The Semi-Puritan Mind of Thomas Paine

There were two Americas in the beginning, as there were in the nineteenth century and as, if the 24-hour news networks are to be believed, there are now. The geography and principles have changed, but the split always exists. On the one hand, you had New England, founded by the Puritans not, as the history books told me in elementary school, for freedom of religion but for the freedom to practice their religion and to punish or banish all others. On the other, you had the mid-Atlantic states, beginning with Jamestown, Virginia, settled for financial reasons—if God was involved in the settlement at Jamestown, He had to share the space with gold and glory, as the old saying went.

(And yes, there were others—New York, settled by the Dutch as a fur-trading outpost and a center of American business ever since; Savannah, Georgia, originally founded as a refuge from English debtors prisons and the best laid-out city I’ve ever visited; St. Augustine, the oldest city in North America, or so the board of tourism says, founded by the Spanish while John Winthrop was just a gleam in his daddy’s eye. But it’s Massachusetts and Virginia, with Philadelphia in between but belonging mostly to the latter, that made the difference during this country’s infancy. Of the seven men labeled as the major Founding Fathers by Richard B. Morris, only two—John Jay and Alexander Hamilton, of New York City—and it wasn’t until Andrew Jackson in 1829 that we’d have a president from anywhere other than Massachusetts or Virginia.)

And yet these two Americans were not as separate as it might appear, in that the Puritan worldview—stripped, to some extent, of its religious baggage—filtered its way down to Philadelphia and Virginia. In his book The American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch notes that the two baseline principles of “Yankee” America, “multidenominational religion and the sacral view of free-enterprise economics” were natural heirs of Puritanism:

Both these developments were rooted in the heterodox tenets established a century before: the moral distinction between the Old World and the New (as between Egypt and Canaan), the chosen people whose special calling entailed special trials, and above all a mythic view of history that extended New England’s past into an apocalypse which stood “near, even at the door,” requiring one last great act, one more climactic pouring out of the spirit, in order to realize itself.

Bercovitch’s analysis explains something puzzling at the heart of the political tracts put out by Deists at the time of the American Revolution. How could a group of people who didn’t believe in God’s providence still see America as, in Winthrop’s famous words, “a city on a hill”? For there can be little doubt that this is how our Founding Fathers saw their country.

Let’s take the instructive example of Thomas Paine, the Deist or atheist (the debate rages on) who coined the phrase “The United States of America” and who wrote the wildly popular anonymous tract Common Sense a mere six months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Very early on, he makes the bold statement that “The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.” Leaving aside the truth or falsity of this statement for now, we can safely say that it is an early, though probably not the earliest, instance of secular American exceptionalism. Paine may use the language of the Puritans, but he’s not claiming that it will be the avenue to lead all of the elect to Christ and thus bring on the tribulation and the millennium. Rather, it is America’s secular government that will serve as the Great Example for the rest of the world.

But Paine’s very secular purpose relies on the Bible for much of its argument. A Deist, he did not believe in the accuracy of the Bible, but he nevertheless appeals to its authority, spending several pages conducting what amounts to a Puritan-style exegetical and political sermon. Problem is, his exegesis is lousy: “In the early ages of the world, according to the scripture chronology, there were no kings; the consequence of which was there were no wars; it is the pride of kings which throw mankind into confusion.” Such a statement is true only if one considers Moses, Joshua, and the Judges to be kings—war very clearly predates kingship in the Hebrew Bible.

But Paine has to use the scriptures to make his point precisely because of the remnants of the Puritan legacy in America—our New England forefathers always viewed themselves as a sort of new Israel, whose success was guaranteed because of biblical prophecies that predicted the maintenance and triumph of the faithful remnant. (This was not a metaphor for the American Puritans; they saw themselves speaking literal truth when they equated ancient Israel with seventeenth-century America.) So Paine’s use of the scriptures has a specific historical purpose, and, as Bercovitch notes, it marks a turning point when Puritan rhetoric became distinctly secular.

I am more interested in the present-day effects of Paine’s rhetoric, however. I argued in episode three of The Christian Humanist that America is not and never has been a “Christian nation” in the sense that the Christian right asserts that it was. My co-host David Grubbs quite rightly brought up the religious language of our (mostly secular) Founding Fathers, and if he agreed with me that the Christian right misreads the facts, he insisted that they have a leg to stand on.

Fair enough, and now we understand why. You’d have to flash forward 225 years from Tom Paine to Karl Rove to find a nonbeliever so cynically willing to use religious language to persuade religious believers to adopt a political viewpoint, and, as with Rove, it worked for Paine. The Revolution was conducted, if not on religious grounds, at least using religious language, even though Paine, Jefferson, Madison, et al, had no real intention of making the United States a “Christian nation.”

And yet it backfired. Every time a Christian conservative appeals to the mythic past of those religious founding fathers (you simply must watch this video, for example, which must have required more time and effort to upload to YouTube than to research and write), they are seizing on an intentional ambiguity in the writings of men like Thomas Paine. Use religious language when you don’t wish to adopt that religion, and you end up with generations of people who can’t tell your real views.

The Christian Humanist Episode #4: God and Country

We've uploaded the latest episode of The Christian Humanist to the FTP site, and it should be available via iTunes this afternoon and our Feedburner site even earlier.

General Introduction
- Response to CWC: The Radio Show regarding visual art
- Response to listener Beth regarding science

Our Three Assumptions
- The United States is not and never has been a “Christian nation.”
- It is not a particularly admirable goal to make the United States into a theocracy.
- No one political party fulfills the mission of Christ.

Our Experiences with Christianity and Politics
- Evangelicalism and Limbaughism
- Pro-life churches
- Home schooling and conservativism

Constantine’s Conversion
- David clears up a common misconception
- A defense of Constantine
- Early reaction to Constantine’s conversion
- Oh, those complicated Middle Ages!

Anabaptist Politics
- Nathan’s not a Mennonite
- Stanley Hauerwas and John Howard Yoder
- Divine vocations that are not for Christians

The American Revolution
- David clears up another common misconception
- What was the American Revolution actually about?
- Were the Christian colonists right to revolt?
- Paul’s appeal to his rights as a Roman citizen
- The difference between kings and emperors
- The pragmatism of the Church Fathers

Modern-Day Protest
- Should Christians make the world safer?
- The role of prophetic speech
- Who should pull the sword out of the sheath?

Should Christians Run for Office?
- Does Washington corrupt otherwise pure people?
- Should we be serving in academia?
- Blame it on the system
- The importance of postmodern theory
- Nathan’s letter-writing campaign

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Estep, William. The Anabaptist Story: An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 1996.

