Against the Stream

Alright Then, I'll go to Hell!

In the ongoing saga of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and their efforts to enforce their own, very specific, not to say ideosyncratic, view of Catholicism on the American electorate, we have our latest exhibit, this time in the form of Bishop Thomas John Paprocki of Springfield, IL.

In a recent letter to parishoners, he urges them to "think and pray" about the upcoming election. Noting that the Democratic Party supports positions that are viewed within the Catholic heirarchy as "intrinsic evils," such as abortion and same-sex marriage, the good bishop states:

There are many positive and beneficial planks in the Democratic Party Platform, but I am pointing out those that explicitly endorse intrinsic evils. My job is not to tell you for whom you should vote. But I do have a duty to speak out on moral issues. I would be abdicating this duty if I remained silent out of fear of sounding "political" and didn't say anything about the morality of these issues.

Of course, Paprocki goes on to note that there are aspects of the Republican party platform that also run contrary to Catholic social teaching, but those positions are not in support of "intrinsic evils" but rather reflect "prudential judgments" on which people of good will may disagree. He then concludes:

Again, I am not telling you which party or which candidates to vote for or against, but I am saying that you need to think and pray very carefully about your vote, because a vote for a candidate who promotes actions or behaviors that are intrinsically evil and gravely sinful makes you morally complicit and places the eternal salvation of your own soul in serious jeopardy.

I pray that God will give you the wisdom and guidance to make the morally right choices.

He then added: "Vote Republican." Well, not really, but he might as well have. After all, the chain of reasoning here is quite transparent and the disingenuousness of claiming that you're not telling anyone who to vote for while threatening them with eternal damnation for the wrong choice is really quite staggering.

There are a number of vectors from which one could analyze this statement. My own low opinion of the moral authority of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is well documented, and I continue to stand by my "shut up old man" principle with regard to the Bishops' public statements about moral issues until a full airing of the facts around their complicity in a mass conspiracy to abet child molestation has taken place.

But even leaving that aside, this kind of statement represents a fundamental repudiation of the approach to Catholic public theology that is rooted in the work done by John Courtney Murray and embraced by John F. Kennedy. The detante between pro-choice Catholic politicians and Bishops that existed uneasily during the 1970s and 1980s has been officially abandoned by the Catholic heirarchy, who now feel free to do exactly what John Kennedy insisted should be out of bounds, namely presume to order Catholics to conform their policy decisions to Roman Catholic dictates rather than to questions of the public good or the constitution. And it's worth noting, most Catholics don't seem to be listening anyway.

What's more, as Amy Sullivan points out, the Bishops' hedging on the moral offense of Republican positions on issues of poverty and social welfare simply compounds their fundamental dishonesty:

If someone like Ryan uses his prudential judgment to decide that there are better ways to help the poor than to use the federal budget to fund programs that feed and house and provide other support to the poor, doesn’t he then have a responsibility to lay out what those other ways are? By not doing so, Ryan effectively shrugs his shoulders and says it’s not his job.

Ryan and his defenders rely heavily on the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, which Morlino defines as: “the problem at hand should be addressed at the lowest level possible—that is, the level closest to the people in need.” The federal government is so far removed from people on the ground, they argue, that it cannot possibly be responsible for addressing problems associated with poverty. That’s only true, however, if institutions at lower levels actually have the capacity to meet those needs. And that’s far from the case.

She continues:

Paul Ryan can believe that subsidiarity precludes the involvement of the federal government in poverty alleviation, but surely he doesn’t just get to kick the problem to the financially struggling charitable sector and say, “Good luck with that.”

Whenever I hear threats of the kind made by Paprocki, which rest on the threat of hellfire to enforce conformity with a moral position that I don't agree with, I find myself recalling Huck Finn, who believed in all sincerity that it was a sin worthy of damnation to help Jim escape slavery. But when faced with the prospect of turning Jim in, could not in good conscience allow himself to do it. "Alright. I'll go to hell," he thought to himself. And that's my answer to Bishop Poprocki: If voting my conscience on matters of social justice and the good of the country means that I risk eternal damnation, then my conscience forces me to say with Huck Finn:

Alright. I'll go to hell.

