Newt Gingrich, Historian

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via the Economist:

Believers in the idea that America was established as a Christian state scored a hit last year when the Texas school board, a politicised body in which evangelicals control crucial votes, ordered up textbooks laying out this view. Given the size of the Texan market, school-book publishers across the country often follow its lead.

The best-known advocate of the “Christian nation” theory is a Texan, an author and evangelist called David Barton, who has been writing on the subject since the 1980s. Among his recent claims are that the founding fathers rejected Darwinism (although they pre-dated Charles Darwin), and that they broke away from Britain in order to abolish slavery. In fact the southern states only joined the Revolution on the understanding that slavery would not be questioned.

Strange as his views may sound to most scholars, Mr Barton’s philosophy is taken seriously in Republican circles. When Rick Perry, the Texas governor and presidential candidate, held a day of prayer for the nation in August, Mr Barton was an acknowledged endorser. One of Mr Barton’s admirers is Newt Gingrich…

Count me unsurprised by that…

Posted in history | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Choosing

Posted on December 18, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via The Tablet, an interesting story from Israel:

According to the Israeli government, there are roughly 5,800,000 religious Jews in Israel, 1,320,000 Muslims, 150,000 Christians, 130,000 Druze, and exactly one secular Jew. His name is Yoram Kaniuk—and if a new movement that he has inspired continues to grow, he won’t be alone for long.

In Israel, every citizen has a religious classification and an ethnic classification. For the majority of Israeli citizens, “Jewish” is listed as both. It’s not a simple formality: One’s religious classification has profound effects, determining whom and how one can marry, the process of divorce, whether one can get buried in a Jewish cemetery, and whether one must serve in the army. The “state” in this case is embodied in the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate of Israel, a quirk of the Israeli democratic system that stretches back to the country’s founding in 1948. At the time, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion gave representatives of the Orthodox religious community, numbering only in the hundreds, a host of powers dramatically out of proportion to their size on the assumption that these Jews would soon turn away from the religion of the shtetl.

Ben-Gurion, needless to say, got it wrong. The ranks of the Orthodox have swelled to well over a million, yet the rabbinate still retains the sole power over deciding who is a Jew. Because of the strength of their voting bloc and the keystone role that Orthodox parties hold in Israeli coalition governments, there has never been a successful bid to challenge the rabbinate’s control.

But Kaniuk, one of the country’s most celebrated novelists, may have accidentally found a loophole. And if it gets widened by the Supreme Court in an important case now pending, it could grow big enough for a large section of the country to step through.

Read the whole thing.

Posted in politics, Religion | Tagged | 1 Comment

Gay marriage and polygamous marriage

Posted on December 17, 2011 by David Hume

Rod Dreher asks: If same-sex marriage, why not polygamy? I think an excessive legalistic focus in this area confuses. Rather, if we focus on the ends then the distinctions are obvious:

– Same-sex marriage is not the human norm. Polygamy is very common, even dominant as the ideal, across human societies (at least until recently)

– Many men who would not enter into same-sex marriages because they are not homosexual in a biological sense may in fact find polygamy congenial to their biological imperatives!

Legally in terms of liberty I think one makes a good case that there isn’t that much of a difference between same-sex marriage and polygamy when you take normative Western traditions off the table. But when it comes to ends, a moderately liberal friend of mine once observed: “How come polygamous societies are always shitty societies?”

Conventional social conservatives are wont to suggest that gay marriage, and gays more broadly, threaten their way of life. As a generality I think this is wrong, because aggressive anti-heterosexual cultural radicals in the gay community are no longer dominant. And, straight people are born straight. In contrast, I do think that the polygamist is a threat to the monogamous way of life. For elite males serial monogamy is already relatively common. For underclass individuals institutional monogamy is an uncommon part of their lives. A solemnized polygamist alternative may seem attractive to many. But like law school, many males may enter with aspirations, but few exit to success, in these societies.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 14 Comments

Why are you a conservative?

Posted on December 14, 2011 by David Hume

This is addressed to people who consider themselves fundamentally conservative, and not libertarian, and, also reject the supernatural. By this, I mean that if you do support libertarian policies (I often do) it is not necessarily because you are at the root someone who is motivated by liberty as the summum bonum. By rejecting the supernatural I mean that you don’t accede to the plausibility of gods, spirits, etc.