Grafton, John, ed. The Declaration of Independence and Other Great Documents of American History 1775-1865. New York: Dover, 2000.

Hauerwas, Stanley. After Christendom?: How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas. Nashville: Abingdon, 1991.

Wulfstan, St. Homilies of Wulfstan. Ed. D. Bethurum. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1957.

Yoder, John Howard. The Politics of Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdman’s, 1994.

Hey, I Hate Ayn Rand, Too, But Aren't You Going a Little Far?

I'm not going to do a full post about this (mostly because I haven't really decided what I think about the universal health-care plan currently making its way through Congress), but I want to make one point about this article from Peter Laarman.

Laarman turns the tables here on the Religious Right, who are fond of saying that if you're at all sympathetic to pro-choice politics, you care more about convenience or respectability or whatever else than the teachings of Jesus. I don't like that argument when James Dobson uses it because it ignores how complicated these things are--how complicated belief itself is and how hard it is to boil down a person's religious commitments to a set of political issues.

So it makes me pretty angry when Laarman says the following of Christians who dare to oppose universal health care:

The reluctant conclusion I draw is that these are Ayn Rand Christians who were never touched by the spirit of the Christ whose ministry was emphatically defined from the start by his compassion for the sick and for his healing of the multitudes who came to him with all manner of diseases. Jesus did not seem to think that it was taking anything away from the already-healthy to restore the health of the physically and psychologically afflicted. He did not operate from a zero sum mentality nor from a neoliberal economics of scarcity. In his economy of radical abundance—one version of what Lewis Hyde calls the “gift economy”—the more health you give, the more health you get.

He gets at least two things wrong here. One, he compares the healings of Jesus to the healings of State-funded medical institutions, which is at the very least short-sighted and, depending on how you want to spin it, is blasphemous. Jesus' miracles didn't cost money, and they were guaranteed to work. I'm not even sure what Laarman means when he says that Christ took "away from the already-healthy to restore the health of the physically and psychologically afflicted." I don't recall His passing a hat around the crowd before healing the blind man.

Two, he throws up the classic liberal smoke screen of refusing to recognize the difference between a person's not thinking a government can or should make it its business to take care of poor people and a person's not caring about poor people. (Lest someone throw me in with the reactionary right, I'll point to the classic conservative smoke screen of confusing government care with government instrusion.) I can think that Obama's universal health-care system is a wasteful boondoggle that will not accomplish what it was created to accomplish without wanting hundreds of millions of sick people to die, uninsured, in the street, and it's a particularly ugly form of bad faith for Laarman to suggest that's not true.

The stories from this website tend to be blindly offensive blanket statements without any middle ground or connection to reality--last week, for example, one of their authors declared ex cathedra that the homosexuality debate had been settled and that there was nothing wrong with it, a proclamation that doesn't seem to have been based on anything or to have had an effect on anything. But this one struck me as particularly one-sided, writing off, as it does, an entire political party as un-Christian on the strength of a cheap and faulty argument.

(For the record, I am vaguely in favor of universal health care but would prefer a complete revamp of the system rather than the current subsidization plan, which I think is just going to waste a lot of money.)

In God's Country

Of the many aggravating buzzwords that cropped up around the administration of George W. Bush, perhaps the most aggravating was “the ‘blame America first’ crowd,” an epithet directed at anyone who dared to suggest that perhaps the events of September 11, 2001, were not undertaken merely because the terrorists “hated our freedom.” To say that America had any culpability was, for a time, tantamount to saying that we deserved it and that any nuclear weapon exploded over Chicago or New York or Los Angeles would also be well-deserved.

I suspect the general attitude that informed the use of this phrase springs from the notion of American Exceptionalism, which began long before the colonies became a country, continued on through Manifest Destiny, and got firmly attached to the Republican party about the time Ronald Reagan called the country a “city on a hill.” Exceptionalism sets up a false binary: Either America is the greatest country in the world—God’s country, in fact, created to be a shining example of democracy and Christianity, which are, in the eyes of some people, the same thing—or else it is the worst country in the world, a cesspool of intolerance that’s far inferior to anything in Europe. Republicans, in the eyes of some Democrats, say the former; Democrats, in the eyes of some Republicans, say the latter.

I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat, and so I suppose I’m somewhere in between the poles. I believe in American Exceptionalism to a limited extent in that I believe in the “mission” of the country and that I believe that democracy is a good system of government that beats out a lot of other options, but I don’t believe America holds a special religious status or (God forbid) that Christianity is somehow summed up in democracy. (In fact, I suspect God moves more freely in more oppressive countries, but I’m no church historian.)

Further, I believe that one thing that makes America great is its capacity for self-doubt. I think it means something important and good that one reaction to September 11 was for some citizens to ask what we did to deserve it. The proper attitude for both the individual and the nation is constant self-scrutiny, constant self-improvement, and, if you’re of a religious mindset, constant repentance. So maybe blaming America first isn’t such a bad thing.

That being said, I think the term is misapplied largely because the people in question often aren’t blaming America qua America first; rather, they’re blaming their political enemies first. Thus, anything negative that happened to America from 2002 to 2008 was, naturally enough, George W. Bush’s fault (including Hurricane Katrina, you’ll remember); and, for Glenn Beck, et al, anything that’s happening bad right now is Barack Obama’s fault. The correct position is instead an inward stare. When the economy hits the skids, the first question we should ask ourselves is, “What did I do to make this happen or to keep it from not happening?” That’s the right way to blame America first; as Langston Hughes says, “I, too, am America.” Starting with self-doubt is a very good way to save yourself from self-righteousness when you actually start looking around at other causes.

That’s one reason I like Nathaniel Hawthorne. I hated The Scarlet Letter for a long time until I finally came around last summer. I’m rereading the novel yet again, and I’m noticing more and more the degree to which Hawthorne suspends judgment before enacting judgment. A popular 20^th-/21^st-century reading of the novel, for example, is to say that those awful Puritans were wrong to treat Hester Prynne as if she’d done something sinful. (See, for example, the truly execrable 1995 film version starring Demi Moore.)

But Hawthorne doesn’t allow for that reading. Hester Prynne does the wrong thing when she sleeps with Dimmesdale, however understandable her loneliness and their connection is. She even admits her wrongdoing to herself and undertakes her sewing career with “an element of penance” in it. Nor is the scarlet A an unequivocally cruel punishment; it alienates her from her fellow colonists, it’s true, but by the end of the novel it’s come to signify something else entirely.

So Hawthorne’s problem with the Puritans is not that they blame Hester Prynne for doing something wrong—indeed, he goes along with that blame to a certain extent. His problem with them is that they enact this condemnation on someone outside of themselves, ignoring the sin that most certainly dwells in their own hearts, thereby using Hester as a scapegoat for the wrongdoing of the entire community. It’s the same thing we see in politics when we blame an entire financial crisis on one political administration—things just aren’t that simple.

