told them. Now they are beginning to get their wits back.

Maybe we'll be spared the tax-spend-and-regulate health care bill. Harry Reid hinted that it might not pass this year, and it's hard to imagine it will be easier to do so in 2010, an election year. On the other hand, the defeats in Virginia and New Jersey might convince some Dems that their careers are ending anyway, so why not make history while they have the chance. Of course, this was always the reason the Democratic leadership was focusing on health care this year in particular. It's obvious that, while it's tenable that our health care system is sub-optimal, this has little or nothing to do with the 2008 crisis or the high unemployment that is our main problem right now. A leadership confident it enjoyed real majority support would have focused on fighting the crisis now, and saved big structural changes until the economy was recovering, to avoid dumping a huge, gratuitous burden of political risk on entrepreneurs and investors at just the time they were least able to bear it. But the Democrats knew that their getting majorities this big was a sort of mistake, afforded them by the crisis, by the national BDS pandemic, and by the donation of most of the MSM's dwindling reputational capital to the cause. President McCain and a Democratic Congress would have had to focus on bipartisan issues. We might even have got the one thing that would stimulate the economy more than any other policy: immigration reform. But the Democrats had to use the one-party-rule moment to plow through the paleoliberal dream.

I think Marx said that "history repeats itself, first time as tragedy, second time as farce." The dictum expresses the relationship between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Barack Obama. Hoover-Roosevelt interventionism deepened and prolonged the Great Depression at home and worldwide, permanently altered America's economic constitution, largely discredited democratic capitalism in the eyes of the world, and opened a path for the rise of Hitler and the totalitarian Axis, culminating in World War II. Socialism, poverty, appeasement, retreat, war. Likewise, the comeback of Big Government under Obama has burdened business confidence, impeded recovery, and is altering the US economic constitution, while his weak, vacillating and cynical foreign policy has caused unease in allies from Poland to Israel to India to Japan to France while emboldening Putin-Medvedev and Ahmadinejad and the Taliban, and abetted the lethal blow to international law by letting Russia's thugocracy get away with the dismemberment of Georgia. But the difference of degree is so great as to be a difference of kind. America will not repeat the 1930s as France, to Marx's dismay, would not repeat the Revolution (the 1848 revolution, which led to a reaction and the rise of President-for-Life Napoleon III, was the "farce" to the "tragedy" of the 1789 revolution and Napoleon Bonaparte's world-historic career). Many of FDR's New Deal policies-- a top tax rate of 90%, show trials of leading industrialists and political opponents, an attempt to impose full-fledged planning on the economy-- amounted to very nearly an overthrow of the capitalist order. And it enjoyed strong public support as such. FDR was a formidable leader. By contrast, it is the essence of Obama to be the apotheosis of insubstantiality. "Hope and change" and "yes we can" succeeded not despite but because of their meaninglessness. How can meaninglessness be a virtue? To understand that, an interpretative glance at the past few years is needed.

George W. Bush ran on ideas in 2000, and many of them-- tax cuts, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, the No Child Left Behind Act-- became law (Social Security reform didn't but Bush tried), while his foreign policy ideology, especially its liberationist side, seems to have been conceived in the wake of 9/11. Most importantly, Bush found a way to turn the illiberal imperatives of the War on Terror inside out. On domestic and foreign policy alike, Bush represented what might be called the radical center, and as such alienated the left especially, but also many on the right. He twisted America's ideological kaleidoscope. He ended up being unpopular, which is a rather less meaningful fact than might be thought. Suppose there are five issues, and person A is for B, for C, against D, against E, and for F, while person G expresses no views on B and C and leans in favor of D and E but is not sure and seems at various times to be both for and against F. A might be unpopular, if disagreement on one issue is reason enough to dislike him, for the set of people who agree on any position on all five issues is likely to be small, while G might be popular, managing by his vagueness and vacillation to leave a majority not antagonized, particularly if he has a pleasant face or manner. Of course, if G has to make decisions he must take stands and lose "popularity" or non-objectionableness. But the point is that A's unpopularity does not mean that a coherent coalition against him is possible. The Iraq War is a case in point. You can oppose the Iraq War because you are (a) totally pacifist, (b) a defend-the-borders-only type opposed to foreign entanglements, (c) a liberal internationalist of the kind that strongly believes in the "sovereignty" of other countries regardless of regime type, (d) a UN legitimist, (e) not opposed to overthrowing dictators in principle but unpersuaded that it's worth it in this case, (f) in favor of Saddam and other dictatorships for "primitive" non-Western peoples, (g) against all US intervention because you think the US is an incorrigible greedy capitalist imperialist hegemon. These seven groups (and others) might agree on opposing the Iraq War, but they wouldn't agree on any arguments against the Iraq War. So if they want to form a coalition, they'll need to be silent about their reasons for opposing Bush, since any discussion of reasons would shatter the coalition. How can they talk to each other then? By resorting to forms of communication that don't rise to the level of reason, i.e., sneering. If we want to claim we're the enlightened majority against the misguided Bush administration, we can't explain why Bush is wrong, lest we expose our own differences, but we can agree to call him dumb, over and over again. It takes a while to run out of epithets. And if we get tired of negativity, we can get some motivational-speakerish type to dress it up in language about "hope" and "change," by which we all know, however, that "not Bush," is meant. Thus Bush Derangement Syndrome metamorphosed into the Obama administration, and the intellectual poverty of the Obama administration is the intellectual poverty of the opposition to Bush. The word "disillusioned" seems too generous to apply to former Obama supporters; the promise of Obamism was so insubstantial as barely to qualify even as an illusion.