Sometimes the answer can be somewhat vague and general. For example, by conservatism, as I implied below, is rooted in the social dependence of human flourishing. This necessarily entails that individual freedom is not the ultimate ends, and means that I am opening to diverging from libertarian logic in many specific cases. Or, more precisely, in the case of the United States I think that this nation-state is a good thing, that it has legitimacy, and that it’s coherency as a nation-state should be defended as a long term project. It’s not a mere convenience for the execution of legal prescriptions.

I throw the question out there because I’m wondering how people will take the ideas I’m going to present at the Moving Secularism Forward conference this March.

Posted in politics, science | Tagged , , | 32 Comments

Well?

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

We’ve heard a lot recently from the Vatican on the “social justice” front, most of it the usual leftish sanctimony garnished with the distaste for the free market that has long been an important strand of Roman Catholic thought.

Well, now comes an excellent opportunity for the church to back up its words. The Daily Telegraph has the details:

The Roman Catholic Church in Italy is under growing pressure to start paying taxes on its massive property portfolio, in a move that could raise up to 800 million euros (£680 million) a year and help bail the country out of its economic crisis.

Campaigners, most prominently parties on the centre left, say it is deeply unfair that Church-owned properties with a commercial function — for instance convents and monasteries that charge paying guests similar rates to four-star hotels — are exempt from property tax. As the new technocrat government of Mario Monti seeks to slash the nation’s 1.9 trillion euro debt, attention is turning to the estimated 65,000 buildings owned by the Church.

They include around 50,000 cathedrals, churches and chapels — which would retain their tax-free status — but 11,000 schools, universities and libraries as well as nearly 5,000 hospitals, clinics and other commercial properties would face the tax.
The Monti administration has announced that Italians are to be taxed on their primary residences, reinstating a levy that had been abolished by Silvio Berlusconi, who resigned from his third term in office last month.

It is one of a package of tax increases, labour reforms and pension reductions which will hit Italians hard in the pocket over the next few years. With millions of people facing a bleak era of austerity, politicians are now calling for the enormously rich Church to play its part in shouldering the burden. The potential windfall is enormous. According to an estate agency, Gruppo RE, a fifth of publicly owned properties in Italy are directly or indirectly controlled by the Church.

But calls for Church taxes may encounter resistance from the Monti government, which is heavily stacked with academics, bankers and lawyers with strong Catholic credentials. Under a law adopted in 1982 and backed up by an amendment in 2006, Church-owned properties are immune from taxation, even those that have a commercial element.

This will be a good test of both Monti and the Catholic Church. Serious or not?

Posted in Church & State | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Libertarianism as ends and means

Posted on December 5, 2011 by David Hume

I haven’t had time to follow up my post below on libertarianism. But my friend Jim Manzi wrote something similar, at much greater length, in 2009: The Paradox of Libertarianism. I endorse it, though you may not!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | 10 Comments

Shouldn’t it be OccupyHoliday?

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Cross-posted on the Corner.

Via the Vancouver Sun:

OTTAWA — Adbusters, the Vancouver-based magazine that inspired the worldwide Occupy movement, has a new target: Christmas. Calling its campaign OccupyXmas, the anti-capitalist magazine is calling on consumers to buy nothing for Christmas this year…Christmas, Lasn [the magazine’s founder] said, has been hijacked by commercial forces. “It’s been an empty, soulless kind of ritual that very, very few people enjoy. This is a chance for us occupiers to take Christmas back and have a bit of fun and remind people that Christmas can be a helluva lot more than just shopping and Black Fridays and maxing out on your credit card.”

“Very, very few.” Really?

And just when you think that Lasn cannot get more patronizing:

Lasn said antagonizing people is what the Occupy movement is all about. “It’s about antagonizing people and slapping them around a little bit and waking them up to reality.”

…Buy Nothing Christmas just sounds good, Lasn said. But what it really means is a different kind of Christmas, one that puts “the spiritual side of Christmas back in the game rather than the consumption.”