Ah, you might say, but when Hawthorne points a finger at the Puritans, he’s got three pointing back at himself. Isn’t he just using Puritan sins as a way to cast the reader’s eyes away from his own sins or the sins of his society? Well, no, he’s not, as is evidenced by the (at times boring but overall worthwhile) introduction to The Scarlet Letter, titled “The Custom-House.” Here he comes clean about his own ancestry. If you’ve read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, you’ll no doubt remember Judge Hawthorn of the witch trials, who was an ancestor of Hawthorne’s and who put dozens of presumably innocent people to death:

I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent, and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them—as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the race, for many a long year back, would argue to exist—may be now and henceforth removed.

The only way, in other words, that Hawthorne can even get down to telling the condemnatory tale of Hester Prynne, is by implicating himself, via his ancestry, right away, and asking forgiveness from God and the reader for his own culpability, however unlikely or small.

It’s a remarkably humble move, one that greatly enriches the subtext of the novel, and one that could teach today’s political commentators (yes, including myself) quite a bit.

Friday Links

• Yale UP chickens out.
  
• David Updike says good-bye to his famous father.
• So what's Gladwell's problem with Harper Lee, anyway?
  
• How Richard Dawkins poisoned his own well.
  
• Stop working on your "relationship with God."
  

Friday Links

• Does Flannery O'Connor use her characters as an excuse for grandstanding?
• Trying to get to Thomas Pynchon.
• The dirty jokes in Twelfth Night.
• David Kessler on the Unholy Trinity.
• What kind of Christian was George Tiller?
  
• Dawkins can't quite chip it all away.
  
• Why sex is overrated.
  

Activists: Questions for Liberals and Conservatives

A few months ago, I took offense at the implication in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics that the words Law and Justice are essentially coterminous. I’m halfway through the Politics now, and he’s addressed this issue, clarifying it to some extent, but it’s left me with a whole new set of questions. Here’s what he says:

Suppose we say the people is the supreme authority, then if they use their numerical superiority to make a distribution of the property of the rich, is not that unjust? It has been done by a valid decision of the sovereign power, yet what can we call it save the very height of injustice?
(III.10)

So the laws of the State must be subject to some higher authority, although Aristotle is a little fuzzy on what that authority is and how we should access it. But the important thing is that he makes it clear that the law is not always just, and III.10 ends with an outright declaration of the distinction:

It might be objected too that it is a bad thing for any human being, subject to all possible disorders and affections of the human mind, to be the sovereign authority, which ought to be reserved for the law itself. But that will not make any difference to the cases we have been discussing; the law itself may have a bias towards oligarchy or democracy, so that exactly the same results will ensue.

He doesn’t say it in these exact words, but obviously his point is that the law is a man-made institution rather than something handed down verbatim from an outside authority, and therefore any objections one makes about human rule must also be made about the law itself.

So who has sway? The rulers or the law? Predictably, Aristotle suggests a balance. On the one hand, “the laws enunciate only general principles and cannot therefore give day-to-day instructions on matters as they arise” (III.15); however, “On the other hand, rulers cannot do without a general principle to guide them; it provides something which, being without personal feelings, is better than that which by its nature does feel” (III.15). Aristotle privileges the law slightly, as he recommends that rulers “only depart from the provisions of the law in cases which the law itself cannot be made to cover” (III.15).

But then he throws a wrench into the gears. As I discussed in an earlier post, for Aristotle, the human soul is divided into two sections: the intellect (strong) and the will/passions (weak). So when he equates the Law with the intellect and human rulers with the passions, we’re back to the drawing board:

he who asks Law to rule is asking God and Intelligence and no others to rule; while he who asks for the rule of a human being is bringing in a wild beast; for human passions are like a wild beast and strong feelings lead astray rulers and the very best of men. In law you have the intellect without the passions.
(III.16)

So we’re back to Law and Justice being coterminous, and the question still stands: Who makes the Law, if it’s not handed down to Aristotle from Mount Sinai?

My question for my readers: How does this schema relate to so-called “activist judges” on the Supreme Court? Should the law—the general principle, in other words—be changed based on changing times, or when the specific situation would require a complete overhaul? The political right seems to see the law as sacrosanct, the left as a general principle. I think Aristotle falls into the former camp, but thankfully we don’t have to accept his word as—no pun intended—law.

So if you’re a conservative, I want to know why the Constitution is a sort of quasi-divine document that Supreme Court Justices can’t change without suffering the slings and arrows of “activism” (and more recently, “empathy”). If the people who wrote it were human beings, why can’t the Constitution be wrong?

And you’re a liberal, I want to know how much we can change the Constitution before we stop having a guiding principle for our government? If the Law is supposed to hold true in general cases, how much can we change that Law without having nothing on which to rest our society?

I have no answers, myself.

Does Democracy Rot Your Soul?

When I was a secretary for an academic department a few years ago, the professors were a little surprised to learn that I—apparently unlike many other secretaries they’d had—was perfectly willing to bend my will to theirs. My anti-authoritarian streak began early, it’s true, but by the end of my undergraduate years, it had to a large extent died out. This happens, I suppose, as a person grows up. Or at least it’s supposed to.

“Some people,” said one of the professors, “take ‘All men are created equal’ to mean that we’re all on the same level in a practical sense.”

“Well, of course not,” I replied. “We’re all created in equal in terms of ontological value, but obviously your job is higher than mine and I shouldn’t pretend we’re on the same social level.” The problem, as I saw it then and as I continue to see it, is that somehow we’ve equated who we are as people with what we do—deep down, I think Americans believe that if you have a better job you’re worth more as a human being. That, for obvious reasons, leads to the attitude “You can’t tell me what to do.”

One thing that surprised me when I first started reading Plato was that he’s no friend of democracy. The ancient Greeks, after all, invented the form. I learned this fact in middle school, and I can’t remember if my teacher bothered to tell us that the most notable of them hated it with the depth of their beings.

In The Republic, Plato places it at the very bottom of his analysis of political systems, warning that if people aren’t careful, their societies will slide into it. “Democracy,” he says, “originates when the poor win, kill or exile their opponents, and give the rest equal civil rights and opportunities of office, appointment to office being as a rule by lot” (557a). This is a nightmare for him because poverty makes a person incapable of choosing correctly. Democracy becomes an exercise in smoke and mirrors, and if people like it, they like it in the way that “women and children [like] gaily coloured things” (557c).