Coda on Ayn Rand

Alan Wolfe offers what should, but undoubtedly won't, be the last word on Ayn Rand:

As for the masses, serious thinkers have shared Rand’s concern about their impact on society: de Tocqueville spoke of the tyranny of the majority and Ortega y Gasset of their “revolt.”  There was a time when the concept of mass society was taken seriously in academic sociology: Daniel Bell wrote an essay about it, C. Wright Mills a chapter, and William Kornhauser a book. But while we continue to discuss mass media and mass culture, we have also learned, as Mills tried to teach us, that elites have flaws of their own. A theory of society that attributes virtues to one group and vices to another cannot pass the realism test: Rand’s “inverted” Marxism, as Chait calls it, is as myopic as its opposite.

Right-wing think tanks can have Rand (even if she had little use for them). In the academy, she is a nonperson. Her theories are works of fiction. Her works of fiction are theories, and bad ones at that. Should the Republicans actually win in 2012, we might need to study her in the academic world. It would be for the same reason we sometimes need to study creationism.

All of which of course, in the minds of Rand's cultists, makes her infallible greatness all the more obviously true.

The Nuns and the Economy

Bill Moyers interviews Sister Simone Campbell and Robert Royal of the Faith and Reason Institute on the Nuns' recent bus trip and the social agenda of the Catholic Church.

 

On a personal note, I was involved in an exchange with some Catholic colleagues recently on the whole issue of the idea of the "seamless garment" approach to Catholic social teaching that was promoted by the great former Archbishop of Chicago Cardinal Joseph Bernardin. While on the one hand I think that there is a lot to admire in the kind of effort at moral consistency that the seamless garment doctrine requires, I think on the other that such an effort at moral consistency actually can lead to a number of morally untenable conclusions (such as opposition to contraception, for example).

Nevertheless, the advantage of being a non-Catholic Christian who is in dialogue with and admires much of the Catholic moral teaching is precisely that I'm not bound to hold that all aspects of Catholic social teaching are part of a self-consistent whole, or that by endorsing Catholic thinking on one issue I'm therefore required to swallow it whole. It is possible for me to admire Cardinal Bernardin and Dorothy Day without having to agree with them on everything; indeed I find it absurd to think that I'd have to accept everything they believed in order to admire anything they believed.

Truth be told, most of the best Catholic moral thinkers I'm familiar with don't hold that either, and all the better for the future of Catholic moral thought, and for its ecumenical dialogue partners.

Charity, Compassion, and Conservatism

Earlier this week, the Chronicle of Philanthropy released a study that analyzed charitable giving across the United Sates. It's caused a bit of crowing on the right because its results seem to suggest that residents of "red" states are more generous than residents of "blue" states:

In states like Utah and Mississippi, the typical household gives more than 7 percent of its income to charity, while the average household in Massachusetts and three other New England states gives less than 3 percent.

The same holds for the nation’s 50 biggest metropolitan areas. The Chronicle found that residents of Salt Lake City, Memphis, and Birmingham, Ala., typically give at least 7 percent of their discretionary income to charity, while those in Boston and Providence average less than 3 percent.

The study also suggests that religion is a strong motivator for charitable giving. At first blush, this seems to suggest that, insofar as one can correlate giving with political ideology on a geographic basis, conservatives seem to be more charitable than liberals. Fred Clark at Slacktivist called that conclusion into question, arguing that what the study actually shows is that people who go to church give more money to churches than people who do not attend church, given that when religious charities are taken out of the equation, the ratios of giving flip:

The study actually shows that the religious are much more likely to give to religion. Church members, apparently, are likelier to donate to their churches than non-church members are.

What a remarkable finding. How surprising. How newsworthy.

Set aside those “charitable” donations to local churches, and the study shows that the churchier regions are generally stingier toward “secular” charities. You know, like those secular categories of the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned.

