Russia: Sick and Dying

From MercatorNet's blog, Demography is Destiny 

Russia: Sick and Dying

Marcus Roberts | 23 Jul 2012 |  (3)

Today I want to share with you a review article by a Master of International Affairs Candidate at Columbia University, Alina Smyslova, who also happens to be Russian. The anguish felt by the writer as she surveys Russia’s demographic malaise is almost palpable. “Our dear Mother Russia is sick and dying” is how the article begins and there is little that follows that doesn’t back up that startling statement.  While I knew that Russia was suffering from a lack of births and even a surfeit of deaths to births in the last twenty years or so, I hadn’t realised just how unhealthy the population that has managed to be born and hasn’t died yet is. According to Smyslova:

“Only 30% of children born in Russia are healthy; 50% of newborns lack either iodine or calcium, the leading causes of brittle bones and mental retardation; seven in every ten newborns suffer from some kind of disorder; and one in twelve babies is born underweight.”

Furthermore, the chances of dying in childbirth are six times that for a German woman.

“Combined with the high chance of giving birth to an unhealthy child and the unstable finances of the majority of the population, it is no wonder the birth rate has decreased.”

Aside from the lack of healthy babies and the risk to expectant mothers, the picture is as bleak when we look at the prevalence of disease.  While 1.1% of the Russian population is living with HIV/AIDS and the number of tuberculosis cases in the 15 to 19 year old age group nearly quadrupled between 1989 and 2002 and

“…the death rate from cardiovascular disease is four times, and the death rate from accidents, injuries, homicides, suicides, and other “external causes,” is five times higher than that of the European Union.”

Part (a large part) of the problem can be laid at the door of alcohol and alcoholism.  Alcoholism and alcohol dependency are significant factors in two-thirds of deaths for men under the age of 55 in Russia, a high amount considering that the average Russian man only lives to be 61.5 years old.

What does this all mean for the future of mother Russia?  According to Smyslova, the health crisis in Russia affects the economy in three ways: it decreases per capita output (as more people are more sick more often) and decreases consumer spending as people save more or spend on medicine and medical care instead. Secondly, a high death rate makes it unprofitable to invest in higher education and additional training for the workforce.  Finally, a declining population can affect offshore investment decisions.  As Deutsche Bank economist Markus Jaeger explained:

“Where will the investor choose to invest?  In India or China, where the income per capita grows together with the population or in Russia, where the income per capita is growing, but the consumer market is shrinking?”

Furthermore, the Russian military will also be affected by the lack of educated conscripts and recruits:

“The historically great Russian military will see a significant decrease in healthy, educated, and competent conscripts to fulfil the ambitious goals of Putin and his cabinet. In 2004, only 43% of those joining the navy finished high school and only 13% received higher education degrees.18 While the rest of the world is relying on more technologically advanced and intelligence focused security measures, Russian army will grow weaker as less and less of those enrolled are skilful enough to learn to operate the advanced computers, weapons, and other technologies necessary to protect the country in an ever advancing world.”

Unless Russia confronts its high mortality rate and low birth rate and horrendous health statistics, it will slowly slip further and further behind.  In the future we may be forced to speak of the “BIC” rather than the “BRIC” economies and watch as Russia slowly decays.

How the White House's Promotion of Sexual Expressionism Hurts Women

Helen Alvaré argues in this new piece for Public Discourse that the White House's promotion of an ideology she calls sexualityism - an inelegant neologism to which I prefer the term she also uses, sexual expressionism - not only tramples on religious liberty.  It also - and this is the burden of the essay - is contrary to women's interests and contributes to their immiseration.  

The White House and Sexualityism

by Helen Alvaré

July 16, 2012

Against what social science tells us about human happiness, the government is promoting sexualityism—a commitment to uncommitted, unencumbered, inconsequential sex—as the answer.

Professor Gerry Bradley made a spot-on observation here at Public Discourse that one of the underlying forces driving the HHS abortion, contraception, and sterilization mandate is the current federal ideology of “equal sexual liberty,” embracing the notion that “women will and should have lots more sexual intercourse than they have interest in conceiving children. … [that] sexual license should never impede a woman’s lifestyle, at least no more than it does a man’s.” Elsewhere, I have identified such a position as “sexual expressionism” or “sexualityism” and have defined it to include also the suggestion that sex should not only be free of the slightest reflection on its link with procreation, but also free of commitment, or even the real possibility of a relationship between the man and the woman involved.

In this essay, I propose to examine this ideology, not only from a woman’s perspective, but also from the best scientific evidence we can currently lay our hands on. I will suggest that the insidious “twofer” the White House is currently proposing—trampling religious freedom in order to promote sexualityism—is even worse than doing the latter alone.  READ THE WHOLE ESSAY AT PUBLIC DISCOURSE

Obama's Kulturkampf in Light of Bismarck's

The Obama Administration's "war" (as HHS Secretary Sebelius calls it) against the Catholic Church has a precedent in the struggle of Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck against the Church in Germany.  The differences are clear, but there are similarities.  

One not mentioned here is the talk of setting up a rival American Catholic Church, analogous to the Old Catholic Church supported by the state in Bismarck's Germany.  Such a schismatic organization, if it materialized, would have money and the support, direct or indirect, of the liberal media, some (many?) leading liberal Catholics of the National Catholic Reporter-Georgetown-Boston College stripe, and the Obama Administration.  The Catholic Church, whether by fines (oops, taxes), court rulings, or diocesan measures to conserve what was left of its assets by closing charities, hospitals, schools, and colleges, would lose much of its property and its religious obligation to serve and educate, regardless of the faith of the sick, children, prisoners, the homeless, and the poor would be crippled.  All this happened in Bismarck's Germany.

But as Cook notes, repression, far from crippling the Church, united it.

Bismarck lost his Kulturkampf.  But the struggle to subordinate the Church and all else to the German State did not disappear.  It took a more sinister and terrible form in the next century.  READ ON!

Michael Cook | Tuesday, 3 July 2012

A Kulturkampf primer

The best-known culture war was fought in 19th Century Germany, pitting Prussia's Iron Chancellor against the Catholic Church. The Iron Chancellor lost.

Now that the Affordable Care Act has survived its Supreme Court challenge, there comes the fight over its implementation. Moral considerations rank high on the list of casus belli for Catholics and other religious groups. They fear that the Act will force them to pay for procedures which they abhor, like the morning-after pill, abortion, and sterilisation. The price of resistance could be “institutional martyrdom”, according to University of Notre Dame law professor Gerard Bradley.

He is not alone in his forebodings. The Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, has said that “The long-term effect is that the Catholic Church will be stripped of the institutions that are her instruments for public service. We will lose hospitals, we will lose universities.”

Is their alarm justified? Or is all this just huffing and puffing by embittered losers? Only time will tell, but there are precedents for a war between the Catholic Church and a democratic government. The paradigm case is the Kulturkampf – the culture war – waged by the Iron Chancellor of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck, in the 1870s. The differences are obvious -- President Obama does not make a habit of wearing spiked Prussian helmets -- but there are thought-provoking parallels as well.

Throughout the 19th century Church and State were often at loggerheads, even in European countries with centuries of Catholic tradition behind them. Enlightenment progressives everywhere favoured a radically secularised society in which religion played only a marginal role. In Prussia, the forerunner state to modern Germany, this problem burst a gasket in 1871.

Bismarck’s life’s work was the unification, through conquest and treaty, of an archipelago of German-speaking states (with the conspicuous exception of Austria). In 1870 Prussia humiliated France in the Franco-German War. Bismarck’s army took Emperor Napoleon III prisoner and starved Paris into submission. The Prussians did a triumphal march through the streets of Paris. Bismarck was on a roll. In 1871 the hold-out states of southern Germany joined a Prussian-led federation with Kaiser Wilhelm I as head of state. In many ways this prosperous new country was authoritarian, but it was also a democracy with active political parties.

Even in the flush of triumph, however, the master politician saw problems ahead. As Prussia expanded and became Germany, it lost its original character – a highly-centralised, largely Protestant state. Catholics – mostly in the Rhineland, southern Germany and in the Polish-speaking East – now constituted about a third of the new nation. Bismarck believed that he needed to press hard for unity of language, religion and education, drawing all of society under government control.

In this, he was supported by liberals who detested the Catholic Church as the archetypal foe of progress. It was the famous scientist and social reformer Rudolph Virchow who gave Bismarck’s “reforms” the name Kulturkampf. He praised them as “a great struggle in the interest of humanity" which would eliminate medieval traditionalism, obscurantism, and authoritarianism.

The flavour of the times can be tasted in these words from a Prussian politician in 1875. To “enthusiastic cheers”, he said: “Gentlemen, anyone who believes in our day and age that he must carry his religion around with him; anyone who feels obliged to wear a particular dress, who swears grotesque vows, who bands together in herds, and who, when all is said and done, swears unconditional loyalty to Rome, the bitterest enemy of our young German and Prussian glory – such people can have no place in our state. That is why I say: away with them as soon as possible!”

In painting the Church as an anachronism, Exhibit A was Pius IX, who was Pope throughout most of the Kulturkampf era. Pius did not take the progressive assault on European Catholicism lying down. In 1864 he published the Syllabus, a denunciation of the errors of modern thought, and in 1870 the First Vatican Council proclaimed papal infallibility. Nowadays most people understand that the Pope’s claim to infallibility extends only to Christian faith and morals, but in those feverishly anti-clerical and anti-Catholic times, infallibility was interpreted as an attack on the principle of secular government. Pius IX’s stand appeared to weaken his authority among German Catholics, as well. A number of intellectuals had rejected Papal infallibility and formed the Old Catholic Church, with its own hierarchy and priests. To Bismarck, the troubled reign of Pius IX seemed like a golden moment to assert control.

In July 1871 the assault began with the abolition of the Catholic bureau of worship and control of government-Church relations was handed over to Protestant bureaucrats. In November Bismarck passed the Kanzelparagraph (the Pulpit Law) which severely penalised criticism of the government by the clergy. In March 1872, all schools were placed under government control. In July 1872 the Jesuits (and later other religious orders) were expelled or interned. In December 1872 he broke off diplomatic relations with the Vatican.

The pressure on Catholics intensified in May 1873 with the so-called May Laws (or Falk Laws). These were four drastic measures designed to crush the hierarchy and subject the Church totally to government control. At the same time, Bismarck fostered relations with the Old Catholics and tried to establish them as an alternative to the Catholic hierarchy.

In 1875 the fight intensified. A “Breadbasket Bill” was passed which suspended all grants to dioceses if the clergy had not complied with the new laws. All religious orders were dissolved, except socially useful ones involved in nursing and social work. Civil marriage was made obligatory. All Church property was confiscated and ownership was transferred to parish laymen acting as trustees.

By 1878 the Catholic Church appeared to be in a sorry state. Most of its bishops were in exile; thousands of parishes had no priest. It had lost most of its property and power. But in fact Bismarck’s Kulturkampf had run out of steam and most of his measures were about to be dismantled.

Repression, far from crippling the Church, had united it. Although Papal infallibility had not been popular with many German Catholics, nearly all of them closed ranks and presented a united front. In 1870 Catholics formed the Centre Party under the leadership first of Hermann von Mallinckrodt and then of Ludwig Windthorst, two politicians who were remarkable for their eloquence and shrewdness. Their party grew rapidly into a major political force. When Bismarck lost the support of his anti-Catholic political allies, a coalition of National Liberals and Conservatives, he realised that he needed to be reconciled with the Centre. Furthermore, a Marxist-inspired party, the Social Democrats, was also rising rapidly. In Bismarck’s eyes, Catholics were far more congenial than socialists. Nor did Catholics resort to violent resistance – although a Catholic did try to assassinate Bismarck in 1874, an event which just gave him an excuse for more repressive measures.

Pius IX was succeeded as Pope in 1878 by Leo XIII, who took a far more conciliatory line. Bit by bit the May Laws were dismantled. Diplomatic ties with the Vatican were resumed in 1882. By 1890, most of the anti-Catholic legislation was reversed – although it was not until 1917 that Jesuits were allowed to return.

In short, the Kulturkampf had failed miserably and in many ways, it had actually been counterproductive. Instead of uniting the new Germany, Bismarck’s policy had intensified bitter divisions, reduced the moral authority of the state and helped to promote socialism.

Are there any lessons in this history lesson for anxious Americans? MercatorNet consulted Ronald J. Ross, an emeritus professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, whose book The Failure of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf analyses this tumultuous era. “My sense is that the differences far outweigh any similarities,” he says. “Viewed from my vantage point, I see nothing comparable in the governmental intentions of the present day and those of Bismarck's Prussia or Imperial Germany back in the 19th Century. Certainly the kinds of sanctions deployed against the Church during the Kulturkampf are conspicuously absent in the present situation.”

However, in the virulence of the debate, says Professor Ross, there are some similarities. “The term [Kulturkampf] embodied all the confidence, optimism, and belief in progress so characteristic of liberal thinking during the 1860s and 1870s. Without the encouragement and aid of liberals like Virchow, other interest groups, and constituencies, which in turn were energized and emboldened by Bismarck's endorsement of their cause, it is difficult to see how the Kulturkampf could have descended to the levels of loathing it did, dividing the country into two mutually uncomprehending, uncompromising universes. It is here, in this limited sense, with the strident tone of debate, that I can see something of a similarity between the Kulturkampf and the present situation.”

Perhaps the most useful lessons are the most obvious ones. First, it can happen here. Although Prussia was an authoritarian society without a bill of rights, it was not a dictatorship. Harsh restrictions on Catholics were passed democratically after debates in a parliament. Prussia’s progressive intellectual elite supported something which was clearly unjust: suppression of freedom of religion in the name of protecting freedom of thought.

Second, democracy works slowly, but it works. German Catholics worked within the political process to reverse Bismarck’s reforms. In this they found allies amongst Prussian Protestants who objected to state control of religious affairs. With time Bismarck’s strategy for national unity, or rather national uniformity, ran out of steam.

Third, so what if there is institutional martyrdom? Catholics in Prussia lost everything. A few years later they got it back. And what they had lost in property they gained in solidarity.

Finally, the resilience of the Catholic Church should not be underestimated. In 1870 the Church had just lost the Papal States and Pius IX was nursing his wounds behind the walls of the Vatican. Intellectually, the Church's prestige seemed to have hit rock-bottom. The yellow press was full of stories about sexual abuse by priests and depravity in convents. Catholicism seemed like a dinosaur thrashing in its death throes. Yet, within a couple of decades, the picture was quite different. 

Unhappily for the historian, there was no tidy, fairy-tale ending to the Kulturkampf. But as everyone knows, after the era of repression had faded, Germany entered dark new tunnels of terror and hatred. Did the Iron Chancellor’s attempt to crush religious freedom pave the path to that?

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet, where this article was first published under a Creative Commons license. 

Retrieved July 5, 2012 from http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/a_kulturkampf_primer

Sigrid Undset and the Fate of Europe

Paul Adams

I am reading Sigrid Undset’s Stages on the Road, a collection of essays written in the years after she won the Nobel Prize for literature, published in English in 1934, and now reissued with an introduction by Elizabeth Scalia.  As the new edition’s blurb says, it is a “fascinating collection of of saints’ lives, a prophetic critique of modernity, and a surprisingly contemporary take on being Catholic--in particular a Catholic woman--in a sometimes hostile secular world.”  It is also - strikingly in these days of religious indifferentism, casual heresy, and lowest-common-denominator ecumenism - a powerful critique of Protestantism, its history and continuing legacy in Europe. 

Undset wrote as a Catholic convert, raised by atheists, in a country, Norway, then and now every bit as hostile to the Catholic faith as England.  (Today there are more Muslims than Catholics in Norway.)  In her preface to the English edition, Undset makes two points about an ancient Christian practice that Protestantism abandoned, the veneration of saints.  She herself produced some of the finest writings on saints, including a vivid, beautifully written biography of Catherine of Siena and the essays in this book.

First, Undset notes that “the cult of saints excludes the cult of success--the veneration of those people who have got on well in this world, the snobbish admiration of wealth and fame” (p. xii).  She points out that the heresy so much associated with the Protestant ethic - what Undset calls the “religious business instinct” that attributes worldly success, personal or national, to divine favor and poverty or disaster to God’s punishment of vice - is opposed by the Church in her veneration of saints.  They were martyrs or exemplars of heroic virtue in life, but very few were successful in worldly terms.

The second point relates to the limited effectiveness of the threat of Hell in bringing about justice and charity on earth.  

Even in those times when most men firmly believed in Heaven and Hell there were always plenty of them who preferred to brave the threat of Hell rather than renounce the joys of self-worship, the gratification of hatred and power, or subordinate themselvesto a force to which their whole ego was antagonistic (p. xiii).

It seems that there are two ways of dealing with this problem, both of which become evident in Protestant Christianity.  One is to intensify fire-and-brimstone preaching, to put the fear of Hell into men’s hearts; the other is denial (outright denial of Hell’s existence or its compatibility with the existence of a loving God, or a psychological denial that represses consciousness of what is at stake).  These find expression in today’s fundamentalist and liberal tendencies respectively.  Undset points to the saints and their veneration by the Church as providing a different perspective:

The position is this, that the Christian Church can never have the right to suppress what her Founder has said about eternal perdition.  But it is equally certain that what the Church has achieved has not been achieved by frightened instruments who shrank in slavish terror before the wrath of a cruel God.  She has accomplished it through her saints who had the heroic love of God--of the Uncreated Creator of the created world, in which the fight is for or against God.  The sectarian animosity against the cult of saints is one of the reasons which have made it possible to represent Christianity as a religion of fear, not of heroism (p. xiii).

The excellent, thorough, and not-to-be-missed review of Stages of the Road by Webster Bull at his blog site, Witness, emphasizes several other telling points in what amounts to a devastating critique of the Reformation.  That catastrophe, Undset argues, “was no reformation of the Church but a new formation, which was in keeping with the taste and feelings of the rising middle class. It needed vast and unscrupulous propaganda before it could make any pretense of being an ‘improvement’ of the Church . . . ”

In response to Protestant and secularist criticisms of the Church’s attitude to women, Undset claims that Catholic women traditionally have been given “a freedom from interference which would be inconceivable in a society molded by Lutheranism or Calvinism.”  Bull’s review echoes my experience growing up in an Anglican-secularist environment in England:

This struck a chord with me. As a convert from the Anglican Church, I never stop hearing about women in the priesthood. Yet as a young Episcopalian I never heard tales of a single notable Anglican woman, the way a young Catholic hears tell of Mary, Margaret, Monica, Catherine, Teresa, Thérèse, and their saintly sisters. “So long as Catholicism was the dominating element in the intellectual life of Europe,” Undset says, “a woman who really had a contribution to make to the spiritual life of her time was given an opportunity to do so.” St. Angela (1474–1540), a third-order Franciscan who founded the Ursulines as a company of virgins living outside any convent, was a stellar example. 

Then came the Reformation. “Where the culture of a country was molded by Lutheranism or Calvinism,” Undset writes, “the women in the course of a few generations were brought up to be content with existing simply for the sake of the men.” Can I hear you say ouch?! Such a charge could not have gone down well in 1930s Norway, when Undset wrote it.

The essays, written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, have a strikingly contemporary and prophetic feel.  In the final essay, which addresses marriage and suicide, as Bull says, “she accuses Protestant churches of caving in to the middle-class mentality, which overlooks the gravity of taking one’s own life while condoning divorce. In both cases, only the Catholic Church has kept its eye on the prize: our eternal salvation.”

Undset warns her fellow Europeans that they cannot expect to throw aside Catholicism while keeping its many benefits:

We must try to make this clear to ourselves—we have no right to assume that any part of European tradition, cultural values, moral ideas, emotional wealth, which has its origin in the dogmatically defined Christianity of the Catholic Church, will continue to live a ‘natural’ life, if the people of Europe reject Christianity and refuse to accept God’s supernatural grace. One might just as well believe that a tree whose roots were severed should continue to bear leaves and blossoms and fruit.

As Bull’s review puts it, “Eighty years after these essays were written, Europe is suffering the consequences of its disavowal of the Catholic faith, just as Undset predicted.”

Assisted Suicide Coming to the UK?

From the MercatorNet site, Careful!

Don’t be fooled, it’s mainly about money

by Peter Saunders | 3 Jul 2012 | 

Today, according to the Sunday Times, Lord Falconer (pictured) will publish his new bill on assisted suicide. In line with the recommendations of his sham ‘Commission on Assisted Dying’ he will push for doctors being given the power to help mentally competent adults with less than one year to live to kill themselves. 

There has been surprisingly little media coverage about this event, but Dignity in Dying (the former Voluntary Euthanasia Society) are planning a mass lobby on Parliament tomorrow to launch an ‘enquiry’ into this new bill which they hope will be debated in the New Year.

Over the last six years there have been three failed attempts to legalise assisted suicide in Britain since 2006 all of which have failed due to concerns about public safety.

An article in the Huffington Post this morning should heighten these concerns.

It gives an account of the deaths of the author’s father and a family pet, drawing similarities and effectively arguing for the legal right ‘to put one’s dad down’. But the most worrying paragraphs are the two about ‘the cost of keeping people alive’ which read as follows:

'In the United Kingdom, in the past 20 years the number of people over 85 has doubled - a total that could double again by 2033. Long term care costs for Britain's growing elderly population has increased 67% between 2007 and 2009, and could cost up to £106 billion a year, equivalent to paying for a second NHS, according to Henry Featherstone, Head of Policy Exchange's Health and Social Care Unit.

Most experts believe that technological change in medicine is the driving force behind the long-term rise of health care spending. However, if one analyses health care expenditures, over half of health care expenditure in both the UK and the USA are spent on patients who die within one year. It is unclear just how much is being spent for services that are not only unnecessary but unwanted. What needs to be analysed is who is benefiting from the billions being spent on health care for people who are being assisted to live against their wishes.' 

At a time of economic recession and shrinking health budgets we are going to hear more and more demands for euthanasia based on economic grounds.

Of course they will always be carefully clothed in the language of autonomy and compassion subtly disguising the fact that there are mainly families and politicians who have a lot to gain financially if those whose lives are judged to be worthless can be ‘mercifully released’.

As I have argued before on this blog there are four ingredients for a holocaust – public opinion in favour, economic pressure, a handful of willing doctors and a law allowing it.

The only one we don’t have in Britain is the last. If we don’t keep it that way we run the very real risk that the generation which killed its children (7 million of them) by abortion will in turn be killed by its children through euthanasia.

Don’t be deceived by talk of so-called ‘robust safeguards’ – that this is only for the mentally competent, only for adults, only for the terminally ill.

Those scenarios are frightening enough. But they are only the beginning. We have 15-20 Britons going to the Dignitas facility in Switzerland each year to kill themselves currently. But with an Oregon or Dutch law we would have 1,200 or 13,000 deaths annually respectively. And given the level of prejudice I this country that already exists towards the elderly it could be many more.

Let’s resist any further erosion of the law.

Dr Peter Saunders is a former general surgeon and CEO of Christian Medical Fellowship, a UK-based organisation with 4,500 UK doctors and 1,000 medical students as members. This article has been cross-posted from his blog, Christian Medical Comment

Fr. Barron on Ross Douthat's "Bad Religion"

Paul Adams

A good discussion of a mostly good book.  But the criticism of George W. Bush and the conflation of his foreign policy with Providence needs to be balanced with a critique of the ludicrous messianism associated with the cult of Obama in 2008, which is still not entirely dead - see the embarrassing quotes from normally sane people assembled by the site that asks, Is Barack Obama the Messiah?  Bush's military adventures need to be balanced with Obama's.

Bush made possible withdrawal from Iraq by means of a successful "surge" that was much criticized at the time, by Obama among others.  Obama copied this surge strategy in Afghanistan despite warnings, from his vice-president among others, that the cases were not equivalent and it would not work.  He makes extensive, legally and morally dubious use of predator drones to assassinate people in other countries.  He led the U.S. into playing a major military role in the attack on Libya.  (For a consistent anti-interventionism, opposed as much to Republican hawks as to liberal imperialism, think of Ron Paul or The American Conservative.  We forget that throughout the last century it was liberal Democrats who led the U.S. into every war, just and unjust.  The neoconservative approach to foreign policy is a continuation of the liberal Democrat internationalist hawkishness associated with Scoop Jackson.)

Nationalism has been a deadly heresy when entangled with religion, as in the Reformation and Thirty Years War.  The American form includes the admixture of utopianism that Fr. Barron describes, a tendency to impose our will on others for their good rather than just ours in the belief that doing so will make the world a better place.  This is the Wilsonianism that led not to a program of acquiring colonies in the old imperialist vein from Greece and Rome to the British, French, and Dutch empires of the nineteenth century. but to the League of Nations.  It is a pious do-gooding form of liberal-Christian imperialism captured wonderfully in the character of the American business leader Charles Gould in Joseph Conrad's great novel, Nostromo.  

But in addition to the important distinction made by internationalist marxists between the nationalism of the oppressor and the nationalism of the oppressed - subject for another post - there is also the need to distinguish a proper patriotism from its near and far enemies, to use Buddhist terms.  That is, patriotism, rightly understood, is as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, a central moral virtue.  It involves special affection for one's own country, a sense of personal identification with the country, special concern for the well-being of the country and a willingness to sacrifice to promote the country's good the love of one's own country.  (For more on this question, see MacIntyre's (1984) Lindley Lecture, "Is Patriotism a Virtue?" and the entry, with references and links, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Patriotism.

Like other virtues, patriotism is a golden mean between two extremes.  One is the heresy to which Douthat and Barron point, conflating the good of one's country with Divine Will or Destiny.  The other, much more common among liberal elites and in the academy, is a kind of cultural self-abasement or self-loathing.  In the name of some utopian cosmopolitan moral high ground, it rejects love of country altogether and tends to support or identify with or at least excuse those who, for whatever reasons, hate the U.S.  This kind of anti-patriotism is also common in Europe, though less directed at one's own country than taking the form of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.


Recognition of the importance of the transcendent to the American Founders, of acknowledgment of the Creator in the declaration - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" - does not entail a belief in Manifest Destiny or an immanentizing of the Eschaton in the form the United States as shining city on a hill.  It is not nationalism as heresy though the heretical tendency was present from early on and persists today.

It does, however, imply recognition of John Adams's point about the limits of even the best constitution:

We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Douthat's book is a sweeping argument full of insights and a brilliant diagnosis of the heresies in American religion (and "not-religion-but-spirituality").  I think it is largely right but it has some serious blind spots that are revealed when journalistic put-downs substitute for serious and fair-minded analysis.

The problems with Douthat's book are most evident in his grossly unfair treatment of Michael Novak, whom he includes  in a chapter on praying and growing rich and who also has written much on the importance of the American Founding and its principles.  Novak offers no nostrums for getting rich.  He is concerned with economic development and acknowledges that capitalism has lifted more of humanity out of poverty and done more to enlarge human freedom than all previous systems put together.  Novak's concern is with reconciling a Catholicism that was historically anti-capitalist and anti-liberal (for good historical reasons) with a liberal capitalist order that offered the best prospect in a fallen world for human creativity, freedom, and innovation.  He stands in the tradition of Tocqueville, Acton, and JP II, none of whom is concerned with making money, though all recognized the potential of liberal, democratic capitalism, rightly understood, to require and develop the virtues required for a vibrant, free society.

Douthat pretends to be anti-capitalist, quoting some prelate to the effect that capitalism is flawed or sinful in its DNA.  What does that even mean?  Economic systems don't have DNA, so it can't be taken literally.  And what other economic system is not the flawed expression of a fallen humanity or is less so than capitalism?  Slavery, feudalism, socialism?  Douthat ducks a serious argument with a quote from a cardinal.

In the same way he quotes Novak quoting Ken Lay and then reveals, in a gotcha line (p. 207), that Novak was quoting the founder of Enron.  So what?  It was early in the Lay/Enron story, but what in any case is wrong with what Lay says in Novak's quote from him?  It is not about getting rich but creating "an ethical environment in which every individual is allowed and encouraged to realize their God-given potential" (Douthat, p.207, quoting Novak quoting Lay).  Isn't that a worthy goal, inconceivable under slavery, serfdom, or 'actually existing socialism'?  So what's the point?  That Lay didn't live up to his own ideals?  Novak is as aware as Karl Barth that we are fallen creatures, and the fact that Lay had feet of clay hardly invalidates what he says here.  (Nor does Douthat even bother to argue otherwise.)  It reminds me of what a Buddhist teacher said to me about a world-famous meditation teacher from Tibet who engaged in all kinds of womanizing and corrupt behavior:  "The Dharma [teachings] come through him as clear as a bell.   But he cannot hear them."

In my view, the Catholic tendency to condemn liberal capitalism - a product of the bitter and lethal hostility of European liberals in the 19th century to the Church - was a serious problem that made it very hard over decades for the Church to respond adequately to the new developments of urban, capitalist modernity and the collectivist alternative.  The ambivalences in Catholic social teaching reflect this need for theoretical development. Novak rose to the challenge and did some very important work to resolve the inadequacy.  His classic, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, was read clandestinely all over Eastern Europe and guided key figures there in forging a path from communist totalitarianism to democratic capitalism.  His work was what enabled JP II to make the distinction in his great social encyclical, Centesimus Annus (1991).  Asking whether capitalism was the model which shd be proposed, as the alternative to statist totalitarianism, to Third World countries searching "for the path to true economic and political progress," JP II responds that the answer is obviously complex:

"If by capitalism is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property and the resulting responsibility for the means of production as well as free human creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative....  But if by capitalism is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative."

It seems to me absurd and grossly unfair to reduce Novak's great work in this area to a variant of the gospel of wealth, to a Mammon over God heresy, etc.  (By the way, Douthat was attacked by a liberal Catholic reviewer, Michael Sean Winters in the Atlantic, for being an uncritical "comrade" and fellow neocon of Novak.  Douthat defends himself by distancing himself further from Novak and pointing to the Lay quote.  One can only tremble at the thought of what degeneration is in store for Douthat as he continues to work with the denizens of the NYT.

But I do think that, Douthat's mistreatment of Novak notwithstanding, the book is pretty good.

Fr. Barron on the Meaning of Vatican II

These characters and developments were very real for me in the 1960s during the Council.  The great theologians of that time continue in many cases to be the great theologians of our time, some even after their deaths.  This is a very helpful explanation of the forces or tendencies involved, how the "progressives" won out at the Council and later split into opposing tendencies, each with its own journal, Concilium and Communio.

I can't help being reminded of the struggle for orthodoxy, for development within a "hermeneutics of continuity," and the splits within Marxism and psychoanalysis (on the latter see Peter Gay's Freud: A Life for Our Time).  It is easy, but lazy, to look at these disputes with a kind of cynical or sentimental indifference - why can't they all just get along?  But the issues at stake were and are of immense importance to the future of the Church, as those splits within psychoanalysis and Marxism were for those traditions.