Omnia omnibus

Euro Cup 2008

My friend and I watched the Euro Cup final match this afternoon between Germany and Spain. Spain won 1-0, with a goal scored in the 33d minute by Fernando Torres. It appeared as if the German coach Jürgen Löw asked his team to play defense in the first half, perhaps in an attempt to tire out the Spaniards and allow for a German counterattack in the second half. This would not have been, necessarily, a bad strategy, as the Spanish team was clearly the quicker of the two, but the plan backfired when Spain capitalized upon Germany’s ultra-conservatism. Nevertheless, Torres’s goal was as much the result of the German goalie Lehman’s miscalculation in running up to try and head off Torres, or as much the result of the German Lahm’s inability to trip up Torres before shooting. I very much doubt whether Casillas, the Spanish goalie, even had to defend once in the first half.

By the second half, it was clear that Spain had established a superiority and momentum that could not be stopped by the tired German players. Both my friend and I agreed that, throughout the game, Spain clearly looked like it wanted to win, whereas Germany more often than not showed indifference. Schweinsteigger of Germany had a lackluster game; Kiranyi played well but was in only for the second half (likely consistent with the German plan of defense in the first and offense in the second). In contrast, several Spanish players had very fine games, among them Torres, Iniesta, Capdevila, and Sergio Ramos. Spain always handled and moved with the ball with grace and aggression, whereas too often the Germans looked like bumblers.

Were Adam and Eve Vegetarians?

This question came up recently when I was chatting with a friend of mine about life before the Fall. He was under the impression (from Milton) that, because death entered the world through original sin, that therefore Adam and Eve, before the Fall, must have been vegetarians. I replied that vegetable and animal death existed before the Fall, but not human death; and further, eating animals would be consistent with the right, given to Man, to have dominion over the Earth. I emailed a Jesuit friend of mine from Georgetown days, and he had this to say:

Did Adam and Eve, while in the garden, eat meat? - On this point Scripture says nothing. The Scripture does say that Adam was given dominion over creation. So perhaps they did, and again perhaps they were vegetarians[.] The question is unanswerable.

[Re:] death coming into the world[:] Scripture indicates that death came about after the fall; before the fall our first parents had the gift of immortality. Death is seen as a punishment for their sin. In saying that Adam and Eve were immortal is merely saying that they were not to die. It does not say that it was impossible for them to die. If it were impossible then how could death be a punishment for them [?] The supposition is that if they had remained in grace and friendship with God, God would have had them pass directly from Eden into Heaven.

Adam and Eve were given a supernatural end (their goal was to be with God) nowhere is it said that creation (animals) was given the same goal....one may speak of a heaven for one's pet dog, but that is merely to comfort the owner of the dog when the dog dies.

However, Scripture seems to indicate that after the fall, nature (creation) is somewhat hostile to Adam and Eve. Prior to their fall, working among the flowers in the Garden was a joy, but after the fall it became toilsome. Was this because Adam lost some muscular strength or was creation bucking him?

The understanding of the "Peacable Kingdom" is involved here. Because of the redemption of the world, there will again be this kingdom where the lion will play with the lamb, and the child will hold a snake in its hands, etc. There will no longer be this animosity between animals or animals and humankind. The understanding here is that . . . nature is again peaceable because of Christ's coming and as he redeemed us from our sins, he also took away the "curse" that came on nature through Adam's sin.

So it would seem that nothing requires the Christian to hold that Adam and Eve were vegetarian; and I would think that the balance of evidence, especially from nutritional history and biology, would be for omnivorous first parents.