November 3, 2009 may mark the beginning of a return to commonsense, and the GOP takes Congress in 2010 and starts to clean up the mess (first order of business: the deficit), Great Depression II will be far shorter and less painful than Great Depression I. Nonetheless I think there is something irrevocable about America's lapse of judgment in 2008. At the end of the day, a nation capable of electing a man and a party so unfit to lead as Obama and the 2008 Democrats is unfit to lead the Free World.

Relative decline for America was always nearly inevitable and mostly desirable. The 5% of the world's population that are American citizens hold far more than their share of the wealth and power of mankind. This is not to say that Americans must become poorer: on the contrary, we can and may hope that the rest of the world will come closer to America's living standards, and this is not only feasible but will benefit America. A lot of people used to fulminated that the Bush administration was squandering America's moral standing in the world. I am not quite saying the opposite, namely that Obama is squandering the moral authority that the Bush administration won. Rather, as democracy spread, as foreign economies grew and developing countries grew more literate etc., America could no longer enjoy hegemony by virtue of its mere military and economic weight. If it were to lead at all-- and a group of people or nations can usually benefit from good leadership-- it had to articulate and champion an ideology with universal appeal that other nations could believe in and support. Democracy has, for the moment, just such a universal appeal. Under the Clinton administration the US was scandalously unwilling to risk the lives of US soldiers for the benefit of others: thus we pulled out of Somalia and relied wholly on air war in Kosovo and Iraq. The Bush administration broke this taboo, and showed how democracy could be spread not only passively and defensively, waiting for dictatorships to fall, but actively, and how dictators could be held accountable. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, though undertaken in support of UN resolutions and arguably essential to restore the UN's credibility in the face of Saddam's continued defiance and impunity, was at the same time a revolutionary strike against a notion of sovereignty that legitimized every thug who killed his way to the top. It was a risky yet potentially valuable precedent. Polls that showed a decline in favorable attitudes to the US and to Bush in the aftermath of the 2003 war belie the complexity of the world's attitude. Nowhere did a democratic electorate reject a government for supporting the Bush administration. On the contrary, Howard was re-elected, Blair was re-elected, Aznar's political heir Rajoy in Spain was on course for re-election until the Madrid bombings, while Bush adversaries Chirac of France, Schroeder of Germany, and Chretien of Canada lost elections in favor of leaders much more favorable to Bush and America. America's relations with Japan, India, and eastern Europe prospered; relations with western Europe recovered without any particular concessions on America's side. The war was a dangerous expedient; the world knew that and didn't particularly like it; but they didn't have a better alternative; and the fundamental presumption that America is uniquely trustworthy and beneficent which has defined the strategies of free nations since WWII was re-examined but was still, indeed was perhaps all the more, valid. The unholy alliance of Putin, Chirac and Schroeder that had tried to stop the war fell apart, with Chirac and Schroeder losing power and disgraced, while Putin withdrew his country into morbid paranoia. Diplomatically, the gambit succeeded. It seems to be succeeding on the ground in Iraq, too: elections were held, a constitution passed, Al Qaeda nearly sparked a civil war but was beaten back, and a new Iraqi democracy took shape, a development scarcely conceivable six years ago.

An America which exercised its power for the general good, to spread freedom and uphold international security, might be able to hold continued sway over the free world through moral suasion, initiative, and good example. Near the end of the Bush years this seemed to be taking place: al-Qaeda had been drawn into the trap of Iraq and self-defeated; no one questioned the legitimacy of the new Iraqi democracy; the bonds between the Western allies were being reforged with the Iraqi precedent unrepudiated; and the Free World alliance of the Cold War years had now been definitely expanded to eastern Europe and India, and was strengthened in Japan. A McCain administration might have made a cause celebre of Georgia as the Bush administration had done with Iraq, thus reaffirming the commitment to international law which the Iraq war had seemed to undermine-- but international law, please note, in the sense that democracies' borders are inviolable, not in the sense that tyrants are sacrosanct-- and immigration reform at home would have strengthened the foundations of American democracy from below, reaffirming America's egalitarian ideals and signalling its openness to the world. The scenario seems to have the force of destiny, but one can flunk one's destiny, one can miss one's moment.

I'm not sure that the moment can be recovered. Why should allies trust us again if we treat them as shabbily as the Obama administration has done to Poland and Georgia? Indeed, the Obama administration's manner of dismissing the war-- "a dumb war, a rash war"-- is an insulted to Tony Blair and all of America's most faithful allies. It would be an entirely different matter if he had limited himself to respectful disagreement. Obama's ignorant remarks about the impossibility of one nation imposing democracy on another have just enough of the flavor of a new false orthodoxy to make strategic thinking difficult going forward. The situation in Afghanistan is especially sad. The Democrats embraced Afghanistan as "the good war" opportunistically, as a means to outflank Bush's "war president" credentials, but Afghanistan never offered hopes of a conclusion as satisfactory as was possible in Iraq. Iraq is urban and literate and middle-class and densely populated and civilized modern enough to have a decent chance of making democracy work; moreover, Americans were in a position really to run the country for a while, and lay the foundations of a new politico-institutional matrix. In Afghanistan a democratic outcome always stretched the bounds of plausibility, which made objectives harder to define, since our ideology makes democracy obligatory. At this point, we should probably abandon objectives other than to avoid the disgrace of having the Afghans who allied with us be left at the mercy of the Taliban. Maybe we defend the cities; maybe we accept some Afghans as refugees in the US, as we did after Vietnam; maybe we try to negotiate some power-sharing federalist deal. But the Obama administration is far from having made it clear that they have a strategy and are determined to pursue it through to success. The contrast with the Bush administration in 2007 is striking. It seems likely to end in quagmire, attrition, retreat, compromises, a blot on our record.

