St. Maximos' Hut

Peggy Noonan has a nice essay, The Steamroller, on OpinionJournal that draws on my favorite quote from the Federalist Papers:

"If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself."

Federalist 51.

Noonan uses it to argue that conservatives have screwed up in power in Washington by getting carried away with exercising power:

The problem with government is that it is run by people, and people are flawed. They are not virtue machines. We are all of us, even the best of us, vulnerable to the call of the low: to greed, conceit, insensitivity, ruthlessness, the desire to show you're in control, in charge, in command.
If the problem with government is that it is run by people and not, as James Madison put it, angels, the problem with big government is that it is run by a lot of people who are not angels. They can, together and in the aggregate, do much mischief. They can and inevitably will produce a great deal of injustice, corruption and heartlessness.
People in government--people in a huge, sprawling government--often get carried away. And they don't always even mean to. But they are little tiny parts of a large and overwhelming thing. If government is a steamroller, and that is in good part how I see it, the individuals who work in it are the atoms in the steel. The force of forward motion carries them along. There is inevitably an unaccountability, and in time often an indifference about what the steamroller rolls over. All the busy little atoms are watching each other, competing with each other, winning one for their little cluster. And no one is looking out and being protective of what the steamroller is rolling over--traditions, shared beliefs, individual rights, old assumptions, whatever is being rolled over today.

This seems just about right. One thing I've never understood about statists' faith in government (whether left or right wing statists) is the belief that somehow the people who are raping the environment, destroying indigenous cultures, and generally being bad people when they work for the private sector are somehow transformed into angels when they take a public sector job (unless, of course, they are Republicans).

Seems to me that transubstantiation of the wine and bread in the chalice is a lot easier to swallow than that transformation.

The real puzzle is when did Americans forget Madison's wisdom from Federalist 51? The Progressive Era? The New Deal? What was it that made so many forget that men are not angels? I'd guess it had something to do with the rise of the perfectionist ideologies and the loss of the view of man as sinful. Perhaps if more people were thinking about their own sins, there'd be less faith in government?

I saw Fun with Dick and Jane this weekend - excellent slapstick, silly, fluff. The basic plot is that two yuppies lose everything in a corporate financial scandal (some nice Enron digs) and turn to crime to rescue their life style.

What struck me as I left the theater was that the couple losing it all never made mention of religion as a means of coping. I don't mean they should have run down to the church, got right with Jesus, and had it all come out ok, or that they should have (like Job) praised God through their tribulations - either of those things would have made it a terrible movie as a slapstick comedy. But what seemed missing was jokes at the church's expense. They should have gone to a church for help (spiritual or otherwise) and been rebuffed in another comic scene.

The fact that the director and writers felt that one could structure a plot about people losing it all without any reference to faith suggests that popular culture doesn't see faith as a major ingredient in life anymore. Compare the wonderful Monty Python sketches from thirty/forty years ago - the vicar sergeant, the Spanish Inquisition, the church service in The Meaning of Life, the Protestants vs. Catholics on birth control scene in the Meaning of Life, the entire movie of Life of Brian and also the Holy Grail. All of these made fun of religion but also assumed it was an important part of life that could be made fun of and required an audience that understood some basics about religion to get the jokes.

This may not be a trend - it's just one movie, after all, but I can't think of many recent films I've seen with religion as a part of normal life.

Seems like everyone's writing about it. AEI's John Fortier takes a look at the implications for different regional growth rates for the 2010 redistricting. The punch line:

If you are afraid of growth, move to Europe, or to Ohio. But remember that most of your friends are moving to Phoenix, Dallas and Miami, and they’ll have more say in future congresses.

As an Ohio resident, all I can say is "ouch."

As people move, do they change churches? Moving to a new town would (I'd guess) make people more inclined to shop for a congenial religious home than they'd be if they stayed put. That disruption is likely to hurt the traditional "mainline" denominations and help faster growing ones, since the lively churches in the sunbelt aren't likely to be the older, downtown ones but the new ones in the new suburbs. These population trends might increase the rate of decline in the older Protestant denominations and increase the shift to evangelical, nondenominational "mega-churches' which seem to thrive in the sunbelt.

Two very different takes on population growth and the lack thereof.

At WSJ.com, Mark Steyn argues that low birthrates aren't a good thing and pins some of the blame on "post-Christian hyperrationalism":

The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths--or, at any rate, virtues--and that's why they're proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.

He concludes:

"What do you leave behind?" asked Tony Blair. There will only be very few and very old ethnic Germans and French and Italians by the midpoint of this century. What will they leave behind? Territories that happen to bear their names and keep up some of the old buildings? Or will the dying European races understand that the only legacy that matters is whether the peoples who will live in those lands after them are reconciled to pluralist, liberal democracy? It's the demography, stupid. And, if they can't muster the will to change course, then "What do you leave behind?" is the only question that matters.