Slavs and the San Francisco Symphony

Yesterday I attended the last concert of the season for the San Francisco Symphony, at Davies Hall. On the program were Lutoslawski’s Mi-Parti, Janacek’s Taras Bulba, and Dvorak’s Cello Concerto. The guest conductor was David Robertson of the St. Louis Symphony, and the cellist for the Dvorak was Alisa Weilerstein. I found the Dvorak to be eminently satisfying, both in Weilerstein’s impassioned, idiomatic, but generally tasteful performance, and in Robertson’s sensible direction. The Janacek I found to be more than a little ponderous, which happens to be my opinion of most 19th-century tone poems, and especially of the ones based upon the works of Nicolai Gogol. As for the Lutoslawski, my reaction was mainly, "This is scary music." The piece is a fine example of moderately atonal, aleatory 20th-century composition. I suppose that it succeeds on its own terms, but whenever the terms are so wholly corrupt as they are here, that’s quite faint-hearted praise.

One thought that recurred to me throughout the evening was how much more I would have preferred some brass motets from one of the Gabrielis or a few harpsichord pieces from the Scarlattis or a Mass by Josquin. I suppose I really despise most Romantic music, whoever the composer, and perhaps this is so because it takes as the purpose of the art to evoke emotion, and considers that evocation the good and end in itself. The older composers, in contrast, viewed the emotion that comes from music as a help to achieving some other, noble end. The emotional experience was part of the fun, to be sure, but that sensation didn’t justify the experience. More was needed, not necessarily something exalted, but definitely something that is other. This explains my disatisfaction with, for example, the Impressionists, who take technique and sense impression, and the faithful rendering of the latter through the extreme refinement of the former, as the point of painting. The subject matter, the theme, the story—all these considerations, which in the past motivated the creation of works, were adiaphorous to the Impressionists, and that certainly is what happens in a piece like Mi-Parti.

And one final curmudgeonly grum ble. Must everyone ignorant Tom, Dick, and Harry end each concert with a standing ovation? Don’t these imbeciles realize that they are cheapening the one commodity that audience members have that the musicans really want, i.e., praise? It is almost as if these rote-ovationers believe that anyone who can play classical music for a living deserves hearty praise, regardless of the product. I disagree.

Fides v. Ratio?

Here is a trenchant analysis of the interplay between science and faith, offered by Cristoph Cardinal Schoenborn, as part of the Templeton Foundation's discussion of the question, "Does science make belief in God obsolete?"  Here's an enticing excerpt of His Eminence's remarks, which remind me of Stanley Jaki.

This theistic outlook has been fully vindicated. As the ancient Greek materialists recognized long ago, if we wish to explain the observed world in terms of Matter without reference to Mind, then it must be explained by things material, ultimate, and very simple all at the same time—by indivisible, notional "atoms" and a chance "swerve" that sets them in random motion. If the things of everyday experience are mere aggregates of these "atoms," and if the cosmos is infinitely old and infinitely large, then chance can do the rest. To be the complete explanation of material reality, these "atoms," and whatever natural regularities they exhibit, must be so simple that their existence as inexplicable "brute facts" is plausible.

Fast-forward to the present: Modern science has shown that Nature is ordered, complex, mathematically tractable, and intelligible "all the way down," as far as our instruments and techniques can discern. Instead of notional, perfectly simple "atoms," we have discovered the extraordinarily complex, beautiful, and mathematical "particle zoo" of the Standard Model of physics, hovering on the border of existence and intelligibility (as Aristotle predicted long ago with his doctrine of prime matter). And order, complexity, and intelligibility exist "all the way up" as well. We see a teleological hierarchy and chain of emergence from quantized physics, giving rise to stable chemistry, enabling the nearly miraculous properties of carbon and biochemistry, providing the material basis for the emergence of life with its own ontological hierarchy of metabolic (plant), sensitive (animal), and rational (human) existence. Beyond this astounding and unfailing order and intelligibility, our knowledge of which increases each day as science expands its scope, we now know of the precise fine-tuning of the physical laws and constants that make possible a life-supporting universe.

In short, the Nature we know from modern science embodies and reflects immaterial properties and a depth of intelligibility far beyond the wildest imaginings of the Greek philosophers. To view all these extremely complex, elegant, and intelligible laws, entities, properties, and relations in the evolution of the universe as "brute facts" in need of no further explanation is, in the words of the great John Paul II, "an abdication of human intelligence."

