Stanley Hauerwas on Bonhoeffer, Truth, and Politics

H/T: inhabitatiodei

58 MINUTES, YOUTUBE

Bill Buckley: Romantic Reactionary [AFTERTHEFUTURE]

FROM AFTERTHEFUTURE

...If there is one overarching emotion that characterizes Romanticism, it's nostalgia. The Romantic poets from Blake to Wordsworth hate modernity and long for something lost, a lost age (or a lost childhood) when one did not feel so estranged, when men were men and women were women, where nobility and grace and chivlary were the rule, where the world was full of mystery and enchantments that the Romantic feels as a kind of memory but no longer possesses....

...I think that this important to understand because for the kind of romantic reactionary Buckley was, American liberalism was just a watered-down version of Marxism. The spirit of modern liberalism was the same as the spirit of communism-- its materialism, its naive optimism, its rejection of tradition and religion, its rational mechanistic solutions to social problems, its top-downism, its Jacobin hubris. His life's purpose was to wage war against the mindset that characterized secular liberalism which for him was a disease that eviscerated the soul and made humans into gutless, dependent, children--"men without chests," as C.S. Lewis described moderns in his Abolition of Man. This is important to understand if you're to understand the animus of Buckley's kind of conservatism against what for most sensible people seems the benign common sense of liberal welfarism. For such romantics Liberal programs are not common-sense solutions to practical social problems; they are the emanations of a spiritually crippling social disease.

And so for all of his elan, Buckley in the end was an irrelevancy. It's the problem of all reactionaries who refuse modernity rather than embrace it in order to live through it. I would contrast him with another kind of traditionalism--the kind, for instance, that the radical social critic Ivan Illich represents. Illich was a Catholic priest with deep family roots in old Europe. Anybody who knows his work knows that for him tradition was not something into which he retreated nostalgically, but was the source for his radical and energetic critique and imagination of solutions. From Cayley's Conversations with Ivan Illich:

Illich has often drawn attention to how traditional his views are and to how novel such views can seem in the context of contemporary cultural amnesia. As early as 1959 he introduced an essay called "The Vanishing Clergyman" by saying that he was not writing "anything theologically new, daring, or controversial." "Only spelling out of social consequences," he went on, "can make a thesis as orthodox as mine sufficiently controversial to be discussed." In these pages, he remarks that today "it's very difficult to speak about . . . things which seem to have been obvious and unquestioned during a thousand years of Western tradition." " I often have the impression, he says, "that the more traditionally I speak, the more radically alien I become."

No kidding. Anybody who has been reading this blog over time knows that I am sympathetic with the conservative critique of modernity while at the same time refusing conservative solutions for the problems of modernity. So I understand where Buckley is coming from, but I completely reject his politics and his imagination for a cure. People like Illich are fecund with future possibility, while Buckley's vision in the end is barren.

I wonder if Illich ever appeared on "Firing Line". That would have been a very interesting conversation.

Faith & Politics-After the Religious Right

E. J. Dionne Jr. [Commonweal]

"...Religion is, necessarily, both conservative and progressive. Religion is rooted in tradition and survives through development and change within tradition. It applies old truths to new circumstances. It also reexamines old truths in light of new circumstances. The conservative insists that the tradition not be distorted merely to accommodate passing fads and fashions. The progressive insists on purifying and clarifying the tradition by freeing it from the cultural encrustations of the past. The conservative keeps the tradition alive by honoring it. The progressive keeps the tradition alive by adapting it, and sometimes by challenging it. The history of American democracy shows that religious conservatives and progressives need each other more than they know. The election of 2008, coming after a long period of profound division in our politics and within our religious communities, will mark the moment when we finally come to understand that truth."

Clinton the Hawk and Her Advisors

[More astute analysis from Jack at AfterTheFuture]

Clinton the Hawk and Her Advisors

Again, in case you needed reminding about one of the most important differences between Obama and Clinton:

It should come as no surprise that during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Obama spoke at a Chicago anti-war rally while Clinton went as far as falsely claiming that Iraq was actively supporting al-Qaeda. And during the recent State of the Union address, when Bush proclaimed that the Iraqi surge was working, Clinton stood and cheered while Obama remained seated and silent.

Clinton's advisors are similarly confident in the ability of the United States to impose its will through force. This is reflected to this day in the strong support for President Bush's troop surge among such Clinton advisors (and original invasion advocates) as Jack Keane, Kenneth Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon.