We have ceased to be the comparative free-market paragon we were in the 1990s. It is not just that we've gotten worse; other countries have gotten better. Western European countries have been comparatively reformist; and now they almost all have right-leaning governments with an interest in fiscal discipline and/or market reform. Now our unemployment rates are above Europe's and may stay there for a while. Asia, not surprisingly, is showing a much more robust recovery from the 2008 recession. America is ceasing to be the cutting edge of prosperity. I think we'll recover, more quickly than in the 1930s, both economically and ideologically. There will be a shift back in the direction of supporting freedom abroad and limited government at home. But by that time the world will have begun to move on, to find ways to rely less on American leadership and example. We probably have decades of prosperity before us, and American ideas, not least the liberationist credo of the Bush administration which is now incarnate in Iraq, will continue to be influential, but the American people, the escapist rubes who voted for "hope" and "change," will cease to be the most important carriers of those ideas.

"Nancy Pelosi's New Health-Care Bill" (WSJ)

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has reportedly told fellow Democrats that she's prepared to lose seats in 2010 if that's what it takes to pass ObamaCare, and little wonder. The health bill she unwrapped last Thursday, which President Obama hailed as a "critical milestone," may well be the worst piece of post-New Deal legislation ever introduced.

In a rational political world, this 1,990-page runaway train would have been derailed months ago. With spending and debt already at record peacetime levels, the bill creates a new and probably unrepealable middle-class entitlement that is designed to expand over time. Taxes will need to rise precipitously, even as ObamaCare so dramatically expands government control of health care that eventually all medicine will be rationed via politics.

Yet at this point, Democrats have dumped any pretense of genuine bipartisan "reform" and moved into the realm of pure power politics as they race against the unpopularity of their own agenda. The goal is to ram through whatever income-redistribution scheme they can claim to be "universal coverage." The result will be destructive on every level—for the health-care system, for the country's fiscal condition, and ultimately for American freedom and prosperity.

•The spending surge. The Congressional Budget Office figures the House program will cost $1.055 trillion over a decade, which while far above the $829 billion net cost that Mrs. Pelosi fed to credulous reporters is still a low-ball estimate. Most of the money goes into government-run "exchanges" where people earning between 150% and 400% of the poverty level—that is, up to about $96,000 for a family of four in 2016—could buy coverage at heavily subsidized rates, tied to income. The government would pay for 93% of insurance costs for a family making $42,000, 72% for another making $78,000, and so forth.

Dear China, please stop buying our debt. It's not fair to lend money to a man or country who you know can't pay it back when he or it has temporarily lost his/its reason...

Forever Young

I want to connect a few sayings and verses to shed light on something. First, Jesus said: 

Assuredly, I say unto you, unless you become converted, and become as little children, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 18:3) 

There is a poem by William Wordsworth which I think sheds light on at least part of what this saying means.

ODE: INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY FROM RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD

(1803-1806)

   THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
   The earth, and every common sight,
     To me did seem
     Apparelled in celestial light,
   The glory and the freshness of a dream.
   It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
     Turn wheresoe'er I may,
     By night or day,
   The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

         II

     The Rainbow comes and goes,
     And lovely is the Rose,
     The Moon doth with delight
   Look round her when the heavens are bare,
     Waters on a starry night
     Are beautiful and fair;
    The sunshine is a glorious birth;
    But yet I know, where'er I go,
   That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

         III

   Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
    And while the young lambs bound
     As to the tabor's sound,
   To me alone there came a thought of grief:
   A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
     And I again am strong:
   The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
   No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
   I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
   The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
     And all the earth is gay;
      Land and sea
    Give themselves up to jollity,
     And with the heart of May
    Doth every Beast keep holiday;--
     Thou Child of Joy,
   Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
     Shepherd-boy!

         IV

   Ye blessed Creatures, I have heard the call
    Ye to each other make; I see
   The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
    My heart is at your festival,
    My head hath its coronal,
   The fulness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all.
    Oh evil day! if I were sullen
    While Earth herself is adorning,
     This sweet May-morning,
    And the Children are culling
     On every side,
    In a thousand valleys far and wide,
    Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
   And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:--
    I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
    --But there's a Tree, of many, one,
   A single Field which I have looked upon,
   Both of them speak of something that is gone:
    The Pansy at my feet
    Doth the same tale repeat:
   Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
   Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

These thoughts lie at the heart of Wordsworth's poetic works and perhaps cannot be fully appreciated without an immersion in Wordsworth's other poetry. In "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" he is subjecting to analysis the feelings that in many of his simpler poems are simply expressed. "While the young lambs bound / As to the tabor's sound" is an effort to express delight, but only so as to study it, to try to figure out whence it comes from and why, Wordsworth thinks, such transports of joy fade as one grows older. Elsewhere Wordsworth expresses delight merely to express delight, and perhaps does it more sublimely. Still, I think one knows what Wordsworth means, knows "the glory and the dream," "the bliss," "the laughter of Heaven"... and I think it's true, too, that certain memories of childhood often evoke it most poignantly. In the next stanza Wordsworth expresses a theory of sorts:

         V

   Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
   The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
    Hath had elsewhere its setting,
    And cometh from afar:
    Not in entire forgetfulness,
    And not in utter nakedness,
   But trailing clouds of glory do we come
    From God, who is our home:
   Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
   Shades of the prison-house begin to close
    Upon the growing Boy,
   But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
    He sees it in his joy;
   The Youth, who daily farther from the east
    Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
    And by the vision splendid
    Is on his way attended;
   At length the Man perceives it die away,
   And fade into the light of common day.

Mormons, who believe in a "pre-existence," find the last stanza to be a confirmation, from a secular poet, of their beliefs. I think Wordsworth did not mean, however, that his words be taken as literal truth; when church people objected to the heterodoxy of the supposition he defended it as a "poetic postulate" useful to communicate certain feelings. Though even from an orthodox Christian perspective, though, Wordsworth's theory has truth in it, but I'll come back to that.