His language here makes it easy for us to dismiss him. The poor are human beings like everyone else, and they’re not in all cases or completely responsible for their poverty. Marx has told us the ways in which the system creates its own caste system and that the dream of social mobility is to a large extent a lottery rather than a meritocracy. And the sexism of the ancient Greeks (way worse than the sexism either of the Hebrew Bible or of the New Testament) just doesn’t work in a modern world. But we should still take his remarks on democracy seriously, especially when he talks about its effects on the soul.

Before we look at those remarks, though, I should say a word about Greek opinions on the nature of the soul. The common opinion, best I can gleam from reading Plato and Aristotle, is that the soul is composed of two elements, the reason and the will. The reason sits in natural authority over the will—the rational over the emotional. Aristotle uses this schema to justify any number of things, including the rule of men (rational) over women (emotional), but we need not accept that implication to recognize the wisdom of a natural hierarchy of character traits.

So under a political system of democracy, the individual character begins to become democratic, which is to say that the emotional elements of the soul begin to rebel against the rational elements:

For the rest of his life he spends as much money, time and trouble on the unnecessary desires as on the necessary. If he’s lucky and doesn’t get carried to extremes, the tumult will subside as he gets older, some of the exiles will be received back, and the invaders won’t have it all their own way. He’ll establish a kind of equality of pleasures, and will give the pleasure of the moments its turn of complete control till it is satisfied, and then move on to another, so that none is underprivileged and all have their fair share of encouragement. (561b)

It’s hard to ignore this warning given the current economic crisis, which is built from people of all levels of society allowing their pleasures, their unnecessary desires, to rule over their rational minds. Why should a CEO who’s completely trashed his company receive bonuses of millions of dollars? On the other end of society, why should someone who makes $6 an hour—or worse, who lives off of Welfare—own two or three televisions and a satellite dish?

The answer is the same: We’re to a large part controlled by our pleasures. Poor Jimmy Carter tried to tell the country this in the late 1970s and was crucified it: Living with your means requires sacrifice; it requires allowing the rational element of your soul to rule over the emotional element. Unfortunately for Carter, democratic people naturally rebel against this instruction.

Additionally, we begin to believe that no one can rule over us. “Every man is a king,” claimed Huey Long, the populist Louisiana senator, and Lord knows this is what Americans believe at the core of their beings. If it’s true, though, we need to start worrying, lest we end up with one of the two kings given in Aristophanes’ The Knights: the vicious, wicked Cleon, and Agoracritus, the idiot sausage-seller. (It’s true that in Aristophanes’ play, Agoracritus ends up being a pretty good ruler. I think most of us will agree it wouldn’t happen that way in real life.)

Besides, even if it were a good thing for every man to be king, it’s simply not plausible. Long devised the slogan and its accompanying song not to elevate every man into his own ruler but to become their ruler. Americans are told from childhood that anyone can become president—we’ve heard this a million times over—but it’s simply not true. By the time you finish college (and possibly even by the time you enter it), you know if you have a shot of being president—and the overwhelming majority of people don’t. And it’s a good thing.

But there’s a tendency to hold onto this myth, to believe that it’s some stroke of luck and not your native ability that keeps you from ruling the world. And that’s where the anti-authoritarianism comes in. That’s where democracy begins to rot your soul—there’s no reason to listen to the people in charge, since we’re all capable of doing it. You may as well secede.

I’m just kicking this idea around, so I’ll present a few caveats before people start to think I’m advocating some kind of dictatorship or suggesting that there’s never a time to overthrow oppression:

(a) I’m a Protestant, which means my Catholic and Eastern Orthodox friends have every right to point out my hypocrisy here. Protestantism is built upon the notion that we can all be our own priests, and in some of its forms, it completely negates Church hierarchy. Presbyterianism happens not to be one of those forms, but it does suggest a sort of hermeneutic self-rule: Anyone can read the Bible and come up with the correct meaning, and we’re not dependent upon the Church to tell us if we’re right or wrong. The Orthodox are fond of saying that the Protestant Reformation removed the Pope and created billions of little popes.

(b) Plato is unable to come up with a political system that’s more appealing or realistic than the ones he condemns. He essentially advocates the society in Brave New World, with a small group of Guardians ruling over everyone else. No one owns anything, not even his family; women and children are shared equally by all. He somehow believes that the Guardians won’t take advantage of their situation and grow rich off of the fat of the land.

Aristotle rightly condemns aspects of Plato’s republic and advocates instead his typical Golden Mean—not too much tyranny, not too much democracy. I am not far enough into the Politics to evaluate this system.

(c) There’s no doubt that there are leaders, democratically elected and otherwise, who are just plain bad, who drive their societies into the ground and who oppress their people. I have little problem with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s plot to kill Hitler, for example. (Of course, Hitler was democratically elected and for the most part did what he did with the approval of the masses.) So I have not yet worked out what we should do with tyrants, that is, when submission should stop and self-rule should begin.

(d) Finally, I recognize that I’m as much a product of democratic thought as the rest of us and that our political system is not going to go away any time soon. Further, I don’t particularly think that’s a bad thing. I wouldn’t like going back to a monarchy or an oligarchy or (God forbid) Plato’s republic.

What I’m interested in, I guess, is finding a way to have the political advantages of democracy without its corrosive effects on the individual. What do you guys think? Does political democracy necessarily lead to the democracy of the soul and to the selfish and lazy citizens that believe it’s all owed to them? Is there any way out?

Friday Links

• So he's not dead!
• Sherman Alexie defends himself.
  
• Plato warned about this.
• Terrifying--I agree with a Fox News editorial.
• Meanwhile, Salon reveals the sinister tactics of the pro-life crowd. I'd love to see a similar argument about pro-choicers.
  
• Take a trip through flavor country.
  
• I thought he did pretty well, even if he talked about L.A. too much.
  

Friday Links

• Let's not forget that "spare the rod" refers to guidance, not corporal punishment.
• The new Auden poems are not that great.
• QUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK!!!!
  
• Need money? Humiliate yourself in front of a national audience!
  
• Rest in peace, Jay Bennett.
  
• On the most interesting man in the world.
• That's actually what I love about Mike Judge cartoons.
  

Friday Links

In a new feature on Ladder on Wheels, each Friday I'll be sharing some links I found particularly interesting over the previous week. So here we go...

• The big buzz on the blogosphere this week is Mark C. Taylor's New York Times editorial calling for an end to "the university as we know it."
• Response to Taylor from the always-brilliant James K.A. Smith.
  
• Mark Edmundson calls for a moratorium on "readings."
• Does this make them not "pro-life"?
  
• The ugly evolution of plagiarism.
• Mike Galanos argues that the morning-after pill is dangerous for 17-year-olds.*
  
• Hunter Baker remembers Francis Schaeffer.
• A priest in Florida obeys Christ's command to forgive.
  
