Samuel Johnson once said, “A decent provision for the poor is the truest test of civilization.” That may be so. But another reliable indicator of a civilization’s health is a people’s public restroom etiquette. Stay with me on this.

Have you noticed, as I have, how difficult it is for many adults, even in classy buildings, to use a simple bathroom bowl without rendering it useless for others? I have small children. Part of the task of raising children to maturity is training them in the civilized use of the salle de bain. Always flush. Always wash your hands after flushing. Leave it as tidy as you found it. (No towels or paper on the floor; get all the bad stuff in the bowl.)

But apparently, there are many grown men (I cannot comment on the women) who cannot use a public convenience without inconveniencing the public when they are done. (I once had to take my bursting five year old boy into a Burger King restroom which was so bad that it’s unseemly to describe.) This is a sign of the declining maturity of American adults, their infantilization, the advancing barbarism that is making “life together” less and less workable all the time. It is a sign of a disintegrating civilization.

At the heart of civilization is a willingness on the part of each to subordinate one’s selfish desires and narrow interests for the sake of harmonious living with others, i.e. our common life. This goes by various names. Civility. Citizenship. Civic spiritedness. Manners. Love of neighbor. The answer is not found in fixtures that flush themselves automatically (though, in the short run, they help). As a people, we would be wise to read this sign of the times, reconsider the nature and prerequisites for civilization, the value of civility, the role of civic education in cultivating it, and the appropriate forms which that education takes – from the cradle to the college to the couch potato.

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The road back from Xian airport felt dusty to my skin, even riding inside a comfortable bus for the US delegation. The pale sky seemed weighed down, thick with coal fumes from the nearby factories. Bicycles crisscrossed the road, even on the highways, farmers and workers somehow managing to swerve in and out, and from what we could see from the inside of the cool, air conditioned bus, their breathing seemed labored and resigned to the heat. We were on our way to Beijing, after an exhilarating day in Xian, visiting the terra-cotta warriors from the Qin Dynasty (211-206 B.C.)

Refreshing also were the conversations that I had on the bus, with fellow delegates from the President’s Committee on the Humanities and Arts (PCHA). I was there to represent the National Council, with Eileen Mason, the deputy director of the National Endowment for the Arts; Marc Pachter, the head of the Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian (expect our conversation will be a future Refractions piece); Irene Love, a world renowned archeologist; Henry Moran, the director of the PCHA; and Adair Margo, the head of the delegation and her husband Don. Bruce Cole, the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, with his wife Doreen, James Billington, from the Library of Congress, and his wife Marjorie accompanied us. And then there was Ralph.

Ralph McInerny has taught for over forty years at the University of Notre Dame, where he is the director of the Jacques Maritain Center. You might know his name, or know of his fictional character, as he has authored twenty-six Father Dowling mystery novels. I found out that Ralph even came to read and sign books at the local Mysterious Book Shop right near my loft in Tribeca. A Thomas Aquinas scholar, I began to grill him with questions after finding out about his connection with Jaques Maritain; and to my delight, he was also a scholar of Dante (see my “Water Flames” exhibit, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Maritain’s “Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry,” one of the A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, given in 1952 at the National Gallery of Art, has been a seminal work for my journey of creativity and faith. I have carried it around with me since college, and this French philosopher/theologian has sown seeds of faith and an integrated view of art and theology into my life and my work. It is not surprising that the Maritain center at Notre Dame chose someone like Ralph who is equally versed in Aquinas and Dante, as well as the genre of mystery novels. Maritain’s theology recovers art and poetry from being a specialized category exiled from the intellect, into an indispensable, central catalyst of the mind. Maritain, in doing so, to the chagrin of many academics then and now, validates “the Virtue of Art.”

“The activity of the practical intellect divides into human actions to be done … and the works to be made; in other words, it divides into moral activity and artistic activity … Art is a virtue - not a moral virtue … Art is a virtue in the larger and more philosophical sense the ancients gave to this word; a habitus or ’state of possession,’ an inner strength developed in man … Art is a virtue of the practical intellect.” (Jacues Maritain, Creative Intuition)

The “habitus” of an Aquinas scholar could include mystery novels, or to consider all creative activities to be a significant intellectual work. Whether art and poetry, a Sunday afternoon baseball game or gourmet cooking, we do not need to segregate art and creativity into a corner, an exiled “extra” of our lives.

Ralph confided to me, though, that he really began to write mystery novels as a side business; to put his kids through school. I told him that my wife is a mystery novel fanatic, and knew of his books. I, on the other hand, first “met” Father Dowling as Tom Bosley, in a TV mystery show in the Eighties. “They loosely based it on my novels,” he said in his jovial voice, “but paid me well.” Having a son at NYU, I nodded, knowing that a financial opportunity a purist may resist, a parent grabs onto for dear life. I began to even ponder what kind of a mystery novel I would write … Murder at NYU (a parent gets mysteriously murdered on his way to paying his son’s tuition)?