This led Timothy Dalrymple to jump in on the opposite side of the argument, writing:

ERGO, according to Fred, the only real result here is that people who go to church give more to churches than people who do not go to church.  This is, of course, not a justified conclusion, because Fred mistakenly assumes that giving to religious charities is simply the same as giving to churches, and that only gifts to secular charities actually serve “the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick and the imprisoned.”

Apparently it’s compassionate to give to a secular nonprofit like the Boston Symphony Orchestra or NPR but it’s not compassionate to give to World Vision or Samaritan’s Purse or World Relief.  Or any number of religious charities — not to mention the work that churches do to serve the needy within their own communities.  When you’re desperate to avoid the conclusion that Christians are actually generally compassionate people, I guess you’ll find some way to make your argument.

Timothy also appeals to Arthur Brooks's book Who Really Cares to bolster his argument, claiming that:

Brooks’ research showed that conservative religious people not only gave more of their money (even though they had less money to begin with), but that they also give more of their time, donate more blood, and are more generous by dozens of other measures as well.  Yes, Brooks is a well known conservative intellectual.  But his data and his arguments stand on their own merits.

This may well be. I haven't read Brooks' book, and I don't know how it's been reviewed. But I do think it would be worth seeing if other studies continue to bear this out. That said, I do think Tim has a point with regard to the kinds of conclusions one can draw from this study about a) whether "religious" giving here simply means "giving to churches" and b) what kinds of charitable giving both more liberal and more conservative givers engage in.

All of which is to say that there's some interesting sociology to be done here. Tim is right that one can give to a religious charity such as WorldVision specifically with the aim of feeding the poor and helping the homeless, and that one can give to a secular charity such as the BSO which does many wonderful things, but not that. So Fred does seem to draw a far stronger conclusion from the data available than is warranted.

That said, I'd like to know more: What does it mean when the Chronicle study excludes religious giving from its sample to flip the ratio? What's included there? Why make a specific decision to exclude religious giving? What were they attempting to show? Is it possible to take the data in other directions, such as distinguishing between giving to aid organizations vs. giving to cultural organizations? Without drilling down into the data to discover these things, there isn't much more we can conclude.

But that said, it wouldn't surprise me in the least to discover that there is an ideological connection between a conservative principle that says "I don't belive in government handouts" and an equally conservative religious princple that says "but therefore I have a personal responsibility to give to those in need." At the same time, it wouldn't surprise me to discover a liberal position that says "I am willing to pay higher taxes in order to allow government programs to exist that aid the poor and needy" and the position that "therefore I don't need to contribute as much personally to charity." Indeed, I think both could be morally defensible positions, and it wouldn't suprise me at all to find that correlated to geography.

But that said, do think that Tim really does seem to be protesting too much in his defense of conservative Christian charitable giving. The question of personal generosity isn't really what's at stake in public arguments about the size of government programs for the poor, rather social philosophy is. One's own private giving may be enormous, and that's an example of personal virtue; but when conservatives seek to cut public funding for programs that aid the poor and needy, no amount of private giving ameliorates the appearance of a lack of compassion on their part.

So on the one hand, Tim may have a point that the study gives a good picture of the personal generosity of religious conservatives, but it will require a lot more than that to overcome the widespread perception of a lack of conservative callousness. Even so, it would also be worthwhile for both religious and secular liberals to think more about their own personal giving, as a matter of personal virtue if not social justice, and how their giving reflects their values, particularly in terms of the poorest and the most needy.

Defending Ayn Rand

Not me! God, no. But Cathy Young has a piece in The Boston Globe defending Rand's philosophy, sort of. Her argument basically boils down to this: If you pretend that Ayn Rand's ideas weren't as repellant as they actually are, then her philosophy is defensible. For example:

Was Rand’s individualism too radical? Yes. Her hostility to the idea of any moral obligation to others led her to argue that, while helping a friend in need is fine, doing so at the expense of something it hurts you to give up is “immoral.” In her fiction, even private charity as a vocation is despised; so, mostly, is family. Rand made little allowance for the fact that some people cannot help themselves through no fault of theirs, or that much individual achievement is enabled by support networks.

Yet great insights can come from flawed thinkers. Rand’s anti-altruism tirades often turn their target into a straw man, but she is right that the knee-jerk habit of treating altruistic goals as noble has aided evil — for instance, blinding well-meaning Westerners to communism’s monstrosity. When pundits alarmed by Rand-style individualism scoff at the “myth” of individual autonomy, we should remember that this “myth” gave us freedom and human rights, and unleashed creative energies that raised humanity’s welfare to once-unthinkable levels. Rand’s work offers a powerful defense of freedom’s moral foundation — and a perceptive analysis of the kinship between “progressive” and “traditionalist” anti-freedom ideologies.

Got it: So Rand made overblown arguments and attacked strawmen, but if you treat her arguments as though they weren't overblown, interpret them in such a way that they don't say what they actually say, and pretend that her strawman arguments were valid, then she's got a point ... of ... some ... kind.

After all, it's not like there were any more reasonable figures, using better arguments and more careful analysis making a more moderate defense of liberal society, individual autonomy, and creativity during the same period, right?

Young concludes thusly:

Rand is best viewed as a brilliant maverick. But there are reasons this woman attracted hordes of followers, influenced many others, and impressed smart people from journalist Mike Wallace to philosopher John Hospers. Those who treat Rand as a liberal bogeyman will forever be blindsided by her appeal.

On the contrary, I suspect that Rand's liberal detractors understand her appeal quite well: She appeals to the inner 15-year old boy in each of us (at least each of us males), who want what we want now, and don't want to be told what to do by anybody. I can truly understand the appeal, and as a 15-year old boy, had my own torrid love affair with Ayn Rand (or at least, her philosophy). But like most 15-year old boys of a philosophical bent, I grew out of it, and found better and deeper resources for my philosophical reflections.

But there will always be a subset of 15-year boys who never quite get over their love for Rand. That's OK, unless that is you become a 42-year old man who is running for Vice President. Then it might be a problem.

Mess Not With the Nuns

Even Bill O'Reilly's bluster is powerless against the Nuns on the Bus:

 

TED, Taxes, and Income Inequality

 

There has been an interesting back and forth over the past few days about Nick Hanauer's recent TED talk about the idea of "job creation." Apparently TED had decided not to run the segment, and Hanauer cried "censorship," after which TED decided to go ahead and relase it. You can see the piece above.

The key element of his talk is the following passage, from an editorial he wrote on the topic:

I can say with confidence that rich people don’t create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is the feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion a virtuous cycle that allows companies to survive and thrive and business owners to hire. An ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than I ever have been or ever will be.”

What he says here shouldn't be controversial. It's black letter economic principle: "job creation" come about ultimately through consumer spending, in other words, it's stimulated by demand, so giving ordinary consumers more money to spend has a greater stimulative effect than giving rich people more money to spend, because the rich are probably already spending near the top of their capacity. Giving Nick Hanauer a 10% tax cut won't stimulate the economy nearly as effectively as giving someone with realtively little money one, since Nick Hanauer has almost everything he might need, whereas an ordinary middle class American will take that money and immediately spend it on goods and services that they otherwise wouldn't have been able to purchase. Again, really not controversial.

It's become controversial because of the ideological capture of the idea of "job creator" to mean "enormously wealthy." The idea is that the wealthy create jobs through their investments, which to be fair, is true to a point. But the stimulative effect on the economy of low taxes for the rich is far less potent than benefits for the poor and middle class would be. In fact, because the low taxes on the rich have necessitated deep cuts in programs to the poor and middle classes, as well as cuts in education and infrastructure around the country, the low taxes on the wealthy have actually had a counter-stimulative effect. They've actually made the economy worse, or at least, haven't helped it get better.

I'm glad to see Hanauer and a few other members of the hyperwealthy in the United States beginning to push back against this ideology, precisely because, as Hanauer notes, as a matter of social policy, it's not only good for the poor and middle classes, but it is also ultimatley better for the wealthy to live in a well-managed, just, relatively equal society with a well-maintained infrastructure and a sound educational system.