Old age is usually seen as an evil, and eternal youth is a perennial longing of mankind. This desire need not have any special, transcendental character: one might simply want to retain strength and beauty and sexual potency, and avoid medical bills and wrinkles and hardness of hearing. A yearning for childhood such as Wordsworth expresses is different: it is not at all practical; its motive is aesthetic, romantic, or so to speak numinous. But I think there is always, or at least usually, this transcendental element in the desire for eternal youth, even in its cruder forms, the hair dyes and workouts and fashions in dress and cults of movie stars that it motivates. A Bob Dylan song contains these words of blessing: "May you stay forever young." What blessing better captures all the desires of the human heart in its best moments than this? And yet it is so absurd that the wish hardly seems to be worth expressing. I like the song "Forever Young" by Alphaville because it is bold enough to express it:

Let's dance in style, lets dance for a while 
Heaven can wait we're only watching the skies 
Hoping for the best but expecting the worst 
Are you going to drop the bomb or not? 
Let us die young or let us live forever 
We don't have the power but we never say never 
Sitting in a sandpit, life is a short trip 
The music's for the sad men 
Can you imagine when this race is won 
Turn our golden faces into the sun 
Praising our leaders we're getting in tune 
The music's played by the madman 


Forever young, i want to be forever young 
Do you really want to live forever, forever forever 
Forever young, i want to be forever young 
Do you really want to live forever 
Forever young 


Some are like water, some are like the heat 
Some are a melody and some are the beat 
Sooner or later they all will be gone 
Why don't they stay young 
It's so hard to get old without a cause 
I don't want to perish like a fading horse 
Youth is like diamonds in the sun 
And diamonds are forever 
So many adventures couldn't happen today 
So many songs we forgot to play 
So many dreams are swinging out of the blue 
We let them come true 

Forever young, i want to be forever young 
Do you really want to live forever, forever forever 
Forever young, i want to be forever young 
Do you really want to live forever forever forever 
Forever young, i want to be forever young 
Do you really want to live forever, forever forever 
Forever young, i want to be forever

I like the hint of ambivalence. The chorus alternates: "I want to be forever young" and "Do you really want to live forever?" There is a hint of smugness in the later stanzas of Wordsworth's "Ode," whose ending, "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," has an air of complacently celebrating his poetic maturity, which, after all, has just been displayed in authoring a fine poem! Oh, well, it's all right then! By contrast, Alphaville's "Do you really want to live forever?" is not the voice of complacency, but, I think, of a kind of holding back or fear; its effect is to underline the wonderful wildness of this unattainable desire. I think this juxtaposition of ardor and trepidation is wise. I'll appeal to another poem:

I THOUGHT no more was needed
Youth to prolong
Than dumb-bell and foil
To keep the body young.
Oh, who could have foretold	5
That the heart grows old?
Though I have many words,
What woman’s satisfied,
I am no longer faint
Because at her side?	10
Oh, who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?
I have not lost desire
But the heart that I had,
I thought ’twould burn my body	15
Laid on the death-bed.
But who could have foretold
That the heart grows old?

Only the refrain of this poem is, I think, really excellent poetry, yet the thought the poem expresses is an important one. For it claims that it is not enough merely to wish for eternal physical youth; it claims that "the heart grows old." This is the insight of Wordsworth's "Ode" too. And it is the answer to Alphaville's question. Do you really want to live forever? Yes -- and no. We want to be forever young, but the heart grows old. And this is unexpected. I think all children disdain adults to some extent, not understanding how adults can be so easily bored by things (cartoons, board games, toys) they find so delightful. And rightly so in a way. Yet the same thing will happen to them. They will become bored by the toys and the games and the old stories. I remember how Christmas-- the candy, the opening presents-- used to be so gloriously delightful an event, and how it faded. And not all, and perhaps few-- one has to know a person well to be sure-- will ever discover higher, stronger delights in which to rejoice.

And this brings us back to the saying of Jesus, who invites us to "become as little children"-- whatever that means. Without saying how it can be done, I think I can see a little of why this is necessary. One must, somehow, reverse the law of fallen human nature by which every delight is dulled and fades, otherwise the gift of eternal life would be of no use, would be a burden, a curse. It is within God's power, but it would serve no good purpose, to make us all "forever young," physically. If we can somehow make our hearts cease to grow old, God will provide, in due course, the new bodies in which we can live forever.

We call God "Our Father, who art in heaven," and rightly so in some ways: He is stronger and wiser than we, He loves us and seeks our good, He ought to be obeyed. Yet in another way the analogy breaks down. A child sees in his father a being more careworn than himself, beset with temptation, and for that reason, at least sometimes, less able to delight in things. God is like the father, yet he is also like the child who wakes a groaning parent on Christmas morning with his impatient cries of anticipation and joy. God says to us, "Thou shalt not...", but also "Come and see! Come and see!"

"Mister Tough Guy" (Mark Steyn):

Benjamin Disraeli’s most famous advice to aspiring politicians was: “Never complain and never explain.” For the greatest orator of our time, a man who makes Churchill, Lincoln, and Henry V at Agincourt look like first-round rejects on Orating with the Stars, Barack Obama seems to have pretty much given up on the explaining side. He tried it with health care with speech after speech after exclusive interview for months on end and the more he explained the more unpopular the whole racket got. So he declared that the time for explaining is over, and it’s time to sign on or else. 