On the other side of the divide is Victor Mallet at the Financial Times, who thinks declining populations in Japan aren't a bad thing at all:

even when the turning point arrives, a stable or declining population ought to be seen as a welcome change - not merely as a harbinger of temporary fiscal crisis - for individual countries and for the world. You do not have to be a Malthusian worried by what the much-reviled demographer called "the perpetual struggle for room and food" to see that our planet is already overcrowded and its natural resources under intense strain.

The overcrowded bit seems wrong - there's loads of room. Whether there is enough of other stuff is mostly a matter of getting the price right - as demand rises for, say, water, so will the price and new investment will appear to satisfy the demand. (We don't need more water, we just need more clean water in particular places at particular times).

One of the important things about humanity is that people are, as the late Julian Simon termed it, the ultimate resource. We're pretty remarkable creatures (God's image and so on) and we're pretty resourceful. I think He meant it when he said "Be fruitful and multiply."

I haven't been online a great deal lately - Christmas holidays away, grading exams, and so on. So I missed the discussion on TKS and The Corner about a Jeffrey Hart essay on conservatism. TKS (formerly "The Kerry Spot" and now relocated to Turkey) had a thoughtful reflection on the religion portion. TKS begins by quoting the Hart essay:

Religion is an integral part of the distinctive identity of Western civilization. But this recognition is only manifest in traditional forms of religion — repeat, traditional, or intellectually and institutionally developed, not dependent upon spasms of emotion. This meant religion in its magisterial forms.
What the time calls for is a recovery of the great structure of metaphysics, with the Resurrection as its fulcrum, established as history, and interpreted through Greek philosophy. The representation of this metaphysics through language and ritual took 10 centuries to perfect. The dome of the sacred, however, has been shattered. The act of reconstruction will require a large effort of intellect, which is never populist and certainly not grounded on emotion, an unreliable guide. Religion not based on a structure of thought always exhibits wild inspired swings and fades in a generation or two.

Then TKS comments:

I wonder how many people I speak for when I say, “huh?”

Am I becoming one of those feared anti-intellectual types when I try to boil this down? Religion gives you hope, something to fear beyond getting caught, teaches right from wrong, binds you to your neighbors and your community, offers a ritual that ties you to your ancestors going back plenty of generations and begins to answer those questions that enter your mind late at night when you can’t get to sleep. As long as it doesn’t become a part of the government and exercising coercion of those of other faiths, it’s generally a good, healthy part of American public life. (For the past few generations, the scarlet ‘A’ on clothing has meant the wearer is an Anaheim Angels fan.) There are a bunch of weenies who are terrified of it and/or unfairly demonize religion, and want it driven from the public square. Conservatives oppose ‘em, and that's the way it ought to be.

This is pretty good, although I am not so sure about the "as long as it doesn't become a part of the government" bit. What exactly does that mean? Presidents Bush and Carter were particularly open about their beliefs, with rather different consequences for policy. I don't think we can say that either shouldn't have allowed his religious beliefs to affect his policies - the whole point of having beliefs is to have them affect your behavior. If all TKS means is that we don't want a state endorsed religion, then I think he's right because state endorsement seems to have very bad consequences for religion (and doesn't necessarily have good consequences for the state either). But one of John Kerry's worst moments (which is saying something) during the 2004 campaign was his attemtps to reach out to Christian (and esp. Catholic) voters while not allowing his religious beliefs to have an impact on his policies in the area of abortion. Catholicism seems just as good or better as a basis for determining when life begins as biology and I'd prefer someone as a president, neighbor, friend, etc. who was at least internally consistent about the subject to someone who was willing to compromise what ought to be deeply held religious convictions for political expediency.

Given the way the "religion in the public square" debate has gone recently, I think I'd lean toward a little too much rather than too little.

Don Kates, one of the preeminent experts on Second Amendment law, periodically sends out emails with interesting historical information with some connection to self-defense, weapons, etc. He recently send along a discussion of the difference between Allied and Axis ammunition in World War II, noting that historian Stephen Ambrose had found in post-war interviews that many of his interview subjects among the Allied forces had experienced being hit by dud German ammunition, while no German forces recalled being hit by dud Allied ammunition.

Don also recounted another episode he found in a memoir:

A Spitfire limped back to base having suffered and survived numerous hits from a German fighter plane. Upon examining it the repair crew found an unexploded German shell stuck inside. Upon opening it they found the shell full of sand rather than explosives and a note which read (in Czech) "This is all I can do for you now. May God bless and preserve you."

The reason for the difference? Don wrote:

British and American arms factories were staffed by the daughters and mothers, wives and sisters of British and American soldiers. These women took care to preserve the lives of their loved ones – and Germans died because of it. German arms factories were full of slave laborers who had no reason to take such care and every reason not to – and so American soldiers lived to tell the tale.

Don's conclusion: "The lesson is that love is a better motivator than terror."

This seemed like the perfect thought with which to begin the new year!

Happy New Year.