Under Heavy Fire for Years, Blankenhorn Abandons Ship

Paul Adams

One of the positive aspects of David Blankenhorn’s reversal on same-sex marriage is the commentary it has elicited from defenders of marriage like Michael Cook of the dignitarian website MercatorNet and Maggie Gallagher, former chair of the National Organization for Marriage and co-author of an outstanding summary of the research on marriage, The Case for Marriage (2000).  

Who is Blankenhorn?  Gallagher offers a succinct summary of his achievements on behalf of children and marriage:

In the early 1990s, Blankenhorn wrote a book called Fatherless America and launched a think tank (the Institute for American Values) drawing attention to the problem of family fragmentation. He did extraordinary work, bringing together family scholars, policymakers, thinkers, and writers across ideological lines to help form a new consensus that marriage matters.

In 2007, Blankenhorn wrote The Future of Marriage, in which he lays out the evidence that marriage is the union of male and female, oriented toward giving children a father as well as a mother. He agreed to testify on behalf of Prop 8 during Judge Walker’s show trial, and he was one of the few experts who did not run when he learned his testimony might be televised.

The difficulty of responding intellectually to Blankenhorn’s abandonment of the fight for marriage as he understands it is, as Gallagher says, is that “he says he has not changed his mind about the fact that gay marriage represents a step in the de-institutionalization of marriage. He stands by his Proposition 8 testimony. He’s not recanting. He has just lost hope that fighting gay marriage can be part of a strategy for strengthening marriage. He’s left with the hope that somehow if he concedes gay marriage he will be in a strong position to address his core concerns about fatherless America.”

The “wall of hatred” (in Gallagher’s term) confronting anyone who opposes same-sex marriage is extraordinarily vehement and violent.  A tactic of intimidation, it is surely the most extreme outpouring of hatred and abuse in our times from people who consider themselves on the side of tolerance and reason.  It is understandable why someone who has been vilified as publicly and viciously as Blankenhorn - from the scurrilous attacks of the New York Times’s Frank Rich to the hateful, often obscene expressions of intolerance that come from pro-SSM comments in comboxes, on Facebook, and the like - would want to retire from the field of battle, rest and lick his wounds.

Blankenhorn himself is a mild and well-meaning liberal who became deeply concerned about the disintegration and deinstitutionalization of marriage and its devastating effects in poor and minority communities, in particular on their women and children.  He wanted to build a movement and write about marriage as a key social good, our most pro-child institution, while bracketing the issue of same-sex “marriage” as an essentially unrelated question.  He came to see that this was impossible, that the hijacking of marriage for purposes unrelated to its historic and universal understanding and to the needs of children - the desire of some adults to have homosexual relations honored and normalized on the same level as heterosexual relations - was already too far advanced to be ignored.

In his op-ed piece in the New York Times - the paper that launched an extraordinarily nasty, biased and absurdly unfair attack on him just a couple of years ago (one of Rich’s columns was called “Smoke the Bigots Out of the Closet”) - Blankenhorn makes it clear that he stands by the arguments he made brilliantly in his 2007 book, The Future of Marriage:

I opposed gay marriage believing that children have the right, insofar as society makes it possible, to know and to be cared for by the two parents who brought them into this world. I didn’t just dream up this notion: the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which came into force in 1990, guarantees children this right.

Marriage is how society recognizes and protects this right. Marriage is the planet’s only institution whose core purpose is to unite the biological, social and legal components of parenthood into one lasting bond. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its children.

At the level of first principles, gay marriage effaces that gift. No same-sex couple, married or not, can ever under any circumstances combine biological, social and legal parenthood into one bond. For this and other reasons, gay marriage has become a significant contributor to marriage’s continuing deinstitutionalization, by which I mean marriage’s steady transformation in both law and custom from a structured institution with clear public purposes to the state’s licensing of private relationships that are privately defined.

In the book he had advanced the best definition of marriage I have seen: 

In all or nearly all human societies, marriage is socially approved sexual intercourse between a woman and a man, conceived both as a personal relationship and as an institution, primarily such that any children resulting from the union are—and are understood by the society to be—emotionally, morally, practically, and legally affiliated with both of the parents (p.91).

So why did Blankenhorn side with the bitter enemies of marriage as it has been understood across time and place for millennia, at least since the earliest surviving legal codes?  He has given three reasons. Two are social and almost embarrassingly feeble: the need for “comity” and “respect for an emerging consensus,” especially among “most of our national elites, as well as most younger Americans.”  By comity, he means he does not like conflict, despite years of finding himself unwillingly at the center of one of the most bitter divides in the culture wars.  He is willing to sacrifice principle for getting along.  By consensus, he seems to mean something similar - if you can’t beat them, join them.  (But Michael Cook puts a more sympathetic gloss on this rationale by comparing it to Justice Devlin’s change of heart about the legalization of homosexual behavior in Britain in light of changing public opinion.)  

The third is personal: “the equal dignity of homosexual love”.  It is a position, rejecting the traditional Judeo-Christian position that homosexual desire is disordered.  (This is a complicated question.  Catholic teaching differentiates between same-sex attraction, which is not sinful but is nevertheless disordered, on one hand, and homosexual (i.e., homogenital) activity, which like all other kinds of sex outside marriage or intrinsically, by its very nature, incapable of generating new life, is sinful.  Before the development, originally as the term for a psychopathology, of the term homosexuality (which generated complementary notions of heterosexuality and bisexuality) in the late nineteenth century, strong and lasting love between friends of the same sex was honored and not taken to be “homosexual” in the modern sense, or sexual at all.

Blankenhorn, a liberal Christian, has consistently rejected biblical and Christian teaching on homosexuality and argued that “homosexual love” (by which he means to include sex) should be accorded equal dignity and honor with the love of man and woman.  But until recently he did not take this to be an argument for changing the fundamental nature of marriage.  

Marriage as an institution is mute and formally indifferent on the question of sexual orientation or disposition or desire.  (Classically, a man was judged or defined not by his desires, but by his mastery of them, his virtue.)  Sexual desire or orientation is not a criterion for admission to or exclusion from marriage. And for good reason.  As Blankenhorn (2007) says,  “But if we as a society cross that Rubicon—if sexual desire becomes a valid legal principle for structuring a marriage—it is hard to imagine the moral metric by which bisexual spousal groups would be excluded from this newly orientation-sensitive institution” (p.259).  And indeed, that cat, rejected by SSM advocates just a few years ago as a bogus slippery slope argument, is already out of the bag.

Michael Cook argues that this question of the moral status of homosexual behavior cannot be avoided and that Blankenhorn’s surrender to same-sex marriage was inevitable given his view of the matter.

The Blankenhorn incident is a painful reminder of one of the main failings of our culture – its inability to set boundaries to sexual expression. Fundamentally this has happened because people have come to believe that they can define the purpose of sex for themselves. On Tuesday, it could be love; on Wednesday lust; on Saturday pleasure; or on Sunday simply curiosity. Sex’s link with children and the complementarity of male and female is something incidental, almost irrelevant, to the way we should live our sexuality. 

There are two lessons here. First, unless opponents of gay marriage have firm views on the immorality of homosexual acts, it is almost inevitable that they will follow David Blankenhorn into a grudging acceptance of a new social paradigm. They must hold firm to the truth that homosexual love is not equal in dignity to married love. Second, those views need to be articulated in a way which does not humiliate or vilify homosexuals but gives a clear account of why homosexual acts are an inherently disordered use of sexuality. There is a lot of work to be done here.

I am not sure this is a logically necessary link.  It seems to me perfectly consistent to argue both that:

1. the state should not intervene in most private consensual sexual behavior among adults, not because it judges such activity to be morally proper or equivalent to the conjugal relations of husband and wife, but because it is a hopeless task that contravenes prevailing opinion, would discredit the law (because unenforceable or arbitrarily enforced, like the old sodomy laws or laws against adultery or the English offense of alienating the affections of another’s spouse); and 
2. the state should differentially honor and support marriage as traditionally understood for the reasons Blankenhorn gives:  It is “the planet’s only institution whose core purpose is to unite the biological, social and legal components of parenthood into one lasting bond. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its children.”

It seems perfectly reasonable to say that the state should not criminalize certain kinds of (immoral) sexual behavior that have become widely accepted and practiced, but that it should discriminate in favor of the one kind of sexual behavior that is capable of generating new life and the institution built on it (without which a marriage is not consummated).

It is also reasonable and right to honor deep and lasting friendships and to respect and accommodate financial interdependence among adults.  The elderly single Burden sisters in England sought in vain to be “treated like lesbians” under the UK’s civil unions law because of their close and lasting interdependence and the impending ruin for the survivor when one died and the other had to sell their family home to pay estate (death) taxes.  Under Hawaii’s former “reciprocal beneficiaries” law, such a situation could have been accommodated because there was no requirement or expectation that those involved in such a relationship be having sex.  Marriage implies, is partly defined by sex; friendship and financial independence are not.

But after years of being vilified and denounced nationally in the harshest terms as a hate-filled bigot (which Blankenhorn never remotely was notwithstanding Rich’s calumnies), these kinds of distinction, though reasonable, may not be emotionally sustainable for a man of Blankenhorn’s mild and peaceable temperament.

Still, Blankenhorn’s notion of seeking new alliances with gays who support the institution of marriage is a feeble hope.  As he himself pointed out in his book, while some supporters of SSM honor marriage as an institution based on exclusive, monogamous commitment between two people, many others support it just because it is part of the de-institutionalization of marriage itself.  Academics who built their whole careers on attacking the institution of marriage and the family suddenly support SSM, not because they want to extend the benefits of a great institution to gays, but because they see it as a key step in the destruction of marriage as understood virtually everywhere and always until yesterday.  For example, as Blankenhorn himself documents in The Future of the Family (2007), Stephanie Coontz and Judith Stacey, who both have attacked traditional marriage for decades and defended its alternatives - divorce, cohabitation, unwed childbearing - welcome SSM precisely for its deinstitutionalizing potential.

And as Cook aptly concludes,

And lest anyone else think that sharing marriage with gays will save it as a social institution, here are some bitter observations about Blankenhorn from Richard Kim, executive editor of the leading progressive magazine The Nation. He thinks that the new player on the gay marriage bench is just as “regressive, archaic and punitive” as he was when he opposed it. All that stuff about what kind of marriage produces the best results for children is irrelevant. “Blankenhorn sees an inner circle of honor and benefits that should be attached to marriage, and he’s now extended that circle to include gays and lesbians," Kim writes. "I want to scramble that circle.” 

I wish David Blankenhorn the best of luck in building a coalition with the likes of Richard Kim. 

Blankenhorn Abandons Ship...and Principles

Michael Cook | Monday, 25 June 2012

A marriage champion changes sides

One of the leading figures in the fight against same-sex marriage has changed his mind. Why?

The year 1957 saw the publication of a key document in the history of the sexual revolution, the Wolfenden Report. A committee of distinguished figures in British public life headed by Sir John Wolfenden, who later became director of the British Museum, studied what the law's attitude towards homosexual acts should be. It concluded that "homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private should no longer be a criminal offence". In essence, the committee endorsed the view that private morality is no concern of the law.

In 1959, to rebut the conclusions of the Wolfenden Report – which was highly controversial at the time – Lord Devlin, one of the leading jurists in the UK, wrote what has since become a classic of jurisprudence, The Enforcement of Morals. The committee got it wrong, he contended. If, in the court of public opinion, certain acts, including homosexual acts, were regarded with horror and disgust, legalising them posed the threat of social disintegration. Society could not afford to decriminalise such acts.

Devlin’s position came as something of a surprise to his colleagues. He was a man of broadly liberal sympathies and had even declared in his own testimony to the Wolfenden Committee that laws on consensual homosexual activity should be relaxed.
What must have been an even greater surprise was his recantation a few years later. On the eve of the 1967 Parliamentary debate on the Wolfenden Report’s recommendations he joined several Anglican bishops and law lords in writing a letter to the London Times:

“Seven years ago a distinguished list of signatories wrote in your columns that the existing law clearly no longer represented either Christian or liberal opinion in this country, and that its continued enforcement would do more harm than good to the community as a whole.

“We hope that in response to the Motion calling attention to the Wolfenden Committee's recommendations… Her Majesty's Government will now recognise the necessity for this reform and will introduce legislation.”

Lord Devlin’s volte face sheds some light on last week’s startling news that David Blankenhorn, who not so long ago was the face of opposition to gay marriage in the American media, has changed his mind.

Blankenhorn is the founder of the Institute for American Values and the author ofThe Future of Marriage and Fatherless America. His credentials as a defender of traditional marriage seemed impeccable. But last Friday, to the dismay of his erstwhile allies, in a New York Times op-ed he ran up a white flag. He wrote: “as a marriage advocate, the time has come for me to accept gay marriage and emphasize the good that it can do.”

Blankenhorn has not abandoned his conviction that marriage between a man and a woman is the best place to raise a child. He has a great argument:

“Marriage is the planet’s only institution whose core purpose is to unite the biological, social and legal components of parenthood into one lasting bond. Marriage says to a child: The man and the woman whose sexual union made you will also be there to love and raise you. In this sense, marriage is a gift that society bestows on its children.”

But he is tired of being called a bigot and so the time has come to compromise. “You can bend a little bit because we have to live together. And the endless perpetration of a culture war over this is enervating,” he told New York Times reporter Mark Oppenheimer in a radio interview. Now he hopes that he will be able to build coalitions with gays and lesbians who believe in stable marriage. Together they will beaver away at improving the woeful statistics on married life in the US.

By what mental twists and turns did he travel to this Rubicon? After all, his support for marriage between a man and a woman was -- and is -- profound and sincere. He had even been the principal witness in support of California’s ban on same-sex marriage when it was appealed before Justice Vaughn Walker in 2010. That took courage and conviction.

Blankenhorn has given three reasons for his change of heart. Two are social: the need for “comity” and “respect for an emerging consensus”, especially among “most of our national elites, as well as most younger Americans”. The third is personal: “the equal dignity of homosexual love”.

Although Devlin and Blankenhorn are separated by more than 50 years, they are at one in arguing that consensus trumps principles. In 1959, Devlin thought that homosexuality was too disruptive; in 2012 Blankenhorn thinks that opposing it is. Go with the flow. Both men use their yearning for peaceful co-existence as a justification for turning their backs on their moral principles.

It is interesting to note that in The Enforcement of Morals, Lord Devlin says that whether a society adopts monogamy or polygamy is a matter of convention. “It got there because is Christian,” he wrote, “but it remains there because it is built into the house in which we live and could not be removed without bringing it down.” Were he alive today, there is no doubt that he would be a strong supporter of gay marriage. Would polygamy come next?

But Blankenhorn takes Lord Devlin’s argument one step further. The law lord had no sympathy whatsoever for homosexuality, which he described in his book as a “miserable way of life”. But Blankenhorn has always accepted that homosexual love is equal in dignity to heterosexual love. This was the fatal flaw in his stand against gay marriage, the leak in the dyke which allowed the waves of virulent criticism to break in and sweep him away.

If homosexual acts are equal in dignity to marital intercourse, then the law has no business criminalising them. If they are not criminally wrong, then they must (at least to the average Joe) be morally upright. If they are right, it is sheer bigotry and discrimination to hamper their expression in any way. The logic is overwhelming.

The Blankenhorn incident is a painful reminder of one of the main failings of our culture – its inability to set boundaries to sexual expression. Fundamentally this has happened because people have come to believe that they can define the purpose of sex for themselves. On Tuesday, it could be love; on Wednesday lust; on Saturday pleasure; or on Sunday simply curiosity. Sex’s link with children and the complementarity of male and female is something incidental, almost irrelevant, to the way we should live our sexuality.

There are two lessons here. First, unless opponents of gay marriage have firm views on the immorality of homosexual acts, it is almost inevitable that they will follow David Blankenhorn into a grudging acceptance of a new social paradigm. They must hold firm to the truth that homosexual love is not equal in dignity to married love. Second, those views need to be articulated in a way which does not humiliate or vilify homosexuals but gives a clear account of why homosexual acts are an inherently disordered use of sexuality. There is a lot of work to be done here.

And lest anyone else think that sharing marriage with gays will save it as a social institution, here are some bitter observations about Blankenhorn from Richard Kim, executive editor of the leading progressive magazine The Nation. He thinks that the new player on the gay marriage bench is just as “regressive, archaic and punitive” as he was when he opposed it. All that stuff about what kind of marriage produces the best results for children is irrelevant. “Blankenhorn sees an inner circle of honor and benefits that should be attached to marriage, and he’s now extended that circle to include gays and lesbians," Kim writes. "I want to scramble that circle.”

I wish David Blankenhorn the best of luck in building a coalition with the likes of Richard Kim.


Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet, where this article was first posted.

Caravaggio Exhibition Raising of Lazarus in Rome

Cornelius Sullivan

Rome

Until July fifteenth at the Museum of Rome, Palazzo Braschi ,by Piazza Navona, the large restored masterpiece will be displayed in a special room.

Raising of Lazarus, 1609, cm 380x275 Museo Regionale di Messina.

The painting is very large and the setting is ideal. You are able to approach very close to see the brushstrokes and get a sense of the weave of the canvas. You are able also to learn about the restoration process in some detail.

The painting was transported from Messina. The restoration in the Museum of Rome took seven months. The painting had significant damage from previous restorations and from the environmental conditions in Messina. It was exposed to both indoor and outdoor conditions of uncontrolled variations of temperature and humidity.

It is being called Resurrezione di Lazzaro, Resurrection of Lazarus, where it should be called “Raising of Lazarus”. As with the Virgin being assumed into Heaven it is passive on the part of the subject. Jesus ascended, Mary was assumed. Lazarus did not resurrect himself, he was raised.

Caravaggio painted this after he escaped from the prison in Malta. He received support in Sicily and the commission was important and the size of the painting signifies that his great gifts as a painter were still highly prized.

There are many similarities with earlier Roman works. Especially striking is the repeat pose of Jesus pointing. In the Calling of Saint Matthew in the French church in Rome he is pointing-calling. In this scene he is raising, leaning back slightly, pulling up his friend. Gone are the rich expanses of glowing flesh and brilliant reds. It is still the hard to describe “Caravaggio red” but it is in a dark haze. All of the forms are recognizable only from the way the light just touches them and reveals shape. The light is illusive, hitting and skipping along from left to right. Less is better. He decides which characters reveal themselves and which remain only a hint in darkness where we must imagine their essence solely from the gestures.

As in a number of his group paintings there is a half-hidden self portrait. The usual expressions early on were disinterest or amazement, but now because of what he has lived, being knighted, then arrested, escaping and becoming a fugitive again, and being de-knighted, de-frocked. There is an expression bordering on horror. He is the figure in the back on the far left.

Caravaggio Self Portrait, detail.

Everything comes out of the dark. That is how he paints. This is his mature somber style reflecting the intense troubles of his later life even though he is still painting a miracle. He always knew about death, and even death on the streets, but now it is what he thinks about and paints more than anything else.

What can we make of the large expanse of darkness above the figures. It is a common feature of his late tragic work. It is as if death is a major player, an important character, in the drama. In the Death of the Virgin there is the large red drape taking up the top half of that painting. Clearly it was painted later to summarize the scene and complete the composition. That painting is often called “The Dormition”, the sleeping of the Virgin. There is still hope and color although we feel the grief of the disciples. But reproductions can never convey the immensity of the dark in the Raising of Lazarus. You cannot help but feel that the painter is telling you that death is immense.

He is like the old Titian and the old Rembrandt who threw away the fine pointed sable hair brushes, and all the learned craft, and all the skill, and became confident enough to load a large bristle brush with a thick glob of lead white paint and with one stroke describe, for example, the jaw of a rising man or the cheek bones of his sisters. Painting became like thinking for these masters.  

Raising of Lazarus, detail.home

(c) 2012 by Cornelius Sullivan

Fr. Barron: Against Heresies

Chesterton, Hitchens, the Nazis, and the Prussian State

Zac Alstin | Friday, 1 June 2012 

Who dares attack my Chesterton?

Christopher Hitchens' last piece of journalism was a all-out attack on another great journalist, G.K. Chesterton. He came off second best.

It is a cliché of pop psychology that we are least able to tolerate people who remind us of our own selves. There’s only room for one Life Of The Party and we feel a twinge of antagonism toward anyone whose excellence threatens to outshine our own. I was reminded of this when I read Christopher Hitchens’ posthumously published review of a biography of the great British journalist G.K. Chesterton. It certainly was a curious valediction. As an obituary for Hitchens described:

“Consider the mix. Constant pain, weak as a kitten, morphine dragging him down, then the tangle of Reformation theology and politics, Chesterton’s romantic, imagined England suffused with the kind of Catholicism that mediated his brush with fascism and his taste for paradox, which Christopher wanted to debunk.”

Two British journalists, each with a cult following, separated in death by 75 years and a seemingly impassable intellectual divide. One broadly forgotten by the culture but remembered with easy devotion and treasured by his fans, the other widely lauded, praised for his genius, but with a legacy yet to be determined.

May 29th was Chesterton’s birthday. I completely missed it, thereby proving that in the ranks of Chesterton fanatics, I am trudging along right at the back. But there I at least have the honour of being a rear guard. And in this capacity I feel compelled to respond to one deceased British journalist’s attack upon another.

Not that Chesterton needs defending. Of those introduced to GKC’s works, a minority is unimpressed. That’s fine. But few have the audacity to draw Chesterton down to their level, to examine the prodigy through their own cloudy lens, and to declare the result deficient. Chesterton fans will not be surprised: Hitchens showed as little appreciation for GKC’s thought as one might expect from a man steeped in Marxist, atheistic and hedonistic currents.

Any attempt to defend GKC is swiftly overtaken by the compelling desire to delve more deeply into his prose. A good defence becomes a better offence, and we find a host of loyal bloggers cheerfully demonstrating to the ghost of Hitchens passed that his dismissal of GKC as “deeply unserious and frivolous” is old hat. If Chesterton is not remembered widely, many of his critics are not remembered at all. A “Mr. McCabe” gave voice 106 years before Hitchens to the charge that Chesterton was a man of cheap paradox and frivolity:

“But how a serious social student can think of curing the thoughtlessness of our generation by strained paradoxes; of giving people a sane grasp of social problems by literary sleight-of-hand; of settling important questions by a reckless shower of rocket-metaphors and inaccurate `facts,' and the substitution of imagination for judgment, I cannot see."

Back in 1905 Chesterton rebutted both McCabe and Hitchens:

“Mr. McCabe thinks that I am not serious but only funny, because Mr. McCabe thinks that funny is the opposite of serious. Funny is the opposite of not funny, and of nothing else.”

In another volume he apologised for the seriousness of his writings:

“Their chief vice is that so many of them are very serious; because I had no time to make them flippant. It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous.”

The Chesterton fan gets it. He gets that his hero is not merely heaping frivolity on frivolity, making light of his opponents’ accusations. Every one of his lines points toward a single inexhaustible understanding of the truth. The truth is a medicine that transforms us. Nothing could be more serious than such a resolute search, and that is why the truth shines through Chesterton’s work.

“The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that…

"The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid.”

Was GKC “sinister?

But Hitchens’ article was not simply a doomed repetition of tattered criticisms. He may be the first person to describe G.K. Chesterton as ‘sinister’, and he further condemned Chesterton’s work as a “minor but still important failure to meet a distinct moral challenge,” the rise of Nazism. In the context of “the Hitler-Vatican Concordat” he opined that “Harsher but correct would be the verdict that his [Chesterton’s] Catholicism made him morally frivolous about Hitlerism.”

Of Hitler, Chesterton had comparatively little to say. Is this surprising? Perhaps not, considering that GKC died in June 1936, less than four years after Hitler became Chancellor, and less than two years after the establishment of his dictatorship. To put this in context, Winston Churchill began his vocal opposition to German rearmament in 1932.

As early as 1933 Chesterton foresaw war with Germany:

“We are already drifting horribly near to a New War, which will probably start on the Polish Border. The Young Men have had nineteen years in which to learn how to avoid it. I wonder whether they do know much more about how to avoid it than the despised and drivelling Old Men of 1914.

“How many of the Young Men, for instance, have made the smallest attempt to understand Poland? How many would have anything to say to Hitler, to dissuade him from setting all Christendom aflame by a raid on Poland? Or have the Young Men been thinking of nothing since 1914 except the senile depravity of the Old Men of that date?”

He condemned the violence of Hitler’s regime as early as 1934:

“If we really wish to make vivid the horrors of destruction and mere disciplined murder, we must see them more simply as attacks on the hearth and the human family; and feel about Hitler as men felt about Herod.”

And by 1935 he was waxing eloquent in typical Chesterton style on the precise evils of the Nazi regime:

“Hitler's way of defending the independence of the family is to make every family dependent on him and his semi-Socialist State; and to preserve the authority of parents by authoritatively telling all the parents what to do… In other words, he appears to interfere with family life more even than the Bolshevists do; and to do it in the name of the sacredness of the family.”

He even provided, ahead of schedule, a response to Hitchens’ invocation of theReichskonkordat:

“It will be noted that the Church generally had a Concordat with her enemies rather than her friends. There was a dispute with Napoleon and a Concordat with Napoleon: a dispute with Mussolini and a Concordat with Mussolini; a dispute with Hitler and a Concordat with Hitler.”

But there is no need to apologise for Chesterton. Hitchens got it completely wrong. Nazism was not, for someone of Chesterton’s era, a “distinct moral challenge”. It was an extension of an earlier ‘moral challenge’: Prussia.

We have the advantage of being able to judge our ancestors. But hindsight can sometimes hide as much as it reveals. For although we now regard Nazism, quite rightly, as being close to the epitome of human evil, the evils of Imperial Germany have faded. Yet nearly everything Chesterton had to say in precise and scathing criticism of Prussia, may be applied with equal vigour to its Nazi progeny. GKC was against Nazism before it even existed.

Historians sometimes describe the two World Wars as a single war with a half-time break. Chesterton drew the link back further to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. He analysed the ideology of the Prussian state and distilled its errors into three main faults:

“A failure in honour which almost amounts to a failure in memory: an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that the other party is an ego; and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud.”

To Prussia Chesterton attributed the Realpolitik that manifested itself in the “militant hostility to certain necessary human ideas [such as] the vow or the contract, which Prussian intellectualism would destroy.” Decrying this ‘failure of honour’ might seem naïve to a modern audience, for whom Realpolitik is really just politics. But Germany instantiated Realpolitik with its invasion of Belgium in World War One in contravention of the Treaty of London, which had guaranteed Belgian neutrality. Indeed, the Prussians were so antagonistic to their treaty obligations that the German Chancellor wondered why Britain would go to war over a "mere scrap of paper".

In such an historical context it is even more surprising that experienced statesmen put their trust in Hitler and a similar agreement made in Munich in 1938, with Hitler happily agreeing to go no further than Czechoslovakia. Chesterton’s Prussian analysis is equally pertinent in both cases:

“The Prussians had made a new discovery in international politics: that it may often be convenient to make a promise; and yet curiously inconvenient to keep it. […]That is the importance of the German Chancellor's phrase. He did not allege some special excuse in the case of Belgium, which might make it seem an exception that proved the rule. He distinctly argued, as on a principle applicable to other cases, that victory was a necessity and honour was a scrap of paper.”

Think of Nazi Germany as simply an extension of Prussia and Chesterton’s analysis approaches clairvoyance. On the topic of Prussian egomania, Chesterton wrote that:

“it is the point about the Prussian that with him nothing is mutual. The definition of the true savage does not concern itself even with how much more he hurts strangers or captives than do the other tribes of men. The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he hurts you; and howls when you hurt him. This extraordinary inequality in the mind is in every act and word that comes from Berlin.”

To demonstrate this egomania, Chesterton drew on a few unusual examples.  He pointed to a phenomenon, in which men had – as a variation on the theme of duelling for honour – invented “the one-sided duel.”

“I mean the idea that there is some sort of dignity in drawing the sword upon a man who has not got a sword; a waiter, or a shop assistant, or even a schoolboy. One of the officers of the Kaiser in the affair at Saberne was found industriously hacking at a cripple. In all these matters I would avoid sentiment. We must not lose our tempers at the mere cruelty of the thing; but pursue the strict psychological distinction. Others besides German soldiers have slain the defenceless, for loot or lust or private malice, like any other murderer. The point is that nowhere else but in Prussian Germany is any theory of honour mixed up with such things; any more than with poisoning or picking pockets. No French, English, Italian or American gentleman would think he had in some way cleared his own character by sticking his sabre through some ridiculous greengrocer who had nothing in his hand but a cucumber. It would seem as if the word which is translated from the German as ‘honour,’ must really mean something quite different in German. It seems to mean something more like what we should call ‘prestige’."

What matters is not so much the examples, but Chesterton’s diagnosis of the “political pessimism and cynicism” of the Prussian state. He observed that Prussians really were men of “blood and iron” with all the disadvantages that incurred. The progressive scientific regime of Prussia was as cold and dead as iron.

“In other words, the Prussian Empire, with all its perfections and efficiencies, has one notable defect—that it is a dead thing. It does not draw its life from any primary human religion or poetry; it does not grow again from within. And being a dead thing, it suffers also from having no nerves to give warning or reaction; it reads no danger signals; it has no premonitions; about its own spiritual doom its sentinels are deaf and all its spies are blind.”

Prussia was once considered a leader in progressive fields such as eugenics and the efficient organisation of the state. The First World War dampened that admiration:

“Scientific officialism and organization in the State which had specialized in them, had gone to war with the older culture of Christendom... As the war advanced from poison gas to piracy against neutrals, it grew more and more plain that the scientifically organized State was not increasing in popularity. Whatever happened, no Englishmen would ever again go nosing round the stinks of that low laboratory. So I thought all I had written irrelevant, and put it out of my mind.”

But the popularity of these ideas resurfaced in the inter-war years:

“I am greatly grieved to say that it is not irrelevant. It has gradually grown apparent, to my astounded gaze, that the ruling classes in England are still proceeding on the assumption that Prussia is a pattern for the whole world.”

As strange as it might seem to us, Chesterton was relentless in his criticism. He referred unashamedly to Prussian principles and national character as barbarism. He said comparatively little about Hitler, because he had said so much about Prussia. He saw the nature of the evil in his own day with a clarity and prescience that modern writers should envy.

Chesterton’s friend and colleague Hillaire Belloc once wrote a cutting poem called ‘Lines to a Don’, defending GKC against the criticisms of a forgotten academic: “Remote and ineffectual Don / That dared attack my Chesterton.” Modern fans of the great British journalist are no less loyal or protective of “the Apostle of Common Sense”. But it is the worth of his work that inspires this love and loyalty to the man despite the human failings from which none of us are immune. As for Hitchens, a true fan will smile or shrug his shoulders or feel a touch of pity for a critic who totally missed the point.

Take this as a reminder to go and read some more.


Zac Alstin works at the Southern Cross Bioethics Institute in Adelaide, South Australia. 
From MercatorNet.

An Ad and Its Critics

Dustin Siggins notes at First Things:  

In a recent political ad, Catholics Called to Witness (CC2W) tells Catholics to look at all of the issues facing America this November (including energy, jobs and the economy). Among these issues are gay marriage, abortion, and religious freedom/the contraceptive mandate. Near its end, the ad (which has gone viral in the nearly three months it’s been out) says votes related to these three latter issues “will affect the future–and be recorded in eternity.”

Personally, I thought the ad was right on point–abortion and the contraceptive/sterilization/abortifacient mandate are, in my opinion, two critical political issues this fall for any Catholic in good standing with the Church. However, this ad naturally drew controversy. MORE here.

I hadn't even realized the ad was controversial.  It seemed to me to be pointing out to Catholics the unquestionable facts that (according to Catholic teaching, or any remotely orthodox Christian teaching):

 1) some politically disputed matters involve prudential judgment on which Christians in good conscience can disagree (e.g., how, rather than whether, to help the poor or heal the sick), while others are non-negotiable (e.g., murder, abortion) because they involve intrinsically evil acts that are never justified; and

2) we are all accountable before God for the actions we take, including those in the political realm.  If you are a Catholic politician and publicly support abortion or assisted suicide or same-sex "marriage," however you rationalize that support, you are putting your immortal soul in peril.

I just thought the ad was optimistic in thinking that liberal-secularized Catholics could be reached by such a reminder, just because they may be too far gone, too secularized, and badly or weakly catechized in the first place.  

But who knows, maybe it will help some.  Most, however, seem to adhere in practice to the view that religion doesn't matter, but is just a personal idiosyncrasy.  In the words I put in Lucifer's mouth in relation to Gary Gutting, "In religion you can say whatever you like, as long as you do not claim that it is true.  The only heresy is orthodoxy."

Rethinking Child Poverty

The Centre for Social Justice, an independent British think tank, has published a new report that calls for a radical rethinking of the UK government's relative income inequality approach to measuring and reducing poverty.  The measure, introduced by the previous Labour government and perpetuated by the current Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government, has proved expensive and ineffective, the report argues, because it is is misconceived.


Crude and flawed yardsticks for measuring child poverty should be scrapped and replaced with a range of new indicators reflecting the true causes of deprivation, according to the leading think-tank.


The Centre for Social Justice condemns the existing official formula as arbitrary and faulty and says that it conveys almost nothing about the suffocating nature of genuine hardship.


Christian Guy, Managing Director of the CSJ, said: “Labour's misguided child poverty targets have wasted over £150 billion pounds of taxpayers' money. By not reforming this misfiring system, the Coalition risks doing nothing to tackle child poverty.


“It must start showing that it is serious about reducing real deprivation.  Poverty is about more than money - it is about the family breakdown, addiction, debt-traps, and failing schools that blight the lives of our children.”


The current formula, based mainly on income inequality targets, has led to narrow and expensive policy responses, costing taxpayers at least £150 billion from 2004 to 2010.


In a new report, the CSJ calls for a complete overhaul of the system, in which the accent would be on measuring the underlying causes of blighted young lives, such as family breakdown, welfare dependency and educational failure, rather than the symptoms of low relative income.


The current system, enshrined in Labour's 2010 Child Poverty Act, classifies a child as poor if he or she is brought up in a family with an income below 60 per cent of median household income.


The ‘relative’ yardstick takes no account of the true, underlying causes of a deprived upbringing, for instance whether a child has the love and care of two parents, whether he or she has the role model of adults who go out to work for a living, or whether drug or alcohol addiction scars family life.

And because the measure is relative (and because income differences are inevitable in a free society), lofty promises, such as Labour's commitment to eliminate child poverty by 2020, are by definition practically unachievable.


The 60 per cent target also has perverse effects. It encourages governments to throw ever-increasing amounts of money at the problem in the forlorn belief that cash alone can solve the problem.


Between 2004 and 2010, the Government spent £150 billion on tax credits designed to lift individuals to just above the 60 per cent poverty line. Yet the number of children classified as living in poverty hardly moved. The total number declined marginally from 2.7 million in 2004/05 to 2.6 million in 2009/10, but the percentage remained the same at 21 per cent.


The CSJ report declares: “The first methodological flaw of the Government's central measure of poverty is that it is defined in relative terms. The result of this is that the poor will always exist statistically, as it is inevitable that some in society will have less than others.


“However, simply having less money than others does not necessarily render an individual to be in poverty. The measure therefore confuses poverty with income inequality. The commitment to eradicating child poverty by 2020 is thus almost impossible to achieve on the basis of a relative measure.


“What's more, on the basis of this measure, a household can be moved into or out of poverty without any change in their circumstances. For example, in a recession, as median incomes fall, so does the poverty line. This means that many households who were previously in poverty are now out of poverty (above the new, lower poverty line).


“Similarly, and somewhat bizarrely, an increase in the size of pensions will lift the median income and thereby push more children below this arbitrary poverty line.


“Measuring poverty in this way also fails to distinguish between those furthest away from the poverty line and those just below. As a result, the depth of poverty is not fully realised and improvements in living standards which raise children from far below the poverty line to just below are not captured.


“However, our main concern is that the exclusive use of an arbitrary line to measure child poverty tells us almost nothing about the real issues blighting the lives of the most disadvantaged.


“This spreadsheet-driven approach is relatively simple to calculate and provides figures which are convenient for politicians and the media to use.


“Yet we know from our own extensive research as well as the research of others that the key drivers of poverty are family breakdown, educational failure, economic dependency and worklessness, addiction and serious personal debt.

“It is these drivers which any serious attempt to tackle poverty must address, and so in turn any effort to accurately measure levels of poverty must assess the prevalence of these drivers.”


The CSJ suggests a new approach to computing poverty levels, taking into account a far wider range of variables, reflecting quality of life as well as quantity of income.


These include sources of income because income earned through work promotes the self-reliance and self-respect of families.


Equally, family consumption rather than income might be a better indicator of poverty levels.


Other factors that should be taken into account include the ability to save, the quality of a child’s parenting, family stability because children from broken homes are twice as likely to suffer behavioural problems than those from intact families, levels of worklessness in households because children tend to repeat the work habits of their parents, access to good schools, truancy rates, drug and alcohol addiction and levels of household debt.


Mr Guy added: “The CSJ strongly believes that any strategy to tackle poverty should focus on the root causes of deprivation and the social breakdown which fuels it, not the symptoms.


“Yet the way the previous Government conceptualised and sought to measure poverty is deeply flawed.


“The legacy of this is a narrow and one-dimensional Child Poverty Act which focuses solely on income and material deprivation. This is despite huge swathes of evidence to demonstrate that poverty is about far more than this.


“Poverty is not just about income, it is about family breakdown, educational failure, intergenerational worklessness, addiction, serious personal debt and poor mental health.


“It is absolutely vital that any serious measure of poverty reflects this. It is wholly unacceptable for such high and deep-seated levels of poverty to exist in the UK today. Such poverty devastates our communities and destroys the life chances of our children.


“We call on the Government to make a bold commitment to confronting this problem head-on. Transforming the way poverty is measured would be a crucial first step.


“We therefore urge the Government to review its Child Poverty Act in order to construct a measure of poverty which is fit for the 21st Century. It would be one of the most radical and commendable accomplishments of its period in office.”
____

A NOTE ABOUT THE CENTRE FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE


The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) is an independent think tank established in
2004 to put social justice at the heart of British politics.


In 2007 the CSJ published its landmark report, Breakthrough Britain. This publication, which set out 190 evidence-based policy recommendations to tackle poverty in Britain, transformed the social policy and political landscape and was awarded Publication of the Year by Prospect Magazine in 2008.


Since Breakthrough Britain the CSJ has published over 40 reports which have shaped government policy and influenced opposition parties. These have included the seminal papers Dying To Belong and Dynamic Benefits, which has led the Coalition Government’s welfare reforms.


The CSJ manages an Alliance of over 250 of the most effective grass roots, poverty-fighting organisations.