 

Ben-Hur

I finished reading this week Ben-Hur, by Lew. Wallace. I purchased my copy at the Wallace Museum in Crawfordsville, Indiana, a few weeks ago on a break from a conference I was there attending. I was afraid, before beginning the rather lengthy novel (550+ pages), that it would amount to little more than Victorian sentimentality with an American twist, much in the vein of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Thankfully, my suspicions were largely proved unfounded. The work is quite fine: Wallace’s narrative, although at times ponderous, tendentious, and a little maudlin, nevertheless keeps the reader interested, and his account of the chariot race between Ben-Hur and his Roman rival-enemy Messala is rivetting. (The time of the race in the narrative is different from that of the 1959 movie starring Charlton Heston. In the movie, the race occurs presumably in Jerusalem and shortly before the Crucifixion; in the book, the race occurs in Antioch several years prior. And whereas in the movie Messala dies shortly after the race owing to injuries sustained therein, in the book he survives and continues to act as a threat to Ben-Hur.)

The most interesting theme of the novel is the folly of seeking redemption through politics, and the necessity of hope in a kingdom not of this world for the ultimate resolution of life’s injustices. Throughout most of the story, Ben-Hur is driven by the expectation that the Messiah will soon arrive, throw out the Romans from Judea, and institute a holy kingdom on Earth. He eventually is disabused of that conception of the Messiah through his casual following of Christ in the years immediately preceding the Crucifixion. It is confirmed by his attendance at the public trial before Pontius Pilate, and the Via Crucis. I think that the valuable lesson to be taken from the work, especially given that it is the fruit of an American pen, is that any form of political messianism is bound to disappoint; and that, although we are right to construct the best society we can, to expect perfection in this life is unwarranted.

The Question of Cage Free Chickens

Here is an interesting article from the Sacramento News and Review on a November ballot initiative in California that would ban all in-state egg farms where the chickens are kept in cages. This initiative presents a number of interesting questions, which I shall just briefly touch upon in this space.

First, what is the obligation of man towards chicken? The initiative’s proponents talk about treating chickens "humanely," but this seems misplaced. After all, in justice, aren’t chickens entitled just to "chicken" treatment, i.e., being treated "chickenly"? Setting aside that potential error, the initiative’s "humane treatement" rationale raises the question of what constitutes humane treatment toward chickens. I shall assume that inhumane treatment would encompass the infliction of pain for the sake of pain, but I suspect that no one would disagree with a prohibition on that type of activity (of course presuming that the government has a legitimate regulatory interest in proscribing some types of animal cruelty). What else would be proscribed? From the article, it appears that the reason for keeping chickens in cages is to reduce the chance of injury and disease, and also to increase egg production. Those who object to caging say that the enclosed space is so small, it prevents the chicken from dusting itself or moving about. Does that make cages "inhumane"? And does it matter that chickens, as a species, cannot reason? Now, certain classes of human beings—babies, for example, or sleeping persons—cannot reason, but no one today would consider that a sufficient basis for justifying acts against those persons which would not be proper against human persons who are presently thinking.

Second, in deciding whether caged chicken facilities should be banned, does it matter that the ban will simply put California egg produces at a disadvantage vis a vis out of state and out of country producers? Even with the ban, the purchase of eggs from caged chickens will still be legal. The observation is relevant, however, only if caging chickens is not intrinsically wrong; for if it is, then it ought not matter whether other people elsewhere continue to commit the evil.

Third, may the government legitimately regulate such activity? No harm to humans comes from the eggs produced in caged facilities; the only harm is to chickens. Is it within the scope of government to regulate human conduct that does not harm other humans? My answer would be, first, is the activity a malum in se? and second, does regulation of the activity produce more good than harm? If the answer to both of those questions is yes, then regulation is legitimate. But to answer those questions requires an answer to the "humanely" v. "chickenly" argument above, which for the timebeing I am lacking.