Meanwhile, to take the other half of the Disraeli equation, Obama and his officials and their beleaguered band of surrogates never stop complaining. If you express concerns about government health care, they complain about all these “racists” and “domestic terrorists” obstructing his agenda. If you wonder why the president can’t seem to find time in his hectic schedule of international-awards acceptance speeches to make a decision about Afghanistan, they complain that it’s not his fault he “inherited” all these problems. And, if you wonder why his “green jobs” czar is a Communist 9/11 truther and his National Endowment for the Arts guy is leaning on grant recipients to produce Soviet-style propaganda extolling Obama policies, they complain about Fox News...

The most recent whine — the anti-Fox campaign — is, apart from anything else, unbecoming to the office. President Obama is the chief of state of one of the oldest free societies in the world, but his official White House website runs teasers such as: "For even more Fox lies, check out the latest ‘Truth-O-Meter.’” It gives off the air of somebody only marginally less paranoid than this week’s president-for-life in some basket-case banana republic ranting on the palace balcony because his interior security chief isn’t doing a fast enough job of disappearing his enemies.

At a superficial level, this looks tough. A famously fair-minded centrist told me the other day that he’d been taken aback by some of the near parodic examples of leftie radicalism discovered in the White House in recent weeks. I don’t know why he’d be surprised. When a man has spent his entire adult life in the “community organized” precincts of Chicago, it should hardly be news that much of his Rolodex is made up of either loons or thugs. The trick is identifying who falls into which category. Anita Dunn, the communications director commending Mao Zedong as a role model to graduating high school students, would seem an obvious loon. But the point about Mao, as Charles Krauthammer noted, is that he was the most ruthless imposer of mass conformity in modern history: In Mao’s China, everyone wore the same clothes. So when Communications Commissar Mao Ze Dunn starts berating Fox News for not getting into the same Maosketeer costumes as the rest of the press corps, you begin to see why the Chairman might appeal to her as a favorite “political philosopher.”

So the troika of Dunn, Emanuel, and Axelrod were dispatched to the Sunday talk shows to lay down the law. We all know the lines from The Untouchables — “the Chicago way,” don’t bring a knife to a gun fight — and, given the “pay czar”’s instant contract-gutting of executive compensation and the demonization of the health insurers and much else, it’s easy to look on the 44th president as an old-style Cook County operator: You wanna do business in this town, you gotta do it through me. You can take the community organizer out of Chicago, but you can’t take the Chicago out of the community organizer.

The trouble is it isn’t tough, not where toughness counts. Who are the real “Untouchables” here? In Moscow, it’s Putin and his gang, contemptuously mocking U.S. officials even when (as with Secretary Clinton) they’re still on Russian soil. In Tehran, it’s Ahmadinejad and the mullahs openly nuclearizing as ever feebler warnings and woozier deadlines from the Great Powers come and go. Even Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is an exquisite act of condescension from the Norwegians, a dog biscuit and a pat on the head to the American hyperpower for agreeing to spay itself into a hyperpoodle. We were told that Obama would use “soft power” and “smart diplomacy” to get his way. Russia and Iran are big players with global ambitions, but Obama’s soft power is so soft it doesn’t even work its magic on a client regime in Kabul whose leaders’ very lives are dependent on Western troops. If Obama’s “smart diplomacy” is so smart that even Hamid Karzai ignores it with impunity, why should anyone else pay attention?

The strange disparity between the heavy-handed community organization at home and the ever-cockier untouchables abroad risks making the commander-in-chief look like a weenie — like “President Pantywaist,” as Britain’s Daily Telegraph has taken to calling him.

The Chicago way? Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight? In Iran, this administration won’t bring a knife to a nuke fight. In Eastern Europe, it won’t bring missile defense to a nuke fight. In Sudan, it won’t bring a knife to a machete fight.

But, if you’re doing the overnight show on WZZZ-AM, Mister Tough Guy’s got your number.

Apologies to National Review for quoting almost the whole article, but Steyn is so funny it's a shame to leave anything out, and I wanted to add my punchline. The difference between Bush and Obama is that since Bush possessed a faculty for moral reasoning, he could be tough on really bad guys abroad even if they didn't harm him much personally, whereas perhaps no leader in the history of the world has tolerated such ferocious criticism as George W. Bush while abstaining completely from the use of power to suppress it. Obama, whose ideology seems to be narcissism, can evaluate various actors only by the degree to which they threaten his own popularity. By that standard, Fox News is objectively more dangerous than Putin or Ahmadinejad.

What the Gospels Say about the Church

In the comments of a recent post, I was startled by Joyless Moralist's reading of the Gospel and Acts:

It does seem worth noting that Christ never sat down and wrote/dictated a book, while on the other hand he *did* give serious attention to the organization of a church...  One has the impression [why?] that more organization may have been done in the 40 days between the Resurrection and the Ascension, but admittedly no real detail is given about what went on during that time. What is certainly true, though, is that a kind of organization began to form fairly rapidly in the years following Christ's ascension...  Immediately after the Ascension the Apostles already understood themselves to be a governing body invested with authority by Christ...  There is nothing ad hoc about the way Matthias is chosen, nor about the way Peter (Peter!) initiates the action...  Why didn't Jesus pick Judas' successor himself? Because that was the Apostles' right and responsibility. Jesus chose the original twelve, and after that left it to those he had chosen to perpetuate the organization. They are no longer fledglings under Jesus' wing; it's *their* job now to build up the Church, and they immediately begin doing so, purposefully and with a clear sense of mission...  [In response to me: "You wouldn't get the idea from Acts that he's superior in authority to Paul, or indeed to any of the apostles."]  Actually, I think that's exactly the idea one would get from an impartial reading of the Gospels and Acts. That aspect of Catholicism always made perfect sense to me, long before I seriously considered being a Catholic. In the Acts, Peter takes charge at once, and others defer to his authority. It's true that Paul stands up to him once, but this is the exception that proves the rule; Paul is clearly taking a bold step here, and his attitude is exactly what one would expect of an underling taking a stand against the man in charge...  Think of the Church as being a bit like a branch of a larger company with a CEO that occasionally steps in and gives a direct order or takes charge of a project himself. Most of the time they're expected to work things out for themselves, though always in keeping with the company's general goals and with certain resources that they can turn to when they need extra help. Once in awhile the CEO might step in personally and change the course of operations in a larger way. Now, in a sense it might undermine the authority of the branch manager when the CEO steps in, because it shows that he isn't the top of the hierarchy, but it doesn't necessarily undermine him in a substantial way, because it was always a clear part of his identity that he was subject to a higher authority. Meanwhile, it's perfectly possible that the CEO (especially in the early days when he's getting a new manager started) might cede certain tasks or decisions to him: it's *your* job now, so you decide!