• Ayn Rand is gaining in popularity--a sure sign of the forthcoming Apocalypse.
  
• This is among the greatest things I've ever seen.

* I have a bone to pick with one of Galanos' points here, though--the reason Plan B is available without a prescription while the birth-control pill is not is the element of time. For the morning-after pill to be effective, it must be taken within 72 hours of unprotected sex, thus making the prescription requirement potentially nullifying to the pill's effect. What if, for example, the condom breaks the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving? You may not be able to get a prescription until the following Monday, thus making the whole thing useless. None of this disproves Galanos' assertions regarding the danger of the chemicals or the need for parental consent, however.

What's Good for the Nation Is Good for the Soul

In an odd twist of fate (and my very convoluted and complicated self-mandated reading schedule), I ended up in the middle of Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics at the same time. Nietzsche, of course, is one of the few Western philosophers who has little to no respect for either Plato or Aristotle, and in fact, from my understanding, he spearheaded the campaign to bring the pre-Socratics back into flavor. (I’m not sure of the degree to which that mission was accomplished.)

One chief argument between Nietzsche and Aristotle revolves around the function of the individual in society. I suspect that this argument is in a broader sense between the modern and ancient worlds, but Nietzsche and Aristotle will do for representatives of the two.

According to Aristotle, the absolute good is that which is pursued for its own sake—it’s the ultimate good, that which, in pursuing it, we pursue all other goods. To twist one of Aristotle’s own examples: To be a good archer, we need to know not only how to draw back the bow and hit the target, but when to shoot and when not to shoot.

The absolute good belongs in the sphere of “the most sovereign and most comprehensive master science, and politics clearly fits this description” (I.ii). This puts the society over the mere individual, but it’s not quite that simple. Aristotle takes what will eventually be called an Arnoldian view of culture—he believes that “the end of politics [which we can also translate as society or culture] is the good of man” (I.ii). So it wraps back around. The individual seeks the good of the culture, which translates back into the good of the individual.

Nietzsche, predictably, disagrees. Or more accurately, he agrees with Aristotle that ethics are designed for the good of society, but they part ways when it comes to the notion that what is good for society is good for the individual: “one would have to notice that virtues . . . are usually harmful for those who possess them” (I.21). Social “virtues” are thus not only not the same thing as the virtues of the individual—they are out-and-out hostile to them.

I’m much more sympathetic to Aristotle than to Nietzsche here. In fact, I imagine I am generally much more sympathetic to Aristotle than to Nietzsche, who often comes across as a petulant and aging wunderkind. (More accurately, I suppose, I follow Kierkegaard, who notes that the ethical is higher than the aesthetic, the universal higher than the individual, except where specific revelation from God dictates otherwise. I have argued that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are closer than we might imagine, but I’m not sure to what extent I really believe that.) But, however unpleasant and egocentric Nietzsche may be, Aristotle is not as easy to agree with as one might suppose.

The problem comes in when he seeks to define the term justice. Aristotle has what appears to me an odd idea of the relationship between the lawful and the just. He claims that “Since a lawbreaker is, as we saw, unjust and a law-abiding man just, it is obvious that everything lawful is in a sense just. For ‘lawful’ is what the art of legislation has defined as such, and we call each particular enactment ‘just’ ” (1129b). But does that necessarily follow? It must assume either (a) cultural relativity, that is, that justice is not only defined but is different under different sets of laws; or (b) the universality of Athenian law.

Certainly almost no modern Americans would claim that lawful and just are synonyms. The right would argue that abortion, while legal, is in no sense just; and the left would argue that gay marriage is unjustly illegal. Am I misreading Aristotle, or were times that different? After all, if legal and just are in any sense synonyms, then there’d be no reason to refine and change the legal system—and I can’t imagine anyone would argue that principle.

And he takes it even further in the next section, claiming that “ ‘unfair and ‘unlawful’ are not identical but distinct and related to one another as the part is related to the whole; for everything unfair is unlawful, but not everything unlawful is unfair” (1130b). Not only does the law subsume virtue, it also creates it: “What produces entire are those lawful measures which are enacted for education in citizenship” (1130b). This becomes something akin to a worship of law—I just do not understand, with my 21st-century brain, how Aristotle can possibly believe this kind of thing.

I’m not a scholar of Aristotle; I’ve now read On Rhetoric and about half of the Nicomachean Ethics, and Politics still lies in my future. Am I misreading him? Was the concept of the State just that different in ancient Athens? Does he clarify this later in the Politics? And more pressingly: Is there a tertium quid? Is there a way to believe that what’s good for the State is ultimately good for the Individual without engaging in law-worship?

I need answers, folks.

In Which the Curtain Is Sewn Back Together

I read Titus Andronicus for the first time as a pretentious high schooler looking for universal verities, and I was horrified by what I found. The play is essentially a slasher film, a terrible bloodbath in which no one is redeemed and even the “good guys” are bad. (Or at least that’s what I thought.) Not that I was alone in this conviction. Titus is the red-headed stepchild of Shakespeare’s corpus, read far less than Hamlet or King Lear or even Measure for Measure and disdained by scholars from all traditions.

Now that I am a pretentious graduate student forced to read the play for a class, I’ve found a lot more to admire. There’s a certain kind of beauty in the action of the play, a certain fidelity in the midst of the horror. And—since it’s still what I mostly look for—there are universal verities, in this case a view of human nature that would make Calvin blush and a vision of the government that would make Ron Paul cheer.

At the outset of the play, we find a Rome in which Church and State have completely collapsed into one another. Everyone seems to believe himself a god. The Roman emperor was divinized, of course, and Saturninus promises Lavinia that he will “in the sacred Pantheon her espouse” (I.i.242). Meanwhile, Titus seems to expect the type of autonomy and respect generally accorded to the gods: “Nor thou nor he are any sons of mine. / My sons would never so dishonour me” (I.i.290-291). He gets to decide not only who lives and who dies but how people are related to one another, and this right seems to proceed from his position as a great general.

Furthermore, every State believes itself to be divine, as we can see right off that bat with Tamora’s speech just over 100 lines into the play:

But must my sons be slaughtered in the streets
For valiant doings in their country’s cause?
O, if to fight for king and commonweal
Were piety in thine, it is in these. (I.i.112-115)

So all countries are the same—or else we can’t really tell which ones are better, so we have to have mercy on all patriots, on all martyrs. All states become divine, and so the conflict between the Romans and the Goths—or, presumably, between the Romans and the Gauls and whoever else they conquer—are a divine contest, similar to the ones waged on Mt. Olympus.