On Greeting Cards

In America today it is common to send a professionally made, mass-produced greeting card in honor of any number of celebrations and commemorations, from birthdays and funerals to house warmings and new pet acquisitions. It is an interesting question whether the custom that dictates that cards be sent requires simply the fact of the sent card, which denotes that the sender (1) recalled the event in question, and (2) is sufficiently attached to the recipient to send the card in the first place; or whether, instead, the custom requires a (1 + 2 + 3) thoughtful sending of a card, meaning that the contents of the card are adequately attuned to the sensibilities of the recipient and the nature of the occasion that is the catalyst of the card’s sending. This latter question—whether much thought must go into the card’s selection—is an especially important one in light of the fact that most greeting cards come pre-printed with material, usually of a very sappy or treacly nature, that is generally only suitable for old ladies and illiterates. For me, I have resolved the question by sending the simplest greeting card possible; and by simplest I mean with the most laconic yet honest verse I can find. What my recipient misses in terms of prose I more than gain in fidelity to my own thoughts, and at the very least the recipient receives a card consistent with (1) and (2) above.

Iron Man: A Review

Yesterday evening I saw Iron Man (2008), starring Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, and Jeff Bridges, and directed by Jon Favreau. The basic plot line is this. Tony Stark (Downey) is a brilliant scion of the founder of a major weapons producer. He has taken over his father’s company since the latter’s death. Stark is portrayed as the classic playboy, with the added twist that he has a very sharp mind able to produce incredibly effective military arms. He has a very low view of women, using them mainly as vehicles of pleasure; the one exception is his relationship with Pepper Potts (Paltrow), his personal secretary, who basically looks after Stark and keeps his personal life in some semblance of order. (Like showing the latest paramour the door the morning after). Stark travels to Afghanistan where he demonstrates his latest missile, dubbed "The Jericho" (surprise surprise, it essentially knocks down mountains, much as Joshua did at Jericho). While in Afghanistan, Stark is abducted by warlords, and is injured in the process. While in captivity, the warlords force Stark to make his latest missile from scratch. During this process, Stark is shocked to learn that the warlords are using his weapons, but he cannot figure out how they obtained them.

Eventually Stark escapes from the warlords when he builds what amounts to a modern-day suit of armor, with lots of bells-and-whistles weaponry added on. His time in Afghanistan proves to be an epiphany of sorts; he returns home wishing to move his company’s focus away from weapons. He meets stiff opposition from Stane (Bridges), Stark’s second-in-command at the company. In secret Stark advances the design of his new Iron Man suit, which allows him to fly and shoot things. Well, to make a long (and oftentimes tedious) story short, it turns out that Stane has been supplying the bad guys. He develops his own suit of armor, and then challenges Stark to a duel to the death. And again, not surprisingly, Stark wins. The last scene is Stark admitting to an astonished press crowd that "I am Iron Man," with the sound track thereupon playing Black Sabbath’s piece of the same name.

I was underwhelmed by this movie, for several reasons. First, it was not clear what the precise content of Stark’s epiphany was. Did he believe that weapons were intrinsically evil? That warmongering is bad, and that he had been a warmonger? Or did he believe that weapons in the right hands can maintain peace, and that the key therefore is to keep the weapons out of the bad guys’ hands? After all, as we later learn in the movie, the Stark-made weapons fall into the hands of the warlords only because Stane willfully provided them.

Second, what is the role of conscience for Stark? At one point, upon his return from Afghanistan, he tells Paltrow that he must change the course of his company because he was saved for a purpose. Now it seems to me here that Stark is conceding the existence of a Providence independent of his or any other human will. But no effort is made to develop this theme further in the movie.

Third, the motives of the bad guy Stane are opaque, to say the least. Is he in favor of the warlords, or just of making money? Is he a perverse patriot, or just a greedy businessman? One can’t tell from the movie, and frankly at the end his duel with Stark really has no real connection with any rational motives that Stane had expressed earlier in the movie.

Fourth, what is the relationship with Pepper? At one point in the movie, she and Stark seem to be falling in love, but this is not developed, or rather, at the end there appears to be if anything a slight retrogression, with both Stark and Pepper calling each other by their business names.