Joyless Moralist seems to look on the history of the early church as a business school case study.  Again and again, the words "organization" and "authority" appear.  The question I find myself asking is: Where did JM get this paradigm that she's imposing on the Gospel and Acts.  At one point in the Gospels the disciples have a quarrel over pre-eminence:

Then a dispute arose among them as to which of them would be the greatest. And Jesus, perceiving the thought of their heart, took a little child and set him by Him. And said to them, "Whoever receives this little child in My name receives Me; and whoever receives Me receives Him who sent Me. For he who is least among you all will be great." (Luke: 9:46-48)

 Or in Matthew:

At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, "Who then is greatest in the kingdom of Heaven?" Then Jesus called a little child to Him, set him in the midst of them, and said, "Assuredly I say to you, unless you are converted and become as little children, you will be no means enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 18: 1-3)

Or another episode, in Mark:

They said to Him, "Grant us that we may sit, one on Your right hand and the other on Your left, in Your glory." But Jesus said to them, "You do not know what you are asking"... And when the ten heard it, they began to be greatly displeased with James and John. But Jesus called them to Himself and said to them, "You know that those who are considered rulers over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. Yet it shall not be so among you; but whoever desires to become great among you shall be your servant. And whoever desires to be first shall be slave of all."

In short, Jesus refuses to put one apostle above the others, to define ranks or hierarchies among them. Their requests for such information are misguided and show that they don't understand what He's about. Joyless Moralist seems to have a rather less evasive answer to the apostles' question: Peter was the greatest of the disciples, the branch manager, the man in charge, to whom the others were underlings. Now, there is one verse in Scripture of which I would say a superficial reading does tilt slightly to this interpretation.

When Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He asked His disciples, saying, "Who do men say that I, the son of Man, am?" So they said, "Some say John the Baptist, some Elijah, and others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter answered and said, "You are the Christ, the son of the living God." Jesus answered and said to him, "Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but My Father who is in heaven. And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock [petrus is related to the Latin word for rock, so some say there is a pun here] I will build my church, and the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. And I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Then he commanded His disciples that they should tell no one that He was Jesus the Christ. From that time on Jesus began to show to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised the third day. Then Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him, saying, "Far be it from You, Lord; this shall not happen to You!" But He turned and said to Peter, "Get behind Me, Satan! You are an offense to Me, for you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men." (Matthew 16:13-23)

I've extended this quote a bit longer than the Catholics typically do, because I think the episodes are closely connected. Anyway, Father Michael Pomazansky, an Orthodox priest, in Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, writes of this passage by quoting a letter to the Fourth Ecumenical Council from St. Juvenal, Patriarch of Jerusalem: "On this confession the Church of God is made firm, and this Faith, given to us by the holy Apostles, the Church has kept and will keep to the end of the world." That is, the "rock" is Peter's confession, not Peter himself. This is certainly plausible, but the Roman Catholic interpretation-- that with these words Christ names Peter personally the rock on which the Church will be built-- does seem semantically tenable. Though the image that puts in one's mind is a strange one. For one does not, please note, build a church or other structure on a single rock. When I think of the Roman Catholic view, I can't help imagining an enormous cathedral balanced awkwardly on a single tiny rock. Actually, that image expresses what's wrong with the view of a monarchical church, too: it is too fragile, too imbalanced, depending as it does on a single individual. If we focus again on the words of the passage, it appears that Jesus's naming of Peter as "the rock" is a response, almost an impulsive response, to Peter's declaration that "You are the Christ." If one of the other apostles had spoken first, one feels that Jesus might have said the same thing to him; or that if another apostle expresses the same declaration then or later, Jesus would have declared him, too, to be a "rock." Of course, they did confess that in due course. And that makes the architectural metaphor much more satisfactory, for a church finely balanced on one foundation stones might, it would seem, tumble at the slightest breeze, but there's no reason a church built on twelve foundation stones could not withstand a hurricane. Still, at least to my ears (biased perhaps because I've lived in the West and spent a lot of time with Catholics) this passage does have a slightly Roman Catholic ring to it.

But nothing else in the Gospel or Acts does. Before addressing the appointment of Matthias, it's worth looking at some of the many images of the Church that the Gospels present. From John:

"I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned." (John 15:1-6)

I find it amazing how apt this passage is if read as a theory of history. Every human civilization has grown old and withered except the Christian one. Christianity is forever young; it gives rise to sciences and literatures and ideologies and states and nations and ethics and institutions, and these all ossify, weaken, wither, and die when they cut themselves off from Christianity: this is the lesson of the past 2,000 years, indeed of all history, since before Christianity mankind was bound to the wheel of growth and decay and "there was nothing new under the sun." But I digress. What does the vine-and-branches metaphor imply for Church organization? First, it is consistent with hierarchy, for branches may branch off of branches and not only from the trunk of the vine. But it does not at all suggest monarchical organization, since many branches, not just one, will communicate directly with the vine.

