A Yearning For The Hearth

I try not to be a Bush basher, there’s too many people out there foaming at the mouth, but I have to mention this.

Bush is planning to veto a bill which would supply basic health care for young children in the US. He initially supported it, but is now stongly opposed because of some modifications that made more children eligable. He’s vetoing on the grounds that the bill is a step toward “government-run health care for every American.” (It’s interesting that this idea is heresy in the States, when it’s gospel in Canada. We’re both a bit irrational about health care).

What’s extraordinary is that the bill has found solid support from Republicans in the Senate, and that Bush feels strongly enough to overrule many of his own, on a bill designed to help kids! This from the President that wanted ‘no child left behind’?   

I’m a pragmatist when it comes to social policy: some things work well when administered by government, some things don’t. Government should focus on the former…often they focus on the latter. Certainly publicly funded health care hasn’t been a complete success and I can understand reservations. BUT, this having been said, we also have a responsibility to take care of children. Of Course parents do too, I know that. But so does the community, and when it’s practical and possible and affordable to help take care of kids, we have to do it. 

Imagine there’s no Heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

“Imagine” - John Lennon 

There’s no doubt that this is one of the most beautiful songs you’ll ever hear, yet whenever I hear it I can’t help thinking about how hollow the world Lennon imagines would be. I’m not sure a world without countries, religion, heaven or hell would mean people would be living life in peace - I’m not sure having less to live for means you’re less likely to kill. I wonder too if those things (and those people) worth dying for aren’t the same things that give meaning and purpose to our lives.  

The quote below is from an aricle called “Darwin’s Graveyards” by Edward T. Oakes. The article is a review of a book called From Darwin to Hitler. The book places Hitler in the stream of Social Darwinist thought. I think the quote is interesting because it reminds us of the diffculty of justifying ethics untheologically. I have serious doubts that it is even possible to do so.

 

“Alasdair MacIntyre famously said in After Virtue that every debate about moral issues in contemporary society can be boiled down to a debate between Nietzsche and Aristotle. Perhaps another way of phrasing that same insight would be to say that every contemporary ethical dispute is really a debate between Charles Darwin and Pope John Paul II, especially in his encyclicals Veritatis Splendor and Evangelium Vitae. One either regards man as a complicated bag of cells wrapped in skin, whose only law is the biological imperative of vitality, self-preservation, and procreation; or one sees man as created in the image and likeness of God, whose innate and divinely bestowed dignity absolutely forbids any metaphysically significant division in human society between fit and unfit, strong and weak, white and black, Aryan and Semite, Greek and Jew, adult and fetus, those new born and those near death.”

-Edward T. Oakes 

I’ve been on an Office marathon. I caught up on the third season. Fantastic. I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point TV went from being pretty bad, to being pretty good. In fact, a television show in a given genre now seems to have higher production values, better writing etc. than a comparable movie.

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” - that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats – Ode on a Grecian Urn

The Urn’s message to our generation, as well as to Keats’ is that: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Profound metaphysics? Utter banality? Something in between, I think. Beauty is not what we now imagine it to be – completely subjective, meaningless. It is real, and art without it is not art. Keats and his peers saw art, science, theology and the other rational pursuits of man as unlocking the truth of the universe and the nature of the divine in doing so. The more beautiful the art - the better the art – the closer it was to the divine, closer to truth.

 
Keats goes too far (I suspect even he knew that), but beauty is not unrelated to truth. And when we can’t tell good art from bad, or if we disregard the notion art being good or bad, something is wrong - something is missing.

People frequently appeal to the separation of church and state. It’s especially interesting when people appeal to this in Canada/UK since our head of state, the Queen, is also the head of the Anglican Church. There’s no separation of church and state at all in our countries! This is what the American republican founders were addressing when they introduced the concept of separating church and state. What they did not intend, and how it is most often now interpreted, is that faith should have no place in the public sphere. This is a dangerous and unhealthy situation. It reflects an implicit preference in our culture for the personal whim of an elected official over the instruction of an established system of thought.

This arouses some interesting contradictions. Most politicians have religious convictions, but is counted as a virtue that they are able to lay aside their ‘personal’ faith and take on and sustain the vague values of the modern culture. It comes as a great surprise and scandal to us when we become aware that our political leaders have acted in an unsavoury manner. I wonder why we should be surprised that someone who is willing to set aside his or her most basic convictions about life and death issues would also be willing to flaunt the rules on matters of finance and fidelity? It should not surprise us at all!

One can make an argument for a separation of the church and state, but to try and separate faith and the public sphere is dangerous, and ultimately impossible. This is not to say that religion in politics is always a good thing – it can often be bad and unhealthy, but that’s another topic – I’m only saying that it’s not categorically bad and it does not defy the principle of separating church and state (in the nations where that exists).

 

 

I’ve been studying Alasdair MacIntyre, who’s a philosopher who has had some important and influential things to say. Probably the most important and influential is his critique of modernity and the current philosophical/ethical discourse.