Clinton's top foreign policy advisor -- and her likely pick for Secretary of State -- Richard Holbrooke, insisted that Iraq remained "a clear and present danger at all times." He rejected the broad international legal consensus against such offensive wars and insisted European governments and anti-war demonstrators who opposed a U.S. invasion of Iraq "undoubtedly encouraged" Saddam Hussein.

Clinton advisor Sandy Berger, who served as her husband's national security advisor, insisted that "even a contained Saddam" was "harmful to stability and to positive change in the region" and insisted on the necessity of "regime change." Other top Clinton advisors -- such as former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright -- confidently predicted that American military power could easily suppress any opposition to a U.S. takeover of Iraq.

By contrast, during the lead-up to the war, Obama's advisors recognized as highly suspect the Bush administration's claims regarding Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" and offensive delivery systems capable of threatening U.S. national security. Read more.

Obama's advisers include Zbigniew Brezinksi, Joseph Cirincione, Susan Rice, Larry Korb, Samantha Power, and Richard Clarke. This isn't the group Dennis Kucinich would likely pick, but they are people who have been much more clearheaded about the folly of our Middle Eastern adventurism.

These differences in the key circles of foreign policy specialists surrounding these two candidates are consistent with their diametrically opposing views in the lead-up to the war, with Clinton voting to let President Bush invade that oil-rich country at the time and circumstances of his choosing, while Obama was speaking out to oppose a U.S. invasion.

Hillary Clinton has a few advisors who did oppose the war, like Wesley Clark, but taken together, the kinds of key people she's surrounded herself with supports the likelihood that her administration, like Bush's, would be more likely to embrace exaggerated and alarmist reports regarding potential national security threats, to ignore international law and the advice of allies, and to launch offensive wars.

By contrast, as The Nation magazine noted, a Barack Obama administration would be more likely to examine the actual evidence of potential threats before reacting, to work more closely with America's allies to maintain peace and security, to respect the country's international legal obligations, and to use military force only as a last resort.

This late 20th Century foreign-policy mentality embraced by both Clinton and the Republicans should be mothballed ASAP. See also the article mentioned in The Nation for more details on Obama's people.

See also this Matt Yglesias post and comments on the meme that Obama doesn't have

People get ready?

"People get ready, there's a train a comin'
You don't need no baggage, you just get on board
All you need is faith to hear the diesels hummin'
Don't need no ticket, you just thank the Lord

People get ready for the train to Jordan
It's picking up passengers from coast to coast
Faith is the key, open the doors and board 'em
There's hope for all among those loved the most..."


---------------------------

To: Anon

cc: Jack

(Jack, this could be a separate ATF entry given its spiritual and moral tone...)

I'll give you this, Anon:

The way Obama and, frankly, all other politicians use words like "unity" is generally hollow, saccharine, and devoid of heft/substantiality.

Underneath the surface, though, the need for real unity--the need for an urgent and deeply spiritual uniting of persons on some core, foundational levels--is profound.

For me, the supreme tragedy of this election season--the heartbreaking and devastating revelation that really has me sad and sorrowful about the country--is the extent to which a solid third of Americans (perhaps as many as 40 percent) are, as a matter of plain, sober and cerebral analysis, NUTJOBS.

I say that without malice or resentment (up until very recently, I couldn't say so honestly, but now I can). I say it as a political analyst, not as a moral and spiritual being.

As a moral and spiritual being, my heart is wounded and crushed that 1/3 of Americans are so fully for the continuation of war, for the automatic long-term enshrinement of tax cuts, and for harsh treatment of immigrants who have not followed the letter of the law in coming to this country.

I am and have been taken aback this week by the ugly way in which the poster boys and girls of the right wing--Coulter, Limbaugh, DeLay, Ingraham, Dobson, and many, many others--are repudiating McCain and calling him "not a true conservative."

As someone who treated Al Gore in 2000 the way right-wingers are treating McCain now, I feel personally shamed by the level of anger and resentment I carried toward Gore in 2000 (and to Kerry in 2004 after he beat Howard Dean, my guy; Gore was persona non grata inside my heart after he played gutter politics to beat back my candidate, Bill Bradley, in 2000).