Also in the Gospel of John, Jesus uses the metaphor of a shepherd and a flock:

I am the good shepherd; and I know My sheep, and am known by My own. As the Father knows Me, even so I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep. And other sheep I have which are not of this fold; them also I must bring, and they will hear My voice; and there will be one flock and one shepherd. (John 10:14-16)

(The "other sheep" are generally taken to be the Gentiles, I think.)  Since sheep are famous for following each other, this metaphor is again consistent with the idea that some follow Jesus more closely, while others, not as close to Jesus themselves, follow other Christians; and in that sense, it is consistent with a certain degree of hierarchy.  But it does not suggest any fixed hierarchy, and certainly not a single highest hierarchy.  Indeed, the idea of some "chief sheep" leading the other sheep is absurd.

In the middle of the Gospel of Matthew there is a wealth of images by which Jesus describes "the kingdom of heaven."  For purposes of argument take "the kingdom of heaven" to refer to the Church, although I don't think that identification is, theologically, the whole story.  First (Matthew 13:24-30), he compares the kingdom of heaven to "a man who sowed good seed in his field," but his enemy came and planted weeds. No idea of hierarchy here: stalks of wheat grows side by side together.  Next Jesus says:

"The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field, which indeed is the least of all the seeds; but when it is grown it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches." (Matthew 13:31-32)

This image seems to contain a prophecy, for it was indeed to transpire thereafter that the tiny beginnings in Judea were to swell into a great movement which converted whole kingdoms, first the Roman empire, as well as Georgia and Armenia, then Ireland and the European "barbarians" beyond the old Roman frontier, then the Slavs, and more recently Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, much of South Korea, now tens of millions of Chinese, etc.: the tiny seed became a great tree. Again, there is an idea of growth, and of fruitfulness, and I think of holiness (to me, the "birds of the air" seem imaginatively to evoke angels), and even perhaps of a limited degree of hierarchy since some branches are stronger than others and some branch off of others.  But not of hierarchy, unless the pope is the trunk of the tree.  Then Jesus says:

"The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened." (Matthew 13: 33)

This is a beautiful and wise metaphor for the way the Church spreads. Again, there is nothing top-down here, no organization: instead, growth comes from the autonomous and decentralized actions of many tiny organisms. So with Christianity: it spreads by this kind action and that good friend, by a song or a story; it is not planned from above by an "organization." Two more parables highlight the initiative of the seekers for truth who come to the Church:

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and hid; and for joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking beautiful pearls. Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matthew 13:44-46)

It is interesting how often Jesus uses commercial metaphors.  These parables communicate the ideas of there being something of great value and of making great sacrifices for its sake.  That individual initiative is so prominent here contrasts, perhaps, with the Good Shepherd metaphor in John.  Of course there is again no suggestion of hierarchy, or of organization.

Aside from the "rock"/"keys" passage, there is one other explicit mention of "the church" in Matthew (and no others in the Gospels):

Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he hears you, you have gained your brother. But if he will not hear, take with you one or two more, that 'by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.' And if he refuses to hear them, tell it to the church. But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector. (Matthew 18:15-17)

This passage suggests that "the church" has authority, but it gives no indication of the structure of the church. Certainly no church leaders are mentioned: Jesus does not say to tell it to a priest or a bishop or an ecclesiastical court. On the contrary, the progression from "you and him alone" to "one or two more" to "the church" suggests that the church is a large body of people, who somehow-- and this is the important point!-- are presumed to be able to form a collective judgment.

Joyless Moralist says that Christ didn't dictate a book, but he did found an organization. While it's true that He didn't dictate a book, He did teach, and the Gospels are (generally taken by Christians to be) first- or second-hand accounts of His teaching. But it's not exactly true that he founded an organization either. In particular, He does not establish authority structures, resisting pressure by the apostles to do so. What He founds is a church, an assembly, a community of love. The Church is something new. He warns the apostles not to model it on the secular authority structures of the Gentiles. He describes this new thing with many rich and beautiful images. Most of them-- the field, the flock of sheep-- are strikingly egalitarian, seeming to put the believers on an equal footing and directly in touch with God. One can derive from some of the parables-- the flock perhaps; certainly the vine-- enough suggestions of leadership and hierarchy to be consistent with the commonsense needs for at least some structure and leadership if any organization which is in this world even if not of it is to manage its affairs, remain coherent, make necessary decisions; but scarcely even that and certainly not more.  If Christ did not found an organization, neither do the apostles seem to have done that, exactly. They taught the Gospel, made occasional decisions in an ad hoc way; their own authority, if that's what it was, as apostles, they communicated to no one, and that office died with them; they created a few offices and set precedents that became the basis of others.  The tremendous amount of traveling that Paul at least, and according to tradition all the apostles, did, was the ideal way to fulfill the command to "go and make disciples of all nations" but seems hardly compatible with running an organization.  Christians needed organizational structures, as they needed bread and clothing and roofs, for mundane practical reasons; but to think that that organization is the Church is a profound error.  As Father Michael Pomazansky writes: "The life of the Church in its essence is mystical; the course of its life cannot be entirely included in any 'history.'  The Church is completely distinct from any kind whatever of organized society on earth."