In “After Virtue” MacIntyre describes a world in which the past has been lost. A great catastrophe has robbed us of the knowledge and the systems of thought our predecessors used to understand things. We have bits and pieces of this old world around us, but they are out of context and only half understood. He then suggests that this is our world; that a breakdown in how we conceptualize concepts such as right, wrong, justice and truth occurred during the Enlightenment and we are living in the wreckage.

He recounts how during the Enlightenment it was presumed that truth could be discerned through impartial rationality. MacIntyre describes in some detail how various Enlightenment thinkers tried and failed to provide purely rational justifications for truth and right action. He argues that the Enlightenment project failed, and had to fail, because it was founded on a false presumption: that we have the ability to rationalize independently and impartially.

The breakdown of the Enlightenment led us to where we are now. We still hold to many of the ethical ideas of the Enlightenment and pre-Enlightenment periods, but we have lost the justification for these beliefs. MacIntyre describes the modern dialogue as functionally emotivist, that is, whether we acknowledge it or not, most of us see ethical judgements as statements of personal will or opinion; these ethical judgements have no bearing on anyone else and have no rational justification. MacIntyre is more nuanced, but we commonly call this relativism, and it is the failure of the Enlightenment.

MacIntyre also laments the loss of ‘telos.’ ‘Telos’ is Greek for end, and MacIntyre borrows it from Aristotle in whose work its sense is the end as in the purpose and fulfilment of human life. It is from this, the goal and purpose of human life, that we derive the justification for moral action. The ‘telos’ is also essential for our understanding of our own lives and determining what actions are right and wrong, and on a larger scale, defining who it is we ought to become and what kind of people we ought to be. Ethics then is not simply about doing ‘A’ or ‘B,’ it’s also about becoming the type of person whose character leads them to make the right choice.

We become this type of person through acquiring the virtues. This leads us to the second influential aspect of MacIntyre’s work. His own conceptualization of how ethics ought to be done. Virtues (like courage, justice, mercy, etc.) function within several key frameworks: practices (activities which promote the exercise and development of virtues), narratives (the stories we hear and learn from, as well as the stories of which we are a part: our lives and the lives of others around us and the stories bigger than our own), and traditions (the historically rooted tradition of shared beliefs and ideas to which we belong). Each of these concepts is important and complex, and each of them has useful aspects for us to consider. For the purpose of this piece, however, I’m going to focus on tradition.

For MacIntyre, rationality only occurs within the framework of a tradition. We must recognize that we rationalize and perceive truth through lenses: systems of rationality and language with limited faculties and resources. It’s our traditions that give us the resources that we do have and it is from within a tradition that we can understand and account for our presumptions and properly evaluate our own tradition and its rivals.

Finally, MacInyre offers us a choice: Nietzsche or Aristotle. If moral pronouncements are merely expressions of will, then Nietzsche is the most consistent and honest account of our moral reality. If, however, there is some truth and some meaning, then we must undo much of what has been done, and recover a teleological understanding of human life, such as what Aristotle and his followers had, and begin rebuilding our traditions around it.

 

Through the process of developing this work in the books “After Virtue,” “Whose Justice? Which Rationality?” and “Three Rival Forms of Moral Enquiry” MacIntyre went from being an avowed atheist to a Roman Catholic. He believes that the tradition of Thomas Aquinas provides the best rationality for right action, and that it has survived the challenges posed to it over the centuries.

There’s much, much more to MacIntyre’s work, but I hope to have provided here an outline that will be informative to anyone who is interested.

Here are some clear signs that I’m south of the boarder:

- Michigan is in an economic depression, but there’s still money here. It’s not what tough times looked like out west.

- There’s a public debate going on about raising the state sales tax. Debate? Vote? Aren’t sales taxes those things that get sprung on you two years after an election without any public consultation whatsoever?

- There’s another debate going on about whether public school teachers should be carrying guns at school. Yeah, you read that right.

- I saw an opossum last week.

- Lots of places don’t take debit so I have ‘cash’ in my wallet and am plagued by ‘change’ jingleing in my pocket.

- It’s not as secular here, at least not in Grand Rapids

On September 11, 2001 I was in my morning class at Providence. I remember how surreal it all felt, and how irrelevent and trivial everything seemed. I remember one of the Prof’s saying “This was Osama Bin Laden,” it was a name I’d heard, but knew nothing about. I also remember thinking to myself that it was important that as a society, we not allow ourselves to respond with hatred, that if we did we would have given the terrorists exactly what they wanted.

 I wrongly predicted that the attack would percipitate a new era of American isolationism.  Instead, America chose a different path. I understand why, but I’m amazed at how things have worked out. 

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me and bend

Your force to break, blow, burn and make me new.

-John Donne, from Holy Sonnet 14

I first encountered Donne in my second year at the University of Saskatchewan. He’s not an easy author by any means, but the magnitude of his genius makes itself quickly apparent. Interesting to me is how his work displays vividly the duality of his life. His poetry records his revelry in his vices, and then, as in this case, earnest repentance and seeking God. All of it beautifully crafted.