St. Maximos' Hut

Saudi Arabia and Denmark are engaged in a dispute over a Danish newspaper's publication of 12 cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed. Images of Mohammed are illegal under Islamic law, which, of course, does not apply in Denmark, at least for now. There's a good account of the dispute here (hat tip: InstaPundit, who asks, quite reasonably, "where's the anger?").

This seems like a textbook example of the advantages of the separation of religious law and general law. Muslims should not depict Mohammed in cartoons but non-Muslims are not so constrained, except to the extent that doing so will lose the non-Muslim's business. As Albion's Seedlings notes, however, Saudi Arabia has limited leverage over Denmark since Danish exports are largely ham, lager, and bacon. (One of the comments does note that a Saudi boycott of Danish products will reduce Saudi utility by depriving them of Bang & Olufsen speakers. That would be a major loss.)

It also points out the importance of distinguishing clearly the role of the state from the role of the private sector. The Danish prime minister seems absolutely correct in refusing to make any apology for the Danish newspaper, noting that he has no authority over Danish newspapers. Politicians are all too often called upon to speak for their "nation". A little more humility in national capitals and a little less speaking on citizens' behalf would be a good thing, I think.

We've discussed the obligation for charity. So when I saw this lawyer joke, forwarded from Don Kates - my favorite Second Amendment lawyer - I felt it had to be shared.

The United Way realized that it had never received a donation from
the city's most successful lawyer. So a United Way volunteer paid the
lawyer a visit in his lavish office. The volunteer opened the meeting
by saying, "Our research shows that even though your annual income is
over two million dollars, you don't give a penny to charity. Wouldn't
you like to give something back to your community through the United
Way?"

The lawyer thinks for a minute and says, "First, did your research
also show you that my mother is dying after a long, painful illness
and she has huge medical bills that are far beyond her ability to pay?"

Embarrassed, the United Way rep mumbles, "Uh... no, I didn't know
that." "Secondly," says the lawyer, "my brother, a disabled veteran,
is blind and confined to a wheelchair and is unable to support his
wife and six children." The stricken United Way rep begins to stammer
an apology, but is cut off again.

"Thirdly, did your research also show you that my sister's husband
died in a dreadful car accident, leaving her penniless with a
mortgage and three children one of whom is disabled and another has
learning disabilities requiring an array of private tutors?"

The humiliated United Way rep, completely beaten, says, "I'm sorry, I
had no idea."

And the lawyer says, "So... if I didn't give any money to them, what
in the hell makes you think I'd ever give any to you?"

Maybe a job at Wal-Mart is better than no job at all - 325,000 people in Illinois seem to think so. That's how many applied for 79 jobs at a new Wal-Mart.

Jim Glassman at TCS has a really good column on the topic. He writes:

....25,000 people would prefer to work in those jobs than the jobs they have — or don't have — at the moment.

That's the fundamental fact of economics that the critics seem not to get. Sure, for those with college educations or substantial technical skills in high demand in the marketplace, work as a stocker or cashier in the retail industry would be undesirable. It's hard, stressful work. But there would appear to be 25,000 people out there who consider those jobs a step up from where they are now.

Perhaps all those who moralize about Wal-Mart's evil labor practices ought to consider how people who might actually work there feel about it, before attempting to legislate Wal-Mart out of town.

An amazing address to the World Economic Forum (you can hear it in English here - I couldn't find a transcript)- not only does she call for dismantling obsolete regulations.

My favorite line: "Freedom is an elementary good for all mankind."

She's not Margaret Thatcher - but what a change!

Slate reports that this week's NYT magazine will have a cover story on missionaries in Africa:

A cover story on American evangelical missionaries in Africa profiles the Maples family, who gave up their middle-class life in California to proselytize in the Kenyan bush. The article recaps both the tremendous success of such missionaries—about 10 percent of sub-Saharan Africans were Christian in 1900, and as many as 70 percent are today—and also the recent focus of American churches on the continent's humanitarian crises. The Mapleses, for example, break from their forebears in that they are self-consciously sensitive, hoping to Christianize the local Samburu tribe without railroading their culture.

I look forward to learning what "railroading" a culture means. I thought becoming a Christian was supposed to change one's behavior and outlook. It's possible that the Times is going to give a balanced, thoughtful treatment to the topic - but if God is intent on performing a miracle in today's world, would having the Times overcome its bias against red-state behaviors like going to church, believing in absolute truth (and attempting to persuade others of such beliefs), and so forth, be likely to be His first choice?

Mark Steyn has some insightful observations on the changing demographics of Europe. After a hilarious and devastating analysis of trends in Scotland, he ties it to the larger picture in Europe:

The other day Esko Aho - oh, come on, you remember, the former Finnish prime minister - presented a report to the European Commission that, in essence, read like a three-year-old Steyn column with an expenses budget: successful companies are abandoning the EU because it is becoming an irrelevant, sclerotic, statist backwater, etc.

Europe, says Mr Aho, is "living a moderately comfortable life on slowly declining capital. This society, averse to risk and reluctant to change, is in itself alarming, but it is also unsustainable in the face of rising competition from other parts of the world. For many citizens without work or in less-favoured regions, even the claim to comfort is untrue."

That is the point. On the present course, everywhere will wind up like Scotland. Mrs Thatcher liked to say that "the facts of life are conservative". Having declined to endorse that proposition in the Eighties, the Scots will be learning it far more painfully in the years ahead.

Steyn doesn't discuss it directly in this column, although I think recall him talking about it elsewhere, but this seems like a direct result of the emptiness of European secularism.

On a related note, Prof. Daniel Chirot of the University of Washington's Henry M. Jackson School gave a faculty talk here today and mentioned afterwards that some folks are predicting a revival of European Christianity in response to the combination of Europe's problems and Muslim immigration.

{Some thoughts prompted by reading Norwich's one-volume version of his history of the Byzantine empire, but which first arose a couple of years ago reading Gibbon as I had always promised myself I would do after learning it was the inspiration for Foundation.}

Americans (including myself) struggle to have any historical perspective. My cousin did a research project and found ancestors back to the early 1600s. Pretty impressive, until you make some comparisons. That 400 year time period is about the same as the time period from Hadrian to Justinian. Double it, to 800 years, and you've got the period from Constantine the Great to the First Crusade. And you're still left with more than 400 years before getting to the 1600s.

To Americans, anything that happened before WW II is ancient history. This leads to uninformed speculation about the causes and consequences of various actions and public policies. I spend part of my academic life trying to educate people to have a bit of perspective on urban structure, so I am most familiar with the problem there. But I am sure it arises in other contexts. On the other hand, we are fortunate in our forgetfulness because old dividing lines are erased rather than reinforced. Even Civil War reenactors don't carry the past into the present the way that Irish marching to commemorate the Battle of the Boyne (1690) still do.

To preempt the smart alecks that share my reading tastes, let me mention that I am well aware of the admonition from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series that the one thing that people cannot afford is a sense of perspective.