Finally, one of the things that saddens me about JM's view of "Petrine authority" is that it seems to make it impossible to appreciate Peter for who he was.  Consider again the appointment of Matthias in the Book of Acts.  Luke writes that "Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples"-- a striking phrase.  Peter says that some passages from the Psalms were prophecies about Judas.  Were they?  Does it matter?  Anyway, based on these Scriptures he concludes that another should take Judas's place among the Twelve.  Two candidates, Matthias and Barsabbas, are chosen, and they draw lots to decide whom to appoint, seemingly a way of ascertaining the Divine will; but if one is inclined to believe that the lot fell to Matthias by mere chance, there is not a word in the Book of Acts to gainsay it.  There is no other mention of Matthias in the New Testament.  However, soon afterwards another apostle, the extraordinarily eloquent and energetic Paul, is appointed by a miraculous vision and conversion on the road to Damascus.  So, if Peter's goal was to ensure that the number of apostles was twelve, the appointment of Matthias actually achieved the opposite of this, raising the number to thirteen.  Mightn't it have made more sense to wait and let Paul take the place of Judas?  This is not to say anything against Matthias of course.  Rather, I want to draw attention to what it shows about Peter's character.  Peter is forever impetuous.  He is present at the Transfiguration, and babbles: "Master, it is good for us to be here; and let us make three tabernacles: one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah" (Luke 9:33). Luke adds explicitly, and amusingly, that "he did not know what he was talking about."  He is the only one of the disciples to walk on water at Jesus's invitation; but he quickly loses faith and begins sinking.  He is the first to declare "You are the Christ!" but a moment later he plays the part of "Satan" by tempting Jesus not to face crucifixion, to "let this cup pass," to quote Jesus's own prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane when (and I hardly dare to write this even though it is written in the Gospels) Jesus seems Himself to have felt a powerful temptation.  (In thise sense, Peter was even a greater tempter than the dread spirit in the wilderness, for none of the dread spirit's temptations seems to have gone as close to Jesus's heart as Peter's words did.)  On the eve of the Crucifixion, Peter boasts that "I will lay down my life for Your sake," (John 13:37) then denies Him three times before the cock crows.  Just before that, when Jesus washes the disciples' feet, Peter first cries "You shall never wash my feet!" then, when Jesus says that "if I do not wash you, you have no part with Me," he goes to the other extreme and declares "Lord, not my feet only, but almost my hands and my head!" and earns another gentle reproof for his enthusiasm.   When Jesus is arrested, Peter takes a sword and cuts off the high priest's ear: Jesus heals it and tells him to sheathe his sword, saying "all who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52).  After the Resurrection, Peter runs to the empty tomb.  Was that necessary?  Later in Galilee, when John recognizes Jesus on the shore:

Simon Peter put on his outer garment (for he had removed it), and plunged into the sea. But the other disciples came in the little boat... dragging the net with fish. (John 21:7-8)

Did Peter need to leap into the sea and swim to Jesus?  Mightn't it have been just as well to help his fellows bring in the haul of fish?  And yet it is these details that bring Peter to life.  He is nothing like a branch manager or an executive.  That is not the sort of role for which he is suited.  His best actions, you could not deduce from a moral code; they are not generically good but expressive of a peculiar goodness that is distinctively Peter's and the more precious for that.  He might never have existed; and yet now that he has lived and been the man he was, he seems necessary, one feels that the whole universe would lose something if he were not.  "Eternity is in love with the creations of time," as William Blake wrote.  In his impetuosity and volubility Peter often makes missteps, yet his love for, his joy in the Lord, always shines through, and is contagious.  I love Peter.  Praise God for Peter!  What joy it would be (will be, I hope) to meet him!  But when you consider Peter's whole character, as displayed over and over again in the Gospels and Acts, it is not at all difficult to see the episode with Matthias as another instance of Peter's, as it were, jumping to conclusions, leaping into a course of action which, though in this case not harmful, is not particularly... optimal.  It may be another case where Peter's missteps turn out well.  One feels, particularly in the phrase "Peter stood up among the believers," that Peter set the church in motion, that the event made an impression and was remembered, even if it received no confirmation by revelation or miracle and nothing in particular came of it, and even if the real awakening of the church came not then, at Peter's initiative, but just afterwards, at divine initiative, with the coming of the Holy Spirit, though of course Peter plays a leading role in that episode too, giving a great speech and converting thousands.  Later, when Peter converts Cornelius, a Roman, Acts says:

And when Peter came up to Jerusalem, those of the circumcision contended with him, saying "You went in to uncircumcised men and ate with them!" But Peter explained [and recounts vision in which God told him to do so]... (Acts 11:2-3ff)

Note here that "those of the circumcision" don't seem shy about confronting Peter.  The passage does not suggest that Peter had "authority" over them.  Peter does lead, but, as in the appointment of Matthias, by persuasion, namely by appeals to Scripture in the first case and to personal revelation in this case, not by claiming ecclesiastical authority.  Christ is the vine, and Peter is one of the branches. 

The Putinization of American Politics

"Fox Wars: The Obama Administration Wants to Delegitimize Any Significant Dissent" (Charles Krauthammer, 10/23/2009):

Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he’s put a horse’s head in Roger Ailes’s bed.

Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn’t scare easily.

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led (by) and following Fox.”

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration — from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health-care legislation — the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry — finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox...

Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN — which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a Saturday Night Live skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?

Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high-school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?

The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

Nationalization of major companies, attempts to muscle out critics in the press, efforts to rewrite history in favor of mass-murdering Communist tyrants... Wow. Note that Obama and Putin go after TV rather than print media; the National Review is safe. It's OK to have small freethinking cliques, but you can't give the other guy access to public opinion. By the way, I made a break with CNN last fall. The last straw was a story last October about people losing money in non-FDIC-insured banks, which was all fine up to the sting: they mentioned that McCain's nephew worked in one of these banks, or something. It was such a low blow. A mere pundit would have been ashamed to make such an ad hominem attack on a candidate's family. I would have been ashamed to see freerepublic.com sink to that level. That was the end. I will simply never watch CNN. I don't think it should be shown in public places, but it doesn't hurt me, because I can look the other way, and I always have an iPod to drown out the sounds. I never watched Fox News either but now I feel guilty about that. If I want to keep my First Amendment freedoms, shouldn't I support the network that is standing up for them, even if I don't like it?