As such, everyone in the play believes himself to be godlike, and a central question in Titus is, What is piety? In the beginning, we seem to have a conflict between mercy and justice. Tamora urges Titus to practice mercy: “Wilt thou draw near the nature of the gods? / Draw near them in being merciful” (I.i.117-118). But the Greco-Roman gods are traditionally not particularly merciful. Titus may be closer to what they’re actually like:

These are their brethren whom your Goths beheld
Alive and dead, and for their brethren slain
Religiously they ask a sacrifice.
To this your son is marked, and die he must
T’appease their groaning shadows that are gone. (I.i.122-126)

The gods require Agamemnon to sacrifice Iphigenia, then allow Clytemnestra to slaughter him when he gets home from the Trojan War. They want what they want and show no mercy on anyone, best I can tell. So Rome acts like the gods, indeed, sets itself up as a god. (Tamora and the Goths, of course, are exactly the same way—she begs for mercy for her sons but extends no mercy to anyone at any time. She’s among the most wicked of Shakespeare’s women, right up there with Lady Macbeth.)

In the next act, Tamora moves from being divinized by her forced marriage to Saturninus to divinizing herself, at least according to Aaron the Moor:

Now climbeth Tamora Olympus’ top,
Safe out of fortune’s shot, and sits aloft,
Secure of thunder’s crack or lightning flash,
Advanced above pale envy’s threat’ning reach. (II.i.1-4)

Even more interesting is that the genders have flipped, and now the man (Aaron) relies upon the woman (Tamora) to divinize him: “Then, Aaron, arm thy heart and fit thy thoughts / To mount aloft with thy imperial mistress” (II.i.12-13). She thus welcomes her lover into the State, makes him into a god even crueler than herself, even crueler than Titus, even crueler than Odysseus’ Poseidon. His name is significant here, as it brings to mind Moses’ brother Aaron, the first priest of the Israelites.

The end effect of all this divinization of and in the State is the brutal slaughter and humiliation of nearly everyone in the Andronicus family. Whatever one may say about Titus, however, he is not stupid, and he recognizes the true cause of all his misery. In the third act, he loses faith in the State, and Shakespeare uses language that resembles the loss of faith in the gods we find in, say, Euripides’ Heracles. He says that the Tribunes can’t hear him but wouldn’t listen if they could, and he memorably renounces Rome altogether:

Why, foolish Lucius, dost thou not perceive
That Rome is but a wilderness of tigers?
Tigers must prey, and Rome affords no prey
But me and mine. How happy art thou then
From these devourers to be banished! (III.i.52-56)

Here is a complete loss of faith in the State—Titus is not so much an atheist as a maltheist. And the comparison is apt because in this play, as in ancient Rome itself, we have a nearly complete conflation of the State and the Divine. But the State is made of human beings—Shakespeare even belabors the point that the people elect the Emperor—and so how can it be perfect?

Later, the genuine (at least in the world of the play) gods answer Marcus’ prayer at IV.i.65-66: “Apollo, Pallas, Jove, or Mercury / Inspire me, that I may this treason find.” He’s separated the Divine from the State, although he hedges his bets with the gods instead of praying to one. That’s just the nature of polytheism, however—the Andronici have learned genuine piety, which is always directed at the genuinely divine rather than the cardboard god of the State.

And so in the end, every figure that has previously been divinized the State—Titus, Tamora, Saturninus, and even Aaron—is dead, and Titus’ son Lucius is left to run Rome. But he seems to run the State in a totally different way; at no point does he declare himself divine, and so there seems to be a sea change in the makeup of the State; in short, he has separated Church from State. (This is not historically accurate, but that doesn’t much matter.)

Such issues must have weighed heavily on Shakespeare, who lived in an England that had changed from Catholic to Protestant, back to Catholic, and then back to Protestant again, slaughtering those on the other side. “Enough,” he seems to say here, and recommends that the State not concern itself with religious matters, in order to save both faith and government.

Mavericks

When a great writer dies, I usually try to read his books, especially if I haven't read anything by him before. Such is the case with the death late last year of Conor Cruise O'Brien, an Irish writer, statesman, and contributing editor to the Atlantic. I'd never even heard of O'Brien, which was my loss, I suppose, as I'm about halfway through 1994's On the Eve of the Millennium: The Future of Democracy Through an Age of Unreason and really enjoying it.

O'Brien's big idea is that the concepts of liberalism and liberty formulated during the 18th-century Enlightenment are worth holding onto and protecting against their fundamentalist opponents, particularly the Catholic Church and Muslim radicals. But O'Brien is no starry-eyed Rationalist, and he's no particular opponent of religion or even Catholicism itself. His call is for a different kind of reason:

The Enlightenment we need is one that is aware of the dark, especially the dark in ourselves. An Enlightenment that is on guard against hubris. An Enlightenment that is aware that there is far more evidence extant in favour of the Christian doctrine of Original Sin than of Rousseau's doctrine of Original Virtue. An Enlightenment that respects the religious imagination, but not the claim of some religious to know what God wants from us and to have the duty to enforce that knowledge.

I don't think I agree with his next to last assertion; to take away religion's right "to know what God wants from us" is to remove its teeth and to render it harmless--even if such claims need to kept separate from the secular state by and large. And I don't agree with his distaste for the former Pope ("I frankly abhor John Paul II," O'Brien says), who, despite his opposition to birth control was a great humanitarian who did as much as anyone to cause the collapse of the Soviet Union. But O'Brien gets it right here for the most part--Western culture and Enlightenment values are worth defending, but not if they don't take into account how supremely messed up we are as a human race.

The second chapter of On the Eve of the Millennium is essentially a history of the American presidency, an office in which O'Brien is interested (for obvious reasons) but for which he holds little respect. The problem with democracy in general and the American sort in particular--even though it's the best system we've come up with--is that there's an inevitable and unfortunate conflation of democracy and popularity. That conflation results in politicians who don't make teleological decisions for the state and instead do what they do because it'll win them votes.

The last fifty years of the American presidency have been marked by this phenomenon. It's O'Brien's assertion that no president since Eisenhower has made major decisions based on anything other than an appeal to popularity. (He has high praise for Eisenhower because of his unpopular condemnation of Israel's 1956 invasion of Egypt, an invasion which took place just before the U.S. presidential election and for which the president risked his re-election.) But lest we think we have fallen from some sort of Golden Age, O'Brien voices this kind of respect for only three other U.S. presidents: Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt, all of whom went against their personal interests for the interests of the country. And he has particular disdain for Thomas Jefferson, whom he calls "a brilliant manipulator of the media, as befitted a dedicated and successful seeker after popularity . . . A different kind of genius: more disturbing, but not less interesting. A genius, after all, in the moulding of public opinion."

Jefferson, of course, championed freedom--even, it must be noted, freedom for African Americans--and owned more than hundred slaves. When my fifth-grade teacher told us all of this disconnect in his life, she made reference to history's flesh and blood, to the contradictions in all of us that are even more glaring and obvious in great men. But this explanation assumes Jefferson's greatness, and even more it assumes his honesty. O'Brien casts those assumptions into doubt, and his is a convincing argument, even if I'm not enough of a historical scholar to say if he is correct or not.

On the Eve of the Millennium was written during the early years of Bill Clinton's administration, but nothing that happened after 1994 was likely enough to change O'Brien's impression that Clinton was in the Jeffersonian mold, much more interested in popularity than in America. But I found myself thinking about Clinton's successor, George W. Bush, whose approval rating has hung below 40 percent for some time now.

I'm no particular fan of Bush, I must note, but he might break the American mold in ways O'Brien had not anticipated. It's difficult to say, for example, that his refusal to pull troops out of Iraq is based on a desire for popularity. If the war began that way--and I'm not saying it did--it certainly isn't anymore. And while it's not the same thing as rejecting popularity, Bush has repeatedly attempted to buck the Republican party line on issues like illegal immigration (an issue, however, on which he later reversed his opinion) and economic bailout, though he had little choice on this last one.

O'Brien's recognition of original sin is particularly useful here, however. One need not be a Catholic or a Calvinist to have a dim view of human nature. In the Republic, Plato disapproved of democracy because the masses are fundamentally stupid. Let's change that a bit: People, in all social strata, powerful and weak, are stupid, which is exactly why democracy is important--if we get a stupid leader, we can toss him out (unless, that is, we're faced with an even worse option, which I believe was the case in 2004).

So merely going against the tide of popularity is not enough. To be great the way Washington, Lincoln, FDR, and Eisenhower were great is to buck the masses and to do the right thing. Bush might have been a great president if he'd been a maverick (in the parlance of our times) in a smarter way--if he had picked his battles more successfully, if he'd have sought wiser counsel instead of always listening to the voice of his heart.

After all, it's a heart of darkness we all have, the darkness that O'Brien describes and warns us about--the real darkness we need an Enlightenment not to eliminate (for it is something integral to our humanity) but merely to recognize. And that George W. Bush followed it ensures a negative legacy for him. I do not think he's worst president ever or even of the post-Eisenhower era. (That dubious honor surely goes to LBJ, a master kowtower of the highest breed whose Great Society made him popular in the North but set race relations back 75 years.) But I do not believe, as does Karl Rove, that history will vindicate him and set him in the pantheon. If anything, he will become a cautionary example of Bishop Wilson's great lesson, memorably quoted by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy: "Firstly, never go against the best light you have; secondly, take care that your light be not darkness."

Election Results

You've read a thousand of these already, but I'll just say that the candidate I voted for won and that I cried when I realized that all of African-American history had been groaning for this moment.

I'll also say that I was nothing but impressed with John Mark Reynolds' post on the election over at Scriptorium Daily. I disagree with Reynolds on most political matters, but I could only hope to be so gracious and optimistic if McCain had won.

I am not starry-eyed enough to buy the myth of Obama as America's personal Lord and Savior, and I am by no means a dyed-in-the-wool democrat. (Indeed, I might have even voted for McCain if he'd picked a better running mate--and I'd probably have voted for him, Palin and all, over someone like John Edwards.) But I do believe he will be a change for the better and I, like Reynolds, will be praying that he make wise, brave, and prudent decisions during his time in office.

And here's hoping--against all hope, perhaps, that we'll lay aside our partisan differences and treat our political parties as being-with-one-another rather than being-against-one-another.

How's that for existential politics?

Dobson Underestimates Constituency

I'm glad to see that James Dobson's fear-mongering "Letter from 2012" (you know, the one that said Obama would molest our kindergartners, etc., etc.) didn't fly. Progressive Revival reports the reaction, some of it quite negative, by his supporters.

Obama Will DESTROY GOD'S COUNTRY

Here's a link to an article on James Dobson's latest inane newsletter.

It's funny. Years ago, when I was at a religious college, Focus on the Family seemed like a legitimate and mainstream organization, but the further I get away from the conservative evangelical mindset myself, the more outlandish and dangerous Dobson and company seem.

Just a few of my favorites from the dozens of ridiculous doomsday scenarios that Dobson proposes will come to pass under an Obama presidency:

- First-graders get “compulsory training in varieties of gender identity,” and parents can no longer opt out of school-based sex ed for their kids.
- The FCC nullifies all restrictions on obscene speech or visual portrayals on TV, and it’s now a 24-hour non-stop diet of explicit porn.
- A single-payer national health care system has banned hospital admissions for anyone over 80. (Interestingly enough, Obama has not, best I can tell, suggested a single-payer national health care system. He's suggested using government subsidies to prop up our current system.)
- Home-schoolers are forced to use state-approved curricula, and rather than do so, many emigrate to New Zealand or Australia where they may teach without restrictions.

I wonder if Dobson actually believes any of this stuff, or if he's just trying to market his new '50s-style Creature Feature, It Crawled from Cook County.

Libertarianism Is Dead

Those of you who share my hatred of libertarianism will want to read this piece over at Slate. The most pertinent quote:

The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history.

Bingo. And I will add, from a Christian perspective, that both Marxism on the left and libertarianism on the right (yes, the right, despite their best efforts to claim otherwise) ignore the sticky problem of human depravity. If, as Calvin claims, people are both wicked and profoundly stupid, we've got to have some oversight. And while it's foolish to expect the government to be pure, it's equally foolish to expect the masses to be pure. (It may be even stupider, given the way the masses are uncurious and attracted to shiny objects.) The solution is oversights on both sides, exactly what a liberal democratic government is supposed to provide.

Why Both Sides of the Abortion Debate Are Disingenuous

The panel question this week over at the Washington Post's “On Faith” blog is whether or not John McCain and Sarah Palin would be right to overturn Roe v. Wade. It's an uncomfortable question, for sure, probably the biggest and most emotional political issue of my lifetime--and it's often hard to get to any legitimate discussion about abortion because of the screaming going on on both sides.

Further, I'm not terribly convinced by either side. 95 percent of the abortion debate comes down to an unprovable philosophical conviction: At what point does life begin? Consensus cannot and will not be reached on this question because both sides have a point. The pro-life crowd (I will use the terms the group members themselves use, incidentally, rather than saying “anti-abortion” or “pro-abortion”) claims that life must in fact begin at conception because the zygote has a different genetic makeup from its parents. The pro-choice crowd counters that the zygote and the fetus are not self-sufficient--that is, they are wholly biologically dependent upon the mother in whom they reside.

Notice that these arguments are waged on totally different grounds; they have two different qualifications for determining when life begins. For this reason, the question underpinning abortion is philosophical rather than scientific. Pro-life activists can tell pro-choice activists that the fetus has a beating heart, but it won't do any good if the latter's definition of life involves self-sufficiency. Likewise, the pro-choice conviction that a genetically individual being is not technically alive because it is not self-sufficient sounds chilling to someone who is pro-life.

Now, the fact that the entire abortion debate rests in the difference between these two definitions of life gets obscured by rhetoric on each side. When I was in high school, there was an organization called “Rock for Life,” in which Christian rock fans got together and devised slogans like “Abortion Sucks” (because they use a vacuum to conduct the procedure--get it?) and to make t-shirts with pictures of aborted fetuses on them. I suspect RFL's tactics got a reaction from people—but I am reasonably sure that this reaction did not involve thinking through the issue and coming to an informed conclusion. Pro-life protesters tend to preach to the choir in this way, and the “Abortion Is Murder” school of debate does not, I think, win very many people over to their side.

If the pro-life camp relies way too much on emotionalism, pro-choice activists use a tactic that's flat-out disingenuous. We see it in full force in Gardner Calvin Taylor's response:

Government has a right to attack Roe v. Wade only when it guarantees that the fetus will have a quality education, adequate food and housing, quality healthcare, and a favorable community in which to advance. Anything short of this is infanticide in stages and wanton hypocrisy.

Well, yes, it's wrong that so many babies are born into families that do not want them and cannot take care of them; and it's wrong that society at large--either in the form of the government or in private or religious-based charities--does not step in and help out. But the difference between not having much chance for a good life and having no change--that is, having no opportunity to live at all--is literally infinite, and Taylor's response makes sense only if you already accept the pro-choice reasoning about self-sufficiency. I've always hated this particular argument--certainly when I considered myself pro-life, and even more now that I consider myself reluctantly pro-choice.

The other pro-choice argument I hate shows up in the comments section almost immediately. A user named “Tonio” (and, oh, how I hope it's legendary L.A. punk musician Tonio K.) claims that “The idea that overturning Roe v. Wade will magically do away with abortion is simply fantasy.” Of course, he's right, and I don't think many pro-life advocates would disagree with him. But outlawing murder didn't keep people from killing other people, and outlawing theft doesn't keep people from losing their car stereos. Society does not outlaw things because doing so makes those practices disappear; we outlaw things because we do not want to sanction what we consider immoral behavior. (For more on the inherent moralizing behind laws in a secular state, see my post on libertarianism.)

I do think there is a better solution to the problem of abortion, one that both the pro-life and pro-choice camps could and should get behind. So here's my three-step plan to improving the discourse around the unborn in this country:

1) Get rid of abstinence-only sex education. Study after study after study has proven this program to be ridiculously ineffective. Teen pregnancy rates actually increase in its wake. Here's the deal: Teenagers have been having sex out of wedlock almost since the day sex was invented, and other than a personal religious imperative, I don't think there's much convincing reason they shouldn't, not in the age of birth control. Let's teach teenagers how to have sex responsibly--how not to put out to cement a relationship, how not to have sex with people they don't love, how to think it over before they decide to go all the way, and how to use birth control every single time they have sex.

2) Make adoption a viable option. I think this is one thing that pro-life activists get right. The “crisis pregnancy centers” and hotlines across the country make it clear to pregnant teenagers that their pregnancy does not have to ruin their lives forever. But many women do not like the idea of having a child--biological bonding begins immediately, of course--and then having to give it away. To really make adoption a viable option, we will have to change American culture to the point where women who give their children up for adoption because they cannot or do not want to take care of them are considered heroes—because they are.

3) Promote the morning-after pill. I am not talking about RU-486 here, which actually is an abortion pill. The morning-after pill--marketed as “Plan B” or under other names--is a double dose of the normal birth-control pill, taken up to three days after unprotected sex, and it reduces pregnancies by 75 percent. It works on the same mechanism as the conventional birth-control pill, which is to say that it prevents an egg from being released rather than preventing a fertilized egg from being implanted (which would, of course, be abortion under a pro-life schema). One reason I distrust Sarah Palin is that Feminists for Life, an organization which she belongs to, ignores the science on this issue and calls birth-control pills “abortifacient”--an assertion which is demonstrably untrue. Birth-control pills, both conventional and emergency, could end abortion in this country.

But this is another area in which pro-life activists are, I think, often disingenuous. Feminists for Life, Rock for Life, and other Right to Life organizations oppose hormonal birth control and search for reasons to do so. You will hear them say that women who are on birth-control pills have a much greater likelihood of developing AIDS than women who are not. Well, of course they do--they're often having sex without condoms. You'll also hear about the negative health effects of hormonal birth control, which is another demonstrably false claim; women on birth control pills actually have lower incidences of cervical and ovarian cancer, fewer ectopic pregnancies, and, some evidence suggests, a decreased risk of breast cancer.

But many on the pro-life side—and particularly the visible and loud members of that crowd—are happy to twist data. And that's because, I think, that they're not really that concerned about abortion. If they were, I would think they'd be interested in effective sex education and in effective birth control. That they are not suggests that the issue is not abortion but sexual morality, an issue they are welcome to argue but that they should admit they are arguing.

Addendum: Legislating Morality

The ex-Baptist in me blanched when I wrote that bit about social morality's being determined by the masses, but this article in the current New Yorker makes me feel a little better:

When the reputation of Bentley’s masterpiece was at its peak, it was not just because he had fashioned a useful tool, of course; it was because many people saw pluralism as being not only accurate but attractive. To regain that perspective today requires an even greater undoing of deeply ingrained habits of thought. Pluralism, in the tradition of Bentley, requires that one see one’s own political passions, and those of such unimpeachable actors as winners of the Nobel Peace Prize and members of the Concord Coalition, as representing something other than the promptings of pure justice. That does not come naturally. One has to see that sincere talk of the public interest and the general good can be dangerous tools in the hands of people one disagrees with, if not in one’s own. (If you’re a liberal, reread President Bush’s second inaugural address, a grandiose exercise in public-interest rhetoric meant to lay the groundwork for waging the war on terror and privatizing Social Security.) One has to get over the habit of assuming that “interests,” and, worse, lobbying and corruption, are the province only of one’s political opponents, an not one’s allies. Pluralism means dialling down the moral stature that we attach to universalist arguments, and dialling up the moral stature of particularism.

So that's how a pluralist society works. The government must legislate morality, but I'm not sure it's our job to get them to legislate our particular morality; we have to change the minds of the masses, not try to force the government into forcing them to change their minds.

Am I contradicting myself?