When we arrived in Beijing, it was Saturday. Ralph had asked one of our interpreters if there was a Catholic church nearby the hotel. They rushed about to find one, and they did, and found that they had a mass on Saturday evening. “If we rush, we can still make it.” Off they went, out of the VIP lounge at the airport, where we waited for our bags. He took one of our interpreters with him.

Later, I asked the interpreter, Jesse (a name given to her by her college English instructor), of her experience going to church with Ralph. She told me that she had a friend who got married there, so she recognized the place. She asked Ralph, though, what the difference between a Church and a Temple was. Not having gone outside of China, she really did not know the difference, she said.

How do you explain to a well educated Chinese, the difference between a church and a temple? Ralph told me that he began to explain, but the conversation soon turned to how she suddenly became a widow recently, losing her husband in a car accident. She had since become a Buddhist: “I before believed in utopia, now I follow in Buddah’s ways to find peace.”

Father Dowling, Ralph’s fictional character, would have found himself drawn to this conversation. Instead of asking probing questions about someone’s present, though, he would have found something in common with someone’s past first, especially in someone’s loss and anguish.

As an “archdiocesan marriage tribunal, specializing in the misery of others,” Father Dowling spent much of his early career counseling broken marriages. But then he found himself carrying their anguish in his heart, silently. “He began to drink … A final binge, a cure, and then, as though into exile, he had been sent to St. Hilary’s in Fox River, a city west of Chicago. Fifty years of age, a failure in the eyes of many of his friends, he had come to see this parish as the sweetest consolation. God is merciful.” (pg. 18)

Reading Ralph’s books now, (purchased at the Mysterious Bookshop with my wife’s help) I realize his books read as an interior journey of faith and brokenness-to capture the real mystery hidden within the very heart of a human being.

As we traveled about China, I began to see China as a mystery, a beautiful mystery.

Here’s a country that would spend a third of their GNP on preserving Xian and the thousands of terra-cotta warriors buried beneath the tomb mount, but at the same time creating a dam to wash away an ancient village. China is a country that would re-build the main road in Beijing to Beverly Hills glamour, providing thousands of workers with jobs, but would force people into retirement at 55, to make room for younger workers, and then displace these younger workers in order to make room for the tourists as the Olympics open. Their parks were filled with the over-55 group of ex-workers, kicking around a feathered version of a hackey sack, playing and singing all day to pass the time. Here’s a country that is investing toward a huge cultural infrastructure, supporting their own artists both at home and abroad, but at the same time carefully censoring the internet, the news and the media. A country that would print Bibles domestically (not many Americans know that for many years they printed their own Bibles for Catholic Churches, but forbade the foreigners to carry them in to China), and yet persecute and arrest Christian leaders in rural areas. They also highly value harmony between people and nature, and yet have one of the worst pollution problems in the world. We asked one of the officials, while riding through the glitzy Beijing streets full of smog, if a marathon can take place in the polluted air: “oh, they will shut the factories for two months before the Olympics.” No other country can be so confidently matter of fact about moving 500,000 workers out of the region to make room for tourists. Today’s China can afford to do so, and has the governmental control to carry that out.

We toured the “Egg,” the brand new Performance Center in Beijing, and one of the delegates who has been involved in building arts centers like this in the US commented to me: “There’s no way we could do this. We don’t have access to enough concrete!” Touring the center, which seemed overly extravagant, even at the half finished state, we were told that the center will be done this fall, which prompted another comment: “There’s no way our unions would allow us to build so fast!”

Each day, The China Daily was delivered to our hotel rooms. We noticed that there were front-page articles about the places we were to visit, often on a specific issue we were to discuss that day. At the end of our tour, when we saw the “Egg” was the subject of a top article with headliner indicating that the construction was on schedule, we realized we were in a bit of a Truman Show. The Chinese could re-create a city in several years, build the largest performance center in the world in a short time, and control everything about how it is reported to impress a small foreign delegation. Shaking our heads, we all had to admit, however, that we were still quite impressed.

From their perspective, to be fair, the US, too, must be a mystery. We speak of freedom of speech as our highest humanitarian virtue, and our internet pages are filled with pornography and other explicit forms of dehumanization. We are a nation swimming with individual wealth, and yet have no national insurance and a high percentage of homelessness. We are an advanced nation of educational opportunity, and yet have one of the highest illiteracy rates in the industrialized world. We are a country of innovation, in technology and the arts, and yet the first time we broadcasted the Superbowl live to China, Janet Jackson’s famed “malfunctioning bra” incident represented us instead. We bicker about the cultural budget for the National Endowment for the Arts, when the budget remains tiny compared to other nations, and a mere half of a baseball player’s (Alex Rodriguez, New York Yankees) salary.

And if you were to read China as a mystery novel, the opening chapter would be on the Cultural Revolution, exiling thousands of families into forced encampment. The trauma left deep wounds that still exist in the lives of people in China. The Cultural Revolution was their Ground Zero.

The vacuum that this Ground Zero has left in their culture, is now being filled by their fantastic drive to bring the world to the Olympics (’08) and then to the Expo (’10). The museums and arts districts are getting support and infrastructure, making even New York artists envious of China’s bourgeoning arts scene. On the way to Beijing, David Fraher of Arts Midwest, passed out a magazine article called “China’s New Creative Class,” highlighting “the next cultural revolution” from China’s creatives like Ou Ning (curator, designer), Lin Jing (furniture and ceramics maker) or Ji Ji (graphic designer). Apparently, the race is on for the creative domain as well, to see which culture can take the lead.

When we met and spent time with their Minister of Culture, Sun Jiazheng, we realized why they were making such a headway into a cultural development.

Minister Sun charmed us, a Renaissance man, who freely quotes philosophers and poets, and humanized every meeting by taking off his tie and his jacket, shaking every delegate’s hand personally. But it was his own poetry, shared at the banquet on the last day of our visit inside the Forbidden City, Jin an Fu Palace, that truly moved me. Our delegation head, Adair Margo, insisted that he share a poem he quoted at the table. He seemed reluctant, saying “such a sad poem should not be part of a grand celebration between two nations.” He explained that the poem was written after his friend, a Japanese author/composer and president of the Sino-Japanese Cultural Exchange Association, Ikuma Dan, suddenly passed away during his visit to China. He brought the poem to Sakuma’s gravesite in Japan, to read at the site.

April comes to Tokyo
The cherries should be at the height of their bloom
I’ve come to see the flowers
But spring came early and they faded too soon

April comes to Tokyo
This should be a glad reunion
Friends from afar once more together
Instead we stand bereft by your grave

Oh, honored colleague!
The blossoms have fallen, but spring still comes in all its splendor
You left with no warning; with whom can we share
The fathomless depths of our loss?

“Graveside Reflections,” April 2002, from Dream and Pursuit by Sun Jinzheng

It would have been a courageous enough act to reveal such a personal journey in public. But his offering was even more daring to me because of the current tense relationship between China and Japan. Even a few days before, the Japanese papers were full of questions regarding Prime Minister Abe’s response to Yasukuni Shrine, a Japanese holy site where many war criminals are buried and honored, including those invading China. Further, the Chinese have demanded an inquiry into the forced prostitution of Chinese women by the Japanese military in the 19th Century.

In that setting, Minister Sun’s poem was not just a balm to soothe such historical wounds, but a principled reconciling act based on common humanity, casting light into the divide.

Art moves into the chasms of past injuries, inspecting and noting each detail of a heart’s wounds. At the same time, Art and Poetry can feed us the manna of hope to malnourished, distrusting souls due to abuses of the past. In the age of terrorism and fear, that is why we need poets and artists. Artists have the potential of creating in love, providing an imaginative vision for their culture, a holistic language to deal with a fragmented, oppressed past. The result should be an even deeper longing.

Thus, Jaques Maritain wrote: “Poetry is spiritual nourishment. But it does not satiate, it only makes man more hungry, and that is its grandeur.” That hunger cannot be filled by even the greatest of banquets in a Forbidden City. In Minister Sun’s poem for the Japanese composer, I felt a certain longing. There’s a mystery there, not a mystery of “who-done-it,” but a longing for a true Jin an Fu (a Place of Eternal Happiness), to finally resolve the irreconcilable brokenness within our hearts for eternity.

Mystery novels seek an answer for every wrongful death. But, really, every death demands an answer whether by murder or by accident. Jesse, our interpreter who met sorrow and death in her young marriage, began to search for peace in the midst of her tears. Father Dowling would always offer clues to such a journey, to re-discover the path home, not just to solve the crime, but for a spiritual home. For often, even in a mystery novel, the accidental turn of events can overwhelm the logic of the analysis of evidence. The Spirit of God, the true detective of our souls, searches via our creativity, a journeyer’s void within.

When Minister Sun read the lamentation poem, Jesse had to translate the poem impromptu. One of the assistants, rushed on stage with Minister Sun’s book in which the poem was translated to help Jesse. Jesse closed the book, gave it back politely to the assistant, and proceeded to begin to translate the poem with her eyes closed. Refracting in each word, carefully and tenderly given to us, both Ralph and I felt the weight of life and death. Father Dowling would have noticed that moment, too, as he, too, would peer deeply into the pain and sorrows of a poet grieving for a friend, and an interpreter grieving for a husband. That, more than even the splendid banquet, would reveal the mystery of our being, being transcribed and etched in our hearts, one word at a time.

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For anyone who does not know, City Journal was the think tank behind Mayor Giuliani’s revitalization of New York City (perhaps “reconquest” is just as apt a word) in the 1990s. Peggy Noonan still calls it “the best magazine in America.”

Judith Miller has a story in the recent issue, “A SLAPP Against Freedom” following up on an issue I addressed in two of my Principalities and Powers posts, “Troubling Saudi Arms Deal” and “Follow-up on Saudi Terror Funding”. Well-funded Islamic organizations and individuals have found it more prudent in the West to silence their critics with libels suits than with violence. If nothing else, the victims pay your expenses. (And you can’t beat that!) Recent cases, however, at least in this country, have been discouraging that sort of legal brutality.

In 2006, Yale University Press published a book on Hamas by Matthew Levitt of the Institute for Near East Policy. KinderUSA, an Islamic charity, and its board chairman, Laila Al-Marayati, brought a libel suit against Levitt and Yale UP in California state court for linking them with the terrorist organization. In June, Levitt charged his accusers with bringing a SLAPP suit (strategic litigation against public participation), i.e. a suit designed not seriously to recover damages, but simply to intimidate. They won. KinderUSA backed off.

In May, the Islamic Society of Boston dropped a suit against the Boston Herald and others for claiming that they had been passing funds to terrorist organizations. In the course of the trial, it came to light that the ISB had in fact given money to two groups on the government’s list of terrorist organizations.

Earlier this year, six Muslim imams who had been removed from a flight for reportedly suspicious behavior sued US Airways, the Minneapolis airport and several passengers who had reported them. In August, they dropped their suit after Congress passed a law, sponsored by my Congressman, Rep. Peter King (R-LI), protecting such civic spirited tips from intimidating lawsuits. Plaintiffs must prove that the finger pointers lied or they must pay all court and legal fees.

That sounds like a series of victories for domestic Tranquility, the common defence, the general Welfare, and the Blessings of Liberty. Were KinderUSA or the Islamic Society of Boston falsely accused? I am not in a position to judge with certainty, though I certainly have my inclinations on the matter. Either way, the remedy is not to shut down all public inquiry and discussion on the matter — which has been the effect of plaintiff-friendly libel laws in Britain. Rather, aggrieved parties should defend the truth by challenging and refuting their accusers in public debate.

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Given what I have been reading about the situation in Iraq these days, I’m encouraged. The Bush administration’s critics say that I should not be because despite military success of the 2007 surge, we have not met our benchmarks. This criticism seems to betray too little interest in remedying the national security problem over there and an inappropriate zeal for pursuing political interests back here. Our interest is not in the benchmarks per se, but in removing Iraq as a source of danger in the War on Terror, perhaps even using it as an instrument of peace in that conflict.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is not encouraged, but he provides some interesting information in today’s column, “A Surge, and Then a Stab.” He opens with this: “To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money…,” which caught my hard-nosed conservative attention. I should be particularly observant of American business activity in response to conditions under the Surge given one of my previous posts. Of course, he completes the sentence with, “…which already knows that the surge has failed.” But I read on anyway.

Background information:

1. “Two thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all of its government revenue come from the oil sector.”
2. The provisional government in Kurdistan “signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas.”
3. Ray L. Hunt, the company’s CEO and president, sits on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board

Krugman then comments:

What’s interesting about this deal is that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

Good point. But it seems to me that Krugman draws unjustified conclusions from this. “The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia” (emphasis added). But our goal is Iraq is not necessarily unity, but stability and decency. The benchmarks included national reconciliation, but that is a means to an end, not the end itself. It would be nice if they would love each other, or at least respect one another as fellow citizens and human beings, but that is a wildly unrealistic foreign policy goal anywhere in the world.

I noticed this in a Wall Street Journal article by Dreazen, Shishkin and Jaffe, “U.S. Shifts Iraq Focus As Local Tactics Gain: Central Government Loses Clout to Regions; Bush Skips Baghdad” (Sept. 4, 2007, p. A1). They reported that, “…senior military officials are increasingly working to strengthen local players who are bringing some measure of stability to their communities. The new approach bears some striking similarities to the ’soft partition’ strategy pushed by senior Democrats, and suggests that despite the often bitter debate in Washington on Iraq policy, a broad consensus on how to move ahead in the war torn country may be forming.” Aid in Anbar has been given directly to local leaders, bypassing Baghdad. This is a classical American solution. Keeping government as local as possible maximizes liberty and minimizes corruption. (Of course, it is not fool proof: look at New Jersey.)

“The logical result of the new policy is a profound shift away from the Bush administration’s original goal of building a multisectarian democracy in the heart of the Middle East.” Politics is the art of the possible. “Instead, the new strategy seems likely to lead to an Iraq with a very weak central government and largely self-governing and homogenous regions.” Instead of calling this “soft partition,” a kind of federalism, the Bush administration has been calling it “bottom-up reconciliation.” General Petraeus refers to “accommodation,” rather than the less realistic reconciliation. This is the Middle East, after all. Perhaps that is the best hope for our ultimate goal which is not universal brotherhood, but a stable and al Qaeda-free Iraq.

Posted in Academy, Editor's Choice, The Nation | 15 Comments »

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent speaking engagement at Columbia University has, among other things, focused attention on the exclusion of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) from Ivy League campuses. Isn’t it strange (as people have been wondering) that Columbia welcomes this political oppressor onto campus, giving him not only a voice, but a prestigious platform from which to address, by virtue of that platform, not only the university but the nation, and yet Columbia is careful to shield its tender and impressionable students from exposure to the ROTC. The school justifies its invitation to the morally repulsive Ahmadinejad by citing free speech and the free exchange of ideas while forbidding ROTC access to the campus on specifically moral grounds.

ROTC has been barred from all the Ivy League campuses since the 1960s when the New Left anti-war student agitators drove them off. Those radicals now dominate the university faculties…and they loath the military. (Remember the early days of the Clinton White House, and how Hillary, a child of the 60s, was reported to resent the presence of uniformed military personnel, forgetting that her husband was commander-in-chief?)
These people are supposedly intelligent, learned and observant. And yet they cannot see their own dependence as citizens, and in particular as a thinking and speaking class of citizens, on the national armed forces that prevent foreign powers from taking away their freedom to think and speak. Has this intelligent, learned and observant class convinced itself that all the world is Mayberry? Have they honestly concluded from their study of man and the history of man that we can safely leave our national doors unlocked because all the neighbors are civil and decent, or would be if only we ourselves would behave as good neighbors?

I have seen this absurdity elsewhere. After the 9/11 attacks on our country, many people began displaying “God Bless America” signs. This seemed to me a natural and healthy response to what amounted to an attack on all Americans and on the foundations of the liberties we rightly hold dear. In that context, someone in my neighborhood put up a large, plywood sign saying, “God Bless the World.” In other words, “Unlike my neighbors, I am above these irrational, even immoral, parochial attachments which do nothing but divide people and lead to bloodshed.” It struck me as not only naively apolitical, but also hypocritical.

Rising above politics certainly has its time and place. But as a moral absolute, it is neither practical nor wise.
We have nations – separate and armed political communities – because there is bloodshed, not the reverse. We live in a world of scarcity, a world of competitive goods. There is only so much land, only so much gold. Glory shared is glory diminished. We need political communities, political life and political attachments because, in pursuit of these goods, people (or too many of them) are selfish and rapacious.

The sentiment expressed on my neighbor’s sign is, on one level, admirable. But as a denial and condemnation of political sentiments it is hypocritical. The person who posted the sign did so because he or she has the liberty to do so. Furthermore, the people in this person’s neighborhood are of such a character that they did not deface or remove the sign, much less turn violently on its author. In other words, to exercise the liberties that his sign presupposes, this globally minded neighbor depends on the same political community and on the coercive authorities that preserve it that he condemns.

The Ivy League universities are in the same position. I’m sorry to have to resort to seemingly uncharitable language, but those who oppose ROTC simply because it represents and advances the United States Armed Forces are either hypocritical or stupid. I suppose it would be more charitable to assume the latter.

Posted in Academy, Editor's Choice | 9 Comments »

This is a striking photo. It has haunted me since I saw it two days ago. These are two allegedly homosexual teenaged boys being hanged in Iran. I am left wondering what the nature and extent of their transgression was. Were they caught in an ill-considered moment of curiosity and moral weakness? Did haunting menaces escape from the basement of their hearts at a time that turned suddenly and terribly public?

They could not have been open and flagrant homosexuals. There is obviously no allowance for open self-disclosure of that sort in the Islamic Republic. Iran does not have a homosexual activist network that identifies young people who betray aberrant tendencies, misleads them with foolish counsel, and emboldens them in shameless behavior.

Perhaps that is all that Ahmadinejad meant when he said, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. We don’t have that in our country. In Iran, we do not have this phenomenon, I don’t know who told you we had it.” They do not have homosexuals of the sort that we have. They do not have “gays.” Homosexual is an orientation of the heart sexually. Gay is a lifestyle. Not all homosexuals are gay. Or perhaps he was just telling a Big Lie.

All the same, the reason I think that this photo caught people’s attention is not horror over the fact that Iran hangs criminals, nor even that they hang homosexuals. It is the tender age of these convicts that takes us aback and shocks our western moral sensibilities. Surely these boys were not hardened in their ways. Surely they were just confused, or perhaps themselves victims of some gross indecency. Surely all that they needed was some gracious and discreet intervention which, along with rigid Middle Eastern social conventions, should be sufficient to prevent the slide of Iranian society into the swamp of Western moral dissolution. Hanging in this case seems particularly brutal, unnecessary and…ungracious.

For one who is supposedly merciful, it seems that Mohammed’s God is not anything of the sort when his religion takes charge politically, at least in Iran…and Afghanistan, and Iraq’s Anbar province.

Praise God that his message of salvation in Christ is one of grace, and that he is making his people gracious because he is making them Christ. “In Christ we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight…” (Ephesians 1:7-8).

Posted in Academy | 19 Comments »

John Stossel has been listening in on my conversations. Or we have both been consulting with the same common sense on health care.

Why has health insurance become such a big issue for everyone? Paying for it is hugely expensive…and that is the “discount” price. The health insurance company pays the rest. And the situation is getting worse all the time.

At some point it became clear to me that at least a large part of the answer to this problem lay in the word “insurance.” You buy insurance to protect you against the unlikely possibility, but nonetheless the possibility, of a ruinous disaster. If your house were to burn down, if you were to wreck your new car, or if you were to require extensive treatment for a serious and debilitating illness, you would be ruined financially. But though these things are unlikely to happen, and because everyone faces and fears the same possibility, everyone pays a small amount into what becomes a large pool and agrees to compensate any contributor who might find himself in one of these unhappy circumstances. We call this “insurance.” It’s a prudent way of managing risk communally.

It is of essence of insurance, however, that it pertains to risk and rarity. Your home insurance does not cover leaky faucets, lawn care, or even replacing your shingles. These are common and predictable expenses. Roofs are even expensive, but you know that they last only 20 years so you save accordingly. So too, your car insurance does not cover gas, oil changes and scheduled maintenance visits. You don’t buy insurance for clothing and groceries. Even though these are necessities, it is the responsibility of neither your employer nor the government to provide you with insurance to cover these things. You pay for all of these expenses out of your regular income. It is why you have income. If you have difficulty in paying for one or a number of these these things, you have to prioritize, budget more wisely, generate more income, and so on.

So why do we treat medical insurance differently? We demand that it cover not only reconstructive surgery and cancer treatment, but also vaccinations, check ups, eye glasses and dental fillings. And people get angry if these things are not covered. One’s employer is considered evil for providing “lousy” health coverage that does not cover these minor benefits. But what should be minor expenses have become quite expensive precisely because everyone is paying for them through insurance instead directly of out of their own pockets.

Stossel does a great of job of explaining this: “Almost daily, we’re bombarded with apocalyptic warnings about the 47 million Americans who have no health insurance. …America’s health care problem is not that some people lack insurance — it’s that 250 million Americans do have it. … Insurance is a lousy way to pay for things. Your premiums go not only to pay for medical care but also for fraud, paper-work and insurance-company employee salaries. This is bad for you and bad for doctors.”

Read his brief column, A Move in the Wrong Direction, which reflects on Hillary Clinton’s proposed new national health care plan.

Posted in Academy | 8 Comments »

A reader asks: “I’m trying to get started as a novelist. Could you recommend something about fiction writing by a Christian writer?” Easy answer: Read Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery and Manners, available in paperback (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), an exceptionally clear book that reads almost as if the author were answering questions.

O’Connor wrote two novels—Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960)—and 31 published stories before dying in 1964 at age 39 of complications from lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease. Had she lived she would now be 82 and WORLD would want to interview her. So let’s do it anyway, using Mystery and Manners.

O’Connor wrote two novels—Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960)—and 31 published stories before dying in 1964 at age 39 of complications from lupus, a chronic autoimmune disease. Had she lived she would now be 82 and WORLD would want to interview her. So let’s do it anyway, using Mystery and Manners.

All the words of the answers are O’Connor’s own, with the exception of a few connecting and explanatory words in brackets. Readers will see that she was acerbic toward what passed as “religious fiction,” but Christian novel-writing has changed over the decades, so her critique from over 40 years ago should not necessarily be applied to current efforts.

WORLD: What’s the difference between a Christian novelist and a naturalistic (or materialistic) one?

O’CONNOR: The novelist is required to create the illusion of a whole world with believable people in it, and the chief difference between the novelist who is an orthodox Christian and the novelist who is merely a naturalist is that the Christian novelist lives in a larger universe. He believes that the natural world contains the supernatural. And this doesn’t mean that his obligation to portray the natural is less; it means it is greater.

WORLD: Do you think some Christian writers are willing to do a slapdash portrayal of the natural because they want to emphasize the crucial evangelistic message?

O’CONNOR: Fiction operates through the senses. . . . No reader who doesn’t actually experience, who isn’t made to feel, the story is going to believe anything the fiction writer merely tells him.

WORLD: Why do you call lots of religious novels “sorry”?

O’CONNOR: The sorry religious novel comes about when the writer supposes that because of his belief, he is somehow dispensed from the obligation to penetrate concrete reality. He will think that the eyes of the Church or of the Bible or of his particular theology have already done the seeing for him, and that his business is to rearrange this essential vision into satisfying patterns . . . by beginning with Christian principles and finding the life that will illustrate them. . . . The result is another addition to that large body of pious trash for which we have so long been famous.

WORLD: Some Christians object to showing evil and violence on the grounds that the good must be emphasized because the good is the ultimate reality?

O’CONNOR: The ultimate reality has been weakened in human beings as a result of the Fall, and it is this weakened life that we see.

WORLD: Some of our readers who don’t like writing about adultery or murder quote the admonition in Philippians 4 to think about what is good. Should novelists avert their eyes from what is bad?

O’CONNOR: The novelist is required to open his eyes on the world around him and look. If what he sees is not highly edifying, he is still required to look. . . . What he sees at all times is fallen man perverted by false philosophies. Is he to reproduce this? Or is he to change what he sees and make it, instead of what it is, what in the light of faith he thinks it ought to be . . . to ‘tidy up reality’?

WORLD: I think I know how you answer those questions . . .

O’CONNOR: [The Christian fiction writer] is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees. He feels no need to apologize for the ways of God to man or to avoid looking at the ways of man to God. For him, to ‘tidy up reality’ is certainly to succumb to the sin of pride.

WORLD: Is tidied-up writing also weak writing?

O’CONNOR: The fiction writer has to make a whole world believable by making every part and aspect of it believable. [He has to be concerned] with the evil, and not only with the evil, but also with that aspect which appears neither good nor evil, which is not yet Christianized.

WORLD: But there are dangers in this.

O’CONNOR: It is very possible that what is vision and truth to the writer is temptation and sin to the reader. There is every danger that in writing what he sees, the novelist will be corrupting some ‘little one,’ and better a millstone were tied around his neck. . . . This is no superficial problem, [but] to force this kind of total responsibility on the novelist is to burden him with the business that belongs only to God.

WORLD: So what do good writers do when they see the need to describe but want to minimize the anger of corruption?

O’CONNOR: [The good writer should] take great pains to control every excess, everything that does not contribute to the central meaning and design. He cannot indulge in sentimentality, in propagandizing, or in pornography and create a work of art, for all these things are excesses.

WORLD: Should readers have obligations as well?

O’CONNOR: [Some readers] open a novel and, discovering the presence of an arm or a leg, piously close the book. We are always demanding that the writer be less explicit in regard to natural matters or the concrete particulars of sin. [Such readers] are over-conscious of what they consider to be obscenity in modern fiction for the very simple reason that in reading a book, they have nothing else to look for. They are totally unconscious of the design, the tone, the intention, the meaning, or even the truth of what they have in hand. They don’t see the book in a perspective that would reduce every part of it to its proper place in the whole.

WORLD: Where do beginning writers often go wrong?

O’CONNOR: [They] are apt to be reformers and to want to write because they are possessed not by a story but by the bare bones of some abstract notion. They are conscious of problems, not of people, of questions and issues, not of the texture of existence, of case histories and of everything that has a sociological smack, instead of with all those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.

WORLD: You emphasize that “in most good stories it is the character’s personality that creates the action of the story.” Where do beginning writers often fall short?

O’CONNOR: [Some] don’t go very far inside a character, don’t reveal very much of the character. I don’t mean that they don’t enter the character’s mind, but they simply don’t show that he has a personality. . . . In most of these stories, I feel that the writer has thought of some action and then scrounged up a character to perform it.

WORLD: Are you overly hard on some Christian writers? Can’t even poorly written religious novels with pious characters be edifying?

O’CONNOR: Poorly written novels —no matter how pious and edifying the behavior of the characters —are not good in themselves and are therefore not really edifying.

WORLD: But can’t God use them for good?

O’CONNOR: We have plenty of examples in this world of poor things being used for good purposes. God can make any indifferent thing, as well as evil itself, an instrument for good; but I submit that to do this is the business of God and not of any human being.

(This interview first appeared in the <a href=http://www.worldmag.com/articles/13099 >June 30, 2007</a> issue of World Magazine.

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As a former graduate student, I would often get into long discussions with colleagues on spiritual and political issues. The great thing about having deep conversations is that it somewhat allays the guilt of procrastinating from writing your dissertation. One of my officemates and I were frequent collaborators in such activities, and went to have lunch last semester with the intended topics being abortion and gay marriage. She is strongly pro-choice and supports gay marriage, and I hold opposing views.We started with gay marriage, and I asked her to go first. She stated quite firmly that she had come to the conclusion that anybody who opposed gay marriage couldn’t be a nice or moral person. To her, anyone that opposed two people who love each other being able to express their feelings in marriage just couldn’t have any decency. I told her that I understood where she was coming from, and I also felt it necessary to add that over the years, Christians like myself hadn’t exactly been the best witnesses to bi-sexual people like her and apologized for falling short.

When it was my turn, I found it crucial to get to the crux of the matter. One’s position on this issue ultimately stems from the answer given to some fundamental and closely related questions: Who are we as a human race? Are we the result of blind chance and uncaring natural forces, or are we the result of some purpose or design? And then the question of what marriage is must follow: is it something that was created by people to help the species survive? Or is marriage the creation of an omnipotent God woven into the fabric of the universe that, like gravity, lies beyond the reforming reach based upon desires of individuals and societies? If one takes the naturalistic choices, then there isn’t much room to argue in defense of keeping marriage between members of the opposite sex. If one takes the second option, then marriage is something that is not up for revision by human society, regardless of their desires or motives or thoughts on civil liberties. We can write a law saying gay marriage is fine, and we can attempt to practice it, but it won’t change the original intention, nature and purpose of marriage.

Given that, I went on to say that I respected her view. But I challenged her notion that anybody who held the opposite view as her wasn’t a nice or decent person. They just have a very different belief concerning the nature of our existence, which results in a very different position on this issue.

The current abortion debate has a little different dynamic to it. Instead of the key being one’s answer to the nature of our existence, it concerns differing emphases placed on values that the vast majority of Americans on both sides of this issue hold deeply; the right to life and the right of free choice. Pro-life people often argue as the Psalmist did that God has knit each person together in the womb from conception, placing each fetus on the same plane as that of a newborn baby, a graduate student or a person on life support. Pro-choice people take various approaches, but what they usually have in common is that the right of the mother to decide if she is to have an abortion is tantamount to all else.

It’s not that the pro-life side doesn’t value choice, and it’s not that the pro-choice side doesn’t value life. I should think that most people could agree that the ideal society is one where no one wants or needs an abortion. The path to that reality will likely raise many more issues that need to be dealt with, but it’s a place to start. Having a constructive dialogue along those lines will yield far more fruit than the current trench warfare.

I didn’t succeed in convincing my friend, nor did she sway me. But I was most heartened by what she said at the end of our discussion. She told me that this was the first time that she had been able to talk about these issues without getting angry. I took that as a deep compliment, for in Paul’s famous chapter to the Corinthians, everything we do is in vain if we don’t do it in love.

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In this weekend’s New York Sun (July 20-22), Lawrence Kudlow argues that, “While the Democrats stand against near all of the president’s wartime policies — and in the process court defeat — the stock market is standing with Mr. Bush, and the chance for victory.”

His argument: “…when the Democratic leadership…launched their latest anti-war offensive, stocks dropped about 150 points. …[A]fter Mr.Bush discussed clear successes in Iraq’s Anbar province, the Dow Jones soared nearly 300 points….” Wall Street’s biggest worry? Another 9/11.

“The stock market, in fact, is voting for the president to stay on offense.”

Kudlow’s partisan point, though nonetheless a true one,is that Bush’s presidency is actually quite successful if measured by actual performance in areas of greatest concern to the nation’s security. He asks, “isn’t it interesting that stock markets have been booming since early 2003, when Saddam Hussein was overthrown and the president signed his supply-side tax cuts into law?”

In the media, we hear selected bad news and a storm of despairing criticism. “But here are the plain facts: The president’s tax cuts helped reinvigorate investors and businesses. The nation has been safe from attack for nearly six years…. Petraeus’s counter insurgency strategy for Iraq just may be working. In other words, Mr. Bush deserves a lot more credit than most are willing to give him.”

Once again, this points to the president’s failure not of policy, but of rhetoric. If the president would be constantly in the bully pulpit, reminding us of these successes whenever he spoke, he could move public perceptions toward what is arguably reality. Instead, Americans think that the terrorists are winning, that the war in Iraq is a failure and that our best days are behind us, according to Rasmussen. That mood seems more like 1980 than 2007.

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