Now, it may well be the case that Iron Man is just the first installment, so that what I now perceive as deficiencies are simply as-yet unwoven threads in a nascent plot line that will develop later on. Perhaps. But if that is so, it simply underscores that installment movies have a high burden to meet to be good. The problem with this movie, as a friend of mine commented, is that it straddles the wrong dividing line, i.e., between action movies and romantic comedies.

The Church in Small Town America

Although the conference I have been attending formally concluded yesterday, all the attendees stayed the extra night, so this morning I and a colleague attended the Sacred Mysteries at the S. Bernard’s Church in Crawfordsville. I cannot say that I found my spirit invigorated. I must of course emphasize that the people I met there could not have been friendlier, or more kindly, or more charitable, or more obviously full of the Christian spirit. Nevertheless, I was repulsed by nearly everything accidental (in the Schoolmen’s sense) about the liturgy. The church building was constructed in the mid-1980s, and reveals all the wretched deficiencies of that period of church architecture: "in the round" with living-room carpeting; cold brick walls; slit windows (on just one side of the building) with formless, Jackson Pollock-like designs in stained glass; a "resurrection" cross; a few perfunctory and nondescript saint statues; no tabernacle in sight; and music provided by one electronic piano and one guitar.

If my choice every Sunday were between this and staying at home listening to a Palestrina Mass on my i-Pod and chanting the Propers, I tell you, carissimi lectores, in all fraternal charity, that I would stay at home.

Federalism and the Separation of Powers, Day II

Federalism and the Separation of Powers, Day II

Yesterday’s conference focused upon the separation of powers at the federal level, and the extent to which the Framers’ balancing of the three branches has been superseded by subsequent constitutional, political, and cultural changes.

Reference was made to Oakeshott’s categories of civil associations and enterprise associations, the former where agreement on the aims of the civil body is absent (in the sense that there is no overriding goal to which the members of that society will defer), the latter where such agreement is present, to the extent that members of the society will subordinate their principal personal aims when necessary to achieve the common agreed-upon goal. The comment was made that the United States is normally, in peace time, a civil association, but in war time often shifts to an enterprise association (the commonly shared goal being, presumably, national self-preservation). Accordingly, the civil association is marked by agreement on procedural not substantive norms.

Another commenter, building upon the Oakeshott dichotomy above, drew parallels to Mark Sandels’ (ph) categories of the republic of common aims and the procedural republic, the former mapping roughly to Oakeshott’s enterprise association, the latter to the civil association. The commenter emphasized that the procedural republic, notwithstanding its name, does contain agreed upon substantive aims, although those goals are cloaked in seeming "procedural" language. His point was that the procedural republic betrays a conception of the human person as a wilful atom, whose principal good is the maximization of willed choices, without discrimination as to the object of the will’s desire, so long as the willed choices do not impinge upon the coordinate willed choices of other human-atoms. I see traces of Rawls and Nietzsche here, but the connection (if any) was not raised in discussion.

To avoid the specter of the human-atom, one commenter proposed a return to the constitutional morality of the Framers (a position advanced, I believe, by George Carey of Georgetown University). The value of that adoption would be the filling of the moral vacuum presupposed by the modern liberal procedural republic and Oakeshott’s civil association. In other words, a constitutional morality would provide both an intimation of the vita bona to which individual human action should be directed, as well as a bundle of rights around which the twines of procedural safeguards could be drawn. The commenter did not have time to explain the content of this constitutional morality, but I would think that it must be based upon a natural law theory to which all persons of right thinking can subscribe, something, in Rawls’ terms, that would comport with good public reasons.