What humbug. I wouldn’t describe myself as retail’s best friend, but Christmas has evolved a bit over the centuries. The spiritual side is there for those who want it, the consumer splurge is there for those who want that (and there’s room for plenty in-between). As for me, I’ll opt for the made-in-Dickens variety, a marvelous, syncretic festival of food, drink, family, good cheer, nostalgia, tradition and, yes, a present or two.

Food, Drink, Dancing & Other Christmas Horrors

Posted in culture | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Reality Bites

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Cross-posted on the Corner:

Via the Wall Street Journal:

CAIRO—Egypt’s secular-minded politicians, facing a greater-than-anticipated drubbing by Islamist parties in the first round of Egypt’s parliamentary elections, began Friday to assess their dwindling prospects for the poll’s final two rounds.

“Greater-than-anticipated”? Really?

Posted in politics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Why I am not fundamentally a libertarian

Posted on November 28, 2011 by David Hume

I agree with libertarians on many specific issues. But on a deep level I no longer am in sympathy with libertarianism. Why? The issue can be encapsulated by a conversation with a friend recently. He posited that so long as his own actions don’t impact others then he should have liberty to engage in his actions (e.g., smoking, drinking, etc.). Practically there is a great deal of wisdom in this perspective. But I now believe that this individual focus misses the critical insight that humans are generally social beings, who gain meaning and purpose from being socially embedded. A philosophically liberal, in a broad sense, perspective which focuses on individual rights and utility extracted from a social context ignores this reality of human nature.

But in the period between 1800 and 2000 this viewpoint was operationally very useful, because so many of the public policy issues were addressed rather well by focusing upon the individual. Concerns of material want are preeminent in this case. Food, shelter, and clothing. Basic subsistence is rather easily addressed in a reductionistic moral framework. You can decompose average caloric units, and aggregate them and evaluate the distribution of consumption, treating all individuals as reasonable atomic units.

Now that we are in a post-materialist era in the developed world I believe that these easily reducible and atomized concerns are fading into the background. Though many of the basic “Culture War” issues like abortion or gay rights are framed in an individual rights context, I believe that more deeply they’re really about a collective vision of society. Individual liberty and tolerance quickly cedes ground to a collective moral vision. This is not a prescriptive model, this is for me a descriptive one.

The reality is that for a minority of humans a fundamentally liberal/libertarian moral framework is profoundly appealing. It makes intuitive sense to us. I say us because I’m one of those individuals. But I don’t think it describes most human beings. And we have to begin with the modal human being when generating an empirically informed rich moral framework. Don’t we?

Posted in culture, politics | Tagged | 31 Comments

Contagion

Posted on November 27, 2011 by Andrew Stuttaford

Via the Daily Mail:

Muslim students, including trainee doctors on one of Britain’s leading medical courses, are walking out of lectures on evolution claiming it conflicts with creationist ideas established in the Koran.

Professors at University College London have expressed concern over the increasing number of biology students boycotting lectures on Darwinist theory, which form an important part of the syllabus, citing their religion. Similar to the beliefs expressed by fundamentalist Christians, Muslim opponents to Darwinism maintain that Allah created the world, mankind and all known species in a single act.

Steve Jones emeritus professor of human genetics at university college London has questioned why such students would want to study biology at all when it obviously conflicts with their beliefs. He told the Sunday Times: ‘I had one or two slightly frisky discussions years ago with kids who belonged to fundamentalist Christian churches, now it is Islamic overwhelmingly….They don’t come [to lectures] or they complain about it or they send notes or emails saying they shouldn’t have to learn this stuff.”

Perhaps the most telling thing about this sorry story is the students’ unwillingness merely to study something with which they disagree. What exactly are they afraid of?

In due course, we can, I expect, see an effort made to allow them to be spared the requirement to attend class on the grounds of “conscience”, the miserable, self-righteous and Balkanizing excuse increasingly being used in the United States to secure exemption for religious folk from this rule or that.

And this is interesting (emphasis added):

Sources within the group Muslims4UK partly blame the growing popularity of creationist beliefs within Islam on Turkish author Harun Yahya who, influenced by the success of Christian creationists in America, has written several books denouncing Darwinist theory

The weird ecumenicism of fanaticism never fails to impress.

Posted in Science & Faith | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments