Positive Liberty

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it’s free. — P. J. O’Rourke

The New York Times today runs another of its current series of economic Dog Bites Man stories “examining how businesses and investors [ohmygawd!] seek to profit from the soaring number of older Americans, in ways helpful and harmful.” Its most recent hard hitting exposé tracks the following bit of reasoning: Baby Boomers are entering the geriatric stage, their health is declining as a result, such ill health often necessitates reliance on oxygen equipment for which – surprise, surprise! – Medicare appears to be paying more than double the market price. Apparently, the Times actually finds newsworthy the facts that (1) aging Boomers are a rapidly growing health crisis, (2) Medicare is, in this case like just about every other case, inefficient and wasteful, and (3) oxygen equipment suppliers increasingly rely on those ‘entitled’ to a government benefits program to act as “unpaid lobbyists” to preserve the inefficient and wasteful status quo.

But after the penis polemic just below, it seems only fair. Kerry Howley writes, apropos of the recent debate at Cato between Notre Dame Philosophy Professor James Sterba and Independent Women’s Forum’s Carrie Lukas,

[They] only agree on one thing: pornography is really, really bad. Sterba says something incomprehensible about the fact that men’s rights are not violated by Shoebox greeting cards. Lukas mentions The Vagina Monologues, which is a relief because if anyone from IWF goes 30 minutes without mentioning Eve Ensler, the universe will implode.

Which is just so true (cf. another IWF take on the monologues, by Sara Gordon).

I’ve never been able to understand why this play is so polarizing. Yes, it’s got its uncomfortable moments — the domineering men, the whole tastes like/smells like bit, and of course the lesbian rape of an underage girl.

Um. People. It’s a play. With, like, characters and stuff. You’re not supposed to presume that everything happening on stage gets the author’s stamp of approval. It’s an examination of life. Not all of life, or of sexuality, is always as it should be. Some of it is horrible. Some of it is multifaceted and ambivalent. Some of it you’re supposed to feel uneasy about. And feeling unease isn’t a sign that there is anything wrong with the play. It’s a sign that this is literature in the truest sense of the word — it’s supposed to challenge. Continue Reading »

You don’t have to be gay, or even ex-gay, to fetishize masculinity. But it certainly doesn’t hurt:

A central tenet to “ex-gay” theory is that a male turns gay because of a poor relationship with his father. Under this baseless hypothesis, a sensitive boy perceives paternal disapproval, and as a defensive measure, the child rejects his dad and all things masculine that remind him of the broken relationship. The mother supposedly reinforces the downward spiral by becoming the child’s fierce protector. The circle is complete when the spurned boy rebuffs sports and male peers in school and instead chooses female friends and leisure activities such as playing house.

…If a guy wants to become heterosexual, according to ex-gay literature, he must reclaim his masculinity by playing sports and hanging out with heterosexual friends, while they partake in “manly” activities. For years, ex-gay organizations have included lipstick seminars for lesbians and touch football games for men…

[But] realizing their forte was white-knuckling prayer, not bare-knuckled machismo - several ex-gay organizations began outsourcing to a paramilitary, pseudo-psychological outfit, The ManKind Project. Ex-gay programs, particularly Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (JONAH), have aggressively promoted The ManKind Project’s New Warrior Training Adventure.

This cult-like national program is a $650 weekend boot camp where participants - mostly straight - are greeted by large, intimidating men dressed in dark clothing and faces painted black. During their stay, the men are forced to take cold showers, survive on about four hours sleep, and subsist on very little food. In follow-up meetings, the activities include shaving another man’s face, kidnapping a member of another camp group and changing clothes with other men. The idea is to help them get in-touch with their feelings and uncover and heal deep wounds that are barriers to successful lives.

The alternative publication, The Houston Press, uncovered a letter Michael Scinto wrote to the Madison County Texas sheriff’s office, just prior to committing suicide allegedly as a result of the boot camp. The Scinto family has filed a lawsuit against The ManKind Project, while the deceased man’s letter to the sheriff claims the New Warrior program practiced bizarre rituals that include:

* Blindfolded walking tours in the nude

* People blowing sage smoke in his face while 50 or so naked men danced around candles

* Men sitting in a circle discussing their sexual histories while passing a wooden dildo called “The Cock”

* Naked men beating cooked chickens with a hammer

In the Houston Press article, the wife of one of the men who attended discussed why her husband eventually rejected the group.

“So, everyone was sitting Indian-style in a big circle in the lodge when the man leading the group said, ‘if you wish, you may reach over and grab your brother’s dick. If your brother doesn’t want your hand there, he can remove it.’ Well, my husband told me he just froze. And, from that point on, he just wanted out.”

Well, that’s one way to attract gay men to your program. Even if beating chickens with a hammer might not go over so well.

Still I feel sure that there’s a pornographic movie to be made here, somehow.

In trying to get a handle on America’s Founding — an historical event which in part because of the authority of the US Constitution, many sides want to claim — those three interacting factors necessarily yield unresolved disagreements over how to properly understand said event. Two things got me thinking about this recently. The first was my coblogger, D.A. Ridgely’s opinion on the culture war over America’s Founding and religion:

Thus, while Prof. Herzog might have wanted to analyze and critique on rational grounds the 2004 Texas Republican party platform’s assertion that “the United States of America is a Christian nation, and the public acknowledgment of God is undeniable in our history [and that] our nation was founded on fundamental Judeo-Christian principles based on the Holy Bible,” I am increasingly inclined to suspect that such approach misses the real point. Campaign verbiage of this sort simply is the sort of rhetoric one hears in the Bible Belt just as one is likely to encounter equally emotional but nearly substance-free economic and political rhetoric in the environs of Ann Arbor. In other words, understanding such phenomena is more properly the work of sociology or social psychology than of political theory, let alone philosophy.

He’s right in a sense. Continue Reading »

Criticize Mormons for their “kooky” beliefs.

And then psychologically abuse an attractive young couple from York, PA under the auspices of giving them an exorcism. Pot…the Kettle calls.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, Part III, Sect III

Questions regarding the Founding Fathers’ various religious beliefs or lack thereof and debate over whether America ought properly be described as a “Christian Nation” as either a historical or contemporary fact is becoming almost as annual a blogospheric event as the Christmas Season, er, Winter Holiday season, itself. At least as interesting a question, though, is why such questions should matter.

I weighed in on these questions online some three years ago, albeit as a commenter, on the now inactive blog Left2Right. Readers interested in my sparring back then with University of Michigan law professor Don Herzog and NYU philosopher David Velleman might take a peek here. (Mind you, that doesn’t mean I continue to believe everything I wrote back then.)

What is at stake here? I understand how conservatives, at least of a certain sort, would be keen to determine what Jefferson, Adams, etc. actually believed and meant to establish inasmuch as one of the central tenets of what I’ll call the Burkean variety of conservatism is respect for and at least prima facie deference to past institutions and practices. Such folks tend also and understandably to be more interested in history, itself.

I understand as well how liberals of the non-classical sort might also be keen to claim the Founders as historical allies and as champions of the Enlightenment both for its then revolutionary tenets and for its implicit legitimizing of revolutionary change. That is, it is surely part of the progressive’s self-image to believe that his politics are in some significant ways a logical extension of 18th century notions of religious tolerance, egalitarianism and popular sovereignty.

Finally, it is almost self-evident that many soi-disant “classical liberals” would seek both to identify with and to legitimize their own views by claiming common cause with the Founders.

Stepping back from the fray, however, at least one point becomes increasingly clear. However reasoned the debate may be among the intelligentsia of these respective camps, the general signal-to-noise ratio of the general public debate is far from audiophile quality. Thus, while Prof. Herzog might have wanted to analyze and critique on rational grounds the 2004 Texas Republican party platform’s assertion that “the United States of America is a Christian nation, and the public acknowledgment of God is undeniable in our history [and that] our nation was founded on fundamental Judeo-Christian principles based on the Holy Bible,” I am increasingly inclined to suspect that such approach misses the real point. Campaign verbiage of this sort simply is the sort of rhetoric one hears in the Bible Belt just as one is likely to encounter equally emotional but nearly substance-free economic and political rhetoric in the environs of Ann Arbor. In other words, understanding such phenomena is more properly the work of sociology or social psychology than of political theory, let alone philosophy.

It is the abiding weakness of intellectuals, too often their tragic flaw, to overestimate the power and value of reason, and this is especially true in the case of normative disputes in the public arena. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter in the slightest whether one affirms or denies that America is or ever was a “Christian Nation.” What does matter is what one subsequently believes the claim does or does not require, permit or prohibit. Not even a Founding Father fundamentalist can seriously contend that the answers are, to borrow a phrase, self-evident truths.

The thesis of this Paul Davies piece seems to be that science is ultimately another form of religion. Superficially, the claim appears profound, and I’ve often heard people – superficial ones – drop this idea into conversation hoping to stop in its tracks any talk about science versus religion.