In subsequent sessions, the comments turned toward reform, specifically whether reform is possible and, if so, how it can be effected. One commenter located the source of the collapse of federalism and separation of powers in American exceptionalism, both in the notion of America as the shining city on a hill, as well as in America the bringer of democracy to the hapless peoples of the Earth. For my part, I urged that a reinvigorated constitutional jurisprudence, emanating from the judiciary, could well be the catalyst to real reform, as opposed to that reform coming from other branches. That fact is due in no small part to the collective action obstacle: the President is hampered by the modern administrative state; Congress, as a collective body of 535 persons, cannot act effectively; but the Supreme Court, with just five votes, can overturn precedents upon which many of the unconstitutional excrescences of the New Deal and Great Society eras depend. A limited "substantial effects" test, a recharged nondelegation doctrine, and a return to economic due process would yield significant benefits, and quickly. Of course, the likelihood that five justices would have the courage so to rule is no doubt small, but my point was simply that the likelihood is greater than the likelihood of the coordinate branches taking remedial action.

Another discussion point was the president’s war powers. One commenter noted that recent presidents have forgotten the political expediency that can be gained from obtaining a Congressional declaration of war. For such a declaration, because of its rarity, would focus the public’s attention, and alert them to the real possibility of prolonged conflict. Another commenter observed that the warfare state engenders emergencies, which provide further opportunities for the president to extend his warmaking powers. The commenter generally endorsed Jefferson’s approach to the president’s foreign policy powers, exemplified by the Barbary Pirates controversy. In that conflict, Jefferson determined that his authority was limited, in the absence of a declaration of war, to providing defense for American and other shipping in the Mediterranean.

In the conference’s final session, the focus was on the potential for the Presidency to devolve into Caesarism. One commenter noted that Caesarism is possible when the people no longer know how to rule themselves, and no longer care to. I then made the point that Welfarism may indeed be an early symptom of Caesarism. The Caesars gave the masses bread and circuses (panis et circenses); the modern presidency gives the masses welfare. The Caesars drew support from the masses; the modern presidency does the same. There is here, as I noted at the conference, a certain parallel between a "welfaristic" slouching toward Caesarism, and the slouching toward servility in Western democracies noted by Belloc in The Servile State. There, Belloc makes the point that the capitalist state—understood as a society in which a small minority owns the vast majority of the means of production, but where everyone "owns" certain political freedoms—is inherently unstable, because a large portion of the populace lives in materially precarious circumstances. Such a state has three courses open to it: socialism, where the state owns the means of production; distributivism, where the means of production are owned by individuals, but ownership is spread fairly evenly across the populace; and servility. In the servile state, to obtain security, the unpropertied masses will "sell" their political freedoms to the state, in exchange for which they receive sustenance in the form of welfare.

One commenter, in discussing reform, argued that the temptation to utopianism would be a significant obstacle to the return of strong federalism and the separation of powers, presumably because those two principles of the Founding were meant to retard the actions of government, whereas utopianism requires a government generally unfettered in its powers. I then raised the point of Chesteron, in his What I Saw In America, that America is the only nation with the soul of a church, because it is founded upon a secular creed. The need to maintain our secular creed may be a built-in risk for utopianism, but that fact simply underscores the importance of finding some substratum of "common aims" to avoid the downsides, discussed above, of the procedural republic.

With respect to reform of the presidency, one commenter observed that historians and the press have created a perverse incentive for presidents to aggrandize power, for one cannot be a "strong" president unless one acts, and few presidents are considered "great" who were not also "strong."

I concluded my observations with a reference to Maritain’s line in The Peasant of the Garonne, namely, the attitude of the Left is to prefer what is not to what is, whereas the attitude of the Right is to prefer injustice to disorder. The relevance of Maritain’s statement lies in this: to seek always a "return" to what may have been, in the name of conservatism, may well prove to be disguised Leftism, whereas resignation to the irrevocability of the present state of affairs may be a copout countenancing of injustice.

*****

A Viniferous Post Script

When one travels to Indiana, one probably should not expect the highest quality victuals and libations. But I must confess to pleasant surprise at the wines providing the conferees for our dinners and for our post cenam hospitality. I noted wines from France (at least one Beaujolais), Washington (Chateau St. Michelle), and California. The white varietel was limited to Chardonnay, but the reds included a very good Napa Cabernet (Caravan, I believe), as well as a California Pinot Noir and a Washington Merlot. Needless to say, the good wines proved very helpful to insightful conversation among the conferees.