I have come to the startling and stunning yet completely undeniable realization that these right-wingers--people whom I have intensely disliked for years, and whose failures have been greatly relished by me and my liberal friends & family members--are, in terms of the patterns and contours of their political (election-based) thinking, are much closer to me than I ever could have appreciated.

Much as I felt the Al Gore of 2000 and the John Kerry of 2004 were betrayers of liberalism (ditto Bill Clinton after the 1994 Republican Revolution), right-wingers now feel that McCain is a traitor to the conservative cause.

So to bring this full circle, unity--REAL unity, the unity that can never be adequately expressed by even a gifted stump orator such as Obama--is about having a heart of compassion for the other, especially the other who stands in entrenched opposition to oneself.

Such a heart and mindset of empathy and compassion--loving your neighbor as yourself, doing for others as they would do unto you--are the cornerstones of good humanity. Accordingly, they lead us to agree on certain fundamentals that were always at the heart of the American ideal, the things that made this country great: equality, universality, freedom, unlimited opportunity, basic civil rights, unfettered self expression as long as it doesn't encroach upon the rights of others.

Unity is a deeply needed value/virtue in America and, for that matter, the world. One simply needs to realize that it's up to us, as Americans, to do the soul searching necessary to bring that about. Politicians will not do it for us.

That's why the right-wing attacks on McCain are so saddening. They reflect a solid third of the country (the solid third that still approves of Bush's job performance) that will demonize a person if s/he strays from marching orders to the slightest extent, including/especially in the defense of illegal immigrants, Iraqis suffering from war, or anyone else who represents THE OTHER.

We need to be unified with all persons, so that THE OTHER ceases to be a part of our vocabularly and, for that matter, our mindset.

That is, ironically, the changing of mythos that Jack has spoken about, and which Obama (albeit on a superficial level that most people can't appreciate) is trying to articulate on the hustings.

Posted by: Matt Zemek | February 08, 2008 at 09:31 AM

Which Side of History Are You On?

Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence

by Jason Barr

Mike Gravel rates Democrat opponents

Congress could do a good job, theoretically, but it can't. Why? Its owned lock, stock, and barrel by corporate America. So you think you're going to become president and you're going to turn to the Congress and say, “Let's really straighten out corporate America.” This is foolishness. It's fantasy.

Video and transcript - 10/01/08

Quote of the Day: Robert Scheer

In response to Gloria Steinem's column asserting that women become more radical as they age, and that's why they voted in N.H. for Clinton:

What is radical about voting for a corporate lawyer who, in defense of her Arkansas savings and loan shenanigans, once said you can't be a lawyer without working for banks? Steinem boasts of Clinton's "unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House" without referencing the Clinton White House's giveaways to corporate America at the expense of poor and working Americans, the majority of them being women. Sen. Clinton's key election operative, Mark Penn, was the other half of the Dick Morris team that recast populist Bill Clinton as the master of triangulation. . . .

Yes, Bill Clinton was a very good president compared to what came immediately before and after, and his wife has many strong points in her favor, not the least of which is her wonkish intelligence. What I object to is the notion that the perspective of gender or race trumps that of economic class in considering the traumas of this nation. That is because the George W. Bush administration engaged in class warfare for the rich with a vengeance that has left many Americans hurting, and we desperately need change to reverse that destructive course.

Let's get our priorities straight, shall we? Having a woman or an African-American president would mean our having reached a wonderful milestone, but it's secondary to the more significant problems that confront us, which have to do with economic structure, power aggregation, and foreign adventurism.

Atheism's Wrong Turn

[By Damon Linker, The New Republic]

Excerpt: ..."ndeed, the tone of today's atheist tracts is so unremittingly hostile that one wonders if their authors really mean it when they express the hope, as Dawkins does in a representative passage, that "religious readers who open [The God Delusion] will be atheists when they put it down." Exactly how will such conversions be accomplished? Rather than seeking common ground with believers as a prelude to posing skeptical questions, today's atheists prefer to skip right to the refutation. They view the patient back and forth of dialogue--the way of Socrates--as a waste of time.

It is with this enmity, this furious certainty, that our ideological atheists lapse most fully into illiberalism. Politically speaking, liberalism takes no position on theological questions. One can be a liberal and a believer (as were Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, and countless others in the American past and present) or a liberal and an unbeliever (as were Hook, Richard Rorty, and a significantly smaller number of Americans over the years). This is in part because liberalism is a philosophy of government, not a philosophy of man--or God. But it is also because modern liberalism derives, at its deepest level, from ancient liberalism--from the classical virtue of liberality, which meant generosity and openness. To be liberal in the classical sense is to accept intellectual variety--and the social complexity that goes with it--as the ineradicable condition of a free society.