But with all pithy philosophical pronouncements, as the words become fewer, their definitions become more important. Much depends on what we mean by “religion,” and on what we understand science to be. A misdefinition can be fatal, and similarities do not imply identity. This last I think is the real problem with Paul Davies’ argument.

“Science is just another form of religion” actually has considerable truth to it: Sociologically, science and religion are quite similar. There are codes of behavior, rituals, professional organizations, degrees of rank and honor, and even (on a very materialist level) special places, forms of dress, and texts. Each of these things acts to bind a group together (the root of the word “religion” means “binding”), and to mark the in-group as distinct from outsiders.

But Davies’ piece is not about sociology. Neither are most claims about science as a form of religion. Davies is writing about metaphysics, and he’s not doing it particularly well. Continue Reading »

If the inclination to look at porn is biological, then to what degree is it a moral question? Or, to speak more precisely, how does the growing body of biological research into pornography affect debates about the place of pornography in society and individual lives? No answers in this piece, but some food for thought:

Another study, out of Emory University, more directly addressed the question of pornography and sex differences. Scientists put men and women under a brain-scanning machine known as functional MRI and then handed them some naked photos.

This time, both men and women reported being aroused by the pictures, which featured nude men, nude women, and heterosexual couples having sex. Participants’ brains showed activity in the visual cortex and a few other regions. The researchers found only one difference between the sexes - in men, the pictures caused more activation of a primitive region known as the amygdala. It’s an area we share with rats.

“Historically the amygdala has been seen as the center for fear and learning,” said Emory University psychologist Kim Wallen, one of the study’s authors. “More recently it appears the amygdala is involved in emotion.”

He speculates that men may find the sex pictures more emotionally salient than women do. So men and women may be equally visual, but men on average have different visual interests.

The question, “Why should I occasionally peruse the Weekly Standard’s website?” admits of only one indisputable answer: Andrew Ferguson. Herewith, Ferguson takes on the heavy lifting of slogging through the quadrennial outbreak of books ‘written by’ presidential candidates. The candidates, themselves, actually author these tomes, soon to be littering remainder tables throughout the land, in the same sense professional wrestling is actually a sport, the results of which are unknown by the ‘contestants’ before the bouts. In any case, thanks to Ferguson’s fine efforts the rest of us can now pretend to have read these books just like the candidates pretended to write them. (Could there be a more symbolically fitting microcosm of American politics than that?)

Just to whet your appetite, here’s a snippet:

The first campaign book I recall reading came out in 1975, a memoir ironically titled Why Not the Best? by Jimmy Carter. Carter’s book was premonitory: In one place a discerning reader could find the pointless, free-floating moralism, the bitterness over professional failure, the Faulknerian family, the scrupulosity, the tendency to envy and recrimination that made the Carter presidency so interesting. From every page the memoir seemed to cry, Caveat lector. If only more Americans spoke Latin!

Great stuff, as usual.

You might not want to watch this if you are a Mormon. The orthodox Christian doesn’t, in my opinion, well represent his side. He’s a bully who scares the young Mormons who come across as naive and more innocent. He’s got a hell of a lot of nerve to accuse them of trying to cut him off and not letting him get in a word edgewise when all he does is cut them off and insult them. At the very end he says he does the same thing to the Black Israelites and that’s fine. If you’ve ever heard their poison, they deserve an encounter with a loud, obnoxious, arrogant bully. These kids didn’t.

Changes in rock singers’ voices. Many rock singers’ voices change (usually for the worse) as they age. There are many reasons for this, one of which is that all parts of our bodies deteriorate as we age. Rock singers also tend not to be trained vocalists (and consequently don’t do the things that trained vocalists do to preserve the voice) and do a lot of screaming and shouting. Screaming and shouting — and damaging one’s vocal chords — may actually yield a desired effect in rock if one values a raspy voice. The more screaming he does the better Brian Johnson sounds. However, such raspiness acquired with age is also usually accompanies by a loss of range. What brings this to mind is rumors that Robert Plant, for Led Zeppelin’s up coming reunion, is demanding to have some of their classic tunes transposed to a lower key so he can hit all of the right notes in the melody.

Such change also happened to Steve Walsh’s masterful voice, and the change was due to more than just age but drug and alcohol abuse, screaming and otherwise not taking care of his voice during the years he wasn’t clean. Compare his voice in his prime to what it became in the early 90s. For Walsh, now in his 50s, the glass is now half full half empty as he regained some of what he lost but his voice will never sound as it did in the 70s. He also projects a much better demeanor, shy and reserved behind his keyboard, than what he did when not clean.

One reason why Dr. Gregg Frazer suggests “theistic rationalism” instead of “Unitarianism” in labeling the beliefs of America’s Key Founders is not only can such term be confused with the Unitarian Congregational Church (of which only John Adams and his son were members), even worse it can be confused with today’s Unitarian-Universalist Church which significantly differs from the the Unitarianism of America’s Founding in a number of meaningful ways. For one, today’s Unitarian-Universalists aren’t very “biblical” and there was a strain of Founding era Unitarianism that was. Men like Joseph Story, John Marshall, Jared Sparks, and William Ellering Channing believed the Bible infallible and argued unitarian doctrines from Scripture alone.

Today such groups as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Roy Masters’ sect follow a sort of Biblical Arianism, named after Arius, who first argued Jesus was a divine but created and subordinate being, but whose views lost out in the Council of Nicea. This website also argues for Biblical Unitarian-Universalism — the notion that Jesus is not God and that salvation is universal — from Scripture alone. John Milton and Isaac Newton certainly were biblical Arians. Locke was a unitarian most likely of the Arian variety, though some scholars argue he was Socinian, believing Jesus just a man and not any kind of divine being. And scholars also dispute how “biblical” Locke’s beliefs were as well.

However, America’s key Founders — Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Madison, Washington and others — since they believed God primary revealed Himself through nature and secondarily inspired the Bible had no problem editing from the Bible that which they believed inconsistent with “reason.” Just how biblical their unitarianism was likewise is a matter of debate. Today’s Unitarian-Universalist Church is more of the tradition of these key Founders than it is of the Biblical Unitarianism of Story, Marshall et al. However, given that today’s Unitarians are squarely on the Left’s side in culture war issues that were not at all issues during America’s Founding, it might not be fair to label the Founders “Unitarian” and suggest some kind of connection between the two. And it’s certainly not right to label the Founders “Christian” in a way that would suggest a connection with today’s Christian right.

Is the “theistic rationalist” label (given that it uses not Christian, Deist, or Unitarian) the fairest label of the bunch?

Garry Wills writes interesting, readable works, even if I often disagree with his perspective. This book — Head and Heart — is no different. Much of what he’s written parallels the research I’ve done for the past few years on my blogs. The book has some minor factual mistakes and typos (as most books do) — for instance, Timothy Dwight was from Yale, not Harvard (p. 134), and it was Dr. Abercrombie, not Bishop White who publicly complained of George Washington’s refusal to take communion which led Washington to stop attending on communion Sundays (p. 169).

The book rightly focuses on theological unitarianism as an Enlightenment religion and a precursor to the more radical deism that would come later. The book properly notes denial of the Trinity as an important heterodox tenet of more Enlightened liberal religious minds of America’s Founding era, naming Mayhew, Chauncy, Gay as Unitarian American preachers who so influenced America’s Founders and their rational religion. He also notes America’s Founders’ philosophical heroes in England — Milton, Newton, Locke, Clarke, Priestley and others — as enlightened Unitarians. Some of these passages look like they could have been written by me — not accusing him of anything, just noting that we draw from many of the same sources seem to think along the same track.

And so it is that I must offer my biggest criticism of the book: Wills is a political liberal and a secular leftist — nothing wrong with that. Though, this book, like much of his work, is ideological (as some might argue all history is). The secular left are too quick to categorize too many of America’s Founders as “Deists” (just as the religious right are too quick to take them as “Christians”) and Wills falls prey to the same error. This article summarizes the relevant part of the book I would dispute. As Tim Rutten writes:

The reaction of the Great Awakening provided an American Unitarian boost that made Deism the religion of the educated class by the middle of the 18th century. Legal scholar William Lee Miller writes that the chief founders of the nation were all Deists — he lists Washington, Franklin, John Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton and Paine, though many more leaders of the founding era could be added (Benjamin Rush, John Witherspoon, David Rittenhouse, Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, Aaron Burr, James Wilson, Gouverneur Morris, Tench Coxe, to name some). Their agreement on the question of God crossed political and geographic lines. Federalist and Republican, North and South, an Adams and a Jefferson, a Hamilton and a Madison — all were professed Deists.

Those names only qualify as “Deist” if we read the term “Deist” very broadly. (And no they didn’t tend to call themselves “Deist.”). John Witherspoon clearly was an orthodox Christian of the Calvinist Presbyterian bent. The kernel of truth to the claim he was “Deist” is that Witherspoon was a naturalist and a philosophical rationalist who promoted many non-Christian Scottish Enlightenment ideas. This flirtation with Enlightenment theory and philosophical rationalism could have led Witherspoon down the road to unitarianism, theistic rationalism or deistic beliefs, but it didn’t; he remained orthodox.

And if we are going to read “Deism” in such a broad way, to be fair, we ought to read “Christianity” just as broadly, and if we did, all mentioned except for Paine and maybe a few others could be understood as “Christian.” Tit for tat. The key Founders — Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Wilson, G. Morris, and Hamilton (before his end of like conversion to orthodox Christianity) were either, if read broadly, both Christians and Deists (or “Christian-Deists” as David L. Holmes puts it) or, if read narrowly, neither, but somewhere in between with rationalism as the trumping element. Witherspoon, as noted, remained orthodox. Benjamin Rush was a Trinitarian Universalist believing all would eventually be saved through Christ’s universal Atonement. Paine was a strict Deist. I’m not sure about the others.

Consider the following bit of dialog, courtesy of the indispensable IMDb, from American Gangster:

Detective Richie Roberts: [explaining why the mob will testify against Lucas] In addition to the fact that they hate you personally, there’s the fact that they hate what you represent.
Drug Kingpin Frank Lucas: I don’t represent nothing but Frank Lucas.
Roberts: A successful black man like yourself? You represent progress. A progress which will un-glue their world. With you behind bars everything can go back to normal.

Roberts correctly understands the implications of Lucas’s career in terms of racial politics. In this sense, Lucas’s success was a precursor to O.J. Simpson’s acquittal which proved that at long last a rich and famous black man in America could get away with murder just like his white counterparts. That is, after all, progress of a sort. But Lucas’s success demonstrates another sort of progress, too. It shows that the market for narcotics, illegal or not, still behaves pretty much like any other market.

As both the real life and film version Frank Lucas figured out, a businessman who manages to cut costs and improve the quality of his product can make quite a tidy little profit. Thus, having discovering a method of buying heroin in bulk directly from Southeast Asia and effectively eliminating the middle man, Lucas became the Sam Walton of smack during the Viet Nam War era, amassing a fortune estimated between $50 and $250 million before his ultimate arrest and conviction in the mid-70s.

Especially amusing in the film is a scene where a Mafioso whose own drug business has been adversely affected accuses Lucas of controlling a heroin monopoly. One can almost hear the small shopkeepers kvetching when Wal-Mart moves in and consumers, rational maximizers that they are, start shopping at the Big Box. This is precisely how heroin addicts behaved when Lucas’s Blue Magic brand heroin hit the streets. Even junkies can make rational purchasing decisions, after all.

Detective Roberts, at least Russell Crowe’s version, understands something else, too. Why is the War Against Drugs forever doomed to failure? Because of the vested interests of, among others, “judges, lawyers, cops [and] politicians. They stop bringing dope into this country, about a hundred thousand people are gonna be out of a job.” But that was the 1970s. The number of jobs at stake is probably vastly higher by now.

The continued criminalization of non-medicinal drug use is one of the few (but, alas, growing) number of social and political issues in which the nanny-state Left and the paternalistic Right agree. Much of the Left couches its opposition to drug use in terms of health and medical issues and, of course, Protecting The Children™ while significant segments of the Right see their opposition as obvious agreement with God’s will. As a result, there is no politically viable segment of liberalism or small state conservativism that favors more than the most modest drug decriminalization. Moreover, it is one of the great ironies of the past half century that the baby boomer generation, which somehow miraculously survived its own rampant drug “abuse” decades ago (and would now like its children and grand-children’s help in buying prescription drugs, thank you very much), is overwhelmingly opposed to legalization.

America’s drug policy is facially absurd, astronomically expensive, unnecessarily punitive, outrageously destructive, an ongoing invitation to a police state and still doomed to fail. We’d all be better off if heroin users could simply buy their $4 refill at Wal-Mart.

The answer to this question is it depends. I’m going to answer Kristo Miettinen’s response in a series of posts. One of Jim Babka’s friends also takes issue via email on the identity of the God of the American Founding:

As for Rowe’s claim that the proclamations were made to a “generic God.” What God pray tell could they have possibly been referring to other than the God of the Bible? Now there may have been a difference of opinion about the deity of Christ, but that difference did not lead America’s leaders to a God other than the one of the Holy Scriptures.

Miettinen puts it this way: Continue Reading »