It is to accept, in other words, that, although I may settle the question of God to my personal satisfaction, it is highly unlikely that all of my fellow citizens will settle it in the same way--that differences in life experience, social class, intelligence, and the capacity for introspection will invariably prevent a free community from reaching unanimity about the fundamental mysteries of human existence, including God. Liberal atheists accept this situation; ideological atheists do not. That, in the end, is what separates the atheism of Socrates from the atheism of the French Revolution...

...Still, the rise of the new atheists is cause for concern--not among the targets of their anger, who can rest secure in the knowledge that the ranks of the religious will, here in America, dwarf the ranks of atheists for the foreseeable future; but rather among those for whom the defense of secular liberalism is a high political priority. Of course, many of these secular liberals are probably the same people who propelled Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens onto the best-seller lists by purchasing their books en masse--people who are worried about the dual threats to secular politics posed by militant Islam and the American religious right. These people are correct to be nervous about the future of secular liberalism, to perceive that it needs passionate, eloquent defenders. The problem is that the rhetoric of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens will undermine liberalism, not bolster it: Far from shoring up the secular political tradition, their arguments are likely to produce a country poised precariously between opposite forms of illiberalism.

The last thing America needs is a war of attrition between two mutually exclusive, absolute systems of belief. Yet this is precisely what the new atheists appear to crave. The task for the rest of us--committed to neither dogmatic faith nor dogmatic doubt--is to make certain that combatants on both sides of the theological divide fail to get their destructive way. And thereby to ensure that liberalism prevails."

"There is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there?"

some good comments too...

The Hedge Fund Class and the French Revolution

HatTip to Godspy

“Is it right or even admissible in the human conscience that while teachers, emergency room technicians, police and firefighters are taxed at full earned-income rates — and often underpaid — that the highest-earning people in this country should pay at either very low tax rates or none at all? …[O]ne of the causes of the French Revolution was the sad truth that the aristocracy was not taxed at all, while the workers and burghers were taxed highly. Is this our future? Let’s keep it real: Congress can take notice of a mammoth inequity in taxation during wartime and make the tax on private equity and hedge funds approximate the treatment of other highly paid people — or it can continue down the road to the Bastille.” [NY Times]

Obama and Foreign Policy

By Morning's Minion at VOX NOVA

Guardian article on Mike Gavel

NewYorkTimes article on Ron Paul

GETTING THE POOR DOWN FROM THE CROSS: CHRISTOLOGY OF LIBERATION

FREE eBOOK!


ISBN:978-9962-00-232-1
Pages: 300

More than 40 Co-Authors: Leonardo BOFF (foreword), Tissa BALASURIYA, Marcelo BARROS, Teófilo CABESTRERO, Oscar CAMPANA, Víctor CODINA, José COMBLIN, CONFER de Nicaragua, Lee CORMIE, Eduardo DE LA SERNA, José ESTERMANN, Benedito FERRARO, Eduardo FRADES, Luis Arturo GARCÍA DÁVALOS, Ivone GEBARA, Eduardo HOORNAERT, Diego IRARRÁZAVAL, Jung Mo SUNG, Paul KNITTER, João Batista LIBÂNIO, María y José Ignacio LÓPEZ VIGIL, Carlos MESTERS, Alberto PARRA, Richard RENSHAW, Jean RICHARD, Pablo RICHARD, Luis RIVERA PAGÁN, José SÁNCHEZ SÁNCHEZ, Stefan SILBER, Ezequiel SILVA, Alfonso Mª Ligório SOARES, José SOLS LUCIA, Paulo SUESS, Luiz Carlos SUSIN, Faustino TEIXEIRA, Pedro TRIGO, José María VIGIL, and Jon SOBRINO (epilogue).

Great YouTube video on Immigration from Michael Joseph & Katerina of 'Vox Nova'

Battling Phony Right-Wing Christians: What Every Progressive Needs To Know About True Christian Economics

Great podcast...

Ron Paul at the June 5 Republican Debate

Ron Paul’s Reading List for the Farsighted